I Am... Will Smith

I am meditating on why I Am Legend makes me cry.

I realize I am in danger of becoming maudlin or depressing in all of my posts, but hear me out - there is hope here I promise!

When I first saw the movie, I felt a deep and abiding sense of unease and confusion. Why was I so sad? More than an identification with Will Smith - who does resemble my brother and father in personality, intelligence, wit, charm, and looks - it was the way the story sunk into me in ways most if not all reviewers failed to touch upon... Was this an inabilty of theirs to see beyond the Star? Beyond the glitz of the production? A refusal to see the world through the eyes of a Black Man Hero who is also a brilliant scientist? (Many reviewers took issue with him as a scientist - they obviously haven't seen my hot brilliant brother, but I digress) But, reviewers would I am sure say to me, everyone knows that Smith is no longer Black, no longer "race-ed" but exists in the extra-critical world of the Star Product. Does he? Do any of us? Halle Berry's Oscar turn in a film where she is a horrible mother who beats up her child and reviewers loved it... was that race-less?

Why is Smith so compelling? Its the look in his eyes. As the camera draws close, invasive, penetrating, and in violation of his private moment, you read so much of fear, exhaustion, despair, and hopelessness under the gloss of the Star. He is a man fighting against impossible odds all alone. He saw his wife and child killed, circumstance has taken away anyone that might help him, and now he just wants to give his life a meaning worth living for. To cure the disease and give humanity a future. 

Does everyone know this film? Some background:

The Plot: What was to be, and appeared to be, a cure for cancer has turned the country into a zombie-like race of extremely photosensitive animal like hordes who have killed anyone who did not at once fall prey to the illness. Smith is a doctor/scientist who worked on the 'cure' and is now working, alone for years in an empty city, on the antidote to the disease.

The Undercurrent: After he kiddnaps one of the diseased, a White Woman, to try and cure her in his laboratory, a horde of pale/White men and women lead by an alpha White male, stalk a Black man through the streets of NYC.

At one point, the string him up through an elaborate trap from one foot for several hours.

Reading race into the movie or reading race out of its set up? I don't know. 

But the idea of a Black man chased, strung up and brutalized is... The story of a Black man in America feeling so alone, crying at his inabilty to make the positive change he wants to, and at one point begging a manequin to talk to him, say anything, recognize him as human, a person, deserving of recognition... This plot is one far, far too familiar.

In his basement laboratory, under generator produced light, Smith is at once Ellison's Invisible Man and yet the hypervisible center of our vision our concern our identification. I can hear my professors exclaiming that I read too much into a star vehicle. But it is there.

Perhaps reviewers failed to connect and the Oscars failed to come calling - as I truly felt they should have for so nuanced a performance that masqueraded as summer Hero worship fun - was that we are still unready as a country to deal with what we have done to so many thousands who have been lynched. Chased down by hordes of thousands and killed for public entertainment. The country cannot face the fact that so many here feel the same way as Smith's character in the film - alone and hunted, ignored and ultimately doomed, adrift and traveling through cities, towns, spaces where they must constantly live in fear. 

Avoiding dark places where the pale ones would do you harm.

I promised hope and I shall deliver: in the end, he discovers the cure!**Spoiler Below** 

He solves the problem and saves humanity.

But still I cry. For my brother, my father, and the many thousands imprisoned or dead as a result of nothing more than mellinin. For the feeling of helplessness we all often feel.

It shouldn't be called I Am Legend. It should be called simply I AM. A request for humanity... at least.

**Of course, they eventually kill him as reward for his discovery. Thus the Black man must die for the country to be saved. Sorry, I guess it is depressing in the end....