The Nine Lives of Marion Barry

                Cities like Gary, Detroit, and Newark with majority African-American communities have had little luck with mayors.  Kwame Kirkpatrick, Marion Barry, Tony Mack, Ray Nagin, Sharpe James, Pete Mandich and George Chacharis.  Big plans and lofty talk result in reoccurring tragedies, American-style.  Tales of racy sex, public dead ends, corruption, and scandal.  Yet, the tragedy--in which one's greatest strength results in self destruction--these communities devotedly support the very charismatic but deeply flawed men doing little while taking a lot.  Families in these cities feel the pinch of neglect and the crunch of choked budgets.  But the critical element of tragedy comes from the cynicism of men like Marion Barry who prey upon a feeling (real and imagined) of persecution to propel them listlessly onward, wasting our time.              

                 "The Nine Lives of Marion Barry" follows the four-times elected mayor, who was born the son of sharecropping cotton pickers in Mississippi.  A school board member, City Council President, and business-friendly candidate.  (Incumbent Mayor Walter Washington considered a franchise tax to close the budget deficit.  Barry, his opponent, helped scupper the tax and made friends in the white establishment, though they abandoned him in his 1978 run..)  Handsome, charismatic, and quite sharp (Barry was working on a PhD in chemistry before he joined the civil rights movement).  As the film's black and white shots demonstrate, Barry had potential.  According to the Feb. 19, 1990 Nation "Barry's accomodation to the city's moneyed interests was matched by a commitment to delivering services and employment to the city's black majority."
                 Barry's greatest sin was not his personal hubris, it was allowing an excuse for the conservative establishment and reactionary prosecutors an opportunity to topple participatory democracy in D.C.  To, in a sense, use the spectacle of his failed leadership as an excuse to disenfranchise thousands of poor and struggling people.  These forces used the drug laws to selectively act to pick off political opponents.  Barry was not a victim, but he allowed his troubles to marginalize his own community and allow moral crusaders an issue.
                  Journalists and authors speculate about his possibilities, one going so far as to compare Barry's potential with that of Martin Luther King.  But the footage we see of Barry from the 1970s belies such gauzy assertions.  Even then he was vain and pompous--a mercurial demagogue who would drop "dig" and "jive talk" in his dashiki just as soon as a he'd down highballs with the D.C. elite in a silk suit.  The compiled footage is astonishing:  Barry sermonizing to schoolchildren about the danger of drugs; a lithe Barry unable to walk up the steps to his apartment while running for city council in 2004.  They are the images of a shaky, sweaty, and swaying addict (with a city burning around him) speeding towards the wall.
                The film's frame is an election for Ward 8, a poor black district in which Barry notoriously won with 58% of the vote.  Because the make of a tree is its roots, the film follows Barry's structure from youth through the present day.  The charmer of the post-60s "empowerment" movement quickly leaps into the top spot of Reagan-era Washington as the bright gleam upon black politics.

                 In fact, his first term glowed:  He was viewed as a competent leader whose administration is a model of smart and savvy leadership, African-American leadership.  But with few funds and Republican Washington wedded to big business, Barry burns up dollars through contracts and large and crony-ridden public employment.  Promises became mere rhetoric, governance a sham.  And by his third term, his only policy is patronage; Barry loses control of himself and the city.
                 Quite dramatically, his downfall coincides with the degeneration of urban black life--from the idealism of emergent equality to the brutalities of coke-fueled post-industrial blight.  By 1987 more than half of the 400-plus homicides in Washington were classified as drug related.  Seventy-five percent of the victims and 86 percent of the assailants were black males.  The 80s brought disenchantment with government but it also ushered in a flood of drugs and mass incarceration. As Barry made his way from the mayor's office to the courthouse (charged with a misdemeanor) and back, the documentary shows how the Gingrich Congress stripped the re-elected mayor of his financial powers, rendering him little more than a figurehead.

                  The film skillfully captures the collapse of an individual life swinging from tragedy to farce.  Mayor Barry, who in 1978 described a government "for us by us," withers into a lonely fiend:  diminished, shameless, and unbowed.  But while Barry becomes a more transparent fraud the closer we lean, he is visibly magnetic, even at his most depraved.  In a major speech in his 1990s comeback, there is a  model of the man embodied in his rhetoric.  The bombast when read, like Mencken's word-by-word analysis of Harding's soothing "Gamiliese," exemplifies energy and style trumping substance:   "Our entire city can get itself off its knees and do for itself again, and bring itself out of where we are now again.

                  The hardest part for me was watching those in Barry's oribt--his intelligent godson and many admirers--consistently disappointed by his inability to shake personal vices, or even to control the last remaining pieces of his broken life.  He tells the camera "I don't think too much about the past."
                   How could he?
                   How could he allow himself to remember the grainy video of him smoking crack with a former mistress?  The wan face of his long-suffering wife?  D.C.'s chalked outlines, like a city-wide Pollock painting?  The increasing dropouts?  The endless murders?  AIDS? Public housing?  To dwell on a past he helped to produce would admit some level of culpability, of shame.  But as we see,  Barry has none.     

                The film's story is a cautionary one.  Americans are too often pulled by the star of the most powerful, charismatic, or even redemptive personalities:  Smooth Clinton.  Cool Obama.  Friendly Bush.  Lovable Reagan.  Yet the policies and product rarely match the packaging and the sucker left with the check, especially in the case of Mayor Barry, is the guy with few hopes and many needs.  But let it never be said that Washington is an unforgiving city.  Truman's line was that one seeking friendship in the nation's capital should buy a dog.  This might, in fact, be excessively harsh.  Ex-mayor, ex-prisoner, twice-divorced, and permanent addict, Councilman Barry, won reelection in 2008 by a landslide.  In fact, he has never lost an election in Washington D.C.