For the second part of his America trilogy, Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier has taken for his subject slavery and the subsequent assimilation of black people into mainstream American society. Since race is such a touchy subject in this country and since we are already so skeptical of Europeans and their attitudes (especially when it comes to sex and violence) it’s easy to understand why almost every professional reviewer has gotten up on their high horse to denounce the very idea of this film. They treat the idea of a European making a film about the American racial problem as if it were sacrilegious and therefore can’t bring themselves to give the film the fair look it deserves.
As far as I’m concerned, outsiders often have the best insight into our culture. Look at artists like the Taiwan-born Ang Lee whose The Ice Storm is as piercing a portrayal of middles class 1970s ennui as has ever been made by an American. Or look at the Italian Sergio Leone whose Once Upon a Time in America is as succinct a summation of the American experience in the early twentieth century as the homegrown Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy. That foreigners would have a keen insight into the vagaries of American culture should not be seen as insulting nor should it even be seen as surprising. Our culture permeates the world. In the days leading up to this most recent Gulf War there were pictures of young Iraqis wearing Batman t-shirts on the cover of the New York Times. Our culture is everywhere, so much so that we no longer can claim ownership of it. And if artists from other countries that are inundated with our culture want to comment on it and poke holes in it, we would be better served to accept their art with an open mind and critique it on its merits not simply on whether it has the right to exist in the first place.
So let’s get down to it then. Von Trier’s idea of the black experience in America over the last two hundred years is basically that black people in America were so scarred by the experience of slavery that they chose a sort of self-imposed slavery after they were set “free” and further that this second form of slavery is the more disturbing and harmful because it is self-imposed. Like the former slaves at the Manderlay plantation, many modern black Americans still live in the South. And those that have moved out of their ancestral homes have largely congregated in predominantly black communities in the urban North and West. Additionally, amongst these black communities (especially those in an urban setting) anything that looks like achievement in the white world is shunned (sometimes this is construed as school success sometimes it is construed as working a low-paying job, etc.). And finally the only areas of achievement that many of these black people respect are music and sports, the same areas in which slaves used to entertain themselves. So, if this is really the case, it sure does look like black Americans have chosen to continue to live as if they were slaves and that Von Trier is right.
The problem, however, is that this idea of black people, while it may be the pervasive depiction of them in our popular culture, is not really the experience of most black Americans. In truth, the experience of most black Americans is pretty similar to that of white Americans of similar economic status. And it is really this economic status that determines what kind a life a person living in America will have not the color of their skin.
It’s not surprising though that Von Trier got it wrong. It is, rather, pretty easy to see how he could think black people have ghetto-ized themselves post-slavery if he only had our popular culture to go on. But Von Trier is smarter than that. And I can’t believe his research would be entirely limited to viewing popular culture. So perhaps he is making the point that this is how we have presented the black American experience to the world. Maybe he’s just holding up a mirror so that we might see. Maybe he’s trying to start a discussion about race in America so that we might take a hard look at how we present it to the rest of the world; a world that we seem to be trying to remake in our image.
Or maybe he’s not even really talking about race in America. Maybe this whole slavery thing is a smokescreen. If we take Grace as a metaphor for George W. Bush, the slaves as metaphorical Iraqis and the gangsters as a metaphorical United States military, a rather interesting idea begins to emerge. Does Grace not force independence on the slaves in the same way Bush imposed “freedom” on the Iraqi citizens after the fall of Sadam Hussein? Aren’t the Iraqis rebelling against their newfound freedom and seeking refuge in chaos and sectarianism in the same way the freed slaves of Manderlay do? This metaphor is so perfectly apt that I can’t help but think this might have been Von Trier’s true allegorical meaning.
With this new reading in mind, much more interesting ideas begin to present themselves. When the slaves are freed their entire way of life is destroyed. Left with no infrastructure, they meander around the grounds doing nothing much and, to Grace’s great displeasure, making nothing of themselves. So Grace takes it on herself to impose democratic law at the point of a rifle in the exact same way that Bush has done in Iraq. But what she finds is that there is no one around any longer with the ability to run the plantation. The old way may have been corrupt but the oppressed slaves were not calling for their freedom. They did not want to take control of the plantation for themselves. And because they did not, once their freedom is given to them they have no incentive to make a new system in place of the old one. And it comes as no surprise that without an infrastructure everything at Manderlay collapses. There is no food to eat. The crops are mostly destroyed. Tensions rise until two people are dead.
As Grace observes this happening she can’t figure out why the freed slaves are allowing their world to crumble. And she makes the same mistake that George W. Bush made in Iraq. You cannot give people their freedom and expect them to do anything with it. They must take it for themselves. For only when they truly desire freedom can they possibly use it to their benefit. No people in history have ever had a successful revolution from without. This is true at the moment in Iraq and it is true at Manderlay.
Further, and this is where the Bush criticism is sharpest, once the slaves are freed, Grace takes it on herself to teach them about democracy and the American system of government. President Bush has said many times that he thinks bringing democracy to the world is the way to heal all the world’s ills. And this is not an uncommon view in America. It stems from our evangelical nature. We think the rest of the world is going to hell and we want to help them if we can. In Manderlay, Grace watches all her efforts to teach voting and representative government be misrepresented and used to promote ends she doesn’t support. But faced with the choice of whether to kill an innocent woman or reject her precious democracy, she chooses murder. She compromises her moral code in order to uphold her governmental aims. And in that moment the audience realizes (and maybe she does too) that imposing a system of living on a people can never work no matter how well intentioned. Grace’s imposition of democracy on the slaves is no better than Mam’s imposition of slavery on them. It is just another system forced on them at the point of a gun or a blade, and it can never work. This is the lesson George Bush is learning in Iraq.
And so the second part of Von Trier’s America trilogy turns out to not really be about the black experience in America as advertised. Rather it is a clever condemnation of the American or maybe more accurately the Bushian idea that we know what’s best for the world. Manderlay says that one group of people can never make another group of people do what they want without everything turning to shit. Change comes from within. This is something anyone who’s ever been an addict knows. This is something anyone who’s ever tried to get a loved one to change knows. It is something those in power should never forget. Grace should have known better. And George Bush should have known better. Let’s just hope that his time in office comes to an end before his anger escalates like Grace at the end of the film and her whipping of Timothy turns into Bush’s nuking of the whole Middle East.
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