This year for Juneteenth, perhaps in the wake of the George Floyd murder and the uprisings that have followed, a number of streaming services posted “Black Stories’ selections. Here are some thoughts on some of the shows that I watched last weekend. [SPOILERS AHEAD]
Blindspotting
OK, first of all, Blindspotting (Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal) is flipping amazing! So here is a film with some potentially clichéd elements: a black ex-con from the innercity, in fact Oakland CA, site of so many innercity films and historical race riots etc. But the incredibly shot, brilliantly written and acted, wonderfully scored film reinvents that story in ways that just brims with insight and revelations about blackness in America, policing and racism, and the racial/cultural entanglements of the innercity.
Firstly, the film covers a few days in the life of the black ex-con, Collin. These are his last few days on probation and so he must stay out of trouble or else he’ll be sent back to jail. But the film juxtaposes, sometimes literally through split screen, the differences between his life and choices and that of his white best friend, Miles (with a black wife/girlfriend and a young son) who can act loud and aggressive and not fear for his freedom or life. But for our hero, every breath is a potential mine field, especially when he witnesses a white officer shooting an unarmed black man.
The film becomes a powerful meditation on the trauma of being black, the trauma of witnessing black death, the weight that he carries that his white friend, however hip to the streets, does not. And this culminates in a heart-pounding, surreal night when Miles spirals into violence at how hipsters new to the area and militant black progressives all think he’s acting black--and he responds by beating a black hipster to a pulp in front of his black best friend, a stunned Collin. Yikes.
The cinematography was absolutely brilliant—particularly the use of slow-motion to heighten time and music (a record on the turntable plays in slow-motion in a heightened moment). Just brilliantly inventive storytelling—the besties drive for a truck hiring company removing stuff from people’s homes, and on these calls, they meet some fascinating characters. And of course, written by the lead actors who are rappers and actors, the dialogue is part regular dialogue and part rap, a kind of Hamilton in film mode.
It’s simply my favorite thing I’ve watched this year, even for a long time. I’ve so long wanted to watch it and thrilled I got to. And of course, mad that although it is apparently a critical darling, it didn’t make a huge amount of money due to limited theatrical release—with all the boring, same-old white stories that get made, why can’t projects like this get enough funding to have a broad release? Anyway.
Watchmen
HBO’s Watchmen is kind of Blindspotting on steroids; by that I mean: just crazy twists and turns every minute. Of course, in terms of time and speculative fictions, I loved the big and small nods to time and clocks, including a very Blindspotting-like scene where George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” with the lines, “time can never mend / the careless whisper of a good friend” is slowed down almost unrecognizably in a heightened moment. Over just a few episodes we meet incredibly drawn characters, some from the DC universe of Minutemen that the show reprises, some altogether new.
But I thought the new, more compelling story of the legacy and alternate history following the 1921 Tulsa Massacre (white people bomb and burn a thriving black business community, killing at least 300), didn’t quite gel with the older, canonical sci-fi tale of the Minutemen (early masked vigilantes), Ozymandias (a rich scientist turned vigilante) and Doctor Manhattan (a Jewish man who becomes radioactive, and thus a god-like, elemental, timelord). The merging of the two universes empties out what was most compelling about the show for me: because of a new law following a later massacre of cops in Tulsa, all cops now wear masks. The image of the central character, Angela, in a punk nun’s outfit, hood and mask, is wonderful, but as the show goes on, we realize that her character’s badassery is far from aspirational or corrective.
For the entire series, Angela is very much a powerless, clueless pawn and observer of the real, secret goings-on of powerful men (and one powerful woman). At the end of the series, it is not even her actions that save the day; her role it turns out is to hide Doctor Manhattan for 10 years; she becomes his wife, he becomes a black man, and they live a beautiful aspirational life, until we find out that our heroine isn’t married to a black man after all but a white, emotionless, homicidal god, one who simply tells her that they will fall in love and have a relationship (we never even see them falling in love, her falling in love). OK.
It also pissed me off that the only people we see doing science in the series are white men (possibly also the Vietnamese villainess/her daughter-mother), never the black characters. The black characters/heroes are all heroes because of their muscle: Angela is a badass masked cop who beats racists to a pulp; her grandfather, supposedly the first masked vigilante whose race is erased/obscured because no-one would have accepted a black hero back then, is simply a guy who beats up bad guys after he survives an attempted lynching. Black folk in the show neither have superpowers nor access to science. To me, that resorts to stereotype and empties out any liberatory potential of the show.
Add to that how the show’s twists and turns make it unclear until the end that the bad guys are being bad because of racism (that was the early sense, but the middle of the series made it seem as if they had an entirely different, possibly justified agenda). And even worse, how much time the camera spends lingering on visceral antiblack violence (repeated images of black men and women being killed, tortured, humiliated) and how the comeuppance of the white racists in the end is merely them being ...vanished.
Aside from the police brutality against suspected white supremacists in an earlier episode—when we like Angela realize that the police beatings are likely unjustified and give us no pleasure—the only comeuppance that is shown and satisfying is the demolecurization of the racist senator. And it’s a self-own: he gets into a chamber to take Dr. M’s power, and turns into a soup of blood and gore when all goes awry.
All in all I enjoyed watching a fun, inventive sci-fi show, but I wasn’t sold on its credentials as a black-positive alternate history. The best parts for me were in fact the subplot of the manor on Europa—a purely hysterical, crazy, dark fantasy—but again with an unsatisfying end (the white bad guy just hops into a spaceship and leaves behind the people he’s tortured and manipulated, with no consequences to his actions). And even the lone powerful non-white woman, the Vietnamese villainess, is killed in the end (again with visceral, onstage violence). The cliffhanger ending where our black heroine potentially gains Dr. Manhattan’s powers is perhaps the only saving grace of the show, but again, it’s offstage, and future.
Self-Made
Another black history series I watched recently is Self-Made, about a black female entrepreneur, Madam CJ Walker, the first maker of black hair products. But despite the presence of the ever-yummy Blair Underwood and great acting as usual by Octavia Spencer, I found the show problematic in many ways. The rivalry between the white-passing villain and our black heroine played as very cartoonish; and I just hated the heroine and her values.
Ok great, it’s wonderful that a black woman was able to achieve so much, despite great racial and gender inequity of her time, but this is a woman selling black hair straightening products—sure, privileging blackness over whiteness, but still upholding white beauty standards and assumptions about black hair (having length and straightness become the marker of beauty/healthy black hair). And Walker and the film adhere to and promote this destructive notion that capitalism or black wealth (aspiring to live among and be like the rich whites) is the ultimate dream. I’m sure some black viewers find this aspirational (for instance, there’s one critical view that embracing notions of black capitalism is a type of alternate reparations) but I do not; it’s that key trope in contemporary hip-hop, the black spin on the American Dream (nightmare), the embrace of the very capitalist system that enslaved and continues to devalue black people. It’s a very individualistic, narcissistic narrative of black excellence: if I make it, I’ll show these white folks that black people are something.
In the film, this competition is destructive on so many levels—for instance, to become ‘self-made,’ Walker has to steal from another black woman, albeit white-passing; and she sidelines and emasculates her loving black husband so as to not lose her power as a female entrepreneur. So this ‘self-made’ success is so much about the ‘self.’ It’s rarely collaborative or collective.
The only exception to this is her empowerment of black women, her training school that gives black women economic independence, and her adoption of a poor black girl. In the end, progress and collective uplift are restricted to gender, not race.
I mean, yay, I guess…