The Blackout Tells The Story of the Other Side

Last night in the swelter of the heat wave, it was refreshing to watch another heatwave unfold on the TV. Francisco and I watched “Blackout,” a movie about the 2003 power outage and how it unfolded in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. One telltale scene was when the radio broadcast how ‘New Yorkers are all coming together, lighting candles, helping their neighbors, and being civil.” Not in Bed Stuy.

There, a world away from serene Manhattan, black people cowered inside their dark, hot apartments as thugs looted, burned and trashed the world around them. The story would not have been complete without the honor student. Yes, he dies, stabbed by a hood after sauntering out into the gloom and meeting up with an undesirable who had had words with him the day before.

The story shows what happens when the lights go out for a day and a night, and how relationships either go bust or flourish. One man who left his cute wife for a supposed day at work crept upstairs to have sex and smoke doobies with the hottie in the other apartment. He’s tripped up when she asks him how he got home from work and he answers ‘the train.’ “The Train!? she storms. “We have had a power outage all day, there ain’t no trains running!” Oops, he’s out.

Then a slumlord returns to his building with the intention of firing his 32-year superintendent, an old black guy named George with a permanent cigar and a penchant for blowing off his duties and slacking on repair work. But as they spend a night in his apartment, trapped because of the blackout, they get to know each other and find a lot more in common than they knew. George regales the Jewish landlord (what’s for dinner? beans and franks–no thanks) with tales of his baseball days in the Negro Leagues with Jackie Robinson.

So when the lights come on, the landlord, Saul, has a reawakening, and threatens to fire his driver who never came to pick him up. Another scene shows a gangbanger who’s about to wail on an innocent yet fiesty black barber, but when the lights go on, there is so much celebrating that the threats are forgotten.