On Seeing ‘Selma’ in the South
Ava DuVernay’s latest is a film worth fighting about
The AMC Elmwood Palace in Elmwood, La. is tucked behind a derelict Kmart approximately ten miles due west of New Orleans’ French Quarter, past the bend in the Mississippi River that creates the city’s distinctive crescent. Though its 20 screens allow for an occasional independent to hang on well beyond the usual shelf life — as of this writing, Boyhood is still showing daily at 11:25 a.m. — it is a typical suburban multiplex. The parking lot, paved in the days before the death of cinema, the mall, and the American Dream, appears barren even at the busiest of times. Blockbusters dominate. Matinee tickets cost $5.21. Overpriced popcorn, fountain soda, and candy beckon from the concession counter, and a six-seat bar named MacGuffin’s sulks in the corner, faintly ashamed. My point is that seeing Selma at the AMC Elmwood Palace in Elmwood, La. seemed an unremarkable way to spend a Tuesday evening in January, though you will probably have gathered by now that it turned out to be anything but.
As Selma begins, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo) is rehearsing a speech in the mirror. Preparing to accept the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, he fusses over his Ascot, concerned that it will send the wrong message to the civil rights movement’s rank-and-file. As his wife, Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), reassures him, director Ava DuVernay establishes in a few deft strokes the relationships that shape the narrative: between the Great Man and the woman whose own work enables his, between leaders and their communities, between oration and action, between violence and non-violence. Selma inhabits the space in which the individual and the collective meet, compromise, and sometimes clash. For every Martin Luther King, Jr. there is an Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey), braving the indignities of a poll test without the prospect of awards or accolades. For every milestone marked in our textbooks, there are hundreds of names we do not know and faces we do not see.
The structure of the film elucidates this conceit by pegging the narrative, which covers the eighteen-month period between the deadly bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in September, 1963 and the five-day, 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery in March, 1965, to a handful of King’s speeches. Alongside each electrifying moment at the pulpit, however, Selma depicts strategic planning sessions, scenes of civil disobedience and the state’s suppression thereof, meetings and phone calls among political leaders, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s malicious campaign to discredit King. Selma focuses on one small slice of a revolution many years in the making, but it does so with due respect to each constituent part in the machinery of change.
This tension, of dual and dueling forces, is at the heart of the “controversy” that has swirled around Selma almost since the moment of its release. (Grantland’s Mark Harris has written the most thorough account — and perhaps the most thorough debunking — of said controversy, which focuses on the portrayal of President Lyndon Johnson, played in the film by Tom Wilkinson.) Numerous observers have understandably bristled at the aspersions cast on Selma’s historical accuracy, or its near-absence from this year’s Oscar nominations, in part because the dismissal of the film seems to reflect the (white) establishment’s desire to demean, elide, or otherwise ignore social movements led by people of color, past and present. As Brittney Cooper writes at Salon, echoing others, the snubbing of Selma reflects a “white gaze” that either rests on the wrongheaded belief that we live in a “post-racial” society or, even worse, consciously seeks to defend the privileged few from any challenge by the marginalized many. Selma rightly appears, to several of the black writers I’ve read on the subject, yet another in the long line of black cultural artifacts misperceived or willfully misunderstood by white audiences used to having their narratives dominate the zeitgeist.
Claims and counterclaims aside — though I must say that seeing LBJ, and not Alabama Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth) or Dallas County, Ala. Sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston), as Selma’s “villain” is a grave, inexplicable misreading of the film — the fact that DuVernay’s treatment of events has elicited such vigorous reactions is the clearest evidence of its effectiveness. By contrast, The Imitation Game, which plays fast and loose with the life of British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), is far too cowardly and inane a portrait to merit an analogous response. Selma, at the very least, is a film worth fighting about.
And yet what struck me most forcefully, seeing Selma in the South — a white man studying the era of slavery in the city where Homer Plessy challenged racial segregation more than a century ago, a film critic purchasing a ticket at the multiplex with no plans to write a review, a citizen benefiting from the privilege of his race, class, and gender in a nation (still) plagued by police brutality and (still) borne up by grassroots organizing against it — was not the accuracy or the artistry of the images on screen, but the sights and sounds these images produced beyond the edges of the frame, the incidentals, as it were, that transformed an unremarkable Tuesday evening in January into anything but.
In my line of work, such quotidian details are often considered gauche, or perhaps superfluous. Critics are expected to set aside the incidentals to focus on the film itself, to navigate a path between the particular and the universal that is, if not objective, at least subjective in an analytical way. Despite the invective directed at the profession from fans, filmmakers, Oscar prognosticators, and, yes, critics themselves, most critics I know or read regularly come to their assessments honestly; emotion, experience, and personal taste shape the final product, of course, but more often than not these factors are held at arm’s length. I accept this as one of the rules of engagement, the bright line between criticism and mere opinion, but on occasion a film or television series tests my commitment to what’s often called “critical distance.”
Along these lines I wonder, for instance, if it’s possible to convey the surprise of seeing Selma without first mentioning the ordinariness of the AMC Elmwood Palace. I wonder if it’s necessary to add that I am 27 years old, born and raised in New England, still working through the complications of falling in love with a city whose history of racial injustice is inscribed in carriage houses and Congo Square, on bridges and street corners and broken levees. I wonder if I can explain Selma’s almost prayerful power without telling you that my fellow viewers, mostly older black men and women, punctuated the air with Amens, mmm-hmms, and yes-indeeds; without noting that a friend of mine brought her high school students to see the film and discovered them in tears as the lights in the theater came up; without acknowledging that the history Selma depicts continues to unspool in Ferguson, Mo. and Staten Island, N.Y., in Cleveland, Ohio and Oakland, Calif.
If I decide to forgo the incidentals, if I hew more closely to Selma as history and as art, do I risk forgetting that the film is also an immediate experience, one that may resist analysis? And if I forget the immediate experience, the emotional instincts and sentimental journeys that lend moving pictures so much of their seductive power, have I succeeded only in limiting the number of possible meanings that Selma may contain? Even if I could divorce myself from the particulars of the Tuesday evening in January on which I saw Selma, with an audience whose relationship to both the violence and the valor portrayed on screen is far closer than my own, does that mean I should?
Perhaps this hand-wringing is a function my own white gaze — my white guilt — but I would be lying if I did not say that seeing Selma, a film that is in my view both historically accurate and artistically sound, proved so affecting in the incidentals that neither point of contention much mattered in the stunned silence that filled the theater as the final credits rolled. I wiped my eyes and walked out to my car, leaning against the driver’s side door in the gentle chill of the Southern winter, convinced that the full weight of the experience could not be measured in lens length or running time, in box office receipts or Oscar nominations. Seeing, if only briefly, how others saw Selma was as important as seeing Selma itself.
In a film marked by more than one astonishing set piece — DuVernay’s depiction of “Bloody Sunday” on Selma’s Edmund Pettis Bridge, narrated by a white journalist filing his dispatch over the phone, marshals the intensity of an approaching tornado — the most rousing may be King’s address on the subject of voting rights, held in a church packed to the rafters with fervent supporters. As his voice rises to its quaking crescendo, the audience’s approving murmur becomes a shout, and then a roar:
“Those that have gone before us say, ‘No more!’”
“No more!”
“NO MORE!”
“NO MORE!”
“That means protest. That means march. That means disturb the peace. That means jail. That means risk. And that is hard. We will not wait any longer! Give us the vote! We’re not asking, we’re demanding! GIVE US THE VOTE!”
“GIVE US THE VOTE!”
I suspect the scene, shifting from King’s firm, impassioned expression to the rapt listeners in the pews, the camera pulling back from the individual to reveal the collective, would send a shiver of strong feeling down my spine no matter the circumstance, but in truth the moment mirrored my fellow viewers’ call-and-response engagement with Selma so closely that it suddenly seemed to be shot in three dimensions. This is, of course, thanks to DuVernay, who induced the echo in Elmwood by giving black activists a voice, yet it was the reverberation of Amens, mmm-hmms, and yes-indeeds that suggested just how squarely she hit her mark.
As any film critic or historian will tell you, facts are not the final product but the raw material: the craft comes in fashioning the evidence into an interpretation, an argument, that reaches out and grabs the reader living in the inescapable present by the scruff of his or her neck. Few historical films strive for, much less achieve, a similar effect, which is why seeing Selma turned out to be remarkable indeed. The film is ultimately an argument, an interpretation of the evidence, that prizes the alchemy of the shared endeavor while recognizing the role of leadership in shaping and directing political conviction — and that prizes, by extension, the deeply moving experience of seeing it in a cinema, the alchemy of other perspectives, while recognizing that we all bring to any film the particulars that make us us. To focus on accuracy or artistry is to lose sight of the affective power of the incidentals, which as it happens are not so incidental after all.
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