"GREEN BOOK" MOVIE REVIEW

In 1962, an African-American pianist Don Shirley wants to organize a tour to the southern settlements of America, a country known at the time for its racism against blacks, and for this he needs more than a driver, he needs someone to ensure his safety (hence the name of the movie, the green guide, the guide used at the time to ensure that blacks could travel safely and legally) and they meet Tony Vallelonga, aka Tony Lip, an Italian of Italian descent, a man with a rough temperament who is fond of family relationships, who works as a bouncer in the backstreet bars of New York to support his family, and who is not afraid of bragging. But at first Tony doesn't want to work with Shirley because, as we see in the first scene of the movie, two black plumbers come to Tony's house and Tony throws away the glasses they drink out of after they leave because Tony has prejudices against black people and he has a racist attitude.

At this point, we should ask the question, why do people fear and hate the stranger, the foreigner? Racism has a very long historical background, but here I would like to talk about a concept called xenophobia t is a fear that arises from the idea that anything different is dangerous. According to the American Psychiatric Association's “Manual of Diagnosis and Statistics of Mental Disorders”, this phobia causes the patient to become overly delusional when confronted with the object of the phobia. There are two types of xenophobia. The first is the fear of a group that is part of a community but is not considered part of that community. This is usually immigrants or minorities, but sometimes a group that has been together for centuries. The second is fundamentally cultural and in this case the object of fear is cultural differences that are considered foreign. All cultures are subject to outside influences, but cultural xenophobia is usually directed at certain things, such as words from other languages, attitudes that have been adopted by the society in which you live. The difference between this fear and other types of fear is that this idea is presented to societies through various perceptions in the media and politics from past to present. The most powerful of these is the perception of us and the other. It specifically targets cultural, linguistic or religious minorities in societies and encourages an attitude of superiority towards them. 

After Tony makes a deal with Shirley to send money to his family, they set off on a journey. What we see along the way is that Shirley doesn't fit the conventional perception of black people at all, and in fact makes an effort not to. For example, when Tony hands Shirley a Kentucky fried chicken to eat, he is surprised to see that Shirley has never tried fried chicken before (Kentucky fried chicken is a dish associated with black people in America) Apart from that, when the black jazz artists of the period play on the radio, Tony, seeing that Shirley doesn't know, says “Come on, these are your people”. At this point, we understand that Shirley has been trying to live differently from the black stereotype throughout his past, he doesn't eat fried chicken or listen to jazz and that he does these things not as a choice but to avoid the traditional black perception. He thinks he has to live like a white person in order to be respected as a white person. We see the conflict he feels about his identity, his inability to feel that he belongs anywhere, his alienation from his own culture because of the way others view his culture and his attempt to create a new image for himself. But it is debatable how successful this image is because we clearly see that he does not feel happy in it.

The most crucial scene of the movie is Mahersahala Ali's (Shirley) famous Oscar-winning tirade “If I'm not white enough, if I'm not black enough, if I'm not man enough (a reference to his  being a homosexual character), what am I?” This scene is a turning point for both characters.  After this introspection, both Shirley and Tony come to a realization about each other's lives and their own lives, igniting a spark within them and they begin to take steps to change.

By the time we reach the last stop on the tour, we see that Tony and Shirley's relationship is much deeper than it was at the beginning, that they understand and love each other much more, and that not only their relationship but also their characters have been transformed. For example, Shirley wants to eat before his last performance, but the restaurant manager tells him that even though they invited him here to perform, they cannot allow him to eat in the same place because he is black. Shirley, who has faced this kind of behavior throughout the journey and adapted to the circumstances, decides to make a stand this time and leaves the place where he is not allowed to eat without going on stage and with Tony go to a black-owned jazz bar and spend the evening there. Shirley's time with the people of his own culture is a big step towards connecting with his own roots from which he has so far been running away.

When the trip is over, Tony invites Shirley for Christmas dinner. The fact that Tony, who in the first scene of the movie throws away the glasses from which black men drink water, wants to have a family dinner with another black man in the last scene of the movie shows that Tony has made serious progress in his prejudices

Obviously it's a story that we can relate to both characters, with Tony we can take a step towards overcoming our fear of the unfamiliar, of the foreign, of the different. With Shirley, we can learn something about coming to terms with our own identity, overcoming our complexes, not approaching our own culture in an orientalist way through the eyes of western culture.