through a glass of no return


THROUGH A GLASS OF NO RETURN

Each of us is in possession of the wisdom and the stupidity all of our ancestors created over many centuries.  However much we lie to ourselves, we can't live without imperfections aplenty.  God, Nature, and the abstractions we have named Humanity ordain that we shall be who and what we are until we are freed by death violent  or peaceful.  Whether we get our philosophy from a pig sty or an academic cloister, we suffer our humanity and struggle to "love" it.



LOVE requires more than a small amount of work.  That is one of several primal messages in the new film Queen and Slim, which delivers one aesthetic jolt after another without apology. If Beale Street Could Talk danced itself into a fine compromise regarding black love.  HBO Native Son takes black love out to [you fill in the blank].  For the moment at least we have the let us keep it real, please, about what love is and what love is not.  The film gives some credibility to what Denis de Rougement concluded about EROS in L'Amour et l'Occident, 1939; Love in the Western World, 1940 and refutes his closing proposition that AGAPE "is aware that our terrestrial and temporal life is unworthy of adoration and even of being killed, but that it can be accepted in obedience to the Eternal."  Ultimately, de Rougement's classic treatise is quite intellectually stimulating but wanting providing a dialectic of the concrete.  Queen and Slim brings the greasy nuts and rusty bolts and blood-stained concrete to the big screen  and  perhaps home for many viewers.  It deconstructs Love in the Western World with the skill of a neurosurgeon.



Before I got my Thanksgiving Day series of cinema  jolts , I read Carvell Wallace's substantial  article on the film's  didactic promises, "Emotional Rescue" (New York Times Magazine, November 24, 2019: 30-35).  At  the Broad Theater in New Orleans I conveniently forgot Wallace's argument as slow frame after slow frame ushered me through a glass of no return into heightened consciousness.  After arriving at as much catharsis as the 21st century allows, I read C. Liegh McInnis' excellent unpublished  review  "How Craft Makes Meaning:  Queen and Slim Articulates a Powerful Message through Excellent Use of Devices" (November 28, 2019).



Wallace concluded



If you allow it to be, "Queen & Slim" can be one of the great love stories of all time.  Which means it should be for everyone to see.  We all watch and have watched for the entirety of our lives movies about loving white people.  Why shouldn't everyone else do the same for us? (35)



McInnis concluded



I don't know if I'm ready to die for my freedom, but I have long since stopped pretending that I am happy or content with this illusion of freedom.  Queen and Slim presents  an artistic rendering of the possibility of what can happen when enough black folks become "sick and tired of being sick and tired" while remaining grounded in the reality that black fear and self-hatred are  as powerful as white supremacy.



I concluded



Queen and Slim is one weapon to be used in inevitable cultural and political warfare.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 29, 2019

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