Cracks in the Shield: Charles Burnett's Dialogue with Hollywood

CRACKS IN THE SHIELD C harles Burnett's most recent film, The Glass Shield (1995), is remarkable, and was remarked upon, as a black L.A. film in which no one gets shot (at least not on screen). Less gangster film than film noir, Tlie Glass Shield is as horrifying a vision of the way in which certain African Americans are forced to live in L.A. as was Menace II Society or Boyz N the Hood, but its tactics are markedly different. Singleton and the Hughes brothers have earned their reputations with didactic, in-your-face, violent, "life as it must be lived" films about urban warfare; Burnett demonstrates that there are other ways to be political on film, and while The Glass Shield is, on one level, blatantly didactic, it also works with a subtlety that links it at once to Burnett's earlier work, to r I I 7 A n C T U avant-garde cinema movements, and to contemporary l LIZ. H D 11 n black urban-American cinema. Burnett's films, particularly in their play with narrative, are among the most original and unique products of contemporary African American cinema, and the four pieces in his remarkably consistent oeuvre bear close reading as effective, subtle models of artistic resistance to that form of racism peculiar to the United States. The black urban gangster film is driven less by plot than by incessant and usually unmotivated violence and derives its power from the realist authority with which it is vested: black kids in Los Angeles really do live in a war zone, these films insist, and this is simply the story of their lives. The spectators know what they're in for from the first scene, which usually includes either a shooting or a corpse. In Menace II Society and Boyz N the Hood, the opening violence that sets the tone is part of the story only because there is no story beyond the protagonist 's need to escape from the city alive; this violence is the first step in establishing that the narrative function of the antagonist has been replaced by an elusive antagonism permeating the urban environment . The films are set in one community within the city, and conflicts between characters within that community are subordinate to, or vehicles of, a greater conflict between the community and the largely invisible powers that determine the city's physical and social structure. The films are punctuated by revenge killings, but the revenge that the spectator comes most to desire — revenge not against members of the other gang, but against whomever is k i r n i 11 LI responsible for the state of the characters' lives — is never M E R M I N exacted. Read in this context, The Glass Sheildis distinguishes itself in how blatantly its villains are named and how precisely they are punished . The structure of the film is not in itself new; it is a typical suspense narrative, politicized to tell a racial story. This narrative is prefaced by another conventional narrative: a fantasy of heroism so prototypical that it is illustrated with comic-book frames rather than live actors, an imagined clip from the happy ending of a real goodguy /bad-guy story. The film's real story begins, with a comfortable opening equilibrium, when the live actors appear; but live actors can not fit into comic-book narratives, because they have real bodies, and this particular kind of story, Burnett reveals, is body-specific. It turns out to be a story about physically determined narrative exclusion. Though Burnett's latest film differs from his earlier works in Above and Opposite: Stills from The Glass Shield, 1996. EJUElJournal of Contemporary African Art • Fall/Winter 1996 CHARLES BURNETT'S DIALOGUE WITH HDLLYWUDD many ways — aesthetically, thematically, and structurally—and those drawn by his early documentary style might be disappointed by this slick production, The Glass Shield is a logical step in the examination of narrative that Burnett has been developing in his films for almost twenty years. Together, Burnett's films stand as a coherent and significant body of work in American cinema, influencing independent and Hollywood filmmakers alike. Burnett...