In depicting racial unrest, these films do the right thing
Gil Scott Heron once told us the revolution will not be televised, but it’s increasingly clear that the seismic shifts in our view of racism and protest are tied to the moving image. If we had merely heard about the gruesome death of George Floyd, rather than seen the footage with our own eyes, it might be easier for authorities to sweep it under the rug with other instances of police brutality. Going back further, there’s no trial, no miscarriage of justice and no Los Angeles riots if an amateur cameraman named George Holliday doesn’t capture the Rodney King beating on video.
Then we have the actual movies, the ones we used to go out to see at the theater before the age of social distancing. Filmmakers have been dramatizing racist violence nearly since the birth of the medium, sometimes, sickeningly, with admiration (“Birth of a Nation”), more recently as a call to protest and action.
It’s hard to believe, but 31 years have already passed since moviegoers debated whether Mookie did the right thing when he hurled that garbage can through the window of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. Like those of us watching “Do the Right Thing” (available on Amazon Prime), he had just watched in horror as overzealous cops killed Radio Raheem with the infamous chokehold. He heard the onlookers shout the names of other then recent victims of police brutality — Eleanor Bumpers, Michael Stewart — and he could no longer hold his peace.
Once so controversial, the burning of Sal’s now seems almost quaint: an uprising with but one building destroyed. But Spike Lee’s masterpiece was always about more than a riot. In dramatizing the tensions of a sizzling-hot day in a single Brooklyn neighborhood, “DTRT” is painstakingly specific yet archetypal in its vision of racism. Unfortunately, it holds up extremely well.
From the East Coast of 1989 we move to the West Coast of 1992, where a lot more than one building went up in flames. The 2017 documentary “LA92” finds its roots in the Watts riots of 1965, in which 34 people, 29 of them black, were killed over six days. Technically, it started with a traffic stop, but the true cause was a more virulent form of the police racism that continues today.
In “LA92” (Amazon Prime, Netflix), we get to hear infamous Los Angeles PoliceChief William H. Parker from 1965 refer to black rioters as “monkeys in the zoo.” Fast-forward to 1992 and LAPD officer Laurence Powell described a domestic dispute between a black couple as “right out of ‘Gorillas in the Mist.’ ” This was right before Powell and three of his colleagues beat motorist Rodney king within an inch of his life. You probably know the rest. The officers were acquitted by an almost all-white jury in almost all-white Simi Valley. And Los Angeles burned anew. By the time it was over, 63 were dead.
“LA92” does away with narration and relies on footage and historical context. Some of that footage is jarringly fresh: Thirteen days after the King beating, 15-yearold Latasha Harlins was shot in the back of the head by Korean liquorstore owner Soon Ja Du over a bottle of orange juice. Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter; she did no time. Rage over the grisly security-camera footage of the Harlins shooting, coupled with the outrageous verdict, went a long way toward setting off the King riots, and damage inflicted on Los Angeles’ Koreatown.
Other examples abound. In “Detroit” (2017, Amazon Prime), Kathryn Bigelow pulls back to re-create the bloodiest uprising of the long, hot summer of 1967 but also the infamous Algiers Motel incident, in which a riot task force tormented a group of unarmed black and white civilians, leaving three young black men dead. “Fruitvale Station” (2013, Amazon Prime) dramatizes the last day in the life of 22-year-old Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan), who was killed by transit police in Oakland, Calif., in the early hours of New Year’s
Eve 2009. Like George Floyd, Grant’s killing was captured on video.
History repeats itself, whether the cameras are running or not.
But seeing, as they say, is believing. Film, be it on-the-scene cellphone footage or a polished historical drama, enhances our knowledge of the country’s racist past in hopes that the future might be different.