IFC Films

To hear critics tell it, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is the most celebrated film of 2014 in large part because everyone can relate to it.

“The profuse pleasures of Boyhood spring not from amazement but from recognition—from saying, Yes, that’s true, and that feels right, or that’s how it was for me, too,” Anthony Lane writes in the The New Yorker. Richard Roeper, of the Chicago Sun-Times, describes Boyhood as “a pinpoint-specific and yet universal story,” and Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers calls it, “a four-star game-changer that earns its place in the cultural time capsule.”

Which raises a question: What is the culture it captures? Whose culture is it?

Filmed over the course of 12 years, with the same primary cast, Boyhood tracks the life of a boy in Texas, from childhood through adolescence. Mason makes and loses friends, survives his parents’ divorce and is transformed by his first serious romantic relationship—all as he naturally ages on screen.

Linklater includes cultural landmarks from the last decade to help note the passing of time, from Coldplay’s first hit to the evolution of video games to the Harry Potter phenomenon. And with a directorial style that suggests documentary, he further encourages viewers to apply their own meaning to Mason’s journey.

There’s no denying that, as so many have pointed out, it takes a visionary artist to conceptualize and execute a project on this scale, this well. Indeed, the experience of watching a human being age in this way, in the span of one movie, is unforgettable. Yet there are also clear limits to Linklater’s vision. Because in this otherwise sprawling exploration of a boy’s life in America, there is an essential aspect of the present-day human experience that goes unexplored: race.

It’s not surprising that the protagonist and his entire family are white; most movies today, still, are about white people. What’s surprising is that, as portrayed in the movie, Mason lives 12 years in America without ever having or overhearing a significant conversation about race. Not on TV, not at school, not with his parents, nor with any of his friends.

Every movie can’t be about boys or girls of color (though it would be nice to have a few more). No film is obligated to talk about race (though it would be nice if a few more did). And it’s plausible enough that a kid growing up in Texas, where the population is 70 percent white, would not be confronted with racism very often.

It’s certainly true as well that many viewers who don’t look like Mason, including women and people of color, have found and will continue to find Boyhood’s narrative illuminating and relatable.

But the fact that this particular film omits the topic of race almost entirely, underscores something insidious about our movies and the society they reflect.

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Boyhood is not, in general, oblivious to the real world. Linklater does choose to openly point out social inequities that Mason encounters on his path.

Mason’s family is not wealthy, and their struggles with money clearly play a major factor in the narrative. His friends make gay jokes and participate in macho posturing, but Mason openly rejects the aggressive masculinity of his mom’s partners (even as he is chastised by one for wearing nail polish). At one point the kids giggle at a disabled person, and the camera lingers on the exchange—asking Mason to consider it further.

He observes women being demeaned, objectified, and—in one brief moment—even physically abused. We’re also shown his working single mother, Olivia, doing her best to get by (brilliantly given life by Patricia Arquette). And Mason’s sister Samantha, played by Linklater’s own daughter, is used throughout to reference just how much girlhood in America might differ from boyhood.

These are intentional decisions on the part of the director. They draw attention to the ways in which kids see the world, how they talk to one another, and how they learn about the society around them. Mason is constantly observing people, and through these observations he is changing.

Most of these scenes make us, as the audience, wince at the things we inadvertently teach our kids. And they make us reflect on a time when we were blissfully unaware of the pain around us. But they also force us to consider some of the cruelties, subtle and not, that mark our society: classism, homophobia, sexism, ableism...

Yet, as a few others have noted (largely drowned out by the mass of praise), the list of humanity's roadblocks in Boyhood does not include racism.

The closest Mason comes to witnessing the long history of racial discrimination in this country is when he, his sister, and father are shown canvassing for Barack Obama, and they meet an older white man who stands in front of a Confederate flag and says he won’t be voting for “Barack Hussein Obama.” But the scene isn’t about that man’s feelings—it’s about electoral politics seeping into culture. There aren’t any actual people of color in sight. The scene, which is played for laughs, quickly transitions into his father asking Mason to steal a nearby John McCain sign.

Similarly, in an earlier scene where Mason and his friends are being bullied by some high schoolers, there is one boy of color present in their group. He gets bullied like the rest of them, but there is no suggestion of racism. And the character disappears from the story as quickly as he arrives.

In fact, there is only one truly significant interaction with a person of color in the entire plot. In the second half of the film, a Spanish-speaking worker—who is fixing a pipe outside the family’s house—is given words of encouragement by Mason’s mom (the teenage Mason, who is waiting for her in the van, doesn’t observe this). We learn a few years later, as Mason is having breakfast with his mother and sister, that her words inspired that man (played by Roland Ruiz) to pursue a college education and that he is now a restaurant manager. The interaction is a reiteration of the film's “carpe diem” theme, and we can infer that by watching this exchange, Mason might have newfound respect for his mother.

In this tale of a white family living in a state that borders Mexico, isn't it strange that the only time they’re shown truly interacting with a Spanish-speaking non-white individual is when they are saving them from a life of manual labor? Perhaps we’re meant to gather from this that Mason is aware of the barriers that those with brown skin must overcome to make it in a place like Texas, but unlike the film’s references to other forms of discrimination, it’s not made obvious. Instead, it actually seems easier to interpret this scene as saying something closer to “any boy can make it in America if they just seize their opportunities.”