OIL: A few thoughts on the motion picture “Origin”

Ava Duvernay’s cinematic interpretation of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” written by author Isabel Wilkerson (simply titled “Origin”) was… tastefully naked. Like how we are born. Like how it was in the beginning. Like being told you can’t go back…there; with a side helping of all the reasons why. It is being inside of an ‘aha moment’ and being shown all of the scars the connective tissue has been forced to make – the baby must be born. So we wade through with a scalpel or a machete (whichever has been handed to you). Main character Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor holds her scalpel with a surgeon’s precision. I know this need for rest. I know this ever present conundrum of the shake and the sweat and the blood. My God, the blood. Yes, indeed the demons tremble. But what do we care of their trembling? We have our own. I watched her in earnest. Her impact was such that you could feel the loss, the anger, the understanding and the channeling. A channeling that had to be precise because, again: the ever-present, pesky scarring within the connective tissue (a tough yet delicate maze). They say it happens in threes. Loss. Death. Rising. And if you have yet to watch the movie, I urge you to pay attention to the idea of thrice. The idea of lying down in your own mess ’cause you simply can’t move until you see what color the walls fitna be. The idea of no walls; instead, the color of sky and the feel of green pasture. But first. But first. But first. The wading. She tells the black man beckoning the birth of her next written work that she wants to focus on family while pulling her white husband close. The nerve! The gall! What happens next is likened to being pulled into an abyss. What happens next is being the first to find the needle in the haystack; being told it wasn’t the needle that stuck you and that you are indeed not bleeding. What’s impressive is how (unlike what would’ve been my first inclination) Isabel chooses to not bleed everywhere. Because: just ’cause you can, doesn’t mean you should. Oil knows when to pour, when to hold back.

Her ink bled onto those who were not the culprit

But it was all in the plan

No one knew what her blood could do

Who’s the most dangerous being? Some say it is those with nothing left to lose. I say it’s the ones with every reason to be dangerous yet choose not to be. The ones who have been stripped of everything, left with nothing but a story to tell. And so they tell it. Leave it out in the open, raw, walking with you as you enter into the house of mirrors. I cried throughout the entirety of this movie. Which is to say a lot because the combination of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 left me in a drought. So, I had to ask myself, what’s pulling at the bucket of this seemingly dried out well? The answer: none of us are safe. No matter what our ancestors have endured. No matter the letters behind our names. No matter. No matter. No matter. Pedestals only exist in the way of hanging trees. Trophies only exist in the way of bludgeoning objects. Beloved books and the stories inside only exist in the way of bonfires despite such eerie warmth in winter. Isabel is dangerous because she could swing from a tree in her grief-stricken freedom, beat someone over the head, tear a whole in the walls of her own house and her mother’s (just out of pure rage), burn the bridges that are every line in the stories she’s written and have left to write. She does none of this. Instead she lies down in green pastures and looks grief in the eyes. Reminiscent of the Spike-Lee-esque double dolly shot, Duvernay creates the same symbolism with stillness and a sort of…grounding. Isabel is dangerous because she endured the house of mirrors and chose to create. She saw a blurry string of consciousness that linked us all and chose to grab hold of it. She walks it like the tightrope that it is. Oil knows the ins and outs, the cracks and crevices.

Couldn’t be me…

Oh yes, the hell it could be 

And has been

You

In the beginning, we have our own ideas and ideals of what life should be and should become. Some have met this idea, most have stumbled upon something utterly different. Celie’s sister and children return. None of them smell the same. We see this same truth with Isabel – finding freedom in obligatory travel, obligatory hard discussions, at the bottom of cesspools, at the end of her spouse’s, her mother’s, her best sister-cousin’s…absolution. The love returns…different, grown. We have put on an armor and must deal with the discontentment, the realization that not only is the shit heavy but it’s wildly (sometimes laughably) inefficient, a block, and a fog. In the beginning we spoke of union and freedom in the same breath. Now we haughtily wonder why the next breath hesitates. We went so far as to project the worst case scenario into our forefront so that we might test this armor. And this armor is splattered about the Caste system. It is why black love has been and still is so political. It is why we are now in a last ditch effort to reframe our essence as kings, queens, high value men and high value women. It is as disgusting as classifying an entire group of people as ‘untouchable’. Yet as understandable as ‘passing’, as surviving. This armor chokes us still. And as a woman is left to tell the story, she is also left with what to do with the heavy armor that a white male spouse has been made to hoist, that a confrontational mother has been made to hold onto, that a cousin has been made to drag behind her like an oxygen tank or an IV pole, that a world in and outside of herself has told her she needed to carry in order to be safe. The oil knows: we cannot be free and safe at the same time. The oil knows: it is natural to desire both. The oil knows why you sometimes hesitate to breathe the next breath. The oil knows the healing powers of one touch from an ‘untouchable’. The oil is their armor.

The only cast(e) I know is a skillet and the rolling credits of the movie reel.

Here, the shot callers and the bullets are all the same such that you know the source.

I wish.

We are walking oxymorons. Educated fools. Dry rivers. Silent screams. Maybe even worse; we are stagnant in these rivers of knowledge. The oceans are getting saltier still. What is the house just past shame? Complacency? Perhaps. If so, I’ve been there; and I can assure you Freedom left a long time ago. Asking a system of caste to give us us freeee is insanity in a bottle – dirty water claiming to be holy. And in this current atmosphere of throwing the whole rearview away, Wilkerson and Duvernay pull out that ol’ string of consciousness (that links us all) yet again and places the rearview (with all it’s cracks and brokenness) back where it was. Isabel’s eyes are there, broken roads are there, waves of goodbye are there. Harsh truths are there: the realization that some of the people we love did some really foul things in an effort to protect, the realization that some of the people we despise did the same, the realization that the ladder used is likely identical; this ladder, now in a museum that bears every last name we’ve ever muttered. In this moving vehicle, all glass fixtures must work together, in tandem, with the assistance of your eyes; and none of them require your forgiveness in order to just be. We are fearful of the rearview and so we fall deeper into a system that placed us there. This is how it’s been. This is not how it has to be. Oil will sink to the bottom, it just must be shaken up a bit. There are some souls down there to whom which it belongs.

And I ponder on this notion: perhaps the pain is bearable once one knows (really knows) they don’t deserve it. Perhaps this is all that has ever mattered if the intentionality was to truly, wholeheartedly, completely set free.

“Origin” was like watching a bouquet in motion (with the roots still attached). Its only request: wherever I go, to whomever I am handed, please, please let there be light! Even if it must be the coldest winter ever…please let there be light. Isabel’s review of culture, politics, religion/spirituality and their footprints on our hearts and minds leads her to a single string. We are invited on the journey as she traces back its knots and its unraveling. And we are reminded of the beginning so that we might knit a better future. We ‘belong’ to each other until we don’t. Some will send you off with, “be safe”, some will send you off with, “be free”. Each is so very telling if we just listen. The oil will remain with you either way.

There are years that give flowers to the artists that dared write. And write again. There are years that keep righting.

DuVernay, A.; Garnes, P.; Bremner, S. (Producers). DuVernay, A. (Director). 2023. Origin [Motion Picture]. USA: Array Filmworks.

Wilkerson, Isabel. (2020). Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House (US) & Allen Lane (UK).