Image via Empire Online
It’s impossible to see Fruitvale Station and not think of Trayvon Martin. Thinking of Trayvon Martin in conjunction with thinking of Oscar Grant, the subject of Fruitvale Station, means you’re not just thinking about those two human beings who were unarmed when they were shot and killed. There’s something bigger there. Much bigger.
We do a lot of things in America that are pretty cool. And we do several things that are the opposite of cool. Really, really far away from cool, in fact. Probably the thing we do the absolute worst at is race.
Racism in America didn’t end in 1865. Or 1964. Or 2008. It’s still there. It’s a strange fruit that refuses to rot and die. It is ever ripe.
So where does racism come from? In its most elemental form, it comes from a fear of the other. And part of what perpetuates that fear is the reduction of human beings who, for whatever arbitrary reason, are defined as “the other.” This reduction of the other creates a tragic gap between human beings where some people have to earn their humanity and some people don’t.
There’s a record out there of who Oscar Grant was. It includes all the complexities and paradoxes that were true of him and the choices he made. None of those things make him a greater or lesser human being than any of the rest of us. They just illustrate the specificity of the life he lived.
If you see Fruitvale Station—and, really, you should—you’ll see neither an apology for nor a glorification of Oscar Grant. Consequently, the film isn’t about how or why he was killed. Instead, Fruitvale Station is an expose of Oscar Grant’s beautiful, flawed humanity. It is an approximation of what happened to one actual human being on what turned out to be the final day of his life.
Filmmaker Magazine recently published an incredible conversation that took place earlier this summer between Ava DuVernay, writer/director of Middle of Nowhere, and Ryan Coogler, writer/director of Fruitvale Station. It bursts with big insights, but the one that matters most for our purposes is an excerpt where Coogler describes his intent for the film—that his work might close the tragic gap leaving one group of Americans unnecessarily afraid of their fellow citizens.
Here, Duvernay speaks first in italics while Coogler’s words are bolded:
I want to tell you about a scene that really resonated with me: Oscar, by himself, driving in his car with the music up. He’s calling his mom, talking about picking something up from the grocery store. What struck me is the profile shot of him in the car with the music on and the windows open, and he’s just driving. I don’t know how many times growing up I looked to the right of me in the car and see a brother in the car with the music up, right?
Yup. [Laughs]
And for me, to see a film in the context of Sundance, where I saw the film, I literally look around me, and it’s filled with white people seeing that same image that I see every day. I know they see it too. But now they have knowledge and context for what that brother’s day was like before that moment. Where you just see some hood in the car with the music up? No. He has a daughter. He has a mother. He has bills. He has worries. He has blood in his veins.
Life.
That scene made me cry. And we hadn’t even gotten into the narrative yet. I was that emotionally into it. You deconstructed something we see every day and allowed people a way into it. That’s one of the reasons why I think this film is so important, and that’s a lot of weight on a film. From my knowledge, the film hasn’t really screened widely in the African-American community yet, but are you feeling the weight of the way the community of black folk will take these [scenes] as opposed to the way that the dominant culture will take them?
Yeah, I feel the weight. But I feel comforted in that I was always honest to how I was feeling and how the people that were involved were feeling while we were making it. I feel comfortable giving that to that community because it comes from an honest place in me, and I’m a member of that community. And what you say is very moving about that scene because I feel like the media is how we connect with other facets of humanity. I came up watching American TV. I’ve never been a police officer, but I feel like I know what a cop says when he comes up to [a crime] scene because I’ve seen Law and Order or CSI. And I ask myself, what aspect of us are we exposing to other people? It’s like we’re newspaper headlines, we’re caricatures. Our humanity is squeezed out to the point where people who are not familiar with us don’t see us as human beings. But we see ourselves as human beings from the inside out. So I hope to capture that humanity, the stuff we’re going through every day, from the inside out.