http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWB_MaFBAOY (specific scene I want to reference)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEL7Hg1QhzA (trailer for the movie— pay attention to the last narrative line and notice how it ties to and resolves the only spoken line of the first link)
Ever seen “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints”? If you haven’t yet, I’d absolutely recommend it. The much-overlooked 2006 Sundance Film Festival winner is essentially a coming of age story about the reasons one boy just has to get out of 1986 Queens. It doesn’t take long for the audience to find out why— so much senseless violence and arbitrary tragedy occurs in such a young world that it is very hard to identify with the family asking Dito (the protagonist) to stay. Reading through the second half of the story of Joe Christmas particularly chapters 11-16, I couldn’t help but think of the opening line of this movie, which is posted above. “My Name is Dito, and I am going to leave everybody in this film.” Now, I am not saying that there is a perfect parallel here, as this contemporary piece of cinema provides you with much clearer reasons for his running, and Dito has a much firmer grasp on his past, family, and character traits, but I do think it’s fair to assert that A.G.T.R.Y.S. does a pretty good job of modernizing “A Light in August’s demonstration of how profoundly effective a chaotic, unstructured environment can be on an individual’s development. There are a lot of parallels to be drawn through gang violence and the Reconstruction South, including racism, arbitrary tragedy, and a lack of security. Everyone in both these stories is a victim of their context, and this context is defined by the lack of structure and the chaos that results from that. In A.G.T.R.Y.S, this is made clear when a Irish immigrant just beginning to become friends with Dito but in no way really involved in his gang world gets shot and dies. In a Light in August, Joe Christmas’s entire life story drives this point home— the tiny, arbitrary toothpaste incident ignites his detrimental, complex relationship with women, and brings him into a mindset where violence and running can be appropriate answers, and his mysterious, mixed ethnicity can now navigate, overlap, and entangle himself in both race worlds because the societal structures that used to so clearly label him as black have been badly damaged by the abolition of slavery. Without rational systems, there are no paths to follow, and without paths to follow there are no ends to reach, so there can be no real resolution.
On another note, it is relevant to our class to point out that on page 350 it is said of Joe Christmas that “He never acted like either a nigger or a white man.” How does the very essence of an “In-between Person” navigate a system that he doesn’t really fit into when that system (race hierarchy) is in the process of being broken down and destroyed? There are no prescribed answers, so one could argue that Joe’s spastic, haphazard, and violent approach makes sense¬— he’s got absolutely no precedent to go on, so I understand why he’s scared. Another question— what do you do with his identity? How do you deal with being an “in-between” during an “in-between time”? My guess is we’re probably still figuring that out, hence why we keep saying in class that maybe Reconstruction South is something we’re probably not fully over yet.