Last week I saw two documentaries that, taken together, left me really upset. The films were Citizen King and Enron: The Smartest guys in the Room, and I'll address them in the order that I saw them.
Citizen King is a film about Martin Luther King that was produced and directed in 2004 by Orlando Bagwell for the PBS series American Experience. If you've never seen any film footage of King speaking, then you owe it to yourself to rent this film. If your knowledge of the American Civil Rights Movement is spotty or vague, or you're feeling jaded and hard to impress, then it's your responsibility to rent this film. If you've never understood what all the fuss about the '60s is about, Bagwell's film will make it clear.
Largely comprised of rare archival footage of King -- being arrested, giving his signature speeches, having a brick thrown at his very beautiful head, leading non-violent demonstrations, relaxing with his friends -- the film harks back to a time when giants walked the earth. It's sad indeed to realize what a very long time it's been since a man of King's stature held the stage of public life, and how petty and self-serving American statesmanship has become. In case you hadn't noticed, there's a cancer on the presidency. But then, things weren't so hot in America back in 1963 when King gave his legendary "I Have a Dream" speech. This is where Bagwell opens his film, and he brings it to a close in 1968 with King's assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. What transpired during those tumultuous five years, for King and for the country, is nothing short of astonishing.
In watching the film I recalled a seemingly innocuous comment Captain Beefheart once made that has always stayed with me. "People used to give a damn," is all he said, but I began to grasp what he meant in watching this footage of the hundreds of thousands of people, both black and white, who made civil rights the top priority in their lives during the '60s. There's nothing visibly extraordinary about these people -- they look to be the very epitome of average -- yet they faced down death threats and were willing to be beaten and arrested in the name of what they felt was right. Heroism of this particular kind seems to have become a thing of the past, but why is that? Have we all become lazy or cowardly or irreparably corrupted?
A contributing element in this collective inertia must surely be the fact that the will of the people no longer seems to count for much. Citizen King makes it clear that the Kennedy administration wasn't exactly champing at the bit to pass civil rights legislation; they were forced to do it by overwhelming public demand. (An interesting footnote here is that it was Lyndon Johnson, not John Kennedy, who actually pushed these bills through Congress). These days we seem to accept whatever we're served, so perhaps we get the leaders we deserve.
Of course, galvanizing leadership of the sort King supplied is in severely short supply at the moment, and he was nothing less than galvanizing. It will break your heart to see how young he was -- he didn't even live to see his 40th birthday -- and how rigorously faithful he was to his own sense of morality. Citizen King is a stirring testament to the incredible things one righteous man can achieve, and I feel privileged to have seen it.
Segueing from the sacred to the profane, I saw Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room the following night, and it is grim. Written and directed by Alex Gibney, Enron is an expertly made film about some of the reprehensible people prowling around the upper echelons of corporate America. We all know the names by now -- Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andy Fastow -- but to get all the grisly details, and see just how far their web of intrigue stretched is sobering to say the least. For starters, the Bush family is implicated, as is just about everyone on Wall Street. Even more disturbing is the utter contempt the Enron hooligans express for the middle Americans who humbly worked for a modest, honest dollar while they emptied the piggy bank. Gibney depicts corporate America as a ruthless and greedy beast operating in a complete moral vacuum; to measure it against titans like Martin Luther King, who embodied the best of the '60s zeitgeist, is to get a glimpse of all we've lost as a people.
I was discussing Enron with one of the very smart people who work at my local video store, and he made the droll observation, "I never thought I'd see the day when I'd long for the Nixon administration." Unfortunately, he has a point: Nixon's crimes against the state seem downright quaint compared with the piracy practiced by the executives at Enron. I don't know what it will take to get people to take to the streets again, but I'll be there when the day comes.
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