‘Blackout’ Review: When the Lights Went Out : Dorothy Rabinowitz ****
http://www.wsj.com/articles/blackout-review-when-the-lights-went-out-1436480095
A PBS documentary provides fashionable rationalizations for the looting that erupted during the 1977 New York City blackout.
In a documentary brimming with sociopolitical messaging, this American Experience film goes back to the hot July night of 1977 that saw New York City suddenly go dark, then erupt in a widespread orgy of violence, looting and arson—the most extensive in East Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The film diligently traces the cause of the blackout—a lightning strike in Westchester County, and a resulting chain reaction that ended with total power loss for almost all all of New York City. But it’s clear virtually from the outset of “Blackout” that the power that concerns the filmmakers doesn’t have much to do with electricity.
ENLARGE Soon—very soon—this becomes a tale of the city’s haves and the have-nots, of the difference in the ways they fared on this night. Those in poorer neighborhoods gather in the streets to escape their hot apartments—there is no air conditioning in the city. The privileged, dining at the dark Windows on the World restaurant, sit drinking champagne—a gift from the management. The film isn’t subtle—testaments to injustice abound. There are merry rooftop parties on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, scenes not quite as damning as those one percenters swilling champagne, but bad enough. In this script, the story of the night of July 13, 1977 was not the blackout and the ensuing criminality: It was about the plague of inequality and how it had at long last found expression.
American Experience: Blackout
Tuesday, July 14, 9 p.m. on PBS
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This was the 1970’s—a time, the film explains, of great tension in the city, thanks to high unemployment, budget cuts, a financial crisis. The creators of “Blackout” lose no opportunity to add to their extensive if occasionally strange list of the riots’ social causes. The city’s residents were unnerved, the film points out, by a disturbing increase in crime—a fact whose point, we can only presume, is that the fear about the crime rate helped impel citizens to go and commit criminal acts themselves. One of the more unforgettable factors cited as contributing to the night’s upheaval was, we learn, terror over a serial killer on the loose. This was, of course, the Son of Sam, fear of whom—if we’re to follow the film’s logic—also played a part in sending hordes of people into the darkened streets to loot stores.
Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1965, a far more widespread power failure that began in upstate New York, spread to New England and Canada, and most of the boroughs of New York City, Manhattan included. The Great Northeast Blackout struck New York City at 5 p.m., rush hour, trapping nearly nine hundred thousand travelers riding the subways, throwing surface traffic into chaos. For all its catastrophic effects, this blackout would be remembered for something else—the city’s response. On this day and night, all of New York seemed the embodiment of a model society, when New Yorkers throughout the city felt duty bound to help, to protect others, to maintain order and also good cheer. Few people who witnessed this behavior were ever likely to forget it.
The film’s creators haven’t forgotten it either, though their effort to explain the immense difference between the two blackouts—there was less unemployment in 1965 and, in that November blackout, the weather was better—is, to put it mildly, weak.
The film’s energies are in any case devoted to another sort of explanation that should by now be familiar—the kind that continues, solemnly, to impart the message, held as religious faith, that inequality and injustice are the prime cause of the sort of behavior that took place in New York City during the blackout of 1977.
The world heard the same, recently, about events in Ferguson, Mo., and in Baltimore. There crowds of looters largely unmolested by police expressed their profound grief and mourning over the deaths of black men who died during encounters with police, by smashing their way into stores to steal television sets, furniture, any other booty that appealed.
The message isn’t likely to convince many of the victims of crime sprees like these. The blackout of 1977 ended with some 1,600 businesses assaulted and robbed, and acts of arson that resulted in over a thousand serious fires.
In one of the better moments of this work, too long marinated in progressive theology to qualify as history, a black American whose neighborhood sporting goods and trophy store was stripped of $350,000 worth of merchandise, speaks her mind. Unlike countless others whose businesses were ruined and who closed up, hers remained open but was never again what it had been.
Her husband sat down with some who had taken part in the store’s looting, but didn’t manage to say anything negative to them, Elizora Williamson recalls. She could never do that, she says, with a still fresh, steely intensity. “I could never sit down and look people in the eye and say, it’s okay. It was not okay”
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