ENGAGING NORMA RAE: A JOURNAL
Mills, Nicolaus
July 18, 1977 Dear Ann: No matter how long I stay here I'm sure to go on feeling like Rip Van Winkle. Twelve years after Mississippi I'm back in a South I still can't believe. It's not simply...
...But none of these reasons is given, and in the context of Norma Rae their flimsiness encourages us to think that at the right time Reuben and Norma Rae will become lovers...
...I can't see anything except raw power beating the mill owners and executives...
...Possibly...
...It's only temporary," the doctor patronizingly assures her, and the scene ends with Norma Rae screaming at him and he reluctantly agreeing to write her mother a note excusing her from work...
...And their remoteness is even more discouraging...
...Reuben is a good teacher but never fully likable...
...Norma Rae: III May 10, 1979 TONIGHT I was moved by a scene I barely noticed before: one in which Norma Rae's father (Pat Hingle) talks about being tired from work, then gives his daughter a hug, and as he puts his arm around her, we see that he is missing a finger...
...Or gets everything wrong...
...The music stops, and the noise from the weaving room where Norma Rae works begins...
...The media give me a bit of hope...
...It's coy but interestingly coy, a variation on the Pygmalion story—with Reuben as a Jewish Prince (his ideal New York day is to play a little handball in the morning, go to a performance of Aida in the afternoon, and eat Chinese for dinner) educating a nubile but worn Norma Rae about the finer things in life (Dylan Thomas in this case) and the importance of building a union...
...Norma Rae March 31...
...Enough to get more than a spot on 60 Minutes or the evening news...
...We see Reuben leafletting the mill, forcing the Henley company to let him inspect its bulletin boards, speaking in a church, but these scenes—although moving at points—do not set the tempo for Norma Rae...
...Or still worse, New England with its nineteenth-century defects intact...
...But every once in a while they appear to drop their guard and listen...
...Even when he compliments Norma Rae, calling her another Mother Jones, he does it in a way that enforces his role as a teacher (she must ask who Mother Jones was...
...For Ritt, whose past films include The Molly Maguires, Sounder, The Front, political coherence is clearly important, and he took a huge cut in salary to make Norma Rae...
...As it turns out, the workers vote for unionization by a margin of 425 to 373, but the margin could have been twice as big or the reverse...
...They looked as if they had been in a pillow fight...
...Even when I allow for the fact that this is the town leading the fight to unionize J. P. Stevens, I'm still astonished...
...It is not until Norma Rae and her mother are home in their yard that the quietness with which the film began again dominates the screen...
...We have not been prepared for this climactic scene and must take it on faith...
...The weariness and defiance that alternately characterize her now have a source...
...Bait and switch in this case means that we take 481 home an inferior product to the one advertised...
...Sometimes—as at the hearings the House Labor Subcommittee held here this week—they seem so anxious to fit everything into a three-minute TV spot or an 800-word column that nothing less than a warm corpse is enough to hold their interest...
...But the worst is yet to come—and at this point we are jolted again...
...As far as the South I care about goes, it's Norma Rae or nothing for the next ten years...
...The answer to that question doesn't improve with a second watching of Norma Rae...
...A wife talks about her husband's death from brown lung disease...
...Norma Rae in turn is an excellent pupil, who not only becomes the "mensch" her teacher wants her to be but his teacher as well, introducing him to workers he would never reach on his own...
...Our interest in the romance between Reuben and Norma Rae depends in great measure on the tensions produced by its nonconsummation (even after a nude swim on a hot afternoon), and yet by the picture's end, we still don't know why they haven't gone to bed...
...But even this scene raises more questions then it answers...
...Used this weekend to read Rise Gonna Rise, Mimi Conway's new book on Southern textile workers...
...I keep thinking all that is dramatic...
...Inches away from each other, the two women must shout in order to be heard...
...Crowded for time, Ritt ceases to make the union issues he began with an organic part of his film and instead reduces them to background material or sketches them in quickly...
...Roanoke Rapids August 11, 1977 WALKED BY the Rosemary mill this morning...
...How can a movie do the same...
...They arrive on a press bus, are taken to a restaurant for a two-hour lunch, and leave as if they were rich tourists who had just put in a hard day sampling the 482 fare of an underdeveloped country...
...The mystery is gratuitous here, and once again its effect is to cost Norma Rae political coherence...
...The worst case of this short-circuiting occurs at a house meeting Reuben calls early in his organizing drive...
...Henley mill where she now works...
...Then suddenly everything changes...
...The camera does not stay on his hand for more than a second or two...
...Her response to Norma Rae: "In the movie they make like it's only me that's important, and there were so many others...
...Or is it a unanimous vote for a union...
...Hollywood never made a movie about the farm workers or the civil rights movement...
...Thanks to the acting of Leibman and Field, the romance holds our attention...
...The help Norma Rae has come for is, however, the last thing she is going to get from this man...
...But that is long enough...
...Either it can develop new characters and show us how other workers at the O. P. Henley mill are also victimized, or it can take Norma Rae's frustration a step further and show her becoming politicized...
...His fatigue, his mutilation from a job in which the machinery is cannibalistic, his love for Norma Rae all merge...
...In 1895 no less a figure than Stanford White was brought here to design a mill and construct thirty houses for mill employees...
...New England transmogrified...
...What better reason, I think, to judge Ritt harshly when he takes the easy way out or to feel that praise for Norma Rae as a feminist film obscures its political thinness more than it captures the spirit of Norma Rae...
...But now we react very differently...
...But in practice, what Ritt does is switch the direction of his film altogether, making it revolve around Norma Rae's sexually charged but unconsummated romance with Reuben Warshovsky (Ron Leibman), the Textile Workers' organizer who has come to the Henley mill to see if it can be unionized...
...And they did, knowing they didn't have to rush, knowing she wouldn't stop listening at the end of a day or a month or a year...
...There are writers who come here and do not pull out the next day, and there is a documentary film crew from San Francisco that has put in a number of weeks...
...And that's what worries me...
...What if it's bad...
...And on it goes in a neat circle: one complaint per worker about horrifying conditions and yet all of it sanitized—nothing that hits us in a way that seeing these problems fleshed out would...
...Is it Norma Rae that her fellow workers are honoring with their silence...
...What we have now are a series of mills with bricked-over windows and workers' houses so narrow and cramped that cross ventilation is impossible...
...It's not simply that relations between blacks and whites are better than anything I could have imagined, it's the number of radical whites (native born) I'm constantly meeting...
...Nor do things improve when Ritt tries to portray the process by which Reuben convinces the workers at the Henley mill to vote for a union...
...Or a combination of the two...
...Ritt's reply: "She's turned into a middle-class bourgeois woman who doesn't want anyone to know about her life...
...May 3, 1979 AN ARTICLE in People Magazine on Crystal Lee Jordan (now Sutter...
...What I wonder is, can this South be made as "interesting" as the old South...
...We know that it is not a permanent part of the landscape, only time away from the mill, and in the midst of it, we realize what has become of the young Norma Rae we saw in the opening snapshots...
...If we start winning the brown lung cases we're taking for hearings, if the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers can begin picking up other mill towns...
...Horrified, Norma Rae grabs her mother by the hand, and pulling her along as if she were a child, rushes her to the company doctor...
...Their first serious meeting, when Norma Rae stumbles into Reuben's motel room with a bloody nose that her lover has given her, is a model of tact (Reuben gets ice for her nose without asking questions) and ethnic comedy, and the relationship between them builds on this combination of affection and tension...
...March 25, 1979 I STILL CANNOT get up the nerve to see Norma Rae...
...But moving for how long and at what cost...
...It's the kind of modesty and inclusiveness Ritt is capable of, and beyond that, it's the material of Norma Rae coming through...
...April3, 1979 WHY SHOULD Norma Rae end this way...
...483...
...The shock is terrific...
...It is the kind of mid-course change that directors make all the time in film and especially in TV, where the need for audience identification is crucial, but I find that as it happens in Norma Rae I'm paralyzed with anger...
...Yesterday I was in the union's office on Main Street when two workers came in directly from their shift...
...We do not, except for Norma Rae, have a clear idea of how Reuben gets through to people, nor do we understand how he overcomes the obstacles, such as pitting black against white, that the company sets in his way...
...Out of respect for Norma Rae's new marriage...
...And then Ifeel my age, as if I were waiting for the sixties to begin again...
...A man complains about the way the company has bricked over the mill's windows...
...Mimi is someone I saw all the time I was in Roanoke Rapids...
...Norma Rae:II April 2, 1979 MY ANGER is in check tonight, and I am able to watch the romance between Reuben and Norma Rae without too much squirming...
...New York March 22, 1979 WHEN I READ that letter or passages from the journal I kept two years ago while I was in Roanoke Rapids working for the Carolina Brown Lung Association, the making of Norma Rae seems too good to be true...
...The problem is that, after carefully setting up these options, Director Martin Ritt does not commit himself to either...
...The din from the looms dominates the scene, and as Norma Rae and a fellow worker eat their lunches in a glassed-in side room, we see that even here there is too much noise for normal conversation...
...Norma Rae turns to her mother (Barbara Baxley), who is sitting on her far side, 480 and when she does not respond to a question, Norma realizes that somewhere between the start of lunch and the present moment, her mother has lost her hearing...
...He goes through the motions of showing Norma Rae's evolution into a "union maid," as he sticks to the outlines of the film's inspiration, Henry Leifermann's story of Crystal Lee Jordan, who six years ago played a key role in the Textile Workers' organizing campaign at the J. P. Stevens mills in Roanoke Rapids...
...Only a handful of workers show up, and in response to a question Reuben asks, they tell him about their troubles at work...
...In the gutters of the street like dandelion fluff...
...Cotton everywhere...
...As a result, by the film's end, Reuben and Norma Rae have touched each other deeply, and their good-by (they shake hands rather than embrace) is moving as much for what it excludes as what it includes...
...For me it is the movie equivalent of bait and switch: the gambit by which we're lured into a store because of a specially advertised product, told the store is out of the product, and then—the store hopes— persuaded to buy what is available (usually a costlier version of the same product...
...A woman says that even when she gets menstrual cramps she is not allowed to sit down at her machine...
...They've spent years denying there was such a thing as brown lung (all the while firing workers whom they feared they might have to put on disability...
...What we get is a glimpsed struggle rather than a dramatically achieved one...
...At best they're Good Germans...
...The only foreshadowing comes when Norma Rae, after being fired for her union work, defiantly stands on a table and holds up a cardboard sign with UNION lettered on it and one by one her fellow workers respond to her gesture by turning their machines off until the weaving room is silent...
...1979 THE OPENING of Norma Rae is as good as anything I could have hoped for...
...Day after day I see people in the Brown Lung office who can barely walk or catch their breath...
...As the credits are being shown, the screen is alternately filled with snapshots of a young Norma Rae (Sally Field) and pictures of the O.P...
...In the cyclone fence around the mill like spider webbing...
...Except for Jennifer Warnes singing, "It Goes as it Goes," there is no sound at all, and as the cotton, which we first see in bales, is carded, spun, and woven, it is as if what was going on were magic rather than an industrial process...
...Because of Reubens dedication to union work...
...In the press kit I got from Twentieth Century Fox, the studio praises Martin Ritt for bringing Norma Rae in two weeks ahead of schedule...
...In the end they seem like postcards sent from an unknown region of the country to a middle-class audience...
...It'll pass off...
...The longer I'm here the more sinister the mills seem...
...The ultimate cost of the romance between Reuben and Norma shows up, however, in what happens to the original political concerns of the film...
...Even then it was clear she was ready to stay as long as it took for people to tell her what they were feeling...
...There is nothing subtle about this kind of suffering, and in a town this small, nobody can say, "I didn't know...
...So perfect has this opening sequence been that there are really only two directions in which Norma Rae can go after this point...
Vol. 26 • September 1979 • No. 4
