American Fiction’ is a Hilarious Plea to Hollywood to Stop Stereotyping Minorities
Will the film’s success force a reckoning among the very media it’s satirizing?
Shortly after Obama won the 2008 South Carolina presidential primary, some of his supporters chanted, “Race doesn’t matter!” National Public Radio wondered whether we had entered a “post-racial” era in the country.
Yet things changed not too long afterward. The era of Black Lives Matter pushed many of our pundits and culture makers in the opposite direction. They started to argue that race always matters. The vibe has shifted.
Writer-director Cord Jefferson’s new film American Fiction is about those vibes and how they trap our literary imagination. Based on a book from 2001, Fiction is about novelist and academic Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (played by Jeffrey Wright).
Ellison, who is African American, has published several novels, but he increasingly finds that his agent can’t get his next one picked up by a publishing house. Yet every time he attends a literary event or turns on the TV, he’ll find that “black” stories are all the rage – movies about slavery, books about the ghetto, and stereotypes about downtrodden African Americans are everywhere.
The problem, Ellison finds, is that he wants to write stories that aren’t what he calls “trauma porn” – in fact, he wants to write stories that have nothing to do with race whatsoever. But that’s the world he lives in at the moment.
In one funny scene in the movie, he walks into a chain bookstore and finds that all his novels are lumped into the “African American Studies” section despite having absolutely nothing to do with that topic.
As bills pile up and he’s tasked with taking care of his elderly mother, Ellison eventually gives in the race-fixated mania that seems to have colonized his industry and his life.
He pitches a comically poorly-written book full of stereotypes about a black man with a deadbeat dad to a publisher. They love it and start throwing money at him. Despite knowing that the book represents everything he hates, Ellison decides to go with it – don’t hate the player, hate the game.
It makes for a very entertaining film, which has found critical success;it’s sitting at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. It also scored some Oscar nominations and has seen a resulting box office boost, letting it rise above many similar indie films.
But will the film’s success force a reckoning among the very media it’s satirizing?
The evolution of stereotyping in media
