How is one to apprehend an image of violence? Let me be specific: a scene of violence in a movie.
Not a painting or a photograph or a scene in a novel, history or memoir. Those images somehow seem measured. We read the painting or a photo or we read the words. We may pause. We contemplate. There can be a shock but somehow a shock made more distant by the distancing effect of language itself and also that of our imagination, which can be both more effective in conjuring a scene but less so as well in that we are dependent upon the author’s choice of how to frame the moment — what to leave out, where to narrow the focus.
Rather than the immediacy of a picture, even more so a movie, language prepares us for what is to come. Pick up a history of the Holocaust or Lynching or the Inquisition, and you know that terrible scenes are coming, but the leadup to such scenes can be paused, the moment of confrontation forestalled.
Language invites us in but intimately so. Movies crash into us in waves of sound and quick cut images.
Maybe it is the sound that has the effect. The screams, the pleading, the moans, the shouts of triumphant cruelty.
But still, unlike language, in a movie we sit outside the frame. We watch. It is the watching that bothers me. Most quality movies that tell a story of a serious nature will, inevitably, both shock and entertain, that mysterious word. Maybe this is simply the story of tragedy itself, that we cannot look away, that we expect to find an answer or wisdom in its terrors.
Watching hard scenes in movies can feel invasive, the pain of characters on screen giving us a cheap jolt of empathy or temporary anger at an injustice. They might even encourage a shallow sense of moral superiority — “I would never do X. I would resist Y.”
How is one to apprehend scenes of violence applied to black bodies? How is one to do so as a white person? Avoid the movies? One might make a case for this. What about movies made on the subject of slavery (or Jim Crow or lynchings, etc) by black directors, written by a black man or woman, movies presumably informed by experiences and perspectives I can imagine but never fully appreciate?
In The Underground Railroad, Whitehead’s prose never evaded the horror of life under slavery or, in his rendition of Black American trauma, his variation of the Tuskegee Experiments and the destruction of the Greenwood section of Tulsa in a pogrom in 1921.
But even though Barry Jenkins, the director, does portray plantation violence, he does not linger on the act. Instead he often turns the camera on the faces of those who must watch the violence being done to one of their own. We see them ‘gaze’ upon the act, unable to turn away. They have been ordered to watch in the owner’s unspoken belief that terror done to another will breed fear in those under his control. We watch with them. In their faces, we see the anguish inflicted upon them, an anguish that compounds, that is inseparable from their lives as property.
But Jenkins also employs another kind of ‘looking’.
In Episode #5 of Jenkins’ film of the book, Cora, the main character, has been recaptured by Ridgeway, the slave catcher. Instead of turning back to Georgia and delivering her for torture and execution to her ‘owner’, Randall, Ridgeway takes his small party West, into Tennessee and through a landscape that is burning because homesteaders clearing the territory for farming have lost control of the fire. The country has been depopulated of native Americans by virtue of their expulsion into Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears. They encounter a camp filled with bodies dead of Yellow Fever. Ridgeway murders his helper Boseman and an anonymous rider. He tells the story of how he came to buy, then emancipate his surrogate son, Homer. He torments Cora with a description of how Lovey was murdered. Jasper, another captive, starves himself to death rather than be taken back to his plantation.
Jenkins, in less than an hour, illustrates how the American Imperative, Ridgeway’s description of the American drive to conquer and subjugate, has poisoned human relationships and the land itself. He never preaches. He shows, and through Cora’s and Jasper’s reactions, he gives us, as close as film can come to doing so, how that American Imperative has wounded them, and how they are fighting it. Cruelty abounds in this episode but it is balanced by our complete belief in the complex humanity of both Ridgeway and of Cora and Jasper. By this part of the series, we have been steeped in the multiple causes and effects that have brought these 3 people to this spot and involvement.
One of the reasons we believe has to do with Jenkins’ use of another kind of looking, ‘the gaze”.
When Cora and Caesar and the men and women in the fields or in the train station or on Valentine’s Farm break the fourth wall and look outward at us watching them, they assert their presence; more than that, they assert their inner lives, for ‘the gaze’ is, paradoxically, both the assertion of humanity in the performance and a performance itself. It is the direct challenge to bigotry’s fundamental flaw, that the “other’, the stranger, the foreigner, the ones with dark skin or different eyes, are us in exactly every way. ‘The gaze’ is the inescapable connection. Why do you think slaves were never to look directly into their masters’ eyes unless told to do so. Because ‘the gaze’ is the powerful assertion of common humanity. ‘The gaze’ is Jenkins’ answer to our watching. “The gaze” demands that we see each character as an individual human being. It is the spectral thread uniting us, looker’s on to looker’s back.
Read the book. Commit yourself to the 10 episodes. It is the best series I’ve seen since The Wire and one of the very best movies I’ve ever watched and been watched in return.
