Trailers

These films are due out this year:

• Anita, a documentary about Anita Hill and her “trial” as a sexual harassment witness during Clarence Thomas’ nomination to SCOTUS in 1994. I have some memories of this period, memories shaped by the 1990s writing boom, narratives about Black American women and their nation, and publications like Ebony and Essence Magazines. Anita is on the film festival circuit right now.

• Divergent, a YA book-to-movie dystopian thriller-drama I don’t have solid preconceptions about because I’ve not read the series. I’m seeing some “young adult” tropes even in the trailer, but hope it won’t be too cloying. Will be looking out for other trailers closer to release date.

• Caesar returns in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. He’s grown up now, James Franco is nowhere to be seen, and the tone is darker than this reboot’s first installment three years ago. This is promising.

The Movie That Won’t Be Made

As much as I love a good story and might have shared these trailers anyway, I was really prompted to share by this series of tweets from director-producer Oliver Stone. I’ve had some reservations about the tenor of Stone’s past work but he knows how to make vivid biographical films: that’s his strength.

Sad news. My MLK project involvement has ended. I did an extensive rewrite of the script, but the producers won’t go with it.

— Oliver Stone (@TheOliverStone) January 17, 2014

The script dealt w/ issues of adultery, conflicts within the movement, and King’s spiritual transformation into a higher, more radical being

— Oliver Stone (@TheOliverStone) January 17, 2014

I’m told the estate & the ‘respectable’ black community that guard King’s reputation won’t approve it. They suffocate the man & the truth.

— Oliver Stone (@TheOliverStone) January 17, 2014

I wish you could see the film I would’ve made. I fear if ‘they’ ever make it, it’ll be just another commemoration of the March on Washington

— Oliver Stone (@TheOliverStone) January 17, 2014

I wish you could see the film I would’ve made. I fear if ‘they’ ever make it, it’ll be just another commemoration of the March on Washington

— Oliver Stone (@TheOliverStone) January 17, 2014

From a publicity perspective, the week before MLK day is a great time for Stone to make this kind of statement about King and the hedge that’s sprung up around his public memory. Like others, I hope he can find a way to salvage his work on the script: I don’t think the world needs even one more tame remembrance of King or the 1950s-1960s movement or the backs on which it was built.

Tribalism

Each of these projects takes a different approach to the question of how forms of tribalism influence our relationships with those we define as Other to us.

Anita Hill suffered when the political class buffered its own and defined her out. At the same time, then-Judge Clarence Thomas’ “high-tech lynching” defense exemplified a fracture that’s still baked into that class, that excluded Hill outright and both shielded and marginalized her former supervisor.

Divergent‘s society marks off five exclusive character traits and discourages members from integrating those traits within themselves. (I have nascent thoughts about how the Christian scriptural metaphors about the members of the body and their distinct spiritual gifts functions similarly in some Christian groups and congregations.)

Caesar’s simian peers were only experimented on to begin with because human scientists and businessmen defined them as non-human. Once defined as Other, the simian population were not covered by the same ethical care and practice metrics we usually offer our species peers. And their battle for physical autonomy and control of space exploded from there.

I’m not sure why this year’s zeitgeist is bringing us these reflections on the Self and the Other or what we might collectively make of it, but I’m looking forward to the articles that will be written about them.

Which 2014 feature-length projects you’re looking forward to? Tell me below.