Hey everyone. At a bit of a loss of how to start these this week. But hoping you are keeping yourself safe, healthy and maybe a little righteously angry. And I think we can all use a Friday tomorrow.
Major cinephile news today: in addition to announcing donations to fight racism in America, The Criterion Collection is opening up a treasure trove of black cinema on their streaming site Criterion Channel for free. As far as I can tell, the portal is not live yet, but I highly recommend keeping an eye out. (And once the link and lineup is available, I’ll offer some recommendations — though I will admit that I am shamefully underversed in this area of cinema and look forward to educating myself.)
There have been a ton of other films centered around racial justice that are now available for free online starting today, following the pattern of Just Mercy. Some of those are…
13th (on YouTube, in addition to Netflix)
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (on PBS until 7/4)
The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975 (on Amazon until 6/12)
Killer of Sheep (available on Milestone Films’ website — this is a classic I have not seen and am looking forward to digging in soon!)
Today’s newsletter is in memory of Breonna Taylor, who should be turning 27 tomorrow (that’s my age, so this hits especially close to home) and not having the world mourn her senseless murder at the hand of police officers. A quest for justice must never forget people with overlapping and intersecting identities, so we cannot center all activism around George Floyd while erasing black women and trans victims of police brutality.
(Artwork courtesy of illustrator Ariel Sinhaha — something I’ve been made conscious of this week is the need to try and track down initial sources of images/ideas I share)
I’d suggest two small things to do to commemorate, memorialize, advocate — whatever verb you want to use. First, literally say the name Breonna Taylor out loud. I was turned onto the power of this by the podcast Las Culturistas today. There’s a strange feeling that comes over you by just saying the name of who died at the hands of an unjust system, not mentioning them in a sentence or in conversation or anything but just saying his or her name. It’s like summoning something spiritual. A little embarrassed to say I hadn’t done this before today, but I encourage you to try as well.
Second, unleash your creativity! As suggested by film writer Cate Young, I plan to send a birthday card for Breonna to Kentucky’s Attorney General that encourages him to bring charges against the three officers responsible for her death. If you don’t have the resources handy to make the card yourself and mail it, she has a link to her resources site where you can send a physical card through a web service!
I’d also recommend reading Jamil Smith’s incredible piece on Breonna Taylor in Rolling Stone, “Breonna Taylor Was Always Essential.” This segment about the scant value of Taylor’s status as an “essential worker” served in preserving her life really got to me:
What value is celebrating an “essential worker” if, when the uniform comes off and she rests in her own bed, her blackness makes her disposable? If Taylor had identified herself as an EMT, would that have helped? Even if it did, is that the world we want? For black folks, “hero” is too often the bar that we must meet to avoid being murdered with wanton abandon.
Now, what you came for…
DAY 84: Monsters and Men (available on Hulu)
Sorry, you’re once again getting a cut and paste job from an old review of mine. (I probably don’t have to say this, but I’m mostly just covering myself in case an editor/publication comes knocking.) I wish I was just made of time and energy, but this week I’m taking my finite amount of it and channeling it into listening and educating myself. I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the triptych story of Monsters and Men this week and the complexity with which it treats the thorny subject of police killings and brutality. I’m even seeing new ways to examine the film through the concept of assimilationist ideology brought to my knowledge by Ibram X. Kendi in “How to Be an Antiracist.” But anyways, less about me, more about the film…
Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Monsters and Men, a tripartite examination of race and policing in America, is very much a movie of its moment. But with the sheer volume of other films tackling similar questions of racial identity in the face of imminent and insidious oppression – Blindspotting, Sorry to Bother You, BlacKkKlansman, to name a few from its release year of 2018 alone – it cannot lay exclusive claim to the mantle. While Green’s debut feature might not quite match other comparable titles in the nuance of its observations, he compensates with breadth of experience documented. He crafts a film akin to The Place Beyond the Pines within the blast radius of a police shooting, watching how a community-shattering event produces fallout that creeps ever outward beyond the initial participants.
The first act of Monsters and Men unfolds rather predictably, if still absorbingly. Anthony Ramos’ Manny Ortega is an average Brooklynite, trying to put food on the table for his family – which is about to grow by one. His striving towards middle-class stability takes a detour when the police begin confronting a black man selling cigarettes outside the neighborhood bodega. (Perhaps the scene is meant to echo fellow New Yorker Eric Garner, who lost his life for a similar offense while yelling the soon-to-be rallying cry “I can’t breathe” as officers held him in an illegal chokehold.) Manny, wise to how these skirmishes play out, whips out his smartphone and makes the police officers well aware that he is monitoring their exploits. Yet even the presence of a video recording cannot stop what, unfortunately, everyone senses is coming.
The rest of Manny’s time in the movie plays out exactly as expected given that he’s in possession of material that would put the NYPD in hot water. (2020 Marshall chiming in here to say that the movie is probably charitable to them, which is really saying something.) Ramos, earnest and angry, at least makes his section of Monsters and Men interesting, but he can never transcend just how preordained Manny’s fate is from the moment he presses record. Maybe future generations less familiar with the minutiae of how powerful institutions silence and intimidate potential whistleblowers will find his segment more compelling. All those steeped in today’s news cycle, on the other hand, will be able to cruise through Manny’s section of the film on auto-pilot.
Things take a turn towards the more thematically complex when the perspective of Monsters and Men shifts to John David Washington’s Dennis, a black NYPD officer uninvolved in the fateful shooting but left profoundly impacted by it all the same. While Dennis proudly dons the blue police uniform, certain colleagues’ inclination to tolerate the bad apples begins to erode his self-confidence. Since the department provides no incentive to hold abusive officers accountable, he continues steadfastly in his duties but carrying the knowledge that the behaviors leading to unnecessary bloodshed are going unchecked.
Following the shooting, Dennis receives increased skepticism from friends and family as to how he can reconcile his professional identity with his racial identity. The dilemma is similar to the one Washington faced as officer Ron Stallworth in BlacKkKlansman – is it possible to achieve racial justice from within an organization that perpetuates racist attitudes, or can real change only be made by agitation outside of the existing power structure? Dennis claims the job is not a choice, even as those around him begs to differ. He never arrives at a definitive moment of truth before Green changes protagonists once again, which feels like an honest place to leave the character. The spot Monsters and Men leaves Dennis in likely intersects with the path of many in the audience, wondering how — or even if — the police can serve as a solution to a problem for which they are responsible.
But the truly shining section of Monsters and Men arrives in its walloping third act, which centers around Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s baseball phenom Zyrick as he prepares for a major-league showcase. Even as his hard work on the field is on the verge of paying massive dividends, Zyrick cannot shake his nagging indignity over the recent shooting. He’s well aware of the role discrimination and racial bias plays in his life in everything from a bogus stop-and-frisk by police officers to a sneakier “character test” administered by a baseball scout. But this particular gunning down of an innocent man urges him towards a more forceful stance against a broken system, even if it that power structure has not directly hampered his professional aspirations.
As if overtaken by Martin Luther King Jr.’s maxim that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, Zyrick begins organizing with a group of strident protesters who are fully prepared to fight the power. His story serves a potent reminder that true activism is more than just posting a hashtag or public posturing – enacting real change often requires people to put their bodies in harm’s way and their futures in jeopardy. Harrison makes his character’s subtle journey towards embracing his inner radical, who’s willing to rock the boat even if it means imperiling his baseball prospects, a genuinely moving one. He vibrantly expresses a portion of black adolescence seldom seen on the big screen.
Though elements of it peek through in the other characters, Zyrick represents the only persona through which Green fully realizes his vision of self-actualization frequently denied to people of color in these narratives. He intersperses flashes of their joy occurring in spite of the violence, an ebullience so rarely afforded to people whose primary motivation tends towards self-preservation in a dangerous society. Zyrick hammers home the message of Monsters and Men with grace: it is possible to find one’s place in the world while also vehemently opposing the forces that created such a place.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall