On a Downtown Train…
Cashing Out Clay
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Imamu Baraka’s Dutchman, Part 4; Hate Movies, Part 7
It must also be noted that Lula in LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka‘s play Dutchman—and its 1967 film adaptation, in which Lula is memorably played by Shirley Knight—also comes across by the finale as a female Adam Cramer (William Shatner), the fear and hate-mongering provocateur of Charles Beaumont and Roger Corman‘s The Intruder (1961), aka I Hate Your Guts, Shame, and The Stranger.
Unlike Cramer, though, Lula doesn’t fold, Lula isn’t beaten.
She doesn’t retreat with her tail tucked her legs (figuratively speaking); she moves from the bloody victory of Dutchman (with “tail” firmly in place between her legs, literally speaking) to scope out a fresh victim in the disturbing coda of Jones‘s play.
Lula, like Cramer, does use her body and sexuality as much as her tongue and wits to beguile and manipulate her prey; in this, she presents a far more demonic and displaced incarnation of the “white trash femme fatale” archetype. Lula embodies the archetype in a new setting. Like some parasitic succubus that apparently moved north with the post-War-Between-the-States black population, Lula cruises the New York City subway system to exact precise but seemingly unprovoked vengeance upon whatever black male America means to her.
She is a serpent in the Garden of the Big Apple, and in the film version director Anthony Harvey only amplified and expanded upon the metaphor with Lula‘s ravenous use of apples as her key prop in her cobra-like seduction of Clay.
Initially aloof, dressed in the film version like a cross between Lolita and Twiggy, Lula in many ways anticipates writer Barry Gifford‘s resonate echo Lula Fortune of Wild at Heart (played by Laura Dern in the David Lynch 1990 film adaptation), crossed with Gifford‘s far more terrifying sociopath Juana Durango (played by Grace Zabriskie in Lynch‘s Wild at Heart, and by Andaluz Russell in Álex de la Iglesia‘s collaboration with Gifford on Perdita Durango, 1997; US title, in cut form, Dance With the Devil).
Actually, mesh Gifford‘s Lula and his Perdita Durango (Rosie Perez in de la Iglesia‘s horrific film adaptation) and you’re closer to the mark. LeRoi Jones‘s Lula shows no vulnerabilities, save those that advance her advances on Clay and win her openings to this heart—a lead she caps with a blade to his ticker. She is crafty, cunning, and insidious, all to serve a almost feral need to consume Clay and discard him as dispassionately as she bites into and disposes of her half-eaten apple cores.
Let’s finally talk about the play itself, shall we?
“When a Girl Like Lula Gets With a Man Like Clay—She Can Love Him…or Kill Him—Or Maybe Both!”
– ad line from the original 1967 Dutchman US release one-sheet poster
[Above and left: Shirley Knight as Lula—on the platform and then in the subway car, circling her prey—in Anthony Harvey’s film adaptation of LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman, 1967; from the SpiderBaby Archives collection.]
Dutchman dramatized an imagined conflict between the 1960s urban black male and the liberated and vengeful displaced white female. Lula, her temptress gaze initially rendered opaque by her sunglasses (worn underground, as it were), is a mysterious white woman with an attitude and an agenda, who in the opening minutes of the play seemingly selects her target—the young, upscale urban black professional businessman Clay—arbitrarily.
Lula: Weren’t you staring at me through the window?
Clay: What?
Lula: Weren’t you staring at me though the window? At the last stop?
Clay: Staring at you? What do you mean?
Lula: Don’t you know what staring means?
Clay: I saw you through the window… if that’s what it means. I don’t know if I was staring. Seems to me you were staring through the window at me.
Lula: I was. But only after I’d turned around and saw you staring through that window down in the vicinity of my ass and legs.
Clay: Really?
Apparently provoked by his “staring” at her as she stands on the subway station platform as he sits inside an otherwise empty car, Lula struts on board, manuevers toward him, and with an at times bemusing, at times alarming, and decidedly peculiar fusion of monologue, conversation, and body moves, ends up sliding onto his lap.
[Right: Al Freeman Jr. as Clay in the film version of Dutchman, 1967.]
Their conversation—such as it is, conducted more like a verbal sparring match in which Lula alone knows the rules and hears the time-out bell, retreating to other seats only to circle and re-engage with her prey—pries, pricks, cajoles Clay with deceptive skill. Lula keeps Clay perpetually off-balance, and yet does so for a remarkable length of time without prompting either ire or outrage.
Lula: So we’ll pretend the air is light and full of perfume.
Clay: It is.
Lula: And we’ll pretend the people cannot see you. That is, the citizens. And that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history. We’ll pretend that we are both anonymous beauties smashing along through the city’s entrails…
It’s a tender dance macabre, perverse and involving, and by the midpoint of events, Lula has effectively seduced him. In the play, as Scene II begins after the passing of an indeterminate time on the subway car, Jones notes “…Clay’s tie is open, Lula is hugging his arm.” In the film version, they end up necking with some passion, the oddest of odd couples—not because of their race or color, but because of the peculiar circumstances and even odder pas de deux that led to this coupling.
The seduction simmers only when they are alone in the subway car; once she has an audience, Lula turns on Clay with disorienting savagery, and arousal tips into increasingly vicious teasing and humiliation.
Lula: Come on, Clay… let’s do the thing. Uhh! Uhh! Clay! Clay! You middle-class black bastard. Forget your social-working mother for a few seconds and let’s knock stomachs. Clay, you liver-lipped white man. You would-be Christian. You ain’t no nigger, you’re just a dirty white man. Get up, Clay. Dance with me, Clay.
Clay: Lula! Sit down, now. Be cool.
Lula: Be cool. Be cool. That’s all you know… shaking that Wildroot cream-oil on your knotty head, jackets buttoning up to your chin, so full of white man’s words. Christ. God. Get up and scream at these people. Like scream meaningless shit in these hopeless faces…
She finally pushes and provokes Clay to slap her—the point at which others in the subway finally take notice of the disjointed, apparently “domestic” melodrama being stage managed by the apparently mentally disturbed woman— and Clay finally vents his rage.
Lula: You’re afraid of white people. And your father was. Uncle Tom Big Lips!
Clay: Shit, you don’t have any sense, Lula, nor feelings either. I could murder you now. I could murder you now. Such a tiny ugly throat. I could squeeze it flat, and watch you turn blue, on a humble. For dull kicks. And all these weak-faced ofays squatting around here, staring over their papers at me. Murder them too. Even if they expected it…
When Dutchman the movie was released in the US by Continental, despite the lack of either nudity or graphic violence, it was promoted as an adult film: “No One Under 18 Years of Age Will Be Admitted,” the one-sheet poster read. This was in the limbo year or so between the implosion of the previous MPAA Code and the 1968 rollout of the MPAA Ratings system (the first incarnation of the ‘G’, ‘PG’, ‘PG-13,’ ‘R’, ‘X’ aka ‘NC-17’ we have today; it was originally ‘G’, ‘M’, ‘R’, and ‘X’), and Dutchman was very much a film of its time…
[Note: All play text excerpts from Dutchman (1964) by Leroi Jones /Amiri Baraka (Dutchman and The Slave, 1964, William Morrow and Company), ©1964, 2010 Amiri Imamu Baraka]
To be continued…
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PS: If anyone out there has access to any advertising materials from Dutchman, the play or the movie, I’d welcome the opportunity to use them here in the concluding chapters of this serialized essay.
Finally, I want to close this installment with some video affording a listen, a look, at LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka‘s own voice, unfiltered by my interpretation or banter.
Sadly, there’s no film clips online from the Anthony Harvey film version of Dutchman (not that I can find, in any case); though there are a few video clips on YouTube of more recent theatrical revivals of Dutchman, none come close to the power of the film adaptation. Still, I feel the need to provide some glimpse of the play; this excerpt from Theater for a New Generation‘s staging, directed by Mel Williams, will have to do. I don’t know who the players are. Alas, this doesn’t give much of a taste of either the play nor the film.
Here’s a followup of sorts to Dutchman and a clearer shot of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka‘s voice as a poet: an excerpt from a documentary on Jones / Baraka, a clip circa 1971 (I believe), featuring the poet reading “It’s Nation Time”:
“Who Will Survive America?”, read by Amiri Baraka (1972, from Baraka‘s album It’s Nation Time, Black Forum):
And, to bring this up to the present, “Somebody Blew Up America” and “Obama Poem” by Amiri Baraka (from Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems), accompanied by Rob Brown on the saxophone, recorded live on February 21, 2009 at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY, part of the 13-part “Free Jazz at the Sanctuary” series:
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Please note: I do not condone or share the views expressed in the archival images presented in this serialized essay at Myrant. I share them here for historical, educational, and entertainment purposes only.
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Damn! The dialog from DUTCHMAN ! Once again, this is a film I’d never heard about. Did this cinematic Lula influence Barry Gifford’s character of Sailor & Lula fame?
Jeez, Bob, I NOTED that it may have (reread paragraph 6 & 7, above the second Lula photo). I know I pack a lot into some of these essays, but… well, I’ll just chalk it up to you being overly dazzled by Jones/Baraka’s DUTCHMAN dialogue, which is a compliment to his skill.
I always got peevish – a mild word for the truth of the matter – over the notion of being graded by how “black’ one is, a certain “blacker than thou” hierarchy that insisted that one must walk, talk, dress, think a certain way to be “really” black. I don’t want anyone telling me, or anyone else – even Clarence Thomas, who I despise politically – that he’s not black.
Agreed, Roger.
Oddly enough, though I never would have raised the issue (particularly not in this context, but here goes), I grew up with another manifestation of such hair-splitting: my French-Canadian heritage made me “not white” (no shit, such is prejudice against “frogs” in some northern VT quarters) and “not a Vermonter.” This became a form of verbal putdown in junior high school in particular; weird, eh? (“eh?” joke intended)