Every history must choose an ending, create a sense of a closure, no
matter how tentative. Every argument eventually opens itself to a counter-
argument, or the counter-argument. As I was completing The Passing
Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature, a good friend
asked me if I had seen a recently released film called Suture. "I hope it
doesn't create problems for your argument," he said, not wanting to
complicate my thesis. I was excited to see a new passing narrative, one that
might suggest new directions and change. Has our sense of "race" evolved?

Suture, like many of the narratives examined in the previous pages, is
about identity. The film begins with half-brothers, who supposedly look very
much alike. The two brothers are played by two actors, one black and one
white, who look nothing alike. Although there are few physical similarities
between the two actors, the dialogue and plot of Suture assumes that they are
near carbon cobies of one another. When Vincent Towers enters his old
house in order to kill his half-brother Clay, the murder is more than a
fratricide: it is a symbolic suicide. In the most dramatic scene of the movie,
they shoot each other at close range, the guns acting as a sort of extended
finger of accusation--You! Me! Us! This vision of self-annihilation is
repeated throughout the narrative: in Vincent's escape from his own troubled
life; in his replacement of his brother with himself; in Clay's amnesia; and
in this "darker" brother's desire to kill his former self in order to remain as
Vincent Towers. Although it is a convoluted story, it is also very simple.

"Where suture interested us," the Village Voice quotes one of the
writers as saying, "is that in a primary way it's about the acquisition of
identity." ¹ Although it is not a story about racial passing, it is a story about
race and there is an orchestrated confusion about racial identities. I have

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