Origin and the roots of Hollywood’s political self-delusions
Ava DuVernay failed in the last-minute campaign to get Oscar recognition for her two-hour-plus dramatic lecture Origin. The strategy is more significant than the film itself. Publicist-turned-producer and director, DuVernay has become a Hollywood mogul by figuring out how to manipulate the film industry’s sentiments regarding race and gender. Origin was conceived as her ultimate, personal salvo.
DuVernay wanted to explain everything we needed to know about racism by adapting Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, from 2020, as an enlightened “woman’s picture.” This biopic features a middle-aged black intellectual (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) traveling the world to discover the source of America’s racial discontent. Yet the guilt-fest wasn’t surefire enough to impress the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or any of the previous awards groups. Wilkerson’s story couldn’t gain traction against the race-gender competitors Barbie, American Fiction, The Holdovers, Poor Things, The Color Purple, and, yes, even the parlay of ethnic-gender prejudice buried within Oppenheimer.
Origin (which opens wide this week) arrives too late. DuVernay, acting on Oprah Winfrey’s suggestion to read Wilkerson’s tome, follows Wilkerson’s 496-page thesis that caste is the foundation of racism. Her roundabout narrative begins with the Trayvon Martin flash point — including a personalized, Obama-fashioned response that incited Wilkerson’s grant-funded mission to find what she was already looking for: She travels to Germany (where a subplot of two black American researchers in the 1930s raises the specter of book-burning, Nuremberg-rally Nazism) and then journeys to India, where Harvard activist Suraj Yengde teaches her about the Dalit untouchables as analogues to American slavery and Jim Crow.
DuVernay’s platform — the character lineup includes Wilkerson’s white husband (Jon Bernthal), her ailing mother (Emily Yancy), and her cousin (Niecy Nash-Betts) — is too cumbersome to win votes. Essentially, Origin copies Kamala Harris’s fable that we must “get to the root causes” of the border catastrophe before we can mitigate it. And though not as disingenuous as Harris, DuVernay fails to be compelling. When her candidate’s pitch lands, it’s like being buttonholed by a strident politician.
Propagandist DuVernay doesn’t respect her audience but preaches politics at them. What a strange drive for a black American woman filmmaker who is not a born storyteller. DuVernay also lacks the ideological sophistication of Italian-Marxist filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, who not only had impressive role models but in such great films as The Battle of Algiers and Burn! knew how to make propaganda pulse. Origin’s obvious point-making repeats facile corporate-media perspectives on social activism. DuVernay never challenges Wilkerson or herself but pushes the absurd, overelaborated “caste” thesis without realizing that similar arguments could also be made from, say, Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.
At a time when the media and political-group spokespersons lie to us perpetually, Origin accepts their self-deceptions. DuVernay (who is 51) sentimentalizes “public intellectual” Wilkerson (who is 63). Actress Ellis-Taylor (who is 54) combines middle-aged intrepidness and self-pity into a defensive demeanor. She wears her “lived experience” as a résumé or uniform, but DuVernay is oblivious to the character’s off-putting smugness. She’s a solemn version of the egomaniac that former actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg has turned into.
Origin’s Wilkerson presents a unique social type like the fictitious civil-rights lawyer played by Denzel Washington in Roman J. Israel, Esq. Her self-righteousness comes close to exposing Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Fani Willis, Maxine Waters, and Stacey Abrams as one balled-up stereotype of self-deluded anger and resentment. They all compete in a politicized version of the Oscar race.
During the Iowa caucus, one candidate illuminated those personal issues as “symptoms of a deeper void of purpose and meaning in our country,” adding, “We’re lost. We’re hungry for purpose,” which goes deeper than DuVernay dares. She settles on guilt narratives, as in Selma, 13th, and How They See Us. Now, in Origin, DuVernay teams up with Ellis-Taylor for the ultimate pity party. This year, it seems the Hollywood primaries have found other stereotypes to honor.
