Nate Parker was a star on the rise back in 2016. Although the country hadn’t yet felt the impact of the Me Too movement or how the movement devolved into something else entirely. Parker’s film, Birth of a Nation, had been celebrated at Sundance and Fox Searchlight paid $20 million for distribution rights. Then a painful incident from his past, for which he had been acquitted in a court of law, erupted again in the court of social media outrage. We won’t go into those details here. But those of us who remember it vividly know that even bringing it up lights a fire that can’t be put out. Instead, I’d rather talk about his new movie.
The reason this may still be a hot button issue is that too many people feel afraid of becoming a target. It isn’t even that that many people are on board with unpersoning someone as talented as Nate Parker. Rather, it’s general fear of being exposed, ejected, targeted. We have cultivated a climate of fear and paranoia on the left such that most of us are not really up for every opinion we have becoming grist for a huge fight or a twitter dunking fest. So most people just say silent. Me, I’m not one of those people. Partly because I got online in 1994 so I’ve seen how much things have changed. I know that much of the damage is due to the dehumanization factory that the internet has become at the hands of social media – what it does to the brain, how people respond when provoked. And partly because, to quote Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, “I’m too old and I’m too tired” to tiptoe around when it comes to suppressing art to punish people for the sins of their past. So it’s your choice to read or not, to watch or not, to speak out or not. But if you’re interested in hearing about one of the best films of the year, you’ve found the right page.
American Skin, written and directed by Nate Parker, is not only one of the best films of the year, one of the most emotionally moving, it’s also the one film I wish every American would watch after the year we just lived through. When I asked Nate in a press junket whether he’s surprised that he made a film about 2020 in 2019 without having any idea what was coming next he answered me, simply, “Because we live with this every day. We live with George Floyd every day. We live with the events at the Capitol every day. That IS our every day.”
But if you expect American Skin to be a film that depicts all cops as bad and all targets for arrest as “good,” you’d be wrong. This is a film about compassion, and understanding the different points of view of all of those involved. It’s about all the clashing complexities that often lead to the shooting of unarmed black men. Mostly it’s about explaining to those who do not understand why so many people took to the streets in 2020 to protest systemic racism. While many do understand it, a good many do not, on the left and the right. The way to explain it to them is contained in this work, not in cancel culture expulsions.
In the film, Nate plays a father who is picking up his son one night in a wealthy white neighborhood in his “beater” car. It’s a perfectly fine car but in that neighborhood it stands out. His son tries to help him by opening the glove box to get the registration papers, things escalate, and he is shot and killed.
After living with this grief, Parker’s character can’t take it anymore. He arms himself and takes a police station hostage. Once inside, however, he holds a mock trial for the cop who shot his son. It brings up so many things at once, just that image alone. You can imagine what most people would think and want to do to anyone who held a police station hostage, let alone a black person. But Parker doesn’t linger on that part of it. What he wants us to do is listen. He wants each character to be brought to their breaking point so they will be as honest as possible about their motives.
Every time an argument would occur to me about the situation onscreen, the conflicted feelings would shift in my head — how police officers are under so much pressure to keep people safe, why there is so much black on black crime, why so many black men are arrested and put in prison. It’s all covered by two sides of a debate in such a way that I think it would cause anyone to challenge their own thinking all the way around.
Parker is such a talented storyteller – and as an actor himself he gives his fellow actors much room to explore their roles from the biggest parts to the smallest. It is apparent that everyone involved in the production is there because either they felt committed to the story, or because it is an important message for right now, or they know Nate and they want to work with him.
Parker told me that the idea for the film came when his nephew asked him for advice about how to survive a confrontation with a cop. As he told his nephew what he needed to do, it occurred to him that he needed to deliver a much bigger, broader message to maybe help people approach the subject in a way that is productive.
Two of the film’s stars, Omari Hardwick and Theo Rossi, said that art can do what politics can’t. In politics it turns into an immediate argument where people take sides, become defensive and nothing gets done (as it did with “defund the police,” for instance). But art can open a dialogue differently. That nostalgic idea that you can go see a movie and walk out of it having a conversation with a companion, without having to take a side and start screaming at each other.
Even though one can imagine how the story plays out, great movies take you there in ways you don’t expect. Here we get to know the family’s grief in losing their son whom they adored, whose future looked so bright but could not escape his “American skin” regardless. One of the film’s most powerful scenes is the father confronting the cop on why he targeted them in the first place. They weren’t even speeding. Eventually, the pressure builds and he finally admits it’s his job to keep the neighborhood safe and he assumed because they were black they didn’t belong and if they didn’t belong they were up to no good. This recalls the shooting of Ahmaud Marquez Arbery who was shot while jogging through a rich white neighborhood. Hunted down and shot. It was one of the events that led to the Black Lives Matter protests this past year. Parker’s film takes us into that debate in a way that defensive whites can participate in and I know it will change minds.
I also know that Parker isn’t stopping here. His is a powerful voice and very much deserves to be at least let back into the room. Fear and panic drove so much of our culture in the past four years under Trump. We all thought we were living in one kind of reality, then another reality disrupted it. It is one of the most difficult periods of American history we’ve ever lived through. We’re almost all the way out of it. Whether we will still feel the need to purge and persecute people for things done in their past, casting them “good” or “bad” for life is another story. I hope so.
American Skin is one of the best films of the year, whether very many in the press will acknowledge that or not. Parker is not giving up on his dream deferred. He is fighting his way back. Sooner or later the dangerous and counterproductive levels of anxiety will cool down. Maybe after Trump leaves office for good, who knows. Or maybe things will have to get a lot worse before it gets better. Regardless, this film, the writing, the acting, the directing will hold its place in time and history.
I thought about two Springsteen songs while watching American Skin. One is the song American Skin, which is very much in keeping with the film’s theme.
And the other is The Land of Hope and Dreams, which has always been my own personal philosophy in life when I know I’m living it right — and I think it applies to the theme of Nate’s film:
This train carries saints and sinners
This train carries losers and winners
This train carries whores and gamblers
This train carries lost souls
I said, this train dreams will not be thwarted
This train faith will be rewarded
This train hear the steel wheels singin’
This train bells of freedom ringin’
This train carries saints and sinners
This train carries losers and winners
This train carries whores and gamblers
This train carries lost souls
I said, this train carries broken-hearted
This train thieves and sweet souls departed
This train carries fools and kings
This train, all aboard
I said, this train dreams will not be thwarted
This train faith will be rewarded
This train hear the steel wheels singin’
This train bells of freedom ringin’
Anyone who thinks that people are born “good” and making one mistake should ruin someone’s life is riding the wrong train. Anyone who thinks people who make mistakes no longer deserve to be seen and heard, can’t find work, express themselves, or show their face in public is on the wrong track. Anyone who believes any of that might feel a sense of moral justification, but they’re ultimately on a train to nowhere.
Instead, get a ticket to meet me in the land of hope and dreams. I’ll be waiting.