The World Is Black, the World Is White

Everything they say about The Birth of a Nation, director D.W. Griffith’s silent 1915, three-hour-plus movie masterpiece depicting the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, is true: it’s about as racist and ignorant an American film as I’ve seen, insulting to anyone who ever had a heart or half a brain. Yet its historical cinematic importance can’t be denied, either.

Based on the play and novel The Clansman, by Thomas F. Dixon Jr., it follows the story of two families--predictably one Northern, one Southern--who meet, make nice, and ultimately get torn apart by the war.

It’s got a great cast (Lillian Gish, Henry B. Walthall, Miriam Cooper, Ralph Lewis, Spottiswoode Aitken, etc.), and technically it was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. The first part (the “war” section) is impressive in its ambitions, particularly the battlefield scenes, although story-wise it drags after a while. The “Reconstruction” half is far more interesting, as the characters introduced previously finally start to be fleshed out. Unfortunately, the racist overtones only hinted at before also come home to roost, so that even as you become caught up in a decent (if melodramatic) adventure, you can’t help but squirm at the hateful (and historically dubious) propaganda being dished out.

I mean, in the end it’s the Ku Klux Klan--with flowing robes and crosses--coming to the rescue on white (of course) horses, to save white women from fates “worse than death,” and save white men from the vengeance of them uppity freed slaves.

If you’re at all interested in American film history or the long, sad ocean of racism we’re all swimming in, see this film. It’s occasionally a hard slog, but it is ultimately worth watching.

Censor it? Hide it from view like a particularly ugly child? No. Rather it should be screened and discussed openly. It would be a start ...

And speaking of racism, it has been a long, strange trip, hasn’t it? From Birth of a Nation to American Gangster, which I also caught recently, and which is probably played at a multiplex near you.

Once again, the themes of U.S. racism and bigoted attitudes toward blacks and lawlessness are explored in this new film, in both subtle and not so subtle ways. Anyone who whines that nothing’s changed in the almost 100 years since Birth was made is someone who probably needs to examine his or her own issues with race--or who has a vested interest in Racism Inc.

Birth of a Nation was breathtaking in its hate, depicting blacks as little better than animals (the black congress scene is right out of a white supremacist’s nightmare and so over-the-top that it’s tempting to laugh it off--almost). American Gangster, by contrast, is a finely wrought, morally ambiguous, extremely nuanced film that raises questions instead of proffering slack-jawed hatred.

In the guise of a typical rags-to-riches success story, wrapped up in a flag by far more than simply its title, the latter flick charts the real-life journey of Frank Lucas, who, in the 1970s, became the drug lord of New York City. Sure, there’s racism here (everyone assumes Lucas is working for somebody else), but anyone looking for the simplistic hate-mongering of Birth of a Nation just isn’t going to find it here. Instead, we get a rich character study of two oddly moral men working in professions that don’t usually demand such moral convictions. Denzel Washington, in an role that’s pure Oscar bait, is a buttoned-down, self-driven black man who inherits the Harlem drug trade from his former boss through a mixture of cold-blooded violence and good ol’ American business savvy, ultimately building a vast empire by smuggling heroin inside the coffins that come back regularly from the Vietnam War. (Frank Lucas, father of globalization?).

Pitted against the stick-up-his-ass Lucas is New Jersey Detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a heavy-set mess of a man, going through a nasty divorce and custody battle. Roberts is a loose cannon and a self-centered womanizer, whose own personal (and often misguided) sense of ethics nonetheless rivals Frank’s.

Black? White? Hah! The sheer vastness and range of grays in this film are staggering. The closest it comes to a simplistic character is one crooked New York cop whose pure, unadulterated wrongness is the single false note I could spot here. Yet, even his dramatic preposterousness is ultimately, at least artistically, justified when you read the Gangster epilogue’s stats on police corruption in that era and realize that cops like him almost had to exist.

And that’s not even the best part of the epilogue--there’s one final sucker punch in the wrap-up that will have you shaking your head, and almost laughing out loud at an especially ironic twist of fate.

That’s how engaging this film is. After a couple of hours of treachery, violence (mostly dealt with quickly), and plowing through an ocean of moral ambiguity and outright corruption, you end up identifying--whether you want to or not--with both leads, even as you despair at their very real flaws, and the sheer cost in lives and moral wear and tear of their ambitions and convictions.

Let’s make this clear: Like David Simon’s masterful HBO series, The Wire, American Gangster does not glorify the drug trade. Brain-dead wannabes going to see Denzel as a bad-ass bling-bling gangsta are going to be solely disappointed; in one pivotal scene, Lucas puts such buffoons firmly in their place. Nor is this film a heavy-handed thumbs-up for the ideals of law enforcement; the whole notion of effectiveness and justification of the then-new War on Drugs is called into question by Richie--and indeed, by this entire film.

And that’s the real point: American Gangster raises questions. Hard, intelligent questions. Questions we should all be asking.

Birth of a Nation gave answers. Stupid, slack-jawed answers.

But, man, I’m glad I took the time to watch these films. They’re both worth seeing, and well worth discussing.

(Cross-posted from The Thrilling Detective Blog.)