Greg Garrett's Reading List

"As we talk in 2020, it’s been in the news because HBO chose to pull Gone with the Wind from its line-up until it could supply a context for it. It’s really interesting, because the African American scholar they asked to provide a context really said the bare minimum, that slavery was bad and that Gone with the Wind is bad mythology, if you will, that many people still hold to and cling to. I’m a child of the American South, although I was born in Oklahoma, which doesn’t fit anywhere in our North-South dichotomy; it was originally Indian Territory. But I grew up in Texas and Georgia and North Carolina and I now live in Austin, Texas. The university where I’ve taught for 30 years is a southern institution, and Waco, Texas, where it’s located, is one of the farthest western outposts of the antebellum South. There are mansions of cotton plantations on the banks of the river and Baylor is one of the few antebellum colleges and universities west of the Mississippi. I’m in this strange space where most of my adult life and my growing up years I’ve been swimming in the waters of Southern nostalgia. The official designation for this is ‘the Lost Cause.’ It comes from a number of historians and writers working right after the Reconstruction period that followed the American Civil War. Black people had made some advances and been given the opportunity not just to be freed from slavery, but to participate in American life. And as we see in Gone with the Wind , and as we see in Birth of a Nation —another film I write about at some length in my book—during the Reconstruction period there was an attempt to roll back those advances. Part of the mythology behind that was trying to create this myth of the great, noble Lost Cause. Early on in Gone with the Wind, there’s talk about this romantic, idyllic life that was tragically lost. It’s almost identical to the words used early on in Birth of a Nation. I pair those films together, even though they’re 25 years apart, because the same ideology is operating in both of them. You’ve got this nostalgia for the noble South, for the chivalric soldiers, for the lady-like feminine ideal. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other piece of mythology that has to go along with that is you have to find a way to justify keeping people in bondage. I’m going to pull a book off the shelf behind me, but there’s a classic book on racism in American film by Donald Bogle. The title is tremendously offensive but necessary: Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in Films . Basically, what he’s doing in this book is tracing all of the different stereotypes of Blackness that have appeared in American film. Almost every one of those stereotypes gets represented in Gone with the Wind . We’ve got coons and pickaninnies—people who are childlike and really need a master to keep them safe and fed and warm. We’ve got an Uncle Tom character, who’s called Uncle Peter in the film. It’s really important to identify these two duelling mythologies that Gone with the Wind presents, so that we can have a conversation about this powerful and, honestly, really beautiful film. The cinematography is amazing, that sweeping musical theme just catches your heart. But we have to identify that this film is one of the great mythmakers about the Lost Cause of the South and one of the great perpetuators of the idea that Black people are not fully human. I write in my book, A Long, Long Way , that we want to celebrate what goes well as well as acknowledge the harmful things, and one of the great achievements of the film is that Hattie McDaniel brings a dignity and a humanity to her role as Mammy. This is a stereotypical role that we see all the way through American film—from Birth of a Nation to Get Out —it’s the character that James Baldwin called ‘the faithful retainer.’ Like Sam in Casablanca, Mammy in Gone with the Wind is a minor role, but she is a character who pushes back against the lead characters in the film and in some ways makes their growth possible. It’s not Hattie McDaniel’s character’s story. It’s not Dooley Wilson’s character’s story in Casablanca , but they both have a humanity and a dignity to them. And, as you know, Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an Academy Award. The story behind that is bracing. The awards were given out in a segregated hotel and she had to sit at the back of the room and then came forward to accept her award. We do want to celebrate every movement forward. There’s a great book on racism, Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America . One of the things that I admire about the book is that it points out that instead of this idea of racial progress that people like me—and possibly you—have held, that we are on this ascending climb towards justice, it’s more ‘one step forward, one step back’ because it’s an action/reaction. We elect a Black president and then a bunch of white people freak out and we get the most racist president of my lifetime. One of the really startling things is that when you look at Birth of a Nation from 1915 and Gone with the Wind from 1939, adjusted for inflation these are two of the top-grossing films. You have Titanic , but then trailing in the asterisks are these films that had this incredible cultural currency and were seen by millions and millions of people. That is a really important thing to note, because we’re not just talking about a critical success. We’re talking about a blockbuster film before we had that category for films. Everybody had seen Gone with the Wind , everybody was talking about Gone With the Wind . The simple act of casting Scarlett O’Hara was a one-year news bonanza and the fact that Vivien Leigh was cast was a scandal, because she was British, not a homegrown southern belle. Then there were Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard, because David O Selznick also just wanted Hollywood royalty in the film and many of those happened to be British. There’s this very strong sense that—like Get Out, which we’ll talk about in a minute—this is one of those films that dominated cultural discourse at the time it was out. “Most of my adult life and my growing up years I’ve been swimming in the waters of Southern nostalgia. The official designation for this is ‘the Lost Cause’” So, when we talk about ways that films can reinforce harmful mythology or establish more progressive mythology, this is a film that does both. It’s about 90 per cent of one and 10 per cent of the other. People who watched Gone with the Wind were confirmed in a lot of their beliefs, particularly people in the South. One of my early mothers-in-law—I’ve had a couple—her entire life was devoted to Gone with the Wind . She had been shaped by it as a girl and she was Scarlett O’Hara for good and ill, the strength of character and the petulance. It’s not a movie from our past. It’s still a movie that we’re debating and wrestling with. I put Gone with the Wind in the same category as the Confederate monuments and statues that we are talking about and sometimes dismantling in the United States right now. I was on National Public Radio a few weeks ago and they asked me, ‘Should we continue to watch this film?’ And I said, ‘Yes, absolutely. We should continue to watch it, but with the content warnings. Be aware that this is what is happening in the background, so that you’re not sucked into the harmful myths that this film so dramatically and powerfully portrays.’ Almost nobody shows or schedules it. It appears occasionally on American cable television, on one of the classic channels, but there are protests every time that it does. As I write in the introduction to my book, it’s a film that I show regularly in class. It’s partly because it’s a really successful cinematic experience, and partly because, in most of my film classes these days, we are going to emphasize race throughout the semester. It’s like, ‘Here is our lowest point. Let’s start with this.’ Henry Louis Gates , the great African American historian at Harvard University, has talked about how Birth of a Nation is the epitome of what he calls the ‘Redemption narrative’ in the American South, which was that pushback against every advance that had happened for former slaves. It embodies all of those attitudes of white supremacy . In the book, I write about how people marching in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 were basically carrying the racial ideology of Birth of a Nation into the public sphere 100 years later. That is a huge problem with Birth of a Nation . Most of the advance publicity for that film talked about its authenticity. One of the famous anecdotes is that it was the first film ever shown in the White House. Woodrow Wilson was a racist (as were most white people in America in the Teens and 20s), and the writer of the novel upon which Birth of a Nation was based, Thomas Dixon, was a classmate of his. From my research, it’s not actually true—it is, again, a myth—but Dixon later advanced the idea that Wilson had said of the film, “It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Wilson was himself a historian. He had written an acclaimed history of the United States and some of the title cards in the silent film Birth of a Nation are drawn from Woodrow Wilson’s A History of the American People . So there is this very powerful sense, when we watch this film and see its incredible production value, that this must have been what it was like. And it is all made up! Birth of a Nation goes to great lengths to try and make you think that it’s history. Gone with the Wind does the same thing, that amazing crane shot pulling up from all the wounded in the railyard in Atlanta. It’s like, ‘it must be exactly what it was like, because why else would they have gone to all this trouble?’ All of those elements make us wrestle with history. “ I put Gone with the Wind in the same category as the Confederate monuments and statues that we are talking about and sometimes dismantling in the United States right now” So providing the context for a film like Gone with the Wind or Birth of a Nation —or frankly most of the films that I talk about in the book prior to the Civil Rights era—is essential. We have to we know that these are our fictions. These are mythologies that are successful, dramatic stories. James Baldwin talked about Birth of a Nation as a cinematic masterpiece, which it absolutely is. If it weren’t a cinematic masterpiece, it wouldn’t matter so much. It’s the same with Gone with the Wind . I watched Gone with the Wind again last week, while we were on vacation, to prepare for our talk today, and I just sat there and said, ‘This is beautiful. Look at that shot! Look at the colours of the sunset. And here comes Tara’s theme again.’ That’s why film has to be watched consciously. We have to come in with an awareness of the stories and mythologies that people are trying to promote in them so that we can reflect on them and not be simply carried away by the emotion of the storyteller."

"It’s a really startling film. I often show Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner , which is also a 1967 film with Sidney Poitier (as well as Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn). In the book, I write about these two films as representative of this era where Hollywood was trying to put people of colour into leading roles and giving them as much of their dignity as the white writers and filmmakers were capable of. They were represented in a much more profound and humane way. In the Heat of the Night is really interesting to compare to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner , which is the more popular and more watched film. Not just because Sidney Poitier is in both films, but because many of the things that Sidney Poitier’s character does in In the Heat of the Night are more startling culturally and politically than just the simple, startling trope in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner —that a black man is dating a white woman. In the Heat of the Night contains a couple of cultural touchpoints that were so radical for 1967 that I always want to let audiences know about them, because both of these films seem a little bit tame to us, 50+ years later. In the Heat of the Night features Sidney Poitier, an actor from the Bahamas with incredible dignity and beauty and intelligence. I often quote my friend Kelly Brown Douglas in the book. She’s an African American theologian who talks about how her experience of seeing Sidney Poitier on-screen was life-changing for her. This was the first person of colour that she had ever seen in a leading role in a movie in a theatre. Sidney Poitier filled that role for a lot of people in the 1950s and 1960s. Sidney Poitier’s character is the most intelligent and competent person in the film. It’s a murder mystery on its surface, but the other genre it falls into is it’s a buddy film—or, as James Baldwin would have it, a love story between Sidney Poitier’s Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs and Rod Steiger’s Mississippi town police chief Gillespie. “there is this really powerful cultural tidal wave that Sidney Poitier brings into American filmmaking” There’s a murder of a prominent white businessman, who was going to build a huge factory and bring wealth to this small town. Virgil Tibbs is waiting for a train on the night this businessman is killed, and Chief Gillespie has Tibbs thrown in jail for the murder. Then he discovers that Tibbs is a homicide detective. That’s the conceit of the story and everything proceeds from that. There is a running gag as Chief Gillespie and his men throw a number of suspects into jail who are not the murderer. Over and over again Virgil Tibbs has to say, ‘no, he can’t possibly have done it.’ There is one scene in the film that really stands out for me and stood out for audiences. It was a gasp-worthy moment in 1967. Chief Gillespie and Detective Tibbs go to visit the most prominent white man in town, what we would think of as the plantation owner. He is this decadent person who is breeding orchids in a hothouse. (It’s straight out of Hollywood central casting: ‘What could our bad guy do? He loves orchids. Let’s do that.’) There is a moment where he realizes that Virgil Tibbs is actually interrogating him for the murder and he is incensed. He slaps Virgil Tibbs and Tibbs slaps him back. In 1967, particularly in a primarily white audience, they would have sat there and their eyes would have gone wide, because this is a Black power moment. Sidney Poitier was involved in the Civil Rights Movement, but he wasn’t thought of as a radical, he was not a black-fist-in-the-air sort of person. But this is a moment in Hollywood films where a Black character says, ‘I will not be treated in this way anymore. You do not have the right to direct violence at me.’ One of the signs that was carried at a lot of the civil rights marches in the 1960s was ‘I am a man,’ and that is basically what this moment is. The other really powerful moment is at the end of the movie. It becomes clear, during the course of the story, that Chief Gillespie, who is an ardent southern racist, has developed an incredible respect for Tibbs. Chief Gillespie takes Virgil Tibbs to catch the train and carries his bag. And there is this moment between them. James Baldwin says that in a love story, this would be the kiss. At that time, of course, a white man and a black man are not going to kiss at the train station, but it is this moment of acknowledgement of their common humanity and this recognition of the respect that Gillespie has grown to have for Virgil Tibbs. And so when I look at those films from 1967— In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner —there is this really powerful cultural tidal wave that Sidney Poitier brings into American filmmaking, because not only does he embody every positive myth, but he participates in all of these powerful dramatic moments, whether it’s the kiss with his fiancée in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner —which had not been done in a mainstream American film—or the slap in In the Heat of the Night . The film also won best picture and Rod Steiger won best actor at the Academy Awards that year. It’s another of these films that had incredible cultural currency, not just because it was seen by a lot of people, but because it was recognized as a film with a lot of value. It’s like a Monty Python police force. It’s not at all strange to say that you know Virgil Tibbs is the smartest person in the room. I think what makes the movie work is that Chief Gillespie wants to be a good policeman and he wants to be an honourable man and that is the arc of his character. When the plantation owner turns to Gillespie and asks, ‘What are you going to do?’ Gillespie says, ‘I’m going to take it under advisement’ and the plantation owner says, ‘you know, in the old days, the last police chief would have shot him.’ And for us watching this—and I hope for audiences in 1967— this is the moment when you think, ‘thank God we are not in the old days.’ We are in some ways—George Floyd’s murder proves that—but we hope that, as Dr. King used to say, there are people of good conscience who want to be better and to do better in regard to racial questions. It’s a little bit of both. I’ve been doing these cultural studies for the past 30 years and it is rare that you find a direct correlation—a Hollywood star does this and America follows. In an earlier film, It Happened One Night , Clark Gable, who is the male lead in Gone with the Wind, is shown in a hotel room with Claudette Colbert. He takes off his shirt and he’s not wearing an undershirt, as was the practice in the United States at that time. That is one of the few quantifiable Hollywood effects, because we know sales of undershirts declined precipitously after Clark Gable took off his shirt and revealed his bare chest. Most of the time, what we look at is anecdotal effects. I mention in the book that I showed Get Out at Washington National Cathedral a couple of years ago. One of my white female students from Baylor University was there watching and discussing these films and talking about race. After we watched Get Out, she turned to me in tears and said, ‘I’ve never before in my life understood what white people do to Black people.’ In Get Out we are invited to participate in Daniel Kaluuya’s character’s life. He is our point of view character for the film. My student had been insulated from many of the horrible things that happen in our culture because of her privilege and her wealth. In the course of her everyday life, she was not going to have this realisation, but a Hollywood film shaped her response in a way that she might not otherwise have had. Powerful stories can transform us. “I’ve been doing these cultural studies for the past 30 years and it is rare that you find a direct correlation—a Hollywood star does this and America follows.” The other thing that I will say about Hollywood is that artists, and thought leaders in general, are often more progressive, because they’re looking for the next thing, the next understanding, the next bit of wisdom. They don’t want to lie in the road and do what has always been done. For me, as an artist, when I write a novel or a nonfiction book, I don’t want to do what I’ve already done. I want to do something new. I want to learn something new and Hollywood has traditionally been a leader, at least in terms of pushing America to move forward on race. In my book, I talk about these different phases. Hollywood started in this place of abject racism and then began taking little baby steps toward more profound and powerful representation, until at last we came to the point where not only were people of colour making their own movies and starring in their own movies, but using Hollywood storytelling traditions to push back against racism and prejudice."

"Yes, we should. I’ve been teaching Do the Right Thing for 30 years. It is a powerful and profound film. One thing that’s important to mention when we talk about this film is that often people talk about Spike Lee as a great black filmmaker. That is so incredibly reductive. Spike Lee is one of the most important American filmmakers and Do the Right Thing is one of the most important American films of the last 50 years. It’s a challenging film. My students have wrestled with it from the beginning and continue to wrestle with it because, as I point out in my book, it is not a film with a closed ending. Usually when we read a novel, we’ve spent a few hundred pages with characters and we expect the story to be wrapped up and tied up with a bow. We have gone on a journey and we are ready to know what we’ve learned. Many films about race do this as well. One of the films that came out in 1989 and actually won the Academy Award for Best Picture the following year was Driving Miss Daisy . It’s a very traditional Hollywood film and it’s often the kind of film that the Oscars will honour, because it’s a film about an individual who becomes less racist, in this case through her contact with a person of colour. It’s a film that’s tied up with a bow and what it indicates to its audiences is that your responsibility is done. You are absolved of future thought. “We are going to have to figure out a way to live together. That’s the great challenge and opportunity that Do the Right Thing presents us with” Spike Lee does not do that in Do the Right Thing. The title of the film comes from a line delivered by Da Mayor who is played by the civil rights activist Ossie Davis. Early in the film, he pulls aside Spike Lee’s character, Mookie, and says, “Doctor, always do the right thing.” And so the question that we ask over and over again in discussions of this film in class and in the screenings that I do is, ‘Does anybody do the right thing? What is the right thing?’ Spike Lee himself has said that audiences have been asking him this question since the movie came out. In particular, he says that people are always coming up to him and asking, ‘Did Mookie do the right thing?’ And he makes the point that he has never been asked this by a Black person. Not to spoil it, but at the end of the film, there are a series of really dramatic and violent actions and white audiences have always reflected differently on those actions than Black audiences. It’s interesting to note, by the way, that Barack Obama and Michelle Obama saw Do the Right Thing on their first date. There’s a movie about that afternoon they spent together and it depicts them walking out of the movie and one of Michelle Obama’s white law partners coming up to them and asking Barack specifically, ‘Do you think Mookie did the right thing?’ He says something very similar to what I have often said. Again, not to spoil the end of the film, but there is an option where human lives can be lost or property can be destroyed. White people, because they typically own property, tend to look at destruction of property as violence, but there is actual fatal violence in Do the Right Thing . So, what the Barack Obama character says—and what I think the actual Barack Obama said, because he’s a smart guy—is, ‘Here’s why Mookie did what he did.’ If violence that would have gone against human beings is redirected to property, isn’t that a win? And yet white audiences struggle with that. That is very much Spike Lee’s strategy. When I teach this film or talk about it, I say that what Spike Lee is intending to do is confront us. He does that even before we start the movie. In the opening moments of the film, even before the credits roll, we hear a few bars of a song called “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is sometimes called the ‘Black national anthem.’ We hear a few bars of it played by saxophone and then Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” comes on and we immediately get this collision between old Black and new Black. “Spike Lee is one of the most important American filmmakers and Do the Right Thing is one of the most important American films of the last 50 years” Then, during the opening credits, Rosie Perez is boxing and during much of that time she is actually boxing us ; she is looking at us and breaking the fourth wall. Breaking the fourth wall is a strategy that Spike Lee uses throughout this film to confront the audience directly. The most famous sequence in the film is what Spike Lee calls ‘the racism scene’, where characters in the film turn to the audience and spew racial hate about the group that they are most angry about. For Sal’s son, it’s African Americans, for the Italian cop it’s Puerto Ricans, etc. We are meant to be uncomfortable and to live in that discomfort. That’s one of the things that also happens in another Spike Lee film, BlacKkKlansman , which I talk a little bit about in the book and is also really amazing, one of the top films of the last 50 years. It doesn’t solve the problem. It doesn’t absolve us of further work. Spike Lee, not just as a great artist, but as an activist, is pushing the audience: ‘This is what I’ve shown you. This is the story that I’ve given you. What is the right thing? What are you willing to do? What are your next steps? Discuss.’ It was not a huge grossing film because white audiences were scared away from going to the theatre. Roger Ebert talks about hearing a critic at Cannes saying, ‘They can’t show this in the States, there will be riots.’ Three really influential white critics wrote that it was a dangerous movie because, instead of enclosing the story and tying it up for us, Spike Lee is inciting the audience’s emotions. Something similar happened with John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood which came out a couple of years later. That’s also a really phenomenal film, from this phase where people of colour are writing and directing their own films and appearing in them. White audiences were scared away from that film as well, because they were made to think, ‘Hey, this is going to be a scary thing for us to watch.’ My wife, Jeanie, talks about seeing this film in Austin with her then boyfriend, and how they were the only white people in the audience. Do the Right Thing is a film with incredible cultural value, but not the same kind of popular success we talked about with Birth of a Nation or with Gone with the Wind, where the white, mainstream audience felt comfortable and safe and confirmed. Largely, yes. Even with the radical actions that Sidney Poitier’s character takes during the film. You have a racist character who becomes less racist. That’s wrapped up, done, I can go to bed. There is no simple way out of it. As I said, often when I teach it or lead conversations about it I ask, ‘Who did the right thing in this film? Did anybody?’ There is not a person who’s universally good in the film. I talk in the book about Da Mayor, who on several occasions does do the right thing, but he’s an alcoholic and the laughingstock of the youth in the neighbourhood. They don’t take him seriously. Mookie does not do the right thing through most of the movie. He’s morally lax and lazy. Then, at the end of the movie, you see him make this conscious decision and you don’t know what it means until you reflect on it. Go back and take a look at this film, or watch it for the first time, and look how precise his motions are at the end of the film, when he makes his decision. He is trying to do the right thing and to do it with a minimum of harm, understanding that there will be harm. But it is the better of the two choices. I absolutely hear what you’re saying, because every time I watch the end of Do the Right Thing I am in tears, because it feels like things will never change. There is violence against a young Black man, just as there was earlier this year, just as there may be this afternoon. It’s heartbreaking. There’s also that human recognition that we are all wrestling with this and we are invited to think about it further. The film ends with the radio disc jockey, played by Samuel L. Jackson, asking, “Are we going to live together?” And that is the essential question, particularly for us in the United States, because as James Baldwin says, here we do not have the luxury of distancing ourselves. We can’t divorce each other. We are going to have to figure out a way to live together. That’s the great challenge and opportunity that Do the Right Thing presents us with."

"12 Years a Slave was best picture at the Academy Awards in 2014 as well as at the BAFTAS. It’s got a British director, a British star, and a couple of British actors involved. What is essential about 12 Years a Slave is that it shows the torture and sexual violence of slavery. It’s a vital corrective to Gone with the Wind and all of the Lost Cause narratives. I first watched 12 Years a Slave at the Austin Film Festival in 2014, when screenwriter John Ridley was there. I watched it in a mostly white audience and at the end of the film, we could not get up from our seats. We had been so powerfully affected that we could not move. I felt so stricken that I thought I could never walk out of the theatre after what I had just seen. So, Solomon Northup, who is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a free Northern Black who is kidnapped and then transported to the worst place in America for slaves, which was Louisiana. Slavery was horrifying throughout the American South, but slaves in Louisiana were picking cotton and, as we see from the character Patsy, they had these targets for their daily cotton-picking that they were supposed to achieve. There was this very real sense that they were in a world where civilization did not apply. The masters of the plantations could do whatever they wanted. Throughout the movie Michael Fassbender’s character, Epps, rapes Lupita Nyong’o’s character Patsy. At one point he orders Solomon Northrup to whip her. If you compare that with Gone with the Wind where, early on, the sun is going down and one of the slaves says, ‘Well. I guess we’re done for the day.’ It’s like they’re going home to have a good time being slaves. There is so much historically wrong with that romantic depiction of slaves, their love for their masters, the idea that they had this benevolent force looking after and over them. Michael Fassbender’s character is a brilliant contemporary villain, because he embodies so much of the violence and oppression and privilege. He will do whatever he can get away with. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I told you when we picked these films that we were looking at mythologies: helpful and harmful. The one reservation that I have about 12 Years a Slave is there is a narrative mythology in it which I find problematic, which is the white saviour story. Brad Pitt, who was one of the producers of the film, plays a character who helps Solomon Northup get to freedom. This is very common, particularly with white actors—it’s almost always actors, although Sandra Bullock played a similar white saviour role in a movie called The Blind Side for which, of course, she won an Academy Award—but Brad Pitt’s character makes it possible for Solomon Northup to escape his bondage. One of the things that people find harmful and damaging about the white saviour narrative is the idea that people of colour are not able to advance themselves, that they require rescue. In the conversations that I’ve been having for the last four years about racial reconciliation and healing, the sense that I get from my friends who are people of colour is that they do not want to be rescued and, at the same, they do not want to do all the work themselves, because we created this system and need to be there on the frontlines with them. That’s the tension. How do we find a balance between the white saviour, ‘I’m going to come in and wave my magic wand and fix everything for you’ and ‘I’m going to leave you to your own deserts and good luck with that.’ I wrestle with this as well. One of the problems for the film is that it’s part of the historical record. 12 Years a Slave is based on a slave autobiography and if this particular person–the character Sam Bass in the film—had not gotten a letter away to the people who knew Solomon Northup back in New York, he would never have escaped bondage. But these are the stereotypes we wrestle with, even in contemporary Hollywood. Brad Pitt is a notably progressive Hollywood actor and producer, as is Matthew McConaughey. He also appeared in a film not too long ago in which he played a white saviour. It’s one of the things that we are trying to put to bed, but we can’t do that until we notice it and call it out for what it is. Yes, a less visible actor would have made the trope less visible. Brad Pitt is the highest-ranking Hollywood personality in the film, so it draws attention to what is going on. If he had cast a nobody, I don’t think we’d necessarily be talking about it, but it’s like, ‘I produced this movie and I’m going to take on this role and I do get to be the pivotal character who saves Solomon Northup.’ It’s a horrifying film. During much of its runtime, I just sat there reminding myself about the title, 12 years: this is going to end at some point. And the reason that I call it a necessary corrective to those films about the Lost Cause, those nostalgic films about slavery, is because it is so horrible. It is not generically a horror film, but it has that same effect on us, because it reminds us of the depths to which human beings can sink. It’s a really valuable film for people to watch and I wanted to recommend it just to say, ‘If you have ever had this notion of friendly slave owners and congenial slaves who loved each other so much that they just continued to live together, even after they were free, that whole faithful retainer thing, this film will show you what’s wrong with that idea.’ And what I love about what Jordan Peele does in Get Out is he actually gives a sort of supernatural explanation for the faithful retainer, because that idea is so messed up."

"I resisted watching this movie for a long, long time. I’m at an age where I don’t watch horror films for the most part, but this was a film that had so much cultural currency and I was slated to talk about it at Washington National Cathedral. So my son Chandler, who is youngish and still enjoys this kind of film, sat down with me and we watched it. Then we watched it again because, as I point out in my book, this film has so many incredible narrative surprises in it that it needs to be watched more than once. The things that you expect turn out not to be true. Like Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, it is one of those stories that you have to return to with your new eyes to see every event in a new way. One of the reasons that I wanted to recommend Get Out to your readers is that, like Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman , it’s emblematic of the kind of film where filmmakers of colour are taking traditional Hollywood filmmaking techniques and genres and tropes and turning them on their heads. There are a couple of tropes that are really essential. The first one is that in an American film, usually, if there is a Black character, he or she is the first person to die. When we were prepping for a conversation about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner at Washington National Cathedral, our moderator was Korva Coleman, who is a newscaster for our National Public Radio. She was watching it and her teenage daughter walked through the living room, glanced at the TV screen where Sidney Poitier was, and asked her mom, ‘When does he die?’ So, there is this first man out trope in horror films, and it is contrasted with what we call the white virgin trope. If you watch an American slasher film— Halloween or Friday the 13th , any of the films in that genre—it is the virginal white female who somehow manages to survive the violence and depredation. There is a virginal white female in Get Out and let’s just say that Jordan Peele rings a number of reversals on this particular horror film convention. “In an American film, usually, if there is a Black character, he or she is the first person to die” There are lots of other things as well. There is a trope in American film about the ineffectual Black friend who is played for comic relief. So Chris, who is played by Daniel Kaluuya, has a best friend who works as a security screener at an airport (presumably in New York, we’re not really told where the film takes place. Interestingly, the film was made in the very deep South, in a place called Fairhope, Alabama. It’s a very white place and I’m sure captured some of the creepy ambiance that Jordan Peele was looking for). The film is smart and funny and scary and heartbreaking, because the longer you watch, the more you begin to realize how the things that are happening in the story are mythologically deep. They’re reflective of Black experience and the ways that white people have appropriated Black culture and appropriated Black bodies. It is a story that has incredible resonance. Another interesting thing is that the movie was written and went into pre-production while Barack Obama was president. Then, when Donald Trump was elected, racial incidents in the United States skyrocketed, including a heartbreaking racial assault that took place on my own campus the day after the 2016 election. So Jordan Peele changed the ending, to offer some modicum of hope in a world that had suddenly become much more dark. It’s a brilliant ending and does everything that Jordan Peele hoped it would do. It reflects the seriousness of any Black encounter with law enforcement, but it also offers us some tiny little bit of hope moving forward. That’s another powerful thing about it. Like the rest of the films we’ve talked about today, it’s beautifully made, it’s dramatically affecting and it’s entertaining, but this film in particular pushes back not just against American history, but against all of the different ways that Hollywood has told stories about American history. That was what I found particularly brilliant about Get Out. The character of the father in the film was played by Bradley Whitford, who appeared in the American TV series The West Wing , written and produced by Aaron Sorkin. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 1967 we had Spencer Tracy, one of the greatest, most sincere, most genuinely decent human beings, in the father role. That was his persona on screen: he wasn’t dangerous, he wasn’t edgy, he was good. To see that character in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner wrestling with these racial questions allowed audiences to do the same thing. When Jordan Peele cast a parallel character in Get Out, he chose another liberal, sincere icon. One of the things that often happens in great Hollywood movies is people are invited either to inhabit their persona or to bounce off their persona. So for anybody watching Get Out whose primary experience of Brad Whitford is the character in The West Wing , the turns that the father character takes are disturbing, but they’re also indicting, because, as Bradley Whitford said in an interview, ‘I’m the kind of person who would say something like I would have voted for Obama three times.’ The film isn’t just pushing back against conservative American racism, it’s also pushing back against liberal American racism. I hope so. Going back to HBO’s decision to return Gone with the Wind to the airwaves with some context, it’s valuable simply because it allows us to have some conscious reflection on what is normally an unconscious response. In movies, the story washes over us and we enter into the lives of the characters. We’re emotionally connected to them. What I try to do every time I show or teach a film is say, ‘Okay, here are three things I want you to think about. Park them while you’re watching. Don’t not experience the film, but also hold these things in the back of your head. Then, when the film is over and the emotional response is done, you can also have a cerebral response to what you just experienced.’"

"Absolutely. The monsters in the book are more like vampires. But the interesting thing about I Am Legend is that it is an apocalyptic survival story. The main character thinks that he is the last human being left on earth. One of the things that I discovered in the course of researching this topic is that zombie stories are not really about zombies any more than Harry Potter is about magic wands. The zombies are merely a background detail. They are a way for us to explore what happens to human beings when they are placed under incredible stress. I think about this book as highly significant for zombie apocalypse for two reasons. The first is that George A. Romero was very clear that I Am Legend was a source for Night of the Living Dead . He was inspired by this story of a person who is menaced by supernatural monsters and is trying to retain his sanity and figure out how to remain human. The second is that I had a chance to interview Mark Protosevich who was the original screenwriter on the Will Smith film I Am Legend . He also thinks of it very much as a zombie apocalypse story. For Mark, there was an overriding question as he wrote the film about what it means to be a survivor. He did a lot of research about people who were in extreme survival situations. He talked with many people who were on death row, or in isolation in prisons. He asked them about their experience and what they did to retain their sanity. Yes, in the movie he’s living boarded up in a brownstone house in New York. Every day, he makes the rounds and repairs the damage. In Mark’s film version, the hope that Robert Neville has is not that he’s going to find a cure for the virus, but that he’s going to find another human being. Yes, it is very bleak. In general, there the two sorts of endings you get with zombie apocalypse stories. The first is the nihilistic ending. It is the end of everything, and the human race is finished. We find that in some of the Romero movies, and in the novel I Am Legend . In the second sort of ending—including the film version of I Am Legend —the human race is going to continue. Here, Tolkien’s concept of the ‘eucatastrophe’ is relevant: the idea that even in this disaster there is the possibility for human growth and change. Theologically, that’s what the apocalyptic narrative is about. It’s a sort of cosmic reboot. If you’re faithful and, frankly, lucky, then you will get to the other side and see the new world, whatever that is. It’s a very unusual ending in which he reflects on what he must appear like to the monsters he has been hunting. They were monsters for him and now he thinks about what he must be to them: a vengeful person who has sent so many of them to an early death—a second death. I think it could. Robert Neville develops a strange sympathy with his antagonists. He reflects that although he thought that he was doing the right thing for his species, actually he might be the destroyer. This is unusual, because most zombie narratives don’t encourage us to question the difference between us and the monster. “Robert Neville develops a strange sympathy with his antagonists…. This is unusual, because most zombie narratives don’t encourage us to question the difference between us and the monster” The problem post-9/11 is that we tend to monsterise the people to whom we find ourselves opposed. Many of our large action spectacles encourage us to do that: the villains tend to be things that you can kill without feeling remorse. Think, for example, of the Ultrons in the Avengers films. We think of them as being soulless, and therefore when we destroy them we don’t take on the same sort of moral culpability as we would if we were to kill a human being or a sentient creature. Ultimately though, zombie narratives are probably more useful when we think about human encounters in these stories. That’s where our opportunity to leap across boundaries and think about whether we’re going to encounter the other with compassion or violence arises."

"I noticed that my book Living with the Living Dead was reviewed on a zombie studies site the other day, and they were somewhat indignant that I included The Road on the grounds that there are no zombies in this book. And in a sense, they’re right. There is no creature that has been transformed by leaking chemicals or radioactive satellites. But, on the other hand, there are human beings who consume other humans and that informs the major conflicts of the book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So, you’ve got a post-apocalyptic setting and you’ve got ethical quandaries for the main characters. There’s the sense of menace that permeates the zombie apocalypse. It’s not bad enough that they’re going to kill you, they’re also going to eat you. What I love about this story is its literary quality. We tend to think of the zombie apocalypse as a low-culture, pulp phenomenon. Sure. Yet with The Road , we’ve got what is essentially a zombie apocalypse story that is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Angela Kang, one of the writers and executive producers of The Walking Dead , told me that she is not interested in zombies per se, but in human beings and what they are willing to do to survive. In The Road , the man and the boy stand in for every human in every zombie apocalypse story. What are they willing to do to survive? What do they do in terms of their resources? Do they share them or do they hoard them? In the contacts that they make with other human beings, do they react with fear or do they react with welcome? It’s such a beautifully written book, although highly fraught. You’ve got a great artist who wants to ask some universal human questions. By the time you come to the end of that novel, you have really explored what it’s like to live in a world where human beings are beset by threats coming from all directions. As we look at the world at this moment, I can say that I personally as an American don’t want to respond to every threat by building walls. But that’s a choice that some people make. The father in this story basically says that all he cares about is his son’s survival, and he is not going to share anything that they have. That is an ethical choice that some people make. It’s an ethical choice that the United States made after 9/11: basically, the US held that it would do some unpleasant things in order to increase its chance of survival. The son is a marvellous character because in his innocence he is constantly checking his father. He keeps asking his father whether they are good—whether they are the good guys. The father comes up with a sort of pseudo-religious construct: that they are ‘carrying the fire’. If you were in a George Miller Mad Max apocalypse story, and if you saw someone coming down the road towards you, you should probably turn and run in the other direction. But the son keeps asking the question: are we the good guys? In encounter after encounter, they make choices that are very narrowly focussed on themselves. “Parallel ethical questions that we need to ask ourselves post-9/11 are: how do we relate to the other people or cultures that we have to encounter? Do we react to them with fear because we have encountered some people who are frightening?” Parallel ethical questions that we need to ask ourselves post-9/11 are: how do we relate to the other people or cultures that we have to encounter? Do we react to them with fear because we have encountered some people who are frightening? Or do we react to them with compassion and generosity, because people may be more well-disposed towards us if we treat them with kindness? Another kind of ethical question explored in The Road has to do with why we are here. The father explicitly says that he has been appointed by God to take care of his son, and that if anyone tries to touch his son he will kill them. The son, in his innocence, is basically pushing back and giving the answer that we get from many of the great wisdom traditions as well as from moral atheism, which is that if he is the most important thing on the planet, then the planet is probably worthless. This position is that there has got to be something more important than me and my desires and my life. I want to live for something more than that and I want to believe that there is something bigger than me. Well, I am sure that there are some Catholic critics who do that because McCarthy was raised Catholic and you cannot shed it. I was raised Southern Baptist, which is conservative evangelical Christian, and however far to the left I go in terms of my own faith and cultural beliefs, there is still some part of me that knows all of the verses to ‘Amazing Grace’. I think one of the things that makes the image of carrying the fire so wonderful is that it can be applied to a range of different traditions. If we read it as straight Christian, we might want to think of it in terms of some of the New Testament ideas around community. At the end of the book, the question becomes: are we going to be like this isolated dyad going through whatever is left of our lives together, or are we going to open ourselves up to the possibility that we could be part of a larger community? What McCarthy does in a very faintly hopeful way is to come down on the side of larger community."

"I think it is important. From a narratological point of view, what Kirkman is pointing out here is that the zombie apocalypse becomes a genre in which we have a laboratory of human behaviour ramped up. We get a similar effect in war stories. What this scenario does is ratchet up our everyday normal human behaviour to force ten levels. It allows us to ask those really challenging questions about character in a much more rapid way. Character is important because both the comic and TV series are long-form narratives in which you have the chance to develop binding relationships with characters. That, actually, for me is the hardest thing about watching both The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones : you get attached to characters who then get killed off. Eventually I stopped reading The Walking Dead because I did not want to get my heart broken anymore! Yes. He starts out as a sort of proto-typical American Gary Cooper good guy—an ‘ah shucks’ lawman from a small sheriff’s department. Over the course of the story, he develops in response to the world of threat but also in response to the new responsibilities that he takes on. Some of those changes are positive, others less so. For example, fans often talk about an iteration of Rick whom they call the ‘Ricktator’. He is basically the pragmatic leader of the group willing to do violence or whatever is necessary to protect the group and keep them together. This is the version that we’ve seen mostly in recent seasons. “What this scenario does is ratchet up our everyday normal human behaviour to force ten levels – it allows us to ask those really challenging questions about character in a much more rapid way” In some ways, I really miss the naïve original Rick. There’s a moment in the beginning of The Walking Dead where he encounters one of the zombies—the first walkers—who has been so badly ravaged that she’s just lying helplessly in the grass making zombie noises. Rick takes her bike and rides back to his old home but before he leaves town, he comes back and kills her out of mercy. He was reacting to her helplessness and what he perceived as their shared humanity. Of course, this is still very early in his understanding of what the walkers are. Later on, such killings just become reflex. We come back here to what we were talking about with the early George A. Romero films. Actually, it’s a trope that extends throughout The Walking Dead : that we are like the walkers if we are not living mindful lives or if we are sunk into old ways of seeing or being. There’s another scene early in the series in which Rick encounters a family of evangelical Christians who have committed suicide. Basically, what has happened is that their faith could not accommodate the shock of the event. They had a very particular way of waiting for the second coming of Christ, and this was not the way the world should end. And if the Bible was wrong about that, then what else might it be wrong about? I think it’s entirely possible that these scenes are intended to be a social commentary on the unthinking kind of faith that some people have. But the lovely thing about the scene in the church is that Rick recognises the connection to the figure of Jesus. He comes back in after they have cleaned up the church and he says that he doesn’t know how to pray, but he knows that he can talk about how to do the right thing and how difficult that is as a leader."

"Initially, your readers should be aware that it is extremely different from the blockbuster film with Brad Pitt. The underlying concept is the same, and the film retains some of the globetrotting elements, but otherwise the two are very different. In my opinion, the book is far superior. One of the reasons I chose World War Z is that it is a novel that bridges the gap between pulp and high literature. It takes a subject matter which we would think of as mainstream geek culture, but it finds universal human themes, develops characters that you care about, and also manages to be culturally critical. It is clearly critical of many of the post-9/11 choices made by the United States and Britain. The novel is an oral history of the zombie war, and it really does range the globe. There is no single narrative line running through the book. Rather, you have to piece the oral histories together like a collage to come to some kind of understanding of what has happened to the world. That is the genius of using this low culture trope: we know what happens in a zombie apocalypse. We don’t have to be told every seminal event in that narrative. We talk to people who are largely on the periphery of the story. There is a lovely effect like those achieved by modernists like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf in which you have a chapter from one character’s point of view, and then another chapter from another character’s point of view. You are putting together thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. The narrator – or compiler – of World War Z is a cultural historian who works for the United Nations. He is trying to talk to people and gather their stories in the same way that an oral historian might put together a history of the Blitz, or a history of the war in the South Pacific. I think one of the things that Brooks is trying to do is to explore what a true world war would look like. Even during the First World War, there were whole swathes of the world that were not involved. In Brooks’s novel, the war starts in China but there are islands in the middle of the pacific which had to deal with zombies coming up out of the sea. Then there’s Cuba which became a world power as a result of decisions that they made during the course of the conflict. There are two episodes that are set in Japan. The Japanese islands were largely evacuated during the zombie apocalypse, except for two people who stay behind. One of these is a sort of Hong Kong action-figure character: he’s a blind gardener who becomes a zombie killer with his spade. Along with his apprentice, he takes on the task of cleansing the Japanese isles so that the garden will be restored. There’s a kind of universality about the situation. Everybody on the planet has to deal with the threat. I think that Brooks is suggesting that we are so much more alike than we are different. Yes. And if we think of it as an anti-American post-9/11 narrative, one of the things that it does is say that there is a value to globalism and cooperation and pulling together, as opposed to the response we took to our own perceived apocalypse."

"Manuel Gonzales is a Texan writer who lived in Austin for many years. He’s a very literary writer, but he mines fantasy and science fiction tropes for their narrative value. There are a number of different kinds of stories collected in The Miniature Wife. The title story is about a man who in the course of his scientific experiments accidentally shrinks his wife. You have seen that in movies, or the converse where she’s a fifty-foot woman. He takes this science fiction trope and turns it into a relation story about what happens when relationships go bad. That’s essentially what he’s doing with all of these stories. He’s taking seriously what we might think of as conflicts that you might deal with in a literary short story. There are two zombie stories in the collection that I think are worth noting. One is told from the perspective of the zombie. We rarely get that perspective because, traditionally at least, the zombie is an unthinking non-sentient being whose only impulses are to feed. But there are some characters, for example in the Marvel Zombies , where they have sentience but they are also affected by this powerful overwhelming hunger. That’s what Manuel Gonzales does in this story told from a zombie’s point of view. “We rarely get the zombie perspective because, traditionally at least, the zombie is an unthinking non-sentient being whose only impulses are to feed” In some sense, it’s a sort of workplace romance: he’s in love with the woman in his office and he’s a zombie. He wants to love her and yet he is constantly fighting these impulses to eat people’s faces. It’s funny, charming, and heart-breaking. Perhaps the most important story in this collection is ‘Escape From the Mall’. It takes us back to the Dawn of the Dead story and the remake, both of which are set in shopping malls. The narrator in this story is just an ordinary guy who is caught up in the zombie apocalypse. He and a couple of other people have escaped into a janitor’s closet. The zombies are outside pounding to get in. He is talking with this guy who is the leader of the group and the guy has told him that he thinks that one of them is a zombie. So, you’ve got the enemy outside and the enemy inside. At the end of ‘Escape From the Mall’, the main character has a long monologue where he says that he thinks that we need the end of the world because without it we can’t know who we are and how we are supposed to be. It’s similar to Tolkein’s idea of the eucatastrophe where the world has changed but people who have survived have changed along with this disaster. Now, perhaps, we can be the people that we are supposed to be in whatever this new world looks like. Yes. It’s one of the things that lets me watch Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead even knowing that there are going to be casualties along the way. This is not precisely how Tolkien means it because in ‘On Fairy Stories’ he’s thinking largely about cosmic change: the new heaven and the new earth, in terms of the Christian understanding of what the apocalypse brings. But the simple fact of being presented with these incredible challenges allows characters to grow and change and become something that they could not have been when they were sunk in their zombie-like lives. One obvious example is Shaun in Shaun of the Dead . It’s made clear early on that there is very little difference between Shaun’s circle of friends and the zombies who are going to show up later. Shaun’s girlfriend says that they’re not really living but do the same thing over and over again and they are stuck in their lives. In that story, because of the apocalypse, Shaun becomes the friend, the son, the boyfriend and the human being that he’s supposed to be. There are a couple of things that he’s chalked on his note-board in the kitchen and one of them is ‘sort life out’. So, Shaun of the dead stops being Shaun of the dead and becomes Shaun of the living. That’s true of many characters who live through the zombie apocalypse. When we’re first introduced to Daryl in The Walking Dead , he’s violent and brutish and a loner. But during the course of the story, because of these challenges that he’s faced with, he becomes a friend, brother, leader, and a compassionate person. Cultural critics talk about the idea of a reboot. Robert Kirkman says of The Walking Dead that in a world where the dead walk, we have to learn to live. We can think in terms of a cosmic reboot as well. It’s not enough for us just to be sunk in our unthinking mindlessness and it’s not enough for us to consume. We’ve got to become truly human. The great Christian thinker Irenaeus talks about the glory of God as a human being fully alive. You don’t have to be a religious person to understand that that’s our calling. And that’s what happens in these zombie stories when we don’t all die."