When it came to people of color making better lives for themselves, Ava Duvernay, the director of Selma, was not “interested in making a white-savior movie”.  DuVernay did start her film, which centers on Martin Luther King’s role in the historic 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, by focusing on girlhood, opening with the death of four black girls who were blown up at 16th Street Baptist Church. The scene is a lyrically haunting nightmare of the disregard for the worth of black lives. Yet while it sets in motion the urgency that Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Lewis and others feel as they fight for black lives over the next two hours, it is never a revenge film. (American Sniper is similarly set in motion by acts of terrorism, but quickly devolves into a orgiastically pornographic revenge fantasy, waged against the wrong enemy to boot.)  Related: Boyhood, Selma and American Sniper: race meets masculinity on film – part one  Disappointingly, given it is one of the few feature films to be directed by a woman in any given year, Selma moves away from those girls and on to the men for the bulk of the film. Manhood – as it also is in American Sniper – is constructed in Selma largely in the absence of women, save for the frozen-out wife. Except for a supporting role from Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King, and an even smaller role for Oprah Winfrey as Annie Lee Cooper, Selma takes us to the civil rights domain of straight men. Coretta doesn’t get the credit she deserves, and Bayard Rustin – the openly gay co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, played by Ruben Santiago-Hudson – is kept well on the sidelines, as he often was in real life.  With these caveats, DuVernay’s portrayal of black manhood – usually given short shrift by Hollywood – is still rich and deep. David Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King is not an American man or even an African American man, but a black man. Much of Selma’s criticism, I’m convinced, flows from the film’s unabashed blackness: we in America are used to seeing the sanitized King, the neutered King, the palatable King marketed to white consumers who can be trotted out once a year without defending or even recognizing blackness.  Even conservatives embrace the “color-blind” King in 2015, who is allegedly proof that racial oppression is over. A powerful, challenging King is at odds with a Hollywood tradition of rewarding black actors to play “subservient” roles, as Oyelowo (who was snubbed for an Oscar nomination) recently pointed out, noting how long it has taken for MLK to be filmed as “the center of his own narrative”.  The King who has familiarly resided in the American imagination has done so in a way which renders him so powerless, he is mostly a boy.  My late father hated the word “boy”, for it was used to degrade him by white men in power well into his adult life. I couldn’t even say “Oh boy” as a child without risking a lecture about what “boy” meant and what the importance of being a man was. My dad imparted in me an idea of being a man which wasn’t reliant upon the binary of male-female socialsexual power, nor even of being necessarily “masculine” (a term I’d suffer with much more in trying to date gay men as an adult). Rather, my dad tried to give me a sense of embodying manhood – of being a black man – which I recognized when I interviewed Memphis sanitation workers who marched with King shortly before his murder and proclaimed “I Am A Man.” It is a call to manhood which artist Glenn Ligon incorporates into his work, a declaration of manhood which Ossie Davis used to eulogize Malcolm X, a declaration of manhood aroused in Ferguson in response to the assault on black male bodies to this day.  Selma presents such an assertive black manhood, which is the very opposite, in many ways, of Linklater’s white boyhood and Eastwood’s obsessively defensive innocent white manhood. Counter to common black tropes typically recycled in Hollywood (as identified in Donald Bogle’s excellent book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks), Oyelowo’s King is a black man in full. He is sexual and not a neutered saint, his marital affairs acknowledged with a refreshing frankness. Personally, he has many doubts (including of white politicians). Professionally, he is assertive and pragmatic, utilizing radical non-violent resistance as an offensive strategy and not, as oft portrayed a half century later, out of passivity and defensiveness. He butts heads figuratively and literally with white men.  Selma’s MLK is black as hell, viewed in a segregated black world through a black lens. Bradford Young, Selma’s black cinematographer who also shot 2011’s Pariah, was educated at Howard University. There, like director (and one time Spike Lee cinematographer) Ernest Dickerson, his “training was geared toward exposing my community”. This training comes through in Selma’s rich hues and deep browns – so much so that the film could almost be watched with the sound off.  Young’s photography works in concert with DuVernay’s vision and a largely British cast led by Oleyowo, who collectively portray MLK as a black man more than as an American. Selma inhabits a space which acknowledges that blackness existed before the United States and is more enduring than any nation state will ever be. As I’ve recently learned from my black British colleagues – and from Paul Gilroy’s academic game changer The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness – there is a black identity which supersedes being black in any one country. It transcends the American descendant of slaves in Brooklyn identifying simply as an American citizen, and the child of Jamaican immigrants in Brixton identifying merely as an English subject.  Blackness connects “the shipped” black people who are moved across borders – whether they have traveled willingly or forcefully – from Africa to South America, Europe to North America. It isn’t particularly concerned with Americanness, certainly not as much as it is reckons with how blackness requires a “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” in any nation, as W E B DuBois first described it in The Souls of Black Folk more than a century ago.  Selma’s international cast and crew placed MLK’s manhood within this type of world blackness and not in relation to American whiteness. This, I am convinced, is largely behind the brouhaha over Selma’s “historical inaccuracies”, which is so hysterically out of proportion, rightwing websites are actually defending the honor of President Lyndon Johnson. As a historian myself, I hardly dismiss LBJ’s role in civil rights history out of hand. I have been oddly fascinated by LBJ since I was a teenager, and I’ve read more books on him than on any other president. (Indeed, this is a stack of Johnson biographies next to my bed, topped by a vase of LBJ’s face.) I’m well aware of discrepancies between certain historical accounts of LBJ and the Selma script, and may have some made different choices myself than DuVerney and British screenwriter Paul Webb.  But as a trained film-maker, I know Hollywood is not the go to place for factual history. Films are fantasies which must be read. Even still, for all of Maureen Dowd’s angst, DuVernay gets the spirit of LBJ as a simultaneous force for and against civil rights progress pretty much spot on.  In Selma, both MLK and LBJ must be read as characters who elucidate certain truths about their eras and audiences in 1965 and 2015. As a character in Selma, LBJ performs the role of obdurate-cum-helpful ally, a function most white ally politicians in the 1960s (including LBJ himself much of the time) performed. There is nothing false in Selma about the essence of that. True, LBJ strong-armed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Congress. He was also deeply invested in maintaining his own power, and would refer to civil rights legislation as “the nigger bill”, and said, before sending Thurgood Marshall to the US supreme court: “When I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”  DuVernay felt no need to portray LBJ as the American negro’s savior; instead, she made a film about a black man’s battle against white supremacy. LBJ’s defense merely meant that Selma was being held to a higher standard for “historical accuracy” than, say, the film Exodus was, with its all-white cast set in ancient Egypt. Since the poll tax, black American citizens have become somewhat used to being held to different and more rigorous standard, even when they are presenting something essentially honest. Fantasies which reinforce white supremacy – ie that all important people in history must have been white, whether they obtained the vote in the American south or ruled over ancient Egypt or are worthy of a three-hour film about their childhood – rarely face any such scrutiny.  A film held to virtually little standard for “historical accuracy”, comparatively speaking, was American Sniper, which this newspaper gave a historical grade of D-minus. Selma has thus far only recouped about $30m of its $40m budget, while American Sniper attacked the box office as bombastically as Chief Petty Officer Chris Kyle picked off 160 people.  Morbidly, it says a great deal about the US that American Sniper opened its assault on moviegoers on Martin Luther King weekend – who was himself murdered by a sniper – by shattering records with the highest grossing opening weekend ever in the month of January (and the highest opening weekend of octogenarian Eastwood’s entire career).  In American Sniper, Kyle completes four tours of duty in Iraq to allegedly become the most “successful” sniper in American history. Cooper’s eyes are pretty to look at, and if you don’t mind children being hunted in a rifle’s sights, it’s a rather entertaining movie. I did not hate it as much as liberal friends of mine who haven’t seen it (and who assumed I would detest it), nor did I find it to be “almost too dumb to criticize” or even entirely simplistic. It is not a stupid movie as much as it is a manipulative movie which needs to be read very carefully in order to subvert its slick and well constructed messages.  Of course the historical accuracy of Eastwood’s Kyle hasn’t been challenged as vociferously as DuVernay’s LBJ’s was. Kyle’s estate may have had to settle for character defamation, but his story is so familiar in the American canon that it needn’t be questioned: he is the prototypical protective white man who saves American innocents from savagery. Kyle – who called any Iraqi in his path overseas a “savage” much more often in real life than in Cooper’s rendition – portrays a type of American manhood that is instantly recognizable in the United States. American history, fictional and imagined, is rife with such white men ostensibly protecting women and children (not to mention enlightenment and freedom) from “savages”.  Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan (the actor and the president), the Lone Ranger, Pa from Little House on the Prairie, Buffalo Bill, Joe the Plumber: Americans immediately know, and rarely challenge the authority of, heroes like Kyle – our rugged white men whose manifest destiny is to stand as the last line of defense between civilization and barbarism.  Kyle, a drifter, is portrayed in American Sniper as being innocently called to history to become a Navy Seal when he sees the US embassy bombings on TV (though in real life, “These had nothing to do with his decision.”) But his manhood really comes into focus as the white savior who comforts his woman, Sienna Miller, as the Twin Towers fall. Kyle then embodies exactly the kind of patriarchal manhood Susan Faludi examines in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America, a type of manhood which worries if “a feminized nation have the will to fight?” To Faludi:  The problem, according to the opinion makers from Fox News, the Weekly Standard, National Review, and the many right-wing-financed think tanks who seemed to be on endless rotation on the political talk shows after 9/11, was simple: the baleful feminist influence had turned us into a ‘nanny state.’ In the wake of 9/11, a battle needed to be waged between the forces of besieged masculinity and the nursemaids of overweening womanhood – or, rather, the ‘vultures’ in the ‘Sisterhood of Grief.’  So after 9/11, naturally, Kyle kisses his new bride goodbye and the American sniper is off to Iraq to defend her honor.  This is perhaps the most dangerous message of the movie, for it reinforces the lie that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Here, being able to read cinema is crucial, for Eastwood’s message is certainly not to be critical of this seamless equivocation. Still, there were many soldiers like Kyle who signed up for war and paid a steep price, based on a lie perpetuated by American politicians (and still employed journalists). I did find it interesting to see a soldier’s narrative of that conundrum play out. But Eastwood does not encourage speculation about the lie which led Kyle to Iraq, and I doubt the hordes who have flocked to American Sniper were much interested in it, either; they’ve proven far more apt to interpret the film as a misguided call to Islamophobia.  American Sniper does not pin the shitshow of violence upon the central lie it perpetuates, which led to the deaths of more than a hundred thousand people, only a small fraction of which were Kyle’s comrades in arms. The film is more of an opportunity for Cooper, with his seductive eyes and recently spornosexual body, to prove his manhood as Kyle shoots “savages” and protects the woman on his cellphone some 7,000 miles away. Mind you, these Iraqi “savages” are at home in a country Kyle’s government invaded under false pretenses. Kyle and his buddies break into home after home in ways Floridians (or citizens of the 20-odd American states with stand-your-ground laws) would never tolerate from a domestic intruder, let alone a foreign invader.  But Iraq is a colony ripe for perfectly innocent exploitation in American Sniper. Kyle, inexplicably, is supposed to remain an innocent in this equation, reifying a phenomena Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe in their book The Undercommons which is meant to elicit our ire at the natives and sympathy for the invaders:  In Michael Parenti’s classic anti-imperial analysis of Hollywood movies, he points to the “upside-down” way that the “make-believe media” portrays colonial settlement. In films like Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) or Shaka Zulu (1987), the settler is portrayed as surrounded by “natives”, inverting, in Parenti’s view, the role of aggressor so that colonialism is made to look like self-defense. Indeed, aggression and self-defense are reversed in these movies.  What Eastwood is doing here; quite simply, is remaking the American western in Iraq; it’s an inverted, but familiar, world where white men aggressively steal from brown folk, then rush to “defend” their own women and children. American Sniper flirts with examining violence and how it transforms Kyle the boy into a man who earns his living by blowing off strangers’ heads in a strange land. Eastwood initially connects the violence of hunting and bullying as formative to a sniper’s development. He even dangles the possibility of book ending his film this way, showing a shell-shocked Kyle teaching his son to hunt in the movie’s final moments. But then Eastwood chickens out and doesn’t dramatize the most interesting irony of Kyle’s life: that he was shot dead in a shooting range by another Iraq war vet. Unable to bear showing our hero killed (at the hands of another vet who also never had any business going to Iraq), after we’ve watched him kill for two hours, Eastwood reduces Kyle’s death to a title card, ending the movie with video footage of jingoistic crowds praising Kyle’s corpse.  The only philosophical questions and moral dilemmas American Sniper ultimately seems interested in concern how the innocence of white manhood can be protected, and how it can be harmed by violence done to (but not by) it. Kyle does reflect upon the morality of what he’s doing, but it’s a worry couched in how his sense of his own honor and innocence may be impacted; it is not invested in the cost to those he is killing. For Iraqis I imagine watching American Sniper would be like black Americans watching a film about Darren Wilson which focused on his anguish and showed nothing more of Michael Brown than a Hollywood rendition of cops indiscriminately killing anonymous black youth.  Considering these films together, and how they’ve been received by the American people, can give us a sense about why American manhood is constructed so often while denying the influences of feminism and queerness (or even acknowledging the presence of women at all). We can also glean clues as to why America continues to be a nation where black and brown boys and men are so feared that we are disproportionately killed, arrested, convicted and unemployed.  Does American Sniper explain why Craig Stephen Hicks killed three Muslim students in North Carolina? No. But does the nation’s reaction to American Sniper help understand why news outlets downplay the triple murders of Deah Barakat, Yuso Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha as “just” over a parking dispute, and not as a mass murder? Or to explain why Hicks’ mortal violence will never cast suspicion of terrorism upon white men, while media tycoons and legislators expect all Muslims to accept blame for foreign terrorists? You betcha.  For even in their precious boyhood, white American males have access to the innocence of habeas corpus that their young black and brown brothers simply do not. So it’s really no surprise that American Sniper, a tale of a white American man celebrated for using his gun to kill scores of people of color, was a commercial American hit while Selma was a relative dud. Nothing can temper Americans’ appetite for armed white men: not threats on the life of Anita Sarkeesian, not pleas for peace by MLK after four girls were blown up, not 168 people exploding in Oklahoma.  Much more so than Selma’s dream of pacifist, transnational blackness, American Sniper is a perfect fantasy for our current conception of manhood in the United States, a nation where violence against women is too often dismissed; where violence by individuals in ethnic groups swiftly casts aspersions on all its members; and yet, where no number of mass shootings by white men – waged in movie theaters, elementary schools, neighborhood congressional meet-ups, or sovereign countries – will ever allow white manhood to be seen as anything but as innocent and pure as young Mason heading off to college at the end of Boyhood.
In the second part of analysis of the role of race in three of this year’s most celebrated films, Steven W Thrasher focuses on Selma and American Sniper