STILL I RISE
HOLLYWOOD’S RELUCTANCE TO BUILD ARTISTICALLY ambitious films around black leads, compounded by its even more chronic incuriosity about collective experiences of blackness, undoubtedly bears the lion’s share of blame for James Baldwin’s absence from our cinemas. But let’s imagine for a moment that some studio or intrepid band of artisans realized that Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain could yield a stunning big-screen exploration of faith and sex and archetypal family tensions, or that his Another Country is perfectly designed to teach almost everyone in America about almost everyone else, while also arousing every possible spectator to climax and moving each one of us to tears. Wouldn’t that be something? Let’s say these folks were all crewed up, sitting on a pile of money, ready to go.
What would emerge at this beautiful, improbable juncture is another obstacle course—because despite his essays’ fully earned reputation for frank oratory around complex problems, Baldwin is a formally slippery fiction writer. This fact surprises people who haven’t cracked one of his books in a while, or have busily revered him without bothering to read him. He loves the trope of the ecstatic or elegiac instant in which characters’ lives flash before their eyes and, more pointedly, unfurl from their mouths in satin banners of speech that can sound a lot like their author, indulging in direct address. In, every short, temporally disordered scene is a wormhole into all the others, a network of chutes and ladders leading from jail cells to perfume counters to bubble baths to corner bistros to sculptors’ studios to the docks of New York to funkysmelling bedsheets to other jail cells, or the same jail cells. And that’s before we jet to Puerto Rico. And how we get , and why, is a whole awful, exciting, tragic, hopeful, hopeless, other , separate but not at all separate from the rest.
