 | MOVIE #1,591 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 04.30.24 Didn’t expect to write almost 1,000 words on this movie but here we are. I felt early on like the success of this movie was going to hinge on the inevitable confrontation (and how they handled that dialogue) between Jeffrey Wright and Issa Rae's characters: two Black authors squaring off on some very big issues revolving around representation and who gets to create and consume Black stories. And I think the film did it well. There are parts of this that are visually too much: the fake talk show sequence is garish and not good. It's one thing to see people acting phony and over the top to push the massively overt satire, but I felt like the world around them should have felt more grounded. |
So, thanks for reading this post and checking out the website in general. Your support means the world to me! At this point, I’d like to do two more things: first I'd like to explore the ending in more detail, so I am gonna get into full spoilers below (and write with the assumption that you've seen the movie as well). Secondly, and against my better judgment, I'm going to compare this film to *cough* Barbie. I think I can connect the dots of these two discussions, especially in how they deal with artist intent vs. audience interpretation. Feel free to tap out whenever you want lol.
On the film's end: my initial reaction was that the entirety of the movie up to that first fade to black moment was essentially ‘a movie within a movie' written by Monk, an L.A. screenwriter, and that this ‘new’ character (aka the ‘real’ Monk) inserted personal elements of his life into what was otherwise the fictional saga of an author conjuring the My Pafology/Fuck book and dealing with its instant success in secret. In my opinion, that reading makes the film better — especially the aspect that it's cynical Oscar bait (because duh, it's nominated: mission accomplished) — but it's clearly not the correct interpretation. The Monk at the end is the same Monk from the rest of the movie (that Adam Brody is on the set of Plantation Annihilation, a production he mentioned in their earlier meeting, as well as his referencing “the real Coraline” give it away). But dammit, this calls into question so many logistical things. Like, are they also making the original Fuck into a movie in this world? And is this pitch an alternate history version of the writing of that book? Is cynical producer man Brody the only other person who knows Monk's secret? It's still meta but it's flawed and needlessly confusing. The bigger meta ending was right there! This could have been a real “American fiction,” if you know what I mean. But here's the kicker: I can still live inside my initial translation even if it's incorrect. This is a free country. And I'm OK with being wrong (sometimes*).
Now — and I don’t feel good about doing this — on Barbie: my main gripe, as I hopefully outlined in my review, was that this film wasn’t nearly self-aware as it purported to be. That there seems to be a loud choir in favor of a certain reading of the film that — for example, the film plainly stating that “the patriarchy is bad!” over and over and over again — was itself some act of parody, and that feels incredibly disingenuous. Because how are we supposed to take that? If it’s a joke, do they actually mean, “well, maybe the patriarchy is not so bad?” We live in an irony-poisoned world and these things can be difficult if not downright impossible to parse. So there’s no clear answer. And that, in and of itself, is fine. If this is art then that is totally fine. I am choosing to believe in my interpretation of how American Fiction ended even though I know it’s not the ‘right’ one. Just as I am perfectly able to eschew what could be the ‘right’ interpretation of Barbie because I feel so strongly about why it’s otherwise bad. This is “ignorance is bliss” but only up to a point.
Because I can’t simply say that what Greta Gerwig and Cord Jefferson attempted to transmit doesn’t matter. Perhaps this is a simple execution issue (and no filmmaker is ever going to bat 1.000 in the Getting Your Ideas Across Dept.) that doesn’t warrant this much (or any) further analysis. That’s fair (Jefferson came very close to sticking the landing, while Gerwig fell off the mat completely). But i’s also not how I want to watch and ingest cinema.
This was more of a ‘thought exercise’ (i.e., using the American Fiction review to further bitch about Barbie, as one does) — I’m not sure I have a coherent point, honestly. The last thing I’ll say is that I try to always give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt, perhaps to a fault sometimes (it’s how I wound up giving the Bret Michaels joint A Letter from Death Row a 9/10 lol). American Fiction is an amusing enough picture that didn’t bring things home as neatly (or as messily) as I would have hoped. Barbie is a failure and a spectacular failure (and not in a fun way), but — more to the point — it was built to fail. There’s not much left to parse when that’s the case.
* read: when it's in the service of me ultimately seeming more ‘right’
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,590 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,592 ⫸
⫷ MOVIE #1,590 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,592 ⫸
American Fiction is a 2023 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Cord Jefferson in his feature directorial debut. Based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett, it follows a frustrated novelist-professor who writes an outlandish satire of stereotypical "Black" books, only for it to be mistaken for serious literature by the liberal elite and published to high sales and critical praise. It stars Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody and Keith David. It was released on September 8, 2023.
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