(IMAGE: Orion Pictures / United Artists Releasing)
The elaborate conversation around cinematic violence against Black bodies that broke into the open before the release of Chinonye Chukwu’s devastating historical film TILL was both illuminating and necessary. It’s a conversation that is likely to intensify with the release of the Will Smith slavery drama EMANCIPATION, and it’s a dialogue that has actually been going on for some time.
Fellow CineGods writer Tim Cogshell and I go back a long way, and I can still recall his deep ambivalence when the LA Film Critics Association–a major critics group to which we both belong–gave a special citation to Steve McQueen’s 12 YEARS A SLAVE.
Old school white liberal that I am, I was a bit baffled by Tim’s reservations, so I asked him what was up. His gentle answer was like an alarm sounding: “I just worry about some 11 year old Black kid getting that story stuck on a loop in her head as the main fact about who she is, or who she’ll become.”
Holy shit. Now there was another angle to look from.
Because we’ve been having this conversation for a long time. The original ROOTS was on TV 45 years ago, and I can distinctly remember its impact on my schoolyard: an increase in racist jokes, some by kids who never made them before. A white kid calling a black kid “Kunta Kinte,” after the slave played by LeVar Burton and John Amos in the mini-series.
And oh yeah. One more powerful link forging itself inside my own middle class white boy consciousness about how racism–and “otherism” of all kinds–is the fundamental evil, not just of American history, but of the America of now, or any other time.
Because all this time later I can still remember how all the friendly sitcom actors who populated that miniseries suddenly turned deathly serious and became living embodiments of violent white privilege and relentless black suffering–a riveting spectacle to a boy who knew these performers only from “The Brady Bunch,” “Good Times” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” I remember Ed Asner’s conflicted Quaker slaveship captain falling off his high moral horse and succumbing to the unspeakable impulse to committ captive rape. I remember vividly when Lou Gossett Jr.’s urbane house slave Fiddler tried to save young Kunta from a beating by speaking bluntly to Lorne Greene as the slaveholder who had always encouraged familiarity between them. The slaveholder’s avuncular mask fell, and Fiddler was tersely told, with an unconcealed menace that struck at him like a fist, “You mind your tone, Fiddler. You mind it well.”
Gossett’s pantomime of emasculation and despair in that moment haunts me even now.
But while I was getting woke, Tim was getting teased. On his playground, Tim, who is Black, remembers being treated very differently once ROOTS had aired.
TILL if you don’t know is yet another horror movie out of the American history books, in this case about the 1955 lynching of a 14 year old African-American boy named Emmett Till near Greenwood, Mississippi. Emmett was Black, a Chicago kid who hadn’t been raised to fear white violence, and he was visiting relatives in the Deep South at the height of Jim Crow. He was by all accounts a spirited kid, and he may have flirted with a white female shopkeeper named Carolyn Bryant. Something about his demeanor made her feel fearful or disrespected, or so she later said.
So her husband Roy and his half brother JW Milam came for Emmett in the night, kidnapping him at gunpoint from his great uncle’s house. Emmett was beaten, tortured and then shot in the head, and his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River.
Three days later when Emmett was found, he was so swollen and mutilated that when Bryant and Milam stood trial, the defense attorney moved to acquit by claiming the body was unrecognizable as Emmett Till, and therefore the legal standard of corpus delecti was not being satisfied.
All of this is a sadly familiar American saga–there were close to 4000 lynchings perpetrated against Black people in the hundred years between the Civil War and 1965. Black bodies were broken in the visual media of those days too. Some towns in the Deep South sold postcards of their lynchings in the gift shops on their small town Main Streets, a historical fact reminding us that, if people are to be changed by being forced to behold evil, they have to be able to recognize when they see its face.
Because they’ve tired of the Hollywood tendency to portray Black history as an endless skein of suffering, there has been some pushback on TILL the film from young African-American writers on Black Twitter and elsewhere. “It was hella uncomfortable watching the trailer for the Emmitt Till movie in a theater full of white people,” Teen Vogue columnist Jenn M. Jackson tweeted. “Black pain, death, and trauma have to stop being the plot device.” She then added, in a separate tweet: “I’d literally rather sweep the beach with a broken pushbroom before I’d want to sit in a theater and experience an Emmitt Till movie.”
I hear what Jenn Jackson is saying, and I also remember so vividly what my friend Tim said about 12 YEARS A SLAVE. As depicted in media, the history of race in America is so often a story of unanswered black, brown and native suffering–of blood and torment, two things movies have never been shy about making money from, followed by miscarried justice, and clenched hands. That’s the template of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, and TILL comes very close to filling it too. So it’s a fair question to ask: Why does American culture insist on imposing violent suffering as a and maybe the prime lens the African-American experience is viewed through? Who’s benefiting from the telling of these stories, told in that way?
Not Jenn Jackson surely. Not my old friend Tim. Not the 11 year old Black girl of his imagining–who surely lives and breathes somewhere, and who would almost certainly wake up screaming night upon night if she saw Chinonye Chukwu’s devastating historical film TILL.
Let’s commence by questioning motives. Guilty white people may feel purged by watching these movies, and by the fact of a movie like TILL’s very existence, which assures us we are better than the people of its time. You go to the movie. You endure the racial horrors of another era, and then you emerge back into the sunlight of…what? A better world? Maybe even (in your mind) a “post-racial” one, as pundits so laughably argued eight years before the rise of Trump, right after the epochal first presidential election of Barack Obama.
Certainly and at the very least, you emerge into a world where the Emmett Till story can now fully be told.
Maybe a pornography of black suffering feeds a whole raft of subterranean impulses inside white producers and white viewers. Maybe for some it’s like watching “Teen Mom” or old episodes of trainwreck reality shows like “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” The failings inherent in the situation are so egregious that the audience gets to feel superior to what’s happening, rather than implicated. “Roy Bryant and JW Milam did this. Not me. And here comes Honey Boo Boo.”
Maybe for some white folks it feels like a pat on the back–a clear indication they are better than the whites of that time.
Maybe for others, there are even unspeakable pleasures at work, and it reminds them of what their grand-daddy described as the good old days.
Here’s the thing though. Chinonye Chukwu is an African-American filmmaker, and she has made every single choice in this movie with a deep awareness of the intricacies of what she has set out to do. Her chief collaborator is documentarian Keith Beauchamp, another African-American filmmaker, who has made the story of Emmett and his mother something of his life’s work.
They are aided by a performance from Danielle Deadwyler as Emmett Till’s mother Mamie that beggars description, because the usual awards-season superlatives don’t get you there. Yes, Deadwyler is “brilliant.” She is “stunning.” She is “mesmerizing” and all that jazz, and you “cannot take your eyes off her”(TM).
But what’s the adjective that you use to tell the world that Deadwyler’s Mamie has a soul? That this recognizably average loving mom, who was radicalized by the death of her son and took the bold step of unsealing his casket so the cover of JET magazine could show her private horror to the whole world, is just real up there?
The whole power of the movie comes from how through Deadwyler’s Mamie, the unspeakable becomes the universal. And you can’t avert your eyes, because she just won’t let you.
I asked who benefits from a movie like TILL, and in so fraught and complex a conversation, I’m not stupid or arrogant enough to try to offer a blanket answer. But I will offer a specific one, based in experience.
I teach a film class at a major LA film school, and I have for twenty years. I was fortunate enough recently to show TILL to my students with the distributor’s permission, about one month before its release.
When I announced the screening, a student who knew the Emmett Till story reached out to me and said they would prefer not to attend. I said I understood.
Then I showed the movie. To a room of students who had just told me they knew who Rosa Parks was, but who drew a blank about the (earlier, even more disturbing) Civil Rights saga of Emmett Till.
The students wept. They gasped. And when it was all over, some of them expressed a kind of anger that they’d never been told this story before, because they could tell that it mattered–that in the age of George Floyd, it mattered quite a lot.
It was a multicultural group, but none of these students were African-American. About five students came up to me after the class discussion, and thanked me for showing the movie. In twenty years of teaching, I can’t remember that ever happening–not even one other time.
All but one or two were deeply moved, and some told me, even days afterward, that they also considered themselves to be a little bit changed.
I was changed too. Because I came into this screening in complete sympathy with Jenn Jackson’s viewpoint, and I still am. But I left it remembering that my bright young students are, like the rest of us, surrounded by a hall of mirrors nowadays–blaring screens and received wisdoms that try to tell them at all times what’s important and what to think.
Things we of the ROOTS generation take for granted that everyone knows about have been drowned out for decades by Marvel-ized, Disney-fied pop culture ephemera, and there is an entire anger-tainment industrial complex working round the clock on national TV and in local school boards to suppress and maybe even criminalize unpleasant truths (like Emmett Till) about the American experience, precisely because they are so unpleasant, and so American, and because they are so utterly true.
So who benefits from a movie like TILL? My students did, and that leads me to believe that thousands and maybe millions like them can too. Because it’s a movie that skillfully incites our empathy, and in doing so illuminates a blood red shadow the young are not just in danger of forgetting, but also in danger of having never known about.
At the same time I think of Jenn Jackson, and I honor and accept their view. It’s called complexity, and it’s why something as commonplace as a movie can house numerous, contradictory and imperfect kinds of truths.
ROOTS was an imperfect vessel way back in 1977, but along with Ellison’s INVISIBLE MAN and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, it steered me away from the unthinking blue collar racism I saw all around me into a wider and more righteous world.
I’m grateful for it.
I’m grateful for TILL.
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