A Few Ideas on Sorry To Bother You

This isn't a full blog post but a series of small ones about individual points of directorial decision in STBY. Here goes:

Racial Makeup of WorryFree: We know WorryFree's advertisements and "tours" don't give the full story. Every ad they had (minus one or two, maybe?) featured smiling white people, not black people given no choice. Despite their claims of being a choice, WorryFree really ends up being a last resort. (Anyone with plural brain cells kind of realizes that they'd rather live freely if given the option.) Cassius' uncle is a perfect example: going bankrupt leaves him limited options, and he would choose WorryFree over jail or homelessness. In this way, WorryFree is likely a blacker institution, as African-Americans are statistically far poorer than other races. But of course, the advertising doesn't paint itself as a last resort, so it shows off white people who chose to be there.

Activator as cocaine: We discussed this briefly in class, and it reminds me a lot of a scene in the music video for Public Enemy's Night Of The Living Baseheads. In the scene (2:19, but also check out the rest of the video because it's great) the reporter looking for "baseheads" (that is, crackheads, people addicted to crack) bursts into a wall street office and finds well-dressed white executives doing lines of cocaine. In a sense, these people are the same as the crack-afflicted "baseheads" in black communities. The only difference is the form of the cocaine. As for why it's in a spiral, or why Lift snorts a line two or three feet long: I think those are just one-off gags for cartoonish effect. This movie has a lot of those. I wonder how the WorryFree people are given the cocaine? I feel like I would be suspicious if I was in this forced commune and was offered cocaine. I worry about the internal systems of WorryFree in general though.

Why Horses? and are all the horse people black? We had a very limited pool of horse-people to choose from, but several were black. And with Riley's political commentary throughout this movie, it makes sense that they would be. A few details lend themselves to this theory: First, as Mitchell said, capital gain has been made off the backs of black men for a very long time. You could also say that capital gain has been made off the backs of horses for a very long time. You could also say that black men have been worked like horses to create capital gain for a long time. The connection makes sense. Another thing: black men have been stereotyped to be bigger and stronger than white men. Horses are strong animals. It also makes sense to turn your workers into the strongest animal possible. As for the horse-people we met, there's a higher possibility they were black simply due to the fact that more people at WorryFree are black (see my first paragraph). It's implied that many of them are black due to the fact that Cassius (a black man) is chosen to be their "Martin Luther King Jr," another black man. Why couldn't he be their Ghandi, or their Emma Goldman (besides the fact that MLK is the most recent, popular example of nonviolent peace leader for oppressed group)?

The VIP Room: Remember near the beginning of the movie when Cassius sees the VIP room in the bar, Salvatore tells him the password (which he knows for some reason), and he goes in only to be elbowed and splashed and not enjoy it at all? Yeah, I still don't know what that was about. Maybe "people not at the top get pushed around in areas of prestige"? Maybe a quasi-dream sequence representing his anxiety about his low-paying position? That's a big question I still have about this movie. Also Squeeze. What's Squeeze's deal??

Complete and total Colorblindness at all-white (minus a few) Mestizo Mulatto Mongrel Elementary

One of my favorite riffs in White Boy Shuffle is the one on colorblindness. Starting on page 29, Gunnar describes his early experiences as the sole "cool black guy" (as he calls himself and, later, the doctor calls him) at his self-proclaimed "multicultural" school. The hypocrisy and sarcasm drip here, from the school's name (three alliterative terms for individuals of, respectively, latino/native american, black/white, and canine heritage) to the homophonic Ms. Cegeny (obviously a reference to miscegeny, prohibition of interracial marriage) who wears a shirt that labels people of all races "human." Beatty's own opinions on this stuff are pretty clear, and I liked picking through the paragraphs to find his concise rebuttals.

First off: A piece of "multiculturalist propaganda" hangs above the blackboard in Ms. Cegeny's room. It reads: "Eracism -- The sun doesn't care what color you are." The class then begins to learn about "Fun with Sunshine and Thermodynamics." "Dark colors ... such as ... black absorb sunlight ... and light colors ... such as ... white reflect sunlight." It's all well and good to say color doesn't matter at all, but scientifically black and white are not the same color and are not treated as such, even by the sun. Gunnar realizes with some horror that he is hot, and the pasty white student next to him is not-- proof that the sun cares what color he is.

After a brief, creepily paternalized and primitivized Japanese lesson, Ms. Cegeny continues her speech. "Does anyone have an example of colorblind processes in American society?" One student replies, "Justice," and gets approval without stipulation (source source...) from the teacher. (Her worldview comes from the pleasant and quaint idea that there was racism in America, and then a thing called the civil rights movement happened and then racism disappeared forever and ever, the end. This is not what happened.) Gunnar's response to "What else is colorblind?" is appropriately cynical and insightful: "Dogs." Ms. Cegeny remarks, "I believe that dogs are truly colorblind, but they're born that way." I don't quite get what she means. Is she implying humans aren't truly colorblind? That would be out of character for her. Either way, she then tells her students, "it's important that we judge people for what?" "Their minds!"

Finally, Gunnar asks the doctor who is testing him for colorblindness how to be colorblind, when "that's hard to do if you can see color, isn't it?" "I think your teacher means don't make any assumptions based on color," the doctor says. "Cross on the green and not in between," Gunnar shoots back. "They're talking about human color." "So?" "So just pretend that you don't see color. Don't say things like 'Black people are lecherous, violent, natural-born criminals." "But I'm black." "Oh, I hadn't noticed," the doctor snarks as Gunnar leaves, with no further insights about how to pretend not to see people's race if you can totally see their race.

For all their pomp about colorblindness, these adults end up being the same ones who write that Gunnar is highly intelligent and rational "despite his race." So much for judging by "Their minds!". And for all their "classroom multicultural" teaching, these kids are the same ones who determine pecking order by "who knew the most Polack, queer, and farmer's daughter jokes." Beatty proves that blind colorblindness isn't a viable response to racism, and that a more active response is needed than sticking one's head in the sand.

Thick Love: Heroic Maternity Gone Too Far

"Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all." Sethe loves hard, especially her children. Her escape (so her husband and kids could have a better life), her devotion to Beloved's grave, her strong attachment to Denver despite their distance: all of those parts of her prove how far she is willing to go for the people she loves. When she (spoiler alert) tries to kill her children in a desperate bid to keep them from wrathful slavery under Schoolteacher, is she right?

We've actually seen her have the exact same reaction before when a loved one is in peril: when the dog is injured, she knocks it out with a hammer with no hesitation. (Jeez, Sethe, at least use a book or something!) Her protective, maternal reaction is instinct stronger than logic. Think of mother dogs who are ordinarily passive but will bite off your hand if you touch one of her puppies, or a ferocious "mama bear," defending her young above all else. She doesn't flinch, doesn't think, but finds the fastest way to resolve the conflict. (Paul D specifically calls her out on the animalistic nature of her protective tendencies when he reminds her she has "two legs, not four.")

Sethe is, as the kids say, peak "mama bear." She has "a big love that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia," as Paul D says. She lives for her children and would die for her children's safety. The big question is weighing how much she wants them to live versus how much she wants them to live free lives. When Schoolteacher's arrival short-circuits her rememory, she goes into hyper-protective mode and loses any secondary mental processes that might have stopped her to let her think. Baby Suggs insists that "there had to be another way," but Sethe holds her conviction that what she did was right. And with all she's been through, you almost believe her.

Clowning vs. Minstrelsy

We talked in-depth in class about the weirdly minstrel-ish overtones of Hurston’s descriptions of the Eatonville townspeople. The basic gist was this: Are the comedic side characters of the town written as “spontaneously funny comedians and gifted linguistic artists” or “dopey, stereotyped, clownish minstrels in blackface”? The underlying question of “what is blackface minstrelsy and what is just non-racially-derived comedy?” lies in audience, performer, and respect. Here are some examples of what I (a somewhat underinformed white person) think is minstrelsy and what’s not.

In part, blackface originated in the North as a way for northern whites to get in on southern black culture (hence the “Jim Crow” dance, plantation dances, and many like it). That idea isn’t a bad one: Zora Neale Hurston did something similar when she performed traditional dances for Northern audiences. So here there is a black person performing with respect and accuracy for a white audience. That works, and I don’t think it counts as that really awful blackface minstrelsy. It’s more of a respectful performance. (This could be debated: it’s still for a white audience, which changes dynamics.) 

But compare Thomas Rice (aka “Jim Crow”) and his dance. We’ll hypothetically call the dance respectful, giving him a lot of credit if we assume he was trying to replicate the dance with respect and accuracy. That is what blackface started as, to an extent. But this is still problematic, because we have this white person performing dances with “respect and accuracy” for a white audience, who ends up appropriating black culture without the drawbacks of actually being black. After he takes off the blackface, he is privileged as any white person, which makes this minstrelsy, playing on race for humor.

 Then there’s the frequent example of white or black people putting on burnt cork, “blacking out” their faces and playing on racialized stereotypes of black stupidity for laughs. This makes for a black or white person performing without respect or accuracy, for a white audience. That’s definitely racially motivated, and thus minstrelsy.

The final option is to have these options all performed for a black audience. That changes the dynamics somewhat, probably because the performer has a chance to get beaten up for being in blackface. It’s like overweight people making fat jokes—you’re allowed to laugh when they make jokes about themselves, but not when someone else makes jokes about it (regardless of whether the joke-maker is also overweight. It’s a personal thing.) In the same way, are black people allowed to laugh at racist jokes made about them, by them, for them? I don’t have an answer.

In terms of Their Eyes Were Watching God: The author is black, the characters are black, and it’s anthropologically, respectfully correct. The question becomes, “Who is the audience?” Are the clownish side characters making jokes for the benefit of the other people in the town, not caring about what an imagined white audience would think? Or is Hurston (as Wright accused her of) as an author playing to the sympathies and desires of her majority-white audience? This is the line between minstrelsy and non-racially-based humor, and Hurston, like with many other lines, walks the divide. What do you think about the audience of Their Eyes?

An Unsatisfying Ending

Some are born invisible, some achieve invisibility, and the narrator of Invisible Man has invisibility thrust upon him in a manner that seems really anticlimactic.

I believe the point of the book is to show how the narrator achieves invisibility. We see his journey from impressionable, naive young man to sarcastic, meta-self-aware adult. But what disappoints me is that we never see the fruits of that. The story ends with a sudden fall into the black hole, then a time-skip of what, months? Years? We get a small story of seeing Norton again, and we can infer some things about his later life from his lights contact, his fight with Monopolated Light & Power, and other references in the prologue and epilogue. Other than that, we don't see nearly anything of what he actually does with this knowledge other than write it down (the frame narrative of Invisible Man.)

Howe said something similar to this at the tail end of "Black Boys and Native Sons." He writes, "as Ellison's hero asserts the 'infinite possibilities' he makes no attempt to specify them..." and this is my main complaint about the book. Ellison spends twenty-five chapters detailing this guy's life to tell us how he comes to this conclusion, then doesn't explain the conclusion other than the still-ambiguous "I am an invisible man" and "I can and do think in a meta way about myself" and worse, "I speak for you." 

I don't agree with Howe on other aspects. He has no right to define an African-American novel to his own specifications. He can't just declare that angry black authors are the only ones who are really black, or really "black authors" in a certain sense. In fact, I agree with Ellison on most points involving the definition of an African-American novel. My only hesitation comes when I examine the book simply as a literary work that has an ending that feels like a cop-out.

What do you think? Is there a good justification for Invisible Man's brief ending? How would the book's message change if the "moral" were more clearly defined by the end? (Would that kill the point?) And can anyone find a good rebuttal on this from Ellison, because I totally couldn't.

The "Extras" of /Invisible Man/

For a novel whose entire plot revolves around the idea that "we wear the mask," that nobody truly sees anyone other than themselves, we sure see a lot of one-dimensional characters that serve one symbolic purpose and leave. To an extent, you can't have a book with one personality and one overly complex plotline-- you have to have simpler plots thrown in. I chose to discuss a few black characters (although there are plenty of quirky, one-off white characters too: think Emerson Jr., Norton, or Sybil) Do we see further into these characters' lives with their stories, or just see further proof of how invisible they really are, even to our invisibility-conscious narrator?

 The first is Trueblood. What was up with that?? Yes, he was an example of a bad guy to show to Norton. But why did he get 15 pages to himself to tell a seemingly non-sequitur, kind of squicky story when a more concise example could have sufficed? Perhaps the answer is that it anything shorter couldn't have sufficed, and his long story was a testament to just how badly the narrator screwed up (plus possibly a reason for Norton to be so lightheaded, furthering the plot.) A question nobody asks: Is Trueblood invisible? It's complicated. He occasionally sings at the college, where he is widely disliked for his racial self-caricature. The college hotshots know of the people in the slums ironically next to the college, but choose to be blind to them (and keep the donors blind to them as well.)

Rather than talk about the Vet (who gets plenty of screen-time in critical review) I'll discuss the more one-dimensional characters in the bar scene-- Supercargo, Halley, and Edna. To recap: Supercargo is the big bodyguard-type guy who gets shoved down in defiance of white control over them: "He's the white folks' man!" (84). Halley (and Barrelhouse, in a later scene on p. 489 [and maybe earlier-- can anyone find it?]) is the stereotypical peacekeeping barkeep who just wants everyone to settle down and spend their money on beer instead of fighting. Edna is one of the only named girls at the Golden Day, who calls Norton a "little white baby" and who "ain't never been to no Chicago" (87, 88). They each play a role in that scene; a good barfight would be incomplete without rousing characters on both sides. But the narrator never seems to think critically about their personalities, and never convinces us to do so either. This is, to be fair, early in his ideological shift, when he isn't thinking about invisibility himself.

The last "character as simple symbol" I'll talk about is Brother Clifton. There's no explanation, no understanding of the turmoil that sent him into selling Sambo dolls. He is the trendy youth pastor of Harlem until the narrator leaves and he goes off the deep end. The conclusion to be drawn is that the narrator was the only thing keeping Harlem together, and Clifton is justified to be used as a rallying cry. But he remains one-dimensional and unexplained, even as the narrator is understanding invisibility himself. Really, for all his introspection the narrator never even attempts to delve into the minds of other people. I suppose that's not the point of the book.

Can you think of more characters that have more personality than screen time? Maybe Emma, or Westrum, or the evicted couple (who clearly have a full life which is used by the narrator as a general symbol), or the white guy who drunkenly sings gospel, or the woman who apologizes for him later. There are plenty in the book, all deserving their own explication. What individual and group effect do all these side characters have on the evolution of the narrator?

Bonus not-quite-worth-a-blog-post idea: Isn't it weird that the narrator gets electrocuted twice in his life, both times after significant injury? It seems like a parallel but I don't know of what.

Who's Taking Grandpa's Advice?

The narrator's grandfather's "curse" in Invisible Man permeates the book. It represents the shift in the narrator's personality, the "look under the surface" motif, and something to compare every character's mindset to. Here it is, in its entirety.

"Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you but our life is a war and i have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you tell they vomit or bust wide open. ...Learn it to the younguns"(page 16).

Most of the time the narrator has referenced this so far, he's confused. "he had spoken of his meekness as a dangerous activity" (16). He has doubts about it as a kid-- "When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks" (17). He really does want to do the right thing, but either option of the "right thing" seemed bad. So the narrator is complicated, and I'm sure character development will kick in and we'll understand better what his opinion is going to end up being. What I want to look at is how the other side characters (specifically Bledsoe and the Vet) in Invisible Man follow Grandpa's advice, and what that says.

Bledsoe is a weird one. If true rebellion is to "overcome 'em with yeses," Bledsoe's a firebrand. "I's big and black and I say 'Yes, suh" as loudly as any burrhead when it's convenient, but I'm still the king down here," he says. Isn't that, in stronger terms, what Grandpa was talking about? Say "yes" when it's convenient to gain power with white people, but believe what you believe. But Bledsoe is an antagonistic character-- why does he follow Grandpa's advice better than the narrator? Perhaps he's the example of Grandpa's advice gone too far, or the dangers of taking Grandpa's advice without humor. I think humor is a crucial difference between Grandpa's rhetoric and Bledsoe's-- Bled vents with anger and impugnment instead of laughing it off.

The vet, in comparison, doesn't follow Grandpa's advice at all! He's an influential guy on our narrator, but not once does he try to overcome anybody with yeses nor put his head anywhere near a lion's mouth. He's tried that, and it's not worth it. Those are the "fundamentals which I should never have forgotten": that black people in the south are forced to follow Grandpa's advice if they want to do anything with their lives. He chooses to not do anything with his life, and be his own person.

Maybe that's the answer: Ellison isn't saying that Grandpa's advice is 100% what everyone should always do. It depends on what you want, power or happiness. The advice leads to power, as Bledsoe attests to. It may or may not lead to happiness. That's the conclusion I hope the narrator arrives at as well.