**/****
directed by Margaret Brown
by Alex Jackson Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths is the flipside to blandly noble docs like The Recruiter. Faithful to the ideal of "objectivity," the typical documentary filmmaker doesn't love anything; Brown's problem is that she loves everything. The result is a film that works very well as cinema: it has a pulse, a mood, a feeling, and is never boring. Yet it also has a terminal case of the cutes, and after it was over I can't say I felt all that edified. The film is about the traditionally segregated Mardi Gras carnival in Brown's hometown of Mobile, Alabama–the white Mobile Carnival Association's celebration and that of the black Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association. There's controversy regarding the white Mardi Gras queen's slave-trading ancestors, who are credited with bringing the very last ship of African slaves to America–illegally, after the trade had been abolished–and forming the "Africa Town" community of Mobile once their smuggling was discovered and the slaves escaped. White residents dismiss an integrated Mardi Gras by saying that blacks want their own celebration. The blacks respond that they don't have a choice. There's a brief bit in the film where we learn that the MCA rents out their floats to the MAMGA as soon as they're done with them. Of course, MAMGA could make their own floats if they only had the kind of Old Money flowing through MCA thanks to centuries of slavery! But I dunno–this doesn't register very high on my social-outrage meter. Given that she's a native of the town, I doubt Brown has enough distance to develop a real perspective on the material. She seems to have made a documentary about Mobile because she loves Mobile. I thought there might be a touch of paternalism when she pays off a scene of a portly black girl reading several essays describing her love of Moon Pies with an elderly black man complaining that he got beads instead of Moon Pies. Except, how would I then explain the scene where we see a white Mardi Gras society of men talk about how you can drink beer through their plastic Mardi Gras masks, even though they're made to look like "Mongoloids"? Stopping just short of condescension, Brown exhibits affection for the idiosyncrasies of white and black Southerners alike. By the end, you realize she isn't even advocating an all-inclusive Mardi Gras as much as simply warmer relations between the camps. In her conception of Mobile, the two have already been integrated.
