(A Critical Reflection On) What We’re Seeing

This is not how I expected to kick off this new year.

I’m not writing as a journalist or a critic, not at this moment. I’m trying to remind myself that I’m an American. A Black man watching my country in the tightening and desperate grasp of other citizens who mean harm, who are not protesting for anything other than a desire to flaunt the extent of their privilege. I am not alone watching these events. The world is watching.

The world has watched such sorry situations in the past. Citizens saw police attack peaceful protesters with water fired from high-powered hoses and attack dogs, officers with billy clubs beating marchers on bridges and city streets.

We’ve seen video footage of multiple police officers surround and beat Black men senseless, fire multiple shots at defenseless Black bodies, choke the life out of Black bodies with batons and knees. We all, every cognizant person of legal age, have these images available to us on our phones, tablets, computers, and smart screens.

But the situation is now dire because insurrectionists, led by a President and certain members of a political party, have stormed the Capitol as Congress sought to conduct the ceremonial business of certifying the count of the Electoral College and recognizing the will of the people. And again, we’re watching it happen.

This is not White House Down (with a Black President at the helm) or Olympus Has Fallen (the first installment of an ongoing franchise). This is not Nat Turner or John Brown projected on the big screen. Cable news has multiple split-screens of action going on at once, like Mike Figgis time-coding the story of us that first time. Images have appeared of random agitators dishonoring the inner-most chambers with their very presence.

I also am watching largely angry white folks acting out without consequence and I am wondering what the scene would have looked like if these folks had been Black or brown, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities. In the case of possible Black and brown people running wild in Congress, the halls would have waves of blood rising higher and higher for days.

I think it might be better to consider what I would rather see right now.

What fantasy would make me happy, grant me some sense of safety and security that I have probably never truly experienced before as a citizen of this country? Would it feel good to see white bodies littering the steps of the Capitol?

That’s what some of these folks imagine Black people want. We’re the dangerous ones, the wild animalistic pack that need to be beaten down and tamed. We’re the ones who, as teenagers, rape women in parks and deserve the death penalty, right? We would, without question, want to do harm and worse to others, those who haven’t given us basic consideration as human beings.

There’s an internal struggle in me, as these thoughts and images flood my consciousness. Do I want to see white folks treated the way Black people have been mistreated? Would that restore some sense of order?

Truth.

The truth is a complicated thing, an ever-changing mood like a face with a slapped cheek whiplashed as the other cheek gets pummeled by an oppressive fist. Back and forth, until beaten to a bloody and ugly pulp. That is the truth.

Reconciliation.

That’s the one that makes no sense. How to reconcile a moment of insurrection that is not just a moment or a lifetime or generations of injustice? The Constitution, the beloved document of the nation, had inequality and injustice sewn into its very DNA. The land we profess to love and stand beside has been nurtured with the blood, the actual life blood of folks who weren’t considered citizens, whose descendants, like me, still question the nature of our relationship with this abusive country.

Does America love me? Has America ever shown love, on any screen, for folks on the lower frequencies? Does America want reconciliation with me and my forefathers?

I like to believe that every day I live and walk outside my door into the world, I represent some measure of truth and reconciliation. I’m still here. I am the truth the country doesn’t want to acknowledge. I am the reconciliation of past and present. The future is unknown, potentially devoid of both truth and reconciliation.

Portrait of a Critic as a Black Man

Whenever I critically consider what I mean when I say that I’m a film critic or that I cover film, some part of my consciousness slips free of film itself and what I think about its storied past, its ever-changing current perspectives and mood swings, or its much-discussed limited future as a form. I think about what it means to see and be seen, up there, writ-large in flickering yet seductively moving images. And that immediately conjures up Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in particular the book’s prologue where his unnamed protagonist says, I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind.

Readers who have undertaken this writing journey with me here in Cincinnati for the past 20 years will certainly recall reading those words in essays or critical works before. They have echoed in my mind, longer than I can remember. I truly can’t remember the first time I read Invisible Man. I know it wasn’t in a class, which is how it should have gone down, how I and my peers – mainly white (whether in gifted classes back in public school in Asheville, North Carolina or at prep school in Chattanooga, Tennessee) – could have shared this quintessential and uniquely American narrative, where we would have discussed how someone or more broadly some groups have been marginalized to the point of being unseen. A few lines later Ellison continues on, explaining, I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me, before recounting the harsh and plain truth of the matter: When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imaginations – indeed, everything and anything except me.

I know how, systemically speaking, this happens, although I should point out that I’m focusing mainly on the images and reflections of black folks onscreen. We are invisible because, for so very long, our stories were not deemed worthy of being recorded and displayed. We were merely part of the surroundings, props on the stage or frames to be maneuvered around or compelled into action by commands from the main or supporting characters whose stories were the only ones that mattered. 

Black Lives Matter. 

Now, that phrase, those words have meaning, still not the fully realized contextual definition demanded, but some greater measure than ever before. What meaning which has been carefully culled and carved out of the corner of this block of raw humanity, has been shaped by a steady stream of moving images documenting systemic abuses, actions without repercussions or meaningful yet tragically futile attempts at the pursuit of justice. Images that we have seen. Before, so long before, there was invisibility.

Think back to Rodney King. The camcorder video of his beating at the hands, boots and batons of a gang of police officers stirred something in the national consciousness. I don’t want to overstate its power or impact because, truth be told, it was only a rumbling noise and a surprising disruption of the norm, like a folding chair flying into the frame from off-camera, and the people at the center of that image, well, they ducked and cowered for a moment before they took control of the narrative swiftly and sought to move on as if nothing had happened. The riots sparked by the dismissal of the courts; they gained attention when folks who were not Black were involved and/or impacted.

But what do we remember more – Rodney King and pictures of his face and body or the scenes of the riots in the streets, the broken storefronts, the looting? This is the familiar recasting of the narrative and the recollections.

I want to talk about film; that is supposed to be the point of all this, right? I’m a critic, a writer and commentator, film programmer. My art, such as it is, is about critical discussions of moving images and the narratives contained therein. 

But I can’t talk about where this career path, this vocation originated for me, without unpacking this other cultural baggage, the burden I carry and most times, don’t have the opportunity to share with readers. It would be too much and seen by some as being beside the point. What does David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (my all-time favorite film, mind you – one that I have seen more times on the big screen than any other and I have a trove of fading ticket stubs from 1986 to 2016 to prove it) have to do with race and representation and invisibility, man? Can’t a movie – especially a surreal noir like Blue Velvet – just be a movie, unrelated to concerns about how many people of color might or might not have appeared onscreen?

That is the sentiment of folks who see themselves so often (and like Ellison said, even when they look at others who do not look like them) that they experience a sense of obliviousness to anyone else. I understand this viewpoint in ways that those who live it will never grasp mine without it being pointed out to them – because I see…

Now, I was a senior in high school when I saw Blue Velvet at least three times during its opening weekend. Once each day (Friday through Sunday) at a mall theater in Chattanooga. I was intrigued and mystified by the creepy ferociousness of its images – the severed ear, that swaying swatch of seemingly living, breathing blue velvet, the swarming ants, the hallucinogenic bar scene as Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) watches Ben’s (Dean Stockwell) rendition of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” – but what tickled my fancy even more was a desire to share in the experiences of the film’s protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), to become an intrepid truth seeker, a junior detective and would-be hero who could woo both the put-upon temptress Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and the innocent good girl Sandy Williams (Laura Dern). I wanted to be Jeffrey Beaumont, yet I knew that on the deepest level, I could never achieve that figurative goal.

I would never be in position – even back then – to discover a severed ear in a field, bring it to the police and not have them consider me the prime perpetrator of whatever foul misdeed led to said ear being removed from its rightful owner. I would not have been seen as a cool character, able to bumble into a kinkily complex arrangement with the mysterious Vallens or earn the chance to engage the lead detective’s teenage daughter (who would end up leaving her clique-certified high school boyfriend) as an accomplice in my Hardy Boys adventure. And let’s not even get into how I wouldn’t have survived the initial encounter with Frank Booth at Dorothy’s apartment. He would never have considered me a good neighbor if he saw me there. 

Celebrated critic Pauline Kael, in her September 22, 1986 review of the film in The New Yorker, points out that readers should recognize the film as “a coming-of-age picture” focused on a college-aged protagonist returning home coming face-to-face with a seedy and tainted underworld lurking beneath the quiet and quaint façade that he should have known, even before he left, wasn’t real. Kael describes Jeffrey Beaumont as “wholesome” looking, despite the fact that he’s a bit too curious about the violent and sensual kinks underneath the surface. He’s a good kid, eager to flirt with being bad.

When’s the first time a critic, a viewer, or another character onscreen offered that impression of a young Black man? Notice I’m bypassing the cliched approach of assuming this has happened before, because realistically, it hasn’t and we shouldn’t pretend it has. 

Further into her review, Kael, while praising MacLachlan’s performance addresses how “his proper look is perfect for a well-brought-up young fellow who’s scared of his dirty thoughts (but wants to have them anyway).” No one, critics or anyone else, imagines or talks about college-aged Black men like this. Back then, no one probably would have assumed a late-teen/early twentysomething Black man would have been attending college at all. I know because even though I went to a prestigious Southern prep school and then attended an Ivy League university, most folks who didn’t know me and happened to pass me on the street probably wouldn’t have dubbed me a “well-brought-up young fellow” despite the fact that I was.

But I enjoyed the escape into this quite tame yet thoroughly Lynchian world, made even more unbelievable due to these dynamics. I never addressed my concerns with my white friends and classmates who went back to watch the film with me again and again. I never knew if these thoughts or other somewhat similar considerations ever crossed their minds while they sat back in the dark and entered that world. I just knew things were different for us.

The fact that these issues never lessened my passion for Blue Velvet or most of the films I watched before or since, speaks to a reality that separates me (and most critics of color) from the majority of our colleagues. Our imaginations, by nature and cultural circumstance, have to be more active, more engaged with a series of societal truths each and every time we settle in to do our jobs. 

I have experienced a confounding lack of imagination, especially early on during my time as a reviewer/critic. Back before I assumed a position where I could decide which films I wanted to cover in either print or in televised segments, I had to take whatever leftover titles were assigned to me, usually the lower-profile releases barely deemed worthy of the 200-words or less and sidebar designation on the back pages. In most cases, that meant covering slick genre exercises or the latest Tyler Perry production, which, during that phase, were little more than static camera stagings of his melodramatic and overtly preachy plays.

I became an expert of the evolution of Perry’s burgeoning oeuvre, but I noticed that there weren’t many non-critics of color on this particular beat. Talking to these peers, I picked up on the off-hand dismissal they offered for not engaging with Perry’s work, which on the surface, wasn’t rude or intended to be racially motivated. It was just assumed that these films were part of an invisible world and belonged to an audience that was invisible to them and not worth their critical imaginations.

Make no mistake though, the lack of imagination I’m referring to here belongs as much to the audience as it does to the artists creating the works, the industry distributing and exhibiting the films, as well as the reviewers and critics I shared the beat with. The film industry, in the last few years, has attempted a degree of course correction; an admission of understanding that their fictional creations can, and should, reflect a larger variety of social and cultural identities. Yet, there is a price to be paid in the inevitable pushback. 

What happens when a filmmaker forces us to re-orient to a character based on racialized casting? Based on the internet and social media, we explode, we fight against these affronts to the natural order of things. The Fantastic Four’s Johnny Storm can’t be Black. Captain America must be white. James Bond can be blond or Scottish, but by God, he can’t be Black (even as Black Brits have proven they can come over to the US and play red-blooded American Civil Rights figures). I singled those fictional characters out for a reason. Two are superheroes from comic books and one is a spy from a series of pulpy novels that have been adapted into an ongoing franchise that has been rebooted almost a half-dozen times with everything from giant henchmen with metal teeth to invisible cars and ice palaces. Do we need to be so precious about our fictions?

Almost every time I watch a mainstream movie, I twist and pervert the narratives and the casting. I’ve rarely mentioned this out loud before, which means I may be damning myself in the eyes of long-time readers and viewers. This admitted betrayal might be too much to bear, but at least you know now. I place myself in these narratives and I don’t always go through the even more consuming process of converting everyone’s race to match up with my own configurations. I imagine being the protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s Memento or one of The Usual Suspects (Fenster’s my first choice even though he’s the first to die – like Black folks usually do in horror movies, so…), which means inserting my Black body and consciousness into these overwhelmingly white spaces. It’s not that different than what I do most days as I navigate through the world. 

And now, after Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, I dream of a trilogy of stories about the American flag and its colors, similar to Kieslowski’s Three Colors films that explored the themes of the French flag or his Dekalog that examined and recontextualized the Ten Commandments in a Polish housing project. I long for Black experiences in the United States to be seen as embodiments of what it means to be American. I pledge allegiance to Ellison and James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman and Toni Morrison, Charles Burnett and Spike Lee, McQueen and Barry Jenkins, Prince (because he certainly wasn’t afraid of his dirty thoughts or where they might lead him), 9^th Wonder and Dave Chappelle. The last two have taught me more about the intellectual and philosophical nature of criticism than any straight-up practitioners of the form I’ve read.

Cornel West, in the weighty Reader compendium of his essays, introduced the notion that being American is part of a dialogical and democratic operation that grapples with the challenge of being human in an open-ended and experimental manner. What I’ve taken this to mean over the years since I first came across it is that America is all about changing and (re)creating ourselves as often as necessary. To do so requires imagination and a willingness to accept a fundamental truth about the human experience. Living is constant change, a continual evolution of body, mind, and spirit.

What reminds us of this better than film? Film presents perspectives on the past and the present, potential multiverses, if you will, and offers us the opportunity to create and share even more reflections, but only if we willingly and actively submit to seeing and considering the possibility of those other perspectives. We have to deem them worthy.

Is that an inalienable right? Was that meant to be included in our Founding documents? Can we make amendments to ensure this happens?

Again, I do this every time I sit down and expose myself to film. My longing and desire to enter those frames, to explode and transform them by my very presence and with my critical awareness of their limitations (by not including me in the first place) is my way of granting a degree of worth. I’m just acknowledging here that I’m tired of doing most of the heavy lifting alone.  

The first time I remember feeling like critics-at-large had emphatically joined me in this endeavor came with the release of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report – back in 2002. I was still a relative newbie as a writer and critic, not even sure I deserved to be considered a true player in the game. I was still reading and studying the outlets and voices I held in the highest of regards. Like The Village Voice, which ran a full-on special section of coverage on Minority Report from a multitude of angles. Rather than limiting the discussion to just film critics, The Voice invited a host of arts and culture and political writers to speak to Spielberg’s (and co-screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen working from a Philip K. Dick short story) moodily blue take on the truth of crime and punishment.

And why not? The film is set in 2054 in Washington DC. Policing has embraced a new initiative dubbed Precrime, which depends upon the drug-induced dreams of a trio of gifted (or cursed) human pre-cogs who see crimes of passion before they happen. The pre-cog “court” releases a murderball, a symbolic charge attached to a digital presentation of the upcoming deadly assault, allowing special coordinated tech support at headquarters and a mobile strike force to apprehend the would-be criminals before their urges become tragic facts.

The pre-cogs – named after crime fiction/detective novelists – exist and operate in concert, despite the fact that their visions don’t always agree. The Precrime unit only hits the streets if Arthur (Michael Dickman), Dashiell (Matthew Dickman) and Agatha (Samantha Morton) unanimously agree on the murderball verdict. But we learn that Agatha, the strongest of the three, sometimes produces a “minority report”, a vision that tells a different, more compelling version of the truth.

Of course, nothing matters until a murderball drops down the chute targeting lead Precrime operative John Anderton (Tom Cruise), sending him on the run with a mere 36 hours to prove his seemingly impossible innocence. He discovers the glitch in the system – Agatha’s dissenting minority report – and kidnaps her, in an effort to determine the real crime and heightened ethical stakes as Precrime is poised to become a national initiative.

Spielberg makes sure to dazzle and amaze audiences with all of the expected futuristic bells and whistles in action sequences and obligatory scenes of Cruise running around like a chicken after the blade has fallen. We’re teased and titillated by the fleeting appearances of recognizable performers like Tim Blake Nelson, Colin Farrell, Max von Sydow and Peter Stormare as a shadily sadistic unlicensed doctor who conducts an eye transplant in what feels like a dive-bar restroom after last call on its final night before its long-awaited demolition.

And while the kink and grime stick and stink like 3D “smell-o-vision” at its best, the real hook, which some of The Voice features zeroed in on, was the presentation of law and order. The pre-cogs were the unintended results of off-the-books experimentation on addicts and their offspring, requiring Arthur, Dashiell, and Agatha to remain captive in drug-cocktail tanks with wires and monitors detailing and documenting their dreams of the violence of others. They exist only as a sacrifice for the greater good. 

So what’s the big deal, you might ask? Why would I (and all of those Village Voice contributors) care so much about this action-oriented Tom Cruise vehicle? 

How could I not be flummoxed by a futuristic iteration of Washington DC where only 2 Black actors have speaking roles (Anna Maria Horsford and Steve Harris) and our presence as a whole draws no attention. What the hell happened to Chocolate City? Had there been so rollout of an early Precrime initiative that took out all of the Black folks – knees on necks and bullets in the back as part of an Executive Order? Is the future taking seed now?

Yet, after watching the film several times, I couldn’t shake a nagging creative and critical fault, in relation to the fundamental principle of inclusion, which – to be fair – is a word and concern that has more relevance now than it did at the time of the film’s release. Still, I found myself fantasizing about how easily Spielberg could have made a single simple change significantly altering the representational power of the film. One casting choice. 

Agatha. 

It should be noted that I am a huge fan of Morton and her work in this film, in particular, but additional levels of nuance open up if Agatha had been a Black woman. 

I know the argument that critics are not supposed to waste time on alternative notions concerning what a film might have been like; instead, our job is to analyze and explore what the filmmaker has presented to us. But, as a critic of color, a challenge emerges that must be confronted from time to time. Why do we not get the opportunity to see ourselves? Critical reflection requires a framework where we can observe some version of ourselves in the moving images.

Agatha, as a character, wouldn’t require any changes to the script. No need to punch up lines to create cultural distinction or flavor. Change nothing but the race of the person playing the role and watch what happens. 

Say, switch out Morton for Halle Berry who won the Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, which was released in 2001 or Thandie Newton, coming off performances in Beloved (1998) and the Tom Cruise franchise sequel Mission: Impossible II (2000) or Kimberly Elise who a few years later would be featured in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, but never garner a breakthrough opportunity quite like working with a director of Spielberg’s pedigree. 

Let the narrative spin out as intended with Cruise’s Anderton compelled to trust this particular minority report. Agatha wouldn’t need to deviate from her small but pivotally necessary arc, but Anderton, again without disrupting the dialogue or narrative, has a far more unique journey. In the end, this version of the film presents viewers with a subtle and potentially uncomfortable reflection on their own experiences/realities of trusting Black truths. Would this re-imagined truth set anyone in the audience free? I would love to know the answer to that question. 

We – and I mean all of us – need to ask and search for answers to these types of questions in all of the frames of moving images that play before us every day. 

Seeing New Worlds Onscreen and Off

When I cover film festivals, I travel the world via screens. Some would say it is a passive journey, watching an unending procession of scenes unfold, the flickering revelation of cityscapes and characters, always at a remove, but intent on crossing that divide in the hope of coming to a shared understanding of our humanity. That idealistic belief – or some paraphrasing of it – has been the over-arching conception of my experiences going back to my first Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), over a decade ago. I’m still a relative newbie with my Press/Industry credentials, which means there’s still a part of me that cherishes the experience of adding my voice to the collective in support of those narratives passed down to us by filmmakers. My critical hum provides the melodic festival buzz with a little extra volume and color and timbre. 

To set the record straight though, that first TIFF, in 2009, wasn’t the first film festival I ever attended. I got caught up in the festival undertow right after graduating from college, where I had enjoyed access to cult & repertory screenings and classes devoted to Hitchcock and the gritty classic films of the 1970s. I was ready for a deep dive.

I wasn’t covering anything back to the early-1990s, when I stumbled across the Philadelphia Film Festival and discovered Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Dekalog, a ten-part dramatic television series of films based on the Ten Commandments, as a relative completist already under Kieslowski’s thrall thanks to The Double Life of Véronique and Three Colors (his three-film series dedicated to the themes and color schemes of the French flag), I couldn’t resist the challenge of attending all ten films as part of my ongoing Kieslowski education, along with any other titles I happened to add along the way. Of course, I have no idea what else I may have watched during that particular year, because I only remember the experience of The Dekalog.

Created for Polish television and set in a housing project as the country begins the arduous transition from communism to democracy, the series loosely wove the Commandments into the narratives, but it wasn’t intended as a theological treatise. The Dekalog, and most importantly Kieslowski himself, refuses to answer questions or provide an updated set of rules for life in the modern world. The setting narrows the focus, fostering the illusory sense of a close-knit community.

The twentysomething version of me saw the housing project as familiar – stripped of the racialized stigma I had grown up around in the late-1970s through the mid-1980s – but Kieslowski had gone further, creating a vision akin to Dante’s purgatory inhabited people on the margins, bodies without value, corralled together, yet able to trickle out invisibly to do the forgotten work. Was that part of what made the Black experience of such a place different, I wondered? Imagining how a similarly minded Black filmmaker, like Charles Burnett, would have fashioned a series of call and responses between protagonists and the Commandments themselves left me with a longing and wanting for the opportunity to see us (Black folks) vested as universal cultural signifiers alongside our human brothers and sisters.

***

What did I “see” this year during my first Sundance Film Festival when I watched 4 Feet High (Part of the Indie Series section, making it available at any time to pass holders) with its dynamic intersectional integration? Director María Bélen Poncio envisions Argentina as a live action setting that is densely political yet a hedonistic carnival always on the verge of spilling over into heightened animated sensuality. It’s schools and students feel innately open to inclusivity, but there’s also a willingness to not be deterred when certain aspects of social and civil rights do not live up to their expectations. 

The lead character, Juana (Marisol Agostina Irigoyen) is a 17-year-old wheelchair user, yet her disability is recognized and, in many cases, factored in as just one element among many that comprises the whole of her. She struggles, as a typical teen, with venturing into a new school, making friends, and finding a place outside her family. All around her, the narrative reflects a fluidity of gender and sexuality reminiscent of Prince’s punk funk manifesto Dirty Mind uprooted and seeded into this new world’s social protest wonderland. 

I see in Juana, the same agitation as in my own children who have answered their generation’s righteous and riotous call to arms over Black Lives, sex education and abortion rights as well as multiple conceptions of identity and disability. There is an innate willing to protest, to lay messy siege to privileged spaces. Rallying support – across the human spectrum – is instantaneous thanks to how social media platforms can summon individuals, complete with something chaotic and magical in the gathering. 

I love how 4 Feet High positions disability into a larger cultural context and illustrates how it can seamlessly be integrated into a much more inclusive vision for social and civil equality but does so without a need to be so precious and protective of Juana. Social struggle inherently has an acknowledgement of pain and sacrifice, an embrace of the possible likelihood of emotional and/or physical harm. Supporting Juana, and by extension my children, means appreciating their acceptance of the dangers of engagement and offering solidarity without limits to a full existence. They don’t live, as I did, locked inside their heads, seeing the world as a lopsided dichotomy between white and black. UNITY in their intersectionality makes them fierce and fearless.

***

My first Toronto International Film Festival was a different affair. A dream trip, to be sure. A combination anniversary/birthday gift that my wife and in-laws cooked up, intent initially on surprising me, until the realization that they couldn’t apply for either a passport or press credentials without my input, so having waited as long as possible, they finally let me in on the plan.

Happily, I prepared for a divided experience. Coverage opportunities during the mornings through mid-afternoons – press screenings and junket interviews – which gave way to late-afternoons and evenings spent with my wife, either attending public screenings (my wife is not the film fanatic that I am, but she was a trooper this first time) or enjoying our first trip together outside the country.

Getting there was a reminder of the ever-present difficulties of escaping racial expectations. We’re an intersectional interracial couple – I’m a Black Southern Catholic and she’s a non-religious cultural Jew from the Bronx – with a strange (made-up hyphenated) last name that belongs to only us. And we were driving up late in the evening with plans to spend the night just across the border in Windsor, which would allow us to arrive in Toronto late-morning the next day.

It goes with saying that we get stopped at the border and told we needed to report to the administrative office for additional questioning. I remember one of the officers asking each of us our names (while holding up and inspecting our brand-new passports) and then asking how we were related. I knew I had a keeper back in the car, having passed this not at all routine situation, when we both admitted to wanting to reply that we were brother and sister, just for laughs. But, of course, what would have likely happened next would not have been the least bit funny.

We made it through and to Toronto and the only film I recall from that year was Precious, Lee Daniels’ second feature directing effort, which would go on to earn six Academy Award nominations and two wins (Geoffrey Fletcher for Adapted Screenplay – a first for an African American in either screenwriting category – and Mo’Nique for Best Supporting Actress). It was a lurid nightmare of neglect and abuse that pumped thick pulsing life blood into Sapphire’s prose from the novel Push. 

Thinking back on it now, some part of me wants to force this Daniels square peg into one of Kieslowski’s rounded holes in The Dekalog. It offers race, religion, and familial discord tropes and insinuates pop cultural awareness in a marked departure from Kieslowski’s stark documentary-styled presentation, but it didn’t speak to or for me. It wasn’t my experience of Black life, although the critical process of rewriting my way into its narrative wasn’t as complex as the effort required sometimes for traditional mainstream (and even indie) films where the premium lives were (and had always been) white. Which was fine, because I sensed that TIFF, in the future, would show me more of what I was searching for. 

***

What teenager sees themselves as being at the center of a narrative? That’s not to say teens don’t experience a sense of invincibility, full of youthful vim and vigor. Or that they don’t enjoy being the center of attention within the confines of family dynamics. But the focal point of a story? 

When I was a teenager, there was no sense of there being a story at all, just statistics, which some folks wanted to believe told a story. I was slated to be incarcerated, expected to be caught up in the system. I wasn’t assumed to be able to make it out of my twenties alive or without having served time. College was assumed to be for someone, anyone else.

(Now that’s not entirely true, in my case, because I was lucky enough to have caught the attention of teachers and administrators who saw something special, something gifted in me, which they rushed to nurture as a means of assuaging societal guilt or to use me as an example of how one of us could make it out. And I didn’t even have to take part in any kind of battle royale a la Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.) 

I thought about how little things have changed while watching Maisie Crow’s Sundance US Documentary Competition feature At the Ready. The film spotlights a recent year at Horizon High School, in El Paso (just 10 miles from the US/Mexico border), which offers a Law Enforcement curriculum, allowing the school to serve as a pipeline for Customs, Border Control, and Homeland Security. A majority of Horizon’s students have direct links across the border, triggering a movement back and forth for both students and their families. The aim is to propagandize and recruit young Mexican American students to spy on and actively police their own communities in the service of a government that does not see or recognize them as full and rightful citizen of the state. 

The choices offered present something more insidious than a simple clash of values or a desire for a better life. There is an existential crisis being foisted on these students, one that America has always found the ways and means to weigh down generations of marginalized people, especially the youngest and most vulnerable.

I watch the scenes of students at Horizon – practicing exercises in their school building after hours where they coordinate incursions into people’s homes, targeting folks in similar situations, seeking an opportunity for a better life, but staring down the barrel of guns, at badges and the faces of officers who look like them, as if that somehow makes everything alright – and I can’t help but see this as exploitative. Is this really the image America wants to present – a police state where we’re convinced it is our duty to target members of our own communities in order to please The Man?

In my mind, I transition from At the Ready to the Apple TV+ documentary Boys State, another feature examining students getting involved in governmental processes, but at least in that case, it felt like all of the participants understood and appreciated the nature of politics. As cynical as I am, I can see how a non-white male student might imagine a path for themselves where they could enter the fray and hope to make a difference. At the Ready, despite its best efforts to present an objective perspective, couldn’t break down my stubborn resistance to the idea that there is no way to truly help people when you’re breaking down their doors and pointing guns at them. That may be what some of us want from law and order, but my eyes see a different truth in that, which may not ever prove to be right.

***

What was it like, during that first truly international journey to Cincinnati’s sister city, Munich for their festival? By that time, I had covered less than a dozen film festivals and the far more intriguing concern was traveling abroad for the first time. More than crossing a border, I was preparing to live completely outside myself. I was fascinated by the idea of being a Black man in Europe and recognizing, for the first time in my life, that my Blackness was separate from being American. I wasn’t unencumbered by race, but I didn’t truly understand what that meant. I could be seen as African or an immigrant, that is until I opened my mouth. 

Beyond the screenings, what I remember is a steady stream of World Cup matches. Before I left the States, I had started tuning in, watching and comparing the game, as an American would, to basketball or American football, especially the playoffs, with their heightened and fiercely loyal fan bases. I could recognize the familiar fun, but I wasn’t ready for the global scale. Forget our trivial designations of “World Champions” from the NBA, the NFL, or MLB, when anyone talks about the World Cup, that “World” is the real deal.

It made sense to me then, for the first time what I wanted to convey when I defined myself as Black. That term, starting with the capitalization of its first letter, encompasses ancestral Blackness (legacy) and a union in the now of this particular group of people of color, which does not need to be limited by national origin, hairstyle, or any other outside criteria. We are Black, like We are the World.

Within a few days, I had settled into a typical festival routine – press only screenings early in the day, hoofing my way between several venues while relying less and less on maps, finding precious moments between screenings and stuffing myself with quick street food treats to knock out blog posts and reviews – and discovered a freedom to explore. Munich invited me to play hooky, to indulge in life offscreen. 

The beer gardens overflowing with people watching and cheering for their national teams or favorite players demanded attention, which compelled me to leave my computer and notes back in my room, along with my fears about not knowing any German. Nearly everyone spoke English and Spanish and French and of course German, while I was isolated in having only one language to communicate in. I wished for the ability to eavesdrop in other languages, to hear comments about me from those in my company and being in position to surprise them with on-point replies.

I watched films during that festival, exploring my Otherness in startling ways. For instance, I will never forget how Quantum Love / A Chance Encounter (Ein Augenblick Liebe) tickled my fancy. I sat down for the screening, assuming it would be like any other, until a minute or so in I realize that I’m watching a French film with non-English subtitles about the quantum physics of infidelity with a narrative that spins creatively without completely jumping off its track and it engaged me effortlessly without a need to understand the dialogue. 

I listened, I suppose, hoping that I would process a word or phrase from French or German on my own, for a fleeting victory. Before long, I listened with more than my ears. My eyes picked up the physical cues, the unspoken language, much more universal than we ever imagine, because we ignore what we express through our bodies. This is another way that we fail to see each other.

I saw characters in love, their fears, glances pregnant with interior information, waiting to be acknowledged. I gained newfound respect for actors who inhabit their characters so fully, becoming these people down to their mannerisms with rich and distinct differentiation from who they are outside these filmed narratives.

Was that how I was in Munich, a different Black man, a different American than the person I am?  

***

How much of telling our stories truly just an act of delusion, when writing becomes rewriting and editing until the truth morphs into something we no longer recognize as our own experience? 

As a film critic heading into a third decade on the beat, I’ve come to recognize the idea that a look at my collected work amounts in some meaningful way to autobiography. Part of my intention, as a break down narratives and remix current cultural acknowledgements into the work, is an act of sharing how and why I fit into the stories (both fiction and non) of these filmmakers I engage with. I am revealing and recognizing reflections of myself. 

It is akin to WEB Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness – the Black struggle of “seeing” ourselves through the eyes of a society whose vision is fitted with a lens of contempt yet somehow still compelled to embrace the ideal of who we are – but there is a powerful shift in terms of taking control of the vision. As a critic (embracing a newfound position as a storyteller and artist), my rewriting of the films I see, by actively creating a place for myself in these presented filmed narratives and the discussions of them, matters. I can transform white mainstream stories into something closer to that idealized notion of what we mean when we talk about being universal (American).

I confronted the inevitable abuse of this rewriting in writer-director Sam Hobkinson’s Sundance World Cinema Documentary feature Misha and the Wolves, which investigates the veracity of a Holocaust survivor’s story. 

Through her memoir, we learn that Misha Defonseca was a child of seven, with no knowledge of her parents beyond their first names. She first told her survival story in a synagogue as an adult with friends listening, friends who knew nothing of her experiences; of how she ended up with a foster family in Belgium that treated her poorly and how she created a deception which kept her alive. She decided, at seven, to walk to Germany to find her parents, although she knew nothing more than their first names. Single-minded focus, young Misha took in the horrors of decimated cities and survived by living in the forests alone. In the woods, she escaped from the war, found a sense of safety among the animals and the ecosystem.

When she finally documented her experience on paper in the mid-to-late 1990s, her time living with and among wolves attracted attention from the publishing world and Hollywood, landing a spot of Oprah’s Book Club. As the spotlight intensifies, Misha retreats for seemingly no reason, going so far as to file a lawsuit against her publisher, which heads to court in 2001.

The publisher, a small press caught up in what should have been a game-changing moment for their business, began to question if somehow, they had done the wrong thing. Was the publisher exploiting a Holocaust survivor? Who was Misha? What and how much of her past did she know? Soon, the publisher starts writing a memoir of working to capture Misha’s memoir. A genealogist joins the publisher’s case. Another Holocaust survivor in Belgium is enlisted to aid the discovery of Misha’s truth (publisher’s perspective). And in all of these overlapping and overlayed investigations, a new Misha comes into focus, upending expectations and potentially shattering Misha’s own idea of who she was. 

Misha and the Wolves spends most of its runtime caught up in the process of storytelling, collecting details and facts from different perspectives, which in turn, lead to the revelation of new layers covering up a fundamental truth. Hobkinson explores how everyone tells their stories, but at the end of the film, we never come to appreciate why – at the center of it all – Misha rewrote her own tale. Is she a victim or villain for having created her grand fiction?

And what about those of us forced to rewrite ourselves into cultural narratives where we haven’t (and sadly still don’t) exist in meaningfully diverse ways? We may be in better positions to tell stories that showcase the multitudes of experiences embodies in our Blackness, but I dare say I won’t give up the critical act and art of recreating and rewriting these worlds I visit on my journeys across screens. 

I will always want (and need) to see…me. 

The Zero-Sum Dynamic of Confronting Authority

In the early summer of 2020, I accepted an assignment from Cincinnati Magazine to do a feature profile on Police Chief Eliot Isaac. As a film critic, I felt a bit over my head, but was intrigued by the layers of complexity in the narrative. I would have the opportunity to sit down with the Queen City’s Black police chief as the country struggled through this latest and quite explosive reckoning on race. Cincinnati has its own traumatic history of tragic encounters between black men and the police, leading up to a week of civil unrest after the killing of 19-year-old Timothy Thomas in April of 2001, which occurred less than nine months after I relocated here from Philadelphia.

As part of a nearly two-hour interview with the chief, discussing these issues and a host of others, I recalled a situation from my own past, in the early-to-mid-1990s, when I was still living in Philadelphia and working for a social service organization supporting people with disabilities. I was walking home, from the University of Pennsylvania campus in West Philadelphia back down to Center City, approaching the intersection of 20^th and Walnut. The streets were alive and bustling with weekend traffic, folks heading out for drinks, dinner, or maybe an evening show. I imagine I was trying to figure out if I was going to drop my backpack off at home before checking out a new film at The Ritz. I probably had some snatch of a melody playing in my head, distracting me from the sounds of the city that night.

A police officer in a patrol car dashed out into the intersection and blocked traffic from proceeding from any direction. He started yelling instructions, which I was only vaguely aware of because I assumed he was addressing someone else. It took a few extra seconds for me to recognize that I was the person of interest. His yelling escalated and soon he had drawn his gun from his holster, while continuing to demand that I approach his car with my hands up.

I did so, as carefully as possible, aware of every lesson I had ever heard about police interactions. I was deathly afraid, but also caught up in a simultaneous sense of being outside my body as well. I was able to watch the exchange from several vantage points at once. I saw myself from the perspectives of the many white folks strolling by or in cars at the various lights and I knew that they were seeing what, for them, felt like a routine police stop and inevitable arrest of a young black man for being a typical menace to society. My tan LL Bean barn jacket and black Doc Martin boots couldn’t disguise my inherent threat level any more than the Ivy League degree (University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business) I had but couldn’t carry around to offer up as proof of my status as an upstanding member of society. Who would have believed it anyway?

Beyond those people though, the face I remember most vividly was that of a SEPTA bus driver, whose bus was literally the first vehicle at the corner on Walnut. He was an older Black man and while I know he was watching the entire scene unfold, probably with a mixture of outrage and horror, we locked eyes and I felt something deeper, a connection with him that was like a momentary sense of communion and communication. He was willing me to do and say the right things, to make sure I would be able to walk away from this encounter. He was brewing up a cauldron of sadness, resignation, and resolve in that moment and its magic was strong.

By the time I made it to the police car, the officer roughly slammed me against the hood near the open driver’s side window and had begun demanding that I produce my ID. I feared complying too quickly, so I let the officer know where my wallet was before making a move to get it. While awaiting further instruction, I heard scratchy reports from police dispatch projecting through the car radio.

Be on the lookout for a suspect – Black male, between 20-35, over 6’5’’, wearing a long black leather duster.

Before I could contain myself, I asked why I was being stopped. I’ve already mentioned that I was wearing what was a waist-length barn jacket and as much as I would have liked to have been taller, I’m only an even six feet. Obviously, this was a mistake. The officer and I both heard the same description, so no harm, no foul, right?

Instead, this officer continued with his belligerent tone, requesting my ID and my full compliance with his orders. Again, I heard the description being repeated by dispatch. I nodded my head in the direction of the open window, attempting to let the officer know that I heard that description and was in no way even close to matching it.

What’s fascinating to me now, as I’m in the middle of this accounting of the events, is how long the exchange took. Time slowed, certainly for me, with each detail framed by a sense of distinct clarity. There’s a cinematic quality to the whole experience, and if this had been my last moment on this Earth, at least I would have had my very own close-up.

This story ends much more mundanely though. I slowly produced my ID, which the officer never even looked at. He instructed me that I should be more respectful and compliant when dealing with an officer and casually sent me on my way with no apology.

I made my way to the nearest sidewalk and stood there, watching him get back in his car and head off in pursuit of another Black man to profile, thus allowing traffic to pick up again. My face felt hot with rage and shame, especially when I noticed the staring eyes of the mostly white crowd that was returning to their evening plans. I wasn’t the right one this time, they seemed to say, but next time…

And sure, I can’t forget how I felt, settling back into my own body and perspective on that corner, but often, when I consider that night, I find myself drawn to the bus driver. I have no idea how old he was. Old enough to have been maybe my father or uncle. Not likely much more than that. But old enough to have seen and lived through situations like that himself. Truth be told, I am now probably close to his age back then. 

When I think about him, I also know that he, unlike everyone else watching that scene play out, wasn’t looking at the police officer as someone serving and protecting him. As Black men, we recognized the police as a necessary evil. At that time, a possible lesser of two evils. The call you would make if you found yourself the victim of a crime, but you would do so knowing that the response might wind up with you feeling doubly victimized.

And remember, that was in the early-to-mid-1990s. I walked away from that encounter with wounded pride and a slightly larger bit of cancerous rage in my belly that wouldn’t go away. With every report of a black man’s death at the hands of the police, that cancer grows.

That moment was post-Rodney King. More than a decade away from a time when such encounters are routinely captured on cellphones or police officer’s body cameras and broadcast on seemingly endless loops. We’ve had to remind folks to say the names of those slain in these situations because, if not, they would morph into CGI blur of faces and bodies snuffed out without distinction.

I recognized that sense while watching the Academy Award-winning Live Action Narrative Short Two Distant Strangers from directors Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe. At first glance, I was Carter James (Joey Bada$$) waking up in the apartment of a young woman he had met the night before, digging the blissful vibe, realizing he either never wanted it to end or anticipating how long it would be before they would be able to re-live/re-experience the moment. He needs to get home though, to check on his dog, his obvious best friend and partner. He slips his earbuds in, lights up a hand-rolled cigarette once he arrives street-level and prepares to bounce. When the officer (Andrew Howard) approaches him, nothing can break his stride, until the officer grabs his bag and attempts to search his person. 

Unlike my early-90s case, a fruit vendor yells out, vouching for him and then pulls out her cellphone to document what happens next. We all know what’s going to happen. In an instant, other officers emerge and wrestle Carter to the ground, pinning him down, choking the life out of him. 

And just like that, Carter wakes up…in the bed next to that same beautiful young woman from the night before. Exactly where he imagined and desire to be, but it’s déjà vu. Think Medicine for Melancholy meets Groundhog Day.

Except Carter finds himself living through the existential dilemma that is the Black Experience in America. No matter what he does, he relives this same morning over, countless times and there’s nothing he can do or say to change his outcome. He’s always going to die.

Watching that short, I longed to give him the reprieve I got from my encounter, which in its own way was still a zero-sum game scenario. The major difference being I got to walk away from that situation, even though I knew there would be another one with another police officer somewhere in my future. Whether we live or die, we are all Carter James.

Except when we aren’t. Like when we happen to be police officers, as in the movie Black Cop, from writer-director Cory Bowles. I caught that film at a public screening during the Toronto International Film Festival all the way back in 2018. The public screening meant sharing the experience with a regular audience of festival attendees rather than during a packed press screening, which tends to be a more reserved situation. Audiences, especially larger ones, see and feel things together and rarely hold back their reactions.

The titular protagonist (played by Ronnie Rowe) of the film is a Black man who identifies fully (first and foremost at the start) as a police officer. His life is blue through and through. He lives in a city caught up in a simmering conflict between the police and the community as a result of the death of a Black person at the hands of the police. He is unfazed by the situation though, until one evening while off-duty, he is accosted by white officers who don’t recognize him as a brother-in-blue. They see and treat him like any Black man, and while he’s able to walk away from the encounter, that cancerous rage I mentioned earlier comes to a dangerous boil and bubbles over. 

The thing is though, he’s not exactly impotent. He’s got power and authority as a police officer, so he decides to use it. Black Cop (he’s never given a name or much of a backstory) begins to treat the white citizens he engages with the way white officers treat Black folks. It is not a revolutionary upsetting of the power dynamic, because he is only one man, but there is a cathartic rush, in particular for Black audiences.

For me, this was like wish fulfillment. I’ve always imagined a world where white men might have experiences with the police that looked and felt like mine. What would it feel like to a twenty-or-thirtysomething college-educated white man and have to stew in the shame and fear of a traffic stop that could end with them splayed out on a city street? 

Let me offer up another anecdote from Philadelphia. A few years after my traffic stop, Center City was on high alert; this time from a white man preying on women usually out running during the early morning. There was a vague description – white male, 25-40 years old, average height – and the police presence in the neighborhood was pronounced. Officers on foot patrol were camped out across from my building on the corner of 16^th and Spruce. My first-floor loft had large windows facing both streets, granting me a widescreen perspective on the daily reality show called life.

One afternoon, I caught sight of a pair of officers approaching a white man who matched the description and stopped what I was doing to tune in. I had been drawn in by the raised voice of one of the cops, that distinctive authoritarian tone gave me pause within the relative safety of my apartment. I heard the request for ID, but as the potential suspect handed it over, a conversation began that I wasn’t able to overhear. It didn’t take long for the exchange to venture into completely unfamiliar territory. Both cops – who happened to be white – and the pedestrian started laughing casually and engaging in what looked like sitcom-style banter. 

This alternative universe experience felt more than foreign. Outside of television and the movies in my 20+ years of life, I had never seen an individual white person stopped by the police. I had never even heard stories of such encounters, but I knew countless Black folks, male and female, who shared their experiences. 

And here I am, recounting this one now as if it has meaning. Maybe it does, but to whom?

Black folks surely recognize the fantasy inherent in it. Imagine movies where police interrogate a white suspect who is obviously a killer or criminal mastermind and then routinely let them walk out of custody. The idea behind that is it’s better to allow a guilty person to go free than to impugn the rights of an innocent. Pure make-believe.

But that is how privilege works. White folks don’t need to hear this story, because all it does is reinforce the notion that the system is thankfully operating as it should. 

Is it wrong for me to say I wanted that white man to be mistreated and bullied by the police during that exchange? Even back in the 1990s, the reality of race relations was such that we could not have created a dynamic where the police could have adjusted their practices to the point where Black people had encounters that ended like his. What had to happen was a world where white men ended up feeling like I did after my stop.

That’s why Black Cop mattered so much to me and some of the Black people in that audience at TIFF. The film positioned itself as satire, but that was only for white audiences. Black folks recognized the truth of its narrative, the skewed sense of justice in its unfair treatment of others. 

I knew I wasn’t alone in this fantasy during that TIFF screening. There was a charge pulsing through the crowd as the film unspooled that gained voltage when the lights came up and the filmmaker joined us for a Q&A. Yanking off my critic’s hat and pulling on my festival programmer’s cap, I knew I had to bring the film to the Over-the-Rhine International Film Festival. It was our first year following a rebranding from ReelAbilities Cincinnati, expanding our focus from disability to also incorporate themes of faith, freedom, diversity and identity. This felt like a seismic title, but when I approached our festival team with it, they feared Black Cop would turn off the Cincinnati Police Department, a potential festival partner.

As one of the few people of color on the team (and the only one who had actually seen the film), I had to go along with the decision to back away from the film, with the understanding that somewhere down the line, we might be in a better position to program a title like this, once we were more secure as a cultural organization.

But why wait? Why not speak truth to power when it is uncomfortable? There is a moral authority, a moral imperative to stand up, to be ahead of these situations. In many ways, this was no different, for me, than when I was left standing on that street corner, after my encounter with that officer in Philly, except I had been left there by authority figures and partners who were far more familiar, people who were supposed to be serving and supporting a unified vision we had all bought in to.

If I’m honest, what irks me about that situation and the others I’ve included in this telling is the knowledge that I wanted to curate conversations about these issues and was denied. I have experienced a lifetime of confronting authority figures of all sorts and having to swallow instances of systemic bias or blatant racism. At least until I’ve been asked to offer solutions to this impossible conundrum. 

I wanted the power and the platform to speak and to spotlight other similarly silenced voices. I wanted to win and not feel bad that maybe, just this once, someone else might have to lose in this zero-sum scenario.

Can I Get a Witness?

From the start of Critical Reflections, my Truth and Reconciliation project, I envisioned ending the long-form essays on the idea of bearing witness. I have addressed being seen and being heard, both in the essays themselves and as part of the podcast. There is great meaning, currently, in the merging of witnessing and representation. Think about the old Virginia Slims tagline – you’ve come a long way, baby – and how it applies to the images and narratives presented to audiences today.

We – specifically Black folks – see a fuller spectrum of our shared experiences on every screen available. No longer are we merely content with the coded representations of ‘urban’ thrillers or the subservient magic Black supporting characters who have been used to redeem White heroes without having any sense of agency of their own. Our righteous indignation can be exercised in the service of our own strivings for love and self-worth, rather than being embodied in the form or notion of some baton we’re passing on to a White protagonist who gets to cross the finish line after we’ve borne the burden for most of the race.

*

For this concluding essay, let’s go on a journey; a couple in fact, that seem to run parallel to one another, despite the fact that the filmed narratives were created decades apart.

*

As an adult moviegoer, I have had a love/hate relationship with Steven Spielberg. When I was younger, I, like every other wide-eyed kid, marveled at ET and the Indiana Jones movies. I watched them repeatedly, eager to see something new in his ingenious execution of action and his appreciation for corny humor. He was updating the heroic television serials of his youth for a new generation that was living through a unique series of cultural and social changes. Separated family dynamics. A dawning technological age that would evolve faster than anyone could have imagined.

I see now, how these issues have impacted his work around the early 2000’s, right around the time he started to draw my ire. With AI (Artificial Intelligence), a film passed on to him from Stanley Kubrick, Spielberg picked up on and explored what on the surface is a contemporary-to-futuristic retelling of Pinocchio, the story of a wooden toy that longs to become a real boy.

Set in a future-scape where the melting polar ice caps has submerged larger chunks of the planet underwater and scarce resources have stunted population growth, despite our technological advances, humanity (which means mainly white mainstream society) needs replacements for children. The desire is for something that can love and be committed without depleting already decreased basic resources.

A gathering of scientists and academics listens intently to the call of Professor Hobby (William Hurt) who has been leading a robotics team seeking to push and extend the boundaries of creation. Not merely focused on creating machines that can beat humans at chess, the goal is to build a more perfect beast, if you will. One that not only looks like them (again, mainly white) and has a conceptual understanding of feelings and sensory responses, but also possesses a beautifully formed and functional mind (a lovely paraphrasing of the Ralph Ellison quote from the beginning of Invisible Man). It is not enough to know what love is, the professor posits; instead, he wants his creations to truly experience love, not so much for themselves, but for the objects of their imprinted affections (you guessed it again, white folks).

I am constantly amazed by the opening sequence of this film, not so much for the pontificating of Professor Hobby, but for the comments from one of the attendees, a black woman sitting towards the front of this collegial group. She has taken in the professor’s philosophical musings and recognizes a deeper conundrum than her other (male and white) colleagues.

To be loved, she points out, is not the heart of the issue. Humans can certainly make a robot that loves their creators and serves as a substitute for the children we are unable to procreate naturally, but what matters more is whether or not we humans can find it in our hearts to love these new robots as unconditionally as we expect them to feel towards us. Professor Hobby astutely frames the notion by reminding her, his gathered experts, and the audience that this is the oldest dilemma, one that goes back to God’s creation of Man. Because didn’t God create Man to love Him?

As true an intellectual argument as this may be, I believe Professor Hobby and Spielberg may have missed a larger and far more obvious point. This woman wasn’t necessarily limiting her assessment to the dynamic between God and Man. She, as a black woman (and more specifically, one of the only black characters in the film given a voice), is commenting on the peculiar relationship seen in race in America.

The Founding Fathers and the white social order they created was built on a bedrock notion of exploiting a group of people – defined as inferior, to guarantee their servitude. Black folks worked the land, cooked meals, cleaned homes, and raised white children, when they were unable to do so for themselves (beyond procreating to produce more workers to maintain the upkeep of the plantation system). Most stories from that period present an idealized version of the relationship between slaves and their masters. Slaves love and protect their owners, if not unconditionally, then certainly out of a sense of fear and obligation.

But did white society back then (or even now) truly ever consider loving Black people?

The film moves on from this theoretical debate to focus on the story of David (Haley Joel Osment), a new experimental robot child “borne” from the earlier discussion to become the robot model. He is gifted to the Swintons, Monica (Frances O’Connor) and Henry (Sam Robards). Henry works for the robotics company and is considered a prime candidate to accept David because the Swintons are struggling to deal with the loss of their son Martin (Jake Thomas). Martin is not legally dead but has been in a medically-induced coma/stasis due to a viral infection that cannot currently be cured. He has been unresponsive for the last five years and the Swintons, Monica in particular, have refused to give up hope, which also means they haven’t moved on.

Monica is initially resistant to accepting David into their home and lives but cannot overcome the exterior presentation. David is for all intents and purposes a young boy, close in age to Martin, and eager to learn and love. Before long, it is obvious that David, as a surrogate of sorts, is an emotional slave. Perfect, in that, he will never get sick, grow old, or stop loving the Swintons, even once Martin miraculously recovers and begins to manipulate his parents into pushing David aside.

David, abandoned by Monica, begins a journey to discover how he can become a real boy and earn back his place in the Swinton household. Becoming real equates with freedom and a sense of belonging.

*

I want to transition from David and his quest, which by the end of the film has spanned thousands of years, to another, more recent exploration of a character discovering their life path in the midst of historic trauma in a speculative world.

Talk about bearing witness. That is what Barry Jenkins and his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad demands of the audience. More precisely, the Amazon Prime original series places that responsibility on us to a far greater extent than the novel itself. The act of reading takes us on a journey – the epic odyssey of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a young woman enslaved on a plantation in Georgia – burdened by history, but freed from fact-based shackles by the narrative’s fascinating alternative framework, unbound by direct considerations of time and historical accuracy. What if the “Underground Railroad” had been a literal network of rail-lines built underground with trains staffed by free and escaped people, with support from white sympathizers? What impact would this subterranean system have had on the Southern states it burrowed through?

Cora is, in many ways, like David. She feels abandoned on the plantation; her mother escaped but left Cora behind. We imagine the difficulty of such a decision, the questions about whether or not they could survive the journey together – a mother and child – or if once freedom has been found, Cora’s mother could somehow find a way to extract Cora later. Yet, for Cora, all she feels is a sense of abandonment and the sad resignation that comes from knowing of no other option.

Jenkins uses Cora and the background Black characters as our eyes and ears into the harsh realities of life during this time. During the first episode, Jenkins presents multiple attacks on Black bodies that must have been simply daily rituals on plantations, but he builds in a distanced perspective, a necessary remove to prevent the presentations from wallowing in tortuous pornographic displays of Black suffering. He starts with wider shots, sometimes at night, and never zooms in to show whips breaking skin or splayed blood. But more impactfully, in these moments, Jenkins shifts from the acts of violence themselves to the faces of the other slaves, the silent witnesses who beyond seeing and hearing, understand the trauma inflicted on those bodies because it is searing their Black psyches as well.

These scenes from the first episode break through Cora’s depression and resignation, fashioning the resolve that leads her to join Caesar (Aaron Pierre) as he seeks to follow the Underground Railroad to freedom. For Cora, much like David, this journey is about reconnecting with her mother, the spirit of a woman whose longing for freedom might not have ended in the promised land, but who certainly came to inspire Cora in some of the darker passages of the trek.

Cora traverses a landscape re-imagined, historically remixed by some twisted lab cabin production genius intent on holding up a pitch-black carnival roadshow of racism. Individual states have determined their own rules for the status of Black folks. In some instances, Black people are not accepted within the borders at all; in others, a seemingly vibrant Black cultural life exists (education, employment, and a sense of enterprise), but below the surface, Black bodies used for medical testing and subjected to sterilization. At other stops, Cora finds the uneasy tension between Black communities that have grown into seemingly sustainable economic and social haven and the surrounding White enclaves that fear the rise of this Black empowerment.

*

And yet, there is actually a third path, a far more radical departure Jenkins put forth after the release of The Underground Railroad. Dubbed The Gaze, Jenkins culled together scenes of those largely seen, but unheard Black characters I mentioned earlier who populated every state along Cora’s journey. The folks who had been our eyes watching and witnessing.

The Gaze, available via Vimeo, is possibly the most thrilling perspective of all. As a non-linear document (that is not truly documentary), it allows those who have been relegated to the background to step into the spotlight and actively witness something more than the suffering and trauma of their time. The Gaze creates a Meta-moment, a period of reflection where those characters from the past get the chance to look ahead, to see us, the Black folks of their future and maybe even catch a glimpse of what they sacrificed their lives for. Is there even a sense of joy in their eyes, seeing a world they could never have imagined and our current stop on the long road to freedom?

In interviews and pieces written about The Gaze, so much time is spent dissecting the differences between the White Gaze and whether or not Jenkins has boldly chosen to explore a Black Gaze to replace the tired notion of White vision and revisionist histories. There are certainly valid points in such arguments, but those debates failed to capture my attention.

Instead, I watched The Gaze, focusing primarily on that notion of these characters looking at me, sizing me up, as I pondered their lives and stories. I wanted to know more about them, especially since Jenkins had allowed them to break free, even if only for a moment, from their day-to-day existence.

And personally, I found myself unable to escape the feeling that, in those faces and the reflective witnessing taking place between us, I was communing with one of my own ancestors. Within my shared family history, I have always known about Solomon, my maternal grandmother’s grandfather, who was the first freedman in our line. I soaked up stories about him from my Nana when I was young and could barely contain my excitement the day we stumbled across a series of old family photos with him and my great-grandmother.

Among that trove of pictures, we discovered a sepia-toned shot of Solomon alone, dressed in his finest, staring out at us. Having a face to go along with the name and the stories transformed the sense of history and the world for me. Solomon became a real, increasingly more living link to that time and a touchstone to help me define myself as a Black man and an American.

Over the course of this project, I’ve spoken about the creative muscle I have exercised throughout phases of my life. I’ve had to watch stories on film and television (and even to some extent via streaming services now) where I wasn’t represented through an authentic reflection and I have found ways to rewrite those narratives and insert myself in those frames. It is sometimes a tricky proposition due to the complexities of race and the inherent realities of invisibility. I still flex this muscle, although I am heartened by the fact that there are far more narratives illustrating the dynamic spectrum of Black experiences.

But The Gaze, what it did for me, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Jenkins foregrounded generations of Black people (not just characters, but what felt like representations of real people) and in some vital way, he helped me to breathe a little extra life into Solomon. While gazing at those faces, I found a space for Solomon too, a place where he took on a bit more shape and definition. And maybe, in that shared gaze, Solomon got to see me too.

*

David’s long and winding roadshow, while a pure science fiction fantasy is propelled by a speculative idea that, unconsciously, creates a future where the lone and discarded child (people of color), in the end represent the last remaining example of lost humanity. Hundreds, if not thousands of years in the future, after Man has completely succumbed to the ill-effects of global warming and our inhumanity, David is found by aliens, re-animated, and serves as a time capsule, a record of his long-gone age. He becomes the face of the past and possibly a means of building a future for humanity. His unending and undying love could redeem human life.

Is that the endgame for Black people in America? Could we, in some distant future, represent the best of the American experiment?

I wonder where Cora goes at the end of The Underground Railroad. She is finally free from the slave catcher who has pursued her like a hellhound across the fragmented landscape of the narrative. She has loved and lost along the way. Curiously, she has seen the inhumanity of everyone, both Black and White, endured the scarring of all these encounters and re-emerged with purpose.

She’s not concerned with loving white folks. Cora’s future is about finding a space where she can truly love herself. Reconciliation starts at home.

Can I get an Amen?

Note: This is the fifth in a series of long-form pieces based on my 2021 “Truth & Reconciliation” project. These essays and the Critical Reflections podcast would not be possible without the support of ArtsWave, the City of Cincinnati, Duke Energy, Greater Cincinnati Foundation, Fifth Third Bank and the Arts Vibrancy Recovery Fund.