Lee Daniels' The Butler

Perhaps to balance out his Oscar-nominated film Precious, which had an almost all-female cast and focused on a young woman’s psychic journey out of abuse, Lee Daniels’ historical drama The Butler focuses most intently on its male characters. Oprah Winfrey delivers a terrific performance as the wife of ‘the butler’ played by Forest Whitaker, and she has a great many scenes showing how her character changes over the years, but she doesn’t get to make the overarching decisions about the family that her husband does. The hero of The Butler is Cecil Gaines, who journeys from a sharecropping childhood in the South to a decades-long post as White House butler, and the movie presents an overview of African-American history during the period as seen by both Cecil and his son Louis (David Oyelowo). The engine of the plot is how their politics and survival skills differ; this dialectic encapsulates a debate that existed in African-American culture as a whole and that persisted throughout the era. 

One of the central questions addressed by the movie is: how angry should a black man be?  The debate even covers Sidney Poitier’s persona: the older Mr. and Mrs. Gaines adore him and are thrilled to see a black man succeeding in Hollywood; the younger Louis and his Afro-sporting girlfriend believe that Poitier is merely the kind of non-threatening black man that whites want to see.

For much of the film, Cecil thinks the role of a black man should be to provide for his family and to be a model upstanding citizen. He gets nervous when his family discusses the brutal Emmett Till lynching even in the privacy of their home; he believes no good can come of rocking the boat, and is horrified when he sees Louis being influenced by the campaign of Emmett Till’s mother. Cecil’s position is completely understandable psychologically, since the movie begins with him as a young boy working in the fields experiencing severe trauma: he sees his mother being taken off lasciviously by their white employer and he urges his father to do something; the father makes the merest objection to the white man and is instantly murdered by him. Moreover, Cecil’s mother subsequently loses her sanity. This is absolutely overwhelming trauma for a child. 

Thus, the opening prelude establishes the father and son chain, and the issue of black manhood, which will become a central concern of the film. Cecil learned early that a black man has to keep his head down and pretend to see nothing in order to survive. He perfects this skill as a waiter in a fancy hotel, and it is this ingratiating quality – the pretense that he is, essentially, just like the stereotype of the loyal black house slave contented to serve – which gets him noticed by a recruiter for the White House job.

By contrast, next-generation Louis chooses to go to school in the South – the last place on earth his father wants him to go -- deliberately to get involved with the ‘Love campaign’ and lunch counter sit-ins. The narrative of the film cuts back and forth between Louis’ growing involvement with early civil rights actions and Cecil’s experience of the movement from within the Oval Office, where he overhears presidents talking about how to handle it. The scenes of targeted civil disobedience in the South repeatedly feature the stoicism of Louis and his well-trained peers in the face of humiliating and grueling violence by whites, and Louis is even one of the people on the Freedom Rider bus which gets fire-bombed. Eventually, after all the beatings and firehosings, Louis and his girlfriend become disenchanted by Martin Luther King’s vision of non-violence, and they join the Black Panthers.

The inspiration for the movie is a 2008 Washington Post article by Will Haygood, “A Butler Well Served by This Election” (expanded since into a book). The article is a human interest story about Eugene Allen, a then 88-year old black man who worked as a White House butler for 34 years, through eight presidencies, and lived to see Barack Obama’s election. Haygood wrote of a diligent servant who “never missed a day of work, and often worked 6 days a week”, and this is reflected in the movie in Cecil’s pride in his work and his meticulous attention to detail. Director Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong praise this diligence – and so does a civil rights group leader in one scene, who explains to the young volunteers, including Louis, that black domestics have aided the struggle in their own way, countering stereotypes with daily evidence of hard work and trustworthiness. 

At the same time, however, Daniels and Strong suggest that there is a cost to this kind of selflessness: Cecil is always at work, and his wife Gloria gets lonely at home. She takes refuge in alcohol and in a neighbor (Terrence Howard). Gloria also seethes with resentment at the great interest Cecil takes in the goings on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

The movie is a giant elaboration on the Washington Post article, but it takes its central structure from one line in the original piece: “He was there while America's racial history was being remade: Brown v. Board of Education, the Little Rock school crisis, the 1963 March on Washington, the cities burning, the civil rights bills, the assassinations.” The Butler begins with Eisenhower’s reluctant enforcement of school desegregation, and then touches on key presidents and their involvement with civil rights gains and losses. JFK has an epiphany and makes a speech pledging to fight for civil rights, but is then assassinated. Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights achievements are contradicted by the private man, who is foul-mouthed and disrespectful. 

The Vietnam War takes one of Cecil’s two sons and devastates Gloria. Though Cecil at first seems to support the war, which is in keeping with his overall philosophy of proving himself as a patriotic and model citizen, he eventually confides in voice-over that he doesn’t know what they were fighting for.

As Vice-President, Richard Nixon is shown courting the votes of the black White House domestic staff; as President, Nixon swears in front of Cecil that he will crush the Black Panthers and the entire Black Power movement. Once again, Cecil is caught in the middle, because at that point his own son is involved in the Black Panthers. As he did when his son was involved in the civil rights movement, he disapproves of Louis’ actions and opinions. 

Overall, the filmmakers show a debate between African-American accommodationism and militancy. This reflects a debate that has long existed within the African-American community -- even before there was a debate between the non-violence of the Martin Luther King Jr.-led civil rights movement and the Black Nationalism of Malcolm X, there was a debate between the approaches of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Cecil’s approach is to work diligently in a low-prestige career that lies in a traditional field for blacks, build up economic stability, and reassure whites that he bears them no ill will – in other words, Cecil is in the Booker T. Washington camp. Much like Washington, Cecil came from the South and suffered from the calamity of a bigoted system. On the other hand, his son Louis grew up in a comfortable and secure environment and didn’t experience that kind of prejudice – like W.E.B. Du Bois. Also like Du Bois, Louis believes African-Americans should not settle for second-class status and is embarrassed by his father’s servile job at the White House. Louis aims for higher education and a leadership role for himself – in addition to his extra-curricular activism, Louis also attends college and ends up running for elected office.

Like the debate in African-American thought over time, the needle is shown to shift during the film. For a while, Cecil responds to Louis’ civil rights activities, his protests and repeated arrests, as if they are extremely radical and are demanding too much. Those demands eventually become law, however --  Cecil sees first-hand that his employers, the leaders of the free world, have to bow to the pressure. The needle continues to shift when the Black Power movement comes along. Cecil reacts even more angrily to Louis’ involvement there, but he no longer feels that the non-violent civil disobedience was inappropriate. Louis quickly grows disillusioned with the Black Panthers; after a scene in which a cell openly discusses the desirability of violence, he walks away, and he starts to work within the electoral system instead. 

If the film short-changes any part of history it seems to be the Black Panther Party. In an on-screen coda at the close of the film, Daniels and Strong pay tribute to the men and women who fought in the civil rights movement, and this supports the way the film leans in favor of civil rights and Martin Luther King, Jr. and away from Black Power and Malcolm X. Louis’ strenuous objections to discussions of violence in small-group discussions among the Panthers makes it seem as if the Panthers were planning serious armed resistance as a main focus, while he dismisses the party’s professed aim to help the community with free school lunches and so on, as if they don’t mean it or have forgotten it. Though he runs for office himself, The Butler makes it seem as if such a move is in direct opposition to Panther philosophy – when in fact it wasn’t that long before Panther co-founder Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland (1973), a stronghold of the movement. Far from being marginalized, Seale won 40% of the vote, paving the way for Lionel Wilson to become Oakland’s first black mayor a mere four years later. 

But Louis’ separation from Black Power ideology is not as great a change as that Cecil undergoes by the end of the movie. In the early years, when asked directly by presidents about his opinions on civil rights, Cecil tries to avoid answering. He is alarmed when his employers find out that his son has been involved in Freedom Rides. For much of the film, Cecil struggles to appear impassive at work, and seems to turn his anger instead on his son, barring him from the house and cutting off all contact with him when Louis becomes so radical they have no common ground anymore. But eventually, Cecil admits that he wears a mask when he acts the part of obsequious butler. First, he reveals it in voice-over when he tells us, during a banquet hosted by the Reagans, that he and other blacks wear two faces, one among whites in order to get by, and one for their real feelings, revealed only in private. This piece of narration imitates the notion of ‘double consciousness’ which W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about. When he offers his resignation to Reagan, he reveals to the president how he has suppressed his true feelings, and allowed his fears to govern him, preventing him from joining in the struggle. He promptly goes out and joins an anti-Reagan street protest being spearheaded by his son.

At the end of the film, an elderly Cecil and Gloria are helping Obama get elected by throwing house parties. After Obama’s victory, Cecil is invited to the White House to meet him one-on-one (dramatic license – a meeting really did take place with the real butler who inspired the story, but it was a group meeting). As a staff member directs him to the door, Cecil interrupts him: “I know the way.” This final line seems purposefully designed to include Cecil in the march of history we have just seen. By going out on this note, Lee Daniels’ The Butler honors Cecil’s own sacrifices, and shows that ultimately his faith was warranted that a journey from oppression to the presidency could occur.

12 Years a Slave and the Oscars

This article was originally published on OpEdNews on January 12, 2014.

 I normally hate to make Oscar predictions. It usually depresses me. By the time the predictions start proliferating, it’s a cold matter of analysis of the awards already given out by the guilds, BAFTA, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and (to a certain extent) the critics’ associations, like predicting presidential nominees by counting poll numbers and delegates before the conventions. You wouldn’t even need to have seen the movies first, because it tends to be a simple numbers game. I don’t much like thinking along those lines; I’d rather keep my mind on what should win.
 

This year is different. I actually think that, rather miraculously, 12 Years a Slave is going to win the Oscar for Best Picture. This may be the one time in Oscar history when the film which so unquestionably deserves to win actually does win.

Moreover, the selection of 12 Years a Slave brings a great many other precedents with it. It is the most uncompromising of the movies likely to be on the list of Best Picture nominees. It is not comfort food. It is not the kind of film which requires nothing of the audience, or reassures them about their own complacencies. Although the performances are amazing, they can’t be separated from the crystal-clear relevance of the film — unlike for instance, the striking, masterful, 8-category nominee There Will Be Blood (2007), when everyone talked about Daniel Day-Lewis’ fearless performance but overlooked the damning psychological portrait of an American oil baron. The directing, acting, screenplay, cinematography, editing, and music of 12 Years a Slave are all astonishing, but none of them let the viewer forget that this is a true story — an adaptation of a first-person slave narrative published in 1853 — and that it is a history churning with urgency about politics, race, and justice in America.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that director Steve McQueen would be the first black director to helm a film that receives the Oscar for Best Picture.

I won’t go into whether he will automatically win the Oscar for Best Director too, since we know very well from last year that the two categories are not necessarily in lockstep, but he should. He would be the first black director to do that as well: John Singleton and Lee Daniels are the only two to ever even be nominated in that category. (It’s hard to believe, but Spike Lee has never been nominated for an Oscar for Best Director — only for Screenplay and Documentary — though he did get a well-deserved Golden Globe directing nom for Do the Right Thing.) No black director has won the Golden Globe for film directing before either. If McQueen wins the top Directors Guild prize leading up to the Oscars, he would also be the first black director to achieve that honor.

It’s certainly a year with an abundance of talented, thoughtful, and fiercely independent directors. (Alfonso Cuarón’s technical skill, graceful style, and boldness of vision in his gorgeous Gravity are especially impressive. Even more notable is the degree to which he turned a potentially “Hollywood-ized’ sci-fi actioner into a compelling meditation on space, our dependence on Mother Earth, and the insignificance and significance of a human life.) I feel rather sorry for Steve McQueen’s competitors, in fact, simply because they might have had better chances another year.

The director, who is about as far removed in attitude and appearance from the cocksure 1960′s movie star Steve McQueen, has actually only made 3 feature films. (Although he has directed an incredible number of shorts.) Yet this British filmmaker’s first feature clearly showed him to be an extraordinary artist, idiosyncratic and visionary. Hunger (2008), a biographical drama like no other, was jaw-dropping. He has simply continued to get better with each feature, single-mindedly carving out his own path with utterly unique projects on rock-serious subjects that few would touch. Hunger is about the 1980′s IRA prisoners’ hunger strike led by Bobby Sands: McQueen makes the concept completely visceral by boldly showing us what it looks like for a person to starve to death. His second film, Shame, mercilessly examines sex addiction, incest, and psychic pain with a minimum of dialogue and a shortage of easy answers.

McQueen’s latest, 12 Years a Slave, is a searing period drama adapted by John Ridley from Solomon Northrup’s memoir. It’s a story that, as McQueen himself has said, was crying out to be made into a film. Northrup was a free, educated, black father and husband; a prominent member of an upstate New York community; an engineer and respected violinist. Then he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south.

By focusing on a protagonist who has grown up free, the film is able to expose slavery anew: we can feel the horrors of it more vividly and acutely because the victim is so confident, so used to self-determination. He goes through enormous suffering, his faith and hope are destroyed, and he finds himself unable to philosophically reconcile the horrendous crime against him — yet in this way he’s a kind of witness for all slaves. Though Northrup’s kidnapping is part of an illicit commerce between the states (the process of abolition in the Northern states gave slave owners ample time to divest from their slave holdings, thereby leading many to just sell their slaves to the south), the 12 million Africans who were kidnapped and brought to the Americas before Northrup’s story even began were themselves ripped from their homes, loved ones, and sense of their own humanity in very much the same way.

Actor Chiwetel Ejiofor’s face, no matter how devastated, always reveals the free man inside. And McQueen makes clear the inner dignity of those born into slavery as well, in a variety of scenes with black supporting players — the fact that some are used to this mistreatment certainly doesn’t make it any easier on them than it is on him.

Black men on the boat traveling south try their best to overcome their terrible situation, but the odds are against them. The price of rebellion is death. Another angle is presented by Alfre Woodard, in a cameo as a privileged apple of a white man’s eye; though she plays house rather like a society matron, she bears no illusions about her status or the meaning of the slavery project as a whole — unlike the cartoonish Candyland toadies which Quentin Tarantino had so little sympathy for in Django Unchained.

It is Lupita Nyong’o, however, in a truthful and heartfelt performance as the charming, spirited, much-tormented slave Patsey, who deeply enriches the moral significance and complexity of the world Northrup encounters — and whose continued captivity when Northrup is finally freed helps ensure that we don’t regard it as an unalloyed happy ending. McQueen doesn’t let the audience off the hook.

The movie lays bare in chilling detail a great many of the mechanics of slavery, and even familiar tropes like the masters’ rapes, the wives’ jealousy, and the backbreaking toil are brought home in ways that seem fresh. McQueen’s special ability to invoke the audience’s empathy in Hunger and Shame are even stronger here, where Ejiofor’s raw emotion and spiritual pain lend a depth to his suffering that is almost Shakespearean.

Indeed, the acting is tremendous with the exception of Brad Pitt, and the visiting Canadian he plays too close to the vest (though Pitt should be commended for his vision in producing the film — getting it made in the first place.) Paul Giamatti is first-rate as the slave trader who slaps and shoves his “merchandise’ around and makes domination his business. Paul Dano is quite brave as an overseer who seethes with resentment over Northrup’s intelligence — Dano’s willingness to dig into the ugliness of such a mentality is profound . Sarah Paulson is intense as a brooding, tightly-coiled, wronged wife, full of perhaps the most virulent race-hatred in the movie. And Michael Fassbender (in his third collaboration with McQueen) is wonderful — as he always is — in a colorful, eccentric role as a depressed, alcoholic, hands-on master; his villainy is also Shakespearean, by turns red-hot and soft-spoken, powerful and needy. (In the interests of full disclosure, I must mention that his character’s last name is Epps. Since this is based on a memoir and that might be the real slave master’s name, I pray that there’s no relation.)

There’s such a subtle, wide-ranging understanding of racism in the film, it really is provocative in the way it challenges viewers on issues of personal accountability for social wrongs. The versatile Benedict Cumberbatch is Ford, Northrup’s first master after the kidnapping. Ford is an intelligent and feeling man who admires the special musical and engineering skills of his slave — but he still gives him a violin instead of freedom. Ford’s complicity in the injustice against Northrup is one of the finer points made by the film; Ford sees how much suffering the slave market creates, but he makes only the merest peep and then drops his complaint. (The agony caused by separating parents from their children is an extended topic of the film.) Ford is also impressed, and takes advantage of for the benefits to his business, Northrup’s exceptional levels of education. But when Northrup tries to tell him that he’s a free man, Ford exclaims “I cannot hear that!”



The question of “what did they know and when did they know it?” is a strong ethical refrain of the movie — since everyone that Northrup meets, like the cast of characters in a Dickens novel, ends up skewing either cruel or kind, trustworthy or treacherous. 12 Years a Slave answers that question, implicitly as: they all knew, everything, and they knew it early. They knew that slaves weren’t really happy, that slavery was earth-shatteringly unjust, that their workers were intelligent and soulful fellow humans rather than property (Fassbender keeps repeating the word “property” as if needing to convince himself). Numerous instances speak to this knowing: characters can quite plainly see Northrup was born free, yet they go ahead and deprive him of his human rights; Patsy’s master believes he has a special regard for her, but treats her brutally; a distraught enslaved mother is told she will soon get over the separation from her children, but when she doesn’t, her grief — and the powerful evidence it thrusts on the white folk that she is, actually, just like them — makes her expendable.

Some long-standing contradictions of slavery are enumerated in the film: if slaves were naturally subservient, why would their spirits need to be broken; if blacks were so intellectually inferior, why would literacy among slaves be such a threat; if all God’s children were equal, how could Christianity be applied so differently to whites and blacks; and so on. (Fassbender even formally preaches scripture to his slaves, explaining to them that he is the “Lord” referred to in the text.)
We are also frequently reminded that this whole enterprise was very much a business. This story reveals a little-known activity within the U.S. slave trade that seems particularly striking in its outrageousness: kidnapping free black northerners and selling them into slavery down south. The kidnappers are so perniciously, smoothly evil — they win Northrup’s confidence by complimenting him, deceiving him into believing that they respect his education and sophistication — that the shamelessness of the way they make their profit is even more horrifying. They know, more than anyone else in the entire film, what they are putting Northrup and others through.

Most of the film is very naturalistic, but an early visual uses computer-generated imagery to make an ironic social comment. After Northrup has been drugged and kidnapped, he is held in a cell and beaten. When finally left alone, he cries out desperately for help. McQueen carries us outside to the rooftops of the 19 ^th century Washington, D.C. skyline. At the very top of the skyline is the Capitol building. Though a potent symbol of democracy, Northrup receives no protection from it.

The movie poster shows Northrup running, but this is not a movie about a fugitive slave — he doesn’t get that chance. He’s always stuck on a plantation, and the movie reveals how fully white society conspired to keep slaves stuck there. Even the abolitionists or friendly whites in the film seem to be scared of that powerful system. (David Blight, a Yale expert on the history of slavery, describes that system as “a police state.”) The poster’s image actually comes from a revealing moment in the film when Northrup is sent on an errand alone, and it occurs to him that now he might escape. He’s wrong, however; he soon comes upon some white men hanging blacks from trees, and he quickly realizes that not only is he powerless to help his brethren, but without the note from his mistress, his own life would have been of no worth.

Yet a couple of scenes later, McQueen teases us again over our Hollywood-reared naïveté . He cuts to Northrup running through the woods once more. We’ve just seen how deadly it would be for him to run away, how impenetrable the barriers are. Yet we still hope that he’s broken free; we’ve been spoon-fed so many popcorn movies of heroes triumphing over gigantic obstacles. Though of course Northrup is resilient and courageous, and that’s how he survived, he’s only a human being. He happens to be running simply to reach the place he has been sent to faster; to summon Patsey back to their master.

That one moment encapsulates how eloquently McQueen reminds us of how much we have forgotten — how much we have averted our gaze from so as to avoid the pain of remembering that shameful legacy. 12 Years a Slave deserves to win the Oscar for Best Picture not just because of its artistic excellence or the ground-breaking precedents it will set, but also because it preserves for posterity a crucially significant part of world history. It’s a history we ignore at our own peril.

Awards Update: 
12 Years a Slave is now the winner of the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture — Drama. (It was also nominated at the Golden Globes for three of its performances and for Directing, Screenplay, and Original Score – tying with American Hustle for the most Golden Globe nominations this year at 7 apiece.)

12 Years a Slave has already won Best Film trophies from the American Film Institute and from numerous local critics associations around the country.

It also has 13 Critics Choice Awards nominations, 10 BAFTA nominations, 10 Satellite Awards nominations, 9 London Critics Circle nominations, and 7 Independent Spirit Award nominations.
Director Steve McQueen’s first two films won numerous international awards as well, including the Venice Film Festival’s FIPRESCI prize.  

The North Koreans Are Coming! The North Koreans Are Coming!: review of "Olympus Has Fallen"

by Jennifer Epps

Originally published on OpEdNews.com on August 21, 2013.

 

The action-thriller Olympus Has Fallen is now out on DVD, and just in time for the August exercises the U.S. and South Korea are conducting against North Korea. To clarify, Olympus Has Fallen is the besieged-White House flick that sold a lot of tickets this year. That it scored at the box office should be of grave concern to thinking people, for action pic director Antoine Fuqua has delivered the kind of movie whose main purpose seems to be to stir the country up to support war against the people it depicts as the enemy. It does for North Korea what 300 did for Iran. In other words, it's a propagandistic, bloodthirsty, button-pushing, racist, fascist, ultra-macho, oppressively violent, self-serving, and simplistic piece of patriotism porn.

Just like in regular porn, the dialogue in Olympus' patriotism porn is cliched, and the married screenwriting couple Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt apparently deemed no line too brazenly manipulative or Fox News-cheesy for inclusion. (This is their first produced feature film, though Rothenberger previously won the Nicholl Fellowship for a script about the Korean War.) The basic plot of Olympus Has Fallen is that the President of the United States is taken hostage by rogue North Koreans who have infiltrated 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Of course he declares courageously that he will not negotiate with terrorists. Of course we're told that the reason they hate us is for our freedoms. Of course both the President (Aaron Eckhart) and, after he becomes incapacitated, the acting president (Morgan Freeman), make speeches about how the American way of life will not be compromised, and about how Americans never rise to the occasion more than when we are tested. The patriotism porn reaches a fever pitch when the female Secretary of Defense (Melissa Leo), after being brutalized by thugs, is dragged off to be raped, tortured, and/or murdered. As she goes, she defiantly spits out a guttural, disdainful mantra: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States." (It's a moment of sexism in disguise: whatever achievement the promotion of someone of her gender to this lofty portfolio might bring is undermined by the tacit message that a female Defense Secretary is vulnerable.)

In Olympus Has Fallen's scenario, we're supposed to believe that North Koreans can take over the White House by attacks from the air with a handful of fighter planes which look like they're from WWII -- and that somehow NORAD, the FAA, the Pentagon, the Secret Service, the National Guard, the Coast Guard, the Washington police, and Washingtonians themselves will all either fail in resisting them or cower in hiding. The principal initial battlefield of the invasion is the front lawn of the White House, where a gun fight takes place between the Secret Service and young-punk Koreans. (The motley group of hostile Koreans look like tourists and students before breaking through the iron gates -- the unspoken lesson of this sequence being: don't trust Koreans. Even if they resemble everyday assimilated Korean-Americans, they might be a threat from within!) Once the terrorists have snuck into 1600 Pennsylvania, they bypass all of the Secret Service's precautions and gain access to the Commander-in-Chief's military and communication consoles -- they don't have to take over the whole country, just its hub.

Like any classic work of fascist propaganda, the movie requires us to believe that we, the pure and principled ones, are small, helpless, beleaguered, and abused, and oh so brave to resist, while the enemy is gargantuan, venal, ruthless, and inhumanly powerful -- and oh so barbaric when they take up arms. (This is also the exact scenario in 300.) There's a recurring double-standard throughout the film which reveals North Koreans committing horrifying atrocities as signs of their savagery, yet when the film's American hero does almost exactly the same things, it's supposed to be because of his high principles.

Also revealing is the inclusion of Forbes, a well-educated, urbane peacemaker with White House access. He's up to no good, of course, because he argues that the North Koreans might have a point. (Message: you're either unbudgingly intolerant, or you're with the terrorists!) Forbes throws terms around meaninglessly; his objections to President Asher, who he feels has sold out to "globalization" and "Wall Street," are so fleeting they're like brand names rather than concepts. He's critical of the President for catering to the rich, but we are shown little by which to gage this complaint. And much like his cousin in 300 -- a politician who tries to hold his fellow Spartans back from war with Persia -- Forbes turns out to be a traitor without a conscience. His veneer of reason masks a vicious heart. How lovely that the faithless turncoat isn't just in favor of foreign diplomacy, but also urges support for social justice at home! That's exactly the kind of guy we want on our side.

And there's President Asher, a basically good guy, a sensitive widower who has no more color or backbone than his plain name. He couldn't save his wife during a car accident in the prologue, and later when terrorists start torturing people in front of him, he breaks, too tender-hearted to watch others suffer. If the fate of the country were left in his hands, the film would end in Armageddon.

By contrast, Olympus elevates the brave he-man who sees things in black and white. Of course: he doesn't engage in "endless palaver," as Ann Coulter would say, but actually gets things done! Mike Banning, a buff, gruff, once top-level Secret Service agent defends the White House single-handedly against the foreign attack, and director Fuqua casts the same beefcake swaggerer as 300 did to spearhead its cult of machismo: Gerard Butler. Though Butler was effective in a feature directed by Ralph Fiennes which had striking anti-militaristic tones (the 2011 film of Shakespeare's Coriolanus), I take it that this Scottish actor has no speaking engagements at "Win Without War" rallies in his future: he was one of the producers of Olympus and spoke admiringly about how relevant the movie was -- it hit theatres this past spring, just when North Korea was using particularly bellicose rhetoric. (The fact that the U.S. and its South Korean ally were also waging mock-military exercises against it at the time is not supposed to matter at all. The U.S. government and the compliant mainstream media always manage to put the onus on North Korea regardless of America's actions -- just witness the first line of The Washington Post's Aug. 19th story on the current drills: "North Korea on Tuesday criticized South Korea-U.S. military drills with milder-than-usual language that is being seen as a sign of its interest in keeping up diplomacy.")



Olympus is Agent Banning's movie, though he's not witty like James Bond or even John McClane in Die Hard. Butler has little in the way of the dry one-liners we expect from big action movies -- this film is a bleak, humorless affair overall. But he has a few. Perhaps most indelibly, when Banning overpowers and captures a couple of armed North Koreans inside the White House, he questions them at knife-point. One of them, terrified, starts to answer in Korean, so Banning stabs him in the leg and yells "In English!" This got a big laugh in the theater. If the CIA and the Pentagon were not already heavily investing in gaining access to Hollywood (they are) this moment alone would convince them to do so. It's a primer of bigotry-in-the-making; it's a paradigm of how brainwashing works under the guise of entertainment.

Of course a crucial part of the equation is that the Koreans in the film are inscrutable -- both the good ones and the bad ones. In the North Korean surprise attack on the seat of U.S. government, the fighter pilots wear helmets that are almost like masks, their mouths firmly set and their impassive faces robotic. The North Korean terrorist thugs who capture the President and some of his Cabinet mostly just brood, looking tough and mean; their main characteristic is their hatred of America. The only Korean character with any significant dialogue at all is the terrorist mastermind Kang (Rick Yune), the fiend who plots the whole assault and who wishes for nothing less than America's complete destruction. (And who seems unaware that nuclear radiation travels, that the scale he's arranging for would reach Korea.)

We don't even get a chance to absorb any characteristics of the South Korean Prime Minister. Screenwriters Benedikt and Rothenberger might argue that this is just efficient storytelling, but somehow there's plenty of time for backstories about Agent Banning's feelings of guilt for the death of the First Lady, for conversations between him and his lady love, and for scenes between the president and his son. Perhaps a substantive conversation with the South Korean Prime Minister might have led us to ponder too many things like: One group of Koreans are our friends but one group are our enemies. One is human and the other is inhuman... and yet they look so alike... Is it possible that even the inhuman ones are human?

Fortunately for Fuqua, the script provides him instead with scenes of Kang ranting incoherently about his grievances, all of which sound meritless. (A core belief of the movie is that the U.S. couldn't possibly have done anything, ever in its history, that could have harmed another country. It's the kind of America that is attacked for its goodness.) Kang's actions speak far louder than his words anyway. He talks about unifying the two Koreas, but the fact he shoots the South Korean Prime Minister in the head, live on TV, makes it clear he doesn't mean unify in a good way.

The film comes up with its own speculative scenario about how North Koreans could nab POTUS and ultimately try to get access to our nuclear arsenal, and it's cleverer and more realistic than the Red Dawn remake last year in which North Korean commandos just suddenly parachute into a remote field outside a school in Middle America, with little explanation of how the U.S. could have been taken over by such a tiny, starving country. (Red Dawn was actually filmed, in 2010, with China as the enemy -- till they remembered they'd be losing their Chinese market, and switched the villain in post-production.) But with a little more forethought, Olympus' writers Rothenberger and Benedikt realized they didn't have to suggest that the North Korean government itself would launch the invasion. They came up with a way round it by having an outlaw, a long-time terrorist on the Peninsula, spearhead the whole operation.

In this way, Fuqua and his scribes can make use of a more inventive and supple villain than a national army, and I suppose they can even pretend they're not beating the drums of war. But the subconscious effect is the planting of the idea that North Korea is even more solidly a part of the Axis of Evil than Bush Jr. thought they were: look! they have their own evil terrorists too! And it doesn't even matter how many nukes they have: they can use ours!

Kang blames America for the famines back home and the destitution of his people, but doesn't talk about immediate and rectifiable concerns like the regular South Korean/U.S. drills against North Korea -- which look very much like real invasions, send fleets into the adjoining waters, involve tens of thousands troops , and fly Stealth B-2 and B-52 bombers which enact simulated nuclear bombing attacks on the edge of North Korean territory. By not mentioning this kind of provocation, Olympus, like the mainstream news media, can make everything the other guy's fault, like the U.S. would be minding its own business if Pyongyang just wasn't so aggressive.

Moreover, Kang's ambition to unify the two Koreas is part of his dream of "one-world government." However much the terminology might please Libertarians, it obviously vilifies the actual unification sentiments on the peninsula, a region which after all used to be one country before it was divided between the Soviets and Americans in 1945. "No one really asked any Koreans, do you want to be divided and stay like that for over 60 years?" The Guardian of Britain quotes a Seoul professor in an article this May. And the article's author explains: "The peaceful pursuit of unification is inscribed in South Korea's constitution. Questioning it would be political suicide for public figures, say analysts, because ethnic nationalism is a key element of political belief across the spectrum." There's nothing underground about dreams of re-unifying the two Koreas, the way Olympus implies. Both sides at least pay lip service to it: Pyongyang has an official Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea and Seoul has a Unification Ministry. The cost of reunifying would be most expensive for South Korea, and young South Koreans tell pollsters they're not that keen on the idea, but the goal of reunification is far from a one-sided Communist plot to dominate the region as the movie suggests.

That MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell would participate in this movie (he has a brief cameo on a TV as a news anchor announcing the invasion) is especially galling because he was in Washington -- as Chief of Staff of two key Senate committees -- during the Clinton Administration, and ought to know full well that there was a time when Washington diplomacy was actually working with Pyongyang. In 1994 North Korea had only one nuke, and Clinton got them to sign an Agreed Framework, which was effective for 8 years. That's right, the Clinton Administration actually got North Korea to cease producing plutonium. They began again because Bush Jr. cancelled the treaty in 2002. Thanks to Bush's approach, North Korea's arsenal grew to 8 -- 10 nukes.

In Olympus Has Fallen, serious, professional, highly-trained men and women like Angela Bassett's Secret Service Director and Robert Forster's General Clegg discuss the crisis with Freeman's acting president and paint North Korea as incomprehensible, with off-hand remarks like "assuming that the Koreans are rational, which isn't at all certain..." They express bafflement about what North Korea could possibly want. But given the indelible illustration in Iraq of what the U.S. was willing to do to countries that didn't have nuclear defenses, it's not hard to fathom why Pyongyang pursued a nuclear arsenal, nor is it a mystery why they've responded negatively to negative stimuli, like the demonstrations of bad faith in the cancellation of treaties, or the massive displays of force in the threatening military drills. Noam Chomsky states in an article this summer: "North Korea may be the craziest country in the world.  It's certainly a good competitor for that title."  But he also adds that "it does make sense to try to figure out what's in the minds of people when they're acting in crazy ways. Why would they behave the way they do? " And he notes a recognizable pattern in postures from Pyongyang: "You can read it in straight, mainstream American scholarship.  What they say is: it's a pretty crazy regime, but it's also following a kind of tit-for-tat policy. You make a hostile gesture and we'll respond with some crazy gesture of our own. You make an accommodating gesture and we'll reciprocate in some way."

Tit-for-tat has no place in Fuqua's film, however, because it's a movie without context. Kang angrily condemns the U.S. for interfering in their "civil war," by which he obviously means the Korean War of 1950-1953. This implies that Kang still wishes (60 years later) that North Korea could just finish what it started. Such an assumption completely ignores the fact that 3.5 million North Koreans were killed in that asymmetrical war and that the vast majority of those deaths were civilians. As Chomsky has put it: the country was "totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing." It also ignores the fact that North Korea has asked repeatedly for a real peace treaty -- the armistice which brought a halt to the Korean War is a mere ceasefire. (It leaves the entire area in a holding pattern, even though the terms of the agreement stipulated that a proper treaty would be negotiated in 3 months time, and that all foreign forces would be withdrawn from the Peninsula. China did in fact remove theirs, but the U.S. maintains 40 bases and almost 30,000 troops in South Korea.)

One can't expect such facts to occur to the filmmakers of a movie which wallows in a bombastic orgy of self-pity with images of the Washington monument crumbling and a tattered American flag falling to the ground. You can't expect a movie with as stereotypically nationalistic a soundtrack as Fuqua has chosen for Olympus to care that, for instance, credible commentators like the former Ambassador to South Korea have deemed North Korea's message of friendship, dismissed by the Obama Administration, as a serious overture.

You can, however, interpret a movie which paints one of Washington's official enemies as brutal and crazed as war propaganda. You can conclude that a film which dehumanizes an entire people is an effort to make it acceptable to kill them.

Oscar Grant, Witness for Trayvon Martin: "Fruitvale Station" review

by Jennifer Epps

This piece was first published on OpEdNews.com on July 22, 2013.

Oscar Grant, police shooting victim in Oakland 

George Zimmerman's defense team essentially put Trayvon Martin on trial, so maybe the prosecution should have called Oscar Grant to testify. If it didn't make a difference that Trayvon was dead, the fact that Oscar was dead shouldn't have been an obstacle either -- he might have been especially qualified, since both Oscar and Trayvon were black men gunned down in their prime by those supposedly watching out for public safety.

Fortunately, in the new film Fruitvale Station, Oscar Grant is essentially a character witness for Trayvon, and for scores of other young black men who've died at the hands of "law enforcement'. Oscar, only 22, was shot on New Year's Eve, 2008, by a BART subway police officer in Northern California. The details of his demise are so extreme they seem like they'd have to be one-of-a-kind: Oscar, an unarmed black subway passenger who was not being violent when the officers decided to arrest him, was shot dead in the back while prone, face-down, on the Fruitvale station platform, in full view of a packed train of witnesses. The defense claimed by white BART cop Johannes Mehserle was that he mistook his gun for a taser. Consequently, he received a sentence of just 2 years -- and served only 11 months.

But behind the specifics of Oscar Grant's horrific tragedy lies the even greater horror and tragedy inherent in the fact that this kind of extra-judicial execution is commonplace. A recent study by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement found that 136 unarmed blacks were shot dead last year by police, security guards, and self-appointed vigilantes. This adds up to an extra-judicial killing of an African-American every 28 hours. The new film doesn't address these stats, but it certainly stems from that kind of awareness.

The fiction feature Fruitvale Station, winner of big prizes at the Sundance and Cannes Festivals, requires a generous supply of Kleenex. Though its simple presentation is elegant and spare, it makes you weep not just for Oscar and his family, or for Trayvon and his, but for the state of America in general. Without preaching or heavy-handedness, with the utmost of subtlety, first-time writer-director Ryan Coogler shows convincingly that something is very wrong out there.
Though the genre is character study, this drama is named after the infamous subway station. It isn't titled after Oscar, I suspect, because the socially-urgent point of this carefully researched docudrama is that Oscar didn't die because of anything he did, but because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And if you're a young, poor, black man in America, it can be the wrong place and wrong time almost anywhere, almost anytime.

Coogler does use some of the actual cell phone camera footage of the incident as an opening prelude, but his focus in the film is on supplying the visuals that have been missing from our consciousness: how Oscar spent his last day alive. He shows us what Oscar valued, what he regretted, and what he hoped for, making sure we get to know Oscar intimately so we can truly mourn for him. The script, which Coogler wrote after perusing the cell phone footage, interviewing the family, and researching Oscar's life and character, depicts Oscar as a loving young father and boyfriend, a considerate son who actually listens to his mom these days, and a likeable family man whose grandmother dotes on him.


Movie still from climax of Fruitvale Station distributed by the Weinstein Company


Oscar, charismatically played with what seems like effortless naturalness by Michael B. Jordan, is a complex person here. He is often joyfully childlike, especially when playing with his 4-year old daughter Tatiana (played by Ariana Neal, a great find) yet he also falls into deep, serious introspection over the course of the day. He does seem to genuinely love his girlfriend Sophina, a feisty and very watchable Melonie Diaz, and he genuinely wants them to have a future together. Yet he also has a penchant to flirt, and he has been caught doing much more. Moreover, he has trouble showing up on time for work, and has lost his job because of it. When the movie starts, he is preparing to sell drugs again to pay the rent.

Fruitvale Station doesn't hide Oscar's prison record, in fact it brings it to the fore by turning it into a long flashback and by showing that Oscar's mother Wanda (a towering Octavia Spencer) was at one point so upset by his repeat convictions -- apparently for dealing -- that she hardened her heart against him for a difficult period of time. Now, he is torn between the life he wants to lead and the life he has led, conflicted and confused but also very close to his siblings, elders, and nuclear family. Part of the message, of course, is that people don't fall into either/or polarities, that just because a black man isn't a genteel scion of accomplishment like Sidney Poitier in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, it doesn't mean that he's a vicious incorrigible criminal who threatens the social fabric.

The kind of characterization of Oscar which Coogler and Jordan assemble, with internal contradictions, has the most sterling of pedigrees: Shakespeare was fond of it too. It is also poignant. In the dramatic world of the film, Coogler proposes that this day was different long before the BART train back from San Francisco pulled into the station; Oscar seems to have made a tacit New Year's resolution to straighten up and fly right. And this interpretation is apparently justified -- a Slate article cites  statements by Oscar's loved ones which support the idea that Oscar planned to reform. In filmic terms, it is also supreme irony. The structure of the film is such that Oscar deals with various personal problems over the course of the first two-thirds of the film but reconciles with his girlfriend, celebrates his mom's birthday, and approaches 2009 -- soberly -- with hope for a better life. If you had never seen the headlines, you might be convinced there's about to be a happy ending.

What Coogler has crafted is a strong counter-narrative to the one pushed by so many whites from Middle America, who seize on whatever flaws they can find in the biographies of black men like Oscar and Trayvon. Fruitvale Station is a much-needed rebuttal to the myth of the "super-predator', a racist stereotype which, longtime social justice activist Tom Hayden makes plain in a recent article in The Nation, stems from a national propaganda campaign that dates from the 1980s -- a tainting of certain Americans (in other words, people of color) as so dangerous and bad at their core that society is in an "us or them' situation with them.

In order to continue to hold on to the racism that is so near and dear to them, Zimmerman supporters and, I suspect, Mehserle fans, yearned deeply to find a reason to justify murder. How upset they were at the slightest doubt, at the merest whisper that Trayvon might not be a murderous thug who had it coming. Coogler quietly dispenses with this element of Oscar's story by staking out a clear position on what caused the fight that led to the police being called in: a white man who frequently tormented Oscar back in prison suddenly attacks him on the subway car. This is a significant part of the story Fruitvale Station tells: the only thing that Oscar does that leads to any trouble with the police on Dec. 31, 2008 is that he fights another subway passenger in self-defense.

Eye-witness reports from the crowded and jostled passengers who saw the fight before the train pulled into Fruitvale are contradictory. But according to several witnesses, there was indeed a fight between Oscar and a white man who'd been in prison with him. Coogler changes several names of supporting characters who do wrong in the film, but Slate identifies the alleged pugilist as David Horowitch. (For the record, he denies being in the fight.) The film shows him playing it cool on the train when the police start dragging off the young black men -- thus illustrating how it never even occurred to the cops to look for a white guy.


Trayvon Martin

Self-defense is the million-dollar concept right now, because Zimmerman's attorneys and cheering section have twisted things to try to make us believe Trayvon had no right of self-defense. Yet the negation of that right tends to be a red flag which reveals the underlying imbalance of power. Ask Iraqis whether they had a right of self-defense when the U.S. attacked them; ask Gazans where theirs was under Israel's bombardment. Coogler's film lets us see that Oscar at least ought to have had the right of self-defense.


That crucial prison flashback mid-way through the film is extremely helpful in this area, especially when you think about it afterward. It helps us to realize what Oscar must have gone through while in prison -- he appears beaten up, and refuses to answer his mother's questions about it. When the Horowitch character threatens him in jail (which happens in plain view with guards watching) Oscar responds as if his very survival is at stake. This preps us to understand Oscar's instantaneous transformation when the same guy reappears much later and lunges at him -- how Oscar switches in one breath from holiday relaxation to fierce defense mode.

And earlier in the film, Coogler had included another exchange that also is part of the portrait of Oscar vis-a-vis aggression. So different from media sound bites regarding the Zimmerman trial, this scene illustrates what the concept of de-escalation and "retreat' might really mean. When his former boss tells him he won't give him his job back, Oscar is humiliated and desperate and reacts with an angry, ominous threat. The store manager happens to be Latino, and that moment could easily have become a racially-charged clash or power struggle. But the manager actually likes Oscar, continues to employ his brother, and, probably most important of all, understands where Oscar is coming from. He knows he's just upset. So he doesn't bite. The whole situation is defused, and Oscar calms down.


By contrast, Coogler clearly shows the BART police brutalizing Oscar and his friends from the moment they arrive. The cops seem to be trying to escalate the situation -- perhaps in part to create a cause for arrest. Indeed, Slate attests, witness statements from the subway passengers who watched the BART police's detention of Oscar and his friends affirm that police were hostile and physically abusive to the young black men. There are also witnesses who've testified that Oscar was co-operating with police as they started to arrest him.

Mehserle's excuse as to how he came to shoot Oscar is not even mentioned in Fruitvale Station until the postscript right before the credits -- Coogler doesn't dignify Mehserle's explanation with his attention, and leaves the exact thought process in Mehserle's head up to us to figure out. The depiction of the cacophony on the station platform is from the victim's point-of-view, which pushes the entire audience to imagine themselves on the receiving end of racial profiling and police brutality in a system where Driving While Black can be suspicious behavior. Coogler takes it one level further, by showing the trauma of Riding the Subway While Black. Sadly, when he began this project he may not have known there would soon be a national case where a 17-year old found guilty of Walking While Black would be retroactively given the death penalty. The film, by examining one specific case and one specific life so vividly, sets a paradigm with which to view many such cases and lives -- following in the footsteps of the Italian neo-realists, who knew that observing the small was a door to the enormous. Indeed, Coogler considers Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief one of his influences.



Movie still of Oscar Grant and daughter in by Weinstein Company

The astute Fruitvale Station is deceptively staid, employing the episodic, random-observations approach that Charles Burnett, renowned filmmaking pioneer from Watts and a 1960's UCLA film school grad, employed to profound effect in his cinema verite-style, classic dramatic feature Killer of Sheep. At the same time, Coogler's film holds a passionately-beating heart beneath its cool exterior. This incredible combination would be an impressive achievement from a seasoned pro, but Coogler just earned his filmmaking MFA from USC in 2011. And unlike so many, many film school grads, he's actually able to resist showing off camera pyrotechnics and fancy edits in his first feature. Instead, he very wisely just lets the actorsact. He recognizes that he has a terrific cast, isn't afraid of them like some directors are, and together they work magic.
Fruitvale Station deserves to have the kind of impact Gus van Sant's Milk did five years ago. That film about the openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk and his 1978 assassination was honored with eight Academy Award nominations and trophies for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay. Not only were these plaudits well-deserved artistically, but they were cultural signs of progress for gay rights, and helped, simultaneously, to further advance the cause.

It's worth remembering that Milk's assassin Dan White used a "Twinkie defense" successfully in court -- claiming he ate too many Twinkies, and that the sugar threw off his judgment. In the Oscar Grant case, it was the "Taser defense". The bizarreness of such explanations did not prove to be a deficit, and that seems almost certainly to be because these killers had fan clubs, in the general public and in the courtroom, who were searching for any semblance of an excuse to let them get away with it. Milk's murder was emblematic of a sickness within the culture -- rabid homophobia -- which was part of what made the story so important to revisit. Likewise, Oscar Grant's death and the multitude of tragic stories like his happening in Sanford, Florida and all over America are potent symbols of rampant racism, and it's of great import to the current spirit of activism opposing it that Coogler has made such a fine film affirming the rights of Oscar and his peers.

Fruitvale Station has the high quality, originality, topicality, fresh faces, and support of the awards-savvy Weinstein Brothers to make it a strong contender for a bunch of Academy Awards for its acting, writing, and directing (the media will love the cute headlines about Oscars for Oscar). It also stands a good chance of being embraced as an inspiration and an organizing tool by a burgeoning movement -- there have been street demonstrations every day since the Zimmerman verdict came out, with protesters often marching miles and miles, and some leaders are calling for a "new civil rights movement" in the face of the demonization of Trayvon, the rash of Stand Your Ground laws, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the craze of voter I.D. requirements, New York's unconstitutional "stop-and-frisk" policy, and California prisons' human rights violations. Certainly the film would be an excellent consciousness-raiser for people of all races, and a great conversation-starter.

One of the most appealing aspects of the film is a thread running through it which suggests that things really don't have to be this way. Oscar charms a young white woman he spots at a meat counter by calling up his grandma to give her a recipe; one of Oscar's longtime drug customers is a friendly Asian tough guy (which may be a conscious counterweight to the historical animosity between blacks and Koreans evident in the 1992 L.A. uprising); an immigrant shopkeeper kindly unlocks his store after hours to the youths' girlfriends; and Oscar and a white father-to-be meet for the first time on the street in San Francisco and end up bonding briefly over women, love, and how having your own family can change your life. Even more powerfully, on the train, the New Year's Eve revelers jammed in together start dancing to the music someone has brought. They are strangers, they are different races and even different sexual orientations, but they celebrate the coming of another year in a fleeting moment where the most obvious thing about them is their common humanity.

By shining a warm but very clear light on a life snatched away too soon, on a community so often overlooked or misrepresented, Coogler has demonstrated how rare it is for movies to actually be about real people and about the real, important things going on in America. Fruitvale Station shames Hollywood by setting a good example.

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FURTHER READING:

Some other recent cases of police killing unarmed people of color:

Alesia Thomas

-- the LAPD physically abused this 35-year old black woman last year while arresting her for sending her children to a police station; she died in their custody and they have refused to release video of the incident.

Kenneth Chamberlain
--this 68-year old African-American heart patient was shot dead in 2011 inside his own home in White Plains, N.Y. when the police responded to an automatic medical alarm.

Manuel Diaz
--this 25-year-old Latino was shot from behind while fleeing police in Anaheim, CA. One shot hit him in the buttocks and he fell; while down he was shot in the head.

The Limitations of Rebellion in "Django Unchained"

Jamie Foxx as Django

This article was originally published on DailyKos.com on Saturday, February 23, 2013:

The spirited antebellum western Django Unchained is nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, and it could win for Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay and for Christoph Waltz’s supporting performance as bounty-hunter Dr. King Schultz. (It has won in these categories at the Golden Globes and at the BAFTAs.) Indeed, the script is clever and compelling, with moments that induce giddy delight – like the fact that a notorious, lethal plantation is ironically named “Candieland”, and like the way Django makes known that “the ‘d’ is silent” in his name. These are interwoven with scenes of gripping, slowly-mounting tension. Also, it is true that Waltz is endlessly enjoyable as a wryly articulate, understated assassin. Though not nominated, Jamie Foxx also adds a great deal to the film’s strengths, being undeniably charismatic as the proud, sharp-shooting titular slave who turns the tables on his oppressors, while Leonardo DiCaprio steps outside his normal range of positive role models and portrays cruel, wrathful plantation owner Calvin Candie with surprising gusto. And in a classic, inspired bit of Tarantino casting, Don Johnson puts in a cameo as a genteel, paternalistic slave-owner (whose minions carry out the brutal side of slave-owning while he dresses in white).

There is much that the movie does very well. Most importantly, the fact that Django single-handedly takes on the apparatus of slavery feels thrillingly subversive. Django’s resourcefulness, strength, and sense of dignity are immensely appealing. Though there has been much controversy over Tarantino’s prolific use of the n-word (110 times during the movie, it is reported) the iconography of a heroic, brooding Django who simmers with moral outrage until the time is right to boil over is ultimately much stronger than the word is. We are all encouraged to identify with the iconic, brave Django, to want to be like him, to leave the theater thinking “I am Django” -- to paraphrase the famous “I am Spartacus” line in Dalton Trumbo’s 1960 slave revolt epic.

But as political philosophy, Django Unchained is the opposite of Spartacus. Tarantino is fully committed to the Western movie trope of the stoic lone gunfighter. His hero, like the Western archetype, faces down a horde of villains, dispenses justice, and then, ever self-sufficient, rides off into the picturesque sunset. In this case, he takes his beloved (Kerry Washington), but it is still likely that they are going to live on the edge of society. For one thing, Django’s going to have to go into hiding after all he has done.

Though Tarantino shows plenty of horrors in the system of slavery, making it clear that power over other human beings was maintained by savage violence, he celebrates the rugged individualist principles of the Western genre above all; when Django and his lady ride off together, it doesn’t seem to matter to them that, in the larger world, that system is still in place and slaves all over the South are still suffering.

Tarantino really has no interest in the collective action that forms the backbone of the slave revolt in the sword-and-sandal epic Spartacus. None of the slaves in Django are inspired by the titular character to throw off their own chains. (An astonished chain-gang at the beginning ofDjango does decide to gain freedom by killing the slave-trader transporting them, but it is white Dr. Schultz who gives them that option.) Instead, pampered house slaves continue business as usual even after their master is gone; when they do eventually flee, it is because Django forces them to – and they look just as foolish running in their layers of petticoats as the landed gentry would. The slave women of Candieland are almost all depicted as courtesans – they dislike seeing male slaves murdered in front of them, but like gangsters’ molls, they accept it with an averted glance. Even the talented Washington is in the movie just to motivate Django with her beauty and fragility; her dialogue consists almost entirely of shrieking and crying over her abuses by whites. Though she is described as willful, we never get to see her will in action. She just waits passively and admiringly while Django wages his “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” alone.

Understandably, Django cares more about his wife than he does about other slaves. His romantic quest to rescue her provides an urgent throughline to the movie, and is overtly likened to the German legend of Siegfried and Brunhild. But this mission also brings out  a kind of selfishness in Django. His first use of his new freedom is to strike back against wicked plantation overseers who are whipping a young female slave, but Schultz warns him that his wrath isn’t strategic. If he’s going to save his Brunhild, he has to play it cool and make sure he doesn’t cause trouble, no matter what he sees done to his brethren in front of him. In essence: to get what he wants for himself and his wife, Django has to betray his race. (It is worth noting that Schultz the reserved diplomat isn’t constrained by the same caution. When he explodes in moral indignation, Django and Broomhilda are on the threshold of freedom, and he recklessly destroys their chances.)

Spike Lee took issue with Django Unchained sight unseen because he didn’t think Tarantino could present slavery with sufficient gravitas. In my opinion, the fact that Tarantino tackled such a serious subject actually ought to be applauded, since it shows some personal growth, but it’s true that all that Tarantino panache and effervescence really ends up just in the service of entertainment, of mere diversion. And this is not too much of a surprise considering who made the film.

It was during Pulp Fiction that I began to suspect that Tarantino was not going to be the kind of director he seemed to be in Reservoir Dogs. When hit men John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson were talking and a loose gesture with a pistol accidentally killed their back-seat passenger – and the audience guffawed – it occurred to me that Tarantino might not be interested in using his gifts, which are obviously prodigious, for a very serious purpose. And I realized that I couldn’t relate to the way he found movie violence so supremely amusing. Little did I know how high the body count would climb as his career went on.

The complexity and intensity of the bond between the Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth characters inReservoir Dogs had been deeply moving – at the time, it seemed like Tarantino was going to make movies about human beings. It’s true that Pulp Fiction also had some of those strong relationships between characters – its assets weren’t only its boldness, wit, sense of fun, and structural ingenuity. By Kill Bill, however, he seemed to lose interest in genuine characters and in the human condition. He seemed more intrigued by aerodynamics (of bullets, swords, etc.) than by psychodynamics.

And so he ends up with Django Unchained, a film about an enduring American shame – and a film that frequently lacks insight. The bounty-hunter subplot aligns the picture early on with the Western genre; conveniently hooks Dr. Schultz up with Django; and provides a slave, who would otherwise have no marksmanship opportunities, with the training he needs to become an avenger. It also lets Tarantino have scenes of violence in the pre-plantation half of the movie without alienating audience sympathy from Schultz. This erudite German calmly announces himself as “an officer of the court” and assures us and whoever on-screen will listen that the people he kills deserve to die because it has been so decreed. Schultz comes across as a good guy, an enlightened free-thinker – he abhors slavery, he is willing to share Django’s quest to liberate Broomhilda from bondage, and he knows that novelist Alexandre Dumas’ grandmother was an Afro-Caribbean slave. But he also seems to have absolute trust in law and order, far beyond his appreciation of the money he collects from bounties. The movie doesn’t contradict this faith, either; while being trained as a sniper, Django dispatches, from a great distance, a farmer peacefully sowing his fields -- because he is a ‘wanted man’. It looks not unlike a drone strike, but neither Django nor Schultz have any misgivings about whether the ‘intelligence’ on him is accurate.

This is odd, since Tarantino otherwise shows the society to be fundamentally corrupt and unjust. Not only did the society consider some human beings property, it was also rife with many other examples of oppression -- unmentioned in the film -- such as a centuries-long genocide against Native Americans; the disenfranchisement of women, slaves, and wage laborers; and a system that abused the workforce while it bucked up the railroad and mining companies. It is unlikely that those laws which Schultz prosecutes with such reasonableness and deadly aim were only used to target legitimate criminals like stagecoach robbers. Considering how much of the process was conducted behind closed doors – and how unequal the criminal justice system is even now, when it operates in relative sunlight – one can assume those ‘dead or alive’ warrants were issued, at least occasionally, in order to entrench the existing power structure. But credulity in the bounty-hunter’s legitimacy helps mark the film as a Western. The fact that the genre may have really been propaganda for the U.S.’ westward expansion, for the overpowering of those people who stood in the way (such as Native Americans and Mexicans) and the subjugation of the wilderness, doesn’t seem to bother Tarantino. He loves movies so much, he is tickled by them in such a pure, fan-like way, that it would actually be hard to imagine him coming from a more critical theoretical perspective.

But this issue is nothing compared to Candie’s right-hand man Stephen, a shuffling, obsequious ‘Uncle Tom’ played by Samuel L. Jackson, and a character criticized by many in the blogosphere as an offensive stereotype. I’m not sure that ‘stereotype’ is the right word, however, since Stephen is far from servile underneath his bent-over posture; he in fact turns out to be a power-hungry manipulator who relishes sitting in Candie’s armchair, calmly warming brandy in a glass for himself while he reveals to Candie what he has discovered about Django. He’s not one-dimensional, he’s actually deceptive; he’s a collaborator or colluder who loves to be on the winning side. Moreover, as the story proceeds, he becomes more and more eager to inflict pain on the powerless. His obsession seems to be to beat down anyone who dares raise their head.

Tarantino never asks why Stephen is like this. Is he so molded by his enmeshed relationship with his owner that he has developed a kind of Stockholm Syndrome emotional dependency? It’s hard to believe that, no matter how emotional he seems over Candie, since we’ve already seen him swiftly and slyly change tones. Is he so circumscribed in his own life that he has become an unthinking rule-enforcer? Again, there’s a sadistic gleam in his eye which belies this; he doesn’t seem panicked by Django’s liberated attitude, but merely full of hate. Is Stephen so proud and committed to doing his job well that he’ll vigilantly protect Candie from all blows, even threats which emanate from his own people? (A precedent for a character like that exists in Alec Guinness’ British colonel, a prisoner-of-war who loses perspective in The Bridge on the River Kwai.) But if he were delusional that way, you’d think that he’d whole-heartedly embrace the decisions of his Mr. and Mrs., not be disappointed when they interfere with his agenda of black-on-black violence.

Fundamentally, Tarantino doesn’t care what makes the head house slave tick. Stephen shows up because a villain is needed in Act 3 and he needs to be worse than the villains who came before; Django needs to go from the frying pain into the fire. Maybe there’s racism behind the portrait of Stephen (it’s worrying that the character’s name has some similarities to a famous black buffoon of early 1930’s films, the persona of ‘Stepin Fetchit’) or maybe Stephen is just  a plot contrivance. It’s hard to know, because Django isn’t really about slavery or racism, it’s about Tarantino’s one abiding subject: movies.

He has certainly made no secret of his adoration of the blaxploitation genre. Since he’s such an expert on it, however, one would think he might be more concerned about the arguments that were made at the time against the blaxploitation tidal wave. 50 movies in the genre came out between 1971, when the success of the legitimately revolutionary Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song inspired Hollywood to cash in with a slew of imitations, and the fad’s end in 1975 – and this glut of cheap and quickly made flicks aimed at black audiences led the NAACP, National Urban League, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference to join forces in protest. When Junius Griffin, the head of the Hollywood NAACP, coined the term ‘black exploitation’ in a 1973 article, he called it a “form of cultural genocide.” He lamented the black community’s children being “exposed to a steady diet of so-called black movies that glorify black males as pimps, dope pushers, gangsters and super males with vast physical powers but no cognitive skills.” Perhaps in part because these movies operated outside the mainstream, however, Tarantino the former video store clerk has long been fascinated with them, as if he has discovered a secret. He differs from some other directors – like Peter Bogdonavich and the French New Wave filmmakers who started out by writing for Cahiers du Cinéma – artists who embraced what they regarded as old cinematic treasures too, because he is really not a theorist. He doesn’t seem particularly adept at evaluating what the flicks he loves actually mean, or how they fit into a social context; he just gets excited about them. If he were not a director, perhaps he would be a film programmer. In fact, when Django Unchained screened at the repertory cinema he owns in L.A., the New Beverly, it was preceded by an assemblage of trailers for 1970s exploitation movies which he had hand-selected to show the audience some of his influences for the film.

If Tarantino actually was more of a theorist, perhaps he would pay more attention to the fact that for much of the film, Django has to squelch his impulses and allow other slaves to be horrifically murdered in front of him. Though these and similar moments do highlight the barbarism of slavery, at the end of Tarantino’s Grand Guignol opus, the code seems to be: successful revenge cancels out suffering experienced by victims. One can’t help wondering if the violent atrocities against slaves that are included in the film do really exist to condemn the brutality of the culture, or if they serve mainly as strong motivators for the climactic, massively bloody revenge sequence that may be Tarantino’s real aim.

As a paradigm of how to overcome oppression, Django happens to give the worst possible advice, and in an age where our real world is beset by a great many senseless shootings, some of it clearly influenced by on-screen mayhem, one wishes Tarantino had more awareness of what he’s doing. Django runs the danger of encouraging people like Chris Dorner – who, incidentally, saw the film -- to believe that a) murder is justified as a response to injustice; b) it is not self-destructive to try to fight on its own terms a historically violent and richly well-equipped power structure; and c) it is nobler to go out in an attention-getting blaze of glory than to actually do painstaking and largely invisible work on the grassroots level.

Django only speaks to whites; he is never seen forming relationships with other slaves (he barely even has one with Broomhilda, despite all the self-conscious romanticism). He may be a rebel, but he’s no revolutionary -- he doesn’t bond with others who are oppressed. Though a film about a slave rising up would seem on its face like a left-wing enterprise, Django could just as easily be seen to perpetuate the right-wing mantra that has spread so widely in America: that we are each on our own, that it’s only individual action that is a source of pride, that none of us should identify with any particular caste but should see ourselves as having gotten to where we are purely on our own merits.

Tarantino is in an unusual position because even if all he really wants to do is make movies celebrating B-movies, he is too creative a director and too captivating a writer to operate in counter-culture obscurity. He is instead very much a part of the mainstream – everyone knows his name, more so than they know the names of filmmakers of blandly formulaic fare – and what he puts out there is going to get analyzed. Whether he likes it or not, his films become part of the national conversation. Even if he is constantly signaling that it’s ‘just a movie’, he’s going to fall under fire, sometimes, precisely because he has made ‘just a movie.’