Word: slaving
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Roots (Roots: The Next Generations, all but forgotten, aired in 1979), but it is a fitting bookend. It is based on Alex Haley's account of the other side of his family, namely his paternal grandmother, who was the illegitimate daughter of a white plantation owner and his slave mistress. When Haley died last February, he was in the process of dictating the story to screenwriter David Stevens. Stevens has now fashioned it into a six-hour drama that John Erman (An Early Frost) has directed and CBS, with much fanfare, will present next week...
...love of a good man (Danny Glover). All of which would be more inspiring if it weren't for the florid melodrama and tinhorn dialogue. The villainous racists do everything but twirl their mustaches. The shallow plantation wives are cliches of another sort: "If it were not for the slave girls," says one, excusing the menfolk's sexual dalliances, "we women would have to submit to our husbands whenever they feel . . . healthy." The young Queen expresses her romantic outlook in sappy lines like "I want to marry a prince on a white horse...
...barring blacks from the dominant culture, Brown suggests, whites effectively turned them toward their own heritage. Indeed, the historical African Company followed mocked-at stagings of Richard III and Othello with dramas about Caribbean slave revolts, apparently the first plays by African Americans ever staged...
...plush -- seven inches or so of tube per hole, 80 holes on each side -- yields about 3 1/2 miles of plastic tubing; one imagines Hesse, who couldn't afford studio assistants, subjecting herself to a routine of repetitious semi-craftwork as punishing as any weaver's or assembly-line slave's, all in the interest of one restrained, tough, unappealing image that seems to oscillate between fear and desire, irony and alarm. There are boxes and boxes, but not many are as powerful as this...
Culturally, we have been bombarded with images of anti-heroes, vigilantes and glamorous villains, while traditional heroes of the American people are discredited as slave-owners (Jefferson), tools of class interests (the Founding Fathers) or "dead white males" (the philosophers on whose ideas our Constitution is based). The death of Superman is the ultimate symbol of the culture's inability to countenance the existence of even imaginary heroes who have not been defiled or humbled...