Very rarely does a film manage to discuss complex and nuanced racial issues without being too preachy and still being clever, hilarious and witty. “American Fiction,“ winner of the 2024 Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, is one of those cases, catching my attention from its first trailer.
For some background, I enjoy critiquing and analyzing film and TV and linking screenwriting to larger societal issues. I have spent some time trying to write an essay on black stereotypes in film with a focus on the excessiveness of “black trauma” in media and the idea of creating a singular, generalized story of blackness.
“American Fiction“ focuses a lot on these themes as well. Its first trailer reveals the main plot of the film: Thelonious (Monk) Ellison, an African American writer, is struggling to write books that actually sell. His editor tells him that what many publishers want from him is a “black” book. He sees that bestselling black writers usually write books about uneducated black characters suffering and living in poverty. The book he finds most egregious is “We Lives in Da Ghetto” written by the fictional Sintara Golden, a book that Monk believes to contain typical black stereotypes — even though, as the movie points out, he never actually reads the whole book. As a joke, he creates a novel under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh” called “My Pafology” (later changed to “F*ck”), an amalgamation of all the stereotypes of black stories: absentee fathers, lack of education, rappers, drugs and crime. To his surprise, this book ends up becoming a bestseller.
Many interpretations of the film are what’s on the surface: black creatives keep writing about trauma, and these are the stories that become expected from other black writers. But the film says a lot more than this. For one thing, Monk is not innocent. He criticizes the repetitive black stories he sees but also puts down many lived experiences of black people in a somewhat snobbish manner. Also essential is that Monk is from the upper middle class. He is college educated with a PhD, and both his siblings are doctors. There are many times it seems that he feels a need to separate himself from the negative portrayals of black people — despite how real they sometimes are — because he is wealthier and more educated than those shown and doesn’t believe he should be lumped in with them. It's a slippery slope that anyone, including black people, can fall into when critiquing African American stereotypes in art. To me, it felt like a cautionary tale as I write my own essay on black trauma: is my distaste for these kinds of stories based on the reduction of an entire race to these types, or does it highlight my own biases against people from a different group? Especially as I am black but not African American, do my artistic preferences reveal unintentional biases against African Americans I have so far failed to recognize?
When Monk meets Sintara Golden, they have a very interesting conversation about “F*ck” and “We Lives in Da Ghetto,” as well as the dilemma that black creatives face when writing stories. Sintara points out that “F*ck” is the kind of book that white audiences call important or powerful, but never well-written. She distances her book from “F*ck” saying that she actually did her research and interviewed the people she was writing about, so Monk should come off his “ivory tower” and remember some black people still have struggles. But Monk is quick to point out that Golden herself comes from a higher class, educated background and somewhat played up the suffering of low-income, less-educated black people in a manner that felt almost like ridicule and perpetuated racial stereotypes so she could “give the people what they want” and advance her career. However, even though it was done with different intentions, does Monk not do the same thing and receive financial benefits as well?
The film doesn't place solving all these fundamental questions of representation on black creatives because it's not all up to them. A large part of the film is spent criticising white audiences and executives who produce and consume these kinds of stories. It pokes fun at white critics and audiences who call black trauma films “important” and publishers who want to “uplift black stories” while only accepting those that fit into a specific box. Sintara doesn’t make an effort to change the perceptions of black people through her stories, but that shouldn’t have to be her job. And even if she were to write a non-racialized story, her books would probably suffer the same fate as Monk’s since that’s not the kind of “black story” that gains recognition. It might not be the kind of story that either Monk or Sintara wanted to write, but it’s the story that could sell. There are black stories that don’t have systemic oppression as their central themes, but how popular do they become — especially with white consumers and producers?
I believe that even though times are changing and we're starting to see more diverse stories, we tend to expect them to justify their existence. When a movie is released with a predominantly or all-black cast, many might question why the cast needed to be black. This creates a pressure to create a story centered on race to justify its existence. It's important to note that despite it having a fresh take and being satirical, “American Fiction“ is still, in part, a story about African Americans centered on systemic oppression. Monk’s heartfelt family drama is the other major part of the film and was not necessarily advertised in the trailer. If it had been the focal point instead, would the film still have found its success? Or did we (myself included) only watch it for its racial critique? Did I perpetuate the pigeonholing of black storytelling potentials that I have been criticizing?
