Men in Black

Men in Black arrives at a curious historical juncture, the moment when Hollywood blockbusters began to feature Black leads in prominent roles without turning the entire film into a referendum on that fact. Will Smith's Agent J is a wisecracking New York cop who gets recruited into an alien-fighting outfit, and his race is treated as fundamentally incidental to the plot. This is, in the context of 1997, almost refreshing in its refusal to comment on itself. The film concerns itself with aliens and jokes and the deadpan chemistry between Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, not with anything resembling cultural consciousness. The supporting cast includes a woman agent (Linda Fiorentino) who is present and competent without the film making any particular virtue of her presence.

Where the film does venture into territory that might be charitably called progressive, it does so almost accidentally. The organization itself is portrayed as meritocratic and colorblind in its recruitment, and several supporting characters represent various ethnicities. Vincent D'Onofrio plays a cartoonishly monstrous villain who is, notably, a white man, though this is clearly not meant as social commentary but merely as casting. The film's one moment of something approaching feminist awareness appears in Fiorentino's character being taken seriously as an agent, though she exists primarily as window dressing in what is ultimately a buddy comedy.

The overwhelming reality of Men in Black is its complete indifference to the social consciousness that would come to define certain quarters of cinema. It is a film about aliens and comedy and spectacle, made in 1997 when such indifference was not yet controversial. By contemporary standards, this reads as a film of almost stunning apolitical innocence, which is to say it barely qualifies as anything more than a mainstream entertainment product. One might argue that the lack of performative progressivism is itself a kind of authenticity, but this would be confusing the absence of something with the presence of its opposite.