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http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonwillmore/the-latest-exploration-of-the-complex-dynamic-between-black"It starts with the hair.
Beyond the Lights begins in 1998 with single mother and future momager Macy Jean (Minnie Driver) racing her daughter Noni (India Jean-Jacques) around their South London neighborhood of Brixton in search of a hair salon. The one she finds is closing, but she begs the woman inside to give them just a few minutes and a few tips, pointing to the adorably bespectacled 10-year-old Noni and explaining that the girl’s about to compete in a talent contest, and that Macy has no idea what to do with her hair.
The salon owner, who is black, looks at the desperate white woman and the neglected riot of corkscrew curls on her biracial child’s head, and relents. And the woman’s there in the audience the next day to hear Noni belt out Nina Simone’s “Blackbird” and, to Macy’s fury, be given only second place, the runner-up to a blonde tap dancer.
Noni will grow up to be a rising singer played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and that flashback introduction serves as an unplanned echo of one in the British actor’s other movie this year, the period drama Belle, in which she plays a mixed-race orphan raised by her Lord Chief Justice uncle. Her character, Belle, is caught in a social purgatory thanks to her aristocratic inheritance and the color of her skin, but it’s her hair that serves as a sign of how isolated she’s been from that aspect of her identity. On a trip to London, Belle is caught struggling to get a comb through it by Mabel (Bethan Mary-James), the black servant working in the house, who gently tells her, “You must start from the ends, miss,” and sits the young woman in front of a mirror in order to show her how.
These two films are the tentpoles for what’s been a very good year for the radiant Mbatha-Raw. They’re also part of what’s been a particularly eloquent year of black hair on screen in general, and how it can be used as a marker of identity, as social armor or constriction, and as a source of battles of race, class, and perception, in a way that’s often been left out of the wider conversation.
How they wear their hair is, for instance, a major and much-discussed identifier for all of the main characters in Justin Simien’s Dear White People, from Tyler James Williams’ outcast afro to Tessa Thompson’s painstaking pompadour, with Teyonah Parris delivering a calculated monologue about weaves and having a regal moment of taking off what turns out to have always been a straight black wig and replacing it with cascading blonde curls before a party. On How to Get Away With Murder, Viola Davis’ removal of a wig, then eyelashes, then makeup, was played out like a warrior shedding pieces of plate mail after returning from war, her formidable character left bare and open at the end of the day."
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