fassbinder
Last week I watched Whity, a caustic and seething Fassbinder film that is nearly painful to watch. In a strange genre mixing of Antebellum plantation story and shoot-em-up Western, the story of Whity, a black slave, is told. He is the sexual partner for men and women of the ruling plantation family, and is also the illegitimate son of the black maid (herself a black woman wearing black face) and the plantation owner. The story is amazingly convoluted and incestuous, and the ending totally melodramatic, perfect for such a camp yet frightening film. After watching it I was left with a sensation similar to the effect of reading William T. Vollmann, a seering sense that the human race will never get past the issue of race and that pretty much every battle ever fought has racism at its core.
Comments
it it hard to forget about race, because our various races tend not to want to forget about us.
that look that some middle americans will give you when you say you prefer living in other countires.
"how could you?"
as if you've betrayed something sacred.
race is a kind of nationality grafted into our skin.
i can throw away my nationality with some effort.
new meaning to the phrase "unbecoming american"
but i can't shake the perception that i'm not black (even though i may be) if my skin says i'm white.
but, and i think chomsky said this first, the problems that are to come betweent the affluent and the disenfranchised may make issues of race secondary.
the new "nigger" will be the whole of the fourth world, i.e. the atomization of poverty, be it in africa or downtown los angeles or in the "homeless mura" between shibuya and harajuku stations, interspersed among their economic masters.
but i already brand myself in saying this much.
Posted by: r. | November 14, 2005 6:42 PM