The Tom Story in Mudbound and Detroit (2017)

Introduction: Beyond Self-Righteousness

Both Mudbound (2017) and Detroit (2017) mobilize the Tom story in ways that are significantly interesting and distinct. Neither film, for instance, really allows the viewer to feel a kind of self-righteousness from a distance—at least not in the way that critics describe occurring in To Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel, the reader can comfortably shake their head at the treatment of the innocent Black man. In Mudbound and Detroit, however, the viewer is too caught up in the horror and the nightmare of what is happening in the moment to feel self-righteous about how they would have handled things differently.

There is no distance in the watching of these films. The action is too immediate and the viewer too wrapped up in the unfolding drama for the Tom story to function in its conventional way—and that is mainly because of the nature of the medium itself. Film makes the viewer a passive participant in the action. In a novel, by contrast, the reader is an active participant: the work does not proceed without the reader's engagement, who can set the book down at any moment, pause to reflect on a scene, and continue at will. A film, on the other hand, simply keeps playing even if the viewer slips into private reflection. Rather than producing self-righteousness, watching these films leaves the viewer with a sense of pity and fear—essentially the feelings that Aristotle (1970) claimed made for good tragedy.

The Tom Story Reframed Through Character

The films do, however, utilize the concept of the Tom story in their own ways, interweaving it into their story lines so that the characters themselves are left to grapple with how they might have handled things differently. In Mudbound, the white Jamie is forced to choose the punishment delivered to the Black Ronsel; in Detroit, the Black Dismukes is forced to watch the white Krauss go unpunished for his role in the abuses at the Algiers Motel. In both films, the essence of the Tom story—the feeling of an audience-jury condemning racial injustice—is felt, but only because the films invite the audience to share in that feeling alongside the two main characters, Jamie and Dismukes.

Jamie smothers Pappy to death in revenge for his brutal attack on Ronsel, and Dismukes confronts the deviant Krauss after the trial. Neither action is truly satisfying: Jamie goes on to abandon his family in disgust, and Dismukes attempts to escape the racism of the city by retreating to the suburbs to work as a security guard in anonymity. The audience is invited to shake its head collectively at the racism that continues to exist in the world—but only once the action has concluded and the audience is able to catch its breath.

Racism as a Present-Tense Problem

While both films depict events that occurred decades ago—and can thus be viewed from a distance, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century where the audience might look back at past behavior and feel that things have since changed—the reality is that today's audience is living in the era of Black Lives Matter and knows that things have not fundamentally changed. The audience of today is not likely to regard the racism depicted on screen as belonging to a bygone era. It is far more likely to feel like an immediate issue, as pressing today as it was at the time depicted on screen.

In the post-war period in which Ronsel is silenced, or in the turbulent 1960s when so many murders were being committed—from those of JFK to MLK to Malcolm X to RFK and others—racism was alive and powerful. The audience of today should sense that the same racism operating then is still operating now, and that nothing has fundamentally changed. Indeed, that appears to be the central point of both films: that racism in America never truly goes away. One almost has to leave the country, slip into anonymity as Dismukes does, or go to Europe as Ronsel does, simply to escape it. As Meer and Nayak (2015) point out, race and racism remain urgent topics in universities, meaning that young students are continually thinking about these issues. The films are therefore bound to be seen as relevant reflections of an ongoing problem rather than as occasions for the viewer to engage in self-righteous detachment.

Conclusion: Pity, Fear, and the Persistence of Racism

Taken together, the two films show that racism can occur anywhere—in the rural South, in the northern city, across the seas. Racism is a mentality, and the point the films make is that this mentality is ingrained in the culture and fabric of the United States. People do not know how to deal with it. There is no clear sense of how to escape it or how to confront it effectively. The films even give the viewer the impression that it is almost futile to try to oppose it.

Unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, these films suggest that the viewer's best recourse is to sit with pity and fear—pity for what happens to those involved, those who suffer; and fear because one senses that all of this could easily happen to anyone. The Tom story, in this rendering, is no longer a vehicle for comfortable moral judgment. It becomes instead an indictment of a society that has yet to reckon honestly with its own history.

References

Aristotle. (1970). Poetics (G. Else, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.

Meer, N., & Nayak, A. (2015). Race ends where? Race, racism and contemporary sociology. Sociology, 49(6), NP3–NP20.

Rapping, J. A. (2015). It's a sin to kill a mockingbird: The need for idealism in the legal profession. Michigan Law Review, 114, 847.