Caste, Patriarchy, Origin

On the plane to LA today, I finally got a chance to see Ava DuVernay’s film Origin. Last year I read the book on which it’s based, Caste by Isabelle Wilkerson, and loved it so I knew a film version by DuVernay would be good.

It was. Go see it. I love this movie!

It’s a beautiful sort of merging (to my mind) of documentary and fiction, theory and story. I’m not going to try to explain her theory on class and race and caste (not that I could), you’ll have to read the book or watch the film. But what I came away with was a burning desire to write about the patriarchy and try to grasp it as a subset or version of caste. Caste is a system of putting people into heirarchical groupings to be subservient: the low caste is subservient to the upper caste, the system makes lower caste to be less-than-human. Wilkerson writes about the Holocaust, slavery and Indian society in terms of caste — it’s fascinating in how she makes the connnection between all three. DuVernay brings the story of her discovery to life and dramatizes Wilkerson’s theory. The film inspired me to think more on how society creates “roles” for women, often dehumanizes us, and how the patriarchy dictates dress and behavior to keep them (us) in place as subservient. It’s often subtle, but it’s there, it’s a system supported by the advertising industry and Hollywood’s continued depiction of women.