Summary
This essay is a short review of the 1954 American musical film Carmen Jones, starring Dorothy Dandridge as Carmen and Harry Belafonte as Joe. The screenplay was written by Harry Kleiner and based on a 1943 Broadway musical. This musical, in turn, was adapted from Georges Bizet’s classic 1875 opera Carmen. The film tells the story of a young African-American woman named Carmen who works in a parachute factory in the American South. When Carmen gets into trouble, she is placed under the watch of the upstanding soldier Joe. Joe falls under Carmen’s spell, but after a fortune-teller informs Carmen that their relationship is doomed, she runs off with the boxer Husky Miller.
Baldwin argues that the film is important and new in certain respects, but also severely limited. Certainly, he suggests, this film with an all-black cast is better than the famously racist The Birth of a Nation (1915). However, this does not mean the film deals with African-American life in a balanced or accurate way. The film is based on trading the 19th-century Spanish gypsy characters of the original opera with World War II-era African Americans. The suggestion is thus that gypsies are parallel to African Americans, yet the film also tries to avoid the offensive implications of this parallel. Carmen Jones tries to "repudiate any suggestion that Negroes are amoral—which it can only do, considering the role of the Negro in the national psyche, by repudiating any suggestion that Negroes are not white." Though the actors are black, very little about their lives shows this. Carmen’s motivations in the film, Baldwin suggests, have nothing in common with what might motivate a real woman in her situation. Similarly, the accents sound false. The sets are overly spotless, as if trying to show that African Americans are as clean and “modern” as white people. Additionally, the film tries to bring sex and race together, but there is nothing really sexual about it besides the fact that “Negroes are associated in the public mind with sex.” The film is ostensibly about passion and love, but neither of these comes off as real in the film.
Analysis
This review of Carmen Jones showcases Baldwin’s sharp wit. While at times it seems like he is complementing the film, he takes back this praise and turns it on its head. Though the review is viciously critical, it is often humorous. In the end, the problems Baldwin sees in the film overlap with many of the concerns he touches on in more depth in the other essays. While the film has an all-black cast, it has very little to say about black experience in America. What it does reveal, however, is American’s myths and obsessions about race: “the questions [the film] leaves in the mind relate less to Negroes than to the interior life of Americans.” The film turns the black characters into “ciphers,” a blank slate or even screen that can be used to project images and ideas. For example, the film’s set-up suggests that African Americans are immoral, but it avoids saying this directly by having the characters act white. While ciphers may be better than directly racist stereotypes, Baldwin argues, this also shows something deeply wrong with the American psyche. He says that ciphers do not just exist in the world. For people to be emptied out in this way transforms them into monsters. This does not reveal any truth about African Americans, but shows that “Americans are far from empty: they are, on the contrary, very deeply disturbed.”
