Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, which won Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay, talks about race by not talking about it
In an early scene in American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s whip-smart adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001), Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) attends the book launch of a ‘commercially successful’ writer, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), in Boston, where his dysfunctional family is slowly getting consumed by the inexorable business of living. When a gushy, overly excited host, visibly in awe of Golden, asks her to read from the book, her ludicrous prose — an egregious, awful showcase of clichés, written in Ebonics — leaves no room to deduce that she is pandering to the market: the pallidly formulaic palates of white audiences, hell-bent on establishing simplistic correlations between a writer’s racial identity and the meanings of her work, to be more precise.
Monk, who comes to her much-publicised book release after attending a ‘literature festival’ with fewer attendees than a silent meditation retreat, and one which misspells his name, simmers with frustration, and rage — it’s writ large on his face — at the exhibition of literary banality. You see this in his raised eyebrows and the movement of his silent eyes that speak louder than words. Before we get the full measure of Monk’s disbelief at the reductiveness of Black experience by a fellow writer of colour, a white woman stands up in front of him, applauding, followed by scores of others present at the reading — fervent admirers of Golden’s ‘bestselling’ book, all. Through this simple imagery, Jefferson takes us into the heart of the story: if you happen to be a Black writer, you’re lauded only when you mine the misery of those like you (only in terms of skin colour), even if you’re the last one to truly represent them.
The story Jefferson wanted to tell
A richly comedic and scathingly incisive satire, American Fiction is imbued with similar fleeting scenes — subtle indictments of the way things work in publishing. They cock a snook at the clutch of people who acquire books, and take upon themselves the gargantuan task of being the greatest arbiters of literary taste. They also underscore the absolute balderdash spouted by editors at the predominantly White publishing houses in America, and lampoon their faux interest in Black stories, their pitiable understanding of Black lives. In the film’s scheme, equally culpable are the producers/filmmakers, who lap up stories that inevitably perpetuate the stereotypes about Black people in America. A nigga (if you’re a ‘sensitivity reader’ offended by the N-word, sorry, but not sorry) can only be this, and not that.
Having received five nominations at the 96th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, American Fiction, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video, took home the statuette for Best Adapted Screenplay. Jefferson is a debutant who has earlier written scripts for edgy TV series such as The Good Place (fantasy-comedy), Watchmen (the Primetime Emmy Award-winning superhero drama, based on the 1986 DC Comics series of the same name) and Station Eleven (a post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction, adapted from the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel). For him, making a film that critiques racial commodification was a huge risk, but he went ahead and took it nonetheless. And his persistence has changed his life.
The recognition the dramedy received at the 2024 Oscars should, one hopes, herald a new era of respect for films made outside the blockbuster paradigm. It is an affirmation of the fact that if a filmmaker puts his heart and soul into a project, it will strike a chord with the audience on a global scale, even if that film is made on a low budget and is released without the razzle-dazzle of advertising. Its triumph has a lesson for aspiring filmmakers: if you believe in a story that you think must be told, you find a way to tell it in a manner that makes people sit up and take note. “I’ve been talking a lot about how many people passed on this movie… It’s more a plea to acknowledge and recognize that there are so many people out there who want the opportunity that I was given,” Jefferson, former editor of Gawker, said in his acceptance speech, underlining how the space for low- and mid-budget films has shrunk in an industry obsessed with blockbusters.
According to a report in The Independent, there has been a steady, and stark, decline in mid-budget cinema since 2007. American Fiction, made on a budget of less than $10 million, had made $22.5 million at the box office. “I understand that this is a risk-averse industry, I get it. But $200 million movies are also a risk. And it doesn’t always work out, but you take the risk anyway. Instead of making one $200 million movie, try making 20 $10 million movies. Or 50 $4 million movies,” Jefferson added.
The portrayal of race
The premise of American Fiction — publishing’s deep dysfunction, and how it disadvantages and typecasts the writers of a certain ethnicity (read African-Americans) — is absurdist, but the film takes on a more personal and intimate tone when it delineates the drama unfolding at Monk’s domestic front; the personal and the professional are the two parallel tracks running throughout the film. The professional borders on the surreal, but the personal is invariably intense and tugs at your heartstrings; if the former centres on the sardonic and the farcical, the latter constitutes the film’s raw emotional core. Monk’s is a family on the edge. But the reasons have hardly anything to do with race. It could happen to any family, anywhere. Particularly America, where the disintegration of upper middle-class families, privileged but each distressed and unhappy in its own way, have been the prime preoccupation of scores of writers, specially the likes of Jonathan Franzen, the chronicler of the modern American life; its angsts and anxieties, stresses and strains, purities and sins.
Monk comes from the privileged Boston family. We get up close and personal with his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), whose mental health is declining by the day and sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), a doctor, whose divorce is not too distant in the past. There is his brother (Sterling K. Brown), a plastic surgeon, who has come out of the closet, and of the shadow of his troubled family that seems destined for gloom and doom. There is a glimmer of hope and sunshine in an otherwise general drama of pain that’s Monk’s personal life: his neighbour Coraline (Erika Alexander). She seems, for a good part of the film, to be his lifeboat as he plays a caregiver to his mother, who is slipping into Alzheimer’s.
Monk is a writer of semi-post-modernist literary fiction, but he struggles to get published: his adaptation of Aeschylus’ The Persians — the West’s oldest play — is rejected by the publishers because it’s not ‘black’ enough. Monk, however, does not see himself as a ‘black writer,’ but a writer who happens to be black; he, therefore, loathes at the publishing industry’s proclivity to pigeonhole him as an author who must become a purveyor of his people, writing about them in a manner that must satiate the literary appetite of the White. Early on, when his literary agent breaks the news of rejection to him over phone, Monk tells him that he doesn’t ‘believe’ in race. “The problem is that everyone else does,” his agent retorts, matter-of-factly. At that precise moment, Monk hails a cab, which doesn’t stop for him, but it does for a White man a few furlongs away.
There are a few other scenes centred on race, but they are very ingeniously woven into the film’s fabric. In one scene, we see Monk at his desk, frantically typing out his parody. It’s called My Pafology (later the title is changed to F***, on the writer’s insistence), for which Monk takes the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh. We get a glimpse of its characters, Willie the Wonker (Keith David) and Van Go (Okieriete Onaodowan) — in flesh and blood — acting out Monk’s melodramatic scenes as he conceives them. But these scenes are sparse, and Jefferson merely skims over them. In yet another scene, Monk’s disgust is palpable when he watches a montage of films like Antebellum, New Jack City, and Precious; it’s part of a cable channel’s Black Stories Month special. In one of my favourite scenes, Monk exposes Golden’s hypocrisy; while she appropriates her identity in her writing, she takes a moral high ground and critiques another writer (watch the film to find out who) for doing the same. Golden, thus, is a prototype of privileged Black women authors, who use their identity as a crutch to advance their literary ambition. Don’t miss the prop in this scene: Golden is reading White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue & Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation by Lauren Michele, which dwells on the nature of cultural appropriation — its benefits and pitfalls.
A literary trickster
It’s established early on that Golden’s writing is not gold, but it’s celebrated. What must Monk do to get showered with the attention that the readers reserve for the likes of Golden? On a whim, and also because he needs money to stop his family from sinking further and further into the morass of melancholia, he writes a book. This time round though it’s not highbrow literature, but a work of monstrous absurdity. My Pafology, like Golden’s We Lives in Da Ghetto — replete with the tell-tale signs of Black trauma porn (unplanned pregnancy, grinding poverty, et al) — ticks all the boxes of a White man’s expectation of what a novel by a Black writer should be: there are predictable tropes involving Black gangsters, deadbeat absentee fathers, rappers, drugs, and what have you.
Though Monk’s agent Arthur (John Ortiz) sends it out almost reluctantly, it clicks, expectedly. A star is born. Stagg gets a six-figure advance. A major publisher declares him to be the next best thing; its editors wax eloquent about the novel’s ‘tell-it-like-it-is authenticity’ and brand it as ‘important and necessary’ — by doing so, they only prove just how hollow the promise of inclusivity rings. The movie rights are bought by a celebrated Hollywood producer, Wiley (Adam Brody). And Monk is made to script his own end, in multiple ways. The one that sticks is also the one that’s most gory, and feeds the standardised template of a Black man’s precarious life in the US of A. What complicates things is the fact that Monk assumes the guise of a fugitive to make his story more credible, and ensure that the book flies off the shelves, just like Golden’s. Ultimately, it proves to be a surefire that, in the end, also backfires. A Black man on the run from the law makes for a good story (if you go by what Hollywood is interested in), but it has its inherent dangers, and its ending is almost certain to be far from happy.
Given that Erasure was penned over two decades ago, there is a recurring feeling that much of what the film shows is either outdated or an exaggeration, like all satires. In the interim years, especially after George Floyd, things have changed, and there are terrific American writers out there who continue to draw on the Black experience without resorting to the set templates. As for Monk, he is a literary trickster of sorts, like his creator Everett, who wrote Erasure as a response to Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and Sapphire’s Push (1996), which was adapted into the 2009 film Precious. Native Son revolves around Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old African American, living amid dire poverty in a destitute neighbourhood on Chicago’s South Side during the 1930s, who accidentally kills a White woman, and pays a heavy price for it. Push, on the other hand, is about Precious Jones, an illiterate 16-year-old in Harlem, who rewrites her life after she becomes pregnant with the second child — by her father. “Honestly I never had a problem with [these] books. The problem was that was all you got,” Everett said in an interview.
In Erasure, Everett dares the reader to identify Monk’s character with its creator. He has done the same in his works since the early 2000s, including with Theodore Street, a college professor on the brink of committing suicide, in American Desert (2009). In his three other books — A History of the African-American People Proposed by Strom Thurmond (2004), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013), he only raises the stakes on that dare by inserting more extensive autobiographical details, a technique that has been copiously employed by a bunch of other writers — from Kathy Acker, David Foster Wallace, John Barth and Philip Roth to Paul Auster, J.M. Coetzee and Charles Yu.
