American Fiction
TL;DR It’s not that I don’t want you to watch American Fiction, it’s just that I want you to watch I May Destroy You too.
Did you enjoy watching American Fiction? Did you enjoy its funny, frantic (for a sheltered college English professor) take on the politics of the Authentic Black Voice, Culture, and Experience? Did you watch with increasing glee as its heady twists and turns added up to an audaciously creative denouement? American Fiction is a very comfortable and comforting viewing experience for Liberals Who Would Have Voted A Third Term For Obama (TM).
During the first thirty minutes of the film, I was reminded of nothing so much as indie charmer Little Miss Sunshine, due to the way protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison’s familial relationships unfold around him, with him quickly sketched out as the central perennial baby of the family. I wondered, was Monk going to have the equivalent of Olive’s revelatory striptease scene later in the film?
Monk’s prostituting himself for his art, it turns out, is the very crux of the movie – his failed attempt to make a statement against it drives the hilarity and generates the dark overtones that nearly swallow up the comedy by the end of the film. And yet, and yet. I heard with cynical ears, my own laughter during the film.
I literally squirmed in my seat, torn in two by 1) my appreciation for the cerebral comedy, the references to Ralph Ellison, Thelonious Monk, and Chinua Achebe that I caught and the delight in getting to re-experience the artistry of those voices, and the feeling that there was a deep blue ocean of Black Male Artists that was being brought to crystalline light throughout the course of the film for its audience to enjoy and 2) my unverbalized howling rage that since it came out in 2020 no one I know has watched I May Destroy with the exception of one friend who dismissed it by saying “the sex was so joyless” (WAY TO MISS THE GUT-WRENCHING POINT) and would therefore never understand the profound pain of watching two films that end in the SAME WAY, with three endings crafted and presented and represented by their respective writers. But one was written by a person who experienced trauma so deep, so damaging, that it is a miracle, pure and simple, that she emerged to tell the tale. And that writer is Michaela Coel and her story is I May Destroy You. Its very existence both undercuts AND supports the points American Fiction makes in its own smaller, quieter way.
Michaela Coel is notably absent from the voices presented in American Fiction (the film feels woefully out-of-date in that way). It’s a remarkably short or conveniently curated memory for the narrative lineage that couches American Fiction. I believe the film would have greatly benefitted from enlarging its ocean of storytellers underpinning its narrative. But what feels unconscionable to me is that Coel also seems completely absent from the public narrative of voices that inspired American Fiction. Because she already made this movie, or at least the HBO-aired television series version that was literally yanked out of her body, a physical and psychological horror that has its own ocean of voices, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and far too many others. And also, Coel’s voice alone, starkly, sadly alone, because she alone experienced the assault that could have left her dead, instead of a rape and violent assault survivor for the rest of her days. Did the filmmakers really miss it entirely? The screenplay would certainly have you believe so.
There is also no public response or acknowledgment, or at least I found none online, from the filmmakers of American Fiction, of what I May Destroy You achieved just four years ago in 2020, and how it laid the foundation for American Fiction to even come to the screen. Instead, within its plot, there is a Black woman author who is mildly set up to take the fall, and yet also gently let off the hook from being any real villain of the piece, because Monk is his own villain, a point made over and over throughout the film. Interestingly, Michaela Coel does incredible, destabilizing things with this very notion in her own exploration of different story endings in service of exposing what a rape and assault victim might go through, perhaps even needs to go through, in order to make sense of something utterly personally, senseless, or to be able to move on.
Overall, American Fiction makes a point of reducing the role of the women in the film over the course of the story until there are none left. It begins with the big, boisterous presence of Monk’s sister, who is taken off-screen in one of the first (although not the first) of many tragic twists the story takes. Monk finds love, briefly, then sabotages it. His mother’s memory is being erased throughout the whole film and ends on a particularly poignant note for Monk. The family’s live-in housekeeper blithely goes off to wed a long-time admirer, although not before her duties to the family end. Even the problematic woman writer is let off the hook, and Monk is left in dialogue with his publisher and a potential creative partner, a director he barely knows. All three are male.
In I May Destroy You, there is a wide open spirit among the three main characters at the start of the story that is violently or unwillingly taken away from each of them through sexual encounters that variously present no form of consent, turn bad after initial consent was given, or represent the encounter after the fact to show that consent wasn’t necessarily the empowering choice it seemed at the time. Women are so thoroughly othered in American Fiction, that the film can’t possibly go to the places that I May Destroy You goes in its storytelling. This is why I think both pieces need to be watched.
Because I have done no digging beyond a cursory Google search for any hits with both movies, which came up with zero, it’s possible there are public acknowledgments from the American Fiction filmmakers of how they thought about I May Destroy You that I’ve missed. I’ve found myself rather disinterested in watching filmmaker Q&As given how discouraged I was that the movie contained nothing there for viewers of I May Destroy You.
To watch American Fiction without also watching I May Destroy You does the viewer as well as the two pieces of storytelling a great disservice. For viewers, to only watch American Fiction gives them a comfortable watching experience that ignores the evidence, the cold hard historically tracked and quantified facts that Black people are disproportionately affected by violence, poverty, and gang violence in this country, and that Black women are disproportionately affected by those things and higher rates of early mortality to boot. Not to mention bridging the generational gap between the two stories’ perspectives.
If I didn’t already hammer the point home enough times, if you watch American Fiction, please also watch I May Destroy You. It goes further, of necessity, and deserves your viewership and your empathy.
