Art/Film Review… The pathology of racism

Mar 08, 2020 News

Award-Wining Documentary Movie: Skin
Director: Guy Nattiv
Critic: Glenville Ashby. PhD

Director Guy Nattiv paints a tenebrous world marked by hatred. Still, he leaves the door of redemption ajar. With a mere 18 minutes to deliver a message steeped in symbolical hyperbole, Nattiv leaves little to the imagination. The opening scene of gun-toting, beer-guzzling, tattooed dissidents spewing expletives at the world is the perfect McGuffin for a provocative drama soaked in racial brinksmanship. Nattiv’s Skin is as mind-bending and provocative as it gets. It conjures questions on free will and determinism, and moves us to contemplate the possibility of a life fated by tribalism?
Nattiv deftly uses imagery, sound and colour to set the tone for unbridled mayhem, but not before presenting the fatherly affection that Fred ‘Hammer’ Krager, a white supremacist, shares with his son Troy. Interestingly, Troy’s fascination with snakes is portentous. His intrepid handling and detailed understanding of the slithering creature foreshadows his impressive marksmanship in front of his father’s band of Neo-Nazis friends who also hone their militaristic craft.
Cupped from the real life story of erstwhile Neo-Nazi Bryon Weidner, Skin, a stand-alone spin-off, exhaustively drills to the core of hatred while searching for answers. Set in rural America, in parts that still bleed from the country’s checkered past, the drama unfolds after an innocuously playful encounter between Krager’s son and a black man in a supermarket. The encounter never misses the jaundiced eye of the boy’s white supremacist father. Words are exchanged and a phone call is made to fellow ‘supremacists.’ The unsuspecting black man exits the store only to be blindsided, mercilessly pummeled and left for dead as his terrified wife and son look on helplessly in their locked vehicle.
But the protagonist – the arch villain gets his comeuppance. In a case of poetic justice, his son looks on as his father is abducted and whisked away by menacing looking black men. A heart-stopping, staggering twist follows.
Surely, Krager is now at the receiving end but hardly in a retributive, vengeful manner one might have predicted. Indeed, what transpires is symbolically instructive and a glimpse into the human potential for meeting out painful justice without spite.
Skin careens to an unexpected ending that leaves us aghast.
Clearly, Nattiv’s work signals a disturbing racial zeitgeist, a toxicity of hate that is infecting countries from South America to Europe and the Far East. As reason and intolerance gasp for relevance, humanity bleeds. It is against this backdrop that Skin must be gauged.
Throughout, Nattiv’s work nudges our conscience.
Skin does not render a solution for racism. No one movie or director can; but Nativv’s radical genius burrows deep into the human condition as his granular insights into socialization prove paramount to understanding and possibly stemming the cancer of hate.
Arguably, Nattiv’s message is articulated through his young actors; mere boys, both scarred, one almost irreparably – both witnesses to the vile excess of racism. Maybe, they are Nattiv’s representations of innocence’s last hope. Maybe, the violence witnessed will indelibly stir their humanity and that of generations to follow.