From "The Watchmen," Tulsa bombing from air.
Jitterbug! began as a fictional romance inspired by American pop culture history. After many drafts, a series of subplots emerged, the most underlying one being race in America. Although the dancical touches upon lynchings in Georgia in conversation and implies racial tension between the white mobster owners of the Cotton Club and its black artists, it also shows how working together can create magic, ie, Cab Calloway's Orchestra plays music written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, two nice Jewish boys working for the mob, tasked with putting together a new Cotton Club hit revue. This symbiotic relationship also extends through the music from that period which is used in the dancical: 7 of the 17 songwriters are white-- and Jewish.
Damon Lindelof, creator of the new HBO series "The Watchmen," is quoted in Esquire as saying that today "it feels like you can't tell a story about America in any kind of real, historical context that doesn't talk about race." He goes on to say that "in order for this to be Watchmen, we have to start with an unsolvable problem, a problem that the most well-intentioned superheroes and vigilantes actually cannot solve." And that is racism.
Unlike comic book fiction, my heroes Billy Rhythm and Tharbis Jefferson can't rely on their superpowers to solve that unsolvable problem, in this case a much simpler one, winning the climatic dance contest amidst death threats-- and actual acts of knives and razors unleashed upon them as they dance. Of course, their dancing could be considered a superpower-- which surely helps them win the dance contest-- but it's what they bring to the legendary Savoy Ballroom dance floor that really wins it for them: human courage, the kind that bleeds when facing death.
Although Billy and Tharbis may not have solved that "unsolvable problem"-- something that may never be solved even with the greatest superpowers at hand-- they do manage to dance around it by bringing the black and white Savoy audience to tears and agreement that what they had just witnessed was... stunning and unforgettably beautiful.
And courageous, too, when these ordinary heroes, beaten and bloodied in the final moments, stand up to the bad guys-- both black and white-- to end the show triumphantly, gifting the audience as they exit the theater with a sense of... hope.
Damon Lindelof, creator of the new HBO series "The Watchmen," is quoted in Esquire as saying that today "it feels like you can't tell a story about America in any kind of real, historical context that doesn't talk about race." He goes on to say that "in order for this to be Watchmen, we have to start with an unsolvable problem, a problem that the most well-intentioned superheroes and vigilantes actually cannot solve." And that is racism.
Unlike comic book fiction, my heroes Billy Rhythm and Tharbis Jefferson can't rely on their superpowers to solve that unsolvable problem, in this case a much simpler one, winning the climatic dance contest amidst death threats-- and actual acts of knives and razors unleashed upon them as they dance. Of course, their dancing could be considered a superpower-- which surely helps them win the dance contest-- but it's what they bring to the legendary Savoy Ballroom dance floor that really wins it for them: human courage, the kind that bleeds when facing death.
Although Billy and Tharbis may not have solved that "unsolvable problem"-- something that may never be solved even with the greatest superpowers at hand-- they do manage to dance around it by bringing the black and white Savoy audience to tears and agreement that what they had just witnessed was... stunning and unforgettably beautiful.
And courageous, too, when these ordinary heroes, beaten and bloodied in the final moments, stand up to the bad guys-- both black and white-- to end the show triumphantly, gifting the audience as they exit the theater with a sense of... hope.
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