Elevated Black Shit
On American Fiction
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At the end of American Fiction, the main protagonist Monk dies. Not in the hail of bullets that tear through his flesh in one of the film’s three psych-out endings. Instead, his death comes through his gradual deradicalization, culminating in the film adaptation of his book Fuck! going into production. Fuck! was just supposed to be a sort of inside joke to Monk. A middle finger to the publishing industry and a catharsis for the fledgling author whose previous works had been critically praised but commercially panned by readers and industry insiders who weren’t interested in reading anything from a Black author that wasn’t about The Black Experience™.
American Fiction, the directorial debut from Emmy-winning TV writer and former journalist Cord Jefferson based on author Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, the film has garnered a lot of praise and award recognition, even earning a “Best Adapted Screenplay” Oscar. The film is a satire about the literary world, and by extension Hollywood, and its reductive depictions of Blackness.
Admittedly, before I even saw the film back in December, I could already sense that the racial politics were going to be reductive and dated. That’s not to say that the publishing industry or Hollywood isn’t still racist. In fact, they’re the first ones to tell you that they are. This year marks a decade since #OscarSoWhite campaign and a few years since #PublishingPaidMe. It’s been four years since the big lofty promises that entertainment industries purported that they would do their damndest to be better allies to Black people in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Of course, those promises were either never met or eventually rescinded as we can see as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion roles continue to be phased out across Hollywood.
But to expand on something that writer Erika Stallings tweeted saying “that George Floyd's death created a lot of opportunities for Black people in pop culture/media that would have never gone to someone like George tells you a lot,” it’s also telling that a person like Floyd – working class, and at the time of his murder deemed a “criminal,” is someone who, if made into an on-screen character, would represent to many people a blight on Blackness.
Because, of course, we should always be mindful that the real victims of the misrepresentation of poor and working-class Black folks in the media are middle-class Blacks. The ones who want you to know that despite their degrees, that you can still “catch these hands” much like Monk’s brother Cliff in the film who is a plastic surgeon who threatens a random white character to a beat down in a singular moment of bravado.
From the opening scene when Monk gets into a spat with a white student in his class because he has “nigger” written on the board, much to his student –- and eventually school administrators' — dismay, Monk comes off as more an edgelord than a professor of literature. Having the protagonist of my film write the hard -ER on a whiteboard in order to stir white discomfort is the kind of thing I would’ve written a character to do when I was nineteen, newly radicalized, and thought that making white people angry was the most radical thing a Black person could do. But I’m twenty-eight now and I know I personally wouldn’t lean on such empty provocations. It’s unfortunate to see that so much of the Black art we make and praise still centers whiteness, even as such pandering is masqueraded as being vanguard.
American Fiction enters a canon of recent films that position themselves as boldly remarking on the sociopolitical climate, while ultimately arriving at a message of fatalism. In Lena Waithe’s Queen and Slim, the two main characters are killed by the police, ending the manhunt for the male protagonist portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya after he kills an officer. In Promising Young Woman, the debut film of writer/director Emerald Fennell, Cassie, the film’s anti-heroine, is murdered by her friend’s rapist — but it’s okay! It was all a part of her elaborate plan that would result in said rapist/murderer being arrested at the end of the film. In Adam McKay’s climate change comedy Don’t Look Up, the asteroid that the film’s scientists had so urgently tried to warn people of, finally hits Earth destroying everything in its path.
In my most generous reading, I would consider that maybe these are all just mangled attempts at trying to embody the ethos of Huey P. Newton’s concept of “revolutionary suicide,” the founding Black Panther’s idea that death at the hand of the state is a near inevitability when one submits themselves to a life of radicalism and yet there’s something much bigger than ourselves that demand such a sacrifice.
But death is only inevitable in a world where white supremacy exists. Art is the only medium where we can be anything we want I’ve been told. “A story with Black characters that’s going to appeal to a lot of people doesn’t need to take place on a plantation, they don’t need to take place in the projects,” Jefferson says at a press conference following his Oscar win. “It doesn’t need to have drug dealers in it, and doesn’t need to have gang members in it.” Elsewhere Jefferson says that “the Black experience now includes everything, all the way up to being the President of the United States.” It’s always revealing to know what lives are granted with the gift of nuance and which are flattened into the umbrella of stereotype.
In American Fiction’s course corrective attempt, they often lean into reductive engagement with Black art. The film relies a lot on visual gestures towards great Black art that otherwise has no link to the scene or the film writ large, in an attempt to elevate itself. This includes a brief shot of Monk staring at the photo from Gordon Parks’ The Doll Test series – the famous social experiment where children are asked a series of questions that look at the psychological impact of white supremacy on Black children. There’s the scene where Monk hashes out his ideological differences with his literary rival Sintara and she’s holding the book “White Negroes” by Lauren Michelle Jackson – a book that explores the white co-option of Black culture and aesthetics. But in this film, the appropriation happens intracommunally.
When you reach the end of the film and find out that Monk proverbially kills himself by killing his Fuck! self insert by police fire in the film adaptation, we’re meant to think he has committed an act of self-betrayal by not sticking to his alleged principles. But the literary street cred he accrues at the expense of economically disenfranchised Blacks makes him less Messianic and more Judas.
