Flasz On Film

American Fiction opens with a bang – a college classroom where the teacher (that would be Thelonious Ellison, whom everyone affectionately calls “Monk” in reference to the iconic jazz pianist, played by Jeffrey Wright) writes the N-word on the whiteboard and proceeds to instigate a discussion about race in modern literature. It doesn’t go well because one of his students feels offended enough by this word, it makes her physically unable to endure the lecture. When Monk politely infers that if he – a black man – could get over the power of this word, she should be able to do so as well, the student storms off in tears.  

Cut to Monk being de facto fired by his department because his presence is apparently a risk to the mental wellbeing of a whole generation of students. He’s told to “take some time off” and write “a book people would like to read for a change” or something. You get the picture.  

Problem is that Monk isn’t in the business of writing books people would like to read, let alone books people assume he should write on account of his heritage. He’s not at all about race or, as he puts it later in the film, in the business of allowing “white publishers to fiend black trauma porn.” Monk is above this. He’s an intellectual and a sophisticate who put his faculties to good use, became a respected (until recently) professor of literature and a prolific novelist of a high-brow variety. He’s not a black writer; rather a writer who is black. His siblings are medical professionals. They have a summer home on Long Island. They buck the stereotype of what middle-class white liberals think black people are like. Which is, again, where the problem is and where the biting satire of this movie, adapted from an equally biting novel by Percival Everett titled Erasure, stems from.  

The story, as told by Cord Jefferson – a successful TV writer turning his attention to feature filmmaking, who also seems like someone who understands Monk’s many frustrations – is replete with such caustic vignettes that are equally piercing as they are hilarious. We get to see Monk find himself at a book festival where a well-to-do young black writer reads an excerpt from her apparently blockbusting novel written in Ebonics about trials and tribulations of life in the hood (a life she probably only knows from movies, or at best from speaking to someone for only as much as it is needed to fit the needs of the book), all to a thunderous applause of the mainly white middle-class audience. We shadow Monk as he walks into a bookshop hoping to find one of his books. I’m told this is what successful writers do on occasion. However, contrary to the subject matter he thought his work was about, he only finds it after a hyperactive assistant locates a shelf with books about race issues. 

As an act of revenge on the world he sees as vehemently prejudiced in its demand to turn a whole section of the American society in its most egregious stereotype under an aegis of positively discriminating identity politics, Monk sits down and decides to teach everyone a lesson. So, he writes the most stereotypical book he could muster, with gangsters, bandanas, fatherless homes and everything else he can think of… and he becomes an overnight success because this is exactly what the publishers want their snooty white readers to read while their chilling on their verandas in the Hamptons. And they clearly do not fathom that what Monk wrote (under an alias, mind you) is a joke meant to expose the world for its performative virtue signaling that clearly amounts to unsubtle racism in its own right.  

And the story goes from there in, shall we say, a variety of directions because Cord Jefferson is not willing to confine his brazen spirit to just one facet of the black American experience. Thus, American Fiction snowballs into becoming an all-encompassing vortex of satirical genius that prods so perfectly at the society we currently live in that you can’t help but laugh uproariously while also feeling a sense of dread and unease at just how real and ridiculous the subject matter is… all the while marinading in the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic directorial style reminiscent of early Wes Anderson.

It is an honestly fantastic example of a movie that drives a spike into the heart of what the filmmaker sees as a two-faced society keen to train black Americans to embrace their “place” as an underclass, as opposed to aspiring to build a cohesive multicultural society Martin Luther King had a dream about that one time. This utterly phenomenal piece of dense satire achieves its primary goal predominantly by way of cutting right into the heart of what the writer of the source material and the man who adapted it know best – the worlds of publishing and entertainment, both overlapping in a strangely insipid twilight zone called Hollywood.  

In fact, if you dig a little bit into the backstory of Cord Jefferson, you will also find a symmetrical experience to that of Monk’s, as he had to fight an uphill battle, being of a biracial extraction, to not allow the entertainment industry to pigeonhole him on account of his background as a black writer writing about black stuff, as though to tell him to stay in his lane or something. As the movie illustrates in a few key scenes, the industry is prone to cast very powerful spells at creatives wishing to begin (or to continue unimpeded) their careers and inculcates in them the need to write urgent stuff. Necessary stuff. Which, if you take away all the hubbub and entertainment lingo, amounts to reinforcing hurtful stereotypes under the guise of embracing them as a “lived experience.”  

In a flurry of scenes, vignettes and subatomic nano-arcs, American Fiction builds a collage out of those ideas that stands tall as a monument denouncing the frivolous callousness of the American middle and upper classes who have found insidious ways to keep the society from becoming one cohesive being. What is more, even though some of you may find it occasionally difficult to sit through some elements of this movie, the filmmaker wants you to laugh and ridicule the world he paints alongside him. If you emerge from this movie discomforted and unsettled, you haven’t learned a thing. You are the equivalent of that student who storms out of the classroom in the first two minutes of the movie.  

American Fiction lambasts the idea of writing things that are labelled as urgent only because it sells well to suburban housewives with nothing to do after dropping the kids off at their private school, in between their morning cinnamon latte and lunch time Pilates at that new sustainable place Susan told them about. Ellison, Jefferson and Everett (in my mind they all sing in a perfect harmony like a well-trained barbershop trio) dismiss the concept of urgency as a cultural and societal red herring and instead use their ingenious storytelling acumen to remind us that what matters to us as a species is not necessary what’s here and now, but rather what lasts, directs and steers. Hence, the movie they made is not urgent. It’s important.  

And it is so because it makes us laugh and giggle at its preposterous exploits. It makes us lower our guards and let go of whatever image we’d like to cultivate of ourselves and those around us. Thelonious and his frankly outrageous journey from being a half-orphaned academic pariah to becoming a frustrated prankster and then to understand something profound about himself and his own family, all the while a literal farce is unfolding around him, add up to a potent and poignant reflection of how far we actually are from ever making Martin Luther King’s dream a livable reality. 

To that end, all I can say to you, dear Reader, is to seek out American Fiction, because it may be one of the most important films you’ll see this year.  And it definitely might be the funniest. So, I suggest you head out and buy those tickets.

Urgently.