The cold December air nipped at my face as I made my way with my friends down to Sharon’s car. The concert had finished, we had wowed the audience and everyone was celebrating the beautiful cello concerto.
“Damn, Natalie, you killed it with that solo, girl!” America whooped as we all piled in the car to go to Damien’s place.
“Thanks,” I laughed with a sheepish grin.
I cannot remember detail to detail what happened, but all I knew was that my body was in the moment during that concert and I lost all train of thought when it came to my anxieties. When it came to playing music, I could tell my stories, share my deepest fears, give away my biggest secrets to the audience without saying a word. I remember the beads of sweat dripping down my forehead and down my back as my fingers flew through the third movement of that concerto. My man, Robert Schumann, may he rest in peace, is probably cheering in his grave for me right now.
“Oh, gosh, I screwed up so many notes though!” America laughed as he warmed his mitten-less fingers by rubbing them together.
“Oh, no, you were fine,” I chimed in. “I was the one who effed up.”
“Quit being so modest,” Derek said, punching me in jest on the arm.
“Ow, you little ass,” I joked.
“Hey, you guys can screw around when we get to Damien’s place,” Sharon called out from the driver’s seat.
“Yes, Boss Lady,” America said, rolling his eyes.
I turned my head to admire the New York City skyline. The Brooklyn Bridge iced over. The naked trees with nothing but fresh snow to clothe their freezing balls. The couples who walked hand in hand with their kiddos as they sipped their hot chocolates from Starbucks.
“It’s so pretty outside,” I mused.
“Funny you should say that, because earlier you were bitching about this crappy-ass weather.”
“Oh, shut up, Derek,” I said, rolling my eyes but flashing him a sheepish grin. He was pretty cute. But he is taken already, so my chances of ending up with him are zero to none.
We pulled up to Damien’s place. Just a regular old two-story house in suburban New Jersey.
Sharon turned the keys out of the ignition.
“Let’s get hammered tonight, guys. We need it more than ever after that shit show of a concert.”
“It wasn’t a shit-show. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” America mentioned.
“Thanks, Mr. Idioms, but it was just that. A terrible performance. The only good thing keeping it together was Nat.”
I blushed. Why was everyone treating me like the star athlete here? We are all good musicians who got into this elite conservatory for a reason, so why should they put themselves down for the sake of lifting me up?
Ding-dong! Sharon rang the doorbell.
A tall, muscular beefcake with stringy, blonde hair and chiseled cheekbones opened the door.
“Hey guys, come on in,” Damien greeted us.
“Hey baby,” Sharon perched onto her black patent-leather flats to kiss her boo. Aw, so romantic. A guy who looks like he should be lifeguarding instead of working in insurance to go towards his college tuition, kissing a 5 foot 1 inch tall soon-to-be-professional oboist. An eclectic combo, but that’s what makes them so perfect.
We left the nippy cold and soon basked in the warmth of Damien’s pad. Ludacris blared from the stereos. Dang, I should have brought my earplugs, I thought. I have sensitive ears, so it pisses me off that while I can hear intonation and have perfect pitch, my ears cannot take loud concerts. So I guess I won’t ever get to meet P!nk of Beyoncé, my childhood idols. It’s okay though because at least I have Jacqueline du Pre. Like Schumann, may she rest in peace.
We made our way to the kitchen and saw about twenty or so people lounging on sofas and around the table. It was all overwhelming to take it, but we all had a rough night so what the hell. After all, you only live once and life is short.
Damien tosses me a can of peach Smirnoff. I gave him a startled look.
“Oh, I’m good, thanks,” I stumbled my words. I know it was my 21st birthday, but I also didn’t want my parents to find out I had been drinking. They do not like alcohol since alcoholism runs in our family.
“C’mon, Nat,” Sharon laughed. “live a little. It’s your 21st and you slayed that concerto tonight.”
“She doesn’t have to drink if she doesn’t want to,” Damien gave Sharon this serious look.
“Oh, no, it’s fine. Sharon’s right. I can live a little,” I said, cracking an embarrassed half-smile.
“If she says it’s fiiiiiinnne,” Sharon slurred, pushing her face up to Damien’s. She planted a kiss on his nose, “then it’s fiiiiine.”
He looked a little worried, but said, “Okay,” and with that America, Damien, Sharon, Derek and I all clinked our cans of Smirnoff and downed them.
After a few minutes, I felt the adrenaline course through my veins. I was starting to come out of my awkward little turtle shell and become the life of the party. This was my birthday and I wasn’t going to let a little gaucheness stand in my way.
“Give me another drink. Let’s try moscato.”
I screwed open the tall bottle of Yellow Tail and poured the moscato with little coordination into a red Solo cup. I feel the warm fruity liquid rush down my throat as I drink.
“Girl, you sure you’re gonna be okay drinking all that?” Derek asked.
“Bro, I’m fine,” I assure him, continuing to swig my Solo cup. I am not fine. I lied. I hate school, I wish the admissions office never gave me that full-ride scholarship. I feel like a fucking impostor, and I want out. This party is the only way I will feel okay being a human being right now.
The room looks a little blurry, but I don’t mind. I finally knock back the moscato.
Within ten minutes the room is starting to look like a Claude Monet painting. A water lilies work with blurry voices in the background to complement the art.
I don’t feel anything. I feel like I am on a plane. A plane flying on Cloud Nine. There is shouting and shrieking. And I feel a deep sharp pain, and my mouth is opening and within a few minutes I am facedown in some acidic green-yellow-brown looking shit. I hear a loud high-pitched wail. It doesn’t stop.
Chapter Two
I struggled to open my eyes. Wait, what happened to the music? Where’s Ludacris when you need him most?
My eyelids feel heavier than usual. What the hell is happening?
I try to open my eyes but something is keeping them from doing so. I see blue. I see blobs wearing blue things, these blue things on their heads. And on their mouths, they wear blue, too. They hold these silver things. Are those forks? Spoons? Knives?
And then I realize, in an instant. It doesn’t take me a second to figure out. I drank over my limit and now these random strangers are pumping my stomach. To keep me from dying.
I love the show black-ish, and I’m sad that it’s wrapping up its eighth and final season, but it was amazing and will always be amazing even during the re-runs. I watched two episodes today, “The Natural” and “The Nod”:
Season 8, Episode 2: “The Natural”
At the beginning, Andre “Dre” Johnson imagines himself playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers and striking hits, and then we see him at his new position at work at an advertising agency, where he got bumped up from the urban marketing department to the general marketing department. At first, Dre is excited by his new promotion, but when he gets there his new colleague tells him that there is reserved seating in the conference room and that he can’t just sit anywhere. Then, when he is actually pitching ideas to the team, they just smile and nod but don’t take any of his ideas, and instead talk amongst themselves. There is one guy who sits barefoot and reads Herman Hesse and just blurts out ideas out of thin air without making any effort on his part, and yet his colleagues (everyone except Dre) thinks his pitch ideas are genius. Dre feels like he’s being excluded from the conversation and that his ideas don’t matter, and imagines that he keeps striking out at the plate when the pitcher throws the ball to him.
Meanwhile, Diane tells her family she is going out on a date with a boy from school. While Rainbow is ecstatic, Ruby, their grandmother, doesn’t trust this boy that Diane is dating and tells her to take precaution. Diane thinks she isn’t attached to the boy and throws away the cheap necklace he gave her. Rainbow tells Ruby she’s being ridiculous and that Diane should go ahead with her date. When she comes back from her first date and Rainbow asks how it went, Diane replies with a fake smile that it went ok, but deep down Ruby knows she wasn’t happy on the date and tells Diane to break off the date if something doesn’t go well. Rainbow again thinks Ruby is being ridiculous. Then Diane comes back with a knockoff purse that her date bought her, and Rainbow is angry that he bought her a fake bag and tells her to call off the date. Later on, when they ask her how it went with breaking up with the guy, Diane said she ended up having a good conversation with him and they made up and are still dating.
Meanwhile, Dre is still unsure about his new promotion, especially because of their ignoring his ideas. Dre puts together an entire binder of ideas for pitching the car commercial they’re working on and brings them to work the next day, but then his boss Stevens tells him that they are putting off the car commercial and moving on instead to a promotion for butter. Dre tells them they are ridiculous and calls out Griffin, the coworker who sits and reads all day barefoot during the meeting. Upset, Dre consults his old coworkers from the Urban department, Charlie and Josh. He tells them he feels that he is out of his league in the job and Charlie and Josh take him to play some baseball. They give him some good advice and tell him to not give up in his new position. He also consults Rainbow and she tells him that things aren’t going to be easy in his new role but that he can do it. He then reflects on the advice and meets with Griffin to apologize, but then Griffin tells him that he himself could learn a lot from Dre and the Urban department since they work really hard behind the scenes. Dre’s new coworkers end up appreciating Dre’s work and listening to his ideas, and Dre envisions himself finally winning at the baseball game.
This episode really encouraged me because it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re in a new environment and it seems like everyone else’s ideas are better than yours. Dre constantly gets his ideas shut down in his new department and it seems like he does all the work and everyone else just magically has talent to think of new genius ideas off the top of their head. But deep down, they respected what Dre did but since he was new they weren’t sure whether he knew what he was talking about when he pitched different ideas. The fact that Dre made those efforts in his new department behind the scenes, though, showed me that even if people seem like they’re not watching my efforts they are, and that I may just not need constant approval to know that I’m doing a good job. When I got a new job in 2018 I felt I had to know everything from the get-go, to be super eager to start and get my ideas going, but like anything in life, learning something new or getting a job in a completely different field than you’ve done before is going to be challenging to get used to at first and there is always going to be a learning curve. And because I felt I had to know everything right away and prove myself to my coworkers, I would get easily frustrated when I made mistakes or didn’t learn things as quickly as I wanted. After more than three years working at the company I came to realize that I didn’t have to prove my worth to anybody because what I was doing was valuable to the company in its own way, and that each role at the company has its own unique purpose, but that the ultimate role is to work together as a team in our different capacities to deliver excellent customer service to clients. I also realized that I am always going to be learning something new at my job, whether that comes in the form of soft skills like teamwork or patience or hard skills like Microsoft Office or databases, and that I am responsible for my own growth at the company. When I get my efforts recognized at work, like Dre, I felt like the work I was doing mattered, and it taught me to keep doing me and keep growing in my own unique way at the company.
Episode 3: The Nod
The episode opens up with Dre helping Junior carry his Hobbit Shire project to class, and they pass by another Black dad and his son. Dre and the dad exchange what’s called “the nod,” which is a greeting that Black people give each other out of acknowledgement and respect. While Dre nodded, Junior didn’t nod to the boy, and Dre asks him why he didn’t do it, dropping and damaging Junior’s project in the process. Later on at dinner, Dre complains to Rainbow and Pops that Junior didn’t nod to his Black classmate like he was supposed to, and Rainbow tells him to let it go because Junior’s generation has a different view about the struggle and race than Dre’s generation. Dre explains that the nod is basic etiquette in Black culture, and that it’s the equivalent of a baby waving hi or a man scrunching up his face when a woman with a big butt walks by. When Junior still doesn’t get it, Dre feels like he failed and Pops defends Dre and tells Junior that the nod, and the “butt thing” are basic etiquette for Black men.
This is the clip explaining the nod for more context:
Meanwhile, Diane and Jack are drawing pictures at the kitchen table and Rainbow looks at Diane’s drawing and thinks they are test tubes because Diane wants to be a doctor like Rainbow, but Diane tells her they are something else and refuses to be a doctor because she thinks it’s boring. No matter how much Rainbow tries to convince Diane of the benefits of being a doctor, the main one being that she gets to save lives, Diane isn’t buying it.
Dre then gives the nod to another Black coworker named Charlie, one of the few other Black people at Stevens and Lido, the ad agency he works at. He moved recently from the Starbucks corporation in Seattle, and is trying to make new friends. He latches on immediately to Dre because he’s the only other Black person at the firm, and Dre promises to make Charlie feel welcome at the firm, even though he feels Charlie seems a little too eager to make friends with Dre. Later Charlie meets Dre in the urinal and breaks the etiquette of standing two urinals away from Dre, instead taking the one right next to him. Dre confesses that he’s stressed out that Junior doesn’t have any Black friends at school (earlier he and Pops met with a Black socialite club that Rainbow told Dre about in the hopes that Junior would make Black friends there, but the couple who runs the club tells them they need a deeper purpose for sending Junior to the club since they are about community service and respectability and not so much about simply making Black friends.) and Charlie tells Dre to take Junior to Compton so he can make Black friends. Dre then takes Junior to a basketball court in Compton so Junior can play with the guys, but all Junior ends up doing is failing to make any of the shots and being beasted by the other players during the game. Meanwhile, Diane at first is bored to be at the hospital Rainbow works at, but then she sees several injured patients rolling by in gurneys down the hall and because Diane is into blood and violence she changes her mind and later tells Rainbow, who apologizes to Diane that she saw that stuff, that is was the best experience ever and that she wants to be a doctor after seeing all the blood.
Dre and Charlie run into each other in the break room and Charlie urges Dre to try some of his soup, not respecting Dre’s boundaries. Dre tells him to cool his jets and Charlie apologizes for being so insistent because he and his son just moved and they haven’t made a lot of Black friends. Dre invites Charlie and his son, Eustace, over for dinner. He introduces Junior to Eustace and tells him to go and play with his new Black friend. While Junior and Eustace are playing, Charlie is telling inappropriate jokes at dinner and comes down from the stairs wearing Dre’s new OG Air One shoes from Dre’s shoe collection. Rainbow warned him that Charlie had no boundaries, but Dre didn’t listen at first and gave Charlie the benefit of the doubt, but now that Charlie has stolen his shoes, Dre is more comfortable expressing his boundaries. Dre tells Junior to say goodbye to Eustace, but then finds that Eustace and Junior bonded over Junior’s Hobbit Shire project and both love Lord of the Rings. Dre realizes that Junior did develop friendships with other Black kids in his own way, and Junior ends up exchanging the nod with an Asian classmate, who gives the nod in return. At the end we see Pops, Dre and Junior sitting on a park bench, and Dre and Pops are teaching Junior how to scrunch up his face when a woman with a big butt walks by. He soon becomes a natural at it, and then says “damn” and scrunches his face up when he sees an attractive woman walk by.
I really loved this episode because it reminded me that there’s no monolithic way to be Black. There were times when I didn’t feel I was “black enough” but then in sophomore year I took a class in the Afro-American Studies department called introduction to Black culture, and towards the end of the course we talked about the different expressions of identity within Black communities, and how there’s no single narrative of Blackness but rather diverse narratives. When I was lonely in college and depressed, I googled the term “black nerds” and I came across a wealth of search results, one of them being an article about a web series called The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae. After watching episode 9 of season 2, “The Check”, I was hooked on the series and couldn’t get enough of it. I saw myself in the protagonist of the series, J (played by Issa Rae), because I was struggling a lot with awkwardness and wanted someone I could relate to and looked like me. Watching J struggle through life as an awkward Black person made me feel less alone.
And in blackish, I found that same solace in Junior. He doesn’t know many other Black kids at his school he can hang out with, and unlike his dad, he grew up in the suburbs around very few other Black kids at his school so he didn’t really have the same upbringing and etiquette that Dre had of acknowledging another Black person’s existence when you’re walking down the street or anywhere where you don’t see too many Black people. Junior and Bow don’t think it’s a big deal but Dre and Pops do because Pops raised Dre to give the nod to other Black people when he encountered them. But when Dre finds that Junior and Eustace bond together over their shared love of The Lord of the Rings, he realizes that Junior was going to find other Black people to hang out with, just in his own unique way and just as he was. This gave Junior the confidence to extend the nod to other young men at his school to show he’s seen them and recognizes their shared humanity, whether or not they are Black like him. I remember in college struggling to acknowledge other Black people; except for my Africana Studies courses, most of the spaces I frequented in college were white: the asexual community, the orchestra I was in, the town. Before college it didn’t matter to me whether or not I acknowledged other Black people around me; I thought, “yes, I’m Black, but I’m human, so who cares?” But then in college, after learning about the experiences of other students of color who felt isolated in these predominantly white spaces, I realized that it is in fact a big deal when you see another Black person and recognize their presence, especially when there aren’t many Black people in the spaces you’re in. I went to a conference my junior year for Black undergraduates, and seeing so many other Black people made me feel less alone, especially because the dorm I lived in there weren’t many other Black people. I also learned I could just be myself; I usually get nervous before conferences or at networking events because I tend to be introverted, but I realized I could just be myself, and I was able to network in my own unique way. I also found other Black friends in college to hang out with. I think that’s why I click with Junior in black-ish so much because he’s nerdy and a lot of times doesn’t feel like he fits in with everyone else, but he remains true to himself and ends up finding people who respect him for who he is.
I watched this movie last week along with another film called Honeyland, and I am glad my mom recommended it to me because it truly was an excellent movie. The first time I saw it before watching it a second time, I was extremely tired due to a lack of sleep and nodded off before I could get to the really good part of the movie, and so I ended up not finishing it. But then I decided to watch it again in full. And damn, it blew me away.
At the beginning of the movie, we hear a woman moaning in pain as she gives birth and the sound of her newborn baby coming out of her womb. We hear this as we look at a shot of the sea. Then we see Asato, a six year old boy, and his mother, Satako, helping him get ready for school. Later on in the day, Satako receives a phone call from the school because Asato allegedly pushed Sora, his classmate, off the jungle gym. Satako called Sora’s mom to figure out if what went down was true, but then Sora’s mom demands not just an apology, but that Satako pay for Sora’s injury expenses. When Satako tries to explain she can’t do that, Sora’s mom digs at her for not wanting to pay the expenses for the injury even though she lives a comfortable middle-class life, so she must have the money and is just stingy. When they are out and about, Satako and Asato run into Sora and his mom and his mom ignores Satako’s greeting.
Satako then flashes back to an earlier conversation she had with her husband, Kiyokazu, about conceiving a child. They try to have a baby but then go to the doctor only to find out that Kiyokazu has no sperm in his semen. He ends up having to go get a surgery to get the semen extracted from his testicles because of a possibly blocked ejaculatory duct. The couple concludes that Satako’s chance of conceiving is most likely nil and he says that the only other option would be to divorce her. Kiyokazu is later seen with his friend getting drunk at a bar; they talk about kids and married life, and his friend tells him about his life with two kids. Kiyokazu, intoxicated, tells his friend that he has to go to Sapporo to conceive and has to get an ICSI sperm injection because his sperm is zero count. He then asks what is sex, and explains that it’s a “miracle.” We then see Satako and Kiyokazu at an airport, and they find out that due to inclement weather their flight to Sapporo to have the sperm injection has been cancelled. Satako and Kiyokazu grieve over their struggles to conceive a child, but later on while watching television at home they see an ad where couples talk about the difficulty of conceiving a baby, and then we see testimonies by pregnant women about not being able to take care of their children and giving them up for adoption. One woman says the guy who got her pregnant was already married to another woman, and another lost her child to a stillbirth. The ad is run by an adoption agency called Baby Baton, where children find their parents and “ill-equipped mothers” give their kids to couples who are unable to conceive but still want kids. Kiyokazu is unsure about going to Baby Baton, but Satako is curious about it so they go to a parents night meeting to learn more about the agency. They meet the founder of the agency, Asami, and Asami goes over the rules about adoption. The first rule is for the adoptive parents to be truthful with the kids and tell them about their birth parents for the sake of the child’s safety and wellness. Other rules are that the couple has to be married for more than three years, and that there needs to be one stay-at-home parent so either the husband or the wife needs to quit their job so they can stay with the child at home. Another rule is that adoptive parents can choose the name of their child but not the gender, so they have to submit both male and female names since the agency chooses whether each couple gets to adopt a boy or a girl. After hearing a testimony from a family who adopted a child through Baby Baton, Kiyokazu changes his mind after thinking about it and the couple decides to adopt a baby from Baby Baton. Satako and Kiyokazu meet with the biological mother of the child they’re going to adopt; she is a high school student named Hikari Katakura and it is an emotional decision for her to give up her child. However, we won’t learn more about her until later in the film. We then flash forward to Asato saying sorry for pushing Sora. Satako gets a call from Asato’s teacher, Ms. Yokota, and reveals that Sora told Asato he lied about being pushed off the jungle gym, so now they can play with each other again. This is joyful news, but then Hikari calls Satako and demands to get Asato back. She shows up at the house and demands for Satako and Kiyokazu to give her child back to her, but then Kiyokazu accuses her of intruding their house and of blackmailing them.
The movie then gives perspective on the events in Hikari’s life leading up to her meeting with the couple. When she was in the eighth grade Hikari developed a crush on a guy in her gym class named Takumi, and one day she goes to his place and they start dating and having sex. Hikari’s mom meets with the doctor at the school and he tells her Hikari is 23 weeks pregnant and that it would be too late to have an abortion. Hikari’s mother cries in disbelief at her daughter’s pregnancy. Takumi meets with Hikari and cries tears of guilt and apologizes to her for her unwanted pregnancy. Hikari’s parents tell her to quit school and give her child up for adoption when it’s born, and that she still has time to study to get into her sister’s high school. Hikari meets with Asami, the founder of Baby Baton, and travels to Hiroshima with her to stay at the agency. It’s at the agency that Hikari meets other young pregnant women, such as Konomi and Maho. According to Asami, many young women arrive at Baby Baton on their own because of strained relationships with their parents. After befriending the girls at the agency, Konomi and Maho leave when they give birth to their children, and then soon after Hikari gives birth to her son, Asato.
The movie flashes forward to when Hikari demands money from Satako since she won’t give her her child back. The police from Kanagawa district arrive at the couple’s home and Detective Mishima shows the photo of Hikari, who has disappeared. The film flashes back to when Hikari is with her family at dinner and everyone else is talking about how great their lives are and Hikari feels left out. When one of the family members makes a snide comment about Hikari’s pregnancy and Hikari calls him out on it, her mom strikes her and kicks her out of the house. She revisits Asami and asks for work because she cannot live at home anymore. Asami then tells her that Baby Baton is closing down so she won’t be able to stay that long. She meets the last mom that Baby Baton will take, named Sara, and Hikari and Sara have a conversation about pregnancy. Sara asks Hikari about her baby and her relationship with it because she doesn’t feel love for her own unborn baby. When Sara leaves to give birth to her baby, Hikari finds a box of records of adoptive parents from March 2013 and finds out about her biological child’s adoptive parents. When Asami is closing up Baby Baton, Hikari asks her why she started Baby Baton, and Asami explains that thought about having a baby herself, but couldn’t, and taking care of the young mothers was in her way taking care of children. Hikari thanks her for everything and travels by sea to find the adoptive parents of her child and get him back. She gets a newspaper delivery job in Yokohama and meets a girl named Tomoka, who wears a yellow jacket and gives Hikari a makeover. They bond as friends but then two men come over and assault Tomoka for not paying the rent on time for her and Hikari’s apartment. Tomoka leaves the apartment and her yellow back behind, and Hikari falls into a depression. When her boss tells her to get help for her depression, Hikari decides to go over to the couple’s house and retrieve her child, especially since she gave all her money to the guys who hounded Tomoka over the rent.
Then we see Hikari at Satoko and Kiyokazu’s house and they still do not trust that she is the biological mother of Asato, no matter how much she is telling the truth, because she looks unrecognizable from the Hikari that they met many years ago when she first gave up Asato for adoption. Hikari cries and begs for forgiveness, saying she is not fit to be Asato’s mother. It’s shown that Satoko told Asato he has a biological mom and that two years ago Hikari wrote her son a letter, and in the letter she writes “please don’t erase me.” Satoko then realizes that she was wrong to not recognize Hikari as the missing woman that the detective showed her, and seeks out to find Hikari to apologize. She takes Asato with her to see his biological mom, and she finds Hikari standing and looking out at the ocean outside. She apologizes for not recognizing Hikari and Hikari is finally reunited with her son, Asato.
This film honestly blew me away. There is also a special feature on the DVD of the movie where French actress Juliette Binoche has a Zoom discussion with the director of True Mothers, Naomi Kawase. She discusses the process that went into making the film, and her inspiration for it. Kawase says that for the scene where Hikari meets the women of the Baby Baton agency she wanted to incorporate real women who had to give up their children for adoption because these women exist in the shadows of Japanese society, and she wanted to raise awareness of what they went through. During the filming she spent a lot of time with the crew and took Juliette and the crew to different Shinto Buddhist temples in six locations throughout Japan during the production of the movie to offer blessings to the temples. For her, Kawase’s goal in making this film was to take difficult topics and create some kind of positive value from them; I agree, because as a Buddhist myself I believe in this philosophy of value creation, where we confront daily challenges and social issues and transform them based on the view that everything has meaning and you can create value out of anything negative. We call that changing poison into medicine.
1/12/22 (this is when I started the review. I didn’t finish writing it until tonight.)
I just finished The Last King of Scotland, and I am still shaking. I’m really glad my dad warned me to not watch this movie late at night because wow, Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy acted the hell out of their roles in this movie. Normally I go back and watch movies twice, but this movie I definitely need to take some pause. It’s based on the novel by British journalist Giles Foden, which I read when I was in high school. In my world geography class we had our unit on Africa and I wanted to read more literature about Africa so I read books like Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Last King of Scotland was one of the books I read in my spare time. I don’t remember how I felt while reading the book, but reading the book is definitely different from watching the movie. This is a two-hour long film and as someone who is sensitive to violence it’s not for the faint of heart, but it shows how brutal Idi Amin’s regime was. For our unit on Africa there was a list of movies to watch that we could choose on our own, and I don’t think The Last King of Scotland was on that list because it’s a school district and I don’t think they were allowed to recommend R-rated features. I overheard one of my classmates ask my teacher if he could watch The Last King of Scotland for his film choice, and my teacher said sure, but said that it was a pretty brutal film and Idi Amin was a pretty nasty dictator. Normally I read the parents guide before watching R rated films because I don’t enjoy jump scares or excessive gore, and honestly this was one of those films where I’m glad I read the Wikipedia page and the Kids in Mind content because it really does depict how brutal Amin’s regime was. Then again, is there really such a thing as a good dictator? Hitler wasn’t a nice guy, Stalin wasn’t, and Amin also wasn’t.
The movie begins with Nicholas Garrigan, the protagonist, jumping in a lake with his friends and having fun with them in Scotland, where he was born and raised. He earns his degree as a doctor and his mom and dad celebrate with him. Even though they aren’t sure of his career choice, they just want him to be happy. In his bedroom, Nicholas spins a globe on his desk to find where he would go first as a doctor, and the first spin lands him on Canada. He spins again, and it lands on Uganda. We then see him riding in a caravan through the Uganda countryside and communicating with the locals. He arrives in a village where he and another guy are the only main doctors there, and is informed by the other guy that most of the civilians use a witch doctor and not Western medicine. He comes to understand the grueling nature of the work, but finds out that the new president, Idi Amin, is speaking in the village. Nicholas is excited and persuades Sarah to come hear him speak, but she says she is unsure and doesn’t work for Amin. He tells her it’s going to be fun, and so she comes with him. They stand in a crowd and hear Amin speaking. Amin promises that his new government will be one of action and not just words, and that they will build new houses and new schools and other new infrastructure. He also tells him “I am you” and that him and the people “will make this country better.” Suddenly, an official calls Nicholas over to see Amin because he got his hand injured in an accident. While Nicholas is bandaging up Amin’s hand, an injured cow on the side of the road keeps wailing in pain and Nicholas becomes more and more agitated because he thinks the cow is distracting him from concentrating on bandaging Amin’s hand. Nicholas tells Sarah to tell the locals to do something about the cow, but even after Sarah communicates with them, nothing can be done. Finally, Nicholas gets frustrated, and finally yells for someone to put the cow out of its misery, grabbing Amin’s pistol and shooting the cow to death. At first, Amin is angry and expresses his anger that Nicholas grabbed his gun without his permission. He assumes Nicholas is British, but Nicholas clarifies that he is actually Scottish. Amin finds a connection with him and his Scottish heritage and gives Nicholas his army coat in exchange for Nicholas’ Scotland T-shirt. Nicholas finds Sarah one night and asks her out for drinks but she refuses, but he doesn’t take no for an answer and tries to kiss her. She refuses his advances and tells him she is married and doesn’t want to have an affair. He later meets Jonah Wasswa, the Minister of Health in Uganda and also meets Dr. Junju (played brilliantly by David Oyewolo) who was the previous doctor in Mulago’s hospital. He visits Amin after being summoned to see him, and Amin tells Nicholas to be his personal physician. Nicholas is at first skeptical because he is committed to his work in Mgambo, the village he was staying at with Sarah, but Amin jokes with him that it was Sarah who convinced him to stay and to take what she said with a grain of salt. Nicholas, goes with what Amin is telling him and decides to become his personal physician. Amin then invites him to a state dinner and Nicholas meets various people there, including two British officials, one of them being Nigel Stone, and Amin’s three wives, one of whom is Kay, who Nicholas develops a crush on. Amin speaks at the dinner and makes these promises to them that many civilizations have stolen Africa’s cultural traditions and borrowed heavily from African civilization, but that it’s important to remember Africa’s history and he also says that in the past few years they have reclaimed Black power for Africa. Later that evening, Nicholas is summoned to Amin’s chamber because Amin is suffering from health issues. Nicholas props him up and presses a baseball bat against Amin’s stomach and Amin farts loudly, which relieves him of his pain. He then sees a future for Nicholas as his doctor and as someone he can confide in. He tells Nicholas that his father left him as a child and he took a job in the army as a cook, where he was treated horribly, and now he is the president of Uganda thanks to the British. Later on, Nigel approaches Nicholas and tells him to stay in touch, and when Nicholas doesn’t understand, Nigel explains that people are starting to speculate about Nicholas’ unusually personal relationship with Amin and that Amin doesn’t show that much attention to someone like that. He tells him to let him know if anything shady goes on, and Nicholas poo-poos what he says, thinking Nigel is just trying to discredit Nicholas. Nicholas is tasked with taking Amin’s place at a meeting with foreign officials, and he strides in thinking he knows what to do, but even the officials are uneasy with the fact that Amin had to leave at the last minute and is just putting some random stranger from another country in his place. Amin also condescends to Jonah but praises Nicholas. Nicholas finds Kay’s son McKenzie has epilepsy. Nicholas gives him a vaccination for his epilepsy and he relaxes. Kay places her trust in Nicholas for saving her son, and his attraction for her deepens. Amin further continues to praise Nicholas, even getting him a nice new car. While driving Amin in his new car, Nicholas brings up the way Amin treats his son. According to Kay, Amin looks down on her and won’t talk to her because he sees McKenzie’s epilepsy as a defect. Nicholas tells Amin that he doesn’t like how Amin treats McKenzie, and Amin retorts that he needs to mind his business, and then tells him with a fake smile how he loves Nicholas’s honesty.
However, as the film goes on we find out that Nicholas ultimately pays the price for being honest with Amin about how he treats people. However, it’s clearly shown how Amin uses fear, gaslighting and intimidation to keep Nicholas in his power. At the pool Nicholas sees Kay and talks to her, but Kay, knowing that Amin will find out about her and Nicholas’s chemistry, keeps her distance from him. Nicholas doesn’t take a hint and maintains his love for Kay. Stone approaches him and tells him about several news reports that are coming out about Ugandan civilians that have gone missing during Amin’s presidency, and once again warns Nicholas to proceed with caution and that he is deluded into thinking Amin is a good person when he’s the one behind the disappearances. Early on, Amin tells Nicholas to be honest with him and he tells him that at a party the previous night, Dr. Wasswa was talking to a white European gentleman and looking at Nicholas out of the corner of his eye while talking to him. Nicholas didn’t like that he was being talked about and asks Amin to have “just a talk” with Dr. Wasswa, and that’s why Dr. Wasswa has disappeared. Stone tells Nicholas to be careful around Amin, but Nicholas blows up at him and tells him that “this is Africa” and that “you meet violence with violence” and that Amin knows what he’s doing and that he doesn’t see why no one trusts Amin is a good guy.
But as the film goes on, Nicholas realizes that maybe all those people warning him about Amin were right after all, because one day as they are driving in his car, they get in a car crash with a coup that is plotting to kill Amin and swerve past the coup shooting bullets at some officials inside a car. He then gets out of the car and shouts at Nicholas and accuses him of putting Amin’s life in jeopardy like that. Amin then takes Nicholas to a shed where four or five men are being brutally tortured with weapons, and Amin accuses them of trying to harm him, reminding them that no one disrespects him and that he is the president who everyone looks up to. This is a harrowing thing for Nicholas to encounter and he thinks “Um, maybe I should get the hell out of here” but it’s too late because he’s already trapped in Amin’s mind games with him. Garrigan once again reiterrates his oath of confidentiality as a doctor, but Amin accuses him of being just like the other white European people who came to Africa and colonized it for their own gain and took away from its communities. Nicholas pleads for Amin to let him fly home to Scotland since that is his home, but Amin tells him he can’t go home because Uganda is his home and that Nicholas is just like “his own son.” At a Western cowboy-themed party that Amin has with go-go dancers, Nicholas drinks and smokes himself to oblivion and recollects the traumas he has witnessed in the short time he has been Amin’s personal doctor. He runs into Kay and breaks down in tears because he wants to leave Uganda and Amin won’t let him, and she consoles him. They hide out and sleep together, and when they wake up Kay tells him he needs to find a way, any way, to get out of Uganda. Nicholas promises but again, is stuck and not sure what to do or even how bad Amin’s regime is going to get. He comes in later to his apartment only to find it completely destroyed and with his papers strewn all over the place, and picks up his Uganda passport, realizing that Amin’s officials took his Scotland passport so that he couldn’t go home. Stone meets with Nicholas in his apartment, and when Nicholas finally tells him he wants to get out of Uganda for good, Stone tells him Amin calls Nicholas his “white monkey” and has complete control over Nicholas’s whereabouts. Stone shows Nicholas photographs of civilians who have been executed under Amin’s regime, and one of the civilians we see being tortured is Dr. Wasswa. Nicholas remembers telling Amin to have a talk with him, and feels guilty for doing so. It’s at that moment he realizes that he really does need to get out. Nicholas tells Stone that he can get him out but Stone tells him “fuck your rights” and tells him to go to Amin for that. Shortly after, Amin announces on television his plan to force everyone who is of Asian descent out of Uganda in 90 days. Nicholas goes to Amin and tells him to not do that because if he expels the Asian community in Uganda, it would hurt the economy. Amin accuses him of being loyal to the Asian tailor he went to early on in the film for his suit, and Nicholas leaves and finds a bus with Asian immigrants fleeing the city, and Sarah is on the bus.
Nicholas also finds out from Kay that he got her pregnant after they had sex, and she is worried for her life at this point about what Amin will do to her when he finds out. Nicholas promises her that they will get her an abortion at the hospital, but Kay tells him it’s too dangerous. Nicholas promises her he will see what the hospital can do, but then Dr. Junju tells him he is out of his mind because Amin will find out. Nicholas ends up being too late to help Kay because Amin has him attend a press conference that Amin is speaking at. When he finally arrives at Kay’s house, he is informed by the people there that Amin’s officials took her to the hospital. He arrives at the hospital and passes by several crying civilians in a darkened hallway, and finds Kay’s dismembered body lying on the morgue table, retching in shock. Amin goes to the Entebbe airport and finds a group of hostages held there and the doctors and Nicholas try to help them, but then Amin finds out about Nicholas’ plan to poison Amin and he ends up taking Nicholas to a private spot and angrily tells Nicholas he has betrayed him and that he will get punished severely. He asks him if there is one thing that he has done that is good and that he thought he could just come to Uganda like the white dude that he is and treat the people of Uganda like they are fun and games, but that “this is not a game.” Amin brutally tortures Nicholas by having his guards pierce his chest with meat hooks and hang him by the ceiling (I didn’t watch the scene because I knew it was going to be graphic, but I could hear Nicholas’s cries of pain and that was enough for me to know that what Amin did was brutal. The scene is also pretty long.) While Amin goes out and tells the hostages he is letting everyone fly back to safety, Dr. Junju finds Nicholas unconscious and tells him he is going to let him go in secret. While Nicholas flies with the Israeli citizens back home, one of the authorities of Amin accosts Dr. Junju of Nicholas’s whereabouts and when Dr. Junju says he doesn’t know, the authority shoots and kills him while the hostages watch in horror. On the plane Nicholas remembers in sadness the times he shared with the people of Uganda and the horrors he faced at the hands of Amin’s regime. In the epilogue, it says that forty-eight hours later, Israeli forces stormed Entebbe and liberated all but one of the hostages and that international opinion turned against Amin immediately. It continues that when Amin was ousted in 1979 that all of the Ugandan civilians celebrated, and that 300,000 people in total were killed under his regime. Amin, while in exile in Saudi Arabia, died on August 16, 2003.
Honestly, this was probably Forest Whitaker’s scariest role. I have seen him in The Butler, The Great Debaters, Respect, Arrival (I also just found out he was one of the Equisapiens in Sorry to Bother You), Black Panther, but this role he was in as Idi Amin was just…terrifyingly convincing. And it’s all in his body language. The character he embodies was a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure. One minute Amin is laughing with Nicholas and the next moment he is screaming at him or threatening him. Amin gave Nicholas this illusion of safety, of security, that he was going to improve the lives of Ugandans everywhere, but it ended up being a fantasy. Amin knew that Nicholas was just a white guy coming in with a savior mentality, and I think that’s what the movie reminded me, too: to not forget the brutal legacy of European imperialism in Africa. In my world geography and history classes we read some pretty harrowing accounts about European imperialism in African countries, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t get past the first few pages of King Leopold’s Ghost without getting nightmares. I picked it up because we were reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and I don’t think I finished it because I had read a lot about King Leopold’s rule on the Internet and saw brutal footage of his regime in the Congo and even just looking at the cover of King Leopold’s Ghost gave me nightmares, like I couldn’t even keep it by my nightstand (thankfully, during the 2020 global reckoning with systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, people in Belgium called to take down King Leopold II’s statue.) But I don’t want to shield my eyes from this history, because it really is important to study and learn from it. The history of European imperialism is one of gross human rights abuses, and Amin’s presidency was also one of gross human rights abuses. Before reading The Last King of Scotland and seeing the movie, I knew very little about Idi Amin, and of course I still have a lot to learn about his presidency and his life, especially because although The Last King of Scotland is based on Idi Amin’s regime, it’s still a work of fiction and it’s told from a certain perspective, that of a white guy who didn’t grow up in Uganda and is setting foot in the country for the first time. Still though, the objective fact remains that many people were killed under Amin’s regime and the film portrays this in the realest way possible.
Overall, I really loved this film mainly because of the powerful acting that James McAvoy and Forest Whitaker brought to the roles of Nicholas Garrigan and Idi Amin. And the film score was out of this world! I think not just the acting gave the film its intense suspense but also the score, which blends African music traditions with European music traditions. It reminded me of the music we studied in a class I took in college about African Popular Music, where we studied the music of people such as Fela Kuti, who was from Nigeria, E.T. Mensah and the Tempos, who were from Ghana, and K’naan, a Canadian musician originally from Somalia. While I enjoyed studying about Western classical music and I enjoy playing it, it was great to know more about music traditions that I don’t typically listen to.
Honestly, when the movie first came out in 2006 I couldn’t see it since I was way too young to watch R-rated films. But I remembered Forest Whitaker winning Best Actor at the Academy Awards for it, and after seeing the movie sixteen years after its release, and being so drawn in by Whitaker’s acting chops, I can honestly see why he won that Oscar. Because holy shit, the man can fucking act.
Here is the trailer for the film:
The Last King of Scotland. 2006. Rated R for some strong violence and gruesome images, sexual content and language.
The movie also reminded me of another movie I watched called Sorry to Bother You, which, like The Wolf of Wall Street, is a dark comedy. Of course, the storylines are different. Jordan Belfort is white and Cassius is a Black guy, and their narratives are different. However, both films make excellent social commentaries about wealth and capitalism. If you haven’t seen the film Sorry to Bother You yet, it’s about this young Black man named Cassius, or Cash, who lives in this alternate universe version of Oakland, California. He works as a telemarketer and spends time with his girlfriend, Detroit, who works two jobs to make ends meet so she can fund her artistic projects. He fails to upsell the company’s products at work and constantly has people hanging up on him. His Black coworker, played brilliantly by Danny Glover, tells him that if he wants to succeed in the world of telemarketing, he needs to put on a “white” voice (Patton Oswalt provides the “white” voice.) At first Cash is skeptical, but because he is in a dire situation with his job and his finances, he acquires the “white” voice and starts talking on the phone in a stereotypical white American man’s voice. Customers start treating him with more respect after he acquires a white voice, and he makes more money in his career and wins the approval of one of the higher-ups, Steve Lift, played by actor Armie Hammer, who offers Cash an extremely high salary for moving up the career ladder. At this time his friends are protesting against corporate America, and when Cash talks with his friends about the promises of moving up at work, his friends tell him it’s all just a dream and that moving up in the corporate world isn’t worth it if it makes him a sellout. And when Cash does become a sellout and starts living a materialistic lifestyle, his friends and his girlfriend see how much he’s changed and they go their separate ways. However, Cash realizes that Steve’s promise of corporate success comes with a dark price because Steve is the CEO of a program called Worry Free, an exploitative program where people’s lives revolve around productivity for the sake of the corporation. He plans to turn them into equasapians, people who have superhuman strength and are part horse, by having them snort a cocaine-like substance that turns them into these creatures. Cash, while in the restroom at Steve’s office, knocks on the door and an employee of Worry Free, who is an equasapien, falls onto the floor (honestly, this scene shook me.) and he runs out of there and realizes he needs to stop Steve before it’s too late.
The Wolf of Wall Street makes a similar commentary about materialism and wealth. Of course, I acknowledge that Jordan and Cassius have two totally different narratives, but for some reason I kept thinking about Sorry to Bother You when watching Wolf of Wall Street. I think it’s because like Cassius, Jordan started out not knowing much about the corporate world. He was pretty happy with his wife and his life before he took on Stratton-Oakmont, and similarly Cassius was pretty satisfied with his life and his wife Teresa before he was told to move up that he had to become someone he wasn’t. Similarly, Jordan was told that to move up in the corporate world he had to become someone totally different. He meets another woman and Teresa tells him he has become someone totally different, and they divorce. His accumulation of wealth affects his entire life to the point where he doesn’t even get sad like his new wife Naomi does when her mother dies later on in the film because he’s focused on his negotiations with the Swiss broker firm he’s dealing with (he opens a Swiss bank account in her name.)
In Season 3 of the show Broad City there is an episode called “Game Over,” and honestly it is one of the funniest episodes I have seen. At the beginning Abbi Abrams (played by Abbi Jacobson) is teaching a swim class for seniors. They are having fun taking the class, but then one of the participants drowns and Abbi has to retrieve him and revive him. When Abbi does CPR, the old guy, Squibs, opens his eyes and winks at the other ladies and grins, showing that he was just faking it and just wanted Abbi to kiss him. Abbi finds out he was faking it and afterwards when she is getting ready to leave and is finishing up the swim class, Squibs says he could “pop her cherry”, and Abbi tells him he knows her daughter is calling her to report that he hit on her. After Abbi leaves, Squibs complains that what Abbi is doing is called elder abuse.
After the super catchy theme song (and awesome art that goes with it), we see Abbi’s friend Ilana Wexler (played by Ilana Glazer) working at a marketing company called Deals Deals Deals. She is wearing a dog hoodie (which I thought was just a super small hoodie for adults) and her boss, Todd, comes to her desk and reminds her that he emailed her telling her not to come into work today because she has consistently goofed off and acted silly during work and doesn’t take it seriously. Ilana asks him if he emailed her at her address ilanawexler@mindmyvagina.com, and he says he refuses to use that email. Ilana keeps convincing him to let her keep staying at work, and he tells her to go home because she is wearing a dog hoodie. She denies this but he tells her that it is because the hoodie has holes for dog ears. In a moment I thought utterly hilarious, Ilana turns around and asks if there is a pocket on the back to confirm that it is, in fact, a dog hoodie. Ilana jokes that this is the second time this has happened to her, and then on her way to go to the bathroom or in the hall for some other shenanigans, she tells Todd and her coworker Nicole, who absolutely loathes Ilana because she isn’t serious about her work and consistently harasses Nicole, that they are going to make millions at the company (“we’re going to be billionaires, no–kajillionaires.”)
The scene cuts to Abbi at Soulstice, where she also works as a cleaner, and they are getting ready for the big competitive games. Abbi, who is extremely competitive, wants to join in. The trainer who has a crush on her, Trey, encourages her to compete, and Abbi gets ready for the games. Before that, she finds herself in a room full of other naked Soulstice folks and Trey tells her there is a changing room if she needs it. At first she says it’s fine, but then everyone around her starts to undress in the locker room and someone drops their pills and everyone gathers where Abbi is standing to retrieve them, and Abbi finally gives in and asks Trey where the changing room is so she can change her clothes in private.
The scene cuts then to Ilana back at Deals Deals Deals, and Ilana misses the memo and asks why everyone seems in such a hurried mood. Nicole begrudgingly reminds her that Todd just told her that the investor is coming. Ilana jokes that she has “baby brain” and Nicole asks her suspiciously if Ilana is pregnant because she said she has “baby brain”, and Ilana laughs and says no and asks Nicole is she is pregnant. Nicole coldly responds, “No.” The investor, played hilariously by Vanessa Williams, comes in and this super funky electronic music plays when Vanessa tosses her expensive beautiful scarf in slow motion across the room to make her entrance. Ilana is seen wowing this woman and scrunching her face to show she is sexually attracted to the investor, whose name is Elizabeth. Ilana introduces herself and says how fascinated she is by Elizabeth’s clothes. Elizabeth tells her it is from TJ Maxx, 30 percent off. Ilana playfully punches Nicole’s shoulder, which is bad because Nicole’s arm is in a brace, and Ilana muses whether she wants to be Elizabeth or be “in” Elizabeth.
Meanwhile, Abbi decides to go through with competing in the Soulstice games, and her competitive spirit comes out in the craziest ways. Ilana warns her about her competitive nature during this kind of event, but Abbi goes through with it anyway because she wants to win. She ends up getting back at Gemma (played by D’arcy Carden) for calling her “cleaner” during a game where they are fighting with these paddle-things. Gemma is impressed with Abbi and tells her she’s stronger than she looks. While Abbi is competing in the games, Ilana is at a company meeting with the investor and the investor tells everyone she is disappointed in how the company is doing with its sales. When she asks anyone if they have any input, she calls on Ilana (she calls her, in all seriousness, “Maxinista”) if she has ideas for improving the company, and Ilana starts telling her and everyone about Salad Fingers and all these videos from ebaum’s world (a website that was super popular when I was in middle school). While her other colleagues look at her with confusion and bewilderment, Elizabeth tells her she has no idea what Ilana is saying and she loves it. She then tells Todd that he is underutilizing Ilana and has Ilana head the company’s Twitter account. In a moment which I thought was absolutely hilarious, Ilana goes “Ms. Hot Lady You Got It!” and Elizabeth looks at her in a determined way. Honestly it made me laugh because I just thought about how many outtakes they had to do of this episode. Like, how can anyone keep a straight face when Ilana says the goofiest things? Also, it must have been a privilege to work with someone like Vanessa Williams.
Unfortunately, things go south and while out celebrating Abbi’s victory in the Soulstice games, Ilana tweets a graphic NSFW video. The next day at work, Ilana comes to work to find everyone grossed out (and one person vomiting in a trash can) after seeing the video on the Twitter account. Ilana wonders what is up, and Todd pulls her into his office. He tells her she is fired for tweeting the video, calling it a “PR nightmare.” Ilana tries to reason with Todd why she was right in tweeting that video, but he tells her that it doesn’t matter, what she did is wrong and he is firing her. She then complains that she is going to talk to “Mom” (aka the investor), but then when she tells Elizabeth about it, Elizabeth tells her she is definitely fired for what she did. Ilana, knowing this is her last interaction with Elizabeth, tells her that she wanted to confess something: that she wants to be “in” her. Elizabeth looks at her blankly, then tells her she needs to leave, implying that Ilana’s comment was absolutely inappropriate and even more reason for her to get fired. Ilana says her goodbyes, calling her coworkers by the nicknames she gave them, such as “White Guy No. 7”, “White Guy No. 3”, and “Adult Braces.” She then precedes to further annoy Nicole and talk her ear off with a sentimental goodbye about how she is the reason Ilana comes to work every other day, and that somehow they will meet again. Before she can stress Nicole out any further, Todd tells her that is enough and to leave immediately. Before she leaves, Ilana puts up an air dancer because she believes in “corporate morale.” When she finally leaves, Nicole and everyone break out into a hilarious lip-sync performance of “Joyful, Joyful” from Sister Act 2 to celebrate Ilana officially being fired from the company. Nicole finally wakes up to the air dancer whacking her in the face, and realizes she was daydreaming of the Sister Act performance. She records in her recording device joyfully that she is free now that Ilana is no longer at the firm.
Honestly, this episode is one of the reasons why I love Broad City. It is hilarious. It’s the episode I’ve re-watched more times than I can recall.
I admit, I was on the fence a lot before seeing this film. I tend to be squeamish about violence and sex, so I looked at the Kids in Mind review for any explicit content that the movie showed (in terms of sex, violence, and language, Kids in Mind rated it a 10.4.10, meaning that this film contained a lot of graphic sex and enough language to warrant any parent to cover their child’s ears.) But I think it helped learning about the explicit content beforehand, because then I felt a little more prepared for what to expect. I was still pretty dizzy after the film because it was definitely a wild ride, but reading the Kids in Mind review helped me get through the movie.
And that’s not to say this is a film for everybody. I thought it wasn’t going to be a film for me, so I thought, “I’m not going to have the stomach to see this.” But then I remembered how much I love dark comedies, and The Wolf of Wall Street is a dark comedy. After watching dark comedies like I, Tonya; Parasite; and Zola, I have more appreciation for the genre. Even though dark comedies are called comedies, I think like any movie they give some pretty serious insight into the human condition and show us in a bare-bones way just as we are, in all our imperfections and fallibility. Also, I’ve been on a biopics kick lately, so I’ve been watching a lot of biographical films. The last one I saw was The Runaways, which is based on musician Cherie Currie’s memoir about her time in Joan Jett’s band The Runaways.
As much as I want to re-watch the film (in college, I treated films as texts so I ended up watching movies for my classes at least 4-5 times no matter how intense the film was. Probably not the wisest strategy since I’m sensitive about content and thus ended up being consumed emotionally by these films, but that’s beside the point.) I need a bit of a break from it because it packed a lot of content into three hours. I didn’t realize this until halfway through the film, but the first 3 hour Leonardo DiCaprio film I saw was Titanic (not the first Leonardo film, though; before that, I saw Inception), and that was 3 hr 17 min long. I made the mistake of watching that at night and at 1 am I was a mess of snot and tissues and tears. The Wolf of Wall Street is almost 3 hours long, too. I thought I would be better off watching this movie in small parts throughout the week because of its length, and because I had other things to do on my schedule, but once I watched it I was so enthralled with the acting, in particular the way Leonardo DiCaprio embodies the character of Jordan Belfort, and the storyline, that I just couldn’t stop watching. Watching this movie made me realize how much I missed watching Leonardo’s acting. He was of course, as anyone who saw Titanic knows, ah-mazing, and in this one he seriously brings his acting chops, too. So I ended up staying up late watching the film until about 11 pm. I had work the next day and was pretty tired, but then I still had thirty minutes left of the movie to watch the next morning, so I finished it before work, and dang I couldn’t stop thinking about that movie for the rest of the day.
So honestly, when I first saw the film I was pretty much duped. At the beginning they play a commercial for a brokerage house in New York City called Stratton-Oakmont, and because I didn’t really read much about the movie before watching it, I was confused because I bought the film on Google Play, and they usually don’t play commercials or trailers before the movie. They only played commercials and trailers for other movies on the DVD version of films I watched, or if I watch the movie in the theater. So I thought it was a brokerage firm advertising for the movie, but then the next scene immediately cut to Leonardo’s character Jordan Belfort and the other people at the firm throwing a short person for target practice at a dart board and yelling and cheering, and then I realized, Oh wow, I thought that was an actual commercial (I’m sure it was though, because this is based on the memoir by Jordan Belfort and Stratton-Oakmont was an actual brokerage house in Long Island, New York). The film starts off with him telling how he ended up becoming so rich and powerful, and shows him snorting cocaine from a woman’s backside. He started off with a pretty humble childhood, and then in his early 20s he worked for a brokerage firm. In his meeting with Matthew McConaughey’s character Mark Hanna, meets with him for lunch and Mark talks him through the business of working on Wall Street. He essentially tells him that it’s a dog-eat-dog kind of environment, and in order to survive he needs to push aside any kind of empathy or compassion, and not care about clients and just focus on making money from other people. Unfortunately, the stocks fail on Jordan’s first day at the firm, LF Rothschild, on a day called Black Monday, and he loses his job. He and his wife Teresa look through the ads in the newspaper, and at first he thinks of taking a job in an entry-level position at a department store and just work his way up, but Teresa tells him it won’t make ends meet and has him apply for something else. She points to an ad for working on Wall Street, and he ends up going to apply for another firm. At first, he is surprised by the more laid-back attitude of the employees, not to mention the smaller size of the firm, which was a total contrast to the LF Rothschild environment, which was more fast-paced and less relaxed. Also, the shares and stocks they sell are way less than what they sold at LF Rothschild. On the first day of him working there, Jordan shows them that he can outsell any of them on the phone calls, and everyone is impressed, so they raise his paycheck. While eating at a diner, a guy named Donnie Azoff (the last movie I saw Jonah Hill in was Megamind. He was the voice of Hal, who becomes Megamind’s archnemesis. So up til then I hadn’t seen him in any other movies, but in his role as Donnie, oh my gosh he was such a good actor. It really gave me more respect for his acting.) approaches Jordan and asks him how much he makes working at the brokerage firm. When Jordan tells him he makes $70,000 in one day, Donnie’s eyes light up and he asks if Jordan can find him a job because he’s working at a furniture store and barely making ends meet. So he and Donnie team up and gather a few more guys and they establish a brokerage house called Stratton-Oakmont. Pretty soon the firm grows in success, and with it Jordan’s ego. He ends up spending lots of money and upgrades his humble lifestyle to a lavish lifestyle of booze, yachts, drugs, and sex with various women outside his marriage to his new wife, Naomi, who he meets at one of Stratton-Oakmont’s lavish parties (Theresa stands outside after she finds out Jordan cheated on her with Naomi, and calls off their marriage.) Jordan thinks he will find bliss in marrying Naomi and buys her an expensive wedding ring and has a nice wedding ceremony. However, eighteen months later, we see her splashing him with water and cussing him out because he brought home a prostitute and slept with her, even though he is married and has kids. However, she stays in their marriage even when he does all these horrible things. Jordan’s activities get more and more corrupt, and we see the Federal Bureau Investigation agency tracking his activities. Eventually, he gets caught, and has to announce to his firm that he is ending the company. Again, I was duped, but not totally because I still was only halfway through this 3 hour film, and I thought to myself, is it over? and then realized, no there’s still another storyline to this. And sure enough, Jordan basically tells everyone, “Nah, I was just messing with you, I’m staying, I’m not leaving.” His dad, who warned him that he was not only spending extravagantly, but also that the FBI was going to be on his case for a long time until he turned himself in and stopped his criminal activities for good, warns him that he can’t simply change his mind like that and that there will be consequences for what he did. However, no one can hear his warning because Jordan is beating his chest and humming just like Mark Hanna taught him to do when they had that lunch together early in the film, and everyone, because they think Jordan is God, follows his lead and starts beating their chest and humming, too.
We then see them on a yacht partying to “Hip Hip Hooray” by Naughty by Nature. However, Jordan is also seen with a Swiss broker trying to get them to smuggle all the money he illegally obtained there so he and the people at his firm don’t get caught. It’s sad because on the yacht in Italy, where they aren’t going to get caught, Naomi comes up to the yacht with her friend crying because her Aunt Emma died. Even though they have to go to the funeral in London, Jordan refuses and insists on taking the money to Geneva and sticking with his plan to go there, totally forgetting that he has a family member that just died. To him, it doesn’t matter that Aunt Emma died, but rather than her money is in the bank and he needs to get it out so that the FBI doesn’t catch him. The FBI finally tracks him down, and he is under house arrest for all the crimes he committed while Stratton-Oakmont was in business. He can’t drink, he can’t do drugs, he is undergoing withdrawal for his addiction to drugs and it’s painful for him. However, Donny visits him and tells him he’s got Jordan’s back no matter what. Then, while Jordan is telling Naomi his plan for the money he’s smuggled illegally, Naomi says she wants to file for divorce. He then gets angry and she slaps him and he slaps her back, and he rips up the sofa and gets out his stash of cocaine and breaks his sobriety from drugs by snorting the cocaine furiously. He gets angry when Naomi tells him she is keeping custody of their kids, and he refuses to let her take custody, and he grabs his daughter and takes her in his car and drives off. Naomi and her housekeeper retrieve his daughter from the car and Jordan, high behind the wheel, is bleeding on his forehead from the force of the crash after he backs into a brick.
Jordan and the people at Stratton-Oakmont end up getting arrested and Jordan ends up teaching a class on sales. He tests people on their knowledge of sales by having them pretend to sell him a pen, and when they’re not quick enough, he cuts them off and goes to the next person to see if they can do what he asked. When the movie ended, I had no words.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to write the review for this movie because there was a lot to digest while watching the movie. However, I think studying more about Buddhist philosophy and reading The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin has given me insight into the human condition just as movies give insight into the human condition. One reason I love philosophy is because it gets to the root of why people do the things they do, and after chanting daimoku about how to best approach this review, I found some things to write about with regards to this movie. I think the early part of the movie, where Jordan is just starting out at the firm, gives context for why he did what he did. I was watching the movie 42 and there’s a young white boy who watches his dad call Jackie Robinson the n-word and at first he doesn’t know how to react but then because he sees his dad do it, he thinks it’s ok and ends up calling Jackie the n-word, too. I told my professor allowed that I was horrified when that scene happened, and he woke me up to the fact that kids are not born racist, they are taught to be racist. Similarly, Jordan wasn’t born a corrupt person who engaged in debauchery of all kinds. He encountered Mark Hanna, who taught him the philosophy of competitiveness. No one gave Jordan an alternative to that philosophy. During the meeting, even little things in Mark’s behavior indicate how Jordan was influenced for the rest of the film. Mark asks for alcohol and offers Jordan some, but instead Jordan asks the waiter for water. Instead of respecting Jordan’s wish, Mark jokingly tells the waiter that Jordan is just starting out in the business and that he’ll “catch up” and learn how to act like everyone on Wall Street. When Jordan asks him about how to care for the clients, Mark tells him that he doesn’t care about the clients, and that the only thing that matters is making money off of them. He also tells him that if he gets stressed he needs to find time to “jerk off”, even though Jordan is married and happy with his marriage. This broker tells him that to work his way up the ladder, he needs to tear people down and make them feel small, and he sees this in his first day working on Wall Street. He sees people shouting over the phone and swearing, and he internalizes this. The work environment is based on the life condition of animality, which is one of the ten life states, or Ten Worlds, that we can manifest any time in our daily lives. Animality is a life condition wherethe strong prey on the weak and take advantage of them. Jordan was young and didn’t know much about working on Wall Street; he just wanted to be reasonably happy. But Mark Hanna instilled in him this idea that he wouldn’t make it in Wall Street unless he succumbed to that life state of animality.
At first it was easy for me to conclude from The Wolf of Wall Street that money is the root of all evil. But I thought about it from a Buddhist perspective, and we have a concept called value creation, which means that even in the most stressful situations, everything has meaning. The philosophy of value creation reminded me time and again that humans create institutions, and just as we use them for evil, we can also use them to create good. In real life, Leonardo is a philanthropist. He has all this money but even though he is rich he donates a lot of his money to environmental causes and has a foundation dedicated to environmental issues. Just as human beings established slavery, they established investing, Wall Street, money in general. As the film progressed, I reflected on the purpose of money: what does it serve? what determines our use of money? what is its fundamental purpose? And it’s interesting because there’s a scene early in the film where Jordan is talking with his friends about starting the brokerage house, and they’re talking about how everyone wants money and one person in the group says that Buddhists are an exception because they don’t care about money. I was kind of happy they mentioned Buddhists, like “yo shoutout to my religion!” haha. But it’s actually interesting they mentioned that, because this week I was reading this article in the April 2021 issue of the publication I read called Living Buddhism, and there’s an article called “Becoming People of True Wealth.” According to the article, “Buddhism teaches that money is neither inherently good nor bad, but it can take on good or bad qualities depending on how we use it…Conventional wisdom holds that praying for something like having a better job or a bigger house runs counter to religious values, but Buddhism views life from a deeper dimension. The Buddhist principle “earthly desires are enlightenment” explains that the Buddha’s enlightened wisdom can be found in the lives of ordinary people who are driven by their earthly desires, or deluded impulses. We can chant to the Gohonzon and express our desires just as they are. And as we do so, we tap into our inherent Buddha nature, which manifests as compassion, wisdom and courage that gradually transform all our desires into the fuel for developing a richer, happier and more fulfilling life.” (p. 16-19, “Becoming People of True Wealth,” April 2021 Living Buddhism)
It’s interesting that I chose to watch this movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, because a couple of weeks ago I applied to a job on Wall Street because I wasn’t really sure what else to do with my life and didn’t think I could find a job in my creative field. I got rejected and felt sad about it, but moved on. The Wolf of Wall Street made me reflect on my 20s and my attitudes towards money: is money a tool to help people or a way to validate my worth? I have been studying The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, and there’s a letter called “On Attaining Buddhahood in this Lifetime,” and in the letter Nichiren Daishonin tells his follower Nanjo Tokimitsu that while everything and everyone has Buddhahood, he needs to summon up faith that “Nam myoho renge kyo” is his life itself, and that he must not seek enlightenment outside himself. I chanted about this and thought about it more the more I studied this letter, and then I watched The Wolf of Wall Street, and it reminded me that no matter how successful I get, I need to win over my own self in order to feel like I’ve truly won in life. In his book Discussions on Youth, the philosopher Daisaku Ikeda has this incredibly beautiful quote where he says that winning isn’t necessarily about becoming rich or becoming important, and that a lot of people who became rich or important ended up leading corrupt lives and didn’t actually win over themselves. He also said we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others because each of us is unique in our own way based on the Buddhist principle of “cherry, plum, peach, damson.” While of course I may be reading too deeply into the movie (after all, it is a comedy, albeit a dark comedy), from a Buddhist perspective, I just feel that Jordan in the film ended up doing the things he did because no one taught him that success lies within himself, and that he could lead a successful life just as he was. Someone else told him that to be successful, all he had to care about was money. Jordan felt that he had to look outside himself for respect, for validation, and couldn’t tap into that respect in his own life.
One scene that really stuck with me was when Jordan and Donny get high on lemon quaaludes, which the most potent quaalude they have. At first nothing is working and they’re not getting high, so they pop more of those quaaludes. Later on, when Jordan is on the phone, he suddenly experiences paralysis of his body and loses all consciousness when the effects of taking so many quaaludes at once hits him. He struggles down the stairs, and honestly, this was the hardest scene to watch because he is literally fighting for his life against the effects of this drug. He slurs his words on the phone and no one can understand him. He gets in his car and his wife calls him and he can’t communicate coherently, and gets in the car and just starts breaking down. When he gets to the house, Donny is also slurring his words high on the quaaludes and also cannot function, and ends up choking on his food. Naomi, who is very pregnant, has to call for help and even though she tells Jordan to help him he can’t understand her because he’s high on the quaaludes. He manages to resuscitate Donny, but ends up feeling miserable on the couch after taking these drugs. It reminded me of a scene from Uncut Gems, when Howard is struggling to pay off his debts from gambling. His girlfriend tries to cheer him up, but he breaks down and cries and tells her that he can’t do anything right and that everyone is after him. Howard was in a life state of hell, which is a life state where everything feels hopeless and you’re swayed by everything in your environment and feel like you can’t do anything about what’s happening to you. Similarly, Jordan feels like he can’t do anything about his situation, and even though he keeps running away from the FBI he still owes a lot of money to the people he and Stratton-Oakmont scammed.
After watching this movie, I reflected on this chapter I read in Discussions on Youth called “What is Freedom?” and even though at times I thought to myself if the point of life and success was to live a lavish lifestyle (not that there’s anything wrong with wanting nice things, of course), reading this chapter made me understand that true freedom doesn’t necessarily depend on our circumstances or how well things go in our lives, but rather on our inner state of life, or what we call in Buddhism our “life condition.” Even though Jordan did as he pleased, he was always at the mercy of his environment. He struggled with what we call in Buddhism fundamental ignorance, or fundamentaldarkness, which is this inability to see our inner potential, the courage, wisdom, and compassion we each inherently possess in our lives. He did these corrupt things because he couldn’t see his own innate Buddhahood. We have a principle in Buddhism called respect for the inherent dignity of life, and while watching Jordan and his friends tear down people at the firm and degrade their humanity, I thought that because they didn’t respect the inherent dignity of their lives they couldn’t respect the inherent dignity of other people’s lives. It reminded me that my success, no matter how much money I make, I need to respect my life, and while I love money like everyone else, and appreciate nice things, if I don’t keep growing as a person I get complacent with my success and stop appreciating the people around me, and eventually I get stagnant and stop truly winning in my life because of this reluctance to keep growing and maintain a sense of appreciation for my life and others’ lives.
Here is the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street:
The Wolf of Wall Street. 2013. Rated R for sequences of strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and for some violence.
I had been meaning to see this movie for a while, and I had read some movie reviews about it, and the trailer looked so good. I watched it last night, and I was stuck making a decision whether to watch this or Good Boys. Good Boys is funny and this movie, The Runaways, was pretty serious. I will watch Good Boys another time though because I’ve really been craving biopics.
This film is based on Cheri Currie’s memoir about being a member of Joan Jett’s music group The Runaways. Honestly, I haven’t listened to much of Joan Jett’s music but this film made me appreciate her music even more. I’ve heard one of her more famous songs, “Bad Reputation,” in just about every movie known to man, every grocery store, on the radio, everywhere. It’s been in Shrek, Baby Mama, and so many other movies. And I’ve heard “I Hate Myself for Loving You” and “I Love Rock n’ Roll” so many times. And maybe “Cherry Bomb” in Guardians of the Galaxy. But I actually first heard of the song “Cherry Bomb” from watching the trailer for The Runaways, and then I recognized it when I watched Guardians of the Galaxy later on. But it wasn’t until this film that hearing Kristen Stewart sing her songs while playing Joan Jett that I actually became familiar with more of her music. Like, in the end credits, the song “Love Is Pain” but Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, I hadn’t heard that one before. In the near to final scene of the film, Kristen Stewart, as Joan Jett, is lying in the bathtub and singing lyrics to what would become her song “Love Is Pain.” It’s a beautiful song and I love it, too, because it’s in D major and I love that key.
Honestly, I saw Kristen Stewart in mainly the Twilight franchise and while I liked her in those movies, she really played Joan Jett well. I don’t know much about Joan Jett’s story, but Kristen embodied the musical energy that Joan Jett put in her performances. The chemistry and complex relationship between her and Cherie Currie (played brilliantly by Dakota Fanning) was played so well, and by the end of the film I wanted to listen to the song “Cherry Bomb” on repeat. Honestly I can’t really put Kristen Stewart’s performance of Joan Jett into coherent words. You know when you watch biopics you know that that one actor was meant to play that person? Like Chadwick Boseman, he was made to play James Brown. Or Jennifer Hudson was meant to play Aretha Franklin (I still have yet to see Respect, but one of my friends said Jennifer was really good in it.) I just felt like I was watching Joan Jett when watching Kristen Stewart perform. I also didn’t realize that Alia Shakwat played one of the members in the band; I vaguely recognized her face, but the last thing I saw her in was Broad City.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind watching this film again. Maybe it’s because I saw Lovelace and really liked that film. Lovelace and The Runaways both take place during the 1970s and Linda Lovelace is briefly mentioned in The Runaways in passing. Of course, the storylines of these films are different, despite them both being biopics. The former is about Linda Lovelace and the abuse she dealt with when she was coerced into filming a pornographic film called Deep Throat. The latter is about a group of female rock musicians who defy gender stereotypes. However, both films deal with young women who don’t know much about sexuality, but then come into their sexuality. In Lovelace, Linda is in her early 20s and lives with her very religious family, who don’t want her seeing boys and value marriage over dating. However, she meets Chuck and he introduces her to pornography, and at first their relationship is strictly friendship but then he coerces her into the business without her knowing what really goes down in the pornography industry. It completes changes her, and while she did awaken to her sexuality, she also dealt with a lot of trauma and abuse at the hands of Chuck and the men involved in the filming of Deep Throat. The film also put tension on her relationship with her parents because no matter how many parties she was telling them she went to, at the end of the day, she was still working in an industry that went against their family-friendly religious morals and they were worried about her (until later on in the film, when they find out that she didn’t choose to go into the industry and that instead, Chuck forced her into doing pornography.) The film made lots of money and Linda became a star but Chuck still maintained full control of her success and her whereabouts, dictating where she could go and not valuing her independence. In The Runaways, Cherie Currie is 15 years old and lives with her parents and twin sister, Marie. She doesn’t get to spend much time with her family and her parents divorced. When she meets Kim Fowley and Joan Jett, her life changes and she becomes more confident in her sexuality. When they first meet Cherie, she doesn’t feel comfortable saying the lyrics to the song that Kim comes up with called “Cherry Bomb” because they are sexually suggestive. When she expresses her discomfort, Kim laughs at her and kicks her out, but then Joan tells her that it’s just a song and to just sing it just as she is.
However, this sours when Kim sets up a photo shoot where some photographers shoot sexualized photos of Cherie posing in sexually suggestive positions for The Runaways’ upcoming tour in Japan. Joan and the other band members get upset with Cherie for selling out and selling her body, and this is partly what drives the band apart. While Kim is definitely different from Chuck in Lovelace, he also is quite manipulative. Even though it seems like at the beginning he is empowering Joan, Cherie and the other band members he is actually driving them apart, calling them names and condescending to them. Towards the end, he calls them a bunch of dog c**ts (not gonna print the actual word but I’m sure you’ll find out eventually.) and Joan throws stuff at him. But he just cheers it on like it’s normal rock and roll behavior. It takes Joan herself realizing that Kim is driving them apart and preventing them from just being true to themselves and making music as friends.
Overall, this was an excellent movie.
The Runaways. 2010. Rated R for language, drug use and sexual content- all involving teens.
Man. This movie. A24. Once again, you have blown me away. The music, the storyline, the acting, the scenes. Just. Wow.
This film is so powerful for so many reasons, the main one being that it is about a very serious issue: gentrification. I first heard about gentrification when I was in college, because some of my friends who lived in New York City were talking about it gentrifying. For one of my Africana Studies courses, I interviewed a classmate about the gentrification of Flatbush. I also had heard about it from a skit by Saturday Night Live called “Bushwick, Brooklyn,” which pokes fun at the gentrification of Bushwick. In the skit three Black men (played by Kenan Thompson, Kevin Hart, and Jay Pharaoh) are standing on the street corner talking about what they did over the week. Kevin’s character says he went to the new artisanal mayonnaise shop down the block called Martha’s Mayonnaise, where they charge $8 for mayonnaise; Jay Pharaoh’s character takes a spin class; and the three guys are seen at an art gallery party where a hipster white lady is playing folk song on guitar.
I also saw another skit called “Do the White Thing” that Jimmy Kimmel did to mark the anniversary of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The sketch features a bunch of white actors playing white people living in the now gentrified Brooklyn (Zooey Deschanel, Jay Duplass, Amy Goodman, Rami Malek, Billy Crudup and Jimmy Kimmel play white people in the sketch) and doing things that mark the gentrification of the area, such as Billy Crudup telling Sal (Jimmy Kimmel) he could have at least gotten a gluten free crust in the pizza he ordered, and when Billy Crudup and Rosie Perez are alone together, he reenacts the scene where she is having ice rubbed on her shoulders, and tells her sensually that the ice was handcrafted at this super fancy pump that used bicycle power to pump the water needed for the ice (to top it off, he breaks out a bottle of Sriracha, and that turns her on.)
While at first I thought both of these sketches was hilarious, as I thought more and educated myself more about gentrification and its impact on the longtime, mostly BIPOC residents there, I found a lot less to laugh about. The Last Black Man in San Francisco served as a very timely reminder to me that the widespread gentrification of cities is a very real issue that has hurt a lot of longtime residents, and in particular BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities. While I have never visited San Francisco, the movie allowed me to feel some kinship, some empathy for what the characters were going through. Two young Black men, Jimmie and Montgomery, are navigating the rapidly shifting landscape of their hometown, San Francisco, as its rising rents force many of the longtime residents, Jimmie and Montgomery, out of the city. They travel through the city on skateboard, trying to hang onto old memories, old relics of the past, as their city changes right before their eyes.
While watching this movie, I kept thinking about another A24 film, Moonlight. The Last Black Man in San Francisco wrestles with another theme, the theme of Black masculinity and its varied expressions, and how society’s norms have limited the freedom to show varied expressions of Black masculinity. Moonlight, if you haven’t yet seen it, is about a young gay Black man growing up in Miami, and it features many tender moments as Chiron’s life progresses and he comes into his sexuality and his manhood with the passage of time. There is an intimate moment where him and his crush, Kevin, are sitting on the beach and just talking, and then they fall in love with one another and kiss. Unfortunately, the school bully gets Kevin to beat up Chiron. Even though Kevin shared such an intimate beautiful moment with Chiron in privacy, because society dictates that he must behave a certain way in order for him to be validated as a Black man, he suppresses that vulnerability with himself and with Chiron. As adults, they reunite and share a beautiful tender moment with one another in the privacy of Kevin’s house. Both Kevin and Chiron get to be their authentic selves in this final scene of the film. Even though Jimmie and Montgomery are not explicitly a gay couple, the other Black men who hang around outside their house tease them for being such close friends with one another. They think these men aren’t really men just because they express their friendship with one another in a way that might not fit what their mainstream ideas of male friendship are. But Jimmie and Montgomery share an incredibly beautiful eternal bond that lasts well after the credits. I just felt those tender moments of dialogue, of shared pain and vulnerability with one another about their desire to just own the space they occupy rather than having to constantly leave, their desire to resist the push of change that robs them of their ability to take up space and just live and breathe and reclaim space.
There is one scene in the film that really stuck with me and further illustrates this human vulnerability. When Kofi, one of the guys who hangs out with his crew and goes along with their teasing of Jimmie and Montgomery for acting less masculine than they do, is murdered, the crew is standing outside of Jimmie and Montgomery’s place and they tell them Kofi got shot and killed in a scuffle with another guy. When Jimmie asks why he got killed, one of the guys in the crew approaches him asking why he’s asking so many questions, and Jimmie tells him he doesn’t understand, doesn’t get it because he just saw Kofi and his friends not too long ago. The guy looks at him angrily, and the music builds and I thought he was going to punch Jimmie for what he said, but he ends up breaking down into tears, landing his head on Jimmie’s shoulder and just letting himself feel grief, letting Jimmy share quietly in his grief as well. This scene had me in tears, especially because I haven’t seen many films where Black men are allowed to just be completely vulnerable with one another and just cry, other than this movie and Moonlight. Black men had historically been conditioned by American social conventions to not show pain, to “wear the mask” and mask their pain and hurt with toughness. During the racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, however, I witnessed a collective moment where Black men were allowed to feel pain, to just acknowledge their grief and embrace it. For instance, John Boyega, during a demonstration in the UK, spoke to the crowd about the racism he dealt with as a Black actor and in the middle, after expressing his anger he broke down in tears. It showed me that I need to listen to more narratives, embrace more narratives in which there are many different ways that Black men express their emotions and themselves. Crying is a human emotion, and part of the process of healing in times of grief and trauma is letting myself cry, letting myself feel what I feel, being honest that I am angry, hurt, confused, not knowing what to say and just expressing my complicated inexplicable pain through my tears. This moment where Kofi’s friend cries on Jimmie’s shoulder was just so deep, raw, powerful tender and human all at once, and honestly I might have exhausted my tear ducts from crying so much during that scene.
I also thought it was sad when Jimmie finds out that his granddad didn’t build the house that he and Montgomery bought. In the middle of the film, a group of Segway tourists are on a guided tour, and the white tour guide tells them that the house was built in the early 20th century, but Jimmie calls down to him that he is wrong, that the house was built in 1947 by his grandfather. He tells people this each time he talks to them, but then Montgomery produces a play called The Last Black Man in San Francisco and reveals to Jimmie and the people who attend the play that Jimmie’s grandfather didn’t build the house he bought. Early on Montgomery and Jimmie speak with Clayton, a white real estate agent who just happens to be a lifelong resident of San Francisco like them. But then the real estate agent throws their stuff out and puts the house up for sale, betraying their trust of him. Montgomery meets with him and tells him that Jimmie’s grandfather built the house and that he has no right to throw out their stuff, but Clayton basically tells him he is just doing his job and that the house was actually built by someone else in the 1850s.
Wanda, Jimmie’s auntie, later meets with him, and Jimmie tells her he feels bad because he told everyone his grandfather built it. Wanda tells him that his feelings are normal, and that if he leaves San Francisco, it’s not his loss, it’s San Francisco’s loss. Later on, while on the bus, two young white women, presumably new transplants to the city, talk about how they hate San Francisco, and Jimmie, overhearing their conversation, tells them that they “can’t hate the city unless they love it.” They think he is weird for saying it, but I feel Jimmie on that. If I go to live in a new city, it wouldn’t do anyone or me any favors if I went to a city and expected it to fit my expectations because life doesn’t always fall into place the way I want it to. I have learned that if I want to get the most out of a city, I need to embrace the longtime community and their contributions to the city. Jimmie and Montgomery and the longtime residents share so many memories of San Francisco together, and it’s hard to maintain hope when something you love is fading so fast and so many changes are happening at once. Honestly, it made me think about the US system of slavery, because Black people weren’t allowed to own property because they were property, their bodies belonged to the white slaveowners. They were, under the 3/5 Compromise, not fully human. Gentrification, as shown in the film, robs Jimmie and Montgomery of their right to own space, to take up space and claim it, to mesh their identity with the space they occupy, and so that it constantly feels like no place is home for Jimmie. He asks Montgomery where he’s going to go because he doesn’t know where his mom lives even after a brief encounter with her on the bus, his grandad is in another place so he can’t stay with him, and he can’t stay with his dad. Jimmie is basically homeless, and he has to constantly keep uprooting himself, not being able to settle in one place because the gentrification is raising home prices and making the city much less affordable.
I think what made this film especially incredible was the music and the cinematography. I swear, the aesthetics of the film are phenomenal, the most intimate human imagery. The music is mostly strings and orchestra, with clarinet, oboe and other woodwinds, and its sweeping and soaring nature paired together with Jimmie and Montgomery’s skateboarding through the city, just moved me a lot. Jimmie and Montgomery spend a lot of time in nature. At the beginning they both sit on a grass hilly area overlooking the bay, in peace and quiet while watching a Black man in a suit talk about the environmental injustice of gentrification. Their spending time in nature is significant, particularly in light of last year’s racial profiling of Christian Cooper.
Overall, it was a powerful film that moved me a lot.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco. 2019. Rated R for language, brief nudity and drug use.
The Arts Are Life 