American Fiction [Media Notes 121] {the revenge of double-consciousness}

I’ve been intrigued by American Fiction ever since I read the first reviews. It finally made it to streaming, Netflix, and I watched it last night. I liked it.

Here’s the first two paragraphs of the Wikipedia plot summary:

Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is a highly intelligent African-American upper-class writer and professor in Los Angeles. While his novels receive academic praise, they sell poorly, and publishers reject his latest manuscript for not being "Black enough". His university places him on temporary leave due to his brashness with students over racial issues and suggests he attend a literary seminar and spend time with family in his hometown of Boston. At the seminar, his panel is poorly attended, in contrast to a packed room for an interview with Sintara Golden, whose bestselling novel We's Lives in Da Ghetto panders to Black stereotypes.

In Boston, Monk has dinner with his mother Agnes, who has Alzheimer's disease, and sister Lisa, a physician. Later, while having drinks with Monk, Lisa suffers a fatal heart attack. Their estranged brother, Cliff, a plastic surgeon, attends Lisa's funeral. Cliff is divorced after his wife caught him having sex with a man; he now engages in frequent drug use and casual sex. Monk meets and starts dating Coraline, a lawyer living across the street from his mother's beach house.

And then things get really complicated.

He needs money to care for his mother. At the same time, and more or less on a lark, he writes his own blaxpoitation – the word isn’t used in the movie as I recall – manuscript, My Pafology under the name, “Stagg R. Leigh.” Much to his shock and chagrin, the book sells for $750,000, far more than he’d ever gotten for his serious fiction. Then he gets a solid seven-figure movie deal. The book becomes a hit, wins a prestigious award, and to rub it in, he was on the committee that selected the award winner. How’d that happen? When the book sold he and his agent decided it would be best for him to keep his true identity secret, so no one involved with the award had any idea what their colleague was going through. 

This is double-consciousness with a vengeance.

All of this is perfectly obvious, but deftly played. The ending is not so obvious, and makes it work. If you’re curious, you can check the Wikipedia plot summary. Not sure how much it will help though. It comes on quick, with an awful pun, and that’s what makes it work.

[Come to think of it, it’s a bit like the ravioli gag in Unfrosted.]