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FOUR

My Brother’s Wedding (1983)

KILLER OF SHEEP WAS FIRST exhibited in the late 1970s and early 1980s, mostly at festivals, museums, and black film series. Its reception wasn’t entirely adulatory. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin gave it an astonishingly wrongheaded review, describing it as “arid,” with nice moments but without “the kind of coherence that might give them larger meaning.” She even complained that “the slaughter of the sheep is numbingly uneventful” (1978, C10). Sight and Sound proclaimed it “sincere but fatally scrappy and meandering” (“On Now” 1982, 216). In Europe, however, it was much admired, and in 1981 received the Critics’ Award at the Berlin Film Festival. This opened greater possibilities for limited theatrical distribution, but at the time Burnett was still trying to secure rights for the music. In October 1981 Variety declared that “marketplace possibilities are slim outside of specialty and festival situations for this admirable effort.” The film’s reputation nevertheless grew, and in 1990 it was among the first pictures selected for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Nearly thirty years after it was made, UCLA’s Ross Lipman restored the print and converted it to 35mm; Milestone Films raised $150,000 ($75,000 of which came from Steven Soderbergh) to acquire music rights and bring it to a wider public via cinemas and DVD. By that time, Killer of Sheep had become legendary, influencing not only films of the L.A. Rebellion but also such later pictures as David Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000) and, in a less pronounced way, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016). Decades earlier, working as what he describes as a “callow third-stringer” at the Village Voice, J. Hoberman had given it a short, relatively dismissive review, but when it was reissued by Milestone, Hoberman (2007) confessed his error, praised the film, discussed its influence, and remarked that its reputation was now so great that it threatened to overshadow some of the impressive work of Burnett’s subsequent career, much as Citizen Kane overshadows the popular conception of Orson Welles’s later work.

Burnett’s less well known second feature, My Brother’s Wedding (1983), has suffered relative neglect in part because it encountered production difficulties that hampered its release and critical reception. Like Killer of Sheep, it was produced, directed, written, photographed, and edited by Burnett. His wife was a coproducer, and he involved a number of young black filmmakers in Los Angeles in the project: Julie Dash was one of the assistant directors, and the credits for the film list a dozen associate or assistant editors. The $80,000 budget was funded chiefly by German public TV (ZDF, or Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), Canadian investors, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Burnett had trouble meeting a deadline imposed by his German backers due to delays caused by weather and by the film’s leading actor, Everette Silas, who disappeared in the middle of shooting. Burnett eventually tracked Silas down in the South, where he claimed to have become an ordained minister, and flew him back to Los Angeles; Silas disembarked wearing a Dracula cape and demanding more money. As the German deadline drew near, Burnett tried to cut the film’s rough assembly by thirty minutes but was unable to find the $8,000 he needed for the job. As a result, My Brother’s Wedding had very limited showings, and Burnett’s production company had to declare bankruptcy. It was not until the Milestone/Pacific Film Archive restoration, supported by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, that he was able to edit a version more to his liking. “It was difficult to get back to it because I didn’t have access to all the material I had shot,” Burnett explained to James Bell of Sight and Sound. “It was a matter of trimming rather than being able to take scenes and make them work by using [alternative takes]. I was able to cut a lot of the bad performances, but if I’d had all the original material it would have been a lot better. It’s not what I originally intended” (Kapsis 2011, 184). Both versions of the film are included as extras on the Milestone DVD set of Killer of Sheep. I’ve chosen the shorter, “director’s cut” for the following discussion.

Killer of Sheep was shot in grainy, documentary-style, 16mm black and white and was concerned with the lowest levels of the 1970s Watts economy. As we’ve seen, it took the form of a series of vignettes without strong narrative closure, portraying the quotidian life of a black husband, wife, and two kids. Generational conflicts were only hinted at, such as the rebellion of Stan’s son or the attempts of the parents to divest their children of southern manners. Black religion played no part, and there were no evident class conflicts in the community. In contrast, My Brother’s Wedding, which Burnett hoped would reach a larger audience, was shot in Academy-ratio 35mm color. It deals not only with the Watts working class of the 1980s but also with black small business owners and the black bourgeoisie. Throughout, it dramatizes sharply delineated class and generational conflicts, among them conflicts between a religious older generation and a secular younger generation, and it has a relatively strong closure. Burnett describes it as a “satiric” and “didactic” film, and Amy Corbin rightly observes that it has a mixed effect, shifting between realistic scenes that encourage the audience’s emotional involvement and more or less Brechtian or broadly comic scenes that create a distancing effect (2014, 34–56).

The film opens with a brief autonomous shot: a close-up of elderly singer/harmonica player Dr. Henry Gordon, dressed in formal attire, standing in a dark limbo and mournfully performing “Amazing Grace.” (The credits for the film incorrectly identify the song as “The Old Rugged Cross.”) Gordon’s location and narrative function aren’t clear, but he seems to be in a church, foreshadowing the two religious ceremonies—a wedding and a funeral—that climax the film.

When the story proper opens, it centers on thirty-year-old Pierce Mundy (Silas), who, we eventually learn, has gone to trade school in hopes of becoming a heavy equipment operator, only to discover that “everybody was going to school to be the same thing.” Since then, he’s had a series of low-wage jobs: driving a cement mixer, working as a brakeman on the railroad, and driving trucks that carry explosives and dangerous materials. Currently he lives rent free with his parents and works in their small dry-cleaning shop. Tall, gangling, often dour or sullen, Pierce is both drifting through life and constantly rushing somewhere, figuratively and sometimes literally pulled in two directions by his family and friends. In the opening scene, Burnett establishes his condition by means of a physical to and fro: Pierce is hurriedly walking down a sidewalk on his way to visit the mother of his friend Soldier when a young woman bursts out of a house behind him and shouts, “Come see my sister’s baby!” Grabbing him by the arm, she pulls him back in her direction and asks, “What kind of friend are you?” Inside the house, he reluctantly agrees to hold the baby for a few moments and wonders, “Who is the daddy?” Cut to the child’s mother, wearing a house robe, sitting at a nearby kitchen table, and gloomily smoking a cigarette. Pierce backs away from what looks like an attempt to recruit him as a father and rushes off to complete his original mission. As he walks along, he passes two girls on the cusp of adolescence, standing on a street corner. One of them (Angela Burnett, almost grown and still a charming actor) calls out to him. He stops, turns, and unhappily walks over to her. “There’s something I had to tell you,” she says flirtatiously, squirming and grinning, “but I forgot.” She and her friend giggle. Almost rolling his eyes, Pierce silently turns and continues on his way.

When Pierce at last reaches his destination, the ruefully comic tone gives way to a quiet, serious conversation. He and Soldier’s mother are seated in her kitchen (many of the key scenes in Burnett’s early films take place in kitchens, which function as the heart of the family), and from what they say we can infer that Soldier is about to be released from prison. Their conversation is intercut with shots of Soldier’s father outside the house, stomping on a pile of soda cans to redeem them for money, then coming inside to fall wearily into bed. The mother holds a broken china cup—one of several instances when Burnett makes good use of an actor and an object—and sadly wonders, “Will Soldier ever act his age?” Pierce assures her of Soldier’s desire to change his ways: “He said he’s never going back. He even asked me to help him look for a job. He’s never done anything mean or vicious, never used dope. He’s nothing like these kids today. If you look at it, we’re pretty much alike.” But the mother doesn’t agree: “You and your brother never got into trouble.” Pierce makes a quiet, sincere pledge: “I promise you, I’ll do whatever I can to keep him out of trouble.”

Pierce’s promise to his friend’s mother motivates one part of the film’s double plot. The other part is motivated by his grudging but equally important promise to his family to act as best man in his older brother’s forthcoming wedding. One of the unusual qualities of this structure is that Burnett gives the two intertwined narratives somewhat different styles. The friendship plot is realistic in the manner of Killer of Sheep and ends grimly with Soldier’s death; the family plot contains a good deal of stylized comic satire, almost like a socially edgy TV sitcom, and ends in the disruption of the brother’s wedding. Burnett crosscuts between the two plots in the closing scenes, when Soldier’s funeral is held at the same time as the brother’s wedding and Pierce’s divided loyalties, one based on an old friendship and the other on a sense of obligation, come into stark conflict. He’s forced to make a decision, but he waits too long, abandoning the wedding only to arrive too late at the funeral. The mood that results is less tragicomedy than bitter frustration or ironic deflation of two kinds of narrative, one associated with tragedy and the other with comedy.

In a 1988 interview with Monona Wali of the Independent, Burnett described the film as the story of a young man who “romanticizes the poor for the wrong reasons” and “hates the middle class for the wrong reasons.” Pierce, he said, “is an accident waiting to happen” (Kapsis 2011, 20). He isn’t a bad person, although he’s having an affair with a young married woman who meets him in the evenings, her entrances backed by the sexy, nondiegetic music of Johnny Ace’s 1955 recording, “Anymore.” In fact, Pierce has admirable qualities. He’s an intelligent, responsible worker, and most of his daily life involves dashing back and forth to help others: he runs errands for his mother; changes a baby’s diaper; and babysits for “Big Mamma and Big Papa” (Cora Lee Day and Tim Wright), his aged grandparents. We see him unzipping his grandfather’s pants to help him pee, taking the old man’s clothes off to bathe him, shining his shoes, giving his grandmother her daily pills, and reading to both of them from their Bible. On the eve of Soldier’s release from prison, he not only tries to comfort Soldier’s parents but also tries to get Soldier a job. First, he goes to a liquor store manager, who tells him, “If you wanted a job, yeah,” but nixes the idea of Soldier. He then goes to a local mechanic and carefully leads up to asking a favor by remarking, “You know, Soldier’s getting out of jail.” Without pausing in his work, the mechanic says, “That’s too bad. That’s one fellow they should keep in jail till he rots.”

Pierce’s chief flaws are immaturity and bad judgment, especially in regard to Soldier (Ronald E. Bell), the only person in the film around whom he seems happy. On the day when Soldier is released from prison, Pierce, who has been delayed because of his attempts to find his friend a job, runs breathlessly down a crowded street to a bus station, where he finds Soldier standing outside in a dark suit and two-toned shoes, holding a paper bag filled with his belongings and checking his watch. There are many scenes involving running in My Brother’s Wedding; a guiding metaphor of the film, Burnett has explained, is “running blindly” or rushing into life without “wisdom” (Kapsis 2011, 20). The two men almost collide and shout with joy and laughter as they punch each other like kids.

In a subsequent homecoming, Pierce stands by while Soldier embraces his mother and father and promises that he’s returned to stay. The scene is poignantly staged, with Soldier’s back to the camera as he holds his weeping mother for a few moments and then walks toward his father, offering to shake hands and accepting a tight hug. But on the same evening, while Pierce is eating dinner with his parents, a man named Walter (Garnett Hargrave) knocks at the door and calls him outside. In the back seat of Walter’s car, another man is moaning in pain, his face bruised and bloody. “Look, what your friend did,” Walter says. “Your friend is sick. Sick! Tell him I’m looking for him, to kill him.”

This encounter has no apparent effect on Pierce, who, whenever Soldier is around, behaves more like a teenager than a man of thirty. Burnett shows the two running wildly and happily down the streets in sun and rain, not unlike the kids in Killer of Sheep. They race one another and engage in an impromptu wrestling match, falling and breaking the front fence of a house on Chico Street, where the homeowner comes out with a gun and chases them away. They stand in an alleyway at night and harmonize with a doo-wop tune. When their singing ends, Soldier turns to Pierce and asks, “Where is everybody?” Pierce solemnly replies that there’s “just you and me.” Their closest childhood friends have presumably left the neighborhood or died young.

In the early 1980s Watts was changing from the relative innocence depicted in Killer of Sheep to something more deadly, precipitated by the rising drug trade. Looked at alongside Killer, the neighborhood in this film seems comparatively urban, colorful, and in some ways prosperous, but guns are becoming more evident. When Mrs. Mundy sends Pierce to retrieve a kitchen pot from his aunt Hattie (Jackie Hargrave), we see the aunt putting down a big glass of vodka and picking up a gun before she answers the door. A couple of thieves armed with a knife try to rob the Mundy dry-cleaning shop, and Mrs. Mundy reaches for a gun beneath her front counter, forcing them to run down the street to their car. Inside the car, a heavily drugged man and woman discuss going back to the shop; when the man grabs a pistol, the woman tells him in slurred speech to keep it away from “my baby,” and Burnett tilts the camera down to reveal that she’s holding an infant in a child’s car seat. Later Walter, who warned Pierce that he intended to kill Soldier, aims a gun at Pierce and Soldier as they walk down the street in broad daylight. He pulls the trigger, but the gun doesn’t work. Soldier draws a knife, and a chase ensues down Arlington Avenue and into a couple of alleyways, the overweight gunman barely escaping Pierce, who has found a club.

The scenes involving Soldier are neorealist in style, but the scenes involving the family and the dry-cleaning business are often humorous. Burnett felt that the humor in Killer of Sheep had been too “dry” and insufficiently noticed, and he set out to make it more evident in this film, in the process creating a kind of dialectic between realism and social comedy. Pierce’s father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Mundy (Dennis Kemper and Jessie Holmes, the latter an especially fine performer), are vivid character types: a hard-working, salt-of-the-earth couple from the South who have done a good job of raising their two sons and are devoted to the local Baptist church. She’s a thickset matriarch with a big voice and a pronounced drawl, and he’s a small, dapper man who is feeling his age. Mrs. Mundy is disappointed by Pierce’s aimlessness but ecstatic over the fact that her oldest son, Wendell (Monte Easter), has become a successful lawyer and is about to marry into a wealthy family.

The forthcoming marriage is a prime source of comedy and satire, but so is the dry-cleaning business, which provides a window onto the local culture. Silas amusingly performs Pierce’s not-quite-deadpan reactions to a cross-section of folks who appear at the front counter of the dry-cleaning store. Among them is Mr. Bitterfield (Ross Harris), a fat man with a pipe in his mouth who continually mutters to himself and expects Mrs. Mundy to work miracles on a pair of “churchgoing” trousers massively ripped apart at the crotch. (Mrs. Mundy decides to pretend she’s worked a miracle and give Bitterfield a pair of unclaimed pants.) Another fellow shows up and can’t remember what name he used when he brought in his clothes. “Could have used the name of Bob Walker,” he says. Pierce consults the books and can’t find that name. In the past, he tells the customer, “You used the name of Jack Ace.” The customer shakes his head. “Look under the name of Korn,” he says. Exasperated, Mrs. Mundy tells him, “I’m tired of trying to keep track of all your aliases!” In still another scene, Angela, the girl who has a crush on Pierce, appears wearing a close-fitting dress and relatively high heels. “In a couple of years, I have my prom,” she tells Pierce. “I was thinking. . . . If you weren’t busy . . .” When Pierce doesn’t respond, she announces that she’s going to a Smoky Robinson concert. Mrs. Mundy, in the back of the shop, hears this and steps to the counter to remark, “I would think you’d be home watching Howdy Doody.” Angela holds her abdomen as if she is having a period and complains that it’s uncomfortable being a woman.

A repeated gag involves a zany but affectionate wrestling match that keeps popping up between Pierce and his father, amusing because Pierce is tall and skinny and his father short and a bit stocky. Early in the film Pierce initiates a battle by lightly slapping his father on the back of his head. They start to tussle, and Mrs. Mundy shouts, “You two act your age!” The father gets Pierce in a hammerlock and starts pulling him toward the back door. “Son,” he says, “never underestimate an old man!” At this point a sad-faced but dignified fellow appears at the front of the shop and tells Mrs. Mundy that he’s looking for work. “No,” she says, “I’ve got two grown men out back to do everything.” Behind her, father and son are rolling around like kids. The effect is comic, but notice also that Mrs. Mundy’s admonition to “act your age” is an ironic echo of a remark by Soldier’s mother in a previous conversation: “Will Soldier ever act his age?” Pierce’s childishness around his father has the effect of domestic silliness, but his childishness around Soldier has troubling implications.

The scenes involving preparations for the wedding are permeated with full-scale social satire, occasionally employing cartoonish caricature. As the occasion draws near, class differences increasingly make things awkward or pose a problem. Pierce may or may not suffer from sibling rivalry, but he isn’t close to his brother and deeply resents the brother’s fiancée, Sonia Dubois (played in over-the-top style by Burnett’s wife, Gaye Shannon-Burnett), who is not only a successful lawyer but also the daughter of what Pierce describes as a “big whatchamajig.” When Sonia visits the Mundy neighborhood in her fancy car and expensive clothes, he accuses her of “signifying,” or using style to indicate she’s superior; he can’t stand her family, and when his mother wants him to socialize with them he sulks, grumbling that Wendell ought to marry “someone from around here.” But Mrs. Mundy is overjoyed that her family is achieving upward mobility and eagerly looks forward to the big church wedding. She reminds Pierce that he’s living with her rent free and orders him to stop behaving like a petulant child.

When Wendell and Sonia visit the Mundy home to discuss arrangements for the wedding, the class differences are glaringly obvious, and the actors project their dialogue with comic theatricality. The very black-skinned Pierce is in the kitchen, wearing a T-shirt and pouring hot water into a washtub so his father can soak his feet, when Sonia, a beautiful, light-skinned female in an expensive dress, sashays through the door to get a drinking glass. “How are you doing, Mr. Mundy?” she asks. Mrs. Mundy enters behind her and beams with pleasure. “You know,” she says, “I always wanted girls, but the Lord gave me boys. Have to be satisfied with what you got.” She pats Pierce on the arm and he scowls. This leads to a face-off, initiated by Pierce, who confronts Sonia like a prizefighter at a weigh-in. “I bet you had a lot to be thankful for,” he says. Sonia gives him an arch look and a condescending, exaggeratedly sing-song reply: “I had to worry about grades, whether people liked me, and oh yes, I had two older brothers I had to compete with.” Acting the heroic proletarian, Pierce goes for a direct insult: “They teach you how to pick cotton in Charm School?” She smirks and imitates a southern belle: “Why no, Pierce, Charm School taught ladies how to be ladies and how to be charming in the presence of gentlemen. A man’s work was once measured by how much cotton he chopped in a day. And how much cotton have you chopped, Pierce?”

When the characters move to the living room, we see Wendell for the first time. More light-skinned than his brother, he wears a business suit and is writing notes with a gold pen. He has only a few lines of dialogue and is a less-developed character than other members of his family; in this scene, he’s little more than a social placeholder, providing just the right indications of a recently achieved educational and social status. He tells Mrs. Mundy that his secretary is going to type up a list of wedding guests. Mrs. Mundy turns to Pierce and asks, “When are you going to have a secretary?” Sonia airily remarks, “I’m sure that when Pierce makes up his mind what he wants to be, he’s going to be quite successful.” Mrs. Mundy takes the remark as a compliment and beams again, her voice rising as if she were at a revival meeting: “I got them into church! If they get married and have a family I’ll be ready to be called to glory!”

Sonia is so flamboyantly bourgeois that many viewers will completely dislike her and probably also dislike Wendell; nevertheless, the film doesn’t take sides in the usual fashion of didactic drama. It has sympathy with Pierce’s class position, but it gives Sonia and Wendell chances to defend themselves. As they exit the Mundy house, Sonia turns to her future husband and asks, “Is Pierce retarded?” “No,” Wendell says, “just ghettoized.” And in fact, Pierce is too self-righteous about his working-class experience and too ready to force arguments with Sonia. He has no political consciousness other than populist hostility toward big shots. His parents, on the other hand, look up to the Dubois family and are deeply conservative, influenced by a mix of fundamentalist Christian charity and worship of individual initiative. Their values are articulated when at one point Mrs. Mundy wants to give a bit of money to a relative who has “the neuralgia.” She feels it would be the “Christian” thing to do, but Mr. Mundy objects, launching into a half-senile monologue about self-sufficiency: “If they made cotton like they did when I was growing up, there’d be jobs for everybody.” He wishes his relatives were “in a Mississippi field in the hot sun picking five hundred pounds of cotton a day. Old folks used to tell us, ‘Boy, you better mind how you walk. There’s trouble ahead and your days are numbered.’”

When the Mundy family is invited to dinner with the Dubois family, the stage is set for a parody of social pretentions, ending in slapstick, and employing what Amy Corbin describes as a “Brechtian style” (2014, 40). The comparison is appropriate because Brecht’s “alienation effect” has something in common with satire and broad or crazy comedy. The Brechtian actor and the comic actor are equally antirealistic, concerned less with subtle emotions than with slightly exaggerated representations of social behavior, and the dinner scene fits this model nicely. Corbin notes that the dialogue, excellent for its purposes, has a stilted, unnatural quality (partly, I think, due to the acting style), and all the characters are depicted as social types. The setting, too, is somewhat antirealistic, designed to create an over-obvious air of stiffness, discomfort, and philistine excess. Seven characters are crowded around a relatively small but expensively appointed table in a dining room covered with elaborate blue and white wallpaper, which dominates the image. Burnett photographs the establishing shot with a long lens that flattens perspective and induces a slight claustrophobia. Mr. Dubois (Sy Richardson) sits at the head of the table, presiding over the occasion. A Latina servant wearing a vintage French maid’s uniform and cap stands at attention behind him. He begins the meal with a prayer, thanking “our Father” for “these new relationships” in a tone that suggests concealed distaste. Pierce is the only person at the table who doesn’t reverently bow his head and close his eyes.

For much of the scene, cringe-inducing comedy is generated by the economic and cultural gap between the Mundy family and the Dubois family. Mr. Mundy provides most of the laughs when he struggles with his meal. Presented with a small bowl of open clams in their shells, he remarks that it’s good you don’t have to open them with your teeth. Given a glass of white wine, he makes a face. “Is something wrong with the wine, Mr. Mundy?” asks the Dubois patriarch. “I would have liked something stronger,” Mundy says quietly, “something like Old Grand Dad.” Mrs. Mundy chastises him: “Wine’s fine! You don’t need nothin’ else!” Mr. Dubois smirks and adds, “Well now, if you would like something else, whatever it is, I can get it.” Mundy politely ignores this and turns to his son Wendell. Glancing at the bride-to-be, he mutters, “I wish I was in your shoes.”

Trouble starts when Mr. Dubois asks the silent, sullen Pierce, “What sort of work do you do?” In an angry tone, the currently unemployed Pierce gives his work history. Asked why he isn’t a lawyer like his brother, he becomes hostile. “I don’t have the smarts for that kind of thing,” he says. He leans aggressively toward Dubois and opens his large hands like claws: “You see, I like working with my hands!” Mrs. Mundy, seated next to Pierce, leans around him and tries to change the topic by smiling at Mrs. Dubois at the other end of the table and asking about the recipe for the excellent salad. Mrs. Dubois (Frances E. Nealy), silent until now, turns to the maid and asks in mangled Spanish, “Que esta in la salada or whatever you call it?” After getting Mrs. Dubois’s translation of the maid’s reply, Mrs. Mundy publicly expresses her disappointment with Pierce: “It would have been heaven if both of my children could have been doctors and lawyers like your two children.” Hearing this, Pierce rocks back in his chair, puts both hands behind his head, looks at the ceiling, and reflects: “Doctors and lawyers—biggest crooks in the world. The higher up you go the worse people you find.”

“You’ll have to excuse my dear brother,” Wendell says to the Dubois family. “He has a very romantic view of the have nots.” Unfortunately, Sonia fills the ensuing silence by giving a nervous, prideful, excessively cheerful account of how she has just won a courtroom victory by devious methods. Her speech gives evidence to Pierce, who attacks her as a typical lawyer and causes her to leave the table in tears. Mr. Dubois pronounces an end to the meal: “This has been a very interesting evening.” As the Latina maid removes everyone’s dishes, Pierce expresses solidarity with the working class by making a show of thanking her—a gesture she doesn’t seem to appreciate. When he and his parents exit the resplendent front door of the all-white Dubois mansion, Mrs. Mundy hauls off and smacks him in the head, knocking him down the steps. Mr. Mundy says, “You want me to hold him while you hit him?”