Charles Burnett. James Naremore
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to bed. He doesn’t respond. The remainder of the scene is played silently through an exchange of gazes between husband, wife, and child. Stan shifts his chair around toward his wife as she clears the dishes, and Angela comes to him, standing between his legs. He gives her a gentle touch and one of his rare, halfhearted smiles. His wife exits, looking back as he embraces his daughter, who looks offscreen toward her mother. The wife goes to the next room, sits on a couch, anguished, and looks toward the kitchen. Angela looks at her mother and softly strokes her father’s face, taking on a maternal role, trying to comfort both parents.
The catalog of frustrations and disappointments carries over into the next phase of the film, which begins with a richly detailed deep-focus shot: Stan’s skinny friend Gene leans far over the open hood of his car while his enormous wife Dian watches him and complains that he’s spending too much time and money on the project; in the foreground, a boy straddles a bike decorated with an American flag and tries to push it forward as another boy pushes back against the handlebars; and in the far distance, Stan comes around a corner and jogs uphill toward Gene and Dian, bringing them a dollar and a can of peaches. A close-up shows the freckle-faced Dian smiling in tender gratitude. “It’s getting late,” Gene says, “Let’s go have some coffee and see what my guests are doing.” He and Stan load a battery and a spare tire into the car’s trunk, and the camera pans as they head toward the house, passing a stray dog. Then the camera pans back to the closed trunk, portending trouble.
In Gene’s kitchen the guests are having a party: blues music is playing, a crap game is in progress, and the camera is set almost level with the floor, looking up at the large posterior of a woman who embraces a fat man. The man proposes marriage and then joins the crap game. Dian approaches the woman, smiles, and asks if she’s happy. A big fellow on the floor grins and winks at another woman as he rolls the dice. Stan and Gene stand apart and look miserable.
The theme of gambling continues into the next episode. It’s a bright Saturday morning, and seven characters—Gene, Dian, and their baby; Stan, his wife, and his daughter; and Stan’s pal Bracy—prepare for an outing at the racetrack. Dressed in their good clothes, they begin packing themselves into Gene’s car, which is now in working order, while a bunch of kids play and fight in the far distance and the apparently drunken Bracy, sporting 1970s-style stacked heels, shouts incoherently about his last night’s adventures. In the backseat Stan’s wife fixes Angela’s hair and wipes her face. Once everybody squeezes aboard, the car drives off to the sound of Louis Armstrong’s rendition of King Oliver’s “West End Blues,” upbeat in tempo yet also mournful. On the road, Dian tells Gene to slow down, Bracy studies a racing form, and Stan’s wife enjoys the air from an open window as her weary husband sleeps on her shoulder.
Soon trouble strikes. Out in the countryside, the car gets a flat tire, and Gene discovers that his spare has been stolen from the trunk. Angela gazes sadly out a window, just as she did in the sequence involving the wrecked engine. We look down the side of the car as Bracy paces back and forth on the road, gesturing wildly and berating Gene: “Look, man, I told you to have a spare tire and don’t be comin’ out here in the middle of nowhere. . . . In the ninth race, man, I got me a nag that I know is going to come in! I got me some money, man! And you ain’t got no spare! Look, aw shit!”
Here Burnett makes excellent use of offscreen space. Stan’s wife, nicely coiffed and made up, slowly emerges from below the frame into a big close-up, looking grimly down at the wheel of the car, while behind her Bracy (whose voice sounds post-synchronized) breaks into rap: “Man, I’m out here singin’ the blues, got me a horse that can’t lose! Always told you to keep a spare, but you’s a square!” Gene studies the situation and softly replies, “I guess we have to ride back on the rim, that’s all. Ain’t got no spare.” Everybody gets back in the car, which makes a U turn and drives off on the rim; once again Gene’s fixation with his auto has resulted in a kind of tragicomedy. Despite all the discord and trouble, however, there’s a sweet quality in the scene: the sharply delineated, flawed characters remain friends, moving through life in the same boat (more accurately, car), facing disappointment together.
We are now at the closing moments of the film, in which Burnett emphasizes the theme of survival and creates a modest sense of ongoing strength. After arriving home from the abortive trip to the racetrack, Stan slumps wearily on a couch as his wife remarks that rain is coming and the roof needs repair. Angela stands with her arms akimbo and then turns and opens the screen door. “Daddy,” she asks, “what makes the rain?” Stan softly replies, “Why, it’s the Devil beating his wife.” Angela smiles and a large close-up shows Stan’s wife also smiling, happier than she’s been at any point. She crosses to Stan and sits close to him. They share a soft smile (his third in the film, and the most genuine), and he touches her knee.
I grew up in the South not far from where Burnett was born, and whenever it rained while the sun was shining, my white father would remark that the devil was beating his wife. It’s an expression peculiar to the deep South, and Burnett’s use of it here is significant. Stan is making a slightly dark joke, but also acknowledging his roots in the folklore of a world he’s been trying to escape. For the moment, father, mother, and child feel a happy bond.
The only member of the family who isn’t present is Stan Jr., and in the next scene we see the wife standing behind their house, calling him. “I know you hear me calling you, boy,” she says loudly, and then talks to herself: “I know that boy heard me calling him.” As she goes inside, the camera pans up to the roof and reveals Stan Jr. and another boy. Cut to the front of the house. On the tiny porch, a girl sitting in a chair is having her hair arranged by Angela, and two other girls are perched on the steps. A pretty young woman enters the shot, supporting herself with a cane, and as she moves up the front steps we see that her right leg is in a brace. She knocks at the screen door, and Stan’s wife welcomes her, giving her a delighted hug when she whispers something. Inside, two women are visiting. One of them brandishes a cigarette and asks the new arrival why she’s wearing a pretty smile. The lame young woman looks down at herself shyly. Stan’s wife beams and announces, “She’s going to have a baby!” One of the women remarks, “Well, I thought her old man was shooting blanks, but I see he’s dropping bombs on occasion, I guess.” Stan’s wife laughs and the young woman looks proudly at her stomach, moving her hand in an arc over it, indicating how it’s going to grow.
This is the first scene involving female friends of Stan’s wife and the only scene, apart from a brief early one between Stan’s wife and daughter, made up entirely of women. It’s also a rare example of a scene that ends on a happy note. Unlike a typical Hollywood movie or “well-made” drama, it doesn’t identify the new characters and doesn’t explain the pregnant young woman’s disability. In fact, the disability motivates nothing and isn’t necessary to the scene; it’s simply there: an undiscussed, unusual, harsh fact that will probably complicate motherhood. The scene is pregnant, one might say, with unstated meanings that have little to do with plot. It celebrates new life and the endurance of the community, but at the same time, partly by means of the young woman’s leg, dramatizes an ongoing struggle.
Burnett ends with a montage of Stan and his fellow workers on the killing floor of the slaughterhouse. Once again we hear Dinah Washington singing “This Bitter Earth,” this time as a background to images of dead and bleeding sheep. There’s a small flaw that Burnett was unable to correct. As Stan herds animals to their death, he’s broadly smiling, almost laughing; during the shooting, Burnett has explained, Henry Gayle Sanders split his trousers wide open and couldn’t control his amusement. Even so, the somber music and the montage are anything but uplifting, and the film leaves Stan in virtually the same circumstances as at the beginning. The screen goes dark, and over the closing credits we hear Paul Robeson’s rendition of Antonin Dvorak’s “Going Home,” a hymn inspired by what Dvorak called the “great and noble music” of nineteenth-century African Americans. Like the film, it’s pathetic, tender, passionate, and melancholy; it bestows grace and importance on Stan, his family, and his community.
FOUR
My Brother’s Wedding (1983)
KILLER