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Rewatching this movie. Was really into it…until the 1:37:31 mark.

I guess the scene I’m about to tear into should be mitigated somewhat with the fact that Don Cheadle, Luis Guzman are good guys. Nice characters and great actors.

But at the 1:37:31 mark, we’re introduced up close and personally to the character who will probably resonate as the worst to our American sensibilities. And he’s black. And effing the s out of a white girl so she can score some drugs.

In a movie filled with people who are doing questionable things, you might ask why this guy stands out to me as worse than the others. Or why he is disserved by being black.

Let’s start with the fact that Americans are weird about sex. That’s a pretty subjective way of saying the equally subjective statement that we’re Puritanical hypocrites, but we are. Raunchy sex in movies typically illustrates the worst that someone can do or the lowest that someone can go.

If you take the psychology of serial killers at the prestigious USC film school, you’ll learn that serial killers are often impotent or at least struggle with the sexuality in some horrible way that leads them to kill.

Virgins survive in horror movies. Girls who have sex don’t.

It’s all over the language of the screen. Sex is bad. Even though rates of unplanned pregnancies and STDs continue to be on the rise in the US (among affluent communities at that) we still as a nation pretend that and enjoy art that acts as though sex is reserved for base people and creates base things.

So when we see Michael Douglas’s daughter having sex done to her by this muscular black man, we know that things aren’t just bad. They’re really f*cking bad.

The sex she had with her (white) boyfriend was a) implied and b) though it was in a drug-addled state, it was at least loving.

This black guy just does sex to her with no feeling. No inkling of emotion. Totally using her. The scene is shot from a horrible perspective angle that lets the viewer feel really up close and personal with a guy we’re supposed to dislike and who we’re pretty sure bad things are going to happen to…and we’re led to be okay with that.

Also add to this that all the people at the girl’s AA group were white. No minorities were there trying to better themselves. But she needs drugs. So off she goes to a poor black neighborhood where she gets laid for crack.

And we’re not led to dislike her for her addiction. She’s explained to the camera that she’s angry. We see her messed up nuclear family. So we feel sorry for her. We sympathize with the fact that she needs to medicate to find comfort. But the blacks on the street in at in her in fact in this scene, there’s no sympathy for them. They’re just street thugs who make faces as Douglas drives his Mercedes through Compton. The white girl is going to get out and get rescued. But Douglas, who’s character is in charge of arresting the nation’s drug problem, isn’t worried about anyone else.

And then, to make it clear just how far gone the girl is, when she passes out and is for all intents and purposes a corpse on the bed, the black guy climbs on top and goes at it again.

Also, at the 2:03 mark, we meet another man to whom the girl has ostensibly whored herself out to. He's white. We don't see him mount her. There's no creepy vaguely necrophiliac sex. The guy is apologetic for his actions and he's gone.

No one else in the movie is as base of a character as the black drug dealer. And as the movie purports, drugs are all over. Even in rich, uptight suburbia. So why go and enlist a bunch of black actors to portray the worst of the drug problem?

There’s any number of other things that could have communicated her downfall. She’s scored drugs from her rich white friends through the first hour and a half of the movie. Why she needs to go to a scary black neighborhood now is odd. Especially since the last time we saw her with her boyfriend, they were a sweet couple. Very very high, but sweet nonetheless. And he got her high just fine. Why not go back to him. call him and ask him to come get her? there’s nothing on film that would suggest that she couldn’t call her established boyfriend and she’s been in treatment, so she’s not making decisions out of her freebased haze.

So why a scary black neighborhood? Why not, I guess? No harm right? In reinforcing horrible stereotypes in a movie that seems to say that it’s tearing them down.

Does Don Cheadle make up for that? Does the black lawyer in the courtroom? Benico del Toro’s character trying to do good? The Latino judge? Maybe. And Soderberg does deserve credit for making these choices that can unnecessarily be called “progressive.” These are bold casting choices in an era where we still can’t have a black man and woman be leads in a romantic movie without it being labeled an “urban comedy.”

But the scene with a guy having sex to a nearly dead girl is more visceral. It makes your gut turn. There’s a physical sense tied to that emotion. And it’s the scene where something horrible happens to someone the movie has taught us to care about. So that’s going to be what sticks out to you. What you remember. The funny and charming banter that Cheadle and Guzman have in the car will fade. You won’t remember all the turns of phrase.

But you’ll remember how uncomfortable you felt when you saw nameless, voiceless black man remount a sweet, innocent girl that he’s just finished corrupting.

I got to 1:51:31 before I had to get back to work. will finish up any more chat about this flick when I get to finish the film.