8 minute read
Martin Desmond Roe: Say Their Names
Fuelled by the horrific killing of George Floyd, the comedian and writer Travon Free completed his script for the Oscar-winning short Two Distant Strangers in just two months. Here the film’s co-director, Martin Desmond Roe (1997, Lit. Hum.), reflects on the complexities of depicting trauma on-screen and encouraging America to engage in its most urgent conversation with itself.
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Travon and Martin, centre, with (l-r) Producer Lawrence Bender, Andrew Howard (Merk), Joey Bada$$ (Carter) and Zaria (Perri)
When my friend, Travon Free, asked if I wanted to make a short film with him at the height of the 2020 Covid lockdown, my first thought was, ‘absolutely bloody not.’ Most American cities at the time were experiencing riots and protests so extreme the national guard was called in. There were literal tanks parked down the road from my house – it did not seem like the time to be telling stories. As Travon pitched me the idea, I realised I might never again have the chance to help bring to life a story so vital, relevant and urgent. And so we set off, in the scorching LA sun, to raise money and convince actors and a crew to join us on what was to become the creative experience of my lifetime.
If you haven’t seen it, Two Distant Strangers tells the story of a black American graphic designer called Carter James who is repeatedly victimised and murdered by the same police
officer as he tries to get home to his dog. Some people have described it as ‘the worst Groundhog Day ever’ – which sums it up pretty well.
You might demur at the premise, tell me that such a nightmare loop isn’t very realistic – but, tragically, it is. For millions of Black and Brown Americans today, police violence remains a cycle of horror which they are forced to relive again and again, every time a killing is splashed across the news or sends fresh shockwaves through a community.
How did this nightmare situation come to pass? Two key developments are to blame. First, the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Pierson vs. Ray to codify the concept of “Qualified Immunity” enables US police officers to inflict violence and death on citizens with almost total impunity (Derek Chauvin is the exception to the 99% of police killings that never see arrest or trial).
Second, we now live in an era, thanks to cell phone cameras and social media, where these killings are relayed to us at a scale and scope that the human mind finds hard to comprehend – or as an activist I spoke to put it: ‘It’s not that there’s more violence and racism, it’s just that now it’s being filmed.’
Travon and Martin reviewing footage as it comes in
I know that myself because I watched every single one of those videos with Travon as part of our research – watched time and again as the encounter mutated from something administrative and banal to the worst horror unimaginable, and, honestly, I wept. Viewed en masse, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the story you are seeing is one of systematic violence.
In a break between clips, Travon explained, ‘This is how we live with it. There’s no gap for us between Eric Garner and Philandro Castile, Breonna Taylor and Adam Toledo. It’s one long, connected string. I know for a lot of people that’s not their reality. It’s more like, “It was raining on Monday, now it’s Friday and the rain has stopped, so I don’t have to carry an umbrella or think about the rain.” But we have not forgotten that it rained – and our clothes are still wet. We’ve never had a chance to experience life outside that bubble of fear, of wondering when will this happen to me.’
We decided our challenge was to create a work that captured that fear, that sense of being trapped in a nightmare from which you can’t wake up. We already had a plot device to convey our message, thanks to the Groundhog Day time-loop. The next question was, how were we going to make it real? Specifically,
Our whole objective was to remove any distance so you become Carter as you watch the story unfold.
how were we going to make it real for all the non-Black audiences who can’t imagine what it’s like for every interaction with the police to carry with it the imminent threat of death?
In the end, we came up with three solutions.
First, we made our protagonist lovable. Travon wrote Carter as this blameless, lovable dude – a dorky, totally out-of-his-depth kid who loves his dog and just happens to have woken up next to the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. That way, when Carter first gets stopped, you already like him and know this kid could not be more blameless in that situation.
Second, we obsessed over the tone of the film. Fairly early on, we realised that, when you’re dealing with subject matter this graphic and recent, your entire tone has to strive for realism in order to respect the lives that have been lost. The importance of tone became clear in the editing suite, when we realised that our initial cut of the transition from the romantic comedy feel of the interior scenes to the shock of first seeing Carter stopped and killed was just too extreme. We subsequently recut those early scenes, looking for takes that were less funny and more naturalistic. That might sound counter-intuitive, but we knew we had to bring you into a world where both Carter’s joy and his horror feel real.
The other thing we did to respect the gravity of the material was adopt a very minimalist aesthetic. We paired a grounded, simplistic production design with raw, stripped-back sound design and as little music as we could get away with. It’s almost like the naturalism of a 70s movie, and you feel it most in the outdoor scenes. Here we moved away from the classic studio-style photography of the interior scenes, with their elegant Dolly moves and locked-off frames, to go handheld, shooting every scene with the longest single takes we could manage.
Our whole objective was to remove any distance so that, whoever you are, you become Carter as you watch the story unfold. That was the great gift that using film to tell this story gave us: instead of being a captive eye forced to watch the horror from fifteen feet away, we could move the camera and immerse the viewer in the subjective experience of that moment, stripping out that half a degree of separation which allows people to look away, to disengage.
The third and final thing we did was refuse to allow our policeman to be redeemed in any way. He is our villain, plain and simple. For us this was vital, because we knew that, for every show like The Wire, which explores the reality of how law enforcement interact with the people whom they police, there are a thousand TV procedurals that frame cops as inherently noble and heroic. We wanted to counter that heroic narrative and reflect the reality experienced by the black community – to expose the heart of a man who would put his neck on another man’s throat for nine minutes while that man begged for mercy, and do nothing until that man was dead.
Up close and personal: cinematic framing immerses viewers in Carter’s experience
To some extent, you can only really understand the way we characterised our cop if you’ve lived with that fear. So I’m going to let Travon’s words speak for themselves here…
‘We wanted to confront the fact that, in movies but also a lot of times in society more generally, white humanity is assumed, but Black humanity needs to be proven. As a kid, I saw it myself in the community outreach programmes the police ran, where officers would come and play basketball or throw water balloons with local kids. To me, that whole idea that, if the police just got to know Black kids better, they wouldn’t kill us, was always insane. First of all, it’s been proven that these programmes don’t stop cops killing people in the same neighbourhoods. Second, the underlying idea that Black people are so alien the police need to go and see us in our “natural habitat” just so as not to kill us is hateful. You don’t see the police going into a white neighbourhood to learn how not to kill white kids.’
So we let our cop be the worst of the worst – because those people exist – and we let our young Black man be the best of the best, because they do, too. Then we put those two characters on-screen at the same time, because that felt like the most radical way of telling the truth. And the truth is that the US police currently kill three times more Black people than white people because there are still people out there who assume those men, women and children somehow deserved it. Can our film change that? Not on its own, certainly. I’m with Travon in thinking that real change can only happen, ‘once everyone agrees that this situation is not acceptable; that we deserve to live in a society where we’re protected from the worst of ourselves without needing an organisation that kills people just for rolling through a stop sign or being a 13 year old boy with his hands in the air.’
Perhaps that is the job a film like ours can perform; perhaps by immersing viewers in Carter’s viewpoint, we can bring them into this space with us and make them think differently about the issue. To put it another way, if we can make you care about Carter getting home, perhaps we can start the conversation that makes sure every Carter gets home.
This article is based on contributions to the Somerville event, ‘A conversation about race and film’, featuring Travon and Martin in conversation with playwright Ella Road (2010, English) and Gabriella Cook Francis (2019, MPhil Comparative
Government). Two Distant Strangers is
available on Netflix.
