Obviously I haven’t seen “Black Snake Moan” yet, but I can’t get away from the buzz today. Several bloggers I respect are writing about the website and the trailers (see here in particular), and a particularly nasty discussion about the movie posters has erupted at Salon.
It’s the interview with director Craig Brewer at Salon that makes me dismissive of the message of the movie, which seems to be by all accounts redemption. As someone who steeped herself in Southern Gothic lit for damned near four years in her free time, I’m always skeptical when the themes are revamped for a young, hip crowd that focuses more on the concept of redemption when one of the most interesting parts of southern lit is paying penance. Flannery O’Connor, my favorite southern author, loved the dark characters, obviously, but she reveled when her meanest characters paid penance for their meanness. These were not simply character studies. Anyway, what piqued my interest was when Brewer conjured up O’Connor’s name among others to defend himself:
So can we actually have movies where a woman chained up can be a character in a narrative, like you would in a Flannery O’Connor short story, and not represent my take on women? I question anybody to come to the end of “Black Snake Moan” and really believe I’m a misogynist — the definition of which is a hatred of women.
Three things: 1) Thanks for the definition. 2) O’Connor wouldn’t have shied away from chaining a woman to a radiator in a story, no. But her version would make the woman the Christ Incarnate and the captor the villain, and the villain would be a good ol’ boy white suit, not an old black farmer/bluesman. 3) Having seen “Hustle & Flow” (and remaining unimpressed), and having read several reviews and interviews regarding “Black Snake Moan” I have to agree with Brewer that some stories are just reflections of nasty society and ought to be told despite their lack of sympathy or with sympathy toward the “wrong” characters. I get that it’s controversial to write a movie about a sympathetic pimp, but it falls flat if the story remains uninteresting or trite as it did in “Hustle.” What I’m beginning to gather from this particular movie is that it’s an amalgam of biblical allusions, half-baked Dirty South, and — pulp factor aside — stories that have already been told better, but choreographed for the MTV crowd. In the meantime critics and reviewers fall all over themselves trying to put their finger on the next great auteur, nevermind if the next guy in line is as masturbatory as Quentin Tarantino.
But the final negative factor that gets me is the role of the black savior yet again pumped through a million movie theaters — not having seen the movie I don’t know but have to ask, is this another Magical Negro? Really, how many times in the past two decades has Hollywood made movie in which a black character saves a white character using magic, music, or some supernatural, mystical wisdom? (I can think of more than five examples off the top of my head right now.) Spike Lee taught a class at Washington State University mocking Brewer’s vision five years ago, but Brewer hasn’t caught on to the message yet — and it ain’t one of magical redemption.
Come on, admit it: The Legend of Bagger Vance kicked ass!
At the risk of derail, Spike has become the filmmaker laureate of New York. Starting with Summer of Sam, he began telling stories that were not particular to the black experience in NY, and instead telling stories that resonate with white New Yorkers also. Much as I liked his earlier work, I was forever conscious that I came to it as an outsider; that it spoke to an experience that I learned about second hand rather than recognizing as familiar as I watched it. In Summer of Sam, he almost flat-out told the audience that he was changing directions. He closed with Jimmy Breslin, calling New York “the city of my birth, which I love and hate equally.” And Jimmy Breslin handed on the torch. 25th Hour and Inside Man are also movies by someone for whom New York is the city of birth, and that he loves and hates equally. He loves it down to the pigeons and the fire hydrants, and down to the neighborhood bars: in Inside Man, as Denzel talks with Clive Owen, he offers to sit down over a beer and talk it out, and he mentions a bar. My sister, who works in the Financial District, turned to me and said, “that used to be my bar.”
So, the movie is autobiographical for the director, and yet, I see Christina Ricci in cutoffs and half a ripped t-shirt. Huh. I suppose redemption for a 35-year-old filmmaker just wouldn’t have the same panache.
Incidentally, the ego radiating from that piece is giving me sunburn.
No, it’s autobiographical because he once kept Christina Ricci chained to a radiator for three weeks.
I remember Ricci too well from The Opposite of Sex to like looking at her now. I have a sense of something beautiful, ruined.
I’m a huge Ricci fan, and fiercely defender her performance in “Monster” when everyone else around me hated it.
I’m fairly tired of Magical Negro too.
And you’re right that Southern Gothic is all about “paying penance for meanness”; it’s not about paying penance for promiscuity, even in the form of sex addiction.
Maybe we can pass out vouchers to rent Charles Laughton’s one and only directorial effort: Night of the Hunter.
I love Ricci, in The Opposite of Sex as well as in everything else I’ve seen her in. If I fail to see this one, it definitely won’t be for any lack of enthusiasm for Ricci.
I probably won’t see it in the theater (small children and lack of babysitters). If anything, it’ll be checked out of the library sometime next year. I haven’t really heard much about it one way or the other, but I also really like Christina Ricci. So maybe it will go on the library list, after all.
Hugo, I loved Monster. During the big makeout scene outside the roller rink (to Journey — brilliant!) I leaned over to my wife and said, “when guys think about a scene with Christina Ricci and Charlize Theron making out, this probably is not what they envision.” To have done that without at all servicing the patriarchy by making it appealing to the male gaze was just fucking wonderful; one of the most unsung difficult things any filmmaker has done in a while. Also, Theron got the usual props for uglying up and making a monster seem three-dimensional and comprehensible if not sympathetic. However, I thought Selby was the tougher part. The brush strokes were much finer; the strains of self-discovery, immaturity, self-assertion, infatuation, callowness and cowardice criss-crossed each other; and it was not only a complex part, but in its own was a far less sympathetic one. Theron played Wournos for both operatic revusion and tradgedy, but Selby was easy to hate.
Yay, Thomas, you’re the first person I’ve heard say that. Absolutely right on.
It’s funny how expectations affect the way I see a particular body. I just saw the photo of Ricci in BSM on the from page at Salon, and YUCK. Bony, wrong. Distressing. Yet, with a moment’s pause, I realize that she’s no skinnier than Sigourney Weaver, that six-foot giraffe, in Alien. When Ripley slips into her space suit in tiny bikini briefs, my eyes pop out of my head. Ricci walks around at the same body composition and I cringe. I’ve always seen Weaver like that, and she looks right in her skin. Ricci looks wrong that way, like she’s half the woman she used to be. And I think that’s just a construction I place on it because I know the backstory.
Yeah, but Sigourney Weaver is a full foot taller than Christina Ricci. That’s the problem — Ricci is trying to mimic the body of a tall person, but she’s 5 feet tall. She doesn’t have the length in the spine and ribcage and torso to do it (her organs have gotta have somewhere to go). So Ricci ends up looking like a concentration camp inmate. Sorry to Godwin, but that’s what she looks like, and it depresses me.
I expected Dana Stevens at Slate to have a good take on the film, and she does:
http://www.slate.com/id/2160961/
I was a little bothered with my assessment after reading the Salon review (which completely blew off Brewer’s “my characters don’t care about oppression so I don’t either, nevermind that I invented the characters”) but felt better again after reading Stevens’ review. I’ll probably watch the movie, but it had better be more interesting than Hustle or I’ll write Brewer for my money back.
What is so disturbing about having a black person be a hero? Or would be more comfortable having him play a gangster?
Marie, you had 9 months to read the damn post, and you still couldn’t do it before commenting? Jesus.