So you want to know everything that really matters about America, but you don’t feel like sitting through a couple of years of college-level history classes. I get it and I got you covered. Not everybody digs the college scene. Some people just aren’t into the pretense or the formality of it all. Besides, who really wants to carry around a six-figure debt for decades without the guarantee of an even bigger six-figure income to pay it off? The student-debt industrial complex is a bitch, and I applaud anyone who figured out how to educate themselves without falling into that financial abyss. Take my word for it; it ain’t cute when Sallie Mae stops making polite phone calls and starts slapping you around like a pimp who thinks you’re holding out on the cash.
Even though nobody really wants that debt or that headache, everybody wants to be informed about the country they live in; or at least feel like they know what time it is. And everybody likes movies. Fortunately, there is great conjunction of all these infallible truths, and this is it: I am submitting my selection of 5 movies that explain America's messiness. I realize I have made quite a sport of dumping on that kangaroo court for many years, but even I must confess that it has its place. And this is it.
The court of public opinion moves the culture, and the culture dictates the politics we collectively choose to practice. And sometimes it can be swayed, in particular contexts and in limited pockets, to improve our collective understanding of who we are and how we relate to each other. Movies can do that as well as any artform or communications vehicle mankind has ever created. And in a context where American polarization is at its peak, and political violence has become a featured topic in both media and governance, one thing that everybody can agree on is that America is indeed very fucked up right now.
This is how we got that way, and unfortunately, why a lot of this is permanent. In chronological order of the events depicted on-screen, watch these films so you can have a quality conversation with your know-it-all brother-in-law who brags about his American History degree from Penn State but never picks up the dinner check. But even if you’re lucky enough not to have that guy in your life, you definitely have some lying ass politician in your district, on your ballot, or on your screen savagely misrepresenting history and misleading you in every way that he or she can get away with. But after you have watched these five, that will be a helluva lot harder.
GANGS OF NEW YORK
Released: December 20, 2002
Whether the rest of us from around the country like it or not, dominant American culture as we know it today, was born in New York City in the 1850s and 60s. Most of us who love to hate, or hate on, NYC should still be willing to acknowledge that it is not only the greatest American city, but it is the most quintessential American city. And Martin Scorsese spent more than 20 years trying to get this movie made to show the world why.
A crucial point of clarification: ‘Great’ does not mean ‘Good.’ It never has and it never will. Greatness reflects power, but goodness reflects virtue. Every now and then we need to remind ourselves of that key distinction. New York, just like America, is great but it has never been good. But don’t believe me, just spend a few hours with Marty laying out the gory and engaging tale of conflict between Bill The Butcher, the cruel and corrupt nativist gang leader of the Bowery Boys, and Amsterdam Vallon, the vengeful and ambitious leader of the Irish gang, The Dead Rabbits.
The conflict between these two charismatic characters is not nearly as impactful as the recognition that the bones of modern sociopolitical tribalism were formed and ossified in that place and at that time. Formalized corruption in public service took root right then and right there. Performative democracy, as it is practiced in America today, was conceived, born, and raised at Manhattan’s Five Points. And most of all, the widespread adoption of unchained violence as the solution to group conflict in America was recognized and even codified by warriors and witnesses alike. Every statement set forth above applies neatly to the massive American mind-fuck we all saw unfold at the Capitol on January 6th. But in the cinematic universe, all of these dynamics were laid out with Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis circling each other and squaring off on a spectacular set location in Italy that looked so authentic that even the most persnickety film critics had to admit was perfect.
No matter what the geography says, on some level, every American is a New Yorker. If you recognize and resent the little pockets of power that seem to have their greedy, money-grubbing hands on everything in your California, Oklahoma, or Tennessee town, those cadres have been so successful because they followed the New York model. Right after the South bent the knee to the North, that particular system of political patronage and access leveraging was planted throughout the former Confederacy and in the developing West.
So you could be a good ole boy from Hazzard County Georgia, who knows that Boss Hogg is in charge of the cops, the courts, and the county seat, and even you are living under a structure crafted and perfected by legendary political wizard William Magear Tweed of Manhattan’s Tammany Hall machine in 1858. Of course, all the locals just called him “Boss Tweed.” And while politics was being poisoned from the top, public service was being built with toxic bricks from the bottom. City police departments, fire departments, and local political parties can never truly be fair and just institutions because they all have their origins in street gangs. Without exception.
As a certified cinephile, I’ll give you my car if you can show me a better execution of this message than what Scorsese delivers in Gangs. His depictions are scalding and raw, but they are without judgment. The objective revelations of the searing corruption are reminiscent of watching a pack of wild African dogs chase down, take down, and devour an exhausted wildebeest while it’s still breathing: it may be violent and it may be unsettling to watch, but it is perfectly natural. And political corruption is just as natural; as is tribalism. This is a point that is impossible to miss after re-watching this movie.
Have you ever examined why, in cities all over America, there are ethnic enclaves that are recognized, respected, and accepted by all residents, visitors, and travelers passing through? Because racial tribalism and the inherent group hostility that come with it made Chinatown, Greektown, Koreatown, and Little Italy essential for the survival of those immigrant groups. That is another New York thing you will see in this flick that got spread across America. And just in case you are called to wonder “why isn’t there a ‘Blacktown’ in any city in America?” I ask you to stay tuned. We get to that in the next two sections. For now, we’ll just close out Gangs of New York with an acknowledgment that while the Civil War was heating up from brewing to boiling in the South, New York had so much money invested in cotton production on southern plantations that city leaders actively considered joining the Confederacy and seceding. Like I said at the start: New York is great but it has never been good.
12 YEARS A SLAVE
Released: October 18, 2013
I have a critical thesis that I cannot prove but I am convinced is true. I posit that American slavery destroyed white folk's psychological foundation as thoroughly as it destroyed Black folk's economic foundation. Of course, these are not equal losses or burdens, but that does not make my thesis wrong. White America was, and is, as broken mentally as Black America was, and is, broken financially. These realities are mutually exclusive. Watch or re-watch 12 Years A Slave with fresh eyes before you call the guys in white coats to rush me to Nurse Ratchet for electric shock treatment.
My point is that as screwed over as Black folks have been financially in America because of how we started out, White folks have been fucked over psychologically because of how they started out; particularly as it relates to their dealings with us. And yes, that includes Ellis Island white folks who hit the shores fifty years later who had the benefit of not occupying the dreaded bottom rung of a competitive capitalist society. As I see it, they inherited a strand of the lunacy when they inherited the whiteness. Culturally speaking, lunacy is central to the legacy.
Michael Fassbender was nominated for multiple major awards for his depiction of Edwin Epps, the villainous slave master who delighted in the systemic torture and torment of the poor souls who fell under his control. Fassbender depicted the savage acts of violence, debauchery, and lasciviousness with frightening and haunting authenticity. Epps, frequently in a drunken rage, ruled over his struggling plantation with a bullwhip in one hand and his dick in the other, always sitting on ready to put either of those tools to work, with or without provocation.
Can any human being be emotionally stable and psychologically healthy under those circumstances? Can they raise children without bleeding that poison directly into them? To rule over other human beings with absolutely no accountability and no restraint for generations is a recipe for insanity.
Imagine if your worst human reflexes could go unchecked; just running amok all day every day. Your ass is going to be crazy. Period. And that is why so many White people in America act so goddamned crazy for no apparent reason on any matter even tangentially related to race. The saying is old but it bears repeating: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Has that ever been truer for any group of people than it was for White men who owned plantations in the antebellum south? I’ll save you the time: hell no.
We can agree that all crazy is not created equal, but even if you are not Edwin Epps crazy, you must still constantly negotiate your humanity against your economic and social interests. You have to make up phony science and fantastical religion to justify whipping and raping with impunity. You have to rig your mind NOT to hear the wailing sorrow of a mother whose child has been sold away from her. You have to tune out the frequent screaming coming from the post at the end of the day when the cotton take was low. Or, if you cannot tune it out, you have to learn to like it. When indifference to depravity is the best you can hope to accomplish, you are in a serious jam. And so are the kids you raise; and the kids they raise; and so on until the present day. I understand that we are not our great-grands, but they are our great-grands; we do not always know and cannot always see what has been passed to us through blood and culture over the generations.
It is both necessary and proper to invest heavily in achieving a complete understanding of the lasting legacy of slavery on the survivors and their generations. But it is equally essential that we investigate the psychological, spiritual, and emotional scars that slavery left on the perpetrators and their progeny. Leave it to some brilliant brothers from the U.K. and a talented Kenyan sister from Mexico to rip off the scab and pour alcohol right into the festering wounds left by American slavery.
Steve McQueen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Lupita Nyong’o brought the horror story of Solomon Northup to the big screens in the world, and anybody who saw it will ever forget it. Just know that remembering is one thing, but coming to grips with it is another.
GLORY
Released: December 15, 1989
Ask 1,000 Americans how slavery ended in America, and my educated guess is that 999 times you will hear some version of this phrase: “Lincoln freed the slaves.” I don’t blame people for not knowing the full truth if all they have been taught all their lives are half-truths and full lies. This particular half-truth is one of the most damaging and enduring historical oversimplifications in all of American history scholarship. There are volumes of records and written analysis available that correct this juvenile representation of the events of 1862–1865, but for purposes of this discussion, I’ll give you the micro-Cliff-Notes version of what happened: Black men and women who were enslaved in America did as much to free themselves as President Abraham Lincoln did to free them. And in the end, they did far more for him and the Union than the Union did for them. Glory paints a clear picture of a historical reality that has been seldom seen.
Away from the battlefield, on plantations all over the Confederacy, a massive work slowdown, dubbed by W.E.B. DuBois as ‘The General Strike,’ economically undermined the south at a time when it could least afford it. On the battlefield, hundreds of thousands of Black men put on a uniform and picked up a gun to kill for their freedom the second they got a chance to. Glory tells the story of Denzel Washington’s brave ‘Trip,’ Morgan Freeman’s sage ‘Sargent Rawlins’ and Andre Braugher’s dignified ‘Thomas,’ in the best Civil War epic this side of Lincoln. In just over two hours you will learn what at least twelve years of American public education failed to teach us: that Black folks were fully invested and committed to overthrowing the slaveocracy and living free in this country. We did not plead or protest our way to freedom: we engaged in the same violence that White men used, and maybe that accounts for the desperation to erase that history.
From 6th-grade history class to History 101 in college, the story of Black freedom is still defined and summarized by “Lincoln freed the slaves” by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. That shoddy accounting deflates any Black youth sitting in those classrooms. Lincoln’s executive order was more about ratcheting up the economic pain the general strike was already inflicting and bolstering the Union ranks than any commitment to Black freedom. The best interests of Black folks were NEVER a motivating factor for Lincoln or the army he commanded.
Not only does it deflate Black kids to cast their predecessors as passive recipients of the magnanimity of a wise and just White man, it also distorts the mind of White kids. All of these kids grow up believing that Black people owe their freedom to good White people; a freedom that they could not (and did not) fight for themselves. By planting that lie deep in their subconscious, white primacy is reaffirmed, even where white supremacy is rejected, because credit for Black liberation is vested in the virtue of White folks. That accounts for the little voice in our heads that always asks, ‘how bad can White people be if, after all, they gave those poor negroes their freedom?’ That is where Glory can close some serious gaps in understanding for those who really want to understand.
The three main Black characters in Glory are two formerly enslaved men who escaped bondage and one son of freedom and relative privilege, who all met each other when they joined the 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment. To the credit of director Edward Zwick, these characters are centralized in the narrative even though the story is written based on the firsthand account of their commanding officer Colonel Robert Shaw, who was ably portrayed by an intentionally youthful-looking Mathew Broderick.
Glory laid out the simple reality for African Americans, as a tribe, that has been in place since we were born on these shores. Stated plainly, when it comes to devotion to our country, Black folks are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. We are routinely called upon to display love and loyalty to a nation that has never and that will never show us any in return. But what the fuck are we supposed to do? America is all we really got. Ignorant racists scream in protest that we should ‘go back to Africa’ blithely unaware that our forefathers were betrayed by other Africans and exiled into this European hellscape. So there really is no ‘back’ to go back to. This is it. And regardless of who likes it or lumps it, this is our home. It is an unkind home; an abusive home. But somehow, someway many Black Americans gave the very last they had to make it a little better when they left than it was when they came.
No group of characters illustrates this reality better than Black soldiers who took up arms in the fight for their own freedom against those who were determined to keep them in bondage. These men had to join the war to fight to help the Union because if the Confederacy won, slavery would have lasted forever. Fuck what they teach in Texas public schools. The Civil War was about one thing and one thing only: the right of White people to own Black people.
But being better than the Confederacy did not make the Union a haven for freedom and equality. Far from it. While the assignment of race-based second-class citizenship was clearly an upgrade from chattel slavery, being in the permanent untouchable underclass really sucked. So that’s what these men fought and died for. The racist, white supremacists in the Union Army were as good as it got in those days because everybody had a stake in niggers knowing their place.
But the brothers who fought were not fighting to be loved by the racists in the North or the slavers in the South. They were fighting to be free men. They fought to define themselves and defend their families. And they won. Patrick Henry went down in history for saying “Give me liberty or give me death” but there were thousands of Black Patrick Henrys in this country that history has tried to forget. Regardless of events that would unfold in the years that followed, in these men’s lives and in their time they fought and made themselves free. And they changed the trajectory of the entire country in doing so. Nobody gave them a goddamned thing, and never let anybody tell you anything different.
NORMA RAE
Released: March 2, 1979
So how was your weekend? Enjoyed any paid vacation time off lately? Whether you spent yours on a Carnival Cruise, jetting off to party in Vegas, or just vegging out on your couch binge-watching The Sopranos for the eighth time, you can thank the ferocious fighters of the American Labor movement for the privilege. And I don’t just mean the burly, boisterous, mobbed-up brawlers in Detroit who started the UAW in the 1930s. I mean little country women from the rural south who you never heard of, but who you owe so much to, for getting into the fight decades later. I mean women like the titular character Sallie Field won the Best Actress Oscar for portraying in 1979, Norma Rae.
There was no such thing as a “weekend” or a vacation until auto workers in Detroit began organizing themselves so they could collectively bargain with corporatist oligarchs like Henry Ford. Ford and his small band of billionaire plutocrats owned all the factories and ruled all the towns that hosted them. A disorganized and disjointed labor force was to them what the city of Miami was to Tony Montana in Scarface: “this town is like one great big pussy just waiting to get fucked.”
And for years, they did exactly that- with impunity. The oligarchs misused, abused and generally fucked over the wage-earning laborers of America and openly mocked anybody who raised their voices to object.
But unions were proud, determined, and stubborn enough to stand their ground, grow their numbers, and against all odds, establish dignity in the industrial workforce and create the ‘middle-class’ in America as we know it today. In case that slipped by you, I’ll run it back in slow motion: Unions. Created. The middle-class. In America. Therefore, it stands to reason that since unions have been in decline, so too has the ‘middle-class.’ Without strong labor unions undergirding the workforce, the American middle-class will never be stable or ascendant. Any economist or historian who goes on the record to dispute that account should have their tenure stripped immediately.
Since Ronald Reagan buggered the striking air traffic controllers union in 1981, Americans have been socially and politically conditioned to pretend that the contributions of labor unions just magically appeared on their own, springing forth from the generosity of magnanimous corporatists. The rank-and-file worker even began to regard unions scornfully. Many swallowed the propaganda campaign whole, and under the influence of the neoconservative movement, began to view organized labor leaders as if they are as corrupt as the soulless bastards they have to lock horns with.
The people have forgotten that corporations generally resent the very suggestion that they should pay workers any more than is absolutely necessary for them to stay alive so they can drag themselves back to work every day and keep making the company richer. Without unions across every industry there would be NONE of the protections and benefits the American workforce enjoys today.
Besides being an exceptionally well executed film about an obscure topic, Norma Rae sets out the facts about corporate corruption and the public propaganda campaigns to destroy unions as well as any documentary I have ever seen. And I’ve seen more than my fair share. The shameless use of racism, sexism, extortion, violence and intimidation is not really dramatized in this movie. It is just exposed in a straightforward manner for those who are unaware.
And for anyone out there who opposes unions without really understanding why, there is a pretty good chance they get their news from Fox and faithfully vote Republican. They could be the chief beneficiary of what a union could bring to their workplace, but the idea of locking arms in economic and political solidarity with non-white and non-binary workers is just too much to bear. If you didn’t recognize that before, just flash forward to the scene where a gang of White workers has surrounded two Black workers, all of them on their way into the plant to work their shifts, and commences to kicking the shit out of them. Norma Rae, witnessing the scene and holding a company distributed flyer in her hand, laments to her friend, “This is what you’re always gonna get when you tell White men that Black men are going to rule over them.”
Of course she was right about that. She was right in 1979 and she would have been right in 2021 when companies as diverse as Starbucks and Wal-Mart moved heaven and earth to stop their employees from unionizing. And although there has been some legitimate progress on the resurgent organized labor front, the old game of divide and conquer is alive and well. But this time around, its got Fox News and Facebook to help keep it strong. And speaking of Facebook…
THE SOCIAL NETWORK
Released: September 24, 2010
It may have been more accurate to call this movie Revenge of the Nerds, but I know that title had already been used up in the 80s. But in a very real way, Mark Zuckerberg has taken over the world because he was a pissed-off computer nerd, frustrated by his lack of female attention in college. Brace yourself for a gross oversimplification, but if just one or two girls on the college scene in or near Boston had given this kid some leg, America probably wouldn’t be in the fucked-up shape it is in right now. And this fuck-up is permanent. We will not be untangling the web woven by Facebook anytime in the foreseeable future, if ever. Watch or re-watch The Social Network and it will become painfully obvious why this is the case. Because for Mark Zuckerberg, this was then and still is now, personal.
Clearly, the Winklevoss twins had the money but lacked the mind and motivation to bring their original idea for a social network to market. So these two rich, muscular, popular, Harvard studs gave this desperate, bitter, frustrated nerd what he really wanted all along: the chance to fuck somebody pretty and have the whole world know about it. And when he did, he took the fullest advantage of it you can imagine. He literally blew their backs out and became a billionaire for doing it.
Evidently, the human mind has an algorithm that can be hacked into. And once you hack into it you can come pretty close to controlling a person without them being aware that they are being controlled. And if ‘control’ sounds to extreme for you, at the very least, you become a person who is highly predictable, and that predictability has a higher market value than oil and steel combined. That predictability is called ‘big data’ and it is largely responsible for everything that our interactive media puts in front of our eyes every second they are open. And, for all practical purposes, Facebook was first to master and harness ‘big data.’
The critical lesson to be learned about our country and our culture from watching the story of how this malevolent genie finally escaped the bottle, is that if you can weaponize and monetize laziness and vanity there is no limit to how much money you can make.
That is all it took to make this goofy, awkward, brilliant little bastard one of the richest men who has ever breathed air on this earth.
And the speed with which he did it is nearly as shocking as the mountain of wealth itself. Wal-Mart took decades to become a billion-dollar empire. The Oracle of Omaha was 55 when he became a billionaire investor. Tesla, for all practical purposes, was a lifelong passion project for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The same goes for Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt. Amazing wealth was built by all but it was built over decades of intense work, both above and below board. But Zuck became a billionaire in roughly the same amount of time it would have taken him to graduate from Harvard had he decided to stay in school.
And that is why the world continues to dance to his tune, even if we went from worshipping him to reviling him in record time. He gave us all a platform to feel seen and heard by all the world, all the time. Our vanity is being served a buffet of ‘me, myself and I’ and we just cannot stop eating. And we don’t even have to stand up, grab a plate and stand in line to gorge. All we have to do is lay on the bed, turn on our phones and disappear into the inner sphere of the metaverse. In effect, we are all trapped in Mark’s orgy of vanity and laziness. And we love it.
So there you have it, folks. That’s America in five movies. That’s about a bachelor’s degree worth of knowledge and insight in under fifteen hours of viewing. It’s a lot more fun and a lot cheaper than four years of college. But a warning: that know-it-all brother-in-law of yours is going to push back hard when you break all of this down to him. My advice is to tell him to shut the fuck up, and pick up the dinner check this time.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of David Saint Vincent's work on Medium.