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• W291240172 abstract "A Soldier's Story (1984), the film adaptation of Charles Fuller's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier's Play, dramatizes the asymmetrical experience of blacks in a world defined and created by whites-the madness of race in America,1 as Fuller himself writes. Fuller himself wrote the screenplay for the film, with Norman Jewison directing. The film evokes memories of Jewison's earlier film about racism. In the Heat of the Night (1967): both films are in the detective genre, with a black-white collaboration arriving at the solution to the crime; both deal with explicit and covert racist attitudes in the South; both present a plot-resolution that affirms and reassures the audience. This essay will examine an organizing principle that unifies both the play and film thematically, structurally, and ideologically: the pattern of reflection. The film is replete with reflections, from Davenport's shining MacArthur sun-glasses, to Davenport himself gazing into a mirror. One repeated reflexive image, the gun, establishes the film's ideological context. The image is repeated four times: when Waters is murdered in the opening scene; when the racist Byrd threatens to shoot Waters; when the flare gun is fired, signalling the black regiment's participation in the war; and when Waters's murder is recalled and Peterson makes explicit the connection between Hitler, Tojo, and Waters's racism. The aural and visual effect of this series of reflections links the murder with World War II, for Hitler's Final Solution and Japan's fanatical race-consciousness are reflections of America's own history of racism-racism that has inspired self-hatred and Waters's death. The reflection motif also reveals the psychology of the characters. In one scene, Waters explains to Wilkie why he must take action against C.J., for C.J. shames him and the race: My daddy told me we got to . . . close our ranks to the chittlin's, the collard greens-the corn bread style (90). Ironically, as he speaks he gazes into a mirror that juxtaposes his image with that of C.J., whom he hopes to isolate and destroy as the embodiment of what he hates. But the point of the image-juxtaposition is his own self-hatred, just as Fuller's subject is black racism. His main character, Waters, in attempting to defeat racism personally, destroys both himself and other blacks. However, that black bigotry is a reflection of white racism, just as Waters himself-the hated sergeant-is a refracted image of what the black soldiers fear and hate in themselves: that they will lose their own identity by being defined by white ideals and ambitions. In the play and film, the political focus is controlled by two illusory but reflectional paths of opportunity for blacks: sports and the segregated Army. In the play, for instance, the set itself is dominated by a large poster of Joe Louis in uniform, reading Pvt. Joe Louis says, We're going to do our part-and we'll win because we're on God's side' (7). The poster presumably alludes to Louis's defeat of Max Shnelling in 1939, in a heavy-weight fight touted as a test of American values; Louis's decisive victory over the German standard-bearer seemed to demonstrate convincingly the superiority of America over Hitler's fascism. Yet in the poster, Louis is depicted as a private, as if to imply that even super-heroes find a low ceiling in the Army if they are black. As in the play, the film emphasizes the sports issue by making the soldiers baseball players, devoting an entire scene to a contest with a white team. C.J.'s great catch, Peterson's perfectly executed bunt and slide into second, and C.J.'s dramatic, towering home-run-all to the exaggerated sound effects of whizzing balls and cracking bats-testify to the pastoral ism of America's favorite past time. However, like the play's ironic treatment, the film's sports motif is undercut by its own setting. The action takes place in 1944, three years before Branch Rickey sent Jackie Robinson to bat for the Brooklyn Dodgers. …" @default.
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• W291240172 date "1991-01-01" @default.
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• W291240172 title "Reflections of Identity in A Soldier's Story" @default.
• W291240172 hasPublicationYear "1991" @default.
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