Origin, movie review

I went to see the fictionmentary: Origin written and directed by Ava DuVernay based upon Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: Origins of our Discontents. It takes a particular skill to adapt nonfiction to the screen; you’re actually telling a couple stories at once and most or all of it has to be TRUE. On a personal note: I couldn’t stop crying through the entire viewing.

Am I highly emotional? Maybe, but I’m the kind of person you want in the middle of a disaster because I tend to keep my head without panicking. But once you start intuiting a lynching—I’m gone, and the movie opens with the murder of Trayvon Martin, the young man/teenager who was killed merely for walking home in the rain on a dark night wearing a hoodie. You know the end of this story before it even begins, and you get a sick thud in your belly just watching the Skittles slide across the convenient store counter. It’s all going to go so bad.

It is a complicated story to tell, weaving the history of black oppression in this country with the histories of other outcast people. At one point the author at a home dinner party is accused of pursuing a flawed theory. She feels temporarily setback, but continues to seek interconnections between how Germany in the 1930s handled their “Jewish Problem” and how the United States created apartheid under Jim Crow laws after the abolishment of slavery. You see, it is complicated.

And complicit . . . as this one reviewer’s story will emphasize.

I was there. Through my tears as the author’s personal story unfolds as well as her writer journey, I couldn’t help but relate. I totally understood that feeling of trying to relay an emotional concept and intertwine it with historical fact, give it present-day context. I’ve been pedaling (intentional pun) a bicycling manuscript of my End To End in England with the story of an overlooked 19^th-century activist named Frances Willard. On top of that—I was there.

In my comfy theater chair I sat up. My eyes glued to the screen. I was there just 4 months ago in that square in Germany where they burned the books in 1933.

As I described in earlier posts, the night I arrived in Berlin was somewhat chaotic. There was the elevator/escalator debacle, Mia going to the wrong train station, and dancing at midnight in the Alexanderplatz outside the station. Then the 2-hour detour to the city before going back to her apartment.

I saw Berlin through a newcomer’s miasma. In general, it was all too much to take in on little sleep, in early hours, on a bicycle: my brain was in a fog. On top of all this, there was the Berlin Festival of Lights, where a light show was projected onto historic buildings and monuments to add even more meaning. Here we are at the Brandenburg Gate:

 

Because this was Thursday and the Festival didn’t officially begin until the weekend, the engineers were doing a dress rehearsal. We got to see the show, the lights thrown out in a dramatic spectacle before the festival crowds. We rode to the Bebelplatz where with one other person we watched the lights blaze, waver, alter—much like flames.

The Bebelplatz is a sizeable area—perhaps big enough to hold a Trump rally—surrounded by the Former Royal Library and across the Unter den Linden from Humboldt University, the State Opera, and Humboldt's law school to the right, with St. Hedwig's Cathedral behind. At the moment I lacked orientation, language, the historical context to know where I was standing. Except, below my feet was a clear Plexiglas window looking into an empty underground library—some kind of art installation. Mia explained that this is where the Nazis burned books. Right here in the midst of so much culture, in front of the library and a law school. My head already hurt and at the moment I could not do the mental gymnastics. In the theater watching Origin, I recognized the place.

As a writer who treasures words, I abhor the destruction of books. Even a lonely book at the book box gets my sympathy—Who would leave this? Another reason to stifle a sob in the theater, the horror of removing books for ideological/political gamesmanship, something we are seeing these days with Moms for Liberty and governor Ron DeSantis. But this situation is not limited to Florida. Even libraries here in Michigan are under attack. School librarians, the heroes of my youth, are coming under intense scrutiny, their jobs at risk. In the movie those who did not want to go along with the political tide walked on eggshells, until—

The movie kept running. The terror, the Holocaust, so many lives. Because of a presumed bias, where a group of people are made to be “other.” Like the author’s sister in the movie agrees—they’re all white people, just as in India the Dalits or untouchables are, in our eyes, just as Indian looking as the Brahmin, the highest-quality caste. All this goes to Wilkerson’s point that not all racism in the US is about color, but caste. A blanket perception that this group is inferior, “blacks to whites.” Even the term black does not adequately define color.

TO BE CONTINUED