Matt on Born in Flames
April 09, 2018, by Matt
I went into my viewing of Born in Flames thinking that the film was a documentary, and it wasn’t until about halfway through the movie that I realized that it was fictional. I hope this doesn’t make me sound dumb – I understand that there obviously wasn’t a socialist revolution in the United States and I googled “Women’s Army” to see if that was a real thing in the history of New York City. I didn’t fully grasp those nuanced plot points until I looked up analyses of the film halfway through my viewing.
However, after I figured out that it was fictional, I was struck by the fact that I thought it had been real. At the beginning, I was impressed by how radical and ahead of their time these women were, especially that the movement’s leader was a black lesbian and that the white women expressed the concept of intersectionality so articulately. To me, it appeared as a documentary that showcased the gritty New York of the 1970s. The condescending male anchors seemed contemporarily accurate and the cinematography was aptly amateur. I realize now that, perhaps, I was giving the movement too much credit, as many criticize Second Wave Feminism as too white-centric and non-inclusive.
When I discovered that this was all fiction, I watched the film differently. I was impressed by Borden’s vision – to see what might be necessary in order to create real and lasting social change. She understood the importance of stressing intersectionality and working as one to make a difference. I was particularly struck by the moment in the film in which the women discuss violence as a necessary tactic to create change. There is a moment when an older woman states something along the lines of “oppressed people always have the right to violence.” When I heard this, I paused and thought about this statement and whether or not I believed it to be true. I’ve never experienced oppression in my life, so I can’t comment on that idea in the same way that she can, but I think I do understand what she means. So much institutional oppression exists in the world that, if I were truly marginalized, I think I would believe that violence could be justifiable to improve my life.
This also connected me to what Sante wrote in “The Lost Sisterhood” chapter. In the first two pages of the chapter, he lists all the ways in which poor men in nineteenth century New York could rise to economic success, and there were a multitude of options. The only way for a poor woman to ambitiously make money? Prostitution. The fact that there were extremely few – and dangerous – ways to rise to economic success if you weren’t a white male in the nineteenth century didn’t surprise me, and to a lesser degree that still rings true today, 100 years later. Obviously times have changed and women and non-white people can pursue the same job opportunities that white men can, but institutional barriers to entry are much higher.