The Problem of the Hero (Dozier, 2023)

The Problem of the Hero is one of those smartly written, deeply engrossing films that mostly consists of two characters debating important ideas. The debate surrounds the theatrical adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son. Paul Green, who Wright hires for help, advocates softening the book’s ending to make Bigger Thomas a more universal hero relatable to a broader audience. Wright wants to keep the book’s ending, even at the risk of alienating the broader audience necessary for mainstream success. Given that it is based on an unpublished manuscript by Richard Wright, it is not surprising that the dialogue pops. Nor is it surprising that points land on both sides of the debate even the film eventually sides more with Wright’s character than Green’s.

I first read Native Son as a sophomore in college in 1985, and I have subsequently taught the film as a university professor. That context is meant to say the film’s topic is very much in my wheelhouse. I’ve been having discussions like these most of my adult life. There’s no way for me to know whether the film will work quite as well for those without a predetermined interest — but I think it will. What is striking about the film for someone who has grown up with the book is that it provides the space to reflect on how my own response to Wright’s work and attitude has changed over the years.

As an undergraduate, I was very much in the camp represented by Green. Great art is universal. To say that a White artist “has no right” to tell a Black story struck me as both counter-productive and inconsistent with the truth of life and art as I had experienced it. But as an adult, I am marginally more aware of my blind spots, and I find myself more empathetic with Wright’s insistence that the liberal, anti-racist White person can still be more enmeshed in the systemic racism of the culture than he realizes.

That being said, it’s crucial to note that Wright (as the ultimate author) gives Green (the “White Man” in Wright’s unpublished manuscript) equal ability to call out the blind spots and hypocrisies of his own position, particularly in a speech where Green reminds the author that Americans are fighting and dying in World War II to liberate others under the yoke of tyranny and oppression. If Wright insists, rightly, that there are questionable attitudes in even the most enlightened White man, Green is equally correct to remind him that there are strains of sincerity in even the most compromised members of tribes and nations.

The Problem of the Hero is not simply a performance of Wright’s manuscript. It is its own drama based on the situation that led Wright to pen it. Consequently, it adds a layer of personal pathos to the intellectual discussion because one is able to see the strain that racism has on personal relationships and friendships, specifically in the way that Wright is able to concede some points about Green in the abstract (through recording them in his own work) yet not in the immediate situation. It is an unfortunate side-effect of the current political polarization that we tend to make little distinction between those of another tribe or party, judging them all by the worst views of the group’s worst members. The psychological effect of doing so is to alienate potential allies — even if a strong case can be made that some views and practices are so extreme that any response short of total rebellion and disassociation can feel like a personal betrayal to those waiting for more moderate members to resolve the dissonance created by their tribe’s drift away from their own personal principles. Green is not the revolutionary that Wright wants, but he does provide a necessary service by allowing Wright to focus on the motes in the eyes of those who will listen rather than the beams in the eyes of those who populate the tableau of Native Son.

The history of American racism has always been intertwined with Christianity because America has wrestled with what it means to be Christian. At its best, American Christianity has reminded its racist elements that social justice is a religious concept as much as a political one and that it is impossible to act as God’s representatives on earth while ignoring a central component of His character. At its worst, American Christianity has been complicit in national disgraces by providing the proverbial fig leaf’s covering to the racist White mind desperate to convince itself that it need not choose between comfortable power and privilege built on injustice and self-satisfaction built on a belief in personal piety. It is no wonder then that religion in general and Christianity specifically holds such a double value in African American literature.

That’s why Wright’s line to Green that he is already an Atheist to hundreds of African gods and Green’s Hebrew god is just one more so painful. Wright’s rejection of a priest for Bigger in the play’s final scene can be explained as a rejection of institutional religion, but his rejection of the source of Green’s belief in universal brotherhood is more bracing than a mere insistence that the institution has not yet achieved its goals. It is an insistence that the goal itself is nonexistent and that the intertwining of racism and religion is not a corruption of the latter but its de facto reason for being. Green doesn’t appear to believe that (neither do I, if that matters), but its utterance underscores a painful truth that the liberal, White Christian must confront: if the African American were to judge the nature of God by the actions of His followers, there is precious little in the recorded history of those actions to lead the oppressed and enslaved to embrace the Christian gospel as “good news.”