A book and a movie.
Two forms, one subject, and two impactful experiences.
My summer of less content has bestowed upon me a new interest in taking on projects, personal paths to acute inundation and learning. One of these paths, a chronological viewing of Martin Scorsese’s feature films, is a ticked box that every American male movie-fan (scare quotes) must address (scare quotes). But I’m not here to talk about the obvious path that has been carved out for me for twenty years; instead I want to share and explore and recommend a path that I stumbled into in a book store in San Francisco, CA.
In my current year of “I’m Reading Again” — thirteen books completed at the point when this story takes place — I knew that I had a Big Biography read in me, waiting to taste fresh air. After the titular stop of a Los Angeles road trip, my partner and I pulled (way) over in San Francisco. Before waiting in line for thirty five minutes at the most authentic Italian deli I’ve ever experienced, fictional or non, we crept down the slopes into City Lights, a wonderful bookstore with a long, storied history. Among a handful of great finds — Osa Atoe’s SHOTGUN SEAMSTRESS, for a friend, and several small finds by my partner — was Jonathan Eig’s KING: A LIFE. Its subject’s name, and its subject’s image, both bold and unmistakable, grab you from across the room. It was a work that had caught my eye before, both in stores and in positive critical analysis. I picked it up, and traded some money for it, as both a delight and a nourishment for my near-future self.
What followed was one of the more voracious and streamlined periods of reading I’ve ever had. Eig’s clear and clean prose leading his deep, rounded research — including newly publicized FBI documents — creates a fluid experience that allowed me to move through and retain information and story at a rapid pace. The writer makes it clear that this story centers a flawed and fallible person, one that fought for many people for many reasons, one who both succeeded wildly, and failed miserably. While the author does not judge the information presented in the book, Eig clearly and explicitly understands that the man he is writing about did good for the world, that he didn’t do it alone, and that we need more good like it.
The book feels like a massive success: it fulfilled me creatively, it inspired me, it taught me, it moved me. It showed that one person can take a long, hard path to change things. They can borrow, steal, and cheat while they charm, convince, and educate. I felt satiated and warmed while reading, even in the face of horrifying facts and revelations. Shining light on the darkest parts of this story only creates more light.
The story ends abruptly, as King’s did. The slamming of that particular door is something I can only imagine, and empathize with through deeply researched and descriptive writing. It cuts to the bone. It doesn’t matter that you knew the blade was coming.
The blade in Ava DuVernay’s 2014 feature film SELMA, alternatively, hits you in the chest before you know it even exists.
Focusing on the organizing in Selma, Alabama that Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) group did, and the events preceding and following, DuVernay and her fellow screenwriter Paul Webb don’t have time to give you the day-by-day, year-by-year building block information to lead you to their starting point. Movies aren’t books, duh. Instead, they must violently compress time while picking their spots to shine their 127 minutes of light. Just after we see the sharply dressed and self-conscious King receive the Nobel Peace Prize, we are shown an insider’s view of a major horror of the world King is trying desperately to eradicate. It’s shattering, and loud, and sickening. In its wake, we watch a prepared and law-following black citizen of Selma attempt to register to vote, only to be rudely declined by the white registrar. With the stakes and grounds set, the plot launches forward into dramatization of a massive movement in the Civil Rights timeline.
The film is filled with lasting performances all over the cast list, anchored by David Oyelowo’s King. Ruth Carter’s costuming and Mark Friedberg’s production design coalesce into a living representation of our recent past, and Bradford Young’s camera captures it wonderfully. DuVernay is a talented creator of images, staging powerful visuals of both the individuals and the groups of people whose story she is telling. The little moments of silence, in which the audience is allowed to wander freely – with their eyes across the screen, and with their hearts and minds across the topics and subjects of violence – are where the goods are found here, and are something no book, nor photos or videos of reality, can produce quite the same.
When the action and energy of the film peak in two particular moments, I was vaulted from the story, and the living inside of it. Instead, I found myself launched into the confines of the four walls around me, incredibly aware of my body and my being alive, and the deep, nameless feelings of pain and sadness and anger that I assume most Americans have inside them somewhere. When an important character puts themselves between people and the police, and when it happens again on a larger scale, the movie pivots away from sober image making, and speeds into vivid reproductions of physical violence and death. Strange, modern, non-diegetic music plays over the top of the police’s beating of the first marchers on the bridge, and as news cameras collect and share the brutality, DuVernay shifts the editing into a strange montage that feels eerily like those of sports dramas as bodies run (desperately) and muscles flex (around police batons) and bodies fall to the ground.
SELMA suffers from many biographical impossibilities: the cramming in of real people and real organizations and real locations and real events into passing comments or “he said, she said” commentary; the swelling of heroic qualities of fallible people; the unfair marginalization of important players, and other insurmountable limitations of the form. SELMA succeeds in its cinematic possibilities and ambitions: burning images into your memory, creating deeper emotional bonds between you and the subjects of our shared history, and of cutting through to you on levels you don’t typically cut to.
When the credits rolled and I walked out into the sun, a taste of fresh air back in my lungs, I was immediately unsure how I could consider having enjoyed the experience I just had, especially with my detailed, recently acquired knowledge of the subject material that was just presented to me again. With time, I’ve come to find a deeper value in its images and its violence and its gut punching: the being punched. Just as Jonathan Eig’s KING: A LIFE broadened me intellectually, SELMA broadened me emotionally. A LIFE made my external world bigger, and Selma made my internal world deeper. The movie was an agitating and unpleasant physical experience, as many of our deepest human learning moments can be. It wasn’t fulfilling or inspiring or teaching, but it moved me. I’m just not sure I can explain from where to where.
I am always thankful to be moved, to be shaken, to be stirred. I’m thankful to be surprised. And I’m thankful to be so intimately reminded of the range of exploration, artistically and intellectually and creatively, that we can all take towards the same goals. It’s a beautiful thing, even if it pushes and pulls us in totally different ways.
Thank you, reader, for reading! It means the world to me for anyone to have gotten this far.
If you’d like to show your support, the best way to do so would be to subscribe, totally free, to this publication. Additionally, in the current social media cleanse I am doing, I have found great joy in using the Substack app, which gives easy access to peruse tons of publications covering literally any and all topics. The endless supply of ideas is wonderful, and I recommend checking it out.
TTFN
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