Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths is an immersion into the archaic miasma that is Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama. Mobile’s Mardi Gras is the oldest in the world, and in keeping with tradition, its two weeks worth of parties and parades are mostly segregated. Using Mardi Gras season as a microcosm for a portrait of contemporary race relations in the city, Brown gets a filmmaker’s dream gift in the black and white Mardi Gras associations’ selection of their queens. Queen Stephanie, a black schoolteacher, is a descendant of slaves who were transported on the Clothilde, the last slave ship to enter the US. When the Clothilde came ashore, there was a fire and the passengers escaped into the woods, ultimately settling in an area that came to be known as Africatown. Queen Helen Meaher, whose family now owns most of the land in Africatown, is a descendant of the company that brought the Clothilde over. “My people was on her people’s ship,” Stephanie says, with a slow, matter-of-fact nod. That nod confirms the film’s thesis: casual racism is not an outrage in Mobile, it’s an institution.
Blending highly controlled fly-on-the-wall verite action with talking head contextualization, Myths finds an unusual tonal sweet spot somewhere in between absurdist comedy and melancholy in considering two groups at a socio-historical impasse. Both the black and white camps invest an inordinate amount of money in their celebrations––Queen Stephanie describes her Mardi Gras budget as being equivalent to “a good car, a car and a half”––and Brown plumbs the bejeweled spoils of these expenditures for both comic relief, and as a marker of difference. Helen and the members of her court seem to spend the Mardi Gras pre-season doing nothing but sipping out of silver goblets and trying on headdresses, all with the kind of nonchalance that could only come from people accustomed to indulgence. Queen Stephanie and her king spend their days working at the same grade school, where their experience of Mardi Gras is partially filtered through stories read by their students. Mardi Gras is a one-time-only investment for Stephanie, but it pays dividends in pure emotional experience to her extended social network. Certainly, the Meagher family never comments on how much Helen’s reign costs, and Helen herself seems to treat the whole endeavor as less of an honor than an obligation.
In his Variety review of the film, the progressively problematic John Anderson criticized Brown for essentially mocking her subjects, and while I think that’s a misguided read, I can see where he gets it. It’s not until one of the film’s final frames, in which Brown reveals that one of her talking head sources, a mystic society member and husband of a former Queen who is most adamantly in favor of Mardi Gras segregation, is the filmmaker’s grandfather. Without that admission, The Order of Myths might feel like an outsider’s charicature, but with it, everything that it’s proceeded by is colored as a personal story. Brown is not, as Anderson puts it, out to “make some easy targets look ridiculous”––she’s grappling with her own heritage through an outward-directed portrait of those who share it and those who have been historically at odds with it. It’s a personal doc without the person, and our more self-indulgent non-fiction filmmakers could take a lesson.
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IMO, it’s not worth your talent to link the Variety review and offer such a simplistic assumption or worse, to engage in simplistic misconstruing or worse, to do it for kicks. The critic’s work speaks for itself and is a click away from his name at Variety.
And I don’t think the first two paragraphs of his review (cut and pasted below) support the assumption you draw from it. However, if you had the time, I think you could make it work in an intellectually interesting and honest way for your review.
“The Order of Myths,” about America’s oldest — and still-segregated — Mardi Gras celebration, is as divided in its sensibilities as the city of Mobile is in its racial attitudes. Doc may find an audience, but it will likely be because of the derisive nature of its portraiture rather than the weightier issues of race and class that helmer Margaret Brown attempts to grapple with — when not making some easy targets look ridiculous. Film’s concern with entrenched sociopolitical attitudes is commendable, but snideness will more likely be the factor that broadens its appeal.
Mardi Gras in Mobile was founded in 1703, we’re told, before New Orleans was even a city. Given what was apparently unprecedented access to the behind-the-scenes machinations of Mobile Mardi Gras (helmer’s grandfather is a longtime member of two mystic societies, one of which lends its name to the title of the film), Brown makes short work of the defenses mounted by people who want to maintain separate celebrations.
Thanks for approving my comment, I’m sure this doc will be much debated by people who study docs. There’s also a Hollywood Reporter critique up as well, by a writer whose work I’m not familiar with presently.