at the movies...

I've been making a list of movies that came out last decade that transformed the way I understood the world because there's nothing I love more than unreasonable, unfair pop culture "top x of whenever" lists.  Here they are, so far:

Mystic River
Memento
Batman Begins


(yeah, I said it) 

Brokeback Mountain
The Hours
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
There Will Be Blood
The Lives of Others
AI
Dogville
Closer
Doubt

I was also moved by Kill Bill (both volumes), even though I winced hard at the race politics, which were winceworthy. So, that's it, that's my list.  Mock me if you like.

Movies are like drugs, the way they change you.  The way that movies can rewire you, reveal unknowns or clarify possibility, give representation to inexpressible truths, is like some kind of crazy power.  Movies are like moving pictures of ideas, and, in this way, they are like miracles.

But after I made and reviewed the list, I felt a sense of regret and maybe shame that, with the exception Crouching Tiger, no movies on my list featured major protagonists that were people of color.  I didn't see our stories represented.

There were dozens of films last decade that I enjoyed, but wouldn't classify as transformative.  In fact, I went to see them with the expectation that they would be greater than they ultimately turned out to be.  Some of those that featured black folks in particular include...
Ray
Ali
Hotel Rwanda

I Am Legend
American Gangster
The Great Debaters 
Talk to Me

I did love these movies, but I did not walk out of the theater itching to connect, to construct, to create.  To write shit down.  They all had lovely moments, especially the first three, but  they didn't change me, they didn't re-make me.

Movies that feature complex black characters that take on the world's incoherencies like Girl 6 or Eve's Bayou or Basquiat...where were they last decade?  I was rewatching Do The Right Thing last month, and I was astonished at how good it still is, I couldn't believe it. I think The Color Purple may be etched into my dna, somehow.  I don't understand how black movies aren't just getting better as we go.  (Capitalism and the soul death of the film industry?)

This listmaking reminds me of how disappointed I was in Precious.  I read Push, the novel by Sapphire that the movie on which the movie is based, many years ago.  I read it one sitting, the voice of the protagonist was like a rope, she just pulls you into her consciousness.  The movie was the opposite.  It pushes away.  I could barely hear Precious's voice, it's not sustained.  I see her, but I don't know her, don't feel her.  In the novel, she has a rich interior life, she has politicized analysis, she has an ironic sense of humor.  She communicates (through reflection and action) the complex ways she experiences profound violence.  She is complicated.  She is a subject.

In the film, she is depoliticized.  Flattened.  Silenced.  The only part of the movie that reached me was the end when Mary, Precious's mother, explains to the social worker what moved her to the choices she made.  It was a devastating moment of clarity.  A heartbreaking, maddeningly direct confessional.  Finally, the subjectivity of someone in the film floats to the screen, in all of its fragmented damage.

This moment is treated as something to transcend rather than something on which to meditate, to absorb, to let change you.  What kind of things is one capable of to manage self-loathing and the terror of loneliness?  That is the stunning question provoked by this scene.  Instead of letting the film give us a minute to think about how human Mary is, we are jerked away.  Precious liberates herself from all of that, walks out the social worker's office triumphantly with her two kids.  I felt empty.  I didn't understand how one woman found herself enveloped by desperation and hatred, while the other could walk away without any real response, voiceless as usual.  After all, I felt like I barely knew Precious, but had just gotten to understand, to hear, Mary.  But then, right when I finally invested, the film wrapped up with the apparent conclusion that "Mary can be dismissed as a crazy maniac and Precious is gonna make it after all." 

It has been said that we should celebrate Precious because it bravely tells a story that must be told. I don't quite know what that means.  The story of black pain? of black poverty?  Are we to believe that the general public doesn't already have a firm narrative about fat black teenage mothers in the hood?  How does Precious recover the stories of these human lives?  What if Precious had been not just a recounting of horrible things that happen to these women, a kind of Slumdog, Harlem Edition, but a sustained investigation of how this shapes a person's identity, relationships, actions, and emotional internal life? How these reflect real truths about the nature of human life?  A view into her view. 

I hate being so hard on this damn movie, mostly because I'm a fan of everyone involved and I hope Mo'Nique gets something out of it.  But, this list depresses me, especially considering that there was an era where we were beginning to witness the inner lives of black people on film.  There are stories that should be told.  I needed Precious to tell Precious's story.  I pray that this next decade will be rich with untold stories that expand us beyond what we expected.  (Probably need to look harder at the indie flicks...)

*update: I just saw 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.  Riveting, brilliant.  Goes on the first list above.