Origin
This biographical film, based on the work of author Isabel Wilkerson, explores the working of discrimination in its totality, and offers a vision as to how it might be overcome.
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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.
Content warnings: Anti-Black racism; Murder; Antisemitism; Caste discrimination.
Note: Given that, at time of writing, Origin is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.
Origin is a biographical film about the author Isabel Wilkerson, and her writing of the 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The film commences in 2014, with the murder of Black teenager Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost), before introducing us to the film’s protagonist (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), an African American journalist turned non-fiction writer, as well as her white husband Brett Hamilton (Jon Bernthal), her ageing mother Ruby (Emily Yancy), and her cousin and best friend Marion (Niecy Nash). During a speaking engagement, Isabel runs into her friend and former editor Amari Selvan (Blair Underwood), who tries to convince her to write an article for him on the Trayvon Martin killing. She is reluctant, citing her mother’s failing health, but also increasingly intrigued by the case, which she does not think adheres to conventional understandings about race in America.
Instead, Isabel seeks to formulate a more systematic and universal interpretation of the bases for prejudice, inequality, and violence, based on a notion of caste. She begins researching a book that will place anti-Black racism in the United States in dialogue with the treatment of Jews in Germany prior to and during the Holocaust, and with the discrimination faced by Dalits as part of the Indian caste system. In the process, however, she faces considerable pushback from people sceptical of the intellectual underpinnings of her project, as well as heartache in her personal life.
Multiple places, multiple histories
For most of its running time, Origin is structured around Isabel Wilkerson’s research process. It unfolds through her travel around the United States, and to Germany and India; through her interviewing those affected by discrimination about their lives and experiences; through her encounters with sites of atrocity and memorials to their victims, and with the archival records they left; and through her dialogue with multiple interlocutors, some sceptical, some enthusiastic.
Isabel is therefore the intellectual and emotional core of the film. It is, moreover, anchored in the America of the 2010s, of the wild contrasts of the Obama and Trump presidencies, of both the Black professional advancement she epitomises and the ongoing reality of racial inequalities and lethal violence that characterised the murder of Trayvon Martin. Yet it is also a polyphonic story, in which hers is the narrator’s voice, the most often heard, but far from the only one. It is a film of multiple narratives, temporalities, and places, albeit that interlock upon her vision. Thus, through her interviews, reading, and archival trips, Isabel re-animates through flashback scenes the lives of those who bravely, both futilely and successfully, confronted prejudice amid the tumult of the twentieth century.
There are August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock) and his Jewish partner Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti), whose union fell afoul of Nazi race laws. There are the married African American anthropologists, Allison (Isha Blaaker) and Elizabeth Davis (Jasmine Cephas Jones), who return to the US from Berlin upon the Nazis’ rise to power, and subsequently collaborate with two white colleagues, Burleigh (Matthew Zuk) and Mary Gardner (Hannah Pniewski) on a ground-breaking ethnographic study of racism in the American South. There is the Dalit academic and politician B. R. Ambedkar (Gaurav J. Pathania), shown during this student days in New York. There is the African American artist and educator Al Bright (Lennox Sims), who as a young boy in 1950s Youngstown, Ohio, is prohibited from swimming in the same pool as his white baseball teammates.
Explaining caste
In her early encounter with Amari, Isabel draws a distinction between the work she once did as a writer of newspaper articles and that she now does as a writer of books: her vocation is answering rather than simply posing questions. She sees Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of George Zimmerman, who is himself Hispanic, in apparent defence of a street of white homeowners, and the broad range and variations in the forms of discrimination faced by African Americans, as revealing hitherto unaddressed levels of complexity. Hers is a quest for a totality, a framework of understanding that breaks from the narrow purview of the present place and time, to settle not just for basic factfinding or speculation, but seek deeper answers.
To do so, Isabel engages firstly in dialogue with analysis of the much older system of Indian caste discrimination, traceable back to antiquity. Why, she ponders, have upper-caste Indians subjugated Dalits, and Germans Jews, people of the same skin colour as they are, along lines that resemble the treatment of people of African descent by those of European descent, ostensibly on the grounds of racial difference?
In the process of answering this question, she is also compelled to confront distinctions between those systems too. Whereas African Americans were relegated to a subservient socioeconomic status on grounds of their being Black, Nazis reviled Jews for their apparent privilege. Whereas Europeans enslaved Africans for purposes of economic exploitation, Nazis sought to exterminate Jews entirely. Swastikas are banned in Germany but the Confederate flag remains ubiquitous in the US. And yet, she realises, Jim Crow provided the inspiration for Nazi race laws.
Nonetheless, as the film progresses, Isabel is able to discern the ubiquitous ‘pillars’ of caste, including ideas of superiority, purity, inheritance, and practices such as banning mixed relationships, dehumanisation, and violence. She eventually develops the metaphor of the house as a way of explaining this system: a concrete and apparently timeless edifice, whose flaws the inhabitants absolve themselves of guilt for and yet that they also have to continue to live with.
Overcoming caste
Despite the ubiquity of caste, Origin offers us an optimistic, even upbeat message as to how it might be overcome. This paradoxically arises in part from the film’s most harrowing moments, the juxtaposition of scenes depicting atrocities such as slave transportation, concentration camps, and lynching. In explaining how we reach those nadirs, the film demonstrates not only the hatred that underpins broader structures of oppression, but also the volume of work that must go into maintaining them. It highlights the absurdity of going to the effort of inflicting suffering, and denormalises trying to proceed with one’s everyday activities in its presence.
Given the scale of dehumanisation, the logical corollary is that simple humanity is the antidote. We are shown at one point a discussion between Isabel, Brett, and Ruby about Trayvon Martin’s killing in which Ruby attributes the event in part to the victim’s naivety as to how to behave in white neighbourhoods as a Black person. Subsequent recollections and depictions of children experiencing and negotiating discrimination, however, bear out that there is nothing natural or innate about caste. To defer to, brutalise, or separate oneself from someone on the basis of an imputed difference is not a natural instinct, but a learned, harmful behaviour.
Attaining enlightenment about the nature of caste is both empowering and uplifting, for it fosters mutual recognition and solidarity between members of oppressed groups, epitomised by Isabel’s warm, instant friendship with Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde (who plays himself in the film). Moreover, the very natural act of forming friendships or romantic relationships that cross caste lines serve inevitably to challenge and undermine the foundations of these systems – epitomised by Isabel’s own marriage to Brett. The personal is political in Origin, and agency lies in recognising and acting upon that together.
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I'll look out for this. Thank you as ever for reviewing such a range of films and texts 👏