Ava’s America
Back with her first film in six years, Origin is another in Ava Duvernay’s canon of work that looks at America through a critical yet cloying lens.
NOTE: If you’re a fan of this piece or any of my other writing, please consider making a small donation here, here or here that allows me to continue my work as a freelance writer.
Not long after watching the opening scene in Origin in which the murder of Trayvon Martin is reenacted, it was evident this film would be less of a viewing experience and more of a test in endurance. The latest cinematic offering from filmmaker Ava DuVernay, Origin is part biopic, part family drama, part history lesson. But by the end, it all amounts to one convoluted and overwrought exercise in watching a filmmaker get high off her own supply.
Leading up to the film’s premiere, DuVernay boasted about how she had been told that Caste: Origins of our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson, the book the film is based on, was “unadaptable” and how that only emboldened her. Upon reading the book for a second time, DuVernay decided that Wilkerson would be the film’s protagonist.
Forgoing a traditional adaptation, Origin is instead a dramatized look into the research process Wilkerson undergoes to argue that America operates under a caste system. Much like the film depicts, Wilkerson (played by Aunjuane Ellis-Taylor) is propelled into this journey after the murder of Trayvon, where in conversation with her editor Amari (Blair Underwood) she insists that race alone can’t possibly be the explanation for why the Florida teen was killed. “We call everything racism. What does it even mean anymore?” Wilkerson asks.” It's the default. When did that happen?”
It's somehow “racist” that there’s a lack of generational wealth within Black American communities and also “racist” that Martin was murdered by a Latino man, Wilkerson says. “Being followed around in the department store and being lynched shouldn’t be called the same thing,” Amari says affirming her logic. “‘Racism’, as the primary language to understand everything, is insufficient,” says Wilkerson.
Tracking Wilkerson’s line of thinking becomes an increasingly arduous task as the film progresses. Her journey trying to prove that America exists within a caste system takes her on a multi-continent pilgrimage that includes her going to Germany to research the holocaust and India to understand their caste system.
When discussing her thoughts with her book editor Kate (Vera Farmiga), Wilkerson beams as she begins to explain the thesis behind the book she’s writing. “There’s a connection here!” She keeps repeating and it feels less like an epiphany and more like she’s trying to conjure a link between all the things she named. Her speech becomes more elliptical and scattered as she begins to talk about the murder of Heather Heyer by neo nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Dalits — untouchables — of India and her mother’s respectability politics.
“I don’t understand how the woman killed by the neo nazis, connects to the Dalit professor, connects to Trayvon Martin, connects to your mom,” Kate says.
Throughout the film, Wilkerson keeps professing “I want to be in the story,” and there’s definitely — to a fault — no shortage of her to be found throughout Origin.
Alongside the research for her book, Wilkerson is processing multiple major personal losses in her life. Her grief pulses throughout the film, but it's not entirely clear just how it enriches or informs her writing. A better film could’ve properly balanced the two plotlines or at least extracted a clearer throughline between the personal and the political. Instead, we have Origin, a film that is unable to sustain the weight of all its moving parts.
Even with the understanding of film as a limiting form when it comes to adapting a work of investigative journalism for the sake of entertainment and brevity, it becomes apparent how much Origin sacrifices to a frustrating end.
When Caste was published in 2020, it was met with near universal praise for the way it attempted to recontextualize our understanding of rac/ism as being merely a microcosm of a broader framework. Despite that, there have been critics who have argued that Wilkerson’s thesis is underdeveloped at best and irresponsible at worst.
Take Professor Sunil Khilnani for example who argued in The New Yorker that Wilkerson “occasionally skirts facts that resist alignment with her thesis.” He gives the example of Wilkerson arguing that white people across education levels overwhelmingly elected Trump to office despite Pew Research that shows “most whites with a college education or higher voted against him.”
Whatever shortcomings exist in the source material are made even weaker by DuVernay’s filmmaking. Throughout the film, we are inundated by a series of familiar images: book burnings, white families attending a lynching, the daily life of the Jim Crow South – moments that can be found in most major cinematic depictions of oppression under Nazi Germany or during the segregated South. For a film based on a book that’s supposed to shift our perspective on systemic oppression, a lot of what we’re shown in the film feels like something that a person with even the most elementary understanding of history has already seen. Maybe a testament to how banal the realities of racism – or caste – are despite the best efforts to give it an intellectual revamp.
Origin marks DuVernay’s first major project since her critically acclaimed 2019 mini-series When They See Us. Since her breakout film Selma, the story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s effort to bring justice to the ballot box, her career has become decorated with works that have been partially credited with helping America try and parse through the endless topic of race and justice.
She once joked that she never intended to become the “social justice girl.” However, her films are often referenced during periods of great political upheaval such as during the 2016 election and the uprisings of the summer of 2020. DuVernay’s work is featured on lists streaming services cobbled together to show their corporate sponsored solidarity, alongside other films depicting slavery or police violence. Her work has even made it all the way to the Oval Office— a feat or an indictment depending on where you stand.
Other than the obvious thematic similarities in DuVernay’s work about the exploration of systemic racism in America, there’s always been the idea of America as a redemptive force.
At the end of Selma, David Oyelowo as King gives a rousing speech where his voice booms with King’s signature pastoral authority, shouting “Glory, Hallelujah! Glory, Hallelujah!” leading into the credits where “Glory” by Common and John Legend plays. A similar scene exists at the end of When They See Us when the Exonerated Five celebrates their freedom, joined victoriously hand in hand amongst a crowd of their exuberant supporters.
Towards the end of Origin, an older white man recounts the story from his childhood of a young Black boy who was a part of his little league team and was barred from swimming in the public pool along with his white peers. Wilkerson imagines herself lying next to the little boy as he sits in the grass on the other side of the fence, staring adoringly into his eyes as she whispers “You’re going to be fine.”
But of course, King was assassinated only a few years after the events of Selma took place and the men of the Exonerated Five still live with varying degrees of trauma from their years of incarceration. In real life, Wilkerson was unable to reach out to the man who was the little boy as he died just a few months before she began writing. DuVernay later revealed in an interview that the white man recounting the story Origin was an extra who approached her on set about his own experience witnessing his Black childhood friend be banned from swimming with his white peers.
In DuVernay's films, white supremacy, state violence, and the ilk are simply obstacles to be triumphed over instead of structuring forces that continue to oppress marginalized communities even after incremental progress is made. Her propensity for the saccharine undermines any effort she makes to connect her subjects to larger systemic patterns.
Not unlike Wilkerson herself who has also been criticized for finding “comfort in sentimentality” by Vulture’s Lauren Michele Jackson. Despite Wilkerson’s own assertion that “racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not,” both Origin and Caste often lean on individualized cases of resistance to make their point.
Most notably the story of August Landmesser, the man believed to be the lone man in a sea of Nazi saluting men to refuse to participate in the gesture, is featured in both the film and the book in part because of his romantic relationship with a Jewish woman as a German man. “We would like to believe we would have taken the difficult path of standing up against injustice,” Wilkerson writes. “But unless people are willing to transcend their fears, endure discomfort and derision, suffer the scorn of loved ones and neighbors and co-workers and friends, fall into disfavor of perhaps everyone they know, face exclusion and even banishment it would be numerically impossible, humanly impossible for everyone to be that man.”
But Landmesser’s refusal to salute and the discovery of his relationship with a Jewish woman didn’t leave him merely uncomfortable, derided, or banished from his community as Wilkerson wrote. He was incarcerated, sent to a concentration camp, and reported missing years later after enlisting in the war. His wife would die in a women’s concentration camp.
There’s a sort of masochism masquerading as social justice at play here in the ethos of much of DuVernay’s work that suggests experiencing agony while watching a film is not only good but virtuous. Some of the things we are exposed to in Origin feel wholly unnecessary including, but not limited to: the actual audio recording of Martin’s murderer’s 911 call. A scene where Martin’s final moments are interspersed back and forth between a scene of a woman being carried off by the Nazis in Germany. And a brief scene in which the Middle Passage is recreated, showing a packed boat full of chained, naked slaves.
Art should be challenging and uneasy, some critics will purport, especially when dealing with difficult subject matter. But many of these critics never seem to posit that art, at the bare minimum, should also be good.
DuVernay’s Origin functions as the perfect companion piece to Wilkerson’s Caste. If there’s a connection to be made out of all the information that Wilkerson gathers, it's a connection with a short in it. And once your tears have dried, you realize Origin didn’t leave you with much else.
