Cliff Mak

Call+Response: A Funked-up Review

— Originally published in print // Permalink

Yet for all that he desires to feel a kind of passionateness, yea, and his passion becomes his pleasure, too. What is all this but a miserable madness?
— Augustine of Hippo

One of the greatest yet least known or understood sins of our age is that of global slavery. It takes all forms, crosses all borders, and too often preys upon children, the most helpless among us. It is an exceptionally ugly sin, one that we would like not to think about, and we’ve been less comfortable glamorizing the fight against it than the “wars” against drug or gun trafficking. Until now, that is.

The brainchild of musician Josh Dillon, Call + Response is billed as a “rockumentary” – a documentary of both the global slavery problem and the various artists volunteering to raise awareness about the problem. It’s an admirable effort, with memorable performances by the likes of Matisyahu and Imogen Heap, for example, but it misfires severely in at least one direction.

It’s not that Call + Response is a bad movie: it’s at its best when doing what a documentary should do – giving us the facts, telling us the story – and it does that for at least half its length. It’s rather that it is a patronizing movie, insisting so terribly much on being a voice, or rather, the voice, for the oppressed and enslaved, and this is the root of the problem.

The call and response from which the movie takes its name and conceit is a tradition springing from the depths of black enslavement in America. It was, as Cornel West himself ex­plains to Dillon and us in the film (and who is, incidentally, the best thing about it), a mode of expression and empowerment for black slaves, through their voices a redemptive witness to their humanity and solidarity.

And yet Call + Response posits itself as the call we’re to respond to; it has the audacity to assume the voice of the enslaved, to tell their story almost univocally. In more responsible hands, this would not be a problem, maybe, but in Call, we are regularly plunged into a world of pop sentimentalism, far removed from the horrors that must be actual slavery. Switchfoot, Five For Fighting, and, ech, Natasha Bedingfield make their appearances (Bedingfield twice, even) as the sentimental black holes of the film, proudly laying on sugary image after clichéd turn of verse, going so far as to tell you, from some deep well of forethought and taste, to “feel the rain on your skin”! The cry of the young, the groan of the people – yes, let us feel! Since no one else can for you, apparently.

Perhaps most telling is one other bizarre performance in the film: The Scrolls’ cover of Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film).” The original song, inspired by Romeo and Juliet, is saturated with irony even as it purports to provide a voice, the voice, for one dead couple and millions of star-crossed teenagers. What was this doing in a film about global slavery? Did The Scrolls mean it as an implicit critique of Call’s sense of pathos? If so, power to them.

The film calls us to feel, just as many of its performers have felt throughout the film. This is translated for us at the end of the film, too, into monetary terms: the proper response is to donate to the International Justice Mission (since no one else can for you). But that’s cheap; that is too easy. With slick informational graphics and editorial overlays almost pulled from a car commercial, Call + Response seems to be selling us a product: give us your money, and we will supply you with feelings.

No response is identical to its call, however, and we don’t have to respond to the film in the way it expects. As Cornel West says, again, the key to the blues, to an understanding of the suffering in life, is the blues note, the unexpected half-step of dissonance. We can discard the trite sap of the film and retain its greater value, moving from feeling to virtue. As the film haltingly proposes, we should strive to improve economic conditions, free the enslaved, and punish the enslavers – deeds more difficult and less appealing than the passions of easy listening. We are to be that note, out of step with a comfortable harmony, dissonant but never discordant.