This summer, I was one of maybe five people in America to actually go to a theater and watch Bushwick, a low-budget urban warfare film starring Dave Bautista and Brittany Snow.
From the trailers, Bushwick looked like a celebration of the diverse people of Brooklyn as they unite against a common enemy. The Verge described it as bringing “the debate over punching Nazis” to life. Right-wing pundits celebrated it as a “liberal film” that “flopped”. I mean, check this out:
Seems like something I should love, right? Alas, no. This film was not liberal or progressive, it was white racist garbage.
Now that the film is on Netflix, I’m going to dissect Bushwick. I hated this film, but I’m going to watch it again, so that you don’t have to.
A note on production values
Look, I could nitpick the shit out of Bushwick (or any film for that matter), that’s something I used to find fun to do. This film is full of things to technically nitpick. It was advertised as a non-stop action ride, but most of it is presented in real time, as a string of shots cut together as a pseudo long take that follows Lucy (Brittany Snow) across Bushwick. This makes the film very slow at first, even when action is happening in the background. You start out with her and her boyfriend in the subway, oblivious to anything happening outside. Because you’re stuck having to follow Lucy, that means you have to wait for things to happen around Lucy. The opening feels very slow, and it’s hard for the film to recover.
I want my action films to feel active, you know? Is that too much to ask?
Don’t get me wrong. I can appreciate and even love “real time” films. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope is phenomenal. The whole film takes place across only a dozen takes, most artfully edited together to make almost the entire film feel like one long take. But what Hitchcock did well was create suspense. The audience gets treated at the outset to a brief, brutal murder. From the first thing you see in the film, you’re sucked into the drama of the murder.
In Bushwick, you’re treated to an opening sequence showing helicopters… just… flying around. The passengers, in black military gear, vaguely like the low-budget film version of S.W.A.T. teams. They could even be the good guys coming in to help. Would it have killed the producers to put some swastikas or Confederate flags on these guys, so the audience at least knows they’re supposed to be the “bad guys”?
From there, you transition to Lucy and her short-lived boyfriend, slowly walking through the subway. You don’t see an actual hint of violence until five minutes into the film (strangely from a man on fire running down into the subway). Six minutes in, Lucy’s boyfriend dies offscreen to the sound of an explosion. We still don’t know why.
It takes until seven minutes into the picture before the audience gets let in on the real threat: Our men in black S.W.A.T. gear, now moving through the streets, gunning down a few NYPD cops. (I guess that makes them bad guys?) With Lucy’s boyfriend dead, she starts running for her life, and we’re forced to follow her through the streets of Bushwick, to the sounds of urban warfare, still without really knowing what’s going on.
This film sucks at proper pacing, generating or building suspense, or making you care about the main character beyond “dumb white girl who wants to not die” (more on this later). It is the opposite of what I expect when I pay to watch a film advertised as a “non-stop action thriller”.
All that said, I can still love a poorly made movie with a good message. This film’s message is not at all good, though.
Racial stereotypes galore
Nine minutes in, Lucy encounters two of the film’s endless S.W.A.T. attackers, who restrain her. A couple of Asians in a riced-out hatchback (featuring a dragon mural on the side) drive up with an Uzi, gun Lucy’s attackers down, and drive off. Lucy runs some more.
Ten minutes in, Lucy finally has a conversation with someone new: Two men (one black, one brown), who are introduced to the audience while murdering a mostly unseen person. On first viewing I thought it was supposed to be a member of the invading army, but you only see the man’s legs, and he’s wearing blue jeans, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, these two men–the first minority characters the audience sees with a meaningful speaking role–proceed to chase Lucy into a random basement, rob her, and then try to rape her. So yeah, this socially progressive film, which is supposed to be about how a racially diverse neighborhood comes together to fight fascists, first introduces minorities by embracing the violent myth of black men wanting to rape white women.
Black men raping white women is one of the oldest racist tropes in film, beginning with the first epic film in history, 1915’s Birth of a Nation, which cast the Ku Klux Klan as its heroes. In the film, Klansmen were recast as saviors of poor innocent white women from hordes of barbaric, sex-crazed black men.
Please don’t tell me shit like this doesn’t matter. It absolutely matters. It mattered in 1915, when Birth of a Nation was so successful, it led to the re-founding of the Klan. A single movie is credited with the rebirth of the nation’s largest and most prominent white supremacist group. Many people today don’t even realize the Klan ever stopped existing, that it was originally extinguished in the 1870s. That’s the power of film.
And that’s why it matters that movies, even supposedly progressive movies made by supposedly progressive directors, decide to introduce black men as people who rape white women. Thankfully, I’m not the only person to have noticed this; Buzzfeed, for example, noted that the film “[has] its villains spout racist rhetoric while portraying most of its own characters of color as criminal caricatures.”
That’s why this movie is completely fucking vile. Well, one of the reasons, anyway.
Accidentally endorsing fascism
Despite what you see in the movie trailer, there is no unification of diverse groups in this movie. There’s pretty much the opposite of that.
Of all the basements Lucy could have run to while fleeing sex-crazed minorities, she happened to pick the basement of Stupe (Dave Bautista), a noble white man who works as a janitor and knows how to kill people. After rescuing her from her attackers, Stupe reluctantly helps Lucy make it across Bushwick to find her grandmother, encountering random militants along the way.
29 minutes into the film, we actually hear some vague details on what’s happening. Sort of. Lucy and Stupe encounter a radio (with an an announcer suggesting domestic terrorism) and a flyer (for something about “building a New America”). They learn this in a bodega, shortly before they discover the bodega’s owner, fatally stabbed. With his dying breath, he tells Lucy that looters were stealing candy, and he didn’t try to stop them, but they stabbed him anyway.
They’re not making the residents of Bushwick out to be good people here.
32 minutes into the film, Lucy and Stupe encounter another set of generically ethnic gang-bangers (including the guy who killed the bodega owner), this time looting some old white dude’s overturned vehicle. One of the gangsters goes to execute the old man with a pistol, and Lucy shoots at him with a gun Stupe gave her. So far, Lucy and Stupe have injured or killed more locals than militant invaders.
They make it to Lucy’s grandmother’s house. She’s dead. Lucy now wants to go to her sister’s house. Stupe, ever the noble white man, follows her to help her. They find Lucy’s sister. She’s stoned. This movie is slow and boring.
Eventually, a lone militant tries invading Lucy’s sister’s home. Here, at 49 minutes (over halfway through the film!), the audience finally learns what’s going on. The militant is actually a young white dude from Kentucky, and fills them in under duress:
A number of southern states are trying to secede from the Union. The plan was to seize control of Brooklyn and hold it hostage until Congress capitulated and recognized their secession.
In a film this poorly written, this dude comes dangerously close to making sense. He’s convincing, including on the idea that no one was supposed to get hurt. This was to be the world’s largest hostage negotiation, not a bloodbath. He even, almost convincingly, manages to blame all the violence on the locals:
“There weren’t supposed to be so many guns, they’re illegal here… No one was supposed to fight back, okay? We had too many casualties. They gave us orders, they told us Bushwick was a shoot-to-kill zone, us or them.”
Given that we’ve just spent almost 40 minutes watching Bushwick locals attacking and destroying each other, this literal fascist almost sounds justified in blaming the violence on the locals, too.
That’s right. This film spends so much time depicting Bushwick’s minorities as violent thugs, that by the time you meet a fascist, you almost want to believe him when he blames the violence on the locals. That’s how sick this movie makes me. It almost accidentally(?) justifies fascism.
Divided we fall
56 minutes into the film, Stupe, Lucy, and Lucy’s sister are trying to make it to Queens and the safety of the U.S. Army. They encounter a group of militants, but are randomly saved by a random bunch of Hasidic Jews with machine guns and Molotov cocktails. Lucy comments, “I didn’t know those guys could fight.” They keep running.
58 minutes in, they enter a random apartment complex, where a gang of black men with guns momentarily threaten them, before James (the gang leader) is told by his mom to bring the guests upstairs. She’s calm, experienced, she “lived through the 70s”. She says her boys can’t make it past the militants to U.S. Army evacuation point on their own. If they could combine their guns with “Father John” and his people, though, they might make it. For the first time, you really start to get a sense that the whole “people coming together to save Bushwick” thing might be happening.
Instead, she orders her son James to take Lucy’s sister hostage, and forces Lucy and Stupe to go deliver a message to Father John for her.
The film even seems aware at this point of its own failing. Stupe tells James, “This isn’t right, man. We’re all from the same neighborhood. We gotta stick together.” James retorts, “We’re not from the same neighborhood.”
It should suffice to say, there is nothing left in the last 20 minutes of this film to redeem it. In a film set up as a literal culture war, the film’s white protagonists spend the entire film cutting a retreat to safety. In the end, Lucy is just trying to get herself and her sister out of Bushwick and somewhere safe. It’s the ultimate in white flight. By the end of the film, Lucy has learned to fight, to shoot, and to survive, and what does she do with this newfound strength? She runs away.
This film is the exact opposite of what the next culture war needs to look like, but it could be a sign of what the next culture war will look like. White people embracing every negative racial stereotype imaginable, abandoning any sense of principles and caring only about saving themselves, running away to safety while neighborhoods burn.