13TH
One of a half-dozen philosophical clichés, right up there with "What's the meaning of life?" or "Is ignorance bliss?" and "If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it..." and "What came first, the chicken..." is "Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?" They're all good questions. Let's talk about the last one. We might specify a bit: "Do movies imitate life or does life imitate movies?"
​
The truth is, at least if we're talking about self-conscious life, life that creates some kind of representation of itself to itself and thereby "knows" itself, or at least witnesses itself as a spectacle of some sort -- whether within the "theatre" of its own imagination, staring at shadows on a cave wall, or strapped in to paper 3-D glasses in a modern IMAX theatre -- life always unfolds on the basis of representations of itself, thereby creating further representations of itself. Life is always imitating art, and art then is of course somehow imitating life. We create our reality on the basis of how reality has been represented to us, and thereby create a reality which represents us, representations which then further form the basis of how we create our reality.
I am certainly designing this course, at least in part, on the basis of countless representations of what a philosophy course, or a college course, should look like, and many of those representations, for sure, were cinematic. If I stray outside of the limited bounds of those images, it's because I've also seen representations of consciousness expanding, de-conditioning, enlightenment, transcendent, experiences and am working them into the course. I may manage to transcend the limited confines of how a philosophy class is supposed to look, but if so, in doing so, I wouldn't have transcended the feedback loop of representation.
​
Consider how you're receiving all of this, and your experience taking in these words right now. To what extent is your experience as a student or, more broadly, a conscious, reflective, sensitive human being, influenced by how students and consciousness, reflectiveness, sensitivity, and humanity have been represented to you?
​
This isn't necessarily to say that the freedom of genuine creativity is impossible, but it would seem that life has a certain conservative bent or inertia -- if we create the present on the basis of representations from the past, the burden of proof is always on novelty and the status quo has an advantage over anything new. Progress is possible, but hard.
A centerpiece of Ava DuVernay's 2016 documentary on the lingering influence of racism in the United States, specifically those surrounding the modern phenomenon of mass incarceration, is the role played by media representations, especially cinematic ones, of black America, and specifically black male America.
​
And a centerpiece of that analysis is the role of D.W. Griffith's 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation. So we'll watch them both.
​
The movie starts off with Barack Obama stating a startling statistic: “The United States is home to 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners." The United States is, that is to say, disproportionately represented on the world stage in its prison population. Were it not to be, it would have 5% of the world's population and 5% of the world' prisoners. It has, in fact, five times that amount. To put it in absolute terms, the United States has approximately 2 million prisoners. If 2 million prisoners represents 25% of the world's prisoners, then there are roughly 8 million prisoners in the world. Were we not to be over-represented in this regard, we would in fact have 1/5 the number of prisoners we have, or 400,000. So we are over-represented by 1.6 million prisoners.
Whenever you have a disproportionality over-representation of a sub-group within a larger group, you basically have three interpretive options:
​
1. Conclude that this is a sign of something awry -- in this case, conclude that are putting innocent people behind bars.
2. Conclude that this is perfectly appropriate -- in this case, perhaps conclude that U.S. citizens are disproportionately given to criminality.
3. Conclude that this is a sign of something awry, but that the problem is not that the subgroup is doing too much of something, it's that the rest of the group is doing too little of it -- in this case, the problem would not be that we are putting innocent people behind bars, it's that the rest of the world isn't putting enough people behind bars -- they're letting guilty people roam free.
​
13th definitely sides with option #1 and explains the phenomenon with reference to another stark statistic: African Americans males make up roughly 6.5% of the American population but 40% of the prison populace.
​
Here, option 1 would be that the criminal justice system -- itself a series of institutions mired within a much larger array of social, political, and economic institutions, including media representation institutions, and including cinematic ones -- is itself somehow racist and that it over-incarcerates black men -- that there are innocent black men in prison.
​
Looking at this statistic in absolute terms, if black males make up 40% of the population of 2 million U.S. prisoners, then there are roughly 800,000 black men in prison. Were there not to be over-representation, only 6.5% of the 2 million prisoners,, or 130,000, would be black men. So black men are over-represented by 670,000 people.
​
Option 2 is what we could clearly call the racist interpretation of the statistic: black men are over-represented in the U.S. prison system because black men are disproportionately given to criminality.
​
The very fact, that is, of the disproportionality creates a feedback loop: seeing so many black men in prison leads people to conclude that black men must be given to criminality. If racism is, as the film argues, at the root of black mass incarceration in the United States, then that very incarceration further fuels racism.
​
​
​
"In order to understand the proliferation of prisons and the rise of the prison industrial complex, it might be helpful to think further about the reasons we so easily take prisons for granted. In California, as we have seen, almost two-thirds of existing prisons were opened during the eighties and nineties. Why was there no great outcry? Why was there such an obvious level of comfort with the prospect of many new prisons? A partial answer to this question has to do with the way we consume media images of the prison, even as the realities of imprisonment are hidden from almost all who have not had the misfortune of doing time. Cultural critic Gina Dent has pointed out that our sense of familiarity with the prison comes in part from representations of prisons in film and other visual media. The history of visuality linked to the prison is also a main reinforcement of the institution of the prison as a naturalized part of our social landscape. The history of film has always been wedded to the representation of incarceration. Thomas Edison's first films (dating back to the 1901 reenactment presented as newsreel, Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison} included footage of the darkest recesses of the prison. Thus, the prison is wedded to our experience of visuality, creating also a sense of its permanence as an institution. We also have a constant flow of Hollywood prison films, in fact a genre.11 Some of the most well known prison films are: I Want to Livef Papillonr Cool Hand Luke, and Escape from Alcatraz. It also bears mentioning that television programming has become increasingly saturated with images of prisons. Some recent documentaries include the A&E series The Big House, which consists of programs on San Quentin, Alcatraz, Leavenworth, and Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women. The long-running HBO program Oz has managed to persuade many viewers that they know exactly what goes on in male maximum-security prisons. But even those who do not consciously decide to watch a documentary or dramatic program on the topic of prisons inevitably consume prison images, whether they choose to or not, by the simple fact of watching movies or TV. It is virtually impossible to avoid consuming images of prison. In 1997, I was myself quite astonished to find, when I interviewed women in three Cuban prisons, that most of them narrated their prior awareness of prisons—that is, before they were actually incarcerated—as coming from the many Hollywood films they had seen. The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment. This has caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all around us. We do not question whether it should exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of the imagination to envision life beyond the prison."
​
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete
​
The question arises: what is to be done? How can this, or any, feedback loop be disrupted?
​
That's precisely what 13th sets out to do, by patiently explaining both the history of racism in the United States and piecing together the various ways overlapping racist social institutions work together to form a systemic whole.
​
And movies play a large role in this movie.
​
Let's conclude this with a passage from Angela Davis' seminal 2003 word Are Prisons Obsolete?:
INSTRUCTIONS
​
1. WATCH 13th
2. READ this interview with 13th creator Ava DuVernay
3. Recommended (but not required) WATCH Birth of a Nation
4. READ "The Most Racist Movie Ever Made"
4. WRITE a 500 word reflection on 13th, Birth of a Nation (optional), the interview with DuVernay, and the article "The Most Racist Movie Ever Made." What impact did all of this have on you?
​