American Fiction
Writer-director Cord Jefferson’s debut film is part blistering satire about the shallowness of diversity politics in cultural industries, part enrapturing character study and family drama.
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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.
Content warnings: Racism; Suicide; Dementia.
Note: Given that, at time of writing, American Fiction is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.
American Fiction centres on middle-aged author and literature professor Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) and his intertwined, troubled professional and personal lives. Monk faces disrespect from his academic colleagues, and resents being pigeonholed as an African American author – while his novels are not perceived as Black enough for his long-suffering agent Arthur (John Ortiz) to successfully sell to publishers. A trip to his hometown of Boston for a literary festival further raises his ire, as he confronts the success there of Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), a younger Black female writer whose much feted book We’s Lives in Da Ghetto he sees as pandering to stereotypes about Black life.
Visiting Boston also means re-confronting his difficult relationship with his family. Monk’s mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) has begun to show signs of dementia following his father’s suicide. His divorced, hard-working medical doctor sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) bears the toll of dealing with Agnes’s declining health, aided mainly by the family’s longstanding, dedicated housekeeper Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor). Monk also gets on particularly uneasily with his hedonistic plastic surgeon brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), who has begun to live a far more liberated life after recently coming out as gay. He does, however, also find budding romance with Coraline (Erika Alexander), a lawyer who lives near the family’s beach house.
While in Boston, Monk writes a parodic memoir, My Pafology, under the false identity of ex-convict ‘Stagg R. Leigh’, which he sends to Arthur. Intending to send up the Black ‘trauma porn’ he sees white publishing executives fawning over, he is horrified when Arthur is instead inundated with large rival offers for the book, and later its film rights. Monk is thus presented with a conundrum as to whether to go along with the lucrative farce, which will also cover the cost of the increasing care his mother needs.
Genre and authorship
American Fiction depicts scathingly the white liberalism underpinning the interlocked publishing and higher education industries. This worldview fetishizes Blackness, or a particular version of it completely counterposed to white middle-class experiences and dominant values. It construes Blackness in terms of poverty, violence, familial breakup, and rejection of Standard American English, and thrills vicariously in these qualities. This liberalism also prides itself, or at least seeks to stave off its own embarrassment, by giving space to diverse voices – but only on its own terms, it the categories it permits, without ever really ceding its power to gatekeep.
Monk simultaneously is not Black enough, in white liberals’ interpretation of what it is to be Black, and only gets to express himself in the literary world in a role specified as that of the Black author and critic. American Fiction renders explicit the racialised ways in which genre and canon, and the lowbrow/highbrow distinction, are made. The challenge for Monk and other Black authors is how far to compromise with that system, to accept the logic of publishing executive decisions and market forces in order to obtain the space to express themselves artistically and authentically.
Life imitates art. ‘People want to love you, Monk’, Cliff tells his brother. ‘You should let them love all of you.’ Monk’s guardedness, dissatisfaction, sometimes self-sabotage are in part behaviours learned through past trauma – repetitions of the conduct of his late father, to whom his siblings and mother repeatedly compare him. Yet the structures he works within require him to compartmentalise himself, to become in part Stagg R. Leigh while concealing that component of his life from nearly everyone else. The literary categories policed by academia and publishing also define the genres of person those sectors, and society more broadly, require him to be.
Depicting Black experience
By contrast, American Fiction is concerned with capturing some of the complexities and divergences in Black experience, depicting lives in which being Black is both integral and yet not wholly defining. Monk is from an upper middle-class background, and the socioeconomic challenge he and his family face is of maintaining that standard of living in the face of the particular strains and travails that are part of the lifecycle both generally and in ways particular to Black professionals: career disappointments; stress; marital breakup; ill health; death and bereavement. Monk resents being expected to articulate and embody a Black experience beyond that, and is contemptuous of peers who try to do so.
The film does not make light of Monk’s difficulties, but compels him to recognise his privileges as a middle-class straight man, which other Black characters do not enjoy. The emotional labour of maintaining relationships with and the wellbeing of loved ones falls disproportionately on women. Agnes had to accept her husband’s infidelities. Lisa has to worry about her mother’s health when her brothers have left town. Coraline has to deal with Monk’s temperamentality and secrecy. Lorraine, as a Black working-class woman, paradoxically is virtual family member and employee, tasked with the physical labour of maintaining the Ellison household. Monk resents what he sees as Cliff’s flightiness and unreliability, but as the film progresses, we also realise the strains he bore in remaining closeted for so long.
Ultimately, for all the trauma and friction that the family unit contains, it also redeems and recuperates its members. The aforementioned inequalities that fuelled its unresolved resentments do not dissipate, but the various main characters nonetheless positively affirm their relationality to each other. They do so within an ideal of family as something built upon shared experience but also open, welcoming, actively chosen, rather than closed, rigid, and biologically determined. Monk in particular, as he embraces his place within that entity, so he comes more to terms with himself, and his place in a broader social structure that so frustrates him.
Two films in one?
American Fiction both satirises white liberal racism masquerading as allyship in cultural industries and dramatises Black family life in all its complexity. These two components are ideologically of a part with each other: it is the nature of those cultural industries that impedes depicting Black experiences in a nuanced manner, as this film strives to do. Yet tonally, they jar slightly, revealing a contradiction that I think is productive to think through.
The film captures with unerring accuracy the discomforting white spaces that Monk has to negotiate, the microaggressions he endures, the strenuous self-censorship he struggles to exercise. Doing so, however, requires the white liberals he encounters to be unfailingly two-dimensional, with their emotional responses to him – and to Black authors more generally – ranging from embarrassed enthusiasm through blasé indifference to unconcealed contempt. There is little exploration of shared experiences of oppression across colour lines, on grounds of class, gender, or sexuality, which might motivate vocal expressions of solidarity against racism, rather than just guilt. They lack the interiority the film grants to Monk and his intimates.
That is no failing on writer-director Cord Jefferson’s part. Meaningfully centring Black experiences and lives requires marginalising the same white feelings that most Hollywood films seeking to address racism inevitably end up prioritising. American Fiction focuses on how white people act – rather than what they intend – and what this means for Black people, or rather one Black person in particular. Yet it also speaks to the dilemma Monk himself vocalises, the flattening work that fiction does, often in the name of seemingly worthy aspirations. To make powerful political points through art requires a degree of stereotyping, enabling one figure to stand in for a wider group or institution. This is in tension with the realism of the character study, which instead prioritises emotional depth and psychological complexity.
American Fiction dabbles in both these versions of realism. In doing so, it reminds us that who gets to stand for no one but themselves, and who has to function as stand-in for a much broader collective, is itself an inherently political question, which most films answer very differently to this one.
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This is one of the few films that motivated me to go to the cinema this year (so far). Had me going through so many feelings. A very clever satire. The family sub-plots touched me so much.
Come to think of it, the underlying theme which could only work in America is how paying for hospital bills is such a grave (and manufactured) problem. I remember seeing a viral tweet years ago about if Breaking Bad was set to be in the UK, then it would be 5 mins long. Walter would go to hospital and just get treated (not entirely true, but works for the comedic effect)
One of my favourite scenes was from the judging panel when Thelonius has the long chat/argument with Sintara, about who it is they are both actually trying to please. It’s a conflict that anyone must feel when you are trying to make a career from creative work, and how intensely you must feel pressure to stay true to yourself.