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To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990)
🕑 Added 2021-03-13 19:32:46 +0000 UTC
Early this mornin'
when you knocked upon my door
Early this mornin', ooh
when you knocked upon my door
And I said, "Hello, Satan,"
I believe it's time to go." (Robert Johnson, "Me and the Devil Blues")
One of the first things one notices when watching To Sleep With Anger is the pacing. By now the cinema has various rhetorical maneuvers with which to suggest otherworldliness, such as visual distortions, outsized acting, eerie music cues, or the suspense-shock-suspense pattern. But in most cases, these approaches have become genre signifiers as well, immediately alerting the viewer that we are in a space outside of realism. Burnett does something much slyer here. To Sleep With Anger has a surface realism that's frequently disrupted by sudden fade-outs, spatially disorienting edits, and above all a performance by Danny Glover that continually signals Harry's illegible motives.
Put another way, Burnett has organized a formal structure that fits the essential thematic logic of To Sleep With Anger, inserting Harry into a cinematic universe where he doesn't belong. This South Central middle-class life is not all that removed from the working class milieu of Killer of Sheep, in that social constraints, including racism, are addressed rather obliquely since they mostly manifest as family problems and personal dissatisfaction. Where so many white artists, and quite a few Black ones as well, present Black life as a tense high-wire act that's punctuated with outbursts of racist aggression, Burnett shows American racis to be, in the vernacular, "drylongso," the grinding background against which some lives but not others must be lived.
This is a context in which a basic instability becomes, if not stability itself, then the deformed ground upon which a semblance of normalcy must be established. This is perhaps why Harry is such a disruptive force. His true nature can never be divined. Certainly his infusion of old-style country Blackness in 1990s L.A. means that institutions like the church are going to seem like obstacles to him, and he is certainly invested in unmooring the family, especially Babe Brother (Richard Brooks), from its rules and ethics. (In this way, To Sleep With Anger is a bit like a Black Teorema.) But as a trickster figure, Harry cannot be pinned down as merely a representative of a historically specific set of survival skills.
Put another way, Harry identifies fissures in the family structure and the identities of its members, and exploits them, without evincing a strong conviction about any alternative ideology. With Junior (Carl Lumbly) and Pat (Vonetta McGee), he deconstructs their upright Christian charity. For Babe Brother, Harry unearths a latent sexism that weakens his relationship with the successful Linda (Sheryl Lee Ralph). With Suzie (Mary Alice), it's about reminding her of her old suitor Okra (Davis Roberts) to destabilize her marriage with Gideon (Paul Butler). And for Gideon, Harry reminds him of their shared legacy of slavery, something the staunchly middle-class patriarch would rather forget.
It's hardly accidental that the women -- Suzie and old friend Hattie (Ethyl Ayler) -- are the least susceptible to Harry's chicanery. What makes his so seductive to the men is that he seems to represent a lawlessness and licentiousness that they all desire to some extent. And this is where Burnett confounds any straightforward attempt to read To Sleep With Anger as a cautionary tale of magic / superstition vs. Christian family bonds. Is Harry a magician? It's certainly striking how his mere presence can pull a posse of old disciples out of the woodwork. The scene where he holds court at the dinner table, reducing Linda to hired help, is noteworthy in terms of delineating his power.
But it doesn't take magic to unleash the charms of patriarchal prerogative, or to confront people with memories of their previous selves to sow seeds of doubt and hypocrisy. Harry is an emissary from the Lacanian depths, a glimpse of the freedom that comes with having no organized personality whatsoever and just doing whatever feels good in the moment. He represents a timelessness, outside of history and, above all, consequences. (You can always just "go back to the country.") There is danger in remembering (Gideon), and in forgetting (Babe Brother), and for Harry they are virtually the same. His chaos moves in all directions at once.
