"I Don't Do Assignments Anymore."

Why Ava DuVernay's "Origin" felt like my "Lord of the Rings"

Over the holidays, I made it a few times to an actual movie theater, and even though I saw some cool feature-length films, the thing I saw that made me feel the most excited and inspired was the trailer for “Origin”—Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction book, Caste: The Origin of our Discontents. The moment I almost started to cry is when Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is approached by a suave editor (Blair Underwood) who asks her, in a suave editor voice, “Are you interested in writing something for us?”—and then she replies, against a rippling piano and orchestral score, “I don’t do assignments anymore”—and then you see a soaring montage of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, and the Taj Mahal, and more Nazis, and I think a cricket match? I couldn’t believe I was seeing this on a big screen: a writer turning down an assignment, being framed as the first step in a thrilling intellectual journey.

A few weeks later, I managed to see “Origin” in a theater—alone, in the middle of the day, during a snowstorm. Although the weekday matinee was sold out at the Lincoln Square AMC, it was nearly empty at the AMC in Times Square—a place I would normally go to great lengths to avoid, but that’s how much I loved this trailer! Which brings me to today’s post, is in two parts: (1) shareable personal writing inspiration I took from the trailer; and (2) some reflections on the movie, its thesis, and its reception.

Basically, I experienced the trailer as a cinematic argument for—and celebration of—a kind of intellectual work that doesn’t fit in either the academy or in journalism, and that thus operates outside most of the recognized structures of prestige and hierarchy. It’s also a joyous affirmation of the value in comparing different things to each other, even though they’re different—a weirdly controversial project, in both academic and journalistic circles. To me, it felt like watching a two-minute “Lord of the Rings,” but for comparativists who want to write long books. After a lifetime of watching “The Lord of the Rings” for good-versus-evil buffs, this was a really intense experience!

The trailer starts with Isabel Wilkerson undergoing some cinematically foreshortened (42 seconds) process of love and personal loss. At 43 seconds, we see her giving a speech at a podium, against a b/w photo of heil-ing Germans—apparently processing her grief through analysis of the European twentieth century. She then walks offstage, past a slide that says, “Pulitzer Prize Winner Isabel Wilkerson, Author of The Warmth of Other Suns,” and has that conversation with her editor.

I’ve been thinking over why that conversation felt so emotional to me. When I was getting started as a writer, almost 20 years ago, there were many years when I couldn’t get anyone to pay me to write a book, and it was a struggle to figure out how to make any kind of living wage from writing—and the way I finally did it was by learning how to pitch and sell magazine pieces. Five years into this process, when my first book was published, it literally made the same amount as one New Yorker article. Over the next five years, working pretty much full-time for magazines, I managed to build up a readership and form professional relationships, and was eventually able to shift my energy to books—and what occurred to me watching the “Origin” trailer is that, even though this was always my dream, there was still something about it the switch that felt painful and somehow squalid. To go from writing about the real world in somewhat-real-time, publishing several times a year, to writing first-person novels about a young woman in the 1990s, published every 6-7 years… there have been moments when I could literally feel people’s interest sort of drifting away from me, as if the decrease of institutional power might be contagious. At a hotel bar in Ukraine a few months ago, someone asked me if I was going to “write about this for the New Yorker”—and is it my imagination that, when I said, “No, I’m writing about it on my Substack,” he started looking out of the corner of his eye for a window to jump out of?

So I was deeply moved by the calm way that Isabel says she isn’t taking assignments. To which the editor responds: “You’re a better writer than most people do anything. Have you heard the tapes?” And that’s exactly it, that’s the attraction!: both the compliments—because if you leave the hierarchical structure, you stop getting hierarchical compliments—and the privileged access (in this case, to the unreleased Trayvon Martin 911 tapes). It’s the thrill of being in the “current conversation”—of doing something that “really matters” (to important people, especially men).

(The scene is fleshed out more in the movie: the editor offers Isabel a magazine cover if she’ll write about Trayvon Martin; Isabel says she doesn’t want to do it; there’s something there that she doesn’t understand, something about the received interpretation that doesn’t feel right; that’s why she’s writing books now. Then the editor is like, “Your last book took years; this is happening now; a writer has to be writing.” And she agrees to listen to the tapes, but not to write a magazine story.)

Cut to Isabel’s eyes, behind thick glasses, in the glow of her laptop screen, which hides most of her face.

I must surely have seen similar shots a hundred times, e.g. in crime procedurals, but this version somehow felt exciting and memorable to me—reminiscent of the first episode of the “My Brilliant Friend” adaptation, when Elena gets the nighttime call about Lila’s disappearance, and she puts on her glasses and sits at the computer:

Something about these images restores to me the immediacy of “the historical moment,” its connection to “the moment of writing”—which has a way of morphing, when you’re doing longer and more reflective work, into the hours/ weeks/ months/ years of writing. It can feel as if there’s no hurry and nobody cares when you finish and time doesn’t matter. But of course it matters—of course there’s a ticking clock—all the more so if it’s a project for years and not weeks, because what’s on the other side of that is the yawning mouth of the grave. To see Isabel listening to the 911 tapes at that moment, late at night, before any of us heard it, makes her journey seem important and narratable, and not like some blurry mush that nobody cares about.

In a way, this moment reminds me of the passage from Time Regained that I once devoted a whole Substack post to—about how hard it can be for a writer to turn away from real-time political involvement, in order to write a long introspective book:

Every public event, be it the Dreyfus case, be it the war, furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to [write] this book: he wants to ensure the triumph of justice, he wants to restore the moral unity of the nation, he has no time to think of literature. But these are mere excuses.

Excuses, that is, not to write “the book, more laborious to decipher than any other… which has been dictated to us by reality.” That’s what Isabel Wilkerson’s book is, too, at least in the movie version: the book dictated to her, and only her, by reality.

Because you know Proust could have been a full-time editorialist about the Dreyfus affair for years while it was happening—and it’s not like he was checked out at the time, he was riveted—but instead, what he did with his engagement was turn it into a zoomed-out longue-durée vision of how the story changed over time, and people’s opinions and alignments shifted, and everyone forgot that any of it had ever been otherwise—and the whole thing becomes one element in a vast kaleidescopic exploration of memory and narrative and meaning-making—and so In Search of Lost Time is received as a book about the self, and not a book about French society—but it’s also a book about how French society is made up of selves—which is a radical political content, even if that isn’t how Proust is traditionally read.

So when Blair Underwood complains that Isabel’s last book took too long, and that “a writer should be writing”… well, she is writing, just not for Blair Underwood. It feels important to note that, in a conventional screenplay, that assignment would be the “call to action.” Isabel would decline, then listen to the tapes and change her mind, and that would be the portal into Act Two, a gripping journalistic adventure where she’s knocking on doors, phoning her editor, eating Chinese takeout from a box, wrestling with her own demons in order to persuade traumatized people to talk to her—in short, “getting the story.” And the thing with “getting the story”… it’s not that it isn’t important, valuable work that some people should do and be rewarded for, and other people should make exciting movies about—but, because of the rules and the deadlines, it forecloses a certain kind of thinking and reflection. And that kind of thinking is also important and valuable work, and its foreclosure can, at least for some writers, be extremely painful.

So Isabel chooses a different path, and the music reaches a stirring crescendo, and there’s a black screen with a quote in white (“Few American movies reach so high, so boldly,” Manohla Dargis, The New York Times)—and the image cuts to Isabel walking determinedly through an airport in morning light, and then shifts to a rally in 1930s Germany—and you hear her saying, in a wistful yet firm voice: “I want to be in the story. Really inside the story.”

In the subsequent soaring montage of images and review quotes, we also see two instances of gatekeeper types discouraging Isabel from her project: first, a US book editor (Vera Farmiga) saying, “I got to be honest with you… I don’t see it”; then a German person at a dinner party (Connie Nielsen), saying, “You’re trying to investigate racism, but your thesis is flawed.”

Because I am a former comp lit grad student, the sound of someone saying “your thesis is flawed” in a European accent will probably always make my blood run cold. It’s a visceral response, as from a physical threat—and when you’re a student, that kind of is the voice of death: if you don’t pass the next thing, and the one after that, you can lose your stipend, housing, health insurance, etc.

Together, the European intellectual saying “your thesis is flawed” and the US publisher saying, “I don’t see it” represent the two fronts that a certain kind of writer has to defend against at all times. You have to prove both that you’re not ahistorical and unrigorous, and also that you aren’t an elitist talking over the heads of busy working Americans with attenuated attention spans. How comforting, then, to see these two voices transformed, from a present existential threat into surmounted obstacles in a triumphant arc—intercut not only with Niecy Nash saying, “Folks need to know about this,” but also with amazing review quotes (my favorite one is from Richard Brody), showing that Isabel did it, and Ava did too, they pulled it off, they tied all the things together—the Taj Mahal, the Nazi book burning, Isabel’s personal losses, and everything else.

It feels, too, like a feminist victory, because the people who do this kind of work—work driven by ideas and by feelings; work uniting personal experience and world events—are so often women. This is not, I think, because women are smarter than or different from men, but because they aren’t socialized as strongly to divorce emotional life from intellect, or to equate lack of hierarchical status with utter soul-death. (I mean, everyone is socialized to be that way, but whereas girls are “merely” belittled and patronized, maybe even with a kind of affectionate tolerance, I think that with boys it starts at an earlier age and looks more like total dismissal and negation.)

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The movie, of course, is much longer and more complicated than the trailer—it isn’t just an uplifting 140-minute commercial for idiosyncratic book projects (though Lord knows I would pay $25 to see that too, even if it was only showing actually inside the Port Authority terminal at rush hour). If the trailer is a celebration of drawing ambitious connections, the movie is about the particular ambitious connections in Caste, a book I haven’t read, but does that stop me from having a lot of opinions about it? Read on and find out!