I went to see the movie SELMA and thought that it was a very
powerful and very inspirational film but I just could not get over the
revisionist history it was trying to sell.
As a history purist I wince at every attempt to revise
history no matter whose history and no matter how painful or embarrassing the
history may be; we deserve to know what really happened.
What makes it even more distressing is the fact that black
children, on a national level, are being given free tickets to see the movie.
For many of them, this will be the history they will remember and not the
history in history books.
The revisionist history I am talking about is the treatment
of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the president at that time, by director Ava DuVernay.
She showed him as an obstructionist or more bluntly, an antagonist of the
movement and that was a blatant falsehood; without him the Civil Rights
Movement would not have moved forward.
Director Ava DuVernay in defending her rationale for
altering history came off as arrogant when she said she was not making a white
savior movie and is not a historian or a documentarist. To me, if you’re
recreating a historical moment than get the history right; don’t fuck with it.
This Sunday’s New York Times had a great article by Maureen
Dowd called “NOT JUST A MOVIE” where she echoed the sentiments of many and but mostly
the people who were actually there with Johnson during this time.
Dowd said that in this country, on matters of race – there is
even a higher responsibility to be accurate.
In my mind, DuVernay had crossed a line and therefore her
reputation as a movie maker will be tarnished and suspect and the movie and all
the fine actors in it will also suffer because of her arrogance and plain stupidity;
the movie has been nominated for Best Picture but that is all…a snub…maybe…but
to me a deserved snub of the director…she probably will call this racism.
No comments:
Post a Comment