Racism in “The Descendants”

Is The Descendants one of the most racist films of all time? What many Islanders see is a whitewashing of the culture and history of the proud Native Hawaiian people. And a sweeping under a cinematographic rug the diverse mutual admiration society of Caucasians, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Native Hawaiians, Samoans, Vietnamese, and many other groups that make the Islands a model of harmonious race relations for the world. “Racism” is defined as the subordination of one race by another, and “The Descendants” clearly pretends that Caucasians are in charge of all other groups.

Directed by Alexander Payne, The Descendents miscasts major characters and downplays the real drama behind the sitcom. The film is an adaptation of a 2007 novel by part-Hawaiian Kaui Hart Hemmings, an adopted daughter of a famous surfer. She has admitted to a reporter that she knew little about her own Native Hawaiian culture while growing up in Kailua, a suburb of Honolulu populated largely by Caucasians, both civilians and military personnel. Her father, Fred Hemmings, Jr., is a Caucasian politician who once ran as a Republican candidate for governor. In the film she plays Noe, King’s secretary.

The story revolves around attorney Matthew King (played by suntanned George Clooney), trustee of an estate that owns 25,000 acres of undeveloped land along the ocean on Kaua`i. The estate was created by his forebear, a man surnamed King who married a daughter of Kamehameha the Great some 150 years earlier. The estate will elapse in seven years, escheating to the state if he cannot decide what to do with the land. When the film begins, King is contemplating commercial options for the property that might include a resort complex in the bucolic setting, and his many cousins await the windfall as descendants.

But filmviewers are supposed to believe that there is not a single trace of Hawaiian facial features or skin pigmentation in Matt King or any of his immediate relatives. In a land where Caucasians have always been a minority, we are to believe that the Kings for 150 years have married and remarried Caucasians to the point where they are indistinguishable from most of those who live in Nebraska. That a descendant would be so white is a paradigm for the power of Caucasian Americans to dominate non-whites, reassuring filmviewers on the U.S. Mainland that Hawai`i is one place where they can impose their authority with impunity.

In other words, while half of the population of Hawai`i today marries someone of a different racial ancestry, the Kings have been racially selective for generations. And, according to the film, the Kings only associate socially with other Caucasians. To do so in Hawai`i today is to engage in the kind of self-segregation that used to occur in British or French colonies. Racist colonies, that is. But Caucasians do not rule the Islands any more. Matt refers to the new power brokers as “bums and stuntmen” but does not refer to their race.

Some three weeks earlier, King’s wife Elizabeth (played by Patricia Hastie) had a boating accident. She is in a coma, on life support, and near death in a hospital, although she could have been accommodated at home as well. At the film’s end, she dies because Matt pulls the plug keeping her alive.

But the secret leaks out that she once had an affair with a Caucasian real estate agent, Brian Speer (played by Matthew Lillard), the very one who proposes to broker the sale of the pristine land for a developer. She did so because Matt was preoccupied with work and neglected his two daughters, but he now must reconnect with them as a real parent. Speer, however, seems much closer to his Caucasian wife and two kids.

Most of the drama in the film centers on how King finds out about his wife’s former boyfriend, and how he deals with her two-timing. The story clearly could have taken place in Nebraska, where director Payne was born. King struggles with the knowledge that he might divest his property for the benefit of his wife’s onetime lover. He does so in a manner no different from what one might expect in Omaha.

The only window into the real Hawai`i occurs early in the film. King’s 10-year-old daughter Scottie (played by Amara Miller) has said something nasty to Lani (played by Carmen Kaichi), a fellow student at school. Her teacher (played by Grace Cruz) and counselor (played by Kim Gannaula) offer insight into the incident. The student’s mother (played by Karen Kuioka Hironaga), of an unidentified non-White race, insists upon an apology. King accompanies his daughter to the woman’s house to make amends. As King is about to leave, the mother urges him not to sell the property.

Those familiar with Hawai`i will immediately recognize that the mother is of Native Hawaiian ancestry (though identified as Mrs. Higgins in the script). She is a member of the working class and dresses accordingly. King has brought up a child who has been impolite, and he accepts the need for an apology so that his child can erase the rancor that must have arisen at school. In sharp contrast is the Native Hawaiian mother’s insistence on good personal conduct. An unobservant filmviewer might miss the culture clash between a rude child brought up by a parent with white skin and the Native Hawaiian who will not abide arrogant treatment, typical of Whites who associate socially only with other Whites and consider themselves superior.

Matt believes that he has been a bad parent, inattentive to his family. His other daughter, 17-year-old Alexandra (played by Shailene Woodley), even flips the bird at him, and is so ill-mannered that she had to be sent to a boarding school on another island. But is the reason for two rude daughters that they have grown up in a broken family? Or because, as exclusivist haoles (Caucasians), they do not fit into the multicultural environment? Mainlanders will imagine the former, Islanders will suspect the latter.

Later in the film, Alex’s boyfriend Sid (played by Nick Krause) disrespectfully characterizes Matt’s father-in-law Scott (played by Robert Forster) as a “prick,” and Matt agrees. “Paradise can go fuck itself,” Matt also says at one point. Caucasians, in other words, are depicted as unmindful of one of the basic rules of conduct in the Islands: Show respect toward everyone.

But these are Caucasians who live in the past and have not adjusted to the fact that statehood brought non-Caucasians into positions of political power. Yet, as University of Hawai`i political scientist Yas Kuroda demonstrates with survey data, most Mainlanders change their values after they move to Hawai`i, blissfully assimilating to the Aloha Spirit as psychological liberation. Not so the King family, which appears to have been Mainlandized.

The mother’s plea not to sell the property may seem puzzling to filmviewers. After all, a Mainland American might think, she should keep her opinions to herself, not meddle in his affairs, and “stay in her place.” Then when he contemplates what to do with the land, he seemingly believes that the unspoiled land should be kept free from greedy developers. But he does not profess an environmentalist philosophy. Instead, his decision is based on his opinion of his wife’s erstwhile paramour. He never acknowledges the advice of the Native Hawaiian woman with whom he shows no affinity despite the fact that he, too, has Native Hawaiian blood.

Thus, The Descendants pointedly trivializes the real issue. Before Captain Cook arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, private property did not exist. All land was held in common. Every family engaged in productive agriculture, animal husbandry, and fishing, sharing their bounty with other families. When Caucasians sought loans to use the land for sugarcane plantations, they had no collateral, so they persuaded the king in 1848 to establish the legal basis for private ownership of land. Gradually, the land was taken over by Caucasian business interests, who tricked Native Hawaiians into taking possession of ancestral domains. The indigenous people who welcomed foreigners with Aloha gradually became homeless and still rank below ethnic groups that came later on a long list of socioeconomic indicators.

A genuine history of Hawai`i was presented in Princess Ka`iulani, a film released last year. The director, Marc Forby, married a Native Hawaiian. He cast the roles appropriately with native people, and the story is about the cruel overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and the princess’s subsequent efforts to reverse that injustice. But Princess Ka`iulani did not win any Golden Globe awards and did not enjoy wide circulation. Hollywood producers know that fiction makes money, not truth. Americans do not like to be confronted with their past misdeeds and do not mind rewriting history to cover up their injustices. The Descendants, after all, has already made nearly $50 million. PK made $9 million.

Instead, The Descendants deliberately fails to inform filmviewers how the land in the Islands has been repeatedly carved up to make money for landowners, while Native Hawaiians have increasingly seen their homeland turned into golf courses, hotels, urban highrise offices, and suburban sprawl. Some of the land was legally set aside for occupancy by Native Hawaiians when sovereignty was transferred to the United States, but successive governments have ignored the legalities and have despoiled the land. Some descendants of the royal family tried to preserve the land through estates, but their offspring have leased or sold for profit to developers, often evicting Native Hawaiians from lands where they had been allowed to live for generations as leaseholders.

Native Hawaiians have a spiritual connection with the land. They believe that the land and sea have sacred properties. The islands, after all, sustained them for a thousand years before Captain Cook arrived. The richness of the land smiled at them, and they responded by developing the Aloha Spirit.

So the real drama in The Descendants is about what will happen to the unspoiled land on Kaua`i. Will the land, as is often the case, be ripped apart for roads, resorts, shopping malls, and the like? Or will the land be kept as a gorgeous, unpopulated testament to the Hawai`i that existed before Captain Cook? Instead of addressing that issue, dear to the people of Hawai`i today, The Descendants pretends that Matthew King feels no responsibility to protect the homeland. Instead, his main option is to make money, and he has competing offers. Yet his wife’s misadventures are more important factors in his decision. He postpones his decision in order to punish someone. And the film is supposed to be a “feel-good” movie!

The selection of Hawaiian music to fit every locale shows extraordinary sensitivity to the Islands. But for only music to be carefully chosen suggests that the local people of Hawai`i are only useful as entertainers.

Film critics praise George Clooney for an understated, calm performance. In that respect, the film indeed captures the unexcitable steadiness that pervades personalities in the Islands. So do his cousins when he delivers news contrary to their expectations. Yet when a Honolulu-born representative of that very zen culture holds the highest office in the land, he is condemned as “too cool,” unwilling to “fight” or show raw emotion. He is not praised for his gentlemanly dignity, but George Clooney’s portrayal is.

At the end of the film, King is in a canoe with his daughters. He drops Elizabeth’s cremated remains along with three leis into the ocean, including Scottie’s white (Get the symbolism?!) flowered lei. Presumably, he is following some sort of Native Hawaiian custom. Yet even that gesture to revere the local culture falls short. An early episode of Hawai`i 5-O provides a much better representation of how Native Hawaiian extended families really bury their dead with dignity at sea.

In short, The Descendants is a condescending misrepresentation of Hawai`i. But in a long line of misrepresentations. Jack London, for example, portrays a Native Hawaiian as an individualistic, gunslinging Western hero who accepts the decline of his own race in Koolau the Leper. In Honolulu, W. Somerset Maugham depicts “Chinks,” “cross-eyed niggers,” and a doctor with a “monkey” face who is “hardly human.” The Descendants had an opportunity to reveal the true Hawai`i to the world, to address the real issues and realities. Instead, what unfolds is a melodrama that focuses on personal foibles and redemption.

The world knows that race relations are better in Hawai`i than elsewhere, so those who visit as tourists or view films about Hawai`i may be eager to learn the secrets behind such legendary ethnic harmony. When they check into hotels, they are usually greeted by dark-skinned Filipinos, Japanese, and Native Hawaiians who solicitously treat them in a special manner unlike anywhere else. But what they will conclude from The Descendants is that racial serenity exists because non-whites have accepted Caucasian dominance. Therein lies the subliminal racist message of the film.

Michael Haas