Lee Daniels caught a lot of backlash over a tweet he made about the role played by Glenn Close in his new Netflix film, The Deliverance. 

 

In the tweet, he referred to Alberta, Glenn’s character, as “part of the fabric of our community”. And it did not sit well with people.

Even though he tweeted that a whole week ago, it only seems to have exploded last night, after the film was widely watched and discussed on socials over the long weekend. So much of that discussion was the strange, unidentifiable feeling that came with seeing legendary actress Glenn Close sitting on a porch in the hood, and at another point, sewing a weave into Andra Day’s head (with confidence, I should add).

 

Lee is no stranger to controversy. And with this being his first venture into the horror genre, and the Black horror genre at that, it’s no surprise that some of his decisions, and subsequent commentary, proved to be incredibly polarizing. But anyone that recalls the flurry of criticism that followed his 2009 film, Precious, could have seen this coming from a mile away.

Lee really played into a lot of negative stereotypes about Black people in Precious, including a plus-sized, illiterate character played by Gabourey Sidibe, pregnant for the second time by her absent father. She wished to be white with “good” hair and to have a light-skinned boyfriend. So Lee’s decision to cast all fair-skinned people including Paula Patton, Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz to fill the roles of the people who supported and assisted her throughout her struggles was certainly questionable, a sentiment echoed in this Guardian review that was published shortly after the film’s release.

 

Lee’s history with casting light-skinned people in the specific roles he casts them in is a little interesting, to say the least. From 2016-2019, Lee’s TV series, Star, was a huge hit. But the main character was a white woman from the hood – essentially Alberta’s character in The Deliverance, just much younger, as this tweet pointed out. 

At the time, he said the reason he cast Jude Demorest as Star was because:

“In the beginning, Star is told through a white girl’s perspective because I felt that the country—instinctively, I thought—needed to heal. I think that this white girl is so fabulous that Black people will embrace her and white people will embrace her.”

 

That is problematic af. Very Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial-esque. But it explains how Glenn Close made her way into The Deliverance. Lee was likely trying to make this a Black horror that had enough Blackness in it to appeal to Black people, but enough whiteness in it that it appealed to white people, too. 

While it’s understandable that some of the stereotypes we saw in Precious, and in so many other movies about experiences impacted by race may be necessary in some capacity to tell the story, I think the audience’s disconnection, my disconnection, always stems from how and when we use tropes for creative purposes and when we use them as a crutch in storytelling. And moreover, how we centre whiteness in all of it. Whether it’s through casting or the lens from which the story is told. We see Tyler Perry do this a lot, leaning heavily on the angry Black woman trope, or the successful-Black-woman-that-can’t-find-a-man-and-therefore-must-settle trope.

In fact, part of the backlash that Lee is receiving includes being likened to Tyler Perry. And if you read the last piece I wrote about him, you’d understand why that isn’t necessarily the compliment some might assume it to be. 

People on social media challenged both men to focus instead on making movies about Black people being depicted in healthy scenarios. One user said they thought Lee Daniels and Tyler Perry were the same person. And perhaps my favourite is this tweet that suggests Lee Daniels is Target, while Tyler Perry is Walmart.

Unfortunately, the reason these two are being so closely compared is because they are two of very few Black directors that have amassed the platform that they have in Hollywood. It wouldn’t make sense to compare either of them to Ava DuVernay or Ryan Coogler, for example, because the movies they make are so different. And though Jordan Peele did try his hand at Black horror with Us, the public reception to him is not nearly as cold as it is with Lee and Tyler. Why is that? 

 

Overall, the consensus is that, when it comes to writing and directing, Lee is the villain, and people arrived at that conclusion for a few reasons. The first, as mentioned earlier, is his dependence on tropes, unnecessarily in some cases, to tell stories. The second is because Glenn’s character Alberta is based on a Black woman – and in casting Glenn to play the role of Rosa Campbell, the mother of Latoya Ammons, he is undoubtedly whitewashing. It would be one thing if this was a work of fiction, but this is based on a true story, so he’s whitewashing actual history. And the third reason people have labelled him the villain is because he speaks with such authority over a Black experience that he has proven to be inherently disconnected from. 

For him to say, with his chest, that “every Black person knows an Alberta” and that we’ve “never seen her on screen before”, when in reality, most of the “Albertas” we know are white women who have endangered anything from Black women’s senses of self to our sense of safety in a personal, public or corporate space is just so out of touch. And I say this as a woman with a white mother.

 

Lee could have made this moment about his powerful and meaningful reunion with Mo’Nique. He could have made this moment about the powerful acting by the extremely talented Andra Day. He could’ve made this moment about so much more than the saviour-esque role he imagines white women play in the lives of Black people – but he made it about that, instead, and expected us to cosign.

And while I think the audience certainly plays a role in allowing that to become the focal point of this story, that speaks to just how egregious and inaccurate of a claim it really is. Because we’re all having to compare notes with each other to confirm that there was not some mythical white woman perched on a porch doing sew-in weaves when we were growing up, right? And the answer, unanimously, is no. 

Unfortunately for Lee and Tyler, until these two learn how to balance making Black art without centering white people in the story, and particularly in their commentary about the story, they will continue to risk isolating their Black audiences because it renders us passive onlookers rather than the intended audience. Unless, of course, we were never the intended audience to begin with.

Attached: Lee and the cast of "The Deliverance" at the Los Angeles Premiere on August 28, 2024.