Interracial Relationships and Their Attitudes
In the 1991 Spike Lee film Jungle Fever, Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes) starts an affair with an Italian-American named Angie Tucci (Annabella Sciorra), and both encounter significant resistance from both sides of their family. In many ways, the basic plot is similar, if a bit seedier, than the 1967 Stanley Kramer drama Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, starring Sidney Poitier and Katherine Houghton as an interracial couple who focus on winning over her distrustful white parents. While both films deal with the complications of two people of different races starting a relationship, the outcomes and themes of the films are quite different. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner focuses mainly on overcoming the straightforward prejudice of the parents of the couple, while Jungle Fever presents the opposition of the relationship by both black and white members of the community, indicating the cultural resistance both races feel at the prospect of "mixing."
In Jungle Fever, the issue of the interracial relationship is compounded by the fact that both Flipper and Angie are cheating on someone - Flipper with his wife, Angie with her boyfriend. As a result, the protagonists are seen as a little less virtuous than John and Joey of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. The writers of Guess Who purposefully made John a paragon of virtue and an ideal man, to make sure that the only issue that Joey's parents would have would be one of race. This places the film squarely on the position of supporting interracial relationships; in the end, John and Joey are accepted by both sets of parents, despite their visceral and visible discomfort with the idea at first, and the ending is happy.
In the case of Jungle Fever, however, the relationship between Flipper and Angie is not nearly so virtuous. Instead of the whole argument taking place over a single dinner, we see the consequences of the kind of pressure both races place on them for dating outside their race. A waitress, played by Queen Latifah, chastises Flipper for dating a white women. Angie's father Mike beats her mercilessly for dating Flipper after he finds out, throwing her out of the house. The issue is always swiftly dealt with, and Flipper and Angie are not given a chance to prove to others that they love each other. They cannot even maintain the relationship for themselves; eventually, the racial differences and the pressure placed upon both of them forces them to break up. This is a much more cynical view of interracial relationships than Guess Who, likely brought on by Spike Lee's focus on poor inner-city Italians and blacks instead of the clean-cut WASPs and pleasant blacks of Guess Who - the resistance is much more aggressive, and the characters much more flawed and not as easy to root for.
In conclusion, both Jungle Fever and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner deal with the issue of interracial relationships, but the themes and outcome are quite different. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner addresses the issue of interracial marriage as directed through parent-child relationships, and the resistance of the father and mother toward the marriage of their child to someone outside their race. In the case of Jungle Fever, the couple is beset on all sides by nearly every member of both community, all of whom do not want them to date outside their race. These differences show a dramatically different perspective held by both Kramer and Lee; while Kramer thinks it works, Lee does not think either community would accept these relationships.
Works Cited
Kramer, Stanley (dir). Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Perf. Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy,
Katherine Hepburn. Columbia Pictures, 1967. Film.
Lee, Spike (dir). Jungle Fever. Perf. Wesley Snipes, Annabella Sciorra, John Turturro. Universal
Pictures, 1991. Film.
