knives wrote: Thu Mar 05, 2020 12:30 pm
If there's a better film released this year it will be a landmark year for bluray. Not only is this in many ways Peebles masterpiece, different from most personal film, but it is also probably the best expression of black male identity on film. All this from around the same time as Finnean's Rainbow! The ending is as powerful a statement as the murder in Do the Right Thing.
Well, when you’re right you’re right. What starts as a scathing yet comedic portrait of white narcissism, oblivious to one’s own behavior or social surrounding due to privilege, jaggedly transforms into a classist nightmare taking Kafka applied to race to influence the displacement of status, and ultimately acknowledges the importance of ethnicity for identity. I don’t know if there’s been a sneakier gut punch of sobriety to the experience of race and ethnicity as not just related to but integral to existence, disguised as a light hearted comedy, which it is- but there is an inevitable confrontation of social position and racism for the viewer here, all while forcing that experience of the black male onto the audience. If that becomes a nightmare is it a racist reaction or one of realization of one’s own power and what is at stake if those stabilizers are removed, or can it be both and much more? Godfrey Cambridge considers it a nightmare, and says so enough times for us to internalize the same, exploiting the thin veil of facade the self-proclaimed white liberal wears until they feel threatened. I’m not a person of color, so I can't pretend to measure this film's effectiveness beyond my own lens, but I wonder if this exposition hammers in an acute clarity of the thick skin one develops by living in one’s non-white skin. This hits a beautiful rhythm between hilarity and raw recognition of social politics as defined by systems that beget prejudice, and in some ways it's more about the fragility of the white identity and the inaccessibility of placing oneself in the shoes of another than it is a surrogate narrative of being black within a dominant white world. By focusing on that horror of transitioning into a body without the tools or experience to cope, Van Peebles attacks the whites who shrug off race and minimize the divide to argue for sameness on their terms (All Lives Matter?), and simultaneously celebrates people of color for being able to cope with what this character simply cannot. The exaggeration is solely subjective to the character in this way and it becomes like Welles’
The Trial (despite clearly being inspired by
Metamorphosis) in this chaotic sense of this disorientation as a product of a lack of comprehension or skills rather than just external circumstance. So Van Peebles does something interesting where the delivery of this idea acknowledges how race fits with ethnicity, and seems to be arguing that it is ethnicity which provides that coating of security and support that Godfrey is displaced from and can't manage in another; and conversely what protects people of color from being psychologically crushed by persecution and abuse to channel into resilience.
Melvin’s compositions, especially during certain scenes (the watermelon one is my favorite), are so intense and surreal in their wild experimentation and ambient layers of mechanical urban noises, overlapping with voices in an incredibly anxious and uncomfortable manner bordering on hallucinatory sound design, that it disorients aggressively as characters respond in ways to make Godfrey doubt his own sanity. This film is much smarter than it appears to be on the surface of satire, and it’ll be a day one purchase for me.
As far as the ending..
It's implied that, now that he’s embraced his black identity, Godfrey sees the only way out from oppression to arm himself and join the militant group he used to chastise, targeted at the goal of revolt. The implications of this are ambiguous in an unsettling way. If this was simply his only idea left to protect himself without having the strength of a developed ethnicity, that would be a full-circle joke, but this also assumes that Godfrey has been able to transition into this role with the rest of his new racial group towards fighting as a method of action for people of color as a collective, as a byproduct of racial injustice. This is one last slap in the face in undoing a lot of the subliminal messaging that people of color who have lived in their skin and developed a strong sense of ethnicity are able to cope while Godfrey can not, suggesting that regardless of those strengths and protective factors, this abuse is too great to live with eternally. It's actually quite a sad ending in many ways, with Van Peebles essentially saying, "Yeah we're way stronger and more adaptable than white people, but that doesn't end the pain." I don't know if violence does, but without any tangible options other than to sit in purgatory in a system that isn't changing in its aggressive molestation of black people, Van Peebles shows that this is one of few options of empowerment. All the skills to cope simply aren't enough.
