Black Womanist Futures and Parallel Paradigms in Lizzie Borden’s Sci-fi Opus BORN IN FLAMES

Black Is Not A Genre: Week Two

“We are all here bc we have fought in the wars for liberation. and we all bear witness to what has happened since the war. We still the see the depression from the oppression that still exists both day and night. But, we are the children of the light and we will continue to fight not against flesh and blood but against a system that names itself falsely. For we have stood on the promises far too long now that we can all be equal under the cover of a social democracy where they rich get richer and the poor just wait on their dreams.”

These are the words of Honey, the Black lesbian disc jockey of the women’s liberation radio station Phoenix Radio station in Lizzie Borden’s 1983 punk opus Born in Flames. Honey’s monologue, the first of many, is recited with the backdrop of the national anniversary of a socialist democratic revolution that’s taken place sometime in the near future but 10 years before the story’s main action and sets the tone for the film’s intrinsically political sci-fi premise. Phoenix Radio represents one of four sects of feminist philosophy concerned with the liberation of women under a regime that’s largely convinced itself it’s solving systemic oppression. In addition to the Black-led Phoenix Radio, there’s Radio Regazza, a trio of radical, white punk poets. There’s the Socialist Youth Review, an intellectual women’s publication sponsored by the national party, and written and edited by another trio of young white women. All of these groups are framed in relation to their stances on the rhetoric and tactics of the elusive Women’s Army, spearheaded by the closest thing the film has to a central protagonist, Adelaide Norris. Increasingly fed up with the nation state’s socioeconomic marginalization of women and lack of response to rampant misogynistic violence and growing increasingly militant, Norris begins recruiting each group in an effort to build a coalition.

Their varying responses make up the loose framework for what Borden sees as the many factions of the second-wave (“or second-and-a-half” as she calls it) feminist movement in which she came of age. Honey respects Norris and her cause, but has her own priorities working with her mostly Black and queer tribe, many of whom see the Army’s tactics as naive. (One comrade makes clear her weary stance when she quips, “That army is not mature enough to hang out with me.”) The Regazza crew sees the Women’s Army as insufficiently radical, “all rhetoric and no action.” In the editors of the socialist newspaper, we see Borden’s most biting and reflective critique of white feminism. At the start of the film, the three, presumably ivory-tower-educated women (one of whom is played by fellow filmmaker and Borden collaborator Kathryn Bigelow) are overtly protective of the party line, continually framing that Norris’ pleas prioritize the rights of women, especially poor women of color, as separatist, “selfish,” and reactionary. In an interview with TANK Magazine, Borden says, “The three newspaper editors’ voices are meant to be ironic in some ways and parallel my journey from reading Marxist texts to being awoken by feminism, then waking up to the complete absence of black women in the art world.”

In this way, the narrative impetus of Norris’ character, played by Jeanne Satterfield, and the whirring discourse that swirls throughout the film’s snippets of dialogue represents the crux of what makes the film a key entry in the Black sci-fi tradition. When Borden first set out to make Born in Flames it was largely in response to a revelatory frustration with the whitewashed New York art scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s, in particular the stark dearth of Black women. The world she builds from heavily edited documentary fragments, grainy surveillance-like footage, news segment graphics, and protest b-roll, is her attempt at imagining, in her own words, “what would happen if there were a socialist-democratic revolution in the U.S. and the government put women second.” She goes on to say more plainly, “I started with that premise and thought about which women would be at most risk—Black lesbians.”

From the opening scene we see the film attack this narrative head on, as the disembodied voice of a shadowy federal operative zeroing in on invasive, alternately elicit surveillance photos of Adelaide. The first socially demographic description he gives of the Women’s Army is that they are heavily Black and lesbian. The film, made in the Reagan era, right out the gate alludes to the state’s most historically insistent belief about Black resistance, no matter how small the movement in question is: the Blacker the cause, the bigger the threat. At the heart of any good futuristic science fiction is the friction between evolution and devolution, between the optimism of change and the pessimism of mistakes perpetually repeated. No people’s story is more indicative of this truth. The paradoxical dichotomy of power (the ability to incite fear through mere presence) and vulnerability (the inability to hide in a white nation) that that creates is what makes the Black body politic such a vital narrative tool for exploring alternative futures.

This aesthetic notion proves even more emphatic in its absence—and the absence, in fact, of Black people entirely—from mainstream science fiction. As advocates for Black sci-fi inclusion have been yelling to mostly deaf ears for years, one cannot overestimate the explicit violence of forcing Black audiences to continuously view cinematic futures in which they simply don’t exist. (As a side note, the Hudlin Brothers’ vignette “Slave Traders,” from their 1994 HBO anthology Cosmic Slop flips this on its on its head and turns it into Twilight-Zone-ian dark humor. It’s a sad running among Black sci-fi buffs, that nearly every futuristic Hollywood film leaves us wondering what catastrophic offscreen event left us watching a world entirely populated by Kristen Stewarts and Chris Pratts. Short story author and screenwriter Derrick Bell’s cruel gag is taking us back to the scene of the extinction event, as invading aliens offer to solve America’s social and environmental problems in a straight swap for all its Black citizens.)

As cliched as it sounds, Born in Flames' unremitting focus on the overlapping political psychologies of race, gender, and class with Black women as its philosophical axis is, cinematically speaking, ahead of its time. Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw didn’t official coin the term intersectionality until 1989, nearly six years after Born in Flames was released. But, the film’s eerily prescient theoretical discussions, seamlessly baked into its patchwork dialogue, is a striking testament to the fact that women, again, especially Black and Black queer women, have been detangling these dense, fraught concepts for decades before they had an academic name. In the same TANK interview, Borden recognizes as much, noting, “In some ways, Born in Flames was unknowingly practicing intersectionality.” She further posits, “Women were attempting to make contact across class, gender, and race lines, but so much wasn’t talked about because there wasn’t the language for it at the time.” The film’s sadly prophetic depiction of the extreme vulnerability of Black women under a police state masquerading as a free nation is hammered home by its catalytic act of violence. The shadowy death of Adelaide Norris while awaiting arraignment, reported as a suicide by state agents, is nothing if not a time-traveled elegy for Sandra Bland.

In depicting the ethos of intersectionality within the context of genre cinema that deals with the Black-centered sociopolitical, engages with radical feminism, and doesn’t feature a white protagonist, Borden is walking a tense line as a white filmmaker. She doesn’t make it across flawlessly (evidenced namely by a couple potentially satirical but oddly decontextualized scenes of appropriation involving white cornrows and rapping), but her work here is artistically rigorous. The fact that she scoured the cities gyms and lesbian bars for Black actors and non-actors to populate the film shows a laudable dedication to the nature of the work but also highlights her quandary of privilege and proximity in what that implies about her own social circle. But, in the end, it’s Borden’s decision not to work with a pre-written script that sets the stage for the film’s groundbreaking potential. As she puts it, “There was no original script, since I didn’t want to put words in the mouths of Black women.” In fact, to that end, Borden largely avoids any direct mention of feminism, a term she remembered many Black comrades didn’t care for, preferring less monolithically charged terms like “womanism” instead. Borden’s other cinematic choices do more than suit her guerrilla, punk aesthetic, they further enhance the collaborative themes of the film by decentralizing its authorial gaze. Writer/professor Brent Bellamy writes in his Cléo piece on Born in Flames: 

“By never establishing one author of the film (a choice that parallels Borden’s own method of working collaboratively with feminist groups), this multi-vocal formal structure prevents the work from being read as a singular narrative about the struggles of one political entity, and instead takes the social totality into account. In this way, Born in Flames navigates the difficult project outlined by Laura Mulvey in her 1979 essay ‘Feminism, Film and the Avant-Garde’ to ‘assert a women’s language as a slap in the face for patriarchy’ while also forging ‘an aesthetics that attacks language and representation.’ As such, Mulvey proposes a politics and a form that are in generative tension.” 

Borden’s faux-documentary montage, painstakingly constructed almost entirely in post-production, is a masterclass in editing as praxis. Coupled with a propulsive, off-kilter soundtrack (anchored by one of film’s all-time great theme songs) that’s equal parts no-wave and pirated soul radio, Born in Flames’ structure is both destabilizing and strangely logical in a contemporary context. It challenges notions of perspective, as expressed by early reviewers who appraised it as “dizzying” or “disorienting,” but is also somehow incredibly legible when viewed through the lens of the nonlinear storytelling that Black American filmmakers brought to the fore in the 1970s and are presently expanding upon in projects like Atlanta, Random Acts of Flyness, and Michela Coel’s monumental I May Destroy You. The woman-to-woman discussions that quite literally dominate the film’s runtime are some of the most nuanced, naturalistic discourse on feminism ever shown onscreen. That free flow of ideas is a product of large blocks of improvised dialogue (the best of examples of which come from the late, sorely under-recognized feminist icon Florynce Kennedy as lawyer and political agitator Zella Wiley) whose cinéma vérité quality place the film in conversation with the likes of The Battle of Algiers or the only truly transcendent scene in Jungle Fever, the living room summit. 

In an age of mass conceptual cooptation, the danger in publicly declaring such a powerful (and thus dangerous) theoretical framework like intersectionality is that it will instantly be reduced to a single corporate bullet point. Despite that, it persists because Black women and women of color refuse to let it be simplified in the public discourse. But, what emerges from Born in Flames is a similar framework expressed in slightly different terms that might be even more conducive to preserving its complexity. Whereas intersectionality still carries with it visual, if only metaphorical, implications of a single point of compromise, Borden’s film cinematically proposes an alternate geometry. Borden touches on it like this: “The film asks if different groups of women who want similar things can band together, not in a unified but in a parallel way, to overcome various patriarchies, because there is not just one “patriarchy.” The fiction in Born in Flames is the idea that any future political solutions, no matter how socially equitable on the surface can be lasting or liberating if they don’t first and foremost address the liberation of Black women. The science lies in the imagining of a new, collective foundation that allows for the simultaneous autonomy of all struggles for freedom, that raises all boats by lifting the sinking ones first and explodes rather than reproduces the very hierarchies from which it seeks to escape. Florence Kennedy, improvising as Zella Wiley as only she can, sums it up with a question: “Everyone’s always talking about ‘unity, unity,’ but I always say if you were the army and the school and the head of the health institutions and the head of the government, and all of you had guns, which would you rather see come through door––one lion or 500 mice?”

---

Black Is Not A Genre is a film series highlighting the under-examined and under-appreciated contributions of black cinema to genre film. The title is a play on the paradoxical existence of black cinema. The acknowledgment of shared aesthetic and cultural languages across the Black film diaspora is integral to a deeper understanding of its value. However, the persistent marginalization of Black art and racist assumptions about marketability have pigeonholed the Black films into a commercial monolith, a commercially artificial ‘genre’ that makes a spectacle of their Blackness and ignores the specificity of their craftsmanship. As a result, Black films are only discussed in relation to other Black-made films and are excluded from essential, canonical discussions about genre that fundamentally shape the way we view what’s good, what’s good, what holds value.

In collaboration with Hyperreal Film Club, with the goal of illuminating new perspectives on Black genre filmmaking, the first edition of BINAG will recommend four Black-directed films for viewers to screen at home over the course of four weeks in July 2020. The emphasis will be on under-exposed films, films that have been largely miscategorized and warrant re-contextualizing, and films that have made major cinematic contributions to their genre. Each film will be accompanied by a weekly podcast in which series programmer Graham Cumberbatch will discuss the week’s movie and genre with a different featured guest.