Author: Brooke Obie

****Trigger Warning: child sexual assault allegations****

Paid subscribers can watch more Michael Jackson videos below the fold.

In early February 2026, a new batch of the Jeffrey Epstein files was released to the public (too late for the December 2025 deadline, and without full compliance under the law) by the Department of Justice. Through all of the new horrific details released, instead of the masses realizing the ubiquitousness of child rape by people with power in this country, a different narrative kept popping up on Threads: Michael Jackson wasn’t in the Epstein Files, therefore proving that he was always innocent of the many allegations of child molestation against him.

One: Michael Jackson is in the Epstein files. There is at least one picture of them together in front of a painting of a naked lady at an unspecified date from the December batch of files, but there’s no correspondence between the two suggesting Michael had any business or personal or nefarious involvement with Epstein’s pedophile ring.

And two: the Files are not a complete recounting of every famous pedophile’s actions; it was a registry of Epstein’s network of rich, powerful and blatantly white supremacist pedophiles.

The allegations against Michael, which date back to 1979 (as far as the public knows) continue to this day, with four new accusers from the Cascio family filing a lawsuit against the Jackson Estate just this month, and a long-awaited trial in November 2026, when Jackson’s companies will face off with two of his accusers, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who detailed their accusations against Jackson in the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland. (The Cascio siblings credit that documentary with “deprogramming” them from their own alleged brainwashing and abuse by Jackson. They’d originally reached a settlement with the Estate in 2020 and after the payments stopped in 2025, they’ve now sought a public lawsuit.)

But I saw this Epstein argument for Jackson’s innocence so much in February that I wondered if it was some kind of collective stan delusion or an army of bots programmed with a mission: clear Michael’s name, no matter how ridiculous the defense.

After watching Michael, the new biopic from director Antoine Fuqua in partnership with the Estate of Michael Jackson, it seems that this film had a similar mission. Because it’s bizarre to even consider a Michael Jackson movie without dealing with the many allegations against him, originally, Michael was to begin with the police raiding his infamous California ranch Neverland, in the wake of the 1993 allegations of child molestation. Then, it would flash back to the beginning of Michael’s childhood career with the Jackson 5 and show his ascension, potential downfall, and perhaps culminate in victory. Allegedly, the film was supposed to dispel 13-year-old Jordan Chandler’s 1993 allegations— something Jackson did not do in court himself. Instead, Jackson paid the Chandlers a $23 million settlement in 1994. Yet the original script, according to Puck News, went “to great lengths to minimize and downplay the actual claims and eviscerate the Chandlers,” Matthew Belloni writes. “The clear message: Michael was the actual victim here.”

An inconvenient part of Jackson’s settlement, however, was that Jackson agreed to never dramatize the child accuser or his family in any way. The Estate of Michael Jackson very expensively missed that little detail, and the film had to be reshot for $15 million more, leaving us with the empty glove that is the Michael biopic that premiered in theaters this weekend. Fans cried “conspiracy!” over the film’s 38% Rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, but, there’s no conspiracy here: it’s barely a movie—a collection of scenes is a more accurate description—and it’s simply not good.

Jackson’s nephew, 29-year-old Jaafar Jackson, stars as the pop icon in his young adult years, and is the best thing about this production. I’ve heard people call his performance ancestor veneration, the way he channels his late uncle, and I would agree. There were moments he really did look, sound and feel like Michael. That, of course, makes the many recreations of Jackson’s famous music videos and stage performances the strongest parts of the film. But the character development—even the connective tissue between scenes!—is non-existent. Beyond the music and the dancing, it’s unfortunate that Jaafar had no real, substantive material in the script to really make his performance worthwhile.

Let this film tell it, Michael is only a sweet, lonely, childlike innocent with animals for friends. He only suffers abuse and harassment from his father, and never perpetuates it against others. He manages to grow into a musical superstar, yet we never see the process or the person. He cries but is never angry; he laughs but is never funny himself; he’s loyal to his family but never resentful enough of them to be vindictive (with older and most contentious brother Jermaine Jackson as an executive producer of the film, that last part is especially laughable.)

Only the core 5 Jackson brothers and LaToya appear in the film. Sisters Rebbie and Janet and brother Randy do not appear by choice, though none have commented publicly on why. Jaafar is Jermaine’s child with Alejandra Genevieve Oaziaza, who was first Randy’s longtime girlfriend and children’s mother before she married his older brother Jermaine instead. I might skip this affair too, if I were him. The other four brothers barely register beyond background singers in the film, anyway.

The same flatness of character befalls Colman Domingo in monstrous make-up as the brutal patriarch Joe Jackson and Nia Long as Michael’s mother Katherine. They do their best, but you simply can’t fix a cobbled-together script in post. Domingo’s Joe has one speed: angry, violent, and threatening—departing only once to chuckle at Michael bringing home the (grotesque CGI) monkey, Bubbles. Long’s Katherine does nothing but eat ice cream and popcorn while comforting Michael after someone’s been mean or unfair to him. I wonder if these acting dynamos rewatched the iconic ‘90s miniseries The Jacksons: An American Dream and simply seethed over what could’ve been.

The American Dream miniseries starts with Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs’ legendary portrayal of Joseph Jackson. He’s courting and marrying Angela Bassett’s iconic Katherine, and showing how much they really did love each other and the dreams they had for themselves before having nine surviving children. We watch Joe working in the steel mills in Indiana and getting laid off. We watch him struggle and tell his pregnant wife about his job loss. We watch Katherine challenge Joe on his physical abuse of their children (LaToya’s accusations that Joe sexually abused both her and Rebbie growing up and that Katherine knew about it have never been dramatized or corroborated by Joe or Katherine).

In An American Dream Joe answers Katherine’s challenges to his abuse with some context: he’s trying to make sure the boys stay out of the gangs that are prevalent in their neighborhood! It’s the way he and every other man around him was raised! It’s all he’s ever seen or known! And the one he can’t say out loud: he’s deeply jealous of his children—especially Michael—and that they get to have the musical career he always longed for.

Of course, these excuses are insufficient relics of slavery; they do not soften or erase Joe’s rampant child abuse. But at least the horrific Joe Jackson of An American Dream gets to be a real person whose anger stems from somewhere rather than a born-angry caricature in Michael.

Likewise, Bassett’s Katherine had plenty to do in comparison. “Joe Jackson, you a liar! And a cheat! And I don’t wontcha—noooooo—I don’t wontcha, I don’t wontcha, I don’t wontcha no mo’!” Bassett got to scream in one of the most memorable scenes of the series where she catches Joe cheating on her. Some suggest that the real Katherine was more soft-spoken, like Long’s muted performance while discovering Domingo’s Joe cheating, but I’ve seen her fiery interviews, taking on Phil Donahue and other talk show hosts when she felt something was unfair. She had that Angela Bassett version in her too.

Whereas Long’s Katherine was only a victim of Joe Jackson, Bassett’s Katherine got to be complicit. After the infamous Pepsi commercial that Joe forced Michael to do with his brothers that ended up burning Michael’s scalp and causing him pain—and addiction to pain killers that would eventually end his life—Michael wanted to quit The Jacksons Tour. An American Dream shows that it was Katherine who stepped in and made sure her husband and her other children didn’t lose out on money by Michael canceling the tour. She played her trump card and he obeyed her, going on to finish the tour when he had healed enough to perform again.

One place that Michael succeeds over An American Dream is in portraying the ending of that tour. Where An American Dream ties up the tour with Michael praising Joe and Katherine for achieving their American dream through their children, Michael shows the truth of the moment. In a shock to everyone, Michael actually announced his departure from The Jacksons and that this would be his last performance with them. It’s supposed to be a major moment of growth for Michael, but we haven’t sat with this iteration of Michael long enough—and his brothers don’t seem gagged enough in the background—for this major milestone in Michael’s life to fully register. Let Michael tell it, it’s simply a battle between Michael and Joe; no one else has any strong feelings about it at all. This stripping away of complexity plagues the film from beginning to its abrupt end.

An American Dream lets us sit with Michael at every stage, and we feel how terrifying it is for him and all of the boys to be chased through hotels and down flights of stairs by rabid fans. That pandemonium feels real and palpable in a way that a couple close-up shots of fainting fans in fake audiences in Michael simply cannot capture.

But at least one major fail of An American Dream was its downplaying of Michael hearing his older brothers having sex with girls in the same room as him on tour when he was a child. “I had to share a bedroom with one of my brothers on the tours, and there was some action going on in my room every night. I could hear it,” Michael told BBC interviewer Martin Bashir in the infamous 2003 documentary Living with Michael Jackson. “I heard everything,” Jackson said. An American Dream plays the scene out more like a joke, but the events as Michael recounts them to Bashir seem scarring and present for him, even at 44 years old, and had to contribute to his warped-at-best understanding of what is sexually appropriate for children. Michael doesn’t bother with this scene at all.

Like Joe Jackson’s slavery-minded abuses of his children, these experiences of abuse and distortion of healthy sexuality in a developing child are not excuses for anyone to go on to abuse. But an abolitionist mind always wonders: how did we get here? And how can we stop this from ever happening again? These details about the sexual violation and corruption of Michael in childhood are integral to understanding why a grown adult man would go on to have so many inappropriate-at-best relationships with young children who weren’t related to him.

At this point, I’ve watched countless hours of Michael Jackson lore (from An American Dream to Bashir’s documentary, to Michael’s rebuttal to the Bashir documentary, Michael Jackson’s Private Home Movies which aired on Fox in 2003, and more).

I’ve read Michael’s own words from the August 1979 edition of Blues & Soul magazine, where his thoughts on 30-year-old men marrying 10-year-old girls in India with no social stigma were telling:

“Our way is not the only way,” he said in the interview. “You realise [sic] that there are other cultures than your own and it makes you feel small and insignificant. Like in India, I was amazed to find out a thirty year old man could marry a ten year old girl. We weren’t raised that way so we look at it weirdly. But there, it’s been happening for centuries and the parents are quite willing to give up their child.”

What a thing to say.

Finding parents who were “quite willing to give up their child” to Jackson wouldn’t prove that difficult in the West either. Leaving Neverland reckoned with the alleged grooming of Safechuck and Robson’s parents by Michael, as well, and what was said and done for them to feel comfortable letting their sons spend unsupervised time with him. We see how that irretrievably broke the parents’ relationship with their sons, as well.

But they weren’t the only parents, and Safechuck and Robson weren’t the only accusers.

Terry George alleged that he was 13 years old in 1979 when Jackson tried to have phone sex with him and essentially stopped their long-distance phone relationship once Terry got too old. A 1986 female “tomboy” accuser was 12 years old when she alleges abuse began; Jordan Chandler was 13 years old; Safechuck and Robson were 7 and 10 years old; Aldo Cascio alleges he was 7 when Jackson started abusing him in 1998; his brother Dominic was 8; their sister Marie was 12; their brother Eddie said he had sexual encounters with Michael from childhood into adulthood; Gavin Alvarizo was a 12-year-old cancer survivor when he alleged sexual abuse by Michael, for which Michael was acquitted in a 2005 trial. But you can watch a clip of the creepy-at-best interview Bashir did with Jackson and Gavin that sparked the criminal investigation in the first place here:

Of course, each accuser has been dismissed by Jackson (in his lifetime) and into today by his family and his Estate, as a “desperate money grab.” But nothing could be more of a soulless money-grab than Michael, which offers nothing new to say about Jackson —and even less than what we’ve already seen in The Jacksons: An American Dream — and now only exists to remind people of how much they love Michael’s singing and dancing so they’ll leave the theater and stream more of his music.

“You are going to miss this wave,” Jermaine Jackson allegedly told his little sister Janet after she allegedly voiced her disapproval of the film at a private family screening. “You are so jealous — just get on the wave.” Unlike the others, Janet, as the second-most iconic pop star in the family, is the least likely to need to ride this “wave.”

In the newly whitewashed, reshot film (for which Fuqua and producer Graham King reportedly got paid an extra $25 million to complete), there are no allegations against Michael to address.

Colman Domingo defended the film against this criticism of whitewashing, saying: “The film takes place from the ’60s to 1988, so it does not go into the first allegations in, what, 2005? So basically we center it on the makings of Michael, so it’s an intimate portrait of who Michael is.” Of course, that infamous first trial of Jackson took place not in 2005 but in 1993 before Jackson settled the civil case for $23 million leading the criminal case to be dropped by the state. And some of the child accusers allege sexual misconduct in the ‘70s and ‘80s, even if their accusations weren’t publicly known til 1993, so, settlement clauses notwithstanding, it wouldn’t have been impossible for a film with this timeline to address. Domingo either misspoke or doesn’t know the lore the way he probably should.

The costume department didn’t seem to know the lore either. The costumes looked like Temu knockoffs compared to the extravagant, decadent fabrics Jackson donned in real life. In a pivotal concert performance scene towards the end of the film, Jaafar’s pants looked like they split from the crotch down. In another scene, he’s performing on stage in a white shirt and in a close-up shot, we see the inside of his shirt collar is covered in brown make-up. Did I feel represented as a girlie who gets make-up everywhere often? Sure. But I’ve never seen Michael look that sloppy on stage, and someone should’ve caught these wardrobe malfunctions and gotten another take.

But the worst technical offense of the $155 million production is the horrendous generative A.I. crowds for Michael’s concerts. These scenes are as sloppy and soulless as that CGI monkey. But the emptiness and uncanny valley that these fake images invoke speak volumes for the life that’s missing from this film. A Tyler Perry wig looks less cheap and thrown together. But much like Perry’s audience, fans of Michael who have garnered a $200 million opening weekend for the film—a record-shattering figure for biopics—don’t seem to be insulted by this or the cheaping out on costumes or story, for that matter. An icon rendered flesh and blood is of no appeal to a crowd that simply wants to worship.

Jackson’s only daughter, Paris, said as much in a series of videos in 2025 on why she is not in alignment with most of her family on this biopic off her father.

“I read one of the first drafts of the script and gave my notes about what was dishonest / didn’t sit right with me, and when they didn’t address it, I moved on with my life,” she said. “I just prefer honesty over sales and monetary gain. That’s it. I don’t want anything to do with that.”

“A big reason why I haven’t said anything up until this point is because I know a lot of you guys are gonna be happy with it,” she said on Instagram Stories. “A big section of the film panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy [of him], and they’re gonna be happy with it.”

In other words: “Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance.”

With such a stellar cast and a real interest in wrestling with who he was, Michael could’ve been a nuanced portrayal of a man and a great movie. It could’ve shown us the human behind the idol. It seems a bit insulting of Michael to reduce him to so flat a portrait. Particularly for a family whom he felt at times did not see or understand him, it feels egregious that they’ll make so much profit without ever having to contend with the person he was in any real way.

I also wonder what it’s like for the accusers and their families to continue to watch the world celebrate Michael. It almost feels worse that the movie sucks and still gets so much praise from fans. It feels like a harsh reminder: there’s literally nothing Michael could’ve done—or the production, for that matter—to turn fans off to the party, as long as the music and the dancing are good.

“People just don’t care,” the director of Leaving Neverland Dan Reed said of Michael’s huge box office success. The film is obviously still propaganda, but, without addressing the allegations, it’s at least empty propaganda.

Leaving Neverland is no longer streaming, as the Estate sued HBO for breaching a non-disparagement clause in an old contract HBO signed with Michael Jackson to air his Budapest concert on their channel in 1992. It won’t be available again until HBO’s license is up in 2029. Their follow-up film Leaving Neverland II: Surviving Michael Jackson which details their fight leading up to the November 2026 trial is available on YouTube and is worth a watch.

Ironically, Leaving Neverland provided a way more nuanced portrait of Michael than his biopic. Sitting in the agony of cognitive dissonance, the accusers allow Michael his full humanity, and as a result, reclaim their own. They accepted that someone whom they loved and was so important and wonderful to them in many ways also, they allege, abused them terribly and damaged them in ways they’ll be healing from forever. How much easier should it be for us to say that someone whom we don’t know at all, but whose music and iconography deeply impacted and shaped our cultural imaginations, might be more than just an icon, but a real and fallible human being?

Because people can be incredibly gifted and abuse people. They can make music that touches our hearts and dance like the spirit of God is running through them, and abuse people. They can be the biggest pop star in the world and abuse people. They can have an incredible way about them that makes you feel seen and understood, and abuse people. They can be sweet and fun and loving and abuse people. They can bring joy to the entire world for decades and abuse people. They can be abused themselves and still abuse people.

Real people aren’t ever just one thing, despite how hard Michael wants to pretend that he was.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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****Spoilers for BEEF seasons one and two****

TW: suicide ideation and domestic violence

For the past week since I finished my Beef season two screeners, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it didn’t captivate me the way season one did. Then the head of directing in my writer-director program, Rob Spera, taught a class on Monday on what he calls the Fisher King Wound, and everything made sense.

The Fisher King, in Arthurian legend, was a king charged with guarding the Holy Grail. But he was wounded between the legs, rendering him impotent and unable to fulfill his destiny. Identifying your Fisher King Wound, as Professor Spera explained it (also in his book), is one way a filmmaker discovers their purpose. Why do we risk the instability, the rejection, the heartache that a career as a filmmaker can bring? It should be because we have something to say that the world needs to hear, and most likely, that need arises from an unhealed wound, a trauma that fundamentally rerouted our destiny and changed who we are and how we think about the world. Wrestling with this wound, healing this wound on film can be a profound gift to the world, an offering for an audience with a similar wound to know that they are not alone. My favorite films and TV shows are the ones where I can see the wrestling and the healing of the wound happening on screen.

Ryan Coogler’s Fisher King Wound, I would guess, is the trauma of slavery. His work often wrestles with what liberation is and how Black people specifically can obtain it. He struggles with this question most profoundly in his best and most awarded film to date, Sinners.

If I were to venture a guess about Beef creator Lee Sung Jin’s Fisher King Wound based solely on these two thematically similar seasons of his work, I would say that the questions he wrestles with are: Does unconditional love exist? Can you be fully seen and fully known and still be loved?

Lee’s answer in Beef season one is a resounding yes.

Season One

The Netflix series began as a limited series following Steven Yeun’s Danny and Ali Wong’s Amy as two strangers whose parking lot road rage escalates into a deadly beef for the ages. Incredibly narrow in focus, the world of Beef was anchored by Danny and Amy and the despair, loneliness and deep insecurity that led them to fixate on a perceived slight from a stranger in a parking lot. Compounded by their experiences as first generation Asian Americans in a white supremacist world (Danny is Korean, Amy is half-Vietnamese, half-Chinese), Danny and Amy grew up unwitnessed—even by their loved ones—ill-equipped to express the pain that it caused and unsafe with their families or even mental health professionals to unpack it.

“Western medicine doesn’t work on Eastern minds,” Danny says about why he refuses therapy, and turns to an evangelical Korean-American Christian church with doctrines also rooted in white supremacist ideology. His lack of accountability to fix his own life in therapy is meant to sound ridiculous. But after seeing even the wealthy and resourced Amy struggle with the same issues with an inadequate therapist, we see how insufficient a white supremacist mental health care system also is, as a tool to help these victims heal across the class divide.

When church and therapy don’t work, Amy and Danny do even more terrible things trying to be seen. They do wicked things trying to affirm their negative self-belief that they are too rotten to ever be truly loved. In the sickest twist of fate, their road rage beef allowed them to find in each other a kindred spirit in despair, matching each other’s freak in their increasingly unhinged attempts at revenge on the other. No one around them understood why they couldn’t just let it go. Even as fully grown millennial adults, they still didn’t have the language to express why this feud was not only important, but life-sustaining.

When we meet Danny in the pilot episode, he’s trying not to die by suicide, but the universe is literally telling him that he should (he thinks, incorrectly). He’s drowning in debt, he’s failed as a son and a big brother to Paul, he’s isolated, outcast and ready to end it all. He’s in the infamous parking lot of a retail store because the checkout attendant wouldn’t let him return the things he bought to assist in his suicide without a receipt.

Amy’s in the parking lot as well, and though she is, by all accounts, an extremely successful one-percenter and the breadwinner for her husband and young daughter, she is also deeply depressed. The white billionaire girlboss CEO of the retail store has been toying with buying Amy’s small business for years, with enough money that would change Amy’s life and allow her to retire and be with her daughter and stay-at-home husband. When she gets this money, she believes she’ll have the time and energy to work on healing herself. But the billionaire is still putting her through more hoops. And her Japanese husband George, whom she doesn’t yet know is cheating on her with her young, white employee, couldn’t possibly understand her struggles. He grew up wealthy and though his parents’ money is now gone, he’s transferred mommy duties to Amy to take care of him. Resentfully, she does. But because he is such a good dad, and she fears that her brokenness will infect her young daughter, she stays with George for the balance.

With all of this on her mind, she’s on edge, and feeling so small and powerless when a distracted Danny almost backs into her accidentally. She honks at him obnoxiously and with intent to shame him, blocking him in and flipping him off. Before either of them know it, their lives are changed forever.

Hoobastank’s “The Reason” plays at the end of the pilot as an almost gleeful Amy chases after a rapturous Danny who just got his lick back for her random parking lot attack the day before, and it’s clear: they can’t let the beef go because they finally found the only other person who understands why they can’t let it go. One-upping each other is the only way they can get a semblance of power and feel a sliver of joy and aliveness. They are the only people in their lives who can witness the other’s depravity and not shrink from it but meet it as a challenge to reveal how much more twisted they are inside than their loved ones could even fathom.

But Lee loves these two wretched humans, and even as he has them accidentally drive over a cliff chasing each other in a fit of desperation and unquenched rage, he offers them grace by soundtracking their cliff-diving with another millennial childhood banger: Bjork’s All Is Full of Love.

“You’ll be given love / You’ll be taken care of / You’ll be given love / You have to trust it
Maybe not from the sources / You have poured yours / Maybe not from the directions
You are staring at / Twist your head around / It’s all around you / All is full of love/ All around you.”

Watchers, I bawled my eyes out the first time I heard that song playing while these two absolute fools were at their absolute worst, driving over the edge in the dark of night. Their sight was obstructed, but all was full of love, and Lee knew exactly where he was driving them to.

The season one finale followed Danny and Amy lost in the California wilderness, injured from their car crash and completely vulnerable. They band together for survival, and over the course of two nights—and with the help of some poisonous hallucinogenic berries—they reach a defenseless state where they emotionally and psychologically meld into one person. There’s nothing sexual here, it’s pure soul-connection, soul-witnessing, soul-becoming. They have seen the absolute worst of each other and saw themselves in the other’s ugliness. In the end, they weren’t repelled but choose to snuggle closer together. Amy’s husband George couldn’t do that for her. Danny’s brother Paul couldn’t do that for him. Too much water was under those bridges. But they did it for each other.

In their final scene in the hospital, as both of these sick souls begin to mend, Amy wraps her arms around a comatose Danny, and in time, in a sign of life and hope, Danny reciprocates, reaching his arm around to hug her back. EUPHORIA!

I screamed at the TV, I cried, I rewound it to be sure I saw what I saw, yup! his arm moved! and then I screamed again. This is how you write a show. This is why you make a show! Healing people. Healing yourself. Showing people the love that they’re missing is not so far away. Hold on, and keep living.

Season Two

After winning several Emmys for the cast and crew, the limited series morphed into an anthology series, with its second season following a new stellar cast of characters unrelated to the season one cast. Moving from Los Angeles County up north to Oprah’s home of Montecito, season two is bigger in scope and scale, with twice as many main characters and a beef that stems from their roles at an elite country club.

Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan star as Josh and Lindsay, a millennial couple on the verge of a meltdown. Cuban-American Josh (whose real name is probably Jésus) is the general manager of the club he’s worked at since he was a struggling teen. Despite his rise and his wife giving him her trust fund money, Josh is secretly in debt, trying to keep up with his one-percenter clients—to no avail. No longer independently wealthy, the white and British Lindsay is aimless and adrift, trapped in a sexless marriage that is her only defining quality. With no viable choice, she plays the role of dutiful wife, occasional interior designer and overall helpmate to Josh at the club. Beefing with Lindsay and Josh are Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny’s Gen-Z waiters at the club, Austin and Ashley, a broke, interracial, newly engaged couple in the honeymoon phase of their young love. While returning Josh’s wallet, Austin and Ashley stumble upon a violent fight between Josh and Lindsay that Ashley records on her phone for safety.

But the couple has their first real fight over what to do with the footage. Austin wants to go to the police immediately. Ashley, as the only full-time worker at the club of the two of them, fears retribution. Soon, she also sees the footage as leverage to get a promotion with health insurance for a surgery she needs. Austin begins to look at his sweet fiancée with new eyes, and newer still when they go to Josh and Lindsay and use the leverage together, but only Ashley emerges with a full-time job and benefits. She negotiates nothing for him. He’s an afterthought. But the leverage is undeniable for the older couple who need Josh to keep his job. The beef begins.

Pressure mounts on the couples when the country club is purchased by a new owner, a Korean billionaire named Chairwoman Park, played by the legendary Youn Yuh-jun (the Oscar winner from Minari!) putting Josh on thin ice. And Austin develops a crush on the Chairwoman’s assistant, Eunice (Jang So-yeon), which, he confesses to Ashley, must be a byproduct of his awakened epigenetics (or cultural memory) as a half-Korean man, since he’s not been around so many Koreans since his childhood in Korea.

Both Austin and Josh have been adjusting themselves to fit a white wealthy world. Their white women partners help them to be received as passably white. When Eunice tells Austin over lunch that he needs more Koreans in his life, he shares he sometimes got confused for Mexican in school. Ashley interrupts his growing connection with Eunice by pulling him back to a neutral white “safe” zone: “I always thought of him as Arizonian,” she announces—clueless—and Austin reassures her in front of Eunice, saying how much he loves that their relationship is race-neutral (a.k.a whitewashed, bland, cultureless). In Josh’s world, a racist neighbor tells him to look out for a sketchy Latin man walking around the neighborhood. He tries to convince her that he is the Latin she’s been seeing and she rejects it outright: “No, you’re Greek.” It’s hilarious and telling. His closest client at the club, a white billionaire named Troy, often calls him “mi amigo,” and it’s a reminder: Josh isn’t so white, and his clients aren’t really his friends. Though the big bad billionaire villain of this season is no longer a white woman but a Korean woman and her crew of henchmen, it’s clear that white supremacist capitalism still has them all by the balls.

Josh has staked his value on serving wealthy white people, believing that one day, when he’s done enough in service to them, they may actually make him one of them. But Josh and Lindsay are just as much the help as Austin and Ashley are. The two beefing couples, both alike in indignity, are too wrapped up in their pettiness that they’re distracted from their common enemy—just as the capitalists designed it.

In one of the most horrific scenes of the show, Ashley suffers a medical emergency in a haunted house of an emergency room where untenable wait times and reckless, hostile medical staff collide, causing irreparable harm to Ashley’s body and future. Josh might’ve prevented the damage with a simple phone call he withholds because Ashley won’t delete the back-up video she has of his domestic violence with Lindsay. So, Ashley fixates on Josh’s role in her tragic loss, but Lee wants us to see the savagery of the American medical system in all its violent, flourescent light. To top it off, the health insurance that Ashley blackmailed Josh for, has a $5,000 deductible, which she learns in real time does not mean a deduction from the price. After her life-saving surgery, the kids are now $30,000 in debt and more desperate than ever.

A mirror image of the kids, Josh and Lindsay are so far in debt that Josh has begun embezzling from the club, with Lindsay’s approval. They can only get on the same page when it comes to sticking it to the kids or sticking it to the club. Still, each couple’s love for each other suffers under the weight of finances and identity that they don’t have, yet desperately covet.

“People love you,” Austin tries to reassure Josh about how well-regarded he is as general manager by the elite club members. But Josh, now having an incredible spiritual awakening thanks to a bofu trip, has seen the wretchedness of his true self, the deepest shadows of his character, and knows what his wife told him in episode one is true. He’s wasted his entire life aspiring to and serving people who will never see him as more than their servant.

“I grasp at all of that [love],” Josh tells Austin. “I steal it…to try to construct this crutch to prop me up because I don’t even know how to stand anymore.” He’s whitewashed himself and his morals and dignity so thoroughly to belong that he’s totally lost whatever grains of sand that once made up his uncorrupted self.

He warns Austin: “Whatever your Achilles heel is, that little spot—I know you think you’ve got time to work on it, and you do! But little by little, life’s just gonna chip away at it. And then, when you finally catch your breath and you go to stand on your own two feet, that Achilles heel is just gonna give out, and you’re gonna fall. And you’re gonna grasp at every one around you. But it’s too late.”

And now we see the Fisher King Wound. Josh knows he’s become a shit husband and a shit person, a thief, a liar and a fraud. Addicted to paying sex workers on OnlyFans, he hasn’t had sex with Lindsay in over a year. The worse he becomes, the more he’s confirmed that his wife doesn’t love him because he cannot be loved. And he doesn’t believe he’s capable of true love either.

His foil isn’t Austin, it’s Ashley, working her way up under Josh’s resentful mentorship. When Austin confesses that he’s not in love with Ashley anymore since her vindictiveness, lying, striving and manipulation has turned her into a self-absorbed mirror of Josh, Austin tells her the hard truth: she doesn’t love him either. She has abandonment issues from her parents who divorced when she was a baby and made separate lives without her. She simply doesn’t want to be left by him. She cries in such a way that it confirms the truth.

Austin is discovering in real time what Lindsay confesses to Ashley: Lindsay’s actions are motivated by a need to hide “the immense pain of knowing you picked the wrong person.”

Ashley counters Lindsay’s philosophy with one of her own: “You shouldn’t be looking for the right person but the right wrong person, whom you’ve seen you at your worse and you’ve seen them at theirs and you still want to stay.”

Amy makes a similar argument to George in season one, which he answers with a demand for a divorce. Lee’s fears about the fleeting nature of love resurface in Lindsay’s answer to Ashley:

“Maybe it’s just something people tell themselves because it’s too hard to admit that this thing which finally gave your existence some semblance of meaning is just a sham. Because then, what? You’re 40 years old without the faintest idea of who you are. And nobody wants that.”

The final couple Lee uses to wrestle with his wounds about love and its staying power is of the Boomer generation: Chairwoman Park and her plastic surgeon husband, Dr. Kim (the legend Song Kang-ho from Parasite). Back in Korea, Kim negligently kills a plastic surgery patient, and the Chairwoman seeks to cover up the crime by laundering money from the club. To cover up the cover-up, she sets a plan in motion to pin her money laundering on Josh, Lindsay, Ashley and Austin.

In the epic finale set in Seoul, the foursome finally understand what they’re up against and try to escape from Korea together. Kim, believing that the Chairwoman only loves him when life is good and not when his poor choices are interfering with her good life, decides to turn on her first and help the foursome.

“I feel like I’m being tested,” Kim says eloquently in Korean during an incredible arc shot in the hallway as the camera pans in 360 degrees from him to the wall, to the escaping Americans, to the other wall, and back to him. “We stay by each other’s side without ever receiving true love. And yet, we keep living with each other. Maybe that’s the test.” He believed at least Austin could understand what he’s saying. Unfortunately, Austin isn’t even close to fluent. No one speaks Kim’s love language. Just moments later, Chairwoman Park has Kim shot in the head to prevent his further betrayal.

“My second husband always said: ‘love is putting other person over yourself,’” Chairwoman Park tells Austin about Kim. “But as soon as you are born, you cry for mommy’s milk. You do not care about her. You only care about yourself. Maybe you put others over self a few times, but only when it is easy. The universe is not designed for this, thank God. We survived billions of years—from tiny cell to bacteria to monkey—because we only care about self. That is why capitalism works. It is a system of nature. A system of the self. Love lives in this system. All relationships exist in this system. They’re all the same. Another way to serve the self.”

And there it is, the biggest Fisher King Wound of the season: True love—like ethical consumption—can’t possibly exist under capitalism. It’s by far Lee’s most depressing conclusion.

Josh tries to prove this wrong, sacrificing himself for the love of Lindsay and even the kids, by taking full blame for all the crimes the Chairwoman planned to pin on the four of them. In a lifetime of selfishness, his grand gesture of love is finally selfless and self-sacrificial. Lindsay feels it deeply and appreciates it, promising to wait for him and support him through his long sentence.

She ghosts him a few years into his sentence, remarries and finally has the child she always wanted. She tosses around the word “love” to her new family like she said to Josh the last time we see them together and one wonders what she means by it. She hides from her new family in the bathroom while watching Josh on the news. He’s spent his years in prison doing exactly what he did at the club: being of service to others, in hopes it will benefit him and bring him love. He does seem incredibly changed, however, when his fellow incarcerated brother tells him that Lindsay moved on around the time she stopped communicating with him. Though his grand gesture was a little too late and the choice to stick by him was a little too hard, he’s content in knowing that she’s alive and happy. He doesn’t bother her again. He proves the Chairwoman wrong—true love does exist—but he remains punished, unrequited and alone.

Austin breaks up with Ashley for Eunice and, thanks to Ashley’s act of love—or manipulation, or a mix of both—he and Eunice have the information they need to go to the police and try to bring down Chairwoman Park for her crimes. But that’s not what happens.

Perhaps it was Eunice’s half-hearted reply when Austin says he loves her; perhaps it was Chairwoman Park’s monologue that capitalism is natural and love only exists within that self-absorbed system—whichever blow cut through, Austin decides not to take the incriminating evidence to the police with Eunice. Austin, the most eager to do the right thing and involve the police in episode one, has learned over the season a bit more about how the powerful work and how useless the police are to stop them. Instead, he’s pragmatic and does what Ashley wanted him to do in the first place: turn the evidence over to Chairwoman Park, bowing to her literally and metaphorically, to secure his and Ashley’s safety and future at the club and sealing his own fate. What he judged Ashley for doing at the beginning of the season with Josh and Lindsay, he’s done now as well—and with much higher stakes—with Chairwoman Park. Austin may not have understood what Kim was saying in his beautiful Korean monologue, but Austin ends up living out Kim’s hypothesis: that we stay by each other’s side without ever receiving true love as a moral test.

The season ends where it begins, in Montecito, 8 years later. Ashley’s fully into her evolution as Josh, serving the rich as general manager of the club, Austin by her side like Lindsay, playing the dutiful, deeply resentful spouse, visibly seething in “the immense pain of knowing you picked the wrong person.”

Chairwoman Park splays herself out over her husband’s grave, “an old woman filled with regret.” Even money, she laments, cannot stop time or change the cycle of life. But, even though she has a sads over murdering her husband, she still won. Josh has taken the fall for her money laundering, her dead husband’s crime no longer needs to be covered up, and she remains a powerful billionaire. Lord knows what happened to Eunice, but I doubt she survived if the Chairwoman would off her own husband (and even her first husband’s hot son!) to hold onto power. What’s an assistant? Austin probably dodged a literal bullet with his about-face evolution into a practical man who knows that billionaire capitalists always win.

I should’ve known that this is how it would end.

Whereas season one’s symbolic animal through-line was the crow—a harbinger of spiritual messages, transformation and growth—season two’s creature motif was a trail of ants, hive-minded and marching in line as designed. The finale episode is even titled, “It Will Stay This Way and You Will Obey.” “Love Like a Sunset” by Phoenix plays over the credits. “Right where it starts, it ends,” they sing.

Still, it stings. Lee seems to have reversed his season one position on the hope and possibility of true love, or at least saw fit to argue the other side: True love is impossible under capitalism. The system is too big to fight. There is no hope for any of us but to suffer and survive.

Lee underscores this message as his thesis of the season with the final image of the Buddhist wheel of life. With Chairwoman Park in the center of the wheel on the grave of her husband, the other couples and events from the series surround her in the circles of the wheel, representing the saṃsāra, or the cycle of existence in Buddhism. The karma for the choices they make plays out within the wheel’s four layers and six realms of reincarnation. Yama, the god of death, is the creature seen holding the wheel, representing the impermanence of the cycle of life. But what Lee excludes from this final image is the most telling of all.

In typical images of the wheel of life, Buddha rises above the wheel of suffering on the right side and points to the moon positioned over the wheel on the left side. The moon represents Nirvana, and Buddha’s pointing to it represents hope for reaching it, hope for liberation from the suffering of life and hope for an end to reincarnation.

But Lee’s wheel has no Buddha and has no moon. He refuses to be a guide and point his trapped audience towards a hopeful exit from suffering.

Believe me, I get it.

This is, no doubt, the most realistic possible ending. As the Zionist lobby AIPAC brags about how many of our politicians it owns and makes loyal to a foreign state, and our senile anti-Christ president threatens to “wipe out the entire nation” of Iran to cover up the Epstein files allegations that he and his billionaire pedophile buddies rape, kill and eat children, who wouldn’t believe like Lee that we are simply stuck in this billionaires’ cycle of hell. April 15th has come and gone, taking our tax dollars to fund the US-Israeli genocide of Palestine and Lebanon and the war on Iran, as well the RSF’s genocide of Sudan. Our tech overlords have ensured the continued genocide in Congo so they can keep profiting off of the country’s cobalt while Congolese children die working in mines.

The billionaires have destroyed every journalistic outlet we’ve ever had and filled our feeds with A.I. slop so that they can both censor real news and keep us confused about what’s real and what’s fake. They’ve stolen our lands for data centers to run the A.I. they’re forcing down our throats, poisoning our air and water while offloading the costs of electricity onto us. They’ve hoarded all the wealth and forced us to fight each other for crumbs, to see which of us will win the Hunger Games for a chance to be the General Manager at their zoo, keeping all the poor underlinings in line and in service to the Epstein class, like good, dutiful ants.

In light of this, I reconsidered the ending of season one and the pure euphoria of hope I felt for Danny and Amy, to be witnessed and to love and to live. But perhaps there is hope in the ending because the finale cuts off too soon. Hell—or the consequences of their heinous actions—will surely be awaiting them when they get out of the hospital. In fact, Danny’s arm is still moving towards Amy when the episode cuts to black, basically screaming “premature ending” at an audience that’s willing to hear it. Maybe it was always a cynical tease.

Hopeless energy does match the earth’s vibe in the 2020s.

In the same week that CNN broke the news about an “online rape academy” where men teach each other how to drug and rape their wives and girlfriends and get away with it—a site with more than 80 million views last month!—several Black women were murdered in their homes by their husbands, partners or sons. Yesterday, it was announced that the Black former Lt. governor of my home state murdered his Black wife who was divorcing him. She’d successfully won custody of their children and he was ordered to vacate their home by the end of the month. Her name was Dr. Cerina Fairfax, she was a dentist and a mother, and a beloved community leader. And she was almost free of her abuser. Then the coward murdered her in their home while their children were upstairs and killed himself to avoid accountability for her murder, leaving their teenaged children to discover their bodies.

Once the news broke, hapless negro rape, abuse and murder apologists spent yesterday posting their smiley photos with the murderer, eulogizing their Alpha phi Alpha fraternity brother, their neighborhood hero. Their “good” man and friend that they’ll miss. They lamented not the loss of Cerina’s bright light or that he snatched her from her life and her children. They barely said her name. Their cries were instead for their promising political rising star who flamed out when “unfair” yet credible rape allegations by two Black women kept him from his entitled spot as the most powerful political figure in the state. (He believed, because his accusers were Black women, it would actually help his gubernatorial campaign, à la Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, as Feminista Jones pointed out. Misogynoir, he believed, would work in his favor. For once, it did not.) They lamented not the rape of two women, but the rapist’s “mental health” and what the allegations “stole” from him. I cussed them. I cursed them. I hexed them. And the reality of the pure hatred and disregard for Black women’s lives and mental health continued unabated.

As a Black woman, I know on a visceral level that Lee’s conclusion is true: There is no possibility of true love under white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Friendship love might be less dicey, if everyone is of the same class and not competing with each other for resources. But women who date men are in the unique position of looking for love with their number one predators. Love under pain of death feels like a cruel joke played on us, if we’re willing to roll the dice where one of the possible outcomes is our murder. Wrap it up. Start the Wrapture, Jesus. It’s simply too hard to love under all that hate.

This is my Fisher King wound that I try to heal in my work, writing the things that are not as though they are. It’s why season two’s ending felt so deeply unsatisfying and dare I say triggering. Fine: the foursome couldn’t actually take down the whole system of capitalism. But wouldn’t it have been wonderful for just one billionaire to get their comeuppance for once in a fictional show? Couldn’t Beef have continued to be the show that proves that love does conquer all—even a beast like capitalism—or at least can put a hell of a dent in it? It’s so disappointing that Lee’s answer here is “no.”

There are some genuine laughs in every single episode of Beef season two. Charles Melton is the perfect himbo and Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, and Cailee Spaeny are deliciously wicked. With a shorter season and more characters, Lee still manages to put on quite a searing spectacle that entertains and informs.

But that hopeless ending gets stuck in the throat.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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Break-ups and rom-coms are all the rage in this week’s edition of Your Weekly Watch! ***Spoilers galore if you have not yet watched this week’s Abbott Elementary.***

Abbott Elementary Lets Janine Grow Up

Well, it started off as a rom-com. After many seasons of will-they, won’t-they tension between Philly elementary school teachers Janine (Quinta Brunson) and Gregory (Tyler James Williams), the two adorkable neurodivergent baddies not only accepted that they were in love with each other, they also made the big step just a few episodes ago to move in together. Then, in episode 19 of season 5, “Trip,” Janine and Gregory have a fight over where they should go on vacation, how much to spend, and how they should get there. They realized that they were unaligned, and Janine suggested they break up. Gregory didn’t respond, but he also didn’t not respond, so they broke up. Their work bestie Jacob is now in shambles, as are many people in the audience.

Most of the comments on Threads are questioning Janine for breaking up with Gregory over something “so small” while staying with Tariq for years who was an absolute emotional and financial abuser and overall weight around her neck. Summarized, they’re saying of Gregory by contrast: “He’s a good man, Savannah!” Yet, as we know from the iconic source material of that quote, Waiting to Exhale, that wasn’t exactly true— and even if it were, it’s not exactly enough.

In retrospect, the writing was on the wall for the couple. In last week’s episode “April Fools,” Gregory’s tone with Janine in the cold open had me cutting my eyes at him. He started his comments criticizing Janine’s ability to be effective in her complaints to their boss Ava with, “no offense,” so you know some offense is soon to follow. Janine didn’t appear to take offense to his comments, though, and deferred that he may be correct that Barbara should be the one to talk to Ava instead. But I still didn’t like it. Why not let her try? Barbara, as it turns out, was no more successful than Janine would’ve been, anyway. I didn’t like him dampening her confidence in herself, I didn’t like his tone, and I didn’t like the words he chose to express his point. Later in the episode, Janine easily turns on Gregory with the rest of the teacher crew who believed that rules-stickler Gregory was the prankster behind the April Fools hijinks that were upending the school. It didn’t bode well for their relationship that she was so easily convinced he would do something so out-of-character, and it struck me as odd for two people in love to act this way. Maybe she really was annoyed with him for how he shut down her efforts with Ava earlier that day.

I’m actually thrilled that Abbott was bold enough to let their heart-warming comedy break up the fan-favorite couple just an episode later. And not just because this is my advice to any woman who has any complaints about how a man is treating her. I think there’s a way to disagree, and the way Gregory disagrees is revealing. They agree to go to Outer Banks for vacation, but Gregory wants to leave at 4 A.M. to drive there and Janine wants to save energy and time and fly. The point of a vacation is to relax, as she points out. But Gregory thinks flying is too expensive and a waste of money. So Janine, with the extra money she’s saved by having Gregory pay half the rent, buys their flights for them so he won’t have to worry about money. But he’s still worried about money—her money—and insinuates that she’s irresponsible. His rigidity and harsh way of explaining himself to her is no-doubt a part of his neurodivergence, and also, Janine doesn’t have to accept it. If there’s one thing she learned from getting stuck with Tariq for years, it’s that ignoring early red flags can lead to years of misery. She can either fall into her old patterns of accepting unacceptable things, or free herself and find out that she is stronger and more capable than she thinks.

Confident Janine who parts her hair down the middle now and stands in her bold fashion choices even when she’s being mocked, spoke up for what she wanted in her relationship, despite the cost. Gregory was either unwilling or unable to give it to her, and she bounced. I’m so proud of her!!! That’s what we call growth, girl. That doesn’t make Gregory a “bad person,” but him not being “bad”—or as bad as Tariq—does not entitle Gregory to Janine as a partner. I’m glad that Abbott is letting her grow up, stand up for herself, say exactly what she wants and be willing to walk away if she doesn’t get it.

They’ll get back together, I’m sure. But I hope Gregory will have to both acknowledge how he was wrong and change in order for that to be amenable, rather than relying on the patriarchal “good man defense” that there are worse men out there, so be grateful for what you have! Confident Janine isn’t grateful for what she’s offered, she’s going for what she wants.

In the words of the iconic Lucille Bluth:

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You, Me & Tuscany Works Because Halle Bailey Is Cute Enough To Get Away With Murder

Good news! The movie that weirdos are trying to gaslight Black people into seeing in the theaters this weekend under pain of death (of all Black rom-coms henceforth) is cute! Starring The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey and Bridgerton’s Rege-Jean Page, You, Me & Tuscany follows Anna (Bailey) as a grieving culinary school drop-out who goes to Tuscany like she and her recently deceased mom always dreamed of. A series of unfortunate events leads her to squat in the empty villa of a man she met back in New York and when his Italian family comes over to look after the place, she lies and tells them she is their son’s fiancé. They embrace her as a daughter, but soon she finds herself falling for her fake fiancé’s Black cousin (Page). Shenanigans ensue when her lie becomes too big to hold.

This unhinged premise can only work because Bailey is adorable and has a high-pitched Disney princess voice that makes you root for Anna’s rights and wrongs. She also has great chemistry with the Italian family, which is at least as important as the love story, à la My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Bailey needed chemistry with both Page and Lorenzo de Mor who plays the fake fiancé Matteo, and they were all mostly successful in pulling that off. It’s a PG-13 movie, so the chemistry did what it needed to do: be safe, sweet and believable.

I was worried that the aforementioned threats that Black people must go see this movie or else!!! was a cover for the movie not being good. The still images they released earlier in the year reminded me that Page is more than a decade older than the ingenue Bailey, and I hate an age-gap romance. And the movie was written and directed by white people, so I had my reservations about why we’re still letting white people tell our stories when there are SO MANY BLACK WOMEN WRITERS AND DIRECTORS who could’ve done this.

There were a few times where it was evident that a white man wrote the script—when Halle’s hobosexual character decides to put on the lingerie of the white woman for whom she’s supposed to be house sitting, and when she was hollering about her edges getting wet. Ma’am! You have locs?! The other time that made me scrunch my face was the not-so-cute meeting between Page’s Michael and Anna. He almost runs her over with his truck and then is immediately rude to her when he sees her again in the café. This is literally the only other Black person around for miles! Usually, we are more happy to see each other—especially overseas.

I remember being on a yacht in Sweden, no other Negros for miles, and hadn’t seen one that whole week on land either. Finally I saw a Black man on a yacht floating nearby and lost my shit waving. He did not wave back. It was all I talked about to the people back home cause who raised him?! Anyway, if Michael was supposed to be one of those Europeans who don’t get excited to see Black people, then it should’ve been more of a sticking point for Anna and she should’ve said as much to Michael.

Otherwise, I wasn’t overly bothered by the script or the dialogue. And Page looks good in the film, not distractingly older than Bailey, so it didn’t impact my experience of their love story. It’s chaste enough for younger audiences to see—there aren’t any sex scenes—so maybe that helped with their attraction feeling more sweet than Bridgerton-esque, and on fire with passion.

But also, enough, Hollywood! Stop pairing 10+ years-older men with young women as love interests. Enough.

Cinematically, Tuscany looked gorgeous on the big screen and the film feels big enough in scope to watch it at the theater. To quote Harry Styles, “It feels like a movie. It feels like a real, like, you know, go-to-the-theater-film movie.” It sounded really dumb when Harry said that originally (and the movie he said this about did not support his statement) but when people asked me whether You, Me & Tuscany should’ve just been a streaming affair, Styles’ stylings were my first thought. It feels lush and warm, and expensive and it’s funny. Aziza Scott who plays the funny best friend is a stand-out and I wish she would’ve had a bigger role, maybe as a support for Anna in Tuscany rather than over the phone, so Anna isn’t the only Black girl in the whole city. But it was nice that racism wasn’t really an issue in this film, though I’m side-eyeing that grandma who knew from the jump Anna was lying and let her know just with her eyes.

Anyway, I laughed, I teared-up a bit, I thought seriously about visiting Tuscany—all the things a standard rom-com should do. It’s a perfectly standard movie that is not in any way revolutionary. Going to see the movie in the theaters is not in any way a revolutionary act, either. Paying a movie theater to see a movie to “stick it to Hollywood” is like hitting my tip jar to stick it to me. (Please, feel free!) Though unlike tipping me, the success of this movie will not do a single thing for any other Black filmmakers beyond those involved, because Hollywood doesn’t make decisions about Black stuff based on numbers; they decide based on the level of their own racism that day. See it if you want! Stay home if you don’t! Tip me if you got it!

Project Hail Mary Plays in Our Face

A few weeks back, after watching a series of deeply unsatisfying screenings for upcoming movies, I posted on Threads:

“i wanna go to the movies and get a cold ass sprite and popcorn with peanut butter M&Ms in it and watch a brand new movie that just blows me away in the best possible way. i wanna watch a movie and right in the middle of it, think wow. this is something special. i wanna leave a movie and think i cant wait to see that again! it’s such a rare and lovely feeling.”

In response, an almost unanimous audience told me to go see Project Hail Mary. Some even insisted that I see it in iMax. Knowing nothing about the film or the book it was adapted from, I took their advice and spent my little coins on a matinee iMax showing. I spent just as much on that popcorn-peanut butter M&Ms-sprite combo! And I took my seat in the back of the theater to watch Ryan Gosling trapped in space with an alien Tetris block, trying to save their respective planets.

About half-way through the movie, I definitely googled the run-time. I felt every second of its two hours and forty-six minutes. It’s unnecessarily long. There were some cute moments, some funny moments, and some teary moments that I later resented because I could feel the movie engineering the tears. I wasn’t that wowed visually and I definitely could’ve saved some money and saw it on a regular screen. Gosling is Ken in Barbie but this time in space, and the adorkableness was nearly unbearable. I tried to get on board with the story of interspecies friendship, overcoming betrayal, and rising to the occasion when you have no other choice. But it was a very long, hard, unenjoyable watch. It’s a chop that I could’ve skipped altogether off the premise alone.

I’m just tired of seeing these propaganda films about white American men saving the planet from assured destruction. Stop trying to make fetch happen with white male saviors, Hollywood! It hasn’t happened, it’s not happening and it’s never in the history of the world going to happen. After this week of Trump terrorizing the planet with his finger on the nuclear button, threatening to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, it’s a laughable premise that Hollywood should be particularly embarrassed to ever try again. Knowing history though, reality will not deter these studio heads.

Between Trump, his entire cabinet, the U.S. Congress, Sam Altman, the Zionist state and Benjamin Satanyahu, white men are hell-bent on destroying this planet—and all of us in it. There’s no affable white guy, no reluctant all-American hero coming to undo the damage. After decades of this patriarchal, white supremacist, American military propaganda, I’ve simply had enough.

Freight shows J. Alphonse Nicholson’s immeasurable range

In late 2024, I had the pleasure of seeing J. Alphonse Nicholson perform in a live-tapping of the one-man show Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green. Like Kendrick Lamar’s GNX track “Reincarnated,” Freight takes us through the many lives of Abel Green as he returns in different American eras, reliving the same spiritual problem with the same group of people but different situations to hopefully compel his wayward soul to learn from and heal his past lifetime mistakes. If you didn’t already know from Just Mercy, where Nicholson stole the scene from its star Michael B. Jordan, or from P-Valley where his closeted gangsta rapper electrifies or breaks you down with a look—J. Alphonse Nicholson is a star. I said as much in my review of his Sundance film If I Go, Will They Miss Me? back in February. One of the most underutilized talents we have has put his own self to use in Freight, co-directing and taping his live performance over multiple nights and editing the production into a film that’s now streaming on STARZ. Through each of the five acts and incarnations, Nicholson shows his immeasurable range; I can’t wait for the role that’s going to launch him into the stratosphere where he belongs.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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**** SPOILER ALERT FOR THE PLOT OF THE DRAMA****

I often put spoilers in my reviews because the lawyer in me likes to make my case and back it up with evidence. But sometimes, like in the case of my review of Queen & Slim, I spoil to warn people in advance. So, in case the “plot twist” of Robert Pattinson’s The Drama hasn’t already been spoiled for you, trigger warning (literally! yikes!) this is a romantic comedy about potentially marrying someone who planned a school shooting in her youth.

You might be asking: who would think marrying a failed school shooter is a great premise for a rom-com? The answer is: Kristoffer Borgli, the Norwegian writer and director of this film. Borgli was born in the same year as I was, according to Wikipedia, so, I wonder: was his childhood also shattered by the Columbine shooting in 1999? Did he learn how to run in a zigzag from the school to the parking lot? Did he do school shooter drills as a kid? Nearly 30 years later, do his nieces and nephews have bullet-proof backpacks instead of gun control? What does he know about school shootings besides what he consumes of American media? Nothing. He is a Norwegian white man from Norway making light of American tragedy.

In this navel-gazing thought experiment of a movie, Borgli wonders: What if you were an original white man from Europe marrying a [generic] American woman and you find out the week before the wedding that she had planned a school shooting as kid and didn’t go through with it—not because she felt bad, she just never did it—would you still marry her? And wouldn’t the drama of it all be a laugh?!

This confession of Emma (Zendaya) to her British fiancé Charlie (Pattinson) sends him spiraling in comedic ways. Who is this stranger he’s marrying? How could he love someone who could think to do something so heinous?

Make no mistake: this is Charlie’s story. Despite the marketing and the red carpet fashion pushing Zendaya to the forefront, Emma is not an equal character in this white male fantasy. She is an empty shell for Pattinson’s Charlie to rage against, stretching the depths of his own humanity, love and compassion. He’s the only one in this story with an arc, whose emotions are fully realized, who gets to be a human. As is typical for her at this point in her film career, Zendaya is a blank canvas for a white man’s projections and emotional growth.

In Challengers, Zendaya’s character was the human embodiment of the tennis net and ball that both separated and bounced between two white men who each had much more interesting things to do and characters to be, on their own and together. In the Dune franchise, as well, her character exists to show the emotional progress of Timothée Chalamet’s main character. Zendaya recently mentioned her desire to work with Ryan Coogler, but why not find the Nia DaCosta to her Tessa Thompson, someone who can center a Black biracial woman’s story and render her a full character on the screen for once?

Zendaya’s character is not the only woman who suffers from thin writing in The Drama. Alana Haim’s awful maid of honor character Rachel revels in her own moral superiority over Emma, but a better actress would’ve played this one-note villainous Karen with more depth, and a better writer than Borgli would’ve written this character with more than one note.

But Borgli isn’t interested in anyone else but Charlie, a foreign-born, self-insert character. And while casting the A-list Zendaya as Emma might’ve seemed like a boon for the film’s marketing, it simply brings Borgli’s painfully limited range and lack of foresight into full focus.

It was already absurd that Borgli wrote a white woman character who planned a school shooting in her youth. Make no mistake, despite the casting of Zendaya, Emma was written as a white woman and Zendaya plays Emma as generically as possible. Though a few white women and girls have committed mass shootings before, everyone knows the vast majority of school shooters—and mass shooters in general—are white boys and white men. This is a white problem and a male problem. Exploring the white male Charlie as the potential mass shooter and the terrifying depths of white male rage while having Emma run around town melting down at the thought of marrying a sleeper-cell psycopath, apparently, would’ve been less funny to Borgli. The twist is that it’s a girl! I can almost hear him patting himself on the back.

How funny that a seemingly kind, sweet, innocent, beautiful white woman with a cute hearing impairment—Charlie found Emma being deaf in one ear endearing!—could plan something so heinous as mass murder of children. And like real-life white woman shooter Audrey Hale, Emma had no real motive for the plan that she could share with Charlie to help him understand why. Some popular girls called Emma stinky and pushed her into a puddle on the sidewalk, making her drop her iPod or Zune or whatever music player it was. Emma shares that she had been wrapped up in incel chatrooms where being a girl who was into school shootings made her stand out and feel special and accepted—by a bunch of white incels. Why this was attractive to her as a Black biracial girl? We’ll never know, cause she’s not a developed character. Emma just “liked the aesthetic” of being a girl with a gun, and that was enough for her to plan a school shooting and record a manifesto until her computer randomly dies right in the middle of it. After someone else commits a mass murder that same day, Emma decides not to go through with it.

To put it bluntly: this is some white people shit. Just, all the way around, this is white nonsense.

Not only does Zendaya have a paper-thin character to work with, her casting also pushes this premise beyond the brink of believability, underscoring the racism of the other characters, while absolutely no one addresses it in the film. No one calls Rachel a Karen, though there is a clear racist undertone and aesthetic to Rachel delighting in publicly humiliating a Black woman. No one calls out the racism of Emma’s white husband-to-be for being terrified of his secretly Angry Black Woman. “Race-blind” casting isn’t a thing when everyone is written as white and we’re all watching white people gang up on a Black woman as if there are no racial power dynamics at play. Whether he noticed or even cared, it’s obvious that a Norwegian white man was not up to the task of tackling the impact of the racial imagery he was creating in the production of this film.

The biggest elephant in the room, of course, makes the entire premise of the film fall apart: Black girls don’t do school shootings. It’s not a thing. Anywhere!

But what would make a Black girl plan a school shooting and then never follow through because this is some white boy shit? would have been a fascinating undertaking. And if Borgli wasn’t interested in that undertaking, or doing the work in the script to make Emma a biracial Black woman beyond casting a Black man as her father for 90 seconds of screen time, then Borgli should’ve just cast someone white.

Inclusivity in filmmaking is beyond casting; it’s about creating characters with depth who are rooted in reality. The little sketch of a character that we have as Emma is actually interesting and ripe for a more curious writer-director’s exploration. As is often the case in a Zendaya project, her character Emma is the only Black girl in a white world. Sure, there are some Black boys sprinkled in, including the teen boy in Emma’s high school who takes a liking to Emma and ironically nominates her to lead their school anti-gun violence campaign. And then there’s the wasted talent of Mamoudou Athie, who plays Charlie’s best man Mike, but is equally racially unspecific, other than in a throw away line where his wife Rachel shares her false belief that her Black husband must’ve grown up “around guns.” Because the audience can see he is Black, she doesn’t have to say it, and we know to gasp or laugh at such a wild thing to say. But Emma doesn’t react to Rachel’s claims about Mike’s upbringing at all, though certainly it’s more evidence that, with her white mom, white girl frenemies, and white fiancé, she is the only Black girl in the space, from childhood to womanhood. Would that not inspire some rage?

With all of the injustice and the institutional colliding of racism and sexism and the adultification that Black girls face, Black girls would be hella justified to have rage. According to a 2024 study from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Black girls “receive more frequent and more severe discipline in school than other girls.” This is a systemic, institutional failure of protection—from teachers to principals to school administrators. This is not to mention the disproportionate rates of domestic violence and sexual abuse Black girls face at home and in their communities. The most unprotected people on the planet would have a right to rage. But we simply don’t process our anger in mass shootings. We are much more statistically likely to be victims of violence rather than perpetrators of it. Yet the stereotypes of Black women and girls—as unrighteously angry, as violent, as hypermasculine, as “strong” enough not to need or deserve protection—persist.

With a few tweaks, this film could’ve highlighted both the systemic failures that lead to the erasure of Black girls’ humanity at the crucial age of development, and the root cause of mass shootings: Congress and the gun lobby, and our healthcare and (mis)education systems. This film could’ve shown that mass shootings don’t happen in a vacuum and are not solely an individual choice of individual bad actors but are the rotten fruit of a society built on and sustained by violence. That’s a film whose comedy would punch up at power, punch up at systems, and challenge the people who have actively chosen to uphold them or to passively look the other way.

Real-life family members of victims and survivors of school shootings have expressed similar concerns about the lack of intention in this film beyond laughs and hypotheticals and have spoken out against it. Tom Mauser, whose son Daniel was killed in Columbine in 1999 told TMZ in March that he thought the film “normalizes” school shootings. He also took issue with the flippant way Zendaya laughed off the “twist” in a Jimmy Kimmel Live! interview.

March for Our Lives, an organization created by child survivors of school shootings, spoke out against The Drama and its film studio A24 for its failure to alert the public that this rom-com contains extremely sensitive subject matter that the audience wouldn’t suspect. “The way this film has been marketed is deeply misaligned with the reality it engages,” they posted on Instagram. “We expect better from A24 and the artists behind it.”

Jackie Corin, a Parkland school shooting survivor and co-founder of March for Our Lives, told the Hollywood Reporter that “Gun violence, particularly in schools, is not just another dramatic device. Art has the capacity to deepen public understanding and create emotional clarity and awareness, but it can also flatten and distort reality, especially when it leans on shorthand or tries to make something more palatable than it actually is. With something like a near school shooting, even small tonal choices can shift whether a story feels productive or dismissive.”

But, Borgli has no interest in understanding why school shootings happen. He doesn’t care about American survivors of mass shootings or the relatives of the victims. It’s as if they’re preemptively being mocked for being upset with the film’s comic tone through the character of Rachel, whose cousin was paralyzed in a mass shooting and therefore reacts to Emma’s confession in such an outlandish and cruel way that it’s played for laughs. He’s certainly not interested in Black girlhood or womanhood for that matter. Emma isn’t rendered as a real person (Black or white) because she’s not based in any reality; she’s a premise. This film isn’t personal; this is comedy for him. He just wants to laugh at our pain.

Borgli isn’t trying to be “productive.” The Drama is the movie version of a social media troll trying to provoke and ending the post with “Thoughts?”

And we’ve seen what’s in Borgli’s “thoughts” before. He’s also the filmmaker behind the Nicolas Cage-starring film Dream Scenario, where a white man is castigated for thought crimes that he didn’t even think. A film that warns of the dangers and harms of “cancel culture” for white men is quite the preface to a newly resurfaced essay Borgli wrote in 2012 where he bragged about the “May-December relationship” he had at 27 years old with a teenaged high school girl while her parents were out of town. Knowing that the “relationship” was, at minimum, “socially unacceptable,” he went looking in movies for evidence that he wasn’t some old weirdo creep. He literally researched “May-December romances on film” on Wikipedia and found hope in Woody Allen’s movie about an old weirdo creep grooming a high school student in the infamous 1979 film Manhattan.

“If a film made in 1979, in which Woody Allen’s 42-year-old character has a public relationship with a 17-year-old girl, is portrayed exclusively in a positive way and causes no controversy in its own time, then why shouldn’t my relationship – with a considerably smaller age difference – in 2012 be “within bounds”? I chose to listen to Woody over my friends,” Borgli wrote, sans irony or shame.

Citing Woody Allen—who married his girlfriend’s daughter in 1997 and was credibly accused of child molestation by another daughter in 1992—as a guide for ethical dating habits in 2012 is a choice. It’s that unthinkable white man shit again.

So, why wouldn’t the guy who wonders “what would Woody Allen do?” when dating, cast Zendaya in her twenties to play a love interest to Robert Pattinson who’s pushing 40? Gross age gaps are par for the course in a pedophilic Hollywood, and so are school shootings in America. Perhaps Borgli figured Americans wouldn’t mind, and hey, it’s not like Americans have stormed the Capitol and White Man’s House over murdered elementary school children in Uvalde or Sandy Hook, or over the allegations in the Epstein files of cannibalism and raped children by the people who run this country and the President of the United States. For all of Borgli’s misguidedness in this film, perhaps he assumed correctly about American audiences on those two counts.

The ending of this film is meant to be sweet, a testament to the power of true love to overcome any obstacle—even if it puts you through the ringer first. The final image of Charlie’s smiling yet battered face drives that point home. But in truth, Borgli made a horror film where a biracial Black woman is now trapped in a marriage with a white man who harassed a woman in a wheelchair in the middle of the sidewalk; who cyberbullied a kid until the kid had to move schools; who fetishized his Black wife’s disability until he learned the ugly truth about it; who cheated on her at the first opportunity; who began their relationship on the lie that he shared her interests; and, when she needed it most, showed none of the grace and empathy for her that she’d shown him throughout their relationship. They can’t start fresh when she asks for forgiveness; only when Charlie cheats and is also in need of forgiveness is he ready to wipe the slate clean—people make mistakes, after all!

But like all of Borgli’s films and his gross essay, his latest thought experiment is unintentionally revealing. In The Drama, we see the emotional violence of white women, the terror of self-pitying, petulant white men, real-life tragedy reduced to wild hypotheticals and insensitive to actual victims, and the erasure of Black woman- and girlhood. How quintessentially American.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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Every year, there’s one big studio film with a Black cast that we’re told will be the make-or-break film for the future of Black Hollywood. This one film, we’re told, is our opportunity to show up to the theater and prove to Hollywood that Black films can be profitable. This mission, should we fail to accept it, will not only determine the career of those involved with that one film. Oh, no. This one film will also give studio executives permission to either greenlight more Black films or turn them down. And either way, their choice will be our fault.

This year’s film appears to be the Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page rom-com You, Me & Tuscany, coming to theaters on April 10. From Universal Pictures, this Italian-set love story will be the first Black rom-com with a studio release since American Fiction grossed $23 million at the box office on a $10 million budget and garnered 5 Oscar nominations for its cast and crew in 2023. But 2026 is a new year! So we must “show and prove” again.

As soon as the film was announced, social media was flooded with (well-meaning) demands of the Black audiences: “Y’all understand the assignment, right?!” We have our marching orders, we must make this movie a success. Not because we love rom-coms, or Italian getaways or Halle and Regé as actors, but because it is our Black duty to support Black films in theaters— otherwise they won’t “let us” have another one. The “they” of course, being Hollywood studio executives. It’s an annoying call-and-response I see often as a hyper-online person and I’m not sure how much the average, less-online Black viewer is bombarded with this. But it absolutely gives the impression of a relentless, tired holy charge that’s been foisted upon us and can never be removed.

You, Me & Tuscany looks cute. I like Regé-Jean and Halle and I’m going to an early screening next week. I hope it’s good! And I resent that, if it’s not, or people don’t show up to watch it, the studios will use the response to a film that’s written and directed by white people to pretend to determine the future of Black studio films. We’re not making that up. It’s not just in our heads. This is what Hollywood explicitly tells us.

“1. Met with a studio about my already shot romcom and they won’t buy it until they see how You, Me & Tuscany does [sic],” tweeted award-winning Black filmmaker Nina Lee yesterday. The rom-com in question, That’s Her, stars Bel-Air’s Grammy-award winning lead Coco Jones and comedian Kountry Wayne. The film is produced by They Cloned Tyrone producer Stephen “Dr.” Love and wrapped production in December 2025, according to Black Film & TV.

“2. Met with an exec about a romance script I have, they won’t buy it until they see how You, Me & Tuscany does. 3. Go see this film! [sic]” She followed up: “A film that has nothing to do with me could quite literally change my life.”

I hope it’s true. I hope we see all of Nina Lee’s films on screen soon and that all Black filmmakers have a chance to make their art and share it with the world. I also have an incredible Black rom-com script with a dream-team package behind it that I hope you’ll get to see soon!

The gag is: Hollywood is lying to us. Hollywood is gaslighting us.

For decades, we’ve heard that Hollywood only wants to make money, so if Black movies don’t make money because white people don’t want to see them and Black audiences don’t show up in droves, then the fault is ours. And then a Black movie will make a huge amount of money at the box office, and they’ll call it a fluke.

In 2013, when another Universal picture The Best Man Holiday raked in $30 million over the pre-Thanksgiving weekend, going toe-to-toe with the Marvel film Thor, breathless headlines from the trades could not believe its luck. They tracked the film much lower, therefore the film was labeled as “over-performing.” In an infamous headline from USA Today, they labeled the rom-com “race-themed,” whatever that means. Steve Harvey’s Think Like a Man had made $91 million at the box office the year before, but The Best Man Holiday’s success was still a head-scratcher for them. And guess what? There was no grand influx of Black rom-coms in theaters after these successes. The Black rom-com Baggage Claim did flop that year, too, so! That counted more.

More than a decade after the backlash to the backlash of The Best Man Holiday’s success, what’s changed? Just last year, Ryan Coogler’s Black vampire epic Sinners rose past projected box office placement and earnings to open at No. 1 with $48 million domestically and $63 million worldwide in ticket sales. While this was the biggest opening weekend for an original film since the pandemic began in 2020 — an encouraging sign that audiences will show up to the movies for an original story if it’s a cinematic event — white Hollywood media just couldn’t let a Black director have his well-deserved flowers.

“Sinners Overperformed at the Box Office, But Only Made $60 million,” said Business Insider.

“Sinners Is a Box Office Success (with a Big Asterisk),” wrote the New York Times.

“The Warner Bros. release has a $90 million price tag before global marketing expenses, so profitability remains a ways away,” tweeted Variety. The outcry from Black audiences — and Ben Stiller — was swift.

“In what universe does a 60 million dollar opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?” Stiller quote-tweeted Variety, which earned more than 300,000 likes.

Everyone in Hollywood knows this is not usually how the media discusses these achievements — particularly for a film that garnered a 98% Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score and a 97% audience score and the first-ever A CinemaScore for a horror film. If there’s any doubt about the fact that this framing of “non-profitability” on opening weekend is blatantly anti-Black racism, compare it to the headlines for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. That 2019 film also had a $90 million budget (which, adjusted for 2025 inflation would be well over $112 million), pulled in less than Sinners’ $48 million domestic haul with a $41 million domestic opening, and it didn’t even hit No. 1 at the box office, falling behind its Disney live-action remake competitor, The Lion King.

“Disney’s The Lion King might still rule everything the light touches, but Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood certainly held its own this weekend at the domestic box office,” wrote Variety’s Rebecca Rubin, the same author of the Sinners piece. Rubin went on to praise the second-place, B CinemaScore film as a “win for original content.” Though the film’s $90 million budget is mentioned, there’s neither a hem nor a haw about how far away the film was from being “profitable” in its opening weekend — just celebration for setting a personal opening weekend record for Tarantino. Qwhite the difference.

White media — from its Hollywood studios to its propaganda journalism arm — have always conspired to spin the narrative about Black films, Black filmmakers, undermining their financial wins or painting them as unrepeatable anomalies that should be individually studied. We are defined by our flops, and our successes are flukes. How can we win, when they keep moving the goalposts?

“What does it take for people in Hollywood to realize Black audiences will come out to see a movie?” Lee Daniels asked in a 2013 interview with The Los Angeles Times. “Does ‘The Butler’ need to make $100 million?” The film went on to win a worldwide box office total of $177.3 million. It has not changed a thing for how Black films and filmmakers have been received or championed as a whole.

In response to white folks underestimating the Sinners box office last year, Black folks (who make up 13% of the U.S. population) showed up at 49% on opening night, leading to the film’s incredible success. As soon as white media played in Coogler’s face after his success, countless Black folk on social media declared that we must go back to the theaters and “prove them wrong again!” Again.

As someone who literally saw Sinners 15 times in the theater: Aren’t we tired?

But, we did it, bros! Sinners grossed $370 million on a $90 million budget. Where’s the influx of studios greenlighting original Black horror films? In 2018, Black Panther grossed $1.8 BILLION. Though 2022’s The Woman King and 2027’s Children of Blood & Bone were both said to benefit from Black Panther’s success (both films by only one amazing director, Gina Prince-Bythewood, by the way!), where’s the influx of Black sci-fi/fantasy epic tentpoles? Two films for one filmmaker and a sequel and an original film for Coogler in a decade is all $1 BILLION can buy? Oh.

So, what’s the number that would make You, Me & Tuscany a success? Cause it’s not making a billion dollars, no matter how much Black folks pack the theaters. We’re all writing these scripts; there’s plenty of Black filmmakers and actors who want to star in them, so what’s the number that gets us a regular influx of Black romantic comedies in theaters? Inquiring minds want to know!

But here’s a damning number, $10 billion.

In 2024, conservative consulting firm McKinsey released a report that Hollywood studio executives leave $10 billion on the table every year by not investing in Black stories. That’s right, the same studios that cry about “profitability” and enact mass layoffs as their executives pocket tens of millions in salaries and bonuses, shrug off the near-assured additional profit of $10 billion. Why? Because they’re racist.

There will never be a high-enough opening weekend or a diverse enough audience or enough history-making achievements to change their mind about us. As Toni Morrison forewarned: there will always be one more thing. It’s time to accept their anti-Black racism for what it is: a distraction.

Let’s lock in on what matters: creating art that we like and supporting art because we like it — not because we believe one Black person’s success will equal Black success in general or that Hollywood will let it trickle down to the rest of us. It won’t. This industry must be dismantled, not begged.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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My debut feature film ABANITU: A FAMILY DOCUMENTARY is having its international premiere at the Coal City Film Festival in Lagos, Nigeria today! Check out my interview with Carolyn Talks on my filmmaking journey:

Paid subscribers! Below is a video of a Q&A with Ryan Coogler, Autumn Durald Arkpaw, Ruth E. Carter and Hannah Beachler from a private screening of Sinners I’ve been saving just for you!

Tonight, ‘Sinners’ is nominated for a record-breaking 16 Oscars by the film Academy considered in this town to be the most significant possible acknowledgement of artist mastery. In its 98th awards ceremony, this Academy could make history by honoring Black genius—literally, they haven’t done it significantly or with any regularity in 98 years, but maybe tonight will be the night! Maybe the brilliance is so undeniable that a 98-year-old historically white supremacist institution will have to concede the truth!

My film-loving Black people, I don’t want you to prepare your hearts “for the worst” if the cast and crew don’t win what they should; I want us to divest our hearts entirely.

When we watched this film multiple times in the theater, Sinners won.

When we sought out stories from our elders after watching it, Sinners won.

When we read books on Hoodoo and reached for our ancestors, Sinners won.

When we shared this film in community and still talk and write and think about it a year after its release, Sinners won.

We are the Oscars, baby. And the Oscars could never be us.

Writer-director Ryan Coogler and producers Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian, best actors Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku, Miles Caton, Jayme Lawson, Saul Williams and Buddy Guy, cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, musician Raphael Saadiq and composer Ludwig Goranson, costumer (and Hamptonian!) Ruth E. Carter, production designer (and leo!) Hannah Beachler, editor Michael P. Shawver have already won.

They shifted the culture. They opened a portal. They unlocked creativity and put a balm on a festering wound in Black history. They reaffirmed for us that the answers to the fight against white supremacy’s death culture are connection and community with each other and our ancestors. In a time of rising fascism and imperialist world war, these tools will see us through as they saw our ancestors through and will ensure our collective survival. That’s a level of power that these institutions could only dream of experiencing and therefore fear. Sinners and its cast and crew have been subjected to humiliations meant to undercut them personally and the film as a whole because of that fear. And we undercut the power of the film and Black genius when we couch it in terms of what white supremacist validation trophies they won or should have won. We concede that they are the arbiters of what’s good and right and true. And that has never been the case.

The Academy is an old and dying institution. It has proven itself again and again to be both irrelevant to Black talent and incapable of awarding it as it deserves. Like Remmick, it seeks to suck the soul and reap the benefits of Black artistry with little but admittance into an eternal death cult in exchange. There’s a reason the biggest onstage performance tonight will be in celebration of Sinners, with Misty Copeland coming out of hip replacement surgery to dance in what will surely be a live recreation of the surreal montage from the film, with Saadiq, Caton, Goranson, Guy and Lawson all performing. They need the fans of Sinners to watch live like all of these awards shows need Black talent and Black audiences to hold onto relevance. But the clips will be online eventually. Imagine if we divested.

Imagine if we did not concede our cultural power to those who never meant to honor it. They risk their crumbling credibility by not rewarding what is handedly and by miles the best film of the year, if not decades. Let them crumble. I want for these individual filmmakers whatever they want for themselves; they deserve to be honored and celebrated. I don’t begrudge them attending the Oscars, even knowing that the Academy might play in their faces. But Sinners is already bigger than the program. With more than 200 awards collected in the past year, these filmmakers don’t need the Oscars.

Though it’s not a flawless film (of course, as always, I have notes!) it’s still perfect. I have talked and written about and watched this specific film more than any film ever because it is unlike any film ever. Who knows when we’re going to get something that moves the earth like this again! So, I’m going to celebrate it all week over on my YouTube channel with video breakdowns of some of my favorite themes.

But this is bigger than Sinners too. This is about culture and how we decolonize our culture by reclaiming our power over it. That is the message of the film! To not be co-opted by benevolent oppressors who want to steal control over our artistry under the guise of “appreciation.” How do we re-root ourselves? How do we reclaim and recontextualize ourselves so that we are not constantly viewing ourselves, our capabilities and our worth through a white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchal lens? How do we stop contorting ourselves and our creative expression to fit within a box built specifically to exclude us? This is what it means to divest.

And with the energy we’ve saved, we can reinvest in community. The cast and crew of Sinners are well-rewarded; who are the artists in your community that you can uplift and support? What’s playing in your local theater that you can patronize? If you’re the artist, who around you can you collaborate with to produce a joint vision? Filmmaker Richie Reseda dropped brilliant gems on how to build community-owned film productions on the BGW podcast Another Possible World, if you need inspiration.

I hope the cast and crew of Sinners hear exactly what Viola Davis told Michael B. Jordan when he won Best Actor at the SAG Awards: “You are shining, Herald Loomis!” Shining like new money! More than that, I hope we all find our shine in our own light, in our own gaze, in our own culture. That’s that new-money shine. That’s how we win too.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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****Spoilers for Bridgerton season 4****

Keeping Up with the Regency Era Kardashians just wrapped its fourth and most interesting season to date. Queen Charlotte, of course, remains my most favorite of the Bridgerton universe because there’s at least an attempt to reckon seriously with what it means to be Black in these spaces. But Bridgerton season four is finally about class in a way that all the other seasons have only addressed in the margins. Yes, the Bridgerton family is extremely wealthy compared to other families, but their competitors in the Ton at least could stand in the same rooms, bow before the queen with them and attend their parties. Like the Featheringtons, Bridgerton competitors could also marry into the Bridgerton family, thus increasing their own status and diluting the need to compete.

Then the second son, Benedict, fell in love with a maid.

This proves to be an inconvenient scenario not just for Benedict (Luke Thompson) and his maid(en) Sophie (Yerin Ha), who cannot marry without being ostracized from high society in scandal, but also for the audience. It’s capaganda (capitalist propaganda, if you will), this fantasy that Bridgerton offers its significantly poorer audience. It’s an escape into a bygone world of gentlemen, ladies, mansions and balls, and, above all, romance. The Queen (Golda Rosheuvel) is Black! So, never mind that the luxury and leisure of the English court are made possible by its booming Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The Featheringtons’ maid, Mrs. Varley, is like a co-conspiring bestie to Mrs. Featherington! So, never mind that the maintenance of the luxury and leisure of the Ton falls on a servant class who work their entire lives for the lords and ladies and will never manage to escape their servitude. That’s too deep for polite conversation.

But with Sophie as the romantic lead of the season, Bridgerton breaks with form and shows us the brutal, disgusting process of how the sausage is made—and then expects us to want more sausage. In a pair of striking scenes, we first see Benedict and his brothers playing a joyous game of Pin the Shaving Cream on the Brother. Immediately afterwards, we see a maid on her hands and knees cleaning up the mess the brothers made and simply left behind.

Later in the season, as Mrs. Featherington snaps at her new maid for not being as good as Mrs. Varley, who quit over the Featheringtons’ disrespectful wages, fan-favorite Penelope Bridgerton (Nicola Coughlan) is seen scolding her mother for being rude to the help. They’re meant to be kind to the help, like the benevolent Bridgerton matriarch Violet. Throughout the season, Sophie checks Benedict on his immeasurable privilege and ignorance over how much strife he puts his servants through on a daily basis. And all I can think about is, are we supposed to like these insufferable people now that we’ve gotten to know the human beings who wait on them, hand and foot?

You have people whose entire lives are about serving you, raising your children, dressing and undressing you, chauffeuring you wherever you want to go, when you want to go there. You have people whose lives consist of cooking your food, serving it you, and cleaning up after you when you’re done. They throw out your chamber pot piss in the morning and draw your curtains when you wake up. And we’re supposed to go back to relating and rooting for the rich people after what we’ve seen?

But this is the appeal of the show. It’s bigger than “steamy love scenes”— we’re supposed to long just as much for the day when we can live as comfortably as the Bridgertons, at someone else’s expense. This is what makes Sophie’s story a fairytale, in the first place.

Through Benedict’s insistence on being with Sophie despite the ruin he could bring to his family, or to himself by being cut off from the family, season four offers both an escape from class strife and a prison. Love, the ultimate liberator, has come to set Sophie free. But of course, only Sophie. As much as the white Bridgertons love to collect marginalized spouses, they do so only as much as their wealth, power and status in the Ton are secured — much like their IRL Kardashian counterparts.

The Sophie-Benedict Cinderella story had the potential to shake up the Ton and to buck the social order, as Benedict declared that he wished he could do. Violet Bridgerton had hatched a plan with Lady Danbury and the Queen’s newest lady in waiting, Alice Mondrich, to make the Queen bless a marriage between the classes, thus upending the social order. But that’s not quite what happens, because that’s not quite what Bridgerton is about.

Look no further than the Mondriches. The aforementioned lady-in-waiting, Alice, and her husband Will had much humbler beginnings. Will is introduced in season one as the Black friend and counterpoint to the Black duke, Simon. Where Simon was born into title and wealth, Will was born into slavery but escaped to Britain, became a boxer and befriended local rake Simon. When Will wanted to build a gentleman’s club, Simon invested and his Bridgerton brother buddies patronized him, making Will everyone’s new Black friend of a different class. While Simon has never been seen again after season one (thanks, at least in part, I’m sure, to the racist fans of the show and book series), Will and Alice, have persisted.

And without a regular Black male constant on the show who is on equal footing with the Bridgertons (thanks to the absence of Simon, Lady Danbury’s fine little brother Marcus, and now with the death of Francesca’s husband, John Stirling) Will and his wife have been promoted to the job. The biracial Alice has a white aunt of status with no surviving heirs, so her estate and family titles go to Alice and Will’s son, elevating Alice and Will to members of the Ton. Will’s storyline in season 3 consists of him wrestling with giving up the club he worked so hard for in order to be a member of society. Gentlemen do not work! They enrich themselves off of the labor of others! That is the trade and the formerly enslaved Will reluctantly but ultimately makes it. As a result, this high society loophole allows Alice to be promoted to lady-in-waiting for the Queen in season 4. Find the cracks and crevices and sneak the colored folk in, if you must! But that status quo will be maintained.

We saw as much in season two, when Eloise Bridgerton, in her search to uncover the person behind town gossip rag Lady Whistledown, fell into a bit of flirtation with a bookshop worker named Theo. He gave her his favorite books to read and introduced her to the political activism brewing underneath the Ton’s polished veneer. Lady Whistledown wrote about Eloise and Theo’s friendship and nearly ruined Eloise and the entire Bridgerton clan’s standing in society. The stakes in this and every season have been about this potential loss of power and status, and how hard the gatekeepers of the family—Violet and Anthony in particular—are willing to work to make sure that never happens.

So, instead of Benedict marrying a maid, Violet blackmails Sophie’s enslaver into pretending that Sophie is a legitimate daughter of Lord Penwood’s house. Though the Queen knows this is a lie, she’s deeply amused by her favorite Kardashian soap stars’ shenanigans, and lets it all slide with uproariously laughter. Benedict and Sophie marry and the status quo remains in place.

Capaganda requires the audience to turn off our brains in order to root for and aspire to be like our oppressors. Our heroes, the Bridgertons, are landlords, for crissake! Bridgerton took a serious risk in upending that social contract by making us remember that the servants are people with lives who are deeply impacted, mostly negatively, by their spoiled, pampered, thoughtless enslavers—whether that’s the Queen, the Bridgertons, the Featheringtons, the Penwoods or any of them— and that there’s no such thing as “the good kind” of enslaver. Benedict wields his power over Sophie in the same uncomfortable ways that Mrs. Featherington wielded hers over Mrs. Varley, and the Queen wielded her power over Lady Danbury—at the end of the day, there can’t be equality, true friendship or love when one holds the other’s livelihood and future in their hands.

Penelope is the only one who recognizes as much this season when she finally lets go of the Lady Whistledown mantle that made her famous and important. She’s a Bridgerton now, and the mother of the new Lord Featherington. The powerlessness from which she created Lady Whistledown no longer exists. In the vacuum Penelope leaves behind in order to pursue other forms of writing, a new Lady Whistledown emerges. People have speculated that it’s Mrs. Varley, someone invisible enough as a maid to get the tea and spill it. Let me dispel that notion right now: the maids have jobs! 24-7! They are too busy to produce a weekly gossip magazine! Lady Whistledown is a bored woman’s job. It’s likely Alice Mondrich who, as a lady-in-waiting, has nothing to do all day but hold dogs, wear wigs, and find gossip for the Queen.

In its focus on class and power this season, the disability representation was incredible, featuring a lord in a wheelchair on the marriage mart; a maid with a limb difference (Gracie McGonigal who plays Hazel) and Francesca and John’s autism-coded characters. All of these disabled characters (and some disable actors) just existed without their disabilities being the center of their storylines. Each were allowed to experience or search for love, unencumbered—if a bit in the background in the case of Hazel the maid and the young lord. It’s remarkable because I’ve yet to see it elsewhere in a fictional narrative on screen—especially not in a period piece!—without a primary focus on disabilities (like in the docuseries “Love on the Spectrum,” for example). The inclusivity in front of the camera is a standard that other shows should follow (even if the show’s insistence that partnering people of color with white people is the revolution gets on my last nerves).

John’s death this season was also excruciating and well acted, with Francesca’s Hannah Dodd playing a young grieving widow with absolute anguish. And the promise of Francesca and Michaela’s love story—the first queer love story that will take centerstage in a future season of Bridgerton, was laid out well, with respect for Francesca and John’s brief but lovely love story.

But with every season of Bridgerton as an example, it’s hard to imagine how this gender-swapped sapphic romance between Francesca and Michaela (who was Michael in the books) will turn out in a series that teases revolution but ultimately refuses to ever actually rock the boat.

Benedict’s bisexuality isn’t invalidated by him ending up in a heterosexual partnership with Sophie. And also, a bisexual character ending up in a heterosexual partnership is notable in a show that is, at its core, about maintaining the status quo.

All of Sophie’s secret maid friends attend her wedding; new money and status won’t make her forget where she comes from! But, of course, she’ll go on to have maids and servants of her own now. It can’t be helped; that’s just the way things are. We should be happy about Sophie’s turn of good fortune! After all she’s been through, she’ll surely be a kind overseer, like Penelope or Violet before her. Maybe she’ll even have a maid bestie like Mrs. Featherington and Mrs. Varley!

But the specter of class and slavery can’t help but haunt this show.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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Anti-Black violence happened at the 2026 British Academy Film and Television Arts awards last night.

First, I want to hold space for Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo—two extraordinary actors who turned in the best performances of their careers in Sinners. I want to sit with them and their hearts as they traveled to London and graced the BAFTAs stage for the first time as presenters, and Jordan as a nominee, and what that must’ve meant for these Black men to be internationally acclaimed for their craft—finally! I want to cover them in love as they opened their mouths to present an award together and before they could even get started good, they were made to hear a white man in the audience hurl at them the slurs “N____r b___h!” in the silence.

I wonder if, before this, Jordan and Mr. Lindo had gotten their hopes up. I wonder if they’d finally felt seen in an industry that has overlooked their contributions for years. The look on their faces is unbearable. But they took a beat, read that prompter, and gave out that award. They watched their cast mate Wunmi Mosaku win Best Supporting Actress and their writer-director Ryan Coogler win Best Original Screenplay and I wonder if, even in their joy, that degradation stayed with them.

“You may have noticed some strong language in the background,” BAFTAs host Alan Cumming said on stage of the racial slur hurled by Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson, whose life story with the disability was featured in the movie I Swear which was also awarded that night. Though no other group besides Black people was subjected to slurs, Davidson had also reportedly yelled out “shut the fuck up” to white people on stage. “This can be part of how Tourette’s syndrome shows up for some people as the film [I Swear] explores that experience.”

It’s true: some people with Tourette’s have the most extreme and rare version, Coprolalia, which causes involuntary use of offensive words and even racial slurs. Apparently, that’s what Davidson has. But that n____r only came out when he saw Black people.

“Thanks for your understanding and helping create a respectful space for everyone,” Cumming said. Isn’t it something, what white people demand that Black people “understand”?

Apparently realizing his outrageous statement about “understanding” was inadequate, later in the broadcast, Cumming returned with a weak non-apology: “Tourette’s Syndrome is a disability and the tics you’ve heard tonight are involuntary, which means the person who has Tourette’s Syndrome has no control over their language. We apologize if you are offended tonight.”

If.

The BAFTAs said nothing publicly specifically to Jordan or Mr. Lindo. Nothing to the Black members of the audience in the room nor globally. The BBC had plenty of time to edit out the slur, yet chose to air it on television anyway. When Nigerian-British filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr. won Outstanding Debut film for his excellent feature My Father’s Shadow, and he gave a speech acknowledging those experiencing genocide and occupation around the world, and said “Free Palestine,” the BAFTAs and BBC acted quickly to cut that part out of the broadcast. The BBC erased Davies’ calls for liberation of Sudan, Congo, Nigeria and Palestine. But they left in N____r.

Sit with that.

The BAFTAs and the BBC made numerous violent choices that night and thanked us for “understanding.” The docile negroes who have to smile and push through and “understand” the layers and levels and generations of white violence collapsed into one evening.

“A source told Variety earlier that Davidson was an ‘invited guest’ and under no circumstances would he be asked to leave the ceremony,” Variety reported of the incident. “Under no circumstances”?

It seems the extent of their plan to mitigate any harm was for the floor manager to offer a mild warning before the program began: “I’d like to welcome John Davidson MBE from one of our nominated films ‘I Swear’. John has Tourette’s Syndrome so please be aware you might hear some involuntary noises or movements during the ceremony,” Variety reported the floor manager saying.

But it wasn’t just noises or movements. It was racism. And it wasn’t just Jordan or Mr. Lindo who were slurred. Sinners production designer Hannah Beachler was also verbally assaulted by Davidson with n____r off-camera. She wrote on Twitter:

“I keep trying to write about what happened at the BAFTAs, and I can’t find the words. The situation is almost impossible, but it happened 3 times that night, and one of the three times was directed at myself on the way to dinner after the show.”

This is BAFTAs’ epic failure.

Where, on an institutional level, was their plan to first prevent as much harm as possible here, and to repair potential harm caused? Disabled people belong in the world and must have appropriate accommodations. In this case, the BAFTAs not only should’ve had a stronger warning for its audience about what could come, but also a plan for how to protect all of its invited guests from harm. If a racial slur is a tic that’s triggered when someone sees Black people and you know Black people are going to be in the room, there is a duty here to plan for this accordingly before harm is caused beyond expecting the victims to “just ignore it” or “understand” it—not only by Davidson and his team but also the BAFTAs. This institution failed its duty to work with Davidson to ensure the safety of Black guests. While I find it unacceptable for the BAFTAs to award the fictionalized I Swear while pushing out the real human who inspired the film, it is also unacceptable to subject Black people to n____r. There is no compromise on that. But the BAFTAs and the BBC don’t seem to understand that. And they’re not alone.

Early Monday morning, after a night of backlash, BBC issued a similar unspecific milquetoast apology as its host did: “Some viewers may have heard strong and offensive language during the Bafta Film Awards. This arose from involuntary verbal tics associated with Tourette syndrome, and was not intentional. We apologise for any offence caused by the language heard.” No responsibility taken for their choice to air the slur. No apology for the racism. Just passive voice stretched to its absolute limits. As of yet, there have been no reports of an apology from Davidson, nor the BAFTAs—and many white people on social media seem to believe an apology isn’t warranted in the first place. This is a disability! It’s involuntary! Wanting an apology is ableism! They have said, rushing to extend Cumming’s demand for “grace.”

Yet, “involuntary” is a mitigating circumstance, not a free pass to harm. And what could be more ableist than suggesting disabled people cannot recognize the harm they cause and repair it? Without a doubt, from Beachler’s tweet and Jordan and Mr. Lindo’s faces, harm was done in that room. And harm was done outside of it. There is far more attention on the violence of Davidson’s words and the BAFTAs and BBC’s violent choices in response than there is on celebration of the three awards that the Sinners team collected last night. Their moment was stolen. That’s violence too, and it demands repair. What is stopping Davidson, the BAFTAs or the BBC from apologizing publicly and for real for their anti-Black violence specifically, other than a centuries-old belief that Black people don’t deserve apology?

UPDATE: BAFTAs has now issued an apology specifically to Jordan and Mr. Lindo almost 24 hours after the event: “Early in the ceremony a loud tic in the form of a profoundly offensive term was heard by many people in the room. Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage at the time, and we apologise unreservedly to them, and to all those impacted. We would like to thank Michael and Delroy for their incredible dignity and professionalism. … We take full responsibility for putting our guests in a very difficult situation and we apologise to all. We will learn from this, and keep inclusion at the core of all we do, maintaining our belief in film and storytelling as a critical conduit for compassion and empathy.”

Davidson, on the other hand, issued no apology to any of the Black people he hurled this slur at, releasing instead a statement only acknowledging how mortifying the event was for him. “I can only add that I am, and always have been deeply mortified if anyone considers my involuntary tics to be intentional or to carry any meaning.

I was in attendance to celebrate the film of my life, I SWEAR, which more than any film or TV documentary, explains the origins, condition, traits and manifestations of Tourette Syndrome. I have spent my life trying to support and empower the Tourette’s community and to teach empathy, kindness and understanding from others and I will continue to do so. I chose to leave the auditorium early into the ceremony as I was aware of the distress my tics were causing.” The end.

Tourette’s is a terrible disability. I’ll never understand what it must be like to live with it. And white people will never understand being Black and being called N____r by a white person. When racism and ableism collide for Black disabled people, they curiously don’t mobilize to call for “grace” and “understanding”—yet the consequences for being Black and disabled in public are deadly. Sonya Massey. Elijah McClain. Ryan Gainer. All killed by police who see disabled Black people as inhuman, inherent threats to be put down. In this white supremacist system, whose feelings get centered, who requires acts of grace, and who is demanded to be gracious are all political. None of this exists in a vacuum.

Jordan, Mr. Lindo and Hannah Beachler were called n____r in the context of an 80-year-old institution awarding its first Black winner in Ryan Coogler for Best Original Screenplay last night. In Big 2026. They were called n____r in the context of the BBC constantly running zionist propaganda on its platforms while erasing calls for a liberated Congo, Sudan, Nigeria and Palestine from its broadcasts “for time,” while leaving in the slur against them. They were called n____r in the context of Sinners competing with and losing to the most basic, most anti-Black movie of the year, One Fetish After Another, over and over again, all season. They were called n____r as the most anti-Black writer-director of the season Paul Thomas Anderson took up another award for Best Director last night, using undocumented Hispanic immigrants and Black women as little more than aesthetic background props for his racist ass white-male-centered bullshit movie, and then declining to say anything in his self-aggrandizing speech about ICE violence against immigrants and Black American women like Dr. Linda Davis who was just killed because of ICE last week.

“I’m not a politician, I’m a filmmaker,” Anderson shrugged through his cowardly answer as to why he wouldn’t speak up for the communities he stepped on to collect his trophies all season. “I try to do it through the work.” The empty work that stated no revolutionary or political vision? The work that caricatured undocumented people and Black women? That used them and threw them away as to not hurt his awards chances with white voters? Oh.

To watch the unmatched Black brilliance that is Sinners and its cast and crew continuously lose to that objectively inferior, self-masturbatory, stilted, stunted, boring, wack ass slog of a movie is par for the course in a white supremacist system that continuously expects Black people to just be happy to be there at all. You have to be twice as good to get half as far, the Black American adage goes. It’s not a challenge for us to accept, but merely a statement of white supremacist reality. They don’t have to yell the word; in those rooms, it’s always hanging in the air.

Love and grace to Michael B. Jordan, to Delroy Lindo, to Hannah Beachler. Love to Ryan Coogler and Wunmi Mosaku. Love to Black people with Tourette’s who are sitting at the intersection of racism and ableism and hearing both be excused and dismissed while erasing the fullness of their reality. May the catastrophe of the BAFTAs spark in us an urgency to divest from these white supremacist institutions that were never created to see or honor us, and to build instead a world that’s safe for Black people and disabled people, that centers the most harmed, and works to repair it.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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