Critical Noir

Debating the Great Debaters

Posted 01/02/2008 at 9:09 PM  |  2 comment/s

I recently weighed in on the significance of Denzel Washington's performances as Frank Lucas in American Gangster and Melvin B. Tolson in The Great Debaters. There are many who want to make critical distinctions between a Harlem drug lord--or dope dealer as Bomani Jones so eloquently asserts--and a celebrated modernist poet who happened to coach one of the most accomplished college debate teams in the 1930s. I argue though that both men, and the worlds they inhabited, provide a rich entrée into the nuanced and complicated lives that everyday black folk lead--lives that rarely get depicted via Hollywood Cinema. That said, The Great Debaters takes liberties with historical realities, often solely for the effect of creating a classic Hollywood tale. In this regard the film--despite the earnest intents of the director (Washington) and the film's producer Oprah Winfrey--does a disservice, by being dismissive of the real political struggles engaged by those depicted in the film.

In his own right Melvin B. Tolson is a figure deserving closer examination. Throughout The Great Debaters though, Tolson's story was too often dwarfed by the need for his character to power the "little engine that could." Thus in the name of adhering to "feel good movie of year" clichés, The Great Debaters offers little with regards to Tolson's significant reputation as a black modernist poet. More alarming was the way Tolson's involvement with southern tenant farmers was employed in the film to elevate his--and by extension Washington's--race man status, providing little detail to how deadly and under-appreciated labor and farmer organizing was in the South, particularly when such organizing aimed to bring together farmers and workers across the color-line. Tolson's truly engaged political work wasn't simply about instructing black college students (largely drawn from the middle class) in the fine art of debate or in producing a body of literature that ranked with the best of his more celebrated Harlem Renaissance peers, but rather the more concrete, roll-up-your-sleeves, labor that he did on behalf of the tenant farming movement. But of course the reality of that struggle is not as exciting as a group of students from a tiny historically black college in Texas successfully competing against students from the very paragon of American higher education, Harvard University.

And yet the film's signature moment is another example of where the film takes liberties, as the presumed debate with Harvard actually took place against the University of Southern California (USC). Understandably having Wiley slay the mighty Harvard is a more compelling story, particularly for a black period film trying to compete for holiday dollars. Wiley's real defeat of the USC debate team is no-less a significant achievement at a historical moment (and some say contemporary moment) when the very concept that blacks possessed intellectual capabilities on par with whites was under assault. The tweaking of history in Hollywood cinema is of course a time tested practice, where the sanctity of the narrative is often privileged at the expense of real historical events and people. It is not surprising then, that the characters of Henry Lowe (Nate Parker) and Jurnee Smollett's Samantha Booke ("with an e") were composite characters. The fact that the film's producers needed audiences to invest in the lives and futures of these characters led to their decision to create biographies for "fictional" characters after test audiences reacted negatively to vague descriptions of Lowe's future.

Ironically the story of James Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), one of the real historical figures in the film and arguably the most compelling on the debate team, was often a backdrop to the steamy relationship between Lowe and Booke. Highlighting the on-screen sexual tension between Smolett and Parker (think about the bare-chested Parker in last year's feel-good-movie, Pride) obviously helps make the film more accessible to hip-hop generation audiences, but Farmer's own story as a teen who was drawn into the critical political movement of his era should have been equally attractive to the film's producers. Farmer, who was a frequent debater of Malcolm X in the 1960s, became an important figure in his own right as a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Figures like Farmer are often footnotes to the "magic" Negro narratives that mainstream audiences find so damn fascinating--those stories of black folk who with their superior talents or superhuman capacity for forgiveness help whites salve their guilt about this country's racist past.

The Great Debaters makes little effort to connect the future political engagement of Farmer--CORE organized some of the first southern "freedom" rides nearly two decades before the more well-known freedom rides of the 1960s--with the visceral struggles that he witnessed following Tolson to a meeting with black and white tenant farmers. Instead that experience with Tolson and the dramatic lynching scene that serves as the film's emotional turning point, are used simply as inspiration for Farmer's anecdotal usage in his debate with the fictional Harvard debate team. That the film's producers make little effort to connect the historical dots here, is particularly egregious at a contemporary moment that demands that American youth imagine themselves as potential agents of social justice. Films like The Great Debaters often relish in the ability of blacks to transcend racist realities and their own moral deficiencies, but provide little inkling of the real political struggles that create the victories and successes that these films celebrate.

de.licio.us digg Furl Reddit YahooMyWeb

Trackbacks

Trackback url for this entry: http://blogs.vibe.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1191

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry:

Comments

Add a Comment

You must log in or register to post comments.