walidah (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} badsis) wrote,@ 2008-08-23 12:19:00 |
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Brother From Another Planet Review
Yep that time of the month again, my monthly sci fi film review on Imagine 2050. Check it out at the link below and leave a comment if you feel inclined! (and yes, I know they misspelled my name on the site, we're working on it!) =)
http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2008/0
Film Review: No Blacks, Immigrants or Aliens Allowed
by Walidah Imarisha
I have probably seen John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet (1984) almost a dozen times. I first saw it when I was in high school, bored, flipping through our cable channels. I was skeptical at first, given the low budget special effects, but the film quickly sucked me in. Last year, when I taught a college course, my co-instructor and I put together a class called Race and Gender in Science Fiction Film. Through all my viewings, that was my first experience watching it with a large group of people and I fell in love with the film all over again. I fell in love with its uncompromising politics, its connections between people of color, and its biting wit.
The film follows an escaped alien slave, played by Joe Morton (who never gets a name in the film), who crash lands on Earth. But not only Earth, Harlem, baby! Morton’s character, who is black and mute, has to learn to navigate Harlem circa early 1980s, before gentrification and upwardly mobile white faces replaced all black, in the grips of drug epidemic, crushed under the weight of Reaganomics, shaped by the factors of benign and not so benign neglect.
Morton’s character also has to contend with two slave catchers on his trail for his planet, Men in Black, played by director Sayles and David Strathaim. Their intent is to recapture him and take him back. There’s a hilarious and touching scene when the Men in Black come looking for Morton at a bar he has hung out at, and all the black people there defend and protect him. They know he is strange, they don’t know exactly what he is running from, but they know he is lost, he is black, and he needs protection.
This scene of the community shows the beauty and humanity breathing underneath the layer of grim dumped on the ghetto. It’s an understanding that communities of color are places of strength and support, not just monstrous landscapes, as they’re portrayed in mainstream culture.
Brother is clearly a critique and comment both about the history of black folks in this country, and the realities of immigration. It’s also the film’s deft ability to show the connections and commonalities between the two that makes it a monumental film. When Morton’s character first crashes here, he lands in Ellis Island, now empty and derelict. One of his special powers is to be able to touch an object and sense the emotions, the history associated with it. Everywhere he touches in Ellis Island, we see him writhe in pain from the collective history there. We here the voices of immigrants crying, yelling, pleading in different languages. And we see Morton, voiceless (a powerful commentary on the state of black people and immigrants in this country), scream wordlessly as he falls to his knees with the historic pain of the American dream, a dream deferred.
The film is rife with humor, like the old black saying, “You gotta laugh to keep from crying.” In one scene, Morton’s character is riding the subway. A white card hustler comes up to him and asks if he wants to see a card trick, and takes him through a complicated set up. He asks if Morton wants to see another trick, “Want to see me make all the white people disappear?” The train stops at Columbia Circle, the stop right before Harlem, and the train empties of white faces. The white hustler looks back at him, winks, and says, “See? What’d I tell ya?” A deceptively simple and yet burning commentary on gentrification and red-lining - an old gentleman’s agreement between banks and real estate brokers to keep Black people and Latino immigrants from receiving loans to buy a house in white communities .
But for me, the most important aspect of this film is that we see the world through the eyes of the alien, the other. In most films, we’re looking at the outsider as foreign, strange, horrific, dangerous – which is much the same way our immigration policy goes today. When we speak of “Americans,” we are often using code words for white native born citizens. Anyone not of that category is foreign and alien. Brother flips it, shows us how truly nightmarish American society is from an outside perspective, especially in relationship to the experiences of people of color.
In the end of Brother From Another Planet, it is through the solidarity of the other runaway slaves, the immigrants and the refugees, in conjunction with the solidarity of the black community in Harlem, that Morton’s character achieves his freedom, defeats the Men in Black and begins to understand that though this place called Harlem is not his home, it can be a home for him, and that that, in the end, is enough.
Yep that time of the month again, my monthly sci fi film review on Imagine 2050. Check it out at the link below and leave a comment if you feel inclined! (and yes, I know they misspelled my name on the site, we're working on it!) =)
http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2008/0
Film Review: No Blacks, Immigrants or Aliens Allowed
by Walidah Imarisha
I have probably seen John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet (1984) almost a dozen times. I first saw it when I was in high school, bored, flipping through our cable channels. I was skeptical at first, given the low budget special effects, but the film quickly sucked me in. Last year, when I taught a college course, my co-instructor and I put together a class called Race and Gender in Science Fiction Film. Through all my viewings, that was my first experience watching it with a large group of people and I fell in love with the film all over again. I fell in love with its uncompromising politics, its connections between people of color, and its biting wit.
The film follows an escaped alien slave, played by Joe Morton (who never gets a name in the film), who crash lands on Earth. But not only Earth, Harlem, baby! Morton’s character, who is black and mute, has to learn to navigate Harlem circa early 1980s, before gentrification and upwardly mobile white faces replaced all black, in the grips of drug epidemic, crushed under the weight of Reaganomics, shaped by the factors of benign and not so benign neglect.
Morton’s character also has to contend with two slave catchers on his trail for his planet, Men in Black, played by director Sayles and David Strathaim. Their intent is to recapture him and take him back. There’s a hilarious and touching scene when the Men in Black come looking for Morton at a bar he has hung out at, and all the black people there defend and protect him. They know he is strange, they don’t know exactly what he is running from, but they know he is lost, he is black, and he needs protection.
This scene of the community shows the beauty and humanity breathing underneath the layer of grim dumped on the ghetto. It’s an understanding that communities of color are places of strength and support, not just monstrous landscapes, as they’re portrayed in mainstream culture.
Brother is clearly a critique and comment both about the history of black folks in this country, and the realities of immigration. It’s also the film’s deft ability to show the connections and commonalities between the two that makes it a monumental film. When Morton’s character first crashes here, he lands in Ellis Island, now empty and derelict. One of his special powers is to be able to touch an object and sense the emotions, the history associated with it. Everywhere he touches in Ellis Island, we see him writhe in pain from the collective history there. We here the voices of immigrants crying, yelling, pleading in different languages. And we see Morton, voiceless (a powerful commentary on the state of black people and immigrants in this country), scream wordlessly as he falls to his knees with the historic pain of the American dream, a dream deferred.
The film is rife with humor, like the old black saying, “You gotta laugh to keep from crying.” In one scene, Morton’s character is riding the subway. A white card hustler comes up to him and asks if he wants to see a card trick, and takes him through a complicated set up. He asks if Morton wants to see another trick, “Want to see me make all the white people disappear?” The train stops at Columbia Circle, the stop right before Harlem, and the train empties of white faces. The white hustler looks back at him, winks, and says, “See? What’d I tell ya?” A deceptively simple and yet burning commentary on gentrification and red-lining - an old gentleman’s agreement between banks and real estate brokers to keep Black people and Latino immigrants from receiving loans to buy a house in white communities .
But for me, the most important aspect of this film is that we see the world through the eyes of the alien, the other. In most films, we’re looking at the outsider as foreign, strange, horrific, dangerous – which is much the same way our immigration policy goes today. When we speak of “Americans,” we are often using code words for white native born citizens. Anyone not of that category is foreign and alien. Brother flips it, shows us how truly nightmarish American society is from an outside perspective, especially in relationship to the experiences of people of color.
In the end of Brother From Another Planet, it is through the solidarity of the other runaway slaves, the immigrants and the refugees, in conjunction with the solidarity of the black community in Harlem, that Morton’s character achieves his freedom, defeats the Men in Black and begins to understand that though this place called Harlem is not his home, it can be a home for him, and that that, in the end, is enough.
