With trust in the media, in institutions, in each other at a depressing low, it’s important to know how we got here – and how to flip the script. Which is why I’ve compiled an eclectic “guide” to movies and more that have helped me make sense of our current moment, one in which the calculatedly-composed cultural narratives surrounding race, reporting, and policing have collided in the caught-on-camera murder of yet another unarmed African-American man. (And since racism should never be the burden of black and brown folks – it’s up to the people who built the system of inequality to participate in its dismantlement! – my following recommendations are also heavy on media-makers actively getting their own white hands dirty to right some deeply entrenched wrongs.)
Valuing Moral Clarity Over Objectivity
Yung Chang’s This Is Not a Movie
Long a thorn in the establishment’s side, veteran foreign correspondent Robert Fisk has spent the past four-decades-plus reporting “subjectively” from frontlines the world over, most notably in the Middle East. An Arabic speaker, who interviewed Osama bin Laden three times before 9/11, Fisk has forever served “on the side of the suffering,” political implications be damned. Unsurprisingly, this has caused the Beirut-based Brit to become a controversial, if highly respected, figure, labeled human-rights advocate and terrorist sympathizer alike.
Now in his seventies and still dodging bullets, both literally and figuratively, Fisk continues to file columns for The Independent (he left The Times soon after Murdoch purchased it) with a near-religious dedication. It’s a dedication perhaps matched only by Canadian documentarian Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze, China Heavyweight), who tags along with Fisk on his current reporting crusades — and in the process paints a revealing cinematic portrait of an uncompromising journo hellbent on exposing modern-day news’s (i.e., Murdoch’s) “fair and balanced” charade. As Fisk himself damningly puts it at one point in Chang’s riveting This Is Not a Movie, if he were covering the Nazi death camps he would not be seeking comment from the SS spokesman.
(Excerpted from the intro to my interview with Chang for Filmmaker magazine.)
Hollywood as Headhunter
Dan Taberski’s Running from COPS podcast
As addictive as the now thankfully canceled television show itself, Running from COPS is the brainchild of Dan Taberski, the talented oddball who brought us Missing Richard Simmons. It’s an illuminating peek behind the curtain of the infamous reality TV series, and the Faustian bargain struck between the show’s producers and the forces glowingly portrayed. One in which editorial control is relinquished for access to “real” life, and screen time granted to those most willing to sell a Dirty Harry image of policing. What the public has gotten in return is an engaging molotov cocktail that’s simultaneously served as a recruitment tool for the past three decades, thrown right at all the wrong potential men and women in blue.
Deescalation Harry as the New Dirty
Jennifer McShane’s Ernie & Joe: Crisis Cops
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at 2019’s SXSW and available on HBO, Jennifer McShane’s Ernie & Joe: Crisis Cops is an eye-opening look at the game-changing San Antonio Police Department’s Mental Health Unit through the daily activities of two of its humble leaders. It’s also a master class in policing done right.
At first glance, the partners-in-fighting-crime protagonists of the film’s title seem straight from Cops central casting — hetero white macho males, one a military vet. But McShane swiftly disabuses us of any preconceived notions we might have with her very first, quite shocking scene, one in which the unassuming heroes respond to a call to escort a distressed schizophrenic man from a government building. Rather than go in with guns blazing, the crisis cops do the exact opposite — casually chat with the man while calmly hanging back, ask him what’s wrong rather than telling him what he must do. In short order the two plain-clothed strangers have managed to firmly gain the hallucinating guy’s trust — enough that he just simply walks out the door with them. No handcuffs, let alone tasers, required. For Ernie and Joe are he-man poster boys for the radical idea that empathy is not only compatible, but necessary, when it comes to law enforcement.
(Excerpted from the intro to my interview with McShane for Filmmaker magazine.)
The Expendable Essential Worker
Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You
Since the start of the pandemic, underpaid Amazon delivery drivers – far too many of whom are people of color – have been transformed into “essential frontline workers.” And though Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, which debuted at Cannes in pre-pandemic 2019, follows the plight of one white British family in Newcastle, the story is unnervingly familiar to those in precarious financial straits on every shore. Scripted by Loach’s longtime collaborator Paul Laverty – who spent a good chunk of his career working with human-rights organizations in Latin America – and with a plot both simple and Sisyphean, the film is a searing cinematic indictment of the globalized gig economy.
Yet to recover from the 2008 financial crash, and with no living-wage opportunities in sight, working-class Ricky (Kris Hitchen) makes a life-changing decision to become a self-employed delivery driver. But buying a van to make the required deliveries means selling the old car that his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) uses to shuttle from client to client during her long shifts as a home healthcare worker. After much convincing Abbie finally relents, which leaves her to take the bus, resulting in ever longer hours; while Ricky rushes around town in the new vehicle he can’t afford, struggling with heavy packages, monitored for any tardiness that will inevitably result in a firehose of fines he’ll be unable to pay.
As the film plays out in a series of increasingly painful scenes, it soon becomes apparent that our new union-less economy is not one of mythic “be your own boss” independence but simply the freedom to live paycheck to dwindling paycheck, no happy ending in sight. Our current nightmare masquerading as the Amazon Dream. Only to be unmasked by COVID-19.
Solving the Caucasian Problem
Whitney Dow’s The Whiteness Project
Dow’s “interactive investigation into how Americans who identify as white, or partially white, understand and experience their race,” available online at whitenessproject.org, is comprised of an exhausting array of interviews with folks of all ages, across the nation and socioeconomic spectrum, paired with statistics that provide for a greater context. As Dow, a white cisgender male puts it in his mission statement, “After almost two decades of making films with my black producing partner, Marco Williams, I have come to believe that most whites, especially liberal whites, see themselves as outside the American racial paradigm – that their race is a passive attribute, as opposed to something that impacts almost every aspect of their lives. I believe this makes it difficult for many white people to empathize with people of other races and see their experiences as parallel to their own.”
A project that began during the hopeful days of the Obama Administration now feels more relevant than ever before.