A first directorial effort by a young Black
actor deserves a better hearing in these “racially tried” times
Seventeenth in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking
askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now
Subsections below:
An old court case was brought up; the responsive audience becomes
anecdotally evident
Parker makes a Black-angled film but for the purposes of a larger
historical consciousness; a special-audience textbook provides some context
Picking up the story more exclusively from the film; the racial angle
Interesting sides: Technical aspects
Nat Turner as a genius, and as a strategist
The film is generally tasteful in what it reveals
I have been dilly-dallying
getting some crude review written for this film, and have no one but myself
(and unusual circumstances in which I’ve been complexly creative) to blame. But
as it happens, this film has strangely been subject to a societal obliviousness
that is puzzling.
In the October 15 New York Times, a letter to the editor
from the actor Hal Holbrook (no stranger to standing heartily for Americana, as
he has portrayed Mark Twain) questioned why the film didn’t get more attention.
Look up his letter if you can.
An old court case was brought up; the responsive audience becomes
anecdotally evident
There was a lot of media
kerfuffle (including a 60 Minutes
piece in September anticipating the film’s release that touched on the sexual
issue) about director and actor Nate Parker’s
having been part of a situation (in the late 1990s) in which rape charges were
filed and led to a trial, and Parker was acquitted. As it happened, his friend Jean
McGianni Celestin, who had been in the same original situation that prompted
the charges—and who is a cowriter of the original story for this film—was found
guilty, but he was exonerated on appeal.
Many years later (2012, I think),
the woman centered on whom the rape charges were made committed suicide. When
media coverage focused on these parts of the story, which ranged over more than
a decade, the implication seemed to be, maybe, that the old (alleged) rape had
led to the woman’s suicide, and thus the “astute reporter” asks Parker, how
does he feel about the old rape charges now? Which, of course, seems
presumptuous, at best. Parker had been not found guilty (do due court decisions
not mean anything anymore?). And the woman, as we can safely-enough
hypothesize, may have had personality issues that went beyond the old
alleged-rape event (and need not even
have conditioned, insincerely, the rape charges), and that led to her suicide.
So why blame Parker?
It was this personal-life
situation that some media coverage suggested played a role in the film’s not
doing well in its first week of release. I think this was debatable at best.
I went to see it on its first
day of release, unusual for me for any film in recent years. I went to an
early-afternoon showing, and for a time before the promo trailers started
rolling, it seemed everyone else but myself in the theater was Black. I felt
like a Black man entering a white neighborhood to suspicious looks (though I
didn’t get specifically these from
the people in the theater, in Rockaway Township, N.J., a mainly white area). As
it happened, one or two other whites showed up, but the audience was
overwhelmingly Black. I wonder how much this was the case across the country.
The film’s title, as is well
known now, alludes to the 1915 silent epic The
Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith, who is known among film
historians and the likes of American Civ professors as the father of the
modern, feature-length movie. Though Griffith’s films were silents, they had
sections and film techniques—like one visual situation immediately relatable to
the following one (like a reaction shot)—that were new at the time, and became
staples in feature films before long. Griffith was a Southerner, and the film addressed
the American Civil War. One of its quaint features, and of course leading to cautionary
“asterisks” given for this film in more recent times, is having a Ku Klux Klan
group function as heroes in the film. Considering the time Griffith lived, this
was not totally unexpected for a man of his background, though of course it
makes the film solidly dated today (like old-time advertisements, from the
1880s or so, that may have racist content that seems strikingly in poor taste
today). (End note 1)
Parker makes a Black-angled film but for the purposes of a larger
historical consciousness; a special-audience textbook provides some context
Parker’s intent seems to be to
update the (cinema-referenced) idea of the “birth of a nation,” and show how
this nation—I think he meant the whole thing, not just the Black community—got
its start, or went through a crucible of a dire condition that could only be
reason to grow and mature beyond it, i.e., being in the throes of slavery and
groping attempts to overthrow it. Parker, maybe, also felt that a film focusing
on a part of Black history was a way to show American history as “of a range of
races, not just whites” somewhat in the playfully-casting way that the Broadway
hit Hamilton told a story of founding
fathers of the U.S., but with Black, Hispanic, or otherwise-minority-group
actors playing the famous roles of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc.
I should point out a couple
things. In opting to cover Birth of a
Nation, I wanted to refer to the old “African American textbook,” as it was
called, that I did copy editing for, for Peoples Publishing Group, in 2000-01.
This book, ostensibly authored by Molefi Kete Asante, a professor and prolific
writer and editor, was being prepared for a second edition in 2000; a slim
first edition had come out from Peoples a few years earlier, and now it was
being expanded, and in fact would turn out looking like a typical inch-thick
Prentice Hall or McGraw-Hill textbook, with colored pages and chock-full of
info, including in typographically arty “sidebars” and such. (By the way,
“Peoples” is the surname of one of the firm’s founders, Jim Peoples, not
“peoples” as in some hokey name for a communist organization. The firm has
since changed its name.) As it happened, numerous people wrote things for the
book, the way other textbooks are also handled editorially; I, in fact, drafted
some passages for sidebar stuff (I wrote on Thurgood Marshall and John
Coltrane); and the whole experience—that book used a ton of “creative” people,
though not as many as for the Prentice Hall H.S. lit textbooks I discussed on
my two blogs last year—is worth a “fireside blog story,” but not in the
foreseeable future.
Anyway, the impression I got
when working on the book, and I don’t think I was a super-good history student in grade school or college (though I
have done interested reading of history in my post-schooling years), is that
most, I would say, of the Black-history topics covered in the book I had heard
about, or read about, in the course of my own history schooling. You know, Crispus
Attucks, George Washington Carver, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, etc. So
though Asante’s book aimed to provide a more Black-centric history
account—nothing wrong with that in principle—I found that American history, at
least as I was exposed to it in the “increasingly liberal 1970s,” included a
lot of Black stories too. And I remember the name Nat Turner, and a rebellion
associated with him, but I very recently opted to read the Asante textbook’s
account to get more boned up. (And even then, memory stirred a bit, I couldn’t
say how much I had learned about it in grade school.)
Here is some stuff from Asante’s
book on Turner. The writing here is fairly typical of the textbook, presenting
historical details with a sort of nonjudgmental narrating, making its subjects
focused on to be credible, and spelling certain aspects out as for young minds:
“By the time he turned 12, he
led a group of much older boys. They followed him because he seemed so
naturally gifted with an understanding of how nature worked and how to plan any
activity.
“Within his limited environment,
Turner learned as much as was possible for an enslaved person [the book took
rigorous pains not to refer to such
people, derogatingly, as “slaves”]. He was fascinated by the chemistry of
various substances and mastered the art of making gunpowder. Often alone, he
saw himself as a mystic with great spiritual powers. A white reporter, Thomas
R. Gray, recorded an interview with Nat Turner after his capture[,] in which
Turner said:
“Having soon
discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided
mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to prayer
and fasting.” [quote marks in original]
[…]
“Turner was always in
reflection. Soon he began to have visions that instructed him on what he must
do to overcome enslavement. In his visions, he saw hieroglyphics, or sacred
writings that had special meaning for him. He heard voices that told him of a
great war between good and evil. He believed that the good represented Africans
and the evil [represented] the system of enslavement practiced by the white
slaveholders. He resolved to answer the divine call and made preparations for a
long time. He then brought into his confidence four men whose names are
recorded in history alongside his as men of courage.” (p. 138)
The 1830s reporter quoted within
this passage, Thomas Gray, is quoted epigraphically at the end: “He [Turner]
certainly never had the advantages of education, but he can read and write, and
for natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension, is surpassed by few men
I have ever seen.” (p. 139)
The book, complete with map
showing Turner’s group’s revolt route, says the revolt ran from August 21 to
October 30, 1831.
Picking up the story more exclusively from the film; the racial angle
Anyway (prior to reading Asante),
I went into this film quite foggy on the old Nat Turner story, whatever I’d
learned of it. Actually, the film—to the extent it sticks to history—goes into
it in far more detail than I, or any other classmates, would have been expected to absorb in our grade-school
days.
The idea of having a smart,
inspired slave lead a rebellion, even to a bad end, as a way to show how this
country went through grubby birth pains with respect to civil rights, and in
the process make it seem as if “a significant part of American history is Black
history,” is not bad in principle, of course. I rather would like to have seen
more white people attend this film. I wonder why it seemed to be a film that
attracted a lot of Blacks and not whites. (End
note 2)
I would quickly point out, too,
that the film, by a presumably non-partisan Black man about a Black hero, tends
to angle things so that the whites, even the more heroic ones, tend not to look
so beautiful or respectable. The ones who are seedier—like racist sorts who
might buy a female slave for sex purposes—are apt to look dubious; and even
somewhat more reputable ones, like a local minister with curly hair who looks like
a rather jaded slob, seem an “acquired taste” (for Blacks or whites). The
female plantation owner who seems to have been an early, nice influence on Nat
Turner is presented as generally honest/decent, but seems rather odd in
appearance (slightly shoddily stagy). Even the young-man slave owner seems
honest and “handsome” enough, as he helps Nat’s development (and inadvertently
cultivates Nat’s capacity to be more leaderly by speaking publicly and
developing his education-based skills) as an incidental of his shepherding Nat around
after the curly-haired white minister has encouraged Nat’s owner to have Nat
preach to various plantations’ slaves, for money—and Nat’s owner seems “one of
the good guys” until, rather late in the film, he becomes a drink-addled lout.
In short, the film might seem
“meant for Blacks” because it makes the main Black characters up front, neat,
relatable, well-defined, marketing-wise, etc., while the whites seem somewhat
like slightly-amateurish “heroes” or background decorations or quite-seedy
types (and we remember how often, even when Black characters in white-audience films are meant to be
honorable stand-outs, the whites in general may seem to look better and more
prestigious than the Blacks). But this film isn’t simply a “genre exercise in
catering to Blacks and making whites look second-rate,” somewhat like a reverse
minstrel show of sorts. I mean, in the Deep South, if a heroic Black guy arises
out of a white society that was as bent on keeping Blacks enslaved as that area
virulently was, you’re going to see some version or other of this way the
Blacks look better than the whites.
But I can go along with whites
made shadier than Blacks (no pun intended). In fact, I’ve been amused when
comedian Richard Pryor has imitated white voices, or when that film White Chicks (2004, starring Shawn and
Marlon Wayans) came out, and it was amusing in its imitation of white society
girls. If we in this country hope to bridge the divides between the races,
seeing how your own race, including the white, can look in others’ eyes—as long
as it isn’t too derogating—is healthy, and develops out “sense of humor muscles”
as we learn to laugh at ourselves a bit.
Interesting sides: Technical aspects
I am trying to speak from
enthusiasm for the film, but only saw it once, and will have to wait for it to
come on DVD before I can study it closely.
Aside from seeming overall to be
a kind of odyssey, or “big adventure story” (though it seems to have
somewhat-disorienting jumps in time, opting for presumably-judicious editing
rather than a smooth “long story” quality), the film has a strong sense of
place—with greenery in a humid, wooded environment; stereo sound making farm-animal
noises evocative; and varieties of picturesque old buildings conveying old
times. Supposedly Parker worked with a tight budget, but the visual effects are
generally pretty good.
As has been critically said, the
growth of Turner from boyhood to young manhood is interesting, and, arguably,
more continuously “processual” than later developments. Some sort of
African-culture “mysticism” is implied (the holy marks on the boy are
depicted)—I would have to watch again to get a better sense of this detail. Nat,
beyond infancy, as helped early by his white owners, as a shy boy, is shown,
but the fact that he has a talent for self-education that comports with
potential leadership qualities (which is suggested by the Asante text above,
too) also comes forth, but is arrayed over a series of episodes, which I think
has an effect of showing how Turner developed over time, with a lot of patience.
(I point out that I take a lot of the story details here on faith; I’ve not
been able to look up details on the sober-history Turner story, and for this
film, it doesn’t seem important to debate whether, or when, holy marks were
noted on the boy, or such. If this is mythological, it doesn’t hurt the aims of
the overall-historically-oriented story.)
It’s sometimes said (as in the
context of Roman Polanski) that film directors who have also acted are better
at handling actors than are directors who never acted. Parker seems to be good
at showing personality qualities and subtle but significant interpersonal
actions; notably, the film has a lot of medium shots with, often, two or more
people in a shot; and such situations as Turner discreetly motioning to a
fellow slave not to rise to assaulting a white man who has beaten Turner down
is good at showing how Turner could provide quiet but ameliorating leadership—and
holding off on tough action until the time is right.
Nat’s way of getting his owner to
buy a female slave, who appeals to Nat, but while Nat also notices the subtle
sexual interest of one white man who has a notion to buy the woman, is well
depicted. Also, we see subtle issues such as the need for Black men to keep
their eyes down while whites are addressing them.
Interestingly, the first good
laugh the audience I was with got—in fact, maybe the only such laugh—was when
the woman Nat saved (from being bought by a lascivious white) turns up at a
meeting where he is preaching. He apparently is a little embarrassed to have
her see him here in this capacity, if I recall rightly.
This woman, we find, is Cherie
[sp?], who becomes his wife, and is present toward the end of the film.
Nat Turner as a genius, and as a strategist
The fact that Turner was
educated, but in a narrow way, is brought forth in the film, as well as
suggested rather strongly in the Asante text above. It is no surprise Blacks
were not aimed toward wide education in those days, even with the smartest
ones; but when a person evinces curiosity and talent, what he or she will
educate him or herself in will be gravitated to, willy-nilly. For Nat, this was
biblical study. And while the film makes a lot of reference to Old Testament
text (I am much less familiar myself with the Old than the New Testament, and
even then am not so strong in it as to be a good candidate for teaching others
about the Bible), the average viewer can get the sense that both sides in the
slave debate could cite chapter and verse of Scripture to back up their
passionately-held positions.
The thing that I think many
whites will find most objectionable about this film is that Turner eventually
opts for violent action, and this isn’t merely the kind of quibble that was
raised about the far more modern-issues-helped figure of Malcolm X. But this
isn’t merely a racial issue: the same thing can be said about the
abolistionist/fanatic John Brown. Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry has long been known as a precursor or “spring
robin” for the U.S. Civil War; I have recently thought that the Nat Turner
rebellion was a sort of early John Brown explosion, from a Black population.
This shows what a painful mess of oppression slavery was. It took the Civil
War, the biggest convulsion of the U.S.’s history, to finally start unlatching
the shackles of slavery.
Brown and Turner were both, you
could say, religious zealots, who were profoundly repulsed by slavery. It is
also, of course, important in our history, remembering how bad slavery got, to recognize
these men’s insurrections as “prodromes” for the Civil War. What kind of story
of heroism, if any, does Turner’s specific story provide?
I don’t want to impute to Parker
what the point of his film is supposed to be—as if (one theory) it took Turner,
a sort of early awakening of the U.S. shucking off slavery, to get the ball to
start rolling to the more purgative fight of the Civil War. As a portrait of a
minor episode in the struggle to defeat slavery, it is interesting and rich
with edifying cultural context. (Turner’s preacher role extending to his even
baptizing a white man—this was interesting, but I would have to re-view the
film to appreciate how this fit into the picture, aside from his merely being “used”
by his associates for his preacher capacity.)
##
One way Turner’s story provides
a level of relevant “moral disposition for today” is that it shows how a person
can strategize to face down a condition that is both oppressive and coming from
a societal echelon that does not level the playing field with him. Let me
explain: whether it is Viet Cong fighters trying to defeat an American army that
was superior weaponry and air power, or some other guerrilla insurgency, if the
insurgency is “on the side of right,” as its adherents will believe anyway, it
has to “level the playing field” in ways beyond having superior weapons, “air
supremacy,” etc. You may have heard the saying that “Good strategy excuses bad
tactics.” A sort of converse situation is when, on the strategic level, your
enemy has a superior societal (or organizational) position, and is not playing
by fair rules, and your own resources are limited (and yet you have the
advantage of time), how, then, fight the enemy with some hope of winning some
important ground (literal or figurative)? Here, superior, lesson-conveying
tactics should counterbalance the strategic assets the other person has.
So, for instance, if your enemy
is a manager, or lawyer, who is approaching you unfairly, trying to get you to
agree to something not supported by facts or law, and “floating around like a
stalking shyster,” you then have to face this person down, “call him into line
with reality,” by some very pungent tactical move that will puncture (and
herald reversing) the shyster’s delusional understanding of you and your
position. This is a sort of situation you can be in in today’s U.S. economy.
Well, the structural similarities to the guerrilla fighter are clear.
So Turner, presumably, is acting
on the only standing he has to fight the evil he clearly sees oppressing him
and his fellow Blacks: aiming for an armed insurrection. The net result is that
this shows how desperate, and seethingly angry, the Blacks have become in this
film’s world. The result in the audience—and this may depend on who you are—can
be sadness, similar to how a film about the Holocaust, even Schindler’s List (1993), which may be
built solidly on a sense of moral outrage, can spur a strong sense of sadness
in the viewer, and this is not for the viewer’s lack of rich moral
understanding of the matter depicted. The sadness isn’t one of stoicism, or of
“What are you going to do?” It is one of morally responding to the monumental grimmess
depicted.
The film shows how Turner’s
experience was only one step in a process when we see a young man, watching
with a kind of admiration, as Turner is about to be hanged. A CIG-type changing
of the image has the young man shown as older, when among a group of Black
soldiers with Civil War uniforms on, wielding weapons with passion. This might
be taken to say that Blacks as helping forcefully dislodge slavery had their
more progress-making turn when they participated in the Civil War. This may be
true, but still the largest numbers to die in the Civil War were whites. But if
Parker’s idea is to say, “Blacks didn’t just suffer and cave in to slavery but
tried to stand up, like any good soldiers, and fight it,” then the film has a
point it delivers. But how well the larger society—and this doesn’t just mean
whites along with Blacks—embraces the film as that kind of history lesson
remains to be seen.
The film is generally tasteful in what it reveals
With such a story, some might
fear the film is too free with depicting awful events. And while violence of
various sorts is shown to get its points across, this is often handled with
restraint. One image that was downright gruesome to me was two slaves being in
a sort of holding cell—I think they had started staging a hunger strike—so a
slave owner (or “cracker,” whoever it is among the whites) starts to force-feed
one of the men by knocking out his teeth first and then pouring food down his
throat. This is easily as awful as anything you might see in Schindler’s List, and the image is
returned to briefly later when Nat remembers the various horrors he’s seen to
help justify his insurrection, or the like.
Another detail I never had a
chance to fit in elsewhere is that a slave-of-sorts who acts as a butler for a
plantation owner looks so much like a white man that I wondered whether he (as
the actor) was white or not. Then I decided he was probably Black. But this
makes another astute observation of Parker’s—that Blacks who were given
higher-level roles in Southern society—and ended up being Uncle Tom types,
despite their best motivation—were ones who looked more like whites than many
other Blacks in the same context did. (More generally, it is true that, as an
irony of discrimination based on skin color, among some Black populations,
there is further subdivision, by their own hand, into lighter-colored and
darker-colored Blacks, as connoting who gets more favorable standing, or such.)
A quickie review, to do right by
a film that should be seen by more people.
##
End note 1.
Incidentally, I think it’s unfortunate people aren’t more attuned to history
when discussing the racial-bias-suggestive sides of certain, less-objectionable
old art. Some months back, there was a reference to the Mark Twain novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on
the New York area CBS local news, and the novel was summed as “controversial”
for a long time, or ever since it was published. This is misleading. The book,
obviously, would have been controversial for different reasons in, say, the
1880s than in 1950 or today. Today, what causes most unease with it for modern
readers is its 117, or whatever number someone counted to, uses of the word “n*gg*r.”
To me, though that word may be obnoxious enough for young Black students, the
point must be remembered that when the book came out, it was downright liberal,
if not radical, for depicting, for white audiences, a somewhat punky, neglected
young boy floating on a raft on the Mississippi with an escaped slave, Jim, who
acts as a sort of surrogate father for him at times.
Though the word “n*gg*r” is used, including by Huck, it was
a typically used term of the time—Twain was big on imitating local and
dialect-type speech in his characters, so it meant Twain was opting for
art-as-mirror fidelity to what behaviors were on the street, not trying to keep
Blacks down, or the like. His having Jim berate Huck for doing something bad
(Jim says some kind of behavior Huck engaged in was “trash[y]”), at which point
Huck learns something, shows Twain wasn’t being racist with the book. But alas,
abandoned old usages can get more objectionable with time (floating in their
conspicuousness like grease we didn’t realize was in food we were eating). This
is like the term “Jew’s harp” for a certain mouth-held folk-music instrument:
it was accepted up to a few decades ago, maybe, and today is not liked, with
another term put in its place.
