“Selma” Vs. “Selma”
By Sam Tanenhaus
Even
if you have an infallible memory for film, you won’t recall the moment
in Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” when President Lyndon Johnson suggests a
compromise to Martin Luther King, Jr., who has been leading protesters
in their demand for voting rights but encountering violent resistance.
“What I’m proposing is this,” L.B.J. says. “I announce a special
commission to investigate electoral abuses in the South, and you respond
by declaring the Selma campaign a major victory—which is exactly what
it would be!—and announce its conclusion.”
You
won’t remember this scene because it didn’t make it into the film. It
was included, however, in the original screenplay by Paul Webb, which
was written nine years ago and was coveted by several major directors—including Spike Lee and Michael Mann—before it found its way to DuVernay, who then reworked it heavily.A rewritten screenplay isn’t news. Film is a collaborative art, and filmmakers with strong visions often reshape the material they’re given. But in the case of “Selma,” the changes matter, because DuVernay’s depiction of L.B.J. and his relationship with King has become a source of controversy, with figures like Joseph Califano, a former policy adviser to L.B.J., on one side, and Gay Talese on the other. DuVernay, for her part, has said that Webb’s original screenplay needed extensive reworking, because it was a “traditional bio-pic” that adhered to antiquated and patronizing ideas about history and the civil-rights movement. “If, in 2014, we’re still making ‘white savior movies’ then it’s just lazy and unfortunate,” DuVernay told the Boston Globe. “We’ve grown up as a country and cinema should be able to reflect what’s true. And what’s true is that black people are the center of their own lives and should tell their own stories from their own perspectives.”
Many of DuVernay’s changes, especially to scenes set in the Deep South, enrich and complicate the drama. As in recent civil-rights histories like Todd Purdum’s “An Idea Whose Time Has Come” and Clay Risen’s “The Bill of the Century,” DuVernay shows how sweeping historical change is often the result of small acts of bravery and defiance performed in quiet, even hidden, corners of our shared national life.
But it is also true that several key scenes in “Selma” do take place in the Oval Office and revolve around the Johnson-King relationship. Webb’s script was “much more slanted to Johnson,” DuVernay has said, and so she tried to right the balance. One way she has done this is through her use of a third central player, J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director who seems more intent on undermining King than on protecting the protesters being menaced by Southern police. In Webb’s script, Johnson, though forced to rely on Hoover’s monitoring of events in Selma, brushes aside Hoover’s well-documented fixation on King’s private life. (He explains to an aide that he can’t fire Hoover because most Americans “think J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. is all that stands between them and Satan. For now I need him inside the tent pissing out, not outside pissing in.”) At one point, Hoover calls King a “political and moral degenerate.” In Webb’s original screenplay, it leads to this exchange:
L.B.J.: What I need to know right now, J. Edgar, is this: Is King about to be killed?The script notes that the ensuing silence between Johnson and his aides is “heavy with irony.” In DuVernay’s film, L.B.J. also swats down Hoover’s attacks on King, but he senses an opening, too. “What I need to know right is what King is going to do,” L.B.J. says, implying that he wants King, not King’s enemies, placed under surveillance.
HOOVER: I have no information to indicate a current threat.
L.B.J.: Good. I sleep a lot easier knowing the F.B.I. is looking out for that man’s life.
“We can go with the wife,” Hoover says. “We know there’s tension in the home already; we can weaken the dynamic, dismantle the family.” L.B.J., by his silence, tacitly approves the plan. Later, after a particularly heated exchange with King, L.B.J. tells an aide, “Get me J. Edgar Hoover,” and in the next scene King and his wife, Coretta, listen to an audiotape that includes a recording of King in bed with another woman.
It is well known that the F.B.I. sent such a tape to King’s home. “Selma” would have us believe that Lyndon Johnson was to blame. To some, this is defamatory. To DuVernay, it’s necessary revisionism. “What’s important for me, as a student of this time in history, is to not deify what the President did,” she told Rolling Stone. “Johnson has been hailed as a hero of that time, and he was, but we’re talking about a reluctant hero. He was cajoled and pushed, he was protective of a legacy.”
But what history has DuVernay studied? Apparently not “At Canaan’s Edge,” the third volume of Taylor Branch’s monumental biography of King, “Parting the Waters,” with its account of the “historic collaboration” between King and Johnson. And not Robert Dallek’s biography of Johnson, which notes that L.B.J., far from lagging behind on voting rights, had called for their reform in a State of the Union address in January, 1965, at the time the Selma protests were being organized. In this same period, L.B.J. also instructed his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, to draw up legislation “that would enforce constitutional guarantees to vote,” Dallek writes.
DuVernay may have in mind a different history—not of civil rights but of American cinema. In particular, she may be thinking about the long history of movies about race, which includes “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), “Mississippi Burning” (1988), “Glory” (1989), and even “42” (2012). All emphasize the heroic role of whites in racial uplift—the lawyer who defends the unjustly accused black man, the Boston colonel who leads a black regiment in the Civil War, the white baseball executive who gives a Major League job to Jackie Robinson. (Amy Davidson noted last week how “Selma” spares us the familiar scene in which blacks pour “loving gratitude on sympathetic white Americans who are willing to recognize their rights.”)
But DuVernay’s conception of the L.B.J.-King pairing suggests another cinematic lineage. It includes “The Defiant Ones” (1958), in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis play chain-gang members who are handcuffed together and who work out their differences in a doomed escape to freedom, and “In the Heat of the Night” (1967), with Poitier as a big-city detective who helps a redneck sheriff (Rod Steiger) solve a local murder and become less blinkered by bigotry. Both are variations on the “buddy film” and are intended for white audiences, who come out of the theatre feeling better about themselves. Racial conflict becomes a vehicle for the exorcism of white guilt. The white character is the hero in the classical sense—the person we identify with—while the black figure plays the secondary role of moral teacher or guide, leading his hard-hearted or close-minded partner out of the wilderness of prejudice. Poitier specialized in these thankless parts, playing it yet a third time in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
And this is where “Selma” the film is most bewildering. The L.B.J.-King relationship offers an opportunity to subvert the “white savior” genre, since the two principals really were equals—each a master strategist, each a recognized leader who commanded the loyalty of millions. Together they dominated the political stage in 1965. In February, as the Selma protests were getting underway, Senator Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina segregationist, complained that King had “more access to the White House than just about anyone in this country.”
Webb’s screenplay captures this collaborative aspect in its complexity. His L.B.J. and M.L.K. circle each other warily, at once antagonists and allies, competitors and comrades. In an exchange inspired, perhaps, by a phone conversation the two had in January, 1965, in which King said that having “a Negro in the Cabinet” would send a powerful message “to the Negro and to the nation,” Webb’s Johnson tries to seduce King with an unspecified job in his Administration, one that would enable him to “use your prestige and influence to the full . . . power. You done your time on the streets, Martin!” When King turns him down, L.B.J., exasperated but also admiring, tells an aide, in language that betrays Webb’s not always perfect ear for Texas idioms, “I have totally underestimated him . . .. Under that saintly exterior is a shit-kickin’ bare-knuckle prizefighter!”
That scene doesn’t appear in the film, needless to say. DuVernay does grant L.B.J. one inspiring moment. It comes near the end, when the President makes his famous televised speech to Congress, declaring that the time has come for a voting-rights law. We hear him say, as he did in real life, “We shall overcome.” DuVernay has said that L.B.J. is redeemed for the audience in this instant. “People cheer in the theatre for L.B.J. at the end of it,” she pointed out to Jon Stewart.
Of course they do, because DuVernay has reverted to the old formula. L.B.J., like so many before him, has fulfilled the time-honored role of the white man in American race movies—he has at last seen the light. The trouble with “Selma” is not that it violates the facts of American history but that it perpetuates clichés of cinematic history.
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