Maybe as a reflection of the time we spend dissecting movies' extrinsically determined audience appeal, cinephiles are as prone as anyone to categorizing people by their demographic. Two older white ladies on a mother-daughter date, hair done up in that weirdly common bushlike up-do? Tinged by probably more than a hint of latent misogyny, it's easy for me to dismiss their tastes in my head without even knowing what they planned on seeing. They're the Oprah/TLC demographic, the light entertainment lovers. And everyone knows women go to movies to escape. Only men go to engage with serious issues like police brutality and institutional racism. I don't believe this, but I used to, and it's hard sometimes to shake off that presupposition. Late capitalism has quite effectively marketed us into mutually exclusive consumer groups, and we've quite happily acquiesced, but we slip through the cracks all the time, often without meaning to, transgressing the hidden boundaries of the market.
After the movie ended, and as we tearfully found our way to the exit, the older lady mentioned she'd been interested in seeing FRUITVALE STATION due to the hugely positive press out of Cannes' Un Certain Regard (endearingly pronounced "Conz"). This also surprised me. Where, I wonder, does a white woman in her early 60s get her Un Certain Regard news? Do we maybe read the same websites? That's a thought. If I'd had the time or the presence of mind I might have stayed to ask.
I'm beginning with this anecdote to share with you how easy it is to let our judgments of others be guided by what we think we know of them, or often "their kind." This isn't news to you, of course, and it isn't news to me either. Seeing myself in act of arrogance and sharing it with you won't lead to a nationwide confrontation with the act of stereotyping. It's just surprising how really and truly commonplace it is in our perception of other people, appearing in such innocuous ways as my smug guesswork at other peoples' movie tastes. I went to see FRUITVALE STATION to sadly observe discriminatory judgment in action and sheepishly found myself noticing that I do it too. Obviously my dismissive scoffing doesn't begin to compare to the racial tension that led to the death of Oscar Julius Grant III, but it's born of the same impulse. A desire to know, to understand, to make predictable the unknown. To know what to expect of unfamiliar people. Human brains are great at recognizing patterns and forming expectations based on past experiences. The trouble is that we don't observe as objectively as we like to think we do. What we see is what we expect to see. Our fascination with people dissimilar to us leads us to pay special attention to the obvious differences between us. In doing so, we miss the innumerable (and unremarkable) ways in which we're exactly the same as people unlike us. I don't think this tendency to focus on differences is necessarily hardwired into us, but I do think we harm ourselves by not exploring and discussing the mundane nature of difference and diversity more openly.
George Zimmerman was guilty before he ever pulled the trigger. He was guilty of seeing a black person in his neighborhood and reacting as if this should concern him. His sense of suburban normality was disrupted by the appearance of a hooded black boy, and he reacted accordingly. We've been told that there were recent robberies in the neighborhood, and that Zimmerman frequently called the cops on suspicious individuals in his neighborhood. These facts have been used to give his decision to follow Trayvon Martin a certain banality, as if his specific rendezvous with Trayvon was a freak occurrence in a chain of ordinarily nonviolent behavior. Relevant to this claim is Zimmerman's history of both unprovoked violence and molestation, but I don't feel those are worth debating here, as they (ought to) speak for themselves. What I want to explore is the way we've created suburbs as presumptive white-only zones and how America's changing racial makeup has imperiled this tidy segregation.
Unfortunately, as is becoming the case more often than I'd like already, it doesn't appear as though I have the space or research skills to really convince you of what I believe to be true. I'll work on that, really. For now, you'll have to just accept my generalizations and a few relevant links.
White flight, or the very deliberate hiding away in suburbs by America's white population, is a problem weirdly underdiscussed in racial politics these days, but it explains so much of contemporary racial discord that it seems crucial to bring up here. Implicit in the allure of the suburbs is that a world exists away from all the Bad Minorities (and don't you pretend you don't know what I mean by that) and their sex and drugs and rap and crime. We get this space and you get the cities, where you can do whatever you want as long as you leave us out of it. That's the deal, and until recently, this illusion of safety has held up reasonably well. The problem now is that the emerging black middle class is mirroring our move due to education opportunities, safety concerns, gentrification and other pressures. All of a sudden the generally conservative generally middle class generally white inhabitants of suburbs are finding their worlds host to unfamiliar faces and races.
The point I want to make by highlighting this development is the effect this has on the white world view. I don't have the data or even the testimonies to prove it, but a good example of what the threat of minority presence does to a white community would be this. They'll never admit it, but white people simply don't want minorities in their safe spaces. It's a breach of a conduct on the minorities' end, and it sends white people into a panic. Never mind that Zimmerman isn't white, or even Hispanic. He doesn't have to be to understand the suburbs as a sacred zone. Simply being surrounded by mild-mannered white people creates an invisible but very real ecosystem that the presence of unwanted black people violates. Communities, however artificial, create energies and presences of their own, as can be seen in any psychological studies into ingroup/outgroup behavior. And I'd argue that anyone, white or Hispanic or Peruvian-American, so invested in removing nebulous threats from something as diffuse as an entire neighborhood is buying the race-baiting myth of us vs. them. Black men can't be trusted to exist in the space we've claimed as our own, and it's our job to do something about it!
Which brings us finally back to Oscar Grant, and to Ryan Coogler and his striking debut film. FRUITVALE STATION serendipitously found itself buoyed into national attention due to its similarities to the George Zimmerman case. The central scuffle depicted in FRUITVALE STATION, though, seems much more cut-and-dry than the RASHOMON-like incident in Florida. In making cell phones a recurring motif in the film, Coogler underscores their importance in more or less objectively bringing Grant's murder to local and national attention. 2009, if you remember, was the beginning of the smart phone era, and a time when everyone was learning to handle their newfound, handheld power. In this case, this singular historical movement allowed an unlikely spotlight to shine on Oscar Grant, father, son and member of a sprawling Californian community. Where other young black men had died in crushing silence, Oscar Grant was killed in full view of a makeshift jury. Here before you was the unmediated video record of multiple observers, the opinions of the assembled paling before the sheer visual force of watching Oscar Grant die before your eyes. And just as the democratization of technology allowed the country to hear of Trayvon's untimely death and demand justice where before he might have been killed in private, Oscar's public death became emblematic of long-embedded distrust of the police force, once and for all caught on video in the act.White people have a hard time understanding why black people don't feel the same way about the police as we do. Raised from an early age to believe in their infallibility and rarely exposed to anything but, it's difficult to imagine our beloved dispensers of impartial justice as actively seeking to harm members of the public. As more and more black voices become heard in our culture, the tide is slowly shifting on this matter. In works ranging from Dave Chappelle's standup to N.W.A. and Public Enemy's protest rap to Spike Lee's DO THE RIGHT THING and Oren Moverman's RAMPART (to say nothing of the real life incidents on which many of these artworks were based), the race-based discrimination of the police is becoming more and more of a commonplace topic. Oscar Grant didn't intend to become a permanent reminder of institutional racial bias when he set out to celebrate New Year's 2009 with his friends and girlfriend, but unfortunately he had little choice in the matter.
In a breakthrough performance hot on the heels of his well-liked turn in surprise found-footage hit CHRONICLE, Michael B. Jordan paints an affectionate portrait of a man cognizant of his place in an unfriendly world but doing his best to succeed despite it all. Drug convictions, lost jobs, and occasional flarings-up of temper can't explain his essentially good character in full, and this is possibly the greatest strength of Coogler's film. Where the mechanics of his fatalistic story of accidental martyrdom sometimes disrupt our immersion in the world of Oakland, Oscar's flaws exist comfortably alongside his better qualities, of which there are many. And if Coogler overplays his hand in proving Oscar to be worthy of the life he was robbed, it's a moral act worth undertaking in a time when a legal defense team can convince juries and spectators alike that young black men have their deaths coming to them. FRUITVALE STATION lives or dies on its mission to portray Oscar Grant as an ordinary human being, and thanks in no small part to Jordan (among others), it succeeds wildly in this regard.
Another key strength of the film is in depicting a convincing ecosystem of Oakland inhabitants, from Oscar's sympathetic but increasingly exasperated loved ones to his friends. One feels no need to question the character motivations because the able cast more than capably illustrates them in their web of interactions. Octavia Spencer earns her Academy Award anew in conveying a world of concern and fear beneath a friendly exterior. Her children are struggling and her grandchild's future is constantly up in the air, but she does her best to give guidance and support to the ones she loves. The flashback to Oscar's prison days sticks out a bit as an obvious reminder of Oscar's unhappy past and as a poorly-concealed Chekhov's gun, but it's worth it alone to watch Spencer's face as she confronts the built-up frustrations and fears of her incarcerated son.
I found myself torn between appreciating these naturalistic moments and silently critiquing the script's frequent bids for our sympathy. Oscar's encounter with a stray dog in particular stuck out as a clumsy bit of symbolism (though as always there was no fault in Michael B. Jordan's handling of the moment). Coogler knows how to stage a scene and guide his actors, but he seems a little less sure of how to structure a story. Oscar's last day comes across less as a slice of lived experience than as a series of vignettes, each seeming like a moral test for our protagonist. This imposing top-down vision is at odds with the film's dogged focus on the small and the ordinary. Much like many of Spike Lee's films, the film seems to be a white elephant made of termites.
I would, however, like to praise Coogler's placing of the cellphone footage of Oscar's death at the beginning. This structuring device is by no means new or daring, dating back most famously to such outsized biopics as GANDHI and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. The context, however, is what transforms Coogler's choice from a trope to a motif. The shadow of Oscar's inevitable death hangs over the film in a meaningful way, a symbol of the fear under which young black men have learned to operate. Much like in 2011's excellent ATTACK THE BLOCK, these submerged fears are externalized and depicted as easily understood environmental threats. A stray shot of a police car passing Oscar's as he drives sets off a symphony of digressive meanings, from the dramatic to the personal to the sociopolitical. We know Oscar isn't going to die so soon in the film, far away from a train station called Fruitvale, but the very threat of being needlessly pulled over passes through the scene like a phantom. In another film, in another life, this could lead to a life-altering event all its own. Shots of the BART train system and Oscar's drug dealings also hang heavy with foreboding, the former due to our knowledge of the film's preordained ending and the latter because of our familiarity with the over-policing of black drug possession. Similarly, Oscar's quickly escalating desperation as he begs for his job back doesn't occur in a sociological vacuum. We know losing this chance for legitimate employment imperils his family and his own ability to take charge of his life.
Coupled with Oscar's choice of clothing, Coogler has a keen sense of depicting the red flags in the life of a young black man. Debate rages to this day over whether or not Trayvon should have been wearing a hoodie. This question, though, presumes not only the primacy of the white perspective, but accepts as fact that black men wearing hoodies are asking for trouble. Much like blaming rape victims for dressing in ways that 'tempt' rapists, the debate moves from questioning the legitimacy of the aggressors' choices to accepting racial/sexual violence as inevitable and something against which victims can only minimize their chances of assault. We normalize aggressive behavior by thinking in these terms. The onus should be on the aggressors to not break laws and violate the sovereignty of other human beings. Ebony Magazine recently released a series of covers showing black celebrities and their sons in hoodies, and there's been an excellent photo circling Facebook which I unfortunately can't find that depicts a graduating class of black doctors first in their scrubs, then in hoodies. These are bold and necessary steps toward complicating our belief that we should accept black people wearing hoodies as a sign of danger.
The issue expands further when we consider that white men are allowed to dress in traditionally tough ways without inviting suspicion and gun violence upon themselves. Shaved heads, wifebeaters, boots, and other such masculinized stylings are common amongst white men with an interest in broadcasting their masculinity. We don't judge them for this, knowing that these fashion choices are merely a personal preference and not indicative of a personal disposition toward violence. But when black and Latino men, particularly young ones, adopt similar fashion, our automatic assumption is that they're not to be trusted. Why? Corporate media has certainly played a big role in normalizing this double standard, but we as white people do plenty of harm on our own by privately subscribing to it. In the wake of the police and George Zimmerman being moved to violence by their perceived sense of danger, it's extremely important that we confront our everyday fundamental attribution errors and ingrained beliefs about masculine fashion.
FRUITVALE STATION is not a new masterpiece of black fiction. It attempts to bridge the easy naturalism of Charles Burnett's KILLER OF SHEEP with the powerful grandstanding of Spike Lee and ends up falling short of both. But that doesn't make it a bad film, nor does it make it worth ignoring. Ryan Coogler is a fairly new director, and his mistakes are certainly nowhere near as grievous than those of innumerable other sloppy first films with far less on their minds. You can, as I did, see through the occasional pandering and audience-pleasing and still be devastated by the conclusion. I felt connected to the handful of other people who joined me in crying as Oscar lived out his final moments on film and as his family and friends learned of his death. We were one in those powerful final few minutes, united in our sadness over a life unfairly cut short. Coogler has performed a very significant act of compassion in restoring agency and humanity to the life of a man who no longer has either, a man none of us will ever have the pleasure of knowing. In a culture hellbent on reducing black men to their mistakes and shortcomings and appearances, Coogler's refusal to accept the status quo should not be undervalued.
I had a sense as I followed the mother and daughter pair, both of whom were still quietly sniffling, that there would be some kind of post-viewing discussion between us. The shared experience was simply too intimate for us to all drift away indifferently. The daughter left for the bathroom, but the older woman and I shared our thoughts briefly as participants in a shared sadness. We didn't have much to say, only that we were both affected deeply, but the viewing of the film bonded us in ways that great art often can. "That was tough to watch," I confided in her. "I know," she answered, "but I'm glad I saw it." In lieu of reinventing the artform of cinema or forcing us to confront our most private selves, Ryan Coogler chose instead to gently unite his viewers in solidarity for one man's righteousness and one people's sense of loss. Sometimes this is all we need from our movies.
(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org)
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