No (actual) history

Overlord (d. Julius Avery)

Strictly B-movie and doesn’t attempt to be more. Movie should have been more decisive in focusing on who the hero is. The most affable and intelligent character is the black soldier but the movie doesn’t want him to be either the leader or the lover, so that despite genre conventions that would lead to the pairing or kiss of man and woman, the film avoids it instead, well, because the woman here is white. The movie tries to be careful about race, but like most well-intentioned movies that tackles race full on or gingerly, it’s not motivated by true understanding, but as a self-reflexive move by filmmakers who would like to convey to the audience how open-minded they are. What one gets, and we have seen this over and over again to the point of exasperation, is multiculturalism without race. Yes, he is black, but there’s no history attached to his blackness, because if it were so, we would have to deal with Jim Crow, primarily, since the movie is set during WW2, and, slavery, which wasn’t that long ago from that time period. The film has the black character explain to the white French character that he was drafted, not expecting to be where he is today. There are no indications of segregated units or racism in the military. The other white dudes don’t express disdain over the blossoming relationship between the two, too. Despite all this, early on, the movie can’t help depict black social death. Note the harrowing scene where the (should be true) protagonist escapes by climbing into a truck of dead (mostly white) bodies. That’s his true social status: to be dead or to be among the dead. Why do I insist on this point? Because those who are revived from death in the film are all white. They have the ability to be reanimated or, for some, rejuvenated, something that doesn’t happen to black bodies in the film. One other thing that has been nagging me is why can’t the black soldier be the leader of the pack? The showdown is really between two versions of straight white maleness: the fascist versus the liberal—is this an early indication of what the next presidential race will look like? The white soldier does one thing truly commendable though when he decides to wipe out all this tainted horrid Nazi alien technology so that even his side will not get it. Nice touch, and it mimics the way the film torpedoes actual racial history, among a few things. We can enjoy things, life, Americana, baseball, as long as we don’t bring history and material relations into the picture into our collective B movie lives.

#2019 #34