About thirty minutes into Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, 2006), middle school teacher Dan Dunne, played by Ryan Gosling, is asked to step into the hall for a word with his boss, Principal Henderson (Starla Benford). This is the only scene in which Benford appears. During the exchange, Principal Henderson chastises Dan for not sticking with the assigned curriculum. Instead, Dan had been teaching the students the general theories behind dialectics—a philosophy theory that discusses how two opposing forces change themselves as a result of their oppositional force—a theory that Dan believes would benefit the students because it teaches them how to think rather than how to recite dates and names.
It is worth pointing out that Principal Henderson is a Black woman and Dan is a white man teaching history at an inner city middle school in which the students are predominantly Black. Dan Dunne, the character, is a White Savior. Or he’s trying to be.
What do I mean by White Savior? I’m sure you’ve already seen this trope. A white person inserts themselves into a group of people of color and is the one to save them from whatever troubles they have. Versions of this trope crop up throughout entertainment—from Avatar to The Last Samurai to Freedom Writers to The Blind Side. It is a trope that has its roots in racism, upholding the views that a white person can save the lives of the oppressed if they are, I don’t know, pure of heart or some other bullshit. As though a single outsider is capable of doing what a group of people cannot. As though the only way for people of color to rise against their oppression is through a goddamn whitey.
Half Nelson plays with this trope largely to turn it on its head. Dan Dunne is primed to be a positive influence to his students: he defies the curriculum, he knows how to connect with them in a way that they’ll listen, he is the coach of the girls’ basketball team, the books on his bookshelf at home are largely about rebelling against an unjust system.
He is also addicted to cocaine.
The film isn’t entirely about Dan. In order to properly deconstruct the White Savior trope, there must be a foil to highlight the trouble it causes. Enter Drey, played by Shareeka Epps.
Drey is thirteen, one of Dan’s students, on the girls’ basketball team, and drifting along through life without much ambition. Who can blame her? Her mother constantly works overtime, her father is out of her life, and her older brother is in prison. The two other figures in her life are Frank (played by Anthony Mackie, who deserves a leading role in a character-driven drama like this one), a neighborhood drug dealer who is also respected in his community, and Dan, who is neither a stable figure nor a good role model. Drey is the last girl to go home after a basketball game when she finds Dan high in the girls’ locker room. It’s a vulnerable moment for him, as he’s just tried something more powerful than his usual, and Drey stays with him as he rides out the trip.
Thus starts a friendship that is, frankly, quite uncomfortable, and the movie forces the viewer to sit with that discomfort.
Because at the end of the day, Dan is not a good friend for Drey. He tries, of course—he offers her rides home after her bike gets stolen, he gives her a place to hang out until her mother gets home from work. When he makes her laugh or smile, there’s a discomforting edge to it. There’s a power dynamic between them that does not exist between Drey and Frank. Dan is Drey’s teacher, he’s white, he’s remarkably unstable, and he may or may not be grooming her. Previous instances of the White Savior trope would have you believe that this power dynamic is something to be ignored. Half Nelson forces you to realize that it’s actually really squicky. A walking bad decision wrapped up in the things any other movie would excuse.
Frank, meanwhile, has a history with Drey outside of school. He’s capable of meeting her where she’s at and be there for her when her family cannot. He attends one of her basketball games, he helps her get her bike back, he knows her mother and brother, he offers her candy at every opportunity. Frank is the only good stable figure in Drey’s life. It just so happens that the reason for that stability is because he deals drugs.
The central tension of the film is between Dan and Frank. Dan attempts to steer Drey away from Frank, probably because he’s primed to think that is the right thing to do. Yet the film sympathizes with Drey and where she’s at. You want to think that Dan is going to be good for Drey, but he’s not. He’s really, really not.
Everything around him cuts down the White Savior narrative. The curriculum he defies was set by the Black principal (why and how should he think to know better than his boss?). The relationship he starts with one of his students is not as wholesome as you would want it to be (as demonstrated in the scene where Dan has a fellow teacher over for dinner and it cuts between them on the couch and Drey trying on makeup). And then there’s the drugs. Oh boy is there drugs.
You are not given the reason why Dan started smoking crack—you are told in his words that “rehab wasn’t for him” which suggests he’s been at it for a while—but I can surmise that it is because he is attempting to fight the power without the community support that’s required to endure it. At one point, a romantic interest asks him if he is a commie, a question he first dodges and then later denies. The root of communism is community. In order for everyone to be lifted up, you have to be there for everyone in turn. Dan is not there for anyone, not even his cat. There is no network of people supporting him in his moral altruistic quest to be a guiding north star to a school full of impoverished children. Even if there was, he doesn’t reach out. At one point, a man approaches him at a bar to say he was the reason his daughter was studying history at Georgetown. Dan fails to recall who the student was, and the father walks away disappointed. Dan is not a community leader.
In the emotional climax of the film, after Dan and Frank sit down for an off-screen heart to heart, Frank sends Drey to deliver some product to a hotel room party. There she finds Dan, who sighs in resignation at the sight of her and hands over a wad of cash. The fight is drugged out of him. By that point we had been watching him spiral for half the film. When he doesn’t show up for class the next day, Drey returns to the hotel and helps to clean him up.
It’s the ending you don’t want the movie to have—a child taking care of the adult, a woman of color reaching out to the white savior—and that is precisely why it couldn’t be anything else.
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