Which brings us again to that pivotal scene within the film that elevated Washington to the rarified heights of film stardom and Oscar winner. On this fateful cinematic second, Journey has been captured after going AWOL. Broderick’s vacillating Shaw is pressured by his blatantly racist drill sergeant (John Finn) to flog Journey in entrance of the entire regiment for desertion; a punishment Shaw’s subordinate Forbes is horrified by because of the heinous connotations of whipping a Black man, significantly in a army regiment meant to champion the tip of slavery. With out bothering to ask why Journey was found away from his tent, or to know the total extent of the scenario, Shaw agrees to have Journey flogged in an effort to preserve what he believes is self-discipline and order.
After the order is given, Washington throws the shirt off his again prefer it had been only one extra chain he was wanting to strip off. Within the course of, he reveals a again lengthy butchered by a spider’s internet of scars. The look of contempt Washington offers proper into the digital camera, and proper into Shaw’s soul, challenges you to not look away. He’s saying, what’s yet another beating from a white man?
That’s at the very least how Journey desires to look within the second. But as we watch the sequence play out, there may be extra than simply defiance in Washington’s face. There’s additionally a beleaguered satisfaction in his potential to see proper via the bigotries of an oppressive system, even right here in relative freedom of the North, and maybe a pang of sorrow too. The tear reveals the humanity beneath the satisfaction—the reality that each one males, regardless of how righteous, can bleed. It betrays a query nonetheless seeking a last reply: what does true freedom in America appear like for a Black man?
Earlier than this fateful second, we’ve been attuned to Journey’s bleak pessimism, even when it’s so charismatically and gregariously performed by Washington. The movie pits his character towards Braugher’s freedman Thomas as if this can be a conflict between a cynic and idealist; the malcontent and the problem-solver. For a lot of white viewers in 1989, and maybe now, it’s simpler to sympathize with Thomas, the type and good-natured man who’s launched as Shaw’s boyhood chum. He’s belittled and demeaned by males like Journey, who in lesser palms may come throughout as little greater than a bully. Nobody ought to make that mistake.
It occurs, as underscored by the occasions Washington continues to be perplexed when white journalists ask why Journey is so laborious to love, however there may be one other, richer strategy to learn Journey’s dichotomy. The character will not be cynical. He’s life like, and Washington imbues that practicality with swaggering authenticity that’s unbowed, however not essentially unbroken. Granted, there weren’t many former enslaved males within the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and there weren’t any who had been flogged for desertion (that method of punishment was banned within the Union Military in 1861, a number of years earlier than the movie is ready).
However whereas inaccurate, the scene is painfully truthful. A well-intended and even compassionate white man is bent by the system to do the oppressive, racist factor as a result of it’s simpler, and the Black man bears the agony of the error. It’s as much as Washington’s eyes alone to speak the burden of this injustice, and he shrewdly refuses to play it like a sufferer. There’s neither worry nor anguish within the face, simply bitter recognition of a Black man’s actuality in America, be it within the nineteenth or twentieth century. In line with the actor, even the tear was actual, a byproduct of the pretend whip being moist and really hurting because it tore into his again. (Therefore his disdain for the tear being known as a “signature transfer.”)
