“Jim Crow” logic has been carried till today by the liberal left’s ethnic politics:
“You are black, how come that you don’t know how to eat the chicken like a black?”
As the ‘Green Book’ sublates the ethnic problem, the film ‘Sibel’ (2019), directed by Guillaume Giovanetti and Çağla Zencirci, similarly sublates the problem of pseudo-feminism.
The negro Pushkin was more Russian than anyone else in Russia. A real art does not fit in any race, identity or ethnicity. What we call “ethnic music” cannot be an “art”. To install a revolutionary function in art, one has first to lift the whiskey glass away from the piano!
Note: This article has originally been published in Turkish, in Sendika.org
Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma was nominated for a record number of awards for the Academy Awards announced on February 24, 2019. The mainstream media promoted and portrayed the film as a great artwork by a guided and coordinated manner.
Lanthimos’ The Favorite by contrast, didn’t have the same support from commentators – for some reason – despite it was also nominated for the same number of awards.
We brought into question these weird facts and examined their reasons in our previous article argueing that a global ideological/cultural war was being led through films.
Having shown the colliding themes of the two films, one can argue that Lanthimos’ The Favorite stood as the direct antithesis of Cuarón’s Roma. To summarize:
1) The film Roma describes the solidarity of women of different classes. The Favorite by contrast, tells about the power struggle and intrigue between gay women.
2) The film Roma proceeds within a theme of victimization that draws the class antagonism into an ethnic and feminist context. The Favorite, by contrast, tells the story of a noble woman, who became servant by some misfortune, who then became the favourite of the Queen thanks to her ambitious struggle. The film The Favourite is ridiculing both the notion of class antagonism and the theme of victimization.
3) Cuaron’s Roma is based on the ‘the indigenous are oppressed, the oppressed are indigenous, so the indigenous must rebel‘ scheme. Therefore it cannot figure out how to deal with the Corpus Christi event. So it uses it as a background decor that passes quickly. It doesn’t allow the audience to question the oximoron aspects of Corpus Christi, where the fascist indigenous Los Halcones killed the bourgeois -but “leftist”- university students. It exploits the stereotypical romantic connotations and emotions in the mind of the leftist viewer attibuted to the notion of ‘social event’. The Favorite by contrast, talks about the macro-political event in the background (the Spanish War of Succession) in detail, almost like a documentary. Queen’s new favourite supports the peaceful Tory against the hawkish Whigs: it stresses ‘The role of the individual in history‘ as opposed to Eisenstein-style mystification of mass movements.
4) Queen Anne is the symbol of unity in the history of England. She had concluded merger negotiations with Scotland and established the Great Britain. Cuarón’s Roma, however, leads the audience to question the legitimacy of the modern Mexican nation-state through ethnic scratch. The political theme in The Favourite is the integrity of locals into an ecumenical area. Roma does the exact opposite: it brings to mind the division of ecumenical areas into locals.
The clash of the messages of the two films is the projection of political and ideological blocks that collide in global arena today. Roma bundles the ethnic question with feminist messages to obscure the notion of class exploitation. The slurry it creates makes a ‘vicious knotting’ out of which the viewer can extract any political message that suits their desires (Footnote 1). The Favorite however, is set like a wedge in front of Roma: It draws its caricature and teases it.
The Favorite and Roma are technical films. As an evaluation within the form X content discussion in art, these two films are based on high technical performance, that is, the ‘form’ prevails in both. High technical (formal) performance is needed in order to fob the viewer into an unethical content.
By contrast, Green Book and Sibel are “screenplay films”. Their ‘content’ prevails. Their sound and ethical message that they rely on can be drawn with few skillful actors in cast and the movie is based on an average technical performance.
‘Scratch’ or ‘Sublate’
Peter Farrelly began shooting the film Green Book in November 2017, in Louisiana. The film was completed in January 2018. The producer was the Chinese company Alibaba. The film was first screened at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival (Footnote 2). Why is it important that the film was first shown at the Toronto Film Festival? Because the Toronto Film Festival; the Tribeca Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival are known for their focus on ethnic and minority issues.
Netflix’ (the company which undertook Cuaron’s Roma custodian) earnings in 2018 was $ 16 billion. Meanwhile, it is a strange phenomenon that the producer who made the film Roma is still not mentioned in the media (Footnote 3). Alibaba’s earning in 2018 on the other hand, was $ 39 billion.
Green Book which was released on 16 November 2018, made a $ 190 million box office until March 4, 2019 (Footnote 4), while Cuarón’s Roma didn’t even bring it’s cost ($ 19 million) back – its box office could barely reach to $ 4 million. While the box office of Roma was complete disaster, media has reported that Netflix allocated an additional $ 20 million to promote it.
Alibaba, however, despite it is much larger and financially powerful than Netflix, did not need to spend money to promote the Green Book. Besides, that revenue as mentioned as Green Book’s box office ($ 190 million) does not include China. The box office in China has not been announced yet. As is known, China is the country with the highest number of cinema viewers after USA.
Dozens of films have been filmed in US cinema dealing with racism. A similar film ‘Mrs Daisy’ s Driver’ was also nominated for nine Oscar awards in 1990, winning three prizes, including the best film Academy Award. This film was about the friendship between an old and wealthy US Jew and her African-American driver. The film was depicting an event in 1948. ‘Mrs Daisy’s Driver’ cost $ 7.5 million, bringing $ 146 million as box office. Having seen the similar success of Green Book one can easily argue that people better understand and love the films which ‘sublate‘ the racism issue rather than doing ‘scratch‘.
Nevertheless, Green Book was not featured in the press until it received the awards. Compared to Rome, it was nominated for much less number of awards. There was a strange gap between the “expert” and commentator judgements and the public’s taste. How do we explain this contoversy?
Again, the Chorus
Having scanned the criticisms on Green Book, one can easily notice that they were reproduced with almost the same arguments and published by the same commentators who actually praise Cuaron’ Roma. Here are a few examples below (Footnote 5):
The criticisms look like as if they were written with instructions. Their disparagement use the same reasons: the film overwhelms an optimism from a black and a white being learned from each other, recognizing each other and overcoming racism, which was the dilution of the black liberation movement, the problem is being over-simplified. The film handles the problem in a too simple way to make the white people feel better. However, racism was not simply something to overcome by a struggle against macho reactionaries who explicitely show their racist stance, it was necessary to fight against the racism in the minds of people.
The last proclaim above is especially toxic:
Are these writers looking for a real solution to a problem? Or are they looking to invent an insoluble problem?
This is how we now understand now, where this money, Netflix’s $ 20 million to promote the film, was spent. The introduction of a film is certainly not done with billboards, banners, TV commercials like the toothpaste ad. It is made with such “expert” commentators who have kept a corner in the mainstream media.
Commentators in Turkey have also received messages from the English press they were supposed to take:
Some have gone even further to articulate (“blacks eat fried chicken!”) expressions that would have been considered as “racist” or discriminative if said in Western countries:
The writer makes inferences out of couplings such as black<>fried chicken; Kurdish<>wrap kebab. And that way he pretends doing “sociology”. This is of course not only a match that is in the mind of this author, but a more general defective template of contemporary social sciences paradigm. Is it valid and ethical to make inferences through this template? This question is a philosophical one and Hegel will answer below. Let us first try to understand why the film Green Book was so discomforting and how it has stepped on whose tail.
From Jim Crow Laws, to cultural liberalism
The racist laws called “Jim Crow South” came into effect immediately after the US Civil War in 1862. “Jim Crow” was a Negro character created by British comedian Thomas Rice in 1828. This retarded, primitive, humiliated black man character used to reflect the view of whites of the time to blacks.
As the Civil War ended with the victory of the North, the form of slavery, which in fact the correct sociological definition was ‘feudal serfdom’, was abolished in the whole of America. This time, however, another type of slave fitting to the needs of industrial capitalism, a free-circulating, able to inter-state migration, unqualified manual laborer was required as ‘slave-worker’. This ‘slave-worker’ had to be isolated in public life in such a way that it could not relate and communicate to the other strata of the working class. Jim Crow South racist laws responded to this need.
So, it is necessary to understand the phenomenon called “abolition of slavery” after the Civil War, in a correct way. It was the serfdom which was ablolished. The new established regime was the slave-worker. Serf has a house, a family, but it has no freedom to circulate outside the fiefdom’s territory. Serf becomes worker when it wins the freedom to travel. Racial discrimination is needed to block the communication and solidarity of black workers with other factions of the working class and thus to obtain higher efficiency from labor.
In the above image we see a poster prepared for the 1968 elections. The man on the right is August Belmont, a Northern investor. He represents the interests of northern capital. The one in the middle, Nathan Bedford Forrest is a cruel Western general. As it is seen, although he is “defeated”, he is within the deal. Even at the center. Nathan Bedford Forrest is one of the most important founders of the Ku Klux Klan. And the one on the left is an abstract figure representing the Democratic Party (Footnote 6).
The roots and tradition of the party that we know today as the ‘Democratic Party’ goes back to these Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow’s laws are based on the principle of splitting the working class using the racial apartheid.
This “Jim Crow” logic has been carried till today by the liberal left’s ethnic politics:
“You are black, how come that you don’t know how to eat the chicken like a black?”
Jim Crow’s laws have been designed with such a skill that, even after 70 years they attracted the attention of Nazi Germany: a delegation sent from the Hitler government to the United States examined these laws and adapted them to Germany. Below you can watch the presentation of these historical findings, which are recently raised:
Victor H. Green and his wife, Alma Green, were a black family living in Harlem, New York. Victor H. Green was a mail officer. In 1936, he and his wife saw the humiliation the black people faced on a car trip and wrote a guidebook titled “The Negro Motorist Green-Book“. The book was citing the hotels where black people could stay, places to eat, buy petrol, beauty salons and even taxi stations.
1936 was also the year in which Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to the presidency by an overwhelming majority (523-8) from the Democratic Party. Six months before World War II, Roosevelt forbade the companies working with the government to engage in racist discrimination with the 8802 Presidential Order. In January 1942, however, a commercial ship captain refused the boarding of the 25 black American sailors. The President then wrote a letter to the National Maritime Union ordering not to engage racial discrimination in the US Navy.
On July 26, 1948, US President Harry S. Truman issued a presidential order that put an end to racism in the US military. This was the first Federal enforcement “tip-truncating” the Jim Crow laws.
In 1960 Harper Lee published her book, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. This book received the Pulitzer Prize. The novel depicted a case that the writer witnessed in a small town in Alabama when he was ten years old, in the 1930s: Her father, a lawyer, took on the defense of the blacks who had been charged with the rape of a white woman and he then proven the innocence of them.
In 1961, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Boynton X Virginia case should allow black people to use bus stops, toilets and anywhere they would like to travel. But this decision did not apply to most of the Southern states. On May 4, 1961, an activist group of 7 afro-niggers and six white Americans began to take the Freedom Ride by bus in the city of Washington DC protesting the resistance in the Southern states. Another group of activists following this group traveled to the middle of the US by another bus. Their aim was to enforce the Boynton case legal precedent of the Supreme Court to the Southern states. In many cities they had been attacked and beaten. The US Chief Prosecutor (President JFK’s brother), Robert F. Kennedy, could not succeed in containing the reactions. As a last option, the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered the bus to be secured on the road so that activists can return safe to home.
In 1962, the movie of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ was shown in cinemas. This film starring Gregory Peck and Mary Badham liked worldwide.
The JFK myth
While all this happened, JFK remained passive. The rise in the black-rights and equality movement, which was at the same time as JFK’s presidency, immediately raised counter-reactions. Racist attacks and discourses peaked. During his entire presidency, JFK did not take any significant action in the face of these counter-reactions. And it was in such an atmosphere that Don Shirley, the main character in the Green Book film, did travel to the Southern states of the United States.
The main point that should have been criticized in the film was the highlighting of JFK government in such a way that it had never deserved the black equality movement. Today, JFK is still unfairly referred to by this glory.
The Civil Rights Act, which brought equality to blacks, was issued by Lyndon Johnson on 2 July 1964, when JFK was killed.
Moreover, this point was very important: Lyndon Johnson was a Southern, fully based on Texas.
With this law, racial discrimination (except for the right to vote) had been made illegal in all areas.
The right to vote was given by Lyndon Johnson too, in 1965, a year later.
In the face of these historical facts, it is still a strange fact that the JFK was presented as a hero in the struggle for human rights.
The fake freedom in the North
Don Shirley goes to YMCA for a night in Tennessee. They were arrested while having sex with a young man he met there and detained by the police.
When Don Shirley was detained for his homosexual act, Tony Lip met this situation as it was a usual and ordinary case. Don Shirley having been shocked by Tony Lip’s indifference, asked him what he thinks. Lip, nonchalant, says he met such situations a lot in nightclubs.
This scene instructs the viewer not politicize the sexual orientations and that the issues on LGBT+ should be resolved within the framework of existing individual freedoms.
It is especially important that the script here emphasizes the phenomenon of encountering these situations, especially in nightclubs: it instructs that gender roles were not stable and that they even become more slippery with various factors such as alcohol, etc. Therefore it is abject and futile to do politics through these roles (identity politics).
The real Tony Lip has explained in his interviews that he had no prejudice against homosexuals because he worked in night clubs. In the 1960s, however, the American Psychiatric Association described homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. This definition of the American Psychiatric Association lasted until 1973.
During the Eisenhower period, which lasted from 1953 to 1961, the hostility to homosexuality increased even more. As soon as Eisenhower became president, in April 1953, with the Decree 10405, he defined orientations other than heterosexuality as actions against the Federal Loyalty-Security Program, empowering the law enforcement to investigate and arrest such situations. This decision concerned more than 6 million employees, including civil servants and the military, in the federal government (Footnote 8).
As the the duo always got into trouble in the Southern states, the viewer has the impression that anti-homosexuality was only an issue in the South. This impression justifies the North in a way that it does not deserve it.
Following the scene in which Tony Lip receives a call from the police station the film suddenly jumps to police custody scene. This “jump” may create the following question in Turkish viewers’ mind:
“In the midst of such a black / white discrimination atmosphere, could it be possible that Don Shirley had tried to have a sexual intercourse with his white partner on the street, in the park, etc…… so that the police had managed to detain them?”
Because the film doesn’t show what had happened in the YMCA, how the two met in the club and so on.
The Turkish audience cannot fill this gap in their head. Because the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey and the Turkish Civil Code guarantees the ‘secrecy of private life‘. Raiding the bedroom or any private sphere by the law enforcement agencies is unimaginable and there has never been such a case where the police chased people by how to live on a sex with whom, in Turkey. There are no exceptions to the ‘secrecy and privacy of private life‘ principle in Turkish law. Even though the Turkish police will make an assault to someone’s home (which is only possible on the decision of the prosecutor), they wait in the morning and does not care who fucks who behind a closed door.
So how did the police take these two into custody?
In the United States, homosexuality continued to be a crime until 2003 (albeit in a decreasing number of states). In 2003, the Supreme Court removed homosexuality as a criminal offense. Homosexuality was still considered a crime in 13 US states until this Supreme Court decision was put into effect.
As can be seen, both for the equality of different sexual orientations as well as the equality of different ethnicities (one can easily add women’s rights too) in the face of Law, Turkey has always been far ahead of the United States. TR Constitution and the Civil Code does not separate lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, or whatever and secures every individuals’ ‘privacy‘ without exception. This is the situation in TR, since 1923.
In the face of these historical and legal facts, the promotion of US fabricated scrap theories such as “queer theory” by the scholastic social “scientists” and their advocating of gender politics in Turkish Universities is another phenomenal weirdness.
Don Shirley: A covered life, dark spots …
There were only Leonard Cohen and Dr. Don Shirley who had the privilege of sitting in Carnegie Hall – the most prestigious concert hall in the United States. There are just two apartments above the concert hall. How came that Don Shirley, who was not popular and known by only a very elite group, managed to get the privilege of sitting above Carnegie Hall? We searched an explanation to this question a lot but we could not find any rational answer.
Cadence Records printed Don Shirley’s records. Cadence Records was founded in 1952 by Archie Bleyer, an ordinary orchestre conductor. It is a rickety company that does not have extensive marketing opportunities. Don Shirley used his apartment above Carnegie Hall until his death in 2013. Neither Nat King Cole nor Duke Ellington nor Nina Simone had such a privilege.
Don Shirley is friend with the President JFK, Federal Attorney General Robert Kennedy and most importantly Dr. Martin Luther King. While Martin Luther King was such a prominent figure in the Black movement, Don Shirley – for some reason – had never been brought up before this film. Moreover, this man is close enough to reach Attorney General Robert Kennedy with a single phone call. Don Shirley never told what he did in the struggle for equal rights of Afro-Americans.
Don Shirley’s other friends include Nina Simone and Duke Ellington.
Don Shirley is a Jamaican black. Caribbean blacks are known as more elite and educated in the United States, unlike the African origin blacks.
Don Shirley told the film should be made after his death. His family is still opposed to the film and this is why their relation with Tony Lip’s family was strained. Tony Lip’s son is one of the screenwriters, so it is possible that he may have filmed some of the details that were disallowed by Don Shirley’s family.
Mafia – Navy cooperation
Copacabana was New York’s most famous nightclub of that time. It is owned by the Italian Mafia. Tony Lip is bodyguard here.
There is an important detail in Don Shirley’s recruitment of Tony Lip, that might have been missed by the average viewer:
In the first interview, Don Shirley rejects Tony Lip. The apparent rationale is that Tony Lip refuses to do extra housekeeping jobs. In later scenes, when Tony Lip sleeps in bed with his wife, suddenly the phone rings. That’s Don Shirley. He wants to talk to his wife first. He asks permission to take her husband for the trip. Then he says he accepted Lip to work.
What really happened in the background that the film refrains from showing us, so that he was accepted to work in the middle of the night while sleeping?
The scenario assembles a kind of romance, “getting permission from his wife” in order to convince the audience to this strange transition. What a wisdom shows our macho bodyguard bearing Mediterranean blood, who breaks noses, chins with the slightest anger, gives the phone directly to his beautiful wife without any query!
This strange romantic snapshot was mounted on the screen in order to avoid showing how Don Shirley was persuaded behind closed doors to recruit Tony Lip, which is indeed also related to a little-known phenomenon in US history.
The American Navy made secret agreements with the Italian Mafia in 1942. The aim of this collaboration was to hunt Nazi spies infiltrated into the US, with the support of the Italian Mafia who dominated New York’s harbor areas. This co-operation also worked during the landing to Italy in showing the US troops the roads and providing the support from local people and families against Mussolini. This support of the Italian Mafia had been very effective in winning the war with less casualties:
Contrary to popular belief, this law, which was established between the US Army and the Italian Mafia during the war years, continued after the war. Although we have not reached the precise sources that confirm this, there is a solid clue:
Before the war, we know that discrimination in the Deep South was against both Blacks and Italian and Polish immigrants, who were called “half-niggers”. In the aftermath of the war, only the Italians become privileged among the other ethnicities and they became almost untouchable in the Ku Klux Klan’s attacks. This phenomenon makes us think that the American State-Italian Mafia secret law, which was established during the war years, also continued later.
The fact that Tony Lip, the bodyguard of the Italian Mafia, was sent to Don Shirley as a driver and guard, also constitutes the main frame of the film, supporting our view.
Contradictory messages and their ideological implications
The film says that Don Shirley had one brother and that had no contact with him. But after the film was released, it turned out that he had three siblings. One of these brothers was interviewed. In this interview, he stated that he had no problem with this brother, Don Shirley, and that they were constantly in touch. This brother also emphasized that the friendship between Don Shirley and Tony Lip was not as close as it was shown in the film: “They were never so close, my brother fired him two years later” he said.
Lip’s family, by contrast, confirmed the friendship of the duo described in the film, saying, “That’s exactly what happened.”
The contradiction in the narratives of the two families shows:
– The black side tells a story that denies the peace and friendship message of the film.
– The Italian-white side however, confirms the film’s story of peace and friendship..
This contradiction in the declarations of today’s representatives of families also corresponds to the logical contradiction between the two ideological/political blocks’ approach to the issue of ethnic politics in general: the separationist approach versus the unionist approach.
It is necessary to understand the reason why the Chorus gets so angry at the film by referring to this contradiction: it is irrelevant to discuss which scenes in the film represent real events or which of them are fiction. The film does not claim to be a documentary! The main reason for the anger of Chorus is that the film reminds the viewer the arguments that question and disturbs the separationist logic.
Consider a statement from Turkey’s extension of the Chorus (Footnote 10):
“Against this rudeness. Don Shirley’s family has rightly stood up and said that the film was a “symphony of lies”. He had known to eat the fried chicken by holding the bone, long before the white driver, as part of the black culture.”
It is obvious that this cadre has another allergy that they cannot express, since they rush on discrediting the film as if it were a documentary.
The inter-class spreading of culture: ‘transference’
In the citation above, the first thing we must focuse on was that a cultural practice had been problematized: fried chicken for blacks; raw meatballs for Kurdish and so on… ie the food culture.
Raw meat balls, McDonalds, Fried Chicken, the Turkish pizza lahmacun, wrap kebab etc. are the kinds of fast food which workers can consume without sitting at the table, without leaving their workplace. Remember the boss bringing the kebabs wrapped in the newspaper at noon, for lunch break to the construction site where workers just seat on the floor to eat them. These are workers’ meals, not black or Kurdish meals!
Like every culture, this food culture is ‘established‘ as it fulfills a need first. Then begins its ‘transference‘. Culture becomes an ‘ideological practice‘, when this phenomenon of ‘transference‘ is brought into play.
We borrow the term ‘transference‘ from psychoanalysis. When this stage is entered in psychoanalysis, the analysand tries to convey their feelings and assumptions to the analyst. The transference has a relaxing function. The analyst must stand against it. The talent of the psychoanalyst is to lead the analysand to question why they need to do this without being trapped in the stream of transference. If the analyst succeeds leading the interrogation, then the path towards the ‘absolution‘ is entered.
Ideological transference, however, spreads between classes again due to its ‘relaxing’ function, similar to that in psychoanalysis. Worker’s food can become an accessory of luxury entertainment life in posh restaurants in bourgeois nightclubs where fortunes are poured every night. Nights that start with ‘high mood’ electronic music are turned to weeping sobbing depressive arabesque songs at the end of the night while desperately fouling the bottom of the cookie plate. The author of the quotation above must definitely be aware of this phenomenon while giving the example of İbrahim Tatlıses (a Turkish singer known as Kurdish, singing arabesque songs) in these following lines (Footnote 11):
“Although looks like assimilated in giving his concerts for the rich tables, in the garden of the White Turks homes, could you imagine someone teaching İbrahim Tatlıses how to eat raw meatballs? Even in its present form, Tatlıses has no need a Turkish tutorial to learn how to experience to be a Kurd”
Do the screenwriters think that Don Shirley didn’t know how to eat chicken by hand and that they were so concerned about this to figure out this scene, where the white employee teaches the black boss to eat chicken by hand?
It is unlikely that the author of the quotation was not adequate to realize that the film deliberately leads the audience to ask this question (“how come that a black guy may not know how to eat the chicken by hand?”). So we stand on a smarter possibility: he does this maneuver to ignore a solid logic which he knows very well and very disturbing to him. Pretending not to know it he invents a way to discredit the film as if it were a dry documentary.
Because the author is stubbornly embraced by the ease of the ‘transference‘. Green Book overturns the truth he attributes to ethnicity, disrupting his bourgeois pleasure. The author avoids confronting the fact that the bosses are already willingly eat worker’s meal. The bosses act as an analyst without ethics: they accept the transfer immediately and adopt them as their own. This is the skill of governance and ruling over the humans.
A similar theme can be seen in Cuarón’s film Roma. Let us recall the scenes where the residents sit on the same table with the maid. These scenes create in the average viewer’s the perception that women’s solidarity could be a remedy to class exploitation. If the audience can overcome this (women’s solidarity has also boundaries, the woman keeps on cleaning the dog shits because she is a maid), they then get stuck in ethnic dramatization barrier (she is a poor Mixtec, therefore she is condemned to clean dog shits). The film Roma obstructs conceiving discrimination and exploitation as a sociological, political and philosophical phenomenon, reducing it into a moralistic issue. This is arabesque. This is betrayal to Left.
Sociology: “Why should a boss know to eat chicken by hand?”
This scene, which the author hates, aims to break the 2a = 2b association lifting it up to the 1 = 2a association. Later on, Don Shirley’s lifting the whiskey glass over the piano, similarly slams the notion of ethnic art or music, gives the message: “There is no such a thing as Negro music, but there is Music for everybody!”
Ethnic identities and cultures are not structures on which one can base ethical politics. They are manipulative tools that cover class differences. The use of these means by the rulers is as old as the history of mankind – a typical example was the fact that Christianity, which emerged as slave religion, becoming the ideology of rulers.
‘Mediation’ and ‘Sublation’ as opposed to ‘Transference’
The reciprocal recognition in Green Book is based on the Hegelian logic that chokes the ‘transference’ leading to ‘sublation’ through ‘mediation’:
First of all, it is important to emphasize that the genre of the film is comedy: Tony Lip’s frequent discourses opposite to today’s political correctness norms such as calling the black as “the daytorch”, the jew as “red”, and so on, does not create any tension but instead loosens the atmosphere. Professor Zizek draws attention to this relaxation function of “racist” jokes giving examples from Montenegro jokes – “Laz fıkraları” in Turkey too has a similar function. Professor Zizek points out that these anecdotes had disappeared in times where racism rises.
As things progress as the film proceeds, they experience that discrimination does not discriminate: when the policeman call Lip “half-negro”, Lip cannot master his fury and blows the fist. This scene leaves a very important question mark in the viewer’s head:
There are two options:
1) Did Lip blow a fist because he was a bit racist himself too and therefore felt humiliated when the policeman called him “negro”?
2) or has he just blown his fist because he was a bit “negro” himself too and therefore reacted against the policeman calling him in a humiliating manner?
The two options are mutually exclusive, both (1) and (2) cannot be valid at the same time: Lip has either punched because of being racist in his head; or because he was not racist at all.
This question remains suspended and does not become clear in the following dialogues. But we see Don Shirley adopting the first answer in advance, saying: “You too because you’re secretly racist in your head that you punched”. Lip doesn’t answer. Because Lip has no means to prove that he was angry because he was not racist – even if the option 2 was valid. Don Shirley’s prejudice attributing the 1 st option to the case, proves that, not Tony Lip, but Don Shirley was secretly racist in his head.
As we cannot know what was going on in Lip’s head at the moment of punching the policeman, when such a situation happens in real life, people themselves may not know what is happening in their minds. But the logics of Hegel shows us how this dilemma could have been lifted over: even if Lip were angry at the 1st reason, the film in progress (through the mediation of experiences that discrimination doesn’t discriminate) establish a law between the two to a higher (more universal) level where only the 2nd option could have been valid. Therefore, the question whether Lip was racist or not in his head at the time of punching becomes a wrong question at the end of the process. This process illustrates the concept of ‘necessity‘ in Hegel. Hegel’s philosophy is a process philosophy. But this is a non-temporal, that is, a logical process. If Lip reacted to Don Shirley’s reflection of his racism on his mind (saying “no I am not, I didn’t because I tought that way…..”), the dialogue would turn into a vicious debate. Because this is unknowable before the process accomplishes. Through the mediation of their intentional and accidental actions in the face of the problems that the protagonists come up lifting the wrong question away, into a common level of consciousness. Being nigger, white or half-nigger are left behind. They come up being equal individuals (Footnote 12). Does Tony Lip keep silent when being accused of being racist by Don Shirley because he was too wise? In the logic of Hegel, this is a wrong question too. Because, after the logical process is completed that one can see it was a wisdom. In the logic of Hegel, the results can precede causes. Time doesn’t flow linear, it’s fractal, and even plastic.
‘Sibel’
As the ‘Green Book’ sublates the ethnic problem, the film ‘Sibel’ (2019), directed by Guillaume Giovanetti and Çağla Zencirci, similarly sublates the problem of pseudo-feminism.
Sibel is a girl who is raised as a boy because she is inarticulate. She doesn’t go out without taking her riffle. She doesn’t have to cover her head. At night she comes home at the time she wants – she even may not come.
Sibel was able to obtain these privileges thanks to her disability. Again, her abilities she developed made her a source of pride for her father – as if she were his son (father has only two daughters and no son). In scenes like dinner, where the family comes together, the father calles Sibel “my girl!” with an intonation loaded with greed as if he were calling his son “oğlum!”.
His sister by contrast, lives the misfortune of being ‘normal’: she has to cover her head. Her exit and entrance to the house is timely limited and monitored. Women’s parties are her only entertainment. This leads us to evaluate the “no harassment – no men” coffee shop projects of pseudo-feminism as the spread of this village culture into the cities. The sister is in a hurry to get married before getting late at age. She prefers marrying rather than attending school, because that way she will fulfill her “womanhood”, liberated from home, acquire her “freedom” actualizing the requirements attributed to her gender identity. Her father too is willing to “give” her to her future husband before they face any “accident”. The father draws a rather enlightened profile compared to their environment they live. Despite he loves his little daughter too he still makes statements like “what can we do?, she is a girl, indeed, she will be gone to husband…”. The actor’s excellent act makes the audience sense the inner tension and pain the father experiences within this primitive culture where daughters are ‘given‘ and ‘taken‘ like a commodity.
Sibel does her best to keep her sister attending school. She becomes increasingly excluded from villagers’ life. Her sister accuses her in being jalous because no family would like to ‘take’ her as she is inarticulate and therefore willing to hampering her marriage.
The wrong reason of the little sister here is comparable to the wrong reason of Don Shirley accusing Tony Lip for his racial prejudice in prison (“You punched the policeman because you’re hiddenly racist too”). Both assertions cannot be verified, can neither be denied nor defended.
Sibel’s tension with her father and her father’s tensions with the villagers increase.
As a catalyst a short love that Sibel lived with an outlaw has been added to the script. Here too, as in Cuarón’s Roma, her lover leaves Sibel irresponsibly. But unlike Cuaron’s Roma, the women’s solidarity in ‘Sibel’ (Sibel’s solidarity with the elderly woman who was also left by her lover years ago and lives in her retired hermit) is not a solidarity through the grievances of abandonment. Cuarón’s Roma, on the other hand, continues the victimization of abandonment until the end of the film following an arabesque track. This point is important: Sibel is not a simple and ordinary ‘woman’ who was abandoned, but she was a special woman raised like a man. Therefore Sibel’s next actions – as in Roma – are not caught in a vicious circle of grievances. Love grinds Sibel. By ‘lifting‘ her femininity up, she becomes the individual getting into a struggle for the other (her sister). In the final scene the ‘ordinary’ village women keep quiet and continue their work pretending that they were unaware of the event in distain, but losing one outage, an ‘unordinary’ one behind them.
As the Green Book film turns down the race-culture-class associations of ethnic politics, ‘Sibel’ inverts the identity politics based on ‘woman’, which the American Second Wave Feminism has abstracted to such an extend that reaching sort of medieval mystical abstractions like referring to the theme of the witch, alternative science, medicine and so on. But as in one scene Don Shirley weepingly says, “I’m neither a nigger, nor a white; neither a man, nor a woman, who am I!“, in fact Sibel is neither a ‘woman’ nor a ‘man’. And she takes all her revolutionary motivation and power from this lack of identity. ‘Sibel’ and the Green Book are the films exhibiting that the identity politics were futile as they were based on lack of identity and that the politically correct concerns like “Let’s not say black to black, let’s call them African-American, let’s not call a girl as lady, let’s say woman…” could never fill this lack.
On one stage, we hear that Don Shirley studied at the conservatory in Leningrad. It is recalled that the Soviet Union was far more advanced than the US in terms of race equality. As pointed out by the sociologist Zahit Atam, the negro Pushkin was more Russian than anyone else in Russia. In fact, a real art does not fit in any race, identity or ethnicity. What we call “ethnic music” cannot be an “art” and to install a revolutionary function in art, one has first to lift the whiskey glass away from the piano!
Istanbul, 30 March 2019
This study was prepared with the data obtained from the detailed and meticulous study of Ali Polat for months. We would also like to thank film critic Ruveyda Bayram, who helped us to evaluate the films from a technical point of view, and we are also thankful to Prof Barış Parkan for her help at any point we were stuck in the literature.
Footnotes:
1) In situations where ‘sublation’ cannot be achieved within the confrontation, the subject remains stuck in a trap of ‘vicious cycle’. In order to achieve the ‘lifting up’, the notion must be ‘solved out’ from its anthithesis that is present at hand. This is described as the ‘absolution of consciousness’. In some Hegel translations it is wrong to describe this ‘absolute consciousness’ as a king of utterance or certainty. Hegel ‘s philosophy is a process philosophy, it does not progress towards a certainty, end, or telos. For this reason, we are adopting the terminology of Prof. Önay Sözer which fits to the etymological constitution of the word “ab+solute” rather than the contemporary connotations of the term. Therefore, we have expressed the situation in which the subject is attached to the vicious circle with terms like ‘attachment’, ‘binding’, ‘slurry’… Associating Hegel’s philosophy to Eastern mysticism, dogmatism, Indian culture, Buddhism, are just disgraceful marketing of Hegel.
2) https://expo.nola.com/life-and-culture/erry-2018/11/edd35b832b5259/where-was-green-book-filmed-a.html
3) https://pandaily.com/alibaba-just-had-its-best-fiscal-year-with-39-3-billion-in-revenue-2018-fiscal-report/
4) https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=greenbook.htm
5) – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/25/green-book-oscar-hollywood-race-best-picture-academy-racism
– https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/28/taking-green-book-critics-to-task
– https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/03/25/green-books-oscars-victory-why-a-lousy-film-won-best-picture/amp/
– https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/11/16/green-book-new-movie-evokes-crucial-guide-black-travelers-during-segregation/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4e99eee838cf
6) Kieron Connolly, America’s bloody history from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Enslow Publishing, LLC, 2018, p.35
7) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/jfk-domestic-politics/
8) https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/5_History.pdf
9) http://time.com/5453443/true-story-behind-green-book-movie/
10) https://www.haberturk.com/yazarlar/oray-egin/2385259-green-booktan-neden-nefret-ettim
11) ibid.
12) The ‘sublated’ contradiciton here is an example to kind of contradiction Hegel calls as ‘notional contradiction’: particular X universal >> individual