I’m reminded of James Baldwin’s famous exchange with Norman Mailer on the subject of power, in which Mailer expressed curiosity about it and Baldwin, as paraphrased by Matthew Clair, responded that, as a black man, “he understood how power worked, for if he didn’t, he would be dead.” One of the movie’s great inspirations, as scripted by Danny Strong, is the display of what Cecil calls the “two faces”: the way that a black person must show himself publicly among whites, and the way that he can be among other blacks in private. The minutiae of daily life and the haunting psychic recesses are all inseparable from the exercise of government power-and “The Butler” has the remarkable effect of making that power appear visible, as if the very air we breathe were suddenly given a tint. Whether it’s the physical assault and arrest of civil-rights protesters or the consequences of military service in the Vietnam War, the possibility of education or the prospect of employment, the struggle to get by on a low income when white colleagues enjoy more and to endure the frustration of a dead-end job when white colleagues can expect promotion-and, ultimately, the very matter of selfhood, of living in wider American society with the same freedom of self-expression and self-recognition that one bears in private circles-all are tethered, in “The Butler,” to the decisions of individuals in the Federal government, and, ultimately, with the President. From the start, Daniels links the traumas of personal and national history, of the country’s stain and an individual’s agony. The movie starts in Washington, where the elderly Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) is on duty outside a concert where Schumann’s Piano Concerto is being played he hears it but doesn’t see it, and, rather, he remembers-and what first comes to Cecil’s mind is a vision of two black men hanging from a tree, with the American flag waving behind them.
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