Black Snake Moan and Transformation

The team that created the wonderfully brilliant Hustle & Flow produced, wrote, and directed Black Snake Moan. Craig Brewer, the white writer, has a remarkable ability to create and empathize with complex, believable, and nuanced black characters. John Singleton (Remember when he was the wunderkind with Boyz in the Hood?) allows writer/director Brewer to sketch racial stereotypes knowing that those stereotypes will catch us in our own prejudices and draw us into the story with our expectations in tact. Those expectations will eventually be exploited to tell one of the best parables I have seen since, well, Hustle & Flow.

Brewer's Memphis childhood contributed to his understanding of the culture and music of Southern black culture. His sensitivity to black characters is made obvious in Black Snake Moan when Samuel Jackson's charater Lazarus (wink, wink) discovers the beaten, partially clad body of Rae, played by Christina Ricci, outside his house. A heavy-handed director or writer would have taken pains to point out that a black man in the South would be facing a dilemma with an apparently-raped, white woman outside his house. Brewer leaves it to the viewer and to Samuel Jackson's understated performance (in this scene) to communicate the plight of black men in the South. Lazarus doesn't vocalize his concern until much later in the movie. If you haven't figured it out by then, you're just not paying attention, or you're oblivious to Southern America's controlling racial narrative.

Black Snake Moan isn't about race, though, nor was Hustle & Flow. Both movies are about the transformation of humans into moral creatures. The strength of Brewer's writing is his ability to juxtapose black and white characters without ever drawing attention to their racial profiles and without losing their racial distinctives, allowing both races to blend into a common humanity who suffer the same weaknesses and temptations. In this case, Lazarus is working through a Cain and Abel story with his brother who has taken Lazarus's wife Rose "into his bed." Rae is a victim of childhood sexual abuse and her resulting nymphomania threatens to destroy her life. Lazarus chains Rae to his radiator in order to drive the demons out of her, both as a means to save a daughter his wife aborted and to vicariously save his own marriage.

Brewer is not subtle. The metaphors are writ plain: chain as bondage, sexual addiction as fallenness, adultery as a false sense of autonomy, etc. His effectiveness is not based upon subtlety though; the story works because the characters exhibit weaknesses and virtues that are common to all of us. As with Hustle & Flow, salvation is realized in "the other" and transformation happens as we overcome our humanness by sharing our weakness with someone who is the yin to our yang. For Brewer, salvation is temporal and personal, and that won't sit well with fundangelical types, but it seems to work better than other, ethereal notions of salvation. At least in this case, the savior is flesh and blood, and we can know our salvation as a tranformative friendship with someone who gives a shit at the moment of our greatest need.

Comments

[GKB]

"...we can know our salvation as a transformative friendship with someone who gives a shit at the moment of our greatest need."

Amen.

[Kristen]

We got it in the mail tonight- can't wait to watch it and talk about it with you.

[GKB]

One of the most striking scenes for me was the wedding.

Salvation, in this sense, really did seem to depend on the "other," or the small community that had developed. I don't know what was said during the counseling session, but you get the feeling that Rae and Ronnie were on a trajectory that had largely been decided for them. I love it when the little kid shows up and says, "Hey, you Ronnie? I'm your best man." And Ronnie goes with it.

Maybe, sometimes, we need people to make choices for us, when we are incapable of making them for ourselves.

(Hoping that didn't come across as too hierarchical...)