PRIVILEGE
Approached as a narrative, Yvonne Rainer’s sixth feature takes forever to get started and an eternity to end. In between its ill-defined borders, the plot itself is repeatedly interrupted, endlessly delayed or protracted, frequently relegated to the back burner and all but forgotten. All the way through, the action proceeds like hiccups.
The essay is a lot more important, interesting, and persuasive than the story, but the essay needs the story in order to exist, and we need it, too, if we’re going to proceed any farther. In the barest of terms, the story goes something like this: a black filmmaker named Yvonne Washington (Novella Nelson) who is experiencing menopause decides to make a documentary about it, so she interviews her white friend Jenny (Alice Spivak), a former dancer who is also going through menopause. In the course of the interview, Jenny recounts something that happened to her 28 or 29 years ago–a “hot flashback,” as she calls it–that virtually becomes the film’s story.
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In 1960 or 1961, Jenny moved into a second-floor apartment in a racially mixed New York neighborhood and became friendly with Brenda (Blaire Baron), a white lesbian and lab technician at Bellevue who occupied the apartment below hers. One night, Jenny heard a fight on the street below between a Puerto Rican couple, Carlos (Rico Elias) and Digna (Gabriella Farrar)–mainly Digna calling for help and for the police. Jenny called Brenda, who remarked, “Carlos and Digna are brawling again.” Eventually the police arrived–as Jenny saw, peeking through her blinds–and wound up arresting Digna and committing her to Bellevue.
“Joyce has as little respect as Proust for the capacities of the reader’s attention; and one feels, in Joyce’s case as in Proust’s, that the longueurs which break our backs, the mechanical combination of elements which fail to coalesce, are partly a result of the effort of a supernormally energetic mind to compensate by piling things up for an inability to make them move.”
I suppose you could say that being black is a fact of nature, too, but the minute a society defines what being black means socially, that definition has immediate political consequences. Privilege deals with other kinds of privilege as well: not just the privilege of being white and male, but the privilege of being young and well-to-do.
