ABSTRACT
Our topic is American spectacle: and no family photograph of the United States would be visible if it did not come in black and white. But reading "race" in our culture—high or low, popular or elite—is a large and difficult enterprise (as it is, of course, in any culture). I am going to pick at a tiny part of the issue, as it arises in the reading of some of our more spectacular movies; and I am going to suggest that in our reading of these spectacles it is as well to keep in mind the complexities of the relationships between representation and represented, particularly given the enormous ethical freight of race in our current practice of reading.
