We rarely watch movies
together as a family. Just doesn’t seem
to be something we do. Probably my fault
as I’m always pushing reading, and the tube isn’t my favorite medium. It can, of course, be facile or fascinating,
depending on what you watch and with what frequency. My wife had gotten a copy of “The Butler” and
we all crowded around for a view. My
girls quickly pointed out that they’d already seen in the previous summer with
my mom. Regardless, they were game.
Forest Whitaker and Oprah perform so well it is possible to
suspend disbelief, despite the ubiquity of their personas from other context. Robin Williams as Ike and John Cusak as Nixon
were much harder for me to swallow.
There they are. I’m being told to
believe otherwise and I can’t. I had to
read the review in the Times to realize that Mariah Carey or Lenny Kravitz
were also in the film. I’ll have to go
back and have another look at Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan, as I completely
missed that. I’m not especially familiar
with Alan Rickman’s work, but as soon as Ronald Reagan entered both my
daughters shouted “Snape! Snape!” from Harry Potter.
It was interesting tracing a half a century of
American history with two American kids who really do not know much of it. And annoying though it may have been it was
useful to be able to stop and explain.
Why are they treated this way at the lunch counter? Why does the mood and the tactics of the
civil rights movement shift with the assassination of MLK? How can you make sense of that year 1968,
with not only that assassination, but the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and
then the Tet Offensive?
They, who by necessity learn about a watered down
version of Maoist ideology were interested to know that these Panthers who were
being profiled, the tactics they were espousing of being willing to plot murder
as revolutionaries, comes straight out of Mao’s little red book, which they
bought and sold to fund their enterprise. The film flies through the time from
Nixon’s fall to Regan’s rise, my formative years, as though it were a bad
dream. But Reagan, again, and the
anti-apartheid movement, I could explain.
How, in our own simple way, we were arrested for civil disobedience at
our university, and why I could exercise that right peacefully, because the
previous generation had fought and endured so much.
I wasn’t crazy about the way the film handled the
Obama election at the end. Though I am
one of a waning core of unapologetic Obama supporters, I thought the film
veered into propaganda with the introduction, finally of one real president and
his speech. (I suppose they had actual
clips of Ford and Carter as well) It
was, of course, such a potent coda to Cecil Gaines and the entire civil rights
narrative life that I suppose it was unavoidable. But I found it jarring to hear a sitting
president speak in what was to have been a fictional adaptation. Yes, it's a remarkably glorious moment, but
it was a time for subtlety, rather than a cudgel or the hint of partisanship
and oportunism.
My daughters recognized when Mr. Gaines was reading
“Madeline” of Paris fame, to Caroline Kennedy as a little girl. And it was timely that she was on the front page
of the Times, and I could point to her photo there, next to the Japanese
Emperor as she was now our new and for standing up against dolphin slaughter,
our controversial ambassador to Japan.
This morning I asked them what they
remembered. And we revisited the point
of the movie where the Butler’s son has just seen Malcolm X speak. And what happens later when he becomes a
Black Panther and he and his girlfriend has the blow up with his parents. And it occurred to me to show them both MLK
and Malcolm X actually speaking.
And both men are forever stirring and remarkable
to contrast. Here first, my little
girls, is Martin Luther King speaking in 1963.
Here is American oratory. Here is
African American oratory. Here is a
peaceful demonstration of people before the halls of power, demanding dignity
and equality. I told them to feel the
cadence of “I Have A Dream” speech, as much as it was to savor each word.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs. And I, unwittingly, cried as it
crescendod.
And I found a clip of Malcolm X famous speech
comparing the “house negro” with the “field negro” as this is what is
referenced in “The Butler.” Here is a
different line of thinking that spawned from precisely the same time. Here is a man who advocated for self-defense,
rather than non-violence. Here is
someone who was not in the Gandhian tradition, nor the Christian tradition, but
rather the tradition of Islam. Here is
separation, rather than integration, and northern rather than southern, a
crystalline explanation of 400 years of 含辛茹苦[1] And here is why that speech would be so
painful to an intelligent young man who’s father was a butler, listening to the forceful clarity of one who claimed he was a ‘field negro.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9AmuYqjRyg
That clip is about two hours long and I confess,
though I’m frightfully busy, I was completely drawn in. Completely drawn into the clear articulation
of frustration. Pulled back into the
core racial questions at the heart of American history, and life, certainly
urban life in New York, and my career in my 20’s in Brooklyn, which all seems
so far away from China. And I don’t know what my kids quite make of all this
soaring hope, cutting anger and murderous tragedy. All I know is that one day, when they are
back “home,” such nuance and understanding of anger and hope will be critical
to their American lives. And that in
spite of all the imperfect difficulty of that tradition, and inapplicability to
map directly here, it is essential to understanding China, what China is and what
it might become, as much as it is to understanding anywhere else in the modern world.
I introduce some “new” music every day and I
confess I’ve been listening to things this morning that were already profiled,
stirred up by looking over my Summary 100 and my Summary 120. I’d already forgotten about Duke Jordan and
Illinois Jacquet. And when I was listening to two+ hours of Malcolm right now I had to pause and
consider at least ten different hip hop samples of his voice that have wound up
in rap songs I adored or didn’t over the years, by rappers both eternal and
temporal. But perhaps it is most fitting
to let the last musical word go to Mahalia Jackson who proceeded Martin Luther
King Jr. on the podium on that famous day.
One mighty, mighty, tough act to follow.
And that he did.
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