Jon Bernthal (left) and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Origin Credit: Neon
George Bernard Shaw once said that England and America two nations divided by a common language. Perhaps they too will soon be separated by a common film.
Origins, Ava DuVernay's new feature film, opens today in the United States after Oscar qualifying screenings in New York and Los Angeles in December. , but not in the UK until early next month. If you think that sounds late for an award contender, you'd be right – but Origin isn't one of those here at all. It is not among the 69 films eligible for the upcoming Bafta awards after the initial round of pre-Christmas entries. And it's not one of the 45 titles that will be discussed at next month's London Critics Circle ceremony.
Across the Atlantic, however, Origins is becoming a celebrated Oscar event. While DuVernay recently lamented the film's absence from the awards conversation, last-minute work is already underway. His supporters include Angelina Jolie and Ben Affleck, both of whom have held screenings for Academy members: the former even threw a party at his home to drum up support, which was attended by DuVernay and the film's lead actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.
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A host of other directors, from Star Wars' JJ Abrams to Bond producer Barbara Broccoli, have praised the film on social media: Last week, singer and former Best Actress winner Cher tweeted “ORIGIN,” then broke up twice lines, then a few spaces, then “BRAVO.” More importantly, it's being championed by Frances Fisher, the “Titanic” actress who helped Andrea Riseborough land a surprise best actress nomination last year with a dogged (and sometimes dubious) grassroots campaign. Will this year's campaign be just as successful? We'll find out next Tuesday when this year's nominees are announced.
To understand why Origin is so controversial, you first need to understand what it is, and that's not easy. We are talking about the 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by journalist Isabel Wilkerson. But this is not an adaptation of the book, which is a work of non-fiction about the social foundations of racism, nor is it a documentary about its arguments. Rather, it is a dramatization of the process of writing the book, during which the author experienced a number of personal tragedies, peppered with reconstructions of some of the historical events that it explores and describes.
DuVernay, who not only wrote the screenplay but is also an accomplished documentarian (her film about American prisons, 13th, won a Bafta): she also directed the historical drama “Selma,” about the 1965 voting rights marches led by Martin Luther King. Thus, the film's hybrid style matches the energetically eclectic work of its creator.
The substance is where it peels off. The thesis of Wilkerson's book is that racism in modern America is actually a caste system: a vast invisible machine that keeps the country moving forward while ensuring that its white population remains at the top of society.
“Like other old houses,” writes Wilkerson, “America has an invisible skeleton, a caste system, that is as central to its functioning as the posts and beams we do not see in the physical buildings we call home.” ” Comparing America's treatment of non-white populations with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and Dalits in India at the bottom of its own caste society, she argues that caste is a recurring feature of all civilizations – a “subconscious code” on which social order depends. .
“ORIGIN”
BRAVO
– Cher (@cher) January 13, 2024
When Wilkerson's book was published in the US in August 2020, at the end of the summer of protests following the killing of George Floyd, it sold more than half a million copies in four months. His claims, although radical and controversial, found an audience. But to the predominantly European press at Origin's Venice Film Festival premiere last September, her arguments sounded intuitively… well, a little off.
Yes, caste and race can be linked. But does this mean that all racism is essentially a clash of castes? What happened to class bitterness, be it geographical, or old-fashioned xenophobia – that is, fear and/or hatred of an alien, perhaps an aggressive other – or simply a bad relationship with neighbors?
Latanya Richardson Jackson, director Ava DuVernay and Samuel L. Jackson at a screening of Origin in January 2024. Photo: Getty
This is how most British (and, I would venture to guess, continental European citizens as well) perceive racism, both as a vehicle and as a target. (As for me, a Scot, the sometimes virulent anti-English sentiment that swirled around my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s had less to do with invisible studs and beams and more to do with accents, TV schedules and a crushing inferiority complex around football. ) But Origins secretly flatters America by suggesting that its own unique racial disorders, rooted in a century of slavery and encoded more than a century later in state and local laws, are just the latest version of a grim, universal mechanism to which many other countries also fall. owe their wealth and status.
Much of Venice was particularly outraged by the passage in which Ellis-Taylor's Isabelle travels to Berlin to research the Holocaust – only to conclude that it, too, was a caste system at work. In a scene at the end of the trip, the scientist, played by Danish actress Connie Nielsen, gently but firmly suggests over dinner that the respective goals of the Holocaust (extermination) and slavery (enslavement) were sufficiently different to allow comparisons between the two. lively
Finally, many of us at this moment thought: here is the nuance; a vital non-American point of view. But no. From here we cut to Isabelle on the phone with her sister, chuckling at this pompous old bat who is arrogantly undermining her work.
Author Isabel Wilkerson was awarded the 2015 National Medal of Arts and the 2015 National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama. Photo: Getty
The most American mistake both the film and Wilkerson's version make is confusing race and color. Since most European Jews are white, Isabel argues, something other than racism must have driven the Nazi genocidal scheme, and the ethnic differences on which it was supposedly based were trivial. (The conversation about how rare black Jews are is handled with a breathtaking levity that would fit right into Brass Eye.)
Later, when Isabel visits India, she gets into a similar confusion, which the film also seems to miss, when she argues that the country's caste divisions must exist on a more fundamental level than racism, since everyone involved is Hindu. Two things are worth noting here: firstly, yes, and secondly, castes in India arose around 1500 BC when the Indo-Aryans arrived on the scene and quickly subjugated the Dravidian natives.
Although the layers of the system have changed shape many times since then, genetic testing shows that they were originally formed along tribal lines. However, as in the section on the Holocaust, the film does not contradict Isabelle's assumptions, and we are simply left to nod in agreement – or not.
You wouldn't believe that the characters in the film would recognize this, but there is a gap in understanding here cultural, not racial. Many of Origin's loudest Hollywood supporters are white, and the film's December screening to young black British critics generated no more enthusiasm than the British Venetian press had garnered three months earlier. For moviegoers whose brains haven't been turned to mush by American discourse, it's an extraordinary spectacle – a thoughtful, well-intentioned, complex structure built in the shadow of a warehouse-sized blind spot.
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