So I did a couple of things for Juneteenth. Here's my theme paper.
First up is a remarkable Netflix film of which I wasn't previously aware -- See You Yesterday. Skip The Help and watch this.
See You Yesterday is Stephen Bristol's first feature film. He was a graduate student at New York University's film school when he wrote the initial script in 2014. The final version was produced by Spike Lee and debuted at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.
It is a time travel movie but something of an anomaly. Time travel is just a macguffin. It isn't what the film is about. It straddles multiple genres, with a central tragedy, a theme focused on the unintended consequences of new technology, and strong social conscience, it's more Black Mirror than Back to the Future.
Two science nerds from the Bronx High School of Science invent the machines. One of them, C.J.'s, older brother Calvin (the rapper Astro) runs afoul of a trigger-happy NYPD officer, who mistakes Calvin pulling a cell phone out of his pocket for a weapon and shoots him dead. C.J. and Sebastian travel back in time to try and save Calvin, leading to some unexpected, and seemingly unavoidable, consequences. Michael Fox, MS and all, puts in an appearance as one of their teachers. It was a while before I realized the only other white face in the film is the cop.
It is remarkably accomplished, especially for a first film and ends on an ambiguously sad and hopeful note. Well worth seeing.
The second thing is also a film of which I wasn't previously aware from a director of whom I wasn't previously aware. It is called Within Our Gates, and is the oldest surviving (silent) film from the genre once known as "race films," intended for black audiences, sometimes made by black directors.
It was Oscar Micheaux's second film. Micheaux was the first major African American filmmaker. Within Our Gates tells the story of a young black woman named Sylvia (Evelyn Preer) who travels north to raise money to build a school for rural black children in the Deep South. She finds love with a handsome doctor named V. Vivian (Charles D. Lucas) and eventually learns she is of mixed race; her father was the wealthy white landlord who had financed her education.
Film historians generally view Within Our Gates as a blistering response to D.W. Griffith's pro-Ku Klux Klan silent film The Birth of a Nation (1915), given its frank depiction of attempted rape and lynchings. In fact, the film had trouble gaining approval by Chicago's Board of Censors, largely because the city feared reigniting the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. Other cities also either blocked screenings or demanded certain scenes be cut. The controversy actually boosted interest in the film, which attracted fairly large audiences in Chicago.
Within Our Gates was presumed lost until the 1970s, when a single print was found in Spain with Spanish intertitles and a short middle sequence missing. The Library of Congress restored the film as close to the original as possible in 1993, including English intertitles and a frame summarizing what had happened in the missing sequence. You can watch the entire film online, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Finally, HBO.com is streaming its miniseries Watchmen for free this weekend. If you haven't watched it, watch it now. It is only 9 episodes. Marathon it. It is the best thing HBO has done in a while.
Watchmen is a show that could have gone spectacularly wrong. Who needed a spin-off of an iconic 1980s comic? In 2019, why exactly did we need to revisit Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins’ meditation on superheroes, violence, and Thatcherite England? But rather than rehashing the comic, or trying to go even darker or even grittier, showrunner Damon Lindelof (who apparently was the smarter of Lost's Abrams/Lindelof team) did two extraordinary things: he only used the comic as backstory, and he handed control of the show over to a diverse writers’ room, who reimagined the story from the ground up and transposed Moore and Gibbons’ anti-fascist story into a brooding look at police violence and white supremacy. The show went on to win a Peabody Award, which was accepted by Lindelof and star Regina King in a lovely remote acceptance speech (https://www.vulture.com/…/peabody-awards-watchmen-damon-lin…).
The show begins in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, then shifts to an alternate modern-day Tulsa, Oklahoma. Thirty years after an alien squid attack on New York City, people who were there still live with PTSD, and people who weren’t obsessively watch Steven Spielberg’s movie about it. Vietnam is the U.S.’ 51st state. News networks show footage of Dr. Manhattan, a radioactive naked blue anti-superhero who lives in all times at once, on Mars. There are phone booths where you can call him and talk into the void -- he doesn't answer.
A liberal presidential administration, headed by President Robert Redford, has mandated content warnings on all TV shows, and people are taught the truth about atrocities like the Tulsa Massacre. Masks are worn by police. Angela Abar/“Sister Night” (played by Regina King as the coolest mask of all time) investigates a case that seems tangled up in the Race Massacre, a terrorist plot, and possibly even Vietnamese freedom fighters. Meanwhile, a mysterious nobleman (Jeremy Irons) with ties to Dr. Manhattan, attempts to escape a country estate (but not really) that functions as his prison.
Louis Gossett, Jr. and Regina King turn in the performances of a lifetime. As does Don Johnson as an amiable cryptoracist, head of a mixed race family, and Jean Smart who, along with Legion, is proving that she is the designing woman with some serious acting chops.
If the show simply contented itself with being an incredible take on the superhero genre, that would be enough. Instead it turns into a powerful look at the fraught nature of Black genealogy, and the ways white supremacy and violence continues to shape the United States. It is absolutely essential viewing for anyone trying to live in this country in 2020.
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