New Song on Bandcamp

Hey everybody, got my bandcamp finally set up (it's a long story). There's a new song up.

http://noahcruickshank.bandcamp.com/

Action Movies in a Post Racial Era - The Warriors as Paradigm

My title would suggest that I believe we are in a post-racial era. We certainly are not - the repeated claims that President Obama is a Kenyan by birth are enough to shatter that hope we had in 2008. But my point in this post is not to make any specific political claim, but look at how film might provide interesting insight on a post-racial world.

Walter Hill's The Warriors, based on a novel by Sol Yurick, takes place in a post-apocalyptic New York. The film is a fever dream, taking place almost entirely at night as gangs of young men (and, sometimes, women as well) clash on the fetid and dirty streets. There is no rule of law - indeed, the film begins with a failed plot to bring every hoodlum in NY together to bring down what's left of the police force. Nearly everyone in the movie is vicious, and it's surprising how many lives are spared considering the brutality of the action sequences. But what interests me more about The Warriors is its take on racial (particularly black-white) relations.

The movie, like the novel it comes from, is partially based on the Anabasis by Xenophon. The history involves a group of Grecian mercenaries hired by Cyrus of Persia to help him defeat his brother in battle and take control of what at that point was the most powerful empire in the world. Cyrus dies, leaving the Greeks to fight, barter, and trek their way back home. Xenophon is an interesting man for many reasons - a friend to Socrates, obviously a skilled warrior - but his political skills are quite astounding. The ten thousand Greeks paid to help Cyrus were from all over - Sparta, Crete, Athens to name a few places - but in their flight home they became one. They were known as the "marching republic," with elected leaders (such as Xenophon).

The idea of otherness is quite interesting in this case. One must assume a certain level of chauvinism from the Greeks against the Persians (obviously working for a Persian was not something to scoff at, but considering the many wars between the two peoples, there is certainly bad blood between the two). In that sense, one can divide the Anabasis on ethnic lines - Greeks against Persians, one group against another. This is overly reductive, though, and I am not familiar enough with ancient Grecian politics to be comfortable arguing that the Greeks' dislike of Persia had anything to do with differing ethnicities. Even the idea of ethnicity, like that of race, is an anachronism here. Certainly there is a sense of the other, though. But, one might expect a similar sense of otherness between the different groups making up the ten thousand Greeks. But miraculously, Xenophon and the other leaders of this army managed not only live, but fight cohesively for a substantial period of time.
I think when most people see the connection between The Warriors and the Anabasis, they're inclined to talk about the journey or fighting in impossible odds or some sort of reductive relation between the stories. But what's most interesting to me is that the film (I can't speak for the book), in following Xenophon, gives us a multi-racial brotherhood. The Warriors are of varying (and sometimes ambiguous) ethnic makeup, but no thought is given to black vs. white politics. One might think of this as eluding reality, especially given the race relations in 1979 New York. But that would suggest the movie has a kind of naivete about it, that it ignores the possible tensions between its characters. That doesn't seem to be the case. Instead, we are given a dystopian future where what binds men together are ties of geography and, in a sense, tribalism. Tribalism not based on any ethnic background, but (the movie never tells us) something else.
The Warriors, like the Anabasis before it, gives a look at what post-racial cohesion could be. Now to be clear, this is something more than just "hey blacks and whites can work together" - there's something to that extent in the movie Predator, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers having a kind of competitive friendship. Firstly, their friendship is competitive, as seen in that ridiculous arm wrestling scene (quick note, I love Predator, but it's not a great movie, let's be honest). Secondly, Arnold is the only one left standing at the end of that movie. What's important and compelling about The Warriors is that not only do most of them survive, it is their group unity that leads to that survival. The single character who attempts to break that unity over and over again (James Remar as Ajax, maybe his only great role) ends up breaking off from the group and being arrested. Unity is underscored in this film in very obvious ways.
Also, when the characters are attacked by what they call "skinheads" there are very clearly black members of the skinhead posse. So even the idea of what a skinhead is has been co-opted into some new, post-(racial? maybe post black/white?) form. None of our usual notions of race relations apply in this film. In a sense we have no stepping stones to understand how different ethnic groups interact, because the social world seems to be so dynamically different from ours.
This is not an obvious point, and the film doesn't spend any time telling us about it - which is good, since if it did its power would be lost. Through The Warriors we're allowed to look at how a post-racial world might function, all without the movie or characters commenting on that functionality. And someone could watch the movie and not notice any of this at all; that's what makes the movie so brilliant.
So what we have here is an example, through a low-budget action film, of what the future may be like - both good and bad (this is a dystopian story after all).