Three Riffs on When the Levees Broke

#1

I loved Act 3 of Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. How did he make this material dramatic? The underlying fact is static: the city's in ruins. Rather than do the Ken Burns slide show of heaping piles of garbage, Spike Lee mixes up the standard documentary fare--talking heads in chiaroscuro lighting--with short stories about people going home or looking for family members or deciding to stay away or making music or burying loved ones. I'd heard about Kayne West before, and I'd heard about the guy telling Cheney to F himself, but I was still interested to see the footage for myself. What was most powerful for me, though, were the scenes of parents and children: the mom on a cell phone making first contact with her lost kids; that same mom reuniting with her kids in the airport; the man who breaks down in tears in the Houston convention center when he tries to talk about his nieces and nephews whom he has raised like a father; and the funeral for the little girl--Serena?--whose body was found months after the storm. I have been trying to think of what word fits the sound that Spike Lee records as the mom walks away from her 5-year-old daughter's grave. She is neither crying nor screaming. Wailing is not right either. Lamentation, perhaps. It is an archaic sound, a grief out of Greek tragedy. You'd need a heart of stone to listen to her with dry eyes.

#2

Because my kids have been watching High School Music a lot recently, I've been thinking about the representation of Black people in American media. The Blacks in HSM strike me as culturally white: they speak the crisp, Standard English of TV newsreaders, and they all engage in activities, like science contests and baking, that evoke the white America of the 1950s. I credit Disney with combating the negative stereotypes and vile caricatures of Black America so often recycled by the US media (often with the participation of Black gangsta celebrities); but they do so by implicitly endorsing the equally absurd stereotypes of white goodness and innocence.

I was thinking about this again today when we saw the short film "Children of the Storm." I jotted down the names of the kids interviewed: Queeneachia, Taaqua, Janique, and Hakira. (Okay, there was a kid with beautiful eyes named Donald, too.) These kids did not have much to say. It's different, or, we're going to stay somewhere else, or it was creepy. Their names--the impulse toward Africanist recovery or invention--and their inarticulateness reminded me constantly that I was watching and listening to Black kids who were poor and uneducated.

Then Spike Lee's movie comes on, which is supposed to be about how America abandoned a city full of poor Black folk. But most of the Blacks interviewed at length were extraordinarily well-educated and highly articulate. They provided the film's narrative drive. The things they had to say--a lawyer with a MBA talking about what it is like to lose everything, or a Harvard MD talking about post-traumatic stress disorder--were very persuasive. If I were Spike Lee, I would have used this footage, too. I can imagine him thinking about representation of race as he made this film. When educated white folk hear these educated Black folk talking, they can relate; they identify. But Lee's rhetorical success regarding race comes at the expense of class. It is as though he knows that poor people, white or black or brown, just don't count. We see pictures of them, but we don't hear much from them. If you want to sting the conscience of America--or at least that part of America with access to political power--tell a middle class story. This rhetorical choice is not really about appeal to conscience, but self-interest. You hear a Black journalist or lawyer talking, and you think, wow, this could happen to me. The middle-class conscience is closed to verbal style of poor people. This is not so much a criticism of Spike Lee as it is a critical comment on America's indifference to poor people's stories.

#3

I loved the music, the culture of New Orleans. Spike Lee tells a powerful story about creole popular culture. Perhaps the music, dance, and festivals are the narrative arts of the poor?

More later, maybe.