To Sleep with Anger: You Never Know What’s in the Heart

To Sleep with Anger’s startling flirtation with magic realism in an identifiably middle-class setting signaled a fresh departure for a filmmaker hitherto associated with brusquely naturalistic—if also gorgeously poetic—portraits of working-class African American families. Burnett had first come to attention with his 1977 UCLA thesis film, Killer of Sheep, a stark, black-and-white drama set in LA’s impoverished Watts neighborhood, in which the eponymous character (played with agonizing vulnerability by Henry G. Sanders) is a soul-deadened abattoir employee, drained of his joie de vivreby his social and economic surroundings. These surroundings were intimately familiar to Burnett, who as a small child in 1947 moved north with his family from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Watts, where he grew up.

Killer of Sheep is arguably the best-known film to emerge from the movement that would be dubbed (by film historian Clyde Taylor) the LA Rebellion. Forged in the fraught aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots, and a climate of anti-Vietnam and black-liberation activism, the LA Rebellion featured filmmakers such as Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Larry Clark, Jamaa Fanaka, and Julie Dash. The group’s work, inspired by a broad range of influences—including American “race movies” of the twenties and thirties, British documentaries, Italian neorealism, and Latin American and African anticolonial cinema—explored the complexities of black, predominantly working-class, American life. It sought to portray black psychological interiority on-screen with grace, formal experimentation, and insight, crucially from a place of intimate knowledge, countering the reductive, stereotyped, and diminished images of blackness being produced just a few miles east in Hollywood at the time (including, it could also be said, the semi­contemporaneous blaxploitation explosion, with its often absurdly Manichaean social dynamics and cartoonish sexual stylings).

Dash has likened the dynamic of the LA Rebellion to that of a jazz combo, with players swapping instruments and working on one another’s projects. Bush Mama, for example—the Ethiopian-born Gerima’s 1975 UCLA thesis film, a ferocious feminist drama—was coshot by Burnett, while Burnett would write and shoot Woodberry’s achingly tender family drama Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), a spiritual successor to Killer of Sheep. Dash, best known for Daughters of the Dust (1991), the first film directed by an African American woman to receive national U.S. theatrical distribution, served as first assistant director on Burnett’s underappreciated second feature, My Brother’s Wedding (1983), another acutely observed, Watts-set drama, in which an indolent young man, Pierce (Everett Silas), struggles to take responsibility for himself.

In My Brother’s Wedding, the main character is effectively an overgrown kid, but Burnett’s films are exceptional for their subtle observations of the lives and experiences of actual children; they are rarely main characters, seen if not necessarily heard, but they are clearly shown to feel. The children in Killer of Sheep—playful, reckless sprites full of hope and humor—pepper the landscape, contributing some of the film’s most indelible images: a tiny girl wearing a rubber dog mask (an oblique nod to the boy-in-African-mask closing sequence of Ousmane Sembène’s anticolonial masterpiece Black Girl); a low-angle shot of kids making death-defying leaps from one building to another. These little ones are poignant counterpoints to the drudgery-stricken adults, who are fun-house reflections of the children’s own sad futures. This point is made explicit in Killer of Sheep’s opening shot, when we see, in close-up, the face of a small, frightened-looking boy who is being lectured by a stern offscreen father figure on the importance of fighting back against bullies in order to be a real man. We never see the moon-eyed lad again after this moment, but the meaning is clear: innocence rarely lasts long for black children in a district scarred by residential segregation, racist police brutality, and the violent uprisings of 1965. 

In To Sleep with Anger—a film ostensibly about adult relationships—children are once again crucial as observers, catalysts, and subtle symbols. Babe Brother and his wife’s young son, Sunny (DeVaughn Walter Nixon), rarely speaks, but he is quietly present in, and affected by, many scenes of familial tension marked by Babe Brother’s increasingly hostile masculinity. Early in the film, moments before Harry’s arrival, a broom mysteriously falls to the kitchen floor, on its way smashing a teapot and causing Sunny to scatter his marbles. Later, Sunny accidentally brushes Harry’s foot with the broom, a superstitious no-no that sends the usually cocksure visitor into paroxysms of panic. 

This broom is just one of the film’s myriad allusions to black folkloric and oral storytelling traditions of the Old South compassionately presented by the writer-director, who was tapping into his Mississippian roots and tracing his own childhood. Most fundamentally, Harry himself is based in part on the African American folktale of the Hairy Man, who is part European devil, part African spirit (amazimu), and part conjure doctor. Other references include the lucky charms, or “tobies,” misplaced by both Harry and Gideon, and even Harry’s evocative, fable-adjacent surname, Mention. “Being from the South,” Burnett told me in a 2016 interview for Film Comment, “my mother and grandma had these superstitions . . . Some people they wouldn’t even let in the house. They would sense this bad karma about people. A lot of this stuff I considered at one time kind of silly and ‘country,’ but as I grew up . . . I began to change my mind and respect them.”