American Fiction - Review Thread

Every year towards the end of the year you find yourself able to look back at a year of cinema and realize that certain weird and almost certainly coincidental patterns have emerged over a certain number of prominent titles that year. Last year, for example, was rather famously awash in “movies about movies” while 2021 had a whole lot of musicals and movies about music for some reason. The book has yet to be written on 2023 but one pattern I have detected from its movies is an odd interest in the lives of novelists and their fragile egos when it comes to their work. The very first movie I saw this year was Infinity Pool, in which an author lets himself be seduced into a highly aberrant subculture in no small part because someone flattered him by claiming to have read and enjoyed one of his books. We saw this theme at its most pure with Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings, about a small rift that opens up between an author and her husband when she learns that he didn’t like her latest novel. In Christian Petzold’s the underseen German film Afire we see an author become an anti-social jerk while on vacation from frustration with the work he’s done on his latest novel. And then of course there’s the Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall, in which a man’s death may have in part had something to do with a marriage being torn apart from his jealousy about his wife’s success at writing compared to his own failures. And that brings us to this year’s most direct look at the world of literature and publishing, American Fiction, in which a desperate author stages an elaborate hoax in order to make a statement about his frustrations.

The film looks at an African American author named Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) who has recently been asked to take a leave of absence from his teaching job after a white student complained about him writing the N-word on the board during a class on “Literature of the South” and who’s having trouble selling his latest book because the publishers are looking for a “black book” and his more generalized literature doesn’t fit the bill in their eyes. His frustration with this hits a boiling point when he learns about a recent best seller from a black author named Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) entitled “We's Lives In Da Ghetto,” which sounds like everything he hates about the way black people get depicted in media. In an act of defiance the thoroughly upper middle class Ellison hastily writes a book about “the streets” called “My Pafology” intended to pander to every negative stereotype imaginable and appends the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh (get it?) to this tome and tells his agent to send it to all the publishers. He thinks this will merely send a message to the publishers asking for a “black” novel but to his horror they all interpret this as an authentic voice of “the streets” and line up hefty offers to purchase it. In need of money Ellison decides to play along with this and continue the charade but as the book gets released and becomes a best seller he’s not sure how much longer he can keep this up.

I will say, I’m not entirely sure what kind of literature the film is trying to subtweet with “My Pafology” and “We's Lives In Da Ghetto.” When I think of buzzy African American fiction the names that first come to mind are authors like Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, and Paul Beatty, all of whom probably more closely resemble Thelonious Ellison, or at least Sintara Golden, than they do Stagg R. Leigh and if there’s a book like “My Pafology” that became a best seller recently I’m not aware of it. Generally speaking it’s actually the non-fiction side of the publishing world that I more closely associate with pandering grifters like Robin DiAngelo writing books for clueless NPR listeners. Part of this disconnect is probably rooted in the fact that American Fiction is an adaptation of a novel called “Erasure” by Percival Everett which was written back in 2001, which was commenting on older publishing trends and may have specifically been commenting on the novel “Push” by Sapphire. That makes a little more sense to me as I’ve long suspected that the film adaptation of that novel, Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire, owed its existence to a situation not unlike the one depicted in this movie but it’s a little strange that they didn’t adjust that a bit given how much the rest of the film seems to be trying to very specifically comment on the discourse of today.

The film that this most clearly resembles is a film that Spike Lee made in the year 2000 called Bamboozled, in which a black TV executive gets so fed up with the state of African American representation in that medium that he pitches a literal blackface minstrel show to a network and then looks on in horror as that show both gets made and becomes a hit. The key difference is that in that movie “Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show” was presumed to have become a hit specifically because it catered to the taste of flat out racists whereas “My Pafology” is posed as being more of a work that pandered to the white guilt of a certain kind of liberal “virtue signaler” whose otherwise rather ignorant about the real diversity of black America. Also while the movie is certainly making fun of certain publishing trends and the people said publishers pander to, it’s a bit less confident that the fictional work at its center is entirely problematic. Throughout the film there is a lingering though perhaps under-explored suggestion that maybe Ellison is just a snob with an overly narrow and closed minded idea of what black representation is supposed to be and that he actually subconsciously made a better and more personal book than he thinks he has. In fact much of the movie is dedicated to Ellison’s neurosis and family drama, it’s not a movie that posits him as a wise prankster for his stunt and he is challenged on his assumptions frequently, though it does definitely agree with him to some extent about the audience he’s taking advantage of.