Perhaps the most unrecognized figure from the civil rights era, Bayard Rustin, is the subject a a biopic running on Netflix these days. Rustin was directed by a black person, George C. Wolfe. It was co-written by a black person, Julian Breece. It was produced by a black company, Michelle and Barack Obama’s Higher Ground Productions. And, of course, it stars a galaxy of black actors including Chris Rock as Roy Wilkins and Jeffrey Wright as Adam Clayton Powell.
Rustin.
I plan to watch the movie by the end of this coming weekend. It’ll be a breath of fresh air after spending two weeks almost continually flat on my back thanks to either the mother of all flus or this year’s COVID variation. I took a COVID test and it read negative but, I understand, these home tests often read negative if you do them too late and, to be sure, I swabbed my nose about a week and a half after experiencing the first symptoms. So maybe I had COVID and maybe I didn’t.
In any case, I spent most of that down time, while awake, watching the entire run of The Sopranos. Eighty-six episodes. I wouldn’t have done such a thing had I not been unable to do any other damned thing. The experience hardened within me a philosophy I’ve held dearly for years. No serial TV program should last more than three years. After thirty or forty episodes, the scriptwriters become desperate, concocting weird, preposterous new situations to challenge the characters and continue to suck viewers further into a rabbit hole. You’ve heard of, natch, the concept of jumping the shark, where the fabulously popular sitcom Happy Days in its fifth season brought Fonzie, in full leather jacket, to some body of water where, to prove his manhood or bravery or what the hell ever, he leaped over a man-eating shark while water skiing. Here’s Wikipedia defining jumping the shark:
…a pejorative that is used to argue that a creative work or entity has reached a point in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with, or an extreme exaggeration of, its original purpose.
In other words, the Happy Days brain trust had run out of good ideas. Ideas that made sense. Jumping the shark became a cultural touchstone, describing precisely what I urge: once a program completes its third year, quit it. Do something else. Come up with another story. Don’t put Henry Winkler in baggy swim trunks and a leather jacket.
Same thing with The Sopranos. Tony Soprano kills Chris Moltisanti by pinching his nostrils together after a car wreck. Carmella Soprano gets jilted by her son’s high school guidance counselor. Tony gulps magic mushrooms. Paulie Walnuts sees a vision of the Virgin Mary. Huh?
All this after several seasons of riveting, dramatic conflict, with credible story lines and compelling character relationships. But, TV being TV, producers and networks are driven, almost molecularly, to squeeze every last dime out of a property.
I recall another serial I got into when I was sick a few years ago, Ricky Gervais’s After Life. It’s the story of a curmudgeonly widower who decides to punish the world after his wife dies of cancer. The first season ran six episodes, detailing his pain, his backlash, his psychological realizations, and, in the final episode, his surrender to the reality that he must move beyond his agony and begin anew. He meets a woman in a park, they hit it off, and you know he’s on the road to recovery. He’s a normal human again. It’s a sweet, endearing moment. And it should have been the end of the series. But it wasn’t. Two more seasons followed. I didn’t watch any of the rest of it. After that Season 1 finale, it would become a soap opera.
Which is what a lot of premium TV dramas become. Breaking Bad. Mad Men. The Sopranos. Who’s sleeping with whom. Whose heart is broken. Who’s a cad. Who’s a slut.
I just don’t care.
Anyway, Rustin. Another bugbear of mine has been the avalanche of books on American racism that nearly buried us in the wake of Black Lives Matter. Many of the titles were written by white people shaking their fingers at other white people for the shitty deal Black people have gotten in this holy land for 400 years. When I was working at the bookstore, people in droves would come in to get the latest detention slip of a book, some customers carrying armfuls of them to the checkout counter. Make no mistake, there were important, required titles published in that time, including The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander and Between the World and Me, by Ta-nehisi Coates. You may hate on me for this, but I could never shake the feeling that so many of these book purchasers were virtue signaling. And, yeah, there is such a thing as virtue signaling, even though the loons on the Right embraced the term years ago and turned it into an insult.
Watching Rustin will be refreshing because it was done mainly by Black people. Of course, Bayard Rustin was a homosexual so he faced crushing discrimination on two fronts, not the least from his own skin-color brethren and sisteren. Keep in mind that it wasn’t until Barack Obama had become president that he finally publicly embraced same-sex marriage, so jittery was he over alienating millions of church-going Black voters who viewed homosexuality with visceral abhorrence.
For too long, Spike Lee was the only black film director the average person could name. He was famously snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences time and again at Oscar™ time. Thankfully things have changed in very recent years. Now, Ava DuVernay, Jordan Peele, Julie Dash, Barry Jenkins, Dee Rees, and many others of color are bankable, recognizable figures in Hollywood.
It’s been more than sixty years since Bayard Rustin helped organize the March on Washington. I wonder if he would have been surprised it took this long for Black people to be recognized in one of America’s signature industries.