THE OPENING scene of West Side Story is so familiar: a series of aerial shots of New York City, an organized jumble of streets, buildings and cars. A singular whistle permeates the air, and suddenly we see a pack of hoodlums clustered on a concrete playground. Soon, the Jets are dancing through the back streets of New York.
When the Virginia Film Festival announced its schedule for this year’s program, themed “Aliens!” I was admittedly suspicious of the inclusion of certain films centered around issues of immigration. The term “alien” is at best a questionable term when used in reference to undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Why call attention to this pejorative term by including films, like West Side Story, that are by or about immigrants? Why equate immigrant populations with extraterrestrials, the green, oval-eyed beings that saturate our movies and cartoons?
Film Festival Artistic Director Richard Herskowitz explained in a press release that, given the fact that immigration is such a hot political topic, “it seemed worth finding films that will allow audiences to question and debate the use of the term in defining immigrant populations.” Regardless of his intent, or perhaps in spite of it, I still remain suspicious of the fact that watching a movie will engage us in a larger conversation about racism, cultural identity and acceptance. Herskowitz’s belief in the power of cinema is misguided: To use the term “alien” in the context of films about immigration is not to question the validity of such a word, but instead - however unintentionally - to legitimize it as a valid description of an outsider population.
Before seeing West Side Story at the festival on Friday, like many other attendees of the screening, I already understood the ultimate message of the movie. The battle between the Sharks and the Jets is not a duel between families, but between cultures, one considered distinctly American, the other labeled as distinctively foreign. The drama concludes when everything is lost: Maria has lost her true love, the gangs have lost their leaders, the city has lost its status as a symbol of promise and opportunity. From here, no one can do anything but hope to rebuild, this time on a foundation much more solid than the faulty one formed from racism and hate. By the end of the film, even the audience has lost its innocence. We are bluntly told that if these are the rules we choose to live by, then this is the outcome of the game we play.
But what else are we told? We are not told by the festival organizers that Natalie Wood, the actress who played Puerto Rican immigrant Maria, was actually the daughter of Russian immigrants, and that her voice was dubbed over by a Puerto Rican actress. We are not told that the actor who played Maria’s brother Bernardo was also not Hispanic but of Greek origin. Additionally, the playwright and the two directors of the film were born in America and were not of Hispanic origin. Nowhere before or after the screening did organizers attempt to start a dialogue about the cultural assumptions made during the writing and filming of the movie. No one openly stated that “alien” is a derogatory term that should never be used to describe a human being.
So on one hand, I can understand Hersowitz’s assumption that putting a pejorative term out in the open can engender a lot of productive dialogue, under certain conditions. But throwing a word out there in the context of a film about immigrants without initiating a dialogue isn’t helping anything. The festival organizers took a film festival intended to entertain too far by attempting half-heartedly to investigate more important historical and social questions.
Forty-seven years after its debut, West Side Story is in many ways an outdated depiction of a cultural group as a foreign “other” rife with stereotypes. Yes, the Puerto Ricans should be accepted, the film implies, but it is still okay to characterize them as hot-tempered and sensual. Such an implication detracts from the film’s ultimate message. If we are truly supposed to understand each other in order to live and work together harmoniously, how can that understanding take place if we rely on cultural stereotypes and naturalized traits as definitions of what it means to be Puerto Rican — or Mexican, or Chinese, or white, or black? Nowhere did the Virginia Film Festival attempt to make such statements. Herskowitz and others began a debate without equipping viewers to participate in it. They sparked controversy, but they did not resolve it.
In the end, though the festival’s in-your-face attempt to call into question how we go about defining the people we encounter in our daily lives — whether in person or on the news — certainly tries to force us to stop and think, for all of its poking and prodding at the question of how we define others, the film festival’s “Aliens!” theme can only say so much. Just as Doc asked the Jets in response to their continuous attacks on their Puerto Rican counterparts, “What does it take to get through to you?”
It will certainly take more than a movie.
Amelia Meyer’s column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at a.meyer@cavalierdaily.com.
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