RvB's After Images: Two by Burnett: Nightjohn, To Sleep With Anger

Next week, the phenomenal Killer of Sheep opens, a 1977 movie at last hitting the theaters in the larger markets in the US. Killer of Sheep demonstrates the importance of director/writer Charles Burnett as both an independent filmmaker and an American artist. An African-American artist, to add that part of it, since well-meaning critics like to give Burnett the distinction of being the best African-American filmmaker ever. It's a new century, so let's dispense with such categorization. Burnett's qualities are more universal than parochial. True, his films are loaded with specific meanings that elude the white viewer. I still remember the gasp of shock a lady friend made when she saw a scene in To Sleep With Anger; her family was Creole from north Texas, and so she knew how tremendously disrespectful it was when a little boy let a broom touch the feet of Danny Glover's Harry.

What could be worst that to try to sweep someone away as if they were dust? And in Killer of Sheep, like To Sleep With Anger, the word "drylongso" comes up; meaning nothing has changed, probably nothing will ever change. And sometimes the word means "as if everything were normal." ("I can't just chase him out, drylongso."). Now, as Albert Brooks said in Real Life, "I'm not black, nor do I claim to be." I don't get it all, but I insist Burnett is too big to be bound by identity politics. He's a filmmaker for the world, with Ozu's ability to depict the tender side of disappointment, and--in Killer of Sheep, he has Jean Vigo's dreamy silvery imagery conveying the hopeless longing for elsewhere.

1990's To Sleep With Anger is about the older generation in central Los Angeles. Gideon (Paul Butler) and his wife Suzie (Mary Alice, best known as the Oracle from the later Matrix movies) are retired and sanctified transplanted southerners. They did well for themselves, and the backyard of their house is like a tiny verson of the South where they were raised, with corn and sunflowers and a small chicken coop. They're distracted by the minor irritations--the strife between their sons, the sore spots any couple has from rubbing against each other for a few decades. Inside, Gideon is bothered by the fires that age hasn't banked. (In a beautiful bit of silent acting--Alice giving him a firm wordless rejection when he tries to interst her in an afternoon nap--Burnett lets us know that their sex life is pretty much over.) In Burnett's magical realist opening to the film, Gideon is sitting, twiddling his thumbs, feeling the heat in him, symbolized by computer animated flames, wishing silently for some excitement.

Maybe bidden by this discontent, Harry arrives. He's played by Danny Glover, in his best role ever; he claims he was Greyhounding it from Detroit to Oakland and he decided to drop by and visit his old friends. Suzie and Gideon tell him mi casa es su casa. After Harry has stayed for a while, Gideon's son Junior (Carl Lumbly) comments, "Harry is the kind of guy you'd like to take out to the woods and leave under a rock." It's not apparent at first; Harry is the smoothest and most attractive kind of bad news, limber with easy superficial charm. His sterling silver tongue captivates Gideon's other son Samuel (Richard Brooks). The fact that he reminds the old couple of their life Down Home gives him more time to stay. And then Gideon falls ill. Too much exertion or is he hexed by Harry? You could read it either way.

Relatively easy to follow symbols suggest that magical realist side to Harry's arrival. He's a trickster spirit, an agent of discord, tempting Gideon's family out of the hard-working, hard-bought life they've got. He calls up no-good friends--wheezing old cronies from Gideon and Suzie's younger wilder days, all raffish and decked out in wide lapeled suits and their floral ties, just like their ringleader. He promotes a party with other people's food, and decimates the hen-house ("Chicken hate to see a preacher coming..." Harry murmurs, hypnotizing a yardbird with a straight line drawn in the dirt, just as he gets a hatchet ready; the old proverb is illuminated in Zora Neale Hurston's collection of Afro-American folklore Mules and Men), What Harry is preaching no one needs. Strife between the two brother breaks out, and Sam gets a gift he could do without: the wicked knife Harry caries and likes to toy with during card games.
Is what I'm describing is a transparent Christian parable, as well as the direct opposite of the "magic negro" story, in which a mysterious black man arrives to heal the heartsick?

The IMBd files To Sleep With Anger under movies with the devil in it. Christians could watch it and feel they got their core values celebrated, but there's undercurrents going on. Burnett charts the sharp division of sacred and profane life in the Black community--all that matter that Craig Brewer seemed to be utterly ignorant of in Black Snake Moan. And it's not so clearly good and evil; Burnett has great affection for the way a great blues singer sings (Jimmy Witherspoon performs "C.C. Ryder" at Harry's little get together), just as he enjoys the way Glover celebrates the craft of being a smooth talker and an age-old liar. But there's an allegory going on here, and it comes out during the scene where the patient, long-suffering Suzie finally has to demand of Harry what kind of a man he is. Without spoiling it, let's try to amplify it a little: an underdog people have to lie a little, have to practice aggression to survive. We celebrate the patient non-violent struggle. The truth is that resistance takes many forms--even the charming devilish and self-interested form of Harry.

Nightjohn, Burnett's 1996 film, reminds us of why deception was a survival skill that got the slaves out of bondage. This made for TV film isn't as much the work of an auteur as To Sleep With Anger. Nightjohn is a family film, but it's also rewarding and affecting; one of the best movies about American slavery that there is. On a cotton plantation a precocious little girl named Sarny (Allison Jones) has long learned the meaning of concealment ever since her mother was sold: "Don't show nobody nothing..that's the best lesson I ever learned." In secrecy, she learns the alphabet from a new arrival, the slave John (Carl Lumbly). He teaches her what he knows, though at the possibility of great retribution: slaves are maimed for trying to learn to read, and one of the others in their cabin had a finger and a thumb taken for daring it. Learning how to read and count at night, Sarny gets something that can't be taken from her by the master--Beau Bridges, in a far more multi-faceted role than you'd expect. Burnett makes an uplifting story that isn't simple minded or simply negative. Here, as in Killer of Sheep, Burnett's concern is the search for freedom and as they say, making a way out of no way.