Happy Friday, friends! Hope your weekend is full of whatever you want it to be full of.
March.
Some good news: since my recommendation last night, distributor NEON has made Monsters and Men completely free to view on their website! (I wish I could claim it was my influence, but alas…)
I realized when I went to do my research that it’s really just a YouTube embed, so … I’ll save you a step and just embed it here so you can save to your Watch Later if you’re interested.
A previous recommendation that is now available through a different platform and just might be good for the soul: Lady Bird is now on Netflix rather than Amazon Prime.
Anyways, will have more here tomorrow. Sorry if you were expecting more here! There’s only so much time and energy in a given day/week, and I’ve decided this week that both are best dedicated elsewhere.
Now, what you came for…
DAY 85: Selma (available to rent for free on all digital platforms)
As has happened with many movies, the cultural impact of Ava DuVernay’s Selma might have eclipsed the film itself. The film’s surprisingly paltry showing in nominations for the 2014 Oscars ceremony galvanized the #OscarsSoWhite movement that has helped remake the member composition of the Academy. It launched DuVernay into the stratosphere as a power player in the entertainment industry, a position she’s used to elevate other female and non-white creators. (An underrated legacy of Selma: Chris Pine crying at the Oscars after the performance of “Glory.”)
But if the memory of Selma leads you to consider it as something akin to an engaging period piece that a substitute teacher would flip on in 8th grade American history class, you owe it to yourself to watch again. (And why not now while it’s literally free?) This is not just a biopic of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (soulfully embodied by David Oyelowo), though we do get to understand him as man rather than just martyr. DuVernay tells the story of a tide-turning moment in the Civil Rights struggle in a way that unapologetically does not cater to either the white gaze or feelings. She was unafraid to paint LBJ as an impediment to the movement as much as he was an enabler of it, a portrait that so enraged certain Oscar voters that it sparked a vicious smear campaign.
DuVernay was both right on time and ahead of her time in many ways with Selma. She sees what was true in 1965, 2014 and now in 2020. The way what appears like a spontaneous demonstration of force is the result of years of planning and lifetimes of trauma. The tragedy that news cameras and public attention only tend to move when white bodies are on the line alongside black bodies — and violence is trained mercilessly against them. The way that white allies might share a passion for equality with their black citizens but often times lack the urgency to meet their demands. She neither coddles white viewers with her view of how history gets painfully made before our eyes nor sanitizes MLK into some kind of perfect saint.
Selma envisions two radically different spheres: the tempestuous ticking time bomb of Selma, Alabama as King and his non-violent movement attempt a march to the state capitol and the hermetically sealed Washington, D.C. In the nation’s capitol, impending legacy judgments and the constant threat of getting voted out in the next election are the arbiters of all decisions. Discussions of appearing just always precede any talk of what is actually just. This mentality reaches a fever pitch in a climactic showdown of political dick-measuring between LBJ (Tom Wilkinson) and George Wallace (Tim Roth). Their words and actions in the scene play so farcically out-of-touch with the visceral violence we observe on Edmund Pettus Bridge that the dialogue might as well have been grafted in from Dr. Strangelove.
Sure, getting down in the mud with them is certainly not beneath King, who engages in a high-stakes game of chicken over the march to Montgomery with the president. Yet these worlds are only really linked in Selma by a series of FBI bulletins, ordered by J. Edgar Hoover to document the movements of the movement. These communications, overlaid in white typewriter font over the scenes in Selma, often deliberately distort the nature of what actually happened. DuVernay uses this dissonance to powerful effect as an illustration of how those who hold power in society can misconstrue and code behaviors and actions to keep any threat to their power in check.
An interesting quirk about the film: they didn’t get the rights to use King’s actual speeches. They’re creating his words from scratch, yet it never feels inauthentic. In fact, it might even work in the movie’s favor because it allows Oyelowo to treat them as orations to intone, not merely imitate. Through his incarnation, we’re inspired to continue MLK’s legacy while being disappointed at how many of his aims remain unfulfilled in equal measure.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall
P.S. — Pulled somewhat liberally from my 2015 review of Selma tonight; it’s Friday night, OK. I did rewatch the film prior to seeing A Wrinkle in Time in 2018, and it definitely rose further in my estimation.