position statement on Native Son (2019(


POSITION STATEMENT ON THE FILM NATIVE SON (2019)



I am extremely  grateful to Richard Wright's daughter Julia for setting into motion my current research and writing project, Richard Wright: An Unending Hunger for Life,  a book for Polity Press' BLACK LIVES series, and her sharing links to the "buzz" in advance of the premiere on January 24 at the Sundance Film Festival of Rashid Johnson's reimagining of Wright's seminal 1940 novel Native Son, based on a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks.  In the spiritual plane I inhabit in this Sankofa year, it Wright's eternal presence, however,   that whispers in my ears "Beware of buzz that frames thought. It may take you to a place that you should not go."  Given my uncanny affinity with Wright, he needs but whisper once.



The buzz articulated in such online sources as Rotten Tomatoes, First Showing, The Atlantic, The Guardian , Harper's Bazaar, the Los Angeles Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, First Showing, and  Variety is a humming that belongs to a rhetoric of motives.  The buzz suggests that Sundance's decision to premiere Native Son (2019) is a signal that Johnson's choice of making a bold statement all his own is a gamble that pays artistic dividends.  I shall not be able to cast a shadow of judgment until I view the film or a DVD of the film.  What is exceptionally problematic is my not knowing whether the film brings to the fore documentation and analysis of Bigger Thomas, who transcended Wright's novel to become an intersectional problem in contemporary thought , what Joshua Lam claims in most astute article is "the fascinating contradiction of race, class, prejudice, and political ideology" in 2019.  See Lam's "Richard Wright's 'Basket of Deplorables': The Return of the Lumpenproletariat in U. S. Political Discourse," Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, 2.2 (December 2018): 31-44.  The buzz indicates that Johnson's vision is either one of a young man with green hair wearing a punk jacket who descends into violence  or of a highly anticipated coming of age drama.  And why does buzz insist on waving a flag that signals two Barry Jenkins' alums ----Moonlight's teenage Chiron (Ashton Sanders) and If Beale Street Could Talk's star (Kiki Layne)---should be the primary focus of how a decision changes the course of Bigger Thomas' life forever?  In the film industry and among film critics the juxtaposition of an adaptation of Wright's novel with the adaptation  a novel by James Baldwin is not identical with the comparison that I and other critics  will eventually make in the name of cultural critique of historical consciousness.  I must not cast shade or praise until I have a chance to be a skeptical  spectator, to determine whether Native Son (2019)  brings to an international audience an  aesthetic illumination of Tommy J. Curry's The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017).  Richard Wright whispers to me "Be silent until you see."



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                            January 25, 2019

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