[In the following essay, Place discusses how the veiling phenomenon, difference, and uniformity are at work in The Bodyguard and The Crying Game.]

The good thing about middlebrow art is that it nicely reflects society's dull edge. Unlike the avant garde, it makes no particular pretense toward advancement; unlike absolute schlock, it doesn't wallow in the retrograde. Middlebrow art is feel-good art: the world may not be this pleasant yet, but we can spend a lot of money creating an accessible façade. And our current middlebrow ideal is a quiet, placid, Coke-commercial kind of world where race is irrelevant, gender immaterial, and sexuality beside the point.

But these fantasies are dangerous. We are awash in our own whitewash. Popular culture cuddles around the notion of love as the great leveler, promoting a false sense of individual social equality and carefully stacking the deck to prevent reality seepage. Today's mass media celebrate the myth of universal harmony and transcendent togetherness, to the exclusion of all contrary evidence. Love not only conquers all, it masks the domination.

The Bodyguard and The Crying Game are two recent examples of the veiling phenomenon at work. Though the films seem to broach that which is potentially and historically divisive from vastly different sociopolitical consciousnesses, both ultimately champion the negation of such differences and the redemptive power of pan-humanism. Each invites the audience to discount difference promising security in exchange for uniformity. The power of One.

The Bodyguard, starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner, is a love story of sorts between a black singer and her white bodyguard in which race is never mentioned. Promotional posters show Costner carrying Houston, her head buried in his shoulder, her face and her race hidden. Race, it is implied, is not a factor or even a fact. The film's studied blindness reaches an absurd height during a romantic dance sequence in which the newly infatuated couple sway lovingly in a regular down-home, sawdust-on-the-floor, mirror-above-the-bar, California country-western saloon, to the beaming approval of the all-white patrons. Not only do the locals fail to notice Houston's chromatically jarring presence—Houston herself doesn't seem to be aware that she is the lone African-American within spitting distance. No NWA here.

As The Bodyguard strenuously side-steps over racial questions, care also is taken to cipher and excuse some of the more problematic issues Houston and Costner's relationship might suggest. For example, Houston is the mother of a black child, darker-skinned than she, a child whose primary narrative function appears to be to reassure the audience that Houston is not exclusively a white man's woman. While the absence of a set racial reference is established as the preferred standard of sexual-social interaction, it is simultaneously belied by Houston's choice of Costner as romantic object. For Costner's character does not just happen to be white: Costner is aggressively Caucasian, a supercop to the short hairs whose deepest life wound was caused by his failure to prevent the Reagan assassination attempt. In another sort of Los Angeles, a streetwise black pop diva might not empathize so intently with our hero's Republican pain.

Houston is the employer, Costner the employee, escaping the obvious connotation of exploitation signified by the white man—black woman paradigm. Yet the class ordering here allows us to come full circle: To avoid the appearance of recapitulating white male domination of black females, the black female is given apparent class superiority over the white male. But because of the male's official protector status, Costner is able to direct the parameters of their relationship and restrict Houston's movements—to continue in his historical role as master. Convention reappears, social order is restored, potentially disruptive difference defused. Glass, like race and politics, doesn't matter.

Sundry other points: The other figure allowed to orchestrate Houston's activities and personae is her white male—Eurotrash—manager. The suspense plot fields one white man as a red herring while another functions simply as a weapon at the disposition of the true would-be murderer, Houston's (black) sister. And of course The Bodyguard is a story of doomed love: for no readily discernible reason, at the end the couple part and the specter of miscegenation is swept away in a swirling 360° pan.

Despite readings of white bias in The Bodyguard, its most telling theme is that of racial indifference. By having Houston be supremely unconscious of race, the black character acts to negate racism. Both blacks and whites are thus racially comforted: if race is so insignificant as to be capable of being ignored, whites are absolved, blacks become liberated, and Rodney King is just a bad driver. The movie made a bundle, and long after its release the film's ubiquitous theme song continues to insistently perforate our collective consciousness, an unrelenting promise of transcendent, yet fruitless, colorblind passion. No one has stayed for dinner.

While The Bodyguard represents solidly middle middlebrow sensibilities, The Crying Game is on the tonier end of the popular spectrum. It too is a love story of sorts, between a white exiled IRA soldier (Stephen Rea) and the black lover (Jaye Davidson) of a black British soldier (Forest Whitaker) whose death he helped bring about. The Bodyguard wallows in blindness; The Crying Game revels in unveilings. Unlike The Bodyguard, The Crying Game is remarkable as it employs difference to create dramatic tension; it is a notable, and even noble, effort. Like The Bodyguard, The Crying Game holds out the promise of transcendence but delivers the reassurance of stasis.

The Crying Game's unveilings revolve around questions of nature and the ability to escape essence. At first, the film seems to aver that nature is individual, that one's nature is one's own, not conferred by color, nationality, sex, or sexuality. According to the fable Whitaker tells early in the film and Rea recapitulates at the movie's end, the world is made up of frogs and scorpions, givers and takers, prey and predators. But Whitaker's tale is given the lie by the other unveilings, and by that which is not unveiled.

Whitaker raises the specter of racial difference shortly after his kidnapping by the IRA and his literal unveiling (he had been hooded) by Rea. When the prisoner complains of being called a nigger by the Irish, Rea laughs and tells him not to take it so personally. Race is never again discussed between either Rea and Whitaker or Rea and Davidson, though Rea's continuing fight against anti-Irish sentiment suggests a generalized condemnation of ethnic bias. If the film has a racial message, it is that race is superficial, irrelevant to nature.

However, gender and sexuality, as represented by Davidson, are potentially disruptive forces of nature. Davidson is unmasked twice in the film: first, when Rea discovers that the beautiful black woman he has been seeing is a beautiful black man who has gendered himself female; second, when Rea cuts Davidson's hair and dresses Davidson in male clothes (Whitaker's, in fact), transforming the gendered-female male into a gendered-male man. While this multiplicity of unveilings shuffles the nature deck a couple of times, it changes nothing. Davidson is both man and not-man, and uncovering his true, inescapable nature simply involves another process of difference and denial.

As much as Davidson recasts femininity, gender is still portrayed as nature. The film's lone biological female, the rather unartfully named "Jude" (Miranda Richardson), betrays both Whitaker and Rea. She is a cold and methodical Eve, a "bitch" and a "whore," who is damned for her "tits and cute little ass" before being shot. Both she and Davidson are the sexual aggressors, conferring a sort of female sexual voracity on even male women. After Davidson's first unveiling, Rea talks of pretending that Davidson is a woman, and so she is. But Davidson is a good woman, devoted beyond death, a woman who gives her heart truly and well. Davidson is a woman like the men around her. In The Crying Game, the best man is a woman, and the best woman, a man. It's a man's world.

Much has been made about the film's secret: Davidson's first unveiling, the slow drift of the camera down her breasts to her penis. The transcendent trick is that the unveiling comes too late, for the audience has already pledged itself to Davidson as a heroine, and Rea and Davidson as a heroic couple. At the moment of Davidson's unveiling, the audience is forced to choose between either accepting her difference or going beyond the distinction. Both the film and the audience invariably opt for transcendence.

The penis, Whitaker assures Rea, is "just a piece of meat." Yet Rea and Davidson only have sex (the latter performing offscreen fellatio on the former) before Rea discovers Davidson's nature; afterward, strategically placed pillows and bedclothes attest to the chastity of their love. Again, this passion, no matter how transcendent, is going nowhere. The Crying Game brings its protagonists and audience to the brink of change, and then leaves them and us safely where we were all found. It's a buddy movie that plays its eroticism up front and to no avail.

Given that fictional characters are made, not born, rationales must exist for their racial and sexual configurations. The most optimistic explanation for the interracial relationship in The Bodyguard would be to assert that we have reached some sort of heightened state where race is only contextually significant. Because face was not important in the movie's narrative, there is no need for a racial exegesis of the film. And certainly it is tempting to believe that obliteration of racial distinction would lead to the elimination of racial bias. But this is foolish and naïve. Not just because race is not insignificant in The Bodyguard, but because for as long as racial differentiation exists, we will interpret that difference. And if we do not interpret difference consciously, we will do so unconsciously, subject to the effects of individual bias and cultural prejudice hidden in unconscious thought.

A more cynical interpretation of this phenomenon of denial is that difference is tolerable if it makes no difference. If race does not really matter, if the racial status quo remains the same, racial variety may be permitted. If homosexuality does not threaten heterosexuality, then homosexuality can be allowed. If a man is a man, even when he is a woman, women are no threat to men. Differences of gender, sexuality, or race are thus stripped of their real difference, of their potent difference, of the difference that gives strength and offense to the notion of difference.

And of course, by rendering socially defining qualities insignificant, other aspects of our current hegemony are maintained. For example, the myth of Horatio Alger-style individualism is conveniently perpetuated; triumphs and failures continue to be wholly self-created, and if at first you don't succeed, it must just be your fault. Additionally, the choice of African-Americans to act as representative Other in films like The Bodyguard is unsurprising. Caucasians view blacks both as the signifier of difference at its most extreme and as the most familiar oppositional symbol, allowing whites to play out racial transcendence with a historically insurmountable yet comfortable foe. It also simplifies things to keep racial relationships limited to a neat binary system of white and black, excusing us from addressing other racial or ethnic configurations.

The most pitiable explanation for these films is that they betray our anxious desire for universality: that in some way, we all want to be the same, to have the same hopes, fears, and dreams, to be able to understand and treasure one another without regard for difference. Universality is our remedy for our crimes of difference—for slavery, for the pogrom, for bashing, for rape. But universality is a tragic myth, and we cannot treasure what we do not recognize.

We must resist the urge for absolution. We cannot forgive ourselves, for our sins are not ours to forgive. Self-pardons are presumptuous and annoying. Pretending to universality of existence changes nothing, for negating difference merely robs us of the power of difference. In a world of One, difference continues to be problematic, a thing to be eliminated, decried, or ignored. But as difference can never be erased, it is difference itself that must be celebrated. Those who would have The Crying Game be a treatise on the omnipotence of true love cheat themselves of the effect of a black man's penis in a white man's face. We do not exist in a postmodern panisocracy in which all share equally in the spoils. Social constructions are not arbitrary or coincidental; as long as race and sex distinctions exist, we will construct around them. Universality just permits the building while cloaking the architects. If we are to begin to honor one another, it will be because of, not despite, our differences.