In the Flesh: American Fiction

American Fiction succeeds in two ways: first, and rather indifferently, as literary fiction populated by the kind of well-rounded and complex, contradictory characters with which Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) fills his unpopular but critically praised novels, and second (and much more substantially) as a series of reversals and fake-outs positioned with such care that they present a kind of shifting mirrored surface for the viewer, repeatedly baiting both white and Black audiences to consider their relationships to various types of art made by Black artists and about Black people. In a critical climate dominated by rushes to find moral consensus on popular art it’s a refreshing change to find something that swiftly and decisively flicks your nose every time you try to adopt a position of comprehensive moral judgment. Visually there isn’t much to write home about here, but a charitable read suggests this may be intentional, a conscious invocation of the kind of milquetoast filmmaking white-written literary adaptations often receive.

Monk himself is a dour, deracinated upper-class professor of Southern literature who struggles to connect with other Black people. The satirical “trauma porn” novel he pens as Stagg R. Leigh (referencing a popular Black folk song about a pimp, Stag Lee, who shot and killed an associate over a hat) is as much a commentary on his own elite contempt for the Black urban poor as it is his fury at being pigeonholed as an African American author, consistently tokenized and subject to the guilt and arrogant racial politics of his white colleagues and students. He has no interest in what lives in that milieu might look like, and seems less bothered by his own pretensions to street knowledge and experience of the penal system than he is that his girlfriend, Coraline (Erika Alexander), enjoys the resulting novel. Surely his knowledge of his own hypocrisy features into his steadily deteriorating mood as the novel, Fuck, explodes in popularity, but Monk’s interest in the hypocrisy of others is much more pronounced, as when he confronts middle-class Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) over her own sensationalized novel of Black urban squalor only to be met with cynical platitudes about giving the market what it wants, which is of course exactly what Monk himself is doing in secret.

Fiction has a keen interest in the figure of the assimilated Black elite who both resents and profits from their own assimilation, and unlike most contemporary elite fiction it has real teeth behind its smile. There’s no big scene in which, as Monk puts it, we’re all spoon-fed the moral of the story. There is no moral, only Monk returning to moronic white film producer Wiley (Adam Brody) to pitch the story of his frustrated attempts at showing the literary world its own racist fantasies about Blackness as yet another sensationalized story of the very same kind he despises, ending with himself cut down in a hail of bullets by FBI agents convinced Stagg R. Leigh is a real escaped convict. White viewers are left to sit queasily with our own baggage around the seeking out, consumption, and marketing of Black fiction, Black viewers with their own complex emotions about the commodification of their history and present not just by white Americans but by Black social climbers. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Monk’s done caring. He’s here to make a buck.