Thursday, March 15, 2012

Alcatraz - "Clarence Montgomery"

Season 1, Episode 10 

Tonight's episode of Alcatraz was originally meant to air two weeks ago, yet was preempted by a rescheduled NASCAR race, and then for whatever reason, was preempted for the next two scheduled episode, before finally airing tonight. Obviously, the network didn't feel as if the reorder would affect anything, and for the most part they were right, since the events of the episode weren't predicated on anything we didn't know past the third episode, and there were only some slight revelations by the end. So instead of repeating myself again concerning the show's major flaws, I would like instead to discuss something far more troubling: this episode's awful depictions of both racism and race. 

To say that racism was rampant in the 1960s is just a waste of breath, because it's not as if anybody is unaware of that fact.* (Well, except for maybe racists and/or whites who grew up in the 60s, but that's a whole another tangent.) Yet most of the running time of the flashback scenes of “Clarence Montgomery” hinged on us knowing this fact, and laid it out in the most explicit way possible. Now, there's nothing wrong with shows recognizing and depicting the mistakes of our nations past and using those past mistakes to create drama. Hell, Mad Men does it all the time, and to great effect.

*(I'm of course well aware that Clarence was charged with murder in the 1950s, but since the flashbacks take place in the early 1960s, let's just stick to with using that decade. It's not like their was a sudden shift in the depiction of race once a new decade rolled around.)

But the difference is that Mad Men does it in much subtler and more believable ways than Alcatraz did here, and it's that heightened realism is what makes it so devastating and powerful to watch. “Clarence Montgomery” by comparison was filled with the most unoriginal and over-the-top examples of racism, such as the disdain with which EB treated Clarence, and the white prisoners refusing to eat his food, that everything came off as cartoonish and unbelievable. I'm not claiming that these things didn't happen – they most certainly did – but the racism within the jail seems perhaps too over charged for the setting, as if the writers just took everyday examples of racism and transported them, without considering how the context might change things.

To the episode's credit, there was one bit subtly concerning 1960s racism that I quite enjoyed for it's role in the flashback – yet I hated it for what it did to the rest of the episode. The reason that Clarence Montgomery ended up in prison – and the show implied this without ever directly saying it – was that he was a black man, and the burden of guilt was automatically assumed in the case of his girlfriend's murder, and he thus never received a proper and fair investigation and subsequent trial. This is both something that makes sense given the time period it took place in, and thus serves as a proper narrative deployment of racism as a storytelling tool.

However, the trouble begins when that use of racism bleeds over into the present-day story. Assume for a minute that you went into this episode without having seen the promo that gave away the twist of Clarence's original innocence, and that you were watching the episode trying to play along with the show -which really is what FOX should have let happen in the first place out of artistic principle – then hopefully (by the show's standards, not mine) you were uncertain as to Clarence's innocence or guilt. Part of this was due to the episode's purposeful withholding of information – a common trick in shows such as these – but perhaps part of it had something to do with Clarence's race. I'm not saying that you, random reader of this blog post, are a racist or that even the writers themselves are, because I choose to believe that people aren't until proven otherwise, but I can't shake the feeling that the writers meant for his race to be a deciding factor in audience destoryingperception of the character. (The character's name is Clarence Montgomery, which certainly sounds like something a less enlightened writer might come up with if he was writing a racially-specific role.)

And whether or not you were tripped up by the character's race, there certainly exists an uncomfortable juxtaposition within an episode that incorporated racism not one part of the story, and then turns around and in actually racist about the same character in a different part of the story. And even if we give the writers the benefit of the doubt and assume that the present-day story wasn't meant to trade in on his race (again, a stretch based on the character's name), it then becomes an issue of the writers simply being lazy and not taking them time to make sure that an episode that deals with historical racism treats the minority character fairly to counteract that.

And I know that at the end of the day (or episode) that Clarence's actual commitment of the present-day murders was caused by some sort of Clockwork Orange-inspired brainwashing, and thus the show can cop to not falling into the “the black guy did it” trope. But this was still an episode that played into that perceived perception, and even if that itself isn't racist either, it's still just very cynical, playing off of old stereotypes does nothing towards what should be the ultimate goal of destroying them.

No comments:

Post a Comment