by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I had been
waiting for a long time to see Selma and finally got the chance Monday night when the San Diego Public
Library played it along with a live gospel concert by the Martin Luther King,
Jr. Choir that took up about half an hour before the film began. Selma is a story of a true-life historical
incident that I had vivid memories of when it was happening — the campaign
against Black disenfranchisement staged in Selma, Alabama in 1965 and led in an
uncertain coalition by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization, the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the more radical Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The film had six production companies
— Paramount, Pathé, Cloud 8, Plan B, Celador and Harpo — the last being Oprah
Winfrey’s outfit (the name isn’t a reference to the silent Marx Brother but is
simply “Oprah” spelled backwards) — though Winfrey (who, unless one of those
pre-“discovery” African empires had a female monarch, seems to have been the
richest African-descended woman who’s ever lived) appears to have been the
prime mover behind the project. She also appears in it, in a brief but
indelible cameo as Annie Lee Cooper, a Black woman who attempts to register to
vote in Selma and is put through a series of humiliating tests — she’s asked to
recite the preamble to the U.S. Constitution by an officious white clerk who
first asks her if she knows what a “preamble” is, then asked how many counties
there are in Alabama and then asked to name them all — before her application to
vote is denied.
Selma was made by a Black woman director, Ava Du Vernoy (that’s how it’s
spelled on her credit, though imdb.com and most other sources mash the two
parts of her last name together and spell it “DuVernoy”), and the writing
credit goes to Paul Webb, though some imdb.com “Trivia” posters said Du Vernoy
rewrote most of the script herself and particularly came up with all the pastiches of Martin Luther King’s speeches delivered
by David Oyelowo, since the King estate maintains tight copyright control over
King’s actual words and had apparently already licensed them exclusively to
Warner Bros. for a King biopic that has yet to be made. It does seem odd that both Oyelowo and Carmen Ejogo,
who plays King’s wife Coretta, are half-British and half-Nigerian; they both do
perfectly fine jobs, but weren’t there any African-American actors qualified
for these roles? (To add to the irony, Ejogo had previously played Coretta
Scott King in a film called Boycott — and had got married for real to Jeffrey Wright, who played Martin
Luther King in Boycott.) Selma wasn’t quite the uplifting celebration of
political protest, direct action and nonviolent resistance I was expecting,
mainly because director Ava Du Vernoy and screenwriter Paul Webb kept the mood
of the piece surprisingly somber for much of it. I give them a great deal of
credit for not turning the movie into a
hagiography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — there’s a marvelously ironic scene
about his womanizing in which his wife Coretta is shown playing a tape the FBI
has sent secretly, denouncing him as a “degenerate,” telling him to commit
suicide and then offering a sample purporting to offer a genuine sexual
encounter between King and another woman. “That’s not me,” King tells his
long-suffering wife. “I know it isn’t,” she replies. “I know what you sound
like.” Then she asks him point-blank if he loves her, and after a long pause he
says he does. Then she asks him, “Do you love
any of those others?,” and after an even longer pause he says, “No” — making it
clear that Coretta King, like Hillary Clinton, saw a higher purpose in staying
in her marriage despite her husband’s “straying.” The film also shows the
sometimes bitter antagonism between King’s Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) and the younger, more radical members of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the SNCC people’s understandable
upset that they’d been organizing in Selma for months and now here was King,
coming in to take over the movement and present its public face to the media.
Selma is a quite interesting historical document and I
could see it being useful in school classes about the civil rights movement,
though a teacher would have to use the film and put the history it shows in
context: that within a year SNCC would publicly break not only with King but
with the whole strategy of nonviolence and elect leaders like Stokely
Carmichael and H. Rap Brown who would proclaim “Black Power,” a doctrine that
took the principle that the liberation of oppressed people must come from
struggle by the oppressed people themselves and ran it into the ground. What
the “Black Power” people did was break off all cooperation with whites — either elected officials
or grassroots activists — and thereby bring a sudden end to what has been
called the “beloved community” of Blacks and whites working together to achieve
liberation and an end to the institutionalized racism of the U.S. in general
and the South in particular. Those of us who were alive when the struggles in
Selma happened (I was 11 but I was precociously aware of what was going on in
the streets of Selma, and my mom was an active participant in SNCC’s white
auxiliary, Friends of SNCC, until the “Black Power” activists that took over
SNCC in 1966 disbanded it) were inspired and thought they would be a model for
future actions that would advance the cause of civil rights — instead they
became, as Debussy said of Wagner, “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a
dawn” (in earlier writings on the period I’ve reversed that quote and said of
the 1964 Barry Goldwater Presidential campaign — which, like Al Smith’s
campaign in 1928, lost but set the stage for America’s next political
realignment — that it was an ugly sunrise that was mistaken for a dusk).
There’s even a hint of King’s assassination when J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker)
tells President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) that if King becomes too
troublesome, he can simply be eliminated — the line in the film is, “Mister
President, you know we can shut men with power down, permanently and
unequivocally” — which couldn’t help but remind me that in his autobiography
Malcolm X (depicted obliquely in the film and played by actor Nigél Thatch) had
predicted both his own murder and King’s and had said the white power structure
would not let either of them live. Selma became a controversial film for its treatment of President Johnson —
whose former aides came to his defense and said he was a lot more supportive of the civil rights struggle in
general and of King in particular than he’s shown in the film. In a way Selma was the answer movie to all the critics of the
film Lincoln, which had shown Abraham
Lincoln as a conniving politician ready to achieve the noblest of ends (passage
of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in the U.S.) with the foulest of
means, including open bribery of wavering Congressmembers with jobs, and which
at least some progressive critics had denounced as saying that you can’t
achieve progressive ends without corrupt means. Well, guess what — you can’t
(as will become quite apparent if the Broadway play showing how Johnson got the
1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress makes it to the screen).
If Lincoln is a movie for activists who believe in working
through the system and making the compromises it demands, Selma is a movie for those who believe that political
change can be achieved through direct action and street demonstrations. In
fact, it takes both — a reality the American Left knew in the 1890’s, 1930’s
and 1960’s but has long since forgotten, while the Right is well aware of it and
skilful in combining pressure from outside groups like the “Tea Party” with
cunning manipulation of the levers of power from elective office to get what
they want. Johnson is also a problematical figure in this movie because Tom
Wilkinson, who plays him, gives the weakest performance of any of the principal
cast members; at times he seems undecided whether he’s playing Johnson, Richard
Nixon or Ed Sullivan. It’s true that a lot of the actors in Selma had the peculiar challenge of playing people who
were extensively photographed and recorded when they were alive, and of whom
extensive film footage still exists — an actor cast as Presidents Kennedy,
Johnson or Nixon has a considerably greater challenge than one playing Lincoln
to create a persona distinct
enough from the real one but at the same time believable to people who’ve seen
the films of the real one — and David Oyelowo as King handles this challenge a
good deal better than Wilkinson. Oyelowo doesn’t quite master the rolling
cadences of King’s public speaking style, and his rhetorical style is less
powerful than the real King’s, but his is a quite good performance that manages
to convince us he is the man
he’s playing in a way Wilkinson never does. Selma also suffers from an especially extreme case of
the past-is-brown syndrome (the cinematographer is Bradford Young), which is
even more annoying in a film in which the main characters are Black: all too
often key scenes are virtually impossible to “read” on screen because the
actors’ deep brown faces are doing way too good a job of blending into the dank brown backgrounds. (In
fairness to the film, the deficiencies of the new San Diego Public Library’s
separate theatre building as a venue for film didn’t help; the broad glass
front looks spectacular but lets in way too much light, there are no curtains you can draw over it, and the
film did get easier to watch once
the sun finally set.) The past-is-brown look and Du Vernay’s oddly slow pacing
through much of the film — as well as her and Webb’s decision to incorporate
the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama
and the deaths of four Black girls (14-year-old Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia
Wesley and Carole Robertson and 11-year-old Denise McNair) in the blast into
the film even though it really took place September 15, 1963, a year and a half
before the campaign in Selma — give the film an oddly elegiac tone; instead of
a paean to activism it’s more a poem about how sheer desperation can drive an
oppressed people to do incredible things.
It’s a measure of how fast things can
change in American politics that the movie shows President Johnson addressing
Congress on March 15, 1965 calling on them to pass the Voting Rights Act and
beginning with his famous opening words, “I speak tonight for the dignity of
man and the destiny of democracy” — two years later Johnson had turned from the
progressive community’s favorite President into its most reviled, thanks to his
escalation of the Viet Nam War, and it’s a measure of how thoroughly the counterculture
turned against him that in 1967 Mike Bloomfield’s blues-rock band the Electric
Flag (itself a name with all sorts of political associations!) sampled that
line from the speech in an ironic context — “Yeah, right” — at the start of a cover of Howlin’ Wolf’s song
“Killing Floor.” And a lot of the original reviewers of Selma noted that it was released around the same time
that the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and thereby allowed
Republican state governments in the South to start passing laws deliberately
aimed at reducing the participation of Blacks and other people of color (as
well as young people and working people in general) in the electoral process —
with the Republicans and Democrats having switched their historic positions on
civil rights (the party of the Civil War, “states’ rights” and the Ku Klux Klan
became the party of civil rights, while the “Party of Lincoln” saw its future —
and ensured its political dominance in the modern era — in becoming the party
of Strom Thurmond and white racist reaction) and the Republicans seeing that
their path towards full-spectrum dominance of the American political system
(they already control the entire federal government except for the presidency, and they fully expect to gain
that in 2016) lies at least partly in making sure people who would be likely to
vote against them — people of color, women (especially unmarried white-collar
professional women) and young people — aren’t allowed to vote at all. At the
same time, what’s left of a Left in America has hamstrung itself by, among
other things, either disinterest or outright opposition to the whole idea of
electoral politics; if I read another article by a proclaimed Leftist saying
that the whole idea of representative democracy is inherently illegitimate and
therefore having anything to do with protecting, enhancing or even exercising the franchise is anti-Leftist, I think I shall go
crazy over what Vladimir Lenin (hardly one of my favorite people, though he’s
looking better and better in an era in which Leftists go out of their way to avoid building the kinds of effective, tightly-run
hierarchical organizations you need to go up against entrenched power) called
“an infantile disorder.”
