Illustration by Claire Anderson / North by Northwestern.

A few weeks ago, a friend directed me to the Web site Stuff White People Like. The concept would be funny, but thin, were it not for its ingenious presentation. The site is structured as a top 100 list (at last check there were 91 entries), as if to guide an outsider on how to make friends with the race. Entry 70 explains that white people actually enjoy the process of breaking up with their significant others: “If you are lucky enough to speak a second language, the best thing you can do for a white person in this situation is to give them an expression in that language that relates to breaking up. This will make them feel better since they are comforted by the gesture and happy to be learning a new sentence that they can reuse to with their friends.” Dead-on in its assessment of a contemporary sensibility, it will, like any Web satire, soon lose of any of its trenchancy.

Still, the site’s inclusion of Michel Gondry in the “canon of directors white people love” proves prescient for Be Kind Rewind. In Gondry’s latest film, Jack Black and Mos Def accidentally erase all of the videotapes in their cutely decaying video store, and rather than switch to DVDs, they remake Hollywood blockbusters with homemade sets and cardboard costumes. It’s cute and warm until Gondry’s whimsical encouragement of DIY art comes unsettingly close to the movie’s fetishization of a black neighborhood and its naïve equation of “blackness” with community. Living in ethnicity becomes a badge for the protagonists’ own kookiness.

Gondry should never be mistaken for a realist. He’s interesting because he creates fabulist worlds that extend from real places. In Rewind, as the homemade remakes incorporate more and more of the people of Passaic, New Jersey, the movies become an illusion, as J. Hoberman said, of an illusion: the projection of a naïve hope for utopian community.

It’s one thing for Gondry to present his characters’ hopes as a wishful fantasy; it’s another for him to turn Passaic into a fantasy without any awareness of its reality. He portrays the city as a predominately lower-middle-class black neighborhood — besides a few cops, Jack Black is the town’s sole white guy, living in a trailer and hanging out with Danny Glover, Mos Def and their Latina friend, played by Melonie Diaz. In fact, according to the 2000 census, 35 percent of the real town’s population is white, only 13 percent is African-American and 39 percent is of other races.

It begs the question: Why are the extras in the film played by predominately black actors? Again, Stuff White People Like seems to provide the answer: “White people love being the only people in the room.” Black’s and Mia Farrow’s kookiness, as the only significant white characters in the film, is understood partly because they’re the only two in an “ethnic neighborhood.” The movie is conscious of this — Glover pulls Black aside after he dresses up in blackface to play a semi-famous jazz musician. But it’s a winking gesture, evading the idea that Gondry is racist, because, hey, he can laugh about blackface and still know the limits. It’s all a bit hypocritical from a movie in which one character calls Driving Miss Daisy “condescending.”

I can’t squawk that Be Kind Rewind is just another dubious exploitation of black culture, because Gondry is genuine — at least about the DIY’ness. Intentionally sloppy, the movie shares the spirit of Black’s junkyard cinema. That’s no small feat from Gondry and his photographer, Ellen Kuras, who in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep always seemed to end up with slick, glossy colors. This is also Gondry’s first film in 2.35:1 widescreen, and the actors look appropriately awkward inside the frame. A conversation between Glover, Mos Def and Black is also cut in such a way that they never appear to actually interact with each other, pointing out the truly weird way in which movies are edited.

Movies increasingly rely on a specific, temporary discourse with an audience. To understand Black’s character requires me to understand the implicit, racist connection between quirk and otherness. Between Knocked Up and Juno, comedies that work only within the immediate context of today’s culture look to be here to stay. The problem is, like Juno’s wannabe cynic, they only look sincere. We know Katherine Heigl’s careerist character needs a baby to make herself worth something, but we never get to hear her talk about it. Instead of speaking to us explicitly, these movies only work because their politics are implicitly understood — and legitimized by the audience that watches them.