While the characters are doing battle with parents over old core cultural values that have gone by the wayside -- and yet the characters have a burning desire to be left to their own devices, e.g., marriage and a long life together -- Levine writes that "Drayton's revised narrative" shows that "the film does not really want to be about any kind of racial conflict, but instead, about the irrelevance of racial differences" (Levine, 2001, 374). It is "essential," Levine continues on page 375, to the "integrationist premise" of the film that "whiteness itself not be rendered explicitly desirable." In fact Levine points out on page 375 that the black assistant to Tillie, Dorothy, has "short hair, short skirt, and long legs," which Levine insists is far more typical of a female in the 1960s than Joanna, who dresses more like a woman in the 1950s.

This is Levine's way...
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