American Fiction

I’m a climate coward.  I like that label better than Snowbird.  Northern winters don’t work for me anymore.  I relegate Sunday for catch-up calls with friends and family, whom I’ve left out in the cold.  A few Sundays ago, after hanging up from one of my favorite couple’s call, I didn’t experience the high I usually felt.  Our conversations typically include everything and the kitchen sink; a little gossip to keep me apprised of the latest local personalities and events, shared curiosity about certain celebrities. (I love gossip. I take nothing seriously because I have a healthy disrespect for the media.  I like the kind of gossip you get from reading doctor and dentist office magazines… People, Us… reminders of my years reading movie fan magazines as I was growing up) This is usually followed by a very quick touchdown of the political landscape… has to be quick because we don’t want to spoil each other’s day. Then, on to the core of our conversations: cultural topics involving books, theatre, movies, artists and their art. 

Our discussions on these various topics are vibrant and challenging.  None of us is shy about voicing an opinion.  By the time we hang up, I am filled with new thoughts, ideas, and challenges that are a direct result of our exchanges… usually.  Not this time.  It’s not that we have to agree with each other.  We each came from three different backgrounds, took many different paths to arrive at this, our not final destination.  They believe, as I do, that life can change in a blink.  No one knows from one minute to the next where or when that damn pendulum of time will swing until the next minute.  It takes a lot of years to learn to live in a moment.  I‘m still working on it.  

One Sunday, I brought up the movie American Fiction for discussion.  I am writing this before the Academy Awards.  American Fiction has been nominated for best picture.  Against the Oppenheimer sweep, I don’t think it stands much of a chance, but then neither did I think an unmentionable running for President in 2016 stood much of a chance.  

American Fiction is based on the book Erasure, written by a black writer, Percival Everett. 

I love the film.  It isn’t perfect.  Is anything?  The creative team, from author to screenwriter to director to cast, produced what, for me, was a brilliant satirical film. The story was about an upper middle-class black family. Upper middle class black families in the world of films are rare, especially funny ones.  

Prior to this conversation I had begged my friends to see the movie.  Interesting aside - even though it received great reviews and awards galore, it did not do well at the box office; a different discussion.

My friends saw the movie.  They were unimpressed. My daughter saw the movie.  She was unimpressed.  I didn’t understand.  Did I miss something?  Why were my friends and family disagreeing with me about this film?  

I needed to reassure myself.  I looked up the definition of satire.  I like this one:

Satire (noun):  Using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society.

Yeah!  Yeah!  Wasn’t it wonderful that people produced a movie where blacks and whites were outrageously portrayed so we could see each other's foibles and human weaknesses?  Isn’t that what the greater good is all about? Beneath our individual achievements, gifts of talent, bizarre personalities, we are all part of the same worldwide human race.

This is the difficulty of being so old.  Frame of reference.  To me,  American Fiction has the same satirical sensibility as a Marx Brothers movie.  Duck Soup,  A Night At The Opera… no one was safe from their bite.  From Margaret Dumont to presidents, prime ministers, ambassadors, doctors, lawyers, businessmen.

What did I see that others didn’t see?  What did others see that I didn’t see?  I don’t know.  

First and foremost, my friends and daughters are all usually on the same page with me regarding book reviews, movies, television shows, and, most of the time, politics.  With American Fiction, we were not.  Here’s what I think we agree on.  It was well produced, directed, and acted.  My friends questioned the performance of the actor who played the gay brother.  They thought it was too much, and they didn’t like him.  He was a member of a black, conservative upper-middle-class family. He was decidedly the black black sheep.  Once the father died, committing suicide no less, this gay son and brother shifted gears and came out.  For me, every outrageous act he pulled was a painful cry for a life less lived. As an actor, he created an uncomfortable character and played his discomfort.  The actor in me responded to such a performance.  Sterling K. Brown risked every minute of the screen time he had. And I am sure there are many people, black and white, who were uncomfortable with his characterization; I feel it was supposed to make us uncomfortable.  And I was… uncomfortable.  It worked.

Now to the core of the film.  Again for me, I relished a humorous black-produced movie that laughed at itself as it made stereotypical fun of white professionals from academia to publishing.  A member of an intellectual upper-middle-class black family used the stereotypical black lower-class criminal elements satirically to make a point.  Black, white, brown, orange, green, no matter what the color or difference, we are all absurd.  Considering what blacks in this country had to and still endure, it is a miracle that any black artist in any medium can still laugh. 

I think the only way I remain sane in an insane world is to laugh at the absurdities I keep running into.  I wouldn’t make it through the day if I lost my ability to laugh not only at what is happening in the world but about watching myself try to make sense of what doesn’t make sense.  For intellectuals, think Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.  For plain folk like me, think Marx Brothers movies.  I love American Fiction for its boldness in taking on very delicate and challenging subjects with humor.

We are all at sea, squished into the smallest cabin, trying to get from nowhere to somewhere.  So pardon me while I make my way to that cabin.  I have an appointment for a manicure right after Groucho.