Taking And Leaving The Best And Worst Of 2023
Breakfast Tex-Mex, video games, and all the other most important things in life
Happy almost-New Year! Here are some things from 2023 I’d like to take with me into 2024, because they are good, as well as some things I’d like to leave in 2023, because they are bad.
That’s it. That’s the setup.
TAKE: American Fiction, Beef, And Art Like It
It won’t surprise any of my longtime readers that I really enjoyed American Fiction, the critically acclaimed and Oscar-buzz-generating film based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett. After all, the film is about a black English professor and writer named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who hails from an upper-middle-class family of doctors in Boston. Having achieved merely middling success, if that, writing highbrow books stuffed with references to, like, ancient Persian wars or whatever, Ellison realizes what the core audience for books (white liberals) is really into: black suffering. So he dashes off a fake memoir called My Pafology under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, supposedly a fugitive gangbanger, as a middle finger to the publishing industry, and has his agent send it out on a lark, not expecting anyone to actually bite. And then. . . well, I’m sure you can guess what happens next. (Fun fact: Cord Jefferson, who directed and cowrote [with Everett] this film, wrote for a blog I helped edit almost 20 years ago at the Center for American Progress, before moving on to much bigger things and becoming one of the most highly regarded young-ish screenwriters around.)
This film hit at the perfect time. American racial essentialism has crested lately, especially since the death of George Floyd, and a rather pernicious and dunderheaded identitarianism has set in. American Fiction skewers it brilliantly, but is also a touching, humane story in its own right, since Monk has a lot more going on than just his frustrations with American race talk and his own career. It’s just a really, really good film, and in addition to treating race with the complexity the subject deserves, it refuses to turn anyone into a straightforward hero or villain, which is of course the right way to go about telling this sort of story.
Go see it! Also watch Beef on Netflix if you haven’t. Beef isn’t about race per se, but it is set among a group of Asian American characters in Los Angeles. The plot, which is kick-started by a road rage incident, actually gets satisfyingly tangled, and it’s too much to sum up here, but I highly recommend this show if you haven’t checked it out yet. The characters happen to be of certain racial backgrounds, and this comes up in various ways, but there’s very little essentialization or tokenization or haranguing of the sort often favored by white liberals. Instead, it’s just good, gripping television. This makes a lot more sense to me as a model for representation than the churning out of shows where the Korean American characters, like, stand around talking about how Korean American they are, and how worried they are about hate crimes, and so on. Most Americans’ views on race — their own and others — are much more nuanced than that. So I hope there’s more stuff like Beef and American Fiction in 2024.
LEAVE: Midwits Who Spread Deeply Essentialist Ideas About Race In America For Fun And Profit
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