Jordan Kauwling on Spike Lee's Crooklyn + #OscarsSoWhite
@cinespeak 's #BoycottTheOscarsPHL Advisory Team member , Jordan Kauwling, weighs in on Spine Lee's 1994 classic Crooklyn + why #RepresentationMatters ❤️💯
***SPOILER ALERTS FOR MAJOR PLOT POINTS IN THE MOVIE***
In a darkened movie theatre, warm tears began to stream down my pre-pubescent cheeks and puddle into the divot in my chin. The movie had barely made its way past the opening credits but there I sat, inconsolable. At the time I wasn’t able to articulate the reasoning behind this sudden wave of emotion that had driven me to the point of almost hyperventilating. To be fair, I was the kind of kid whom most of the other kids in my grade referred to as “overly-sensitive”, the kind of kid who would make mixtapes to cry to long before I’d ever had my heart broken for the first time. The kind of kid who’d daydream easily. But this was no daydream. There I sat, staring up at the big screen at a face, a cinnamon-toned face much like my own. A face that wore joy and pain across it in equal measure. A black girl (!) as the lead protagonist of a film. I was dumbfounded. And all I could do was cry tears of… what exactly, I do not know. Catharsis, maybe. There had been black girls and teenagers depicted in film prior to Zelda Harris’ performance as Troy. Steven Spielberg captured the strong sisterly bond between a young Celie and Nettie in his film adaptation of Alice Walker’s acclaimed novel The Color Purple. And while I could certainly relate in a tangential way to their lives on screen I had yet to see a character on celluloid that so closely embodied my own existence in both their physical and emotional portrayal as Troy Carmichael in Spike Lee’s 1994 flick, Crooklyn. Crooklyn is a semi-autobiographical coming of age story directed by Morehouse alum Spike Lee. Like most of Lee’s joints it functions as both a time-capsule into the Black-American experience and as a love letter to the city of New York. Its protagonist, lest anyone get it twisted, is a dynamic yet melancholy preteen black girl! Troy lives in a pre-gentrification Brooklyn brownstone with her long-suffering school-teacher mother, her dead-beat musician with a heart of gold father and her four rowdy brothers. Troy is kind of a tomboy in that wonderful way many girls who grew up with brothers are. She spends her summer days outside playing with her kin and the neighborhood kids back when kids could do that kind of thing with minimal fear of strangers. Troy is shy and loud and silly and moody and glorious. We follow the Carmichael family as they struggle to make ends meet with a patriarch who refuses to acknowledge that his glory days in the music industry may in fact be behind him and can’t give up the chase. Or at the very least get a stable day job so that they can stop bouncing checks! Delroy Lindo, who some of you may remember played Lebron James from roughly 1992-2003, delivers a measured yet masterful performance as Woody. Although viewers will be as frustrated with him as Alfre Woodard’s Carolyn is you can’t help but root for the guy to make it. Woody is the kind of good-natured dad who would sneak ice-cream to his kids after mom specifically said, “Y’all kids better not eat up all my damn ice-cream!” Being the child of a 70s musician father who sometimes missed special moments in my own life while out on tour and who has never really given up his dream of playing Carnegie Hall, I can relate to Carolyn now as an adult. While men like Woody and my father really just want to love big and follow their passion it’s women like Carolyn and my own mother who must walk that fine line between encouragement and, “Hey, fool! We can’t make the mortgage payment with a sick-ass bass line!” All of the tension between husband and wife happens around the edges of our story, while Troy and her brothers play stick ball, make trips to the bodega and watch Souuuuuuuuul Train on their old television, until it bleeds through and boils over during a particularly hot summer. Troy’s brothers are sent to stay with relatives and our hero is also sent down South to stay with her cousin Viola (Patriece Nelson) and her Aunt Song. Uncle Clem is there too but Aunt Song and her little dog Queenie steal every scene they’re in so one could be forgiven for forgetting Uncle Clem existed. Sorry, Unc Clem. For the scenes down South, Lee uses an anamorphic lens which creates a distorted, compressed image much in the same way Troy’s view of life down in Atlanta seems slightly off-kilter in comparison to home back in Brooklyn. Troy is a tough cookie and she makes the best of her uncomfortable situation with her bamma relatives even finding a way to enjoy herself although she misses her family, particularly her mother. Carolyn is strict yet it is her tenacity that bonds her to her daughter and the two stay connected via letters read aloud to the camera. At best, Troy merely tolerates her Aunty Song and her bougie opinions on things like cornrows. Lee’s screenplay handles the colorism that at times plagues the Black community with a much defter hand than he did School Daze but the element is definitely there. Viola, with her Whitley Gilbert hair and fashion choices, doesn’t exactly look down on Troy but she clearly already understands the “light-skin privilege” she can cash in at any moment. As Troy turns ten years old down South she receives a final letter from back home and unable to simply click her heels together like Dorothy she asks to be sent back up North. When she gets to the airport she is met by relatives who promptly drive her over to the hospital. Woody gathers all of his children together to tell them that Carolyn is sick. She has cancer. Lee spares us scenes of watching Carolyn suffer and in the next scene the children are preparing for their mother’s funeral. Troy is completely devoid of emotion. Unable to cry she watches as her brothers mourn a person snatched cruely from her arms while she was away. Zelda Harris conveys oceans of regret, rage and pain in just one look. I again recall crying in the movie theatre during the funeral scene as well as the scene that follows as Troy is haunted by the sound of her mother’s yelling and being overwhelmed. I remember being terrified to let my own strict mother out of my sight that evening. Those scenes of loss hit home. They broke me. They still break me up to this day. Because Troy looked like me. She spoke like me, with an air of bombast thinly veiling timidity. She viewed the world in much the same way I viewed the world and the world viewed her in much the same way as it would view me. And that’s why I cried during those opening scenes. I had someone, finally, that I could relate to. Hollywood had starved me for so long from that experience that I never even realized I was hungry. And it almost never happened. Had a black man along with Lee’s sisters Joie and Cinque not been allowed to tell a version of his family’s story his way. Had Black folk not been given an opportunity to work in front of the camera and behind the camera and on the script I may have waited my entire childhood to see a character I could truly relate to on screen. That’s all people of color are talking about when we mention, #OscarsSoWhite. White men got to relate to Luke Skywalker and John Wayne and Indiana Jones and countless others while everybody else had to live vicariously. So, why not a movie about a ten year old Black girl growing up in the early 1970s? Or an East Asian boy navigating the tumultuous seas with only the company of a tiger? Or a black boy coming to terms with his sexuality in a violent Miami neighborhood? Why aren’t we carrying entire films on our shoulders? We all want to see a reflection of our experiences mirrored back to us on film. And we’re tired of waiting. --- Jordan Guerra-Kauwling is a social-issue comedian and radio producer based in Philadelphia. By day she is the Audience Engagement Manager at The Philadelphia Citizen as well as a freelance writer whose works have been featured in VerySmartBrothas.com and Ozy.com You can contact Jordan for projects or to argue with her about the Buffy Universe on Twitter @cinnamonlafemme -- WE HOPE YOU WILL JOIN US FOR OUR #BOYCOTTTHEOSCARSPHL KICK-OFF on FRI JULY 21st w DOUBLE FEATURE of Spike Lee's Crooklyn (5:30PM) + Do The Right Thing (8:00PM) FOR MORE INFO + TICKETS--> www.boycotttheoscarsphilly.bpt.me