HEAVY BREATHING

By Jack E. White

I'M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THE 1950S, WHEN BLACKS were so rarely on television that the mere sight of one was enough to produce pandemonium in our Washington neighborhood. "Colored on TV," someone would shout from the front porch, and all normal activity ceased as everybody within earshot rushed to the nearest set for a moment of electronic racial solidarity. If somehow you missed the event, you felt seriously deprived. At a time when the civil rights movement was just beginning, seeing blacks on the tube made us feel more like a part of America. We wanted them to be there even if it meant settling for a demeaning sitcom like Amos 'n' Andy. Anything was better than nothing.

These days, there are enough African Americans on the air to make prime time more integrated than the average suburb, but the "colored on TV" instinct lingers on. It helps to explain why such a run-of-the-mill movie as Waiting to Exhale is a box-office hit. For many blacks, especially women, the film version of Terry McMillan's best-selling 1992 potboiler about lonely, frustrated black women and no-good men has become a catalyst for discussions about sisterhood and relations with the opposite sex. "It teaches you that you need to find peace within yourself. It has characters anyone can identify with," says Sabrina Williams, of Washington, who has seen it three times. "It will further a dialogue my friends and I have been having about men-women relationships," says Akahita Maaaungka, a management consultant in Washington. Says no less an authority on black sexual politics than John Doggett III, the lawyer who bragged during the Clarence Thomas hearings about having been pursued by Anita Hill: Exhale "truly is a 1996 morality tale for the African-American community."

All this heavy breathing obscures the fact that except for the color of its stars, Exhale is fairly standard Hollywood pap--sort of Steel Magnolias in black face. Its biggest virtue is that there is not a struggling welfare mama, sassy street-corner "ho" or domineering matriarch in sight. Indeed for all the predictable carping from black men about the supposed bashing of their sex in Exhale, it is middle-class black women who take the real beating. Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon play to a new black female stereotype that is in some ways more damaging than the ones it replaces: the young professional woman who can excel in a demanding job, be a successful single mother and support her aging parent, yet who is abjectly clueless about defending herself from exploitative males--the romantically stunted career-girl stereotype that Hollywood has already perfected for white women. "One of the things I was hoping to accomplish was to point out that we as women often choose men who aren't necessarily healthy for us," says McMillan. "The bottom line is that people will do stupid things when they want to feel loved." The lesson is lost on some viewers. "The movie didn't do black women any justice at all," says Gail Christopher, author of Anchors for the Innocent, a guidebook for single parents. "As black women we fight the stereotype of being oversexed all the time. Because so much of it is filmed in the bedroom, this movie will reinforce that.''

But Exhale's message about relations between black men and women is far less urgent than the one it is sending about the strength of the black pop-culture market. Though whites largely ignored the film when it debuted at Christmas, so many African Americans flocked to see it that it became the No. 1 box-office draw its first week. By last week, when it dropped to fourth, it had already earned $40 million. In this, the film is repeating the success of McMillan's novel, which stayed near the top of the best-seller lists for nine months almost exclusively because of its strong sales among black women. Says McMillan: "When the [executives at 20th Century Fox] found out we were No. 1, they were trying to figure out, 'How can we reach a white audience, because the movie isn't playing real well in white communities.' My point is that you really don't get it, do you? This is about black people." Only now, she says, are whites, especially women, coming out to the theaters to see for themselves what the fuss is about.

In short, Exhale demonstrates that it is no longer necessary for a book or movie to be targeted for whites to be a smash. The black audience alone can make it one. That could mean a further Balkanization of the mass-entertainment market, as the movie, book and music industries turn out new products designed to exploit each sufficiently lucrative ethnic niche. Says McMillan: "I told the executives at the studio, 'Watch and see after the holidays how many scripts you have on your desk about middle-class black people who go to the grocery store and live regular lives.' There are going to be a lot more films too, because this is America. It's trend oriented." Unfortunately, if the black-oriented romance novels that came to market after McMillan's well-written book struck gold are any indication, it's also trash oriented, no matter what ethnic group it's aiming at. What a tragedy if African Americans' understandable desire to see themselves on the big screen becomes an excuse to smother all of us in slick Hollywood trash.