Selma

Ava DuVernay’s Selma is more important as a social document than as a film. It reminds America of the brutal history from which it has not yet escaped. Like any period piece it reflects not just the time of its setting but also the time it is made.

First, it recalls the drama of Martin Luther King’s leadership in the 1965 march from Selma Alabama to the capital city Montgomery. That forced the Voting Rights Act ensuring African Americans the unimpeded right to vote. It’s a stirring story but a sad one because it recalls the horrible violence of the white suppression of the negro, extending to the murder of white sympathizers as well. The blatant hatred is chilling.

The black woman director makes this very much the black perspective on those events, without the usual valorizing of some whites. She pulls no punches on the violence, especially in the church explosion that killed five little girls and in the vicious police attacks on civilians. It’s also the woman’s perspective, as Coretta King’s role is emphasized, especially in mediating between King and Malcolm X, and in the assertive career of a hospital worker played by Oprah Winfrey.

When the epilogue text explains the later career of King’s aides Selma becomes the turning point in US politics. From there a generation of African Americans moved into the mainstream. And Dr King’s speeches still stir the soul.

Perhaps more importantly, the film reflects on today. Clearly the nation is still stuck in the quagmire of racism. The political system still privileges the white man. That’s what Sarah Palin was saying when in the wake of Obama’s first election she declared “Give us back our country.” There is still a systematic suppression of the underclass’s attempt to vote, whether in voter registration, voting regulations and conditions, or the farce of the hanging chads that snuck G.W. Bush past Al Gore. Especially given the new unbridled power of the PACS, the voting system is still rigged and corrupt.

Nor has President Johnson’s War on Poverty been won either. If anything the gap between the richest and the poor has widened and the number and desperation of the poor have ballooned. Cops still get away with the unwarranted murder of African Americans, as do white civilians armed with the Stand Your Ground clause. 

So electing a black president did not make America post-racist after all. In the Republicans’ belligerent refusal to respect his office, explicitly preferring to ruin the economy rather than cooperate, and in the virulence the president has evoked in the vox populi, the old racism has metastasized but remains systemic. 

If we don’t have a George Wallace now we have the Koch brothers poised to spend a billion to buy the next election. The Right-dominated Supreme Court is a far cry from the assuring humanity of the film’s judge, Martin Sheen (of course). Seeing the engagement of the Christian church in the civil rights movement, one has to ask where is the church today? Where are the church leaders speaking out against the oppression of the Spanish American underclass, the systemic poverty and restrictions on education and voting rights? And how do today’s Tea Party class and Christian Republicans stand against the leadership their church took in the civil rights movement then?  

We need to see Selma, then, both to be reminded of that signal point in American history and to see how our present system harbours new forms of the old systemic bigotry and inequality.

     With that important business going on here it seems trivial to reduce the discussion to the film’s Oscar nominations. The Best Picture nomination acknowledges its importance and its achievement. As for the other categories, there was just too much better competition this year. As a film this isn’t in the same league as Boyhood, Birdman, Foxcatche etc. But Selma has a social value beyond its mere function as a film and for that we should be grateful.