Black Like Me

I watched Black Like Me today. The film is based on the essays and memoirs of journalist John Howard Griffin, who in 1960 underwent a dramatic dermatological makeover in order to change his skin color from white to black. The middle-aged husband and father then spent 6 weeks moving through the Deep South pretending to be a black man, all the while writing about his experiences in articles for Ebony and other magazines. Ultimately the experience and articles would be turned into a book, which in 1964 was made into a film. The movie version of the memoirs received little critical success in 1964, and since that time has become an obscure but important marker of the 1960s race relations culture.  It is not surprising that the film was not received with great fanfare. James Whitmore (who plays Brooks in Shawshank Redemption) portrays Griffin with a straightforward but nonetheless inspired attempt to recreate the frustration and discussion that Griffin felt after countless episodes of prejudicial treatment.

The film itself lacks a plot. We move from one scene to the next. There are several exchanges between Whitmore and white motorists who give him rides from town to town. All but one motorist inquires about some form of black sexuality, and these are sequences, while perhaps exaggerated slightly for viewing-value, which Griffin describes candidly in his memoirs.  Much bigotry and fear directed at blacks up through the Civil Rights Era regarded their apparent overt and animalistic sexuality. Griffin becomes consumed with anger over the ignorance and indifference many whites, including those who will not offer to help when he is chased by young hooligans through the streets of Hattiesburg, MS, show towards a polite, well-spoken, educated black man. The movie reveals that blacks only have a negative attitude towards Griffin when he reveals his identity to a young civil rights activist and his father near the movie's end. But this film's significance is not about the lack of plot, nor the way in which the movie's makers ignored the temptation to dramatize the events of Griffin's memoirs for the sake of flow. The film isn't really about the countless ways in which whites mistreated a man they assumed to be black. This film is a bridge. While we can only judge the creative thought processes behind movies like Mockingbird and Defiant Ones, if we take this film as a mostly honest depiction of the experiences of a "black" man traveling through the American South, then we can view the potential for film's power.

In 1964 this film portrayed the realities of the Civil Rights Era in the South with candor and grit. This movie holds no punches. It is far more telling of the realities in the American South during the Civil Rights Era than any of the other film we have discussed this far and yet... you cannot purchase it for less than $40 on Amazon.com. It is obscure and hard to find on the Internet. It made no money when it was released and gained little attention from the American public. Perhaps, this is because the film is not very good. It is well acted in parts but views more as a documentary in others. There is no climax. There is no hero. There is no justice served. It is a bitter depiction of what was going on during that era. The story itself is remarkable, and the book Black Like Me garnered much attention for Griffin when it was published. Yet somehow the film was not even a flop. It was a never seen never heard of movie that only now gains recognition as ahead of its time. Perhaps again it is an all too familiar tale of white heroism. Griffin is a white man highlighting the plight of African-Americans. In reality and through his writing he is revered, but there is something about this film-- the visual image of a white man pretending to be a black man and wading through a limbo of racial identity, the psychology of the ordeal that we see in his very blue and tired eyes, that overshadows the events themselves. At the movie's end we are more concerned with Griffin's struggle to stay sane as he loses his identity, to make peace with his persecution, that we are consumed with the semblance of plot and character in this film and distracted from its ultimate accomplishment: presenting the purist depiction of racial relations in American cinema that was, perhaps, ever made. It's a shame we lose that in a mediocre film. I will leave with this excerpt from the Encyclopedia of American Film:

"Students might find Black Like Me very useful as a snapshot of a point in time, and explore how things have changed in the years since the setting of the movie. It could be used in many ways by students wishing to gain an understanding of the roots of the civil rights movement and of the many levels of discrimination faced by black citizens in the American South in the late 1950s. The film could be viewed on different levels, appealing to both a white and black audience and studied for the different gradations of racism. It could even be useful to consider subtle points, such as language. Are phrases such as “you people” actually code words for racism?"  


It was unintentional, but I could not help but notice the use of words "could" and "might". These are things this film could do, but it remains in obscurity.