George Washington - Diversity

Although George Washington isn’t a film that expressly sets out to expose the inequality of poor, black children in North Carolina, it does so by examining their lives and how they react to the situation of their friend dying. It is shot intimately and acted authentically which adds to the underlying argument that these children’s poor situation needs to be heard.

As was demonstrated with the children’s books we read, childhood is a time of identity formation. It is when people begin to attach things like race and culture to their personal definitions. George Washington takes place just before this formation—when children are still naïve to the seriousness of the inequalities of the world. Roger Ebert describes it as “the summer when adolescence has arrived, but…makes you feel hopeful…[and] powerful instead of unsure.” The children see each other as equals in spite of age difference or skin color or medical condition. The adults working on the railway converse with the children as if there was nothing to separate them. Green creates a sort of paradise (later shattered by the death of Buddy) of hot summer days spent in peace with all.

The film assumes that their world is the only world—there isn’t a real binary (besides the audience’s own experience) to compare their situation with. Green privileges this one side of the binary by treating it as if it were the only side. However, he keeps waving red flags for the audience in order to ground their almost surreal existence in reality. For instance, the portrait of Pres. Bush Sr. starkly stands out against its environment , just as George did when he walked by the predominantly white parade sporting beauty queens and fat, white business owners and politicians. These jolting reminders that the children’s situations are underprivileged and not a summer fairytale  emphasizes the plight of the film.

The form of the film contributes to privileging their poor, minority living as we see it through the perception of the children, similar to the way poor life was portrayed in the clip from Days of Heaven. The cinematography is glowing, warm, and beautiful, emphasizing the overgrown, rusty beauty of rural North Carolina, creating an almost surreal environment. However, the subject matter and the acting counteract the surrealist look of the film as they were uncomfortably realistic. Buddy’s death was terrifying in its suddenness and innocence, breaking the spell of these children’s carefree lives and bringing the immediacy of the problem of these children’s situations right to the forefront. Their varied reactions to their friend’s death brings a universality to their characters, peeling away the alienating layers of dialect, race, culture, and economic status that may have distanced the audience before.