This 1936 all-black folk interpretation of the Old Testament draws 'Uncle Tom'-style flak from liberal academia, and maybe they're right (1), but on the other hand, God is portrayed as a black man (Rex Ingram), and He is a God of Wrath and Vengeance. So, while he may talk gentle and folksy, and heaven may be just clouds and an endless singing, fish-fries, five cent ceegars, and cups of firmament-deficient custard, it's still no place for buffoonery. And I personally love the shit out of this movie, and if part of that love comes from a kind or round-about racism, then stone me not lest ye be first stoned, as I was when I had it on a six-hour tape sandwiched between a host of 30s Betty Boop cartoons and Death Takes a Holiday (1934). The tape was labeled "In case of Emergency" - knowing this blog you might guess what kind of emergency I meant. For nary a month or so went by that my weird self-medication regimen wouldn't fail on me, to the point I'd drunkenly and ill-advisedly take too much acid in order to pull myself out of a spiritual tailspin and instead wind up spinning even faster, the yawning chasm of Hell opening up before me. In those dark moments, with Death so close I could see its reflection in the toilet bowl mirror, I'd reach for the Boop-Pastures-Holiday trifecta tape, and lo, I would be healed. "Nothing dies forever," probably a misquote I heard while in the other room during Expendables 3. But ain't it apt?
Because, children, for all its folksy drinkin' mammy wine stereotypin', Green Pastures won't stay dead. At its core it's not about the black experience, it can't demean what it admits it can't understand, in its clear-headed mystical scissor complexity it is a very modernist film, darker than blue even as it goes down sweet as vanilla extract bottle downed as a last resort on a blue law Sunday. When situated twixt Boop's Max Fleishcer animated, Satchmo-scored surrealism and the Frederic March-starred "Hurrah for the next who dies" love story, all three personified great archetypal forces in play and provided a soulful comfort to a poor space cowboy fallen so far off his horse he'd already passed the ground three times. It was surely meant to heal this way, for 1930, the year it was written (as a play) was a rough year for this great country, a whole lot of once middle class white folks--many decorated war heroes--were suddenly very enlightened in how it felt to be poor as hell, spat on by the cops, and forced to sleep in Central Park and to take whatever demeaning job was offered. The market crashed, the Depression was on, and you couldn't even drown your sorrows, thanks to Prohibition. FDR was still three years away, but Hitler was coming right on into view.
Even today a black actor can't just be an actor, they have to 'represent' color, one way or another, elevating or denigrating with every step and word. To quote one of the Angels near the end as he watches Jesus down on the cross, that's a terrible burden for one man. But a great actor uses every ounce of whatever he's got in his DNA. He finds deep soulful power in his blackness, rather than perform whiteness he performs the blackness that is there at the core of the entirety of mankind. He recognizes the universal man as black via accentuation of the black man as Other rather than the kind of sanitized PC sermonizing that reinforces stereotypes even as it denies them. White fans like myself look at the vibrant soul of the black performer with vampiric envy. We recognize it as something we lack, and feel it in our bones, long to absorb it. We know that it's wrong in a PC sense, but in an artistic sense, it's universal to first admire, then imitate, then absorb aspects into one's original voice, and move on, absorbing more and more of what other artists have done, other visions, ever-widening, past one's own parameters in the social order.
And so it is that The Green Pastures was written in 1930 by a white man, Marc Connelly, one of the key wits of the Algonquin round table, from a source text called Ol Adam and his Chillun by Roark Bradford. Both the play and the book have been criticized by black intellectuals and they're right, but the criticism is no reason to avoid the work, which instead of being dismissed as racist might be seen more as folk art, which was big at the time, especially on Broadway. Don't forget, in the same era the popular books were savage satires of white hillbilly poverty and deviance by eugenics proponents like Erskine Caldwell. Relatively speaking, Pastures is socially progressive, wise, and humorous, if some of the black actors embody exaggerated grotesques, it should be remembered that the source text basically chronicles Eden, the Flood, ancient Egypt, Babylon, and so forth, and the idea of humanity ever-oscillating between humble reverence and depraved decadence, between higher human and bestial indulgence, is something America still struggles with today.
We should also remember that the most racist of all biblical films are those deadly dull ones that cast only white actors, sometimes in black, brown, or yellow face, to play the biblical figures. Based on the relatively small geographic area where most of the Old Testament transpires, characters should all actually be North African. Where else in popular culture, aside from that Isaac Hayes album Black Moses or on Kwanzaa tapestries, are biblical characters black? The black man is the original man, true? So no other race should portray Adam, or Noah for that matter, and that means everyone else in the damned burg should be some mix of Northern African and Middle Eastern heritage, Jews included as part of the Israel / Ishmael divide. (2)
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| Right |
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| Wrong! |
So in a sense this movie does what my lame Christian Science Sunday school teachers never could, make sense of what is, in a literally biblical sense, a bizarre unheimliche mix of historical fact and mythic 'telephone game' translation and editing. Having it be a folksy narrative along the lines of something Mark Twain or Carl Sandburg might write is perhaps the 'truest' way to tell the story.
If all that doesn't mean anything to you, o judger of my love as racist, then just this: The Hal Johnson Choir does some great singing as the Heavenly angel congregation, the kind of music we don't hear nowadays when gospel is either Mahalia Jackson style or stodgy Catholic classical; the choir is more attuned to, say, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, another old trippy favorite of my clan. The film is not a musical and the songs mostly serve as transitions between scenes, as God meddles with or just visits the folks on his Earth, then comes back up and decides whether or not to wipe out this latest version and start again.
And if the language seems outdated, note of the original bible text (which I looked up wondering what the hell firmament was):
Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day (GENESIS 1.6-8)Jeezis that's bad speaking on old God's part. I far prefer de Lawd's version:
"Let there be some firmament, and I don't mean no little bit of firmament. I mean a whole mess of firmament, 'cuz I'm sick of running out of it when we need it.".
Like a lot of enduring mythic texts, the Old Testament defies easy interpretation as either truth or fiction, i.e. it is true myth, tall tales in a sense, ala John Henry if crossed with the historical fact of Joe Louis, Leadbelly, and Cassius Clay. You can argue its accuracy all you want, but the text is full of magical staffs and personifications of elemental forces that were probably never meant to be taken as concretized dogma (3) as there are huge gaps in logic that my Sunday school teacher never could answer for me. For example, who did the children of Adam and Eve go off and marry if there were yet no other people? And later the children of Noah. Did they mate with some prehuman life form, or in the case of Noah's progeny, mermaids? Or with each other, and if with each other, and this goes for the two of each kind of animal, how with such a small gene pool are we not all (and all the animals) deformed inbred monsters? I get no answer... but in the context of The Green Pastures I don't need one. We're not here to blindly obey some nonsensical text with a wildly inconsistent and petty God. We're not making literal interpretation ala Chuck Heston. We're here to understand what it all means. And what it all means is that even our extraterrestrial old school God of Wrath and Vengeance can learn new tricks, and be taught by his own creations, to recognize and value suffering as a tool for self-transformation. The no atheists in a foxhole or a hospice vibe includes God too. Once He winds us up and sets us off into the world, He has no control over our actions, just hopes you find Him again, even if He's hiding, like Irene Dunne with a broken leg at the end of Love Story.
For first world white kids like myself, with no diseases or ailments or crippling accidents or arrests of any kind, we can really only know true suffering via mental illness, such as depression, or our own drug withdrawal or bad trip overdoses on psychedelics that turn out to be laced with strychnine or formaldehyde, or are just way stronger than we were prepared for. Failing that, it's my opinion suicide attempts are a last ditch effort to achieve the same grace, because if you survive, suddenly your once stifling woes are dialed back into focus. Here's a little mantra I wrote about it:
Suffering is the fire of God the blacksmith, melting down your frying pan soul to hammer it into a mighty sword. Best learn to love the sound of the hammer ringing, because He's never satisfied.
The dentist is not punched for his painful probe;
you pay him for the privilege. So it is that
the infant is forgiven his filthy diaper,
the old man his soiled bedsheets,
but not the vagrant, drunk, obscene, stumbling reminder
that no pursuit of pleasure escapes its counterbalance misery,
and so to vice versa.
If your crying is not from worry or the dread of dying
Allow it. Aummmmmm
If your crying is not from fear the manna's flow shall soon cease,
Aummmmmm
If your crying is not from thinking about tomorrow, worrying on
the punishment from father, the trouble you'll be in, the missed finals, the repetitions
already seen as tedious, before they're starting
um...
Where the twig meets the leaf is where the first frames of meshed mom morph.
Then it vibrates outward, the unspooling spiral of the seashell snail shape Aummmmmmm
shuffled downward onto plankton carpets, shamanic rattles caked in baby spittle,
white and shiny glistening like freshly hatched serpent.
Aummmm, shapes cut from glowing red lantern light revolved in orbit patterns as you lie down.
Aummmmmmmmm, the holy gleaming halo of your last first faint sunset Aummmm.
Each death, night, goodbye, adieu just an outward breath Aummmmmmm.
Mom, that titan, that tower, encircles us no more,
just the slow spinning stars of nontoxic plastic, above us,
out of reach, above the crib prison crypt.
The rattle dries into whiskey and drum sets, growing tall brings
girls of equal height, their breasts no longer big as beanbag chairs,
only the forgotten homework now
stirs a guilty shiver that giant crib mom absences's harrowing equal.
Inward..
Buzzing, the razor stops suddenly, the chair
either dentist of barber, you forgot which,
lurches downward.
The bib comes off.
We're unleashed,
to where, with such a naked neck?
And so we sense that the hangups that befoul our spiritual questing are all beaten and cleared away by the enormous suffering of the Jewish slaves and the black slaves, and the grotesque words, faces, jewelry and actions all speak to a great evolutionary quality, as the grotesque exaggerations of blackness, the dice game, the koochie dancers, the grim inhumanity and shallow interest in 'tricks' gives way to hard-won dignity as humanity collectively moves from a Pagan pantheon of animal gods and graven images (requiring human sacrifices) to the idea of a jealous God who demands fidelity, to a God of love and forgiveness. It's all there in Ingram's face as de Lawd, and also as Adam, and Hezrel, a name that appears nowhere else.
During my 'here comes the big 12/21/12!' big rapture moment (4) I understood at last with diamond clarity that all the suffering in the world had only this one purpose, the shaking of the gold prospector's pan - to sift away the dross and mud so God might see what's left to shine, and all the baubles and wealth in the world won't buy you one step onto that golden stair, so don't be sure all that glitters in Plant's hair has two meanings. But in losing all that, in tossing possessions away, in enduring centuries of slavery with one's every pain-wracked step (5), one earns it. No expensive wine ever tasted half as sweet as plain water to a man dying of dehydration in the desert. And to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, God made men into desert wanderers, that they might know this awesome vintage. Because I'm too pampered to want to wander and die in the desert just for a taste of this golden water nectar, I became a psychedelic surgeon. But when I accidentally sew my ego into the soul via incorrect sutures and stay awake in the dark night of the soul despair, then I got Leadbelly, and Lightnin' Hopkins, and the Pastures, to raise me clear above it (by going below it) via transcendental alchemical process. It remindeth me the desert's always waiting, somewhere wrapped in foil in a forgotten college freezer, the 'good work' always ready to be picked up right where you left it. Aummm.
A final word:
Ingram also played the devil's son-in-law in Cabin in the Sky, another all-black film that posits the negro culture as being more extreme in its polarity than whites (i.e. a black man is either a decent, God-fearing Christian or a debauched craps-shooting, razor-wielding pimp) gets far less critical dross, but I think is far more racist (7). Here Ingram is de Lawd and we never see the devil. And he played the genie in Thief of Baghdad, in short he's very good at playing larger than life mythic archetypes that far transcend the generic role of the 'bearer of the burden of blackness.' He genuinely seems to be asking, in that beautifully gentle but forceful purr of a voice, "Have you been baptized?" ("Yes, Lord" the choir responds) Have you been redeemed? ("Yes lord"), etc. He's a complex god because though he judges his creation his main request is that he honor him on Sunday, obey the commandments, and not go "fussin' and fightin' and bearin' false witness." He brings in the three Jewish angels in long white beards, and declares "It so happens I love your family, and I delights to honor them." The angels mention their people are in bondage down in Egypt. "I know they is. Who do you think put them there?" The Angels look dismayed "Oh, that's okay, I'm a take 'em out again." The Angels smile - but again there's the nagging suspicion that God is a bit of an insecure egotist. A good parent understands his children are bound to disobey on occasion, that it's essential to good growth of independent thought (as an academic advisor I see the damage done by over-protective parents who work double time to prevent this independent thought in their children).
During my last big awakening I became a ball of light unmoored from my body and 3D space time. I realized I was always either revolving closer to the godhead or farther away - but there was no such thing as true motionlessness, and to merge into the godhead obliterated all separateness, and can be dangerous - like moths aren't meant to survive hitting the bulb they orbit. In this case it was a ground zero of infancy - the sun being mother's breast, her love, her giant presence, for when a baby, your mother is a gigantic icon, more then five times your size. You worship her and need look no farther for true sustenance and comfort and if you hold a good orbit you're okay, but drift too far from her amniotic light and it's total darkness. She becomes just another star as you drift (as seen in Enter the Void). And if you're not working back towards that holy light, the devil's got you in his long reach gravity, convincing you to curse, get drunk, and get more stuff because God doesn't exist anyway. True or not makes no difference: I feel this comforting gravity of the lord when watching Green Pastures. And that is enough. If there is a God, the miseries He creates here on Earth are to aid us in finding a streak of true faith and true mercy, true humility, the nonjudgmental love that unites all dualities back into a healthy radiant whole. Do I bow mighty low? I do.
Until the drugs wear off.
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NOTES:
For New Testament Action, see Acidemic's 2011 Great Acid Cinema JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977)
1. See G.S. Morris's great, even-handed analysis: Thank God for Uncle Tom. Race and Religion Collide in The Green Pastures (Bright Lights, Jan. 2008)
2. I don't know what I'm talking about here, shhhh!
3. Imagine if Aesop's Fables were taken as truth, with vintners making sure their vines are always low enough for foxes to reach, lest the grapes turn sour, etc.)
4. fall 2012 if you're keeping score, check the posts.
5. Giving away all your possessions and $$ gives you a rush of total freedom, if it didn't cults wouldn't exist. Add to that the idea that a vegan diet is both very holy and right and yet makes you highly suggestible and passive, and drudgery and ceaseless toil give you clarity (i.e. when standing for 24 hours straight, lying down is a sublime ecstasy) then cults have a great rationale for all their exploitive behavior.
6. STP - or DOM - is a Berkeley chemist masterpiece, it's a sports car that comes with no brakes, and no way to de-accelerate, the gas tank just has to run itself out. I didn't know til Erowid that what I'd taken (DOM) was the same as what my doppelganger avatar Dave in Psych-Out (Dean Stockwell) is drinking and passing out sips. See: Great Acid Cinema: PSYCH-OUT (1968)
7. see one of my very first posts on this site: CABIN IN THE SKY: Co-Dependence and the Lord. (7/07)