Stuber: Whiteness in a Decentralized Era

AKA the Spiritual Successor to Hancock

I just went to see Stuber on a lark, and it is amazing. All of you must see it immediately.

Because it's good? Oh hell no. It's two central actors - Dave Bautista and Kumaili Janjiani - are mediocre to decent comedic talents performing at the upper edge of their middling range, and the plot is the most paint by numbers buddy-cop movie you can imagine. Nothing you see in this movie will make you sigh "this is true craft."

But the writing. The writing captures this current cultural and economic moment better than any other film of the decade. Future generations will be lucky if they remember this movie to accurately portray the teens. It is not "deep" in any sense, but rather leaves everything at the surface, to be so easily analyzed.

The movie is prominently "about" Uber. What is the brilliant malevolence of Uber? That it is a faceless market-network that connects labor and consumers directly in a race to the bottom for both of them, while the network takes a cut. Of course, small business founders have been working inhumane hours and floating their meager savings as startup capital - often losing it all - forever, but Uber and similar apps are the commodification of their self-exploitations, encouraging more people than ever to enter this cutthroat environment in order to take their cut. It is Capital finding a way to eat its cake (exploiting labor), while never having the legal responsibility of an employer or the personal relationship of a manager. There's no employment protections - if you're unlucky enough to get customers who have bad days and drop your rating on the app below 4 stars, you are impersonally dropped from it (as Kumaili's character - Stu - worries over.)

Cool, we all know that. Now what is whiteness? To quote SMG about multiculturalism:

The idea of multiple cultures, in itself, is not wrong. The trouble is that it's employed as a substitute for antiracism, antisexism and so-on. Those are issues of class, and the reduction of various communities to just 'cultures' serves as a distraction from class. 

Like, as a basic example, you go to a generic multiculturalism festival and there's going to be a Chinese pavilion, Portuguese pavilion, whatever. What you won't see is a Homeless pavilion, or a Poverty pavilion. 

Tumblr's solution is essentially to create endless new pavilions, so there's a little booth for 'homeless culture' slotted inbetween the ones for bronies, sentient anime characters, and dogs. Little recipe cards for how to drink Listerine without going blind, that sort of thing. Maybe a special seat for the transhomeless - those who are rich but have a 'hobo spirit.' 

And FYaD, I suppose, would have effectively the same setup: ironic pavilions for n*****, goku, doge, etc. 

The thing is that multiculturalism is already assimilationist. People are grouped into a 'multiculture' that is subordinate to white culture and, in a broader sense, liberal capitalism.

Now of course any Marxist (like SMG) will say that "race conflict is just a mask for class conflict" --but the epiphenomenon of racism and whiteness can still be interesting to discuss as this superstructure.

And the message of Stuber is that "whiteness is like Uber - it can work even when there is no white person around present to enforce it."

What does that mean? First, it means that none of the main characters of Stuber are white. Not the two main characters of the cop and the Uber driver. Not the villain, who is East Asian. Not the heroine/daughter of the cop. White characters are all at the periphery - the platonic friend/love interest, the cop's corrupt boss, the dead partner who is mourned like a surrogate daughter, the bro-asshole boss - who all represent the different authority figures and objects of pursuit that whiteness dominates in our culture, but are not really central figures full of agency themselves.
(And they're outnumbered by other peripheral characters of color). And all of these side characters are flat caricatures, lacking even the minor depth and nuances that Stu and Vin get.

And the entire setting of the movie is a multicultural, boring, suburban LA with set-pieces of banal multicultural commodification: a gay strip-club (which has the best scene in the movie), a sriracha factory, Koreatown, the omnipresent Uber, a sporting goods store, an art gallery, a women-only spincycle gym. It's a tour through "new world same as the old world." A goddamn sriracha factory with workers hiding in a van fearing ICE!

And the two main characters, neither white? One is an overly macho cop who is short sighted, and the other is an over-educated Uber driver who is desperate for money and the approval of a white woman.

And yet, the two main characters have no way to interact with each other except through whiteness. The young precariat Stu through his educated-class wokeism, and the old cop Vin through his establishment machismo. Here are some of the best jokes in the movie between them:

STU: Oh sure, haul me in. A white cop dragging a brown guy around. That will look great.
VIN: I'm not white.
STU: What are you? Puerto Rican? (Vin shakes his head.) Mexican? (No again.) Libyan? (No.) Chinese?
VIN: (eyes squinting from Lasik) Oh, now who's being racist.
STU: Ugly people come in all races.

***

STU: That was trauma. You're going to put me in therapy. And neither of my jobs give me insurance. So I'm going to have to get it from college students. Who all read books by white guys with Indian names. And they'll tell me to mediate. I ALREADY MEDITATE.

 ***

VIN: When I was fourteen, my father took me camping in the desert. When we ran out of food he went back to town. Except he just got drunk and hooked up with his local sidepiece. So I just had to wait in the desert, cold, hungry, afraid of wolves, and with nothing but this switchblade. That night I become a man.
STU: First off, your father was abusive. Second, you don't have to starve alone in the desert to become a man.

Which is all topped off with Stu showing up, dating Vin's daughter, wearing a Bad Christmas Sweater (white cultural appropriation) and saying "this is your night in the desert."

Or perhaps the peak is when these two ethnic men are letting out all their aggression by beating the shit out of each other -- but they do it in a sporting goods store so they are using golf clubs and climbing ropes and other bourgeois toys.

There is nothing they can do that captures their authentic ethnicity in a way to interact with each other. And that's because in this world there is no authentic ethnicity that has not been captured and intermediated by whiteness (aka upper class capitalism, really.) And viewed through this lens it is very, very funny.

It's like my favorite movie Hancock, as I say above, except you don't even need the white-male figure supervising the characters anymore. We live in a decentralized world where the oppressed classes do it to themselves now.

There are so many examples of "brave new multicultural frontiers sublimated into white/capital relations" in this movie that I am too tired to list them all (and the movie and the script are not online yet.) Just go see it, and bask in the best movie to Capture Our Era so far.