Looking at American White Supremacy “Through a Glass Darkly”: James Baldwin on Birth of a Nation

Abstract

This chapter offers a close reading of James Baldwin’s analysis of Birth of a Nation and establishes the value of his approach to cinema adopted in The Devil Finds Work. The chapter also considers how Baldwin contextualizes Griffith’s film through his comparative reading of the film with Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night and Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once. Baldwin’s contextualizing of Birth of a Nation underscores the importance of his critique of American supremacist mythologies and American history in this and others of his works.

The law in this country, just like in most countries, is for the privileged and if you are White in America, you are privileged. We hope for the law to protect us, but it doesn’t.

—John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am

A black man, in any case, had best not believe everything he sees in the movies.

—James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s early initiation into moviegoing had a profound impact on his worldview throughout his lifetime as is attested to in his essay The Devil Finds Work (1976). Defeating the world’s intentions for him and his own became a matter for conscious calculation upon his entrance into the “cinema” of his mind. When speaking of “his own,” Baldwin points to a literal need on his part, as the eldest in his family, to protect his younger siblings from being wrongly influenced by the movies they watched. Baldwin’s essay recounts the fears and desires of a spectator under specific social and political circumstances, which Baldwin claimed offered a metaphor for “the ordeal of black-white relations in America, an ordeal … which has brought us [blacks and whites] closer together than we know.”¹

Nowhere is this more evident than in Baldwin’s critique of the 1915 D. W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation, which serves a focal point for his essay. Just as Susan Courtney traces how the film served to create the “Great White Spectator” in America, Baldwin intimates that it also played a major role in constructing the black American spectator, albeit over a longer period of time.² By contrast, Siegfried Kracauer, in his 1947 From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, located his own spectator under the shadow of Hitler’s rise to power. Kracauer creates an apologetics for Germany’s move toward an acceptance of Nazism. He posits that “the films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way than any other media” because they are never the product of a single individual and because they appeal to the “anonymous multitude.”³

Kracauer’s methods can be seen as indirectly applicable to the study of reception theory in Hollywood. The works of Courtney , Anna Everett , Jacqueline Stewart, and others trace the links between the making of Birth of a Nation and the evolution of black and white American spectators. Baldwin’s condemnation of the film and its manipulative relationship to the American collective memory are anticipations of the more formal theoretical work on reception theory about filmic representations of American race relations. Most scholars of reception theory believe that Griffith’s monumental film caused irreparable damage in terms of spectatorship and identity politics in America.

For Stewart , a distinctive characteristic of Baldwin’s contribution to studies of black audience reception research is his ability “to embrace the contradictions that characterize black spectatorship and couch them in terms of a collective, urban experience.” Stewart’s comprehensive study focuses primarily on black spectatorship in an American context, though she rightly suggests that “much historical and theoretical work remains to be done on black spectatorship in its many historical and geographical contexts (beyond the urban North).”⁴

Due to Devil’s testimonial nature, any engagement with it as an approach to film reception theory must take into account its emotional edges as well as Baldwin’s deeper engagement with relations among history, memory, and dream. The essay is a vital part of the broader social critique of American society so crucial to Baldwin’s corpus. Against the backdrop of a racially troubled America, the essay focuses on the evolution of Baldwin’s memories and his cinematic imagination as he matures.⁵ Ryan Friedman notes that Baldwin established a balance of theoretical perspectives from which to read films as texts with ethical dimensions in Devil, a technique that merits greater appreciation than it has received to date.⁶

According to Friedman , Baldwin creates an “oblique analytical perspective, from which he can read a film text’s internal contradictions.” Friedman argues that Devil can be viewed as part of Baldwin’s “larger project in his mid-career nonfiction writing, that of deconstructing the ‘mythic’ consciousness that sustains America’s racial categories and hierarchies.” With reference to notable film theorists, such as the Cahiers du cinéma critics Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Friedman concludes that the “cinema” of Baldwin’s mind is rooted in the ability to discern the internal contradictions of Hollywood film language.⁷

Baldwin’s critique of classical Hollywood narrative indirectly informs Devil since the essay focuses not only on spectator response but also on Baldwin’s interest in deconstructing cinematic ideologies. Though Baldwin was not directly engaged with the French New Wave movement, his strategies in The Devil Finds Work are similar to the ones employed by French New Wave critics. Beginning in 1958 and extending through the 1960’s and beyond, the French New Wave helped to accelerate the evolution of internationally institutionalized film theory. The resultant film theories offered more sophisticated analytical methods than the straightforward film reviews that dominated journalistic writing about film in America in the early to mid-twentieth century.

Another perspective from which to understand Baldwin’s approach is that of cinematic excess, as articulated by Kristen Thompson in her article “The Concept of Cinematic Excess”. Thompson suggests that the meaning of any given film can extend beyond the meaning of its controlling narrative through its cinematic excess. The spectator’s reading of the excess (which has been either consciously or unconsciously inserted into the screen space by the director) allows the spectator to construct multiple and even contradictory meanings. The spectator’s newly constructed meanings work “against the grain” of other unifying elements, most notably the narrative or diegetic spaces of the film. As Thompson states, “Each film dictates the way it wants to be viewed by drawing upon certain conventions and ignoring or flouting others. But if the viewer recognizes these conventions and refuses to be bound by them, he/she may strive to avoid having limitations imposed on his/her viewing without an awareness of that imposition.”⁸

Both deconstruction of cinematic ideologies and attention to cinematic excess are crucial in Baldwin’s film analysis. The study of cinematic language in formal theory equally relies on an awareness of the ideological underpinnings of a film and on how that language enables and enhances the fim’s narrative structure. The two main dichotomies structuring my argument thus become intertwined in that Dyer’s studies on whiteness are largely linked to cinematic ideologies. By contrast, Bordwell’s studies on classical Hollywood cinema are focussed on the structures of cinematic language. To understand the cinematic representation of Birth of a Nation requires looking at its contribution to classical Hollywood narrative and it equally requires recognizing the creation of ideological foundations of invisible whiteness, which is part and parcel of the plot of the film.

In his reading of Birth of a Nation, Baldwin becomes what Stewart has referred to as a spectator with “reconstructive strategies” who reads the film in more complex ways than as simply “assimilationist identity or as primitive externality or dis-identification.”⁹ One of the most curious aspects of Baldwin’s treatment of Griffith’s film is its placement in his essay. The film is not specifically addressed until the second subsection of the essay titled “Who Saw Him Die? I, Said the Fly.” After a long discussion of Michel Gast’s I Shall Spit on Your Graves (1959) and just before an extended analysis of Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967), Baldwin inserts his analysis of Birth of a Nation. An analysis of Gast’s film is the subject of Chap. 8 of this book. Baldwin reads Gast’s film as a representation both of revenge as a human dream and as Europe’s dream of America.¹⁰

Through the juxtaposition of these three films, Baldwin indirectly suggests that Birth of a Nation, an American narrative of human revenge has had its impact not only on Gast’s European perspectives on America but also on Jewison’s depiction of 1960’s US racial conflict. Baldwin ends his analysis of Birth of a Nation by turning to the film In the Heat of the Night. In claiming that there has been little progress in America’s racist history, he asserts that Jewison’s 1967 film is a sad justification for Griffith’s film and a deceptive representation of the claim that there has been progress in America’s fight against racism. In Baldwin’s view, the Jewison film is like the descendant of a crime. Baldwin’s placement of his review of Griffith’s film is crucial in understanding the stakes of his judgment of Griffith. He creates a view of cinematic history through these juxtapositions which suggests that the Hollywood film industry is not at all interested in representing historical progress but is rather more interested in reinforcing white supremacist mythologies. Baldwin’s reading of Gast’s America-style French film rests on similar assumptions.

Baldwin begins his review of Birth of a Nation by referring directly to its source material, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905), which he claims he will never read. After mentioning Stuart Heisler’s 1952 film Storm Warning, which is also about the Ku Klux Klan but is pro-Union rather than pro-Confederacy, Baldwin states that Storm Warning is a negligible film in the history of cinema. He equally affirms that Griffith’s Birth of a Nation “is known as one of the great classics of the American cinema; and indeed it is.”¹¹ His implication is nonetheless clear. Storm Warning is a film that speaks to the injustice of American white supremacy in a way that Birth of a Nation never can.

Like Heisler’s film The Negro Soldier (1949), Storm Warning succeeds as a pre–Civil Rights period film representing America’s white supremacist tendencies in all of their intimacies and horror. In the film, Marsha (Ginger Rogers) goes to visit her sister Lucy (Doris Day) and, upon arrival in the small all-American town, witnesses a murder committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) (Fig. 2.1). She is able to identify two of the murderers when they remove their hoods (Fig. 2.2). After telling her sister what she has witnessed, she is introduced to her sister’s husband Hank (Steve Cochran), whom she recognizes as one of the murderers (Fig. 2.3). In the interest of protecting her sister and having believed Hank’s claim that he was simply pulled into something over which he had no control, she remains silent and thus complicit in the murder.

Fig. 2.1

Storm Warning , Stuart Heisler, Warner Brothers. Witnessing the Crime 7:33

Fig. 2.2

Storm Warning , Stuart Heisler, Warner Brothers. Unmasked and Guilty 8:14

Fig. 2.3

Storm Warning , Stuart Heisler, Warner Brothers. The KKK Culprit = the Husband. White Supremacy in the Home 21:23

Through various machinations by the town’s district attorney, Burt Rainey (Ronald Reagan), the proof against Hank and other members of the KKK is established but not without Hank’s attempted rape of Marsha and the eventual death of Lucy , suggesting that the violence of white supremacy enjoys its own form of revenge against the silent majority afraid to speak up against it. Without belaboring the plot, chaos ensues yet justice is restored. The film explores the extent to which white supremacy is at the heart of small-town America rather than an external force of evil. It is no doubt for this reason that Baldwin differentiates it from Birth of a Nation.

It is worth dwelling on the form and content of this film, which is only briefly alluded to by Baldwin prior to his analysis of Birth of a Nation. Unlike Griffith’s film, Heisler’s film “fails” in terms of its place in cinema history because it sacrifices form to content. It offers a brutal appraisal of how American white supremacy functioned in these small-town contexts. Baldwin’s claim just after referencing this film is that Birth of a Nation succeeds where Storm Warning fails due to the Griffith film’s innovative creation of a form that both promotes and also protects and reinforces supremacist mythologies.

Baldwin’s claim is somewhat buried in the deeper pain most likely to be felt by a black spectator of Birth of a Nation in that it clearly separates form from content and does not denigrate the form of the film despite its objectionable content. Baldwin equally remarks that the power of Griffith’s film is to be found in its images. He states that the film “has the Niagara force of an obsession.”¹² Baldwin therefore cannot be held accountable for rejecting the film on the basis of its ideological content, which is an affront to himself as a black spectator.

Just as with Baldwin’s insistence on juxtaposing Birth of a Nation with I Shall Spit on Your Graves and In the Heat of the Night, his passing reference to Storm Warning is crucial. Baldwin’s next move in the analysis of Griffith’s film is to distinguish between the story and the plot. He specifies that a story has a necessity to reveal whereas a story has nothing to hide. Any responsibility for the resolution of a story lies with the spectator. The resolution of the story depends on how the spectator contends with the questions the story has evoked. By contrast, Baldwin asserts that a plot must seek resolution and must prove a point. Before speaking directly to Birth of a Nation and its participation in either story or plot, Baldwin contrasts In the Heat of a Night, a film that requires a plot, with The Defiant Ones (1958), which he claims “attempts to tell a story.”¹³

The division between story and plot is crucial for understanding Baldwin’s analysis of Griffith’s film, as are the specific comparative examples he provides. Other examples in these distinctions are the story of Job and the plot of the biblical account of Joseph and his many brothers. Baldwin claims that the account of Joseph is an elaborate plot of revenge skillfully hidden behind the details involving Joseph’s coat. These details cloak that revenge through an emphasis on Joseph’s kind treatment of his brothers after they have attempted to leave him for dead. Baldwin suggests that none of them, neither Joseph nor the brothers, will ever forget their attempt to kill him, and thus the chances of this episode being repeated are high. The episode cannot be forgotten, and it cannot be forgiven, no matter how much the plot seems to suggest that it can be.

By using this specific contrast, Baldwin suggests that plots can be used in the distortion of histories, and his follow-up to his analysis of Birth of a Nation precisely suggests that even though In the Heat of the Night is a film made fifty years after Griffith’s film, it contains a plot that repeats the ideological pain and ugliness of the 1915 film. What Baldwin suggests is hidden behind the plot of Griffith’s film is an “elaborate justification for mass murder.”¹⁴ Through a very incomplete and sardonic summary of the plot, Baldwin suggests that the “film is concerned with the Reconstruction, and how the birth of the Ku Klux Klan overcame that dismal and mistaken chapter in our-American-history.”¹⁵

The dismal chapter to which Baldwin refers is the Civil War, and though he is somewhat tongue-in-cheek in his description of how the war plays itself out, he does specify that the apologetics of the film is rooted in trying to assert the myth of the Lost Cause and the victimization of Southern whites. What is more important in this observation is that Baldwin reminds readers that this is not a plot about the Southern whites’ history; it is rather a story about our American history. He concludes his assessment of the film by suggesting that the plot of the film is ultimately dependent on the damage caused not by the n***er but rather by the mulatto.

According to Baldwin, the mulattoes are driven by their lust for whites. Due to the hysterical hatred of these mulattoes by whites, the film presents us with “the spectacle of a noble planet brought to such a pass that even their loyal slaves are subverted.”¹⁶ In order to save these defeated slaves, the violated social order must be restored, a need echoed by one of the main tenets of the myth of the Lost Cause, which asserts that slave owners were benevolent and protective of their slaves.

A question that Baldwin claims the film cannot concern itself with, given its dependence on a labyrinthine plot that cannot allow for much questioning, is one about the origins of the mulatto. He suggests through an etymology of the word that “mulatto” is linked to the concept of the mule, which he specifies is defined as a sterile animal. He further asserts that possible reasons for the absolute hatred of the mulattoes by whites in Birth of a Nation has ultimately to do with America and its shame about its mulatto children who were “proof of abandonment to savage, heathen passion.”¹⁷ Baldwin concludes by suggesting that America’s history of self-destruction is linked to this shame. His observations about such self-destruction are tied not to the white forefathers but rather to our fathers.

Baldwin shifts his analysis from Birth of a Nation to In the Heat of the Night at this point in order directly to suggest that many films about race in America after Griffith’s film are intended to show us the “essential decency” of its plot. In the Heat of the Night, he ironically suggests, is a film intended as a sign of progress. It is a proof that the maintenance of the social order dependent on the privileging of American white supremacy is crucial to our sense of identity. Baldwin insists that he cannot lay the blame for this unfortunate reinforcement of the message of Griffith’s film on the makers of In the Heat of the Night; he can only state that the film is proof that Americans are a people trapped in a legend. That legend is one born and bred in Hollywood, according to his critique. By so carefully distinguishing between story and plot throughout his critiques of both films, Baldwin also reinforces the idea that Griffith’s contribution to cinematic narrative has not been challenged by Jewison’s film.

One last point made by Baldwin in the closing sections of his review of Jewison’s film is truly chilling. Again by focusing on the need for plot, Baldwin points out that it is the widow of the rich businessman who has been murdered in this small Southern town who insists that Virgil Tibbs, the black Northern policeman, be put in charge of the investigation. Tibbs was originally gratuitously accused of the murder since he was a strange black man visiting a small Southern town when the murder occurred, and therefore he was the most likely suspect. The racial injustice or profiling against him, according to Baldwin’s logic, masks the fact that the wealthy widow is obeyed only because she is wealthy and white. Because the town stands to profit from her promise to invest in the town’s industries, following in the footsteps of her deceased husband, her wishes are granted. Baldwin asks the seriously dangerous question that reveals the fragility of black-white relations undergirding the film: What if she had asked that this man be accused and sentenced for this murder instead of having a full investigation of the crime carried out?

When Baldwin raises this question about the wishes of the widow he underscores the film’s similarity to its 1915 counterpart, which is that blacks are still at the mercy of the whims of powerful whites. Fortunately in In the Heat of the Night, the wife’s wishes work in Virgil Tibbs’ favor but it could just as well have been otherwise. But Baldwin intimates that the film cannot ask this question and the spectator seeking progress in American racial relations wants to avoid considering the flip side of the widow’s power. Because she is white and wealthy, she can condemn or save the black man. He equally suggests that her power and her identity are rooted in her visible whiteness. Baldwin notes that “the question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic—a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall” and suggests that “[a]n identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall or when the wretched begin to rise.”¹⁸ Baldwin echoes Stewart’s accounts of black spectatorship, where characters such as Bigger Thomas in Native Son and Pauline in The Bluest Eye confront their own terrors on the screen.¹⁹ Stewart asserts that identity formation for these characters is intricately tied up with their viewing experiences just as Baldwin’s identity is shown to be shaped by the films he watched.

Baldwin’s essay also traces what Kaja Silverman refers to as the lack of suture afforded to a black American when viewing films portraying characters with whom he was not invited to identify.²⁰ At a time when Hollywood was producing only white heroes or loathsome representations of blacks, none of whom was heroic, a preadolescent black boy had very few characters on the silver screen with whom he could connect in terms of racial identity. His reality and the reality of the movies were not only worlds apart; they were on a collision course that always ended in a confirmation of the myth of white supremacy. When viewing In the Heat of the Night, Baldwin concludes that the film shows that it is a terrible thing to “be trapped in one’s history” and that it most decidedly proves that “white Americans have been encouraged to keep dreaming, and black Americans have been enticed to wake up.”²¹

Devil chronicles Baldwin’s mastery over the disjunction between his viewing experience and the expectations that were targeted by narratives in the films to which he was taken as a child. It does so in prescient ways that allow Baldwin to speak about the human condition and its past, present, and future dangers. His later adult viewing experiences were no doubt informed by these early childhood excursions. As he observes, “The people of In the Heat of the Night can be considered moving and pathetic only if one has the luxury of an assurance that no one will ever be at their mercy. And that no one in the world has the luxury of this assurance is beginning to be clear: all over the world.”²² By looking in to the cinema of his mind, he is able to speak powerfully about the world and its controlling ideologies. As he states, “[I]t is claimed that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see. The language of the cinema is the language of our dreams.”²³

Just as James Agee refers to the images in Birth of a Nation as capturing a collective dream, Baldwin pointedly remarks that the collective dream cannot be shared by all Americans due to the racial tensions the film evokes. Collective dreams, as understood by Agee , appear increasingly linked to Baldwin’s discussions of mythologies, which work to exclude the black man from America’s histories and, by extension, from its cinematic language. In essence, Baldwin insists that the narrative of the films he analyzes, insofar as they are controlled by the ideologies of white supremacy, can claim to present racial progress in their narratives. But the visual image as experienced by someone like himself for whom those ideologies are unacceptable can always give truth to the lie. He notes that “[t]his observation [i.e., that blacks must say “I cannot believe what you say because I see what you do”] … denies, simply, the validity of the legend which is responsible for these films; films which exist for the sole purpose of perpetuating the legend.”²⁴

According to Baldwin, authentic depictions of racial progress were indeed rare in the films he viewed and that he reviewed in The Devil Finds Work. His disparagement deeply informs his reading of Birth of a Nation. He does however suggest that Fritz Lang’s film You Only Live Once (1937) is one that spoke to him. In a sense, he intimates that a German-born filmmaker from outside Hollywood circles might have a chance at breaking through the strongholds of supremacist mythologies on Hollywood filmmaking technique. Though his argument about Lang’s filmmaking does not suggest that Lang will blatantly betray Hollywood methods, Baldwin does assert that Lang’s European methods allow for a certain visibility of whiteness not found in mainstream films made by American filmmakers. This is primarily due, according to the logic of his argument, to the fact that Lang himself is a stranger to American white supremacy but also recognizes how it mirrors the supremacist values of his native country.

Baldwin asserts that You Only Live Once is the epitome of Lang’s Hollywood filmmaking career because in this film Lang begins to figure out his American audience. You Only Live Once is devoid of any direct commentary on racial relations in America, but it rang true to Baldwin concerning obstacles facing the black man in twentieth-century America. “The premise of You Only Live Once is that Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is an ex-convict who wants to go ‘straight’ but this apparently banal situation is thrust upon us with so heavy a hand that one is forced—as I was, even so long ago—to wonder if one is resisting the film or resisting the truth”.²⁵ More important, the film intimates that the only honest way for European directors to contribute to a discussion of race in America was through the creation of racial allegories. The same argument might be made about Jean Renoir’s use of American material, to which I turn in Chap. 7.

Baldwin intuits the racial allegory when watching You Only Live Once. It was Baldwin who made the leap from gangster to “n***er,” whether Lang intended that connection to be made or not.²⁶ Baldwin’s exposure to Lang’s use of the gangster to approximate the life of the “n***er” was an identification that influenced him greatly. Baldwin claims to have appreciated Lang’s faithful application of the gangster genre while still creating an interface of meanings with which he himself could identify.

Baldwin’s positive response to the film must be weighed against his rejection of Jewison’s film Heat as a purportedly progressive critique of American racism. Baldwin implies that the direct treatment of racial issues, as represented in Jewison’s film, was nowhere near as precise as Lang’s treatment of violence and injustice in You Only Live Once when he claims that viewing Jewison’s film “demands one’s complicity in a lie: which state of affairs, having gone beyond progress, is sometimes called brotherhood, the achievement of which state of grace is exactly what In the Heat of the Night imagines itself to be about.”²⁷

Despite the fact that In the Heat of the Night is an overt depiction of racial tensions in the late 1960s, Baldwin’s argument is that it portrays the dream of the self-satisfied white viewing population rather than that of the liberated black viewer. Baldwin’s position is that the intended effect of Heat is to “increase and not lessen white confusion and complacency, and black rage and despair.” The film “helplessly conveys—without confronting—the anguish of people trapped in a legend.”²⁸

In his article on Richard Wright’s fascination with the criminal image and black manhood, a fascination shared by other public intellectuals in the 1940s, Maurice Wallace suggests as well that “[t]he picture is always subject to reproducing ideational blinds spots.”²⁹ Capturing the essence of the criminal in the photographic or cinematographic shot of the black man would, according to Wallace’s paraphrase of Heidegger, be necessarily read differently by the white and the black viewer. Baldwin suggests that such is the case with the film Heat. In the final moments of the film, the white Southern sheriff and the black Northern policeman say good-bye in a way that “speaks of reconciliation, of all things now becoming possible”—a moment Baldwin reads as inauthentic and unreal.³⁰ Despite their many differences, certain points of agreement between the writings of Baldwin and Agee can be discerned in this observation in that both black Harlemite and white Southern intellectual knew that progress in racial affairs in America faced insurmountable obstacles.

Though attempts by Wright and others to showcase a study of the hegemonic vision controlling relations between the criminal and black manhood did not come to fruition, according to Wallace , the failure of the project is consistent with Baldwin’s judgment of Heat: Baldwin’s analysis of the ending of the film implies that the white viewer’s understanding of the triumph of Virgil Tibb (Sidney Poitier) would not accord with the viewing perspective of a black spectator. As a result of deeply entrenched ideational blind spots on both sides of the viewing population, Poitier’s “friendship” with the small town police chief (Rod Steiger) could only be seen as falsely hopeful. Baldwin rightly names it as a stereotypical fade-out kiss for the standard Hollywood buddy film.

That Baldwin identified more with Lang’s depiction of the white gangster subjected to social injustice than he did with a Hollywood narrative of a forced “friendship” between a black policeman and a white one shows his resistance to some intentions of the filmmakers and his acceptance of others according to his “knowledge and cultural tradition” both about race and about generic conventions.³¹ Baldwin’s memoir is thus a record of the resistances and recognitions of cinematic codes and their intentions. He articulates tensions between narrative structure and screen space in the context of social and racial injustice. His analysis of Birth of a Nation lacks any discussion of identification, and despite his pronouncement that the film is indeed valuable for American cinematic history, there is no even approximate way, if we follow his analysis, that the black spectator can identify with any of the characters on the screen.

Studying the internal contradictions of a Hollywood film is facilitated by recourse to genre analysis where camera codes and unifying functions of the film are strongly indicated. In Baldwin’s imagination, Lang was able to pinpoint the undeniable obstacles to progress for the “n***ger” though his structural application of the gangster genre. As previously mentioned, though You Only Live Once does not take up racial injustice as a specific theme, Baldwin asserts that in the film Lang reveals painful truths about American injustice. Baldwin equally claims that Lang’s representations of American injustice resonated with his own feelings about racial injustice from which he suffered in his everyday life. Speaking of some of the real people in his life who had suffered from racial injustice just as he had, he claimed that they were “now being murdered by my fellow Americans … my countrymen were my enemy, and I had already begun to hate them from the bottom of my heart.”³²

Lang began his career in the United States with an urgent need to work through his own demons—those imposed by his precipitate exit from Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic and at the beginning of the Third Reich. As Baldwin notes, Lang’s alienation, both from Germany in the early 1930s and from America upon his arrival in Hollywood in 1934, began with his study of mob violence in the film Fury (1936). Baldwin criticizes this film for its inability to say anything about America since he considers that Lang has not yet been able to extract himself from the connotative issues of Nazi Germany even though his denotative narrative is placed in middle America. “Lang’s is the fury of the film, but his grasp of the texture of American life is still weak: he has not really left Germany.”³³ The mob depicted by Lang in the film is accurately conveyed, according to Baldwin, but Lang’s hatred of the members of the mob remains unreal.

Based on his viewing of Lang’s later film You Only Live Once, Baldwin concludes that “we were all n***ers in the thirties [in America]” and “Lang’s indictment of the small faceless people … who are society” articulates American guilt and suffering with precision and communicates its resonance for victims of American racism. Unlike In the Heat of the Night, despite the absence of actual black characters, there is room for the black spectator to identify with Eddie Taylor, according to Baldwin’s interpretation of what is happening on the screen. Of Eddie’s question about why should he not try to kill them before they try to kill him, Baldwin says, “I understood that: it was a real question. I was living with that question.”³⁴ For if there was one truth for the 1930s black man, it was that the American dream was unattainable, and happiness as an implicit outcome to attaining the American dream was a key component for the gangster genre.

If one adheres to the premise of Robert Warshow in his article “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), the American gangster aspires to the happiness of the American dream. The gangster is able to accept the impossibility of such happiness only once he tragically realizes that he can never overcome the dictates of his role within the context of the American dream. Warshow’s thesis is that the gangster is the cinematic code for a man who knows that the American dream is his only if he transgresses the boundaries that have been set for him and in so doing paradoxically forfeits his right to happiness.³⁵ Though Lang wisely did not consider himself capable of making a film about race from the authentic perspective of the American black man, he did grasp the rules of the gangster genre and, according to Baldwin, Lang followed them in order to represent the dubious chance at happiness offered to American blacks. Lang represented this hard truth in ways that struck Baldwin’s imagination dramatically. As previously discussed, opportunities for happiness offered to the black man in Birth of a Nation lies in the plot’s claim that a necessary social order which privileges white supremacy has been restored by the end of the film. The film righteously claims to restore a sense of place for the Negro who has been victimized throughout the film by the ravages of mulattoes. Unfortunately, this is a bleak notion of happiness, and it echoes Baldwin’s perspective in his poem “Imagination,” which is that “imagination creates the situation and then the situation creates the imagination.”³⁶

Though Birth of a Nation predates the Motion Picture Production Code, which was instituted in 1930, it met with plenty of resistance and with calls for censorship from viewers. The production code (popularly known as the Hays Code after William H. Hays who was fundamental in its establishment) essentially formalized questions of spectatorship and the moral purpose of the cinema that are implicit in Baldwin’s film critiques. According to Koepnick, the US production codes explicitly signaled film as the art form that could “speak to the cultivated and to the uneducated.”³⁷ The Code’s rules and regulations imply that the motion picture industry had an obligation to self-censorship when speaking to uneducated and thus potentially vulnerable spectators. Baldwin indeed suggests in Devil that he was perhaps vulnerable in his early viewing experiences. Unfortunately, according to Melvyn Stokes, the NAACP did indeed begin to appeal to Will Hays as early as 1921 to speak out against Griffith’s film when Hays was chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. As Stokes points out, the NAACP’s appeal did not go too far since Hays was himself an admirer of Griffith’s film.³⁸

For Baldwin, watching films at such an early age gave his imagination access to moral perspectives on cinematic genres and on the American society as viewed by Hollywood as well as by émigré filmmakers such as Lang. Baldwin suggests throughout his commentary on Lang’s work that the moral weight of Lang’s films did not escape his attention. Baldwin’s analysis of You Only Live Once in turn forms part of the moral project that Friedman suggests is a crucial aspect of Devil. In his analysis of Birth of a Nation as well, Baldwin’s comments on the moral dimensions of the film precede any comments he makes on the form of the film. Despite his distaste for the moral content of Griffith’s film, Baldwin is well aware of the ways in which the director was able to wed form with content and thereby create a fusion of American white supremacy mythologies with cinematic language in Hollywood. This set a precedent for film history that was partially formalized in the production code.

The moral dimensions of the code play a role in determining the relations between the myth and the reality depicted in film. As Friedman points out, “[For] Baldwin the medium of film is crucial insofar as it can dramatize the tensions between mythic and real consciousness.”³⁹ Baldwin ends Devil by expressing his concerns about the audience: “When I saw the film again [The Exorcist, 1973] I was most concerned with the audience. I wondered what they were seeing and what it meant to them.”⁴⁰ His life of filmgoing and conscious calculation about his responsibility to defeat the world’s intentions for black spectators had come full circle.

The interplay of myth and history is indeed one of the central moral tensions for Griffith’s film which Stokes analyses extensively in his history of the film. Griffith’s claim that his film was grounded in historic realities rather than in the myths of supremacy he was developing in it was questionable. Griffith’s desire to contribute to a controlling narrative over Americans’ memory of the Civil War went relatively uncontested in 1915.⁴¹ Had the Hays Code been in effect, Griffith might indeed have been faulted for making a film that actively encouraged whites to join the KKK.

As it turned out, the film allowed white spectators to play out fantasies of revenge against blacks and reinforced white supremacist views. Spectators felt enabled based on their viewing of a purportedly realistic representation of the history leading up to the Civil War and its aftermath. One of the general principles of the Hays Code was that “the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.”⁴² Baldwin faults Griffith not for consciously flouting this code but for creating a trap of history by having his audience identify with the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith’s celebration of the Klan reinforces the ideological beliefs in white privilege created by the Lost Cause myth that still holds sway today.⁴³ Since for Baldwin the Klan is necessarily seen as an evil and misguided group, the implication is that to incite sympathy for them is equally misguided and goes against the dictates of the Code.

Baldwin intimates throughout his analysis of You Only Live Once that Lang avoids the trap of history. He equally implies that Birth of a Nation constructs one of the many traps of American cinematic history, as is attested to in his observation that In the Heat of the Night cannot free itself from this particular snare. For Baldwin, reading the cinema of his mind hinges on not being trapped into reductive readings of Hollywood films or of reproducing Hollywood films that are there to victimize the spectator. As he puts it, “[T]he film cannot accept—because it cannot use—this simplicity. The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he, or she, has become a threat.”⁴⁴ The film viewer can make a difference. Baldwin’s rejection of Griffith’s Birth and Jewison’s Heat is not simply a rejection of their messages but a rejection of their senses of history as well.

According to Baldwin, if Heat is a revisitation of the racist film Birth of a Nation, it proves that not much had changed for native-born white Americans in the fifty-two years that passed between the two films. The fact that Heat film escapes scrutiny from the Hays Code is partly due to the fact that the code was disbanded in 1968 but also, and more important, because the similarity of its message to that of the 1915 film remains masked to a certain extent under a cloak of progress or invisible whiteness.

While Baldwin dismisses the idea that the creators are acting out of base motives—“I do not wish to be guilty of the gratuitous injustice of seeming to impute base motives to the people responsible for its [the film’s] existence”—he does assert that they, unlike Lang, failed to understand the implications of their own historical moment: “The history which produces such a film cannot, after all, be swiftly understood, nor can the effects of this history be easily resolved. Nor can this history be blamed on any single individual; but at the same time, no one can be let off the hook.”⁴⁵

Baldwin wrote Devil because he felt he had the responsibility to defeat the world’s expectations for black spectators, and thus his book-essay anticipates an increasing attention to the invisibility of privileged whiteness in the Hollywood industry. In writing, he comes to terms with his own historical moment and with his moral obligations, as Friedman suggests. As Friedman states, “If what Baldwin fears comes to pass, then the society as a whole will become trapped in despair and myth: it will be without hope and unable to use its past.”⁴⁶ In other words, Baldwin’s filmgoing serves a moral purpose, and just as perhaps only Lang could have made the film You Only Live Once as a way of exorcising his engagement with Nazism, only Baldwin could have provided the perspective one discovers in Devil.

In The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin stated that one of the most important ways in which he could defeat the terrible and crushing blow of America’s whitewashed sense of history was something he began to discover by going to the movies on that first Saturday afternoon, an event that he soon realized was an entrance into the cinema of his mind. Like Kracauer’s study of a Germany that gives way to the Nazi regime, Baldwin’s essay illuminates how the mythologies of America came to control classical Hollywood narrative language. Baldwin also provides a key to reading Hollywood cinematic language from outside the boundaries of privileged whiteness and of Hollywood studio production. The remaining chapters in this book explore that potential from varying strategic perspectives. Baldwin’s prescient perspective is indeed relevant and potentially applicable to a broader global context, as subsequent chapters explore.