Adopting a pseudonym, a disillusioned author writes a novel based on
crude African-American stereotypes, only for it to become a
bestseller.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Cord Jefferson
Starring: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam
Brody, Keith David, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown
There's the old stereotype of the uneducated working class man who
visits a modern art gallery where, bemused by paintings he can't
understand, proclaims "My kid could paint that." The idea that high art
is some sort of scam indulged by the intelligentsia is sadly all too
prevalent. Whenever a film critic posts a list of their favourite movies
you'll inevitably see responses like "You don't really like all those
movies about suicidal goat-herders in Mongolia, do you?" Lots of people
think they could knock out a great piece of art if they were simply
bothered, usually the sort of men who claim they could outperform a
professional female athlete in their chosen sport. Movies like Roger
Corman's A Bucket of Blood and the Tony Hancock vehicle
The Rebel, in which untalented nobodies accidentally become the toast of the art
world, have satirised this idea.
But for every working class person who laughs at "high" art, there's a
middle class snob who scornfully denounces the sort of "low" art enjoyed
by the general public. They both come from a place of equal
ignorance.
Writer/director Cord Jefferson's satirically sharp debut
American Fiction, a semi-adaptation of Percival Everett's novel 'Erasure', takes
the premise of films like A Bucket of Blood and
The Rebel and gives it a class switcheroo.
Jeffrey Wright gets the role of a lifetime as Thelonious "Monk"
Ellison, a literary professor who has found modest success with his own
writing. In what plays like a companion piece to Kristoffer Borgli's
Dream Scenario, the opening scenes display Monk's disdain for the modern American
academic space, populated by fragile, entitled rich kids who become
"triggered" at the drop of a hat. After an argument with a white student
over his insistence on displaying the N-word on a whiteboard, Monk is
called into what you assume is just the latest in a line of faculty
meetings, where a group of white people tell him he can't use the
offending word, without a hint of irony.
Monk is intensely frustrated at how he's labelled a black writer,
rather than simply a writer. "The blackest thing about my books is the
ink," he rages at a bookstore clerk after finding his work in the
African-American Studies section. At a literary festival Monk is
disgusted to see the main attraction is author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose debut novel 'We's Lives in da Ghetto', sounds to his ears like
a collection of the sort of negative black stereotypes that pander to
white audiences.
When his mother's (Leslie Uggams) dementia reaches the point
where she needs to enter a nursing home, Monk is suddenly desperate for
the funds to keep her in care. He decides to have a crack at writing the
sort of "black trauma porn" novel that publishers currently demand,
using the pseudonym "Stagg R. Leigh," presumably surmising that white
audiences won't be familiar with the historical figure of the
African-American pimp Lee Shelton, who was immortalised in a variety of
blues ballads. To Monk's surprise, his book (which ends up being titled
"Fuck") sparks a bidding war, with publishers offering him the sort of
numbers he could only have previously dreamed of.
At one point a character remarks how a writer should be non-judgemental
of other people, and especially of the characters they write. The very
judgemental Monk is taken aback by the idea, which is offered by the
woman (Erika Alexander) he claims to love, but whose opinion he
easily dismisses. It's an idea however that Jefferson clearly endorses,
as his is a film that refuses to judge any of its characters. There are
no villains here, save for the ones in Monk's mind. Instead Jeffferson
presents us with a group of characters with conflicting ideas and allows
the viewer to make up their own mind on who's right. When 'Fuck' is
entered into a literary competition whose panel of judges includes both
Monk and Sintara, Jefferson reminds us of the necessity of something
that's going out of fashion in our increasingly narrow-minded and binary
world – a spirited debate. Sintara sees the novel for exactly what it
is, siding with Monk in campaigning against its inclusion. The white
judges view it as an important work. A pair of white liberals seem to
want to include it to make themselves look good, while a gruff Norman
Mailer wannabe sees it as a vital work "from the gutter." A lot of
cringey comments are made, but also some valid points. Confronting
Sintara as to how her book is any different to 'Fuck', Monk's elitism is
exposed.
Had Monk been around in the 1970s, he likely would have been one of
those black intellectuals who rallied against blaxploitation movies.
While such figures certainly had a point about how those movies
portrayed black men as pimps rather than professors, they missed the key
point, that they were the only movies that featured heroic black
protagonists, and that working class black audiences lapped them up. For
the average African-American in the '70s, a figure like Ron O'Neal's
Superfly was surely more relatable than a teacher played by Sidney
Poitier. Black filmmakers like Melvin van Peebles and writers like
Iceberg Slim were able to reach the African-American public in a way the
likes of James Baldwin couldn't.
At the same time, Monk certainly has a point about what sort of black
stories dominate the culture, though it has arguably less impact now
than it would have had in 2001 when 'Erasure' was published. The sort of
black stereotypes interrogated here have become much rarer as more black
artists have emerged in recent years. It's unlikely that
American Fiction itself could have been made a decade ago
when its themes might have been more resonant, unless Spike and Denzel
signed on. I certainly can't imagine its delightful subplots concerning
Monk's gay cokehead brother (a charming Sterling K. Brown) and a
romance between his family's maid (Myra Lucretia Taylor) and a
local security guard (Raymond Anthony Thomas) would have remained
intact, as they show black people having a good time in a manner that
isn't related to their race.
The prevailing question that needs addressing however is not who gets
to tell what stories, but who ultimately consumes those stories? Who is
more likely to embrace American Fiction: a black audience or the white liberals it so savagely satirises? On
the basis of his excellent debut, Jefferson deserves to reach the widest
audience possible. You can tell he's a special filmmaker because he even
finds a way to make the act of writing engrossing for the viewer.
