The Worrying Reaction to Girls Trip's success

In this issue, we review Malcolm D. Lee’s uproarious comedy Girls Trip, a raucous romp about four college friends who reunite in their forties for a wild trip down to New Orleans. The film has already been a commercial success, pulling in over $30 million on its opening weekend, more than making back its $19 million budget. It’s the highest-grossing live-action comedy of the year so far, following a string of similarly themed R-rated comedies – such as Rough Night and Snatched – that have failed to land with audiences.
The success of Girls Trip is particularly welcome because it was unexpected – and it shouldn’t have been. The cynicism that surrounded the release of Girls Trip was partly because it’s a comedy film featuring four women, and as we all saw with Ghostbusters – and, y’know, the world – misogyny is still going strong. But the snarkiness around Girls Trip was also because it’s a comedy that unashamedly targets black American movie-goers. Films that do so are often dismissed by mainstream culture, showing the cultural superiority-based form of racism that surrounds films made by, for and with black people – despite their constant success. From Jordan Peele’s record-breaking social horror film Get Out, to the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures, it’s time that we stopped being surprised by the success of black stories onscreen.
These films have a clear formula for success with their target audience. Girls Trip stars beloved actresses of colour Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith and Regina Hall; has a director whose previous offerings Best Man and Undercover Brother were a hit with black audiences; was written by the team behind the critically acclaimed show Black-ish; and features a scene-stealing performance from breakout star Tiffany Haddish. The film itself also happens to be a blast, reworking a familiar tale of female friendship with a tonne of fun and filth.
It’s when we acknowledge this winning formula that the difference between the coverage of Girls Trip, and comparable comedies with white filmmakers and actresses, start revealing themselves.
Many reviews by white critics have attacked the film’s nods to Essence, a famous lifestyle magazine for black women, in-jokes about the actresses’ lesser-seen work, and the spirituality of the characters. These signifiers of black culture have been deemed as ‘alienating’, ‘pious’ and ‘niche’ in many a review of Girls Trip. Meanwhile, the constant representation of uber-privileged, Manolo Blahnik-obsessed, nanny-employing, cocaine-loving white women in comedies goes without comment, inexplicably assumed to be a more normal, naturally occurring state of female existence. The racism (often intercut with classism) that affects these ideas of what is “normal” and “relatable” is absurd, yet pervasive – and it’s also seen in how the stars of Girls Trip experience fame when compared to their white peers.
Pinkett Smith, Hall and Queen Latifah all have solid filmographies and have all starred in box office hits. However, unlike peers such as Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock who similarly built their careers on comedies, the stars of Girls Trip haven’t been offered the same opportunities for meatier dramatic roles. Nor have they had the same level of media exposure over the course of their careers – where are all the late night talk-show interviews, the SNL hosting gigs, the endorsement deals?
Black actresses such as Viola Davis and Gabrielle Union have publicly addressed the fact that the paucity of diverse roles for black women forces a unique form of competition and conflict. But mainstream culture’s continued scepticism about their potential for critical and commercial success isn’t helping either. Time we all got over our biases and supported great films in general, not our limited ideas of what they might look like.