Selma: LBJ and Martin Luther King

There are a lot of reasons the Phantom expected to be disappointed by the movie "Selma,"  but for some reason he found himself in one of those reclining chairs at the Epping O'Neill theater, enlightened, moved, enthralled, swept away.

That the movie makers treated President Lyndon Johnson unfairly has been widely proclaimed, but this actually turned out to be, at least for the Phantom, a non issue.

Of course, one reason it did not bother the Phantom is that he hated LBJ.   LBJ tried to kill him,  and all his friends, and his brother, by sending them  all to Vietnam.
What males of that vintage remember about LBJ is Vietnam. Nothing focuses the mind like getting shot at, or the prospect of getting shot at.

But there is something else, the Phantom became thoroughly addicted to listening to the Lyndon Johnson tapes and having heard those long conversations between Johnson and Richard Russell, his old buddy from Georgia, and having heard the conversations Johnson had with every Southern Democrat (and the Southerners were ALL Democrats in those days) trying to get the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act passed, it is clear the movie does not distort the truth. Johnson knew he could not move too quickly; he just did not have the votes. He could not get too far ahead of public opinion. 

The movie suggests LBJ placed higher priorities on the war on poverty and on Vietnam, but the tapes reveal another truth--Johnson, the consummate politician, dealt in the world of the political reality,  while King dealt in the world of moral imperative, whether it was politically palatable or not. Johnson had his schedule, Martin Luther King had his. For King, there was only the awful urgency of now.

And, in the end, they do show Johnson's famous speech in which he cut the final ties to the Democratic South and said, Hell with this--we've got to move forward for the Negroes now, and when he did, he did decisively and effectively and with great and genuine feeling.

But the real reason to see this film is not Johnson or his relationship to King, it is to see just what King and his colleagues faced, the brutality, the enormity of the hate. 

It is not an easy movie to watch; there are scenes of graphic brutality, but it is one of those experiences you need to have. The Phantom sat there thinking, "I knew about  that march across the bridge, but I never really knew what that was like.

One surprise is the white characters. There are white Alabamans, one woman in particular, who are shown watching the images of the carnage on the bridge and being revolted, and transformed, and they turn out to march across the bridge with King the next time. These are the American equivalents to those Dutch people Maud described, who hid Ann Frank and her family in Amsterdam.  Those are the people in life who really astonish the Phantom. Evil is so common. Cowardice is common. But people who are comfortable, who are not threatened, but who place themselves in harm's way to help others, those people are wondrous. 

And that is what this movie is really about: Nobility, the possibility of nobility.

There is an interesting depth to nobility displayed here:  There is a scene where Coretta King has received a tape recording of, purportedly,  her husband having sex with another woman. She knows it's a fake recording, because, as she says, she knows what her husband sounds like when he is having sex. But it is clear she also knows she is not her husband's only lover; she simply demands that she is the one he actually loves. And, as much as The Phantom disparages the idea of marital "love," in this context, the word actually has meaning because, for this couple, their struggle as a couple and as individuals and as leaders of a movement is all about the meaning of love. In the face of so much hatred, love becomes something tangible, something you can almost see and smell and taste.