Tag: Ryan Coogler

‘Fruitvale Station’ Humanizes the Pigeonholed African American Father/Child Relationship

Fruitvale Station film poster.

“I got a daughter…” groans Oscar Grant. “He just shot me…”
Lying face down, a coward’s bullet inside his back, young Oscar’s black-brown eyes water, blood spews between his purple lips, redness staining bright white teeth that had smiled with an infinite amount of mesmerizing happiness prior to Oscar’s unjustly end.
One person dominates his mind, one little female of great importance.
In Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler’s first independent feature film, Oscar’s final words bring forth poignant honesty that dismantles the absentee black father, that negative stereotype surrounding black culture, haunting it like a skeletal ghost refusing to die. The precious gift of fatherhood is robbed from Oscar, shot into the perilous night by a senseless white police officer. It is the kind of tragedy seen every day in America–a young black man murdered, his life thrown into a casket and immediately glossed over, swept aside for the next victim without any real emphasis behind his personal story. Media would say a black man died today, talk about surviving relatives, and–like a conveyor belt moving fast inside a methodical slaughterhouse factory–another man takes his place.

Coogler focuses on the last day of Oscar Grant’s life, specifically his relationships between his mother, Wanda, his girlfriend, Sophina and their daughter, Tatiana–a definitive, commendable highlight. To Oscar, Tatiana is everything. Media portrays the African American father as never present and always on the hunt for sowing his wild oats. Despite its setting against horrendous ill-conceived logic, however, Fruitvale Station is no Pursuit of Happyness Will/Jaden Smith film either. There is no happy ending here. Set in an urban foundation, the bond between a father and his daughter is tested by a system designed to fail black men.

Tatianna (Arianna Neal) is the apple of Oscar’s (Michael B. Jordan) eye.

Now unfortunately, I’m all too familiar with the “black father not being around” stereotype. I grew up in a single-mother household, second oldest of five kids–three fathers between us. I breathed that negative stimulus of being a fatherless child all throughout my life. I admired my peers’ stick figure families with dads in them and hated whenever June came around. Eventually, I found my father, but it became even tougher to deal with the fact that I had five other siblings–all in different states. So yes, while it is tough to face difficult situations, one must move over the past and not become oppressed by it. Otherwise it becomes a pattern. 

Oscar’s biological father doesn’t appear to be around either, but the love offered from his supportive mother is tenderly passed down to his daughter and rendered with a remarkable tranquility that is difficult to turn away from. It is like a lesson has been passed down. That “I’ll do everything in my power not to be like my father” mentality is endearing and honestly portrayed. Laughter, pride and joy are magically threaded together, humanizing the reality of the American black father, showcasing his imperative role in the upbringing of a precociously bright daughter. I didn’t feel this extreme jealousy or envy while seeing him depicted as a strong, caring parent who adores and nurtures his child–that sustenance missing from my painful childhood. 

Oscar is no martyr, no betrayer. He is a catalyst. I sense hope for change, a harrowing desire for other filmmakers to portray the black man as a hero to be worshiped by his own offspring, to inspire a generation still believing the worst about his race, shooting him down just because his brown skin incites “fear.”
“Do you want her to come down here? See you like this?” Wanda asks, speaking of Tatiana, after Oscar has been jailed for the implied umpteenth time.
She moved me to tears in this scene when she abruptly admits she cannot take it, rises out of her seat, and boldly walks away. She almost breaks down, but her strength–that same tenacity flowing through Oscar’s veins–allows her to rein it all in. This solidifying moment, set just a year before Oscar’s death, defined Oscar’s passion to change, to truly make a genuine effort as a father. He knows that he cannot guide Tatiana from behind bars, that in order to be a good, responsible role model the most important rule is just to be present, and not take advantage of time.

Tomorrow is never ever promised, especially for a black man.

Coincidentally enough, black men are often penalized for killing each other–at times with no possibility for parole; but on the other hand, people of other races receive light sentences on killing black men because black men are still seen as expendable. Johannes Mehserle served eleven months out of a paltry two-year prison sentence for killing Oscar. George Zimmerman is free for shooting an armless teenager. These slap on the wrists transpire every single day. Throughout the course of America’s grisly racist history, families continue grieving lost loved ones, a mother’s mourning the most bereft because justice continues murdering her children and telling her it’s fair.

Tatiana (Arianna Neal) and her father (Michael B. Jordan).

Fruitvale Station is a film that confronts viewers with love–the love that a black man feels for his family, his friends, his girlfriend. This is not some ridiculous caricature with watermelons and fried chicken. These people eat lobster and celebrate life together. There’s no oppression or fodder. They are connected to one another through Oscar, who says “I love you” to everyone through words, laughter, and body language. When he tells his daughter stories, they are not inventive lies or tall tales, promises of a better life. He doesn’t say, “Yeah! We’re going to Disneyland tomorrow!” He may not be a wealthy man, he may be struggling a bit, but real unconditional love is what keeps him going, what sets him in a positive direction. 
After the death of a symbolic pit bull, a shining array of wisdom captures Oscar in a beguiling light. He sits on rocks and tosses a fat bag of weed into the river and doesn’t take any of his friend’s wad. Reflection has created a striking change in Oscar, an enlightened promise to become a better man, a better father, a respectful, worthy being. Before the credits roll, as he clings to life on his beeping hospital bed, viewers are left with what are possibly his concluding thoughts before death–that of Tatiana, his guiding light, his North Star in a world filled with darkness, in a world crueler than a black man selling dope in the street corners to survive and provide.

Tatiana’s (Arianna Neal) fear for Oscar (Michael B. Jordan) is a disheartening premonition.

Oscar makes mistakes, but he always set out to right wrongs and often speaks on future dreams.
It is hard to breathe in a society that programs us how to think, taking away the mentality of the colored person, reshaping them only to a fit comforting representation–the joking, laughing spectacle. The moment a black man, especially as a father, is shaped into a person experiencing real struggles and hardships, the jester masquerade is over. It is impossible for lips to crack a smile. An ugly illustration of residue is left behind. A suffering mother stares at the lifeless body she isn’t allowed to hold again, barred from nearness. Even death has become another prison cell. Then there’s the daughter. She knows that her father is not going to outrace her in front of schoolmates or take her to Chucky Cheese or let her sleep between him and her mother.
Fruitvale Station ends somberly, the note quiet and gut wrenching. Coogler is not only crying out for retribution, for understanding, but for dignity and honor for those black men murdered without any sense of decency or remorse for the lives they have touched–family, friends, passing strangers.
Most gently, however, Coogler gives black fathers their due. 

‘Fruitvale Station’: White Audiences Need to Look, Not Look Away

Fruitvale Station movie poster.


Written by Leigh Kolb

Fruitvale Station, unlike most feature films, is not told from and for the perspective of the white gaze. For white audiences, this is startling, uncomfortable and heartbreaking. It should be.

The film is a harrowing re-telling of the true story of Oscar Grant, who was killed by a police officer in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2009.

Oscar’s murder (the 22-year-old was unarmed) was in the national spotlight and incited protests, both peaceful and violent, surrounding the racial profiling and violence that perpetually victimizes black men.
A black man is killed by police or vigilantes every 28 hours.

Fruitvale Station provides a snapshot into the last day of Oscar Grant’s life without turning him into a martyr or villain, but depicting him as an individual–imperfect yet deserving to live.
The film opens with real-life cellphone video footage of the arrest and shooting that was taken by a bystander. There’s screaming, there’s police brutality and there’s a shot. Audience members gasped. It was shocking. It should be. We are forced to look at reality.
However, the shock and terror that we feel at that scene is part of an American historical context that has perpetually reminded young black men, especially, but really all black people, that their lives are not only in danger from white supremacists, but also from those who are supposed to be protecting them.
Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) and girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz).
While Oscar (Michael B. Jordan) is a man, his relationship with his mother (played by Octavia Spencer) is highlighted–in flashbacks when she visits him in prison, when she scolds him for talking on the phone while driving and when she pleads with him to take the train instead of drinking and driving when he and his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz) go out for New Year’s Eve. Emphasizing their relationship reminds viewers that Oscar’s age–22–is technically in adulthood, but he’s still growing and needing guidance (as most of us do in our early 20s). In a recent article for Jet, bell hooks, addressing Trayvon Martin’s death, explains:

“…black children in this country have never been safe. I think it’s really important that we remember the four little black girls killed in Birmingham and realize that’s where the type of white supremacist, terrorist assault began. That killing sent a message to black people that our children are not safe. I think we have to be careful not to act like this is some kind of new world that’s been created but that this is the world we already existed in.”

Oscar’s death was just another part of this world that hooks is talking about. The remarkable difference about his legacy is that it is now a feature film in more than 1,000 movie theaters across America (it was in the top 10 in box office numbers in its opening weekend). Fruitvale Station humanizes Oscar Grant and makes audiences look instead of look away.
Oscar’s mother (played by Octavia Spencer).

“By the time the credits roll, Oscar Grant has become one of the rarest artifacts in American culture: a three-dimensional portrait of a young black male—a human being. Which raises the question: If Grant was a real person, what about all these other young black males rendered as cardboard cutouts by our merciless culture? What other humanity are we missing?”

In one (fictionalized) scene, Oscar is approached by a stray pit bull at a gas station. Oscar loves on him (there appears to be a marking around the dog’s neck that could signify he was used in fights, or chained up) and the dog goes on its way. A few minutes later, the dog is hit by a car, and the vehicle speeds away, leaving it in the street. Oscar runs and cradles the dog, calling for help, and moves him out of the street. No one comes. The dog dies. All Oscar can do is pull down his stocking cap and get in his car.
This scene was heart-wrenching, of course, but as viewers we can’t help but see this as foreshadowing, knowing what’s to come at the end of Oscar’s day. On a larger scale, the dog scene symbolizes what so often happens with these stories of young black men dying–there’s a hit, there’s a run, no one responds and no one is punished. As a white viewer, I understood that angle, because the driver in this allegory has usually been one of us. Even if we don’t perpetuate violence, we continuously look away from the violent reality of being black in America, which is directly borne from a long history that is often belittled or ignored.
On his inspiration for that scene, writer-director Ryan Coogler said:

“Oscar was always talking about getting a house and one of the reasons he wanted to get a house is because he’d have a backyard for the first time and he could own a dog… And he wanted a pit bull. That was the kind of dog that he likes … it’s interesting because when you hear about pit bulls in the media, what do you hear about? When you hear about them in the media, you hear about them doing horrible things. You never hear about a pit bull doing anything good in the media. And they have a stigma to them … and, in many ways, pit bulls are like young African-American males. Whenever you see us in the news, it’s for getting shot and killed or shooting and killing somebody — for being a stereotype. And that’s what you see for African-Americans in the media and the news.…So, there’s a commonality with us and pit bulls — often we die in the street. Do you know what I mean? That’s where we die.”

Peeling back the layers of this scene even further–beyond a white audience member’s reaction into the director’s thoughts and Oscar’s aspirations–reveals even more depth to what is at the core of Fruitvale Station: Oscar Grant’s humanity and how it fits into the woven-together history of what it means to be a young black man in America.
There is a focus on Oscar’s relationship with his daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal).
The police officer who shot Oscar was sentenced to two years in prison, and served less than one. Just a few years later, in Florida, George Zimmerman was found not guilty in Trayvon Martin’s death. In the aftermath of that verdict, the most common and pervasive displays of racism I saw were white people insisting that the case had nothing to do with race, or arguing that the media needed to shut up about the case. It was revealed that the jury never discussed race while deliberating.
While Grant’s and Martin’s deaths and their killers’ court cases weren’t the same (although they bring up both sides of the aforementioned police-brutality and vigilante-justice coin and one critic noted that Fruitvale Station served as a eulogy to both young men), they both share the quality of being able to be ignored, dismissed or forgotten by white audiences. The dismissal of the disproportionate violence against (and mass incarceration of) young black men is our generation’s Jim Crow.
Next to discrimination and violence, looking away is one of the most racist things whites can do.
Fruitvale Station also quietly shows, through a young white woman named Katie, the ways in which whites can or should be allies.
Early in the film, Katie is shopping at the same fish counter as Oscar (who is buying crabs for his mother’s birthday dinner), and it’s clear that she has no idea what she’s doing. She wants to fry fish for her boyfriend, who loves Southern food, but she doesn’t know what she’s looking for or how to do it. When Oscar approaches her, she seems uncomfortable, and when he asks if her boyfriend is black (because of his food preferences) she laughs and says, “He’s white, but he knows a lot of black people I guess.” (Katie, at this point, is virtually playing “Problematic White Lady Bingo.”) “I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into,” she laughs.
Oscar calls his Grandma Bonnie and puts her on the phone with Katie. Grandma Bonnie teaches her what she needs to know about frying fish.
While this scene is ostensibly about frying fish, it can be read as a lesson to white people in regard to race relations (stay with me here). At first, Katie feels uncomfortable. But after talking to someone who knows more than she does, she’s enlightened.
Too often, white feminists don’t do this. We have a long history of marginalizing and ignoring women of color–caring about racism, but not pulling in those whom it affects. Just last week the turmoil over a blog post showed how completely tone deaf white feminists can be in regard to talking about race. (Read a response to it by Jamilah Lemieux at Ebony and this history lesson by Anthea Butler right now.) We talk, but we don’t listen.
By the end of the film, Katie sees Oscar again on the train, beaming at him and calling him over to her. When he’s arrested and brutalized, she is enraged and doesn’t understand, but takes a video on her cell phone. She’s pushed back onto the train, and is taken away from the scene.
The black men are profiled and taken off the train car (while the white man in the fight remains on the train), accused and arrested. Oscar is killed.
This happens too. For white allies, when that veil is lifted, and we are in a place of truly listening and caring, we feel like Katie must have felt–enraged but separated. Protected, privileged and safe, but unable to take clear action against what we see around us.
But we need to keep trying. We need to listen more. We need to learn history and look hard at the world around us and figure out what we can do to help fix it. It might be having a conversation. It might be recording injustice. It might be teaching others what we learn and encouraging them to seek out authentic voices. But we need to listen first. More than anything, it needs to be not looking away.
The success of Fruitvale Station (before its box office success, it won awards at Cannes and Sundance) will hopefully usher in more films that challenge the white gaze. Because now, perhaps more than ever, American society is at a dangerous crossroads. Too many want to forget the past and move forward to a future where white hegemony is intact. This denial and erasure of what our society was built upon is the utmost form of racism and white privilege.
White allies will never be able to fully empathize, and we shouldn’t pretend like we can. In an incredible essay, Jessie-Lane Metz addresses “Ally-phobia: On the Trayvon Martin Ruling, White Feminism, and the Worst of Best Intentions.” She quotes Audre Lorde, who wrote,

“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.”

When I was crying at the end of the film, I wasn’t crying the same tears as the black woman behind me was. White allies can’t fully understand that fear and pain that Lorde speaks of, but we need to listen to those who can. We can only create a better and safer world for all of us and all of our children if we listen. After we listen, we can speak.
Fruitvale Station, in humanizing and presenting a three-dimensional young black man, is, remarkably, groundbreaking in 2013. We’ve kept our backs turned too long on stories like his. Films allow us to see the world differently, and that kind of media representation is desperately needed. So we need to ask, listen, watch and learn. We need to look.
Recommended reading: 
Timeline of real events.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.