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kind of dressed upnot the black; the producers used them to provide sexual titillation. But the values about knowing your place and conforming, the celluloid was dripping with that.
I also talked with them about cutting rhythms and production decisions. I asked them to really look at the role of actors, and at the pat narrative structure, with the violins playing and the guy coming back home after twenty years away from his slave family and the tears, the synthetic tears, rolling down the faces of the black ladies. It's puke-making. I really can't look at a narrative film anymorenot one with these traditional rhythms going on. The manipulation is so obvious and so patent. I got the students to think about what these rhythms might be doing in terms of their perception of history, their perception of themselves, and their sensitivity to the black and white issue.
We didn't meet Alex Haley, but we met his counterpart in
Holocaust,
Gerald Green. He came along and spoke; we were lucky to get him. Everything I've said about
Roots
you could say about
Holocaust
. The people who make these shows are so proud of their research, but when you start to press them about it, they back off immediately and say, "Well, you know, we're not doing documentary; we're making a show; we're making drama; we never pretend that we're being historians." But they do! The Learning Corporation of America, the distributor of
Holocaust,
is constantly saying in the blurbs that this
is
reality, this
is
accuracy, that it represents an incredibly high academic standard, that this is for people who don't have time to read anymore. I remember Green saying, well, we don't think of ourselves as historians; this is entertainment. It's fantastic the way these people yo-yo between the two. As soon as you hold them to some responsibility for what they're doing, they do a quick Pontius Pilate and say no, no, we're only entertainers.
MacDonald:
Well, I think they feel proud because they've done
some
research; most TV is entirely fantasy.
Watkins:
And unfortunately it's just that that allowed
Roots
to scrape through in America, because it was the first timewhich just proves the absolutely appalling standard of American televisionthe
first
time anything on the subject had even been seen. According to most people I've talked with, black people welcomed it with open arms. But in my opinion, it is overt racism of a most virulent form, to take the suffering of the slave experience and the suffering of the whole experience of being black in America today and wrap it up in this conservative, if not neofascist, schmaltz! I would go so far as to say that to put the black experience into a conventional narrative structure is racisttoday. Because you are feeding it into a language that neutralizes it. How many people say, "I can't even remember the film I saw last night." You put the slave experience through the same rhythms as
Kojak
and
Love Story