On the benefits of the macro and micro approaches to representing history.
I wrote at the end of yesterday’s post about comforting but limiting
mythologized historical narratives, the kind in which (for example) great men
(or women) achieve meaningful advances, bad people produce the dark histories,
and never the twain shall meet. The problem with those narratives isn’t just
that the world doesn’t work that way—it’s that they make it impossible to get
at either the complex realities or
the deeper truths of the past. Take the case of Rubin
“Hurricane” Carter, for example—by all accounts, including his own, boxing
champ Carter had a lengthy and deserved criminal record at the time of 1966 arrest and 1967
trial for triple murder; it’s also undeniable that the evidence against
Carter was (at best) extremely weak, and almost certainly manipulated and
falsified by racist police offers on a vendetta against Carter, and after
nearly twenty years in prison Carter
was freed in late 1985. But can we tell the latter story while
acknowledging the former aspects of Carter’s identity and life?
In his 1975
song “Hurricane,” Bob Dylan opted to focus entirely on the macro histories,
the story of individual and institutionalized racial prejudice and injustice “in
a land where justice is a game.” As such, Dylan’s song focuses at length on the
identities and perspectives of Alfred
Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley, the two career criminals on whose
testimonies much of the case against Carter depended; and very little on those
of Carter, about whom (outside of the details of the arrest and trial) we learn
only that he was a “number one contender for the middleweight crown” who “could
take a man out with just one punch / but he never did like to talk about it all
that much.” Dylan’s choice makes sense, particularly given the broader histories
of racism and lynching with which the Carter case must be contextualized
(alongside the 1966 race riots
that were unfolding at the time of Carter’s arrest, and to which Dylan alludes
in the line “Four months later the ghettos are in flame”), and in light of
which the individual identity of an African American man made absolutely no
difference. But on the other hand, for those who learn about Carter’s case from
Dylan’s song, the specifics of Carter’s own life and identity would seem to be
part of the story as well, not because they necessarily change the broader
realities but precisely because those realities tend to elide individual
identity.
More than two decades later, Norman Jewison’s 1999 film biopic The Hurricane took a
distinctly different approach to the story. The film is far from a documentary,
and has been critiqued
for its factual inaccuracies; but where it succeeds, thanks both to its
intimate focus and to a
truly stunning performance from Denzel Washington, is in its extended
development of Carter’s character and perspective. As such, the film directly
flips the narratives of faceless or interchangeable African American men within
a racist system, becoming instead, quite literally, the story of
Carter/Washington’s face as it evolves over his time in prison. That is, while
its simplifications of some of the case’s broad details require an audience to
investigate further in order to learn more about the relevant histories, its
close attention to Carter helps it reveal profound truths about what such broad
systems and histories can do to the people caught up in and affected by them. While
Dylan’s song is the story of the kind of tragic storms that so often have swept
our nation’s race relations and dynamics, the film is instead the story of The Hurricance
himself; both have a great deal to tell us about ourselves.
Next case tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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