![]() Wright’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is a young black Chicagoan who accidentally kills a white woman, Mary Dalton, the daughter of his employer. ![]() Where the novel starts, with a bleak clang-“Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!”-of the antihero’s alarm clock, the movie begins with a statement of his readiness: “I don’t need an alarm clock to wake me up.” It is awake to the ways in which the story, as invented from Wright’s mind and reiterated in earlier adaptations, lulls its observer into easy satisfaction. Thus, the “Native Son” that premières, on HBO, this weekend-a movie, directed by Rashid Johnson, from a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks-is a feat of literary criticism almost before it is a work of drama. To transport the action of the novel-published in 1940, set in the Jim Crow nineteen-thirties, rife with melodramatic energy that is positively Victorian-to the twenty-first century requires not just a rejiggering of its particulars but a reconsideration of its essence. A contemporary update of Richard Wright’s “ Native Son” is necessarily an overhaul. ![]()
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