A New Reality Is Better Than A New Movie!

For the digital essay to the poem “A New Reality Is Better Than A New Movie,” I chose to make an interpretive mirror image of the poem itself.  The idea behind the “movie” is simply a metaphor for media distraction, and the new “reality” can be best defined as the realization of equality through complete separation from an oppressive government.  With the digital essay, I took more of a minimalist approach in order to emphasize the actual actions and subtle undertones of the conflicted feelings that my character (an imaginative person living “within” Amiri Baraka’s poem) has toward the world he lives in.  As stated before, at the beginning, he was excited by the trailer of a movie on a laptop screen, but overtime it is seen that the events that occur within his life eventually break him free of this form of distraction.

The events in particular reflect on the poems lines that insinuate that the wealth create an illusion of equality, when in fact black Americans are used as a part of a “machine” that leads to their own economic self-exploitation.  This conflict can be seen in the main character’s reluctance to get out of bed from the alarm, his expression of uneasiness while shaking the hands of the white character, his expression of disgust after he was only given $1 out of a stack of $20, and with the unleashing of a pent-up anger by the end.

I chose the John Trudell quotes to hint toward a vague idea of “identity.”  Finally, I chose to use the Martin Luther King Jr. quote at the end to relate the images shown in the movie to a macro or national-level.