The next four months are to be the most intensely self-conscious, galvanizing, awkward, crazed, humiliating, uplifting, maudlin and surreal period in American racial history. A black man will or will not be chosen as the next President of the United States. My fingers tremble as I type this. As a black-and-white racial spectacle, this is bigger than black Jack Johnson casually beating the living shit out of white Jim Jeffries before all of Anglo-America in 1910. This is bigger than Bigger Thomas. This is bigger than Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, the Edmund Pettis Bridge, Emmet Till, the March on Washington, OJ, Rodney King, Willie Horton, Jeremiah Wright, the riots, the assassinations, the aggregate of four centuries of two races trading hostilities while building up this nation. This is it. A partial descendant of slaves takes the helm of the American Empire. Or not: Maybe McCain plays into enough fears and received notions to convince his base and those volition-less swing voters that we can have morning in America once more.
Those geniuses at Criterion Collection have anticipated the moment andplan to give it something special. Their new high-definition restoration of Sam Fuller’s White Dog is due on DVD in December, just when all hell should be breaking loose. Fuller’s 1982 adaptation of the Romain Gary novel about a dog trained to attack and kill black people is a nightmare of the Reagan Era. Told with the broad earnestness of a sweeps week Diff’rent Strokes episode, White Dog is easy to dismiss as Public Service Announcement on hate crimes. Ennio Morricone’s somber score captures the heartbreak of racism but also emphasizes the movie’s cuddly, Benji-esque sentimentality. The presence of aging teen starlet Kristy McNichol as
the dog’s unsuspecting Hollywood-liberal owner is also good for a snicker to anyone over 30.
But Fuller’s mise-en-scene has never been more precise, operatic or unsettling. White Dog’s visual scheme is less about racism than about the panic and dismay that grips witnesses of racist violence and the loved ones of violent racists. Just as the real horror of Brian DePalma’s Carrie adaptation was not her satanic power but th casual cruelty she lived with daily, White Dog’s main subject is not the dog’s bite but its ugly, irrational bark. And a la DePalma’s slo-mo bucket of pig blood showering a prom dress, Fuller attenuates moments of shame and distress far longer than the initial or subsequent act of violence. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees covers the mayhem with the dynamism he brought to actioners like Dirty
Harry.
With its comic book compositions, this flick is virtually a graphic novel about national character and destiny, like 300, A History of Violence and The Dark Knight. But Fuller’s vision is a lot less polished, much more dreamlike–closer to Lynch’s Blue Velvet in its surreal flourishes than today’s all-business Big Idea pop spectacles. Never released theatrically and shown on cable TV sporadically over the years, White Dog is finally rearing it’s snarling, snapping head at the perfect time in American history.
If the Blue Velvet comparison sounds a bit extreme for those who have seen the movie and found it’s metaphors (not to mention the acting) pretty crude, I’ll let Sun Ra carry the argument further, from beyond the grave. But don’t click the link if you haven’t yet seen the movie–wait ’til December.
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