A Brief Review: The Last Black Man in San Francisco
There’s a scene in The Last Black Man in San Francisco (TLBMS) that shows Jimmie, one of the film’s two main characters, sitting at a bus stop, lamenting. As he stares at the ground, over strides an older white man, stark naked. At this point, we are over halfway through the film and its discussion of gentrification has been clearly established. The crowd I happen to be a part of, seated in the Angelika theater in New York City, is given to believe that this man is everything wrong with the “new San Francisco”: a white man with the hubris to bare his skin, shamelessly, in a city to which he can lay no claim. Even I am thinking this, in spite of the year I have spent working in that city and living in its East Bay neighbor, Oakland. I should know better. But shrouded once again in the culture of the East Coast, I have forgotten the freedom and hippy ideals that serve as the foundation of Frisco: I have forgotten the slogan “keep San Francisco weird.”
The two men exchange, perhaps, two lines. The old man leads, asking Jimmie how long he’s been waiting for the bus and Jimmie replies, in typical Bay Area fashion, “hella long, bro.” Seconds later, a trolley full of Saint Patrick’s day revelers rolls, first into earshot, and then onto the screen. One rider, hanging out of the trolley car, spots the man sitting next to Jimmie and begins a chant: “This guy fucks! This guy fucks!” The other partiers on the trolley join in and, as the chant grows louder, we cut back to Jimmie and the old man who sit aghast.
And the audience in the Angelika sits spellbound and aghast in parallel. Jimmie and this old man — who moments before we thought emblematic of gentrification — have suddenly become unified as symbols of “old San Francisco”. Of course, a keen viewer might have noticed during their earlier exchange, as I have in hindsight, that Jimmie doesn’t bat an eye when this fully nude man plops down next to him. This odd couple is the antithesis of the trolley full of millenials: the old guard watching helplessly as their city is transfigured into something they can’t recognize (there is something to be said about the contrast of old and new that is being presented here: a trolley, San Francisco’s oldest form of transportation, filled with San Francisco’s newest and least traditional residents).
Here, I think, we hit upon one of the film’s central themes: what bonds a city and its people, and what helps the people of that city recognize authenticity in others. Jimmie is very San Francisco: a native black San Franciscan, wearing a flannel shirt and skully, skating through the streets of the city he’s grown up in. But what we don’t realize — what the movie asks us to acknowledge— is that this old man is also very San Francisco. He, too, has lived there for decades — just as long as Jimmie — he has embraced the city’s traditions and culture, and he is willing to share a bus stop, conversation, and moment of intimacy with the city’s residents of color. Contrast this with the moment at the film’s end that sees Jimmie conversing with two white women on the bus. The two women, recent transplants, are lambasting the city. And Jimmie — disappointed by his city, but still in love with it — delivers one of the film’s most powerful lines: “You can’t hate San Francisco if you don’t love it”. The two women, rather than engaging with that comment and the sentiment it expresses, (or at least engaging with Jimmie) dismiss him outright, bringing the scene to what feels like an abrupt end. The movie asks us to take all of this in: to consider what roles outsiders can play in a city with a storied history; and to consider where natives, the Jimmies and the naked old men, can be found in the cities that we are watching gentrify, or are gentrifying, and ask ourselves what happens when those cities lose those people.
If it began and ended with an examination of gentrification, TLBMS would have plenty of material for a feature length film. Yet it doesn’t. The film also forces us to examine how much we are willing to sacrifice to preserve our bonds with our hometowns, especially when those places seem to be screaming — with every pop-up bar erected on the rooftop of a closed school, with every barbecue that is shut down, with every call to the police for loud music — that they don’t want us anymore. It seems that every black character in this movie, and there are many (despite the title), knows that surviving in the city is eating away at them. They know that the self they present to the streets, so that they might persist for another day, is a distortion of the true self. Kofi is not really a gangsta. Jimmie tells himself a lie, believing it his only means of staying away from the streets. The street preacher’s diatribes are carefully crafted, though they give the impression of being wholly improvised. Everyone is wearing a mask, each of them slowly forgetting where the paint and plaster end and their real skin begins.
And, in some sense, can’t most of us relate? For my part, my partner often pokes fun at me about whether or not things I do, say, or would have done align with my persona. And while we’re decidedly joking, it is a fact that the world does not see my true self. They see a version of me, played with such care and regularity, that it has become indistinguishable from my authentic self. Many of the people around me have a similar experience. I can see it and feel it, even if they haven’t explicitly told me so. The Last Black Man in San Francisco touches me because it asks me to question how this persona, this conjured self I affect in an attempt at defense, is cannibalizing my essential self: what am I stifling by surviving in this way? It poses this question most explicitly for black people. What, it asks, are we sacrificing if we cannot cry on the shoulders of our friends when our brother is shot on the block?
But, and this is important, in the world of The Last Black Man in San Francisco we do not have to shun a man who is expressing his anger and sadness over the loss of a life close to him. We can cry together. For this, I love the film. In an age when black pain is being discussed so widely, and is the most common depiction of blackness in media, to see a movie that says that the cycle can be broken is refreshing. I don’t need to be told that everything will be okay, it won’t, but I need to know that I don’t have to pass this pain onto the next generation. I need to believe that it’s possible to stop the so-called “generational curses”.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is about life. It is tragic. Not in the impersonal way that watching a drama or thriller is: one cannot divorce themselves from this pain by seeing it as far-fetched or unrealistic. TLBMS is tragic in much the same way that leaving your friends behind in a city that molded you is tragic: it burns hot at first and then simmers as a dull pain, a brand that sits on the skin for months or years. This is a film for people who want to engage life. If what you want of your movies is an opportunity to reflect, and perhaps to acknowledge a reality you may have less distance from than you think, this is a movie you must see.
