Armond White interview by Justin Desmangles, Selma (movie) fake controversy,

 New Day Jazz, January 25, 2015
 
Justin Desmangles: Indeed it is a great pleasure, a great honor, to welcome back to New Day Jazz, Armond White. Armond, thank you for being generous with your time and sharing with us your early evening, our afternoon, here on New Day Jazz.
 
Armond White: Oh, happy to speak with you, my pleasure Justin.
 
JD: It’s always a thrill to be able to share time with you, and also to bring to the air waves a conversation, a critical conversation, and a deciphering one, that is too often left out of broadcast media. So, it’s indeed and honor to be with you. Now, as I mentioned to listeners, our discussion this afternoon, will perhaps center on the film Selma, and the controversies surrounding it, but of course, this is a topic that lends itself to many others, and I'm sure once the conversation gets started that time is just going to go on by, but perhaps we can start there. I recently saw the film and I was greatly disappointed by what appeared to me as a great deal of deception and reduction, that is, the film makers used their skills persuasively to reduce and deceive audiences in to a kind of feel-goodism, you know, to get a pass on their conscience, and perhaps grief as well, in order to ignore the real issues raised by the legacy of Dr. King. Can you talk to us a little bit about your take on the film. Can you find anything to agree with in what I just said.
AW: Well, you know, one of the interesting things about dealing with popular culture is that you often, in a movie like Selma, you’re dealing with filmmaking as a popular art, and your also dealing with the personal and political attitudes of the people who make the films. And you also have to contend with the personal and political attitudes of the people who will receive them, being critics and their audiences. Almost all of that comes into play.  When I saw the film my initial reaction to was a rather mediocre, mild-mannered thing.  And my first response as I watched it, as it played out in front of me, was, I began to ask myself, well, who is this film for?  Because as the story, as it began to unfold, to quote Morrissey, “it says nothing to me about my life.”  It seems to be going back into the history of the Sixties, the Civil Rights Movement, with no other clear purpose other than to be nostalgic about it.  And that’s what I mean about not saying anything to me about my life.  I’m not nostalgic about that, I remember a lot of that history, and I think back on that history, as a kind of sign post for what people can do, how people can live, but as the movie portrays that era, it just seemed like a piece of nostalgia to me, and I found it useless.  So I sat there thinking who is this for, its clearly not for me, it must be made for someone who simply wants to be nostalgic about struggle, about American history, about politics, someone who simply wants to be nostalgic about Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King himself.  That’s my immediate reaction to it, and I found it useless. I don’t need it. 
 
JD: Well, this representation of Dr. King as a piece of merchandise, as a nostalgic piece of merchandise, as a kind of ideologically bound piece of merchandise, seems to evade many of the key issues of his legacy that are present with us today.  Ironically, or not so much so perhaps, much of the film addresses its concerns to a particular moment in the development of our history, in which the focus was on voting rights and the Voting Rights Act, which in recent years, as recently as last year as a matter of fact, the Supreme Court struck down many of its key provisions, and we find ourselves at this time in numerous states with large voting blocks of non-white people, that very right is being threatened again. But you bring up a very important point, who is this film for?  And so I would like to explore that a little bit more here, there is an impulse I believe in many of us to reduce difficult and complex situations to something that is more manageable, but this impulse is especially pernicious, especially egregious, in respect to the history of race in America.  So when we talk about, who is this film for, who are these reductions of King’s legacy, merchandising, ideological nostalgia, who is this film really for, in your estimation?
 
 AW:  Well I’m glad you brought in the term merchandising, because it certainly brings in one of the aspects, it’s for, well let me put it this way, it’s for people who can hustle race, and it’s for people to make a buck off race. And that covers a large area.  That covers movie studios, TV stations, record labels, as well as people who call themselves political activists.  It covers all kinds of egotists as well.  I think the movies made for someone who can hustle race.  And people who enjoy seeing race hustled, because they mistake that for struggle.  They mistake the hustle for people who want to improve their lives and others, and I do think that is who it’s made for. Because hustling race has become profitable, if not just popular to do, in mainstream movies. 
 
JD: You know, I’m so glad that your expanding in this particular direction, in regards to that hustling of race, because for me, as someone who has spent a great deal of time studying and deciphering this particular era in our history, I was very flummoxed to discover that the film presented not only Dr. King, but also members of his opposition as being inchoate, uneducated, occasionally blubbering, unsure, unsteady, when in fact, say for instance here with Dr. King, we’re talking about one of the greatest intellectuals that this country has ever produced.  We’re talking about a man who by the time he was twenty-six had not only graduated college and had his Masters degree, but had achieved a PhD. in Systematic Theology from Boston University. At 26 years old!  And yet in the film, everybody on all sides appears to have nothing more than a 7th grade education.  Is that part of that hustle, to sort of dumb it down? I say, sort of, but it really was a dumbing down of all articulation. 
 
AW: Sure, to dumb it down, to over simplify it, which in essence is to disgrace it frankly. One aspect of this merchandising, of this Civil Rights Movement and of Reverend King, is that in simplifying him they try to make him a model for contemporary use, and they don’t deal with his complexities . . .
 
JD: That’s exactly right.
 
AW:  . . .and one complexity, and I think this is also a fault I find with progressives, you know his proper title, Justin, is Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.
 
JD: That’s right.
AW:  And lately there’s very little attention paid to him as a reverent man.  And I find these days, in particularly how important spirituality was to the Civil Rights Movement, and to the survival of black people in America,  I don’t believe that the movement was simply a political movement, just as I don’t believe he was simply Dr. King, he was Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and it too easy for people to forget the complexity of his spiritual life and so we leave it out.  That’s one of the first problems I had with the movie because he’s introduced as a Noble Prize winner, not as a man who prays, he’s not shown to be a man of much spirituality at all.  He has to make a phone call to Mahalia Jackson to figure out how to get some sustenance. To me, not only was this simply a name dropping of Mahalia Jackson, but simply shows no understanding at all of how a spiritual person lives their lives, of where a spiritual person goes to get sustenance.  Not simply from hearing a famous singer singing on the telephone.  It has to do with being on your knees, it has to do with humbling, it has to do with a spiritual commitment which I think people are not interested in or believe in anymore, but if you’re going to deal with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, you got to deal with that, or else your being false to his history.  And you’re being false to the history that made black people survive all these years of slavery.  It was largely a matter of spiritual survival.  I think the makers of Selma, and the makers of so many resent race hustling films, they just don’t deal with that at all.  If they started there, they might get some place, but they just ignore that totally. 
 
JD: This is an extremely important point that your making, because it ties in, it weaves in, it fills out, the vision that has been so consistent in the story of Africans in the New World, of the experience of Africans in the New World from the centuries ago up until now! And that has to do most presently, most specifically, with the radical legacy that has been inspired by faith in God.  By the faith in love as a binding and revolutionary force! And so, Armond, you are absolutely illuminated and correct on this point. Because as a very close friend of mine was letting me know, as we later talked about the film, we saw it together, she noted the word Love never comes up. It never comes up.  How can you talk about King, without talking about love? 
 
AW:  Yes, the expression of God’s command to us, where is it? I mean as someone who lived through part of that era and as someone who has watched many documentaries about it, you can feel that force. In the great documentary series, Eyes on the Prize, that is no longer available, when you see the marchers, and the people at the sit-ins, and you see them praying, there’s a force there, and you’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind, to be ignorant to it. And it was powerful, and I think that was the thing that changed souls.  The movement didn’t simply, the Civil Rights Movement didn’t simply change law, though that was important and necessary, but it changed people’s souls, it changed people’s thinking, and that comes through prayer, that comes through belief in God. That comes through love, and the race hustlers, they don’t deal with that.  They leave that out, and they think that some version that marks the struggle is sufficient, but I don’t think it is.  And it’s sorely absent from this movie (Selma).  As it was from even more ridiculous The Butler, but that’s another issue. 
 
JD:  I want to be able to come full circle on all of these things, so let me step back and bring it to something we were talking about moments ago, and that had to do with the dumbing down. Now, I directed our attentions to the dumbing down of King’s speech itself, in fact, bizarrely he’s depicted as mute, utterly without talk, without speech, in the face of tremendous and horrific violence. But before getting on to that point, the opposition, including Johnson, are also similarly depicted as intellectually challenged figures, which is ridiculous, not to wave the flag for Lyndon Johnson , there’s plenty to critique about him, but this man was no dummy. The Master of the Senate, as he was known before being tapped by (John F.) Kennedy for the Vice-Presidency, I mean, this man set the tone and tempo for American politics for a very long time.  Could you respond to some of that as well, because it’s such a mistake that happens among Progressives, or what’s left of the left, to paint the picture of opposing forces to the Civil Rights Movement as being somehow not-too-bright. Could you talk about that a little bit?
 
AW: Well, it strikes me as being another form of reduction, as you say, and oversimplification of the political and social dynamics of the Civil Rights Movement, evidenced, and once again oversimplified, as a way of manipulating audiences. I think Johnson is a fascinating character, and I don’t think the filmmakers deal with what was fascinating about him, and they don’t deal with what was in some cases paradoxical about him, because that’s too complicated for their simplistic purposes. It’s too simple for their own propaganda purposes, and I call it propaganda because I think the intentions of films like Selma, are to make politics seem simpler than it is, and to appear to have the answers to political problems that imply my side, my perspective is right, and only my perspective is right, and not to understand how complicated the United States of America, and the people who live in the U.S. are. A man like Lyndon Johnson had a lot in common ground with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that this film doesn’t show, because it’s easier to show opposing sides that way.  It’s part of what I see to be the contemporary fashion to be divisive, to be polarizing, there’s a right side and a wrong side on every issue. That really does a disservice to history, it does a disservice to the way Americans live their lives frankly, and I think that’s one reason for it. And also not helped by casting Johnson and George Wallace and the other white opposition figures with Brits, with British performers, because this creates a kind of alienation from them that is not helpful.  In a certain sense King and Johnson spoke the same language, and if you can’t hear it in the way they talk, then you missed something about the way they communicated, and the film isn’t good enough, or fair enough to give us that.  I fear that it’s kind of intentional.
 
JD:  To offer a model for the present, for people to emulate, in this kind of caricature of the opposition, there is an effort, in part, by this film, to propagandize around a certain politic, a reductive politic that over simplifies the complexity surrounding the debates that take place in our daily lives, and we’re talking about, again, the present time.  I mean this is offering some sort of misguided model with how to deal with these issues in the present. Do I follow you there?
 
AW:  That’s what I mean, or I certainly agree with how you restate it, sure.  Yes, now not to get off the subject of Selma, but it reminds me of one of the problems I had with Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Because one thing that I found disastrous about Lincoln was that it to oversimplified the Civil War era politics, and I feel that Spielberg, and his screenplay writer Tony Kushner, did it that way because they were trying to make an allegory for contemporary politics. They’re trying to make a Barrack Obama allegory whereby they would justify any kind of political chicanery.  I found Lincoln to be a horrifying film because it tried to glorify political chicanery rather than dealing with any kind of political idealism or deal with any kind of common American experience. Common in a good sense.  And I think that Selma works the same way.  I think the opposition that it creates between King and Johnson is a way of paralleling contemporary political polarization, political division, as if to say it’s always that way and its only that way.  It neglects idealism the same way it neglects spirituality and love, and I think that is the political propaganda of the film and it seems to be the current fashion among filmmakers, if you consider the similarities between Lincoln and Selma.
 
JD:  There certainly is a great deal of truth to that, and this trend, this fashion, which includes films, 12 Years a Slave, also, Django Unchained, among others including, The Help. Again back to this point, these films are deeply contextualized in the cultural trends that surround the Obama presidency and the image of Barack Obama, more so than I believe than any one policy, any policy, really.  The image has been, for Hollywood at least, a provocation to delve into these territories in an attempt to digest the history that brought this presidency, or the image of the president, into being.  I think this has been, at least on the part of the filmmakers that we’ve discussed, or the films that we’ve talked about, a really terrible, horrible, misguided exercise in trying to sanitize and devolve and dismiss these legacies and these histories. And part of what is so bazaar about that, in dealing with the many thousands, tens of thousands really, of narratives that emerge from the experience of non-whites, blacks in particular, throughout the Americas, we are talking about the most persuasive and compelling stories. Stories that reveal some of the most fascinating images of the West, of the world, really.  Now everybody knows that, around the world, and they are constantly mining Black American culture to find something to help them get along. I mean, you can find in every corner of the world, that there is someone right now making some kind of imitation of some aspect of black American culture. Now, given the resources that are available, how can they (the filmmakers) come up with such thin gruel.  You know, it leaves me somewhat flabbergasted, man.  I just can’t believe it, that they would dwell in such a, well, fraud.  I can’t think of a nicer word for it. It’s fraud.
 
AW: Yes, it is a kind of fraud.  Well, in terms of fraud and in terms of merchandising, I imagine you have seen, and your listeners have seen, the posters for the movie Selma, which is the back of a black man’s head. You know it’s a very round head, but it’s the back of his head, and I see it and I cringe at it because to me, it just looks like branding. It makes me cringe to think that history has been so easily commercialized. But that’s what they do in Hollywood.  But every time I see that poster, you know the back of that head could be King, it could also be Obama, and I think that’s intentional.
 
JD:  That’s the point that they’re trying to make.
 
AW:  Yes, that’s the point they are trying to make, that this man could be Obama. But the filmmakers and the film-sellers, they do us all a disservice. But they are doing us a disservice, I suspect, not for the best of reasons. But part of the reason they do it is to try and control the way people think about history, try to control the way people think about politics,  and their own lives.  There is a common phrase that I don’t particularly like that came out of one of Barack Obama’s speeches, where he talks about being on “the right side of history.” That phrase just doesn’t sit right with me.  And certainly when dealing with works of art that are supposedly portraying the complexity of human experience, being on the right or wrong side of history has nothing to do with anything.
 
JD: Absolutely nothing.
To Be Continued