A Racial Metamorphosis, Charlie Kaufman's Regret, and Class Warfare - My Week in Movies 1/23-1/29 (Part 1)
Finally, I got one done on time! Sort of. Had to split this one up because I ran through too many movies this week and already wrote too much. Part Two coming tomorrow! (1/23/21 - 1/29/21)
As always, add me on Letterboxd to see what I'm up to. Enjoy!
Watermelon Man (1970)
Director: Melvin Van Peebles
Writer: Herman Raucher
Cinematography: W. Wallace Kelley
Music: Melvin Van Peebles
A year before Melvin Van Peebles ditched the studio system to write, direct, soundtrack, and star in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and establish himself as the definition of an auteur, he directed Watermelon Man. He also composed the soundtrack and made a key suggestion that certainly saved it from the “bad-taste curiosities” dustbin.
You see, it’s a movie in which a bigoted white insurance salesman wakes up in the middle of the night and discovers that he’s now black. “We need a black director for this one,” said various studio heads at Columbia Pictures, “but let’s cast Jack Lemmon or Alan Arkin as the lead!” Van Peebles suggested they go in the opposite racial direction and cast Godfrey Cambridge, a black comedian, as the insufferable Jeff Gerber. That way, instead of a white actor performing 90% of the film in Blackface, you get a black actor performing 10% of the film in Whiteface. Can you imagine how this movie would have aged had they ignored his advice?
The quintessential cracker Jeff suddenly finds himself on the receiving end of racist incidents small and large. His regular morning run to catch the bus turns into a frenzied chase sequence as white people see a black man running with a suitcase and assume he stole it. Only the insistence of The Bus Driver (D’Urville Martin) that Jeff was running for the bus saves him from the mob and the cops.
Two points really surprised me about this film: 1) how much advantage it takes of its central premise, and 2) how nasty the depiction of racism is. In its trim 100 minute runtime, scene after scene is set up to show how a black man would be ejected from the white man’s domain. Be it the country clubs he used to frequent, the neighbors he used to barbecue with, and even his “liberal to a point” wife Althea (Estelle Parsons), they just don’t want him there. Even the “acceptance” of black men is taken to task. For example, his boss sees an opportunity in Jeff’s sudden blackness, pointing out that he can get their firm into their neighborhoods and open up a whole new clientele. A beautiful coworker who barely tolerated White Jeff goes to bed with Black Jeff. Initially excited, he realizes that he’s not much more than a participant in her racial fetish. If they still want you around, it’s only because they wanna use you.
I enjoyed seeing Manton Moreland as the waiter who treats White Jeff as God’s Gift to Earth while treating Black Jeff like dirt. As one of the few black actors “allowed” to be in major Hollywood pictures during the ’30s and ’40s, he was generally given the type of roles you’d expect the racial attitudes of the day would offer. The about-face he does with Jeff is a clever comment on that. Plus, he’s just a genuinely gifted and hilarious performer.
—Spoilers Follow—
From what I understand, the screenwriter and Studio wanted Watermelon Man to end with Jeff waking up white. “It was all a dream!” Again, Van Peebles stepped in and said he’d shoot two endings but only ever shot the one that made it to the screen. It’s a powerful call to black empowerment as Jeff sets up his own insurance agency to serve the community his boss wanted him to rip off. He accepts and embraces his new identity by building a black-owned business, hanging around in black clubs, and generally giving up on the whiteness he once cherished. The message here is a complex one, as it argues clearly that race is a social construct only defined by skin color and existing prejudices. But at the same time, it depicts Jeff totally abandoning his “white life” and any attempt at bridging the gap between races.
The film ends with an unambiguous call for Black Militancy as he and a large group of black men train in martial arts. What began as a sitcom and satire ends as a rallying cry.
NOTE: Beyond racial commentary, this film was a revelation to me for another reason: it is the source of a sample in the outro of “Deep Fried Frenz” by the late greatest rapper of all time, MF DOOM.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Writer: Charlie Kaufman, Iain Reid
Cinematography: Łukasz Żal
Music: Jay Wadley
Ever since I discovered Charlie Kaufman back in high school, I’ve been a huge fan. His work is deeply self-obsessed and preoccupied with the inner machinations of our minds. His most well-known movie (written by Kaufman but directed by Michel Gondry), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), asked the viewer to consider whether they’d be better off if they could just wipe out their most painful memories. His directorial debut and a film I plan to write a much longer piece about soon, Synecdoche, New York (2008), depicted a man so obsessed with expressing truthful humanity on stage that he ends up creating an entire world built out of every memory he’s had.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is Kaufman’s third shot at the whole writer/director thing and is a remarkable achievement. This is a painful movie. A story about “what could have been.” I’m going to be brief here because I encourage you to see this for yourself, really absorb it, and reflect on your life. As I watched the credits roll, I felt as though I needed to take the film's lessons to heart. Thoughtlessness, overthinking, fear of aging and fear of sharing your true feelings are warned against, and I believe Kaufman is calling upon his audience to give themselves to others without fear of judgment.
Aging, change, and death is inevitable. So don’t worry about it too much. Be honest with each other before it’s too late.
Tout Va Bien (1972)
Director: Jean Luc-Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin
Writer: Jean Luc-Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin
Cinematography: Armand Marco
Music: Paul Beuscher
I fear that this and the next three entries will expose me as a fraud. You see, I’ve only ever seen one other Godard film, Goodbye To Language (2014), which utterly baffled my College Freshman brain that still considered Trainspotting (1996) to be cutting edge.
Tout Va Bien, or Everything’s All Right for us philistines, follows American reporter Suzanne (Jane Fonda) and her former-radical-filmmaker-turned-commercial-director husband Jacques (Yves Montand) on a visit to a sausage factory. Against their Union Bosses' dictates, the workers have imprisoned the manager (Vittorio Caprioli) in his office and are staging their own strike/micro-revolution. Suzanne and Jacques are soon trapped inside with him. Management, workers, union reps, and the central couple deliver interview-style monologues straight into the camera and say what you’d expect them to say. “Class warfare is over,” says the manager, “we’re in a new era of class collaboration, you see, and we're happy to work with Union Reps!” “The work is disgusting,” the workers agree, “we’re treated like machines, and we won’t put up with this shit under these conditions or for this pay!” The Union Rep says, “we’ve been in negotiations for quite some time to improve conditions, and conditions will be improved through decisive action on the part of the Union! These troublemakers have set us back and are totally counterproductive.”
In these ways, Tout Va Bien reminds me of the 1978 Paul Schrader film Blue Collar. You’ve got the bosses screwing over fed up workers who complain to a union that promises action but collaborates with management instead. This story crosses the Atlantic, apparently. But Godard and Gorin’s film takes place in the shadow of “May ‘68”, a moment in which strikes and demonstrations brought France's industrial powers to a standstill and seemed to offer true revolutionary potential. This inspired Godard’s “Revolutionary Period,” in which he wanted to be “making political films politically.” Using Brechtian techniques, seen immediately as the film opens with Godard signing checks for the various components necessary to make a film (including international stars Jane Fonda and Yves Montand) while discussing the basic plot outline of a compelling narrative. Then the dollhouse-like set, evocative of the elaborate home constructed for The Ladies Man (1961), helps remind the viewer that they are watching a film.
The idea was to surprise viewers and shock them out of complacency. To detail class struggle as it stood four years after 1968, and the picture painted is not pretty. Talk of class collaboration abounds while the workers are no better off, and what’s more, they’re tired of telling the same old story. One character explains that he doesn’t want the American journalist to talk about how disgusting the factories are, how hard the work is, how they get treated badly. That story has been told. He wants the public to hear about how the Manager gets locked out of the administrative restroom and is given a timed break to relieve himself, which he fails to do. This humiliation of the bourgeoise, or at least their most loyal servants, could put the complacent middle-class American/Frenchman into the workers’ shoes via the Manager.
What is this film trying to say? I suppose it is simply a class struggle portrait and an argument that it is not and will never be obsolete. Montand’s character gave up the fight to make commercials but cannot regain the feeling of May ‘68, as Fonda demonstrates with a jarringly explicit sexual allusion. She herself cannot bring herself to even read her own words on the radio as she is so fully distanced from the struggle. Once radicals, now locked up with the manager.
The ending sequence of civil unrest and a spontaneous riot at a market implies a belief that revolution will come, it’s just hard to say when. As for the effectiveness of cinema as a revolutionary medium, I must confess I’m a skeptic. While I’ve been personally challenged and deeply affected by films, I can’t say they’ve ever changed my worldview as fundamentally as Godard-Gorin seek to do. But, if you’re on the same page or just open-minded, Tout Va Bien is a fantastically inventive and enjoyable project.
END OF PART ONE. Tomorrow, I’ll be posting about Persona, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, On The Waterfront, and more!