A rare movie review

I watched Cadillac Records over the weekend, more to send the disc back to Netflix rather than out of any pressing desire to see the movie. I probably know more than the average viewer about Chess Records and the music that came out of the Chicago blues scene in the 1950s and 60s, so it was pretty much predestined that I wasn't going to be overly impressed by the movie. And I wasn't; I was too busy thinking "well, it's supposed to 1955, but that song didn't come out until 1963" or "wow, they're playing fast and loose with the history here" and "I'm pretty sure that song was recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis, not in Chicago," but whatever.

Cadillac Records focuses on the difficult and often tenuous emotional relationships between Leonard Chess and the artists on his label's roster. In the wake of two MAs in cultural studies and falling in love with television shows like Deadwood and the Wire, I find myself much more fascinated with media that explores process and institution than with media that explores emotion. I don't much give a damn how Leobard Chess felt about Etta James; I'd rather see the process by which he developed Chess Records and how his treament of his artists (payola, loose accounting policies, a tendency to gift cars and houses instead of regular paychecks, etc) fit with the rest of the industry and the social codes of the time, rather than how it reads today.

Today we simply judge him for using the racial system of the time to draw his artists into a kind of patriarchal system (exchanging one kind of sharecropping for another) in which they ask for new cars and houses and he provides, rather than giving them the money outright. In some ways Chess treated those men and women better than the average white man would have in that time and place, and in other ways not so much. In the movie, we are invited to read him fairly sympathetically- the patriarchal nature of his business practices is demonstrated on a regular basis, but we also see how much he cares about his clients, how much of a strain the money puts on his relationship with Muddy Waters, what it costs him to feel whatever it is he feels for Etta James. And I just do not care. Poor straight ethnic white man, trying to prove himself to his father, or to his new country, or whatever. For once can we please be asked to identify with someone who is not like us? And by us I mean a straight white man? Please? Much more interesting that way.

I think my biggest problem with the movie is that it was kind of boring. Whereas a story about Chess Records in the 1950s should be exciting. Really exciting. I mean, it was the postwar boom in the 1950s! For the first time, African-Americans from the deep South were experiencing prosperity in major urban centers in places like Detroit and Chicago. They could make enough money to get a little ahead, and still have enough left over for a good time on Friday night, and the music that developed there reflected that. Leonard Chess was one of a large group of enterpreneurs, including Sam Phillips, Jim Stewart, Estelle Axton, and Rick Hall (of Sun, Stax/Volt, and FAME Studios respectively), who took a chance on a business they knew little about and made a whole bunch of great records in a less-than-friendly racial climate. It's a story about race, and about class, and about success and poverty living side-by-side, and self-destruction, and about people from two or three very different cultures coming together, sometimes easily and sometimes not, to create music that is still played and loved today. It is about working within a series of structures and institutions - namely Jim Crow segregation and the music industry - that are changing faster than anyone can follow during that period. How in the hell can you make that boring?

So I currently have a preference for pop culture (I feel weird calling it art, though that's not untrue) that explores the effect of those kinds of structure, of culture and economy and society, on the relationships between people. And how those relationships are both shaped by and shape the structures under which these people operate. Those kinds of stories, obviously, are much easier to pull off in television, where you can stretch out, than in a movie, where you've got to get it all into an hour and a half, two if you're lucky. Still, I can't help wishing someone would figure out a way to do that.

And also, don't play "No Particular Place to Go" over pictures of Rosa Parks and Emmett Till. Hell, "Maybelline" didn't even come out until 1956, and "No Particular Place to Go" was't written or released until Berry got out of jail in 1963. Research, people. Plus, one Chuck Berry song sounds exactly like all the other ones- why not pick one slightly closer to the right time?