Kind of Blue Fairy, or, thoughts on the insurrection

“Real food for real people.” The motto of Oliver’s, our local upscale grocery chain. Of course I’ve wondered if that is supposed to make Safeway shoppers into fake people buying fake food. Silly question, right? They’re not really saying that they sell reality. Are they? I’m wondering again this week, for a couple of reasons.

First, A.I./Artificial Intelligence by Stephen Spielberg (2001), which I think is great, and have seen a few times. We watched it again last week. It felt different — felt, this time, like it really wasn’t very much about A.I., but about a boy, David, whose mommy cruelly abandons him, but not before reading him Pinocchio. In response to his trauma, and using Pinocchio to think with, he first decides that she abandoned him because he isn’t “real,” and second, embarks on a quest to find the Blue Fairy, who can grant his wish to become real. Then his mommy will love him. At one point in the quest he finds himself in a glass-enclosed submersible, a thousand feet beneath the ocean’s surface, with the submersible’s headlight aimed at a wooden statue of the Blue Fairy on the ocean’s floor. Poor little David stares with childish hopefulness at the statue, thinking it’s the real Blue Fairy, and pleads, “Blue Fairy? Please, please make me a real boy. Please, Blue Fairy. Please make me a real boy.” He says this over and over, for a thousand years, even as the oceans freeze about him and the earth is encased in ice. I found this scene, on this viewing, enormously moving. Heartbreaking.

It changed the way I think about this, from Trump’s Wednesday January 6 speech to the crowd on the Mall, before they attacked the Capitol: “You’re stronger, you’re smarter….You’re the real people.”

On the one hand, this is textbook American white supremacy: you’re better, stronger, smarter, than those other, you know, “people.” And this licenses your violence against the fake ones, the unreal people. Thus the confederate flags, the signs, “Murder the media,” thus the t-shirt, “Six million wasn’t enough,” thus the plan of the dude with zip ties to “put a bullet” in Nancy Pelosi’s “noggin.”

But after watching A.I. again, I’m hearing not just the assertion of superiority, but a note of anxiety, not about their superiority — but about their reality. As in: Some people might say you’re fake. Perhaps because you shop at Safeway, or Walmart, instead of Oliver’s. Because you watch Fox News, or OAN, instead of listening to NPR. Some might say you’re not real. But I’m here to tell you that the people who say you’re not real are the fake ones, and you’re the real ones.

An existential anxiety. Like David’s. A mob of Pinocchios, they seek out the leader, as David seeks the Blue Fairy, for assurance that they are real. Because they are tormented by the suspicion that they’re not.

James Baldwin was on to submerged terror about reality itself in white supremacy a long time ago:

“Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation.”

The really terrifying thing for white people, as Baldwin sees, is not so much that white ideas about blackness aren’t real, but that white ideas about whiteness aren’t real. That explains the lengths white people go to avoid facing the truth that racist ideas about whiteness are no more real than racist ideas about blackness. The two are conjoined twins, the twin effects, so to speak, of the single evil magic spell of race. Thus the freak-out over Obama, which helped Trump get elected. Thus the freak-out over BLM. Thus the need for the president to stand on a podium on the Mall and tell them, “You’re the real people.”

I think it’s significant, though, that Trump didn’t say, “You’re the real Americans.” He didn’t, because he doesn’t give a damn about America, or about Americanness. He gives a damn about one thing: Trump. And so he’s not the leader of an American white supremacist mob, or not just that. Such mobs may believe passionately in democracy and equality — for white people. Trump believes in neither. No, he’s the leader of a full-blown authoritarian cult of personality, and the signature of the genuine authoritarian is his power to say what does and doesn’t count as real. When Stalin said the latest 5-year plan for tripling the wheat harvest was a great success, you better believe that it really was, notwithstanding those corpses of starved peasants lining the streets of your village.

This is why Stalin went out of his way to condemn a considerable number of true-believer Stalinists, people who had always sincerely praised the 5-year plan’s triumphant success, as enemies of the people. Far more important and powerful than loyalty to the party was the party’s power to declare without limits what was and was not real. And so at least some of those true believers welcomed the bullet in the back of their neck. The leader is always right: a fixed star, an immovable pillar. O’Brien in 1984 persuades Winston finally not just to say that 2+2=5, but to believe it, and Winston ends by not just believing Big Brother, but, as with Trump and his fans, by loving him. He is the reality giver. Like a god.

Or at least a fairy. The reality fairy.

So Trump need merely suggest in his crude code that Mike Pence is, as of this moment, no longer one of the real people, and the mob rushes off with nooses to…well, I’ll be damned if they didn’t intend to lynch Mike Pence! We can all agree: if there is one thing that Mike Pence is, it’s white. If there’s one thing Mike Pence has shown, it’s loyalty to Trump. But Trump will piss on whiteness if it’s not loyal enough to Trump and only Trump gets to say how loyal is loyal enough.

So Covid is fake, or the Covid infection rates, or death rates are fake. The election is fake — fake black people in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Atlanta, submitted fake votes, denying real Trump voters their real landslide victory. The threat to Alabama posed by Hurricane Dorian, with the aid of Trump’s sharpie? Real. Climate change? Fake. The triumphant, peaceful and patriotic protest of election fraud on January 6 at the Capitol? Also real. The violent, antifa-inspired mob pillaging the Capitol on January 6? That’s real, too. That some of these are mutually exclusive, like the fact that Stalin knew some of his terror victims were genuinely loyal, doesn’t matter at all, only goes to show the total power of the leader over reality. And all these lies are enormously destructive. We might want to say, not Stalin-level destructive. Not yet. But wait. Wait for the climate change lie to play out.

The broad context for A.I. is the extinction over several thousand years of the human race, from consequences of climate change. This suggests that if we think the real question of the film is whether David is real or not, then maybe we don’t have our eye on the ball. The film includes a sequence suggesting that the anxiety over whether David is a real boy has roots in the history of American racism. The real question is not what will happen to David but what will happen to the human race.

And so David is mistaken in thinking that his mother doesn’t love him because he’s not real. She does love him! That’s why she’s wracked by grief and guilt, weeping piteously, as she abandons him in the dark forest, and her last words to him, through her sobs, are these, which pierce my heart: “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the world.” She’s cruel to him, despite her love, because she refuses to surrender her conviction that he’s not real. And so this suggests to me that questioning David’s reality is the wrong frame to bring to the movie. It’s the frame adopted by the movie’s villains, including David’s mommy, who excuse their cruelty to the object of their love by claiming that the latter is not real. I think it’s fair to say that this is a distinctively human behavior.

I’m sure I’m not the only viewer who cries during the scene of David’s abandonment, in sympathy with both David and his mommy, as they suffer and weep together. Our tears testify to our felt conviction that David is real, just as real as his mommy, despite the fact that in another sense of the word “real,” he’s “really” Haley Joel Osment on a movie set. It misses the point, I think, to dismiss the felt conviction of David’s reality as an epistemological mistake. I’m feeling the reality of the imagination. There wouldn’t be much point in going to the movies if I couldn’t recognize and feel that.

I wonder if, instead of saying that whiteness isn’t real, we would do better to say whiteness is imaginary. Then the problem isn’t that it’s “just” a story, and not real. The real problem is that it’s a bad story. An ugly imagination. Part of its badness is that it has built into it the failure of white people to understand the reality of the imagination, for example, the ugly reality of the story of whiteness. Maybe this is why it’s an American commonplace to think of the narrative arts, like movies, as “entertainment” — something that distracts us briefly from a stressful reality, instead of powerful works of the imagination that help us understand and appreciate and see and love and feel at home in reality. Maybe this is why we’re so anxious about our own reality that we’re vulnerable to cons like “Real Food for Real People.” We imagine that we can buy the reality we need in the store. Silly!

Or we fall for much more destructive cons like “Stop the Steal,” because we imagine that those people — the un-people — are getting away with stealing our reality.

A.I. moves me to feel not that it’s a mistake for David to model his life on Pinocchio’s search for the Blue Fairy, but, on the contrary, that the intelligence and adaptability and drama and pathos of his commitment to that model are what makes him feel to me, as we like to say, human. Pinocchio ends up, albeit in a strictly limited way, being a good story for David to guide his life by. He finally gets what he’s always longed for — his mommy’s unconditional love. Only it’s not exactly his mommy giving it to him. She and every other human being has been dead for at least a thousand years. It’s really the A.I., child of and successor to humanity, who gives it to him, but it’s only able to give David unconditional love for one day. And as that day unfolds, David is never able to understand that it’s the A.I. loving him unconditionally, not his mommy. To be fair, he’s only a child. The day ends, and the screen goes black.

I call that neither a black ending, though, nor a white one, but a blue ending. It’s great because it’s blue. It shows how the Blue Fairy is real. It shows that the Blue Fairy is real because she’s blue. Or at least, as Miles Davis might say, kind of blue.

Walter Mosely understands, maybe, in telling the story of Socrates Fortlow, an ex-con trying to make it on the outside, in Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. As a child, Socrates had no mother. His aunt Bellandra Beaufort cared for him. She would take him to the beach, where Socrates would stare out at the ocean, and wonder about God. What his aunt tells him makes me feel something like the ending of A.I. makes me feel. I won’t even try to explain why that feeling, in turn, makes me feel a little better about whatever is in store for our country. I don’t understand it myself.

“’God ain’t nowhere near here, child,’ Socrates’s aunt…used to say. ‘He’s a million miles away; out in the middle’a the ocean somewhere. And he ain’t white like they say he is neither.’

‘God’s black?’ little Socrates asked the tall, skinny woman. He was sitting in her lap, leaning against her bony breast.

‘Naw, baby,’ she said sadly. ‘He ain’t black. If he was there wouldn’t be all this mess down here wit’ us. Naw. God’s blue.’’

‘Blue?’

‘Uh-huh. Blue like the ocean. Blue. Sad and cold and far away like the sky is far and blue. You got to go a long long way to get to God. And even if you get there he might not say a thing. Not a damn thing.’’’