Since I found out about Presidon’t’s alleged ties to Russia during the summer of 2016, I wondered if he won, what an invasion would look like. Would it be like Poland where our officials were already successfully substituted with Russians or traitors or would they treat us like the Ukraine, but without any resistance from our troops because Presidon’t would tell them to stand down? Soon after Presidon’t won the election, a Russian spy ship traveled up the East Coast, passed my home state of NY and eventually arrived at my shores in MA. I didn’t realize how ill prepared I was for an actual invasion, and as a student of history, I know that civilization completely breaks down after one. Maybe the nutty militiamen had a point when they stockpiled weapons. Red Dawn tapped into this concern in the 1980s, and Bushwick mines it in the twenty first century, but instead of an invasion, it is a civil war, which seems just as plausible considering the last year that we had.
I am from NYC, but spent almost all of my time in Manhattan. I probably passed through Brooklyn for the Caribbean Carnival a couple of times so unlike some critics, I was examining whether the movie got the spirit of my region right, not the actual location, which apparently it did not. The movie follows Lucy, who has brought her boyfriend home from college to meet her grandmother and wears a red coat. Red Riding Hood, is that you? There are a few early missteps during the first third of the film, specifically a Bernard Goetz vibe to the beginning that prevented me from fully enjoying it. I also hate that only Lucy and her boyfriend left the train station. No one else had to get off at that stop. If you watch the film on DVD, start playing the movie immediately, don’t let the introductory loop play too long because it spoils the beginning of the movie. As the film focuses on resisting the hostile forces, I was all in and loving it.
Bushwick transforms the executive and legislative branches’ psychological violence on the people whom they are supposed to serve into literal violence so it is extremely cathartic and satisfying to watch New Yorkers fight back. It is a fantasy of clearcut and decisive forceful resistance led by people with no survival skills, but plenty of will to fight and subversive resources. In real life, the battles are being fought incrementally and incessantly like a marathon. The film evokes images of Kosovo and being unable to walk down the street without being vulnerable to snipers, which makes the whole scenario less far fetched than scoffers would like to believe.
Bushwick starts off stronger than The Purge franchise in celebrating diversity and confronting the racist resurgence in our discourse. It gradually captures the pleasure of resistance with images of a certain iconic ethnic demographic throwing Molotov cocktails at the invaders. Rallying cries heard on the streets of Ferguson are led used by the resistance leaving a local church to confront the mercenaries. (I wonder if Ferguson residents found it exploitive or not). An older black woman cooking is the mastermind of the resistance. A Latina says, “Welcome to NY, stupid motherfucker.” The invaders thought that the city would be easy pickings because of “ethno diversity,” but instead finds it far more indomitable. The major cities that are being attacked by people from certain states reads like a roll call to our current political conflicts except the movie forgot Alabama, who appears to be leading the charge in real life. I think that this movie would be perfect for a franchise.
Even though it is a cynical casting move to have a blonde woman be the star of a movie set in Brooklyn, because viewer bias probably assumes that the more ethnic you are, the more innately able you are to fight so making Lucy a white woman exploits the audience’s assumptions that she won’t be able to fight. Character development is equated with her gradually getting her bearings, adjusting to her home becoming a war zone and responding effectively to her third tackle of the day with, “Get the fuck off me,” while shooting the man in his face. Brittany Snow plays Lucy, and I am not surprised that they originally cast Don’t Breathe’s Jane Levy in the role because that is whom I originally thought played Lucy. Apparently Levy is the face of urban survival. Still the movie inflicts enough physical injury on her to counter any cries that the film is thoroughly unrealistic.
I loved Bushwick so much that I hope that it becomes a franchise. I am disappointed that the movie either never came to my neck of the woods or was not properly promoted. While its commencement is extremely problematic, and I delivered a healthy dose of side eye in the first third of the film, I think that the remainder of the film more than made up for it, particularly the denouement. If you watch The Walking Dead, you will be able to predict a few moments that the filmmakers probably thought were unexpected, but viewers who watch too many movies and TV shows could clearly anticipate the shocking moment. In the end, I appreciate that Bushwick depicted the unlikely revolutionary and created a world that seemed realistic enough to mirror my own.