Discuss Shirley
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Two points
posted by DRDMovieMusingsSTAFFMOD on March 25, 2024 at 11:11 PM
It's great that this great woman is getting new attention. Too many people are not familiar with her story.
But, I'm keen to see if this movie touches at all on how her campaign for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination:
1) was a big tipping point in the Party Switch. Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips famously said "Whites will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party" ((https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-06-22-vw-353-story.html), and he was right; all those racist southern Democrats who wanted nothing to do with a Black woman as president deserted their Democratic party and gave Republican Nixon one of the largest landslides in American history, outnumbering the forward-thinking Republicans who had been wooed to the Democrats by the Civil Rights advances of the Kennedy/LBJ administrations. Nixon's big win is infrequently remembered, likely because it draws attention to the critical role Ms. Chisholm played in cementing the party switch, erasing any doubt that the parties did indeed switch their bases, and ending the slightest notion that the modern Republican party bears any resemblance to the historical "party of Lincoln"; and
2) revealed the nation's struggle not only with racism but with sexism. "She later said, 'When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men.' In particular, she expressed frustration about the "black matriarch thing", saying, "They think I am trying to take power from them. The black man must step forward, but that doesn't mean the black woman must step back." (https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19720408&id=nqlWAAAAIBAJ&pg=4748,5584936)
With all of this history, it's no wonder she's largely forgotten. America today shows increasing hostility to education, especially education that shines light on its shortcomings and skeletons in closets.
Hopefully, this movie might help more people see the modern landscape within a historical perspective, especially while ramping up to this next presidential election.
Of course, I'll circle back after I've watched it. If anyone has already seen it, please chime in and let me/us know if they nailed these or missed these.
Reply by bratface
on March 26, 2024 at 5:11 PM
https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/shirley-chisholm-netflix-biopic-true-story.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-true-history-behind-netflixs-shirley-chisholm-movie-180984008/
https://time.com/6959179/shirley-chisholm-true-story-netflix/
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on March 26, 2024 at 7:00 PM
All decent articles on the history!
Heartwarming to discover how her visit to Wallace apparently changed him.
Reply by bratface
on March 26, 2024 at 7:16 PM
I haven't seen it because I loathe Netflix & refuse to give them any money. Although there are a couple of things I would love to see (here are two):
Lupin
https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/96677-lupin?language=en-US
The Last Kingdom
https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/63333-the-last-kingdom
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on March 26, 2024 at 7:23 PM
I hear you. I don't love Netflix, in part because I don't think they love movies, and I think their promotional efforts are based on poor algorithms they care little to fix. Though my list of gripes with Netflix is long, I won't digress beyond simply saying hey, you're not alone :-)
Back when TMDb had a General board that was not title-specific, we could have discussions about Netflix itself specifically, or streaming in general...now, we have to be creative in how we digress from discussing a movie to such a topic.
At any rate, I'm not loyal to any streaming platform. It's about the title for me, and I see what I can based on the platforms to which I may have access.
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on March 30, 2024 at 2:18 PM
Okay, seen it.
First of all, Regina King was excellent. I've spent a lot of time with Barbadian ("Bajan") folks, and her accent was not on point but it was sufficiently "not African-American/ebonic" that most people will simply register she as being "generally, vaguealy, Caribbean."
Re: issues of sexism, they did a decent job. It all came down to a nation — white, Black, men, women — simply not ready to elect a woman. Yet, she was indeed an inspiration to many, a vision of what America purported to be and could have been, a calling out of what America really was, despite its jingoist marketing.
Re: issues of racism, they tried, but were overly subtle, in my estimation. Not clear enough, not brutal enough. It was clearly downplayed so as not to offend the fragile.
Re: the party switch, they only took the story to the Democrat Party uniting behind McGovern. They didn't even have a role of anyone even playing Nixon, nor of him commending on the DNC race.
However, what emerged as the biggest issue in this movie, for me, surprised me a little, and disappointed me as well — it seemed almost completely disconnected to what was going on at the time.
To say the 60s and 70s were tumultuous and eventful are understatements. High profile assassinations, the Vietnam War, anti-war and anti-racism civil unrest, Tet Offensive, Tate-LaBianca murders, landing on the moon, Kent State massacre....there sooo many iconic moments in social history, and this movie manages to make it appear as though they are almost living in a parallel universe where NONE of it is part of the conversation.
Yeah, sure, they had the Wallace shooting and hospital visit included...but that was it. Even in the tv show Mad Men, they frequently interwove real history into their fictional stories. From the Kennedy Nixon 1960 presidential election, to Clay Liston fight, to MLK assassination, passing mentions of the Vietnam War insofar as the neighbour kid enlisting, to landing on the moon...they didn't hit everything (no Woodstock, no Tet Offensive, no direct Manson family...) but they did try to connect to our real world.
I find it impossible to believe that a Black woman — in Congress — had no thoughts or opinions on any of this.
That all said, the triumph in this movie, in my opinion, is that it not only presented a version of her story for people to discover, but produced a whole lot of articles dissecting what the movie got right, history-wise, and filling in a lot of blanks, so that, together, all of this inertia and attention builds up a little more awareness that she existed and did what she did, at the time she did it.
Modern revisionism of American history downplays the entire story of HOW Nixon won such a landslide in 1972, preferring to stick to the standard focus on the Watergate scandal that brought his adminstration crashing down by '74, partly because it is a critical step in the long-simmering "party switch" that actually was finalized by Reagan's run in 1980. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" is well-documented as a play for the votes of the Confederate states and rural areas who had been Democrats all their lives, but had grown increasingly disatisfied with the leftward, liberal slide of the Democratic Party that got started innocently enough in the 1930s with FDR's New Deal and its applications and implications, which itself was a reaction to the rightward slide of the Republican Party in the aftermath of WWI and the good times of the Roaring 20s (Warren G. Harding's campaign emphasized a "return to normal" and Coolidge's 1924 campaign slogan was "keep cool with Coolidge" — Republican rhetoric began to align with the status quo, previously the domain of the Conservative Democrats...). While calls for Conservative movement away from the Democrats, in response to FDR, had begun in earnest as early as the 50s, it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ignited the newest push behind Nixon in 1968. LBJ, who signed the Act, is quoted to have said, when signing, that "We've lost the South for a generation." He was righter than he even knew he'd be.
So, I had, in truth, unrealistic expectations, that this movie would do a better job of connecting Chisholm's historic run to the wider issue of Nixon's landslide specifically, and the the party switch in general. I suppose I can't quite blame the makers of this movie for not nailing this more clearly — the party switch is, remarkably, controversial. Republicans really want to believe the modern Republican Party is still "the party of Lincoln" (although Lincoln was progressive, challenging the southern conservative's efforts to cling to the status quo of slavery), so downplaying the reality of the party switch plays into their narrative.
This movie, about Shirleyl Chisholm's run, for what it was — bravo!
Reply by bratface
on March 30, 2024 at 4:27 PM
Here is Shirley Chisolm on 'Meet The Press' on July 9, 1972. How close is Regina King's accent to this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYh_EzC6J0c
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on March 30, 2024 at 7:20 PM
Not close! Dr. Chisolm here sounds like the church folk I grew up around (my baptismal congregation happened to be mostly Bajan, with some Jamaicans like my family, and then others of the smaller Antilles, Montserrat, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, as well as Guyanese, etc.).
Regina's affectation is non-descript, it's just "not ebonics." She got some of the lilt, the music, if you will, if Caribbean accents, but not enough that it was recognizable or distinctive. No criticism to her from me, really; Americans aren't very good at hearing it. As another example, MOST "Jamaican drug lord" characters don't sound Jamaican at all, like, at all.
Reply by bratface
on March 30, 2024 at 8:35 PM
I didn't watch the whole video, YT hates me because of my adblocker, so they make it really hard to watch anything. But I didn't hear an accent other than she seemed to use her tongue a lot (lisping)? Does that make sense?