American Fiction
I never meta film I didn’t like, as this one. A superior satire that still works both as romantic comedy and its opposite.
Some extremely intellectual writer keeps putting out complex and rich books, with ultra erudite references to Greek mythology, but doesn’t sell a groatsworth of ink, and gets miffed his peers less inclined towards high culture keep bagging all the awards and recognition.
The straw that breaks the camel’s back is visiting one of those big chain bookstores, ask to see his own books (after searching all around the mythology section), but gets directed to “African American Studies” section. This irritates him to no end, it’s just literature, nothing about that are studies of any kind.
He is also in a waiting room and reads about this new up and coming woman writing the kind of pandering story about the Black experience he dreads.
So he gets home, and in a lark just writes the soppiest most stereotypical black story he can think of, involving parental abandonment, crack cocaine, busting caps and busta rhymes, dropping the N word like a motherfucker, you know the drill, bro?
‘Em characters be talking jive an’ all, my man, dig it? Foshow’, this shit is gonna drop faster than a gangbanger messin’ with da homies, bro.
Turns out this piece of crap he farted out in a sleepless night is the shit, some crackers want to blow nearly a mil on this bad boy. White boomers lap this shit up like a ‘ho in heat. Our boy was just playin’, but other people be thinking this is better than all the Tyler Perry films.
All he needs to do is to keep up the charade. Talk jive on the phone, giving an interview on TV with a voice modifier, the publicity stunt of him being an ex con on the run from the fuzz, this is the one book he is remembered by.
He is still pissed, and tries as much as possible to sabotage it. Changes the title from “My Pafology” to just “Fuck”. Runs away from the movie adaptation pitch meeting. But it doesn’t die!
He is caught between a rock and a hard place when he is the jury for a literary award, his own book comes up, and wins! The only black people on the panel, him included, think it’s a piece of shit, but they are overridden. The up and coming woman is on the panel as well, she also thinks it’s shit, but cannot articulate a reason why her own book is not part of the same milieu being satirised.
While all this happens, his personal life is a complete shitshow. His loving sister dies in front of him, then his mother takes this hit by developing Alzheimer’s. Their final remarks are usually some criticism, or complaining about him drifting away.
Then there’s his gay brother, who came out of the closet by accident, after being caught in bed with another man by his wife! The mother “always knew he wasn’t a queer”, thus truly breaks him.
Our protagonist meets a cute prosecutor that really like him, but he can’t help but following on his father’s footsteps and pushes her away over that stupid book shit, what a complete fuckup.
The only silver lining is what appears at first the Mamie stereotype, the live in maid who worked there for decades. She even has dinner with them on the same table.
She is the truly happy person in the whole film, marries the other security guard they knew for a long time, truly accepts the gay brother, she is the overall rock holding everything together.
“Erasure” has Lisa killed by an anti-abortion extremist
Shiit, they should have kept this in!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.