Who Gets to Be Violent in America?
By: Heather M. Edwards
Tags: Racism, Culture, George Floyd, BlackLivesMatter, Race

All rights © Fox 2000 Pictures

It’s been 13 days — and 8 minutes and 46 seconds since Derek Chauvin handcuffed George Floyd and had him facedown on the pavement.

Instead of putting him in the back of the patrol car like procedure dictates with any “suspect” he murdered him with his knee instead.

Chauvin’s nonchalant violence ignited a 400-year-old powderkeg. And too many Americans only started expressing outrage about violence when that violence was against inanimate objects — not when it snuffed the life out of a man begging for mercy and crying out for his Mama.

Violence in America is too widely considered a necessary evil when law enforcement is “protecting” us from bad guys, wholly unacceptable when Black people are trying to protect themselves from “good” guys and celebrated in film when white guys are trying to make a point.

Movie night tonight after curfew? How bout a cult classic from the 90s? When was the last time you watched Fight Club? I watched it again this weekend through a very different lens than twenty years ago.

In 2020 I see a roving pack of seething white dudes who have every historical, societal, political and cultural advantage still hurtling toward a collective breaking point where the only viable catharsis is to burn it all to the ground. Can you maybe — just maybe understand how any human being can reach a breaking point after enduring too much for too long?

If one insomniac white dude can be so spiritually exhausted after what? Enduring the choices Ikea offers him? All of the quirky coffee tables and exercise bikes and corner shelves he can afford? The consumer imperative that society imposes on him? And a beautiful woman who wants to fuck him? Can you perhaps consider how spiritually exhausting it must be to see law enforcement murder people who look like you every. single. week?

If options and perceived obligations cause you smoldering internal rage, if seeing condiments but no food in your fridge (you can’t go grocery shopping?) and losing a wardrobe that’s getting “close to respectable” is more than your soul can bear what do you imagine systemic racism must be like? Have you imagined that?

While I’m not sure anyone actually comes away from it laughing, what Fincher did do is manage to capture the disaffected Gen X essence of the novel, the iconoclastic ethos that has been enthralling die-hard fans like me for 20 years. — Rebecca Renner

If this motif, violence-as-catalyst, is the siren song of anti-capitalism, if burning the credit card companies to the ground sets people free people from debt, shouldn’t Black men be able to burn police precincts to the ground to free people from police brutality? Provided that the buildings are empty at night, (Fight Club did not address whether or not janitorial staff would be in the building during “off” hours while they watch it burn), Black anti-heroes should be able to protest the same way white protagonists do. At least on film.

So who gets to be violent in this country? Who gets celebrated for dismantling invidious systems in this country?

White men’s angst is celebrated but Black men’s activism is condemned. Even the non-violent protests the racists claim they’d support.

Black people’s anguish and outrage threaten the white fairytale of equality and our belief in a just world — a far greater crime than police brutality. This is why so many white people deny, minimize and try to recontextualize Black suffering. It disrupts our comfort level.

But the art-house aesthetic of white violence is not only gilded as non-threatening, it is glorified in Fight Club. Violence is an ingenious solution — a cure for the perceived disease of emasculating materialism — as harmless as teenage rebellion but as inspired as the best subversive thinkers.

But what if Fight Club had an all-Black cast and the plot centered around overthrowing institutionalized police brutality?

What if arson, violence and explosives were a Black man’s solution to police brutality? What if “losing all hope was freedom” meant they were free to violently protest the murder of one more innocent person? What if Dulé Hill played The Narrator instead of Ed Norton? What if Idris Elba played Tyler Durden? What if Project Mayhem was comprised almost entirely of Black actors — how would you respond to Black agent provocateurs roaming the streets trying to pick fights and terrify people into pursuing their dreams by kidnapping them?

I thought it was unexpected and brilliant when I watched a white cast ingeniously reshape a reality they deemed insufficient. They were in no danger, all of their survival needs were met, they had comfortable jobs that paid their bills. But fuck all that. That’s not good enough. Their lives weren’t exciting enough, not fulfilling enough. And they were done serving an economy they didn’t feel served them. These malcontents were so disgusted with a society that failed to make them feel alive they had to do something drastic.

I loved it immediately. It lionized everything I thought I loved about masculinity — stripped-down irreverent authenticity, aggression, strength, power. I didn’t realize how problematic the idea that violence defined masculinity was.

So who gets to destroy the system that systemically destroys you? And your community? Laud the anti-hero! But if this is a brilliant treatment of anti-capitalism can Black men use violence to be anti-anything? No. They can’t even use violence for self-defense or to protect one another. That difference literally put white privilege on the big screen. White men feeling unfulfilled might not be an injustice but it is a great enough social ill that violence was eminently justifiable.

Which begs the relatability question. If our consumerist culture drains your spirit to the point of rebellion can you perhaps empathize with how mentally and emotionally draining it must be to be hypervigilant every time you leave the house? Botham Jean and Breonna Taylor didn’t even leave their homes. Botham Jean was eating ice cream in his own damn home when an off-duty cop unbelievably mistook his apartment for hers and him for an intruder. And killed him. Breonna Taylor was sleeping in her own bed. She was an EMT gunned down in her sleep. They didn’t even have a chance to defend themselves.

But you know what was too much for The Narrator? Remember the line? What kind of dining set defines me as a person?

Spoiler Alert — this is one of his last thoughts before he sets his own apartment on fire.

If the pressure from having to choose a dining set, travel for work through different time zones, and just doing your white-collar job causes an existential crisis that culminates in: burning your own apartment down, orchestrating and training an underground resistance, breaking and entering, stealing, illegally stockpiling nitroglycerin and bombing financial institutions to dismantle an entire industry how in the name of literally everything that is holy do you think POC feel when they can’t: fall asleep while studying at Yale, propose while at an orchard, eat ice cream in their own apartment or call for help when they break down on the side of the road? How do you think they feel watching the news and see tax-payer funded public servants kill innocent people who look like them?

“Step forward into your pain,” Tyler says. “I don’t wanna die without any scars.” How many POC do you think need to seek out contrived adrenaline rushes in dark parking lots or give themselves chemical burns because they just need to feel something, anything?

“The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes. Like the first monkeys shot into space. Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing!”

FFS, gentlemen. What are you so angry about?

“He was THE guerilla terrorist in the foodservice industry,” Norton’s character rhapsodizes his alter ego for pissing in soup in reservation-only restaurants. Way to stick it to The Man, you basic bitches.

What if Black men were doing that in restaurants that had actually treated them poorly? Restaurants and coffee shops whose employees or customers berated them, refused to serve them or called the cops on them for waiting for their friends? That seems more deserving of retaliation than the perception that these restaurants merely represent the scourge that is capitalism.

Would be all be “calm as Hindu cows” while vicariously cheering such juvenile vigilante justice if Black men were committing the crimes?

Even movies that aren’t explicitly about race and racism can be revelatory if you do this exercise. Asking yourself What if this were an all-Black cast can help you identify some of your own implicit biases. I’ll admit it. If Fight Club had an all-Black cast, a.) I would inadvertently pigeonhole it as a “Black” movie, b.) if I watched it I might have been more scared by their rage and misogyny than I was exhilarated by their masculinity and intimidated by their “brilliant” takedown of our society.

If you can’t imagine a familiar movie with an all-Black cast and still want to experiment I have a fun and funny double-feature suggestion for your next movie night: Death at a Funeral. It is about family, forgiveness and love. It is not a “Black” movie. It is an American remake of an English comedy. It bombs the Bechdel-Wallace test right down the line but that’s for another article.

Try watching the English version first. Then watch the American family comedy delve into relationships, careers and life. See how familiar it can feel to watch an all-Black cast tackle the issues that mean the most to us.*

I don’t think imagining all-Black movies or even watching the few that are will unravel this country’s intricately woven racism. But the more positive representation we see of one another the less threatening “the other” can feel.

In the meantime, to the self-deputized angry white men patrolling protests in their Cabela Cavalry costumes, it turns out I have an alternative activity from Fight Club’s thoroughly marginalized Marla for them to ignore: “Candy-stripe the cancer ward, it’s not my problem.”