Origin (Ava DuVernay, 2023) (Patreon)

Okay, so Origin is not a good film. There are a lot of things wrong with it. But it is also a very weird film.

I have not read Isabel Wilkerson's book, so I am unable to speak to the nuances of her caste theory. However, as presented in DuVernay's film, its problems are fairly apparent. The impetus for this rethinking of race, apparently, was Wilkerson's confusion over German antisemitism and the oppression of Indian Dalits. She argues that German Jews were white, and the Dalits are brown, so how can their systemic oppression be considered racism? The question itself overlooks the very function of racial ideology, the fact that the Nazis turned the Jews' physical and social attributes into a false genetic category. There is so much scholarship on this very topic, like how in England and the Americas, people who are now considered white, like the Irish and the Italians, were denigrated as inferior races. Building up and tearing down racial ideology is a complex sociological project, and it's bizarre to me that Wilkerson (again, to judge from the film alone) studied the Nazis but missed this.

This objection speaks to my own theoretical proclivities, of course, but I don't see what is to be gained by creating a trans-cultural, even trans-historical category like caste. Why is Wilkerson opposed to seeing these various cultural formations as related in some ways, but distinct in others? It's the historical specificity that allows us to understand how these formations came to be, and how to most effectively deconstruct them. 

But at several points, we hear Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) speaking with her cousin Marion (Niecy Nash), and the refrain is that Isabel must make her theory accessible to everyone, and that it cannot be couched in academic language. Is this accomplished by ignoring contradictions and smoothing out complications? If so, is it worth it?

Origin is a mess, with an inconsistent tone and more than a few moments that are utterly workmanlike, as if DuVernay were deliberately trying not to obscure Wilkerson's message with distracting aesthetics. Other parts are over-the-top in their symbolic imagery, in particular those that pertain to Isabel mourning the deaths of her husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) and her mother (Emily Yancy). But the disparity in DuVernay's approach only exacerbates the main problem, which is that Wilkerson's theory and her personal life do not really mesh into a coherent movie. 

One could reasonably ask why DuVernay felt compelled to make a film that fictionalized Isabel as a character, rather than making a documentary. Then again, I often find myself wondering why films with political themes are shoehorned into the horror genre, often quite artificially. If the format of Origin was dictated by producers (who, amazingly, included the Ford and MacArthur Foundations), I hope they're happy with the terrible result. And if it was DuVernay's attempt to make the caste argument accessible, that too represents a massive failure. 

But then it's possible that Wilkerson actually believes that her own biography is just as vital a component to her argument as her historical research. When meeting with her editor at a cocktail party, Isabel says as much. Now, there are certainly valid ways to make a nonlinear, not entirely causal argument about a theoretical point. Post-structuralist thought is largely composed of such attempts. But as presented in the film, Isabel's theory means to be so overarching as to somehow account for her own interracial romance, the fact that she and Brett were able to love one another despite occupying different racial categories.

This is one of the things that makes Origin too bizarre to simply ignore, or write off as a bad film. There is something symptomatic in DuVernay's presentation of Wilkerson's thesis, as well as her determination to do so. When we hear Isabel reading from Caste near the end of the film, she quite explicitly posits a kind of mind/body dualism as regards to race and/or caste. She explains that categories based on skin color or other attributes are prejudgments of a human "container," preventing the racist from seeing the person "inside." Doesn't this resonate with conservative or crypto-racist claims that only racists "see color"?

Is it not possible that the experience of living as a raced body is one determinant of one's identity, something that is not so easily dismissed as surface-level information? Of course "race" does not exist. It is a manufactured ideology. But as such, it has a material history, one that unavoidably shapes us all. This does not mean that our racial identities are somehow natural or intrinsic, but that our bodies carry social messages in time, regardless of our desires.

While researching in Germany, Isabel is unable to really answer the challenge posed by Sabine (Connie Nielsen), the German woman she meets. Black chattel slavery and the Holocaust are distinct because one was about subjugation, the other extermination. Isabel phones Marion and expresses her anger at being challenged on this point. But Sabine wasn't saying that the Holocaust was "worse" than the Middle Passage, only that they had different objectives relating to ethnic cleansing and capitalist production, and that simply collapsing them is not conducive to a rigorous analysis.

It is not unusual for today's hybrid documentaries to feature reenactments of historical events. So why is it so jarring, and arguably offensive, to see DuVernay reconstruct the Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost) murder? Once again, it largely has to do with Wilkerson's flattening of difference. Martin is one ghost among many who come to Isabel at the end of her project, providing a sort of unified, retroactive approval. But was Martin's death really somehow equivalent to the dangers experienced by Allison and Elizabeth Davis (Isha Blakker and Jasmine Cephas Jones), two Harvard anthropologists who went undercover in the Jim Crow south? Unless we are expected to believe that Martin had no business in a mostly white neighborhood, then he made no choices that night. George Zimmerman, however, did.

There are many complicated reasons why these reenactments add up to less than the sum of Isabel's theoretical parts. But even more than this, they stick out from the rest of the film formally. They don't gel, and they exhibit no real reason for their disjunctive presence. And this brings us back to the overriding sense that DuVernay never really had control of this material, that the film (perhaps like the book?) tries to do too much and ends up tripping over its generalities. 

To be fair, it is extremely difficult to bring theoretical concepts to the screen, to make them both legible and at least minimally engaging. But the failures of Origin give the impression that DuVernay felt compelled to invent the wheel from scratch, struggling to find any sort of  cinematic form that could accommodate these disparate pieces. Why is that the case? It is frustrating to see just how insular Origin is, how disconnected from the long history of political cinema. DuVernay could have looked to Godard, Kluge, Yvonne Rainer, Isaac Julien, Su Friedrich, Marlon Riggs, Ephraim Asili, and many others. There's a big difference between stretching yourself as an artist and trying to create ex nihilo. The first approach is ambitious, and the second is naive.