Desert Bayou
Directed by Alex LeMay
In his second feature film, director Alex LeMay attempts to answer the question: What do you get when you take a nearly all-white state filled primarily with Mormons and add 600 black Hurricane Katrina refugees? Oh, and don’t forget to add a special guest appearance by one incendiary, famous Jewish rabbi for good measure.
As Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke took a probing look at the plight of black folk left in New Orleans, Desert Bayou tells the story of the Katrina refugees who were told to take everything they owned that was salvageable and get on a plane to god-knows-where for god-knows-how-long. In fact, their first knowledge of where they were going came from the pilot after takeoff, when he told them that in six hours they would reach their destination of Salt Lake City, Utah. One displaced victim sums up the change aptly by looking straight at the camera and chuckling, “There are a lot of white people in Utah.”
LeMay deftly underscores the jarring process for the 600 who leave New Orleans, a city with a rich black cultural heritage, for a temporary home in a land where 62 percent of the population self-identifies as Latter-day Saints, a religion with a rich heritage of black exclusion. He takes no pains to hide the response that Utah gave its new residents: They were barricaded in an army camp an hour outside of the city, forced to have a curfew and generally made to feel that they had done something that warranted a prison-like confinement. LeMay cuts media clippings and radio announcements about these developments with interviews with slack-jawed Utah residents claiming that they were perfectly hospitable to the displaced persons. One particularly deluded woman says she believes Utah is a completely racially diverse place: “We’ve got Mexicans.”
Interspersed with interviews from the displaced refugees are statements from various scholars and politicians all spinning their own take on the story. Oh, and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach barges in on the camp and attempts to drum up some controversy and publicity. He tells the victims of this great tragedy that this is an opportunity to have a truly “united” United States, that this event will change the course of race relations in America. While perhaps true, it doesn’t sit too well with most of the army personnel. Boteach is asked to leave without appearing on a local radio show in Salt Lake where he was scheduled to speak.
It’s clear that the residents are being manipulated by political and cultural figures, but it’s unclear how much LeMay endorses this manipulation, since he’s also part of it. He indicts the Salt Lake community and Utah political figures for their racial politics, but he also portrays the victims as pious, salt-of-the-earth, simple folk—a problematic rendering for a white filmmaker examining an all-black community. The need to wrap up the story in a feature film of this kind also lends itself to a pat ending, where LeMay seems to congratulate Utah for the 100 refugees that decided to stay in the desert.
The new Utah residents seem to give a big figurative thumbs-up for the experience in general, something that conflicts with and trivializes what they went through, and is an ill-fitting closing for a film that, in some ways, does great justice to the appalling aftermath of the biggest natural disaster to hit America in our lifetime.
Directed by Alex LeMay
In his second feature film, director Alex LeMay attempts to answer the question: What do you get when you take a nearly all-white state filled primarily with Mormons and add 600 black Hurricane Katrina refugees? Oh, and don’t forget to add a special guest appearance by one incendiary, famous Jewish rabbi for good measure.
As Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke took a probing look at the plight of black folk left in New Orleans, Desert Bayou tells the story of the Katrina refugees who were told to take everything they owned that was salvageable and get on a plane to god-knows-where for god-knows-how-long. In fact, their first knowledge of where they were going came from the pilot after takeoff, when he told them that in six hours they would reach their destination of Salt Lake City, Utah. One displaced victim sums up the change aptly by looking straight at the camera and chuckling, “There are a lot of white people in Utah.”
LeMay deftly underscores the jarring process for the 600 who leave New Orleans, a city with a rich black cultural heritage, for a temporary home in a land where 62 percent of the population self-identifies as Latter-day Saints, a religion with a rich heritage of black exclusion. He takes no pains to hide the response that Utah gave its new residents: They were barricaded in an army camp an hour outside of the city, forced to have a curfew and generally made to feel that they had done something that warranted a prison-like confinement. LeMay cuts media clippings and radio announcements about these developments with interviews with slack-jawed Utah residents claiming that they were perfectly hospitable to the displaced persons. One particularly deluded woman says she believes Utah is a completely racially diverse place: “We’ve got Mexicans.”
Interspersed with interviews from the displaced refugees are statements from various scholars and politicians all spinning their own take on the story. Oh, and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach barges in on the camp and attempts to drum up some controversy and publicity. He tells the victims of this great tragedy that this is an opportunity to have a truly “united” United States, that this event will change the course of race relations in America. While perhaps true, it doesn’t sit too well with most of the army personnel. Boteach is asked to leave without appearing on a local radio show in Salt Lake where he was scheduled to speak.
It’s clear that the residents are being manipulated by political and cultural figures, but it’s unclear how much LeMay endorses this manipulation, since he’s also part of it. He indicts the Salt Lake community and Utah political figures for their racial politics, but he also portrays the victims as pious, salt-of-the-earth, simple folk—a problematic rendering for a white filmmaker examining an all-black community. The need to wrap up the story in a feature film of this kind also lends itself to a pat ending, where LeMay seems to congratulate Utah for the 100 refugees that decided to stay in the desert.
The new Utah residents seem to give a big figurative thumbs-up for the experience in general, something that conflicts with and trivializes what they went through, and is an ill-fitting closing for a film that, in some ways, does great justice to the appalling aftermath of the biggest natural disaster to hit America in our lifetime.
