"Boycotting the buses in Montgomery. Segregation in Birmingham. Now? Voting in Selma. One struggle ends just to go right to the next and the next. If you think of it in that way, it's a hard road, but I don't think of it that way. I think of these efforts as one effort and that effort is for our life."
- Martin Luther King Jr, Selma (2014)
Over the past week and a half, we've seen horrific images on both our television screen and on the web, images that would resemble a third-world country ran under a dictatorship. In troubled times like these, it's easy to let ourselves fall into cynicism and feel that nothing has changed in our 50 year war for racial rights. In fact, the day before I watched this film, I was prepared to bear such a sentiment myself by the end of it.
Selma recounts the final years of Martin Luther King Jr. (the Oscar snubbed David Oyelowo) from 1964 up to 1968, but it's largely centered on the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by King. Despite criticisms for certain historical inaccuracies, including the vilification of president at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), the events recounted in the film only further strengthened my conviction that little has changed since the '60s, from the excessive force exhibited by the law enforcement officers during peaceful protests to "covert racism" dressed under subtlety and hypocrisy to corrupted politicians waging a domestic war on American citizens, caring more about how it makes them look than what it does to the people. Yes, 2020 doesn't leave much room for optimism.
But then I started to pull back my rage and reflect a little upon our current privileges, our privilege to vote and protest regardless of race, gender or even sexuality - or sit wherever we want in a damn bus for that matter. There's light in the tunnel Martin has opened for us, and there's light to be found in this tale of the great man as well (one of the few movies out there actually about MLK and his civil right movements that's not a documentary, whereas JFK had at least five movies about him and his assassination). But more importantly, the light I speak of comes in the form of retrospect, that today, in 2020, we've come further than ever to a universal agreement that to persecute anyone by the color of their skin is not only intolerable, but an utterly barbaric and antiquated concept that would only revert society back to uncivilized times. Police brutality hasn't changed much, but at least now bystanders are doing more than just standing by idly. Furthermore, racism is now being documented on an iPhone. It's not much, certainly not the ideal future people have fought for their children in the '60s when a black man could be murdered in the daylight on the street, but the hard road has indeed come far since the days of cotton fields.
And I think such an optimistic perspective towards the film and the progress we've made is indeed befitting for the simple man who had a dream of equal men (and women). Hell, even the writer (Paul Webb) wasn't afraid to inject some humor into an otherwise grim look of human atrocities. There's a very uplifting approach to its theme of racial equality, particularly in its portrayal of white Americans who also share the heartache of witnessing people beaten down for demanding human rights.
In retrospective contrast, it certainly has a more sanguine approach than the likes of Malcolm X, a figure whose biographical film I shall visit the following week (though in retrospect, I felt like I should've watched it before "Selma").