03 April 2005

UNFORGIVABLE BLACKNESS

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

I was coming into this film as a pretty big Ken Burns fan. I’ve found the numerous episodes of The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz to be responsible for some of the very few moments in my life when I felt that America was a narrative, a grand story, a story with a meaning . . . and not merely a catalog of atrocities, greed, narrowness, and superficiality rouged up Tammy Faye Baker style in the colors of the flag. Not only have these films rather boldly implied that there is a narrative of America and then convinced me of the fiction, they also (in doing so) made me feel like an American, like I could see myself in relation to the national drama . . . not wholly alienated from it, but as one of its billions of cells. Ken Burns’ vision of America is one large enough to accommodate real individuals . . . even when America, as it has been defined by its powerful elite, has chosen to attack, reject, and destroy some of those individuals. America, a nation antagonistic to its real heroes and mythmakers, the actors in its theater, has grown its soul by opposing these inconsumable creatures, by trying to wolf them down its throat, and then gagging on them. America (as controlled by its elite) has always been a monstrous whale, but its Jonahs, surviving in spite of its appetite, end up being the real heroes of the American story who define the real American consciousness.

This tendency has its pitfalls, of course. For instance, the powerful elite have increasingly learned how to use our mass overanxiousness to focus too much attention on highly-visible individuals so as to establish a politics of misdirection (e.g., Republican NeoCon hawks courting the religious right with talk of “values”, usually prejudicial intolerances, to build up enough voter support to finance their true goals of colonial global corpocracy . . . which is not at all in the interest of the majority of the Republican voter base). When the individual in the spotlight is a meaningless, non-dangerous, petty indulgence and distraction, some celebrity or rich fool, all the better for the powerful. But, there is always a chance this approach will backfire, because individuals are not necessarily damned to be beholden to groupthink or to serve the whims of those “in charge”, to play as willing pawns. America has granted individuals a substantial right to power, and the elite have hoped that those empowered individuals simply wouldn’t recognize an enemy in the wealthy elites. But when the occasional American harnesses some of his or her mythic individualism and directs it against The Powers That Be, all of the players can come forward to the front of the stage, and the disguises fall away. Where the masks have fallen, America flashes its elusive, unadorned visage, and we get to glimpse the strangely familiar features lining its face . . . and the sudden truth of our parentage pours down on us like a bucket of ice water.

Jack Johnson was that kind of player, that theatrical individual, unswallowable, who pricks the country into looking straight back at us, into briefly revealing itself on some essential level. Ken Burns is a master of illuminating these moments, pointing each out as a nexus where numerous threads of the American story tie together into a knot. He is a maker of the proverbial “picture that’s worth a thousand words”. His best films are both a mirror for the American everyman and everywoman and a portal into that smithy where America is forged. They achieve what is, in my mind, maybe the highest purpose of art: the connection, the unification of various disparate and opposing things under the eye of a consciousness that transcends individual or party perceptions, attitudes, opinions, and beliefs.

Of course, it isn’t just the writing or interpreting of these American stories that Burns does so well, he also tends to get great interviewees, chooses excellent pieces from literature, newspapers, correspondence and puts these pieces into the mouths of the best voice talent available. And, of course, he locates an abundance of superb film and photo footage out of which he creates narrative motion and emotional gravity. To my inexpert eye at least, he seems to pull all this together into a film in a way (with a formula) that is incredibly simple, but never cowardly or cheap.

Unforgivable Blackness struck me as on par with his best work. In Jack Johnson, Burns finds a microcosm of a stage of American stagnation. White bigotry, after being shaken by Johnson’s “outrageous” defiance, unquashable individualism, and undeniable supremacy in the sport of boxing, finally got to actualize its fantasy of his defeat . . . but in winning that battle it ended up losing the war. But it takes a portrayal of the man like the one Burns gives him to expose this. It was an ugly, ugly episode in our history. One in which, as the Jungians might say, the white man’s shadow rose up to land a stinging blow on the cheek of unconscious white prejudice. And, as always happens in the face of the shadow, the white man overreacted and proved with all available force that he himself is, in fact, the dark, raging animal, brutal, stupid, hateful, wrong.

Jack Johnson became the archetypal symbol for white fear of blacks in his time, the ultimate scapegoat for the evil of racial hatred, which had persisted beneath a shellac of pseudo-civilized posturing and political, “intellectual” rationalization. I’m not sure there was ever a more widely hated man in America. And it wasn’t just the whites who hated Johnson. The middle class blacks could be just as bad, just as intolerant . . . and in some ways, their attitudes toward Johnson were even more damaging to black consciousness at the time. Burns casts the two main black ideologies of the time as a conflict between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, who advocated approaches toward black consciousness that were more humble and compromising or more defiant and demanding of equality, respectively.

We don’t have any individuals in our society today that are so large or so dangerous (to the establishment) as Jack Johnson, but to look back on a time when a man could rise so high and do so in the face of horrendous oppression and hatred, to do this and come to mean so much . . . to his race, to the country, to individuality, and to humanity . . . casts some light on the American myth of the individual: the individual as the maker of American consciousness. Maybe this will never be possible again as the powerful become wiser and more adept at suffocating or marginalizing the voices of individual dissent, yet I think it should be looked on with a least a crumb or two of hopefulness. We are, each of us, responsible for making America. Our individuality is not just lonely, fruitless navel-gazing. We are not worthless when we defy or refuse to serve “the system”. Our country may be looking increasingly Orwellian, but ultimately, there is still a chance of keeping it from utter self-annihilation (and the annihilation of the rest of the world) by, first of all, being unpalatable, by thinking and evaluating individually, by seeing America and Americaness not as its cumulative material wealth or global might, but as the drama of its story of consciousness, as its characters and conflicts. The good story, the transformative story woven from American individuals, not the propaganda, not the PR of the wealthy elite.

As in any scenario where story is the “truest truth”, we need, desperately need, great storytellers, men and women who can take stock of all the characters and events and weave them into a narrative of consciousness by seeing the potential connections, comprehending their worth, and by staying vehemently opposed to pimping for some political force demanding partisanship. I think Ken Burns does that as well as anyone else I can think of. He is one of . . .maybe even the greatest American storyteller of our time, this time in which big stories, like the myths before them, have largely faded into the subconscious of the language, and agendas, party platforms, self-serving think tanks, and other rhetorics of power are defining all the words we use to think, to create ourselves, our own Americas, our consciousness.

3 comments:

kenrolston said...

Darn, Matt. That was just so well written I couldn't examine any of its propositions.

My response... an admittedly impatient and superficial one... is to:

a. go see some more Ken Burns documentaries [I've only seen THE CIVIL WAR, and though I admire it, I've read so much about the Civil War in my youth, and played so many epic simulation board games of the perido, that it seems a relatively small part of my file on the subject], and

b. think about your proposition about unswallowable American heroes. My instinct is to suspect that both its heroes and villains are unswallowable. It is probably my nature to find the humanity of society's villains as illuminating as the heroic figures of light. [See my comments on DOWNFALL.] Just as an example, I love Robert Caro's biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson, because Johnson strikes me an epic and homogeneous blend of hero and villain.

But your review is a fascinating and satisfying read. Thanks.

Matt said...

Thanks, Ken.

Of Burns’ epics, I found The Civil War least satisfying. My guess is that he was still hashing out his own vision while he was making it. But it takes on more significance (as a piece of art) when it can be seen as related to the two other epics in his trilogy: Baseball and Jazz.

I am not an “avid” professional baseball fan, but I used to play when I was younger, and I coached youth ball for about 5 years. But baseball was my first love, my first connection to the dramas and ecstasies of human conflict, theater, discipline, introspection, and spirituality. I decided to replace baseball with writing when I was 17, and the decision has haunted me ever since. Baseball is a more noble art than poetry . . . and much more holistic. It requires the whole being, whereas poetry is terribly specialized in the mentality it asks of its devotees.

Needless to say, I was a “thinking player” when I played. I pitched and caught: the two defensive positions where 99% of the defensive intelligence is concentrated. To me, baseball was a microcosm of my human condition, and it prefigured my approach to writing and thinking. In fact, I will now stop writing about baseball, because I fly off the handle entirely when I do (yes, even more than usual!).

If you are a baseball fan, Burn’s Baseball will (I think) come across like a religious experience for you. It is excellent, and I thought, much more entertaining than The Civil War. As good as some of the Civil War interviewees were, the Baseball ones are substantially better. Burns treatment wasn’t myopic by any means, but his interviewees bubble over with a profound nostalgia and love (and hate) of the sport that can ultimately only be accurately described as spiritual. To me, it was soul food . . . and I really need to watch it again, because I haven’t seen it for half a dozen years.

Jazz. As much better as the interviewees in Baseball were than those in The Civil War, The interviewees in Jazz are proportionally twice as good as the ones in Baseball. Wynton Marsalis is God’s gift to the documentary interviewer. He is a total one man band, and his energy drives the creation that Burns’ puts together. Some have felt this narrows the perspective in Jazz, and maybe that’s true . . . but damn if I didn’t like Marsalis. Marsalis is the key speaker, but Stanley Crouch gets a lot of screen time, and he is just as brilliant. He lays down some great phrasings and perspectives. There are some outtakes with extra interviews with Crouch on the DVD, and they are just as fascinating. Crouch also contributes a lot to Jack Johnson.

If I came away from Baseball feeling it was truly “God’s Game”, I came away from Jazz, not only enlightened about its history and eras, but with the feeling the Louis Armstrong was not a human being, but some avatar or angel. Again, other reviews I read felt Armstrong was over-emphasized, but I found Burns’ (and Marsalis and Crouch’s) argument for such royal treatment sound. Never, in the history of any art form, has one man had so much creative impact. The Burns’ “argument” or conceit is that Armstrong was the embodiment of Jazz.

And OH the music! I like jazz, and I tend to prefer jazz from bebop backward (which Jazz emphasizes most), but I am not an expert or an aficionado . . . merely a casual listener. I thought the music was fantastic. The music in Jack Johnson was also excellent . . . this is just another of those Ken Burns things executed so effectively and so simply.

But with Jazz (and also with Baseball), Burns sees his subject as one of the furnaces in which the American psyche is forged. Specifically, he focuses on black/white race issues (with great sympathy for Black struggle) and suggests that those moments in our national history when we sought to define ourselves were always moment of racial conflict that usually ended in integration or fusion. It strikes me as some of the smartest race theory I’ve come across. I’m not saying it doesn’t have its flaws or that it is some “grand truth” and not a fiction, a good story . . . but it seems to achieve a stance which transcends contemporary trends and partisan posturing.

Because Jazz is using the examination of the art’s development to tell a story about American consciousness, some Jazz nuts were put off. They wanted an academic study of the history of Jazz. But because the film is what it is, I think it achieves the status of art, itself. It is far more than an educational documentary, a history lesson.

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I agree with you about American villains being just as illuminating (of society) as heroes. Psychologically speaking, villains tend to speak to something unconsciously villainous in us . . . or rather, to activate that villainousness or focus it. Whereas heroes tend to activate our consciousness, villains activate our unconsciousness. They usually accomplish this by preying on our fears and selfish desires. I’m thinking of people like Hitler and W. They thrive on darkness, on ignorance in the populace, and they function as manifestations of the collective unconscious evils of their societies.

But I’m not sure that’s what you meant by villain. It’s hard for me to get my Jung-addled tongue to speak freely of the archetypal jargon it’s so accustomed to. But I think it’s also that, if pressed, I would say that I don’t believe in evil, per se . . . in a literally sense. For the sake of fiction making, yes, but not as a genuine natural force that can be scientifically observed and possibly quantified. I see fear, unconsciousness, and the lust for power or greed for wealth as literal . . . and they are evil (with evil used as an adjective). Evil as a noun . . . it’s just not analytical enough for my tastes. And those evils I just mentioned, to me they are compensations for the feeling of impotence. I wonder if the human relationship to power (under the patriarchal model) is the real root of all “evil.”

Certainly, the most fascinating characters are the ones who combine both light and dark qualities. Jack Johnson was not an angel, by any means. He was pigheaded and inconsiderate. He beat up women on at least a couple occasions. He was selfish and greedy. But, whereas these are not redeeming traits, the fact that he flaunted his carefree, greedy, pigheaded impulsiveness right in front of the noses of prejudiced whites was a tremendous and well-deserved slap in their faces. He reflected back all of their jaded sense of entitlement to them, and in doing so, made the double standard a huge neon sign. He was not a race leader, but his role (as unconscious actor and force of nature) in the theater of race relations was immense. It wasn’t his ideas that meant something to Black consciousness; it was his person, his life. He was a catalyst.

And yet, I got the feeling he was much more contradictory than he may have seemed. He was a very articulate man. Considering he was a mostly uneducated black man in the Jim Crow era, he was capable of both complex thought and eloquence . . . which I found to be such a shocking contrast to our professional athletes today (even those who are suppose to be college educated). It says a lot for the good old self-made (and self-educated) philosophy that used to be part of the American ideal . . . but has since fallen to the industrial push for a poorly-educated, mass-minded populace bred to ignore dissent and abhor rebellion.

And as for “figures of light”, well Jack Johnson was not one of those. He was definitely a figure of darkness (especially for whites of that era), a shadow figure. My jazzy talk about heroes likely disguises the fact that I hold both fools and devils in equally high esteem (or greater). These are all transformative archetypes, archetypes of consciousness. Fools are even less palatable than heroes.

We don’t live in a heroic era, though, so there’s no real use in talking about heroes. They are as strange to us as gods. We have idols and celebrities to fixate on . . . and none of them has an ounce of heroism. They are our sanctioned distractions, part of our miseducation, a legerdemain to dazzle the eyes while the magician’s hand pockets our 20 dollar bill. Heroes are dangerous, because they threaten change. Villains are only dangerous if they are autonomous, if they defy the powerful . . . in which case, they become heroic. Otherwise, the villains are the powerful. There seem to be plenty of these types in broad daylight these days . . . and they do frighten me, but they don’t fascinate me. What’s fascinating about them (in my opinion) is the impact they have on large groups of people . . . which is often inexplicable, like a mass hypnosis.

Sadly, people are always rushing to aid and advocate such villains, while, when heroes show their faces, people rush to destroy them. We are always hungry for scapegoats . . . and heroes can carry a lot of baggage. They make good mules for that bitterness and disgust we find too difficult to reconcile.

kenrolston said...

I think of 'hero' and 'villain' as masks... probably your Jungian archetypes... assumed by people and perceived by people. They have objective existence only in the sense that you can describe and classify their features.

I'm a relativist. The features and qualities of the masks change from culture to culture, from one age to the next.

A society''s 'hero' or 'villain' -- the extraordinary or dramatic character who rises above the background noise and becomes a rolemodel or behavior template -- is interesting for me in the mixture of the 'good' and 'evil' elements in their personality.

Why do masses come into the thrall of heroes and villains? because there's something interesting or compelling about them. And the difference between a hero and a villain may be in the perspicacity with which the affected crowds can anticipate whether they will like or dislike the consequences of using these extraordinary figures as models for behavior. Sometimes it takes a long time, and a lot of consequences to review, before we decide whether we have a hero or a villain. Sometimes we can never decide. Maybe we can be Very, Very Wrong for a long time before we review the consequences and regret our initial classifications of hero or villain.

There is no way i'm going to get away with a short post on this without being vague and incoherent. Suffice it to say... a stimulating topic, and an intriguing discussion.