Review: The Order of Myths

Mobile, Alabama is home to America's oldest Mardi Gras celebration, founded in 1703. What makes it truly unique, however, isn't its longevity but, rather, its composition, as the city's celebration is, in fact, two celebrations: one for Caucasians, and one for African-Americans. An overt vestige of the South's legacy of segregation, these dual Mardi Gras festivities provide a stark view of the intractability of racial prejudice. Yet Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths is less a vitriolic critique than a considerate, despairing depiction of the intractable sway exerted by long-held, unpleasant traditions. And unpleasant they most certainly are, having crept into the very fabric of Mobile life to an extent that, in most cases, neither African-Americans nor Caucasians are willing to wholly decry this separate-but-equal arrangement, content to chalk it up to the accepted, and acceptable, way things are. Accepted it unquestionably is. But as Brown's shrewd doc makes clear through tight editorial juxtapositions, telling snapshots, and refusal to belittle or disparage her sometimes-repugnant subjects, acceptable it most certainly is not.

Brown's film details the build-up to the parallel events organized by the Caucasians' Mobile Carnival Association (MCA) and the African-Americans' Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association (MAMBGA), both of which involve crowning a king and queen, holding parties, and staging elaborate parades on the same day. Similarities in design, however, are matched by extreme dissimilarities with regards to economics and social standing. Whereas the African-American king and queen are schoolteachers selected by their community, the Caucasian royal couple attain their posts via their lineage, which in the case of Queen Helen Meaher speaks directly to this Mardi Gras' divided structure. Meaher's wealthy family holds the distinction of having chartered the Clothilde, the country's last slave ship, which three years after abolition was deliberately set on fire and run aground after it became apparent that getting the slaves ashore without attracting the authorities' attention would be difficult. The slaves who escaped ran into an area that would later become Africa Town, an all-black neighborhood where most of the real estate is now owned, and leased to residents, by the Meaher family.

The inextricable ties that bind Mobile's present to its past are spied throughout The Order of Myths, from a Caucasian man in a Mardi Gras mask using the term "coloreds" while justifying segregation, to the sight of MCA ball attendees with their faces covered by white cloths (shades of the KKK), to shots of lavish MCA get-togethers staffed exclusively by African-American waiters. These last images are related to the story of Brittain Youngblood, a self-described "liberal" who reluctantly agrees to participate in MCA's royal court and increasingly comes to see her decision as a positive step toward reconnecting with her ancestry. Youngblood articulates this very notion to an African-American seamstress, and her oblivion to the woman's muted disgust at this fondness for Southern history (seen in her diffidently downturned eyes) is a telling indicator of the blindness (willful or accidental) that seems to plague the city's Caucasian revelers. Repeatedly, white speakers espouse the notion that African-Americans don't want integrated Mardi Gras because they too cherish tradition, an opinion occasionally reaffirmed by African-American interviewees. But their comments, like the sight of an black clothing designer becoming giddy after receiving subdued praise for her work from a Caucasian tailor, seem at least partly symptomatic of institutionalized, inequitable power dynamics.

Brown's focus on Youngblood, and the limits to which her family (and others like hers) treated African-American employees as family, unfortunately comes at the expense of a more in-depth portrait of Meaher, who truly symbolizes the indulgent opulence and bigotry-infused entitlement that defines the MCA. Still, there's humor in The Order of Myths' glimpses of profligacy and pathos in its depiction of Mardi Gras as a profoundly personal honor for MAMBGA Queen Stephanie, whose relatives were slaves brought over on the Clothilde. The secrecy of mystical societies, the self-deception practiced by both Caucasian and African-American celebrants, and the callous distortion of historical memories all inform Brown's sensitive, insightful, highly personal doc. And, eventually, these topics coalesce into a rich, generous portrait of the country's still-ongoing civil rights struggles, epitomized equally by enduring narrow-mindedness - an MCA bigwig exalts the locale's aged oak trees as symbols of the citizenry's esteem for roots, ignoring the fact that lynched African-Americans were hung from their branches as recently as 1981 - and also, in the MCA and MAMBGA royal courts' landmark decision to visit each others' parties, tempered hope for a progressive future.