Charles Burnett. James Naremore
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echo of a remark by Soldier’s mother in a previous conversation: “Will Soldier ever act his age?” Pierce’s childishness around his father has the effect of domestic silliness, but his childishness around Soldier has troubling implications.
The scenes involving preparations for the wedding are permeated with full-scale social satire, occasionally employing cartoonish caricature. As the occasion draws near, class differences increasingly make things awkward or pose a problem. Pierce may or may not suffer from sibling rivalry, but he isn’t close to his brother and deeply resents the brother’s fiancée, Sonia Dubois (played in over-the-top style by Burnett’s wife, Gaye Shannon-Burnett), who is not only a successful lawyer but also the daughter of what Pierce describes as a “big whatchamajig.” When Sonia visits the Mundy neighborhood in her fancy car and expensive clothes, he accuses her of “signifying,” or using style to indicate she’s superior; he can’t stand her family, and when his mother wants him to socialize with them he sulks, grumbling that Wendell ought to marry “someone from around here.” But Mrs. Mundy is overjoyed that her family is achieving upward mobility and eagerly looks forward to the big church wedding. She reminds Pierce that he’s living with her rent free and orders him to stop behaving like a petulant child.
When Wendell and Sonia visit the Mundy home to discuss arrangements for the wedding, the class differences are glaringly obvious, and the actors project their dialogue with comic theatricality. The very black-skinned Pierce is in the kitchen, wearing a T-shirt and pouring hot water into a washtub so his father can soak his feet, when Sonia, a beautiful, light-skinned female in an expensive dress, sashays through the door to get a drinking glass. “How are you doing, Mr. Mundy?” she asks. Mrs. Mundy enters behind her and beams with pleasure. “You know,” she says, “I always wanted girls, but the Lord gave me boys. Have to be satisfied with what you got.” She pats Pierce on the arm and he scowls. This leads to a face-off, initiated by Pierce, who confronts Sonia like a prizefighter at a weigh-in. “I bet you had a lot to be thankful for,” he says. Sonia gives him an arch look and a condescending, exaggeratedly sing-song reply: “I had to worry about grades, whether people liked me, and oh yes, I had two older brothers I had to compete with.” Acting the heroic proletarian, Pierce goes for a direct insult: “They teach you how to pick cotton in Charm School?” She smirks and imitates a southern belle: “Why no, Pierce, Charm School taught ladies how to be ladies and how to be charming in the presence of gentlemen. A man’s work was once measured by how much cotton he chopped in a day. And how much cotton have you chopped, Pierce?”
When the characters move to the living room, we see Wendell for the first time. More light-skinned than his brother, he wears a business suit and is writing notes with a gold pen. He has only a few lines of dialogue and is a less-developed character than other members of his family; in this scene, he’s little more than a social placeholder, providing just the right indications of a recently achieved educational and social status. He tells Mrs. Mundy that his secretary is going to type up a list of wedding guests. Mrs. Mundy turns to Pierce and asks, “When are you going to have a secretary?” Sonia airily remarks, “I’m sure that when Pierce makes up his mind what he wants to be, he’s going to be quite successful.” Mrs. Mundy takes the remark as a compliment and beams again, her voice rising as if she were at a revival meeting: “I got them into church! If they get married and have a family I’ll be ready to be called to glory!”
Sonia is so flamboyantly bourgeois that many viewers will completely dislike her and probably also dislike Wendell; nevertheless, the film doesn’t take sides in the usual fashion of didactic drama. It has sympathy with Pierce’s class position, but it gives Sonia and Wendell chances to defend themselves. As they exit the Mundy house, Sonia turns to her future husband and asks, “Is Pierce retarded?” “No,” Wendell says, “just ghettoized.” And in fact, Pierce is too self-righteous about his working-class experience and too ready to force arguments with Sonia. He has no political consciousness other than populist hostility toward big shots. His parents, on the other hand, look up to the Dubois family and are deeply conservative, influenced by a mix of fundamentalist Christian charity and worship of individual initiative. Their values are articulated when at one point Mrs. Mundy wants to give a bit of money to a relative who has “the neuralgia.” She feels it would be the “Christian” thing to do, but Mr. Mundy objects, launching into a half-senile monologue about self-sufficiency: “If they made cotton like they did when I was growing up, there’d be jobs for everybody.” He wishes his relatives were “in a Mississippi field in the hot sun picking five hundred pounds of cotton a day. Old folks used to tell us, ‘Boy, you better mind how you walk. There’s trouble ahead and your days are numbered.’”
When the Mundy family is invited to dinner with the Dubois family, the stage is set for a parody of social pretentions, ending in slapstick, and employing what Amy Corbin describes as a “Brechtian style” (2014, 40). The comparison is appropriate because Brecht’s “alienation effect” has something in common with satire and broad or crazy comedy. The Brechtian actor and the comic actor are equally antirealistic, concerned less with subtle emotions than with slightly exaggerated representations of social behavior, and the dinner scene fits this model nicely. Corbin notes that the dialogue, excellent for its purposes, has a stilted, unnatural quality (partly, I think, due to the acting style), and all the characters are depicted as social types. The setting, too, is somewhat antirealistic, designed to create an over-obvious air of stiffness, discomfort, and philistine excess. Seven characters are crowded around a relatively small but expensively appointed table in a dining room covered with elaborate blue and white wallpaper, which dominates the image. Burnett photographs the establishing shot with a long lens that flattens perspective and induces a slight claustrophobia. Mr. Dubois (Sy Richardson) sits at the head of the table, presiding over the occasion. A Latina servant wearing a vintage French maid’s uniform and cap stands at attention behind him. He begins the meal with a prayer, thanking “our Father” for “these new relationships” in a tone that suggests concealed distaste. Pierce is the only person at the table who doesn’t reverently bow his head and close his eyes.
For much of the scene, cringe-inducing comedy is generated by the economic and cultural gap between the Mundy family and the Dubois family. Mr. Mundy provides most of the laughs when he struggles with his meal. Presented with a small bowl of open clams in their shells, he remarks that it’s good you don’t have to open them with your teeth. Given a glass of white wine, he makes a face. “Is something wrong with the wine, Mr. Mundy?” asks the Dubois patriarch. “I would have liked something stronger,” Mundy says quietly, “something like Old Grand Dad.” Mrs. Mundy chastises him: “Wine’s fine! You don’t need nothin’ else!” Mr. Dubois smirks and adds, “Well now, if you would like something else, whatever it is, I can get it.” Mundy politely ignores this and turns to his son Wendell. Glancing at the bride-to-be, he mutters, “I wish I was in your shoes.”
Trouble starts when Mr. Dubois asks the silent, sullen Pierce, “What sort of work do you do?” In an angry tone, the currently unemployed Pierce gives his work history. Asked why he isn’t a lawyer like his brother, he becomes hostile. “I don’t have the smarts for that kind of thing,” he says. He leans aggressively toward Dubois and opens his large hands like claws: “You see, I like working with my hands!” Mrs. Mundy, seated next to Pierce, leans around him and tries to change the topic by smiling at Mrs. Dubois at the other end of the table and asking about the recipe for the excellent salad. Mrs. Dubois (Frances E. Nealy), silent until now, turns to the maid and asks in mangled Spanish, “Que esta in la salada or whatever you call it?” After getting Mrs. Dubois’s translation of the maid’s reply, Mrs. Mundy publicly expresses her disappointment with Pierce: “It would have been heaven if both of my children could have been doctors and lawyers like your two children.” Hearing this, Pierce rocks back in his chair, puts both hands behind his head, looks at the ceiling, and reflects: “Doctors and lawyers—biggest crooks in the world. The higher up you go the worse people you find.”
“You’ll have to excuse my dear brother,” Wendell