Radicalism in Mainstream Entertainment, Again

The discussion of it in the comments to my post about The Good Lord Bird last month encouraged me to get over my skepticism and watch Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. It is, as it turns out, an effective and gripping courtroom drama. It also, from my reading after watching the movie, downplays the weirdness and irreverence of the trial—and particularly of the defense’s tactics—to a degree that feels not only ahistorical but entirely dogmatic. Any courtroom movie would be improved by witnesses singing on the stand, and many other antics that Sorkin removed, and one can only view the choice to omit them as an integral component of the film’s message.

For all that, Chicago 7 is a great deal less Sorkin-ian than I was expecting. So sure, you get things like the principled Republican prosecutor and the reverent respect for fallen soldiers that unites good people on both sides of the aisle. But there’s also a healthy streak of skepticism towards this attitude that runs through movie, mostly in its handling of Bobby Seale. Chicago 7 seems aware that Seale’s struggle is not the same as the rest of the defendants, as exemplified by his comment to Tom Hayden, that his brand of revolution, which is essentially a rebellion against a repressive father and the system he represents, is “pretty different from a rope and a tree”. It’s a recognition that exerts constant pressure against what feels to me like the film’s project, the apotheosis of Hayden as the “right” kind of liberal, who can earn the respect of counter-culture figures like Abbie Hoffman while still exuding the kind of respectable image that allows him to get elected and enact real change.

I found myself thinking about Chicago 7 when I sat down to watch the first installment in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, a series of films about the experiences of the Afro-Caribbean immigrant community in Britain in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The first of these movies, “Mangrove”, is almost Chicago 7‘s UK counterpart. Like it, it tells the story of a group of criminal trial defendants—here, the Mangrove Nine—who have been charged with inciting a riot after participating in a protest that turned violent due to actions taken by the police. One might even argue that McQueen had a more feelgood story to tell, since the Mangrove Nine were acquitted where the Chicago 7 were convicted and spent several years in prison before their verdict was overturned on appeal. And yet at almost every turn, McQueen makes the opposite choice from Sorkin, one that reveals his radical understanding of the situation, and his commitment to exposing audiences to it.

“Mangrove” is the longest of the Small Axe movies, at just over two hours, and it takes nearly half its running time to even get into a courtroom. The first hour is spent introducing us to Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), an entrepreneur who, in the late 60s, opens the titular restaurant, where he serves West Indian cuisine and creates a meeting space for a community that is growing into political awareness. The local police repeatedly raid the Mangrove and harass its customers, leading Crichlow to join forces with local Black Panther leaders and stage a protest march. When that march is violently broken up by the police, Crichlow and several other leaders are arrested and charged with conspiracy to start a riot, which carries a sentence of ten years.

Sorkin presents the trial of the Chicago 7 as a legal drama, with twists and turns—this witness blows the prosecution’s case out of the water! No, wait, the judge is refusing to let him testify—and revelations—this tape proves that Tom Hayden incited the crowd to riot! But no, because if you study his writing, you’ll see that wasn’t actually what he meant. Characters, like Hoffman, who insist that the trial is a sham and that the verdict is predetermined are given their chance to speak, and then ignored as if they haven’t said anything, because to acknowledge them would also be to accept that they are entirely right. Sorkin, who made his name with a legal drama in which the truth sets the innocent free, can’t abandon those habits, even when the behavior of the historical defendants demands otherwise.

McQueen takes the opposite approach. Even once the trial begins, “Mangrove” is extremely light on courtroom scenes, because it recognizes that what’s happening in the courtroom has nothing to do with law or justice. What can you do, after all, when police officers brazenly lie on the witness stand and are accepted as credible by virtue of their position and race? So the focus of the film becomes, instead, on how the Mangrove Nine can subvert, undermine, and expose to ridicule the system that is putting them on trial, and use the proceedings to bring race and racist systems into the courtroom. Several of the defendants—most notably, Panther leaders Altheia Jones-LeCointe (Letitia Wright) and Darcus Howe (Malachi Kirby)—choose to represent themselves, as a way of forcing the judge and jury to reckon with them as human beings, and of using the trial to lay out their political philosophy. In his closing statement, Howe informs the jury (and really, the courtroom audience and the press) that he doesn’t actually care about their verdict. What matters to him, he explains, is the system of which the trial is only one expression, one that can’t be defeated by a single verdict but through sustained political action.

At the same time, McQueen keeps the emphasis of “Mangrove” not on these activists but on Frank, a generally apolitical person who just wants to pursue the path to prosperity that he’s been sold his whole life—open a business, serve the community, bring some happiness to people’s lives, do good for others and for yourself. Characters like Frank abound throughout Small Axe, people who believe in hard work, self-sufficiency, and following the rules, and who are repeatedly slapped down by a system that isn’t willing to recognize those virtues in them, and which was never intended to reward them. So even though “Mangrove” ends on what would have been, in another creator’s hands, a note of triumph, in McQueen’s depiction it is careful to stress the toll that even success and vindication have on an ordinary, non-radical person like Frank. How he is forced to shoulder a burden he didn’t ask for, because of his race and ethnicity.

This tension, between characters who are just trying to go about their lives, and radicalism as the only possible response to a system that doesn’t permit that, persists throughout the Small Axe movies. The second installment, “Lovers Rock”, is a nearly plotless hour that follows a group of young people as they arrive at a house party in 1980s London, where they dance, drink, pair up, talk about their lives, and in general just act like kids out for a night of fun. It feels entirely apolitical, until the moment that a young woman wanders out of the house and is immediately accosted by a group of young white men, who are scared off by the party’s bouncer. It’s a sudden reminder that in a society that sees only the color of your skin, even partying and falling in love can be privileges, and that special spaces and systems have to be erected to allow you to engage in them.

Other episodes revolve around the radicalization of characters who were raised to respect authority and believe in the system. “Alex Wheatle”, the fourth episode, is a biography of the children’s writer, whose books have depicted life in the Afro-Caribbean community, during his childhood and early adulthood. Raised in a children’s home, Wheatle experiences racism (his housemother is quoted as saying that she feels “compelled to pick on him”) and, possibly even worse, indifference to his intellectual and emotional development. He arrives in London as a young man who is nearly a blank slate, detached from his heritage while also being treated with suspicion by the white establishment. Discovering the Afro-Caribbean community’s culture, history, and most of all music is Alex’s path to self-discovery, but it also radicalizes him politically, leading to incarceration after he participates in the 1981 Brixton riot.

The fifth episode, “Education”, is the series’s smallest story but arguably its most horrifying, as bright but dyslexic grade schooler Kingsley (Kenyah Sandy) is diverted into a “special” school that is really little more than a warehouse. Though Kingsley himself quickly realizes that something is wrong, he’s unable to convey this wrongness to his parents, both of whom are weighed down by multiple jobs, but more than that, by a reflexive belief that the system knows best. Though Kingsley’s mother eventually realizes how poorly her son and other black children have been served by the educational system, McQueen holds back on offering simple comfort or triumph. The last avenue for appealing Kingsley’s school placement, we’re told, is to write to the newly appointed minister of education, one Margaret Thatcher. And though the film ends with Kingsley, in a Saturday school established by the community to supplement his nonexistent education, reading a passage from a book, his words are juxtaposed with images of space, which he’d previously expressed the desire to explore as an astronaut. It’s left to us to wonder whether he’ll ever get the support he needs to follow his dreams.

The episode that most encapsulates Small Axe‘s sophisticated approach to both history and radicalism is actually the one that, on the face of it, would seem the most inclined to institutionalism. In “Red, White and Blue”, John Boyega plays Leroy Logan, one of the London Metropolitan Police’s first black recruits. If you read Logan’s wikipedia page, his life seems ripe for an inspirational story about how exemplary individuals can “disprove” racism and change the system from within. He served in the Metropolitan Police for thirty years, retiring as a superintendent, and received an MBE for his services to policing. And in the movie itself, Boyega plays Logan as exactly the sort of person who would try to win by following the rules. He’s hard-working, respectful, a stickler for the rules but also a natural leader. He exudes the kind of Sidney Poitier-ish gravitas that “good” black characters from the middle of the 20th century all had to demonstrate.

And yet at the same time, Boyega’s performance seethes with barely suppressed rage. He plays Logan as someone who knows exactly the kind of hornets’ nest he’s walked into, and who understands his task as something much greater than mere policing. He approaches the Metropolitan Police as an enemy force, maintaining an implacable facade that nevertheless can’t help but crack when he realizes the depth of the department’s racism. He’s played almost like a superhero—smarter, stronger, just better than everyone else—who nevertheless might not be up to the task he’s set himself.

In the film’s final scene, Logan visits his father, with whom he’d clashed over the course of the film about his choice to join the police, in part because the older Logan has been on the receiving end of severe police violence. The two sit silently, nursing their respective wounds, when suddenly Logan says: “Sometimes I think the world needs to be scorched. Replant it, so something good will come of it”. The movie ends on those words, without even an end title informing us that things worked out for Logan. It’s this refusal to offer uncomplicated triumph, this reminder that even the most accommodating, institutionalist figures are barely holding on to their anger, that is at the heart of Small Axe‘s radicalism, and which makes it a remarkable work of political fiction.