We have to believe a better world is possible, if we just
get rid of the left-handed
dir: Ava duVernay
2023
Sometimes, adaptations of non-fiction, non-narrative books get you something like Adaptation: A rare flower of absolute creativity and insanity.
Sometimes, film adaptations of non-fiction, non-narrative books result in something utterly completely unlike the bestselling books that they’re based on. There are virtues and problems to that approach, but what the best way to adapt a book is, is well beyond my paygrade, and I wouldn’t presume to tell other people how best to tell the stories they want or need to tell.
Ava DuVernay has made powerful movies and limited series about the trials and tribulations of African-Americans and Latinos as their lives bump up against the American legal system, which we keep being reassured is completely colour-blind and utterly fair to all, or the civil rights movement, or, in the case of A Wrinkle in Time, something about cool space aunties with more costume changes than Jane Fonda in Barbarella.
That’s probably as obscure a reference as I can get away with without convincing myself that I’m just muttering to myself at the back of a bus.
Origin seeks to adapt Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, but seeks to do so by not only telling the story through a narrative form, with an actor (the always wonderful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) playing the author at a critical time in her life, but tries (perhaps pretends) to deliver on the central thesis of the book’s premise by re-enacting scenes around the world and through history in order to best explain how they all relate, how it’s all connected.
It’s always worrying when you have a scene when two people are talking, and, both of the people speaking in English, and one of the people speaking says “Can you repeat that in plain English?”
You know you’re about to hear a long exposition dump. Adapting books in such a way must be so daunting. It delivers reams of arguments and ideas, and feeds them through other dialogue and conversation that’s about the person and all the stuff going on in their own lives, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the central themes even if they’re tangential.
An African-American woman, inviting a plumber into her home to fix a problem, where the plumber is wearing a MAGA hat is going to have certain pre-conceptions of how their interaction is about to go down. Maybe we have certain pre-conceptions of how that interaction is going to go. There’s a tension there, but it’s meant to be surprising, when it doesn’t go the way we thought it would.
That scene, with the most wonderful Nick Offernan as the offending MAGA hat wearer, has been criticised as being too obvious, too on the nose, too subtext as text. If anything, that’s practically subtle compared to many other scenes in the flick.
There is a great deal of discomfort for characters having conversations in this flick, and that’s not a criticism. The irony is that someone reading this who hasn’t seen the film or read the book would think I’m talking about the tensions that arise when African-Americans talk about their lives or experiences or the inherent dangers of their lives, with non-African-Americans. That isn’t even where I’m coming from.
By far the hardest part of the movie to contend with is the footage of an actor playing Trayvon Martin on his fateful night, coupled with the recordings of the 911 calls. I’m not going to elaborate further, but this stuff is gutting and infuriating, and incendiary. No wonder this film’s entire theatrical run, despite all the talent involved, despite the necessity of the argument they are making (the author and the director), earned less at the box office than I make in a whole year of work down at the cracker factory.
No-one wanted to see it. No-one wants to hear these arguments made, however well. Bring up Trayvon’s murder, and it’s either “too soon” or people falling back into the same lazy patterns of arguing from their established positions, with rarely any variation.
And while all those arguments should be had, the better to air our grievances or hear our alternate views and maybe see life from someone else’s perspectives, we need to ask ourselves, in determining which arguments are in good faith, and which aren’t – does the argument being made see the humanity of its opponents, or does it not.
An argument whose central plank is that caste, not just racism, is the central element of oppression throughout the 20th-21st centuries, and well before that as well, argues that those deciding these matters decided so arbitrarily, but with purpose.
We all know that racism is bad, at least, those of us who aren’t fuckheads, but simply saying “racism is bad” and getting people to agree with you doesn’t change a whole hell of a lot for anyone in their daily lives if the structures that govern the circumstances of their lives are still tilted against them.
The idea, her idea of caste, transcends socio-economic class, and skin colour, and her examples are myriad. The entire film tries to make the argument about what links the trans-Atlantic slave trade (by the European powers, initially), Jim Crow laws post-Civil War, the Holocaust, the caste system of India, which requires the so-called Untouchables / Dalits to be at the bottom and the rest to police each other, and it requires a strong argument, because it’s saying a lot. If a person is seen, or allocated a caste from birth, by birth, nothing they can do in the course of their lives can transcend that, and it’s accepted, despite the fact that it has no basis in fact.
But how does the flick tell us this story? Well, both by having actors depict scenes from days of yore, and by watching Isabel writing words on a whiteboard as contractors work to fix up the foundations of her mother’s house so she can sell it.
It’s pretty clunky, but I guess it tells the story the way she wanted. Perhaps the reenactments tell the story better.
It also struggles to tell the story as it tells the story of Isabel’s life at the time.
Ye gods, so much grief. As the film starts she and her husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) are trying to help her mother, who is still happy and sprightly, but with limited mobility, so there’s some aged care facility they need to find for her. She feels guilty about where her mum has ended up, and then Trayvon is murdered, and a former editor starts pressuring her to write about it. She doesn’t want to, giving all sorts of excuses, even as two other (white) women (Vera Fermiga and Stephanie March) try to encourage / pressure her into writing about it too.
And then tragedy strikes multiple times, with Isabel, over the period of time that the flick covers, losing so many people close to her. Raw with grief she comes up with her “this is how it’s all connected” theory, and tries to explain it to the people around her while simultaneously sobbing with her sadness. It makes for many uncomfortable scenes. Isabel is not a confrontational person, but other people are happy to tell her that they think she’s wrong.
Her tensest argument occurs during a dinner, with a fellow academic from the States and a German academic couple. She awkwardly explains her theory about how the caste designation of African-Americans as second-class citizens is the same as the manner in which Jews were stripped of their rights by the Third Reich well before the exterminations began.
Sabine (Connie Nielsen) tries to push back on that, saying the established narrative is that slave states in the US only used slaves because capitalism, whereas the hatred of the Nazis for Jews meant they launched something that made no economic sense yet got rid of as many as they could for no overall ‘benefit’.
This is a dumb, ahistorical argument, and I’m not sure why it’s even in the movie, but its purpose is to shock Isabel back on her feet, and make her rethink her approach, by which she ends up having to approach it from a different angle.
That pulls a fascinating thread from history, regarding an African-American couple, who also happen to be social anthropologists, who happen to be in Nazi Germany in the 1930s when all the book burning starts.
But that leads not only to someone begging them to leave the country for their own good, but the revelation that the Nazis patterned the laws they past against the Jews, asserting their superiority, on the Jim Crow laws of the former slave states. Of the United States of America.
The thing is, people probably do prefer reenactments of history rather than documentaries. This film tries and fails to reach a mass audience, but it does so with the purpose of explaining how all this is interrelated, in order to increase people’s understanding of how these systems are created, maintained, and how they persist. But she (the author, the actor, the director) wants us to understand this, to grasp this without just telling us.
Those vignettes are powerful, though. One set at a swimming pool, and just how insane the people running the pool thought they needed to act, because of the prevailing and legal understanding that African-Americans are somehow infected with something that makes them both African-American and inhuman, is just insane. It’s insane. So much accepted as being correct, just like the contaminated nature of the people branded as Dalits, so much accepted as common sense, has always been, to the discredit of our species, is utter fuckheaded folly.
They try. The whole story tries and struggles to tell its compelling tale. It’s not always successful, and some of the personal elements in the story overwhelm the thesis (like Isabel, trying to explain, sobbing with grief, to her (white) publishing friends that it’s all connected makes her look unhinged).
But it makes sense, at least to me, and it explains a lot about how the same people arguing that there’s no need to keep bringing up the past as an excuse for current circumstances are the same people banning books (again), who pay lip service to equality under the law but who always find an excuse to blame the victims, as an example of police brutality or vigilante ‘justice’.
There are many harrowing and horrifying scenes in the flick, but they are no more harrowing than they should be. They should shock us, they should remind us of inhuman acts we shouldn’t be forgetting.
There’s also the argument to be made, considering the critical drubbing this flick endured, that people often decide who they’re going to ‘accept’ these arguments from (like, say, The Zone of Interest), versus the people they feel the impulse to whom to say “stay in your lane”, if they have the balls or ovaries, which they usually don’t.
It’s a strong, uncomfortable film, but yeah, it’s probably preaching to a choir. But what a choir! Of handsome and beautiful people, with wonderful singing voices! Oh what a wonderful choir!
8 times out of so much grief came something powerful out of 10
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“If you look closely, you’ll see something tragic is happening” - Origin
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