So over the last week I was finally able to watch Fruitvale Station, the movie that follows the 22-year-old Oscar Grant up until his murder on New Year’s Day 2009. First off, the movie is really good. If you haven’t seen it yet please do. More relevant to this page though is a scene that was included in the movie for metaphorical reasons, as it features a stray Pit Bull having a moment with Michael B. Jordan, who plays Grant, while he gets gas.
*Spoilers ahead*
The camera then cuts back to Grant as you hear a car speed by, which ultimately strikes the Pit Bull and doesn’t stop. The dog is fatally wounded. Grant runs after the car and then turns around to help carry the dog off of the road, where he was left to die. I’ll leave it to them to explain the symbolism…
Black males, we are America’s Pit Bull. You know, we’re labeled ‘vicious,’ you know, ‘inhumane,’ and left to die on the street. Oscar was kinda like left for dead, so many of us, you know, um, young African-American males are left for dead. We get branded a lot.
When you hear about them (Pit Bulls) in the media, you hear about them doing horrible things. You never hear about a Pit Bull doing anything good in the media. And they have a stigma to them … and, in many ways, Pit Bulls are like young African-American males. Whenever you see us in the news, it’s for getting shot and killed or shooting and killing somebody–for being a stereotype.
Many people apparently love this scene, and others seem to hate it. Not for the metaphor, but for reasons that they feel the scene “misleads” the audience into liking Oscar Grant more. To that I say: It’s a movie! Don’t criticize these men for one aspect of their art. For anyone to sit here and act as though they knew Oscar Grant in full prior to seeing this scene, and then for you to get angry at the notion that this scene possibly tampers with your potentially bad thoughts about Grant, it just goes to show the improper judgment that you are carrying around in the first place! You don’t know him either way, and it’s certainly no crime to humanize someone who we all came to know only from a YouTube clip showing him being unjustly murdered in the back, while laying face down and handcuffed.
Isn’t that what should lead to your outrage? But that doesn’t and Coogler’s artistic choice does? See, it’s stuff like that that makes me shake my head at some folks in a vigorous fashion, certain media “journalists” and otherwise.
As for the comparison: It’s real, and it’s deep, and it’s powerful. Human beings are individuals, just as dogs are individuals. You do not learn someone’s character in a sound bite. Character echoes through life, through existence, through action, through history. Through the seen and the unseen, known and the unknown. Millions of things make up someone’s character, and provide evidence to their track record. No man or woman is all bad or all good. We are all imperfect. But each of us is an individual, and if we act heinously towards another then let us be judged on the crime that we committed, and on the facts. To demonize the group on the actions of the singular is the biggest sham that this system can ever conjure up. To look at someone and say that they are all (insert here), based on how they look and nothing more, well, it’s most definitely the bottom of the intellectual barrel (and the compassionate one, too). The same applies to dogs. That’s the point. And it’s wholeheartedly true.
For those curious, the dog in the movie is named Ian and you can follow him on Facebook.