Been thinking about racism lately (who hasn’t?). And the racism I’m thinking about is personified in the character of Bill Connor, portrayed by Vic Morrow in TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE. Bill is an old-school angry racist, not the “I have lots of black friends” type, but one who openly expresses his hatred for anyone he perceives as inferior. But because this is the Twilight Zone, Bill steps out of a bar and into a nightmare: suddenly he’s in Nazi-occupied France, where SS officers identify him as a Jew and shoot him in the arm. Bill escapes the Nazis only to find himself in the Deep South, about to be lynched by the KKK, who identify him as black. He gets away again, and suddenly he’s in a swamp in Vietnam, pursued by a platoon of trigger-happy American soldiers who think he’s Charlie. To us, the audience, Bill’s appearance never changes. It’s only the other characters in his nightmare who see him as something they hate, and for the first time in his life Bill experiences the fear and hopelessness of being perceived as the enemy, just for being himself. Bill has lost something he never realized he had, but now desperately wants back: his White Privilege. So we know the beginning and the middle of Bill’s story. This being an episode in a movie based on a TV show, you’d expect there to be an end: forced to confront the truth about himself, Bill comes to a deeper understanding. Because we’re in the Twilight Zone, it might be too late for full redemption or it might not, but at least there would be a moment of truth. But there isn’t—and perhaps that’s because, as you may know, Morrow was killed in an on-set accident, along with two children, while shooting a scene for the Vietnam sequence. Director John Landis broke safety regulations to get the shots he wanted, which included having a fully operational helicopter hovering just 25 feet above Morrow and the children while pyrotechnics were going off. The chopper crashed right on top of the actors, and that was all she wrote. Morrow’s last words, reportedly, were something to the effect of “I should have asked for a stunt double.” So in the movie, the last we see of Bill, he’s back in occupied France, where the Nazis stick a yellow star on his jacket and shove him into a cattle car. We can surmise what happens to Bill, but we never see his moment of truth. It’s an incomplete episode in a very uneven film, but it’s worth a look for the way it captures the experience of being forced to see the world through a different pair of eyes. The director of ANIMAL HOUSE and THE BLUES BROTHERS was onto something here, although he was unable to finish it. You see, even in the movies, we can’t find a satisfactory response to racism. The film trundles along into the next episode, “Kick the Can,” directed by Steven Spielberg, which is horribly insipid and possibly the worst thing he ever put on celluloid. As for Landis, despite being responsible for the events that led to three deaths, he was acquitted of manslaughter, proving that the only privilege possibly more pervasive than White Privilege is Celebrity Privilege. To draw parallels from Bill Connor to certain more recent events in the news, I leave as an exercise for the reader. But they are crying out to be drawn.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 19:16:09 +0000
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