"There's only one more question I need to ask you. . . . The man with you appeared to be not entirely in his pants at the time of impact. Can you tell me what happened just before you went off the road?"
"Well, he became [whispers] Motherfucker this, motherfucker that."
"Like in the movies?"
"Exactly. And um . . . the next thing I knew . . . I only remember bits and pieces of it, but he, uh, the gist of it was he was going to uh . . . impale me with his . . . big . . ."
"Ohh."
—The Last Seduction, John Dahl, 1993

"I ain't never been with a black man in my life. . . . [Pause, some thought] Oh bloody hell. Oh Jesus Christ. Oh my. [Breaks down into tears] I'm sorry, sweetie. I'm so ashamed . . . I can't look at you. I didn't know, sweetheart. Honest, I didn't know you was black."
"Who was he?"
"You don't want to know, darling. . . . Listen, I want to be honest with you, but I can't tell you that, sweetheart. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
— Secrets and Lies, Mike Leigh, 1996

These two scenes from recent, highly successful independent films give some indication of the variety of ways in which figures from traditional lynch narratives have been invoked in recent cinema. The first exchange occurs after Linda Fiorentino's supremely manipulative Wendy Crow has foiled a black private eye's kidnapping attempt by tricking him into lowering his pants while she drives her car into a tree. While Crow is recovering in the hospital, a policeman questions her about what happened. Her answers take full advantage of the racism that is prevalent in her area of rural New York State (the town's population is almost completely white, and Crow had noticed earlier that any black people were immediately seen as suspect), as she is completely confident that her charge of attempted rape will be believed. The officer's reference to the movies suggests that the community's belief in the myth of the black rapist is based, at least in part, on cinematic representations of black men.

The second exchange is between Marianne Jean-Baptiste's Hortense and Brenda Blethyn's Cynthia. Hortense is a black woman who was put up for adoption at birth and who has gone on a quest in which she has discovered that Cynthia, a white woman, is her birth mother. As the dialogue suggests, Cynthia is initially incapable of accepting Hortense's claims because she's unaware of ever having slept with a black man. When she finally does understand how Hortense could be her child, she is devastated by the realization. As the film progresses, the relationship between Hortense and Cynthia becomes more and more intimate, and a great number of secrets and lies are shared and revealed. Still, even at their closest, Cynthia is unable to reveal the identity of Hortense's father. Finally, Hortense gives up on finding out anything specific about her father, but suspecting the truth, she bitterly asks, "Was my father a nice man?" Cynthia is still unwilling to discuss him and responds by saying, "Oh, don't break my heart darling." Though he is never explicitly named as such, the figure of the black rapist is a constant presence throughout the film, never seen but always lurking at the edges of consciousness, haunting and threatening to disrupt the relationship between these two women.

Ever since Flora Cameron attempted to "preserve her honor" by throwing herself off a cliff while being chased by the ex-slave Gus in D. W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, Hollywood has had a particularly strong fascination with imagery associated with interracial rape and lynching. Whether exposing racist stereotypes as dangerous myths, as in The Last Seduction, or relying upon them for dramatic tension, as in Secrets and Lies and The Birth of a Nation, cinematic representations of the rape/lynching narrative have been of central importance for the production of collective memory and a national process of racial-formation.

Collective memory is constructed within the realm of representational politics and can be powerfully shaped and widely disseminated through cultural narratives involving photography, television, and cinema. But the production of collective memory is inextricably bound with processes of cultural amnesia, for representations of the past also work as "screens, actively blocking out other memories that are more difficult to represent." While a variety of forms of cultural representations are involved in national processes both of constructing collective memory and of forgetting, Hollywood films have a particularly interesting role. As cultural artifacts, Hollywood films offer unique insight into the cultural anxieties and "value crises" of the periods in which they were made. More important, the emotional investment that viewers bring to films and the massive circulation of Hollywood films in particular enable commercial films to powerfully influence social agendas as they "reposition us for the future by reshaping our memories of the past."

The stakes over cinematic representations of the past are nowhere more evident than where race is concerned. Hollywood films have helped to shape audiences' understandings of race, and by representing African Americans in "every possible manner" of demeaning and marginalized position, they have worked to "glorify and relentlessly hold in place the white-dominated symbolic order and racial hierarchy of American society." But because racial categories are fluid and subject to ongoing challenge and negotiation, "Hollywood's unceasing efforts to frame blackness are constantly challenged by the cultural and political self-definitions of African Americans, who as a people have been determined since the inception of commercial cinema to militate against this limiting system of representation." Hollywood films are key sites in the struggles over the meaning not only of the category of "blackness" but also of a variety of other categories of race.

The process of representing race is closely linked to the construction of racial metaphors. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue that debates surrounding political and cultural representation of oppressed groups are based on "the semiotic principle that something is 'standing for' something else, or that some person or group is speaking on behalf of some other persons or groups." This analysis of the stakes in struggles over representation resonates strongly with Burke's definition of metaphor as "a device for seeing something in terms of something else." Indeed, some representations are automatically caught up in what we can see as processes of metaphorization. A tendency to reduce racial minorities to a series of essentialist characteristics works to ensure that "any negative behavior by any member of the oppressed community is instantly generalized as typical, as pointing to a perpetual backsliding toward some presumed negative essence. . . . each negative image of an underrepresented group becomes, within the hermeneutics of domination, sorely overcharged with allegorical meaning." Representations of members of oppressed groups are unavoidably caught up in a process whereby they stand for something broader than themselves. The relative dearth of varied representations of oppressed groups, particularly in mainstream Hollywood cinema, helps to ensure that these representations automatically become metaphors for, or devices for seeing, the oppressed group itself. Struggles over how various racial categories are represented in mainstream film are thus inseparable from broader social understandings of various racial groups and policies. Cinematic representations of lynching and rape present these struggles in their starkest terms.

While many of the most enduring of the films that have dealt with lynching have already received widespread scholarly attention, the last decade has seen a host of new films that self-consciously invoke, manipulate, and attempt to reconfigure a collective memory of lynching and racial terror. The selection of films in this chapter is not meant to be exhaustive. Because I am interested in the films that are most likely to have a substantial impact upon a national collective memory, this chapter is primarily concerned with mainstream films. Practical considerations have forced me to further limit the bulk of this discussion to Hollywood films that have been released recently. As I have noted, representations of lynching have been central to the history of cinema since the inception of the studio system. The virtually endless supply of films to consider forced me to make difficult choices when determing which films to address. Still, Hollywood's ability to construct and deploy racial images has never been uncontested, and to focus solely upon mainstream cine-matic depicitions of lynching would be to deny a critical part of the history of resistance against racism. The antilynching struggle waged by Ida B. Wells and groups like the NAACP and the ASWPL was complemented by the work of some early black filmmakers. I turn now to a brief discussion of their work.