Origin (2023): A necessary film of ideas

I wasn't quite certain what to expect going into Origin, Ava DuVernay's latest. I knew it would be less of a typical narrative than an exploration of what divides us, but I wasn't prepared for the film's thesis (because I hadn't read Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: the Origin of Our Discontents, an oversight soon to be corrected). The film, however, is not a documentary based on a book, but a frequently stirring and moving interpretation of how Wilkerson came to write it and a masterful demonstration of how an idea-driven film can hold the content of those ideas and engage us with how an author comes upon those ideas layered into the day-to-day unfolding of her life.

This isn't the kind of movie that can be "spoiled" in the sense of ruining a plot twist or a surprise ending; what would spoil it, i think, would be to talk too much about the film and giving people the impression that they've experienced it because the idea that drives the film has been discussed. That said, the film can't be reviewed without doing so. So I'll just say that at the outset, please see this film even if you think I've told you everything you need to know. I won't, I can't, and you'll be better for the experience. Trust me on this.

DuVernay's solution in presenting Wilkerson's thesis that what has led to humanity's deepest division is not race - though that plays a significant part in some societies like ours - but caste. How she arrives at this is when talking about writing a piece for her old editor Amari Selvan (Blair Underwood, very much the like some of the editors I've known, when he says "no pressure", you suspect he means the opposite, but he's so charming and persuasive, you'd get to work...if you weren't Isabel Wilkerson) about the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.

Selvan maintains that race was the central driver in Trayvon's murder but Wilkerson demurs. She questions how that can be when it's a Black youth murdered by a Latino male who was purportedly defending a white neighborhood. Her counterargument is that race is not the only driver in attacks on Black folks. Selvan challenges her by saying she should write a piece about this and other questions that Isabel proffers. Mind you, she no longer writes on assignment and tells him as much (particularly after winning a National Book Critics Circle Award for her first book The Warmth of Other Suns) but is nonetheless intrigued. She knows that there is a larger, underlying force behind the heinous actions visited upon minority populations and those at risk that isn't always reducible to race.

Thus begins Isabel's journey to find out just what is the origin of what lies at the heart of humanity's inhumanity to members of itself. The journey will take her from the rise of National Socialism in Germany to 1930s America in full Jim Crow segregation, to 1950s India where Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar would begin his work of fighting for the rights of the Dalits, the caste formerly referred to as "untouchables" and how all these diverse strains are driven by the enforced sense of inferiority regarding one group of people by a larger oppressive class. 

Along the way, Isabel loses her husband Brett played by Jon Bernthal turning in another performance where you can't believe that it's him (the man's a chameleon), her mother Ruby (Emily Yancy in one of those unshowy, organic roles that makes you wonder if she's not really Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor's mom), and her cousin Marion (Niecy Nash bringing it completely). If this sounds like a lot, it is. But it happened. Isabel lost the people closest to her on her way to developing this story. 

And that's just it; the caste system as it threads its way through our shared history is a story. It has its beginnings early on in human history. It is the unifying structure behind some of our worst genocides, and it continues unabated across the world. Yes, racism is a facet of it in some cases, but not necessarily all. As Isabel points out, Jews are mostly white people, so how were the Nazis to begin their Final Solution? By codifying into law Jewish inferiority, by dehumanizing an entire culture "legally" and exterminating that culture systematically. 

For the uninitiated, how the Nazis arrived at this might be (and is) devastating; they studied the Jim Crow laws on the books in the United States following the Civil War and Restoration. Also, as a German friend of Isabel's pointed out, the Holocaust and slavery had different ends. The goal of slavery was the use of "free labor"; the goal of the Holocaust was utter extermination of an entire people. But the methodology was the same; devalue, dehumanize, and render inferior in the eyes of the dominant class or caste(s) an entire population and you are free to do with them what you will. 

We follow several narratives across the film. In 1933, we see August Landmesser refuse to salute at a Nazi rally. Why? Because he is in love with Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman and it isn't just that their love is verboten, but sooner than later, she will be round up and sent to her likely death along with six million other Jews and an additional three million other humans of backgrounds deemed sub-human by the Nationalist Socialists. 

Also, present in 1930s Germany is a Black couple - Allison and Elizabeth Davis, researchers from the United States. Upon looking for Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and not finding it, they are met with a cold response of silence and dismissal by the librarian. They will find out shortly just what is happening in Germany when they attend a book burning in Berlin and are warned to flee. They return to the U.S. where they partner with two other Harvard researchers, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, a white couple, to examine segregation in America. Both couples go undercover and embed themselves in a small town in a southern state, risking their lives in the process but the result is a kind of ur-text for Isabel in their resulting book Deep South. 

The Davises and the Gardners may be the first to contend that oppression Black folks encountered stemmed from a structured and systemic creation of Black people as an inferior class of beings. As Isabel points out later, you can't dehumanize people on a one on one basis; this leads to empathy and relating to the other person as a genuine individual being with thoughts, feelings, and life. Thus, in the wake of the signing into law of the Fourteenth Amendment, the former slave owners continued their project of continued dehumanization of Black people as an entire class to be kept "separate but (not really) equal". The miscegenation laws in the United States helped provide one of the pillars for Wilkerson's book; the criminalization of mixed relationships, let alone, marriages. This would provide the basis for locking in the Othering of the Jews, Romani, and others in Nazi Germany and has, of course, been a continued strategy across the world today.

Isabel finds another part of the connective thread she's following in India, the land of the caste system and in coming across Dr. Ambedkar, finds a direct link to Dr. Martin Luther King. She travels to India to meet a Dalit scholar professor (Suraj Yengde, playing himself) who spiritedly leads her through the history of Ambedkar's battle. It is while sitting with Dr. Yengde and his colleagues that one of them asks if Isabel is familiar with Ebony Mangazine. She says she is, and the young woman mentions the July 1959 issue wherein Dr. King writes about his experiences in India. In voiceover, we hear him mention how he is introduced by a principal of school he was visiting in South India as "an untouchable from America"; it is a pointed, accurate, and damning statement but it solidified for Dr. King (and I would think doubtless, Isabel) the nature of what undergirds racism in America and elsewhere. Racism alone doesn't account for subjugation of entire populations, particularly where there is little or no diversity of race in any given society. 

All of this bears deeper examination and experience and the reason why I am so adamant that people see this film is that for all that it is replete with ideas, it is equally if not more so, replete with humanity. Aujanue Ellis-Taylor carries the film as Isabel Wilkerson with a tangible lived-in sense of what Wilkerson herself seems to be about. Ellis-Taylor's work in Lovecraft Country and King Richard is only the most recent of showcases for one of our most remarkable actresses. What she does here is nothing short of phenomenal because there is, of necessity, a lot of discussion. Mostly of ideas, but given the losses in her life, also of the emotional depths of what we encounter on our way to what we seek. 

Some have complained of a flatness in Matthew Lloyd's cinematography. I don't see it. There's an immediacy, sometimes uncomfortable, in what we are exposed to here. A segment on the Middle Passage aboard a slave ship is gut-wrenching, the re-enactment of what happened the night of Trayvon's death is the first among many gut punches, but none of this is wallowing. This is not a miserablist exercise; DuVernay has an iron grip on the material and she is as driven as Wilkerson to deliver the results of a profound study.

It goes without saying that we are far from having done away with the caste system in all its permutations across the world. Victims include populations of the poor and the indigenous people around the world, pushed to the margins very often by inhumane legislation and further brutalized by the execution of those laws. Do the people perpetrating and supporting these laws know what they're doing? I would sternly and strongly say yes, of course, they do. 

As Isabel points out in the film, referencing Toni Morrison, white people knew African-Americans weren't animals, knew they were people, otherwise why would they allow Black people to care for white children; but they had to convince themselves that Black people were "less than" white people. The Nazis had to convince themselves that the Jewish people were sub-human in order to carry out their brutality against them.

Of course, this continues today; racism in America and Europe is real, there's no debate about that, but it is systemically implemented by interpretations of laws, whims of capitalism (this is a whole other dimension that would require a whole other film), and of course, the self-entitlement of racists here and the world over. 

In India, the Dalits are still treated atrociously, inhumanly and inhumanely. This I've seen; I don't need a film or a book to tell me. I could continue with other people around the globe; the indigenous people of the Americas, Asia, and Africa are often subjugated and reduced to barely surviving through draconian legalism, where outright murder can't be utilized. 

All of this said, DuVernay has produced an important and often so-close-to-us-it-hurts film that needs to be seen, discussed, and internalized. She remains one of the greatest directors around and this is proof of why. It's not preachy, strident, or bombastic; the thesis is presented in the most riveting manner possible and it is our loss if we don't pay it heed.