Nicki Minaj in "The Other Woman"

 

My incredibly smart (and cute) friend Rajul writing at Racialicious about rapper Nicki Minaj's "staring" role in the chick flick "The Other Woman", calls into question why so many minority entertainers are relegated to sidekick status, even when they are actually main attractions.

 

 

The trailer for The Other Woman, a flick about the unlikely blossoming friendship of three women (Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, and Kate Upton) while they conspire against their mutually shared cheating man (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), was released last week. Nicki Minaj is in it too, and a plethora of entertainment outlets are ablaze with blurbs about her non-animated silver screen debut.

 

One of my favorite headlines reads, “Nicki Minaj Stars in The Other Woman.“ Fun, right Barbz? Finally, her formal theatrical training and the scintillating possibilities of Minaj channeling one of her alter egos on the silver screen. But, as the preview reveals, she’s hardly the star of the movie. She plays a “sassy, outspoken, legal assistant” to Cameron Diaz’s power lawyer. She’s not even the side chick. She is the side chick’s sidekick.

 

Sound familiar? Yes, let the sassy black woman sidekick role sashay its way into 2014. To be fair: at this point, I have not seen the entire movie, so I should not be judging the book by its racially insensitive, pseudo-feminist, and cheesy cover, but I’m going to go ahead and jump the gun here. Nicki Minaj as someone’s legal assistant is a hot, cinematic abomination. It’s even worse than Jennifer Hudson’s role as Carrie Bradshaw’s personal assistant in Sex and the City.

An alumnus of New York’s LaGuardia High School for Performing Arts, Minaj spent much of her musical career taking on different personas. Meanwhile, the only exposure to acting that supermodel Kate Upton apparently has thus far are minute roles (as vessels for objectification) in Tower Heist and The Three Stooges. The fact that Upton – one of The Other Woman’s stars – is referred to as “The Boobs” in a revenge operation plot opens up a whole ‘nother conversation about offensive stereotypes. Regardless, “The Boobs” still plays a central role in the film.

Minaj appears sparsely in the preview. Her shining moment is when Diaz’s character sits down with her in the office and confides that the man she’s been dating has a wife at home. Minaj’s character then responds, “And you don’t think you can take her?” Instead of being appalled at her boss/friend’s experience of betrayal, she portrays the “strong bitchified black woman” as bell hooks calls it, assuming the role of the predator ready to pounce on any woman to who presents a challenge.

As I replay the trailer – this disconcerting piece of cultural anthropology – I echo bell hooks’ question from her dialogue in New York last month. Where is our decolonized image? It’s certainly not here, where women such as Minaj’s character play fourth fiddle to three white women who are duped into sleeping with the same man.

I get it. Nicki Minaj is fierce, irreverent, and fosters her own brand of black feminist. But this is where I (along with many commenters on the aforementioned entertainment sites) get confused – she isn’t playing herself in this movie, regardless of the eyelashes and Queens drawl we note in the trailer. Minaj is not Jasmine, she is Aladdin. So why is she at the back of this magic carpet instead of co-piloting?

 

Go ahead and read the whole thing. Rajul does address the fact that it is Minaj's first cross over, mainstream movie role, so perhaps that should quash any questions of should her part be bigger. But I get what she's pointing out, especially when she links J. Hud's bit part in SATC2 after winning an Oscar for an emotional turn in "Dreamgirls". Hollywood loves to keep black performers on the sideline, providing a fun, sassy forgettable addition to the main stars, who more times than not, are white.

 

You don't have to be a Minaj fan to wonder why they'd cast someone who's entire career is based on theatrics in such a flat role. Although I disagree with Rajul's statement that it's worse than Jennifer Hudson playinng an assistant (come on, from Oscar to... organizing closets and sorting mail?), I totally agree with her that it's lame to see Nicki in a servile role to Cameron Diaz.

 

Dandridge as Carmen Jones

 

 

Rajul shared her story on Facebook, and after reading it, I left comments that this Hollywood demotion is nothing new. I noted that Dorothy Dandridge went from Oscar nominee for 1954's "Carmen Jones" to struggling for any decent role offerings. The next film she was asked to star in was "The King and I"- as Tuptim, a slave. Dandrige declined. Incidentally, the role went to beautiful Puerto Rican actress, Rita Moreno. You can see her parts here.

 

Moreno as slave and "present" Tuptim

 

 In a later comment, I added that Billie Holiday, at the height of her singing career, also stared in a film- playing a sassy, soulful maid. In real life, the iconic jazz singer started performing in part because she loathed the job of being a maid to white people. In 1947's "New Orleans", Billie plays Andy, a singing maid who introduces her white boss to the "blues". You can watch her scenes here.

 

 

 

 

Andy folds and puts on private impromptu performances simultaneously.

 

Back in November, I wrote about Brazilian singer and actress Carmen Miranda, and how Hollywood put her in film after film as a Latina spitfire bestie to the Anglo main stars around the same time Billie was playing the happy maid. She shook her hips, gave advice and gave chase to her cheating macho boyfriends. The Hollywood folks made sure she spoke broken English, heavily accented, too.

 

I could go on, but the examples are countless. Along with the token black girl and Latina, there's also the smart, subdued but aching to go wild Asian, the flaming gay, the nerdy rich Jew and the South Asian who plays the Asian or Jew's role. Sometimes that South Asian gets to also be super materialistic and air headed like Mindy Kaling's Kelly on "The Office", Kal Penn's Kumar in "Harold & Kumar" series, or Aziz Ansari's Tom on "Parks & Recreation".

 

While I hold a bit of hope that one day minorities won't be relegated to cheerleading sidekicks to the "real" star (or conversely, when they do get a star turn, it's no longer marketed solely as a race film, a la "The Best Man: Holiday" which is just as much of a chick flick as any other), and they won't have to play a stereotype, I'm not holding my breath until they do. Hollywood has proven for decades that it has space for tokens, but not change.