Akeelah and the Bee is a great movie that seems perfect for over-analysis. I think I'll indulge, but first the DaddyMan side.
I took my kids this weekend to see Akeelah and man was it a weeper. As you know, I have no defenses against weepy movies. This one is a classic "you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll applaud" kind of deal. I've been seeing all of the five dollar words at the local Starbucks, but I've seen very little marketing elsewhere. But since it's your standard family-friendly flick, the word of mouth is already out there. So I don't expect a whole lot of extra marketing dollars.
Anyway it's definitely worth a look see, but I wouldn't buy the DVD. I give it an 88%. Now onto the extended deconstruction.
It's interesting how blithely all of the ghetto stereotypes have been reduced to a neat set of movie conventions. While it's true that I haven't bothered to see 'Hustle & Flow' and it's been a while since I watched 'The Wire' on HBO, it's fascinationg how quickly we've advanced the acceptance of these without much depth. You see, I'm comparing this movie with 'Finding Forrester', which is in my opinion, the best of the ghetto fish out of water succeeds against the odds movies. And while I understand and appreciate the assimilationist theme as a motivator in filmmaking, I wonder how accurate this reach is. 'Akeelah' the film goes there in almost every dimension. I say this in light of the self-congratulation that accompanies the appreciation of 'Crash', yet another movie in a related race genre.
All said, Akeelah demonstrates what we all know to be true, and I take it once again from Premature Autopsies.
[N]obility is always born somewhere out there in the world, and when you live in a democratic nation you have to face the mysterious fact that nobility has no permanent address, you hove to face the fact that nobody has nobility’s private phone number. Nobility is not listed in the phone book. Nobility is not listed in the society column, nobility shows up where it feels like showing up, and where it feels like showing up might be just about anywhere. If it could rise like a mighty light from among the human livestock of the plantation, you know it can come from anywhere it wants to.
In the most inspiring moment of the film, as far as I'm concerned is the moment when Akeelah decides to misspell a word she knows in order to save her competitor from the humiliation his father is heaping upon him. She would rather come in second place than win a contest that would get this boy in more trouble with his father, a father's love that she misses so dearly in her own life. I would be so bold as to suggest that this very capitulation is central to the question of nobility, and in many ways I think it explains some of the disinvestments of black culture in the mainstream.
I came to 'Corporate America' in the 80s with a great number of myths in my backpack. It was a shocking revelation to me that so much of this mysterious place (my parents were both civil servants) was lame. In fact today, I make my bread and butter improving various aspects of that lameness. For me, and folks like me, with a relatively overdeveloped sense of strong black identity, the amount of character one could extract from a corporate job seemed surprisingly small. And yet we have been subjected to a significant amount of middleclass browbeating from the same corporate lame brains when we were on the outside looking in. The more prideful of us would say, to hell with you, and many of us still do, but some without the advantage of having been on the inside at all.
Akeelah was an insider at that moment, fully capable of triumph, but that didn't matter. She got her character and motivations from other places. Such is the nature of an open and properly plural society and we are faced with that question all the time. Which confers dignity on which? Is it victory itself or the character of the champions? In Akeelah's case, especially with an audience with something to prove about black girls from South LA, her noble character as champion is the pleasant surprise. But coming from close proximity from that same place, I know that the noble character was there all along.
Yet Akeelah's triumph, handled through the cliche of several montages, and some really solid scenes, does indeed demonstrate some of that child / village reciprocity. There is nothing made so clear in this film as how necessary it is to motivate kids to achieve what is great. The quote repeated throughout the film is one I am quite familiar with (but I don't remember how). Is it Audre Lorde perhaps, or James Baldwin? Ahh.. Nelson Mandela quoting author Marianne Williamson. It is the resonance of the Bogard, that constant act of assimilating rebellion by the uppity, those who dare to desire what is presumeably not theirs to have. And it is Lawrence Fishburne's lesson to the young Akeelah which he strives to deliver by any means necessary. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, how many black heroes must a young girl quote before she can become a woman? How many lessons before dying must be taught? Maybe all of them. That depends on how far we go ourselves.
All of our fates lie in the readiness, willingness and ability to grapple with our own achievement and failure as we instruct those who would follow. We don't know what youth will do, but whatever it is they do, we have to go there with them. That is, if we seek to be represented in the future. We need to be the unforgettable teachers, and even when we think we can go no more, and even when we can't control, we have to be there alongside them on their journeys to success.
That's how the future gets spelled. One letter at a time.
Recent Comments