My award for the Best Cinematic Controversy of the Oscars goes to—envelope please—did you have any doubts: it goes to Selma ! Selma
engendered more furious passion than all the other nominees combined (go ahead, add all that passion
up. I’ll wait). On the one hand, it drove aging baby-boomers
up the wall with its rather uncharitable depiction of Lyndon Johnson. On the
other hand, the LBJ criticism led to the counter-charge that the real problem so many establishment types
had with the film was that it didn’t have a Great White Savior at the center of
its narrative.
The two sides of this award-winning controversy come together near
the end of the film. The intractable President Johnson is so moved by the awful
violence at Selma that he finally
breaks down and calls for congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, quoting from
the great hymn of the Civil Rights Movement: we shall overcome. The black and
white footage of this historic speech is the emotional climax of the film,
earning applause from the audience the night that I saw it. Unfortunately, it
also reveals the flaw at the center of the film’s logic.
The director, Ava DuVernay, has said she
purposely put Johnson at loggerheads with King so that the president would have a dramatic
character arc, going from villain to hero. But not only did this falsify the
LBJ/MLK relationship, it also CREATED the very Great White Savior trope that
Smith had wanted to avoid. Despite all the hard work of the activists in Selma ,
it is Lyndon Johnson who swoops in to save the day.
And so, as irony would have
it, if only DuVernay
had portrayed the Johnson/King relationship more accurately, she would have both
spared the precious feelings of aging Democrats AND created a more authentic
narrative without a great white savior. But DuVernay can surely console herself with the knowledge that she has created a film that will be watched and argued about for decades, the runaway winner of the Best Cinematic Controversy Award of 2015.
Next up: Birdman
wins for Best Film I Fell Asleep to in a Public Theater.
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