2 Very Different Films
Training
Day & Life And Debt
Towards
A People’s Review
By
‘Bro. Zayid’
Training Day
“You are
living in time when image making has become a science…”
-Malcolm X
Denzel
Washington has played Malcolm, Hurricane Carter and Stephen Biko on film and has
done them all with conviction and presence.
This Black man is without a doubt a great actor, a great artist. He has
also been an artist who has had balls enough to choose roles that do not degrade
our people and that do not compromise his craft.
Then Training Day dropped…
This is a flick about corrupt police starring our brother as a super corrupt super pig himself.
Ironically, it dropped in the aftermath of the ‘911 Incident,’ as the
government now seeks to further codify and solidify its insidious hated
hypocritical practice of racial profiling, all of course in the name of
‘national security.’
Naturally against this background, my antennae’s shot to the green and
blue cheese moon! Why Denzel in this role in this kind of flick? Why now? Whose
interests does such a project serve?
What made me especially edgy is that the joint is rockin at the box
office, and there has been no fanfare or outrage from popo officialdom anywhere
on my radar.
As for the film itself, its ok on its own terms as a movie. Its strengths
are him, of course, and it’s capturing of the violently edgy environment that
the likes of his corrupt character operate in. It’s loaded with action and has
a cross section of star appearances including Macy Gray of all heads as a
cracked up drug mom that Denzel rips off!
In the end, Denzel plays a supremely corrupt pig so dangerously well, he
makes it almost inviting, just like Hollywood has always made the genre of
gangsterism romantically inviting for decades now. To be sure, it has been one
of Hollywood’s most consistently developed of all its genres. Crime has always
paid big time for Hollywood!
Most importantly, the film shows how corrupt, drug dealing pigs roll just like the organized thugs they are supposed to be pursuing. They have highly established relationships with key suppliers. They have their own territories that they control. They work with either the implicit or explicit support from their superiors, and they are about as trustworthy as the devil on crack.
Denzel’s character ultimately comes to a bad end, as he gets smoked by the Russian mob. His white sidekick, played by Ethan Hawkes, emerges as the hero who refuses to work with his operation. That’s the other sh#t that pisses me about this. Other than a teenage Latina, who the white sidekick rescues from a rape attempt, and a little boy who is supposed to be Denzel’s seed, there is not a positive character in the whole joint! Not one, except this blue blooded, all-amerikkan white boy!
No wonder popo didn’t beef
about their image being made to look bad in this one. Here’s a niggah,
that’s what they think of us as, making their dirty stuff look so crazy, sexy
good that it’s almost all right. Better still, the white man emerges as the
goddamn hero, the real ‘star.’ So their image of their larger role as
the first line of defense for white supremacy remains secure. Their no good
behinds still come out smellin ‘rosy’!
At best, Training Days cuts both ways. It makes Adam Abdul Hakeem, the
former Larry Davis, look like a prophet. It also makes you question what side
Denzel is on for doing this…
Life And Debt
The documentary Life And Debt is a film of a fundamentally different kind, however…
Produced and directed by Stephanie Black for TuffGong, that bedrock of Reggae music, by the way, Life And Debt is a film that clarifies in a very significant way the great divide between rich and poor and the affluent north and the impoverished and oppressed south.
The film uses the case of the island paradise/nightmare that is Jamaica
to illustrate how a small southern country can be ‘underdeveloped,’ using
the late Walter Rodney’s language, and its people impoverished for the benefit
of northern finance capital, and how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
the World Bank are the key institutional instrumentalities for that
underdevelopment and poverty.
For the record, the IMF and the World Bank are two arms of monopoly
capital that were created at the end of the WW2 to finance the reconstruction of
western europe from the ravishes of that war.
Central to the creation of these institutions are two things: The first
is that it marked the emergence of u.s.-based capital as the dominant source of
international finance. The other is that these two institutions would become the
primary institutional tools by which the united states and western Europe as
former colonial masters would continue to control the economies of the southern
hemisphere, the countries of the south and keep them poor and dependent in this
bloodsucking financial arrangement through debt.
For a small country like Jamaica, notwithstanding its considerable
agricultural production potential, it would mean going from a debt of 4 to 5
million dollars from 1976 when it first sought IMF support and relief to 800
million by 1989, the last days of the Cold War, and from that on to a current
New World Order of several trillion dollars.
The film goes on to show how these debt arrangements do anything but help
the country’s economic development. Instead, they virtually retard and deform
the local economy to the point where this proud island could feed its own people
or even eat of its own food! But they can have cheaper access to u.s. food or
contracted to be raised in Jamaica at the expense of their local crop
development.
The film also shows how the paradigm was used to retard and undermine
Jamaica’s dairy industry as well.
At its most obscene, it also illustrates the viciousness of one of the
NAFTA/GATT New World Order specials, the so-called Free Trade Zone, or to make
it plain, the sweatshop, and they are
imposed on countries like Jamaica for cheap labor without accountability to
local or international labor and human rights standards or to local tariffs for
the right to produce goods for a profit there. So people can forced to work for
peanuts, or in this case for $30 a week!
Interestingly enough, it should be pointed out here that as bad, as
devastating, as destructive as this real example of national economy deformation
is, the cases of other national economies under the same bloodsucking grip are
even worse like Haiti’s tragic example for instance.
What makes this film especially compelling is that the recognition and
impact of this debt arrangement is not just being articulated by academics and
officials; It is being pointedly articulated at the points of underdevelopment,
on the ground, by the people affected most directly themselves, by the farmers,
the dairy workers and the garment workers themselves.
Other strengths are obvious as well. Author Jamaica Kincaid’s
enchanting, but necessarily narrative is chilling. The use of visual vignettes
to capture the beauty of the island through its tourist sector to the delight of
sunbathing foreigners eyes, and then to contrast them against the extreme
poverty throughout the rest of the island which, of course, those same tourists
never see, is depressingly effective. On top of that, it’s done against the
musical background of one of the bumpinest Reggae soundtracks to come out in a
good while. Everybody from Bob Marley, to Mutabaruka, to Sizzla, to Buju Banton,
are all here spelling it out!
Perhaps the film could have shown how militarism and covert action are
the other handmaidens of the neocolonial order used together keep the people in
these arrangements in check. In Jamaica’s case, this would mean the CIA
flooding the island with guns calling the Manley government and its supporters
‘communists’ and creating a civil war climate where a u.s. puppet Edward
Seaga could de-elect this government. In fact, one could argue that Jamaica’s
current problem with gun violence and crime is in fact a residual consequence of
this bloodletting covert operation from that period. By placing the onus of the
people’s misery and suffering on local authority, no healthy respect for local
institutions develops and the larger external enemy is shielded from the
people’s wrath and is allowed to continue his beastly economic bloodletting.
This
is a people’s film…
#
’ Bro. Zayid’ Kazi Angaza Kikongo Muhammad
February 03, 2002