I heard so many reviews about this movie, and it won for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Even though I saw the trailer several times every time they advertised it, I still hadn’t read much about the movie, so I didn’t know what to expect. I saw it last week a day before the Oscars came on, and man, it was pure brilliance. I think this is why I love satire, because it brings humor to serious subject matter. I remember when I was in college, I took an Introduction to Black Culture class, and we had to watch the Spike Lee movie Bamboozled as part of the class. To be honest, up until then I hadn’t watched many black comedy films so the idea of using humor to approach a very sensitive topics like minstrelsy and racism was pretty foreign to me. If you haven’t seen Bamboozled, it’s about a Black man named Pierre Delacroix who works for a media company and has to deal with a racist white boss who rejects his TV show proposals as not being mainstream enough. Pierre is frustrated that the public doesn’t want to see Black people defy stereotypes in television, and so he decides to hire two homeless Black men off the street to star in a racist minstrel show called Mantan where they don blackface and portray extremely offensive caricatures of Black people that were prevalent during the Jim Crow era. At first the audience is uncomfortable, but then they end up liking the show and it becomes a commercial success, and people in the audience start coming to the show in blackface themselves. There is a scene where one of the actors in the show, Honeycut, goes around the audience asking them if they are “n-words” (I’m using the euphemism because I’m not comfortable using the actual word) and the audience members call themselves the n-word. Mantan ends up quitting the show because he realizes that Delacroix is exploiting him, and he appears one evening not wearing blackface and tells the audience he is sick of being used to portray these offensive stereotypes, and the executives fire him from the show. Honestly, this film blew me away, and it got me to reflect on racism and racist stereotypes and how Spike Lee uses satire to illustrate how this dark part of American history still holds an important legacy. Racism isn’t over, even though people are more aware of it, and history repeats itself, so that’s why I need to keep remembering history so that we don’t repeat the past.
But on to American Fiction. American Fiction is about a Black author named Thelonius “Monk” Ellison who is struggling to get his works published to the masses. Like Pierre Delacroix in Bamboozled, he is highly educated and he publishes works that portray positive representations of Blackness. However, his books, while they receive praise from academics, don’t sell to the public well because the publishers think they aren’t “Black enough,” which is similar to when Pierre’s racist white boss, Dunwitty, dismisses Pierre’s ideas for TV shows as being “too white bread” or “too Cosby Show” because Dunwitty wants Pierre to cater to the public, who doesn’t want positive representations of Black people on TV. Thelonius is determined to stick with his writing style, but when he meets an educated fellow Black author named Sintara Golden, his life changes. He encounters Sintara at a talk she is giving on a bestseller she published, but when he actually hears her reading the book excerpt allowed, he finds out she wrote the book in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and he is appalled because the book portrays Black people in a stereotypical way. However, everyone loved the book. Meanwhile, Thelonius has to deal with problems at home. He goes to visit his sister, Lisa, who is a physician, and while they are eating lunch together, Lisa has a heart attack and dies. While she was alive, Lisa always looked after their mother but now that she is dead, Thelonius has to take care of their mother, who has dementia. Cliff, Thelonius and Lisa’s brother, lives in Arizona and is trying to live his life as a gay man, away from his mom, who didn’t support him being gay. But Thelonius has him come back to help their mom and it puts a strain on their relationship, not to mention that their sister just died, so they have to deal with a lot of grief. Thelonius goes to a bookstore and finds copies of his books haven’t been selling, but he finds that Sintara Golden’s books have been bestsellers. Everywhere he goes, he can’t avoid Sintara, whether her works are in a bookstore or whether she is featured in a magazine. Thelonius meets a Black woman named Coraline, who lives across the street, and they start dating.
He decides that he needs to pay the bills, so he decides one evening to write a satirical novel filled with racial tropes about Black people. Even though Thelonius wrote the book to make fun of American literature’s stereotyping of Black characters, agents and publishers take his book seriously, and he gets a very large cash offer for the book.However, Arthur has Thelonius pose as a convict so that they don’t know his true identity, and he meets a white movie producer who eats up Thelonius’s made-up story about being a convict, having spent a month in jail himself. Throughout the film, Thelonius wrestles with whether he should tell everyone that he wrote the novel or if he should continue going under the pseudoynm “Stagg R. Leigh.” Even when Thelonius changes the book’s name to Fuck so that they don’t go through with the book deal, the agents allow it to go through anyway because the book has gained so much popularity (also, I think the changed title aptly shows how done Thelonius is with these fools, like “Oh my gosh, FUCK. These people drive me nuts.”) Thelonius keeping his identity a secret from people puts a strain on his relationships, especially his relationship with his girlfriend, Coraline. I think it’s interesting that Coraline liked Thelonius’s writing even before his book Fuck. It showed that she was one of the few people who genuinely thought his writing was good. However, Thelonius finds himself in hot water, and so when Coraline gets a copy of Fuck he gets angry with her and insults his own book (she still doesn’t know it’s he who wrote the book) and he also insults her, prompting her to kick him out of her house. Thelonius reflects on himself and realizes that he really loves Coraline and is really sorry he took out his frustration on her. He and his brother, Cliff, reflect on the death of their father, and Cliff says that his dad never knew about him being gay and that was painful. There is an earlier scene where Cliff and Thelonius’s mom enters a facility for patients with dementia, and she is dancing with Cliff and makes a comment about how she is happy that he isn’t gay, and he leaves. Cliff encourages Thelonius to live in a way that is true to himself, and Thelonius decides whether he is going to tell everyone his real identity, but the movie leaves that ending up to interpretation. The white producer, Wiley Valdespino, wants the ending where Thelonius goes up and before he can confess that he was the writer of Fuck, the police come and riddle his body with bullets, and he dies a tragic death. Wiley doesn’t want the ending where Thelonius is honest with the people at the gala or that he apologizes to Coraline for insulting her earlier and they fall back in love. Wiley wants the typical ending where the Black person dies and doesn’t have a happy ending, because tragic endings for Black characters are what make the movie producers big bucks in the studios (and the movie theaters.)
Honestly, this was a really good movie. I really liked Jeffrey Wright in the movie Cadillac Records, and I love Tracee Ellis Ross in the show blackish. Sterling K. Brown is also a good actor; he was in season 3 of a show I love called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I was pretty sad when Lisa dies; losing a loved one is painful, and also Thelonius’s mom was struggling with dementia, so he had to take care of that, and he had to deal with this problem surrounding his book being published. It sounds really challenging to deal with all of that at once. I appreciate that Lorraine accepted Cliff for who he was because for a minute I didn’t think anyone was going to accept Cliff’s sexuality, especially after Cliff’s mom made a not-great remark about his sexuality. This book taught me that authenticity is important and it’s important to have your own voice rather than try to cater to what other people want. But the film also showed me that being authentic and not pandering to mainstream tastes can be challenging because Thelonius was behind on his bills and needed to take care of his mom, so he didn’t really have a choice to turn down the big advance that his publishers offered him for his book. His previous books weren’t selling, and he saw Sintara Golden’s books were selling and so he decided to write a book that would be popular with mainstream audiences, even though he was writing in a way that didn’t feel authentic to him. The film shows how he wrestles with his identity as a writer and being a Black man in a competitive industry.
American Fiction. 2023.
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