Once the train passes, we become aware of individuals: a boy stands beside a railroad sign, bored or sad, while another boy behind him listlessly throws rocks at a metal shed. An older boy with a cap and glasses suggests that they all go to a local bar and watch “hos” go in and out. One of the kids says no; if his mother were to see him there, “my ass is hers. You’d have to call the police to get her off me.” In the next shot the boy with cap and glasses is lying on a rail track, his neck against the wheel of a freight car, laughing and daring the other kids to push the train over him. (Burnett has said that in his neighborhood when he grew up, “most kids did not believe they would live longer than twenty-one.” In 1994, he added, “they do not believe that they will live longer than sixteen” [Kapsis 2011, 79].)
A wide-angle, deep-focus shot positioned at ground level shows a boy walking down the tracks toward the camera away from the railcar. He reaches the foreground, ties one of his sneakers, and tells everyone that he’s going home to get his BB gun. We don’t know it yet, but this is Stan Jr., nearing his teen years and entering a rebellious, troubling phase. He’s a sometimes-angry kid and virtually drops out of the later parts of the film. The camera follows him home as he walks down an alleyway behind houses, combing his Afro and observing the local sociology. Strolling along, he turns to look at two young men climbing over a fence, boosting a TV set. An elderly gentleman in shirt and tie who is watering his back lawn also sees this, and the thieves chase him off: “What you looking at, punk?” they shout. “I’ll kick your heart out!” Stan Jr. warns the thieves that the old gent is going to call the cops. (The call would do no good, because the LAPD was notoriously indifferent to black-on-black crimes.) One of the thieves tears a board from the fence, waves it like a weapon, and flies into nearly hysterical rage as his pal struggles to restrain him. Stan Jr. laughs. The thieves pick up the TV set, and the camera tracks backward as they race wildly down the alley carrying their loot, backlit by an afternoon sun. On the sound track, as counterpoint, we hear Cecil Grant’s 1945 “race” record, “I Wonder.” (“I wonder, my little darlin’, where can you be, while the moon is shining bright?”)
The sequence is characteristic of Burnett in its mixed emotional effects: a blend of humor, violence, beauty, and sadness, roughly like the great blues songs. The humor and beauty are underappreciated by commentators on Burnett’s films; without them, Killer of Sheep would be unbearable. In the closing shot of the sequence, for example, there’s a momentary beauty in the light of “the magic hour”; a crazy violence and comedy in the thieves’ run with the TV set; and a wistful sadness in the tune, which continues as Stan Jr. walks farther down the alley and passes a group of silent children looking over a wall at the theft.
“I wonder, my little darlin’” bleeds into the next sequence, which introduces Stan and establishes his depression. We look down at his shirtless back as he kneels on the floor of his kitchen, laying linoleum and talking with a big fellow named Oscar, who stands mostly offscreen, restlessly slapping his fists together. “I’m working myself into my own hell,” Stan says. “I close my eyes and don’t sleep at night.” (As one of Stan’s friends later observes, trying to count sheep would do him no good.) The big man offhandedly asks, “Why don’t you kill yourself?” Stan looks up—he’s a handsome man with a slight bald spot and sad eyes—and wanly smiles. “No, I ain’t going to kill myself,” he says. “Got a feeling I might do somebody else tomorrow, though.” He glances offscreen, and we cut to a surprising, almost surreal close-up of a child of about four or five, standing in a doorway, wearing a rubber Droopy-Dog mask, sucking a finger through the mask’s mouth hole. She’s Stan’s daughter, impressively acted by Angela Burnett and the subject of some of the film’s most memorable images. When Stan Jr. enters he treats her roughly, squeezing the mask and asking where his BB gun is. “Mamma threw it away,” she says. Stan tells his son to stop acting like he has “no sense” and shoos him off.
If Burnett is underappreciated for his humor, he’s equally underappreciated as a writer of dialogue, perhaps because people assume the conversations in his early films were improvised. Some of his lines have what Adrian Martin aptly describes as a “loopy” quality (2008, 73). A good example is when a woman named Dolores remarks that Stan would be good-looking if he didn’t frown so much. Hearing this, a nearby fellow boasts, “Some sister told me I look just like Clark Gable!” Dolores looks wearily at him and mutters, “You about as tasteless as a carrot.” Many of the speeches in Killer of Sheep have this wry, hard-boiled quality. In the scene at hand, Oscar notices two men approaching the back of Stan’s house and makes a quick exit: “Here come Bracy and Ernie Cox. I don’t want them asking me for money.” The two men enter, and Bracy (Charles Bracy, a longtime friend of Burnett who was also responsible for the sound recording in Killer of Sheep) observes Stan scraping the floor with a kitchen knife: “I see your wife got you towing the cart. I see Oscar must have been here. . . . He’s the only one I know wears that Old Spice aftershave.”
Bracy is a bumptious type, unmarried and unemployed, whose raucous personality makes Stan’s depression more evident. (In his commentary on the Milestone DVD, Burnett emphasizes that the poor have little if any possibility to get medical treatment for depression.) Before the contrast between the two men is fully established, however, we briefly leave the kitchen for a sweet and humorous encounter. Stan’s daughter Angela hears a whistle and runs outside, where she meets a shy little boy standing against a hurricane fence; she sucks her thumb through the hole in her mask, moves a little closer to him, and quietly bounces against the fence. Brief scenes involving her will become a motif. She’s a key witness to adult behavior: innocent, not yet marked by the harshness and traumas of life in Watts, but coming to an awareness of her family’s troubles.
When we return to Bracy and Stan, they’re seated alone at a table in the poor but well-kept kitchen, sipping tea. Stan presses a warm teacup against his head and wearily remarks that it reminds him of “making love, how warm her forehead get some time.” Bracy laughs; he thinks warm tea is nothing but “hot air” and doesn’t care for “women with malaria.” He and his pals have been walking the streets at night, he explains, hesitating to drop in; Stan says not to worry, he never sleeps. Another of Burnett’s elliptical cuts shows the two men later in the evening, playing dominos as somewhere in the night a dog barks (the sound design of the film is as effective as the photography, establishing an ever-present offscreen environment). Stan’s lovely wife, who has apparently been ignored during all this, appears in the kitchen doorway without speaking, her hair wrapped in a bath towel and an angry expression on her face. She turns and exits. Whatever nostalgia for intimacy Stan might feel, he doesn’t act on it; he simply rubs his face in fatigue and says it’s time to go to work. Bracy yawns and looks at his watch: “Maybe me and Ernest can luck up on a slave [i.e., a menial, part-time job] if we’s lucky.”
Each episode in the remainder of the film is relatively autonomous, illustrating typical events in the life of an ordinary but admirable man who is trying to cope. Like certain forms of jazz or modernist narrative, these episodes could be somewhat reordered without disturbing the fundamental unity or meaning of the film. The first two, however, are in dialectical contrast, representing male industrial labor versus female domesticity. To the music of William Grant Still’s “Afro-American Symphony,” we’re given a montage of Stan at work in the slaughterhouse, hosing the floor and carrying sheep parts; then at home, we see his wife awaiting his return. The wife applies makeup while Stan’s daughter, wearing a dress, sits on the back porch floor next to an old phonograph, playing with a white doll that has no clothing, happily singing along with Earth, Wind, and Fire’s recording of “Reasons.”
The next