American Fiction: 'The majority of scientists will tell you that race is not real'
Erika Alexander and Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction, currently in cinemas.
In popular culture, whether that’s books, films, music or television shows, the black American experience is often depicted as being nothing short of traumatic. Drug addiction, slavery, crime, heartache, poverty – stories of being black in America are often pigeonholed into these reductive vignettes, leaving little space for stories that are not centred around trauma.
American Fiction’s protagonist Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright, is fed up with these lazy, monotonous stories. He’s a writer, a professor of English literature, but tires of his novels not attracting publishers because they’re deemed “not black enough”. Meanwhile, the literary sector’s eyes are all trained on the author of a new bestseller titled We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, a trauma-porn novel Monk thinks panders to readers looking for stereotypical black misery.
He’s had enough of these kinds of books topping the charts while other black stories are sidelined and forgotten, and that anger soon turns to spite. Under a pseudonym, he pens My Pafology, which includes every black cliche he can think of to try and make a point – but, to his shock, it attracts a publisher offering the biggest advance he’s ever seen.
Behind the scenes, Monk’s dealing with some family issues. For one, his mother’s health is in decline and requires a level of care neither he, nor his brother Cliff, played by Sterling K Brown, can afford – at least, not without the huge sum of money the publisher is offering for Monk’s novel crammed with black stereotypes.
American Fiction, therefore, is a story of identity, family, integrity and reality, one that’s earned Oscar nominations for best picture, best actor for Wright, best supporting actor for Brown, best adapted screenplay for writer/director Cord Jefferson and best original score for Laura Karpman, and one which leaves us questioning the kind of media we’re consuming and the kinds of stories we’re telling.
“I think the message of the film is that the prism through which black life in America has been seen is a very narrow one and it usually has to do with some sort of trauma, overcoming pain, adversity, etc,” says Sterling K Brown, 47, known for roles in The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story and This Is Us.
“And that’s the nature of a lot of drama, but it seems to be particularly strong with regards to how the black experience is depicted, whether it is slave narratives, whether it’s stories of the inner city and overcoming deadbeat dads and drug addicted moms, etc, etc.
“Are those things part of our story? Absolutely. Are they the totality of our story? Absolutely not.”
Jeffrey Wright praises the film’s “discussion around race, and identity, and culture, and media representation”, which he says “is a conversation that we rarely have in smart ways in our country – it’s just like we’re not fluent in it, or we want to avoid it”, and says that he also deeply understood Monk and his journey.
“When I read the script, I felt a very close connection to the character and to his journey, and I felt that I understood him, kind of on a granular level,” says the 58-year-old star, known for roles in James Bond and The Hunger Games.
“There were a lot of overlaps for Cord [Jefferson, director] between this character, Monk’s, life and his own, and likewise, for me, there were a lot of overlaps both in the book and in the script, between his journey and my little journey.”
The book Wright refers to is the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett, which Jefferson adapted for his first feature film. While the subject at the heart of the story is an important one, Jefferson’s film approaches it with an acerbic humour, leaning into the “inherent absurdity” of the matter.
“The book and the movie talk a lot about race, and I think that there’s an inherent absurdity in race in that the vast majority of scientists will tell you that race is not real, and yet we’ve structured our society in a way that suggests race is real,” says Jefferson, who’s previously worked on television shows Master of None, The Good Place, and Succession.
“So it’s both real and not real, which to me, there’s an inherent absurdity in that tension between those two things, and so I like to underline and poke fun at the absurdity.
“I think that that’s my favourite kind of comedy, observing the natural insanity in life and then underlining that and exaggerating that.”
Of course, there’s also the narrative through-line of Monk’s family. His brother, Cliff, is recently divorced after his wife caught him cheating with a man, and is now struggling with drugs and alcohol; his mother is beginning to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease; he has lost his father to suicide; and he begins dating a lawyer who lives across the street.
This, Wright says, is the “heart and soul of the movie … and in some ways, it’s a response to the social commentary”.
“I think it’s maybe the most radical element of the film for that reason, because it’s very subtle, just kind of quietly there, just this group of people living through the madness, the dysfunction, the function, and despite it all the love that comes with family – and they happen to be black,” says the star.
“But they’re a family like any other family, and I think audiences will find themselves inside it and find surprises in this film that will be welcoming to them.” “There are elements to the story that are unifying, or at least people can gather around together,” he adds.
“Because at its core, it’s really about a guy and his relationship to love.”
- American Fiction is in cinemas now
