![]() Rae Dawn Chong is a sweet and conscientious Love Interest who struggles in class because she’s both a single mom and working menial jobs on the side due to not getting the scholarship Howell stole. Thomas Howell’s Best Friend is played by Arye Gross, his amiable roommate at Harvard Law. By the end, the Intruder has either embraced or rejected the Professor’s values, resolving the Intruder’s character arc.Ĭ. At the beginning, the Professor confronts the Intruder as an authority figure. The relationship between the Intruder and the Professor is crucial, because the Intruder’s relationships with the Best Friend, Love Interest, and Asshole are pre-ordained. And the Professor represents the university and academia at large. The Asshole is the opponent to be vanquished. The Love Interest exists to be wooed and won. The Best Friend’s job is to stay the same, serving as an advice-giver and partner in expositional conversation. Resolving that conflict forms the narrative spine of the movie. The point of the Intruder is that he or she has won admission to Harvard, but, in some crucial way, doesn’t belong there. It also established the essential tropes of the Intruders at Harvard genre, which revolves around five stock characters: The Intruder, the Best Friend, the Love Interest, the Professor, and the Asshole. It’s not a cynical movie, the supporting roles are well-acted, and there’s a certain crude earnestness in its attempts to grapple with issues of bias and identity. In fairness, Soul Man is not altogether terrible. Over the course of six films and 25 years, Hollywood would accidentally tell the story of how Harvard University came to rule the world, until the world caught up with it and moved on. That’s the point of blackface-the white people don’t relinquish their whiteness.)) But it also marked the beginning of a sturdy new filmic sub-genre: Intruders at Harvard. But there’s a difference between a movie in which a white man is made up to look like a black man, and a movie in which a white man is made up to look like a white man wearing transparently fake face paint and a wig. Soul Man exists now as a reminder of how terrible movies often were back in the ‘80s, and that society has at least improved enough that major studios don’t release blackface comedies anymore. So he puts on a cheap Jheri Curl wig, covers himself head-to-toe in self-tanner, and pretends to be a black man in order to get scholarship money reserved for minorities. The movie tells the story of a privileged UCLA grad who is accepted into Harvard Law School, only to learn that, in a fit of therapist-inspired middle-aged selfishness, his father won’t pay the tuition. Thomas Howell would never star in a consequential movie again. Yet Soul Man would become something of an enduring cultural embarrassment and C. ![]()
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