The Devil Finds Work: An Essay

Of all Baldwin's nonfiction I have read, this is my new favorite. Baldwin looks at America's racial divide, White people's misperceptions, through film. Moving from Birth of a Nation, through In the Heat of the Night, Lady Sings the Blues, The Exorcist and many other films Baldwin illustrates how movies (sometimes most especially those written and directed by well-meaning liberals) create a completely false lens, a White lens, on the experiences and perspectives of Black Americans. These misperceptions are designed to comfort White Americans. His analysis is fascinating. This is a work from the 70's, and I actively wanted it to feel dated so that I could be reassured. It is not dated. Not at all.

Baldwin sheds the sort of startling light on well-known films that gives the same jolt to us white folk that Russo's "The Celluloid Closet" would give to us straight folk a few decades later. To watch "The Defiant Ones" through Baldwin's eyes is truly to see the problem of race relations in the United States.

A pungent and probing essay featuring primarily Baldwin's searing analysis of films: The Defiant Ones, Birth of a Nation, Lady Sings the Blues, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Godfather, and the Exorcist. Baldwin highlights the lack of truth and irrelevance of most American films, with white casts and white directors, to the Black audience. Thoughtful and convincing.

He's great just to listen to. Interesting insights. So powerful and perceptive. His non-fiction is just as exciting as his fiction.

Great interpretations of such movies as "In the Heat of the Night," "The Grapes of Wrath," and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". He skewers the latter hilariously. I disagree with only his interpretation of "The Best Years of Our Lives," which I think is more subversive than it may have appeared to Baldwin.

I need to read this it was a mistake to read it right after No Name In The Street as my mind can’t separate them

Essay