While I generally do not see Hollywood movies these days, I
try to make an exception for music biopics: not because I think they will be great
films, but because I feel a duty to see how Hollywood presents, or often
misrepresents, musicians, music and music history—especially since these
accounts give many their “education” about legendary figures such as Ray
Charles, Johnny Cash, Etta James, Chuck Berry, and Biggie Smalls to name but a
few….and, now, James Brown. Directed by Tate Taylor, with a screenplay by the
Butterworth brothers, and co-produced (and partially financed by) Mick Jagger. Get On Up (2014) is ostensibly a film
about James Brown, but in many ways the film is as much about Hollywood as it
is about Brown.
It is interesting to observe that the subjects of most of
these major Hollywood biopics made in the past decade (with the exception of
Biggie) emerged during the 1950s, a time when America was building its national
(and imperial) mass culture identity. These stories of iconic figures that were
the subject of Ray, Walk The Line, and
Cadillac Records all tell us as much about
the changes taking places in American culture (the ground) as they do about
their ostensible subject (figure). In general, there is a reason so many more
larger than life iconic musicians---even geniuses—emerged during that time than
in more recent years. Electronic mass culture encouraged and nourished a
present culture then, but now it prefers to use these figures, and our cultural
past in general, to prevent something like this from happening today.
Part of this is due to the fact that in the 1950s and 1960s
a more decentralized music culture (for instance, the chitlin circuit) dominated
and generally lead the more centralized Hollywood culture, from the ground up.
But since the early 1970s, the music culture of America takes its lead much
more from an industry centralized in Hollywood (NYC and Nashville to a lesser
extent, but increasingly Silicon Valley).
James Brown, in fact, touches on this transition that
occurred in American music culture in his autobiography, when he speaks about
what happened after Syd Nathan, the owner of his Cincinnati-based record label
King Records, died and he had to search for new labels in the early 1970s, and
large bureaucratic multi-national conglomerates like Polydor were now the only
game in town. Of course, that insight, and chapter of JB’s life is absent from Get On Up (more on this egregious, but
predictable, omission a little a later).
One Standard Cliche
of the Music Biopic (a short summary)
In Ray (2004), the
childhood accident that lead to Charles’ blindness is emphasized, not just for
giving the gift of music, but as a way to locate a founding trauma that lead to
the many demons that Ray had to battle in his own life. While racism,
especially as experienced in the Jim Crow south, is not absent in this movie,
his troubled childhood as a poor blind boy becomes the main context in which
his talent and genius, as well as his heroin addiction, emerged. Here, the
biopic convention essentially demands such a superficial analysis that de-emphasizes
the racism and poverty and emphasizes the “internal” causes of Ray’s maladies.
The personal story of a man who is addicted to heroin for
the same reason he’s addicted to music (and loves it more than his wife) almost
serves to ‘justify’ the white naysayers who felt that R&B and soul music he
was playing was “devil’s music.” Furthermore, the scene in which he takes a
gospel standard, and secularizes it (“I Got A Woman”), makes a clear
ideological choice in presenting the black gospel scene who resist this heroic ‘crossover’
moment that lead to what is now called classic rock as a bunch of reactionaries
(hell, even the Beatles tried to cover “I Got A Woman”).
Such reductions and distortions of history show how these
biopics push a despiritualized, commercial sense of American music that
elevates a heroic, yet troubled, individual who can change (or at least provide
a decorative soundtrack for) history. On the heels of this movie’s success, Walk The Line (2005) seemed consciously
scripted with Ray in mind. Another
“rags to riches” story of a southerner from a broken home (though he doesn’t
become blind), who is haunted by and motivated to musical greatness (and drug
addiction; again, the two are almost synonymous in this convention) to prove
something to the parental figure who abandoned him, whether physically or
emotionally (again, cut off from any serious dramatization of environmental
factors like abject poverty or systematic racism).
This deeply Freudian under song to Walk The Line becomes one of the many things the movie Walk Hard (2007) brilliantly satirizes. Obviously,
the director and screenwriters of Walk
Hard felt something very similar to what I felt when watching Walk The Line, and one of the reasons Walk The Line did not achieve the
success that Ray had was because it
had taken Ray and crassly made it
into even more of a formula…and audiences seemed to be getting hip. While Walk Hard is primarily a satire of Walk The Line, it reaches deeper to
satirize many conventions of the bioptic genre. The “hero,” Dewey Cox is
presented alone, in solitude, pausing before a long walk down a hall to a
retrospective performance that would somehow sum up his life-work. After Walk Hard, I hoped we would never have
to weather another scene like this, but it reappears in Get On Up, providing the narrative frame for the movie.
Life As Rise And Fall
(and maybe redemption)
A biopic is ostensibly similar to a behind-the-music show
in proposing a dividing line between the art and the life, but what does it
mean to be “behind the music” when you put your life into your audience and to regular everyday people who can blow
your mind each time you feel them
dance at your shows? Hollywood loves to undress what it believes is the hubris
of any musician who believes the power of music, of call and response, both
live and recorded, can be bigger than life viewed as a story.
Here, Hollywood casts itself in the roll of Toto: Take that,
you mighty and powerful OZ! We know you’re just a bumbling man from Nebraska
slumming it in Oz, a kind of homesick imperialist who really just never wanted
to grow up and be abandoned by mama like Citizen
Kane.
Hollywood is so wedded to the conventions of the biopic
that they exploit people’s love of music to lure people in, and in most cases
fans of the music leave disappointed. It’s not that that the musical scenes in Get On Up are not good. As Odie
Henderson points out, “Chadwick Boseman has done his dancing homework. Watching
him perform, and listening to him perfectly nail Brown’s speaking voice are the
true pleasures of Get on Up. Unfortunately, the movie wastes this
performance.”[1] Indeed,
the biopic seems designed precisely to push an alien religion on those for
whom music, especially black music, is often superior to, and wider than, a
story--in particular, a rise and fall story of an isolated self.
The film doesn’t go quite as far as to have James Brown cry Rosebud with his dying breath, but we do
get Citizen Cocaine, if not King Heroin, right from the get go. As Henderson
brilliantly summarizes, Brown enters the movie “as a buffoon reeking of danger
and insanity who is rendered harmless by his own comic ineptitude.” This
“neutered, cartoonish,” yet nonetheless still threatening, version of him hangs
over the whole movie.
Clearly the screenwriters, the Butterworth boys, felt that
emphasizing these scenes set in 1988, only two years after the positive note on
which his autobiography ended, was the most dramatic way they could introduce
the character they call James Brown. Apparently, the directors and screen writers
felt that this was the fall, the negative climax, and it can only (or most
‘realistically’) be explained by a superficial Freudian reading of the “family
romance” of his childhood formative years. Thus, the plot of the movie becomes
“how did he fall so low from such a height?”
In Get On Up, the
scenes with his birth parents are overemphasized unless one is a Freudian or
post-Freudian developmental psychologist. Brown’s autobiography is frank, and
doesn’t dwell on his dad’s whoopings or inability to provide for him. Yet JB
offers a wider context for his dad’s particular pathology. His dad had a temper
about white people, but he was too submissive to express that to whites, so
took it out on his son. Showing the young James witnessing his dad’s encounters
with racist white folks could’ve made for great cinema, and dug into a truth much
deeper than trying to fit the movie into the Ray and Walk Hard grid
that puts Brown on the shrink’s couch when it’s not putting him on trial.
The post-Freudians, of course, have their system rigged so
that they would call any other interpretation of childhood other than “primal
foundational trauma” to be denial, and as long as (white) Hollywood continues
to be dominated by this mindset it simply cannot register why JB devotes much more
time on the largely positive relationship he had with his extended family in a
brothel presided over by his aunt. The movie does devote some time on a touching
scene with his aunt (her nurturing, her spiritual wisdom, her prophecy, and
her pride in him as he makes his first money hustling for her before he ends up
in prison as a teenager)—but it more insistently flashes back to the trauma
presumably caused by his birth parents.
White Supremacy &
Black Capitalism
Because JB understood his dad’s pathology against the
backdrop of white supremacy, the movie’s erasure of this is suspect. It’s not
that Get On Up entirely sweeps white
supremacy under the rug. Little Richard and JB bond over how to deal with what
Richard calls the white devil that runs the music business. This is a lesson JB
would later apply in his relationship with his white manager, Ben Bart,
affectionately called “Pop” by Brown (and played by “Blues Brother” Dan
Ackroyd in the movie). These scenes are perhaps the film’s most intimate, and
reveal some of JB’s chutzpah in
dealing with the white music establishment (and provide a useful contrast with
the scenes between Chuck Berry and Leonard Chess in Cadillac Records).
I’m glad the movie dramatized the scene in which James
brilliantly explained why cutting out those who “Pops” calls the best big time
promoters in the business and, instead, choosing to work with the local DJS, would
make both client and manager more money….and, in addition, help the underpaid,
exploited, DJS who were the lifeblood of the music industry (the filmmakers had
to make the DJ white, but that’s no biggie; some were). James’ solution is a win/win
situation that helps the local economy and helps bring democracy to the
nation’s music culture!
The manager was skeptical, but JB’s wisdom prevails. This
kind of insight into, and analysis of, the music industry is part of what makes
JB’s autobiography such a delightful, engaging and even empowering read. It
shows JB’s generous, populist, community oriented side—which is otherwise
absent from the movie. Yet, once again, Get
On Up has to frame this as a largely individual mere selfish attempt to make
money and, like Berry Gordy, disrespectfully underpay his musicians. But can
you really reduce his pubic service advertisements, his ownership of several
radio stations, his James Brown Stamps, and the generosity of his enlightened
self-interest to that?
Sure, he may have been too busy making music to really know
how to run all the enterprises he started (just like The Beatles with their
Apple Corp fiasco), but the movie makes it seem like it was merely about JB
trying to dodge taxes! I’m not looking for a white-washed portrait of JB,
stripped of his various contradictions that are touched on, for instance, in
Thomas Sayers Ellis’ brilliant poem sequence (with photographs and footnotes
for footwork), “My Dynamite Splits.” But I would at the very least like to see
a movie that acknowledges that what was so great about James Brown was not
merely the genius super bad musician and performer.
When I hear the cry in “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World”
about how man makes money to buy another man, and how man is lost in the wilderness and bitterness, it’s not just about
little James and his personal hell, it’s about life in White man’s America, and
one black man’s attempt to do something about it, an attempt that in its own
way was as successful as any of the more radical spokesman and organizers of
Black Power during this era. He may not have liberated the people, but his hard
work liberated—and still can liberate--the spirit. There is little or no room
for this in the ideological interpretation the Butterworth boys, Taylor and
Jagger, promulgate in Get On Up!
“Closure: Walk Hard Style”
Though the movie touches on how important music was for JB
in prison the first time around, as a kid where he lead a group “to sing for the lord,” it shows nothing but one horrific broken
man scene during his 88-93 prison stay. It certainly shows nothing of the grassroots
movement of fans and supporters who held “Free James Brown” dance parties
across the country to fight the racist double standard in his 6 year sentence
for nothing more than a “blue light” violation.
Despite the repeated testimony by those who were closer to
him and visited him in prison during this period (like Tucker and music critic
Dave Marsh), the directors try to render James Brown into a flawed tragic hero
who couldn’t really relate to those closest to him, or even a villain, like
Richard III (pushing away the loyal Bobby Byrd as Buckingham) into that
isolation of the tragic individual that the genre of tragedy demands.
At least Walk The Line,
could rely on the cliché of the MGM or Shakespearean comic happy ending, a love
story that could inspire such songs Heidi Newfield’s “Do You Want A Love Like
Johnny and June?” Like Johnny, James Brown was also deeply devoted to his wife
and devastated by her death, but Get On
Up makes no room for that, and in the process reduces his (temporary) split
with Bobby Byrd to an argument over whose dick is bigger (“I could’ve had your
wife”); Byrd’s marriage is presented as healthier and more loving than Brown’s
because that fits the tragic larger than life cliché that underlies this
movie’s portrayal of Brown. What makes Brown great is what makes him tragic.
Larger than life becomes smaller than life; this isn’t what the audience
demands, what the complicated truth demands, and it’s not what the music
demands; it’s what the convention and the shrinks demand.
The movie does offer its little biopic cliché of redemption
when JB gets out of jail in 1994, a comeback concert and a personal humbling before Byrd (“I neeeed you”). This is closure: Hollywood style: Walk Hard style; it’s touching, but
ultimately trivial and tedious. I really wish JB could get on up today to tell a thing or two about the “honky hoedown”
these directors and screenwriters tried to reduce him to, or even look Mick
Jagger in the eye, and say, “you still making money ripping off black folks.”
Maybe someday, when Jagger dies, there will be a bioptic made of him. After
all, stories of the (Rolling) Stones mistreatment of women and drug abuse are
at least as prevalent as much as JB’s, but I severely doubt they will play as
central a part in such a movie.
In Get On Up, we
return to that long walk down the hall, in which the larger than life character
sees his life and career pass before him, a life reduced to the child’s need
for ego-validation. In this light, you can listen to many of James Brown’s
lyrics and see how much of an individualist he could be (in words), but that’s
a persona he consciously developed,
as he reminds us over and over again in his autobiography. Even the movie
reminds us it was the white suits who wanted to change the name of the Famous
Flames to elevate the solo artist. Sure, he’s a “greedy man.” Sure, “I got
mine, don’t worry about his,” but listen to the sounds of the grooves, the
collective unit, the package shows he put together: see everybody dancing. Join
the dance (if they let you do it in the theatre, or better Get On Out of the theatre), and
feel the unity—everybody working together in the name of soul, in the name of
JAMES BROWN who contains multitudes.
Now pause and think about that experience for a second (even
if it’s just a recording of a song by a dead man at a party or an aerobics
class), and then think about what Hollywood—white Hollywood—is trying to tell
you, sell you, about Life---not just James Brown’s life, not just the biopic
convention, with no personal investment, not just the life of any public
figure, but life in general. Is the soliloquy really more “authentic” than the
dialogue? Is the community organizer really just a tortured individual? Is the
so-called man behind the music really the deeper reality?
“Hollywood: “that’s
how the white man sells himself to the world.”
Judy Juanita, Virgin Soul
Critic Tanya Steele argues that Get On Up exhibits “the need for ‘Hollywood’ to situate itself in
the lives of Black Americans without giving a Black Director the opportunity to
tell the story.” White Hollywood has a long history of this, dating back to its
origins with D.W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation.
While Get On Up doesn’t go so far
as to celebrate the KKK, it presents a series of dubious “tropes that are
supposed to relay that this is Blackness.”[2]
From its first scene, Get
On Up puts James Brown on trial, looking at him through judgmental white
eyes. As Bruce Tucker, co-author of James Brown’s autobiography, The Godfather of Soul, pointed out over
20 years ago: “for white audiences, even sympathetic ones, [JB’s] difference
always threatens to become otherness—the raw, uninhibited, possessed exotic
black Other of colonialist fantasy….Perfectly well-meaning people….talk to me
about his troubles in tones usually reserved for the appreciation of Road
Runner cartoons. It is clear that part of the price of the difference James
Brown sought—and the otherness he didn’t---is to be treated like a cartoon
character, capable of popping back into shape no matter how many anvils land on
him. Or, in an only slightly more affectionate form, he is regarded as a
child.” (xxii, xxv).
Get On Up relies
on both interpretations, and it’s unclear whether the filmmakers are
“well-meaning,” unconsciously racist, or purposely trying to debunk James Brown
by “dwelling on James’ high-handedness with musicians, the reported domestic
violence, and the problems that [in 1988] landed him in jail,” in Tucker’s
words. In Get On Up, even these
cartoonish portrayals cannot entirely neutralize the presentation of a strong,
proud black man who is first introduced as threatening and potentially violent.
And the movie is in many ways about the white culture of fear of the black male
which Michael Moore memorably exposed in Bowling
For Columbine, and presumption of violent
until proven gentle often subliminally instilled in contemporary white
consciousness.
However, comically portrayed, the fear on the faces of the
white people in the film’s first scene is real, and implicitly justifies the
harsh six-year sentence he received for his blue-light violation in 1988,
entirely ignoring the racist double standard involved in his sentencing by
relying on an unverified story of Brown shooting at a crowd. According to Get On Up, this apocryphal story is the first thing you need to know about
James Brown. We may ask, by what standards this is great cinema?
These ruminations lead me to some heavy question: Is Get On Up a failed movie, or does it do
exactly what it set out to do? Is it a bad movie that was genuinely intended to
be a tribute to James Brown? Or is or is it bad for the same reasons it’s
inherently racist? Amiri Baraka writes,
“our enemies have created our spokesmen” in reference to how white corporate
culture has elevated the image of the “gangsta rapper” and package it to black
folks. Hollywood couldn’t create James Brown, or even the image of JAMES BROWN.
However, they can muscle their way into it with their money in his death.
Yet, Get On Up
shows the bioptic as it is currently understood is a dead-end genre so based on
a Euro-Westernized notion of a self-contained “self” that it simply cannot
begin to sound the phenomenon, and ongoing legacy, of James Brown. If one must
accept that JB indeed had a “downfall” after 4 decades of top ten hits, this is
more likely due to the corporate takeover of the record industry than his own
personal trauma; this becomes very clear reading his autobiography. Ultimately
I concur with Tanya Steele that there are definitely black filmmakers “talented
as f**k who could smash a James Brown bioptic” much better than Get On Up does. I firmly believe that
such a movie could help revolutionize Hollywood as much as James’ Brown’s music
was able to breathe life into and transform American music.
In the meantime, if you want to know about James Brown, read
the autobiography, or check out all those less famous recordings he did (most
of us have only scratched the surface of his oeuvre). There’s really no point
seeing the movie unless you are interested in studying how Hollywood uses its
shock and awe tactics to try to manipulate us with its frame and narrow
world-view.
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