The Harder They Fall — a Thug-Western Allegory

The eight Image Award nominations given this week by the NAACP to the fantasy western The Harder They Fall, as one of the best “race films” of the year, set a record for commendations from the civil-rights group. (The Image Awards began in the 1970s.) This excessive acclaim should not be taken too seriously, yet it measures current, degraded standards. The NAACP’s political goals collide with artistic confusion.

Showing conflict between several black outlaw gangs in the Old West, The Harder They Fall defies facts of the post–Civil War era, starting with director-writer Jeymes Samuel’s impetuous opening epigraph:

While the events of this story are fictional . . . These. People. Existed.

Samuel’s emphatic double-talk plays to the juvenile taste for make-believe, and then, just like Marvel’s Black Panther, adds Black Lives Matter pretense by insulting both historical reality and political projection. Legendary African American and Black-Indian American personages, such as Cherokee Bill, Rufus Buck, and John Ware, from that late 19th-century period when the Western genre is traditionally set, and recognized by some historians as freedom-fighters rather than gunslingers, are replaced here with outlandish, anachronistic style icons: Nat Love (Jonathan Majors), Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), Bass Reeves (Delroy Lindo), Trudy Smith (Regina King), Stagecoach Mary (Zazie Beetz) are like fancy-dressed superheroes, each more bodacious, more violent, and with more extravagant hip-hop-style verbal braggadocio and swagger than their brethren and sistren.

These cartoon folk flout the dignified self-regard that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People used to represent but, apparently, no longer values. Repeating the same backward impetuousness as the late John Lewis’s staging of that pointless 2016 congressional sit-in (ironically for “gun control”) after having already won seats of legislative power and influence, these fictional rebels are all about political theater. (Most of these actors have never been flashier.) The plot contrivance combines Mario Van Peebles’s Posse with the Hughes Brothers’ Dead Presidents then goes for the operatic effects of Leone and Bertolucci’s Once Upon a Time in the West. But Samuel exaggerates black Americans’ capacity for showing off violent, stereotypical social images.

Samuel confuses black “fakelore” (Albert Murray’s term) with folklore. The Harder They Fall takes its cues from Quentin Tarantino’s funny sadism — the opening family-massacre scene imitates Inglourious Basterds, and each following episode evokes Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. It’s no coincidence that the film is co-produced by Pulp Fiction’s Lawrence Bender and co-written with Boaz Yakin, who made the indie race-exploitation film Fresh.

But Samuel’s inauthenticity goes deeper. Although British-born Samuel plants his own reggae tunes throughout the film (he is the brother of pop star Seal), he debases the 1973 Jamaican crime movie The Harder They Come, by which reggae singer Jimmy Cliff popularized reggae. Samuel misses Cliff’s original message that became a worldwide hit:

And I keep on fighting for the things I want
Though I know that when you’re dead you can’t
But I’d rather be a free man in my grave
Than living as a puppet or a slave

Samuel not only ignores the facts of slavery but loses Cliff’s moral point about the exploitation of community and losing one’s soul (ideals that Cliff probably derived from civil-rights experience, same as the irony that Curtis Mayfield’s score brought to the Blaxploitation film Superfly).

The ’70s Blaxploitation movies combined pride with protest, but The Harder They Fall is dishonorable dissent — a crabs-in-the-barrel, black-on-black crime fantasy that lacks the horror of gangs-in-the-hoods movies from the 1990s. Instead, Idris Elba’s supervillain summarizes the nonsense by speciously quoting Napoleon: “I am driven toward an end that I do not know.”

Today’s hopeless NAACP should know better than to honor this internecine violence, but the Image Awards (put on by the organization’s Hollywood branch) interprets racial progress superficially. Nominating so many of the film’s cast members proves that celebrity has become the NAACP’s primary gauge of achievement — not art that reveals historical truth or personal integrity. These performers play-act the Hollywood fantasy of belonging to a sadistic white world and yet learn nothing — it’s a Thug Western twist on Malcolm X’s “The hate that hate produced” sermon. During the females’ cat fight, one of Samuel’s patois lyrics – “Let’s start what we have come into the room to do” — is a pledge to Hollywood exploitation. Despite the NAACP’s approval, The Harder They Fall confirms there’s no honor in performing garbage with relish.