Fruitvale Station: Kinship and the Catastrophic in the Life/Death of an Afro-American Man

[Militarized Police and Protester in Ferguson, Missouri Last Week]

Last Sunday night, as protests over the police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown continued into another night in Ferguson, Missouri (US), I sat to watch Fruitvale Station (2013) a dramatized depiction of the life/death of another unarmed black male fatally shot by police in an American city (San Francisco). 

Fruitvale Station is the intimately told story of 22 year-old Oscar Grant's final day of life, before his killing by Bay Area Transport Police on a New Year’s morning metro platform. The film has a realist, almost experiential quality to it offering a close-grained view into Oscar’s partially-fictionalized interior word. Whilst the film's director undoubtedly endeavoured toward verisimilitude and achieves an honest presentation of the contested terminal encounter, the story is not so much about the particular circumstances of the killing as it is about Oscar's familial life, his transitioning masculine self and what the devastation of his murder means for his girlfriend, their young daughter and his grieving mother (an all too familiar image of a black mother grieving a dead son; see for example Michael Brown's mother). And equally, the substance of the film is ,indeed, what it reveals of the violence that America visits upon its black citizenry – in this case young black males. 

[Oscar and his daughter 'T' in Ryan Coogler's Film Fruitvale Station (2013)

Fruitvale is a person-centred tragedy about intimacy, kinship, brutality and humanity. In its presentation of these themes it illustrates a beautifully nuanced picture of youthful black fatherhood and masculine being, as well as more generally reminding viewers of the enduring perilousness and devaluation of poor black lives in America. Cornel West (2009) terms this condition of violent denial (of equality, opportunity and full humanity) the ‘Catastrophic’. Evidenced by disproportionate un/underemployment, de facto segregation, overincarceration, poor schools, housing and healthcare (amongst other things), the catastrophic is the continuous racialized blighting of poor black America by the dominant social order (state, ruling classes and popular culture). In Oscar’s story we witness the catastrophic writ-small, channelled, magnified, complicated by the personal, the everyday struggles of an individual man.Spanning approximately 24 hours between New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Morning of 2009/10, interspersed with flashbacks to stints of incarceration, we follow the protagonist's individual movement through his daily life. The film offers an over-the-shoulder insight into his affective interaction and play with his daughter, and his frictive yet loving romantic relationship with his girlfriend.We see moments of vulnerability as he conceals from her and his mother the financial insecurity of losing his supermarket job, along with his resigned return to dealing weed. 

We observe Oscar's mild and easy way with friends, kin and strangers, as well as adversarial flares during prison fights and the metro brawl shortly before his death. And we observe the mutually expressive filial bond between him and his mother: from texting her "happy birthday" in the early hours of New Year's Eve at the start of the film; to spending the day dutifully running errands for her birthday party; to his memories of their intense argument in prison and the anguish of her telling him she will no longer visit him there (see video clip, right).

Interestingly, Oscar’s story echoes in many ways the transitional story of Scratchie D, a Dominican man whose redemptive journey I have been documenting in my thesis and an ethnographic film project I recently finished filming. Scratchie’s moral reorientation from a life of  crack cocaine smoking and dealing, ‘touching people thing’ (i.e. theft) and incarceration between Guadeloupe and Dominica; to his marriage, becoming a father/grandfather and securing stable employment, all signal the realisation of the kind of transition Oscar was just beginning to embark on. Interestingly, Scratchie identified kin relations to his mother and, later, his daughters as a key motivator for his transformative endeavours. It is evident that the same is true of Oscar grant's personal journey. The special love between mother and son and the associated maternal pain of repeatedly having to visit an incarcerated childis common to both Scratchie and Oscar’s stories. Indeed, in an interview for the documentary Scratchie’s mother narrated to me a story not entirely dissimilar to the scene above in its thrust and effect (see unedited clip below).

Oscar is a young man engaged in processes of becoming. He is struggling towards maturity - a sense of personal and familial stability -  in spite of the vagarious and catastrophic conditions of his existence. Therefore, although the fundamental tragedy of the film is the very fact of Oscar’s killing by state force - a repeating and increasingly routine American phenomenon (that of the 'accidental' police killing of poor black men with impunity) - an added tragic dimension of the tale is that the viewer gets the feeling that the new years day of Oscar's death paradoxically signaled the beginning of the rest of his life. The magic of film is that although the viewer is aware that his death is inevitable and impending, one can’t help but be optimistic for his unfolding future. The contradictions of optimism and the ominous, as well as the hope of a shared familiy future and the violent disjuncture of death, all feed the intensity of the film’s most poignant scene.

Oscar dies from multiple gunshot wounds at the end of the film, a fate shared with a growing list of black men killed at the hands of police in America – of which Michael Brown is one of the most recent (http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-often-are-unarmed-black-men-shot-down-police?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark ). Fruitvale Station provides provocative viewing, helping us to think through recent events in Missouri and the realities of black male being in America, whilst staving off the lure or reductive tropes. As one reviewer wrote of film's the director,

His main intention — and his great achievement... is to make Oscar a fully human presence, to pay him the respect of acknowledging his complexities and contradictions. The radicalism of “Fruitvale Station” lies precisely here, in its refusal to turn a man into a symbol. Nearly every black man... tends to be flattened out by popular culture and the psychopathology of everyday American life, rendered as an innocent victim, a noble warrior or a menace to society. There is a dehumanizing violence in this habit, a willed, toxic blindness that “Fruitvale Station” at once exposes and resist.

 A mother’s prayer and the silent scene of Oscar playing with his young daughter as he teeters on the brink of death emphatically underscore the contingency of black American life and uncertain futures. 

This film is well worth watching, more today than ever. It is currently screening in cinemas in the UK and available for sale online.

Some good reviews:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/14/fruitvale-station-unlawful-killing-oscar-grant-reel-history

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/movies/fruitvale-station-is-based-on-the-story-of-oscar-grant-iii.html?_r=0

Cited:

David Kyuman Kim. "Democracy, the Catastrophic, and Courage: A Conversation with Cornel West and David Kyuman Kim." Theory & Event 12.4 (2009). Project MUSE. Web. 18 Aug. 2014. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.]

A very brief contextual intro to recent frictions in Ferguson, Missouri: 

An Introduction

This blog is the extroverted twin of a PhD project on fatherhood and masculinities in (The Commonwealth of) Dominica. It aims to engage anthropologists & non-anthropologists, fathers & non-fathers, Dominicans and non-Dominicans with all things related to being a man and dad in the West Indies (and beyond).

Fathermen has been set up to inform those who may be interested about some of the diverse themes and issues that intersect the project. Videos, articles, short essays, poetry, photos and links to events (amongst other things) are likely to feature. However, Fathermen seeks not only to provide information, but to open up debate. The author of this blog is of the belief that all humans possess anthropological faculties. In other words, all of us have the capacity to reflect upon, enquire about and ask questions of the cultural worlds that surround us.... so I hope the entries of Fathermen will be critiqued, commended and interrogated by readers in the comments boxes of each post. Such emergent conversations will hopefully result in a healthier and more publicly grounded project.

Fathermen is a blog by Adom Philogene Heron, a doctoral research student in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews (PhD Profile).