Origin and Fast-Car Ecstasy, movie review
I left off my last post in the Bebelplatz in Berlin, atop the glass covering the Empty Library below. The swirling colored lights bouncing off the buildings added to the hallucinogenic feel to being there. I wasn’t quite sure where I was.
Yet, watching the movie Origin, I recognized the location and déjà vu—personally and historically—washed over me. It’s happening again.
Book banning.
Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, upon which Origin is based rests on the premise that the othering of Jews in early 20th-century Germany and how we treat people of color here in the States informed each other, The writing and examples in the book are irrefutable.
The end of the film goes back to an interview Wilkerson did with a subject who as a young boy, white, growing up in what is presumed a southern town, though I guess it could have been Illinois, when his Little League team wins a championship and is rewarded with a day at a town pool. The whole team goes, even the star player who scored the winning run—a black child. Yet, this child is singled out to remain outside the pool club gates. The coach and parents bring him the complimentary hot dog and a drink. His mates come to the fence to speak to him and see if he’s doing okay. The young man smiles and waves. Finally the grownups convince the pool warden to allow the boy into the pool. A scheme is organized where he steps onto an inflatable lounge where he lays stiff as a board because the warden warns him NOT TO TOUCH THE WATER because if he does they will have to drain the pool, a costly and time-consuming endeavor, all because he has contaminated it with his black skin.
I’m nearly cried out by this point in the film. I place my hand over my mouth to stifle a sob. I want to crawl under the comfy theater recliner. “Wilkerson” or the actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor playing Wilkerson asks the subject now an old man what he thought at the time. Of course, awful, helpless; he knew he should have done something, made a stand, his apathy or powerlessness haunts him. He’s never forgotten the shame and horror of that injustice. As now shall we, the viewers. Our complicity, complacency. In this system.
Which brings me, like Wilkerson, weaving and zigzagging with her theories of iinterconnectedness, to the 2024 Grammys. I watched a small YouTube snippet of Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs singing a duet—a duet, they sang together and also took turns with the lines—Chapman’s hit Fast Car. Cut to the audience, yes, other musicians, but white and black, they’re all standing and rooting, hands raised to these accomplished artists on stage. My point: The words and sense of the song apply to all people. We all feel it, being outside, wanting to be someone, to make it: we all want better. The last line in book and movie: Wilkerson asks whether a “world without caste would set everyone free.”
For one moment I saw it in the faces of those celebrating in
the audience. A coming together in fast-car ecstasy. If only we would shed our
misconceptions of how people look, the prejudice that lies in our
subconscious—what Wilkerson asserts is not so much racism, but caste. There is
no other, other than what we have strangled our mind into believing.
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