"American Fiction" | December 2023 | starring Jeffrey Wright, Issa Rae & Sterling K. Brown
- Thread starter Optimus Prime
- Start date
-
- Tags
- american fiction
Quoting again, I guess I was the only mfer that caught this line/scene?Also... what was up with the scene with Monk and Carolina after he introduced her to his moms? They were sitting on the couch, he mentions that he thinks that Carolina reminds his moms of his sister.
Then goes on to list reasons why she would remind her of his sister, and one of the things mentioned is how they're both fantastic kissers
Was I the only one that caught that shyt?
Duke Dixon
Superstar
He didn't say anything wrong to me unless my ADD is going wild.
Monk was joking. He just told his girl that she has similar qualities as his sister. Some women would think that means he likes his sister. Monk sarcastically brought up the kissing part as a way to joke about how it sounds but isn't the case.
Last edited:
Black people don't joke like that
My wife and I both hit the
after hearing that shyt
Outside of The Coli echo chamber, a whole lot of black people aint like the film at all.
I personally loved the movie and wasn’t until he won when I found out people didn’t like it. Most of the quote tweets to the tweet I posted were against the film. But when I looked a little more, I found this great thread on the film.
RickyDiBiase
The Sword of Jesus of Nazareth
Twitter is just as much as an echo chamber
but I also didn't care for it, hated the main character
Twitter and Facebook are the OG echo chambers.
But the discourse about AF on twitter is very counter-echo chamber, and very black.
There's something to me though, about the idea that every movie like this has to be either torn down or worshipped, and isn't allowed to exist in it's own way, on it's own merit-- the movie touches on that in a sense, but I think one of the ultimate unfair aspects of "black" movies is this dynamic. Something like the dynamic behind Get Out and the other movies by Peele.
Percival Everett said in one interview, “I’ve been called a Southern writer, a Western writer, an experimental writer, a mystery writer, and I find it all kind of silly. I write fiction.” It’s this attempt to pin writers down that Everett satirized so effectively in his exquisitely mordant novel “Erasure.”
Percival Everett said in one interview, “I’ve been called a Southern writer, a Western writer, an experimental writer, a mystery writer, and I find it all kind of silly. I write fiction.” It’s this attempt to pin writers down that Everett satirized so effectively in his exquisitely mordant novel “Erasure.”
Dr. Narcisse
Veteran
This was sharp as fukk too:
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 fukk! going into production. fukk! 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 “******” 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 fukk! 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.
https://www.hannaphifer.com/blog/elevated-black-shyt
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 fukk! going into production. fukk! 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 “******” 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 fukk! 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.
Dr. Narcisse
Veteran
Everett has been super coy about the film, declining interviews about it for its entire press run, speaking only on stage with Jefferson. Part of it is that he was paid for the rights to his book (a relatively paltry sum), and part of it is he doesn't think much of the film (I know someone extremely close to him) - but he also doesn't really care one way or the other. Like, this sort of shyt is so irrelevant to him. He exists in a world so separate from the mainstream - not just in terms of popular entertainment, but just life in general. He's a total weirdo, in the best way.
The whole representation as remedy ethos that has come to define so much of the black "art" churned out over the past 5 or so years has significantly shifted the way we discuss and consume it, elevating the mundane to radical, and acts of assimilation to acts of subversion. The political and social machinery for material change and uplift is broken, leaving us no outlet for radical action to better our station in life - so we settle for the fundamentally white, capitalist concept of radical politic: vote with your dollars. Which leads up to an impotent politic, where we fete mediocre art and rejoice when we see someone who resembles us in the flimsiest way on-screen, or winning an establishment award. As a paragraph from the other essay referenced in one of the tweets I posted articulated:
That has been the great con of the post-George Floyd era: So many opportunists posing as garden-variety creatives, activists, intellectuals, and DEI experts sold the idea that the success of their individual pursuits should be seen as a referendum on collective black uplift, that an assertion of black identity is part and parcel of what makes a piece of art or an essay excellent, worth your attention, and deserving of your money. Rather than a meaningful discourse in which we examine how race and art move in tandem, we’ve seen the creation of a crude capitalistic “representation” assembly line that cheapens the seriousness and stakes of both.
We've become unserious while taking ourselves seriously in the most hollow ways. We talk about pedestrian movies as if they're Earth-shattering, historical events: I've got to see this in an all-black theater, with my parents, with a dozen Harriet Tubman candles burning. The Wakanda parties were amusing before they became depressing. It's good that black people get to make and act in more films. And even though Cord Jefferson - who people in Hollywood know as one of those tragic mixed dudes who only fukk white women and never really embraced race until it became profitable to do so - sanitized a truly brilliant and radical book into a black Hallmark movie, I guess it's true that we could use more black Hallmark movies too. But to pretend a Hallmark movie is a groundbreaking social satire that marks a singular moment for the culture is just more of the same okey doke. The vast majority of the overwhelming white community of film critics didn't read Erasure, and neither did the vast majority of black people who saw the film. And almost none of the white critics understand or even care about the complexities of racism in the arts, nor do they care. And the black audience is locked out of that too. Which is why you need black critics, and a black intellectual class and arts class with integrity and skin in the game to disseminate this information to a wider black audience. Not just a bunch of negroes who look at mediocre shyt winning and give a standing ovation because "hey, that could be me soon."
Let's sum this colloage of white thought up with this tweet that you missed. "Whites mystified and bewildered regarding racial commentary in cinema" take..........
*Additionally needing to draw all the way back to a 20 year old black production in the Chappelle show as a reference to this films thematic comp is essentially driving the directors message home... We're clearly not overrun with these perspectives.
Last edited: