It was the great playwright August Wilson, as I recall, who pointed out that in the movie Crossroads, it was a white teenager whose life experience was that of a privileged white boy. Julliard Student (is there any other music school, ever, in Hollywood products?) who, in the movie, was assigned the task of outshining the old Willie Brown, a great blues man with enormous life experience, to ransom the old man's soul from the devil's bargain he'd had to make to gain his virtuosity. Let's just say that the movie is more of a revealing personality profile of a certain kind of white person's view of black artists than it is anything about the blues. White teen from an elite school, who never HAD TO make a deal with the devil, outdoes old black man who had to, the old man's vast life experience and skill were presented as inferior to the teenage conservatory student's.
I don't think I have any more to add to it than what Wilson said except that his analysis means entirely more than the opinion of the white film critics who loved the thing. I have to admit I hadn't noticed that as I saw it on TV. I was too busy being annoyed by what it presented about the musical world. As I recall, I was annoyed that the white kid got top billing.
Everybody knows that movie was a piece of shit. If your straw man was any more fully stuffed, he'd go to the Emerald City and ask the wizard for a brain.
ReplyDeleteActually, the head-cutting duel was between a white kid from Julliard and another white guy. The latter having sold his soul, and the former with his soul on the line. The white kid is also mocked and belittled throughout the movie by the older bluesman for his pretensions, at one point asking him why he's playing a beat-up acoustic that he accuses him of having just because of how it looks, and when the kid says, "I know I'm not Robert Johnson." the bluesman replies with, "NO you are NOT."
ReplyDeleteNot a great movie. I caught it on HBO once. I listened to the music.
I was only recounting my memory of what August Wilson pointed out about it. You have to wonder how the devil could pass out musical skills to white guys that he couldn't, himself possess, though what you point out only heightens the problems of the movie. To say the least, it's a highly problematic story.
DeleteI didn't like the movie, at all. I think it suffered from what Aaron Copland pointed out about literary men, when writing about music, at best, would only get half of it right. And then there was the Julliard fetish...
The music was by the great Ry Cooder. Who Sparky probably thinks is shit.
DeleteLike the Harvard Law School fetish. ..
DeleteWe learn to hate that one young in the Boston states.
DeleteWow -- what really pisses you off about that universally reviled movie is the fact that the white boy went to Juilliard?
ReplyDeleteMan, talk about unintentionally revealing...:-)