FILM IN REVIEW
2016; Wiley; Volume: 104; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2016.0081
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
Resumo1 7 7 R F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R As during the Civil Rights years, America has been given the great and terrible opportunity to either a≈rm that its promises of liberty and justice and equality include black Americans or to decide that the worst version of America is its truest self. Over the past few years, as the bodies of unarmed black citizens killed by police have piled up, as courts and juries have failed to hold the killers accountable, and as the national nervous breakdown over the election of a black president continues, the nightmare America has seemed to be winning. The historian Isabel Wilkerson has referred to this time as the new ‘‘nadir.’’ Which may be why black artists are operating in something like the spirit of A. J. Liebling’s 1944 proclamation: ‘‘The only great nation with a completely uncensored press today is France.’’ In music like D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, the neo-soul outfit the Internet’s Ego Death, and Rihanna’s single ‘‘American Oxygen’’ and her album Anti; in films like Dope, Straight Outta Compton, Chi-Raq, and Creed; in novels like Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and the late Fran Ross’s recently reissued 1974 Oreo (imagine James Joyce as a black Jewish standup comic); in memoirs like the poet Tracy K. Smith’s Ordinary 1 7 8 T A Y L O R Y Light; in volumes of history like Patricia Bell-Scott’s The Firebrand and the First Lady and – though the work of a white journalist – Ethan Michaeli’s The Defender (a history of the African American newspaper The Chicago Defender), there is a clarity and confidence and fearlessness that can make even the good work being done by other artists seem beside the point. Whether overt or sly, brash or insinuating, these albums and books and films carry the crackle of people shrugging o√ the conditions imposed on them, whether by society or by the industry they work in or by their own fear or caution. These artists treat each piece of music or film or book as a chance that will not come again. I want to be very careful not to reduce this work to protest art, which, as James Baldwin once remarked, too often merely restates and strengthens the boundaries it means to abolish. Only occasionally do these artists directly address the current racial violence. D’Angelo in his song ‘‘The Charade’’ sings, ‘‘All we wanted was a chance to talk / ’stead we only got outlined in chalk.’’ But the sound is su√used with regret more than anything else. The most bracing moment in any American movie of 2015 is set in the past: the scene in Straight Outta Compton in which the hip-hop group NWA defies a police edict and performs its signature number ‘‘Fuck Tha Police’’ before an electrified concert audience takes place nearly thirty years ago, but the police harassment detailed in that song has never stopped being true, nor has the emotional need for the fantasy the song presents – standing up to police violence and turning the tables to make the perpetrators feel the fear they have long instilled in their black victims. Many of the strategies these artists employ are slyer. Even Paul Beatty’s audacious novel The Sellout, which imagines a return to slavery and segregation as the path by which black people might once again be treated decently, seems to work by stealth. Beatty can make the outlandish sound so goddamn reasonable that the outrageousness slaps you upside the head on the rebound. These artists know that for any black person who speaks out publicly about the violence done to all blacks, the word that is always lying in wait is anger. President Obama, possibly the most conciliatory president of any in recent memory (often to his detriment ), suddenly became an Angry Black Man when he dared address the murder of Trayvon Martin or the arrest of the Harvard F I L M...
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