Waves (Trey Edward Shults, 2019)

It's only fitting, I suppose, that I am stuck illustrating my review with the "official" stills that A24 is willing to place into circulation. (I tried taking screenshots from the DVD screener, and they were grayed out, "protected" from my Fair Use.) Waves is a critic-proof film in an almost palpable sense. As I ruefully remarked on Twitter, taking it to task is a grim undertaking not unlike correcting a particularly wrongheaded student paper, and in fact I'm taking a break from marking fall semester finals to dive into this wreck.

On a formal level, the single biggest problem with Waves is over-identification with its subject matter. There's a constant discussion in film-critic circles about whether or not a filmmaker needs to "like" his or her characters (part of the Humanism Debate). Be that as it may, it seems clear to me that an artist should have some degree of distance from their characters, in order to see them differently from how they would see themselves. That's to say, art is not just a carbon copy of surface reality. Art entails perspective. And while no one would mistake the gaudy expressionism of Waves for Parrhasios' curtain or Zeuxis' grapes, Shults so thoroughly occupies the emotional mindset of his overheated teenage protagonist Tyler (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) that the film just vibrates with spasmodic melodrama and testosterone-fueled rage. The camera swings, the frame pulses with the primary colors of dance clubs and cop cars, and we're just supposed to go along with this initial 105-minute-long shout of "fuck you, dad!"

But that's not the half of it. With his borrowed focus on Tyler as a formalist time bomb, a bolt of drug-crazed Kanye swagger come to life, Waves doesn't just fetishize black masculinity. It weaponizes it. Shults, a young white man, replaces his own suburban Texas upbringing with an African-American father-son conflict that becomes accidentally, half-assedly archetypal because of racial myths that dominate our society at the present time. Tyler is on the brink of success as a wrestler, has college in his sights, but an injury sidelines him. His black male body his only stock in trade, his disciplining of it having come to nothing, he is now set to explode. Tyler's father Ronald (Sterling K. Brown) is a hard man, and he is probably too tough on Tyler. He would be an unequivocal son of a bitch were he a white father, but we're meant to understand that he pushes his son because he knows that in America, African-Americans, especially black men, must work twice as hard to get half as far.

This is an ugly film, blinkered by white guilt and blithe prejudice, manipulating its characters into making awful, cruel decisions in order to insure that they will suffer the worst possible fate. This in turn will "prove" that they were both hamstrung by the legacy of racism and undone by entirely individual psychological instabilities. This hedging of bets (which is really just an equivocation engineered by shoddy writing) is supposed to suggest a complexity that is irreducible to the bromides of identity politics, when in fact Shults is working entirely off revolting assumptions that only a white man could make, about "black rage" as some primal essence that will eventually crack civilization wide open. 

But then, Waves slinks into an extended epilogue, in which Tyler is utterly forgotten (like so many black men), and his sister Emily (Taylor Russell) takes up with a sensitive white dudebro boyfriend (Lucas Hedges), whose own anger she manages to heal. Women (who survive) hold up half the sky. Brothers remain in lockdown. Couples learn to love again. Crash meets This Is Us.