On Race and Redemption in 'Three Billboards'

By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, The Hollywood Reporter

22 February 18

Focusing on how the Oscar-nominated movie trivializes racist police brutality misses its bigger message, writes the NBA legend and THR cultural critic.

espite four Golden Globe wins and seven Oscar nominations, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri asks a lot of its audience. It wants us to forgive the unforgivable. To feel compassion for the undeserving. To root for the unworthy. It challenges us to be our best selves in a world more comfortable with punishment than betterment. For the audience to accept that challenge, we have to sympathize with the spiritually damaged characters’ struggles with crippling guilt and self-loathing and invest in their stumbling journey toward redemption.

Part of that challenge for some is the film’s seemingly glib treatment of today’s profound racial issues, particularly police brutality. For them, the portrayal of violent racist Dixon (Sam Rockwell) is too sympathetic. Keeping his rumored violence against blacks offscreen makes it easier for the audience to forgive his trespasses. Giving him an overbearing, racist mother provides motivation for us to nod in compassionate understanding. To watch his kind and benevolent mentor, Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), see a lurking goodness within this dumb-as-a-stump racist cop permits us to accept his abrupt rehabilitation. To these critics, the film seems like a guilty-with-an-explanation plea for support for racism apologists who agreed with Trump when he said of the white supremacists in Charlottesville, “You had some very fine people on both sides.” I get why those criticisms have occurred. But I don’t see it that way.

For me, the core of this film is about how we are imprisoned by our own malignant guilt. Like a child’s finger trap, the more we try to pull away, the tighter it grips us. Mildred (Frances McDormand) struggles with the knowledge that her arguments with her daughter inadvertently contributed to her rape and murder. Willoughby must confront both his inability to solve the case and how his impending death will leave his wife and daughters abandoned. Dixon’s guilt builds more slowly, as befits his less-than-sharp mind. He is inspired by a letter left behind by his father-figure Willoughby that contrasts the faith and hope the chief had in him with the wretched person he has become.

What understandably rankles people is that the film uses Dixon’s racist brutality as a literary device — a baseline for his entitled cruelty — and therefore trivializes it. Add to that Chief Willoughby’s implicitly condoning such behavior by not firing Dixon or charging him with a crime. That seriously undercuts our sympathy toward Willoughby even more than it does with Dixon because Willoughby clearly knows better. Having these levels of racism introduced but never directly addressed is definitely frustrating, but not enough to take away from the film’s rich rewards.

The film makes it very clear that these are deeply flawed people, the twisted wreckage of living the unexamined life. Their lauded heartland stoicism doesn’t give them solace or feed the soul, instead it results in the inability to articulate internal pain except through violence against others. Mildred kicks teenagers and hurls Molotov cocktails, her abusive ex-husband slams her against the wall, her son puts a knife to his father’s throat, Willoughby shoots himself, Dixon throws someone out a second-story window. Not people seeking to get in touch with their inner children.

Willoughby’s redemption is discovered postmortem: Before he kills himself, he pays a month’s rent for the billboards, in part acknowledging his sins. Mildred is able to reconcile her anger toward her ex-husband and his dimwitted girlfriend. But Dixon has the farthest to travel for redemption, so it’s fitting that his hardships are the most brutal. He deliberately endures a trial by fire, resulting in severe burns, and a beating in an attempt to solve the mystery of who killed Mildred’s daughter. Appropriately, he turns out to be wrong about the killer because the trial is not about receiving a reward but about being the kind of Christlike person willing to suffer for others.

The ending makes clear that Dixon and Mildred are still a shaky moral work-in-progress when they decide to hunt down the man who was cleared of killing her daughter because he is undoubtedly guilty of something. Even as they have doubts about the righteousness of their vigilantism, they’re unaware that by forgiving each other, their quest is already successful.

In “The Pardon,” Richard Wilbur’s poem about self-forgiveness and death, the tormented narrator writes, “I dreamt the past was never past redeeming.” This is the spiritual foundation for most societies: We don’t have to be defined by past mistakes but can forgive ourselves, and one another, to evolve into better human beings. This is also the theme of the movie. Though it’s unfortunate that the highly sensitive issue of police violence is used but never fully addressed, the movie isn’t about that. It’s about the search for the ember of humanity in all of us, and fanning that ember until it burns bright, even in the darkest of us. In doing so, it reaches all people of all backgrounds and asks us to take a single step toward enlightenment. That’s what our best works of art should do.

The Real Reason Congress Banned Assault Weapons in 1994 - and Why It Worked

By Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post

22 February 18

ast week's horrific massacre of 14 students and three staff members in Parkland, Fla., has reinvigorated the national debate over assault weapons. A Quinnipiac poll released Tuesday, for instance, found that 67 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of gun owners, say they favor such a ban — the highest level of support seen on this question since 20 children and six educators were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

Critics of bans on assault weapons, however, say they do little to save lives. The NRA correctly points out that assault weapons are used only in a tiny fraction of gun crimes. The gun rights group also notes that a federally funded study of the previous assault weapons ban, which was in place from 1994 to 2004, concluded that “the ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” Similar points have been made in arguments against a new ban in publications running the ideological gamut from Breitbart to the New York Times to HuffPost.

But the 1994 assault weapons ban was never intended to be a comprehensive fix for “gun violence” writ large. Its purpose, according to gun violence experts and the lawmakers who wrote the bill, was to reduce the frequency and lethality of mass shootings like the ones in Parkland, Sandy Hook and elsewhere. And on that front, the data shows it had a significant impact.

Louis Klarevas, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who wrote a book on mass shooting violence published in 2016, says that the impetus for a federal assault weapons ban came in 1989. That year Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, an Ohio Democrat, introduced the original assault weapons ban bill after a gunman armed with an assault rifle killed five children and injured 29 more in a schoolyard in Stockton, Calif.

“The guy used an AK-47 variant, with large capacity magazines” capable of holding 10 or more rounds, Klarevas said. The shooting “got a lot of attention” and galvanized public opinion. National polls conducted in the months following, for instance, showed that over 70 percent of Americans supported bans on assault weapons like the one used in Stockton.

But Metzenbaum's bill didn't pass, and Congress spent several years debating other assault weapons measures that were less stringent in nature. None of those were ever signed into law.

Momentum returned with two back-to-back mass shootings in 1993: one at a San Francisco law firm that killed eight people and injured six more, and another on a Long Island Railroad train that left five dead and 19 wounded. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, architect of the 1994 assault weapons ban, said that “it was the 1993 mass shooting at 101 California Street in San Francisco that was the tipping point for me. That’s what really motivated me to push for a ban on assault weapons.”

The San Francisco shooting “made clear that the increasing sophistication of weapons had made it possible for a mass shooter to murder large numbers of people in a matter of minutes,” Feinstein said. “The goal of the ban was to reduce the frequency and deadliness of mass shootings.”

The final piece of legislation that we now know as the federal assault weapons ban was signed into law a little over one year after the San Francisco shooting.

The 1994 law included a ban on 18 specific models of assault weapons, as well as a ban on any firearms containing certain military-style features, like a bayonet mount, a flash suppressor or a folding stock. It also banned high-capacity magazines capable of holding more than 10 bullets. The bill allowed individuals already in possession of such weapons to keep them. It was also set to expire after 10 years' time.

“The original intent of the assault weapons ban was to reduce the carnage of mass shootings,” Klarevas said. “And on that front the data indicate that it worked.”

Klarevas has compiled data on gun massacres involving six or more fatalities for the 50 years before 2016. His numbers show that gun massacres fell significantly during the time the assault weapons ban was in place, and skyrocketed after the ban lapsed in 2004. A separate mass shooting database compiled by Mother Jones magazine shows a similar trend.

Klarevas wasn't surprised by the 2004 report showing the ban had little effect on overall rates of gun crime. “If there was going to be any benefit on [overall] violent crime, that would have been a pleasant surprise,” he said. But, “the real objective of the assault weapons ban was always to reduce both the frequency and lethality of mass shootings.”

Klarevas is particularly concerned about what the numbers show for the years after Congress allowed the assault weapons ban to lapse. Guns like the ones used in Parkland and in other mass shootings are now among the most popular firearms currently on the market. The proliferation of these guns means that would-be mass shooters have little trouble obtaining them.

“In the last three years we have had as many gun massacres with assault weapons as in the decade prior,” Klarevas said. “The trend is continuing to escalate.”