George Washington

Since our demographics in this BYU film class are largely similar (all of us are college students, most of us are white, middle-class, and LDS), George Washington offers a narrative from a very different perspective. George Washington takes place in a small town in North Carolina. The characters, a group of kids in their early adolescence, are mostly African American, and all living in poverty. Their summer becomes a frightening period of regret and secrets when one boy named George accidentally kills his friend Buddy.

It is a beautiful and sorrowful film full of haunting moments, and as I was watching it I could not stop comparing it to John Steinbeck’s novels. The character vignettes evoke Cannery Row in their goodness and their quiet strangeness. The inciting incident of George Washington echoes the troubling climax of Of Mice and Men. The poetic voiceover narration also reads deeply Steinbeckian, as Nasia observes her microcosm and reflects on its joys and defects. In all three of these narratives, poverty encourages meandering, gentleness, and idiosyncrasy, but also violence and tragedy.

 George Washington was written, directed, and produced by David Gordon Green, who grew up in Arkansas and most likely knew people like these people and had walked in places like these places. But just as Manthia Diawara is skeptical of films about black people made by white people and the inauthenticity that often encourages, I think this film may have been more justified if it were created within the perspective of actual experience. I do not think Green is fetishizing poverty or blackness. But he might be fetishizing something about comparisons, and something feels guilty about the multiple violent catharses that are thrust on our young protagonists. The amount of violence in this film turns the narrative deeply nihilistic. There is a death due to a head bashed on a bathroom floor. There is a seizure. There is a near drowning. There is hospitalization. There is a bloody car accident. There is the murder of a dog. Is it warranted? To what end? Is the truth we are supposed to glean from this film that these people are utterly stuck and completely victim to random, unavoidable, persistent violence from within their own community? I prefer a sympathetic perspective to an accusatory one when someone from outside makes something inside. But I am not sure I like what this one is saying. Ultimately, it seems that the most useful pieces of diverse media are created by people who are part of the diversity being explored.

I recognize that this is an essentialist perspective. Ideally, characters ought to be distinct and established enough that every person represented in a narrative is an experimentation with diversity. Every person’s life experiences, physical appearances, and internal psyches, even within a narrow or relatively homogenous group, is unique, valid, and worthwhile to explore. But the unfortunate truth is that the distribution is off kilter in favor of the culturally preferred binaries, not only in regards to who the stories are about, but also who are creating the stories. Children’s media that focus on introducing characters, stories, values, and situations from a wide range of cultural, political, economic, racial, ethnic, national, and linguistic perspectives will encourage empathy and understanding. As things currently stand, we are portraying more of these perspectives than we are hearing directly from.