Author: Brooke Obie

***SPOILER ALERT FOR STAR WARS, ANDOR AND ROGUE ONE BELOW*****

It should come as no surprise that the Star Wars franchise about an alliance of rebels fighting against an evil Empire is anti-fascist. Since the original trilogy (OT) began in 1977, the Rebel Alliance, also known as the Resistance, has had a single goal: to liberate the galaxy from its fascist overlords.

Across films and planets, we see the storm troopers of Empire invading, colonizing, exploiting, looting and destroying, keeping the people in fear and under tight authoritarian control. Threats to Empire lead to entire cities—entire planets—being annihilated at its leader Emperor Palpatine’s command. What better way to keep people hopeless and compliant than through constant state-sponsored terrorism?

But while the OT and its three prequels and sequels focus on the force-sensitive Skywalker family of Jedi knights who can manipulate energy to their will, for either evil (Darth Vader) or good (his children, Luke and Leia), the prequel series Andor gives us something different.

Starting 5 years before the first Star Wars film, A New Hope, the Andor TV series follows Captain Cassian Jeron Andor, a skilled thief and fighter pilot with a serious vendetta against the Empire. They colonized his home planet of Kenari, hanged his father and genocided his people. But he’s got no deep love for the Rebellion—at least not at first. Throughout its two seasons, Andor features no Jedi knights, no superhuman powers, no force magic or ancestral ghosts pushing everyone forward, just a ragtime bunch of ordinary citizens facing extraordinary enemies and rising to the occasion.

Where the OT is a campy, family-friendly adventure, Andor is gritty and grounded, exposing not only the Empire’s atrocities but their aftermath on all creatures, the air and the land. In real life, the consequences of fascism couldn’t be higher and Andor takes us deep into the lives of the unsung heroes of the rebellion so we can feel every blow—and feel the bittersweetness of every victory.

With this visceral writing led by showrunner Tony Gilroy, the two-season story of Andor, complete with its grand finale film Rogue One (also co-written by Gilroy), is not only the best Star Wars story Lucasfilm has ever told, it’s also one of the most important TV shows in history. (Seriously, I’m telling my kids that the OT is Andor, Rogue One and A New Hope, it’s that incredible.)

Black feminist writer, filmmaker and activist Toni Cade Bambara once said, “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” Gilroy and his team have done just that, crafting a compelling series and film that both awakens the audience to our fascist reality and provides a guide to anti-fascist resistance.

“I’m writing about how I feel about all the revolutions, about all the insurrections,” Gilroy says of his intentions behind Andor and the obvious parallels critics are drawing between the show and current events, like the Ghorman massacre in season two and Palestinians being genocided by the US-Israelis in real life; and the infamous Empire of Star Wars and the continued rise of fascism in the West. “People legitimately fail to recognize how puny their individualism is. The narcissistic belief that you live in some unique time — it’s shocking. We all do it. I do it. That is not the pattern of history,” Gilroy says.

Recognizing this pattern of history is the first step in a storied anti-fascist tradition.

Know Your Enemy

Before Andor ever accepts his destiny as a revolutionary, he was very clear on who his enemy was. In season one, through flashback, we meet him as a young boy called Kassa on his homeplanet of Kenari, taking care of his even younger sister. Their dress and tribal marks suggest an indigenous culture—a sharp contrast to the colonial spaceship that crashes on their planet. With nowhere for his rage for all that the Empire has stolen from him to go, Kassa takes it out on the Imperial ship. With tiny fists and a rod as a weapon, he tears the ship apart. Though he was soon rescued and adopted by rebels Maarva and Clem Andor, renamed Cassian Andor for his own safety and therefore escaped the fate of the rest of his people, Andor never forgot that his enemy was that system of power and every cog in the wheel that kept it turning.

Knowing Andor’s background of oppression, revolutionary leader Luthen Rael recruits Andor to the Aldhani Heist in season one, promising a bigger blow to the Empire—and a bigger payday than the petty crimes Andor’s been committing on his own. This effort to steal an Imperial sector’s quarterly payroll in order to fund the rebellion would take place on Aldhani, another exploited planet, with another genocided and ethnically cleansed population, the Dhanis. Like Hawaiians, the Dhanis had been pushed into the lowlands as the Empire turned their sacred valleys into military outposts. Just hours before the heist, an imperial soldier brags in front of his soon-to-be assailant that there used to be 15,000 Dhanis who would sojourn that day for the holy ceremony of the Eye that the Heist team is using as a cover for their mission. That small number had been stomped down to 60! The Enemy brags about their terrors, not knowing that their arrogance will soon lead to their downfall.

Though Andor was only on the planet as a mercenary and not yet a revolutionary, Luthen knew enough to connect the dots Andor wasn’t yet interested in seeing—Kenari yesterday, Aldhani today, and any planet could be tomorrow. To know your enemy, pattern recognition is key.

“The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness,” Maarva says via hologram at her funeral in the season one finale. “It is never more alive than when we sleep.” Wake up to the patterns in history that are alive today.

When the Empire and its propaganda arm, Imperial News Now, spend season two manufacturing consent for the eventual genocide of Ghorman, recognize CNN, BBC, Fox News and state governments in western settler-colonial countries colluding to manufacture consent too. Ghorman wasn’t a threat to the Empire, it had mineral resources under its surface that the Empire needed to build the Death Star. Gaza, like Iraq, has oil. Congo has cobalt.

When you see Andor kidnapped by Imperial soldiers and arbitrarily imprisoned indefinitely on Narkina 5, and you see immigrants in America kidnapped from the streets and trafficked indefinitely to a concentration camp in El Salvador, think: what is to prevent this Empire from labeling literally any person in America a criminal and trafficking them indefinitely to a labor camp?

America was built on genocide of Indigenous people of Turtle Island and Africans and our enslavement too. It can only maintain itself with more genocide, more enslavement. Just like the Empire didn’t stop with Kenari, Aldhani or Ghorman, our Empire won’t stop with Turtle Island, Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, or Haiti. Our Empire won’t stop with “undocumented immigrants,” either. Jedha City’s fate was a practice run for Scarif and Alderaan, just like police brutality against Black Lives Matter protestors was a practice run for the bipartisan police attacks on anti-genocide student protestors. Who’s next?

Think of this reality as corporations slash jobs in favor of A.I. labor, corporate buy-backs, shareholder profits and CEO bonuses—and our government criminalizes homelessness and triples down on investments in private prisons. Won’t we make a convenient free labor force when the laws adapt to the needs of the prisons’ profits? There’s only one way out.

Right before the genocide, Ghorman’s senator Dasi Oran wouldn’t stand with secret revolutionary Senator Mon Mothma to end the arbitrary imprisonment of residents, because Oran believed compliance and appeasement with Empire would ease Ghorman’s suffering. He did not know his enemy and, ironically, wound up arrested in the Senate halls of Empire and either indefinitely imprisoned himself or likely executed for treason after all of his compliance.

In the aftermath, Mon Mothma stood alone in the Imperial Senate to call the genocide of Ghorman a genocide, because it wasn’t just one political party that was corrupt and complicit—it’s named the Imperial Senate, after all. Mon Mothma fled the facade of politics to join the real revolution underground full-time because she knew her enemy was not confined to a party. It’s the system itself that birthed cowardice.

Black and brown people have long-since peeped the Empire’s lies of “democracy” and “equality.” The fascism we know well has spread so that white Americans can now feel it too, but it’s not new; it’s simply the imperial, colonial, white supremacist boomerang coming home to roost. The Empire has divided us into hierarchies along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability so that we would punch down on each other instead of up at our Enemy’s neck. This is how Empire keeps us under control. But this is not our natural way of being.

“The imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural,” says Nemick, the youngest member of the Aldhani Heist team, in a section of his manifesto that bookends both the season one and series finale of Andor. It’s why our Empire is so violent to trans and gender non-conforming people; why it must beat women, Black people and Indigenous people into submission and rob us of our rights and existence. If this submission were our natural state, instead of liberation, the Empire wouldn’t need to exert so much effort to try to enforce their will on us. “Oppression is the mask of fear,” Nemick says. “Remember that.”

Think of the guards in the Narkina 5 gulag, shivering behind locked doors when the enslaved rebellion of the prisoners led by Andor and Kino Loy begins. The guards know that the numbers aren’t on their side. There’s only one way out: If we know our Enemy—if we are to win—it must be the Empire of the 1% versus the resistance of the 99%.

Know Your Power

“We’ve grown reliant on Imperial tech and we’ve made ourselves vulnerable,” Nemick records in his audio manifesto. “There’s a growing list of things we’ve known and forgotten. Things they’ve pushed us to forget,” he says, and I can’t help but think of our tech overlords shoving A.I. down our throats on every platform. Google search is essentially non-functioning, spitting out A.I. slop instead of vetted news results. Students are openly admitting to cheating their way through school, using ChatGPT to think and write for them. They can’t even write their own emails or status updates, let alone essays. The Empire is rewriting its racist history, banning books, firing librarians, co-opting museums, and strong-arming universities because when we have time to think, to learn, and read and share ideas in community, we are a danger to the Empire.

Knowing this, the principled rebel commits to liberation by not falling into Empire’s obvious traps. Using generative A.I. not only atrophies the minds we need to think and fight back, but also steals the work of artists, destroys the environment—particularly poisoning Black and brown communities in America —and exploits Kenyan workers with $2/hour slave wages to operate it.

To free ourselves of Empire, we must free ourselves of reliance on Imperial tech. We must see ourselves in all the exploited laborers, all the cut down trees, all the wasted water discarded in its service. The principled revolutionary knows that our futures are inextricably linked.

Boycotting corporations and tools that fund genocide, destroy the environment and that are otherwise meant for our harm, empowers us to not only bring down Empires like Jim Crow in America in the ‘60s and Apartheid South Africa in the ‘90s, and Apartheid Israel today, but also frees us from the deceptive comfort and ease that these tools and corporations provide, making us principled and thoughtful with where we spend our dollar. As we divest from the complacency of comfort, we invest in an ethic of revolution.

To become this dangerous collective, we must also understand every aspect of our individual power. As we see in the series pilot episode, Andor’s trauma of leaving his little sister behind on Kenari led him straight into the revolution; it turned him into a dependable warrior who would never again leave a comrade behind. Because he studied his enemy and could successfully infiltrate the Empire, he turned his petty thievery and his survival skills as a pilot into a full-on and relentless assault on Empire, completing mission after mission for the Resistance.

“One fighter with a sharp stick and nothing left to lose can win the day,” reluctant rebel Jyn Erso quotes her mentor Saw Gerrera in Rogue One, and I can’t help but think of Palestinian professor and poet Refaat Alareer. In October 2023, in the months before his assassination in Gaza by zionist invaders, he said through tears in an interview: “I’m an academic. The toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade …I’m going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I would be able to do.”

Our pain and trauma can be fuel to change the world. Our skills and gifts can be weapons. Think: what has my life experience prepared me to do for the Resistance?

Know Your People

“I have friends everywhere,” is the code phrase for rebels to recognize each other as on the same team. Deeper than code: the phrase epitomizes the Alliance. The team that pulled off the legendary Aldhani Heist was made of a thieving mercenary, a former storm trooper, a current lieutenant of the empire, two badass lesbians, and a prodigious manifesto-writing kid, bankrolled by a rich senator and organized by a former Imperial soldier-turned art collector with an incredible lacefront wig. As my grandma used to say: “It takes all kinds to make a world.”

Skeen—the 7th Heist member who turns on his team in the end—didn’t understand that. When the former storm trooper asks Skeen to cover him so he could rescue their other team member Vel, Skeen just doesn’t do it, and the former storm trooper gets shot quickly. Earlier, Skeen mentions to Andor how upset another team member was to learn of their comrade’s storm trooper days, but it appears to have been a mask for Skeen’s own feelings. But people come to the revolution when they come to it. If they have skills and knowledge that the revolution needs and are taking steps to be accountable and trustworthy—like risking life and limb to rob an Imperial bank to fund the revolution—then there must be space for defectors to join. In more ways than one, Skeen proved he was no revolutionary in the end and Andor killed him for it.

Likewise, after the Heist, Luthen sends his rebel assassins to kill Andor, as the only uncommitted loose end who could turn Luthen over to the Empire. But even after Andor realizes that Luthen is trying to kill him, he recognizes that Luthen is not his enemy—only the Empire is. After all he’s seen, survived and given to the rebellion for pay, Andor’s now a believer, ready to be all-in for the cause. “Kill me or take me in,” Andor challenges Luthen who laughs with joy that Andor is joining the revolution at the end of season one. Recruiting Andor ends up being one of the greatest decisions Luthen makes for the Resistance. Andor goes on to help and save so many people and he is also helped and saved many times, in return.

This is in complete contrast to Syril, the Imperial cog in Ghorman who’s been facilitating the genocide on his girlfriend, Lieutenant Dedra’s behalf, without even knowing what she or the Empire were really up to. He dedicated his life to the so-called law and order of Empire, only to be played and dismissed by the very system that cannot by its nature value its expendable devotees. Empire only tolerates compliance—it has no need for morality or justice, as these threaten its existence. Syril believed himself on a righteous hunt for justice when he pursued Andor to his own peril. He didn’t know his enemy, and in the end, he blames and tries to kill Andor for his own poor choices and lack of foresight. Isolated and alone, hated by the Ghormans for his betrayal of them, Syril is killed out of nowhere by a Ghorman resistance leader in order to save Andor—a decision that ultimately saves the galaxy.

The Empire wants the revolutionary to feel vulnerable, alone, depressed, outgunned, outmanned and crushed under its boots. But the true revolutionary is never alone; all over the world people are waking up and joining the Resistance. “I have friends everywhere” is both a mantra and a conjuring. It includes people we’ve yet to meet—people we’d never expect. “Rebellions are built on hope,” is a common refrain in Andor. And a community of people down for the cause are what sustain it.

Know Your Sacrifice

One of the greatest things about Andor is its refusal to romanticize a revolutionary life. Andor and Bix are so scared and plagued by what they’ve done for the revolution—and what has been done to them—that they can’t necessarily count themselves happy together. Over the course of their two-year rekindled relationship, Bix had been seeing the signs that Andor was compromising the Resistance out of fear of losing her. When Andor is ready to quit the Resistance and go be happy with Bix on a planet far, far away, she knows she must leave him. A force-sensitive healer confirmed for both Bix and Andor that he had a special calling, and Bix knew he would never leave her willingly. So she sacrifices being together so that he can pour his all into the rebellion. “If I’m giving up everything,” she says, “I want to win.”

Vel and Cinta, Luthen’s top rebels and the badass lesbians from the Aldhani Heist also can’t seem to make a revolution and a romantic relationship work. When Vel tries to get closer to Cinta, Cinta tells Vel she already knew the deal from the jump: “The rebellion comes first. We take what’s left.” Like the Jedi knights that came before them, it seems that fear of losing love is not only a distraction from purpose but also, like we see with Anakin/Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith, a path to the dark side.

But their inability to sustain both romance and revolution should not be mistaken for a belief that a revolutionary must sacrifice love. Though hate for Empire may be many a revolutionary’s entry point, it is in no way a sustaining emotion. Indeed, as Che Guevara once said, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”

Andor and Bix don’t stop loving each other, nor do Vel and Cinta. What they sacrifice, instead, is the part of themselves that values their own safety, comfort and love above everyone else’s. Their love is not safe from Empire until everyone is safe from Empire.

Luthen might be the one who gives voice most clearly to what a revolutionary sacrifices:

“Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!”

Finally caught in Lieutenant Dedra’s trap by the end of season two, Luthen stabs himself, his mission of funding an operating rebel base on Yavin 4 and passing information about the existence of a planet-killing weapon to his confidante Kleya now complete. He burned his life building the Resistance and in the end, it’s only Kleya and Andor who show him gratitude and fight to make sure his sacrifice was worth it. There’s just no guarantee.

In the series finale, Vel—who lost Cinta in a rebellion on Ghorman—urges Andor to reconnect with Bix before it’s too late. She must know that Bix has had his child, even if Andor doesn’t know. He says he’ll do it when there’s time but he’s off to his next mission to pursue Luthen’s intel on the Empire’s potentially nuclear weapon. And he’s out of time. He dies in Rogue One in a blaze of that nuclear weapon just moments after completing his final mission, fueling a sunrise he’ll never see.

The famous opening crawl of 1977’s A New Hope (which picks up immediately after the events in Rogue One) simply declares that the Rebel Alliance has achieved a big victory against the Empire by stealing the plans for how to destroy its Death Star weapon. It doesn’t even mention Andor or his sacrifice—nor the dozens of other rebels in the fleet who died on Scarif for this bittersweet victory.

For every Kleya that Andor could rescue, he couldn’t save his own sister. For the child of Galen Erso (who built the Death Star with its fatal flaw) that Andor protected until their bitter end in Rogue One, he would never even be able to meet his and Bix’s own.

“You think I’m crazy?” Saw Gerrera asks. “Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane. Look at us. Unloved. Hunted. Cannon fodder. We’ll all be dead before the Republic is back and yet, here we are.”

But oh, “If I must die… in a blaze— and bid no one farewell, not even to his flesh, not even to himself—” Refaat Alareer writes in a poem before his murder in Gaza, “let it bring hope. Let it be a tale.”

You do your part; you run your race and pass that baton forward until the sun rises and the revolution comes.

Know Your Endgame

Before I was bullied by my friend Charles into watching Andor, I had never taken any interest in a non-Skywalker Star Wars story. I hadn’t seen Rogue One until Monday, after I finished my Andor season 2 screeners. I was unprepared for how gutting it would be to see Andor and Galen’s daughter Jyn Erso destroyed on Scarif in the nuclear blast of the Death Star. To see Andor grow from a vengeful thief into a loving revolutionary; to watch him survive two seasons of countless attacks, blaster burns, spaceship crashes, two enslaved uprisings, two genocides, an Imperial bank robbery, and the nuclear blast on Jedha City at the beginning of Rogue One just to die a short while later in a second blast in Scarif, made me feel the way Empire wants us to feel. Emotionally destroyed. Depressed. Defeated. Hopeless. One of the realest revolutionaries in the galaxy was taken out by incompetent unmitigated evil. Is this victory? What was it all for?

Then I rewatched Episode IV: A New Hope. No, Andor’s name is never mentioned and his and Jyn Erso’s sacrifice to get Leia the plans to destroy the Death Star don’t seem to be known by any of the main players in the OT film. But a whiny farmboy from Tatooine who happened to also be a damn good pilot himself, takes those plans, let’s Jesus take the wheel, and drops two bombs exactly on the target, destroying the Death Star at the end of the movie.

For all of the many times since college that I’ve seen A New Hope, I have only now on this rewatch actually cry buckets of tears—of sadness and joy. We know the sacrifice it took to win this victory. We know what was lost to win. In that context, everything is more precious; everything has more weight; everything means more.

When I think of the structure of Star Wars—the original saga starting in the middle at Episode IV, going forward in time, then backing up to the beginning; Andor picking up right after Episode III and Rogue One leading into Episode IV—I think about Toni Morrison’s first novel. In The Bluest Eye, she tells the entire story on the first page and dares the reader to continue. “If he turns the page,” she said in her documentary, The Pieces I Am, “it’s because he wants either to find out how it happened or he loves the language.”

In these Star Wars sequels and prequels, we already know how the story ends: Darth Vader and his two Death Stars will be destroyed, the Jedis will reemerge, the Force will awaken and return to balance—the endgame is that the Resistance will win. The Empire will fall. The people will be free. Everything else is just the “how” — and a lifetime’s worth of beautiful language.

“You made this decision long ago,” Andor reminds a young revolutionary who asks him for reassurance as she fears her imminent death. “The Empire cannot win. You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them. You’re coming home to yourself. You’ve become more than your fear. Let that protect you.”

I watched this opening scene of the rare but still nameless Black woman revolutionary having this moment with Andor in the season two premiere and I couldn’t help but think of Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

I watch this series and I think of the Tonis—Morrison and Cade Bambara—I think of Assata. I think of Angela. So, if I have any criticism of Andor, it’s the same one I have had for all of the Skywalker-driven Star Wars properties since 1977—where are the revolutionary Black women of consequence in this story???? In real life, Black women are foundational thinkers and creators of revolutionary art. To have not one Black woman revolutionary of any significance in Andor’s story arc seems like a bow to the racist fanbase that has a conniption whenever a Black woman or non-white person gets to do anything significant in fantasy. The principled anti-fascist knows their enemy and doesn’t comply in advance. Despite this glaring oversight, Gilroy gave us something eternal; he ran his race and passed the baton forward with visuals and language—the language!—that will rattle in the brain until it spur is onward in revolutionary love.

“There will be times when the struggle seems impossible,” Nemick says in his manifesto that’s now been spread around the galaxy by the season two finale, long after his mid-season-one death. “I know this already. Alone unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy, remember this: freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

“Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.…Remember that. And know this: The day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.”

Never forget that original creator George Lucas set this entire revolutionary franchise not in the future, but “a long time ago.” These stories of anti-fascism take place in the past to spark a guarantee for us that fascism will not be our future. Today, we’re witnessing the dying gasps of Empire and we already know that we will win. The Empire will fall. The people will be free. With every step forward, we write the how.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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In the two weeks since my seventh watch of Sinners, I’ve been looking around like that meme of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. What now? While paid subscribers can expect an exclusive, full syllabus on the groundbreaking film this week(!!!), I have managed to pull myself away from it, in order to watch some other stuff. Here’s your weekly binge:

Andor: The season two finale of the best Star Wars show yet premieres on Tuesday and if you’re not yet caught up, or put on, this is the week to do it. I’ll have a deep-dive on Andor after the finale, but until then, know that it is even more radical than Severance, as Star Wars has always been about anti-fascist resistance. Featuring enslaved rebellions, citizens kidnapped and sent to foreign labor camps indefinitely, and one politician brave enough to call a genocide a genocide on a livestream, Andor hits particularly close to home as fascism continues to rise in the real world. Though it’s not without its flaws, Andor features some of the best antifascist writing on T.V., like this gem of a peptalk that the title character gives a scared rebel who’s losing her nerve as she’s facing certain death: “You made this decision long ago. The empire cannot win. You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them. You’re coming home to yourself. You’ve become more than your fear. Let that protect you.” Hot damn! And that’s just from episode one. Buckle up for the ride of your life.

Andor is streaming now on Disney+.

Forever: Legendary T.V. showrunner Mara Brock Akil (“Girlfriends,” “The Game,” “Being Mary Jane,”) is back with an all-Black adaptation of Judy Blume’s most-banned book, the Y.A. romance Forever. Starring my favorite girl, Lovie Simone (“Greenleaf,” “Stella and the Spades”) as Keisha and newcomer Michael Cooper, Jr. as Justin, Forever captures the beauty and heartbreak of falling in and out and in love in your teens. Simone’s leading-lady talents have deserved this spotlight for a long time and Cooper is perfect as her sweet, neurodivergent forever-love. Set in 2018 with a fire soundtrack to match, the show balances warm nostalgia with the bitterness of predominantly white institutions built to break Black kids. Simone’s Keisha gets the worst of it. Trigger warning: in a sharp turn from the relatively conflict-free plot of the book, Keisha is the victim of an ex-boyfriend’s revenge porn and is summarily slut-shamed for it by both peers and adults. Though it’s “realistic” that parents can be horrible, if Keisha simply *had* to go through something this traumatic for the sake of the plot, I do wish that Keisha and Justin’s moms had reacted in a less stereotypical and a more healing and loving way. It’s a TV show, after all—why re-trigger when you can heal? The lesson of the show: hire Wood Harris (“The Wire,” “Creed”) to be a wholesome dad in everything and stop sending your Black children to white schools.

Forever is streaming now on Netflix.

FYC SEASON

It’s the most wonderful time of the year and L.A.’s best season: Awards. This is when studios trot out their star shows to hobnob with critics and awards-voters “for your consideration.”

Severance: At the Severance FYC, I got to chat up Adam Scott about how revolutionary the show is and I got my own Lumon Sever’d Floor employee badge:

Watch my recap video on IG here, read my Severance pieces here, and stream Severance on AppleTV+.

MO: At the MO FYC, I got to meet the man himself in my Mandela Hirbawi keffiyeh and enjoy his INCREDIBLE falafel tacos from the show. I asked Mo if his unrelenting truth about the genocide in Palestine led to the show’s cancellation after a fantastic season two, which I reviewed back in February here. We’ll never know, but one thing is for sure, he left it all on the field and told a true, powerful, heartbreaking and hilarious story of Palestinian resistance and survival and should be so proud.

Watch my recap of the event on IG:

Stream Mo on Netflix.

Government Cheese FYC: I had the pleasure of moderating AppleTV+’s new show Government Cheese with showrunner Ayesha Carr (“Everybody Hates Chris,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine) after a screening of the first two episodes. The surrealist comedy follows David Oyelowo’s Hampton Chambers as he leaves prison for fraud and tries to reconnect with his wife and kids in 1970s Simi Valley, CA. Because I hadn’t reviewed the series before being a paid moderator, I’ll refrain from reviewing now, but you can stream the series on AppleTV+!

ABANITU: A story on my directorial debut feature film Abanitu was featured in the May 2025 print and online editions of Inside Nova Magazine! Following five generations of the Obie Family, ABANITU tells our 119-year-history owning land in North Carolina as we heal through the indigenous practice of farming and face heart-breaking challenges when people try to separate us from the land. You can read the story here, and of course, stay tuned to Black Girl Watching for updates on when and where you can watch my debut film!

Brooke on the Island Fever podcast talking Sinners:

I took my friend Krit to see Thunderbolts* and it was fine! Immediately after, we hopped theater screens to see Sinners (my 7th time, his first!) which was way better! Then I joined him on his podcast Island Fever to break down the film:

Fiona Apple(?!) “Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)” – Speaking of revolutionary, new anthem just dropped from Fiona Apple! I’m so sorry, Fiona, I was unfamiliar with your game. But apparently the iconic singer is not new to being woke, she’s true to it. She spent two years as a court watcher where she saw thousands of women be incarcerated before even being convicted of a crime simply because they could not afford bail. She channels the rage of this injustice into her new song, “Pretrial (Let Her Go Home).” The music video features images of real women, mothers and the families and communities destroyed by pre-trial detention. Her rallying cry “Let Her Go Home” doubles as a website to facilitate bail fund donations. Watch and donate here:

The revolution will be live streamed on YouTube.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

For the past two delicious weeks, there’s been little else on my mind besides the full course meal that is Sinners. I’ve now seen it seven(!!!) times, written a deep-dive, taken different friends to see it, and had the most enlivening conversations about it.

Out of all of the best and worst analyses that I’ve seen so far, the most confusing has been the idea that some Black people don’t want to see a movie set in the Jim Crow South because they don’t want to see any more “slave movies.”

Never mind that Sinners is set in 1932 Mississippi—about 67 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the civil war. Though I’m certain a lot of these folks got their history tests and English essays returned to them face down in school, I still won’t fault people for accusing Ryan Coogler’s best film yet—and one of the greatest films of all time—of being a “slave movie.” Through Miles Caton’s character Sammie and Omar Benson Miller’s character Cornbread, we see what life was like for Black sharecroppers picking cotton in the Mississippi Delta. Through Del Roy Lindo’s character of Delta Slim, we see how the Black Codes—which restricted Black people’s newfound “freedom” by policing and criminalizing their activities after slavery—led to Black men being imprisoned for the smallest things like “vagrancy” and being forced to work on chain gangs to give the state the free labor they’d lost when the south lost the civil war.

Just as it traces the history of music through the blues—from R&B to country to folk to hip hop to house—Sinners also traces the evolution of slavery. Both sharecropping and chain gangs were the next iterations of the violent institution, and both did their part to keep Black people in America from freedom. The reason Michael B. Jordan’s twin characters Smoke and Stack were underwater financially on the opening night of their juke joint, Club Juke, was because the Black sharecroppers who came to party were paying with wooden nickels—currency that they could only spend at the general store of the plantations that they worked on.

Yes, even in the 1900s, up through the middle of the century, Black people were still trapped on plantations, picking cotton. And for all the audience hand-wringing about not wanting to see “slave movies,” most commenters didn’t know that fact. They’d never heard of wooden nickels. They know nothing of Reconstruction or the Black Codes. And that’s the point.

At the announcement of any new movie even tangentially related to Black enslaved people in America, the online groans from Black audiences are nearly audible. While most people would be hard-pressed to name more than 10 actual “slave movies” in the past 50 years, “I’m tired of ‘slave movies’” is a frequent social media refrain. Still, usually, there’s a good reason.

Typically, in the “slave movie” genre, enslaved Africans in America are central to the plot, or at least the backdrop of the story, and often face extreme violence. There’s often copious use of “n****r” and other racist slurs, as well as the prominence of a white savior for white liberals in the audience to project their fantasies on to of how they would’ve behaved “back then.” (Hint: whatever you’re doing now is what you would’ve done then.) The purpose of these films is to inform audiences about the horrors of chattel slavery while also, weirdly, occupying that entertainment space. It’s a complicated dichotomy. It’s exhausting and, for many Black audience members, traumatic.

But the problem with these films is not that stories of enslaved Africans are being told on-screen. Often, it’s about which stories are being told, who is telling them, how they’re telling them, and why.

The films in the genre that Hollywood studio heads and financiers usually green-light and champion are the ones that eroticize stories of Black enslavement and promote white savior narratives. The last corporate-approved addition to the genre is 2020’s Antebellum, a film so masturbatory in its commitment to eroticized Black trauma that its co-directors and writers, Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, put Quentin Tarantino and Django Unchained to shame.

Starring Janelle Monaé, Lionsgate’s Antebellum rips off the premise of Octavia Butler’s brilliant novel Kindred but doesn’t even have the guts or the skill to follow through on Butler’s inventive explanation for why a modern-day Black woman finds herself back in antebellum slavery. Instead, the audience is subjected to brutal and gratuitous rape scenes and other horrific violence, mainly against Black women, until an enraging, underdeveloped plot twist appears.

Aggressive in its pointless cruelty to its Black women characters, Antebellum underscores how dangerous it can be when men tell Black women’s stories.

We’ve seen this before.

In Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, the true story of Solomon Northup features directorial choices that gratuitously and heinously zero in on the repeated rape of Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) who is then, separately, whipped by Northup. The excuse of the story’s historical accuracy still doesn’t answer the most important question: Why? Why tell this story of a Black man who is forced into slavery and whips a Black woman nearly to death and then leaves her behind when his white boss finally comes down south to rescue him? Why do we need to see that story on-screen?

Some say we need to educate viewers who don’t know the truth about slavery. But where does education stop and eroticized Black trauma begin?

In the 2016 film The Birth of a Nation, about enslaved revolutionary Nat Turner, writer and director Nate Parker invented a gang rape of Turner’s wife that did not exist in her story. That film flopped, as gang rape allegations from 1999 against Parker and his co-writer Jean Celestin resurfaced during the press tour, raising even more questions about the irresponsible use of sexual assault in the film. Even Kasi Lemmons’ 2019 Harriet refuses to avoid gratuitous violence against Black women. Here again, Monaé stars as a fictional Black woman whose sole invented purpose is to die violently on-screen at the hands of a fictional Black man bounty hunter.

Even as Lemmons chose not to focus on the most brutal elements of slavery in the film, one still must contend with the emotional violence of fabricating the vast majority of Harriet Tubman’s narrative, as if to say her truth was not good enough; deifying Tubman instead of spotlighting her humanity; and skipping over her White enslavers and hunters to create a Black man villain who never existed in her story.

Though it can be of small comfort, at least when Black filmmakers tell these stories, Black people are the main characters.

When white storytellers have full rein to tell our histories, we’re assumed lucky to be the vehicles whom the white savior characters drive to glory. White filmmakers who are obsessed with telling stories of anti-Black racism curiously never want to deconstruct their own. That’s because the white savior’s role in a “slave movie” is not to examine or indict whiteness as a power structure. Their role is to redeem whiteness as a social construct and to protect the fragility of the white audience. Which is why “slave movies” with white saviors, like Django Unchained, Glory, and Lincoln, are so useless to activate any measure of real social progress in the present day.

The 1997 film Amistad had the potential to both educate audiences on the 1839 rebellion of kidnapped Africans on the slave ship La Amistad and inspire rebellions in the present day. Instead, Steven Spielberg’s film continued the genre’s pattern of white savior uselessness by focusing on the white lawyers battling in an American courtroom over whether the rebels were kidnapped people acting in self-defense or if they were property.

The choice to tell this story and tout its “truthfulness” only serves to underscore the “goodness” of whiteness and the legal system it created—the very same system that had legalized slavery in the first place—as well as to normalize the conditional nature of Black humanity.

We can and must do better than this.

At its best, a full-bodied film told from the perspective of enslaved people and centering on Black people processing, surviving, and overcoming trauma — instead of fetishizing Black trauma — could spark more than just another tired and fruitless conversation with white America. It could educate its audience on the foundations of every facet of modern American life and inspire a path forward in the present day with intent to dismantle these continuing systems of oppression.

When Alex Haley’s Roots miniseries came to television in 1977, it was the most thorough and most thoughtful depiction of West African life before, during, and after being enslaved in America. Though largely fictional, the series centered its Black characters, their humanity, their culture, and their resistance to white supremacy over generations. Roots disproved the lie that Black life begins and ends with slavery and inspired generations of Black people to learn their family histories, reject white supremacist narratives, and reconnect to Africa.

We’ve also seen the evidence of dramatization bringing about swift social change in Ava DuVernay’s 2019 miniseries, When They See Us. In the first weekend after the critically acclaimed series told the 1989 story of the five Black boys falsely accused and wrongfully convicted of a rape in Central Park, a global outcry from audience members resulted in the lead prosecutors in the case being forced out of their prominent and lucrative positions. The series also fanned the flames of the growing police abolition movement, perfectly illustrating how the police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and “the whole damn system is guilty as hell.”

Though the story of the Exonerated Five is traumatic, DuVernay illustrates how writers and directors can process Black trauma on-screen without exploiting or fetishizing it. She achieved this by centering the Black audience — mainly the five boys, now men, who would relive their trauma by watching the series. Even the most painful scenes are imbued with empathy and love for the Black audience. When Black people are the target audience, there’s no desire to rub our faces in our own trauma as one does when the goal is “educating” and “bringing awareness” to white audiences.

We’ve yet to see the full social impact of Coogler’s Sinners beyond its historic box-office wins in these first two weeks in theaters, but we have seen a filmmaker center a Black audience in a Black story that deals with Black trauma and is also triumphant. Because this story is for Black people, Coogler does not indulge in gratuitous images of anti-Black violence. A powerful example of this is in Lindo’s stunning scene of Delta Slim recounting the lynching of his friend Rice. The audience only hears faint audio of the lynching in the background as he tells this story—an incredibly effective bit of sound design that allows us to be in the moment with Delta Slim as he remembers it, without forcing those violent images into our brains. And when the inevitable anti-Black violence does come, the victory, in life and death, is ours. That’s how you tell a satisfying liberation story.

Though it is painfully cis-hetero in its presentation of Black life in a Mississippi Delta blues scene that was historically full of musical Black queer folk, Sinners still achieves its aim to be a balm for the grief of what and who we’ve lost in our quest for freedom, and a thesis on how we pursue it: We may not see freedom in this lifetime, Sinners suggests, but we can fight like hell for it and revel in the moments—whether hours or days—when we feel the most free. This is a story worth the cost to tell it.

And good luck telling an American story without slavery because everything about this American life is rooted in slavery. It is the haint that haunts this country’s past and permeates our present and future.

We don’t have the luxury to be “done with slave stories” when slavery is so clearly not done with us.

When the wildfires raged in California this past January, incarcerated firefighters who have historically been the ones fighting these capitalist-made disasters, were forced to risk their lives for the state for less than $30 a day. In the 2020 pandemic lockdown, our capitalist overlords sent essential workers into a pandemic —and many to their deaths —without even a $15 minimum wage, to save the economy that slavery created and maintains to this day. This is slavery! As homelessness and the cost of rent and basic necessities rise, billionaires and their hangers-on like Gayle King brag about joyriding in space subsidized by our tax dollars. As we beg for free healthcare, our government sends billions of our tax dollars to the zionist state to fund theirs—and to facilitate the genocide of the Palestinian people and their land—all while telling us this is the best our country can do for us.

The powder keg of revolution was struck in the summer of 2020, as millions died of covid and millions more lost their livelihoods. Our political overlords have spent decades protecting corporate interests over people, including granting trillions of dollars in pandemic funds to corporations that pocket the money, firing the employees who were supposed to benefit. In July 2020, 30 million American residents didn’t have enough food to eat as unemployment skyrocketed. When the system of policing murdered George Floyd, the explosion of global uprisings shook the ruling class to its core. White politicians kneeled in kente cloth sashes to get Black folks to stop burning down police precincts and setting cop cars on fire. The entertainment industry posted black squares on Instagram to feign solidarity in order to quiet down the evidence of racism in its institutions. And all the while the ruling class was ramping up the police state so that nothing as effective as the 2020 protests could ever happen again.

Biden declared the Covid pandemic emergency over—not because it was ever actually over; in 2025, more than one thousand people still die every week from COVID! Biden wanted our unemployed asses back in the fields making money for this country at the expense of our own health so we wouldn’t have the time the pandemic lockdown gave us to be out in the streets. And when college protestors encamped at their universities beginning in 2023 to protest the U.S.-Israel genocide of Palestinians and their universities’ roles in funding it, Biden created such a fascist hostile infrastructure to punish them that Trump is merely building upon the foundation democrats have laid, kidnapping and incarcerating international students and the deporting immigrants to concentration camps around this country and in El Salvador.

Today, ICE continues its bipartisan reign of terror, detaining and separating even U.S. citizen children from their families and forcibly sterilizing migrant women with our tax dollars. Just last November California voted AGAINST abolishing the slavery of prison labor. With homelessness being criminalized across the country, and private prisons making a killing selling incarcerated people’s labor to the highest bidder, where do you think we’re all headed if we can’t organize right now to abolish prisons and police?

If ever the moment were ripe for “slave movies”—-let’s reframe this: abolition movies—-that could facilitate an understanding of how slavery has shaped us all in the present day while also providing further impetus for healing and upending these systems of oppression once and for all, it’s now.

As the demonic despot continues his attacks on Black history as “divisive narratives” and “indoctrination,” and Hollywood studio executives eagerly rolled back their black square promises to comply with his anti-DEI orders, it’s no wonder this industry won’t allow an abolitionist genre to live up to its potential and tries to aggressively undermine it when it does. Our history is being erased before we’ve even had the chance to know the half of it. But our ancestors have been silenced long enough, and their stories deserve to be told.

The first long-form story I ever wrote was my debut novel Book of Addis: Cradled Embers, inspired by the revolutionary real life of an enslaved girl Oney Judge, who defied her enslaver, George Washington, and lived to tell her own story. My debut documentary film Abanitu, tells the story of my great-great grandmother Lucy Obie, the first generation of our family out of slavery, who bought land to farm in 1906 that five generations of Obies have expanded and continue to steward 119 years later. Facing my past and studying our ancestral history of survival has prepared and empowered me for the fascist United States of today.

There are so many more true and revolutionary stories of enslaved Africans in America that deserve wider audiences — like and Mum Bett and William Dorsey Swann (the first known drag queen!). There are so many reimagined stories on the evolution and impact of slavery like Sinners left to tell. (Imagine missing out on the loving miracle that is Sinners!) Our ancestors had keys, life lessons, tactics and skills that we could be using today against an evolving enemy. When we honor our revolutionary history of struggle and survival, trauma and triumph, our ancestors’ stories from the past can be our healing, our power, and our strength in the present.

Shake off the anti-Black shackles that teach us that slavery is our shame to bear. Enslavement is white history. Survival is ours. And liberation in this lifetime is in our future. What more powerful and far-reaching place to tell these stories than on the screen?

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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****SPOILER ALERT FOR THE PLOT OF SINNERS!***

In the 1930s, a Black wannabe guitar player from Mississippi named Robert Johnson stood at a crossroads. It’s there, legend has it, that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the gift of playing the blues. He died tragically young at 27, fueling more rumors that the devil had come to collect his due. But the tale of Johnson’s fantastical journey from terrible musician to a seemingly overnight sensation lives on.

Ryan Coogler’s new Southern gothic horror film Sinners doesn’t borrow from Johnson’s story, but it does take the Christian premise that the blues is “the devil’s music” and flips it on its head. In Coogler’s original story—the first and best in his film canon so far—he crafts a love letter to Southern Black people specifically and our generational tradition of searching for and finding freedom through the arts. And I do mean craft. His historic use of both 65MM and IMAX film cameras to shoot the film in the widest and tallest formats possible—also making his cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw the first woman to achieve this, as well—shows the vibrancy of the Black South like we’ve never seen it before on screen and offers a visual feast of Black American culture and a warning of those outside it trying to crash the cookout.

In Coogler’s hands, the blues music of the “sinners” is a holy, righteous, healing thing; both a weapon against white supremacist evil and a salve for its wounds. If we can sing about it, then maybe, for a time, we can be free of it. If we can tell the stories of who we’ve lost, then maybe, in a way, they get to live on.

But survival in this vampire epic is no trifling matter, and who Coogler chooses to let live to tell the story and who he chooses to die feels too much like a metaphor to ignore.

THE HEIST OF FREEDOM

Starring Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers Elijah and Elias Moore in his best performances to date, Sinners tells the legend of the duo, nicknamed the Smoke-Stack twins. Seven years after killing and burying their abusive father, fighting in the trenches as veterans of the Great War and robbing the Italian and Irish mobs in Chicago, Smoke and Stack return to Mississippi with money to spend, buying an old saw mill from a secretly evil white man to turn it into a juke joint. Money is power, and a Black-owned business, they think, can bring them both.

After buying the mill, they pick up their little cousin Sammie (soulful singer Miles Caton in a remarkable debut film performance). Like all the Black people in his community, Sammie is a sharecropper, but he yearns to sing and play the blues. Nicknamed Preacherboy because of his father’s role as a pastor in their community, Sammie is trapped between the cotton fields and the church—two white systems of oppression that won’t let him be who he is. Playing the blues in his cousins’ juke is his way out of pain and oppression, but his father Jedidiah (a powerful Saul Williams) lectures that he should be using his music in service to God at church instead of “dancing with the devil” in the clubs. Sammie chooses the blues “for just one night” and leaves with his cousins, but promises to be back in time for church in the morning.

Pay no attention to the reviewers who call the first hour of this opus “slow;” it’s deliberate. It’s world-building. It’s a filmmaker and a storyteller at the top of his craft. I’ve never been so hype watching the symbolism of Smoke and Stack on opposite sides of their hometown, assembling their rag-tag team of sinnin’ avengers—each with their own conflicting ideas of salvation—all driving towards their common destination: the juke. It’s the hours before the heist and the loot is freedom.

Stack and Sammie pick up local Blues legend Delta Slim (an undeniable Del Roy Lindo), and entice married singer Pauline (Jayme Lawson who is nothing short of a revelation) to stop by and (unintentionally) provoke Stack’s white ex-lover Mary (a devilish Hailee Steinfeld) into coming too. Cornbread (a hilarious Omar Benson Miller) will be the muscle at the door. Smoke enlists the help of the married Chinese couple and local grocers Bo and Grace Chow (a pitch-perfect Yao and Li Jun Li) to bring the food and make the signage, and he picks up his longtime love and the mother of his dead baby to cook the food and otherwise be by his side, hoodoo worker Annie (a regal Wunmi Mosaku who lifts her underwritten character to otherworldly heights).

In a sequence that will go down in film history, Sammie gives his first-ever public performance, singing a song he wrote for his dad about how sorry he is to disappoint him, but how much he loves the blues. As the power of his performance builds, his voice and his steel guitar merge on an ethereal frequency, proving that he is a griot, and piercing the veil that separates the physical and the spiritual realm. All heaven lets loose. A West African griot plays the akonting—the predecessor to the banjo—alongside Sammie, as does a futuristic Black man with an electric guitar, showing the evolution of blues music, from West Africa to the Black American South.

Bo and Grace’s ancient Chinese ancestors dance around them too, as an 80s DJ scratches records on a turntable, modern Southern Black girls twerk to the beat, and a West Coast crew walk it out. It’s not just a history of Black music on display, it’s the history of the shared Black musical experience—from the drum circle to the juke to the disco to the club. The power of our gathering in song and dance has existed long before white supremacist oppression and will exist long after we tear their kingdom down.

In the meantime, the club has been the spot where, no matter which evolution of slavery we’re in, we can, for one night, shake it all off and be a little more free.

Sammie’s singing metaphorically raises the roof and sets it on fire; they all let it burn down around them as they dance the night away. It’s a gorgeous scene of community that made it all the more disappointing that there are zero Black queer-presenting “sinners” in the juke. Even Steven Spielberg’s famous juke scene in 1984’s The Color Purple centered the town’s famous Black bisexual griot Shug Avery. Though a Black queer woman wrote the source material for that film, that shouldn’t be necessary for inclusion. Just look around. Yet even the vampires—known in most modern lore for their undying horniness and sexual fluidity— are painfully and uncanonically straight in Sinners. When I thought about this, even after my four screenings of the film I can’t stop watching (on IMAX 70MM; IMAX digital, standard 70MM and again in XD), I still couldn’t help but quote Stack’s gripe to Smoke: “no vision!”

But the white devil’s is 20/20, and even from far away, Remmick (a horrifying Jack O’Connell) sees Sammie’s celestial talent and, like a true vampire, sets about trying to take it for himself.

THE DEATH OF IRONY

Once the vampiric bloodshed begins, Remmick eventually reveals to Sammie and the surviving Black folks that Sammie’s voice and music are the reason he’s come to the juke.

“I want your stories. And I want your songs. And you can have mine too,” Remmick, in his full, unmasked horror warns Sammie. When the Master Vampire bites, he can suck up and take for himself all of your memories, all of your traumas, all of your rhythm, all of your blues. Yes, it’s a poignant commentary on the demonic music industry that has been robbing our griots since they discovered they could capitalize on Black music. But Coogler hesitates to put too fine a point on this metaphor of white vampires who suck Black musicians and Black music dry for their own gain. His minister of music for all of his Black-music-heavy films—from the Afrocentric Black Panther score to the Delta Blues of Sinners—is, after all, a Swedish white man.

Ludwig Göransson is without doubt a masterful (heh) talent. I own all of his scores on vinyl and will get this one too. He’s an objectively great composer who, much like an actor, can find joy in stepping into other people’s stories and histories and creating new life. But it’s not lost on me that, when Coogler had the opportunity to have a composer tour Africa, to find the music of Wakanda for the biggest Black box office film ever; to connect with something deep and ancestral that was stolen from us, a Black American composer—or even an African composer—was not selected for the opportunity. Sure, Black musicians like Senegalese singer and guitarist Baaba Maal, contributed to the music, shared their stories, jammed in sessions, and got paid and credited for their participation in the liner notes. But there’s only one name on the 2019 Academy Award for Best Score, and it’s not Maal’s.

Perhaps, it would be less of a sticking point that the film is scored by a white European man if the thesis of Sinners wasn’t rooted in white vampires co-opting Black music. This was, after all, the motivation for Coogler to demand the near-unprecedented ownership rights to Sinners. The white elephant in the room was stomping like Pearline on that juke stage and I suppose everyone decided to ignore it. The music is great, after all. And yet.

When Delta Slim tells Stack and Sammie the harrowing tale of how his friend Rice was lynched in the train station because white men wanted the roll of money in his pocket, he beats the side of the car in anguish. He wails. And that beat and that holler turn into a song. That’s the blues.

Coogler wrote that because he knows it’s true. The blues comes straight out of the cotton fields. Straight out of white supremacist oppression of Black people. Straight out of Coogler’s own family history. And it shows. Coogler locked in with his own ancestry and made the best film of his career. You can watch someone else’s people pick the cotton and you can listen to someone else’s people’s stories. You can study it, and give a great impression. But there will always be a distance if you can’t tap into an ancestry, a spiritual tradition.

THE DANGER OF THE “COOKOUT” INVITE

Remmick understood that. He knew his music couldn’t pierce the veil. He needed Sammie. That’s why the image of Remmick’s Black victims-turned-vampires surrounding Remmick and laying their blessing hands on him, anointing him while he absorbs their power, their voices, their music with glee is one of the most haunting images in the film.

Sure, it would be wonderful if, like the vampires promised, that we could all “just be family” and play music in “fellowship and love.” We could all do the Irish jig and we could all share the blues. But as long as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy gives money, power, credit and fame to white men at the expense of the Black musicians at the soul of the music, we can never be in true community with one another.

And that may be the strongest lesson of the film.

In a brilliant and historically accurate nuance, Remmick shares with Sammie that, even though Christianity/Catholicism was also forced on his Irish people by their English oppressors just like Black folk, he too still finds comfort in the words of the Bible. It’s the emotional mimicry of an abuser who’s building a false sense of community by highlighting their shared oppressor, while ignoring his current role as one. He seeks to trauma bond with his victims, promising them new life, just as he takes theirs away.

Bo and Grace, the Chinese shopkeepers who can service both the white side of the street and the Black side of the street in segregated Mississippi, were down to make money with Smoke and Stack—until things got real. When Stack is killed, Grace tells her husband to go get the car so they can leave. They signed up for a party, not to support their friend through his biggest grief yet and whatever demons he’s got to fight. Bo agrees, to his peril, and succumbs to vampirism when he steps outside.

Grace, confronted with the loss of her husband and threats against her child, decides against the will of the Black people she’s supposed to be in community with, to invite the vampires in, which leads to most everyone’s death.

And that’s not to let the other villain of the story off the hook, the one whose actions lead to the death of all the people she called “family”: Mary.

When Mary confronts Stack in public at the train station and brings herself uninvited down to the juke joint, she does so without care or concern for Stack’s life—Black men, after all, have been lynched for less than upsetting a white-looking woman in public. Though he tells her on both occasions to leave, for her safety and theirs, she chooses both times to not only endanger Stack but all the Black people around her. When Cornbread lets her in, Smoke and Stack let her stay, and Annie calls her “family,” she’s empowered to further endanger them. This 1/8th Black reverse-Sarah Jane Johnson from Imitation of Life doesn’t “want to be white,” after all. (It’s no small detail that her hair is styled just like Sarah Jane’s). But she’s been living as a white woman in Arkansas, because whiteness is about how you look, just as much as its about who you choose to be in community with, and she can’t help but act like one.

In true delusional Karen fashion, she sees Remmick and his two white recruits as “harmless,” and seeks them out for the money they can provide. Never mind that she’s married to a rich white man and can likely just give the brothers some money herself! No, these three raggedy-looking strangers are the key to the juke’s financial success. It’s a very unserious plan, and just like Remmick’s first victims that day, Mary’s fate is sealed when she accepts the white man’s gold. Cornbread’s is sealed when he lets her in the first time, let alone the second, and Stack’s is sealed when he pockets the gold from Mary (in both ways).

Of course, none of them knew the full consequences of their actions, but there’s something to be said of Smoke, who’s more worried than anyone about keeping the juke afloat, turning the white man’s money down at the door. Amused by Remmick and his folk band, Stack probably would’ve let them in eventually if Smoke wasn’t there to stop him. Once Stack becomes a vampire, he seems to believe without question Remmick’s promises that—in a world that wants to snatch the lives of Black people out from under us—choosing eternal death is actually freedom.

Freedom is the goal, but there’s some compromises that Smoke wouldn’t make for it that Stack just couldn’t resist.

Still, Coogler’s vampire lore is not without weaknesses—if Mary was already invited in after she turned, and Stack was already inside when he turned, why do they need another invitation to re-enter? Are the vampire’s a hive mind, enslaved to the Master Vampire and forced to do his will, or do they maintain their humanity, as the end-credits suggest, and have their own agendas? Is Remmick a misguided white savior looking to genuinely offer Black people a better way of “life,” — the klan did show up to kill Smoke, just like he said they would—or is he Jim Jonesing them with promises of equality and love while only wanting to increase his numbers and access to Sammie’s talent? Are the vampires rabid and blood-thirsty, unable to stop themselves from killing their loved ones whom they know don’t want to be vampires, or do they have willpower not to kill, but only if their twin brother asks nicely?—It’s a bit muddled.

But the betrayal of Black folk by trusted community members hits hard. It makes the juke joint scene, when all of the people and their ancestors’ spirits were dancing together, with their own beats, their own traditions, their own cultural garb and style—not in unison but in harmony—all the more tragic when it has to end. Despite how much richer the world is when we’re all together, everybody can’t come to the cookout while anti-Blackness is still on menu. This sense of safe community is just another thing white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy has stolen from all of us.

THE DEATH OF BLACK WOMEN

And I do have to mention patriarchy specifically in analyzing this film, as not a single Black woman character survives the night of vampires.

Pearline, a powerful blues singer and performer in her own right, sees Sammie in danger from Remmick and stabs Remmick in the back with the stake, missing his heart and sealing her own fate. When Remmick bites Pearline and she’s processing the devastating loss of her living life, she pushes away Sammie’s comfort and yells at him to go, leave her behind and make it to sunrise. He’s all that matters.

Likewise, when Annie realizes that hurting Remmick hurts all the vampires (sometimes! This is not a consistent truth!), she turns her back on the vampires so that she can warn Smoke. In so doing, Stack, her brother, for all intents and purposes, lunges at her and devours her neck. “Not you,” she cries, over and over as his drool and her blood mix and drip from his fangs into her mouth. “Not you,” she cries and I felt that in my soul.

In what my friend Janae described as “Chekov’s Promise,” Smoke must fulfill what he told Annie earlier that he would do: if she’s bitten, he would drive a wooden stake through her heart immediately and set her soul free. Through tears, he does it, and that’s how Annie goes: her brother and her lover end her life on earth. Aint that bout a bitch? Like our dire, real-life maternal mortality statistics, Smoke and Stack’s mother died giving these boys life. And just like Annie, in real life, we’re more likely to die at the hands of our brothers, our lovers. It’s bad enough in real life, but even in our brother’s wildest fantasies too? Damn.

Annie’s mojo bags keep not only Smoke but also Stack safe from hurt, harm and danger as they fight in the trenches of the Great War, and rob the Irish and Italian mob in Chicago. When his own brother comes to devour Smoke and turn him into a vampire, it’s Annie’s mojo bag around Smoke’s neck that prevents Stack from being able to bite him. She’s a powerful woman. But why wouldn’t she make a mojo bag for herself? She may not have known about vampires, but she’s a Black woman in the Jim Crow South—surely, she would think herself deserving of protection.

If it’s griots we’re supposed to be protecting, Annie is a griot too. She’s the first voice we hear in the film, narrating the story. She’s the keeper of the histories that help them destroy the vampires. Sadly, the bones have been thrown for poor Annie, and the verdict is that she must die. Why? Simply because she was written that way. She has her rootwork and she can cook, but outside of Smoke, no joy that we can see, no reason to fight for her own life. Why would she want to live when she has a baby daughter (who was also written to die for Smoke’s character development) waiting for her on the other side? She was written to empower others, and Smoke specifically—not to benefit from her own power.

It is heartbreaking when Smoke finally removes his mojo bag before his big showdown with the Klan because, without his twin, he’s ready to die and join Annie, his mission of keeping Sammie safe and killing Remmick now complete. But how I wish the Black man could’ve covered the Black woman like she covered him, prayed for her like she prayed for him, given her life like she gave him life for once!

Annie’s final moment, crowned with baby’s breath, breastfeeding their infant while dressed in all white, is breathtaking imagery and a beautifully crafted ending for Smoke to be reunited in death with his family. It’s a scene meant to evoke the highest emotions, and it succeeds. And still, in the aggregate of Coogler’s most recent films, a pattern starts to emerge. In Creed III, which Coogler created and produced and Jordan directed and starred in, Phylicia Rashad plays Creed’s mother and is sacrificed mid-way through to spark Creed’s character growth, using his grief from her death to raise the stakes. In Wakanda Forever, which Coogler wrote, directed and produced, Angela Bassett’s Queen Ramonda is also wholly unnecessarily murdered to raise the stakes for the other characters. The trope of killing off women for other (usually male) characters’ growth happens so often in men’s fiction that the colloquial term is “fridging” the women. And I have to ask: why, in Coogler’s imagination, is the story more emotionally resonant if the Black women die?

In Sinners, I can understand Sammie being a symbol, not just of our youth and promise but of our stories and our songs. It’s not just the women, but Delta Slim and Smoke who promise to die protecting Sammie and what he represents from the white man’s destruction. Especially as Trump is literally erasing Black history from the archives and museums, the symbolism is not lost on me. How and ever, the avatar for our youth/promise/songs/stories in this film is a Black man, at the expense of the Black women. And that feels very much like something a Black man under patriarchy would believe.

To his credit, before he kills her off, Coogler does center a Black woman’s pleasure through Sammie’s brief encounter with Pearline. Thanks to Stack skillfully explaining to Sammie (and the listening audience too) how to perform proper cunnilingus, Sammie does so eagerly in the only scene that is solely about a woman’s pleasure. As another consolation prize, when Sammie becomes a famous musician, he honors his one-time lover and rescuer by naming his blues club Pearline’s. She’s not there to sing her own blues, but he can sing them for her. Still, the haunted sweetness of that gesture and of Smoke and Annie’s reunion is undercut when we learn in the end-credits scene that something else has survived: the white woman.

Speaking of troubling patterns, Jordan’s first big-screen love interest who’s darker than a paper bag is Mosaku’s Annie. (Yes, I checked, going all the way back to his All My Children days when he was romancing Amanda Seyfried, up to his next franchise, The Thomas Crown Affair with Taylor Russell.) Killing Annie off, then, while showing Stack in the end-credits scene “alive” and “well,” 60 years later with Mary, is hard not to take as another stab to the heart. We cheered when Smoke took out all the Klansmen in the film’s coda, but are we supposed to cheer that the white woman who got all the Black people killed in the first place not only gets to survive, but remain in #BlackLove, on earth forever?

Because Coogler will own the rights, a Sinners franchise has endless potential, now that we know one of the twins has survived. But what has survived with him is a far less compelling love story than Smoke and Annie’s, and a bittersweet answer to the film’s central question: how do we get free?

THE CONSTANT STRUGGLE OF FREEDOM

Before they headed north, Stack thinks freedom is in the Black-owned Mississippi town of Mount Bayou. But the town folk figure they’re just as evil as their dad and run them out. They eventually try going back home, creating a Black space, “for us, by us,” with the white man’s blood money, but quickly learn that was always going to be a slaughterhouse, whether by vampires or the KKK. (Catch that message!)

When the devil has Sammie in his grizzly grip of death, Sammie tries to recite the Lord’s Prayer to save himself. But Remmick and his undead pack recite the prayer along with him in chilling unison. When praying only stalls Remmick, Sammie takes hold of his steel guitar and slashes Remmick deep into his skull with it. The power of Black music and community, and the sunlight of truth and time all work together to send this demon and his pack of newly made vampires back to hell (Though I would’ve loved to have seen the Choctaw vampire hunters and the ancestors from the juke return and join forces with the survivors for the final battle of flesh and blood and principalities of the dark). They’re free of Remmick, but he’s only one shark in a sea of evil.

Back at the crossroads, Sammie stands before his father and the church, chastised, bloody, and permanently scarred. Still, he rejects his father’s label of him and the people he lost as “sinners,” he refuses the call to “put the guitar down” and repent. He’s seen the holy things his music can do, and he owes it to the people he lost to tell their stories. He leaves the church, and drives to Chicago, choosing freedom through playing the blues. But, now in his 80s, played by legendary Blues man Buddy Guy, Sammie drinks his trauma just like Delta Slim did, and admits to vampire Stack that the best day of his life, when he felt the most free, was the day they made that juke joint, before the sun went down. Stack, who once thought vampirism was the way to freedom, agrees.

In a genius bit of character work, Jordan’s Smoke doesn’t smile the entire film. Unlike his slick and flashy play of Stack, Jordan plays Smoke with public affection and love only for his brother. Though in the end-credits scene, Stack remembers it differently, Smoke doesn’t kiss or hold Annie in public at the juke. He doesn’t speak to her gently. No caressing of her hair or hands. Only when he’s grieving his brother does he allow Annie’s public embrace. Only as he lays dying, piercing the veil between worlds, does he reach for his baby in Annie’s arms, hold her, and finally smile. Freedom—the kind that lasts—might only be found in heaven.

For a film that undermines the white man’s religion so thoroughly throughout its runtime, it seems a devastatingly Christian ending, and perhaps a foregone conclusion. Maybe, for Black folks on earth, the death that brings eternal life is still our only way out of all this.

But in choosing as the final representation of freedom Sammie’s memory of riding in the backseat of the car with his big cousins on the morning of the last best day of his life, cotton fields to the left and right, and a long stretch of road and unending possibility before them, Coogler offers a bit of hope. It’s those hours before the heist, assembling your team, surrounded by our past, and traveling in community towards freedom—even if we fail, even if it won’t last—that’s always worth the struggle.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

Welcome to another weekly binge!

First, an oldie: In 1970, a white filmmaker chased down an increasingly hostile James Baldwin for a documentary interview on his “escape” from racist America to the so-called utopia of Paris. Because Baldwin wouldn’t necessarily give the journalist what he wanted, the documentary only wound up being about 30 minutes long, but it has a classic quote that inspired my latest piece:

“Where would a fleeing Black man go, if he wanted to escape?” Baldwin responds to the filmmaker, dripping with disdain. There is no “safe” place for Black people in an anti-Black world, but dating all the way back to American slavery, Black Americans have found a port in the storm in Hawaii. In 2023, I spent 5 weeks hopping around the islands, researching and interviewing Black scholars, historians, activists, artists, healers and more to write this piece on the long tradition of Black and Hawaiian solidarity—how we lost it, and how we might get it back. After two long years of writing and selling this piece and it getting killed and publications folding, I’ve finally found a home for the piece that pays what I deserved for the love and work I put into it. Check it out on ContrabandCamp:

ContrabandCamp

A Hawaiian Escape? How Black Americans Found Refuge and Solidarity in the Kingdom

“And where would a fleeing Black man go if he wanted to escape…

Read more

8 days ago · 68 likes · 3 comments · Brooke Obie

Though the annoying filmmaker is annoying, Baldwin is brilliant and this slice of his life in Paris is illuminating and invigorating. Watch the short film James Baldwin: Meeting the Man on MUBI or Criterion Channel (or if you just search on YouTube you can watch it full for free—don’t tell em I sent you though lol)

Mid-Century Modern

I was so wrong about this show! After a bit of a rocky start with the pilot and second episode, I was ready to throw this show in the dustbin. But by the 3rd episode, everything just gels for this modern-day Golden Girls sitcom that features three gay men best friends of a certain age (and one of their moms) choosing to live together in Palm Springs after the death of their fourth bestie. In this sweet tear-jerker starring the iconic Nathan Lane as the Dorothy, the hilarious and fabulous Nathan Lee Graham as the Blanche, and a surprising Matt Bomer as the loveable ditzy Rose. If you’re in need of a pick-me-up, you will not regret this heartwarming watch.

Watch Mid-Century Modern on Hulu.

Dying for Sex

TW: cancer, chemo, childhood sexual abuse

Okay with all these trigger warnings, this is still a dramedy in the truest sense of the word. Molly (Michelle Williams) is a breast cancer survivor two years into remission when she learns that her hip pain is cancer that has not only returned at stage four but has metastasized in her bones. Somehow, this news—and the libido-killing medication she had been taking to prevent the cancer from returning—makes her very horny. After a seriourealizes that her sexless marriage is not for her and takes charge of her cancer journey and what’s left of her life by pursuing pleasure at all costs. With the help of her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate) she starts choosing the life and the sex that she wants with a bevy of hilarious suitors. Of course, the premise is in the name, and Molly is dying of inoperable cancer, while also trying to heal from childhood sexual abuse. It’s handled with care and love and is based on the true story of real best friends Molly and Nikki and the podcast they did together recounting these adventures of the same name.

Watch Dying for Sex on Hulu.

Black Mirror

The sci-fi-horror-drama anthology series about what fresh hell new technology will bring us is back—despite the fact that we’re already living in the fresh hells of new technology and our tech overlords IRL. Though it digs in its own backyard for many of the episodes — there are sequels and spiritual sequels to fan-favorite episodes this season — series creator Charlie Brooker still has some fresh horrors up his sleeve. Read my full review of the season—featuring Rashida Jones, Tracee Ellis Ross and Issa Rae here.

Your Monster

Okay, another oldie but goodie—I’m so behind on supporting my girl Melissa Barrera! When Hollywood’s zionists came for her neck for supporting Palestine, she continued to thrive and still educates her social media audience on the genocide daily. So, I had every intention of watching her 2024 Sundance romantic comedy and just never did. But I finally watched last week before attending a panel with the filmmakers and when I say this movie has everything, I mean everything: Rom-com-horror-fantasy-MUSICAL. And it’s brilliant at every genre. Melissa plays Laura who gets dumped at her hospital bedside when her horrible boyfriend can’t deal with her illness anymore. Recovering alone in her childhood home, she meets the Monster (Tommy Dewey) whose been hiding under her bed and in her closet. With a little help and love from Monster, Laura learns to tap into her long-simmering rage.

Watch Your Monster on HBOMax.

Stay Watchin’,

Brooke

*Spoilers for The White Lotus, Season three below*

The girls are upset about this underwhelming season three of The White Lotus—an anthology series that follows a revolving cast of wealthy white people as they vacation in tropical locales of the exorbitant titular resort chain. Among those fans on social media who are devastated by the death of a fan-favorite character, are fans who are confused by the plot holes and annoyed by the finale’s lack of resolution and overall sense of meaninglessness.

But it was always going to end this way.

And I don’t just mean the 50-’leven instances of Chelsea foreshadowing her and Rick’s deaths throughout the season. Or the glaringly-obvious-to-anyone-with-eyes fact that rich hotelier Hollinger didn’t kill Rick’s dad because he is Rick’s dad. Not even that the audience would excuse Lochlan as just a sweet confused boy instead of someone who sexually assaulted his own brother, or that they’d blame the female wellness worker for Rick’s violent rampage—boys and men are rarely responsible for their own actions and somehow there’s always a woman to blame instead.

Yet, in a season of predictable and unsatisfying events, the most predictable of all is that creator/showrunner/writer/director/producer Mike White would frame white male violence as an inevitable force, corrupting everything around it without any hope (or desire) for change.

Of course there are white men like Timothy Ratliffe (Jason Isaacs) the wealthy patriarch who would rather murder (most of) his family and kill himself—out of “love” for them, no doubt!—before confessing that he’s led them into financial ruin and the shame of federal criminal charges. And sure, there are men like Rick (the criminally underused Walton Goggins) who, instead of seeing the love staring them in the face would rather pursue a decades-long vendetta over the love he didn’t get in his childhood. And of course, both of these kinds of violent men end up corrupting the most vulnerable people around them—women, children, people of color.

Obviously I mean Chelsea (an adorable Aimee Lou Wood) who gets caught in the literal crossfire, and Ratliffe’s wife and children who get caught in the metaphorical one. But also, because of the cycle of global white male violence, gentle Buddhist Gaitok corrupts into a typical cop who would shoot in the back an unarmed man holding a dead woman; Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) and her son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) become complicit in murder in exchange for 1% of the murderous Greg’s ill-gotten fortune (though be serious, people who think Belinda “betrayed” her one-night stand by not going into business with him after she became wealthy: Belinda had no obligation to financially tie herself to that random man she met a few days ago and made tentative pillowtalk plans with. And idk, maybe Belinda was Tanya’s one-night stand and she was never obligated either!). And Hollinger, the originator of this cycle of global white male rage and violence, in a full-circle moment, gets hoisted by his own petard.

And still, the world of The White Lotus keeps turning. Nobody even seems to notice that 5 people were murdered at the hotel they’re staying at. What was it all for?

Yes, we see structural whiteness is a corrupting power. Structural male violence is a corrupting power. Structural greed is a corrupting power. But we saw that in season one (though it’s stated much better by bell hooks, who named our intersecting systemic oppressions as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy). So, what now?

White’s just a writer, after all, just an observer of human behavior making TV shows. What else could this creative “genius” do anyway, other than just observe and report on our global white, patriarchal, violent reality for entertainment (and a lot of money)?How many times can he dig from this same well without providing any new insight or stakes or even—God forbid—a call to action?

At least for another season, apparently, as location scouting for season four was reportedly already underway before the season 3 finale even aired.

Because what the world needs is even more capaganda: capitalist propaganda masquerading as entertainment that humanizes the ruling class and makes an eager working class audience sympathize with their self-made plights. Worse, capaganda as entertainment makes workers feel even less inclined to revolt because they see that the wealthy aren’t as happy with their choices as it seems, and perhaps that karmic justice is enough. (I have a theory that AppleTV produces my favorite show Severance for these same reasons, but my theory is still baking in the oven at the moment.)

Both of White’s shows Enlightenment and The White Lotus rub me the wrong way because I see a white male writer come to the same conclusions about power—racial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power— and turn away from any sort of revolutionary application of that knowledge. As if the knowledge itself is enough and he can breathe a sigh of relief and pat himself on the back for doing “the work”. It’s actually infuriating to watch white male creators get lauded and paid for making less coherent (and therefore less dangerous) points about white male violence than the people who are most victimized by it and who have been screaming about this on pain of death for actual centuries with no relief. It’s all, at the least, unimpressive and unserious.

After season one’s offensive storytelling where the Hawaiian and Black characters at the Hawaii White Lotus were rendered backdrops for white enlightenment, I wrote a piece for Refinery29 on White and “The Limits of White Self-Critique.” It still applies:

“Excellent performances (and performers) like Natasha Rothwell as Belinda are wasted as the Black and Hawaiian characters — the ones actually best suited to critique their white oppressors through the lenses of race, class and gender — are sidelined to focus on The Real Story: the humanity of rich and powerful white people. In the characters’ fight for power, the rich white people emerge victorious as ever, the exploited white hotel manager winds up dead, and the Black and Hawaiian characters barely even get to play. This is, after all, a six-episode story about white people for white people, created, written and directed by one white man, (pun inherent) Mike White.

The White Lotus is far from alone in its shallow, self-congratulatory attempts at white introspection. Most of the so-called prestige dramas center on horrible, rich white people, with their racist, classist obliviousness as part of the appeal: Big Little Lies, Billions, Arrested Development, Succession, The Crown, The Undoing, and on and on.

Each show parades these horrible rich white characters across the screen and we’re supposed to laugh or shudder at or empathize with their messy ridiculousness, as each series flirts with the idea of disrupting the status quo. We cheer when that one outsider character calls bullshit, and — like The White Lotus’ Belinda, who believes her rich white client is really going to invest in her and make her dreams come true — we think maybe this time, maybe on this show, things will be different.

But it’s Lucy with the football. Before the nails even come out, the white savior jumps down from the cross, unscathed. The rich and powerful are only more humanized, more excusable. Even if individuals change, the system of the powerful remains powerful; the system of the rich remains rich; the status quo remains intact.

White explains what’s going on in all of these Rich White Shows (perhaps unintentionally) in an illuminating and stunningly meta interview with Vulture. Responding to a criticism he read that white people like The White Lotus because they get to remain the center of the conversation and nothing ever changes, he says, “If I took that assumption to its fullest, it would make it so that I shouldn’t even be creating anything anymore. It’s a deep criticism of who’s getting what stories made, which is a completely valid conversation.”

White — who, again, wrote and directed every episode of The White Lotus by himself — has taken the critique of whiteness being centered in his show and distilled it into the nonsensical conclusion that “white people shouldn’t exist or create things.” Even as White finds the question of “who’s getting what stories made” to be a “completely valid conversation,” clearly, there are limits. After all, what would happen to him if marginalized people got the chance to tell stories too?

Shot: “[O]bviously, it would threaten me in some way! Because this is all I can do! I don’t know how to be a general manager of a hotel!” He says.

Chaser: “I’m that white kid, I guess,” he says. “Am I going to hate myself? What do you do?”

Therein lies the frustrating end of the line for white wokeness. If you do a little digging beneath the surface of white supremacy and all of its damage, you quickly hit on the obvious answers to the question: What do you do with all of this undeserved power? These answers are carved in stone with lightning, like The Ten Commandments: give up your power; redistribute your wealth. And the white woke’s response to those obvious truths is, “But wait, like, not really, though, right? I’m that white kid. Am I going to hate myself?”

White people hating themselves is useless to us. Nobody asked for that and nobody cares how they feel about themselves. It’s a common deflection —the entire argument for why Critical Race Theory shouldn’t be taught in schools is that it might make white children feel bad about the legacy of white supremacy. It’s a plugging of the ears to silence the cries for what we’re really demanding: Reparations Now. Give up your ill-gotten power. Give up your stolen wealth. But they can’t seriously entertain that. (“Obviously, it would threaten me in some way!”)

So instead, Mike White ate his own lotus, took every dime of that HBO money and made himself the creator, the writer and director of every episode of a show that takes place on stolen land, using marginalized characters and colonization as props, instead of giving a shit in a suitcase about putting Hawaiians in place to tell their own stories — in front of and behind the camera.

It’s a satire of a satire within a satire.

“The show will move on to a different exotic-to-white-people location, presumably with new people of color to disappear into the background of The Real Story.

But perhaps Mike White might cede a sliver of power and bring on, say, a Connie Britton girlboss type to showrun next time. The title of the aforementioned Vulture interview is “Mike White Accepts the Criticism,” after all.

Or perhaps, like White admits in the interview, “accepting” criticism after you’ve been paid, praised and promised even more is literally the least one can do. “Accept” the criticism all the way to the bank. The series enjoyed steady ratings through the finale and dominated Twitter talk during its Sunday night run. The Emmy buzz for the show continues to grow. The people who keep winning are the Shanes of the world (who are really just Armonds but with the promise of white supremacy actually fulfilled). So, what incentive is there to change?

Which leaves the marginalized viewer and critic alike as Paula [the only Black guest of season one, a young friend of a rich white family]. We, the Black friend^TM, have come to the realization that our white liberal shows love to talk a good talk, sprinkle in a little “white supremacy is wrong!” Add a dash of, “Obviously, imperialism was bad!” (an actual line from The White Lotus season one recited by Steve Zahn). But when it’s time to act, to divest, and to redistribute — both on the page and screen and behind the camera — they bristle at the thought and slink away with White’s infuriating conclusion on their lips: Am I supposed to hate myself?

They’ll serve us up the next unseasoned critique of whiteness (here’s looking at you, Nine Perfect Strangers), but now we know. The camel won’t be educated, dragged or willingly walk through the eye of the needle. And we’re left to decide if we want to burn it all down in a righteous blaze or be complicit in exchange for a glimpse into a world in which we were never meant to belong.”

What did you think of season 3? Let me know in the comments.

Stay watchin’

Brooke

In the midst of disaster, Mister Rogers always taught us to look for the “helpers.” We’re certainly living through a disastrous age, and there are people still working hard to help change people’s minds and inspire them to act. These bingeable streaming shows and films will either light a fire under you to keep going or help you find the joy in our weary world, or both. Here’s my list of the best things to binge this week:

Adolescence — It’s the number one show on Netflix for a scary-good reason. Well-written and acted, the four-episode limited series out of the UK marks a remarkable debut turn from 15-year-old star Owen Cooper, who plays the adolescent in question, Jamie, who is suspected of being an incel murderer of a girl in his school. While the show is being hailed as an unprecedented look into the misogynistic radicalization of young boys on the internet, it’s actually quite precedented to center disturbed boys at the expense of the girl and women victims at the end of their knives.

True to form, the girl that’s murdered in Adolescence is not the focus of any of the four episodes. Her devastated Black girl best friend is tossed to the side after the second episode, never to be seen again. Girls are merely collateral to this series as it focuses on the real concerns: what’s going on with this boy and the dad who raised him. Even the boy’s sister and mom are no more than props to be pushed around at the dad’s whim, to show how deeply disturbed and broken the dad is. Do they ever get to break at the terrors they’ve had to live with and sleep next to for years? Who knows. Who cares. This is about the boys.

Still, it has sparked worthwhile conversation among parents and teachers about what toxic masculinity and misogynistic men are teaching young boys through podcasts, chat forums like Reddit and 4Chan and how to recognize the signs of a little incel-in-the-making. For that reason, and to encourage people to be more aware and involved in the lives of the boys in their care, it’s worth a watch.

Watch Adolescence on Netflix.

Clean Slate — On the week to celebrate Trans Day of Visibility, there’s no better time to start the quick binge of this Prime Video series. Starring LaVerne Cox in the classic rom-com trope of city girl returning home to small-town Alabama, Clean Slate follows Desiree Slate (Cox) as she reconnects with her father Harry (George Wallace), whom she hasn’t seen in 17 years—since before she transitioned. This sweet, father-daughter reunion story subverts expectations by allowing the shocked and stubborn Harry to still be accepting and loving of his daughter immediately and for Desiree’s transness not to be the butt of the joke in this comedy. With the help of Desiree’s childhood (and closeted queer) best friend Louis (D.K. Uzoukwu), Desiree shakes the town up and helps everyone become a little bit more free. Clean Slate is a wholesome good time that’s long overdue.

Watch Clean Slate on Prime Video.

Have your watched the BGW exclusive interview with Severance star Tramell Tillman yet? Upgrade to paid to watch here.

Number One on the Call Sheet: Part 1 & 2 — This two-part documentary film features many of Black Hollywood’s biggest stars and tells the story of the industry through their rise. Part one focus on leading Black men, while part two centers leading Black women. Part two is the better half, as it’s more in-depth and honest about the challenges that Black women have faced in Hollywood (considering that Halle Berry is still the only Black woman to win Best Actress at the Oscars) and part one is more of a celebration of the men with a “we’ve still got a long way to go” caveat clipped onto the end.

There are a few headscratchers in the mix on part two who shouldn’t really be there—and especially not at the expense of legendary #1s on the call sheet like Sanaa Lathan, and Queen Latifah. But overall, it’s an interesting documentation of Black film history and what it took to rise in an industry that remains determined to shut the door on us.

Watch Number One on the Call Sheet on AppleTV+.

One of Them Days— I never reviewed this hilarious buddy comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA back when it premiered over MLK weekend, but that’s not because I didn’t like it. I love it! I did some consulting work with the Sony marketing team and I like to avoid the appearance of impropriety at all times. But this film is LOL funny and follows two best friends on the first of the month scrambling to make back their stolen rent money by 6 P.M. I love a comedy with a message and this one is chock full of them—calling out gentrification, capitalism and all the other anti-Black systems that try to keep us down. Just like in real life, in the end, it’s community that helps us survive. If you need a genuine laugh and a bestie in your head that knows what you’re going through, this film is it.

Watch One of Them days on Netflix.

Survival of the Thickest S2— I guess this is going to be a Netflix-heavy post today! Season two of comedian Michelle Buteau’s show about Mavis, a 30-something, plus-sized fashion stylist making in the big city, is out now. From an Italian villa to AfroPunk, the show takes Mavis around the world and back as she finds herself and helps others do the same through fashion. The show centers fat bodies, queer bodies, Black women’s bodies and all the intersections in between, in a way we never get to see on screen. It’s a charming, quick binge that will leave you feeling warm and fuzzy.

Watch Survival of the Thickest on Netflix.

The Residence — The always excellent Uzo Aduba hasn’t really gotten her due since her award-winning supporting actress turn in Orange is the New Black. But that may change with The Residence, Shonda Rhimes’ new show from her Netflix deal. If not for that pesky Adolescence being #1 for two weeks straight, The Residence would definitely hold that spot. Aduba stars as Detective Cordelia Cupp, a clearly neurodivergent problem-solver brought in to investigate the death of the White House butler (a fantastic Giancarlo Esposito). When the powers that be are ready to call the death a suicide, Cupp puts the clues together that determine he was actually murdered in seconds. But this Agatha Christie who-dunnit will take 8 episodes for even the brilliant Cupp to solve. With great turns from Susan Kelechi Watson, Edwina Findley and Randall Park, it’s well worth the fun and funny ride.

Watch The Residence on Netflix.

The Studio — This comedy about a bumbling film studio head who wants to make great films but is hamstrung by an art-hating capitalist CEO hits a little too close to home. Enemy number one during the writer’s strike was Warner Bros. head David Zaslav and he continues unabatted with the same mission as the CEO in The Studio. But if you have to cry about the state of the industry, why not laugh? That’s show creator and Seth Rogen’s mantra, I guess. The series follows Matt (Rogen) as his old boss Patty is fired for greenlighting too many women films and he’s promoted in her place if he promises to stop trying to make great films but focuses on ridiculous money-grab IP like, say, a Kool-Aid movie. Matt easily drops his morals for the chance to be a studio head and we’re off to the races as his new job turns him into everything he claims to hate. It might be a little too inside-baseball to know that Matt’s old boss Patty, played by the hilarious Catherine O’hara, is a version of IRL disgraced Sony producer Amy Pascal whose racist emails leaked in the Sony Email Hack of 2014—but you can still enjoy the show without knowing all the little nuances. With The Studio, it seems all of Hollywood knows the truth about studio execs—they’re driving this industry straight into the ground and they don’t care, as long as they can make a buck on the way down.

Watch The Studio on AppleTV+.

******Warning: spoilers for Season 2 of Severance******

As you must know by now, my vote for Best Show on Television is Severance —the workplace dark comedy that ponders what it would take for someone to sever their brain in order to avoid the pain or even discomfort of being alive. As I’ve written before, Severance is a brilliant metaphor for capitalism and slavery, and no character on the show has had a bigger breakout than our favorite handsome overseer, Seth Milchick.

Played with a delicious devilishness by Tramell Tillman, Milchick is a labyrinth of emotion in season 2 as the newly promoted manager of the Severance floor at Lumon Industries. The only Black man in Lumon leadership that we know of, Milchick plays the role of keeping the severed innies in line during the workday and wrangling their wayward outies at their respective homes, while riding the sickest motorcyle you’ve ever seen. But why is this handsome, stylish Black man there? What motivates him to play this role at a company that proves in season two that it is, in fact racist, and it is, in fact, doing slavery?

I caught up with my fellow HBCU grad and 1985-baby Tramell Tillman to talk all this Milchick and the Black Breaking Point we’ve all been through in corporate America.

Here’s a brief transcript of my SPOILER-FILLED interview with Tramell. *Paid subscribers, scroll down and watch the full video interview below the fold.*

BLACK GIRL WATCHING: This was such an amazing season. You did such beautiful work on season two. I did not think they could top season one, but y’all came back with season two like, ‘You have not seen anything.’ So I, as a Kier devotee, I am super just thrilled with how this season turned out and.

TRAMELL TILLMAN: Thank you.

BLACK GIRL WATCHING: There’s no worries about spoilers, so we’re gonna go all into [season 2] and all of your beautiful work. But first, I wanted to talk to you about when I met you last month. I was at your Rising Star Award event and you just gave such a beautiful speech. You specifically asked for family to challenge you to get you back on the right path if you’re not there. And that just felt like it spoke so much to your character and who you are. And I would just love to hear why you chose an award acceptance speech to take the time to be like, ‘We’re in this together and I want to be accountable to you.’

TT: Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. For me, the theme, you know, to dream forward, you know, I really meant when I said that that’s that’s a scary thing to do [with] where we are right now. And I’m a person who is a dreamer. And it feels as though there’s so much cost to activate your dream or move on the dream or have a conviction towards something because we’re in such a polarized world right now. And anything that’s said or done, you are canceled or pushed out and your whole lifestyle has changed and whatnot. So what it was for me was just speaking from pure honesty.

I do dream and I do dream big. And I want us all to have opportunities to grow and learn and share our art and create with one another. But there’s a lot of resistance to that. We’re still fighting with each other. We’re still wrestling with one another. And it’s disheartening to see. And so I do my best to be part of the solution to make myself available to other Black creatives, other queer creatives to advocate as much as I can in the ways that I can because I do understand the importance of community. And while I have been very fortunate to travel the world doing what I love to do and work with all of these wonderful, talented legends, you know, I also understand and know for a fact that there’s not many people that look like us that are in these rooms. That should change.

And so, if it does mean advocating for a Black hairstylist to come on board because she has the knowledge and the expertise to take care of my hair, then I am going to advocate for that. If it does mean having more PAs of color on set, so they can have the opportunities to learn how a set works and operates and understanding financial management on set and producing and so forth and so on, then I’ll be a part of that as well.

BGW: I love that. Speaking of being the only one set, we have Milchick, Seth Milchick, the only Black man in at least upper management that we’ve seen. And I remember you saying, I think several times now, you’ve said that your first question to Ben Stiller [the director and executive producer] and Dan Erickson, the creator of the show, was, ‘Is Milchick Black? Does he know he’s Black?’ But I never heard the answer. What answer did they give? What was the conversation that you all ended up having to create how Milchick’s Blackness shows up in the world?

TT: I laughed because there was no answer.

BGW: Ooh!

TT: You know, it basically evolved into something that is still very much alive now. It’s a continual conversation. You know, and I wondered if they knew what I meant by that question. Cause I’ve been in a few conversations with friends and whatnot and we’re talking about dating and such like that. And they say, ‘Well this person’s Black.’ And then we jokingly say, ‘Well, do they know they Black?’ And it creates this whole different world because there’s that connection to culture, a connection to who you are as a person, the realization that you are in a world that does not look like you. And so you will very well be treated differently. So the depth of the question also was connected to whether or not we’re approaching race in season one, you know. ‘Cause that was very important to me.

And the reason why I asked that question is because I had learned that Ben [Stiller] specifically wanted Milchick to be Black. And there was nothing in the show that spoke to his Blackness. So I was thinking, well, why do you want him in Black? What is that? You know, so that’s why we continue to have these conversations around Blackness. And when we were exploring season two, Dan Erickson had approached me and said, ‘What do you think about Milchick having these paintings from Keir that are basically blackface?’ And I asked him, I said, ‘Well, how does he respond to this?’ Because that’s going to be indicative of where his journey goes. And it’s also going to tell us how our Black audiences are going to respond or disconnect or connect with this character. And so that led to even more dialogue.

Working with Sydney Cole Alexander, who plays Natalie, and when she presented me with the Kier paintings, Ben pretty much was like hands off. He said, y’all do what y’all wanna do. And I asked for rehearsal space and we got the time to get together and Natalie and I chatted and bonded and everything. And so, when it was time to film, there was direction that Ben would give us, but for the most part, it was us, me and her feeling the scene out. And she would throw me something, I was like, ‘I see you, let me throw that back. Okay, we doing this.’ So it was really, very collaborative, as it should be when it comes to dealing with Black characters or characters as a whole that are not often displayed in such a specific way as we see with Severance.

BGW: So I love that you and Sydney have that relationship because Milchick and Natalie obviously do not, you know, he is reaching out to her for anything— like, ‘Connect with me, please.’ Like, ‘Let me see—let me know that I’m not in this by myself.’ And she’s like, ‘Not me! I’m not the one! Don’t don’t try that.’ So I am interested in like what what was going through Milchick’s head when he’s seeing these paintings. So, he’s obviously not OK with it. He’s obviously disturbed with it enough to put it away in the back of his closet and never see it again. So what’s his rationale for you as you’re as you’re, you know, bringing this to life? What’s what’s Milchick’s rationale for why he’s upset by these paintings?

TT: Well, my interpretation is that he is very surprised by this. It is a performative effort in corporate inclusion that is absolutely ridiculous, right? And as a person who has worked in the corporate world, I’ve been in that space. I know exactly what that feels like. And to send another Black employee that happens to be fair skinned to give you these paintings as the Board is watching is extremely off-putting. And just stepping away from Milchick’s, you know, response to it, but more so just the show at large, it speaks to, you know, the colorism aspect.

There’s a little bit of—and I hate to distill it to this point—but this is what it reminds me of: it’s kind of like the field Negroes versus the house Negroes, because she is closer to whiteness and she is closer to the Board. And so, now she is coming down from the Board to go down to the field to send this guy this gift from the board—I know, that kind of feeling as well. And the Board is watching. They won’t show themselves, but they are making their presence known. And so his job is to receive this with grace. And that is also part of his performance review. So not only is he unable to enjoy it authentically, because he is going to be evaluated on how he’s done, but he can’t connect with the only other person of color that’s in a high position that we see in the world of Lumon.

And one thing that I appreciate in episode [five] is that there was conversation of taking that scene out where Milchick and Natalie connect before he goes into the performance review. Before he goes into performance review, they’re standing outside the hallway. They were gonna remove that scene. They were gonna remove it. And I said, no, you need to keep that. It’s really important to keep that because we need to see how this man is still wrestling with what he just experienced. And it wasn’t enough for him to take this iconography and just push it away and then it’s done. That’s not how it works. That’s also not reflective of human behavior.

If someone does something that is jarring, you’re trying to do everything you can to make peace with it. And so we needed that scene. We needed Natalie. We needed to see her make a decision if she was going to give something to him or not at all, or basically insinuate that it’s, “Not right now,” because [Lumon boss] Drummond is waiting.

BGW: is that what she was communicating? Like maybe at a later date, but not now?

TT: That is up for interpretation.

Paid subscribers can watch the full 32 minute video interview with Tramell Tillman on Severance and the Black Breaking Point below:

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Every week, more news drops from the legal battle surrounding the nightmare production of the blockbuster rom-dram It Ends With Us. The film’s star Blake Lively has sued the film’s director Justin Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer Studios for sexual harassment and retaliation. Baldoni and Wayfarer have denied the claims and have countersued Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds for defamation, extortion and breach of contract. Many of Lively’s on-set complaints around sexual harassment stemmed from feeling “uncomfortable” with things her director and co-star Baldoni said and did during filming, including adding sex scenes and improvising moves that were not in the original script. Baldoni has countered that an intimacy coordinator was made available to Lively before production began and Lively declined to meet with the IC, leaving him to meet with the IC alone and recap what they coordinated to Lively later on set.

While the case won’t be heard in court until March 2026, this is truly a worst-case scenario production that artists should be invested in learning from—not for the sake of tabloid salaciousness, but to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Yet, there still seems to be a prevalent backlash to the profession in general among top stars.

Just yesterday, a clip from a Vanity Fair interview with Gwyneth Paltrow (52) went viral after she said she felt “stifled” by the presence of an intimacy coordinator during sex scenes with her co-star Timothee Chalamet (29) on the set of their new film. Paltrow—who was infamously victimized by Harvey Weinstein and spoke out against him during the #MeToo movement—stopped the intimacy coordinator from choreographing a sex scene, saying: “I was like, ‘Girl, I’m from the era where you get naked, you get in bed, the camera’s on.’” She told the intimacy coordinator “We [Chalamet and I] said, ‘I think we’re good. You can step a little bit back.”

Anora star Mikey Madison (25) also came under fire when she admitted in an interview that filmmaker Sean Baker gave her the option of an intimacy coordinator and she declined because she felt comfortable with Baker (54).

Paltrow and Madison aren’t alone; Sean Bean, Toni Collette, Michael Douglas, Kim Basinger are just a few more who have spoken against the present of intimacy coordinators on set. But in an industry that’s infamously unsafe, it’s paramount that we start doing things in a different way.

In the new world that artists build, I believe intimacy coordinators are essential to a safe and liberating production. But I had no idea just how radical the profession could be until I met up with Veronica Burt, an intimacy coordinator and my colleague in the WIF 2024 fellowship. At an afternoon tea for WIF fellows, Veronica introduced herself and what she does and her approach totally blew me away. I had to interview her and find out more. Here’s what she had to say about the future of her profession and the “consent-forward” world we could have:

This interview has been edited and condensed. Paid subscribers can listen to the full audio interview on the BGW podcast Another Possible World below:

BLACK GIRL WATCHING: When we were all introducing ourselves at the tea for Women in Film Fellows for 2024, and you were introducing yourself as an intimacy coordinator—the only one in our program—and what it is that you do, I was just so impressed and excited about it, because I do think there are some misconceptions about what it means to be an intimacy coordinator. So I would love it if you would just start off by saying what it is that you do as an intimacy coordinator. What is an intimacy coordinator?

VERONICA BURT: Totally. I explain it as someone that works to ensure an actor’s boundaries are being maintained on set. That’s one part of the job. A second part of the job is liaisoning that information to all the parties that need to know that, whether that be a producer, a director, a DP. And then the third component is choreographing said intimacy. So, those are kind of the three branches of work that I do. Working with actors to maintain boundaries, liaisoning with departments to make sure that everyone has that information, and then choreographing.

So there’s a lot of real technical parts to that, right? Like the choreographing is very specific. Working with wardrobe on modesty garments is very specific. And then there’s also this like emotional social component to it as well, which is a lot of the work with actors and a lot of the work to navigating, sharing that information with other people on set and navigating the power dynamics of that.

BGW: That’s really, really important. And I loved hearing about your background too, like how, like all of the different parts of your experiences and how they came into you becoming an intimacy coordinator. So can you talk a little bit about that and how you decided that intimacy coordination was the path for you?

VB: Yeah, it’s one of my favorite things about the community as a whole because everyone comes to it from such different backgrounds. So any intimacy coordinator you talk to is going to have such a unique story, which obviously is the case with all artists, but it’s because it has such a different set of skill sets that you need. But for me, I started in the entertainment business as a dancer in theater. So almost exclusively a live performance. And while I was a dancer, I was back in New York doing it, I sometimes felt like just a body, like there was no one behind that. I was just something to be used and manipulated in space. And I started to get really sick and tired of that.

As I was starting to feel that exhaustion really, I began a doula training. I truly was just like listening to a podcast and in it, they were [discussing the] horrific Black maternal mortality rates in this country. And I was like, what is going on? And so started to get involved in some like local doula groups that were doing amazing things to reverse some of those rates. And in those doula trainings, I was learning about trauma-informed advocacy, somatic work, community care work. Like I just started to understand the ways in which we can disrupt hierarchy by using collectivity and somatic trauma-informed awareness to disrupt that.

I started to bring some of those tools into rehearsals as a dancer. So, someone would say something, someone was concerned with something, there was some language that was being used—I had the tools now for non-violent communication from one of my classes I had to take for my doula training. So, I started to use that in the [performance] space and began to realize not only was it really needed in those spaces, this was a job, like people were doing that already. And so I really took the pandemic to train up properly, try things out, build my own practice.

I made the decision in 2022 to move back to Los Angeles and then started to creep my way into the film business. What was really helpful was I started off as a COVID monitor. And so, I learned how to honestly code switch between departments, trying to get people to follow the rules for this collective idea of safety. And I will say, my COVID monitoring really, really, really has informed my intimacy coordinating. Sometimes I will have to use language like, ‘I know it’s just the rules, right?’ [to get people to comply non-defensively.] You’re not the bad guy. you’re just trying to bring people in to this common thing that we all have to do together. So yeah, that was kind of my journey.

BGW: Okay, this is all really, really amazing. I wanna get into all this, but like just the overlap between the resistance to COVID cautiousness and resistance to intimacy coordinators—like I do think that it’s getting at like a common root and the doula training and intimacy coordination connection, like I feel like that also has a common root, as well. There is a separation between us and our bodies, and I feel like that comes probably from our capitalistic training [to disassociate]. When you were talking about being a dancer and feeling just like a body that’s being used, that’s what capitalism has trained all of us to do. So, the work that you’re doing is so revolutionary on so many different levels, like between the doulaing, between being the COVID monitor on set, [your job is really] putting us back into our bodies. That is probably the most anti-capitalist thing that you could be doing, which is really amazing.

VB: I’ve said this before already, but somatic community care work is really what I call it; that’s what all these jobs are, right? That’s what it all is and what it all comes down to. And oftentimes when I’m talking to a producer, because some people come to this work as fight directors or advocates for survivors of sexual assault, right? Like there’s a lot of different pathways to this. And so producers are like, ‘What’s your kind of niche or how did you enter?’ And I often am like, ‘Well, I come to this work as a dancer and doula. So I approached this job as somatic community care work.’ That’s like literally my pitch line for myself.

BGW: One of the things that you said in our tea that was it’s not your job to stop things from being sexy, but your job is to say, ‘let’s make it as filthy as possible, but within the bounds of like what’s comfortable for people. What are the things that you say to reframe people’s thinking about these things? Like, ‘This is not necessarily an indictment of who the people are, but maybe we could think about this in a different way and see how this is actually you being a person who is caring about your community on set’?

VB: Okay, there’s so many like pillars to this question, but yes, I think what I do first is try to educate producers on the scope of the job itself, right? Because some people do think that you’re an on-set therapist, right? That’s actually a different job in our industry. I have mental health first aid training, but I’m actually not equipped to offer that sort of support, right? So being clear about that. I am not a fight director, right? Sometimes people really think that intimacy coordinators automatically do fight direction as well. Some do, but it’s really important that producers don’t think that because I don’t have that skill set, right? And that’s putting actors in great danger, actually, if you have someone that doesn’t quite have those tools. So it’s communicating with them what the scope is, how this is going to go. What is the process of this?

Because so much of intimacy coordination is like, are these grand sort of ethos about how we keep actors safe, how we promote sustainability. So what does that actually practically look like on set, and it just is a lot of communication. It really, really is. And making it very clear to everyone that although you are there to support the production as a whole, your first job is to support the actor. Of course, I’m also supporting a director in this, which I think a lot of directors think that intimacy coordinators are coming in and taking over their set, when in fact, I’m offering support so that you don’t have to do a lot of that emotional labor. Like you’re free to just enact the vision because I’m taking on a lot of that work.

So yeah, I also just make it very clear to producers that I’m not there to censor anything, right? In fact, I’m really interested in the most daring, the most vulnerable version. And I’m a great believer if we have those protections in place, we have a clear understanding of what we’re doing. Actors are able to go that much further then because they have that, the boundaries are set and in place.

If you know what the parameters are, you’re able to execute the job a lot more clearly, smoothly, efficiently. So I think people get this idea that having an intimacy coordinator on set is going to disrupt efficiency. And in fact, I’m a big believer that it promotes efficiency.

BGW: That kind of leads like perfectly into the next thing that I wanted to talk about. So I don’t know if you saw Mikey Madison, the star of the movie, Anora, did an interview, Actors on Actors, with Pamela Anderson, and Pamela was asking Mikey about intimacy coordinators and if they had any on set, because, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, Anora is a sex worker, and so there is quite a bit of explicit sex scenes and nudity and all of that throughout the film. And so she was basically saying no. She felt really comfortable with her director. So she did not feel the need to have an intimacy coordinator. So when you like see interviews or actors, especially young actresses, like Mikey Madison like saying things like this, like what goes through your mind?

VB: Yeah, I mean, I always wanna advocate for an actor, which means that I’m not placing any of my own feelings onto the situation for them. Whatever they feel like their needs are, that’s great. The thing about this is that it’s not just her, right? That’s also her scene partner. It’s also the DP [director of photography]. It’s also the rest of your crew. Yes, it is a role that primarily prioritizes the safety of actors, but it’s also ensuring the professionalism of these sort of scenes so that everyone is safe on these sets. So, I think one of the issues here is the lack of specificity in the SAG [Screen Actors Guild] guidelines around intimacy coordinators. There’s been a lot of work lately as intimacy coordinators are beginning to unionize with SAG. I think that those will really change those guidelines, but right now they’re very loose. And so it’s really up to the discretion of producers if they want to have this position on set or not. So I’m hoping that there’ll be a bit more regulation there. And so then there’s just an intimacy coordinator on set. And if they are not used, right, if a director doesn’t want to use them or an actor doesn’t want to use them, fine.

They can just sit there and watch, but there’s eyes and ears out for everyone there. There’s a resource for everyone from number one on the call sheet to crafty for someone to go to should they have any issues with closed-set protocols, nudity protocols, maybe wardrobe needs some support, right? So we’ll see, but yeah, I know that she got a lot of flack and I think that’s really unfair, right?

She knows how to do her job best, right? Like she knows her character best. It’s one of the first things I always say to actors. You know your character best. I’m just here to help facilitate all the other parts around that. I’m not here to tell you how to act your role. I’m here to offer suggestions, to ask questions. I’m not here to do that. So I think, you know, she did her job beautifully. We know that. But I wish that it was just a set standard so that some of these power dynamics weren’t there so that everyone just has the resource if they need it.

BGW: I’m with you, I believe it should be a mandatory position. I feel like we’re having the same kind of situation with an opposite outcome with It Ends with Us because you have Justin Baldoni, the director of that movie, saying that, ‘Well, we offered Blake Lively an intimacy coordinator. She said she didn’t want to meet with them in advance, that she felt comfortable, she felt good.’ He’s releasing his side of the text messages saying this is what she said. So, I mean, just to go back to your point about the way that your role actually collaborates with directors as well— it would have ended with an intimacy coordinator. Like, none of this would have happened, you know? If there had been an intimacy coordinator there, just all of the problems that they were talking about would just kind of not really exist.

VB: That’s if this set had producers that were also collaborating with the intimacy coordinator, right? There’s only so much you can do if you don’t have the support of a producer on set, right? You can start to have some of these conversations, especially at this high level, where you’re working with big names, stars, and all of what comes with all of that. I think there’s a lot of mitigation and conversation and parameters that you can set, but unless you have the backup of producers being like, yes, this is what we’re doing, or yes, we’re following through with this complaint or allegation, it’s like your hands are kind of tied.

I’ve had mentors of mine that have worked at some of these higher levels and it’s like, “Better is better,” is the motto of Chelsea Pace, who’s amazing. She’s just like, you know, we’re chipping away at the thing. And sometimes it can be really hard for an intimacy coordinator when you’re leaving set and you’re like, I could have done better. I could have handled that situation better. You know, someone’s leaving upset. There was harm that was enacted on this set, you know, and it’s like, you have to remember better is better. Because you can’t be a martyr for the work either, right? And I’ve had to learn that the hard way, specifically in theater spaces, which when you’re just around a lot more, that you have to be following the same guidelines that you’re setting for everyone else in terms of taking care of yourself, treating the work in a sustainable way. It means you also have to have closure practices and those sort of things that we gift to actors. It’s important to have that for yourself too.

BGW: I love that. Tell me a little bit more about the closure practices that you do for yourself when you get it when you’re getting off of a set.

VB: Yeah, I mean, I love a voice memo. So I will often kind of do a dump for really close friends of mine, just kind of getting it out of my system, talking out the thing. The drive home is very much the time for me to get it all out of my system if something has happened. And then when I come home, I love a long hot shower. So, I try to kind of tackle both the mind and body aspect of it, Kind of like work through my thoughts, get that out of my system, verbalize the day, and then have a time to really wash that off of my being. I have friends of mine that will light a candle when they get home, when they blow it out, it’s done. The moment of the day is done. It’s over.

I also have an amazing community of intimacy coordinator friends. our group chat name is Bold and Nasty Intimacy Cohort. And because it’s such a solitary job on set—you’re a department of one most of the time—it has been amazing to build this community of other intimacy coordinators to be able to lean on, to ask questions to, because, you know, sometimes we’ll be on set and it’s a scenario that you’ve never been in. It’s the wild west of a job sometimes. And so you need people to kind of talk through situation with or help with language when you’re negotiating. Again, for me, it’s all about community. All about collectivity. And it just proves time and time again that that’s what gets us through things. Like that’s what support is, is when you do things together.

BGW: What are the ways that people in this industry can support and advocate for intimacy coordinators?

VB: A million dollar question. I think I feel really supported on set when a DP wants to actively work with me. When [the sound department] is also practicing consent practices in the way that they’re asking to mic actors and touch their bodies to adjust microphones and whatnot, right? Like when the whole crew has this consent-forward collaborative approach, again, it makes the shoot more efficient. We make our days when everyone works together in this way and it makes for better art because if I’m actually in communication with the DP, we can really mask something well. We can pick up on this detail. We can tell the story that much better. So I just think that folks that are working below-the-line on sets can just support the work by actually speaking to the intimacy coordinator, by saying hello, by welcoming that role. A lot of times ICs are coming in for one or two days on a long shoot, so we don’t have a lot of the relationships or rapport that you build on sets. So when folks just bring us in, we’re able to do our work that much better. So I would say that’s a very small thing that anyone on a set.

I think educators can continue to make sure that young artists understand the role, understand the power that they can gain by having someone on these sets. I think that actors with big platforms can continue to talk about how productive and helpful these positions are. I loved last year hearing about Emma Stone in Poor Things. She was someone that was like, ‘Well, I’ve worked with this director before, so I feel like I’m gonna be fine. I know this DP really well. I’m a producer. I have a lot of title power already on this set.’ And I’m not sure who was the person that pushed—maybe other producers. Someone there said, ‘No, let’s just have an intimacy coordinator on that set.’ And then she spoke about how helpful that was for her, especially as someone who had to navigate multiple roles on that set. Because an intimacy coordinator is helping you process and remove some of that weight so that then she could go do her role. So I loved how she really spoke about how she kind of came around to it. Those sort of conversations really help as well.

I have a lot of hope with the next generation for how things will shift.

Paid subscribers can listen to the full audio interview on the BGW podcast Another Possible World below:

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Before I get into this week’s post, a special note for BGW subscribers! After the Severance finale next week, come right here to BGW for my spoiler-laden interview with the show’s breakout star, Tramell Tillman, AKA Mr. Milchick, AKA Mr. Milkshake! Paid subscribers will also get to see the whole video interview, so if you’ve been waiting to upgrade, this is the time! See you again next week!

I love critics. The work we do is so vital and necessary. As I’ve said at the launch of this platform, criticism is how we fight fascism and it’s also how we grow in critical thinking. Last year, I made my list of the best films of 2024 —many of which had only been seen on the festival circuit at that time. Now that most of the films have had a theatrical run or are streaming, the masses have had their chance to weigh in on what’s really good with these industry faves. After reading their reviews, even some films that I initially enjoyed, like Anora, I’m now looking at sideways. Check out the best critiques of the most popular films of the season.

Anora’s male fantasy of sex-worker representation— As you may have read in my piece last year, I initially enjoyed this gritty Gen-Z Pretty Woman. But since the film has left the festival circuit and more audiences have been able to view it in theaters and on streaming, I’ve been reading the reviews of sex-workers, and let me tell you, they are not on board. In a scathing and heartbreaking review/personal essay, sex worker Marla Cruz writes: “Anora embodies the dehumanizing consumer fantasy of a devoted worker who loves the consumer so much she does not conceive of her servitude as labor.” The whole piece is well worth the read.

It’s also super creepy that director Sean Baker—who has now made several films about young women sex workers in danger—made his 23-year-old (at the time) star Mikey Madison responsible for whether or not a film with a large percentage of nudity and sex scenes would have an intimacy coordinator. Madison decided that she felt comfortable enough with Baker that she didn’t want an intimacy coordinator—removing the agency of other nude cast members, including her younger co-star Mark Eydelshteyn who was 19 or 20 at the time of filming and didn’t even speak English fluently. (My next piece for BGW will be on intimacy coordinators, how they keep actors safe, and why it’s so egregious the profession is not required on set.) Madison is no stranger to acting, but this is her first lead role, and with her youth and inexperience as #1 on the call sheet, it’s really on writer-director-producer Baker to have instituted an intimacy coordinator and not scapegoated his young star to avoid having one. Creep!

Also, sex worker, therapist and educator Raquel Savage created a Red Light Rules test of four questions by which to measure the portrayal of sex workers on screen. She scored Anora a failing 1 out of 4.

Conclave’s condescending intersex representation— The most memeable film of the year, Conclave is about the process that leaders of the Catholic church undergo when it’s time to pick a new pope. Conclave didn’t really do anything for me personally because, despite the idea of “secret progressivism” in the film, the Catholic Church as an institution is still very much in power and very much unchanged at the end of the movie. Yet intersex filmmaker Pidgeon Pagonis found the film frustrating. “The world needs to know about the injustices intersex people face. And for once, we had the stage. But instead of opening the doors, Conclave left them locked.” Read the spoiler-filled review here.

Dune: Part Two’s non-existent Muslim representation— The sci-fi/fantasy epic continues in this film starring the whitest white man, Timothee Chalamet, and Zendaya on a planet called Arakkis that’s clearly Iraq and filmed in the Middle East. It’s a story of colonization and appropriation, with many white stars ripping off Arab and Muslim culture with no Arab and Muslim actors. “The film simply relegates its cultural inspirations to exotic, Orientalist aesthetics, which is frustrating at a time where such communities are openly discriminated against and demonised,” writes Furvah Shah in Cosmopolitan.

Javier Sethness for The Commoner writes: “And Broadly speaking, it is hard to dissociate the stark anti-Muslim prejudice and chauvinism against Arabs and Amazighs evident in the Dune films from current events: specifically, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The symbolic violence seen in Villeneuve’s erasure of the centrality of Islam and MENA culture to Herbert’s fictional universe for his own adaptation is ironically part of the same continuum as the ongoing mass-violence committed against Arabs and Muslims, especially in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Occupied Kashmir, Syria, Iraq, Xinjiang, and Burma (Myanmar), among other places.”

Emilia Perez’s offensive and retrograde Mexican and trans representation— This film about a trans Mexican cartel leader who later gives back to her victims’ families through charity work, was not filmed in Mexico, starred zeroes Mexican actors in main roles and was written and directed by a white French man who does not speak English or Spanish. It’s no wonder that Mexicans were outraged by the film: “It shows a Mexico full of stereotypes, ignorance, disrespect and profiting from one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises,” Mexican actor Mauricio Morales tweeted. “Maybe. .. just maybe, believe the Mexicans.” GLAAD echoed these criticisms in a round-up of reviews of why its also “a step backward for trans representation,” noting that the first reviewers hyping the film as “progressive” were cisgender and not trans”:

“Who gets to dictate what “progress” looks like: the well-meaning cis people desperately trying to prove they’re not transphobic by hyping up a regressive mess, or the actual LGBTQIA+ community who have been speaking out against it since the now-infamous “from penis to vaginaaaaaaa” song clip started making the rounds on social media?”

Mo’s “disneyfied” take on Palestinian struggle: I wrote a raving review of season 2 of the Netflix TV show Mo, the show about a Palestinian refugee seeking asylum in Houston for the last 22 years of his life. The comedy shows not only the plight of what Palestinians endure as “stateless” people in a crumbling American dream, but also the horrendous U.S. immigration system. However, The Middle East Eye had serious concerns about the only Palestinian show on TV, calling it “the most frustrating view of the year”:

“Mo 2 is a Disneyfied version of the Palestinian cause: a confused, watered-down domestic comedy that wants to have its cake and eat it; an irrefutable emotional saga with a lot of heart that nevertheless feels ill-fitting in the morally and politically charged post-7 October world.

The importance of Mo in maintaining the Palestinian narrative at the forefront of popular American culture is unquestionable; yet for anyone absorbed or engaged with Palestine outside the US, it offers little but rehashed ideas in a reductive form.” Ouch!

No Other Land’s “normalization” of Israeli apartheid: This is another film that I marked as one of the best movies of 2024, and is now an Oscar winner for Best Documentary—still, as I predicted last year, with no distributor. For Palestinians who have been able to see the film at festivals or indie theaters, there has been some critique, not so much about the film, but it’s co-star and director, Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham. Though he is essentially a “pariah” in Israel after his involvement in the film and criticism of the Israeli government, he still manages in his press tour and even on the Oscar’s acceptance speech stage to center Israeli feelings over Palestinian lives in what Mondoweiss has called “liberal Zionist hasbara” [meaning propaganda]. The BDS Movement has derided the film as an act of “normalization,” of Israel’s atrocities in and occupation of Palestine that partners with Israelis for validation, and has called for a boycott of the film”:

“Palestinians do not need validation, legitimation or permission from Israelis to narrate our history, our present, our experiences, our dreams, and our resistance, including artistic resistance, to the colonial system of oppression that denies us our freedom and inalienable rights,” the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel that founded the BDS Movement said in a statement. “It is therefore imperative for us to challenge the racist conditions, whether covert or overt, imposed by the colonial West and its hegemonic institutions, which do not platform Palestinians except with the permission or validation of Israelis.”

Wicked’s lack of character development: On a lighter note: y’all know I love me some Wicked: Part One, and consider it the most radical film of 2024, teaching us how to fight fascism through fiction. I even compared the film to the Broadway musical to the book. But I’d only seen the Broadway musical on YouTube prior to writing my piece, and only after having watched the film. YouTuber The Writer’s Block has studied the Broadway musical and raises some excellent points in this video essay on why the film adaptation misunderstood the Broadway musical. What’s funny is that the musical adaptation and the film adaptation were written by the same people, so perhaps “misunderstood” isn’t the right word, but The Writer’s Block makes a case for why the adapters and Jon Chu as a filmmaker undermined plot, character development and visual story from the musical in favor of visual spectacle in the film. Elphaba’s character arc is also a big sticking point for The Writer’s Block, because she starts out confident, she wears stylish clothing and doesn’t have much room to grow from beginning to end as compared to Elphaba on Broadway. Cynthia Erivo has talked about how she never wanted Elphaba to be played as a “joke,” but there is something lost when the protagonist has no real character flaws. The only thing I strongly disagree with from the essay is that The Writer’s Block does not take into account that Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba is BLACK, as opposed to the other versions of Elphaba, and the way she moves in the world of Oz on film must be different from the way white Elphabas move on the Broadway stage due to the consequences of white supremacy. However, other points were made, including the centering of Glinda in the film vs. the Broadway musical:

There’s nothing wrong with still enjoying films even after they’ve been critiqued! The joy of critique is offering a fuller understanding of a piece and expanding the way we think about the art we consume and the impact it has on the most marginalized communities. With the widest lens possible:

Stay watchin’,

Brooke