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I like the part in the movie where they're just talking about blaxploitation films, and how the only heroes for black folks are either cops or pimps. Counterbalanced with this repulsive screening of The Birth of a Nation isn't just the parallel scene of Belafonte's character describing the lynching of Jesse Washington, but also the whole scene of the undercover cop and the radical activist talking about blaxploitation movies, and coming to the irony of how these movies are often specifically either presenting the black hero as a cop or private detective or otherwise; or else they are, while still being the "heroes," horribly misogynistic pimps and pushers. The anachronistic references to films that hadn't even been released yet is great, and it's interesting how this scene itself even follows up on the one where Ture describes watching Tarzan movies and cheering on the white man brutalizing natives. The film is a fascinating study in applying W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of "double consciousness" (explicitly mentioned), and it uses popular culture to give expression to that, I think.
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Aug 15, 2018 06:01
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:38 |
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TrixRabbi posted:I find it weird that anyone would think Lee would ever attempt this message, given, y'know, his entire artistic output over the past four decades. The film itself uses those two sequences to very craftily dismantle the racist argument of "How come they can say Black Power but we can't have pride in being white?" It shows where the two slogans are born from: One as an empowering slogan for people who have been murdered and oppressed for centuries, and another from a group of unrepentant bigotry and a cult-like belief in white supremacy. And it does this without having to lecture the audience, or explain it. It removes the academic approach that people so often find themselves debating when this comes up and shows the emotional impact those phrases have. What's interesting is that the film also expands this dichotomy in the dialectic of ethno-nationalism by having the student union activists very quickly adopting the slogan "all power to all the people." Contrast the organic relationship between black pride and authentic liberationist philosophy for all oppressed groups with, say, #AllLivesMatter.
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Aug 19, 2018 06:00
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Xealot posted:The end of the movie works really well for me because of how bluntly it repudiates the scenes preceding it. Ron's story ends with this optimistic fever dream, where the Good Guy Cops win and sting their racist coworker and laugh in David Duke's face. But it's a purely symbolic victory...the Klan outside Ron's home serves as a reminder that the well is still poisoned. The Klan will simply replenish itself because our institutions enable and encourage them. Nothing is different today because the same systemic corruption that created David Duke has created the Steve Bannons and Richard Spencers and Alex Joneses of today. Not only that, but the police as an instrument of power is inherently predisposed to perpetuating the status quo, which leads to an inherent conflict of interests with any party that wants to actively oppose white supremacist terrorism, within or without 'the system.'
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Aug 20, 2018 23:53
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And we're not given any complementary perspective on why, for instance, Stallworth wanted to be a cop. It's merely this thing that he needs to say he's always wanted, but unfounded by any identifiable or formative moment. Heck, in that very scene with Ture when he's talking about being a kid watching Tarzan movies, it's clearly that part that hits Stallworth the hardest. We as the spectator are only able to interpret his motivations as part of a much larger process of the collective, psychological enslavement of blacks. Heck, it's almost like an anti-sunken place - it's Ture stirring the raising of Stallworth's consciousness, showing him where he is.
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Aug 21, 2018 05:50
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RandomBlue posted:I'd argue that most people don't have a formative moment and that in this case it's not that important to the story. What is important is that he realizes that his expectations aren't reality and even though he's in a position that typically has respect, he doesn't entirely because of his skin color. Well yeah, but it's a movie, is what I'm saying. They could have done anything they wanted to show us what makes Ron tick in the same way as Ture acts as a voice for this sea of black faces in the room with him. We're not introduced to Stallworth as a guy who's born out of the heroic glorification of cops, he quite literally emerges spontaneously out of a void where what preceded it was literal racist propaganda. Again, aside from his literally saying, like, "I come from a military family" or whatever, the spectator is put in remarkably the same position when it comes to Stallworth as the people he goes undercover to investigate, including but especially significant with regards to the black student radicals. There's something mystifying about him as a presence, a big "?" that never really gets filled. Actually, to that effect, the most direct a look we get into Stallworth's motivations comes about as a form of subterfuge: When he's talking to David Duke, he tells a story from his childhood, but from the perspective of his white friend with the racist father. So on one level, we're confronted with just how little anyone (the symbolic order around Stallworth being our surrogate, as opposed to himself) really knows about Ron, even on a basic interpersonal level. Both on duty and off, he is always "undercover." He can literally only give expression to himself through disguise, there is no "real" Ron Stallworth, he might as well be two different people, a white man and a black man, a cop and a radical. This goes back to the film's interrogation of Du Bois's concept of "double consciousness."
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Aug 21, 2018 13:29
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Sir Kodiak posted:Yeah, misrepresenting Kwame Ture as more violent than he was bugs me in a way that the more ordinary biopicish elevation of Ron Stallworth to a more heroic figure than he was doesn’t. The film doesn't represent Ture as violent. It represents him as believing that violent revolutionary struggle would come in the near future, that it would come about as an inevitable response to racism and imperialism; and as believing that oppressed peoples should arm themselves. Both of these things are true of Ture specifically, as well as being entirely consistent with radical black nationalist rhetoric of the time. Ture, on the other hand, does absolutely nothing "violent" in the entire film, nor does he even advocate pre-emptive, revolutionary violence. What Ture is talking about in the film is not even violence, in the sense that a white supremacist society is predisposed to seeing any attempt by oppressed people of color to maintain and defend the right to their own dignity as human beings, as "violence," as if if merely saying that black folks should arm themselves is in any way, shape, or form comparable to the license to eradicate unruly black folks that American whites have historically had no problem excising. What Ture is talking about is simply intelligence.
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Sep 6, 2018 20:32
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:38 |
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Sir Kodiak posted:Boots Riley: "I’ve met Kwame Ture two or three times, and heard him speak more than that. By the time he was calling himself Kwame Ture, he had formed the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) and was living in Africa most of the time. The program of the AARP for Black folks in the US at the time was to help create a revolutionary Black intelligentsia. They did this through an immensely long reading list and rigorous study groups. He cam back to the US and toured colleges to talk to Black folks for this reason. At SF State in 1989/90, I took part in a few of these study groups. If you really went up to Kwame Ture and asked him what we should do right now–as Ron Stallworth does in the film–he would have said what he usually said– 'Study!!!' But, it made the Black radical group look more dangerous to have Ture say something that sounded like he was calling for armed insurrection–which they were not calling for in the US at the time. I mean, this movie is trying to make a Cointelpro operative into a hero. It needs every little piece of help it can get." What's happening here is that Riley is already completely steamrolling the context of the scene - which is not that Stallworth asks, in some general or vague way, "what we should do right now." He asks Ture, the character, specifically about whether he believes that repressive, counter-revolutionary violence against black folks is imminent. It is not "the movie" that is trying to make Ture seem more violent than he actually was. It is Stallworth and the police who have an invested interest in prodding Ture to affirm his radical beliefs as much as possible, and Stallworth is simply characterized as being enterprising in asking Ture - the character - to expand upon the logical conclusions of his arguments. It is not enough to simply say that the "real life" Ture that Riley met nearly two decades after the specific historical context and social milieu of the film arranged most of his radical program around consciousness raising, of building up a revolutionary intelligentsia. Because what is the point of a revolutionary intelligentsia without radical praxis? This is the same as when liberals attempt to downplay X's renewed political radicalism after his conversion to Sunni Islam, or to portray the Black Panther Party as merely a social welfare organization, when what the latter specifically billed their welfare programs as were survival programs, in anticipation for revolutionary struggle that they believed to be imminent. Anybody can support education and critique of the status quo - that's not what made black revolutionary struggle inconvenient, or why it was specifically targeted by counter-intelligence. The reason it is targeted, in "real life" as in the very film we are watching, is because of its logical conclusion in radical praxis of some kind. That is what the film is attempting to illustrate, the inherent conflict of interests between Stallworth's chosen profession and the logical trajectory of black liberation. The proposition that Riley makes, and that you are in effect supporting - that the representation of this intractable conflict within the film is there to make revolutionary struggle look scary and counter-intelligence look heroic - can not be supported by the text of the film. The film does not show Stallworth being heroic in this instance, it shows his being compliant in the subterfuge of political discontents, which is then implicitly connected to the subsequent flashback of Ture and his comrades being outright harassed and molested by explicitly white supremacist pigs. It does not show Ture being irrational or dangerous. Stallworth himself vouches for the idea that Ture is not dangerous, that, from Stallworth's perspective as a character, that Ture's belief in the necessity of black folks arming themselves in self-defense is a cathartic fantasy with no tangible connection to future violent acts. But furthermore, Ture's beliefs in the imminence of white supremacist violence against people of color are shown to be absolutely correct. This is what happens in the film. Everything Stallworth does, meanwhile, is portrayed as very much the sort of cathartic, ideological fantasy that he uses to characterize Ture: He accomplishes nothing by working within the system, the fundamental contradiction between white supremacy and black liberation remains, and accelerates to the present day.
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Sep 27, 2018 20:19
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