Black Man Talk: Lee Daniels' The Butler

(The following is a Google Chat conversation between Big Media Vandalism founder Steven Boone and Big Media Vandalism's proprietor Odie Henderson. It is the latest in the Black Man Talk series. Other installments include American Gangsters, Tyler Perry, Django Unchained, and 42.)

ODIE

Today's topic is Lee Daniels' The Butler, so named because Warner Bros. didn't want to relinquish their ownership of the film's original title, The Butler. Since this is your first Lee Daniels movie, let me provide the Cliffs notes version of what his films are all about.

This man is a freak.

I mean that in the most positive of ways. Let me give you an example: In Shadowboxer, Stephen Dorff is screwing some woman. Outside his door, people are making way too much noise. So Dorff comes barging out of the room, full frontal and wearing a condom, and starts shooting people. Also in this film, my doppelganger Cuba Gooding Jr. is a hit man getting his freak on with his stepmother, Helen Mirren.

BOONE

I love Shadowboxer already

ODIE

That in a nutshell, is Lee Daniels' style. He managed to put interracial, May-December quasi-incestuous screwing in a film with full frontal male nudity and gunfire.

BOONE

I repeat, on that summation alone, I LOVE SHADOWBOXER AND LEE DANIELS ALREADY.

ODIE

Wait! There’s more! In Precious, he has Mo'Nique playing with herself and throwing TV's. In The Paperboy, Nicole Kidman gives John Cusack an orgasm from across the room AND she pisses on Zac Efron. I haven't even gotten to the hog-tying, rape and gay Matthew McConaughey character.

So of course Daniels was the perfect guy to direct a PG-13 rated pseudo-Noble Negro movie!

BOONE

I'm over here oohing and aahing like Boomerang’s Nasty Nelson.

ODIE

The MPAA probably told Daniels what Marcus told Nasty Nelson in Boomerang: "I like the orange and I like the ice cream. You gotta get rid of the cherries, and lose the banana."

BOONE

Exaaactly. Listen: Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitars when he wasn't playing them with his teeth. He humped the air as he played Foxy Lady. We need a black filmmaker like that, not just skilled professionals. We need an uncaged freakazoid or two.

ODIE

Lee Daniels is our man. The last thing he's about is presenting bland racial interactions.

BOONE

Maybe the more precise Daniels collaboration would be with Nasty Nelson's onscreen muse, Grace Jones.

POOSEY!!

ODIE

If Lee Daniels made a movie with Grace Jones, they’d need to make a rating after NC-17.

BOONE

Which begs the question: How did they let this crazy man anywhere near the White House for a film the whole family can enjoy?

ODIE

I've read interviews with Daniels, where he said he was being driven crazy by the constraints of the rating. Remember that old In Living Color skit with David Alan Grier as Luther Campbell from 2 Live Crew trying to make a clean album? That's how I imagine Daniels shot this film.

"Oprah, pull ya titty out! Oh wait, that's R. SHIT! Just pull out the top of ya titty!"

BOONE

I am going to be first in line (at a Times Square adult video store) for the Director's Cut. Hopefully in 3-D.

ODIE

They'll have it on bootleg DVD in front of the Beacon Theater.

Daniels may have wrestled with the PG-13, but he pops up in the corners of the screen every so often to yell out "FREAKY DEAKY!" like Leon Spinks.

BOONE

I just read an interview with Ava DuVernay and Ryan Coogler where Ava complained that they, as black directors, rarely get asked questions about their technique, just the content of their work. It seems like there's a similar general blind spot happening with Daniels. This film has a lot of style and control, beyond the freakazoidality* and negritude.

*Kids, look that one up!

ODIE

So let’s talk technique. The first shot of the movie is the huge White House room where Whitaker is sitting. It’s almost a parody of the “by the numbers” opening for a message picture. Then Daniels immediately thrusts us into the harsh world of Cecil's plantation-set youth. It's as if he had to wash the gloss off with dirty reality. Throughout the film, he goes back and forth like that, as if he's saying "here's what you want to see" then flipping it to  "here's what you need to see."

BOONE

Yes!  It punched the audience right in the stomach! I heard people gasp at the plantation scene.

ODIE

He really screws with audience expectation there. When the plantation owner, who has just finished raping Mariah Carey, points his gun on her husband, Daniels waits a few beats. The audience is lulled into thinking it's just a threat. But then he tightens the frame just before the gunshot…

BOONE

And the father (David Banner) was so hesitant and docile. You wouldn't expect him to get blown away like that, just as you wouldn't expect an unarmed teenager with a bag of Skittles to get taken out.

ODIE

I immediately thought of ?uestlove's article about how he wasn't worth shit. Banner looked big enough to jump down, turn around and pick multiple bales of cotton, yet his "boss" just shoots him, as if to say "Plenty more niggers where that came from!"

Vanessa Redgrave's reaction to this would be comical if it weren't so damn sad. She tells young Cecil "you're gonna be in the house now. I'll teach you how to be a house nigger." Never mind that the kid's just seen his father get his brains blown out. Daniels frames the scene as a Great White Father moment, but with Vanessa Redgrave instead of a man. No doubt, one of Daniels' fascinations is with depictions of racial power in the compositions of his shots.

BOONE

Yeah, I was mentally cataloging various scenes as still frames as the movie went along. There are some that tell the whole story in one composition. He also boldly puts, in vibrant, high definition color, scenes we're used to seeing in very sketchy, grainy black and white: Lynchings, racist mobs attacking freedom riders, the FBI and police assaults on the Black Panthers. Not that we haven't seen these things re-enacted in full color before, but there's something really garish and disturbing about the way Daniels has them photographed here, somewhat similar to the extreme closeups of a slave being picked apart by dogs in Django Unchained.

ODIE

The cinematography is another character here. In all the scenes involving the Presidents and the rituals of serving them, the screen is lit up like Christmas. It's TOO bright.

But the scenes where Black folks convene, whether it's in the underbelly of the White House where they prepare, or at Cecil's house--those scenes are shot in an almost noirish way at times. For example, I could smell the gin, cigarette smoke and leftover collards whiffing through Cecil's house when Terrence Howard tries to seduce Oprah.

BOONE

YES!

ODIE

The only time a president is shown in a darker setting is Nixon, which was a funny visual joke. Cusack almost looks like the Phantom of the Fucking Opera coming out of the shadows.

BOONE

I find Daniels' comic book universe a lot richer, deeper and truer than Christopher Nolan's.

ODIE

Daniels is definitely the Joker in his universe, or at least the Two-Face Tim Burton promised us when he cast Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent.

BOONE

Because it's all about "two faces"--and don't we know a thing or two about that? It's even spoken of at some point, by whom I forget. The face you wear when serving the dominant group, and the one you wear at home. Some will argue that we all must modify our behavior in a professional setting, but that's something different from doing that while black.

ODIE

Exactly. Cuba Gooding Jr. makes that comment about having a face for the White man and one for the Black folks. In the world of The Butler, the Black faces are like that Billy Joel line from The Stranger. "We take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone." Not because we want to, but because, as Redgrave (and Ralph Ellison) put it, we were supposed to be invisible in "proper company."

Gooding’s Carter, by the way, is Lee Daniels' onscreen stand-in. I'm so proud my doppelganger gives a great, randy performance here.

BOONE

Cuba is a genius. He has made about a dozen shitty movies at this point and he's brilliant in every one of them that I've seen. I have witnessed him leaving an entire room full of unsuspecting viewers in stitches just by the way he uttered "vagina" in Rat Race.

ODIE

Speaking of vagina: Cuba tells the old Redd Foxx joke about the woman with the huge punany! As I said in my review, he’s the film's Black id. The PG-13 keeps censoring him, but you can read his lips. He blew up our audience when he addresses Whitaker at the White House table the way I'm sure he wanted to address all those White folks he served:

"You Black motherfu--" [FORCED PG-13 CUT AWAY]

We should talk about that White House dinner scene, where the Reagans invite Cecil and his wife Gloria (Oprah) to sit at the same table Cecil has set for 8 other Presidents. In a regular film would have been the film's "We Shall Overcome" moment. But that's not what Daniels intends. Instead, both in editing and tone, it's a mini-collision of both Cecil's worlds.

BOONE

That White House dinner scene resonated so much. Cecil was suddenly face to face with what a farce the whole setup was, and the empty, ceremonial race relations of the Reagan era, a la Nancy and Mr T on Diff’rent Strokes.

[Ed.: She should have been talking to Willis and Kimberly.]

This isn't Glory, where the ultimate honor is being given the privilege to serve in the guise of "proving" yourself.

ODIE

Did you notice how differently Daniels shoots each President? He goes from a straight on, almost 50's portrayal of Robin Williams' Eisenhower to an ass-shaking, long shot of a cameo by Jane Fonda as Mommy Reagan.

(Casting Fonda as Nancy Reagan is like casting Wesley Snipes as David Duke--it's designed to piss off the right people.)

Marsden's Kennedy (and Jackie O, post assassination) are shot with the reverential glances of the old Black Grandmother who has JFK, MLK and Black Jesus on her mantle.

BOONE

JFK is the equivalent of Benita Buttrell’s Ms. Jenkins to a certain segment of the older black population. “Can't nobody say nuthin’ bad about JFK!!”

ODIE

Exactly. There's emotional weight in the scene where Cecil observes Jackie O, still in blood soaked dress, weeping openly. If I remember correctly, it's an overhead shot of her bloodied skirt as the dialogue makes a thinly veiled reference to Emmitt Till: "She kept the dress on because she wanted the world to see what they did to her husband."

It's kind of funny that LBJ gets no credit for passing the actual laws. Ain't no Black folks got a picture of LBJ on their walls, not even in Texas.

BOONE

Well, to play mindreader to an entire race, I think black people sensed that Johnson was carrying out policy as a pragmatist whereas Jack and Bobby appeared to have true passion for civil rights. At the very least, they LOOKED more like people who could be in genuine sympathy with negroes, whereas Johnson looked like the kind of jowly redneck who would shout "nigger" at his staff while sitting on the toilet.

ODIE

Of Liev Schrieber’s constipated LBJ, Cuba says "When did he start calling us Negroes? That nigga says nigger more than I say nigga!"

BOONE

It's the killin’-est line in the whole movie! Like falling through the nigga looking glass.

ODIE

I wonder if, in different hands, we would have had a window into Cecil's home life and the camaraderie he has with other Black folks. Daniels and writer Danny Strong use Cecil's family as a microcosm for the times that are a-changing, but they also use these scenes to flesh out the characters. Without these scenes, Whitaker's Cecil would be more like Peter Sellers' Chance in Being There, that is, a blank slate for the audience to impress their own ideas.

Oh, fuck that shit! LET'S TALK ABOUT OPRAH!

"Look under my seat! It's another OSSSSS-CUUUUUR nomination!!"

BOONE

Hahaha! Oprah is so sexy and electric in this movie, as I always expected she could be. It's just a crime that she hasn't done more movies. Daniels knows how to put her to work in a scene.

ODIE

If Cuba is this film’s Black id, Oprah is its strong Black backbone.

BOONE

Absolutely. And it just points out how tragic Whitaker's character truly is, since he's clearly not weak or incompetent. He's suffering from lifelong PTSD, and it’s clear that Oprah’s Gloria understands that. She's deeply frustrated but, in the end, she is devoted to him.

ODIE

Whitaker, who I should mention is excellent, has to be so internal. It's a pleasure to see that he has a wife to back him up, to elevate her man when life is whipping his ass. It's in stark contrast to the Black Panther chick with the fucked up Angela Davis Afro who uses Cecil's son as a stepping stone. Oprah's confrontation with that girl is the “Tyler Perry jump up and cheer” takedown moment of 2013.

BOONE

Just like Oprah’s TV show, this film traffics in such raw, grand emotion and sentiment that it can be easy to OD on it. It's such an emotionally charged subject that I already have people attacking my generally positive three star review of the film essentially for not being positive--or reverential--enough. It's but one of the backlashes a film this powerful (and its commentators) will face.

ODIE

In your review, you point out how Daniels uses David Oyelowo's character to mend that riff between the older and the younger generation of Blacks. I also mention his character, Louis, in my review, because he didn't really exist and some reviewers have pounced on this "dishonesty." Yet Louis is important to the film, however clunky his insertion is.

He's the militant while Cecil is the MLK follower. In the documentary, The Black Power Mixtape, we see that distinction between Stokely Carmichael and his mother. In her time, if she made one false move, she was dead. Her generation was more in tune with Dr. King's nonviolence methodology. The same fate of "wrong move, you die" is faced by the younger generation, but they also feel more compelled to fight back. That had not been beaten out of them yet.

I also love how somebody (I think it's Terrence Howard's wife) says "I love me some Dr. King, his militant ass!” MILITANT! That's what ?uestlove calls Dr. King in Black Power Mixtape--and Dr. King WAS back then.

BOONE

Exactly. King's antiwar, anti-American Imperialism, anti-racism speech from April, 1967, a year to the day before his death, was as radical as it got. He was meeting the late Malcolm X halfway. He caught hell from the mainstream press for it. It was essentially his "ballot or the bullet" speech and could be the spiritual script of this movie. What the movie arrives at is that, fundamentally, it’s about resistance.

The way David and Cecil reconciled just physically shook me. It's a tension in the black community that still isn't reconciled and now has so many layers of new troubles and dysfunction on top of it since the Reagan Era.

ODIE

Louis had become a Senator by this time. So now he's dealing with the White House on a more level playing field than Cecil.

BOONE

Which resonated so much for me as an 80's kid who saw a lot of veterans from Civil Rights and Black Power move into politics.

ODIE

Louis also figures in the film's best montage, superbly edited by Joe Klotz. The scene where Cecil sets the table while Louis and his fellow Fisk University students are trained for the sit-in is a great visual juxtaposition. Neither Black person is allowed to sit at the table, and in both cases, it's preferred that they remain invisible.

BOONE

 Yes.

ODIE

The White person who shows the most empathy in the ENTIRE picture is the bespectacled young man who is very uncomfortable calling Louis' girlfriend nigger during the sit-in training.

BOONE

YES.

ODIE

He says "I'm very uncomfortable with that," and it felt so genuine. I felt sorry for the guy!

BOONE

I've never seen a re-enactment of young civil rights activists done so naturally, without the actors being too busy trying to convince us that they are upright, model, Poitieresque good kids. In such scenes I usually feel the filmmakers being careful to make the (white) audience comfortable with the fact that the kids aren't simply human but GOOD and CLEAN. Here, Daniels just gets them to be real people reacting to real and anticipated terrorism. The post-Django Unchained movies on American race make it plain: this was terrorism.

ODIE

The violence perpetrated on these kids is terrifying. Daniels shows a dark chocolate skinned girl getting hit in the face with the whitest vanilla shake I have ever seen. It's done with such force that I jumped. It splatters so obscenely that it looked like a violation of epic proportion. I thought "ooh, the nasty version of  Lee Daniels directed that moment!"

BOONE

Your review and your comments here get at how Daniels uses light, shadow and color values to push past our jadedness at four decades of tidy, solemn Black History Month Civil Rights Moments on TV. He might have had an easier job of it if he'd just shot in black and white, but he went the other way, putting these images we've seen so many times in high definition stereo.

ODIE

Through the brothers Charlie and Louis, The Butler also shows what options there were for Black men in the 60's. One could work either in a blue collar capacity (as Howard does), get involved in the movement as Louis does, be a servant as Cecil does, or go to Vietnam. We know of Charlie's fate as soon as he tells Louis his intentions. But what else could he have done? My Pops went to Vietnam, and when he came back, he eventually became an auto worker.

I liked the dynamic between Louis and Charlie--their brotherly banter is great and far too underrepresented in Black movies.

Cuba’s Uncle Carter also gets involved in the brotherly dynamic, as the guy one could turn to in "Don't tell my parents" situations. "Y'all better GIMME BACK MY MONEY!" he says after bailing Louis out of jail.

"Quotes about money are my stock in trade, baby!"

BOONE

That one scene of Charlie and Louis chatting at the jail  is such a rare thing. The spontaneity, the humor, the effortless way they express their loving bond. It seems so standard as I write it down, but we are still starving for this kind of thing onscreen.

ODIE

I have three brothers, and it sounded like the shit we popped growing up. "What's with all the leather, Louise?" Charlie asks Louis. Isn't it crazy that we're talking about minor dialogue in this fashion? It shows just how thirsty we are for REAL communication onscreen.

BOONE

We're in a rich time, though. The Ava DuVernays and Ryan Cooglers are seizing the moment with the new technologies and distribution platforms. They are making movies with these small gestures and pleasures, which are really everything we need. The audience at large needs to remember that people are interesting, but the black audience in particular needs to see it in the worst way.

ODIE

I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with DuVernay in Poland at the 2013 Off Plus Camera Film Festival.

(l. to r.: Odie, Małgorzata Radkiewicz, Ava DuVernay, Michał Oleszczyk)

Her film, Middle of Nowhere, was screened in competition, and I loved how it tells its story visually. Her cinematographer on that is a brother named Bradford Young. He also shot Pariah and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Like the masters Gordon Willis and John A. Alonzo, he knows how to make Black skin GLOW. Watch out for this dude. He's gonna be big.

And jumping back to the dialogue: The Butler has some prime nuggets of Blackness! They sound improvised too. Oprah saying "Get yo' YELLOW ASS offa mah couch and go home!" to Terrence Howard almost gave me a stroke.

BOONE

That is probably second only to Cuba’s "That nigga says nigga..."

ODIE

Let's close this out with a few words on casting. I called the Presidential celebrities stunt casting, but in actuality, I thought this was Daniels' most subversive stroke of genius. It's as if he's saying, to these Negroes in my film, these high-power White folks could be anybody--aliens from Mars or some shit. Who cares who plays whom, so long as it's somebody you immediately identify as famous. At the end of the day, Cecil and company see just another White person giving orders and/or treating them like shit. "Y'all all look the same."

BOONE

Yeah, and I also think of Dave Chappelle's super-fake beards and wigs when he does famous characters. And his kabuki-makeup white newscaster. Daniels doesn't go that far, but there's a similar sense of play. He might also be giving back a little taste of the ridiculous casting for famous black people in Ho'wood movies, like light skinned brothers playing Miles Davis or some such.

ODIE

I never thought of that, but it makes perfect sense. Because I just saw a movie where Terrence Howard played Nelson Mandela. I kept looking at him cross-eyed.

 Because Nelson Mandela is not high yella.

BOONE

Hahahaa

ODIE

(watching movie) "Did he get bleached while in jail?"

BOONE

Those Apartheid motherfuckers had some cruel tortures. Took ten years to get him back ta his original color.

ODIE

I mean, Mandela has been played by Morgan Freeman, Danny Glover, Sidney Poitier…and Terrence Howard. I could hear the Sesame Street song going "One of these things is not like the other..."

So I think you're onto something. Maybe this is Daniels' way of giving back to the community that thinks Nina Simone was Zoe Saldana's complexion. It would explain why Rickman's Ronnie looked like Boris Karloff's Frankenstein.

BOONE

When I took my glasses off he looked like the Spitting Image Puppets version of Reagan.

ODIE

What was that puppet show from the 80's? DC Follies? That's what Rickman looked like.

OK, closing thoughts! You first!

BOONE

This was my first Lee Daniels film, and it came preceded by a trainload of reputation. Daniels was supposed to be either so bad he's good or so brilliant his garish style is misunderstood as unintentional. The Butler turned out to be simply a very good and rich historical melodrama made for the general audience by, as you observed so well, a lusty freakazoid who is nevertheless in control. I dig that. Not to fall into the habit of validating a black auteur by comparing him to a Euro legend, but didn't that describe Luis Bunuel? An art filmmaker who knew how to play in the commercial arena, flashing a little nylon-stockinged leg occasionally to show us he's still untamed. As much as great civil rights strides, we need that. We need minority artists who are just as free play in the mainstream film arena as they tend to be in other arts. Miles and Michael and Jimi and Isaac and Stevie in popular music always pointed up the need for similar artists in popular cinema. Lee Daniels’ The Butler is no masterpiece, but it is clearly the work of an artist, not merely a Hollywood hustler. An artist who is thinking long thoughts about the history, legacy and destiny of his people and his country. Cool!

ODIE

Absolutely. When our fellow Ebert Contributor Michał went to see Lee Daniels' The Butler, he said it was preceded by about 12 trailers, all of which were for Black themed movies. I can only hope that not all 12 of them were for variants of Soul Plane 9 (the Black version of District 9). Just hearing the sheer number of Black movies, not to mention how much I enjoyed the ones I've seen this year, made me smile. We can only hope that these adventures in cinematic Negritude are undertaken by directors with strong, independent visions. And yes, they can be freaky, because regardless of what the snide society of film critics say, we need more Lee Danielses out there. Blacks and Hispanics and gays and women who are beholden to their passions, perversions and fears, and are willing to exorcise them onscreen for our edification and pleasure. Lee Daniels' The Butler will play in schools for years to come, and I just hope that none of those kids' parents rent any of his other movies thinking they have the same kind of educational value as The Butler. Unless these kids are as perverted as we were growing up, the poor bastards will probably be traumatized.

Until next time! We outta here.