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."
