The HBO production’s strongest points are the diversions from Wright’s original text, many of them indications that Johnson and Parks took to their source material with an eye toward James Baldwin’s salient critiques of Wright. The same could be said for the film itself. He skulks about the screen, and the South Side, in green hair and punkish attire: black high-water pants, black nail polish, a black leather jacket with OR AM I FREAKING OUT spray-painted across the back. This Bigger, who more often goes by Big, is played by a graceful and dynamic Ashton Sanders ( Moonlight). The film thankfully dispenses with some of the novel’s most graphic elements and moves its protagonist out of the 1930s and into contemporary Chicago. A new HBO adaptation from the director Rashid Johnson and the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks now joins its predecessors.
The point, Wright insists throughout the text, is that Bigger was conditioned to become a criminal by a country that viewed all black men as savages. Realizing he’s killed her, Bigger frantically carries Mary’s body to the Dalton family’s furnace, then decapitates her corpse so it will fit inside.
In the novel’s climactic event, Bigger accidentally suffocates Mary one night after helping the drunken girl to her room and fearing her blind mother would sense his presence if she heard Mary’s lustful banter. Dalton, a wealthy white man whose daughter, Mary, soon takes an interest in the young black man. Native Son follows Bigger Thomas, a poor black man living in Chicago during the Great Depression. But as source material, it’s grisly and heavy-handed, a tale that originally was met with either horror or adulation. It might seem, then, that Wright’s novel is the kind of story that lends itself easily-or at least fruitfully-to visual renderings. By 2014, there had been yet another Native Son film and two more plays. Ten years later, Wright played his own protagonist in an unfortunate Argentinian film adaptation, Sangre negra (“black blood”). In March 1941, Wright and the playwright Paul Green staged a contentious, Orson Welles–directed production at New York’s St. Just over a year after the author Richard Wright published his first novel, Native Son, in March 1940, the text was adapted for the first time. This article contains spoilers for Native Son.
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