Rioting, Bobby and violence in America
The 2006 movie Bobby is, largely, an ambitious failure.
Director Emilio Estevez assembled a vast and impressive cast and then tried to channel Robert Altman (specifically Nashville) while also making a eulogy to the slain presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy.
Demi Moore, Helen Hunt, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Fishburne, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, Christian Slater, Shia LaBeouf, Ashton Kutcher and William H. Macy (and others) all star as part of the ensemble cast whose lives, for one reason or another, centre on the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
It was here on June 5 1968, 52 years ago this week, Bobby, like his brother, was assassinated.
Estevez’s film fails because most of the interweaving subplots are either uninteresting, underdeveloped, overwrought or serve no purpose (Ashton Kutcher as a hippy drug dealer is the nadir).
You can tell Estevez, who also wrote the film, was desperate for Bobby to serve as a kind-of time capsule of the 60s with Vietnam montages and discussions of the Cold War and even a reference to The Graduate which came out the year before.
But it is saved from total disaster not due to a performance nor any exceptional film-making craft.
Estevez decided to heavily use Kennedy’s oratorical skill to carry off the shell-shocked moments after Bobby has been shot.
The film is saved by the use of Bobby’s speech, ‘On the Mindless Menace of Violence’, which the US senator delivered in Cleveland on April 5, two months before he was killed in that hotel kitchen and the day after Martin Luther King Jr was himself assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
King’s death sparked riots nationwide not dissimilar to those seen on the streets of America in recent days following the killing of George Floyd.
The speech was delivered in roughly 10 minutes (you can listen to the full version here) and even now 52 years later large sections of it could apply to Donald Trump’s America in 2020.
It begins:
This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity to speak briefly to you about this mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.
It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed.
No one — no matter where he lives or what he does — can be certain who next will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.
Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet.
No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.
No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders.
The speech goes on:
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others.
Kennedy did not speak of his hopes for the White House but instead spoke on bloodshed: riots in American cities; killings that took place “in the name of the law, or in defiance of the law” and civilian deaths in foreign lands, which triggered only numbness from the American public.
Although Estevez truncated sections, the film ends with the last three paragraphs of the speech, Bobby’s second in as many days, which spoke of the violence in America:
Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember — even if only for a time — that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek — as we do — nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
It was Bobby’s second speech on MLK’s assassination.
The first he delivered the night of the killing from the back of a flat-bed truck and for those in the crowd his opening sentence would have been the first they had heard of the civil rights leader’s death:
I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
The speech ended:
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
This speech, given in Indianapolis, received the greater acclaim. It has been credited with the fact that although 110 cities rioted following King’s death, Indianapolis was not one of them.
But in the last 15 years, as violence has continued to stain America, the second on April 5, the one used by Estevez, has been reassessed as the more damning rebuke of violence as a solution.
President Barack Obama quoted the senator’s remarks in an open letter to American law enforcement in the aftermath of the 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers.
Obama turned“lamented in the wake of unjust violence a country in which we look at our neighbors as people ‘with whom we share a city, but not a community,’”.
Kerry Kennedy, Bobby’s daughter, said in 2018:
My father’s ‘Mindless Menace of Violence’ speech in Cleveland laid responsibility for reform at the feet of all Americans. It called not only for a rethinking of state policy, but also for a moral ‘cleansing’ to remove the ‘sickness’ of racism and prejudice ‘from our souls.’
Estevez, who was six years old when Bobby was killed, said during promotional run for the film 14 years ago:
From that moment of June 5, 1968 on, it seemed we became more and more cynical and resigned, and I think it’s a big part of why we are where we are at culturally today. It’s heartbreaking.
And where is America now?
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