American Fiction Flattens a Cultural Crisis

Switching cult novelist Percival Everett’s literary satire from page to screen doesn’t work in American Fiction. The movie’s preening title (effacing Everett’s Erasure, from 2001) raises impossible expectations. The story is no longer a semi-autobiographical burlesque about a writer of serious fiction who is frustrated by degraded popular taste; instead, it suggests something uselessly “meta.” The original subject of a black author confronting the culture’s demand that he and his work be “black enough” (Everett’s phrase) turns into some vague notion of what is or isn’t real in American life.

Cord Jefferson, a Hollywood professional who won an Emmy for writing HBO’s abominable dystopic series Watchmen (never to be confused with Zack Snyder’s 2009 sci-fi spectacular Watchmen), wrote and directed the film in ways that “flatten” Everett’s conceit. “It flattens us” is the film’s best line, spoken by a balding, bespectacled Jeffrey Wright as a whimsical version of Everett who objects to stereotypical depictions of black people.

The problem isn’t simply that American Fiction can’t live up to Everett’s breezily compacted humor and convoluted linguistic games — such as a protagonist named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison — but that Jefferson himself deals in stereotypes.

American Fiction may be the first theatrical movie in which  black characters are just like the self-congratulatory middle-class strivers seen on Blackish, C-SPAN, and Henry Louis Gates celebrity-centered TV shows. It replaces the black ghetto stereotypes with Obama-era black bourgeois self-consciousness.

”White folks want to be absolved,” Monk’s literary agent (John Ortiz) explains. So does Monk and his Martha’s Vineyard family, including siblings who became doctors. They recall Biden’s description of Obama: “articulate and bright and clean.” The Ellisons resent fashionable deceptions about race, and the niceties of social progress leave them dissatisfied. American Fiction focuses on Monk’s careerism and his decision to parody the publishing industry’s trend that favors the reprobate black underclass (typified by a best seller titled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto). He then gets trapped in hypocrisy: sudden fame and multimillion-dollar movie deals.

Monk “code-switches,” posing as a scary ex-con and taking on the old blues moniker “Stagg R. Leigh.” That’s one insider reference too many (Everett puns incessantly), but these facile jazz, blues, Invisible Man, even Flannery O’Connor stunts don’t really land for a culturally illiterate generation.

Fact is, Monk’s literary hoax is standard operating procedure in a culture that has already fallen for Ta-Nehisi Coates as if he was the second coming of James Baldwin. The vulgar literary philosopher role is just another side of black-identity farce — now epitomized by the clownish movies Precious and Get Out.

Monk’s phony book is titled My Pafology — the deliberate misspelling of “pathology” shown in a big-screen close-up. And that’s how Jefferson works; his “insights” are blatant, simplistic, and visually unsurprising. He downplays Monk’s obvious joke on himself, the pathological egotism that makes him tense. He’s incensed by competition — from trendy black-lit rival Sintara (Issa Rae); attractive divorcée Coraline (Erika Alexander), who dares challenge his vanity; and his gay brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), who flaunts faddish, self-destructive sex-and-drug habits.

Taking a sentimental, narcissistic way out, American Fiction uses Monk’s personal demons for sympathy (“Genius can’t connect with the rest of us”). Here’s where Jefferson’s complicity with Hollywood’s black bourgeoisie prevents him from launching a caustic media critique. We need courageous wit as in Robert Downey Sr.’s classic Putney Swope, Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, and Rusty Cundieff’s Fear of a Black Hat.

Everett’s novels intellectualize such spoofing, while Jefferson’s climatic scenes resemble SNL skits (Monk’s fantasy of disrupting a book-award show) that trivialize the offense of today’s dishonest writers and their partisan publishers. Jefferson turns cultural offense into a sitcom. The joke of Monk’s fake best seller getting retitled into hip-hop profanity is too easy. Nothing in American Fiction is as funny as the joke in Woody Allen’s 1998 Celebrity in which a Hollywood producer promises to do a remake of The Birth of a Nation “with an all-black cast.”