Cabin in the Sky

Paradox reigns supreme in ‘Cabin in the Sky.’ Whether it is between the devils and angels, God and Lucifer, men and women, religious and sinful, or the wealthy and the poor, the entire plot centers around opposites with which Joseph ‘Little Joe’ Jackson is faced. While the film attempts to present the ‘pleasures of sin for a season’ in contrast to the eternal reward of righteousness, the plot appears to be weakened by the countless flashbacks and the lack of consistency when Little Joe is welcomed onto the heavenly staircase with his wife despite his philandering. Furthermore, despite the fact that Little Joe is supposedly a round character who is supposed to be developing the plot, he appears no stronger at the resolution than he did in the beginning, suggesting a cyclic nature of man in which men cannot rise above temptation. God is viewed as a spineless pushover. Overall, I thought the plot wreaked of stereotypes and inconsistencies.

I did, however, find the juxtaposing of various female African-American stereotypes interesting. It was interesting how clear-cut the distinction was between the Mammy-figure of Petunia Jackson and the Vixen-figure of Georgia Brown. The mammy, as usual, created a home atmosphere, cooking fine food, attending the church, singing all day happily, and mothering her husband while the vixen--as usual--was self-centered, vain, and enjoyed tempting men for the fun of it. The film does not offer the viewer a vision of a larger black woman as a vixen or a thinner black woman as a mammy. It appears that the physical characteristics dictate the personality and character of the woman. I initially thought that Georgia Brown offered a deviation from this pattern with the conversion of Georgia Brown; however, this turned out to be a dream of Little Joe’s. The message behind the ‘revelation’ that this could only happen in a dream astonishes me. I wonder how much the black actors and actresses understood about the stereotypes they were portraying. Why would anyone seek to sustain such a one-sided view of themselves? Overall, this film presented much less depth of character than that presented in ‘Check & Doublecheck’ or ‘The Jazz Singer.’ It is a narrative filled with stock characters that are not very interesting except as evidence that Americans still held the mammy and vixen stereotypes as truth in 1943.

This says a lot about the American public, however, in that they appear to have believed that blacks could not be a threat to the rest of society. If these characters are so bound up with their own cares and temptations, they cannot be expected to ‘lift the race’ as we discussed last week with Dubois. The acceptance of Little Joe’s philandering and constant failures by God appears to denote that blacks cannot help but be mischievous tricksters and that even God doesn’t expect much better of the race, allowing them into heaven still. I don’t know quite what to think of this film, but I was not impressed. American film seemed to be in the stone age still in reference to its views of African Americans.