Hacker Cinema
The Human Stain
2003 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Robert Benton
Coleman Silk is a worldly and admired professor who loses his job after unwittingly making a racial slur. To clear his name, Silk writes a book about the events with his friend and colleague Nathan Zuckerman, who in the process discovers a dark secret Silk has hidden his whole life. All the while, Silk engages in an affair with Faunia Farley, a younger woman whose tormented past threatens to unravel the layers of deception Silk has constructed.
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2 comments on Hacker News
Sex may be easy (well, in most cases) easy to define but race may be much very hard to define "objectively", e.g. see the novel/movie The Human Stain.
I think the point was that Agee, like Silk, didn't consider the possibility of misinterpretation. I'm sure if he did consider it, he would have dismissed it as remote. Even so, the ambiguity of the term was current in the 70s, and Agee, given his profession, probably was aware of The Spook Who Sat by the Door (book, 69; movie 73) about a black agent, the title playing on the ambiguity. The Human Stain came out 16 yrs after Agee's article.