Killer of Sheep

This movie was difficult for me on so many levels.  Wrong movie, for the wrong week.

LOVE ME.

First of all, a lifelong vegetarian with a stomach bug should never watch a movie entitled Killer of Sheep. I needed nothing more to solidify the next 20 years of vegetarianism than images of sheep heads getting split open. At least Charles Burnett didn't pull a PETA and put it in full color and high definition. Youch.

This movie was pretty mundane. There was a sense of hopelessness, like nothing was going to change. There was a strong sense of longing from all the characters- the wife and mother longs for the attention of her husband who longs for the opportunity for a big break, the boy who longs for the respect and power that comes with being a man, and the girl who longs for the attention of her father. The entire time I was simply waiting for something to break the constrains of tightly shot frames.

In the end, nothing really happened. They got a flat tire. It rained. They smiled. He worked.

(Critique of the meaning behind the dog mask)

This film was difficult because Hollywood has trained me to expect certain things from films. They are meant to be narratives in the sense that they have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. The quality of the film is judged by the length of the three and the strength of the climax.

This film was difficult because I have been trained to think certain things about films about family life. There is always some seemingly insurmountable question that either tears the traditional confines of family apart or makes them even stronger.

This film was difficult because I have been trained to see black people in very few roles (black actors make up roughly 15% of the actors in film and TV) especially in all the leading roles of a film. This film is older than the statistic, but this film is different than even the most progressive stories told today.

The reason I truly struggled with this film so much wasn't because the story was mundane and it definitely wasn't because the cinematography or the characters (both were stellar, RIP sheep). Killer of Sheep showed me a little too much real. It made me uncomfortable. I cringed at the idea that this was made almost 40 years ago. This film didn't have a happy ending. This isn't some fuddy-duddy Love & Basketball movie were everyone is successful and falls in love and blah blah blah. There is no happy ending to the conversation this film has started yet either.

This family hurts sometimes. It is stressed and tired and hopeless, but there are small moments when that can be forgotten before the next day at work starts. The entire film was really dragging on for me until the scene at the very end when Stan is at work. I have felt that almost every working moment of my life. Coming home to a messy apartment and a screaming child that wants food and juice and the cat dug up a plant and the puppy pissed on the floor and I have to make dinner and wash my work clothes, but then there's the perfect moment when I get a child's kiss on the nose when everything is silent. It could be raining. I could have a flat. It doesn't matter because the next day I have to go back to work. Whomp, whomp. That's the true story of a working class family life.

One of the most surface things that we forget about film is that there is no path that it needs to be on. It is not art just because it is in the "proper" or expected order. This film is as solid as the most narrative Caravaggio painting, the most mundane Toulouse Lautrec drawing, or the most vivid Dutch still life. To tell a story you only need a single moment and everything else can be filled in based off the historical context. Killer of Sheep gave us a moment in the lives of a family and everything else is for us to figure out. Compelling? Totally.

This movie was difficult to watch, but it was good. There was no glorified Hollywood drama about what its like to be a black man or a family man. There's no Foxy Brown there to save the day. Thankfully this was a dose of real life perspective that can keep an inch of our reality in check mode.