"The Order of Myths," Cinema Guild, 2008

Empty, perverse rituals are at the heart of Margaret Brown's "The Order of Myths" (2007), a patient and, for me, qualmy documentary about the Mardi Gras pomp undertaken every year in Mobile, Alabama, the first city in the country to have a Mardi Gras and, arguably, the most stubborn prideful about asinine social ceremony. There are two Mardi Gras organizations, white and black, and two parallel sets of "queens" and "kings," and certainly Brown's film has pertinent things to say about the survival of segregation in 21st-century America. (The "white queen" crowned in the film is the college-age scion of the town's oldest land-owning family, who have a well-known history of owning slaves whose descendants now happily participate in the black parade.) But I couldn't help but find both camps scary, as they commit to the importance of meaningless, age-old bylaws and "mystic" societies, of faux-monarchal costuming and rites (my favorite is the power luncheon held for "the showing of the train," meaning the queen's jewel-encrusted robe-raiment, newly designed each year), of outrageous class hierarchies that survive only by sheer determination and express racism. We see very little of Mobile's substantial poverty (nearly a quarter of the population lived below the poverty line in 2007), only the city's upper crusts, white and black, as they seriously dedicate themselves to the lingering masquerade nonsense of yesteryear's slave-owning wealthy. If this were a documentary about persistent rituals in Tibet or Bolivia or Malta, it might be merely interesting from our perspective. That it's contemporary America makes it galling.

"The Taking of Power by Louis XIV" (Criterion Collection) and "The Order of Myths" (New Yorker Video) are now available on DVD.

Name (Required)

Email Address (Required, not displayed)

URL

Type your comments here...

mustang

WHY DO YOU MAKE AND PLAY MOVIES THAT CONTINUE TO MAKE THE WHITE PEOPLE LOOK BAD AND LIKE MONSTERS? jUST CURIOUS THEIR ARE SOME THAT CAN OBVIOUSLY SEE THAT. THE HEARTLESS PEOPLE OF THE PAST ARE DEAD AND GONE... SURE MAKE THE WHITE GIRLS LOOK DEGRADING SHOWING THEM MAKING IT WHITH POOR LATIN BOYS FROM THE HOOD AND A WHITE FATHER SHOOTING ONE AND A WHITE COP SAYING HE WONT REPORT IT TO THE MEDIA...YEAH SURE MAKES THE WHITE PEOPLE LOOK BAD GOOD JOB ! TO BAD YOU IGNORE THE GOOD AND THE SMART PEOPLE OF THE WHITE RACE AND HOW THEY HELP OTHER PEOPLE IN POOR COUNTRIES ETC .KEEP UP THE FAIR PLAY... VERY PROFESSIONAL IM CURIOUS OF THE RACE OF THESE DIRECTORS AND THE PEOPLE WHO PLAY THESE MOVIES...YEAH WE KNOW ...