The Bodygaurd 2
Some thoughts on music and tragedy in the film, The Bodyguard, which I just watched for the first time
High tragedy mistaken for box office smash thriller, The Bodyguard starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner, pretends to be about a famous black singer who hires a white former secret service officer to protect her from a violent stalker. They fall in love, so it also pretends to be about the erotics of the white savior, the reversal of roles, a white man as the help who is taken in by a black boss and wooed by her. We even get his weekly salary, three thousand dollars in 1992, the year of LA’s Rodney King Riots, the year of unrest and no relaxation of racial tensions. The film’s subplot is its more important message and the reason it accesses the screeching pitch of Greek tragedy. It turns out singer’s sister, who is also her manager and in charge of her affairs, is the one who placed the hit out on her. She’s the stalker, living in her house, the reason it be your own family is a black proverb the reverberates omnigenerataionally. Costner’s character figures this out when the sister, who it should be noted is Whitney’s foil in many ways including being high yellow to Houston’s mahogany-toned skin, makes a sexual advance at him. She slowly erodes into a basket case who is ostensibly being eaten alive from the inside by envy. She’s unable to celebrate her sister’s charisma and celebrity, she is too jealous, ruined by a desire to either be what she isn’t or destroy it so she no longer has a reminder of her inadequacies, her lightness and frivolousness in comparison the the deep impact of her next of kin. The sister’s breathless waspy politeness is suspect from the first scene she appears in; anyone familiar with inklings of this toxic dynamic already knew. Costner knew too but was waiting for hard evidence. Once he gets a confession he shoots her in the heart at point blank range, and blames it on the arrival of the intruder she had enlisted to kill her famous sister. He never tells his boss/lover, the reason or cause of her death, never divulges that she was a traitor. “So this is love,” fairy tale version can play softly in your head here, and then dizzily, like the madness and maddening honesty of the dynamics at play on screen.