Caste, Grief, and the Audacity of Origin

I sat through Oppenheimer and the Isabel Wilkinson story. I watched Origin alone with my wife, but I think we both got so emotionally engrossed, we forgot the other was there. It's not a party-fun film that you play to distract friends who come over for drinks. It needs quiet, and it needs the particular kind of attention you give something when you suspect it's going to ask something of you. It made me cry!

Ava DuVernay's film follows Isabel Wilkerson, one of my favorite authors — played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in one of the great performances of recent years. She researches and writes Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, her 2020 book, a must-read, by the way, arguing that what America calls racism is better understood as a caste system, one with structural parallels to Nazi Germany's hierarchy and to India's. Wilkerson builds this argument while, in rapid succession, losing her husband, her mother, and her best friend and confidante, her cousin. The film is about a woman trying to think clearly about the architecture of human cruelty while grief is dismantling her from the inside. To have written such a heavy book while living through her own personal trauma had to be monumental. I don't know if I would have been strong enough.

DuVernay described it as "a film about a woman in pursuit of an idea." That's right, but it's also a film about what it costs to pursue an idea when the world keeps reminding you that you are also a body, a daughter, a widow. You are a person with obligations that don't pause for intellectual projects.

Now, I read Caste, the book, and I am fully on board with Wilkinson's synthesis. But I had no idea about the author's life. I tip my hat to DuVernay for telling the story in this way. I had not seen it before, because it's like one of those stories within a story. Ava, if I may be so bold as to call her that (she seems personable enough not to mind), has a way of shooting a character in their most vulnerable moment that just wrenches your heart. The parallel scenes of the deaths of her loved ones, and Ellis-Taylor lying on dry leaves, and the last leaf falling...damn! The parallel of the boy after the humiliating pool incident (no spoilers here) crushed my heart. I kept thinking that kid's emotional scar must have stayed with him for life. It stayed with his white friend for life!

The question DuVernay asked in interviews — you'll sit through 180 minutes of Oppenheimer, will you sit through 141 of Origin? — is not a complaint. It's a diagnostic. She wasn't accusing audiences of anything they weren't already aware of. She was simply naming the gap between what we call important and whose importance we're actually willing to attend to. Oppenheimer was about the most efficient mass murder tool, and ironically, for the behind-the-brain reason as expressed in Origin.

We destroy people we have convinced ourselves are not human, thus making us inhuman.

I've thought about that gap for a long time, though I didn't always have that precise a name for it. Growing up between Antigua and New York, and then moving through Geneva, Atlanta, and Lisbon, I had plenty of exposure to the films considered serious. I had exposure to films used as teaching aids in schools, screened at festivals, reviewed in the papers. Very few of them were about people who looked like me, or from places that shaped me, in any way that wasn't either misery or exception. The norm was absence. You got used to it, even thought it was normal.

Origin makes the case that this absence isn't coincidence. It's structure. Caste isn't only about who suffers; it's about who gets to be at the center, whose interiority gets treated as universal, whose grief is allowed to anchor an epic, and who gets to market this package from their prism.

It starts early. I live next to a school in Lisbon, and the joy of hearing the children scream at the top of their voices during play is truly invigorating. But I always complain that when I was in school, your value was never how much noise you could make and how free you were to be a kid, an individual. You were told to stay quiet, and that quietness was you being good, for the teacher, for your parents, for the church, for your boss. Be quiet and calm. Adults tell children in my part of the world that they should be seen and not heard. But here were kids, free to scream during play as if they were being murdered. I grew up in a colonized island. I envy them.

Being told to keep quiet as a kid translates to work. As an adult, because I am not in the dominant caste, my speaking up, or sounding even half-intelligent, gets comments like, "you are always using big words", or "I heard that you also speak other languages; is that true?" These become strike outs, not home runs.

There's a scene early in the film — I won't give more than that — where Wilkerson is sitting with her dying mother, and the conversation moves between the ordinary and the unspeakable in the way those conversations do. I've sat in rooms like that. I've had those conversations where you're talking about food, and you know you're really talking about everything else. The film earns that scene. It doesn't reach for it. It's like your wife arguing with you about taking out the trash, when it has nothing to do with the trash itself.

What DuVernay does that is technically difficult and emotionally necessary is refuse to separate the private grief from the intellectual project. Wilkerson's losses are not backstory. They're argument. The woman who writes about caste and its cruelties is the same woman whose husband dies too young and whose mother is fading and whose cousin cannot escape the system Wilkerson is trying to name. You cannot hold the thesis at arm's length when it keeps walking into the room.

The film did not do the numbers it deserved in cinemas. DuVernay partly financed it outside the studio system — through grants, including from the Ford Foundation — because the studio system was not going to fund it. That story inside the story says something on its own. A film about caste could not be made within the structures that caste built. It's not surprising, but it also serves to help tell the same story.

I keep thinking about who this film was made for. Not in the demographic-targeting sense, but in the deeper sense of who DuVernay imagined sitting in the dark watching it, what she assumed they already knew, what she expected them to feel. I think she imagined people who have been living inside the argument of Caste their whole lives without having had that precise vocabulary for it. People for whom the film is not revelation but recognition.

That's a different thing from being surprised.

Often, we don't have the language to explain what is happening to us. You just feel it. Others gaslight you by saying it is not what you are feeling. Society has decided definitions and separated Brazilian from Australian, from Indian, from German, from African, from American forms of caste system, and pretends they are different, and for different reasons. This movie helps you see they are universal.

Two years on, DuVernay's question still doesn't have a satisfying answer. The film is on Hulu and Disney+, I think. It found its audience, eventually, in the way serious films sometimes do. I talk about it over beer with my men's hang out group. I ask, "have you seen," in the particular transmission that happens when someone passes something along because they need someone else to have seen it.

That kind of distribution is fragile. It depends on people like me writing things like this. It depends on whether my friends like my taste in movies.

So: to you, reader, have you seen it? If not, I'll just say what I said at the start. You'll need some quiet, and you'll need to be willing to be asked something. You can watch it with someone who won't interrupt due to their discomfort with the truth, or watch it alone.

Origin (2023) is directed by Ava DuVernay. It is currently available on Hulu and Disney+.