‘By Any Means’: Does God Need a Hitman?

 

When your dad is an American history teacher, your class meets around the clock. My dad both lived through and taught American history. 

He was a child of the civil rights era and educated my brother and me around coffee tables and turntables as he taught the history of African Americans through texts and music. So there are not many civil rights names and events I don’t know. Or so I thought.

Until I watched Elegance Bratton’s new film By Any Means, I never knew the name Vernon Dahmer. So if you’ve never heard of him, don’t feel bad.

Dirty Work

Dahmer owned a grocery store and sawmill in the Kelly Settlement outside Hattiesburg, Mississippi, just 90 miles from where I was born in Jackson. He also served as president of the Forrest County NAACP.

When Mississippi suppressed Black voters by using the poll tax to keep Black citizens from the ballot box, Dahmer told people they could pay their tax at his store. If they did not have the money, he would pay it.

His house was firebombed on Jan. 10, 1966, by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Sam Bowers. While Dahmer resisted his attackers with a shotgun, his wife and children escaped, but he did not. He died from smoke inhalation.

The story of the investigation to find and prosecute Dahmer’s murderers is the story of By Any Means.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Special Agent Wayne Strider. He is joined by executive producer and co-star Mark Wahlberg, who plays Mafia hitman Gregory Scarpa, who does the FBI’s dirty work to get people to talk.

“Turn the Other Cheek—That Ain’t Working, Is It?”

By Any Means re-litigates an enduring argument: What creates lasting change? Peace or force? Protests or pain?

The title is drawn from Malcolm X’s inaugural speech at the 1964 founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Malcolm X advocated force for much of his career, while Martin Luther King Jr. was an advocate for nonviolence. The question is also at the heart of the X-Men comics and movies, with Professor Charles Xavier standing in for King and Magneto representing Malcolm X.

The question has never actually been answered. Most Christians side with King’s interpretation of Jesus’ nonviolent way of being. 

However, as we see the erosion of voting rights and immigrants rounded up and shuttled to places like “Alligator Alcatraz,” many are wondering whether the God who commanded plagues on oppressors needs real-world representatives to do that kind of bidding in our time and place.

Hollywood Keeps Receipts

Some critics have lambasted the film, saying Bratton’s film reinforces white-savior narratives, with Scarpa being the man who gets it done. But that is exactly the discomfort Bratton offers.

Scarpa cannot be leveraged. Unlike Dahmer, he is nameless and faceless. 

He doesn’t live in Hattiesburg. Neither do his wife or children. 

A man who cannot be threatened by a community cannot be controlled by one. He is a kind of irresistible force.

The hard news about By Any Means is that it is not a great movie. The script is often flat. The performances are boilerplate. And the cinematography won’t have young artists rushing to enroll in film school.

The good news is that it is a necessary movie because these stories need to be told. They are not merely stories about American history. They are mirrors for the American soul.

Racism, sexism and xenophobia are never defeated. They require faithful resistance.

Go see this movie. It won’t win any Oscars. It might win your heart. 

It reminds us, in a crucial time of racism and Christian nationalism, what we are working against and who we are trying to become.

Vernon Dahmer is not in many textbooks and Hollywood keeps receipts. It takes someone like Mark Wahlberg to risk the money to keep these stories alive. He had to stand in a room and argue that an audience existed for these stories.

Showing up, movie ticket in hand, joins the resistance.