烈血大风暴

第一次看到片名(烈血暴潮)，以为是黑帮片。我点进去看，有另一个片名(密西西比在燃烧)，曾经我好像哪里听到过，于是饶有兴趣的去看了这本经典佳作:
  1964年，在美国密西西比州，三K党徒劫持了一辆载有三名民权主义者的旅行车，其中包括两名白人和一名黑人。从此，他们失去了联系。联邦调查局派出两名特工(艾伦·沃德和鲁珀特安德森)来调查此案。沃德是一个年轻，充满原则性，和理想主义的人，注重程序。鲁珀特是一个老练，懂得人情世故，懂得变通的现实主义者，不特别在意程序。调查困难重重，当地人都不对他们说实话，两人也是时常冲突。当地的三K党以袭击黑人和火烧教堂作为回答。鲁珀特意外结识了副警长的太太，他认为她可能是知情人，真相缓缓浮现...
   白人与黑人之间的冲突是本片核心矛盾，3K党与黑人之间的暴力事件以及当地白人对黑人的冷漠，造成这种原因可能是从小的文化熏陶，黑人与白人是不相干预的两种文化，黑人也在自己的区域生活，没有过多权利的要求。形成了一种隐形的社会隔阂，白人欲求这种稳定，初心是好的，都想推动社会的稳定与发展。但在平权运动风起云涌的六十年代，这种稳定开始被打破，发生了各种白人袭击黑人的事件，造成社会的不稳定。黑人进白人的学校要有警车护送。在密西西比人看来，正是北方那些以精英自居的人干涉南方各行其是的文化，造成社会动荡。密西西比在燃烧，三K党徒的面目也让人看清。当地人的人性中的善良一年也被唤醒，像那个警察的妻子，内心无比痛苦，道出真相，成为突破本案的关键。社会的稳定不是考靠一个种族去消灭另一个种族可以换来的。
本片深刻展现了三K党对黑人的残害以及揭露了社会黑暗的矛盾。吉恩哈克曼扮演的鲁珀特和威廉达福扮演的沃德表现得精彩绝伦，一个现实者和一个理想者两人正好互补。他们代表着两类人:一类带着理想主义气质，一类带着现实主义色彩，但都是价值观上平等的人。那个时代，价值观上达成共识才能一起推动社会向着平等自由转型。对现代社会来说也具有非常高的借鉴意义。

《密西西比在燃烧》是一部拍摄于1988年讲述美国60年代黑人人权问题的影片，根据真实的历史事件改编。1964年在美国南部密西西比州的一个小镇，2个犹太男孩和一个黑人男孩失踪了，他们都是某个人权组织的成员。两个FBI探员来到小镇负责调查此案。他们在这里看到的不是简单的失踪案或谋杀案，而是熊熊燃烧的仇恨的火焰。影片的第一个镜头时两个饮水机，上面各自挂了牌子，一个写着“白人”，一个写着“有色人种”。在这个仍然实行种族隔离制度的小镇，从镇长到警察到许多普通白人公民都有着对于黑人的极端的偏见甚至仇恨。这种仇恨从何处来呢？是什莫样的仇恨能驱使人们去杀人放火毁人家园而毫无愧疚与怜悯呢？同样的仇恨使得二战时上千万的犹太人被屠杀。 影片似乎并没有能很好地回答这个问题。这部影片的背景正是美国黑人民 权 运 动的高潮时期，美 国 国 会先 后 在 １ ９ ６ ４ 、 １ ９ ６ ５ 和 １ ９ ６ ８ 年 通 过 了 三 个 被 统 称 为 “ 第 二 次 解 放 黑 奴 宣 言 ” 的 民 权 法 案 ， 从 法 律 上 彻 底 结 束 了 种 族 隔 离 和 种 族 歧 视 制 度。片中的案件是一个真实的案例，并且被认为是民权运动里程碑式的一个案例。不过电影并没有想拍成一部纪录片，尤其是后半部分，简直就是一部情节有些老套的好莱坞式的伸张正义的电影。我不知道影片是否想讽刺FBI的办事能力，片中那些FBI探员身着一式的深色西服，看上去傻乎乎的，而且招来200个FBI探员，居然毫无进展。最后还是Gene Hackman饰演的那个老探员招来自己以前当警长时的手下，以爆制爆才最终把那些3K党的杀人凶手搞定。该片的导演Alan Parker曾经执导过那部著名的英国电影《迷墙》Pink Floyd The Wall.

It was a hot Sunday afternoon in June of 1964 when three young civil-rights workers - Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney - were arrested on a trumped-up speeding charge outside Philadelphia, Miss. They were held for eight hours, then released in the deepening darkness of rural Mississippi. By prearrangement, they were again stopped on a lonely road by the same Neshoba County deputy sheriff who had arrested them earlier, this time accompanied by a party of Ku Klux Klansmen. They were murdered in cold blood, transported to an earthen dam several miles away and buried with a bulldozer.

More than 150 F.B.I. agents ultimately descended on Neshoba County to investigate the disappearance of the civil-rights workers, two of them, Goodman and Schwerner, whites from New York, and the third, Chaney, a black who lived in Neshoba County.

It was 44 days before the investigators penetrated the racist veil of silence that enveloped the case and found the bodies. Goodman, horribly, had a ball of the Mississippi clay in which he was buried squeezed tightly in his hand, indicating that he had not been dead when the bulldozer sealed him into the makeshift grave.

Another three years passed before some of those responsible, Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and six others, including Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, were convicted of civil-rights violations and given prison terms of up to 10 years. None served more than five. There is no Federal murder statute covering such crimes, and no state charges against the men were ever brought in Mississippi.

Those are the facts - the ''true facts'' as some put it in these days of relative reality - on which the British director Alan Parker's film ''Mississippi Burning'' is based. It stars Gene Hackman as the Mississippi-sheriff-turned-F.B.I.-agent, whose own violent tactics ultimately break the case when orthodox methods fail, and Willem Dafoe as the young, by-the-book Justice Department official who finally but grudgingly acquiesces to Hackman's tactics. Locally, the film opens Friday at the Loews Tower East and at Loews 84th Street Six.

The facts of the case are shocking to the sensibilities as well as the emotions, and their depiction by Mr. Parker, known for ''Angel Heart'' and ''Midnight Express,'' leaves little to the imagination. But he does not shrink from inventing dramatic embellishments to capture - and shake - a wider audience.

''I'm trying to reach an entire generation who knows nothing of that historical event,'' Mr. Parker said in a telephone interview, ''to cause them to react to it viscerally, emotionally, because of the racism that's around them now. And that's enough of a reason, a justification, for the fictionalizing.''

The film's opening credits are overlaid on the roaring blaze of a burning church, the scene moving immediately to the lonely back road where the murder of the three young men is re-created with graphic realism. The names of the victims are never mentioned, and other names and details are changed, but the killing itself is eerily close to the reality that is starkly revealed in court records and F.B.I. documents - although the actual victims were led away before being killed.

To those familiar with that place and time, the brutal intimidation of the black people of Neshoba County, also a historic reality although compressed in time, is evocative. When Mr. Dafoe, as a dedicated but inept investigator, makes a public point of sitting in the black section of a restaurant and talking to a young black man, the black is later brutally beaten by Klansmen. Whether the actual event happened is moot; such beatings occurred. Churches and homes are torched in the film, and that, too, is very much the way much of it happened. From June of 1964 to January of '65, just six months, K.K.K. nightriders burned 31 black churches across Mississippi, according to F.B.I. records. So, Mr. Parker does not greatly exaggerate in a film that literally crackles with racial hate.

Onto the basic framework of fact, the screenwriter Chris Gerolmo and Mr. Parker graft considerable artistic fabrication, chiefly concerning the F.B.I.'s investigation of the case, and say it is essentially a ''work of fiction.''

Yet, much of the power of ''Mississippi Burning'' derives from the audience's knowledge that the essential horror it is witnessing onscreen really happened. Even the title of the movie is the actual F.B.I. code name for the investigation. Many details are drawn from life.

''You didn't leave me nothin' but a nigger,'' says James Chaney's killer in the film. ''But at least I killed me a nigger.'' That piece of dialogue comes directly from F.B.I. files, the confession of one of the participants.

There are any number of reasons for turning fact into fiction for the purposes of making a movie, not the least of them the legal difficulties involved in portraying numerous lives, many unsympathetically. But in this case, fiction enables Mr. Parker to have his factual cake, so to speak, while spooning it out richly slathered with fictional icing. Indeed, a legion of dark-suited F.B.I. men are shown nervously wading waist-deep into a fetid Mississippi swamp in search of the missing men's car, and Mr. Parker, who used various locations in Mississippi and Alabama, casts local people for some atmospherics, like on-the-street TV interviews.

For those who know such places, Mr. Parker, who is English, evokes the texture, the gritty, fly-specked Southernness, the brooding sense of small-town menace, the racial hatred, with considerable accuracy. Even much of the violence, the beatings, burnings and lynchings, are perhaps defensible because they are central to the reality. But there also seems to be violence for the sake of it, and Mr. Hackman's portrayal of an F.B.I. man, even in the purest of fictions, beggars Clint Eastwood.

Mr. Parker and Mr. Gerolmo defend the fiction on the ground that there were numerous suggestions - none ever proven - of F.B.I. excesses, but more importantly on the ground that it makes the story all the more emotionally affecting.

But the reality itself is powerful. Those who never ventured into the rural South in the 1960's might find much of it hard to believe - that backcountry lawmen belonged to the Klan, covered up killings and beatings, and were proud to tell you that N.A.A.C.P. stood for ''niggers, apes, alligators, coons and possums,'' as the fictional but all-too-real sheriff tells reporters in ''Mississippi Burning.''

Those of us who did cover the rural Deep South in those days heard that sort of thing, and worse, virtually every day; scarcely a week went by without a burning cross flickering somewhere against the soft velvet backdrop of the Southern sky.

It was a time when more than one Mississippi judge was said to wear a black robe by day and a white one by night, and while it might be an exaggeration to suggest that most white Mississippians supported the Klan, it is fair to say that few of them - with notable and courageous exceptions - had the temerity to speak against it.

For 44 days, F.B.I. agents searched for the bodies of those three missing men before finding them. But, gruesomely, they did find several others they weren't seeking, one a 14-year-old boy, never identified, wearing a CORE T-shirt and those of two black men, eventually found to have been the victims of Klan murder. (Those interested in similar details of the Schwerner-Goodman-Chaney murders should read a meticulously researched nonfiction book by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, ''We Are Not Afraid,'' published by Macmillan and based on F.B.I. records and exhaustive interviews.) That was the way it was in Mississippi in those days, and painful as it is to relive it, ''Mississippi Burning'' serves to remind us with extraordinary force just how bad it was.

But Mr. Parker and Mr. Gerolmo heighten the reality. The real-life truth of the F.B.I.'s long investigation in Neshoba County was that it was neither very efficient, nor, in the end, particularly dramatic.

In the film, the key revelation in the case comes when Mr. Hackman, at once courtly and cynical, uses seduction as a means of obtaining information. The reality is less romantic. The actual ''seduction'' was a $30,000 F.B.I. payoff to a Klan informant.

Mr. Gerolmo said in a telephone interview that ''the fact that no one knew who Mr. X, the informant, was, left that as a dramatic possibility for me, in my Hollywood movie version of the story. That's why Mr. X became the wife of one of the conspirators. That's it - we're making up a story about the facts.''

The re-enactment of the unearthing of the bodies - filmed, with some discretion, from a distance in the humming heat of a Mississippi August - is wrenching, sickening. Yet that, too, is how it happened.

But it is more or less at this point in the film, which had so far been fairly faithful to the record, that Mr. Parker and his scriptwriter go for broke.

To find out who put the bodies in the dam, Mr. Hackman brings in a black bureau ''specialist'' (as an incidental fact, the F.B.I. had no black agents in those days) who, posing as a vengeful black Mississippian, kidnaps and threatens to castrate the bound-and-gagged Mayor if he doesn't reveal the names of the conspirators. To make his point, the kidnapper drops the terrified man's trousers and brandishes a razor blade. The black man describes the horrifying castration of a black youngster by Klansmen and says he intends to do the same to the Mayor unless he talks. He talks.

The razor-wielding ''agent'' is, however, a kind of twice-incarnated fiction. Mr. Gerolmo said he originally wrote the character as a Mafia hit man who forces a confession from one of the conspirators by putting a pistol in his mouth. That, he said, was based on ''a rumor'' circulated in Mississippi at that time, never corroborated.

''In the original screenplay, I wrote the story as I heard it, that there was a Mafioso who owed the F.B.I. a favor who was persuaded to come up and hold a gun in a conspirator's mouth until he told them what they needed to know. Then Alan [ Parker ] was inspired to change that in detail, but basically the spirit was the same.''

Mr. Parker said in interviews that he transformed the Mafia hit man to a black F.B.I. agent as ''almost a metaphor for what was happening in real life, the assertion of black anger, and black rights reasserting themselves.''

By the same token, he said the agent's description of the castration of a young black man was taken from a factual description of a real castration of a black man by a Klansman.

Mr. Parker said, moreover, that preview audiences found the scene the most powerful in the film.

In reality, according to Mr. Cagin, Mr. Dray and other researchers, the F.B.I. relentlessly dogged two shaky participants in the killings -one of whom made indiscreet comments to a friend, who passed them on to the F.B.I., who in turn threatened them with long jail sentences, paid them for information and ultimately arranged plea bargains for lesser sentences in exchange for their cooperation. It took nearly three years.

 In the film, all this becomes clever but brutal F.B.I. dirty tricks, including a staged lynching of a Klan conspirator in which he is ''rescued'' at the last minute by other agents.

''When it came to me, the already fictionalized treatment of that script depended upon the F.B.I. not necessarily behaving in such a noble way,'' Mr. Parker said, adding, ''They did resort to rather underhanded methods.'' Castration threats? Staged lynchings? ''In the end,'' said Mr. Parker, ''I will stand by it, because in the end I think I would behave the same way.''

Mr. Parker handles the question cinematically with an exchange in which by-the-book Dafoe accuses get-results Hackman of dragging him into the gutter with the crude tactics. Hackman's response is that that is precisely where the Klan came from.

''It is a fiction,'' said Mr. Parker. ''It's a movie. There have been a lot of documentaries on the subject. They run on PBS and nobody watches them. I have to reach a big audience, so hopefully the film is accessible to reach millions of people in 50 different countries.

''It's fiction in the same way that 'Platoon' and 'Apocalypse Now' are fictions of the Vietnam War. But the important thing is the heart of the truth, the spirit,'' he said. ''I keep coming back to truth, but I defend the right to change it in order to reach an audience who knows nothing about the realities and certainly don't watch PBS documentaries.

''The proof in the end will be how it reaches an audience.'' SHORT MEMORIES

Although Neshoba County, Miss., was the actual setting for the grisly events of ''Mississippi Burning'' and the locus of one of the turning points of the civil-rights struggle of the 1960's, it is even today not a place where politicians like to remind voters of just how bad things were.

When Ronald Reagan took his 1980 campaign for the Presidency to the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss., not many miles distant from the lonely dirt road where those civil-rights workers were killed, he made no mention of the racial murder and its attempted cover-up. Instead, he talked about ''state's rights,'' which many Southern blacks regard as shorthand for the purported right of a state like Mississippi to ignore desegregation laws.

In 1983, when the space hero John Glenn appeared at the fair, he pointedly omitted his usual detailed criticism of President Reagan for failing to enforce the civil-rights laws, and on television later hailed ''the old values, the old traditions that are epitomized by the fair.''

Michael Dukakis made a campaign appearance at the fair, a major political event, on Aug. 4, 1988, 24 years to the day after the bodies of the three young civil-rights workers were dug from the dirt dam where they had been buried. Mr. Dukakis did not even mention their names, telling his mostly white audience only that the anniversary was ''a special day.''

        美国基于民权运动背景的种族题材作品，总是在似曾相识的感觉中，表现出不同的特点。毕竟，那段历史背景是相同的，对黑人的歧视，特别在美国南方依然严重，然而种族平等已是大势所趋，同时这个转型期的冲突却在局部根据尖锐，而同时在白人中已经涌出很多声援黑人权益的人们，特别权力机构的这类人群常常是这类题材作品中捍卫黑人权力的精英。《烈血大风暴》（又译《密西西比在燃烧》）就是这类题材中又一部出色的作品，而它的出色之处在于，不光表现着一种振奋人心的正义力量或是励志激情，更以一个事件，传神的表现出整个时代中围绕种族平等运动的各个角色的立场和准则。

        1964年6月21日，三K党徒在美国密西西比州劫持一辆载有三名民权主义者的旅行车，三人中包括两名维护黑人权益的白人社会活动者，事发后，三人下落不明，联邦调查局派人前来保守小镇调查，拉开了这部影片的序幕。这部影片的事件和小镇，实际上就是一个各方矛盾和利益交织的舞台。先看联邦调查局一方，艾伦•沃得和鲁珀特•安德森是调查的主力，而两人又有所区别，艾伦•沃得是个年轻的充满原则性和理想主义的FBI调查人员，不达目的誓不罢休，坚决要将恶人惩治，但是却又显得手法不够灵活，甚至鲁莽。而鲁珀特•安德森属于老鸟，深深明白一个保守小镇的人情世故，更懂得变通，同时也不会特别在意程序正义之类的东西。于是，查案中，我们看到两人时常冲突，艾伦•沃得的急躁和冒进常常给当地黑人和调查涉及人员造成更深伤害，但是也正是他的决心，让这个案子可以不断推进，调动更多资源。而鲁珀特•安德森的沉稳更是对艾伦•沃得的有力补充，他更善于在民间获取线索，并不时给予嚣张的当地种族正义分子一些颜色看看，而一旦坚定信念，他更是可以采用多种手段去惩治凶手。可以说，他们代表着两类人，一类带着理想主义气质，一类带着现实主义色彩，但是却都是价值观上坚定的平权人士，在那个时代，正是靠着这些价值观达成共识，方式上各有发挥，相互补充的人的共同努力，才推动者社会向平等的转型。

        而当地黑人和白人的冲突也是典型的，而这又分两个层面，一种是3K党与当地黑人充满暴力的冲突，另一种是深入社会文化中的，白人与黑人间的相互不信任，当地白人民众并非都是暴力对待黑人，但是长期的文化熏陶下，他们起码认为与黑人是两种应该不相互干涉的文化，而当地黑人也在自己的社区生活，并未做更多权利的要求。这种无形的隔阂使得社会显得很稳定，但是这是一种地基缺乏合理性和带着危险的“稳定”。于是，当平权运动兴起时，这种稳定被打破，白人充满危机感，黑人充满被剥夺感，于是，一种吊诡的局面产生了，本欲让社会更平等，各方人士更和平友好相处的平权运动，倒是在进行过程中，造成了社会的动荡，黑人反倒受到了更激烈的攻击，如同片中不断被烧毁的黑人房屋，密西西比在燃烧，这团火又进一步激化着矛盾，制造着恶性循环。在此基础上，另一种文化的矛盾也开始显现，那就是美国历史悠久的南北矛盾，在密西西比人看来，正是北方那些以精英自居的人们，粗暴干涉南方本来各行其是的文化，造成了社会动荡。而当时的整个美国，也是这副景象，肯尼迪政府甚至要出动军警，坚定的护送黑人走入以往只有白人可以进入的学校。这份动荡也时刻考验着艾伦•沃得和鲁珀特•安德森的良心，当他们试图维护正义，却发现激化矛盾，发现一个个黑人被殴打和杀害时，那份内心的纠结是显而易见的。而同时，燃烧的密西西比，也让人们看清了3K党徒的真相，让当地人内心的善良也被唤起，这是一种个人内心的矛盾，就如片中那个3K党徒警察的妻子，内心折磨的痛苦中，终于说出真相，成为本案突破的关键，而她也付出了惨遭殴打的代价。然而，一个社会不需要缺乏正义的稳定，更不需要让一方忍受屈辱和不公的维稳，所以，哪怕付出一时代价，当时的美国社会依然坚定的走向至少制度性的平等，在威廉•曼彻斯特的杰作《光荣与梦想》中，关于这段历史有着激荡的篇章，而这部影片正是从一个侧面，一个事件，给观众带来了那个时代全景式的感受，这正是本片难能可贵的地方。

        本片的戏剧性与演员的精彩表演密不可分，吉恩•哈克曼扮演的鲁珀特•安德森尤其出彩，老到沉稳，又不乏正气凛然，几段与嚣张的3K党徒对峙的戏份几个眼神动作就令人叹服，可以被列入表演教科书。威廉•达福几乎演过电影中可能出现的任何角色，本片中的理想主义FBI调查员艾伦•沃得似乎与其棱角分明的外形不太符合，不过他的激情和稍稍的莽撞一下子就让你看到了一个热血探员的风采。几位3K党徒和为虎作伥的当地官僚都演的很传神，传神的让你为他们迟迟没有被惩处着急，真想抽丫两下。当然，后来这批党徒大都受到了惩罚，鲁珀特•安德森找来了自己人以独特的方式折腾了他们，而他的朋友中的一位的扮演者令我眼前一亮，惊呼“竖锯”，那张苍白的脸太标志性了，没错，就是托宾•贝尔，“电锯”迷大可看看本片尾声一节，看“竖锯”大叔如何以非常规手段助FBI一臂之力。

        本片取材于1966年，密西西比州的民权激进分子弗农•达默遇害事件，与影片结尾惩恶扬善的畅快不同，真实事件的发展要曲折很多。弗农•达默惨案发生后，诸多证据暗中指向了3K党党魁“巫师皇帝”塞缪尔•鲍尔斯，但是由于缺乏足够证据，这位幕后策划者长期逍遥法外，直到1997年，才有一名新的证人出现，让塞缪尔•鲍尔斯接受了正义的审判。

        《烈血大风暴》堪称一部带着些死磕惨烈味道的电影，明知过程将会崎岖坎坷，甚至带来更激烈的冲突，如艾伦•沃得这样的人依然竭力推动。从影片中，我们看到，当时最纠结的是黑人，他们中大部分已经有了一种逆来顺受的沉默，因为在一个种族歧视弥漫的地区，一切反抗都只能带来更严重的报复。于是，我们看到的是一群白人在为黑人是否该受到平等对待进行制度化的对抗，而黑人则受到非制度化的暴力攻击，这是一种悲哀的现实，却也只是一时的困境，他们终于忍无可忍，如影片中的场景一样，以游行的队伍表达自我的尊严，当这些人走上前台，密西西比才不必再燃烧。因为，与艾伦•沃得和鲁珀特•安德森们一道，他们已经点燃正义与平等的火把，去唤起更多人从社会痼疾中觉醒。

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