Space is the Place: Reader Response

"Calling Planet Earth...Calling Planet Earth" PLEASE can somebody answer the damn phone....


I love crazy sci-fi movies so when approaching this movie I was intrigued, but soon became very confused and tired. Therefore, I will keep this blog nice and simple by only analyzing two scenes in the movie that I was the most interested in deconstructing.

The first scene is in the youth center where on the wall they have various pictures of black activist. There are pictures and sketches of Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Fredrick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Marvin Gaye, Malcolm X and some others that I do not recognize. The scene makes it apparent that the room holds not only the present generation of youths but an older generation of blacks as well. This scene becomes even more interesting because the young adults in the room are playing pool, singing, shooting craps, yet all around them are examples of black activist, yet the young black people are doing nothing revolutionary. They are not changing history like the other blacks presented on the wall have done; instead they are singing, playing pool and stealing shoes from intoxicated men. I also thought it was interesting that Martin Luther King was not present on the wall or maybe I did not see him. But I rewind the scene quite a few times, and I still did not notice any King’s on the wall. There were many pictures of Angela Davis and the picture of Fredrick Douglass stood out, but I did not see any pic’s of Martin Luther King. But they were a lot of black panthers in the pictures as well.

When Sun Ra appeared in the room he is yet again confusing when he says to the young black people“you don’t exist in this society, if you did your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real..So we’re both myths.. I come to you as the myth, because that’s what black people are. I came from a dream that the black man dreamed….I am actually a presence sent to your by your ancestors.” This quote of course is confusing and ambiguous, but I still think that Sun Ra is saying something important and of significance here. So in order to gain insight we have to read beyond the ambiguity of his language.

For example, when he states that black is just a myth and they do not exist because they do not have any rights is a valid description of racial politics in the United States. When Sun Ra said this I kept remembering the Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again”. Where Hughes has a line that reiterates the subservient social status of minorities in America:

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

But, as Hughes has articulated in his poem, freedom and equality, which constructs America, has never been that place for blacks. Therefore, when Sun Ra states that black is a myth, I can perceive that he may be defining race as a social construction. Sun Ra is also summarizing, in the quote, that because blacks are marginalized and pushed to the boundaries of history or civilization then blacks do not have any citizenship or status. This argument of course is not something new or revolutionary to the historical discourse surrounding racial politics, even though Sun Ra and this movie present it as such.

The second scene that I thought was interesting was the prostitution scene. Specifically, when the black and white women are supposed to have sex with the influent white men, and yes the scene is basically self explanatory. But a closer analysis of the scene can be useful in demonstrating the overall gender and racial power matrices presented in the movie. Obviously, the white men hold power and prestige in which they exert over other people and specifically black people in that particular scene. Hence when the one man says to the black prostitute, “We been trying to get a coon on the moon, but we can’t have any run in and say the jig is up,” the climax of the scene unfolds when the two black men in the room jump out of the closet and tells the white men that the “jig is up” after the white men are not able to perform sexually. Now the power hierarchy in the room has changed and the status of the white males’ sexuality has been diminished because they cannot perform sexually like the other black men in the room. The black men never have problems performing sexually with women.

Furthermore, the white men not only feels inferior to the black man’s Phallus, but is further emasculated when the white and black women laugh and call them punks. But of course the power structure is not able to function with the white males’ sexuality and masculinity diminished. To reaffirm their status and social power as white men, they proceed to go back to the room and beat both women until they lose consciousness. And if that is not enough proof of their masculinity and social power, both white men decide to remind the other black woman, the owner of the establishment, of her subservient position and status by calling her a nigger.