I was anxious about seeing Fruitvale Station, partly because
I’ve been traveling/moving and did not like the idea of seeing it alone, without being
able to talk about it immediately with friends. This perhaps inflated the
nervousness I had about the tenor the film would take.
The film begins with Oscar Grant's death. It simultaneously begins with opposition from people on the train and platform to the BART
police. They were adamantly saying something
was wrong and trying to stop a harm. The film ends with documentary footage of a commemoration
at the Fruitvale station four years later, and likewise illustrates the commitment
to justice and refusal to accept the daily danger and arbitrariness of police
violence. I think it went to lengths to show the possibility of interracial
relationships, in their most awkward and apparently easy forms, and acknowledged, or at least I want to believe I saw
the film acknowledge, the gap between white and Black residents in the
expectation of bodily safety and a future with family and job.
Fruitvale Station was devastating, in part because we know what was
always going to happen, but Oscar Grant’s murder already felt devastating to me
because racialized violence seems so intractable as a practice and commonsense.
It is part of the structure of the city; BART as a class and racist project
extends beyond the police to the history of its very construction, and
ridiculously short hours of operation. The past and present workings of
gendered racial capitalism come to this devastating moment of Oscar Grant’s
death. What the film captures in its attention to the mundane details of
dropping kids off at school, celebrating mom’s birthday, trying to keep a job
and stay out of prison, and spending New Year with friends and strangers is the
arbitrary denial of this day-to-day. The outrage I and so many others feel, I think
stems from all of this, and the horror of even trying to come to terms with the
fear that a mother’s child may not come home.
The film’s also devastating because I personally feel at a
loss, and experience a gap between the feeling of intractability with which I
was left (I don’t know that any film could shake that) and some feeling of, and
imperative of moving toward, collective capacity to make his death unthinkable
and impossible. There were glimpses, as I mentioned above, into the
possibilities of refusal and change. So I am glad the film was made and being
seen and discussed by so many people. Rather than fixate on limitations, or critique
in a project-destroying way, I’ll say, as Carwil suggested, what I wanted more
of, and where I would like to see all sorts of films be able to take their
audiences.
What I wanted more of is context that might provide political
direction with which to move emotion. (Maybe that’s a different film, an
impossible request, too didactic, but here’s where I’m at.) What interested me
in the film being made is what made the film possible. This includes both this
particular historical economic moment in California, where policing and
imprisonment racially structure livelihoods and life chances, and also the
political context of Bay Area organizing. To give an example: I happened to be
back in the Bay Area for a visit just a few days after Oscar Grant’s murder.
This was also while Israel was bombing Gaza. What I saw at the large scale
emergency protest called in San Francisco and at more informal demonstrations popping
up in the Oakland streets were signs connecting Gaza, Greece, and Oakland. The Bay
Area’s long history of militant antiracist, labor, and antiwar organizing (and
much else besides) made it possible for people to connect the dots between the militarized
occupations of all these places, despite their unique circumstances, and to be working
to prevent injustices and violence in their and their neighbors’ (near and far) communities.
There’s
a lot to learn from this interrelated history of organizing against war and
policing, and there are many people eager to learn and build together. So I would
want the questions percolating in audience members’ heads to bubble not so much
around what is to be done about this patent injustice, and linking the feeling
of this outrage to movement rather than inertia. I feel sad to the core, the
kind of sad that indicts all the violence that structures this society, but I
know I can’t and don’t want to stay in this place because the conditions that
make that sadness must end.
These are some initial thoughts prompted by a Twitter discussion of a review of Fruitvale Station.
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