Okay. This is gonna be a hard one. Not an easy watch. Nor should it be.
Origin is an unusual and unlikely concept for a film. It is not a direct adaptation of the non-fiction book it’s based on, but a biopic of the author during her process of conceiving, researching and writing that book. Why would you do that? Why not a straight adaption?
Because the book, Caste: The Origin of our Discontents, is all about dehumanisation, the process of dehumanisation, the perpetuation of dehumanisation, the horrific consequences of dehumanisation. And the author’s message, over and over again, is we are not groups, we are people. Both the oppressed and the oppressors, we are people. So this film, about a huge span of inestimable suffering is told through the journey of one person.
It grounds the story, makes it tangible, means that every person’s experience she draws upon is not a nameless statistic or number, but someone she meets, someone you as the audience get to meet. Each story is a human story.
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this technique when the movie began. I dislike the trend in documentaries of focusing on the documentarian’s journey into learning about their subject rather than the subject itself, an obnoxious and arrogant branding exercise. Was Origin just going to be a fictionalised version of that?
I also was unsure about Origin when it opened on a dramatisation of the moments before Trayvon Martin’s death. I did not want to see a pantomime production of the murder of a real child used for shock value and emotional shortcut in the opening scenes of a film.
But I stuck with it.
Aujanue Ellis-Taylor plays Isabel Wilkerson, a celebrated author and journalist, who is asked to write a piece about race in America in the wake of Trayvon’s killing, but is met with personal tragedy before she can decide to do so. In the same year, in quick succession, she loses her husband and her mother. The deaths are sudden and unexpected. And she is totally at sea, completely devastated, utterly lost.
And into the stew of seemingly unending grief, colleagues try to pull her back on her feet by discussing work, and the thing everyone is discussing – race in America. And Isabel, exhausted, says she doesn’t want to talk about racism, it’s a word so broad it’s meant to encapsulate everything from how someone hands you your change through to whether you are denied a loan or pain medication through to bodies hanging from trees. The same questions get asked and the same answers get given and around and around we go.
Isabel decides she wants to talk about what’s happening in terms of caste, not race. It is about what happens when you create a category of people that anything can be done to with impunity.
To that end she journeys to Germany, and then to India, talking to Jews and Dalits, seeing and hearing the stories of their suffering, their degradation and their constant fight for their own humanity. She reads about how, in Nazi meetings discussing the creation of the Nuremberg laws, American’s segregation system is quoted as an inspiration and model. She reads Martin Luther King’s writings about his travels in India and his solidarity with Dalits.
This is a hard watch. The build begins of stories of every individual, about being singled out, about being humiliated, about being denied that which everyone else is entitled to, and always the ever present threat of violence if they fight back or try to retain their dignity. Over and over again, across the world the same patterns, the same horrors, the same fear. Until that pervasive, choking threat bursts out into realised violence, gallows noose, gunshots, gas chambers.
It’s a strange and difficult thing, to balance going between these scenes and utterly domestic scenes of Isabel trying to sell her mother’s house. Surely it would be easier to make either one type of movie or the other. The hard-hitting plea for rejection of systems of injustice, or the quiet emotional drama about grief. But that presumes those stories belong outside of our ordinariness. That those things happen elsewhere than our mundane and quiet lives.
The last story in the film was the most horrendous to watch. Not one of those explosions of violence or those large scale calamities. No bones are broken, no lives are lost, but I sobbed uncontrollably throughout. It is about a boy whose team wins a baseball match, then goes for a swim. One of those ordinary occurrences that happen in our quiet mundane lives. And because it happens in the midst of friendly, happy people, among friends and neighbours, you are utterly defenceless against its raw horror and injustice. And the thought that anybody, any child should be singled out and made to feel different, or less than, makes you wrack with fury and dry with grief at what is being taken from them.
Origin is not a simple movie or an easy movie. It is however profoundly moving. A call to see the humanity in all of us, and to hold accountable the humanity in all of us.
