Black Man Talk: Us: Stunning With Scissors

by Odie "Odienator" Henderson and Steven Boone
 

(The following is a conversation between Big Media Vandalism founder Steven Boone and Big Media Vandalism's proprietor Odie Henderson. It is the latest in the Black Man Talk series. Other installments include American Gangsters, Tyler Perry, Django Unchained, 42, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Dear White People, 12 Years a Slave, Sidney Poitier, Get Out and Black Panther)

THIS IS VERY SPOILERIFIC! DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN US.

Post #1: Odie

Brother Boone,

Time for another Black Man Talk! My proposed topic: Jordan Peele's new horror film, Us. It's already drawn big-league box office numbers and a ridiculous amount of thinkpieces, most of them by White folks just dying to sound woke. More power to them, but let's throw our two cents into this mix.

Speaking of the number 2, Chadwick Boseman originally held the record of two Black Man Talks and now Jordan Peele joins him in the Two-Talk club. I'd love to see what the two of them would do together, but with Boseman's track record of playing every famous brother in history from Jackie Robinson to James Brown, I'd be afraid the Boseman-Peele collab would be about a resurrected Frederick Douglass. Can you imagine Boseman as a pissed off Douglass, with grave dirt still in his hair, ringing the doorbell at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and saying to Donald Trump "oh, so I was doing an amazing job despite being dead for a hunnert and fourteen years, huh bitch?" I'd see that movie! Twice!

We know Sam got that role locked up, tho'.

Until we get F.D.'s Revenge, let's focus on Peele's incredibly thorough mindfuck. Like Kubrick, everything in Peele's films is open for interpretation AND seems to have a genuine purpose even it it's only tangential to the main plot. Viewer theories will soon abound and they will not soon abate. Remember that documetary, Room 237, about fan theories relating to Kubrick's version of The Shining? I saw that movie at 8am on a Saturday back when I covered the Toronto Film Festival. I was hung over and in no mood for the incessant ramblings of folks who thought Kubrick used Jack Torrence to confess that he faked the moon landing. Us could beget its own Room 237, but I propose that we not venture that microscopically into Peele's delectable minutiae; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a pair of scissors is solely for cutting one's throat.

Besides, everybody knows that Barry Lyndon is where Kubrick owns up to faking the Moon landing. If you listen real closely, you can hear Kubrick whispering "Whitey was never on the moon!" on the soundtrack exactly every 1,969 seconds.*

*that oughta keep the Kubrick zealots busy for a while.

But I digress. I don't scare easily, but Us really got under my skin. Lupita Nyong'o played a major part in that, but let's return to her in a bit. Let me tell you why I felt a strange pang of familiarity while watching this movie.

When I was growing up broke and lonely in Jersey City, New Jersey, I amused myself with a "what-if?" scenario about my life. Like Margaret Mitchell's thot from Gone With The Wind, I swore I'd never go hungry again if I got out the 'hood, but I wondered why I was hungry and poor in the first place. My theory was that there was another Odie, my twin, and that guy got everything I wasn't getting but deserved to have. That other Odie was the beneficiary of a confused God who was sending blessings meant for me to other Odie by accident. He looked down from Heaven and was like "oh, there's an Odie! BLAM! Blessings, bitch!" So, while I seethed as a have not, my doppelganger was getting all the money and the sex and the power earmarked for me when I was placed on this Earth. Granted, the Bible tells us God doesn't make mistakes, but look at the platypus or that big ass dent in the back of my head and tell me that shit wasn't a mistake.

To solve this grievous error, I needed to find Odie Prime. "And I need to kill him!" I thought.

Now I am sure I did not craft this theory on my own. I must have read something similar to it in my literary travels, or maybe heard a story like this. But as Us played out, I thought about those old ideas--things I had totally forgotten about once I became an adult--and it made the motivations of the Tethered and Lupita's twin roles even more intriguing to me. That pang of idea recognition made me think that Us is not just a movie about the privileges and underprivileges of class, it's also about the fear of having what you deserve and/or earned violently yanked away from you by the person behind you on that perceived ladder of success.

The American psyche is nurtured and poisoned by that John Steinbeck misquote that said poor folks see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. In our lifetimes, this idea really got exploited during the Reagan era, which is where Us places its prologue. We're old enough to remember the cultural climate during Hands Across America. My mother thought it was an incredibly stupid idea to have a chain of people stretching across the country, holding hands like some church Fellowship gone viral, while making a symbolic gesture about the poor. It ran through my hometown on May 25, 1986, exactly a month before I graduated high school, and I did not go down there to participate.

Granted, Hands Across America, along with its sister cause USA For Africa, raised some money, much of it never reaching its destination. But it was such an empty gesture nonetheless, a means of allowing folks to say "I did something" when in actuality they hadn't done shit. It was the probable origin of "performative wokeness," which makes it a perfect metaphor for Peele's Tethered. They're going to do something about their situation besides hold hands and sing a shitty song.

This went to number 65 on the Billboard Chart, folks.

What do you think about my Hands Across America side-eye? And did you notice what everyone's tether looked like, especially the ones played by Elizabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker? Can you think of any film where we followed a dark skinned Black nuclear family anywhere, let alone into a nightmare? And let's also talk about the skin complexion of evil when that evil is Black. And remind me to bring up my own scary trip to Santa Cruz. Perhaps you're talking to my tethered other right now...

...nah, I'm still too many blessings short of a church picnic. It's the real me you're dealing with today.

Ride that escalator down into the depths with me, Brother Boone. The floor is yours.

Post #2: Boone

A lot of recent movies have been labeled conversation-starters but in my experience have only started fights or echo chamber circle jerks (Green Book, y'all?). Us is the first Big Ol' American Movie in a good while that seems alive with spontaneous thought and reflection rather than hashtag cues. Right now there's a cold war happening between the idea of audience as political constituency vs audience as AUDIENCE--distinct human beings going into the dark, hoping to be moved, shaken and even awed by the screen action. Get Out did a more elegant job of the latter than Us, but Us leaves, um, us with a lot more leftovers to take home.

I'm not sure if it's Boone Prime typing these words or my wayward other, but many have suspected that the election of Donald Trump, after an unprecedented year of catastrophes and famous deaths, signaled a detour down a dark alt timeline. Soon Cosby was in prison, Roseanne disgraced, Michael Jackson tried and convicted in the court of HBO. These add up to the pop omen equivalent of birds dropping out of the sky. Us is clever enough to seize the idea of a world askew by tracing back a few decades to the moment the Evil Plan was Hatched. In that sense his project reminds me of my friend, the experimental gonzo filmmaker Damon Packard, whose surreal comedies Reflections of Evil, Space Disco, Foxfur and Fatal Pulse all look back to the 70's, 80's and 90's, searching for the poisoned roots of the present late capitalist nightmare.

Like you, me and Packard (and style-jack auteurs like Panos Cosmatos, Peter Strickland and Ana Lily Amirpour), Peele is Generation X down to the socks. While Millennials are largely interested in burning, skimming, sealing off or upgrading anything from the pop past that seems stale or irrelevant to the Now, Gen X nostalgists remember a time when the past and present existed in a chain of continuity: Then and Now are but different bends of the same river. It's a different approach from, say, Spike Lee (the world's oldest Millennial filmmaker) catering to the youthful BLM notion of "Wow, back in the 70's folks had the same struggles we do now!" which posits that the only thing that has changed are the haircuts. 

A film like Us reflects that everything is always changing, that the dopplegangers are not separated by time (a la the social media memes along the lines of "Look, a pic of a 1908 Jonah Hill lookalike!") but by timeline; that in both the benevolent timeline and the evil one, there are people living out whatever life they've been given, growing older, accruing more experience, wisdom, bitterness, rot, whatever. What doesn't change is a social power structure that foresaw how to maintain its grip on the population, decades in advance. That's the real horror.

We all laughed at do-gooder stunts like Hands Across America, Live Aid, USA for Africa (We Are the World) and Do they Know It's Christmas? but it was a troubled laugh. Underneath it there was a genuine yearning for a world that wasn't so greedy and selfish. We were little kids then, born when everybody from John Lennon to Coca-Cola were trying to get everybody on earth to sing together, so we couldn't be 100% cynical about it. Peele's joke is that we're still attempting the gesture 40 years later, even as social media guarantee we needn't touch another hand, cater to or be considerate of anyone outside our networks. As has probably been noted in a dozen think pieces by now, maybe we, not the Tethered, are the Romero zombies going through the motions at the abandoned mall.

You asked for my thoughts on the "Tethered" look. The Tethered generally looked smoked, pan-seared, kind of like the vampires in Peele's '80s touchstone, The Lost Boys. The lighter skinned and white ones could be meth heads. The black Tethered looked cracked out. As Peele (ill-advisedly, IMO) gave us longer and longer looks at them, I wondered if Us could also be read as an elaborate metaphor for rehab. (Notice how the Tylers couldn't make it five minutes without a drink.)  Their wine-colored jumpsuits notwithstanding, I could picture the Tethered Wilsons caught on Walmart surveillance camera boosting Cheetos.

You asked, "Can you think of any film where we followed a dark skinned Black nuclear family (two kids, but alas, no dog) anywhere, let alone into a nightmare?" Sounder? I know I'm cheating there, genre-wise, but you get what I mean. The scariest nightmare for a dark-skinned Black nuclear family is the one that slavery, Jim Crow, law enforcement and Welfare created by lawfully tearing it apart. There were many specific narrative reasons for the unstated tension in the cheerful opening car ride, but even without story context, the dissonance works for anyone who has had to live a Black Life in America.

Which reminds me, WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU IN SANTA CRUZ? Nigro, SHOW ME YOUR NECK!  

Post #3: Odie

Peele tips his hat to The Lost Boys by filming in Santa Cruz. I had no idea that's where they filmed my sister's favorite Coreys fllm until I went there on a work team building exercise. Considering I hate the beach, I wasn't too happy to be there, nor was I dressed for the location because my stupid,  Jersey-born ass had no idea Santa Cruz had a beach. See below.

 "Clueless Negro from Joisey: A Hip-Hopera"

Here's a tip for anyone who wishes to torture me: Just pour sand on my feet. I'll tell you my social security number and the few secrets I have left. Sand is my Kryptonite.

Anyway, I wound up in this creepy, dark arcade that had the video games you and I would have played growing up. I had just gotten finished whipping some teenage kid's ass on Ms. Pac-Man ("these old ass games suck!" he whimpered) when I started feeling dizzy. I went back outside, dragging my bare feet through that sand while carrying my sneakers. I became disoriented and I got lost. I remember sitting down near a ride and then the next thing I knew, I'm back at the arcade. I don't know how I got there and I didn't have my cap anymore.

So maybe this is the tethered me talking to you! (Cue creepy I Got 5 on It remix) [Ed. Note: The tethered Odie is named Garfield, for obvious reasons.]

Thank you for pointing out the meth-iness of Moss and Heidecker's tethers. I didn't consider the great rehab angle you mentioned. Instead, I thought of them as the "low class" versions of these characters, perhaps a reminder of the trailer-park world they escaped when they got some money. Despite the financial chasm that separates them, Moss and Heidecker don't seem that far removed from their tethers--the addiction's still there but the drug is more highbrow, respectable and expensive. When Moss' doppelganger garishly paints her lips in the mirror post-murder, it's as if she's saying "see, we're really no different. I'll show you." Her sudden, mutilation-fueled rejection of that notion is the creepiest shot in the film.

By comparison, Peele makes the Wilsons stew far longer in the crock pot he's thrown them into with their tethers. They seem a little more far removed, at least until Adelaide's truth is revealed. Those doubles did look like crackheads, but I also saw them as a warning to folks who made it out of the 'hood and didn't look back or help pull anyone up. The Curse of the Respectability Negro. You know them, the ones that tell you to pull your pants up, speak properly at all times and stop listening to rap. Then maybe the cops'll stop shooting ya and the White establishment will hire you at a decent salary. These are the folks who put on airs once they leave the 'hood and damn sure don't want any reminders of anything that's perceived as TOO Black; they've graduated to the pristine fashion purity of P. Diddy's white parties but don't want you to know they've still got dark-colored clothes in their closet.

Presented without comment

I don't see the Wilsons as these types of people; Peele doesn't give us any indication and he even allows Duke's Gabe to code switch when threatened by the first appearance of the Wilson tethers. (His "I done tol' you..." bat-wielding monologue rang so familiar and so true that my mostly Black audience exploded with laughter.) But I felt the class distinction metaphor much more sharply with the Wilsons. The tethers are decked out in red, but their attire looks a lot like prison uniforms. Gabe's tether is a grunting, bearded brute who's ultimately undone by a capitalistic status symbol. Evan Alex's tether is an African myth's trickster named Pluto who shares his name with Michael Berryman's character in Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, another horror film about class. (And Alex's character, Jason wears a Jaws shirt whose image evokes the torn Jaws poster on the wall in Craven's film. Told you Jordan Peele's a thorough motherfucker!)

Lupita's complex dual role is the linchpin in my theory. As we learn, Adelaide is actually a tether. This doesn't come out of the blue as far too many inattentive folks have written. Her rhythm is off in the I Got 5 on It scene. Her younger self's PTSD is actually her learning how to speak English and her ballet lessons are a means of assuming the former Adelaide's identity. When "real Adelaide" turns up as the spooky Red, she's a have who has brutally been made a have-not and is now out for revenge. I don't think there's a successful woman, brown person or LGBT person who doesn't feel a fear that what they've accomplished might be snatched away at a moment's notice by an unfair, rigged system. Because that system has only allocated X number of places not just for people like us, but also for poor folks attempting to rise from the depths of poverty. Americans have always mocked the French, but they did something we'll never have the balls to do: They banded together and killed their rich asshole oppressors.

Class as a theory is all fine and good, but what about Jeremiah 11:11 and all the Blblical/religious nuggets Peele throws at us? This intriguing article by film critic Candice Frederick sees Us as a Judgment Day allegory, which isn't far-fetched when you realize Jeremiah 11:11 evokes the angry Old Testament God I understood far better than Jesus when I was a kid:

"Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them."

In that quote, de Lawd is basically saying "Fuck Yo' Couch, Nigga!"

Michael Abels' score does use that creepy Omen-style chanting which implies religion-based terror, but I think all the Biblical stuff is a red herring. What do you think about Frederick's theory? Any other symbolism you wish to riff on? I'd like to riff on the skin color of Black villains in horror movies next time. And let's talk about the brilliance that is Lupita Nyong'o and the unfair advantage that is Winston Duke's thighs. And the rabbits! This is the second time Peele has taken a seemingly innocent animal and recast them as a symbol of violence. What's up with that?

Post #4: Boone

Ms. Frederick's piece on Us as a group portrait of faithless self-absorption resonates (though she coyly avoided the Adelaide/Red spoiler).

At one of Clay McLeod Champan's brilliant public horror talks a few years back, the consensus fear among panelists turned out to be the fear of losing control of one's mind and body. I couldn't quite relate. My overwhelming fear, having grown up around shootouts and drug raids, was not of losing control of mind/body but of losing mind/body. Dying. To be alive in any form beats entering the void and its unknowns. As Redd Foxx (whose analysis of Us I would love to hear) put it, "There's a lot of things worse than cancer. A six foot six black nationalist in an alley with a hatchet, mad at ya... is worse than cancer."
 

Similarly, I didn't have much of a visceral response to the primary fear Us is stoking: the fear that the relative privilege and comfort "we" enjoy will eventually come with a bloody bill. American horror has always been about shattering apparent safe spaces and making happy people pay for their pleasures. But the (thinkpiece-speak ahoy!) post-Zuckerberg social world we live in now delivers fitful, anxious, lonely pleasures--ephemeral crack-hits of hope, confidence and community that never escape bloody reality. Old school escapism is dead. Or maybe I should just speak for my algorithms, which deliver beauty and excitement at one scroll, GoPro snuff films and utter ratchet-ness at the next. There is no calm that the arrival of Boone-Tether could shatter.

Big Media Vandalism Artist's rendition of Boone's Tether

The Tethered actually deliver the Wilsons an inadvertent gift, sort of the way the home invaders in Straw Dogs awakened meek Dustin Hoffman to his essential manhood. The Wilsons briefly become a coordinated, unified force while battling the Tethers at the Tylers'--even if their victory quickly lapses into a (pretty clever, funny) debate over who notched the most kills--as if huddled around a Playstation. Suddenly, they're alive with purpose in a film crowded with mindless stragglers.

It's the vitality of the fight that I appreciated as something "real" in contrast to the convoluted symbolism of the Tethered, which is more of a clever puzzle than an immediate source of terror. Even so, Lupita Nyong'o sells the hell out of it. Her panic as Adelaide and malevolent wretchedness as Red (or vise versa) give the action a weight it might otherwise have been missing. Also, she is impossible to look away from. Lawd. Has there ever been a woman this simultaneously dark and lovely holding the center of the big screen? She is a gorgeous rebuke to a 125-year old lie.

As for the ballet motif, I may have misread it as Adelaide's memory of her last moments of freedom and dreaming of a future before she got trapped in Tethered hell. But I'll just have to go watch Us again to be sure.

The rabbits didn't do much for me. Maybe Peele nurses a phobia or some serious Watership Down PTSD, but, as signifying animals go, those rabbits can't top Black Philip, the scary-ass billygoat in The Witch.

I feel you on the notion of how important skin color is in this film, as it was in Get Out. Tell me about it.

The Final Word: Odie

That Vox video about skin color you cited above was an eye-opener. It shows how little we mattered to Hollywood and to the historical record in general. The fact that film colors were measured and calibrated with White skin didn't surprise me at all; the fact that this practice continued well into the '80's and '90's did surprise me. It makes you wonder how much harder it must have been for Gordon Parks to take those magnificent pictures for Life.

Us's use of dark-skinned protagonists seems novel, but the skin color of their villanous doppelgangers is far more prevalent in Hollywood movies, especially horror. Years ago on this very site, I wrote a piece about Black horror movies. Most of the villains in those films tended to skew darker-skinned. Hollywood Shuffle takes a swipe at this notion in its Black Acting School skit. Peele's casting plays like one corrective amongst many; in Us he has several scores to settle. As Monica Castillo points out in her four-star review over at Roger's, the house of mirrors Adelaide enters is branded with Native American imagery in the flashback, yet when she revisits it, the site has been rebranded as if to hide its sordid racial past. Peele's tying of the Tethered to the first Americans who were robbed by colonizing White men offers a form of payback for this country's original sins.

Since we started doing this talk, a lot of different reviews have come and gone. Several of my non-critic friends expressed disappointment that the film wasn't cut and dry, that it didn't explain everything. A few of those guys also complained about "plot holes" and being left to their own devices to figure things out. Granted, this is not as neat as Get Out, which zeroed in on the specificity of being Black in dangerous White spaces, but I found the film's messiness to not only be rewarding but it also pays new dividends every time one thinks about it. Walking out, I thought of our good buddy Matt Zoller Seitz, who lives for shit like this.

Since I've got the last word here, I want to big-up all the performers in Us. Lupita deserves all the praise and then some for creating a dual role that's ripe with complexities that reveal themselves over several viewings. She rocks her final scene with Pluto, which is the moment where Peele almost tips his hand for those of us who wondered if she were actually a tether (his decision to have Jason walk backwards before Adelaide's empathy becomes too noticable is a clever one).  But she's in good company with Evan Alex and Shahadi Wright Joseph, who also bring a similar richness to their dual roles. And lest we forget M'ThighU, i mean Winston Duke, who has just the right touch of goofy playfulness as Gabe, and just the right touch of menace as Abraham.

To close out, you said:

"The Tethered actually deliver the Wilsons an inadvertent gift, sort of the way the home invaders in Straw Dogs awakened meek Dustin Hoffman to his essential manhood. The Wilsons briefly become a coordinated, unified force while battling the Tethers at the Tylers'--even if their victory quickly lapses into a (pretty clever, funny) debate over who notched the most kills, as if huddled around a Playstation."

I want to take that unity a step further. At first, when the Tylers' tethers turned to attack the Wilsons, I thought it was due to their visual branding as redneck-y White folks. Of course they'd go after the Black folks! They're racist! But, in hindsight, I realized instead that their actions showed how united a front the Tethers had. The have-nots have finally come together, no longer put asunder by the endless blame babble regurgitated by Fox News, the GOP and the right-wing nutjobs whom mainstream media outlets like CNN and MSNBC can't help but amplify in their lustful quest for ratings. It no longer made a difference what color the Tethers were; they had finally realized that a common enemy had boots on everyone's neck. If poor White folks finally realized that the powers-that-be actually saw them as no better than the folks they're supposed to hate and blame, there would be the kind of reckoning only hinted at by the bird's-eye view of the endless stream of Tethers in the final shot of Us.

Now, that's a sequel I'd like to see.  

"I hate to cut this Black Man Talk short, but..."

Black Man Talk: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, or Please, T'Challa Don't Hurt 'Em

by Steven Boone and Odie "Odienator" Henderson
 
(The following is a conversation between Big Media Vandalism founder Steven Boone and Big Media Vandalism's proprietor Odie Henderson. It is the latest in the Black Man Talk series. Other installments include American Gangsters, Tyler Perry, Django Unchained, 42, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Dear White People, 12 Years a Slave, Sidney Poitier and Get Out)

Post #1: Odie

Brother Boone,

Have all the Black Man Talks we've done in the past been leading up to this one?

Since its announcement, Marvel's Black Panther movie has had Black folks, to use Tim Curry's pharsing, shivering with antici...PATION. The optimism hit fever pitch when it was announced that Ryan Coogler would direct it. What a perfect choice for this material! With Creed, Coogler bent a beloved White creation at a right angle and refocused it on the character he rooted for as a kid. And he did it without diminishing Sylvester Stallone, the creator of the franchise. Coogler returned Rocky to the underdog status that made viewers shed tears for him back in 1976, yet he also made the movie a showcase for his own themes and characters within Stallone's universe. Here was a guy who had proven he could step into something and make it his OWN. BLACK. THING.

Had they announced that J.J. Abrams was directing it, Black folks would have still been dancing in the streets, but it would have looked like the two Black dudes in Billy Joel's Uptown Girl video instead of the wedding dance number in Coming to America.

What kind of fire are you starting with these Negroes, Billy Joel?

Speaking of Coming to America, ten years ago on this very site, I proclaimed that film "the Blackest movie ever made." I took a lot of shit for that, but I stood by my words. Now, methinks I must run a retraction. Is Black Panther the Blackety-Black-Blackest movie ever made? Let's discuss that!

Speaking of people named Abrams, you and our mutual pal Simon Abrams (no relation to J.J., verdict still out on affiliation with Colonel) did a Black Panther piece over at The Ho'Wood Reporter. I'm glad you got to jibber jabber with someone who knows about comic books and universes and all that shit. Because, as you know, I'm pretty clueless in this department. I was not allowed to read comic books as a kid. My mother said they were "only for stupid people" and had them banned from the home. The only superhero I can speak about with any historical context is Spider-Man, who was rather ubiquitous in our childhood era. He was on The Electric Company and in those cartoon reruns with the bomb-ass theme song. Spidey's comics were the only ones I snuck into the house for years. In fact, Spider-Man is responsible for one of the more memorable childhood ass-whippings I received. But that's a story for another time.

Since I'm digging back here in my chlldhood, let me show you a memory. When I was a kid, my male cousins and I would tuck my aunt's towels into the backs of our t-shirts and play superhero games. Unlike me, they had superhero Underoos, so their outfits looked more "realistic." My Mom said we were too broke for Underoos, and my therapist will tell you that my being deprived of said fancy kiddie underwear is why I'm willing to spend 90 bucks on a pair of drawers today.

I discovered that they make these for adults now. I'll pass.

Back then, I just had my towel-as-cape and my imagination.

Like all kiddie games, the ones we played had some wacko rules. The one that affected me dealt with the fact I wore glasses. When we played Superman, I was only allowed to be Clark Kent. "Superman doesn't wear glasses," my cousin Al once told me. The fact that all of the superheroes we portrayed were White never struck us as a reason we couldn't play them; it was a given that all superheroes and villains were White. I mean, as far as Blackness goes, we had the Verb guy from Schoolhouse Rock, and later, the Brown Hornet on Fat Albert. On the villain side, we had Eartha Kitt's sexy Catwoman--and the shoddy animation on The Adventures of Letterman made the turban-clad Spellbinder occasionally look like he might be a redbone. But we knew nothing of Black Panther, who'd been around since 1966 but had never been in a medium that trickled down to us.

I bring this up because a lot of responsibility has been thrust upon Black Panther in terms of representation. Coogler and his cast can't just deliver the standard issue superhero movie. Like Patty Jenkins before him, the director had to shoulder the burden of the hopes and dreams of those who finally feel their time in the sunshine had finally come. For Jenkins, it was all about women and for Coogler, it's Blackness. I don't think either of these added pressures were fair to the filmmakers or the movies themselves. Chris Rock said--and I used this same line in our Black Man Talk on 42--that we'll have finally "overcome" when Black folks are allowed to be as mediocre as their White counterparts.

So, the initial theory was that Black Panther would have to be absolutely perfect in its execution in order to satisfy all of the souls yearning for something like Wakanda. Which is why I welcomed you and Simon's carefully measured takes on the material. Specifically, I want to focus on this statement of yours:

For all its concessions to modern style, Black Panther is a very '60s movie whose hero may be royalty, but whose burdens and pitfalls are ultimately those of a Pan-African revolutionary. It leaves T'Challa and his genius sister right where Newton and Seale began: making plans to shepherd self-determination and innovation in America.

I love this and want to use this to begin our discussion of T'Challa's ideologies vs. Killmonger's ideologies. More than one White film critic has tried to position this as a Martin Luther King vs. Malcolm X "battle royal," which to me is not only rather ignorant but also forgivable because the schools don't teach Marcus Garvey (or either of the names you site in the above quote). How would you describe the differences between Killmonger's ideas of world domination and the Wakandian ideal of isolation and Swiss-like neutrality?

Please be as Black as possible and show all work.

Also up for discussion as our talk progresses: What interaction, if any, did you have with Black superheroes as a kid? Did Coogler's vision of Wakanda, made real by Rachel Morrison's ace cinematography (she knows how to light and shadow brown skin in ways that evoke Gordon Willis in The Landlord) and Ruth E. Carter's jaw-droppingly tactile costumes--did this vision speak to you both as a filmmaker and as a viewer? Whom would we side with? Killmonger or T'Challa? And most importantly, did the beautiful, smart and dangerous Dora Milaje make you wish for a kickass reunion of Zhane?

We should also discuss something The Hollywood Reporter piece went into at length, the film's battle sequences and its violence. I gave Black Panther four stars over at Roger's, but that doesn't mean I think it's perfect. I liked the scenes more than you guys did, but I'm gonna have to take Col. Abrams behind the woodshed for some of his ideas. And I'm sure you'll be taking me behind the woodshed for some of mine. It's gonna be our ass-whuppingest Black Man Talk yet! Let's break off some switches and get started, shall we?

Post #2: Boone 

I'm glad my tete a tete with Colonel Abrams at The Hollywood Reporter provoked such a rich response.

I'll get to the most important issue first: I never pay more than ten bucks for drawls (TM), but if somebody comes out with adult Wakanda Underoos, an exception shall be made. [Ed. Note: They got some Chewbacca Underoos for adults, but no Lando Calrissian ones, the bastards.]

You mentioned that Coogler and Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins "had to shoulder the burden of the hopes and dreams of those who finally feel their time in the sunshine had finally come." I agree with this, though I still yearn for creators of color or underrepresented gender to take up an even heavier and riskier burden: make your own universe.  Now that Black Panther has put some heat and shine on Afrofuturism, let's have a renaissance. When I hit the lotto, I am going to give Andrew Dosunmu and Bradford Young $200 million to make a sci-fi epic out of whatever they damn please, with no supervision. If they go over budget, thas they problem. I'll slide Janizsca Bravo, Khalil Joseph, Hiro Murai (our great ally), Malik Sayeed, Shaka King, Arthur Jafa $10 million each to make something that, to their individual satisfactions, fits the description "next level." And I'll let Charles Burnett name his price for any lingering lost project or quixotic dream he wants to put onscreen. And I will fight to get them all in the multiplexes and on major streaming platforms.

Look, if politicians can make empty promises, why can't a random blog weirdo? But I do hope somebody who can move some cash around is listening. What I've learned during the past decade of Marvel Studios' ascendancy is just how vast is many grown black folks' knowledge of that companies' comic book properties. I've listened in on perhaps hundreds of passionate debates about Marvel storylines that tend to get as raucous as sports, politics and religion talks. And if you happen to praise any aspect of the Bryan SInger/20th Century Fox renditions of X-Men, brother, PREPARE TO GET CUT.

Is Black Panther the blackest movie ever made? Naw. But it is the blackest mainstream fantasy film since The Wiz. (In my worthless opinion, Coming to America shares the crown with WATTSTAX.) It is indeed blackety-black, most def. There are many indexes of its blackety-blackness, but my favorites are the simple exhilarating closeups of African women with short, natural hair (or no hair), stunning all to silence with their beauty--the ecstatic truth so long denied. Images that answer centuries of slurs and falsehoods against the great wondrous wellspring of our people. Of all people. All this to say: Lupita I love you, we can be happy!!

Lupita responds "New phone. Who dis?"

So anyway, I'm with you on the Chris Rock-inspired notion that we will really have overcome when we no longer expect a director hired by a major corporation for a popcorn movie to deliver us to the promised land while tap dancing like the Nicholas Brothers and pounding the keys like Oscar Peterson. Coogler is indeed some kind of burgeoning genius, but let's let that brother breathe. Right now he could probably use the gift of a small, intimate film. It would be great to see all the international attention drawn by his association with a blockbuster lured over to some amazing, life-affirming story of an ordinary Black Life. Or whatever Coogler wants. We have to show this brother love by letting him be. I was going to say "setting him free" to make a corny reference but no: the whole point is that there is no liberator more powerful than one's self.

One of the interesting aspects of the Killmonger character is that his Field Nigga cynicism and siege mentality could have been harnessed for revolutionary muscle but it didn't "free" him. You are not free when you live in constant unresolved trauma and rage. And on the flipside, you are not any more or less a prisoner of a white supremacist system if you adopt non-violent resistance. Malcolm and Martin died the same way, and for the same reasons: they had reached a place of boundless mental freedom that, given their international influence, ran the risk of contagion effect. 

Garvey's Pan-Africanism, Huey's 10 Points, Kwame NKrumah's socialism, Elijah Muhammad's capitalism, Lumumba's reforms--all these efforts boil down to free men attempting self-determination and, acquiring, be it on the economic or diplomatic level, some standing in the international community. Garvey probably saw most clearly that the international community was no community at all but a collection of self-interested colonizers and exploiters. Like Killmonger, he preferred the relative honesty of his sworn enemies (Garvey's pact with the KKK; Killmonger's with Klaw) to the hypocrisies of "friends" who gave public endorsement to reforms while plotting coups and sabotage through their intelligence agencies. His beef with W.E.B. Dubois was a matter of approach (capitalism vs socialism, segregation vs "equal opportunities") and style (Garvey's brawling grandiosity, Dubois' "Talented Tenth" finesse).

T'Challa's Wakanda reminded me a bit of Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, only with sick tech. A proud, strong country that sets itself apart from the rest of Africa, astonishingly impervious to colonialism... yet, during the revolutionary era, more than willing to back up African nations resisting colonial powers.  At the end of this origin story, Wakanda is guardedly joining the UN, but mainly as a set up for its participation in the upcoming Infinity War. In the Marvel imagination, the impending threat to all humanity that Thanos poses makes all that colonial/slavery/tribal infighting/Jim Crow/redlining/COINTELPRO/Tuskeegee stuff water under the bridge.

But there are no neat parallels for the T'Challa vs Killmonger conflict. Each has attributes of legendary Field Niggas and infamous House Niggas. (And who is which depends on how one interprets their actions in the context of history and one's level of cynicism.) The film wants us to get past labels and remember that "our" conflict is a family conflict. In its climactic sequence, a few characters are suddenly seized by that awareness. They get woke to the simple fact that carrying out vendettas for wrongs within the family while the house is being robbed brings only the robber satisfaction.

As for the Dora Milaje and going behind the woodshed, I would... well, never mind.

Let me hear your thoughts on the movie's battle sequences before I do my usual obsessive "go-in" on technical matters that only me and three nerds somewhere even care about...

Post #3: Odie

I can just see you stepping to Okoye and she flings your ass over that waterfall. I love Lupita and Danai, but my science major heart belongs to Letitia Wright’s Shuri. Not only is she Wakanda’s resident Q from James Bond, she is as nimble with her brain as the Dora Milaje are with their weaponry. “Just because it works doesn’t mean it cannot be improved,” she tells her brother. Wakanda runs as smoothly as it does because her technology game is tighter than good cornrows. Her brother may be King, but it’s Shuri who’s keeping the lights on in Wakanda. Behind every great man there’s a great woman, as the saying goes. Behind every great Black man there’s a great Black woman—at least until he gets some money and decides to get a White girl.

But I digress.

Ain’t no White girls in Wakanda!

But there is a White dude in the kingdom, Martin Freeman’s CIA agent, Everett K. Ross. I like how his character was used—he got the Black role! That is, the guy who makes a difference but isn’t the hero. He’s thrown in as a token, but not a racial one. Ross is what’s tethering this beautiful, self-contained Ryan Coogler Universe to the much larger and more traditional Marvel Universe. We need to be reminded that Infinity War’s coming, y’know!

I got some hate mail that claimed I’d left Freeman and Andy Serkis out of my RogerEbert.com review because I was a racist who didn’t want to give any praise to White actors. If only I were that devilishly evil! I left them out because motherfuckers are always whining about spoilers and other bullshit I don’t believe in, and I was trying to err on the side of caution by not revealing too much. I start talking about Klaw, and then I have to explain that he knew where Wakanda was and how he ties in with Killmonger and Ross.

The letter writer didn’t point out that I also didn’t talk about Winston Duke or his character M’baku’s great line about vegetarianism. That, and Shuri’s “Colonizer!” line, are two of the best moments in the script. I also like that M’Baku’s people drown out with noise the people they don’t want to hear. They kind of sounded like the audience on The Arsenio Hall Show. We need to adopt that noisemaking philosophy the next time a GOP politician speaks, or when one of the relatives starts drunkenly talking shit at the cookout.

Your analysis of T’Challa’s philosophy vs. Killmonger’s was great (and you really took my “show all work” to heart—thank you!). So I want to focus on another aspect of their duality. Both of them undergo the same spiritual baptism when they become king, and both visit the fathers who have left this mortal plane for the afterlife. T’Challa’s visit to his Pa takes place in a land that, forgive me, looked like the origin story sequence of Paul Schrader’s Cat People. T’Challa yearns for wisdom while expressing his fears about his new role as successor. It’s a positive experience for the most part, fitting in with other comic book movie style visits to “a home planet.” (See the Christopher Reeve Superman movies for another example.)

"Ain't this a bitch? They sent me to the wrong goddamn Heaven!" -Richard Pryor

Killmonger’s vision, which takes place in the realistic setting of Oakland, is a scarier mirror image of T’Challa’s. He’s trapped at the scene of the most traumatic event in his life, the death of his father. This development haunted me, because it seemed to be saying that even at our happiest moments of achievement, we as Black folks still carry tremendous psychological baggage. It’s here that Coogler makes his most direct connection between the two characters who represent Africa and America. Both T’Challa and Killmonger know they are descended from royalty (as we all were), yet like the slave, Killmonger’s birthright was snatched away from him, leaving him to ultimately stew in poverty.

In his vision, T’Challa’s father tells him “a man who has not prepared his children for his own death has failed as a father.” That line resonates throughout Killmonger’s vision; he has not been prepared for this death, but his father’s true failure was making a deal with the wrong people. On his spiritual journey, Killmonger is visiting Hell, or at the very least, Limbo, whereas T’Challa is experiencing Heaven. This goes a long way in humanizing Killmonger, making him a very complicated villain worthy of empathy despite his vicious nature.

This brings me to Colonel Abrams’ comment about the film’s violence:

“Don't get me wrong: Coogler and his fight/stunt choreographers and second assistant directors arguably never really break the Marvel mold, but rather impressively build on it. But the one area that they deliver too much of the same ol', same ol'? The fight scenes.”

I don’t agree on this one. Granted, some of the scenes (like the Korean section) have characteristics of other Marvel (and DC) movies, but I could follow the action for a change. Coogler and his editors are nowhere near as good at clearly staging frenetic action as the master of this, George Miller, but their staging is far more coherent and interesting than the standard fare. Many of the battles are on a smaller scale, especially the fights for the throne. Additionally, I liked the way the climactic battle played out, with Coogler hopping from the epic attack on Wakanda to T’Challa and Killmonger fighting for dominance on a literal Underground Railroad.

You as a filmmaker have a better eye for layout and framing than I do, so can you sum up what bugged you about these scenes?

One more thing: Did you see that video of fans meeting Chadwick Boseman? Under normal circumstances, I’d never subject you to Jimmy Fallon’s late night show, but you gotta see this.

One guy bows to Boseman like Vondie Curtis-Hall does to Eddie Murphy in Coming to America. The importance these fans place on Black Panther is ingrained in the movie. That Coogler stages Killmonger’s youth and T’Challa’s outreach in Coogler’s hometown of Oakland speaks volumes about this; in a way, Coogler is aligning the Marvel Universe with the place where he probably played his own versions of the superhero games. He probably couldn’t afford Underoos, either.

Let’s talk about the performances and our favorite scenes. And since you think Coming to America still holds the crown for Blackety Blackest Movie, let’s do a Zamunda/Wakanda comparison! I might be leaning back in this direction, but I’m with you on Wattstax being #2. Convince me, bruva!

Post #4: Boone 

I'm sorry-- I want to get into my technical peeves, but the clip of Chadwick Boseman meeting Black Panther fans just short circuited my critical faculties. That video is what popular movies are all about, leaving people inspired and encouraged to dream. Not feeling left out of visions of the future. All the Coming to America parallels folks you've noted are quite apt: Both are fantasies that link African-Americans and Africans through sheer charm and imagination. Impeccable casting in both cases makes the films fly high above more mundane filmmaking concerns.

Yet all that collective charisma is why I yearned for better, less programmatic editing. (As I wipe tears and collect myself after the Fallon video.)  In the fight scenes, such is at least in line with contemporary hectic-affectless film editing practice. But in the intimate scenes and dramatic turns, such cutting feels like being rushed out of the restaurant while there's still coffee in your cup. T'Challa's return from the void at M'Baku's compound was a thrilling moment, but the filmmakers didn't juice it, build to it with all the patience and grace it deserved. It was just, Okay, Next!

Type "You Are the Pan" into YouTube to see a scene from Steven Spielberg's worst movie, Hook, that nevertheless drinks deep of a pivotal moment. Or even that scene in The Dark Knight Rises where Bruce Wayne finally climbs out of that goddamn prison tunnel thing, with all the goons chanting and Hans Zimmer's score building to a heart attackgasm. That silly shit was granted more room to unfurl than any of the lovely flourishes and grace notes in Black Panther.

Of course, this probably all reads as a typical Old Man Complaint, since, in the Age of Meme, folks are now quite comfortable with experiencing the Cliffs Notes/Last-week-on-Hill-Street-Blues version of screen events. But so long as humans are still capable of appreciating the deeper pleasures of time-based storytelling, there's always an opportunity to relate moments as something more substantial than a screenshot of same. The beautiful thing is, audiences remain so open and willing to engage with what speaks to them in the material that their enthusiasm often bridges the gap. It's like a relationship where the one who's in love does most of the heavy lifting. In this case, Black Panther would have had to be reeally poorly told in order to defeat the excitement the fans had going in. And with Coogler's own Oakland-kid enthusiasm at the helm, that wasn't gonna happen. I just wish the ghost of an African griot (or Sally Menke) had invaded the editing room.

I can't pick out favorite scenes from Black Panther but there are many, many images that stirred the soul. 

I was just out of high school when I saw luminous closeups of Tisha Campbell and Adrienne-Joi Johnson in the movie House Party. That was my first full-on view, on a movie screen, of what the Internet now calls Black Girl Magic. Maybe I'd had glimpses of it on TV, in blaxploitation clips, Josephine Baker or Carmen Jones dance numbers or a Grace Jones music video. But I hadn't seen the crush-inducing everyday black girl glamour I experienced in reality reproduced in a movie theater. Usually black girls were on the margins, bickering or sobbing. Not since House Party have I had as strong a revelatory big screen crush-jolt, not until Danai Gurira's bald, majestic profile in Black Panther. She and the bald Dora Milaje warriors, along with Shuri's (Letitia Wright) and Nakia's (Lupita Nyong'o) natural hair are an answer to hundreds of years of Eurocentric Fair Maiden programming. While it feels a bit harsh when Okoye (Gurira) calls the straight wig she's forced to wear during an undercover mission "a disgrace," the induced shame black women have had for what naturally grows out of their heads is indeed a disgrace, and its time is up.

Of course, we can't forget Gurira's appearance in the wondrous Andrew Dosunmu's Mother of George, an Africans-in-America film whose use of skin and fabric color must have been a reference point for Black Panther's night interiors and royal court pageantry. If Coogler ever taps out of the Black Panther franchise, Dosunmu and his cinematographer on George, Bradford Young, have my vote for next at bat.

As for M'Baku's Dog Pound, I'm just waiting for the inevitable supercut of it alongside Arsenio's, Snoop's, She's Gotta Have It's and Baha Men's Dog Pounds.

Anyhow, friends of mine are already calling this film a Black Classic for all time. But where do you place Black Panther in the short long history of Black Fantasy? Or is it silly to draft that history at this early stage? 

Post #5: Odie

Ah yes, House Party! The subject of the first piece I ever wrote for our Black History Mumf series here at Big Media Vandalism. The cinematography in that was by David Lynch’s cin-togger Peter Deming, who made those beautiful ‘round the way gurls glow. He made them look the way my heart felt when I gazed up at them from my theater seat. Rachel Morrison has taken this a major step further: Her lighting of the Dora Milaje conjures up all sorts of emotions, from conflict to joy to excitement to, aw hell, I’ll say it, full on arousal. The way Okoye is lit when she decides to adhere to tradition no matter what the cost is different from the way she’s lit in any of her action sequences. If only Pam Grier had these cin-toggers to highlight the halo around her ‘Fro!

I hear you about wanting more patience within scenes. I didn’t really give it much thought while watching Black Panther, but you do have a point worth considering. It made me think about how much slower movies of our generation (and before) were. For example, I recently watched WarGames, a movie I adore, for the first time in years and was struck by how long it takes to get to its central plot. Director John Badham takes his time letting the viewer get to know the characters, to live with them for a bit before they get in trouble. We had much longer attention spans back then—MTV and Nintendo hadn’t yet started short-circuiting attention spans. Whatever crimes  of pacing Black Panther commits, they are sins that cater to the impatience of today’s audiences.

Hell, I’m willing to congratulate folks who have made it this far reading this conversation. I’ve had people complain that these pieces are too long. My response is “bitch, you don’t have to read it all at once!” So thank you if you've made it this far. I’m tempted to give you a reward!

So here’s a Jungle Fever cookie!

You said:

“I can't pick out favorite scenes from Black Panther but there are many, many images that stirred the soul.”

I agree about the soul-stirring imagery, but I can think of a few scenes I loved. The scene where Okoye removes her wig of oppression and uses it as a weapon in the casino; any scene with Winston Duke; Killmonger’s final scene; the arrival of those kick-ass rhinos in the climactic battle. And lest I forget, the moment we first get a glimpse of the spectacle that is Wakanda.

Seeing Wakanda realized onscreen immediately made me think of the opening credits of Coming to America, when images of the Kingdom of Zamunda were accompanied by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It was the first time I ever wanted to just climb into the screen to live--can somebody give us an IMAX screening of Coming to America? I was too chicken to mention Zamunda in my Black Panther review, so I’m glad Kam Collins mentioned it in his. These are two places that live in Black viewers' hearts, places that evoke such joy and freedom because the Black folks there aren’t worrying about racism in any form (colorism might be another story, but that usually doesn’t get you shot). 

So I gotta ask you where would you rather be? Zamunda or Wakanda?  I’m too old and out of shape to be on Wakanda, so unless I can get a job as one of those rhinos, I’ma have to ask King Joffee to adopt my Black ass and get me some royal bathers.

Come visit me at my new address, y'all!

You asked where Black Panther place on the Black Fantasy and/or Black Classics lists. I’m not sure yet, but I will say it’s perhaps the biggest game-changer we’ve had in Black cinema. But while we’re on the subject of Black Fantasy movies, I saw A Wrinkle In Time at an advanced screening held by the Walter Reade. Disney hyped the hell out of this movie, which I think will hurt it. The reviews have been less than kind (some have been outright racist and hostile), but I really liked it. It’s a kids’ movie, to be sure, but Ava DuVernay cast a strong young Black actress as her lead. Storm Reid is excellent here, and will surely inspire some young girls to get into science. And it has a gigantic Oprah, whom I’m sure will stomp the shit out of Mister’s son, Harpo when she finds him.

There’s a scene in Wrinkle that’s as subversively Black as anything Disney has done (those crows in Dumbo don’t count—those muthafuckas were RACIST). Reid’s character, Meg, is being tempted by an evil force that wants her to succumb to the dark side. The temptation takes the form of Meg being transformed into a more “popular” version of herself. Her naturally kinky hair gets straightened out and her dorky attire is replaced by more revealing clothing. The evil force tells Meg this new look will make her the top dog at school. My jaw dropped. “The Devil is giving out free ULTRAPERMS!” I thought. Meg’s rejection of this image of herself sends the same message Black Panther does: Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud. And I ain’t changing.

I would love to see Bradford Young work with Coogler on a small scale movie, or with Wendell Harris if he ever decides to come out of retirement. Just don’t make it science fiction. Young shot Arrival and that looked like shit! Of course, he got an Oscar nomination for it instead of Selma or Mother of George. Shit, now I’m starting to sound like you!

Did you notice that Stan Lee’s cameo was a huge swipe at his image? At the casino, he takes the winnings won by a Black character in a franchise he helped create. They do all the work and he gets the money. Talk about symbolism!

Enough of me! If you could influence Black Panther 2, which I’m sure Coogler will direct, what would you suggest? And can we live with T’Challa being sent back to supporting character status for Avengers: Infinity War? Wouldn’t it be fucked up if he were just the Sidekick Negro in this?

Take us home, bruva!

Post #6: Boone

In his cameo, I half expected Stan Lee to say something like, "Lemme bet on black this time around"--or whatever folks say when they "always bet on black" ((C) 1992, Wesley Snipes).  And then lose his shirt and start yelling at his black assistant. But that would have slowed the movie down.

Speaking of slowing down (oh brother, Jeezus Crys, Boone, shut up!): I fundamentally, respectfully disagree with the "attention span" defense of modern film editing practice. But lazy editors get away with it cuz it goes down easy and studios/producers don't know the difference between holding an audience's attention vs. superficially averting potential impatience by simply cutting around to shit. And when relatively slow-burn films like No Country For Old Men or Django Unchained or Sicario manage to keep folks engaged, it gets chalked up to some mystical auteur magic rather than the director and editor simply giving the story room to pull us along of its own momentum rather than superficial inducements. We're so many years into this status quo that this is largely my problem, not the world's. 

Mr. Boone, after the aforementioned editing status quo drove him insane

I do agree that old school first acts now tax the patience of even codgers like me! That's where modern screenwriting has actually improved some things. We no longer need to spend a half hour establishing the "norm" that will be uprooted in order to begin Act Two. In Black Panther, we get arguably the most elegant and mesmerizing expository passage in Marvel movie history in that opening flight through Wakandan tribal history. As you say of the film's first landing in Wakanda later in the film, it reminded me of the soothing, soaring approach to Zamunda in Coming to America. Can't front: the first Wakanda approach put a lump in my throat. Metaphorically, it is the "promised land" and the view of it that T'Challa grants Killmonger as he dies is from "the mountaintop."

Where would I rather live? I was with you on voting Zamunda, with its fairytale charm, until I thought about what it must be like for the lower classes there, as opposed to in Wakanda. The regular folk in Wakanda seem to have at least a decent amount of leisure time and disposable income, judging by the occasional cutaway to a Wakandan marketplace. In Zamunda, everything is lovely if you're the prince. But I doubt my broke ass is getting rose petals and Victoria Dillard Executive Cleaning Service (TM) over there.

I guess we are stuck here in America for the time being, bruhman. As long as I can say "we," anyplace is about as good as any other place. That's the Wakanda that we've learned to fold up and take with us, through all our troubles. If we can keep laughing together and dreaming together, we'll be alright.

These are our comment moderators. So be nice!

Black Man Talk: Get Out: Never Trust A Tea Cup and a Smile

by Odie "Odienator" Henderson and Steven Boone
 

(The following is a conversation between Big Media Vandalism founder Steven Boone and Big Media Vandalism's proprietor Odie Henderson. It is the latest in the Black Man Talk series. Other installments include American Gangsters, Tyler Perry, Django Unchained, 42, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Dear White People and 12 Years a Slave)

THIS IS VERY SPOILERIFIC! DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN GET OUT.

Post #1: Odie

Brother Boone, I was hoping our next Black Man Talk would be about the vengeance-filled tell-all book President Obama wrote once he got out of office. Alas, he only signed the book deal for that last week. So unless he's as quick as Stephen King and can turn out that book by the end of this sentence, we're going to have to choose another subject. 

Don't rush me, goddammit!

I propose we look at Jordan Peele's social horror hit, Get Out. This is the story of a brother whose dalliance with a White woman yields terrifying though hilarious results. It's a cautionary tale that will immediately evoke memories of conversations between Black men and their parents. Finally, we've got a movie that will do what millions of warnings from Black Mamas couldn't: It puts the symptom of chills back into Jungle Fever!

I admit I was skeptical about this movie. First of all, I am not fan of Key & Peele, the Comedy Central show that Get Out's writer-director Jordan Peele did with his old MadTV colleague, Keegan-Michael Key. I just didn't find them funny, and I was hard-pressed to find another Black person who did. Couple that with the absolutely rapturous reception by film critics, and all I could see were red flags. You and I both know the film critic world is as White as a blank sheet of paper, but outside of Armond White, there were no critic howls of outrage. Immediately, I was suspicious. "This shit is probably toothless!" I thought.

I was happy to be wrong. This thing bites and breaks the skin. How on Earth did this movie get made?

Let's talk about not only the movie but the recent outpouring of White Tears against it! And let's comment on OUR boy, Get Out co-star Lakeith Stanfield's tweet about YOUR boy, Armond White's review. And let's talk about the cinematic precedents of this film's race-tinged horror movie plot. The film that immediately sticks out for me is Three the Hard Way, whose poisoning of the Black neighborhood's water supply plot was adapted by the GOP for Flint, Michigan.

But first, I'd like to present a skit detailing what would have happened had I brought a White woman home.

Me: Mom, Pops, this is my girlfriend, Heather Kardashian Winthrop. We're in love!

Heather: HIIIIII! It's so nice to meet Odie's parents! (to my mother) Odie tells me you like Turtles candies so I brought you a huge box!

Odie's Mom: Oh thank you, dear! That's very nice of you.

(Takes box, hands it to my Pops)

Odie's Mom: Put those in the refrigerator, please. (to me) Odell, can I see you in the other room for a minute?

Me: Sure, Ma. Be right back, honey! (We leave)

(Cut to the outside of my parents' house. Suddenly, the roof flies off the house in a huge explosion. The blast sends me flying straight into the sky. The roof falls back on the house crooked.)

(Cut to back inside the house)

Odie's Mom (re-enters room, smoothing down her blouse and skirt before opening her arms to hug Heather) Welcome to the family, girl!

I exaggerate. Slightly. My mother always thought I was gay. She once told me that, if I ever brought home a White man, he better not be broke. When I brought home the Black woman I eventually married, my mother said "OK, so you like girls too. Whatever. Still, don't bring home no White woman."  It never ceases to amuse me that the roof would have stayed on the house in the above skit had I brought home a White man.

But I digress. There's a great throwaway bit in Malcolm Lee's Undercover Brother where Chi McBride reacts to Eddie Griffin bringing Denise Richards' White She Devil character to Undercover Brother HQ. McBride says something like "he did NOT just bring that White woman up in here!" The line isn't as funny as his delivery of it; he sounded exactly the way my mother--and a lot of Black parents--would have sounded. Because, unless you come from a biracial union like Peele and his parter in crime, Key, there's a parental expectation attached to future children-in-law. Sometimes it's unspoken, and other times it's blatant as hell. But the expectation is there. Society has hammered into our heads a series of givens: everybody's straight and everybody's gonna bring home someone that looks like them.

Of course, these givens are quite often disproven, and there's usually more fallout than people acknowledge. Peele hints at this in the first scene between lovers Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Girls' Allison Williams, perfectly cast). Chris asks a very valid question: "Do your parents know I'm Black?" Rose responds with an answer that immediately infuriated me. "Should they?" she asks. "Hell yes!" the loud, talk back to the screen Black kid inside of me yelled in his head. "This is your cue to RUN, Chris!!"

Rose's response is the first of many microagressions Get Out blatantly explores and exploits, though, as we find out later, her response is of a bigger, more sinister piece; it's pure aggression rather than microaggression. I fucking hate the word "microaggressions," because they damn sure don't feel micro when you're subjected to them every day. But I guess it's the word I'm stuck with here, and the way Peele works these microaggressions into the horror fabric of his film is the movie's best asset. You and I both know what it feels like to be the only person of color in a room, and how much more worrisome it can be, whether that worry is justified or not, when we're the center of attention in that room. Let's talk about that great party scene where Chris meets the way too friendly denizens of Rose's small hometown. Without the overambitious pleasantries, it could have been a scene from a slavery epic.

Before I get too deeply into the delicious minutiae of Peele's mise-en-scene (and also tell the watermelon-centric story of the time I met a White girlfriend's parents), I'll turn the floor over to you. What did you think of the film overall? How was your moviegoing experience? (My audience was VERY vocal--more on that later.) What was the deal with Rose's creepy ass brother?! Do you think Catherine Keener's character was Peele's less than subtle commentary on the stigma that often accompanies Black folks who seek therapy? And what woulda happened if you'd brought home a White woman?

Take me to the Sunken Place, my brother.

Post #2: Boone

I saw the movie with our buddy Simon Abrams and a diverse, very game and vocal New York crowd. It was the loudest, funnest time I've had at a horror movie since seeing Drag Me to Hell at the Court Street multiplex in downtown Brooklyn some years ago. This film has a comedian's sense of the crowd.

I hadn't any high hopes for this flick, either. Key & Peele are clever but somewhat generic comedy writers, and lackluster as performers. Plus I couldn't tell from the trailer whether we were in for an eccentric horror or just an extended K&P skit. So Peele's really rich writing and subtle, visually astute direction in Get Out were a nice surprise.

It's bursting, roiling with ideas, but at the center of the maelstrom is a question: What do white people want from us? Now, bruvas of the world like you and I definitely have white friends with whom this question never comes up. That's why they're our friends. But all my life I've had unsettling encounters similar to those played for horror-comedy in Get Out: being placed, out of the blue, on a kind of impromptu stage, under a spotlight at work or in a social setting where I am the only dark person in the room. And then holding, essentially, a press conference on my race.

The focus of the symposium varies, but I'd say the top three subjects are

• The size of my Johnson 
• Whether I agree or disagree with some controversial statement a black celebrity has recently made
• Am I as pissed off as they (the questioner) about some recent political or social justice outrage affecting my people (if the questioner is essentially liberal) OR
• Am I as pissed off as they about some racial double standard that has resulted in an injustice against an innocent white person (if the questioner is essentially conservative and has assessed that I am fair-minded enough to hear them out).

These kinds of encounters are awkward, amusing and maybe a little irritating... but how do you get a horror movie out of 'em? Easy. Give the people asking the questions a vast, unknown amount of power. Make them friendly and ingratiating on the surface. Like kindly old corporate rep Will Geer in Seconds or Ruth Gordon in Rosemary's Baby.

But in so-called black life, friendly faces that could determine your fate are a daily reality. There is no sweeter, more inviting face than Catherine Keener's, and look how it masks her affluent white character's power--until she's good and ready to use it. Her husband and creepy ass son, being restless alpha males, have a harder time hiding that they don't mean entirely well. It's Chris, their black house guest, who has to stay fully on his toes in their presence. If any of the tension boils over into something physical, he is the one who will have the most explaining to do, and fast, if the police arrive.

Yes, Peele plays a lot of black folks' hangups and internalized oppression like a fiddle. This includes the psychology stigma.The Sunken Place is all that suppressed shit that paralyzes us. It's also a handy metaphor for being "woke" yet powerless to act.

You know, I have no idea how my parents, who grew up in the South during the Emmett Till years, would have reacted if I brought home a white girl. No roof explosions, for sure, but definitely a Fred Sandford chest-clutch or two.

I  want to hear more on the micro stuff, the subtle messages and flourishes you spied on Peele's work here. Abrams told me of Richard Brody's observation that with this film Peele has become America's Bunuel. That sounds so right.

Post #3: Odie

The experiences you've described mirror both my own experiences and the ones Get Out puts Chris through. Except Peele throws them at Chris all at once, which makes things more terrifying. Surely we can handle a few of these aggravations, but every single one in succession would make even the strongest person start doubting their sanity. Like Ira Levin, a master of the social thriller subgenre Get Out belongs to, Jordan Peele's screenplay keeps us off-balance. As in real life, we question whether our perception of events is being altered by our innate paranoia. Because to be Black in America, or, in Levin's character Rosemary's case, to be female in America, is to have an almost deer-like awareness of potential danger: Sometimes it's just a harmless noise in nature, but sometimes it's really a hunter with a gun. We just aren't sure until we have a moment to reflect, and such moments tend to be scarce. We need to ACT accordingly and immediately.

It's no coincidence Bradley Whitford's character, Dean, brings up his hatred of deer during his initial meeting with Chris. His speech is the first indication something may be awry. Chris is lulled into a false sense of security by Dean's wife Missy (Keener) and Rose's embarrassment at Dean's Dad jokes and his attempts to be Negro hip. Whose parents don't seem tragically out of date to their kids?

Chris' introduction, and Dean's use of "thang" and "brother" reminded me of the time I went to my first (and thus far only) White girlfriend's house for a barbecue (notice I didn't say cookout. YOU KNOW WHY!!) I was young--15 in fact--and stupid, but smart enough to know you do not eat the potato salad at a barbecue! Her dad seemed normal enough, and so did her Mom, though the Dad did call me "brother" and used jive phrases I swear he got from Barbara Billingsley in Airplane!.

 I love that June Cleaver says "Whitey" in this clip about her jive fluency

The only time it got uncomfortable was, after eating hot dogs and burgers (I purposely avoided the ribs--optics, y'know!), the Mom came outside with this HUGE tray of sliced watermelon.

She went around offering it to the guests, and when she got to me, the only Black person there, she froze. I could read her face: THIS LOOKS BAD! Optics, y'know! She was about to offer me (sarcastic tone) the dreaded fruit of racism, WATERMELON!!! 

Evil is only 19 cents a pound!

Now, had she offered everybody else strawberries and came to me with a big ass Petey Greene slice of watermelon, THAT would have been racist. But she was offering everybody the same thing. So it was fine. But it was the first time I'd seen that sense of social paranoia I normally felt being reflected back at me on a White person's face.

"It's OK," I told her, "really it is." She offered, and I politely declined. Because I HATE watermelon. Hate it! Hate it! Hate it!

Again, I am digressing. You said:

"It's bursting, roiling with ideas, but at the center of the maelstrom is a question: What do white people want from us?"

Peele's answer to this question is the film's most subversive touch--the one that made me say "shit, they let him make this?!"

This is a movie about Black victims of theft. The body-snatcher angle makes it blatant, but it's more than just about the theft of Black bodies, a clear slavery metaphor that this great Esquire article explores better than I could. It's also about the theft of achievement, the theft of culture and the theft of myths that were originally conjured up by the same folks now trying to commandeer the hype. The only way they can do this is by stealing the bodies of their victims, controlling them like marionettes while--and this is the most sadistic part--keeping just enough of the original host's psyche alive so that, in rare moments of clarity, they know what's happening to them.

Peele runs with these thefts, bending them into horror elements.

The myth theft: Lakeith Stanfield is literally stolen in the film's creepy opening sequence, presumably because he'd make a believable Black buck for the horny middle-aged White woman practically glued to him at the big party. Sure, he'll sling the long john! To quote Lethal Weapon 2: It's "because he's BLACK!!!" Why else would he be chosen, without prior carnal knowledge, by this woman? Plus, he's her personal Umfufu, the African lady Eddie Murphy married in Raw. In that movie, Murphy jokes that he has the perfect person to exploit, but the second Umfufu talks to "American woman" her brainwashed spell is broken and she has an important moment of clarity that fucks up Eddie's game. Look at how that woman tries to keep Stanfield from Chris! But the second he takes that picture, Stanfield is self-aware long enough to issue his ominous warning: "GET OUT! GET OUT!"

The achievement/culture theft: Creativity and achievements have no color, but legitimacy is usually White, especially in the arts. You put in all this work to make something your own, but there's a possibility that you will get jacked for it. This is something we've seen over the years, from Elvis on down to Macklemore. Pat Boone could sing Tutti Fruitti and make it a #1 song, but Little Richard had to settle for it being race music when he released it.

Here's where Chris comes in handy. He's an artist, a photographer of urban scenes. Jim Hudson (Stephen Root from Office Space), the blind art gallery owner, is able to visualize whatever pictures are in his gallery courtesy of someone describing them to him. Granted, the person describing the art must be a wordsmith on par with Cyrano de Bergerac, but Hudson isn't without his own talent despite his blindness. Hell, Stevie Wonder can describe a sunset better than somebody with 20/15 eyesight, so I could buy Hudson's genius. And yet, Hudson wants to see the world through Chris' eyes. Chris' harsh and joyful experiences as a Black man have shaped his photographer's eye, and now Hudson wants to steal it without having to do any of the work.

Had Chris been more muscular and in shape, his body might have gone to Rose's creepy brother, Jeremy, whose fetishistic drooling indicated he would love to have all that perceived skill without doing any of the work.

Or, as Peele's fellow comedian Paul Mooney used to say:

  "Everybody wanna be a nigga, nobody wanna be a nigga."

What did you think of LilRel Howery, Peele's stand-in and the film's conspiracy theory-heavy Black id, and the two scary House Negroes responsible for many of those goose-inducing jump scares?

Post #4: Boone

Just last night I had an encounter that made me think of Get Out's first act. I was delivering some groceries to an apartment on West 57th Street but my scanning device suddenly died. I hadn't memorized the customer's apartment number, and without my device I couldn't determine which of the mountain of sealed blank packages I was carrying belonged to this customer. So I took some time to sort everything out, with the help of my dispatcher over the phone. 

After I got it together, I loaded only the packages I needed onto the elevator, just as a woman somewhere past 60--who happened to be white--entered the building. "You've got quite a lot of packages there!" she said brightly. I barely acknowledged her--this was a rush delivery, two hour window closing soon--but must have managed to mutter something between short breaths.

Was this the old lady in question? Oh wait, the Dakota's not on W. 57th...

She went on down the ground floor hall, saying, "..but you really can't hold the elevator like that." I said, "...for 20 seconds?" She went into her apartment.

After I delivered the stuff upstairs, I organized the rest of my bags before heading out. I was almost at the front door when a man--who happened to be white and about six foot seven--got in front of me. He asked me what I was doing. It took me a moment. He wasn't wearing any uniform or badge. I told him I'd just made a delivery. He said I had a lot of bags, was I sure I was delivering? I said these bags are for other drops. 

He asked if he could see some ID, that "we" had "been watching" me "on the camera" in the lobby for "some time." I hadn't even thought about a camera but now I could see it up there in a corner behind him. "...so I'm just investigating." Investigating? Odie, this dude looked like Steve Wilkos.

(this is from stevewilkos.com)

I felt like one of the rapists on his show. But I played it cool, searched my bag for my work ID, couldn't find it. He then asked what apartment had I delivered to, arms folded, eyes narrow. When I told him, he called the tenant to vouch for me.
 

Anyway, I'm writing this from jail.

Not the real Steven Boone.

Just kidding! But as I walked down 57th Street after Wannabe Wilkos set me free with a lame apology, I had a slight sickly feeling. A clammy sensation similar to that I've had when in handcuffs, in police custody. This guy was doing his job, I supposed: looking after the tenants in a city where push-in robberies and assaults still happen on occasion. But I'd delivered to this building before. They get deliveries of all kinds all the time. What had he--or they, whoever they were--seen on the camera aside from a harried courier scrambling to get his shit together? A black hoodie I had forgotten to pull down, five o' clock shadow, a slender frame (crackhead? perc-popper?), maybe too much frantic motion and cell phone action. Maybe they'd had an incident in the past. Maybe the perp had been a courier or delivery man. Maybe their caution had absolutely nothing to do with my color. Wait, had the woman who complained about my holding the elevator called security? Is that why....?

I imagined if Wannabe Wilkos had been of a more George Zimmerman temperament. I imagined if this non-incident had taken place in suburban Florida, or Giuliani-era New York. Or present-day Long Island.

So there's my digression. I guess it has to do with the microaggressions that accrued early on in Get Out (from a highway patrolman; from Chris' girflfriend's dad and brother). They are ancillary to the central theme you've identified: theft.

It's the way Peele weaves this theme into the tight-knit fabric of his story that really grooves. It's in the art direction (the pictures on the walls, Chris' photographs, White Dad's hunting trophies, girlfriend's mementos) and the sound design (a miscegeny of sounds from an aristocrat's Victrola and an especially woke Spotify playlist). Spike was up to similar cultural/historical survey in his Ganja and Hess remake, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, which has more black art on the walls than the Schomburg Library. That film, like its predecessor, was more about the spiritual costs of assimilation, upward mobility, lost ties to "our" heritage. And unlike Get Out, it's a mess. A fascinating, sensual mess, rich with vision. If I have any criticism of Get Out, it's that it could've done with a bit more mess and sensuality and, well, ig'nance, for all its crowd-pleasing propulsiveness. Imagine the fun Spike, a Certified Freakazoid (TM), would've had with the Jungle Fever/Mandingo aspects of this story. (Or, CF (TM) Lee Daniels or neo-blaxploiter Craig Brewer, for that matter.)

Nah, I instantly withdraw that too-many-notes critique. LilRel Howery was enough glorious mess and ig'nance for three movies. As Chris' keep-it-one-hunned homeboy, he kept this heady movie on solid ground. Peele brings him on at the perfect moments to shake up the horror conventions--even though he himself is the latest in a long line of Real Brothers to track mud on a tidy genre carpet, going back to Eddie in The Golden Child, Kadeem Hardison and Bill Nunn in Def by Temptation, Richard Pryor's Wino vs. Dracula...

As for those skeery House Negroes: I just wish I could screen this film with Dr. Ben Carson, and watch his nose bleed.

Not the real Ben Carson

And oh, deer:

I was thrilled, though not surprised, that the deer became such an important metaphor for genocide and plunder. One dead deer's antlers-turned-weapon provided the most charged moment of catharsis. We've been apes in pop culture parables for so long, from Planet of the Apes to Da Lench Mob's one great song Guerillas in da Mist to Harambe memes. But, really, almost all of the "gorillas" are long gone. Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Tupac, etc. The surviving rank and file citizens are generally agreeable foragers whose most revolutionary act is to insist that our Lives Matter.

It's the artists who are stepping up most strikingly. 2016 was the post-Kendrick Year of the Woke. Black artists and allies were finally filtering history and far-flung influences into stunning popular art, guided by a vogue of music videos and short films that began coloring the Internet late last decade. (One of those allies being Japanese-American Hiro Murai, the genius behind the Flying Lotus/Kendrick video masterpiece Never Catch Me and co-genius of Donald Glover's Atlanta series.) We had Beyoncé and her sis turning into audiovisual Nina Simone Sun Ras, FKA Badus. It all seemed to culminate in the triumph of Moonlight and extend into this year with films like Get Out. There have been many films "for us, by us" that express deep consciousness, but few that float like a butterfly, in a singular voice rather than the blunt, roaring voice of "the community." It's the nimble grace that's new. These children of Spike and Kanye and the Criterion Collection have a fine touch that I take as evidence of unprecedented freedom. Freedom not granted but seized.

You said: "Creativity and achievements have no color, but legitimacy is usually White, especially in the arts." 

Goddamn, that's it right there. The irony is that we're discussing a film that would not have made it to the front of our Talk slate if the mostly-white critical establishment and Universal Pictures had not put it on the legitimacy radar. Nah, you know what? Fuck that. Good is good. It's enough that Peele traded on his television celebrity to make some art that scans as disquietingly aware of our connection to history as this year's Oscar ghost, August Wilson.

Speaking of da dead, what did you make of Get Out's ending? It felt like a missed opportunity to go fever-dream bananas. A police chase into the night, like the end of Lost Highway. As it is, you know these dudes ain't riding off scot-free with a trail of dead rich white folks behind them.

Bring on the TSA Cavalry, Odie!

The Final Chapter: Odie

That ending showed just how conditioned we are vis-à-vis the cops and brown folks. I've talked to friends of all races, including a few who went to lily-White theaters to see Get Out, and the audience response to those flashing police car lights illuminating Chris has been consistent! People were like:

"AFTER ALL THAT?!! PLEASE GOD, NO!!!!"

At my theater, a voice yelled out from the darkness the exact sentiment that had popped into my head at that moment:

"Oh shit! He is so fucking dead!!!"

Knowing Jordan Peele had cited Night of the Living Dead as one of his inspirations, I immediately assumed Chris would be shot dead. Here's this bruva surrounded by a bunch of dead pillars of the community, with his hands around a shot White woman's neck. You couldn't tell me his ass wasn't getting shot up like Bonnie and Clyde.

But Peele lets us breathe easily. This final jolt is his most shocking one, and not for any horror movie reason. I thought back to that Melvin van Peebles story about how shocked Black audience members were when Sweet Sweetback got away at the end. We're so used to the trope of the Black guy getting killed first (or eventually) in horror movies that Peele jovially puts a twist on our expectations. That he made Chris' savior the audience's stand-in, LilRel's TSA agent, was just the icing on this surprisingly delectable cake of a movie.

This movie has a serious following, with near-unanimous praise. But of course, there are detractors. Let's start with the folks who think this film is misogynistic. The argument I've heard, and ONLY from White viewers, is that the film is too hard on Allison Williams' character. Her demise, as well as Keener's, is too brutal; therefore it's misogynistic. This reminds me of the similar outrage leveled at Tarantino for having Django shoot the mistress of CandieLand. "What did she do?!!" people asked, faces awash in White tears. We talked about that particular scene in our Black Man Talk on Django Unchained, so I'm not beating that ignorant dead horse today.

As for the dead females in Get Out argument, I'd like to point out that:

a. Williams doesn't even get the most brutal demise--that's reserved for her brother.

b. She is responsible for the deaths of numerous former Black lovers, male and female (that box with the pictures in it is almost as gasp-inducingly hilarious as Williams' search criteria for her next victims) and she's the most villainous character in the film.

c. This actress acted her ass off, as did Keener, to create a palpable source of terrifying menace. She deserved a major-league exit. The one thing I hated most about Street Smart was that it didn't give Morgan Freeman's complicated, yet evil pimp an exit worthy of the Oscar-nominated work the actor put into that role.

Truth be told, I thought Williams got off easy compared to the character who got the Ryan Gosling/Drive elevator treatment. She still got a great exit, one she milks for maximum effect.

All this chatter over White woman deaths in a horror movie (a genre where violent death always befalls good Black and female characters by default) is a red herring. It has the same tinge of eye-rolling faux-outrage that accompanied Mookie's trash can through Sal's Pizzeria's window in Do the Right Thing: "But all that property damage!" instead of "someone died just before that scene!"

And then there's this:

This is how OUR dude, Lakeith Stanfield, responded to YOUR dude, Armond White's expected pan of Get Out. This ruined the film's perfect rating on the reprehensible yet extremely well-visited website, Rotten Tomatoes. Readers can go find White's review on their own, as I ain't linking to it. My favorite part of the review, however, is the comment on the dark-skinned features of Daniel Kaluuya, a comment written by a man who ain't passin' no Paper Bag Test either. Seek it out, if you dare!

I wonder if Peele had to fight to cast an actor with Kaluuya's skin tone, even in a film that cost so little money to make. Regardless of how Kaluuya got into this movie, I'm glad he's there. Every frame he's in resonates with a familiarity I felt deeply in my bones. The way he brushes off comments with an uneasy smile, the way he lights up with temporary relief when he sees potential running buddy* Stanfield for the first time. The way he wears his horrific childhood trauma on his stunned, tear-stricken face when Keener hypnotizes him. This is a performance worth remembering. In fact, everyone here is impeccably cast and brings not only their A-game but a sense of fun to the proceedings.

* a "running buddy" is that one other person who looks like you at an event. If shit goes down, you'll know you have at least ONE person to run with as you're being chased.

One final thought: I wonder if the little sliver of the body-snatched person that's intentionally left is there to teach them a lesson about how to behave around their "superiors". What made me think of this is Dr. Ben Carson's comments today about slaves. Addressing a room full of GOP White Folk, Carson said “[t]here were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder, for less.” 

Immigrants, Boone. Not property. Immigrants. Sam Jackson went batshit on Twitter about this, calling Carson a "dick headed Tom!"  But Carson's words are exactly what his audience wanted to hear--how the slaves were "treated well" and "came here" rather than "were fucking kidnapped, sold and brought here against their motherfucking will." It's so weird how, in order to be a brown person down with this party, you've got to completely obliterate anything about Black reality that may upset them, even if it's an awful truth whose denial would violate the common sense God gave you. You see it in so many KNEE-GROW celebrities cheering for this team. It makes me wonder if these folks, some of whom were once revered or respected by Black folks, are trapped in the Sunken Place. Maybe Get Out 2 can be about their rescue.

I'm out! Let's do this again soon!

Another Black Man Talk?!! Oh no! No no no no no no noooo!