film club XVIII: i walked with a zombie

So Film Club has now reconvened, and its kickoff film for 2008 was 1943's I Walked With A Zombie (1943), which continues the "undead" theme we've been working with of late.

It's an interesting and provocative film. It opens in Canada, with a young nurse ("Betsy") accepting an assignment that brings her to the island of St. Sebastian, to caretake and potentially cure Jessica, a woman who has fallen into a seemingly irrevocable trance state:

No one is exactly certain what has happened to Jessica—there are at least three different hypotheses. Roughly speaking, they can be grouped into the medical ("she never recovered from a fever"), the psychological ("her cruel husband drove her mad"), and, of course, the supernatural ("she has become a zombie"). Our nurse learns about this theory from a representative non-white island person:

Some of these trappings, of course, are familiar from other films that deal with the idea of possession. I'm currently reading Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film—my notes on the book are here—and there's a whole chapter in there which examines patterns in the "occult film." In this chapter, she notes that the occult film often contains a struggle between Black Magic and White Science (she borrows these terms from another Haitian zombie film, The Serpent and the Rainbow). That struggle is definitely depicted here, and—again similar to many other films—the body being struggled over is female. (Clover writes that women's bodies, in these types of films, are spaces to be "exposed, denied, fixed, filled, colonized, [and/or] detoxified," and that's pretty much in full effect here.)

It's interesting, though, that the selected representative of White Science is female—traditionally, of course, it's male. And it's further interesting that as an agent of Science, Betsy is also an unusually sympathetic one: it isn't long before she decides that maybe taking Jessica down to the nexus of Vodou activity on the island (the "Home Fort") might actually work out as a way to cure Jessica:

It's important to point out that, at least in this point in the film, Betsy doesn't necessarily buy the theory that Jessica is, in fact, a zombie: it's more that she sees the line between White Science and Black Magic not so much as a sharp demarcation but rather as something that is potentially permeable or negotiable, with Psychology representing a kind of murky middle realm. (The film repeatedly considers the possibility that a psychological state can be the cause of a "medical" ailment, and Betsy's willingness to try magic ritual as a cure shows that she might accept the idea that a ritual can enact medical change via the conduit of its psychological force. In other words, Magical = Psychological = Medical.)

All of this is pretty intriguing (and it gets even more complicated before the film ends), and the blurry lines in effect go some way towards complicating the easy binary wherein non-white-people equal Magical (but simple) and white people equal Rational (but blinkered). The film does even more interesting things with regard to race, though: a number of times the island's Black characters, who (unsurprisingly) mostly play the roles of servants, refer overtly to the island's slavery past. as Betsy effuses about how "beautiful" everything is at the same time her Black carriage driver is calling the island a place of deep suffering. It's difficult to read this as anything other than a privileging of the Black point of view over the White one: not because the Black characters are "simple" or "noble savages" or any of that horseshit, but because they simply hold a knowledge that the White protagonist doesn't have. It's not a supernatural, "primitive" knowledge, but a literal, modern knowledge about colonial violence and its effects. The fact that the film opens with a voice-over from Betsy and closes with a voice-over from an unidentified Black character is also provocative in this regard.

This isn't to say that the film is super-progressive: it definitely trades in the image of the Black body as a source of uncanny creepiness:

—but this is still a film making unusually thoughtful and sophisticated points about race and colonialism, especially given that it was produced during a time when Black people still weren't, say, allowed to vote in this country. I'd be curious to revisit The Serpent and the Rainbow, a product of an age we like to think of as being more enlightened about matters of race, to see if it comes anywhere close to being this pointed, although I won't be doing this next week, because as my follow-up I've instead opted for us to take a look at Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).

Skunkcabbage's write-up on I Walked With A Zombie is here.

Labels: media commentary, race

Thursday, January 17, 2008
2:16 PM
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film club VI: malcolm x

For our film club this week, we decided to stick with the Spike Lee trajectory begun last week, and so we watched his terrific, uncompromising biopic Malcolm X (1992), which I'd not seen before.

On one level, the film is an extended examination of persuasion: specifically, it looks at the difference between persuasion and coercion.

Persuasion can be powerful, but when power itself is the means of persuasion we cross a line into coercion. The film is very interested in how people and institutions weild power, as it announces baldly in its opening juxtaposition:

The Rodney King tape is, of course, among some of the most iconic coercive footage ever shot, but the early portion of the film has no shortage of additional examples. For instance, here's someone making a point to Malcolm's mother:

And here's someone making a point to the young Malcolm himself:

These experiences are illuminating; they inform a person how power works, how to establish your place in hierarchies founded upon dominance. The young Malcolm learns this lesson well, as we can see from the way he settles a dispute early in the film:

So, on one level, the story of Malcolm's development is a story of renouncing coercion in favor of persuasion: doing work through lectures and argument, using the intellect as the tool rather than the body (or a club, or a gun):

The film is at its most interesting, however, when it blurs the dividing line between these two modes. The turning point in Malcolm's experience, as readers of the Autobiography will know, is his stint in prison and subsequent conversion to Islam. In the film, the catalyst for this is a mentor figure named Baines (invented for the film), who steers Malcolm, with a firm hand, to some tools of intellectual power:

The experience is undoubtedly positive for Malcolm—but as with any mentorship, it is not free of hierarchy, and it comes with its own dynamic of dominance and submission (the sequence culminates with a resistant Malcolm learning to kneel in submission before Allah). The difference would appear to be that the submission here, ultimately, is given voluntarily, without threat of force, but the territory is getting tricky all of a sudden.

Even more interesting is the sequence when one of the Nation of Islam brothers is injured by police and taken to prison without medical care. Malcolm goes to the police station and demands to be taken to see the injured party. The police consent, but it certainly helps that Malcolm has this force waiting outside:

Is this coercive? Is it the threat of violence that these ranked men (might) represent that causes the police to submit to Malcolm's request? Is it morally right to use coercion to save a man's life?

Further complicating this scene is the fact that the Nation of Islam members, in fact, act as a restraint on the even more coercive force represented by an inflamed crowd of people who gather outside of the hospital, demanding justice:

Cops, a black man wounded by those same cops, and an angry mob: this is the same formula we have at the conclusion of Do the Right Thing, and it is precisely the addition of the Nation of Islam members that allows the scenario to be reimagined as triumph rather than as tragedy. Whether this is because they represent reason instead of force or reason in addition to force is perhaps the key question involved with understanding Malcolm X, the figure. The film, to its credit, provides no easy answer.

Labels: media commentary, race

Friday, August 17, 2007
10:51 AM
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Last week, Cathy H. forwarded on this article to me, which critiques hipster culture by way of critiquing the films of hipster posterboy Wes Anderson.

The most interesting part of this article, for me, is the way it looks squarely at the "casual racism" of Anderson's films. I've seen each of Anderson's films as they've come out, and I'll confess to being won over by their substantial charisma and charm, but I think this criticism is spot-on. Over Christmas break, I was talking to people about The Life Aquatic and I said "I liked it, but I wish it didn't feature a black character who does nothing but hang around playing guitar." I mean, I like a Portugese David Bowie cover as much as the next guy, but I have a pretty serious problem with straight-up minstrelsy.

That said, I'm not sure that I agree with all of the examples that the article raises—it seems obvious to me that the scene (in The Royal Tenenbaums) where the pre-redemption Royal Tenenbaum calls Henry Sherman "Coltrane" is meant to illustrate Royal's racism rather than being an expression of racism on Anderson's part. On the other hand, I think the article's point about Tenenbaum's Pagoda being "pretty much bereft of any individuality" is spot-on. To me it comes down to "inner life": the goals, desires, feelings, or anything resembling what we'd traditionally call "subjectivity" that a character in a movie gets accorded. If a character is granted little or no inner life then they're really functioning as a prop, not a character, and although the Belafonte is nothing if not ethnically diverse, only the Caucasians are characters; the rest are props.

Rushmore's Margaret Yang and Bottle Rocket's Inez are, for me, borderline cases—although they're both stereotypes (it's hard to think of cultural types more "stock" than the Asian whiz-kid and the Hispanic maid) the movie does grant them some degree of inner life, although this inner life is limited, almost exclusively, to a desire for / interest in the strangely irresistible Caucasian protagonist. Seems fake to me—and while an argument can be made that all of Anderson's films are really about the comfort of the fake or imaginary, and while I'm sympathetic towards this theme, I still can't help but wish that the fantasy of Anderson's world(s) didn't seem so goddamn colonial.

The magazine this article comes from, N+1, looks pretty good to me: check out their annotated table of contents (links to the actual articles themselves are, somewhat confusingly, stored on a different page, so you need to sort of toggle from one page to the other to really make sense of what you're doing).

Labels: media commentary, race

Tuesday, January 18, 2005
5:15 PM
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OK, time for the big Kill Bill writeup (contains mild spoilers):

As expected, this movie is not about people, it is about other movies. Most of the characters have no interiority whatsoever, and those that do only have the bare minimum necessary to create pathos or to advance the ruthless machine of the plot. This is a questionable tactic, especially when dealing with a film that features members of another race—I have long believed that racism in representation begins at the exact moment when an artist denies interiority to the racial "others" that they represent, and indeed, some have condemned Kill Bill for what they perceive as its racism.

It's worth noting that Tarantino is by no means the only filmmaker of recent years to deny minority characters their interiority: one need only look to Lost In Translation or some of the films of Wes Anderson to see other examples. To me, these other examples are more troublesome because those other filmmakers don't share Tarantino's larger project of exploring genre, or his repeated explicit underlining genre as artifice, an end to which the clever usage of stereotype is in fact the very means. It's true that when we watch Uma Thurman mow down eighty-eight Yakuza, those Yakuza aren't granted full personhood—but the whole set-piece during which this occurs is patently fantastic. Nothing in it bears any resemblance to a recognizable reality. The characters (inasmuch as they are "characters" at all, I'm more prone to describe them as "signifiers") reference not real-world Asians, or real-world assassin-women, for that matter, but rather these same signifiers as they appear in other films. And in this I think Tarantino is enormously successful.

This film also continues the project of exploring the cultural politics of authenticity, a project begun in earnest in Jackie Brown. Asianness is Kill Bill's version of Jackie Brown's blackness: the exotic ethnicity that has the power to connote authenticity. Witness the scene where "The Bride" is in Okinawa: when she poses as a tourist just learning Japanese she comes across as flaky, but when she reveals that she is actually fluent she seems serious and sober; hard-core, authentic. Another example would be the Hattori Hanzo katana she attains, which has the literal stamp of authenticity upon it. Etc etc.

Jackie Brown takes a naturalistic approach to critiquing the notion that authenticity can be derived through cultural affiliation. Kill Bill takes the opposite approach: critiquing it by highlighting the lunacy of deriving our sense of the authentic from something that is so clearly artifice. By straight-facedly amping up the cartoony elements of the film, Tarantino makes it impossible for us to use the film to shore up our sense of our own authenticity. The metacommentary happening in the film functions the same way: by casting Sonny Chiba as Hattori Hanzo, it makes it difficult for us to see Hanzo as a "real" Asian savant. We look at Hanzo but see Chiba, star of a hundred kung-fu movies.

(Jonathan Rosenbaum, of the Chicago Reader, treats Kill Bill as a response to Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, and I think the contrast between the films is fruitful: I love Jarmusch as a director, but I think his use of Asian and African-American culture as markers of authenticity is far less complicated, far less critical, than Tarantino's.)

Inasmuch as they are films about "Asianness" and blackness, Kill Bill and Jackie Brown are also both films about Caucasianness. Kill Bill refers repeatedly to Uma Thurman's blond hair and blue eyes; at one point Lucy Liu refers to her explicitly as a "Caucasian girl who likes to play with samurai swords." Swap "boy" for "girl" and Tarantino emerges. And I'm beginning to think that Tarantino's ultimate point is that the defining feature of Caucasian identity is its capacity to appropriate, its ability to select from all available genres. (Consider Tarantino's oft-praised ability to create eclectic soundtracks.) Perhaps Tarantino sees a chameleonic nature to be, in fact, the only identity that rings "authentic" in an market-driven, postmodern, imperialistic society, a kind of "meta-authenticity." (It is worth pointing out here that part of why a lot of people (myself included) admire Japanese film and music is less because of its authenticity and more because of its appropriative qualities: it may not be an accident that Kill Bill prominently features the 5,6,7,8s, a Japanese girl-rock band.)

This of course raises a whole set of thorny questions about who has the power to appropriate, but the crazy network of cross-cultural appropriation is material for a whole nother set of posts.

Anyway. I hope the second volume of Kill Bill will be as interesting as this first one: I am especially interested to see what Tarantino is planning to do with the Michael Madsen character, who briefly appears in Kill Bill Vol. 1 looking exactly like Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs, down to the cheap suit and everything, leaving me wondering whether Tarantino was preparing to meta-reference his own oeuvre, which, as you can probably tell, would thrill me.

Labels: media commentary, race

Monday, October 20, 2003
3:23 PM
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vampires and creoles

I am currently reading Interview With the Vampire, which I will be teaching in a few weeks for my Horror course.

The most interesting thing about the first fifty pages or so is the way that race flickers in the background. The early action in the book's narrative all occurs around plantations near New Orleans, a city which receives special attention as a site of racial and ethnic mixing:

"There was no city in America like New Orleans. It was filled not only with the French and Spanish of all classes who had formed in part its peculiar aristocracy, but later with immigrants of all kinds, the Irish and Germans in particular. Then there were not only the black slaves, yet unhomogenized and fantastical in their different tribal garb and manners, but the great growing class of the free people of color, those marvellous people of our mixed blood and that of the islands, who produced a magnificent and unique caste of craftsmen, artists, poets, and renowned feminine beauty. And then there were the Indians, who covered the levee on summer days selling herbs and crafted wares. And drifting through all, through this medley of languages and colors, were the people of the port, the sailors of ships, who came in great waves ... Then add to these, within years after my transformation, the Americans, who built the city up river from the old French Quarter with magnificent Grecian houses which gleamed in the moonlight like temples."

This is not the first time in the past few weeks where I've been reading American horror fiction and race has come up as a substantial theme. It is worth noting that Rice's second novel is not horror fiction but rather historical fiction about the free people of color: obviously something she had some significant interest in.

Here is a website covering the "history and genealogy of the Free People of Color in 19th century New Orleans."

Labels: book_commentary, horror, race

Monday, January 07, 2002
10:11 PM
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