Movie Dare: You make a movie about this…
I dare you to make a movie about a modern (or future-modern) urban woman with strong African features who, through your subtle expose, embraces a fascist society. We learn through your adept storytelling that that her interpretation of a woman’s right to be “equal” has nothing to do with looking for opportunities to fight for justice but has more to do with a concern for her personal, comfort and safety (and perhaps the safety of her very few “loved ones”) that indulges heavily in selfishness. The image of a small woman with slender wrists driving a gigantic, gas-guzzling SUV represents this statement.
Through interaction with your carefully designed characters, we are seduced into questioning the female “instinct” to nurture. You have to be careful about distinguishing biological motherhood and nurturing. Not an easy thing to do—especially for all those English speakers raised on the Hollywood tradition of not knowing what to do with women—especially colored women.
Ultimately, this new fascist society recognizes the relatively new role women play as leading consumers and is shown to take advantage of them through a fear-based culture (sound familiar?). Your argument as a filmmaker is that these so-called “strong” women are actually very afraid (and the fear grows with age) and they are willing to sacrifice “human rights” for a sense of safety with such a massive storehouse of fear behind a militaristic façade of massive (masculine) fire power.
Your film has many layers. One part details your leading woman’s relationship with food (or what they call food in her world). Without preaching dietary law to the audience, you somehow manage to show that the woman’s relationship to food and eating is ritualistic, self-exploitative and disturbingly sensual—and it reveals the depths of her loneliness in a “post apocalyptic world” of negative birth rate. Can you get Angela Basset interested in your script?
I mention Angela Basset because she was in a scene in Boyz N the Hood as Reva Devereaux on the telephone in her clearly opulent, lush apartment speaking to her ex-husband (played by Laurence Fishburne), living in a shack relatively speaking. The contrast of the economic class difference between this man and woman was not thoroughly explored in this film—or in any other so-called Black film I can think of… but you did feel immediately that she was in a “safe” place—away from the world of Jason ‘Furious’ Styles.
Now, my dare is your chance to explore this “safe place.” One model of this fictional fascist society starts with a small but powerful classical (white) upper-class patriarchy, supported by massive middle class of money earning women as head of household—and the rest of us is underneath this oppressive structure. The lack of solidarity among these individualistic and relatively affluent women is clearly what keeps the society going. You have to be very, very careful here to avoid the accusation of “blaming women” for the problems of the world—it would defeat the purpose of telling this story. What you are trying to show in this “modern” world is actually very old fashioned: a few imperial men have controlling access to a mass of willing women. This control and access is not one over simple chattel—again, going this way defeats the purpose of telling the story. These willing women are educated and highly skilled and worked very hard to be where they are—and they are aware that so many of their male counterparts failed to reach their heights.
This now cliché story of getting away from “Furious Styles” must be retold with such care that we get beyond the victim role of the colored woman and start to explore what the woman commands, reveres and dreams of… The film, Children of Men, was excellently designed to purposely show people of color outside of the upper classes. But now it’s time to go further and not draw such simple, physical color lines. I dare you.
Why can’t I make this film? First of all, making a film is just like opening a business and I am too old to open a lemonade stand with the promise of being the next Coca Cola. The “passion” to make this happen is not with me. My preference would be to write a poem and move on… But I’ll definitely make an effort to see your film. So get to it!