Wilkerson’s 2020 Book, however, offers a somewhat radical interpretation of the prejudices in the US that goes well beyond racial lines. Instead, she presents parallels between the US’s socioeconomic hierarchy (from colonial America to the Jim Crow South through to today), Nazi Germany and the caste system in India, to argue that the social construct of caste – the system of dividing society by class or group based on social, cultural, ethnic and/or hereditary factors – has been an invisible and insidious influence on global societies for centuries. On the first reading, the director didn’t quite understand or agree with every part of the book but she was thoroughly engaged. “So I read it again and as I started to go deeper into this anthropological thesis, and really understand the repercussions of what I was learning, I became very arrested and wanted to share it,” she explains.
Four years later, the result is an expansive, emotionally potent drama grappling with the weighty themes and ideas that Wilkerson’s writing explores, as well as the writer’s journey itself. Where the academic book blends philosophy, sociology, theology and historical fact with anecdotal evidence, DuVernay expands the more personal stories of humanity on screen. She does this both through flashback sequences to historical figures mentioned, such as the real-life couple August Landmesser and Irma Eckler, a German man and a German-Jewish woman who married during World War Two – “I was interested in how to extend Isabel’s explanations through the development of the human stories that she introduces” – and by making the author the film’s protagonist too.
With Wilkerson stunningly portrayed by Academy Award-nominated actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, DuVernay tracks her “intellectual quest” around the world – her exploration of the social ills that led to to the 2012 killing of African American teen Trayvon Martin catalysing her wider investigation – as the writer discovers uncomfortable truths and banal horrors during trips to Berlin, New Delhi and back home. All the while, Isabel is processing unfathomable personal grief; tragically, the journalist and academic not only suffered the loss of her husband Brett Kelly Hamilton in 2015, but her mother a year later and her cousin too. “She was gracious enough to tell me those stories about her loved ones, her love stories with them, and how their passing affected her,” says DuVernay of the 15 months of conversations on video calls she had with Wilkerson. “It was a beautiful gift that she gave the movie.”
It would be easy to compare this sort of globe-spanning writing endeavour by a female writer to Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling travelogue-turned-film Eat Pray Love – Origin might be more “Grieve, Discover, Write” with far more narrative probing and cinematic flair – but DuVernay bristles at the comparison. “We have a whole subcategory of male geniuses moving around the world to solve big problems and journey through their intellectual curiosity, and those are regarded as their own work and have great weight,” says DuVernay. “Where we are is images of a woman alone in the world, thinking, feeling, are reduced to the very few cinematic comparisons of it that we have, which is unfortunate.”