Postlude to a Kiss: Will Smith’s Performances of Race and Sexuality in Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation

“Beneath its self-presentation as a satiric comedy of manners lie cogent interrogations of notions about race and class, the history of blacks in America, the limits of assimilation, the representations of black gay men, the nature of African American and Hollywood homophobia, and the fluidity of racial identity. Smith performs, resists, and usurps this character in order to effect certain cultural interventions and to further the cause of his public star identity.”

Will Smith now occupies a position in Hollywood that is unrivaled by any other black performer. His films over the last eighteen years have grossed more than $5.3 billion, more than any other actor, with the exception of Johnny Depp (Smith 31). He commands a salary in excess of $20 million per film, which places him in the highest stratum of bankable actors. Consistently over the last decade he has been the highest ranking black star on annual lists of power figures in Hollywood.1 His success is in certain ways unprecedented. Even more than this, the meaning of his star status has historical and cultural implications that have not been fully examined. Smith’s ability to reach such varied audiences, both domestic and global, is an indicator of evolving attitudes about race. The types of roles he has accepted and in which audiences are willing to accept him (savior of mankind, the last man on earth) have done interesting cultural work in terms of redefining concepts of black identity in general and of black masculinity specifically.

This discussion contributes to an examination of the Smith phenomenon by taking another look at his first major film performance in Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation (1993). Smith’s casting as the hustler who impersonates the son of Sidney Poitier has a particular rightness; Smith is indeed the inheritor of Poitier’s legacy in terms of breaking new ground for blacks in film.2 Poitier won visibility and dignity for black representation in Hollywood film; Smith extends and complicates this legacy as his performances engage racial representation as it intersects with class, gender, and sexuality. This complex of issues contained within Smith’s screen personae sustains his iconicity, and these valances of significance find their source in his seminal performance as Paul Poitier in Six Degrees of Separation.

Based on a series of actual incidents reported in The New York Times in 1983, the story of the film and the play details the encounter of a New York power couple with a young black man who cons and charms his way into their lives for an evening by impersonating the fictional son of Sidney Poitier.3 Flan and Ouisa Kittredge (Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing) are a private art dealer and his wife who are entertaining a possible investor in a crucial sale. They are burst in upon by the doorman and a young black man (Will Smith) who is bleeding from a knife wound to his side. It turns out that the intruder is a Harvard classmate of their children. They administer first aid, and he begins to talk. He persuades them to stay in, and he will prepare a meal. This he does and in the process dazzles them with his conversation. He discourses on The Catcher in the Rye and the death of the imagination. On top of this, it turns out that his name is “Paul,” and he is the son of Sidney Poitier. It is a magical evening, and the deal is sealed. Subsequently, they discover that Paul Poitier is not who he claims to be and that several of their friends have had similar experiences with him. The path of their investigation into the real identity of this strange young man leads them to a friend of their children named Trent (Anthony Michael Hall), a student at M.I.T. He admits to befriending this Paul and sharing his knowledge of their lives with him. This seems to be the answer, but it doesn’t begin to explain what has happened to them and how their lives have been profoundly affected.

Paul also seems to have had an effect on Smith as there are distinct parallels between their narratives. I argue that in his ascendant trajectory Smith replicates Paul Poitier’s project of attaining celebrity and social status. Indeed it could be said that Smith learns valuable lessons about how to succeed in the mainstream from the character he portrays, and then he surpasses him. Paul insinuates himself into the white and privileged world of the Kittredges through canny and deliberate strategies to overcome the two salient aspects of his identity that might otherwise prove to be barriers: his race and his sexuality. He does so through a process of minimizing his race and sexuality while at the same time subverting conventional notions of those identities. Similarly, Smith’s broad-based stardom is predicated on his choice of film characters whose racial identities are non-threatening and whose sexuality is muted or erased, especially given the hyper-sexualized stereotype of black men in film.

“Mrs. Louisa Kittredge, I Am black”

The film adaptation of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, particularly in the construction and significance of the character Paul Poitier and as performed by Will Smith, constitutes an important meditation on race in America. Beneath its self-presentation as a satiric comedy of manners lie cogent interrogations of notions about race and class, the history of blacks in America, the limits of assimilation, the representations of black gay men, the nature of African American and Hollywood homophobia, and the fluidity of racial identity. Smith performs, resists, and usurps this character in order to effect certain cultural interventions and to further the cause of his public star identity. His performance, in fact, is a part of a larger pattern within the film in which Paul Poitier is marginalized, patronized, and distorted.

One critic, Scott Poulson-Bryant, has observed that Six Degrees of Separation is the history of America in two hours (96), and he is right. More specifically, it is an allegory of the history of blacks in America. Certain scenes involving Paul and his interactions and confrontations with the white characters in the film register a number of historical, social, and racial points. It is ironic that Paul, who is ambivalent about a racial identity, should actually carry so much black signification. Three scenes are essential to this reading.

After Trent picks up Paul and brings him back to his apartment near M.I.T., there ensues a charged exchange. Paul picks up Trent’s address book and is curious about the people in it. His trickster’s master plan is not yet fully formulated. Trent, on the other hand, has another agenda: seduction. They come to an agreement. For each piece of information Trent gives Paul, Paul will remove an article of clothing. This bartering of clothes reinscribes the plot of the children’s story of Little Black Sambo in which an Indian boy, who is threatened by four voracious tigers, barters his clothes in exchange for his life. Paul exchanges his clothes for the possibility of entrée to a better life. This exchange also constitutes a reenactment of the economic transaction of slavery. A privileged white male bids for the possession of the body of a black man. One crucial difference, of course, is that the black man here is actually an agent in the negotiation and stands to gain, in this case the knowledge that will allow him the social mobility he desires. Paul enjoys a certain empowerment in this moment: he acquires the intellectual capital by which to take control of his fate, and he also wields an erotic control over Trent. However, this kind of power can only be virtual. Regardless of the amount of leverage Paul attains, he will always function in a society that has not been constructed for him; he must always play by someone else’s rules. It cannot be forgotten that Trent, though sexually marginalized himself, nonetheless still operates from the advantaged position because of his race, gender, and class. In truth, Trent’s education of Paul, apprising him of the fact that the best gift to give the wealthy is jam in little pots, is essentially an imperialist project. By teaching Paul the details of the lives of his parents and their circle, he is teaching him the codes and values of a supposedly superior civilization. Trent is indoctrinating Paul, annexing or colonizing his mind. Guare makes a joke about this process when he has the South African millionaire joke about the sums of money his government is putting into the education of blacks in his country. He says, “And we’ll know we’ve succeeded when they kill us” (10). Revolution is the furthest thing from Paul’s mind; the end of his education is something perhaps more disturbing: he wants to become his oppressor.4

Paul’s profoundly culturally conservative desire is not merely to transcend race, but to appropriate whiteness. His agenda confirms Frantz Fanon’s assertion that one of the results of colonialism is that “the black man wants to be white” (Fanon, Black Skin 9). Paul demonstrates Stuart Hall’s observation that “blacks could gain entry to the mainstream — but only at the cost of . . . assimilating white norms of style, looks and behavior” (Hall, “Spectacle” 279). The basic motivator of Paul’s social agenda throughout is a denial of blackness, which is also the operating mode of Will Smith’s subsequent non-racial film personae. Notice how in his fictional identity as celebrity son “Paul” characterizes his racial identity: “I never knew I was black in that racist way till I was sixteen and came back here . . . Very protected. White servants. After the divorce we moved to  Switzerland, my mother, brother and I. I don’t feel American. I don’t even feel black. I suppose that’s very lucky for me even though Freud says there’s no such thing as luck. Just what you make” (30).

Here he expresses his wish for a black identity not informed with the wounds of history and racial oppression. His desire is for an autonomous identity which in American society is synonymous with whiteness.

Paul’s will to whiteness, which is also the measure of his own sense of marginalization, is reflected in his choices of lovers. The three young men with whom he chooses to have sexual encounters are all white, and certainly the choice of object cathexis, on some level, is a reflection of identity. In his preference for young white men, he is expressing a desire to become one with them, or even to become them. At least, he seeks validation from them. It must be taken into account that none of these relationships involves love, but instead some variety or degree of exploitation. This idea of import/export strengthens the point about identity. These men may use Paul for sex, money, or information, but he also uses them in his own way. They support him in his quest — to acquire and affirm his simulation of a white identity. Paul’s associations with Rick and the hustler are bound up with his highest sense of self, the peak moments of his self-realization. After the evening’s triumph with Geoffrey and the Kittredges, Paul’s happiness demands that he celebrate his accomplishment with sex. The sex with the hustler thus validates his successfully performed identity. In the second half of the film during the evening with Rick at the Rainbow Room and in the hansom cab, again Paul’s powers of imagination and transformation are given free rein, and it is this young white man from Utah who provides the moment and the audience for Paul’s assumption of his complete and essential self.

Sexuality is only one means of social and identity mobility. Another is through family connections. One can gain entry to privilege by sleeping with it, or one may simply be born into it. Paul makes use of both methods. His project with Flan and Ouisa is to seduce them, not as lovers, but as parents. He sets out to rewrite history and biology so as to become their son, thus to claim their status, wealth, and cultural legacy. It is significant that he devises the fiction of a famous black parent in order to gain access to the desired white parents.5 This goal is efficiently achieved, if only for an evening. The acquisition of the pink shirt (emblematic of class), the possession of the Kittredge’s real son, becomes Paul’s inheritance and investiture.

There are many textual references to Paul’s assumed status as the Kittredge son. Late in the story the Kittredges’ doorman, believing Paul’s claims, spits at Flan for having abandoned his “Negro” son (82). Certainly, there is a family resemblance between Flan and Paul in terms of their gifts for the con. Flan’s entire profession is based upon dissembling, if not the actual defrauding of his clients. On a different level, Paul does the same. As for Paul’s relationship with Ouisa, her maternal feeling for him informs their long telephone conversation in which she promises an enduring relationship on the condition that Paul surrender to the authorities. It is during this scene that Paul usurps the position of the actual Kittredge children, signally in the moment when Ouisa disconnects her daughter on the other line in order to concentrate on Paul.

Yet it is Ouisa, for all her sympathy and solicitousness, who also acknowledges the failure of Paul’s identity project. At the final dinner party during which she comprehends and defends the true meaning of her encounter with Paul, she pronounces the following truth about his dream: “He wanted to be us. Everything we are in the world, this paltry thing — our life — he wanted it. He stabbed himself to get in here. He envied us. We’re not enough to be envied” (116-17). This speech echoes a passage in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time: “White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want . . . Alas, this value can scarcely be corroborated . . . there is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts know this” (94-95).

The measure of Ouisa’s transformation is that she can acknowledge this lack of value. In the end, what Paul aspires to is not worth his effort and imagination. His goal of social and racial transcendence, though genuinely and passionately pursued, remains nothing more than a dream.

The second significant sequence in the film that carries racial and historical signification is one in which “Paul” intrudes upon the Kittredges and subsequently charms the company during that evening. The Kittredges’ Fifth Avenue apartment carries with it a certain value. What is this overstuffed red apartment but a metaphor for a materialistic, capitalist American society?6 This is one of the stated intentions of the film’s set designer, to capture a particular ’80s moment of New York history in an apartment that serves as a kind of epicenter of American society and culture.7 Paul’s quest for passage through these portals is an enactment of the project of assimilation. The goal of his journey is to gain admittance to this American Dream; he wants to see for himself what it is he has been educated to covet. It is significant that in order to gain entry Paul has to wound himself, the wound being a metaphor for the psychic violence required for social acceptance.8 He has to discard his own identity, whatever that may have been given his essential ambiguity, and then assume another identity that he has learned, appropriated, and constructed. His new fictionalized identity, one that has been shaped for this specific audience, is one that decentralizes or deracializes blackness. In a previously quoted speech, Paul characterizes his non-racist blackness as luck and then claims that luck is what one creates. Clearly he has constructed this fictional identity in order to seize the opportunity that he orchestrates.

In his next speech, Paul discusses how his father, Sidney Poitier, has no real identity because he is an actor: “he has no life — he has no memory — only the scripts producers send him in the mail through his agents. That’s his past” (31). Critic David Roman makes the observation that this concept of role-playing as identity is the essence of the black American experience, identity as a fulfillment of those social roles that have been conceptualized and authorized by the white power structure (203). Certainly during the course of the evening described in the film, Paul functions in a number of these prescribed social roles that historically have been designated for black people: he cooks the meal, cleans up afterward, and serves as the entertainment.9 Even more emblematic of “Paul’s” representation of black progress is the fact that he does get to sit at the table, but (ironically, at his own insistence) he doesn’t get to eat.10

The third key scene is the one that transpires on the Sunday morning after the art deal is completed. Ouisa’s discovery of Paul and the hustler in flagrante is a moment of truth in more ways than one. Of course, a side of Paul is revealed, his secret sexuality. Guare has said in interviews at the time of the original release of the film that he insisted this scene remain in the film because he wanted the Kittredges to face the Other, to have it brought right into their home for a direct confrontation (Milvy). In this way Guare allows not only Paul to be exposed, but also the seemingly blameless couple. Their actions disclose the inauthenticity of limousine liberalism. Notice how this couple will embrace this young black man only when they find out he is the son of a celebrity. In the act of admitting Paul they are committing a subtle act of racism. He is admitted to their home because his embodiment of a benign intersection of race and class, or its subsidiary, celebrity, confers upon him the status of an honorary white person. How appropriate that their guest that night is from South Africa whose presence underscores this racial dynamic. Notice also that they evict Paul in a veritable act of disenfranchisement not because he is black, which seems to be acceptable by itself. What they cannot abide is his association with a transgressive sexuality. It is almost as if this doubleness or confluence of difference is too much for them to bear. Their action also interestingly suggests that their homophobia resides in a place much deeper in their liberal hearts than racism.

Autobiographies of Ex-Coloured Men

Still, it is race that is the primary barrier Paul must overcome. Paul achieves his goal of assimilation into the mainstream symbolized by his penetration of the Kittredge home through a manipulation of how he is perceived. He circumvents possible resistances to his race by denying it and at the same time transcending it. During his early interactions with Flan and Ouisa, Paul makes a conscious effort to downplay his racial difference. Claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier, he fabricates stories about his past that serve three functions: to render his fictional identity plausible, to mitigate possible negative responses to his blackness, and to affirm the couple’s self-congratulatory non-racist liberalism. In the stories Paul tells and in his performance for the Kittredges and their guest, there is a reference to a deeper past than his personal one; he actually reproduces African American history in such a way that further ingratiates him to his audience. In cooking the meal and providing the entertainment through his soliloquy about Salinger and the death of the imagination, he references the history of slavery as well as the servant and entertainment roles black actors occupied in American film history. He intentionally invokes the racist stereotypes of the past. These subservient images of black people cater to white audiences who may feel comforted and safe with these conventional stereotypes in that they reaffirm their sense of a social hierarchy as well as their own positions of privilege and superiority within it.

Paul’s choice of Sidney Poitier as his father also makes a specific appeal to the liberal consciences of his hosts and their guest. Poitier is a symbol of the civil rights movement, and his film career broke racial barriers not only in Hollywood but in the world. By selecting Poitier, Paul moves his image from associations with slavery in the 19th century to the great social transformations of the 20th century. By accepting the son of this iconic actor who embodies racial good will, the Kittredges can feel good about themselves and their sense of their decency and fairness. In describing his fictional childhood as the child of an international celebrity, Paul moves his image from slavery to the civil rights movement and finally into a postracial position, one that transcends the historical experiences of black people with racism and oppression. When he says that growing up in Switzerland he never felt black, he reassures the couple that he will not make an issue of race or confront them about their racial attitudes. Thus they are free to embrace him.

Paul creates this fictional identity not only for the benefit of his white hosts, but also for himself. He has seduced himself with the idea of being the son of a famous international movie star. (Notice it is the celebrity dimensions, not the black activism aspects, of Poitier’s fame that attracts Paul.) That this Paul inhabits a blackness that is free of history and the experience of racism is meaningful to him and must express a deep wish to be delivered out of his marginality and alterity. This is one of the messages conveyed in Paul’s famous “death of the imagination” speech that is the centerpiece of the evening at the Kittredges. Paul explains to his mesmerized audience: “The imagination has moved out of the realm of being our link, our most personal link, with our inner lives and the world outside that world . . . I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us” (Guare 34). Paul believes that essentially we are what we imagine ourselves to be. This speech is his justification for his impersonation; this act expresses his truest self. That invented self is one that is free of all contingency, including the burden of race.

His desire is similar to that expressed at moments by Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk when he discovers his racial difference and wishes to live above the veil of race “in a region of blue sky and wandering shadows” (Du Bois 4 ). In both Paul and Du Bois, this desire for a free, raceless identity is really a wish for the fully realized self that would be recognized and accepted if society were truly just.

Like Paul Poitier, Will Smith deftly negotiates race to achieve his particular agenda. Victor Wong offers an analysis of how the terms of Smith’s stardom are constituted: “Smith’s blackness is one that has been made safe for consumption by Hollywood audiences in several ways, including a lessening of conspicuously black characteristics, and by imposing some level of white authority upon him. There should not, incidentally, be any doubt that it is the creation of Will Smith’s image as safe which has directly enabled him to assume his status in the upper echelons of Hollywood’s A-list” (Wong).

Wong isolates one of the primary maneuvers Smith utilizes to mask and contain his blackness: to choose roles originally intended for white actors. The role of Agent J in Men in Black was originally offered to Chris O’Donnell. The role of Robert Dean in Enemy of the State was offered to Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise. The original Agent Jim West in the television series The Wild, Wild West was played by Robert Conrad. Smith is a beneficiary of colorblind casting, and he pulls off these roles with considerable ease. Film audiences accept him in leading heroic roles usually filled by white actors. It is also remarkable how little racial baggage he carries into these roles. Usually colorblind casting of black actors in white roles creates repercussions in the film’s narrative because of unexpected racial implications and interpretations. The casting of Denzel Washington as Gray Grantham opposite Julia Roberts in 1987’s The Pelican Brief, a character conceived as white by the author John Grisham, created problems in terms of the depiction of the central love relationship that develops. The anticipated interracial kiss was not included in the film, which resulted in a noticeable narrative gap for the film’s audiences. The logic of the plot leads to this moment, and its absence raised more questions perhaps than the actual kiss might have. Interestingly, like Smith’s resistance to the male kisses in Six Degrees of Separation, Washington himself refused to do the kiss with Roberts. He claimed he did so out of respect to his black female audience (Ojumu 27).

Billy Dee Williams’s performance as Lando Calrissian in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is another problematic example of colorblind casting because his racial presence raises questions about his personal life and his relationship with a racial community that the film does not begin to answer. He is the only black man in the universe of the film.11 These are issues that would not be so salient were a white actor to play this role. In most of his films, Smith plays a character who, quite often having been conceived as white, inhabits an all-white world. Smith’s persona fits easily into these film environments, and his blackness doesn’t signify. In fact, Smith, more than any other major black actor, has the ability to mask the racial sign. His screen persona can signify race or not signify it at will, depending on the narrative and the situation; this perhaps is his genius. For the most part Smith chooses not to carry the racial sign, and this allows him to not only to function in white screen environments as characters originally conceived for white actors, but also to be accepted by mainstream film audiences. Wong concludes, quoting Paul Harris in The Observer: “‘Race just did not seem to matter to the parts offered to Smith.’ This would almost suggest that Will Smith does not even belong amongst Hollywood representations of blackness, being outside of them — certainly he himself would seem to encourage such a view” (Wong).

For the Kittredges and their guest, Paul is able to display his best self beyond the categories of class, sexuality, and, above all, race. The problem is that this essential Paul, beyond his past and background, beyond his blackness and gayness, unsettles those easy definitions and offers a glimpse of the possibilities of freedom and wholeness. The figure he strikes becomes a transgressive threat that his audience cannot bear and thus resists. Frank Rich invokes Ralph Ellison on the subject of the self-invented American protagonist: “As one modern master of the theme, Ralph Ellison put it, America’s capacity for the protean reflects the country’s ‘rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom’ and yet also ‘illusion which much be challenged, as Menelaus did in seizing Proteus'” (Rich 98). If Paul is such a Proteus, then he must be put in his place. Flan ejects him from the American dream, and Guare relegates him to the criminal justice system.

Smith shares Paul’s desire for racial transcendence. The momentum of his career has been driven by his desire to be the best without considerations of race. His ambition from the start has been to be the biggest star in the world, not the biggest black star. He has said: “My goal is to be the most famous actor on the face of the earth” (Fleming 36). Another example of Smith’s racial attitudes is a statement he made upon the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. He said: “[W]hen Barack Obama won, it validated a piece of me that I wasn’t allowed to say out loud — that America is not a racist nation . . . I love that all our excuses have been removed. African-American excuses have been removed. There’s no white man trying to keep you down . . . I’m African American, and I was able to climb to a certain point in Hollywood. On that journey, I realized people weren’t trying to stop me . . .” (Smith, Will).

In other words, he believes that black people have not been able to succeed because they have been held back by their own sense of racial impediment. Race can no longer obstruct black progress. Black people should be judged on their achievement, and race should not be a factor. This is how he wants to be assessed. Like Paul, he wants to be taken for his best self, free of contingency and identity politics. Unlike Paul, who realizes this ideal for only a moment, Smith has actually achieved it, and he has been validated in this racial transcendence by Hollywood and audiences around the world. Newsweek in an article entitled “The $4 Billion Man,” quotes a studio executive about Smith: “‘He can do anything.’ His appeal is so universal that it transcends race” (Smith, Sean). Mike Sager in Vibe magazine supports this idea: “Women and children love him; men identify with him; nobody envies or feels insecure around him. A reflection of a model hero in a colorblind, idealized America” (Sager 134). Smith occupies in the real world the postracial space that for Paul exists only in his imagination.

“Don’t Be Kissing No Man”

The postracial identity that Paul Poitier and Will Smith inhabit is complicated by their performances of sexuality. The intersection of blackness and homosexuality is located in a space at the center of Six Degrees of Separation that is resisted on several levels: those of the film’s critics, the film’s writer, and the filmmakers.

Some critics of the film (and play) have found the introduction of Paul’s sexuality to be extraneous, arguing that his blackness is enough to make the point. This addition of homosexuality compromises his believability as a character, as if the nexus of race and sexuality is a mere theatrical stunt, as if black gay men do not exist, or should not. Again, this component is integral to Guare’s conception of this character, and certainly it is consistent with Paul’s historical referent. What remains still is the resistance to Paul’s gay identity, an identity which contributes so much to his complexity and significance.

Though Guare provides his own best defense on this point, he, too, participates in this denial of Paul’s sexuality. It is as though Ouisa’s recoil is inscribed over his own resistance. When Ouisa encounters this same-sex primal scene with Paul and the hustler, notice it is the body of the hustler that serves as the eruption of chaos. Given the logic of the narrative, Ouisa is transformed by her confrontation with Paul. Her leap of imagination is to see him in his human wholeness, and what better way to dramatize this than for her to encounter his nakedness. Curiously, Guare displaces the exposure onto the naked body of the white male, as if to imply that the revelation of blackness is too much to be imagined. To support this charge is the way Guare handles the three men who engage Paul sexually: the nameless hustler, the amorous college boy Trent Conway and Rick, the innocent from Utah. In the second half of the film, Rick is seduced and robbed by Paul in an action that tragically parallels Ouisa’s experience. All three are silenced by their intimacy with Paul. (Rick is quite permanently silenced by suicide.) They disappear from the film, as if the experience were a devastation. Guare seems unable to place white men who have sexually encountered the black male. As David Roman points out in his commentary on John Clum’s analysis of Guare in Acting Gay, “black gay sexuality is constructed as duplicitous, aggressive and uncontainable, rendering white men passive, penetrable, and as Clum suggests, ‘unmanned'” (201-2). The film ultimately contributes, through reticence and avoidance, to the regressive effect of fetishizing, demonizing and mythologizing the black gay male and his perceived dangerous sexuality.

The filmmakers also participate in the resistance to Paul in their failure to visualize his sexuality fully and coherently. As Stephen Farber has noted, the internal evidence of the film seems to indicate that Schepisi shied away from the homosexual nature of the screenplay’s content and did not insist upon certain fidelities to the letter of Guare’s conception because he simply was not sufficiently emotionally invested in that aspect of the story (33). Paul is therefore resisted, and his sexuality is marginalized, even denied, at the directorial level.

This resistance is also compounded at the level of the interpretive artist. During the months following the film’s release, there was a minor controversy after it was reported that Smith, the then untried actor cast as Paul, when on set, refused or claimed inability to perform the role as written. This was surprising behavior as he had actively campaigned for the role, seeing it as an opportunity to prove his legitimacy as an actor. In effect, he would not engage in any of the dramatized homosexual activity required. The intersection of race and sexuality that Paul Poitier constitutes created a crisis of masculinity in Smith, who chose a public performance of heterosexuality over the queer performance required by the role. Much has been written about Smith’s failure to negotiate this aspect of the film, and the repercussions have followed him as it remains an issue that is raised in television interviews and magazine profiles even today. After the release of the film, Smith proclaimed, and still does, his wrong-headedness in dealing with this matter and that now he would have no problem performing the role as written. This stance is disingenuous as now he has nothing to risk with the film released, reviewed and a part of cinematic history, a touchstone film of the ’90s. At the time, however, there was much comment concerning Smith’s homophobic behavior. Following an article on Smith in Premiere, the Letters to the Editor section featured some outraged reactions. The most cogent critique raised the question of what position would Smith, as a black actor, take if a white actress were to refuse to kiss him? (Yarborough 16).

What has not been often remarked upon is the thoroughness and completeness of Smith’s resistance to the necessary representations of Paul’s sexuality. The problem is not that he was unable to kiss the actor Anthony Michael Hall on that particular day of shooting; the problem is that from the beginning he had no intention of doing so. The compromised scene is the one in which Paul extorts information from Trent about the people in his address book in exchange for a discarded article of clothing. At one point, instead of continuing with the game, Paul breaks the rules, approaches Trent and kisses him fully on the mouth. It is neither a romantic nor an erotic kiss, but actually an act of aggression whereby Paul seals his pact with Trent and asserts his power over him. When performed on stage, it is a powerful dramatic moment. Both James McDaniel and Courtney Vance, who portrayed Paul on stage in New York, did not hesitate in this depiction and gave full value to the scene. In the film the illusion of the kiss is created by extreme closeup of the back of Smith’s head, compensatory editing and sound effects. The result is a dramatic moment whose power and point are diminished.

Also missing is the other crucial kiss in the second part of the film, one that mirrors the first. During the midnight hansom cab ride, Paul kisses Rick (Eric Thal) in a spontaneous romantic gesture. In the film Smith makes only a vague embracing movement toward Thal. This important scene thus loses its concluding punctuation, and an interesting layer of the story is obscured. Again, as reported by Richard David Story in New York, Smith claimed the inability to perform what was required on the day of shooting (43). The third compromised scene is the discovery of Paul and the hustler in bed. Onstage, this scene, in order for it to achieve its full shock and surprise, is performed by the actors in the nude. Even this detail is sabotaged by Smith, who in an interview boasts of having avoided this additional requirement of the role (Morrison 4). As can be seen, Smith’s approach to the sexual dimension of Paul’s character constitutes more of a systematic resistance as opposed to a momentary lack of nerve. An essential part of Paul is not merely marginalized here; it is sabotaged.

In defense of his position, Smith at the time made the argument that as a black actor whose position is paradigmatic and iconic, he could not afford to risk any damage to his public image because his constituent audience would be unable to make a distinction between him and any role he might inhabit (Story 43). Unlike a white actor, who can play any character without personal ramifications, a black actor, Smith reasons, is more completely identified with any role he might play, and therefore has a responsibility not to do any social or personal damage. The underlying premise here is that to portray a gay character and to do so with artistic commitment is inherently compromising. Furthermore, in support of his decision as to his interpretation of the role, he has cited the advice of fellow actor Denzel Washington: “‘You can act all you want, but don’t do any physical scenes.’ In other words . . . ‘don’t be kissing no man'”(Chambers 76). Whatever the merit of his argument, the result in the film are moments of technical awkwardness, needless ambiguity and a character who seems even more opaque than perhaps necessary. Here is a case of a fledgling actor who overrode the power and artistic visions of both John Guare and Fred Schepisi and was able to get away with it because he had the backing of the producer and a base of power in a celebrity that needs to be interrogated.

Queer Willie Style

Both Paul, within the film, and Smith, in his performance of Paul, react to the assumption of a heterosexist norm. For all his gayness, which is revealed halfway through the film, Paul covers his sexual identity by adhering to the requirements of the white upper class into which he attempts to assimilate. His language, his manners, and his dress conform to the WASP social code, and his performance of class is seamlessly effective. He follows the regimen required for assimilation as Stuart Hall outlines: “Blacks could gain entry to the mainstream — but only at the cost of . . . assimilating white norms of style, looks, and behavior” (Hall 279). When he enters the Kittredge apartment after simulating an attack by muggers in Central Park, he is wearing the prep school/Ivy league uniform of khakis and blue blazer. His conversational gambit is to flatter Flan and Ouisa by reporting that their children do not criticize them at school. In addition to these blandishments, he makes the white couple comfortable with his presence by making them feel that he is not what he so obviously is: a young black man. Such a categorization carries with it certain assumed characteristics, the most relevant here being the cultural sexualization of black masculinity. Historically, black men are associated with particular stereotyped sexual attributes relating to genital size, sexual performance, and a predisposition toward rape. All of these can pose a threat that results in the stigmatization of black men by mainstream society. Kobena Mercer articulates this fear of black manhood: “In the phantasmic space of the white male imaginary, the big black phallus is perceived as a threat not only to hegemonic white masculinity but to Western civilization itself” (Mercer 284). Paul’s markers of class neutralize his sexualized racial identity, and he is read as acceptable, the black equivalent of their privileged and wholesomely heterosexual children.

In his stories about his acquaintanceship with their children, Paul does not hint at any special friendship with the Kittredge daughter. Aside from the fact of his homosexuality, which would exclude such an interest, he knows very well the white anxiety over interracial relationships and furthers his assimilationist goal by distancing himself from such a problematic sexual perception. Successful black men continually negotiate this vexed issue, and Will Smith does the same. In fact, Paul Poitier and Will Smith share an identity in their performances of the non-threatening, desexualized black male. While Paul gains entry into Fifth Avenue apartments, Smith ascends to the Hollywood A-List of the most marketable and highest-paid male stars. The construction of Smith’s screen personae is predicated upon a resistance to a sexualized profile as well as an avoidance of interracial heterosexuality. Most often Smith is teamed with another actor in his films: Martin Lawrence (Bad Boys and Bad Boys II, 1995 and 2003), Jeff Goldblum (Independence Day, 1996), Tommy Lee Jones (Men In Black and Men in Black II, 2002 and 2002), Gene Hackman (Enemy of the State, 1998), Kevin Kline (Wild, Wild West, 1998), and Matt Damon (The Legend of Bagger Vance, 2000). In some films he is linked briefly with a black actress: Marcelle Beauvais (Wild, Wild West), Thandie Newton (The Pursuit of Happyness, 2006) and Salli Richardson (I Am Legend, 2007). In all three cases, these black women’s characters disappear from the film. In two films he is engaged or married to black women (Vivica J. Fox in Independence Day and Regina King in Enemy of the State), but these relationships are not sexually visualized.12 In Enemy of the State, Smith’s protagonist has an affair with a character played by Lisa Bonet, but this sexual relationship occurs prior to film’s plot.

In other films Smith is paired with women of Latino or of other ethnic backgrounds: Eva Mendes (Hitch, 2005), Alice Braga (I Am Legend, 2007), and Rosario Dawson (Men in Black II and Seven Pounds, 2008). Seven Pounds is the only case of Smith engaging in a sustained sexual scene in his career. When he is opposite white actresses, the relationship is either chaste or adversarial: Linda Fiorentino (Men in Black), Bridget Moynihan (I, Robot, 2004), Charlize Theron (Hancock, 2008). The latter film does feature Smith’s only interracial heterosexual kiss though in the most extreme and vexed and not romantic or sexual circumstances. The record of Smith’s performances of a contained black male sexuality attests to how carefully he has shaped his career in order to avoid the difficulties of racial and sexual politics, and he has been rewarded by a remarkable mainstream success.

Paul Poitier’s performance of a classed heterosexual normativity mitigates the threat of a stereotyped black male sexuality, and it also completely masks his homosexuality. The success of Paul’s impersonation of class and a normative sexuality is measured by the degree of shock registered by the Kittredges when he is discovered in bed with the male hustler. It is a shock that resonates as well with Guare and the makers of the film, as has been discussed. Paul’s sexuality is the source of demonstrable unease at multiple levels of the film and text. What does Paul mean to these different interests, and why is he in all his blackness and gayness so consistently resisted? Perhaps an answer can be found in Paul’s relationship with Flan. Paul affects him in various ways. Paul affords Flan the opportunity to test his liberal convictions when he shows up on his doorstep. His magnanimity toward the young man affirms his sense of his best self. Even when Paul is exposed and is in trouble with the law, Flan, though reluctantly, assumes a fatherly role. He is forced into postures of tough parenting that he has never exerted with his own children. He is shamed by the doorman of his building for neglecting his Negro son and begrudgingly puts forth an effort. Flan is symbolic of the great American patriarchy whose social responsibility, which it continually fails to meet, is to care for all its children. Paul is a nagging reminder of his stake in racial equality and social justice and also of what he has not done to secure them.

Paul’s sexuality is more problematic. At one point Ouisa confesses her attraction to Paul and urges Flan to admit to similar feelings. He replies: “Cut me out of that particular pathology” (117). His use of the word “pathology” to describe same sex attraction registers his need to distance such a possibility from himself. Homosexuality for him is disordered and perverse. (It is interesting that Guare within the logic of the narrative equates homosexuality and blackness with chaos.) Yet he would not need to assert that sense of distance if those feelings were truly alien to him. Paul makes him question his identity as a privileged, white heterosexual male and confront aspects of his identity and sexuality that he cannot accept. Gillan quotes Diana Fuss to explain Flan’s situation: “Flan repositions Paul as the ‘outsider’ who enacts the process by which ‘heterosexuality secures its self-identity and shores up its ontological boundaries by protecting itself from what it sees as the continual predatory encroachments of its contaminated other, homosexuality'” (51).13 Consequently, Flan must denounce Paul and expel him from his home and life.

By resisting and rejecting Paul, Flan is simultaneously acknowledging and denying a formative trope in American literary representation: the homoerotic bond that motivates a thematic strand in American literature and film. The cultural wish for a rapprochement between the races is most often expressed in the American imaginary through the interracial male bond. For instance, writing about the buddy action film genre, Donaldson observes that “feature films function as a keeper of America’s collective conscience — the repository for fears, guilt, and hopes — the interracial buddy film creates a world where that conscience can find a peaceful balance, that is to say where conflicts can find resolutions” (11).

Leslie Fielder also describes this homoerotic bond famously in the essay “Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey” which focuses on the relationship between the slave Jim and Huckleberry Finn: “The mythic love of white male and black [is] buried at a level of acceptance which does not touch reason, so desperately repressed from overt recognition, so contrary to what is usually thought of as our ultimate level of taboo — the sense of that love can survive only in the obliquity of a symbol, persistent, archetypal,       in short, as a myth” (Fiedler qtd. in Phelan 522).

Christopher Looby notes that Fiedler’s argument about the interracial homosexual subtexts of the American literary history contradicts itself because of Fiedler’s uneasiness with the real implications of homosexuality (529). This uneasiness is embodied in Paul, whose blackness and gayness doubly destabilizes patriarchy. His presence makes the film’s other characters and the filmmakers confront the centrality of race in American society and history as well as the homoerotic desire that haunts the American mythos. The intersection of these two forces that Paul represents is a powerful threat as if the nexus is unthinkable. Certainly, it was too much for Will Smith. As with Flan, Smith has no other choice but to reject the reality and implications of Paul’s sexuality. Flan is invested in preserving his life and his identity, while Smith seeks to protect his career. In interviews published around the time of the film’s release, Smith commented on his motivations for refusing to perform the physical manifestations of Paul’s sexuality. He claimed that the film came at a pivotal point in his career as he was making a transition from television to the big screen, and he didn’t know how those scenes would be received by audiences. He ran the risk of alienating his fan base and of losing face within the rap music community and its constructions of manhood that incorporates “the historic tropes of black heterosexual, masculine (hyper)sexuality, insensitivity, detachment and cold-bloodedness” (Gray 178).

This is a masculinity that is also noted for its misogyny and homophobia.14 Yet, despite the assumed homophobia of rap, Smith later revealed that doing the part ironically gained respect for him because within these notions of black masculinity facing and overcoming the most difficult challenges, even playing gay in a film, is a test of manhood. When asked about the reaction of his peers in rap, he has said, “Everyone applauds me for having the heart to take the role. Rap is about macho, being hard. In a weird way, it turned out that it was a macho and hard thing for me to have had the balls to do” (Gordon 54). He gained credibility for doing the film and facing its challenges, even though technically he did not fulfill all the requirements of the role.

Perhaps it was not so much his rap music peers about whom he needed to be concerned as the Hollywood establishment itself. In making the decision to limit his investment in portraying the gay aspects of Paul’s character, it could be argued that he made the right choice for a young actor attempting to establish himself in a film career. Smith in his off-screen persona, despite the usual gay rumors that accrue to any actor who attains celebrity status, is exemplarily heterosexual. This still does not mean that taking on the role in Six Degrees of Separation was not without real risks.15 Although Hollywood is considered to be a site of liberalism, in terms of its film representations of homosexuality and in terms of its treatment of homosexual actors, it is not as progressive as it appears. Certainly the visibility of gay black male representation is minimal.16

Mainstream film production is relatively conservative compared to television or theatre. The stakes of film stardom are much higher than in other entertainment forms because mainstream films are so expensive to make. Thus, bets are hedged. Elements that might compromise profit are not embraced because they may not attract large audiences who wish to have the film experience affirm their deepest beliefs. Film powerfully reproduces traditional American social ideology, which still does not fully embrace homosexuality. There are many exceptions. Tom Hanks won the Oscar for Philadelphia in 1993. Sean Penn won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Actor in Milk. Yet Brokeback Mountain did not win the Oscar for Best Picture in 2005 after winning every other major best picture accolade around the globe. It was as if Hollywood resisted having this particular film represent its best and highest achievement because of its subject matter. There are very few out gay male actors, and the ones who are have limited careers. Rupert Everett, for example, now publicly regrets his decision to be an out gay actor because of the roles over the years he has been unable to secure (“Coming out”). Richard Chamberlain has also stated the following in an interview with The Advocate: “Personally, I wouldn’t advise a gay leading man-type actor to come out” (Voss 3).

Even young straight actors think twice about taking on a gay role for fear of being stigmatized or marginalized. Brendan Fraser was in a position quite similar to Will Smith’s when he took on the role of Clayton Boone in Bill Condon’s 1998 film Gods and Monsters. In the film, Boone becomes the object of desire of the aging, legendary film director (patterned after James Whale of Frankenstein fame) for whom he poses for sketches. The logic of the narrative requires that Boone finally accede to the wishes of the older man and pose for him in the nude. The scene asks for full-frontal shots, but Fraser refused claiming that the nudity would detract from the scene’s emotional impact (Condon). The scene was filmed utilizing alternative staging and camera angles, and the result perhaps is not as fully effective as it might have been. Fraser has gone on to a respectable and high-profile career as has Smith. The wisdom of caution in the face of homophobia is borne out. Smith ascended to stardom to a certain degree because he resisted Paul.

Another reason that Paul’s sexuality is such a resisted force in the film is the possibility of freedom that it offers. The revelation of Paul’s other side, like the other side of the two-sided Kandinsky that is displayed in the Kittredge living room, is an irruption of chaos, as intended by Guare. It is also the manifestation of a joyous unruly spirit at the core of Paul’s identity. His sexuality is integral to his sense of self, and he is unselfconscious and unapologetic about it. At one point, Ouisa asks him why he brings the hustler into their home. Paul replies that the evening was so magical and that the experience made him so happy that he wanted to add sex to it. When he inquires of her if she does not do the same, she is speechless. The idea of sex as an enhancement of joy has never occurred to her, and he opens up for her a new world of erotic possibility. Paul has this effect on several characters in the film: Trent, the MIT student who schools him in the ways of the upper classes; and Rick, the aspiring actor from Utah whom Paul dazzles with a magical evening at the Rainbow Room. Despite the devastation he wreaks and the unease he instills, Paul, through his sexuality, has the ability to be a transformative figure for the people he deceives.17

There are also two sides to Will Smith’s relation to Paul’s sexuality. Smith is as double-sided and contradictory as Paul. His capacity for containing opposing messages is key to his broad-based appeal. He functions as a universal signifier. He is an open figure onto whom audiences can project their needs. He can mask the implications of a black identity for white audiences while simultaneously riffing in vernacular for his black viewers. He can play a homosexual character to earn the praise of the film industry at the same time he manages not to invest fully in that character in order to maintain the respect of his rap and neighborhood peers. In an extension of this duality, Smith denies Paul’s sexuality through aspects of his performance, but at the same time he accesses Paul’s queer spirit in his career as it has developed. The criticism that Smith received for Six Degrees of Separation is in some ways refuted by the body of his work. One pronounced irony contained within Smith’s refusal to play gay in this instance is how often he performs queerness in his films. In “Unintentional Camp and the Image of Will Smith,” Seth Nesenholtz argues that Smith’s persona is informed with a camp sensibility as defined by Susan Sontag in her seminal essay “Notes on Camp” and claims that “there are numerous instances in his filmography where homosexual camp is reinforced” (Nesenholtz).

Within a number of his films there are irruptions of camp or queer desire similar to the revelation of Paul’s gayness in Six Degrees. In Made in America, there is a scene in which Smith as the best friend of Whoopi Goldberg’s daughter, in order to make a comic point, ends their conversation by suddenly taking on a stereotyped female persona and walking away with exaggerated swinging hip movements. In Independence Day, there is a scene early in the film script when Smith as pilot Captain Steve Hiller reports to his military base. In the locker room, as he begins to change his clothing, he discusses his disappointment over a rejection letter from NASA. Harry Connick Jr., as his best friend Captain Jimmy Wilder, asks, “What else do they want you to learn?” Steve answers, “How to kiss ass” (Devlin and Emmerich 42). Connick, kneeling behind Smith then says, “Sometimes you just have to pucker up and. . . .” (Devlin and Emmerich 42). As performed in the film, Connick says, “I’m sorry, man. You know what you need to do. You need to like kiss some serious booty to get ahead in this world, man. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. See, I like the one knee approach because it puts the booty like right in front of the lips” (Independence Day). As he says this, still kneeling, he makes a motion forward as if to plant a kiss on Smith’s backside. The scene is played for comedy, but it registers the homoerotic dimensions of their friendship and summons up the same-sex emotional dynamics of Hollywood war films going back to Wings in 1927.

In Wild, Wild West, as government agent Captain James West, Smith engages in a comic rivalry with U.S. Marshall Artemus Gordon played by Kevin Kline. In one scene on a gadget embellished train, the two masters of disguise argue as to whose female impersonation is more convincing, particularly their costuming and their false padded bosoms. Each claims that his artificial breasts are more lifelike. The unsuspecting conductor overhears them and has his suspicions about their relationship confirmed. He exclaims, “I knew it!” (Wilson et alia 49). Even more explicit is a scene later in the film when the two men find themselves stuck to each other by magnetic metal collars. The positions they find themselves in simulate sex acts when Smith’s face is pressed against Kline’s crotch as his collar becomes attached to Kline’s belt buckle.

In Hitch, Smith plays a relationship expert who attempts to teach a hapless client (Kevin James) how to win the unattainable woman of his dreams. Smith offers to instruct him in the art of the goodnight kiss. Smith stands in for the date so that James can practice his technique. The two end up accidently kissing to great comic effect. The payoff of this moment is that Smith is nonplussed by the kiss, and takes it in stride. His own masculinity is so assured that a male kiss cannot faze him. This scene clearly is a reference to the kissing scenes in Six Degrees of Separation. It is as though Smith is doing penance for his lack of nerve earlier in his career. He rewrites the past, and gets the scene right this time.

There is one more significant scene in a Will Smith film in which there is an errant homoerotic subtext. Enemy of the State dramatizes the plight of an everyman attorney who finds himself the target of a government conspiracy. At one point he is aided by an older man played by Gene Hackman, who is a surveillance expert. When they meet in a hotel hallway, where Smith has momentarily escaped, Hackman, who knows that microphones and tracking devices have been planted on Smith’s person, orders him to take off his clothes. This moment has a deep resonance. The situation of an older white man telling a young black man to strip replicates a pivotal moment in the Frederick Douglass’s narrative when the slave-breaker Covey commands Douglass to remove his clothing and follow him into the woods. Presumably Covey intends to whip him, but the situation is open for alternate interpretations. Covey perhaps has a sexual motive in uncovering the young man’s nakedness and securing the seclusion and privacy of the forest. Their intimacy is staged for either a beating or for sex, the two perhaps being synonymous.18

There is a similar scene in Six Degrees of Separation when the wounded Paul is attended by Flan after he has removed his shirt. As Gillan notes, “One can find . . . traces of a sexualized racial anxiety in the moment when Flan cleans and bandages Paul’s bleeding wound . . . . The moment is also interesting because Paul is naked to the waist, posed on the edge of the Jacuzzi like a lounging Greek statue . . . emphasizing the erotic nature of the position in which he and Flan find themselves” (60). The sexual dynamics between Covey and Douglass are reproduced in Flann and Paul as well as the characters Hackman and Smith portray. The reoccurrence of this charged moment indicates once again the presence of a strong homoerotic interracial component in American mythology and its reproduction in Hollywood film.

All of these moments in Will Smith’s films reveal a contradiction at the center of his film persona, and his ability to contain oppositions is central to the construction of his stardom. Despite his resistance to a homosexual character in his first major role in a major Hollywood film, and despite his exemplary heterosexual public identity, his performances enter into queer spaces, and as such he destabilizes stereotypes about black masculinity and does significant work in deconstructing and reconstructing images of young black men in American popular culture.

A Good Will to All

As a result of the jump-start that Six Degrees of Separation gave to his career, Will Smith has gone on to major stardom. His astronomical box-office successes have earned him a high ranking on Hollywood’s A-list of bankable stars, a position shared by no other black male actor and that constitutes assimilation on the highest level.19 What is even more remarkable about his success is its symbolic power. Will Smith now can be read as a cultural sign of the state of American racial relations, or rather a cultural wish for racial transcendence. In a country that remains racially divided despite the election of the first African American President, he, like Obama, is a public figure who constitutes a bridge.20 In film after film Smith is cast as heroes who literally save the world or is the last man on earth, and given the public response to the films, America seems to be quite comfortable with the idea of this particular black man being the repository of traditional societal and cultural values. Of course, the cost of this image is the masking of the real racial problems that persist and a de-emphasis on blackness. Certainly the key to Smith’s success is the construction of an image and persona that deracializes blackness, that voids blackness of its historical and cultural content. If this is so, then it is entirely appropriate that Smith’s rise should begin with Paul Poitier and his postracial dream.

At the end of Paul’s part of the story, he is defeated. He is driven off in police custody, an image of particular irony in that he has arrived at the exact fate his identity has been constructed to contradict. In this ending, his identity is not in any way validated by external reality, which in a just world it would be. Here he is just another statistic, a young black man in trouble with the law.

What is even more poignant about Paul’s case is that he cannot even maintain authority over his own identity, fictional though it may be, but still expressive of his truest and best self. Simply, he is usurped by the actor who enacts him. Paul’s sexual identity may be betrayed by his audiences, his creators and his interpreter; however, his project of race and class transcendence, whatever its inherent worth, which he ultimately fails to realize himself, is finally fulfilled by the actor who embodies him, and on a scale and to a degree that exceeds even his own wildest dreams.

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