American Fiction

In American Fiction, an embittered black author, who is sick of having his highbrow material rejected by publishers and neglected by readers, writes a lurid pastiche of urban black life called My Pafology. He submits the new manuscript under a pseudonym. His object is to needle the industry with its own bad taste. And so, following the logic of The Producers, it sells.

This much is made clear in the trailer, which features a pull quote calling the film a “cinematic stick of dynamite.” The advertising emphasizes jokes at the expense of gullible white people whose self-righteous endorsement of representation masks deeply ingrained feelings of racial prejudice.

In a way, the trailer is as lurid as My Pafology, and more perceptive than the satirical elements in American Fiction. White liberals in 2024 are quick to reject negative stereotypes about people of color—but they are extremely credulous when it comes to negative stereotypes about themselves. White self-mortification is used as bait. But the switch is worth the swindle.

If Beale Street Could Talk

On the evidence of Moonlight, and now If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’s dominant theme is the redemptive power of love. An indication, perhaps, of a labile sensibility, his viewpoint can blur with lust: when, for example, Trevante Rhodes was introduced as the final iteration of Chiron in Moonlight, the camera crawled up his newly swole body, ab by ab. Here, an ex-convict describes incarceration in an atmosphere that suggests rape. The threat to Jenkins’s theme, however, is not that it is so deeply felt that it borders on carnality; the danger is that beauty will betray the romantic artist by bleeding into a trite ideal. That it will turn limp and “pretty.”

As Beale Street opens, Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) float down a staircase in a park. His jacket is saffron. Her dress is cream. They are color-coordinated with the leaves—models posing for a spread. A spray of sun touches them like Midas. Are we looking at a perfect couple, ruined by the system? Or is this Tish’s consoling self-image while Fonny, accused of rape, rots in prison, and she carries their unborn son? A shared heart swells in her gut. Bodies can be hurt but beauty cannot be blemished.

In his celebrated 2015 memoir Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates transfigured the black body into an article of faith: something once stolen that can never again be taken away. (Coates borrowed his title from James Baldwin, who wrote the novel this film is based on.) Jenkins summons the cinematic equivalent of Coates’s exaltation; he blankets Harlem in divinity. But this glorification of the body fails to illuminate Tish’s or Fonny’s mind. Her voiceover doesn’t register as the consciousness of the reserved 19-year-old we see on screen. And I cannot recall Fonny engaging with this side of her personality either. Tish and Fonny don’t suffer the slings and arrows of mortal passion; they are angels whose wings are tragically clipped.