Douglas Messerli | Black Narcissus [Introduction]

black narcissus

by Douglas Messerli

  

Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play The Emperor Jones is on the one hand perhaps his most experimental work, but also reveals nearly all the problems of his early explorations of character types and dialect. It’s particularly difficult to wander through the dynamite fields of O’Neill’s sometimes seemingly racist attempts at dialect given that the central figure of this work is a black man and a con man to boot.

      Despite this, however, there have been several memorable stage productions of the work, as well as the highly entertaining 1933 film by Dudley Murphy, Alvin Rakoff’s now lost BBC TV version of 1953, a second TV version, directed by Fiedler Cook in 1955 on the Kraft Television Theatre, and the truly remarkable Wooster Group productions in the 1990s which resulted in their video compilation of 2009.

      In The Wooster Group’s production of this play, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and starring Kate Valk as Jones, performed from 1992-1995, and eventually made into a video released in 2009, they resolve the problems of O’Neill’s/Jones’ racist language and characterizations by reversing both race and gender, putting a white woman in black face to force us to immediately recognize O’Neill’s intentions of demonstrating that the Emperor is a creation of the white world in which Jones has suffered. We no longer gaze at this figure in desire because we recognize ourselves in the image through history. It’s a production which I very much enjoyed and respected.

      Yet as good as it is it can’t match Murphy’s 1933 film, which seems always, in its long monologues, ready to fall apart. In his often juvenile but also entertaining and invigorating essay on his Acid Cinema site critic Erich Kuersten finally expresses what comes fairly close to my overall feelings about this film:

 

“The Emperor Jones remains a true work of art in part because of its flaws…. It’s utterly unique unto itself, an avant-garde howl of racial fear and confusion. It’s a celebration of black power, even as that power is—before our eyes—broken down, crushed, frustrated and torn apart, until the terrifying roots of slavery are exposed. Jones exposes below those roots, even, until life itself, the ‘first man’, is revealed as originating in a bloody whirl of black skin and primordial anguish. Moby Dick isn’t Greenpeace-friendly and Jones isn’t PC, they are literature from an age when literature didn’t mean snoozing in the Merchant / Ivory section and running creative decisions through a cultural committee. There’s a little something for (and against) nearly everyone in The Emperor Jones: horror, action, spirituality, island beaches, and great bass-baritone singing. It’s messy, it’s complicated, and it’s retroactively racist. But real art doesn’t leave you pious and ethical and with arms of hand-printed socialist pamphlets you’re expected to hand out at the door or else be labeled part of the problem. It kicks you in the groin, knocks the pamphlets out of your hands, and then tells you it’s sorry with a song that gets you too teary-eyed to resist when it steals your wallet.”

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 7, 2023).