Killer of Sheep (1977)
AS THE MAIN TITLE of Killer of Sheep appears over a black screen, a chorus of children’s voices sings:
Lull-a, lull-a, lull-a, lull-a by-by.
Do you want the moon to play with?
All the stars to run away with?
They’ll come if you don’t cry.
So, lull-a, lull-a, lull-a, lull-a by-by,
In your mother’s arms a creeping,
And soon you’ll be a sleeping.
Just before the song ends we see a tight close-up of a preadolescent boy with tearful, frightened eyes. The song fades into a man’s angry voice from offscreen: “You let anyone jump on your brother and you just stand and watch, I’ll beat you to death!” A slow retreat of the camera reveals a father berating his son: “I don’t care who started what . . . you pick up a stick or a god damn brick!” The father, wearing a wife-beater T-shirt, is ill, fatigued, or maybe drunk; his speech is slurred, and at one point in the harangue he breaks into a coughing fit. Cut to a brief shot of a woman’s torso as she stands in a kitchen doorway embracing a young child, his face buried in her perhaps pregnant stomach. A shot from behind the father shows the frightened son standing quiet, tense, trying to remain expressionless and accept humiliation. “Knock the shit out of whoever is fighting your brother,” the father says, “because if something happens to me and your mother, you ain’t got nobody in the world except your brother!” Cut to a thin old woman seated with her back to us in a poor but brightly lit kitchen, calmly leafing through a newspaper. Return to the father: “And if the son of a bitch is too big for you, come get me! Look, you’re not a child any more. You’ll soon be a god damn man! So start learning what life is about now, son!” The heavy woman exits the kitchen, smiling slightly; behind her, seated in the kitchen, we glimpse a teenage boy. In a reverse angle, the woman walks up to the boy who is being chastised and slaps him in the face. The screen goes black, and the rich bass voice of Paul Robeson sings the same tune we heard at the beginning.
This sequence contains seven shots and five camera setups, most of them close-ups. There’s no establishing shot, and viewers work a bit to determine spatial and temporal continuity. The only dialogue is the father’s angry rant, and some of the shots (the woman holding her child to her belly, the old woman reading a newspaper, and the male teenager glimpsed in the kitchen) generate questions that aren’t answered. Burnett leaves it to us to sort out details and decide how the scene and the people in it will relate to everything that follows. The characters don’t reappear, although some of the players can be glimpsed later in different roles. There’s no causal, spatial, or temporal connection between this and any later scene, and thus the opening of the film takes on thematic or poetic rather than narrative importance. The film deals with the themes it dramatizes: black family life, the growth of black children into adulthood, the problem of becoming a “man,” the relationship between black family and black community, and the chances of black survival in a dangerous world.
A great deal of the film centers on children, because, as Burnett has remarked, “without children, there is no survival. . . . In my community, the most important thing is to survive above all else, and children are taught that they have to support their brother, or their family, no matter what they do. . . . When you’re growing up, it poses some moral problems. You become more and more insensitive: the only thing that matters is survival. This callousness gradually alienates you, distances you from other people and complicates relations in a peculiar way—survival implies a good deal of mistrust—particularly relations between men and women. That’s why I show these children in Killer of Sheep, always there, attentive to what their parents are doing, witnesses of everyday drama” (Kapsis 2011, 8).
Throughout the film, music is as important as imagery. Burnett’s eclectic compilation score ranges from King Oliver to Rachmaninoff but is chiefly associated with African American culture. The song that frames or bookends the opening sequence, called simply “Lullaby” in published credits for the film, is also known as “My Curly Headed Baby,” one of a series of faux “plantation songs” by the classically trained Australian and later British composer George H. Clautsam, who in the early twentieth century wrote light operas and a single movie score. Clautsam’s song was intended to be performed as art music, but its lyrics were written in a crudely phonetic, naively racist, appallingly bad imitation of southern black dialect. Paul Robeson later recorded the song, dispensing with phony dialect and giving the words simple dignity. Burnett’s choice of it is significant, not only because Killer of Sheep concerns black families in Los Angeles who have ties to the Deep South, but also because of Robeson’s historical importance as a black artist, star, and advocate for social progress. (Burnett has long wanted to make a film about Robeson.)
Burnett’s treatment of music differs from a typical Hollywood picture because he seldom mixes it with diegetic sound, thus giving it a degree of independence and allowing it to function as counterpoint or commentary. But if the song at the beginning is intended as some sort of comment on the action, exactly what does it say? Obviously there’s an ironic relationship between the song, which evokes parental love, peace, and celestial beauty, and the scene, which deals with parental punishment, violence, and danger. The song is about a child falling asleep in its mother’s arms, the scene about a boy awakening into the duties of manhood and the imperative of survival; the song is comforting, the scene shocking; the song is dreamlike, the scene harshly realistic. But there’s also a sense in which the song is coterminous with the scene, so that music and image aren’t in complete conflict, and one doesn’t take priority over the other. The song bleeds into the visual action in the form of a chorus of children’s sweet voices and reemerges at the end in the form of a man’s grave bass voice; it joins with and permeates the “plot” of the scene, lingering afterward like a poignant memory or yearning.
Killer of Sheep gradually develops a plot of sorts, made up of a series of vignettes involving the problems of a married black man with two children who works in a sheep slaughterhouse and suffers from depression. Burnett got the basic idea for the film from a man he often saw riding the bus in Los Angeles. “One day he happened to sit by me, and I had the opportunity to ask him what he did. He told me he worked at the slaughterhouse, and what he did was kill sheep. What they did then was they had a sledgehammer, and they would hit the animal in the head with the sledgehammer and crush the skull. And I just couldn’t imagine someone doing that every day, day in and day out, without creating some nightmare effect” (Kapsis 2011, 166).
Burnett’s central character and his wife have come to Los Angeles from the South and are trying to divest themselves of a “country” background, such as when the father tells his son to stop addressing his mother as “mot dear” (an old expression meaning “mother dear,” made fun of in Tyler Perry’s films about the character Madea), or when his wife admonishes their daughter for going barefoot. He’s a proud man who at one point angrily claims he isn’t poor: he’s able to give a few things to the Salvation Army, he loans or gives small amounts of money to his friends, and unlike another man in the neighborhood, he doesn’t have to survive by eating greens from vacant lots. Even so, he seems perpetually weary and dejected and is unable to make emotional contact with his family. During the film he undergoes a very modest emotional change for the better, but he doesn’t achieve true progress; his day-to-day projects—helping a friend repair an old car, a trip to a racetrack—usually end in frustration, and he keeps the same awful job at the end that he had at the beginning.
This is a film lacking a clear resolution or a strong cause-effect relationship between events, centering on a man whose personal crisis is both economic and psychological. Burnett’s purpose, he has explained, was to depict a character who works in terrible conditions but whose “real problems are within the family, trying to make that work and be a human being. You don’t necessarily win battles; you survive” (Kapsis 2011, 98). Hence, as Manthia Diawara has pointed out, Killer of Sheep almost completely rejects the forward momentum of classic Hollywood and the typical social problem picture, “with its quest for the formation of the family and individual freedom, and its teleological trajectory (beginning, middle, and end)” (1993, 10). Like certain other black independent films, among them Ganja and Hess and Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991), its form is “rhythmic and repetitious” and its narrative style “symbolic.” It has something in common with “Black expressive forms like jazz, and with novels by such writers as Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, which stop time to render visible Black voices and characters” (Diawara 1993, 10–11).
In more specific terms, Killer of Sheep renders visible the 1970s black community in Watts. Burnett doesn’t show us the area’s most famous landmark: the Watts towers, a notable example of outsider art, constructed by Italian emigrant Simon Rodia in the period between 1921 and 1954. During Burnett’s interview/commentary with Richard Peña on the Milestone DVD of the film, he says he wanted to depict more of the local life in the schools, but was unable to do so. He also doesn’t show us churches; indeed, his central character remarks that he hasn’t been to church since he was “back home” in the South. Burnett nevertheless gives us documentary evidence of the city streets and produces striking images, some disturbing, some beautiful, of a kind that had never been seen in theatrically distributed movies. Most of his large cast was made up of nonprofessionals, including many children, who lived in Watts; some of them had even participated in or been witnesses to the Watts riots. One of his purposes was to encourage local participation and “demystify filmmaking in the community” (Evry 2007), but he also dramatized aspects of daily life he had witnessed, creating a more personal sort of film than the Italian neorealists or the Brazilian Cinema Novo. Like Several Friends, his earlier student film about Watts, Killer of Sheep has a scene that was shot directly behind the house where Burnett once lived (it involves the theft of a TV in broad daylight). He knew people who stored car parts inside their houses to keep them from being stolen, just as a character in this film does; in fact, he once walked into a house and saw the entire front end of a car sitting on the floor. The dangerous games played by young people in the film are the same games he played.
Scattered throughout Killer of Sheep are short scenes of kids playing in the streets and of sheep going to slaughter. Burnett traveled to San Francisco with his lead actor to find a factory that would allow him to document the killing of sheep, which he photographed without the aid of a crew. He shows us ghostlike crowds of snowy ewes; a Judas goat leading the innocent to their deaths; sheep carcasses strung up on hooks and moved down an assembly line for butchery; sheep heads stuck on pikes and stripped of flesh, eyes, and brains; and sheep blood washed from floors. More often, he shows children running and playing their dangerous games in Watts. Boys throw rocks at one another, jump gracefully from rooftop to rooftop, and race bikes down the street chased by angry dogs. Sometimes they torment girls; when a girl in a sunlit, blindingly white dress starts hanging her white laundry on a sagging wash line, boys throw dirt over her and her clean clothes. Occasionally the girls get back at the boys; as a group of preteen girls dance in an alleyway, as a boy riding a bike enters from behind the camera, rides over to the group and shoves one of them, the girls push him, kick him, and break his bike. In another scene, a boy on a porch watches a couple of girls walk down a sunny sidewalk. “Look at them ol’ ugly girls,” he says loudly; the girls shout back “Your daddy is ugly!” and stroll off. “Wanna come here and fight?” the boy halfheartedly yells. In still another scene, a rangy girl climbs onto a rooftop and leads a group of boys in a rock-throwing fight; as she aggressively tosses missiles at kids on the street below, one of the boys on the roof suffers an injured wrist and tries to make his way down, wincing and wiping away his tears.
When the kids aren’t playing, they’re silent, sometimes amused witnesses of rough adult behavior, as when a drunken man in an army uniform is forced out of an apartment by an angry woman bearing a gun. Burnett’s treatment of them has a complex tone, often humorous and remarkably unjudgmental. He never sentimentalizes the children or looks away from their occasional cruelty; at the same time, he repeatedly shows their ingenuity, curiosity, and energy. Manohla Dargis has rightly compared some of his images of kids in Watts to the photos of legendary New York street photographer Helen Levitt, who specialized in still pictures of children’s games. Levitt’s sixteen-minute, 16mm film In the Street (1945–1952), a straight documentary photographed in New York’s Spanish Harlem in collaboration with James Agee and Janice Loeb, has almost no scenes of raw poverty and far less roughhouse play than Killer of Sheep, but it resembles Burnett in its humane respect for the anarchic spirit of children and its awareness of the beauty in their improvised amusements. In Killer of Sheep, children have very few things to improvise with—a few bikes, an old top, a string of unexploded cap-pistol caps, a gum wrapper, a rubber mask, a beat-up white doll—and they often make do with rocks and rubble. Burnett records the meanness of their life, but he observes them with tenderness and wit.
Killer of Sheep isn’t a thesis film that overtly argues for solutions to social problems, but it implicitly compares the children in Watts with the sheep going to slaughter and makes viewers think about what could be done to give them a reasonably secure future. To solve that problem, one needs to confront a wide range of social, political, and economic issues. No doubt Burnett wanted audiences to discuss such things, but his immediate aim as an artist was to objectively dramatize the quotidian struggles of a working-class black family, its attempts to reproduce itself and raise its children against almost impossible odds. Fittingly, he introduces us to the family—Stan (Henry Gale Sanders), Stan’s unnamed wife (Kaycee Moore), Stan Jr. (Jack Drummond), and Stan’s daughter Angela (Angela Burnett, who is Charles Burnett’s niece)—by way of neighborhood children playing daredevil war games in the decaying remains of the Watts rail yard.
The games are gritty and spontaneous looking, staged in a wasteland of dust, dirt, and rocks, but like nearly all the scenes in Killer of Sheep, they were scripted, storyboarded, and guided by Burnett’s unobtrusively poetic feel for space, time, and tempo. He gives them an overarching design, moving from a tightly framed montage of a dangerous rock fight to an exhilarating wide shot of boys running alongside a passing train, and finally to an elliptical series of shots conveying dispersion and restless boredom. As he often does elsewhere, he starts with a close-up—in this case a boy using a piece of plywood or metal as a shield from rocks thrown at him—and gradually reveals the environment. Once the rock fight ceases, we see a kid’s legs and feet standing on a patch of grimy, paper-strewn dirt. The kid knocks dust off his pants, and the offscreen sound of a train serves as lead-in to a wide, expansive traveling shot from the point of view of a railroad car as it traverses the dusty rail yard, making the entire space visible. On the far horizon are palm trees (this is, after all, sunny California), a few houses, and industrial power lines marking the outskirts of Watts. Suddenly, from over a mound of dirt, the boys run energetically into sight, racing the train and gradually passing it. Open-air exuberance ends with a stationary, reverse-angle telephoto of the slowing freight train as the boys line up along the tracks and throw rocks at it.
Once the train passes, we become aware of individuals: a boy stands beside a railroad sign, bored or sad, while another boy behind him listlessly throws rocks at a metal shed. An older boy with a cap and glasses suggests that they all go to a local bar and watch “hos” go in and out. One of the kids says no; if his mother were to see him there, “my ass is hers. You’d have to call the police to get her off me.” In the next shot the boy with cap and glasses is lying on a rail track, his neck against the wheel of a freight car, laughing and daring the other kids to push the train over him. (Burnett has said that in his neighborhood when he grew up, “most kids did not believe they would live longer than twenty-one.” In 1994, he added, “they do not believe that they will live longer than sixteen” [Kapsis 2011, 79].)
A wide-angle, deep-focus shot positioned at ground level shows a boy walking down the tracks toward the camera away from the railcar. He reaches the foreground, ties one of his sneakers, and tells everyone that he’s going home to get his BB gun. We don’t know it yet, but this is Stan Jr., nearing his teen years and entering a rebellious, troubling phase. He’s a sometimes-angry kid and virtually drops out of the later parts of the film. The camera follows him home as he walks down an alleyway behind houses, combing his Afro and observing the local sociology. Strolling along, he turns to look at two young men climbing over a fence, boosting a TV set. An elderly gentleman in shirt and tie who is watering his back lawn also sees this, and the thieves chase him off: “What you looking at, punk?” they shout. “I’ll kick your heart out!” Stan Jr. warns the thieves that the old gent is going to call the cops. (The call would do no good, because the LAPD was notoriously indifferent to black-on-black crimes.) One of the thieves tears a board from the fence, waves it like a weapon, and flies into nearly hysterical rage as his pal struggles to restrain him. Stan Jr. laughs. The thieves pick up the TV set, and the camera tracks backward as they race wildly down the alley carrying their loot, backlit by an afternoon sun. On the sound track, as counterpoint, we hear Cecil Grant’s 1945 “race” record, “I Wonder.” (“I wonder, my little darlin’, where can you be, while the moon is shining bright?”)
The sequence is characteristic of Burnett in its mixed emotional effects: a blend of humor, violence, beauty, and sadness, roughly like the great blues songs. The humor and beauty are underappreciated by commentators on Burnett’s films; without them, Killer of Sheep would be unbearable. In the closing shot of the sequence, for example, there’s a momentary beauty in the light of “the magic hour”; a crazy violence and comedy in the thieves’ run with the TV set; and a wistful sadness in the tune, which continues as Stan Jr. walks farther down the alley and passes a group of silent children looking over a wall at the theft.
“I wonder, my little darlin’” bleeds into the next sequence, which introduces Stan and establishes his depression. We look down at his shirtless back as he kneels on the floor of his kitchen, laying linoleum and talking with a big fellow named Oscar, who stands mostly offscreen, restlessly slapping his fists together. “I’m working myself into my own hell,” Stan says. “I close my eyes and don’t sleep at night.” (As one of Stan’s friends later observes, trying to count sheep would do him no good.) The big man offhandedly asks, “Why don’t you kill yourself?” Stan looks up—he’s a handsome man with a slight bald spot and sad eyes—and wanly smiles. “No, I ain’t going to kill myself,” he says. “Got a feeling I might do somebody else tomorrow, though.” He glances offscreen, and we cut to a surprising, almost surreal close-up of a child of about four or five, standing in a doorway, wearing a rubber Droopy-Dog mask, sucking a finger through the mask’s mouth hole. She’s Stan’s daughter, impressively acted by Angela Burnett and the subject of some of the film’s most memorable images. When Stan Jr. enters he treats her roughly, squeezing the mask and asking where his BB gun is. “Mamma threw it away,” she says. Stan tells his son to stop acting like he has “no sense” and shoos him off.
If Burnett is underappreciated for his humor, he’s equally underappreciated as a writer of dialogue, perhaps because people assume the conversations in his early films were improvised. Some of his lines have what Adrian Martin aptly describes as a “loopy” quality (2008, 73). A good example is when a woman named Dolores remarks that Stan would be good-looking if he didn’t frown so much. Hearing this, a nearby fellow boasts, “Some sister told me I look just like Clark Gable!” Dolores looks wearily at him and mutters, “You about as tasteless as a carrot.” Many of the speeches in Killer of Sheep have this wry, hard-boiled quality. In the scene at hand, Oscar notices two men approaching the back of Stan’s house and makes a quick exit: “Here come Bracy and Ernie Cox. I don’t want them asking me for money.” The two men enter, and Bracy (Charles Bracy, a longtime friend of Burnett who was also responsible for the sound recording in Killer of Sheep) observes Stan scraping the floor with a kitchen knife: “I see your wife got you towing the cart. I see Oscar must have been here. . . . He’s the only one I know wears that Old Spice aftershave.”
Bracy is a bumptious type, unmarried and unemployed, whose raucous personality makes Stan’s depression more evident. (In his commentary on the Milestone DVD, Burnett emphasizes that the poor have little if any possibility to get medical treatment for depression.) Before the contrast between the two men is fully established, however, we briefly leave the kitchen for a sweet and humorous encounter. Stan’s daughter Angela hears a whistle and runs outside, where she meets a shy little boy standing against a hurricane fence; she sucks her thumb through the hole in her mask, moves a little closer to him, and quietly bounces against the fence. Brief scenes involving her will become a motif. She’s a key witness to adult behavior: innocent, not yet marked by the harshness and traumas of life in Watts, but coming to an awareness of her family’s troubles.
When we return to Bracy and Stan, they’re seated alone at a table in the poor but well-kept kitchen, sipping tea. Stan presses a warm teacup against his head and wearily remarks that it reminds him of “making love, how warm her forehead get some time.” Bracy laughs; he thinks warm tea is nothing but “hot air” and doesn’t care for “women with malaria.” He and his pals have been walking the streets at night, he explains, hesitating to drop in; Stan says not to worry, he never sleeps. Another of Burnett’s elliptical cuts shows the two men later in the evening, playing dominos as somewhere in the night a dog barks (the sound design of the film is as effective as the photography, establishing an ever-present offscreen environment). Stan’s lovely wife, who has apparently been ignored during all this, appears in the kitchen doorway without speaking, her hair wrapped in a bath towel and an angry expression on her face. She turns and exits. Whatever nostalgia for intimacy Stan might feel, he doesn’t act on it; he simply rubs his face in fatigue and says it’s time to go to work. Bracy yawns and looks at his watch: “Maybe me and Ernest can luck up on a slave [i.e., a menial, part-time job] if we’s lucky.”
Each episode in the remainder of the film is relatively autonomous, illustrating typical events in the life of an ordinary but admirable man who is trying to cope. Like certain forms of jazz or modernist narrative, these episodes could be somewhat reordered without disturbing the fundamental unity or meaning of the film. The first two, however, are in dialectical contrast, representing male industrial labor versus female domesticity. To the music of William Grant Still’s “Afro-American Symphony,” we’re given a montage of Stan at work in the slaughterhouse, hosing the floor and carrying sheep parts; then at home, we see his wife awaiting his return. The wife applies makeup while Stan’s daughter, wearing a dress, sits on the back porch floor next to an old phonograph, playing with a white doll that has no clothing, happily singing along with Earth, Wind, and Fire’s recording of “Reasons.”
The next sequence, also without dialogue, shows Stan at home and makes clear that his depression has affected not only his libido but also his will to express affection. The postures of the actors in Burnett’s films are always communicative, and are especially so here: Stan slumps in a kitchen chair, one arm dropped to his side, while his wife, wearing an attractive African print dress, sits across from him and leans forward, her legs crossed and her chin cupped in her hand. Angela enters, gets a glass of milk from the refrigerator, exchanges glances with her mother, puts her glass down hard, and exits. The wife stares at Stan, her head tilted, trying to get him to return the gaze. Stan lifts a teacup (a reminder of the earlier scene in the kitchen), and she reaches out to him. He rises, turns his back, and resumes work on the kitchen floor.
Burnett was fortunate in the casting of Stan and his wife. The man who was supposed to play Stan wound up in prison, and Burnett came across Henry Gayle Sanders by accident in an elevator. “I thought Henry was [the] saddest-looking man I’d ever seen,” Burnett has said. “I asked him if he’d ever done any acting” (Kapsis 2011, 143–44). Sanders had recently returned from two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he was injured, and was attending college under the GI Bill; his original ambition was to become a writer, but in Los Angeles he had begun to take acting courses. In Killer of Sheep he radiates gentle strength and thoughtfulness, performing in a quietly naturalistic style. Kaycee Moore, on the other hand, had appeared only in theater (after Killer of Sheep, she acted in two films directed by Burnett’s “students”: Billy Woodbury’s Bless Their Little Hearts and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust). She’s a more vivid, ostentatious performer, and the slight difference in acting styles helps bring out the contrast between Stan’s depression and his wife’s vitality.
Moore’s intensity is evident in one of the more improvised moments in the film, when a couple of gangster types—characters who seem to have entered from one of the blaxploitation pictures Burnett disliked—try to recruit Stan for one of their jobs. A shiny Cadillac with whitewalls comes to a lurching halt in front of Stan’s small house, and in comic but sinister fashion, two slicked-up dudes named Scooter and Smoke exit the car and strut up the walk, calling out, “Hey, Stan, can you come out and play?” Laughing, bumping fists, acting cool, they knock on the door until Stan grudgingly emerges. They’re wearing shades, leather, and bling; he’s barefoot and wearing an undershirt and shabby pants. He sits on the front step, frowning while they gather around and tell him he’s been recommended as a “third man.”
In a ghostly close-up, Stan’s wife is seen through the screen door as she watches Stan telling the two men he doesn’t want to hear about their proposition. Scooter says he and his pal are looking for somebody “who wouldn’t blush at murder” and asks to borrow Stan’s “roscoe.” When Stan says that he doesn’t have a gun, the wife emerges. “Why do you always want to hurt somebody?” she asks loudly. Burnett frames the four actors as a group, and their postures and movements tell us everything: the wife stands in an assertive position, arms akimbo; Stan sits on the step, his head hanging down, lighting a cigarette, and picking at his toe; the two hoods sway almost like dancers, gesturing with an air of flashy, easy confidence. Scooter speaks to the wife in a patronizing tone: “That’s the way I was brought up! A man got scars on his face for being a man . . . me and Smoke are going to take our issue [i.e., what’s ours].” Turning to Stan, he says, “You can be a man if you can, Stan.”
At this, the wife marches down the steps and gets in Scooter’s face, gesturing passionately and making a fiery speech, much of which Moore made up on the spot: “You wait just a minute! You talk about being a man if you can . . . scars on your mug!” Her finger points assertively. “Where do you think you are? In the bush or some damn where? You are here! You use your brain, that’s what you use. You’re not an animal. And both of you nothing-ass niggers got a lot of nerve coming here to ask him to do something like that!” When Smoke reaches out to grab the wife’s arm and turn her toward him, she becomes nearly wild with anger and fear, jerking free and wordlessly rebuking Stan for doing nothing. Smoke and Scooter give up and wander off, complaining: “All we trying to do is help the nigger.”
A threat of violence against the woman hovers throughout the scene, becoming evident in the veiled contempt Smoke and Scooter feel toward Stan’s wife and their attempt to shame Stan into ignoring her. Ironically, the domestic male is the true “man,” even though he looks shabby, passive, and worn down (we may recall that the theme of manhood was introduced in the film’s opening sequence). Stan’s job and his consequent depression have sapped his energy; he’s in an inferior, seated position when his wife takes charge. There’s also irony in the wife’s speech. She passionately criticizes certain ideas about black manhood, but does so with the same language and imagery racists use: Smoke and Scooter, she says, are primitives who think they’re in the jungle “bush.” They’re “nothing-ass niggers” with ugly mugs. They’re “here,” meaning the big-city United States, far away from Africa or the South, and they should be using their small brains. Smoke and Scooter deserve this abuse, but the wife has internalized racial images and language created by a long tradition of oppression.
Stan has better sense than to join up with thieves and killers, but it isn’t clear that Stan Jr. will grow up to think the same way. Soon after Smoke and Scooter leave, the boy unsuccessfully asks his father for a dollar; in a later scene he broods about the rejection of his request. We see Stan’s little daughter putting on a dress in the bathroom and going into the kitchen, where her brother is eating cereal. “How clean I must be,” she says, then sits at the table watching him. He scowls, pours what looks like half a box of sugar on the cereal, munches ferociously, and in close-up mutters, “I need some money.” “What?” his sister asks. He pauses, stares at her with near hate, and speaks distinctly: “I need some money!”
Lack of money determines everything in the film. At one point Stan confronts a man who owes him money, and the man walks away, saying, “I ain’t got anything but my good looks.” At another point Stan gives a dollar and a can of peaches, wages he’s received from “Miss Sally” for “cleaning up behind the garage,” to his poor friends Gene and Dian. But the local economy is most evident when Stan goes to the only bank available to him—a liquor and convenience store—and tries to cash his paycheck from the slaughterhouse. Burnett introduces the episode with a striking image and a sad joke about the people hanging around on the street outside the store. A drunken man is reflected in a bewigged young woman’s aviator sunglasses. “You a no-good woman,” he says. “You get yourself in line,” she sneers, and a close-up of her high heels shows her walking away to the sound of blues music. He follows, and the two squeeze into a beat-up car where four others are already sitting; there’s a beer can on the hood of the car, and a fellow in the front seat reaches straight out to get it, revealing that the car has no windshield.
The only white person in the film is a big, tough-looking woman who manages the store. (Burnett found the woman working in a post office.) When a customer asks to cash a check, a middle-aged clerk behind the counter calls to her and she emerges from a back room, seen in a floor-level shot that makes her look imposing. Shoving the clerk aside, she glances at the man’s check and says “hell, no.” Then the younger, better-looking Stan comes in with the same request, to which she responds with a sexual come-on. She might be able to cash the check, she says with a smile, and asks, “Why don’t you come work for me?” Henry Gale Sanders does a nice job of conveying Stan’s struggle to hide his discomfort and remain politely subservient; he shyly smiles and looks away, saying that he fears getting held up and shot. “Oh, I’ll protect you,” the woman promises. “You’ll work in back with me.” She nods toward the middle-aged clerk: “He takes care of the register.” A close-up shows her hand stroking Stan’s wrist. Stan doesn’t pull away and manages to get out with his check cashed.
Possessed of a little money, Stan tries to help his friend Gene buy a used auto engine. This results in the longest episode in the film, a self-contained drama that serves as a virtual allegory of Stan’s precarious situation in life. It’s by turns bizarre, comic, sweet, suspenseful, and almost tragic. At the beginning, we see the two men, accompanied by Stan’s daughter, drive an aged pickup to the edge of Watts and park on a steep hill outside a three-story stucco apartment house. Gene enters the building, heading up the steps to the top apartment. Before joining him, Stan worriedly counts cash from his paycheck and puts bits of it in different pockets to hide the amount. Stan’s daughter, whom he leaves behind, sucks on a plastic toy. In the ambient street sounds we hear the shouts of kids and faint music from an ice-cream truck playing “Yankee-Doodle Dandy.”
Inside the apartment is a strange collection of characters. Burnett introduces the scene with a close-up of a man with a bandaged head, lying on the floor. Gene knocks, enters, and asks what has happened. A wide shot reveals four other people: a slender, flashily dressed man playing with a deck of cards and consulting a hand mirror; a sullen young woman and her little daughter; and a teen-aged boy picking his toes. According to Burnett’s screenplay (published in Klotman 1991), the man on the floor is named James and the woman is named Dolores, although we never hear these names. We eventually learn that they’re the nephew and niece of Silbo, the fellow playing cards. The boy’s exact identity is unclear, but he seems to be part of the dysfunctional family. He explains to Gene that James was hurt when “Adolph and Boulevard jumped on him.” Just then Stan arrives, winded from the long climb up the stairs. “What’s happenin’ ol’ dude?” the boy shouts in welcome. Silbo unsuccessfully tries to get the morose Dolores to join him in a card game. Gene tells Silbo, “All I got is ten dollars.” James, groggy from the head wound, complains of the noise and tries to go back to sleep. Burnett waits until this point to slowly zoom back and reveal that sitting on the floor next to James is an automobile engine atop a bunch of newspapers.
A large close-up shows Dolores, chin in her hand, quietly asking herself, “How did I ever get married to such a damn silly-ass family as this?” Before the zany situation can develop further, however, Burnett takes us outside with Dolores’s daughter, who has gone to meet Angela in the truck. As in an earlier episode, we have a brief glimpse of childhood innocence apart from the adult world. The two girls sit together, chew gum, and play with the gum wrapper. “How come you don’t come to school?” Stan’s daughter asks. “I have been sick,” the other little girl says. “You gotten far behind,” says Stan’s daughter.
Back in the apartment Dolores, seated in a chair and wearing a short skirt, rubs lotion on her ample, attractive legs. The wounded James leers from his position on the floor and tries to make a pass, which results in bickering and then an angry quarrel between the two. During this, Gene confers with Stan and announces to Silbo, “All I got is fifteen dollars.” He can barely be heard over the exchange of insults between James and Dolores, which escalates until James yells, “You just an all-day sucker, bitch,” at which point Dolores gets up and kicks him (like most of the sequence, this is framed in a close-up—we see Dolores’s face, but not where the kick lands). James cries out, Stan rushes to him, and Gene holds Dolores back. “Hey, Silbo,” Stan says. “Take care of your nephew here, man! . . . He’s bleeding!” In response, Silbo picks up his hand mirror and studies himself. “I’ve got more important things to do,” he says. “My hair’s falling out.” Then he half rises, disgusted with his niece and nephew, and accepts Gene’s offer of $15 for the motor.
The remainder of the episode concerns Stan and Gene’s grueling, reverse-Sisyphus attempt to get the engine down to the street and load it onto the pickup. Burnett devotes nine shots to the journey, negotiating the tricky space of a long stairway, creating a downward spiraling movement, and generating a fair amount of suspense. (The sequence was shot on two different stairways, making the trip down look especially complicated.) Given the world of this film, we fear disaster—and not the comic disaster of Stan and Ollie moving a piano. Burnett begins with a close, handheld view as the two men struggle to get the engine out of the building. They move through the apartment door, out a hall entrance to a stairway, and then start down. Good Samaritan Stan is predictably at the heavy end, moving backward along the rickety steps. They reach a landing, turn slightly, and encounter another flight of steps. Slowly they continue down, pause, turn, and face a third set of steps. Stan, wearing work gloves, is beginning to wince from the effort. “One more,” Gene says as they reach the bottom. They put the engine down for a moment’s rest, then pick it up and struggle toward the truck. Arriving, they heave the load up onto the flatbed, which lacks a gate, and Gene, who has no gloves, cries out because his finger is caught. He extracts the finger from the engine and winces, “Just leave it there. It’ll stay there.” Stan disagrees, and they shove the engine forward a bit. Still nursing his finger, Gene insists that they’ve done enough—no more pushing.
On the sound track there are ambient sounds of a passing airplane and kids at play. A low, street-level shot shows the two men walking up the hillside toward the doors of the truck. Dolores’s daughter gets out, and the two men get in, Gene taking the driver’s seat. He starts the truck, but when he puts it in gear it lurches, causing the engine to tumble off the flatbed and crash into the street. (The engine nearly hit Burnett and his camera when it rolled toward him as he lay on the ground for the street-level shot.) The truck stops and the two men get out, silently surveying the wreckage. Without speaking, they climb back in and drive off, to the poignant piano music of Scott Joplin’s “Solace.” Burnett ends the episode with Angela looking sadly out the back window as the truck moves away. From her point of view, we see the engine lying dead in the street, receding into the distance.
The sexual problems between Stan and his wife reach a crisis sometime later, when they’re alone at home, embracing and slowly dancing. For this sequence shot, Burnett originally used Dinah Washington’s sensual, hauntingly romantic rendition of “Unforgettable,” but he was unable to secure the rights for distribution; instead we hear Washington’s hit 1960 recording of Clyde Otis’s “This Bitter Earth,” which creates a sensual mood tinged with lament, pain, and sorrow. (“What good is love that no one shares? . . . My life is like the dust that hides the glow of a rose.”) The music is mixed in a style that makes it seem nondiegetic, yet it collaborates with the expressivity of the actors and the choreography. Stan and his wife are framed in profile, half silhouetted against a lighted window; at left, atop a table, are a lamp and a pair of preserved baby shoes. The actors only slightly change their position, and the camera doesn’t move. Stan, shirtless and wearing loose pants that almost expose his buttocks, stands slightly apart from his wife; she looks lovingly at him, but he doesn’t return the look. They slowly turn to the music so that his bare back is to the camera; she runs her hand along his back, puts her head on his shoulder, and moves close. As they continue to turn, we see that his hands are held loosely and his expression is zombie-like. She strokes his chest and moves a hand behind his neck. They turn again, and she seems to reach down into the front of his pants. Then she embraces him with both arms, kissing his neck and cheek. When the song ends, she kisses his chest, grasping him tightly, subtly grinding against him, on the verge of tears. He pushes her gently away and exits, leaving her alone.
Stan’s wife moves to the window and strikes a somewhat melodramatic pose of grief that suits the inherent musicality of the scene. Turning, she sits on the windowsill, and we’re given one of the film’s most unusual narrative devices, a brief internal monologue that also has musical or lyrical qualities. The monologue deals openly with themes that until this point have been treated only indirectly, revealing the wife’s deep memories of the rural South, an impoverished world she and her husband had left behind for the sake of opportunity, only to find alienation and struggle: “Memories that don’t seem mine, like half eaten cake: rabbit skins stretched on the back-yard fences; my grandmother; mother dear, mot dear, mot dear, dragging her shadow across the porch.” (An insert shows the wife picking up the baby shoes on the table.) “Standing bare-headed under the sun. . . . Cleaning red catfish with white rum.” As she embraces the shoes and walks off, the plaintive sounds of Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto Number 4” form a sound bridge into a montage of sheep being herded to slaughter.
When Stan returns from work on a subsequent day, tension is conveyed by a silent tableau around the dinner table. He once again slumps in his chair, and his wife looks dejected. Stan Jr. stretches his arms, rises, slams his chair against the table, and walks out, barely noticed by his father. As Angela tries to clear away the dishes, Stan breaks the silence by glancing at his wife and asking, “So, what’d you do today?” She smiles sadly, shakes her head, and worries the napkin in her hands. “Got to find me a job,” he mutters. She grasps his wrist, gently reminds him that tomorrow is Saturday, and suggests they go to bed. He doesn’t respond. The remainder of the scene is played silently through an exchange of gazes between husband, wife, and child. Stan shifts his chair around toward his wife as she clears the dishes, and Angela comes to him, standing between his legs. He gives her a gentle touch and one of his rare, halfhearted smiles. His wife exits, looking back as he embraces his daughter, who looks offscreen toward her mother. The wife goes to the next room, sits on a couch, anguished, and looks toward the kitchen. Angela looks at her mother and softly strokes her father’s face, taking on a maternal role, trying to comfort both parents.
The catalog of frustrations and disappointments carries over into the next phase of the film, which begins with a richly detailed deep-focus shot: Stan’s skinny friend Gene leans far over the open hood of his car while his enormous wife Dian watches him and complains that he’s spending too much time and money on the project; in the foreground, a boy straddles a bike decorated with an American flag and tries to push it forward as another boy pushes back against the handlebars; and in the far distance, Stan comes around a corner and jogs uphill toward Gene and Dian, bringing them a dollar and a can of peaches. A close-up shows the freckle-faced Dian smiling in tender gratitude. “It’s getting late,” Gene says, “Let’s go have some coffee and see what my guests are doing.” He and Stan load a battery and a spare tire into the car’s trunk, and the camera pans as they head toward the house, passing a stray dog. Then the camera pans back to the closed trunk, portending trouble.
In Gene’s kitchen the guests are having a party: blues music is playing, a crap game is in progress, and the camera is set almost level with the floor, looking up at the large posterior of a woman who embraces a fat man. The man proposes marriage and then joins the crap game. Dian approaches the woman, smiles, and asks if she’s happy. A big fellow on the floor grins and winks at another woman as he rolls the dice. Stan and Gene stand apart and look miserable.
The theme of gambling continues into the next episode. It’s a bright Saturday morning, and seven characters—Gene, Dian, and their baby; Stan, his wife, and his daughter; and Stan’s pal Bracy—prepare for an outing at the racetrack. Dressed in their good clothes, they begin packing themselves into Gene’s car, which is now in working order, while a bunch of kids play and fight in the far distance and the apparently drunken Bracy, sporting 1970s-style stacked heels, shouts incoherently about his last night’s adventures. In the backseat Stan’s wife fixes Angela’s hair and wipes her face. Once everybody squeezes aboard, the car drives off to the sound of Louis Armstrong’s rendition of King Oliver’s “West End Blues,” upbeat in tempo yet also mournful. On the road, Dian tells Gene to slow down, Bracy studies a racing form, and Stan’s wife enjoys the air from an open window as her weary husband sleeps on her shoulder.
Soon trouble strikes. Out in the countryside, the car gets a flat tire, and Gene discovers that his spare has been stolen from the trunk. Angela gazes sadly out a window, just as she did in the sequence involving the wrecked engine. We look down the side of the car as Bracy paces back and forth on the road, gesturing wildly and berating Gene: “Look, man, I told you to have a spare tire and don’t be comin’ out here in the middle of nowhere. . . . In the ninth race, man, I got me a nag that I know is going to come in! I got me some money, man! And you ain’t got no spare! Look, aw shit!”
Here Burnett makes excellent use of offscreen space. Stan’s wife, nicely coiffed and made up, slowly emerges from below the frame into a big close-up, looking grimly down at the wheel of the car, while behind her Bracy (whose voice sounds post-synchronized) breaks into rap: “Man, I’m out here singin’ the blues, got me a horse that can’t lose! Always told you to keep a spare, but you’s a square!” Gene studies the situation and softly replies, “I guess we have to ride back on the rim, that’s all. Ain’t got no spare.” Everybody gets back in the car, which makes a U turn and drives off on the rim; once again Gene’s fixation with his auto has resulted in a kind of tragicomedy. Despite all the discord and trouble, however, there’s a sweet quality in the scene: the sharply delineated, flawed characters remain friends, moving through life in the same boat (more accurately, car), facing disappointment together.
We are now at the closing moments of the film, in which Burnett emphasizes the theme of survival and creates a modest sense of ongoing strength. After arriving home from the abortive trip to the racetrack, Stan slumps wearily on a couch as his wife remarks that rain is coming and the roof needs repair. Angela stands with her arms akimbo and then turns and opens the screen door. “Daddy,” she asks, “what makes the rain?” Stan softly replies, “Why, it’s the Devil beating his wife.” Angela smiles and a large close-up shows Stan’s wife also smiling, happier than she’s been at any point. She crosses to Stan and sits close to him. They share a soft smile (his third in the film, and the most genuine), and he touches her knee.
I grew up in the South not far from where Burnett was born, and whenever it rained while the sun was shining, my white father would remark that the devil was beating his wife. It’s an expression peculiar to the deep South, and Burnett’s use of it here is significant. Stan is making a slightly dark joke, but also acknowledging his roots in the folklore of a world he’s been trying to escape. For the moment, father, mother, and child feel a happy bond.
The only member of the family who isn’t present is Stan Jr., and in the next scene we see the wife standing behind their house, calling him. “I know you hear me calling you, boy,” she says loudly, and then talks to herself: “I know that boy heard me calling him.” As she goes inside, the camera pans up to the roof and reveals Stan Jr. and another boy. Cut to the front of the house. On the tiny porch, a girl sitting in a chair is having her hair arranged by Angela, and two other girls are perched on the steps. A pretty young woman enters the shot, supporting herself with a cane, and as she moves up the front steps we see that her right leg is in a brace. She knocks at the screen door, and Stan’s wife welcomes her, giving her a delighted hug when she whispers something. Inside, two women are visiting. One of them brandishes a cigarette and asks the new arrival why she’s wearing a pretty smile. The lame young woman looks down at herself shyly. Stan’s wife beams and announces, “She’s going to have a baby!” One of the women remarks, “Well, I thought her old man was shooting blanks, but I see he’s dropping bombs on occasion, I guess.” Stan’s wife laughs and the young woman looks proudly at her stomach, moving her hand in an arc over it, indicating how it’s going to grow.
This is the first scene involving female friends of Stan’s wife and the only scene, apart from a brief early one between Stan’s wife and daughter, made up entirely of women. It’s also a rare example of a scene that ends on a happy note. Unlike a typical Hollywood movie or “well-made” drama, it doesn’t identify the new characters and doesn’t explain the pregnant young woman’s disability. In fact, the disability motivates nothing and isn’t necessary to the scene; it’s simply there: an undiscussed, unusual, harsh fact that will probably complicate motherhood. The scene is pregnant, one might say, with unstated meanings that have little to do with plot. It celebrates new life and the endurance of the community, but at the same time, partly by means of the young woman’s leg, dramatizes an ongoing struggle.
Burnett ends with a montage of Stan and his fellow workers on the killing floor of the slaughterhouse. Once again we hear Dinah Washington singing “This Bitter Earth,” this time as a background to images of dead and bleeding sheep. There’s a small flaw that Burnett was unable to correct. As Stan herds animals to their death, he’s broadly smiling, almost laughing; during the shooting, Burnett has explained, Henry Gayle Sanders split his trousers wide open and couldn’t control his amusement. Even so, the somber music and the montage are anything but uplifting, and the film leaves Stan in virtually the same circumstances as at the beginning. The screen goes dark, and over the closing credits we hear Paul Robeson’s rendition of Antonin Dvorak’s “Going Home,” a hymn inspired by what Dvorak called the “great and noble music” of nineteenth-century African Americans. Like the film, it’s pathetic, tender, passionate, and melancholy; it bestows grace and importance on Stan, his family, and his community.