Folk culture and masculine identity Charles Burnett's 'To Sleep with Anger.'

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Karen Chandler

To Sleep with Anger, for instance, appeals to audience members' potential interest in narrative as a fictional means of analyzing, judging, and resolving social problems. This process, central to the film's address to its viewers, reflects the critical exertions of audiences engaged with traditional folklore. Not only does the film incorporate important elements of folklore, such as storytelling and song, then, but it demands that its audience make the same kinds of tough ethical decisions called for in the African-American vernacular tradition. Indeed, To Sleep with Anger embodies this process of decision-making in portraying the problems that the protagonist Samuel (Richard Brooks) has in establishing his identity.

Samuel (or Babe Brother, as he is usually called) must choose between the secure, family-oriented ethos of his parents and older brother Junior, and the self-interested, socially disruptive path taken by Harry, a visitor from the family's past. Burnett shapes To Sleep with Anger in a way that encourages viewers to appraise Samuel's choices and thus replicate, to a degree, the process of judgment central to the film's mission. To Sleep with Anger thus recalls the work long done by black vernacular forms: presenting models of African-American selfhood in a morally unstable world, building community, and fostering audience members' capacity for judgment. This updating of folk forms is clearly compatible with the initiatives the writer and film maker Toni Cade Bambara identified in the work of Burnett and other African-American independents who emerged from UCLA in the 1970s and 1980s: "In short," Bambara writes, "they were committed to developing a film language to respectfully express cultural particularity and Black thought" (119-20).

To Sleep with Anger signals this dedication to cultural particularity early in exploring generational tensions within the protagonist Babe Brother's middle-class family. Set in a comfortable black residential neighborhood in L.A.'s South Central, the film presents a contemporary world with ties to the rural past. Babe Brother's parents, Suzie (Mary Alice) and Gideon (Paul Butler), maintain a fine, commodious house with a chicken pen and splendid vegetable garden in the backyard. Suzie works as a midwife; Gideon, whom friends call "John Henry," has apparently retired with a comfortable pension; and everything seems to be running smoothly with the family, except for the conflicts between Babe Brother, on the one hand, and Gideon, Suzie, and Junior, on the other. This tension primarily proceeds from the disjunction between Babe Brother's materialistic values and Gideon's, Suzie's, and Junior's very different moral concerns. Suzie and Gideon have shaped a way of life based on family, church, and community service, to which Junior (Carl Lumbry), his wife Pat (Vonetta McGee), and their daughter Rhonda have willingly acceded. By contrast, Babe Brother and his wife Linda (Sheryl Lee Ralph) are an upwardly mobile, materialistic couple contemptuous of Suzie and Gideon's old-fashioned values.