Film: Moonlight, The Birth of a Nation and the US African-American Experience

After some years in which Spike Lee's realism-comedies were about the only mainstream films by black directors, there has been a recent bounty of such films, all with thoughtful, individual takes: Precious (2009), Straight Outta Compton (2015), and now work by two young (37 year old) directors: Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation  and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight. In very different ways, these films join Toni Morrisons's novel Beloved as helping me to have a window into our persistent troubles with race in this country, and the seeming futility of solutions offered by both the political right and left.

The Birth of a Nation's excellent title gives a hint of Parker's intent--he sees Nat Turner's failed 1831 slave rebellion as a metaphorical beginning of an American black consciousness, just as D.W. Griffith saw the Klan as the driver of a new Christian white triumphant South in 1915. Much more than the safer Twelve Years a Slave, this new film immerses you in the experience of slavery as part of an established system, not some transient evil. Even in 1831 there were slaves with 3 generations of slavery already in the family, and thus norms had been established for both black and white, rich and poor, for how the system was to work. What the film captures well is how a young man who is part of this system gradually comes to realize its evil and designs a plan to defeat it, however unlikely the odds of success (it failed, and all the participants were tortured and/or killed). The film avoids the traditional stereotypes of one event setting off a rebel, and takes the time to show us Turner's eventual accumulation of outrage. Turner, rented out by his owner to talk to slaves on other plantations about how the Bible supports their continued passivity, sees the scope, injustice, and brutality of the culture. I found this much superior to the approach of Twelve Years a Slave, in which a northern black freedman is kidnapped and enslaved, experiencing the South as a malignant foreign land. While theatrically dramatic, this fails to show the insidious institutionalization of slavery that made it accepted by so many of the era. Parker's The Birth of a Nation is more introspective and ultimately more connected to our period, showing a young black man gaining awareness, then anger, then exploding, similar to what happened in the 1960's, and even now. Before seeing it, I thought Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) gave me the best look at the diverse, violent institution of slavery (albeit from Tarentino's typically cynical cartoonish format). The Birth of a Nation is still better, and from the perspective that only a black director, heir to generations of participation in and recovery from slavery, can bring. The controversy about this director's past college behavior has clouded acceptance to what I think is a terrific film.

Moonlight is a wonderful, complex film about many things, focusing (like Linklater's trio of Sunset movies and Boyhood) on the relationship of two people over two decades on the background of the grim Liberty City neighborhood in Miami, site of ongoing poverty and violence. There are many remarkable things about this film that belie this simple concept. First the two people are black gay men--a taboo topic in movies up to now. Second, the film chooses to show the neighborhood violence and drug use as an unsensationalized norm (reminding me of slavery depicted in The Birth of a Nation), terribly frustrating to see as we start to care about the characters, but reminding me that most kids do not see their neighborhood as good or bad, as adults may--it is just theirs. Hence, Liberty City is not shown as it would in most films set in similar neighborhoods--no rats, brown/black tones, grey skies, and grainy cinematography. Instead, the buildings are bright, the sky is blue, and the cinematography often has a hazy dreamlike quality, with the ocean nearby as relief from heat, humidity, and neighborhood trauma. The drug dealers and gang members are pretty normal acting, often quite benevolent, and not very different from the other characters (Only the "crackhead" mother shows much real violence). Director Jenkins somehow achieves the impossible--showing a mixture of malevolent and good people, showing how both the good and the bad people have another side to them, making you remember your own high school angst, yet immersing you uneasily in an environment every bit as foreign as the one in The Birth of a Nation. Again violating a movie stereotype, the lead character does "escape" this environment, but not to some Nirvana, but to an equal setting in Atlanta, only to return to Liberty City for the human emotion of love. This is a movie I need to see again to better understand how the director achieves this balance of personal and public, commenting on the complexity black experience while telling a nice love story between two typical, flawed men of the community, not valiant Romeo and Juliet-type rebels. But it left me with the very uneasy feeling that the underclass trap for much of modern black America has a common human characteristic maintaining it--we tend to do and accept what is familiar, and spend most of our energy managing day to day events, not achieving societal change a la Nat Turner.

This is a lesson I have to remember when I feel unsympathetic about angry white "working class" men thinking they have been left behind. (By the way, how did "working class" come to represent only white middle income people without college degrees? It implies that only they have a culture of wanting to work.). While it is tempting to blame outside influences for a community's misfortune (slavery certainly was such a case), often we create our own prisons, not due to our flaws but due to most peoples' desire to avoid change and disruption. Most bad things happen to a population or community very gradually (steel mills shutting down, trade unions vanishing, universities raising tuition) not with one cataclysm that might drive mass outrage. Protests to complacent normalcy, even miserable normalcy, bubble up randomly, then tend to die down (e.g. populist movements such as now) or can be set off rarely by big, dramatic outrages (Rodney King, Selma). Langston Hughes was prescient about this in his poem "Harlem" (1951):

What happens to a dream deferred?
   Does is dry up
   like a raisin in the sun?
   Or fester like a sore--
   and then run?
   Does it stink like rotten meat?
   Or crust and sugar over?
   like a syrupy sweet?
   Maybe it just sags
   Like a heavy load.
   Or does it explode?

This poem has given rise to novels, plays, and movies about the mixture of stasis, hope, and violence of black experience ever since Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959). It is wonderful to see a new generation tackling this frustrating, resistant problem in 2016.

Thanks to all of you for reading my blog this year--I really enjoy writing it! Here's to a Happy New Year!