Gabe and Rich watch a movie: Goodbye Uncle Tom

To cap this historic week, who's up for an examination of the most tasteless movie about the slave trade (and possibly race, period) of all time? No? Well, whatever, that's what's below anyway.

As a self-conscious (as in the talent talks to the camera) "documentary" of slavery's many aspects (from middle passage to breeding), 1971's Goodbye Uncle Tom is a movie I've long found fascinating. Why, you know? Just why? To make sense of this morbid interest, I asked my friend and eternal object of admiration Videogum's Gabe Delahaye to watch this garbage with me and put me in my place. We did this before with Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, though instead of chat format, we exchanged a series of emails (over a few months, actually...). What follows is long and maybe inconclusive, but getting it all out sure felt good! (And this isn't any normal catharsis: it's cross-posted catharsis.)

[Note that the English-language version is the one discussed here. Though the Italian version contains a variety of differences that give it a more Mondo and, paradoxically, balanced feel, the film was shot in English so watching it dubbed in Italian with English subtitles just feels weird.]

[Oh, also, there's a shot of a boob below and other NSFWish screenshots, so beware.]

Rich:

Gabe, this film is the reason I wanted to start examining movies with you in the first place: I know that you're a reasonable guy and I so need as my moral center here. When I first watched Goodbye Uncle Tom, I was obsessed. I was in love with its audacity, its aesthetic beauty, its singularity (there never was and never will be again a self-conscious, hypothetical, dysentery-and-all documentary that attempts to explore every facet of U.S. slavery -- I can barely even believe this film exists and I've watched it repeatedly!). Just as you can't take your eyes off this thing as it's unspooling, I couldn't take my mind off it long after it headed back to Netflix headquarters.

The obvious, unshakable question is: is this film racist? Racism, as infuriating as all its modern permutations can be, is easily dismissed in my head. It's just too stupid to merit the effort it takes to get bent out of shape over it. I’m more likely to be pissed about the rudeness or entitlement it takes to say something hateful than I am the actual hateful sentiment. So I feel that if Goodbye Uncle Tom were merely racist, merely exploitative revelry over the good old antebellum days, it wouldn’t warrant any serious consideration. And I can’t stop considering it.

At the very least, Goodbye Uncle Tom is more than racism committed to film. It is indeed exploitation, grindhousey and gory, but its conscience is explained in its final segment, when a modern incarnate of Nat Turner seethes with rage while watching white people frolic on the beach. He’s still affected by the injustices of the past, and after watching them for two hours, can you blame him? Pauline Kael called Prosperi and Jacopetti "irresponsible," and in her scathing review famously deemed Goodbye Uncle Tom "the most specific and rabid incitement of the race war." But shit, what's wrong with incitement? I think that we should be fucking mad about slavery and reminded of atrocity! We should be faced with what we're capable of as a species! We should never forget that we are so fucked up because we can be.

It's just like Goodbye Uncle Tom is fucked up because Jacopetti and Prosperi could be. To illustrate dehumanization so vividly -- the caging, the force-feeding, the trough-dining, the inverted hanging, the nonchalant sexual harassment of women and sometimes children -- they had to dehumanize. I read that the Haitian dictator essentially gave the directors free reign of his people. I wonder if the hundreds of extras that populate Tom were even paid. I wonder who the real slaveholders are.

See, it's not like Goodbye Uncle Tom is an unselfish work of cinematic activism. Jacopetti and Prosperi have clearly stated what their intentions were. After their expose of the savagery of Africa, Addio Africa, was, in fact, savaged as racist, they set out to "make a new film that would be clearly anti-racist" (per The Godfathers of Mondo documentary). Goodbye Uncle Tom resulted, at least in part, to clear their name -- this is the cinematic equivalent of, "I'm not racist, I have black friends."

"We're not racist, we direct black movies."

It's all very suspect and, at least to me, endlessly fascinating.

Gabe:

Well, having only seen the movie the once, I have nothing but my initial reactions to go off of, for better or for worse. Although, that said, I can tell you that I am impressed that you've sat through that movie multiple times. One thing about racism that people don't talk about his how BORING it is. I don't mean that in a dismissive or reductive way. I understand that racism does actual damage to real people all the time, and in that sense it is horrible (understatement) and unignorable. But in the sense that this movie is racist, it's boring when people are just so bull-headedly wrong about EVERYTHING. It's not only insulting in the way that racism is a moral affront to everyone, but it's insulting in the way that WE ALL HAVE TO DO THE WORK OF BEING CURIOUS AND ENGAGED WITH THE WORLD AND TRYING TO SOLVE ITS QUESTIONS. If that makes any sense. This film is kind of beautiful cinematographically, but also has the plodding pace of a lot of '70s cinema, where you just wish everyone would put the bong down for long enough to get to the point. The point being that black people...should...I don't know, actually.

Of course, the Goodbye Uncle Tom filmmakers' insistence that this movie is their anti-racist project is part of its charm (in the way that anthropology or science museums filled with dead fetuses in jars are charming). The toothless crime of someone being crazy racist but thinking that what they're saying is just the opposite is a fascinating phenomenon. It's that type of benign, "harmless" racism that actually shows how deep the roots of racism go. And this movie is, at least at this point in history, ultimately harmless. It's grotesque and repulsive, but most of it is just so ridiculous and wrong. The scene in which the short carnival barker slave trader goes from one room to the next, showing off slaves painted gold and silver and whatnot is a real mindfuck and we should probably both go to race jail just for watching it, but I am not sure that anyone has ever held that to be their deep-rooted intolerant belief about the history of African Americans because what?

But your reference to Pauline Kael's review is interesting, because it puts this movie in the context of the time it was made. One of the reasons that this movie struck me as such an unpleasant but ultimately benign curiosity is because the idea of a "race war" just seems like such a relic of the (reminder: not so distant) past. And that in turn puts our current "culture war" in perspective. Because for as "heated" as things sometimes seem, and for as much as the world and the United States in particular seems divided along important fault lines regarding crucial questions of civil liberties and human rights, the idea of a movie creating any kind of serious stir or reaction is nearly impossible. Granted, I am not sure that I've ever SEEN a movie this inflammatory released in my lifetime. But in some senses, it makes the world seem a little more even-keeled than it might feel on a day-to-day basis. Stories about Reverend Fred Phelps excluded.

Or maybe there's another, somewhat more distressing interpretation of the Pauline Kael review. Maybe it's just that art no longer has the power to effect any change, for better or for worse.

Rich:

I guess the first thing that I'd like to propose is for you to spell out exactly why you think this movie is racist. I don't doubt your conviction, but since I'm more ambivalent on the topic, I think that which you're assuming goes without saying should be, in fact, said. And because I didn't exactly spell my feelings out initially, here they are: while reveling in the exploitation of slavery on an epic level, I don't see how you could possibly come away from this movie with anything but disdain for slavery. Slavery was disgusting, and the movie makes sure you understand that by being disgusting. It mocks those who attempted to explain it away, and the scenes in which God and the Bible are invoked as rationale reverberate through the present as the amoral moralists try to justify their subjugation of the homosexual minority. And while rumors of Prosperi's and Jacopetti's explicitly stated racism linger, there's something to be said for the by-any-means necessary nature of '70s cinema (particularly Italian cinema and specifically Mondo movies) informing Uncle Tom's gratuitousness. There is something refreshing about showing something for what it is, and no context could be less appropriate for whitewashing than slavery.

And you know, that Kael review could also bespeak a belief that blacks were volatile and dangerous enough to start a race war in the first place, as much as it's commenting on this film itself. That whole review, actually, was kind of gross to me -- it's a mutli-film examination-cum-take-down of blaxploitation cinema, in which she dismisses the ridiculous archetypes the movement presented without any attempt to understand why they existed and why these weirdo black superheroes might have been a smidge more relevant to subjugated blacks than some whitey film critic. I haven't read much of her, which I know is a crime for anyone interested in criticism, but I can't say that review made me want to read more.

Gabe:

Regarding examples of the film’s racism, for one thing, the black people in the movie are categorically depicted as monstrous, bestial, dangerous, hyper-sexualized animals. Although the movie deals relatively gruesomely with the "horrors,” it still feels like a pretty light condemnation of the slave-trade in general. I agree that you can't come away from it with anything other than contempt and disgust for slavery, but in some ways I wonder if some of that contempt and disgust towards slavery isn't just contempt and disgust for a tradition that gave anyone the ideas they needed to make a film like this. Like, for the educated viewer, a movie about the Holocaust told from the German point of view should still leave you with nothing but contempt and disgust for the Nazis, but it's going to take a lot of slogging through genuine anti-Semitisim and Nazi-apologism to get there. The best thing about examples that don't exist is YOU CAN'T PROVE ME WRONG.

I'd also argue that this movie has an overwhelmingly racist tone? And that it just feels yucky watching it? And that the yucky feeling does not come from having my sheltered eyes opened to so many truths, so then it has to be something else, and without being able to exactly identify it, or explain it in a way that would have made any of my college professors proud (starting with my distinctly non-academic use of the word "yucky"), I have to identify that yuckiness as coming from something that is basically racism even if it's hard to figure out the what/why/how.

One thing that's interesting about your last email, though, is your idea that I've "dismissed" the movie as racist. What a lot of people seem to struggle with is what it means for something to be racist, and especially what it means for something to be racist if you like it. Does that make you racist? The obvious answer to that is not necessarily. It's a tricky subject, but I think at the end of the day, if we're supposed to keep making progress on this issue, the main thing is to identify racism in the culture, regardless of how we feel about it. I think that people get really nervous about identifying racism because of what it might say about them, so they'll defend something as not being racist and as the person who's calling racism as being overly sensitive or PC, when really something can be racist whether you like it or not (and by like I mean "enjoy"). Does this make sense? Like, if you like something that is racist, that doesn't make it not racist, so just identify what is racist about it and spend some time thinking about why you like it, and move on. You don't even have to change your opinion about that thing, and you certainly don't have to dismiss it, but that doesn't change what it carries inside it. Which is racism. It carries racism inside of it.

Rich:

I definitely was not out to dismiss you by calling you dismissive, first of all. It's just that at the center of my interest in this movie is the racism question, which I think you sort of just took for granted. It's fine if your reaction was that the film was so blatantly racist that discussing color as it pertains to Uncle Tom would be like discussing color as it pertains to the sky: duh-worthy. I'm not trying to accuse you of being overly PC -- my question ultimately gives you the opportunity to prove that you aren't.

I agree with you about the portrayal of the slaves, to a point, although most of their negative qualities could be attributed to their owners. The owners are the ones who demonized (and, in the case of the "studs," controlled) their sexuality. The owners are the ones who kept the slaves ignorant. The owners are the ones who slashed the slaves' humanity into fractions. These are historical facts. The amount of editorializing the portrayal of the slaves that comes directly from Prosperi and Jacopetti is fuzzy. Perhaps this is by design and the whole affair is one big slimy sleight of hand.

And really, the owners look no better. A lot of them are just as "bestial" as the slaves (that German woman with the dental issues who gags over her foreign tongue about a slave's castration that's taking place, for example). It may not be equal opportunity misanthropy, but it's something close to that.

Also, I would argue that regardless of what's causing it, "Yuck" is the morally sound response to an explicit depiction of slavery. I can attest to being grossed out by the exposed truths, but even if it's something different for you, we've arrived at much the same spot. I guess that's the point and that's what makes this exploitation. And maybe that's one argument for the film's racism that I can get behind: to use slavery as a tool of cinematic arousal is ultimately disrespectful. No matter what you may learn along the way, Goodbye Uncle Tom's primary target is your gut. It pummels you in the exact manner that gross-out movies do. The slave owners are just zombies who haven't died yet or slashers on the right side of the law (and God's providence, so they think). The slaves are just bodies to count. Because, really, what’s the point, anyway? In the most constructive scenario, Goodbye Uncle Tom exists only to teach us what we already know. If we think slavery's disgusting, we leave justified. If we take pleasure in the suffering of the black race, we leave satisfied.

I have a high threshold for the disrespect of life in cinema, but if I had to sit down and draw lines of taboo, places not to go, slavery would be included. And the fact that Goodbye Uncle Tom doesn't just cross but rapes that line is what makes it amazing. Its audacity is spectacular. My relationship to this film is an endless cycle of repulsion and enthrallment. I suppose this is why I can't move on, as you suggest.

Gabe:

You make a really good point about the equal opportunity misanthropy and the fact that the white people in the movie are never let off the hook. But it reminds me of a pretty common trend these days for people to refer to their work (book, movie, TV, stand-up comedy) as being an "equal opportunity offender.” We're all so hyper-aware of the dangers and complexities of race these days that we have to make sure that people understand that we're ready and willing to make fun of everyone. And I have no problem with that. But that doesn't make it not offensive in each instance. Like, your racist black joke can sit next to your self-hating jokes about the Cracker Barrel but that doesn't make the racist black joke not racist. Not that this movie has a lot of jokes in it.

I also would argue that this is a pretty heavily editorialized depiction of slavery. It certainly seems to capture the grotesquerie of the whole thing in a way that a movie that was trying to be less shocking might not, and let's not get confused: slavery is obviously grotesque and shocking in a way that this film couldn't even begin to match. I'm not asking for some sanitized version of the story to appease my genteel sensibilities. But the movie begins with the filmmakers arriving on a Southern plantation in a HELICOPTER. Right from the beginning we're dealing with their personalized and, in my mind, highly suspect interpretation of events. The fact that they claim it is a documentary only further complicates things because of how, you know, it's not.

In the end, though, what makes this movie so compelling (if that's even the right word, because it's not like you'd call a sexual assault or a vivid depiction of torture "compelling") is the fact that, without getting too Late Night College Idea Jam, Dorm Edition, we are all Goodbye Uncle Tom. That is to say that this movie doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's the product of the world we live in, and its meaning is dependent on our interpretation. And with a movie like that, that is kind of an intense idea, because that says a lot about the world we live in, that this exists, that we made that happen.

I am curious, even though I know we're trying to wrap this up (because JESUS), why you would draw the line at slavery as a film taboo? Why is it off-limits our out-of-bounds?

Rich:

That point about the documentary claim at the end of the movie has been going through my head all day (would you believe it if I told you I watched this again yesterday?). It's key, I think, to the skewed vision Prosperi and Jacopetti have of their "clearly anti-racist" work.

And as for slavery as a taboo, well...I mean, I guess what I ultimately object to isn't so much the idea of portraying it, but exploiting it. I'm OK with educating people (as best you can) with movies. I'm OK with even inciting rage if you're making your best effort to tell the truth while doing so. But to use something so integral to the reasons why things are so fucked up today as a fetish object or even gross-out gag is so shockingly tasteless. We're talking fine lines here since all cinema is essentially exploitation, but I'd feel the same way about anything that is inherently and under every circumstance unfunny: the Holocaust, child abuse, animal cruelty, gay-bashing, whatever (murder's not on the list, but a fascination with death is only human). Does that keep me from watching? Hell no, but despite hating an institution that I already hated a fraction more, the emotions mostly turn off and I watch the filmmaking and not the film. I watch what the directors do to provoke, and that is sometimes the greatest horror show of all.

And yes, I do think that "compelling" is exactly the word for this movie. If you could stand it, I'd suggest watching it again (and again and again) with different people and trying NOT to discuss it. Impossible. As much as society has progressed since its release, this nasty depiction of slavery is still relevant. It's still willing to, as you say, incite interpretation. This garbage that's been sitting around for 38 years still stinks. A hardly shocking result for a purposely shocking film.

Mission accomplished?

Gabe:

Yeah, I think we did it. We solved racism, right?

Rich:

And all it took was a few months and some email. Yet another reason why the Internet is not the worst!

Comments

[RF]

"the caging, the force-feeding, the trough-dining, the inverted hanging, the nonchalant sexual harassment of women and sometimes children"

--sounds like what happens to billions of animals every day. Go Vegan!

[KH]

There's nonchalant sexual harassment of women and sometimes children happening to animals?

[grrg]

This is interesting. Regarding the point that Goodbye Uncle Tom is a very, let's say, idiosyncratic perspective on slavery, you might be interested in the work of Marie Jenkins Schwartz, a historian at the University of Rhode Island. Her scholarship is motivated by the insight that, while the entire system of slave ownership should obviously be repellent and nauseating to every thinking person, slavery as it was experienced was rarely the chamber of horrors that 19th-century abolitionist tracts and 20th-century anti-racist scholarship had a vested interest in exposing. For her, both the slaves and the slave owners had incentives to maintain loving, nurturing family units and a bare minimum of autonomy. The fact that masters could, at any time, treat their property like sub-human animals, sexual objects, and disposable machines, didn't mean that they did, at ALL times.

Some of this is touched on here, although Schwartz's books are more nuanced. A similar attempt to complicate the cartoonish ways we've come to imaging how slaves actually lived (like, um, this movie) is hinted at in Annette Gordon-Reed's amazing new book on Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.

[M]

Great entry

[Captain Wrong]

I had this set and wasn't able to make it to Uncle Tom. Africa Addio really got to me and all this time later, I still haven't made up my mind about it. (I blogged about it ages ago, if you'll allow me to blogwhore: http://tinyurl.com/ctzakv) I think Rich summed up my feelings about Africa Addio in his last section about this film. There's just something about these guys work that you can't help discuss what the hell it all means. Compelling is a good word for it.

The documentary on these two that came with the set is well worth seeking out, btw. It's really interesting to hear them tell their story in their own words. They are either fantastic liars or hopelessly naive. I honestly don't know which it is.

PS, tell Winston I said hi. The wife got me a Team Winston shirt for Xmas and it's one of my prized possessions now.

[Cornelius]

Spot on entry Rich, two questions:

"Three's Company" theme-ish music during the slave rounding up scene on the breeding farm?? WTF?

Did anyone think when they switched to the modern day setting at the end and there was the panning view from the sky that is was the opening to "Golden Girls"? That would have been a very special episode I imagine, especially if Blanche brought that stud Jason home.

[mimo]

What about the fact that it was two ITALIAN filmmakers coming to America looking to make a fast buck by exploiting the black/white obsessions that occupy our nation. I'm not saying that only an American should have made this, but to become fascinated by it for its assault on taste feels like you're falling for one of their (the filmmakers) tricks. It doesn't feel like a whole lot of thought was put into the making of or the implications of scenes. So why waste your mental energy?

[pingilitis]

i get gabe was being facetious when he said "we solved racism, right?" but i kind of think if everyone was capable of articulating their perceptions of race, and the requisite implications (not necessarily in regards to grotesque, italian genre films) like you guys did, it'd be solved. at least, as close to solved as possible (save for human error, like, i don't know, creating the myth of race to begin with).

[spazmo]

Gabe makes a good point regarding the timing of this film vis-a-vis Kael's "race war" comments.

Shit was hitting the fan from Oakland to Omaha & from Philly to Roxbury in those days. Race riots destroyed entire neighborhoods back then and drove employment and educational opportunities even further out of reach. Huge swaths of real estate were blighted at flashpoint over the span of a weekend, the blink of an eye really.

The senseless executions of MLK and Bobby Kennedy capped a decade of wrenching grief and upheaval for blacks. True misery bore naked hostility on both sides of the nascant "culture war".

A movie like this, viewed in its historical context, must have seemed to Pauline and other critics as being not just exploitative, but obscenely reckless as well.

Once again, good thoughts from both you guys. The "Salo" video post you guys did is still a favorite of mine. (Just a little hint for next time!)

[nikki]

speaking of racism, has anyone read this article. i'm disgusted by the amount of ignorant, racist comments against black people.

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball/blog/the_dagger/post/Please-note-that-Chase-Budinger-s-face-is-not-a-?urn=ncaab,136602

[mighty undies]

I'm dying to see a review of you of 'The Spirit'.
It might be one of those that no one gets. It's being trashed everywhere.

[Jules]

Rich,

I appreciate it when you say "to use slavery as a tool of cinematic arousal is ultimately disrespectful. No matter what you may learn along the way, Goodbye Uncle Tom's primary target is your gut."

I also appreciate your taboos: child abuse, animal abuse, holocaust, etc.

I am genuinely curious (and not coming from a place of defensiveness--because these are questions about cinema I've had to deal with myself)does this sentiment extend to prolonged, exploitive gut-wrenching depictions of rape? Torture porn-ish horror films?

[Jackie]

Your movie discussions are seriously the best. Please keep them coming.

[Riley]

I've never seen this film (documentary?) before, but now I'm curious. As for this:

"to use slavery as a tool of cinematic arousal is ultimately disrespectful. No matter what you may learn along the way, Goodbye Uncle Tom's primary target is your gut."

I agree to an extent.

When I was in 9th grade, our history teachers had us watch movies about slavery and the Holocaust - and they were pretty graphic and, I guess, "sensational." (We had to bring parent-signed permission slips to watch). Up to that point, most of us only knew about slavery from a pretty detached, academic standpoint - meaning, we knew facts, dates, names, etc, but not much else.

It was kind of strange, afterwards, to see an entire classroom of 15-year-olds crying when the lights came back on.

I'm not saying that it changed any of our then-present thought on "race", or that we even considered racism in the context of the filmmaking - or our watching the film - but it did educate, in a way.

Note: I'm still in high school, and history is not my best subject (I'm a math girl), so I could definitely be wrong on all the points I made.

Now that I know about some of the most horrific aspects of slavery in greater detail, I probably wouldn't watch any more films that brutally expose those acts... because I don't think I would get any more out of it. (I don't know if that makes sense at all?)

Kind of why I didn't watch The Passion when it came out. I'm not currently religious, but my parents have made me go to church since I was 3, and we learned all about Jesus' death, the stations of the cross, etc. I felt like the only thing I could get from watching The Passion was watching hours of torture that would (obviously) result in a cruel death. So I just didn't bother...

Anyway. Before I go, I had to say I love your blog... I mean, you discuss racism, homophobia, Christian fundamentalism, ANTM, music playlists, Fat Camp, Winston and Rudy, and more - with the sentiment and attention appropriate to each subject. Certainly not an easy thing to do... keep it up :)

[RF]

"There's nonchalant sexual harassment of women and sometimes children happening to animals?"

forcifully impregnating cows on 'rape racks' and sticking shock prods up animals' vaginas to make them move faster to their deaths i think qualifies.

and yes i have personally seen it. i live in amarillo, tx.

[typescript]

Terrible, but humans are not animals, and the quick jump (/threadjack) is a little disgusting in itself, in this context.

[RF]

uh, humans ARE indeed animals. mammals even. primates, in fact.

[N]

Are you retarded? Stop comparing what happened to PEOPLE to animals and go eat your tofu, damn.

[Dutty Bama]

I think the stranger fact is that slavery was imposed by humans (animals) who thought themselves superior to another group of humans (animals).

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[Shepherd]

Re: the first comment...

I was a vegetarian for 5 years. I also raised sheep for many years. I'm sympathetic to animal welfare (not animal rights, a concept which is utter nonsense) as well as experienced with the meat industry, and let me say that nothing irritates me more than people who compare animal suffering to human suffering.

I'm all for humane methods of getting meat. I believe in free-range meat and am willing to spend extra money on those products so that evil corporations like Smithfield and Perdue, who don't give two shits about giving the animals they breed and ultimately kill pleasant, healthy lives, can't fund more inhumane practices, but COME THE FUCK ON.

You cannot even begin to logically argue that stockyards and plantations/concentration camps are comparable.

Why don't you tell a Eli Wiesel and Anne Frank and Harriet Tubman that their lives amounted to nothing more than chickens' lives, and that the hell they went through was nothing more or less than than what happens to a steer going to slaughter?

Do you believe all the bullshit the psychopaths at PETA spew on you?

You are completely insane, RF.

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