The ANNOTICO Report
In real life, Vin Diesel may have a Black father, but
he never had a
conversation with him about being an actor since he apparently
never met
him. He was brought up by his stepfather, an Italian
American like his
mother. He grew up in Greenwich Village, a multicultural
and multiracial
place if there ever was one. He also tells stories about
how as a child he
always felt ostracized and can therefore identify with
the rejected
anti-hero characters he has played such as “the Iron
Giant” in the
excellent animated movie of the same name, or Richard
Riddick in Pitch
Black.
Vin Diesel has the skin of a White man, the facial features
of a Black man,
an Italian American first name, Vincent (his last name
by birth), a Black
voice and a very Black sense of cool. He is the perfect
multiracial and
multicultural hero. He can be read as the latest specimen
of a long line of
actors cultivating racially ambiguous personas, whether
their skin was
Black or White, from Sidney Poitier and Elvis Presley
to Will Smith and
Bruce Willis. Vin Diesel is the first major movie star
to also have a
racially ambiguous physique.
This discussion of Vin Disel by an African publication
takes an interesting
approach to Vin Disel. It doesn't chastise him for not
embracing him for
not embracing his blackness, but applauds him for the
ambiguity of his
racial persona.
AfriCultures
Le site et la revue de référence des cultures africaines
Congrès AFEA 2004: Couleur(s) d’Amérique
Anne Crémieux
04/04/2005
A paper about the changing vision of race and color in
America: presenting
Vin Diesel and his “raceless” persona within the racial
history of American
action heroes.
In the 20th century, a person like Vin Diesel would never
have become one
of the highest paid and most famous Hollywood actors,
not as a Black man
because he was too light, not as a White man because
he wasn’t White, and
not as a mulatto, however tragic, since they were not
played by biracial
actors but by white men and women. The presence of Vin
Diesel as a major
star is an indication that America’s concept of race
and skin color has
changed. Having a “drop of black blood” doesn’t so much
mean that you are
Black anymore, but rather that you are cool. Vin Diesel
has managed to
embrace his multiracial and multicultural audience without
antagonizing
anyone. Yet from film to film, rather than truly living
up to their
multiracial identity, Vin Diesel’s characters have become
raceless, of no
specific color: living proofs of America’s post-civil
rights movement,
soon-to-be post affirmative-action, fantasized ideal
of color-blindness.
In 1987, Robert Townsend wrote, produced and directed
Hollywood Shuffle, a
film about the life of a young Black actor who could
not get any decent
roles in Hollywood because Black men were typecast as
inner city low-lives
who got killed within ten minutes of their appearance
on screen.
Seven years later, in 1994, the equally unemployed young
actor Vin Diesel
produced his own short film about his lack of job opportunities
not as a
Black man, but as a man of unclear ethnic background.
In Multifacial, Vin
Diesel is a talented actor who cannot land a role because
though he can act
Italian he doesn’t look the part, though he can act Latino
he can’t speak
Spanish, and though he can rap and has the voice of Barry
White, he is just
too light to play Black men, as producers candidly tell
him time after
time. As Mutifacial shows, people love categories.
In 1994, Vin Diesel was determined to create his persona
outside of any
category. The company Vin Diesel created to produce "Multifacial"
and then
"Strays", two films in which he plays the main character,
is called “One
Race”, stating the actor’s refusal to split up the human
race into various
sub-categories. Strays was shown at Sundance but never
released in the
theatres. It is a film about a macho kid named Rick who
finds true love and
doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Apparently he
is not racially
categorized in the film.
Multifacial however is about race, more precisely how
it will affect an
actor’s career or lack thereof. The character’s name
is simply Mike,
revealing nothing of his ethnic background. Whenever
Mike names the actors
he admires, he pairs an Italian American and an African
American, Al Pacino
and Denzel Washington the first time, Marlon Brando and
Morgan Freeman the
second time. At the very end of the film, Mike gives
a moving monologue he
wrote about having an African American father who aspired
for his son not
to be a Black actor but just an actor. When the casting
agent showers him
with compliments he knows won’t get him the job, he tells
her “it was just
a story”. During the film, Mike’s parents are said not
to be Spanish.
Apparently they are Italian.
In real life, Vin Diesel may have a Black father, but
he never had a
conversation with him about being an actor since he apparently
never met
him. He was brought up by his stepfather, an Italian
American like his
mother. He grew up in Greenwich Village, a multicultural
and multiracial
place if there ever was one. He also tells stories about
how as a child he
always felt ostracized and can therefore identify with
the rejected
anti-hero characters he has played such as “the Iron
Giant” in the
excellent animated movie of the same name, or Richard
Riddick in Pitch
Black.
Yet, true to his “One Race” credo, Vin Diesel never again
played a
character that embraced his Black biological heritage
the way Multifacial
did. Rather, in all of his subsequent films, Vin Diesel’s
race is not
discussed as such. He interacts with men and women of
all races, while his
own race is in no instance mentioned or made an element
of the plot per se.
Vin Diesel played Pvt. Adrian Caparzo, an Italian American
soldier, in
Saving Private Ryan (1998); he gives his voice to the
metal alien in The
Iron Giant (1999); he is Chris Varick, an Italian American
broker, in
Boiler Room (2000); and most famously Richard B. Riddick,
a man of
undetermined race, in Pitch Black (2000). He then played
Dominic Toretto,
an American of Cuban descent, in The Fast and the Furious
(2001),
immediately followed by the Jewish tough guy Taylor Reese
in Knockaround
Guys (2001). He then became immensely famous as Xander
Cage, the hero of
XXX (2002), again a character of undetermined race like
in his following
movie, the aptly named A Man Apart (2003), in which he
plays Sean Vetter.
In Boiler Room in particular, Vin Diesel’s character must
put up with
particularly racist co-workers which is either a testimony
to his extreme
cool when faced with irrelevant attacks, or more likely,
his character’s
lack of identification with Blacks – he is said more
than once to be
Italian. Vin Diesel’s race has been the subject of many
film reviews (not
to say every) and always comes up in his televised interviews,
though
systematically qualified by disclaimers to the irrelevance
of the matter.
People ask about his hair, his biological father, how
he defines himself,
is he Black or is he not? Vin Diesel answers that his
hair is thinning,
that he is multicultural, and that he embraces his racial
ambiguity.
Vin Diesel’s most interesting character from a racial
point of view is
Richard B. Riddick from Pitch Black. Pitch Black is a
science fiction film
centered on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
All in one film.
A small group of survivors are stranded on an inhospitable
planet lit by
three suns. Predatory creatures are living underground.
The crew crashes
hours before a total eclipse, a time when the light sensitive
creatures can
come out and hunt. All the characters are types, as is
usual in such films,
but they are actually defined by their ambiguous nature.
One British
antique dealer (Paris P. Ogilvie) is most clearly yet
never outspokenly
gay. The female captain, Carolyn Fry (Radha Mitchell),
sets off with the
guilt of having almost sacrificed the whole crew to save
herself, unknown
to all the survivors but one. While everyone is thankful
for their captain
saving their lives, she keeps answering “I am not your
captain”. Introduced
as a “blue-eyed devil” by Riddick’s voice-over, William
J. Johns (Cole
Hauser) knows Fry’s secret but also has secrets of his
own. He is a
morphine addict, and a bounty hunter rather than an officer
of the law.
Finally, Jack (Rhiana Griffith), the youngest survivor,
is revealed to be a
girl and not a boy, like she is letting everyone believe.
The character I am most interested in is of course Vin
Diesel’s Richard
Riddick. His racial ambiguity is a metaphor for his moral
complexity. He
admits to having killed men. He was in prison long enough
to have his eyes
surgically altered so he could see in the dark, knowing
he would probably
never see daylight again. Under the circumstances, this
soon becomes a
valuable asset and though he is a dangerous criminal,
he also is the only
one who is capable of saving the rest of the surviving
crew. They must
trust who they most fear. No reference is ever made to
his racial
background, except that 1. in the first minutes of the
film he refers to
Johns as the “blue-eyed devil”, a phrase used by Malcolm
X to speak of the
white man; 2. he tells Carolyn Fry, the female pilot,
“so, you finally
found someone scarier than me” and 3. tells her later,
as she understands
about the coming eclipse “You’re not afraid of the dark
now, are you?”
These elements can be read as hinting to his race. He
is mostly considered
as “other”. When Carolyn must convince Riddick not to
take off but back for
the others she says “there’s got to be some part of you
that wants to
rejoin the human race”. He is a human being, but he has
certain sensory
powers that other lack. He can smell the morphine on
Johns, the blood the
boy is not supposed to be shedding, and just like the
alien creatures, his
vision is opposite everyone else’s. Possibly because
he feels a
commonality, he is the only one who finds the deadly
night creatures
“beautiful” instead of simply horrifying. In the very
first scene, Riddick
is the one commenting the ship’s crash in voice-over.
His face is largely
hidden by a wide blindfold. His skin color is difficult
to make out due to
color filters used to convey general malfunction of the
aircraft. Only his
voice, deep and hoarse, is a distinctive clue to his
race. In contrast, Abu
'Imam' al-Walid (Keith David), referred to as the “holy
man”, is clearly of
African descent, while all the other characters are clearly
of European
descent.
Jack/Jackie, the boy-girl, greatly admires Riddick for
his ambiguity as a
good-bad guy. She shaves her head and wears small dark
glasses to look as
much as possible like Riddick, and she is white. In the
scene where Jack,
fascinated by Riddick’s eyes, watches Carolyn Fry question
him about the
loss of the first victim to the alien creatures, Riddick
tells Fry whom
he’s just terrorized with his light-beaming eyes to “look
deeper” into the
ground where Zeke was torn to pieces, possibly meaning
“deeper than skin
deep”, deeper than appearances, serving as a civic lesson
of sorts to the
impressionable teenager.
With Pitch Black, Vin Diesel was truly given the opportunity
to represent
the multicultural, raceless action hero that all audiences
can relate to.
Vin Diesel’s characters never use the word “Black” or
“African American” to
refer to themselves or any family member after Multifacial.
For Pitch
Black, A Man Apart and XXX, the three films where Vin
Diesel’s ethnicity is
never referred to in the dialogue, the actor has described
his characters
as “urban heroes” while he uses terms such as “Italian”,
“Cuban American”
or “Jewish” for other characters. (Krulik, 28)
It appears, however, that more and more Vin Diesel’s undecipherable
ethnic
background – he has been said to be a combination of
German, Italian,
Irish, Dominican, Mexican, and yes, African-American
– is a key element of
his career as an actor. His race is the subject of Multifacial,
it is the
strength of Pitch Black, and it is the never spoken mystery
of XXX and A
Man Apart. The triple X stands for the character’s first
initial and
nickname, Xander Cage a.k.a. X, repeated in his tattoo
at the back of his
neck: three Xs. It evidently also has a teaser effect,
as a non-fulfilled
promise of scenes that were deleted to ensure a PG-13
rating. It can be
read as the indicator of a new generation of secret agents,
taken one notch
further, from a double O-7 to a triple X. And finally,
a personal
interpretation is that it stands for the non mark, the
anonymous race of a
man whose skin color and facial features is not unlike
another famous man
named X: Malcolm, who living under different times, with
a different
upbringing and family situation, was indeed of a different
race.
Immediately following the immense success of XXX came
A Man Apart, in which
Vin Diesel plays Sean Vetter, a man with the talk, the
walk, the clothes
and the childhood friends of a Black man, yet never said
to be Black
because like Vin Diesel himself, he is “a man apart”.
Surrounded by all
kinds of people, he personifies the racial line, bringing
the different
races together rather than dividing them. Picking up
on his “urban hero”
character from Pitch Black, in the Chronicles Riddick
finds out about his
past. In a universe made of many different races, Riddick
is a Furian. He
was separated from his people at birth because of a prophesy
that an unborn
Furian would one day overthrow the Necromongers’ Lord
Marshall and become
the new leader. The Furians are a race of fierce soldiers
who are neither
motivated by money nor power, but by their innate hatred
of authority: they
are free-spirited rebels gifted with impressive physical
skills. Having
suffered quite a bit of injustice in his youth, Riddick
has turned into a
bitter cynic whose calculating sense of right and wrong
is however intact.
Most importantly, he is not a human being, he is indeed
literally “other”,
as clearly established yet never made explicit in Pitch
Black, where on the
contrary he is assumed to be part of the human race.
As far as women are concerned, Vin Diesel has not dated
much on screen. His
first on-screen romantic counterpart was Michelle Rodriguez
in The Fast and
the Furious, in which he played a Cuban-American character
Dominic Toretto.
She was said to be his off-screen girlfriend at the time.
He falls in love
with a white Russian agent in XXX, and is married to
a white woman in A Man
Apart. In The Chronicles of Riddick, Riddick is protective
of Kyra, a white
woman, the grown-up version of the boy/girl from Pitch
Black. There is some
sexual tension though their relationship remains fraternal
rather than
sexual. Vin Diesel will in all probability be dating
many more beautiful
women of all races on screen in the future. For the time
being, if the race
of the women a character dates is any indication of his
racial persona,
given present-day America’s rate of interracial dating,
it seems that the
XXX race, the race by default, is dangerously getting
closer to simply
being white…
America might have been built on the myth of a classless
society, but it
was never built on the myth of a raceless society. Yet,
in the past two
decades, with the demise of affirmative action as a defunct
polity based on
an archaic vision of racial relations, the myth of a
colorless society is
gaining ground. Though most non-Whites still experience
a highly
color-coded world, and most Whites still interact overwhelmingly
with White
people, Hollywood, ever the promoter of social change,
seems to be
resorting in this very case to a racially ambiguous actor
to sell the myth
of a raceless America to the greatest number of racially
conscious
Americans. A case in point is the soaring career of non-hyphenated
American
actor Vin Diesel, whose star persona is entirely built
on the blurring of
racial lines. It is fitting that his first major role
was in Pitch Black,
meaning dark at its blackest, and that his last roles
to date have been for
XXX and A Man Apart, with metaphors for his colorlessness
in the titles.
The Chronicles of Riddick, which in all fairness, should
have been entitled
Pitch Black 2, also deletes any reference to color. Vin
Diesel has the skin
of a White man, the facial features of a Black man, an
Italian American
first name, Vincent (his last name by birth), a Black
voice and a very
Black sense of cool. He is the perfect multiracial and
multicultural hero.
He can be read as the latest specimen of a long line
of actors cultivating
racially ambiguous personas, whether their skin was Black
or White, from
Sidney Poitier and Elvis Presley to Will Smith and Bruce
Willis. Vin Diesel
is the first major movie star to also have a racially
ambiguous physique.
Despite and because of Vin Diesel’s claim that his race
is irrelevant, his
persona is unquestionably over-determined by issues of
race. In the most
Hollywood of fashions, just as Vin Diesel’s subsequent
roles negated and
ignored every class and gender subtlety raised by Multifacial
and
complicated in Pitch Black, so did they erase the racially
charged tensions
his presence fostered in those film, relegating entirely
to the
extra-filmic all discussions about his refusal to be
categorized. Vin
Diesel’s new action hero is raceless, neither Black nor
White he is of no
race, the hero of a new America, free of prejudice and
privilege. Most
Americans over twelve will recognize the prank, yet delight
in it. And
Hollywood can be the colorful dream factory of the wannabe
colorblind.
Anne Crémieux
http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?
menu=affiche_article&no=3781
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