The last time I remember formally blogging my thoughts on a movie was for Queen and Slim. That was Black History Month 2022 (though Queen and Slim was released in 2019). Anyway, here I am again, struck by another masterpiece of film—a film written and directed by Ava Duvernay. My admiration for Ava DuVernay is no secret. Remember me fangirling over her response to my Queen Sugar Halloween costume? She is brilliantly thoughtful, creative, and intentional—everything I aspire to be. When I first saw the mention of ORIGIN, I confess—I did not even know what it was supposed to be about really, but it was the work of Ms. DuVernay, whom I stan, so instinctively, I was looking forward to it.
I followed along with its developing reveal, becoming more anxious to see it, especially after hearing Ms. DuVernay sing the praises of Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s performance (and also, I loved her in King Richard, so). I kept checking my local theater well after the release date, and at one point, I had legit anxiety that it would not come to my local theater. And then, this past Friday, I was in the middle of watching Harriet, and ORIGIN came across my mind again. I checked my local theater listing, and there it was! There were few show times to pick from– but it was finally here. I stopped everything I was doing and dressed to make the next show. I grabbed my purse and keys and was out the door to grab a ticket and some popcorn.
I wish to be as brilliant and impactful as Ms. DuVernay. I left the theater in utter amazement. ORIGIN is a work of art. A work of art that Ava DuVernay did independently with no studio–raising the money herself. And all of the praises for Ms. Ellis-Taylor’s performance were beyond deserved.
This biopic is about the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson (the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism) as she writes Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. The book, which I have not read yet (but have ordered along with The Warmth of Other Suns), is about how a caste system has shaped America and has been a common denominator in American slavery and segregation, the Holocaust, and the Dalits in India. This was particularly interesting to me because remember when I blogged about reading The Covenant of Water in August last year? Specifically, when I wrote in that particular post:
Remember that 90’s classic A Different World episode where Whitley is about to marry Senator Byron, and DeWayne interrupts and asks Whitley to marry him instead? And then the preacher bellowed— “Blessed are those who ask the questions, brotha!” Yeah.
Maybe I didn’t know how to properly frame or pose the question or dig deep enough into it, for that matter (because perhaps then I would have come across Ms. Wilkerson’s Caste book), but after reading Abraham Verghese’s novel and without any prior knowledge of Isabel Wilkerson or her work, I remember the familiarity I felt while reading about India’s caste system. Interestingly enough, I also read a couple of other books last year that deepened my understanding of Nazi Germany and how cruelty had no limits during slavery. Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson—a historical fiction novel based on the life of Mary Lumpkin, a.k.a. Pheby Delores Brown, born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, who finds herself enslaved at the Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond. And All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which plot entails a little girl who goes blind and has to flee Paris with her father when the Nazis invade it, and a parallel plot of an orphan boy in a mining town in Germany who is recruited for training with Hitler due to his exquisite talent with fixing radios. This story won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Now I have learned that the Nazis were inspired and influenced by American racism and segregation, so much so to study it for use in their cruelty against the Jewish (but crazy enough, apparently, not all of it because some of how Whites were treating Blacks was too surprising and appalling and taking it a little too far even for the Nazis.)
If you have not seen the film, you can skip over the following several paragraphs because—spoiler alert. For one, I enjoyed Blair Underwood (still handsome) as Amari Selvin–the editor who tries to convince Isabel that she is the writer who needs to write about the Trayvon Martin case. “Writers write, so write,” he said to her while trying to coax her into at least listening to the recordings of the 911 calls on the night Trayvon was killed. As a poignant side note, Trayvon would have celebrated his 29th birthday this past Monday, February 5th.
The relationships portrayed–the love between two Black women as mother and daughter and as cousins (Niecy Nash was wonderful), the love between a Black woman and a White man as coy, flirty neighbors, and then husband and wife (Jon Bernthal was also wonderful), and even the love between a White husband and his Black mother-in-law, were beautiful, natural, charming, funny, heart-breaking—all the feels, all the things.
There is a scene where Ms. Wilkerson calls a plumber to deal with flooding in her basement, and the plumber, a white man, is wearing a Make America Great Again hat, ready to easily dismiss her and treat her according to the principles of that hat. Gosh, this scene was so triggering. For those who do not know me, I am a nurse practitioner, and I immediately thought of the time I walked into a patient’s room, and he and his wife both had on that atrocious red MAGA hat. All of the emotions portrayed on Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s face were understood deep in my gut. But she was better than me. I swallowed my disbelief and anger—did my job, and left the room without sparing an extra second lest their condescension cause me to regurgitate it all. Isabel pushed past her feelings and sought to search for and pull on his humanity, finding some common ground by asking about his mother and father. She assumed humanity was there (an assumption I didn’t make because in my Toni Morrison voice, don’t you understand, that the people who do this thing, that practice racism are bereft. There’s something distorted about the psyche, a profound neurosis.) But Isabel’s tactic worked. He dismissed his former dismissive self and looked into her water leak as she had asked. It felt too simple, too ideal. This reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the movie: “There is more to life than what you can see.”
There was the historic scene of Al-Bright, the only little Black boy on his Little League team, who in 1951 was not allowed into the pool with his teammates while celebrating a championship win. And when he finally was allowed to partake in the water festivities, it had to be alone, on a floater raft. Everyone stared on silently, and he was firmly reminded by the lifeguard repeatedly to “not touch the water.” I cried. That scene wrecked me. What if my little sweet Black boy was being treated like this?
And I cannot forget Isabel’s meeting with Miss Hale, played by Audra McDonald. This was easily one of my favorite scenes. Harold Hale, a father from Alabama who came along during Jim Crow, marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King, Jr in 1965, served this country in the U.S. Army, and knew that Black men and women were not addressed with the respect of “Miss” or Mister,” purposefully named his daughter Miss to demand her respect and wittingly “beat the system.” Checkmate! Miss reminds us of Toni Morrison’s point—that Whites logically could not have thought Black people were inferior or lazy. Or that we were inhuman. Because, well, you do not give your children over to the care of people whom you believe to be inhuman.
There was the story of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, an Indian man who grew up an “untouchable” in poverty but overcame and went on to help draft India’s constitution. (And there was the story of Dr. King being introduced as an untouchable from the United States of America while on a visit to India) There was the story of August Landmesser, the German man refusing to give the Nazi salute in a 1935 crowd photo. There was the story of the Nazi book-burning and present-day empty-bookshelf memorial built into the cobblestone streets of Berlin’s Bebelplatz. There was the story of how one of the first Black anthropologists Allison Davis and his wife, Elizabeth Dubbs Davis, found themselves in Germany just as the Nazis were coming into power and how with their white colleagues, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, were the first to study the social divisions on both sides of the racial divide. There was so much. And it was all fused beautifully and brilliantly.
Unjust, inhumane systems created to give a particular group of individuals a false-positive superiority is crazy and maddening. Remember in that same scene in A Different World when Whitley’s mom (a.k.a the gorgeous Diahann Carroll), more enthused with the status of her daughter being a Senator’s wife versus DeWayne’s wife and perturbed at DeWayne for interrupting that reality, stood up and primly said, “Die, just die!” Yeah. Discrimination needs to die. One of my favorite Toni Morrison quotes, “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”
In an interview with Democracy Now, Ava DuVernay spoke about choosing the title ORIGIN (instead of CASTE) for the film, “The film is not the book; the film is about the writing of the book. And it’s about the woman who wrote the book. …It’s about the intellectual pursuit, the curiosity that leads us to knowledge, the interrogation of status and power. It’s about obstacles, love, and triumph over adversity. It’s about the life and work of this woman as she is writing Caste.”
I want to add to that. This film is about the ability of a genius storyteller to gracefully hold up a mirror to humanity and reflect on the inhumane. It is about being gifted, charged, and tenacious. It is about the ugly things that have put us and kept us in an ugly place. And for me, on an even more personal note, between these beautiful intellectual women—Ms. Ava DuVernay, Ms. Aunjanue Ellis Taylor, and Ms. Isabel Wilkerson, it is about every reason I unequivocally love being a black woman– why, no matter what pathetic racist rhetoric or caste construct tries to imply, my pride in who I am is completely unscathed.
“Always live up to your name” is probably my favorite line from this film. Ms. DuVernay does that with ORIGIN and has profoundly inspired me to do the same. To celebrate Black History Month, please head to my IG page and comment “ORIGIN” on today’s post. I want to give two tickets to someone to see ORIGIN this weekend on me! Happy History Month! If you have already seen ORIGIN, let me know your thoughts!
