Author: Brooke Obie

***Spoilers for The Odyssey***

I wanted to love Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Based on Homer’s epic poem whose story of the warrior-king Odysseus was ancient oral mythology even before Homer put pen to paper in the early 8th century BC, Nolan’s version came with a twist. Though set in Ancient Greece, Nolan’s The Odyssey stars Matt Damon as Odysseus with an American accent, alongside British stars Himesh Patel, Robert Pattinson and Jovan Adepo, who also deployed their American accents for the film. Though this is often a Hollywood trick to white-Americanize history, it seemed clear from the outset that Nolan, a British-American filmmaker himself, chose to white-Americanize the myth of Odysseus—architect of the Trojan Horse that exploited Zeus’ law of hospitality to the stranger and caused civilization’s fall—to make a statement about the global consequences of white American imperialism specifically.

King Agamemnon’s war with Troy was fought under the pretense that Troy’s prince Paris had stolen away Agamemnon’s brother’s wife, Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Of course, as Luptia Nyong’o’s Helen explains in the film, the Trojan War was never about getting her back to her husband, Menelaus, but was always about Agamemnon’s desire to conquer Troy for its control over shipping lanes, thereby increasing Agamemnon’s empire and power. If anyone knows about starting a fake-righteous war over control of shipping routes and natural resources, it’s the United States of America.

The Odyssey picks up in the aftermath of Agamemnon’s victory over Troy, which was only won because of Odysseus’ idea to hide soldiers inside of a giant hollow horse and present it as a peace offering of surrender to the Trojans and a gift for their temple to Athena. Trusting in Zeus’ law, the Trojans accepted the horse, brought it into their impenetrable city walls, giving the Greeks the ability to destroy the city from within.

In the aftermath, rumors abounded that a lawless “people from the sea” have taken to raping, pillaging and looting their neighbors, the bonds of civilization and humanity forever broken. Like Odysseus, many Americans who watch the film might be shocked to discover that, despite the propaganda of white supremacy and American exceptionalism that we’ve been fed for centuries, Americans and its 800 military bases in more than 70 countries, are in fact the dreaded “people from the sea.”

Ask Black America. Ask Palestine. Ask Hawaii, Iran, Puerto Rico. Ask Mexico. Ask Libya, Cuba and Guam. Ask Korea, Japan and Yemen. Ask the sailors in the Atlantic that America bombed like a game of Battleship. Ask the people of Venezuela and their kidnapped president Maduro. Ask the entire continents of Africa and South America. Ask the Indigenous people of Turtle Island upon whose land and graves stolen Black people were forced to build this illegitimate country to solidify white American hegemony in the first place. Ask the immigrants getting ripped away from their families or shot dead in the streets by American gestapo ICE. The white American Odyssey is meant to be a mirror, if one would only look.

Though racists abhorred the presence of non-white cast members in the film about gods, cyclopses, rock monsters, and sorcerers, I appreciated the “woke” casting. Of course Nyong’o should play Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world; she’s ethereal enough to have been hatched from an egg. And trans actor Elliot Page playing a new character to the story, Sinon, “the bravest man” Odysseus has ever known, is a powerful touch. If the racists could read, they’d lose whatever’s left of their minds to find that Odysseus is described several times in the source material as “dark-skinned.” They’d also faint to learn that no one was white in Ancient Greece. These facts aside, Nolan’s diverse casting also makes a larger point about white American patriarchal supremacy in recent centuries.

Patel as Odysseus’ right-hand-man in battle Eurylochus, alongside Adepo’s soldier Elpenor and Korean American actor Will Yun Lee as Anchialus was, to me, an excellent reminder that white supremacist patriarchy cannot run without the aid and enthusiastic participation of men of color. Even the most noble and earnest soldier character that Nolan created for his adaptation, Sinon, played by Page, shows how marginalized people contribute even unknowingly to the imperialist project.

Much like our U.S. military and Trump’s cabinet, these soldiers played by actors of all races and marginalized identities followed Odysseus into battle, under the call of Agamemnon, raping, murdering, pillaging, and destroying with hellfire, the kingdom—and the people—of Troy. The Odyssey recounts the soldiers’ downfall even more than Agamemnon’s and Odysseus’. Catch that message.

This is why I wanted to love The Odyssey. I set myself up for success by sitting in the perfect seat at an IMAX 70MM film screening at AMC CityWalk: the fourth row. (I’d learned from my many IMAX 70MM screenings of Sinners last year that fourth row makes you feel like you’re actually in the movie). Still, I left feeling empty.

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***SPOILERS FOR HOUSE OF THE DRAGON AND GAME OF THRONES***

Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in! That incestuous white-haired family with the dragons is back on my TV and as I much as I would like to quit them—you know, because of the incest, and because I already know how the story ends from the books and from that little twerp Joffrey in Game of Thrones—I simply cannot quit them. I am a fire-breathing Leo and I deserve dragons. I love lore and ancient histories and misinterpreted prophecies. I love Black people in fantasy and a story finally centered around women.

House of the Dragon delivers on all fronts, but season three, episode two, “Queen’s Landing,” where Queen Rhaenyra takes her Iron Throne, offered the highest reward yet for my steadfastness. This episode is the best of House of the Dragon and ranks with the best of the Game of Thrones franchise, and now I’m locked back in.

The revolutionary nature of House of the Dragon both for Black people and different races of women—and its inherently problematic nature—are made most clear in this episode. It’s not until “Queen’s Landing,” that we get a scene of only Black characters in a group. Lord Corlys Velaryon, The Master of Ships, and his two illegitimate sons, Addam, a dragonrider and Alyn, a warring seaman like his father, and Corlys’ granddaughter, the Lady Baela, a dragonrider who was next in line to be queen of Westeros. A team full of a hittas!

Yes, we’ve seen two Black characters speaking to each other alone before on this show: Alyn and Addam; Alyn and Baela; Baela’s mother Lady Laena and her sister Rhaena; Corlys and Alyn. But the Black audience lost our shit this week just seeing a group of the four of them alone together, without their white spouses/ betrothed/ counterparts. They’re regrouping after surviving last week’s sea “Battle of the Gullet,” with Lord Corlys at the helm, expertly driving the boat like an unc with a ‘78 Coup de Ville. Though they’ve won the battle, Baela has just lost her betrothed prince and her future as the queen, Corlys has lost his entire estate. But they have each other; they are officially all a family, with Corlys granting Addam and Alyn the gift of his high-born last name, Velaryon.

For a fantasy series, and for one in the GOT universe specifically, the presence and significance of these Black characters is revolutionary. I didn’t finish the books (but neither did the author! So, it’s fine!), but as a huge fan of the OG series (seasons 1-6 only), I can definitively say that the white male showrunners of GOT, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, did not care about Black people or women. Enjoying GOT as a Black woman was like enjoying hip-hop: pay no attention to the rampant misogyny and anti-Blackness and just listen to the beat and clever turn of phrase. If you don’t get hype when the GOT theme music starts playing and the animation starts going, are you even alive? And who didn’t love the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen who could birth dragons, be consumed in fire and remain unburnt, who was riding dragons bareback and setting all of her enemies aflame with one word: dracarys! Of course, they had to constantly remind their Black and female audience that we don’t really belong in their fantasies beyond props.

Daenerys, the only main character who kept Black and brown people around her, did so because she “freed” the Black and brown “slaves” who then dedicated their lives to her protection. In one of the nastiest scenes of Game of Thrones, the Black and brown people literally lift her lily-white ass up to crowd surf on them like the white savior she was.

The brilliant Jacob Anderson who is now killing it as Louis de Pointe du Lac in Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Lestat was simply wasted playing one of those freed enslaved soldiers for Daenerys in what could’ve been an interesting role if the D&D showrunners cared anything about Black characters having depth or being anything other than enslaved people “freed” by white people and eternally grateful to the point of death.

It’s because of how Game of Thrones used (or didn’t use) Black characters that this week’s episode of House of the Dragon was so striking. Because Black fantasy lovers are starved for such images and scenes of us together, on the same side. Yet even from the premiere episode of the series in Summer 2022, Black people have existed not just as lords, ladies and dragon riders through Lord Corlys and his family, but also as a maester and adviser to the king in Kings Landing, and as regular folks doing this and that in the background. In fact, Black people are so prevalent in HOTD that I’m actually worried about what happened to them all between the time period of this show and Game of Thrones which takes place about 200 years later. I guess white folks are committed to doing 200 years of Black enslavement in every lifetime, including in their wildest fantasies. It’s true, skin color doesn’t divide the way having wealth and dragon-riding blood does in HOTD, but Black characters being a free and regular part of the biggest fantasy franchise, represented in all classes of nobility, while also having a moment on screen where we can just be Black together is rare and beautiful to see—regardless of how race might work in their world.

Just as rare on screen is the exploration of patriarchy through the lens of women of different races in fantasy. Even white women main characters in Game of Thrones were constantly punished on screen through the male gaze. Though Game of Thrones had some fascinating women characters—Cersei, Arya, and of course, Rhaenyra’s descendant Daenerys among them—it was largely a man’s game told from a male point of view, with women characters filtered through a man’s lens. From Dany to Cersei to Sansa Stark, the central white women characters on Game of Thrones and even random background women characters were all brutally and violently raped on screen throughout the long-running series, and gratuitously nude. It’s “realistic”; it’s “period accurate,” all the incel boys cried at any pushback from Black and women viewers for why Game of Thrones just had to treat all manner of women and Black people this way. Never mind the dragons and zombies and magic. It’s realism and period accuracy we’re going for here.

And then came House of the Dragon.

Three years after Game of Throne’s disastrous final season in 2019, the prequel series about the Targaryen civil war with dragons premiered. Even with male showrunner Ryan Condal on this series, House of the Dragon is decidedly female and therefore a fundamentally different show.

It’s still a man’s world, but in House of the Dragon, we see the patriarchy through the female gaze. When women are centered, we learn as an audience to focus and sympathize with women as the most important people in a story—something blatantly against what patriarchy conditions us to believe.

At its core are two women, Rhaenyra and her childhood best friend and lady-in-waiting Alicent. Both navigate patriarchy with wildly different ideas of what it takes to win the game. As a dragon-rider, the heir to the Targaryen dynasty and the future queen of Westeros, Rhaenyra was born into ultimate power. Her life’s motto is “who gon check me, boo?” The first woman pledged to sit the Iron Throne, Rhaenyra sees no difference between herself and her male ancestors, and exercises total agency over her body and her pleasure, as men are trained to do. She has no concept of not getting her way, as long as her father can drag his decrepit ass out of bed and remove her enemies for her. She is patriarchy’s princess, and her biggest weakness is not understanding that she can only be queen if the men around her allow it.

Alicent, by contrast, is the daughter of Otto Hightower, a high-born second son who ascends to power by scheming and pimping out his daughter to Rhaenyra’s widowed father, King Viserys. Alicent is socialized to believe that if she is a good girl for the patriarchy, she will be rewarded and happy. In a betrayal to Rhaenyra, she becomes queen to Viserys and serves men well: her father, her king husband, and then the sons that she bears for him. And she is miserable, sleeping with a decaying old man who calls her by Rhaenyra’s dead mother’s name. Alicent grows to resent Rhaenyra’s sexual freedom and agency over her own body and the way Rhaenyra flaunts her disregard for the respectable role women are supposed to play in society. Once Viserys dies, Alicent and her father plot and install Alicent’s son Aegon II on the throne instead.

Nonbinary actor Emma D’Arcy as Rhaenyra will go down in history for their performance in this week’s episode, and the quote “Bring Aegon—the YOU-ZUR-PAH—to me!” is one of those epic line readings that’s gonna ring in our head for weeks. What a stroke of genius and luck, having a non-binary actor playing the role of Rhaenyra who seeks to destroy the boundaries placed around her womanhood (if not all women), who simply wants to live freely—not as a man, but as men do. With D’Arcy as Rhaenyra, existing as non-binary, the audience is opened to a world beyond the gender binary and can view Rhaenyra’s story (and perhaps even our own) through the lens of gender-free possibility—and what’s lost when too many men, and Alicent as their humble servant, won’t allow it.

“You toil still in service to men. Your father, your husband, your son. You desire not to be free, but to make a window in the wall of your prison,” Princess Rhaenys (Rhaenyra’s cousin) reads Alicent for filth as she’s usurping Rhaenyra’s throne. Alicent plays her favorite game, playing ignorant to the truth and then acting shocked when her betrayals have deadly consequences.

Through Alicent, House of the Dragon shows the audience how utterly unfulfilling being a foot soldier of the patriarchy is for women. Through Rhaenyra, it reveals how unwilling we are for a (perceived) woman to be free, let alone to rule.

After this epic “Queen’s Landing” episode, where a grieving Rhaenyra takes her long and labored walk up to the throne, snot-crying as she goes, sitting awkwardly upon it, unsure if it was worth all that she has sacrificed, the audience called her “weak”.

Countless posts wished Rhaenyra would’ve been more of a “badass” in her ascent to the throne, like her descendant Daenerys. When taking what was rightfully hers, the audience said she should’ve been filled with rage and determination instead of crying with grief and walking slowly up to her new royal perch. It revealed the truth that this country has long-since proclaimed in real life: we do not actually want women to lead unless they perform strength like men do.

Because as much as this show is about women under patriarchy, it’s specifically about motherhood, and Rhaenyra is a grieving mother who behaves as a grieving mother does.

We’re with Rhaenyra as she births a stillborn daughter Visenya upon hearing that her king father has passed and Alicent’s son has usurped her throne. Just as her mother Aemma told Rhaenyra before dying in childbirth, the pregnancy bed is a woman’s battlefield. It’s violent, bloody, tortuous and lonely. Rhaenyra pulls her stillborn daughter out herself, as her now-husband-uncle Daemon and the men on her council ignore her screams of agony and plot the next course of action without her. But because Rhaenyra has been through this battlefield of pregnancy loss and has felt the consequences of it first-hand, she is measured in her response and slow to go to war. She knows what war costs.

Everyone around her doubts her leadership and her choice to try and avoid war as a womanly weakness without the stomach necessary to lead. Never mind that her father, a man, was a peace-time king and instilled in her the importance of peace in the realm above all. Never mind that she would be waging war against the other half of her family—people whom her beloved father also loved—not to mention the suffering of the rest of the kingdom. Every decision she makes is doubted because she is a woman. It’s only after Alicent’s second son Aemond kills Rhaenyra’s young son Lucerys that she knows peace is impossible and is therefore ready to go to war at the end of season one.

Season three opens with the epic Battle of the Gullet between Team Black (which literally includes the Black characters on the show) for Rhaenyra and Team Green, which is Alicent’s Hightower usurper branch of the Targaryen family. I wish I knew Rhaenyra’s eldest son and heir Jacerys better as a character so that his death alone would gut me like I know it’s supposed to. Like I know his little brother Lucerys’ death was supposed to gut me at the end of season one. My second-major complaint about the show is its rushed and awkward pacing, leaving us little time to know secondary characters like Luke and Jace. But I know Rhaenyra, and Emma D’Arcy acted their ass off as Rhaenyra seeing Jace dead for the first time. Rhaenyra yells at him as a mother would their rebellious teenager, as though he were alive and would answer her as commanded. That gutted me. Watching Rhaenyra move through denial to sheer agony, I was bawling along with her. D’Arcy is so powerful in this role that I started asking why my son had to disobey me and go get himself killed in a war. Watchers, I have no children.

But it’s with this context, wielding her dead son’s sword, grieving the loss of now three of her six children to this war, that she cries as she chops the head off of her biggest op, Alicent’s father and the mastermind of her usurpation, Otto Hightower. She walks heavy-footed through his pool of blood, leaving behind red footsteps as she ascends to her throne, mirroring her bloody walk through the Red Keep in season one after giving birth to her son Joffrey. The first shot we see of Rhaenyra on the throne is not head-on, but through her reflection in Otto’s pool of blood.

Her children are what it costs for the Queen to land.

“The boys who clung to me, who hid their little faces in my skirts, dead. So that I could sit upon the throne of swords,” she cries to Daemon earlier in the episode. Rhaenyra isn’t “weak,” she’s alive and feeling. She still handles business, yet doesn’t delight in the death and destruction. Men like Daemon would rush headlong into the “glory” of war without a second thought to what it would cost. A matriarchy, however, must consider the children.

Motherhood is central not only to Rhaenyra as a character but to the overall HOTD story. Rhaenyra is a kind and loving mother who raised sweet boys—a huge contrast to Alicent who, in her bitterness over being forced to marry her best friend’s dad and bear his children without pleasure, has raised entitled, bitter little demon sons who rape and pillage. But, like Alicent, Rhaenyra also set her sons up for failure.

Because Rhaenyra’s first husband, Lord Corlys’ son Laenor, a silver-haired Black man, was gay, and Rhaenyra wanted sex for pleasure, not just duty, they made an arrangement to keep up appearances but sleep with whom they wanted. As a result, Rhaenyra had her first three children with a guard from the City Watch, Ser Harwin Strong, which resulted in all of her sons being white with noticeably black hair. For the silver-haired, interracial couple, that was obviously a sign that Rhaenyra and her children’s legitimate claim to her father’s Iron Throne could be easily challenged, against her father’s wishes. At least cheat with a Black man, Rhaenyra, damn!!

“I could father a dozen bastards if I were a man and no one would blink an eye,” young Rhaenyra tells her father when he first approaches her about the possibility she had “lost her virture,” (to her uncle Daemon, no less!) before marriage —again, a conversation that would never exist if Rhaenyra were Raemond. Her father agrees with her and yet tells her that she’s a woman and this is a patriarchy and Rhaenyra doesn’t get a special “but I’m the Queen-to-Be” pass. Rhaenyra tries her luck at acting like a man anyhow.

Despite Alicent’s best efforts, including forcing Rhaenyra’s bloody walk through the Red Keep after giving birth, Rhaenyra refuses to be shamed for exercising agency over her own body. Alicent can only dream of such power over oneself and bitterly resents Rhaenyra for it (so much so that Alicent starts her own self-righteous affair with Rhaenyra’s old work, the incel edgelord Drake of Westeros, Ser Criston Cole). And Laenor’s father, Lord Corlys, always stood by Rhaenyra’s children as his own grandchildren, even though we can all see with our eyes that they are not Black! It’s hilarious and I love it.

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It’s not simply out of the goodness of Corlys’ heart that he defends his legal grandchildren as his own blood. He also married off his daughter Laena to the king’s younger brother Daemon. The Master of Ships is an extremely ambitious man, and if his son’s legal children ascend the throne, or if Daemon usurps Rhaenyra as the male heir to his brother’s throne, either way Velaryons will be kings and queens of Westeros moving forward. “History remembers names, not blood,” he tells his white Targaryen wife Rhaenys, who is over the bullshit of Corlys’ ambition. It’s a fascinating racial dynamic that they’ve set up, making Corlys Black when he is not in the book. Because of Corlys’ ambition, tangling his children up with Targaryens, both Laenor and Laena die, causing even more friction between the houses when Rhaenyra marries Daemon immediately after Laenor and Laena’s deaths.

But in “Queen’s Landing,” we see exactly why no one but Daemon could be by Rhaenyra’s side in her moment of grief and triumph. Besides D’Arcy breaking out their best acting, what really made this episode so special was how much it catered to the female gaze. When I found out that this episode was written by Sarah Hess and directed by Clare Kilner, I understood immediately why it was so effective. Women behind the scenes can make a world of difference.

The episode begins with Rhaenyra, sick with a mother’s grief, unable to move from her bed. Only Daemon can reach her. He whispers to her in their ancient language, High Valyrian, reminds her of who she is and the greater cause they’re fighting for. He’s seen a vision of Daenerys Targaryen in the long-off future, and knows that Rhaenyra sitting the throne is the only way to make that world-saving future possible. (Let’s pretend we don’t know how Game of Thrones ends so it hurts less!) He encourages her not to let her sons die in vain. And she’s up, ready to go reclaim her throne. Her small council finds it a terrible plan to fly to King’s Landing with four dragons and no army but Daemon shuts them up with “she has me.” HOT.

Then, they do in fact fly to King’s Landing on dragonback, and Daemon proceeds to kill everybody in their path, and then looks back at Rhaenyra like Did you like that? and she gives him the same look we all have at home: YES! THAT WAS HOT!

“Who else dares rise up against us in our house?” He yells after slitting the last soldier’s throat. I hate violence, but my god. This clip of Daemon handling big business set to Usher’s “Daddy’s Home” has been playing on a loop in my house for several days. Thus raising the bar for men to actually be of service. Because if you’re not clearing a path to my throne with the blood of my enemies, why are you even bothering me? This is ROMANCE. This is DEVOTION. This is MALE COMPETENCY. Annnnd it’s also problematic as hell.

Rhaenyra and Daemon are very hot together; truly, they are twin flames. When they barge into the Red Keep, they do so in lock-step. When he clears a path for her to the throne, she takes his hand. When they’re surrounded on all sides inside the throne room, it’s his Que Dawg fraternity brothers in the gold capes that bend the knee to her, defeating the Kingsguard. And we love to see it. He is giving his all for his queen, the love of his life. But that is her uncle! She is his niece! We are salivating over incest! WE’RE UNDER SPELLS!! There’s literally no more appropriate song to play over Daemon hotly cutting down Rhaenyra’s enemies than “Daddy’s Home.” It works on every level because that man is literally a half-step away from being a father to her. CRAZY.

When Rhaenyra begs her uncle to marry her at the end of season one, we’ve already seen him groom her for this when she was a child, giving her wine, kissing and undressing her in a brothel. JAIL. ELECTRIC CHAIR. DRACARYS! But, no. By the time she’s begging her uncle to marry her, we cheer because they’ve been in love for years and their marriage literally saves Rhaenyra and her children from speculation over their legitimacy. We’re supposed to be relieved for these incestuous fan-favorites under these circumstances, which is a huge leap from the feelings we were meant to have during Game of Thrones.

In that series, Cersei and her twin-brother-lover Jaime were the literal villains of the show, and their incestuous bond was a trait of their depravity. This week some loser on Threads was lamenting about how he was ridiculed for shipping Cersei and Jaime back then but now everybody loves Husbuncle Daemon with his niece and it’s okay. All that tells me is that, after eight years of Game of Thrones, incest has become more mainstream and normalized. That’s bad!

Just last year, Durham University published an article about the rise and popularity of incest porn, growing from 1% of porn content in 2006 to one of the most popular categories on pornography websites by 2014, with no sign of slowing down.

“The prevalence of incest-themed content matters, as it normalizes and legitimizes ideas of sexual activity between family members – particularly involving young girls. When these messages are consumed by millions every day, the influence extends beyond individual users and filters into broader cultural attitudes,” Professor Clare McGlynn writes.

“In time, we may become desensitized, less likely to understand the prevalence of child sexual abuse, or its seriousness. The claim that incest porn is fantasy without real-world effects assumes incest is rare, abhorrent. But it’s not.”

Thanks to the rise in consumer DNA testing, we now know that 1 in 7,000 people are born to “first-degree relatives,” meaning a parent raped a child or sibling rape has likely occurred. Women rape boys and men; yet statistically, the largest group of rapists are men. Fathers. Uncles. Brothers. And that’s just what we know from the number of girls and women who produced children who lived. We can safely assume the prevalence of incest in our society to be much higher.

We know that images are powerful and help shape in our minds what is possible in the world. As we celebrate women-centered stories that reframe how we value women and Black characters revolutionizing what we think is possible for Black people, we must also consider what it means to normalize incest in fantasy.

And we are normalizing it. “The only incest I approve of!” read a post with thousands of likes on Threads. “Best Husbuncle ever!” was the caption of a trending video of Daemon at work. Social media was flooded with these “jokes” after “Queen’s Landing.” And as much as I loved this episode and what this show is doing overall for fantasy-loving Black Girl Watchers everywhere, I have to sit in this and my own discomforting response to it.

Because this episode also revealed something deeper about the show that is akin to Rhaenyra’s own dilemma within it: trying to be queen of a patriarchy. A show can be progressive and powerful, breaking ground for Black people and women of different races in fantasy. It can be full of queer characters and queer people in front of and behind the camera. But at the end of the day, we are adapting to and operating within a white man’s fantasy. This is George R.R. Martin’s wet dream. The source material of both their world and our current reality, is white male patriarchy. Of course incest would thrive. Of course rape of women and children thrives. Of course white supremacy and class hierarchy thrive. We have seen the Epstein Files. This is the status quo. And here we are, an Alicent, carving a window in our prison cell. Whatever joy, power and progress we claw out for ourselves within this system, inevitably, we will be made to bend the knee at the boundaries of the white male imagination. Our victory will be as short-lived as Rhaenyra on the throne, with death and destruction of the soul as the cost to ascend.

Of the entire Game of Thrones franchise, the one with the most power and the most sense was Daenerys’ dragon Drogon. After all it cost him, he let loose his fire on the Iron Throne, melting the swords into the worthless pool of metal it always was. Because real freedom won’t come in the form of Black people, queer people or any race of woman in the seat of power crafted for and by white men. It will only come when we burn it all down.

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Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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****Spoilers for the plot of Obsession and Get Out*****

Hollywood has crowned a new favorite white boy, Curry Barker, who impressively wrote, directed and edited a $750,000 horror film, Obsession and sold it out of TIFF for more than $15 million. Released by Focus Features in May, the film has gone on to make $250 million at the box office in just a few weeks.

Starring Michael Johnston (who looks like the boy from Hereditary) and Inde Navarette (who looks like Natalie Portman), Obsession looks a whole lot like white Get Out. Needless to say, it’s derivative. The similarities are beyond its low-budget genre fare and massive global box office return from a first-time filmmaker. Obsession takes “homage” to Jordan Peele’s horror masterpiece to the extreme, yet this poor man’s rip off fails to achieve the pinnacle of social commentary that Get Out achieved.

Using a man dating a perverted version of his “dream girl” as a premise, Barker has nothing substantive to say about dating and relationships, just a whole lot of editing actors walking in reverse to set a freaky tone. With Obsession, Barker has fulfilled the old adage that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”

The film begins with a cowardly “nice guy” named Bear (Johnston) who wishes his friend Nikki (Navarette) who has no romantic interest in him, would “love him more than anyone else in the world.” All of the horrible consequences of the film stem from that narcissistic, life-ruining wish. Instead of “love,” Nikki becomes obsessed with Bear to the point of murder.

But like Andre (Lakeith Stanfield) in Get Out, Nikki isn’t really Nikki; she has been possessed by an alternate personality controlling Nikki’s brain and body, while the real Nikki is in the corners of her own mind (a sunken place, if you will!), aware of everything that’s happening to her, but in control of nothing. Unlike Get Out, where there are rules for what triggers someone in the sunken place to escape the prison of their mind and re-take control of their bodies, in Obsession, Nikki pops out occasionally with no rhyme or reason to let Bear know that something is wrong.

Just like the brilliant Betty Gabriel who plays Georgina in Get Out and made saying “no, no, no,” in quick succession iconic, Navarette’s Nikki copies Gabriel’s Georgina with a glassy-eyed smile and repetitive pattern while saying “no,” to let Bear know that Nikki isn’t being herself. (Watch for yourself below.)

A quintessential “nice guy,” Bear knows the real Nikki isn’t interested in him but wants to believe that he can treat her so well it shouldn’t matter. He knows something is off when she comes on to him and kisses him for the first time, but it’s only when the real Nikki pops out to say “what the fuck?!” that Bear expresses that she makes him “feel like a rapist” doing something wrong — which, of course, he is.

Like the white couple who bought Andre’s body off the auction block in Get Out, possessed him and has sex with his body, Bear is a rapist who has sex with Nikki knowing it’s not the real her. He dies for it all, but it’s unsatisfying, because the real Nikki is left with a pile of bodies in her wake while he, like the coward he is, gets to escape without being accountable for the crimes that have taken place and will ruin the rest of Nikki’s life.

So what was the point? What was the message? Why did I sit through this movie?

On second thought, to call Obsession derivative is far too mild and doesn’t quite capture what’s really going on at the root of this film’s success. Obsession isn’t smart. It isn’t layered. It isn’t nuanced. It isn’t commenting on centuries of oppression in an inventive way. It’s a straight forward “be careful what you wish for” film. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a straight-forward, crowd-pleasing film. This one, however, is ripping off one of the smartest, most layered, nuanced social commentary horror films of all time.

The brain transplant surgery Peele invents in Get Out satirizes white neo-colonization and enslavement of Black people. Mixing sci-fi with horror, Peele also comments on the long history of white scientists, surgeons and mental health professionals experimenting on and exploiting Black people to advance medicine and technology for their benefit at Black people’s expense. Peele’s film put 21st century racism on full display, taking direct shots at white women who prey on wealthy Black athletes and the Obama-liberal white people who still hold tight to their anti-Blackness with a few exceptions. This genius racial body horror story is so original, so thoughtful in its creation of lore, in establishing the rules of the world, in creating the technologies necessary for the satire of America’s racist history to work, that Barker’s laziness and lack of effort on all fronts in comparison with Obsession seem like a slap in the face.

The gag is, Obsession could’ve had something smart to say about patriarchy; about the ways that men are socialized to devalue women as autonomous people and how that can lead to pedestaling women without actually caring to see and know and love them as people. Bear didn’t “love” Nikki—he barely knew her. The “love” that he wished from her ended up being sick and twisted because it mirrored his own “love” for her: sick, twisted, self-serving, inconsiderate, narcissistic, fake, unconscious and deadly.

This idea connected to the larger system of patriarchy, of the ways that men systematically devalue women’s personhood for their own gain, could’ve been a worthwhile use of ripping off Get Out. Instead, Obsession is simply one boy’s silly wish gone awry, a story in a vacuum, outside of any social inference or analysis, with nothing to say beyond, “Oops! Did I do that?”

It reminds me, I’m rarely mad at bad films themselves—people make bad films all the time, they come and go and have zero impact on society. But the response to this film is yet another infuriating reminder that white filmmakers can afford to be cheap. They can be lazy in their storytelling. They can rip off Black brilliance, dilute it to its most simplistic form and outpace it in a matter of weeks. Whereas Get Out made $255 million at the global box office over a year’s time (it was in theaters around the world from February 2017-February 2018), Obsession has made a record-breaking $224 million in just over a month. Deadline also compares the films in its report on how Obsession’s faring overseas: “UK & Ireland grossed $2.6M this weekend to reach $13.8M cume, above Get Out at the same point.”

This poor-man’s rip-off has indeed made Barker very rich. He’s already secured an 8-figure offer for his next film before it’s even been pitched. But there’s simply no accounting for taste.

At the end of Get Out, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) has survived the attacks of the white Armitage family that meant to enslave him, burning down most of the evidence and killing every one of his would-be enslavers. But Chris is a Black man in a wealthy white American world. Things look incredibly bleak for him at this point of the film, even after surviving such horrors. As he uses his remaining strength to choke the life out of his murderous girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams), flashing lights appear in the driveway of the Armitage home. The hearts of the audience immediately sink, especially the Black viewers: everyone knows the reality of Black people and police in this country, whether they’ll admit to it or not. But in a twist of love for Chris—for the Black audience—the police lights are really from Chris’s TSA agent friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery)’s car. It’s not the police coming for Chris, it’s his friend coming to rescue him. Chris has fought white supremacy and won. He is safe! And so, for about five minutes, were Black people as a whole.

I watched Get Out on opening weekend at the AMC Magic Johnson Theater in Harlem, surrounded by Black people (and some of the men’s white girlfriends) during Black History Month 2017. I have never had an audience experience like that in my life. I will never forget the uproarious cheers when Rod stepped out of that police car. It was damn near the first Juneteenth in that theater! It was catharsis. It was relief.

In the age of 12 Years a Slave, where torturing Black people on screen could win you Oscars; in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, where videos of police murdering Black people flooded our timelines, Chris got to be okay. In Peele’s reality, we would be safe. We would be saved. It was perhaps the first time that I remember watching a movie and thinking out loud oh, this filmmaker LOVES us!

There is no love in Obsession. Despite the rampant femicide in America, where women are often killed by their male partners, fathers, sons or complete strangers for failing to behave the way that men want, there is no catharsis for Nikki or women like her. Despite the likelihood that Bear would statistically be the one to kill Nikki and then go on a mass shooting spree, it’s Nikki who is possessed with murderous intent.

Unlike Chris, who has a good friend in Rod, who is concerned for Chris’ well-being and searching for answers on his behalf, Barker has created no girlfriends for Nikki—only competition. Sarah, who is supposed to be Nikki’s friend, has an obvious crush on Bear and she lures Bear outside, away from a sleeping Nikki to confess her crush to him, saying that Nikki is only using him to get back at their co-worker whom Nikki has been secretly dating for years. Sarah has no concern that Nikki has been acting wildly out of character. She doesn’t see Nikki as endangered or at the point of mental breakdown. She sees Nikki as a threat to dilute and winds up getting diluted herself.

Men are the center of Barker’s world, and the real tragedy of Obsession, Barker would have us believe, is that Bear can’t just like the woman who likes him back. A pitiful, weak warning for men that their “dream girl” could turn into a nightmare—for them. By the end, Bear’s suicide puts Nikki back into her right mind, only to be left literally covered in the blood of everyone she’s murdered, their bodies strewn about her. The ending is a scream. No words, just loud air with no point. Just like the film itself.

Stay watchin’,

Brooke

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We’re back with another episode of the Another Possible World! A Black Girl Watching paid subscriber exclusive podcast where we explore revolutionary new ways of creating art and spotlight the radical creatives behind it.

This month’s guest is Oakland filmmaker and musician Boots Riley, the creative mind behind the ground-breaking surrealist and anti-capitalist films and series Sorry to Bother You, I’m a Virgo and his latest I Love Boosters.

Boots is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers due to his bold creative vision and unapologetic insistence on being overtly and radically political in his work. When I was creating my dream guest list for the Another Possible World podcast, Boots was at the top of the list and in the next hour, as we talk about art and revolution, you’ll see exactly why.

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In this episode we talk about the twenty-year-old roots of Boots’s new film. In 2006, he and his Oakland hip-hop band The Coup released their fifth studio album Pick a Bigger Weapon. The 13th track of the revolution-minded production is a little song called “I Love Boosters.” The song is Riley’s ode to the (usually) Black women in the Bay who steal clothes from department stores and “And sells it in the hood for dirt-cheap resale”:

“For some of y’all folks, this stuff might phase ya / This ain’t the way the society raised ya / But most of it was made by children in Asia / The stores make money off of very low wages /

“The next time you see two women running out The Gap / With arms full of clothes still strapped to the rack / Once they jump in the car, hit the gas and scat / If you have to say something, just stand and clap.”

Now, Riley has turned the song and its central thesis of corporate exploitation of labor as the real thief and burden on society into the genius new film of the same name, I Love Boosters.

Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, the head of an all-Black women booster crew called the Velvet Gang. The opening of the film mirrors the first verse of Riley’s song, where a man goes into what he thinks is a woman’s apartment looking for a hook-up, but it turns out, the place is full of boosted clothes and shoes in all sizes that she’s selling on the low. Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige round out the gang who have become a thorn in fashion mogul Christie Smith’s side, whose department stores they’ve been robbing blind.

My new favorite, God’s Strongest Soldier and a frequent Boots Riley collaborator Kara Young also makes an appearance in a memorable role as “Crying Black Mother,” a supposed Concerned Community Member and in our podcast episode, Boots talks about the wild origin story of this character.

We also talk about his definition of surrealism as an exaggeration of contradictions, and how the bright bold colors of I Love Boosters conceals the seedy underbelly of the fashion world and the ways these corporations build their wealth on the backs of a desperate labor force, risking their workers’ health and livelihood for profit.

Played by Demi Moore in her kookiest role yet, Christie Smith is as crooked as they come, building an empire off of Chinese enslaved labor, and living at the top of a literal leaning tower that most people have to hilariously struggle to navigate. In a clever bit of production design by Christopher Glass, this slanted building that she lives in both externalizes Christie’s twisted morals and character and also, in that Boots Riley, anti-nihilistic way, shows that the empire she’s built isn’t as solid as it appears and can be toppled with one big push.

Surrealism merges with science fiction when one of those Chinese laborers, played by Poppy Liu, steals a teleportation device meant for corporate evil and uses it to get to Oakland and help get the word out about the conditions of people in the factories that make Christie’s clothes. People are getting cancer and dying from the chemicals they use to make the clothes as cheaply and quickly as possible. But Corvette can’t see beyond the abandoned Chicken Shack that she’s squatting in. With bills due and overdue, Corvette is literally chased around town by a giant ball of her anxiety. This, Riley argues through the film, is how our corporate overlords keep us from being able to effectively organize for all of our basic rights and needs to be met. When we can barely see above water ourselves, it’s hard to see the people drowning right next to us.

Lakeith Stanfield plays a charming man with a deadly secret whom Corvette can’t help but be mesmerized by. He pops up throughout the story to tempt her off of her mission, an easy out through love and romance than the dangerous life of a squatter and a booster with the law already on her tail. But of course, every choice has a consequence, and there’s no such thing as a free ride.

Whereas evil tech billionaires are destroying our land, air and water to build A.I. data centers to better surveil and replace us, Riley uses technology as a form of liberation, literally connecting our struggles to those across the world whom we may never see and know. In Riley’s world, the Afro-Future is communist, and not even a handsome, charming literal soul-sucking demon should be able to tempt us to try and “change things from the inside.” (That’s a little bit of a spoiler but you still will not be prepared for how that actually manifests on screen!) A general labor strike is our only path forward to end capitalism.

I don’t want to spoil the many surprises coming your way in I Love Boosters (yes, out of nowhere, there is claymation). But if you’ve seen a Boots Riley production—Sorry to Bother You features enslaved half-man, half-horse laborers; I’m a Virgo features a 13-foot-tall teenager in a world where superheroes are real—you already know to expect the wildest ride you’ve ever been on. If you haven’t, think of the man in the opening scene: go in for a hook-up, leave with the fliest pair of shoes in your size for the low price of a movie ticket instead. The laugh-out-loud I Love Boosters will literally go off the rails. Think B.A.P.S. with the girl-gang comedy, plus Blade Runner and the collage art of Mickalene Thomas. And claymation! If you’re up for a vicious tear-down of the world of high-fashion, the billionaire class and capitalism, just hang on and enjoy the riotous, liberating ride.

Thanks to all of the Watchers who submitted their questions for this episode! Boots answers quite a few of them, sharing updates on I’m a Virgo season two, when another The Coup album might be coming, and also his favorite rom-com—only the most cinephile of cinephiles will be able to guess it!

Catch all of the behind the scenes stories, his process for writing music versus screenplays, how to build a communist revolution through art, only on the Black Girl Watching podcast Another Possible World.

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***SPOILERS FOR THE PLOT OF ‘IS GOD IS’***

“You so mad, Twin.”

Anaia (Mallori Johnson) says this to her older twin sister Racine (Kara Young) in the new revenge thriller Is God Is. There’s judgment in Anaia’s voice, sadness—fear even.

“Aint you?” Racine retorts with tears in her eyes and Anaia doesn’t answer. Anaia might be angry about their father, the Monster (Sterling K. Brown) for abusing their mother Ruby/God (Vivica A. Fox) to the point of restraining order. She might be angry about him breaking into their home, choking their mother out and setting her on fire in front of them when they were three years old. She might be angry that the flames from the fire disfigured her face forever; that no one can even look her in the eye without horror and discomfort. She might be angry that, day and night, the twins take turns rubbing ice on each other’s still-burning scars (Anaia’s are the most visible on her face, while only Racine’s left arm is fully burned, her fingers melting into something claw-like). But Anaia is still not as angry as Racine.

Racine, it seems, is too angry.

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Paid subscribers can watch my interview with writer-director Aleshea Harris below.

It’s the main source of conflict between the twins throughout playwright Aleshea Harris’s fiery directorial debut—what’s the acceptable amount of angry to be over what’s been done to you? To Black women? Adapted by Harris from her Obie (no relation) Award-winning play of the same name, Is God Is follows “burning twins” Racine and Anaia who have been charged by their mother Ruby whom they call God to “make [their] daddy dead. Real dead.”

“We ain’t killers,” Anaia says. “Ain’t we been killed?” Racine answers.

Growing up in foster homes, the twins were subjected to physical and sexual abuse and denied the truth about their parentage or how they got their disfiguring scars. What’s the appropriate amount of rage a Black girl should have for all of that?

Now, God has written Racine (not Anaia) a letter telling her that she’s not dead like their many foster parents had told them—but she is dying. And she needs her girls to come and see her before she goes. Not to give them the love they’ve been craving, but to send them on this deadly mission of patricide and revenge.

It’s such a contrast within the most striking scene in the film, of God in bed, clothed in brown and green like a tree, surrounded by her Greek chorus of nurses who wear red and pink like blooms, who braid God’s hair and speak in unison. Even Racine and Anaia wear matching flower dresses as they sit on God’s bed like the fruit of her branches. In death and dying, the Black Mother of all is revered, not just by her children, but her nurse attendants, anointing her head with elaborate braids. Unlike in the courtroom—where the Monster was acquitted of the horrors he inflicted on his family—in God’s room she is believed. She is supported. She is cared for. And she is defended.

When the Greek chorus removes the blankets covering the lower half of God’s burnt body and steam rises up from God’s skin, Anaia is horrified. Racine is angry enough for war. “Just tell us where to find him.”

The title, Is God Is, Harris told me in our interview (paid subscribers can watch it below), is simultaneously a statement of fact for Racine and a question for Anaia. She is God ‘cause “she made us, didn’t she?” But would God abandon us for decades and send for us only on her death bed to give us a deadly mission that would damn our souls?

With this tension at the center, I thought this story was Harris’ way of deconstructing Christianity, examining with a harsh light the ways the religion has kept Black people and Black women in particular from the full range of our humanity and emotions. There’s no turning the other cheek in the face of abhorrent violence against us.

By nature of the spaghetti western/Blaxploitation/Southern gothic/mythic adventure film, we spend very little time with the source of their scars, the Monster, seeing him only from the mouth down or his menacing feet in Sperry Top-siders. Brown plays the Monster with a disarming mildness, a soft-spoken gentleness that explains how easy it’s been for him to circumvent justice. A Monster could be beautiful, unassuming, and double-cheeked-up on a Tuesday. He decides when you get to see his real face.

In a redux of the reaction to 1985’s The Color Purple, some Black men are already up in arms about the “negative portrayal of Black men” in Brown’s character. Funny. Exactly a year ago, Black men flooded the theaters celebrating a different set of Black daddy-killing twins in Sinners. I wonder what the difference could be. Nevertheless, Is God Is’s story of a Black patriarch who attempts to murder his Black wife and children, exists in the context where this happens regularly in real life.

Just last month, a Black man murdered eight children (7 of his own) and tried to kill his wife as well as a former partner who mothered 3 of his children. Literally yesterday, a rapper murdered the mother of his children and shot himself on livestream to escape justice. Black men killing their Black wives and children is a crisis that has persisted for decades, and Is God Is merely shines a light on the aftermath, and the culture that created this crisis in the first place. If only that reality were as enraging to these men as the portrayal. If only justice were something within reach for these Black women and babies. So, we turn to film.

How will they feel once they kill their father, Anaia asks. “Better,” Racine answers. “This is purpose. This is destiny type shit.” It seemed that Black women’s righteous anger for the harms we’ve suffered was holy evidence that we have selves worthy of defense. And when we render justice, we won’t be “all sad-sacky,” as Racine calls Anaia. We will feel better.

But this interpretation is immediately undermined by the imagery. Anaia doesn’t buy into the truth of feeling better after revenge, and Racine, the shorter twin, is positioned on screen behind Anaia, talking over her shoulder like a perched devil trying to convince Anaia to do something bad and wrong.

Still, it’s easy to think that this film might have a message of deconstructing Christianity and its role in oppressing Black women because immediately after Racine convinces Anaia to come along for the ride to find their Monster father, the first person the twins meet on their journey is a Southern cult preacher by the name of Divine the Healer. Played with the perfect combination of absurdity and sincerity by Erika Alexander, Divine the Healer is the woman the Monster took up with during his trial for attempted family annihilation.

She either believed in the Monster’s innocence, or, like the real-life defenders of wife-murderer Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (and let’s face it: the defenders of most famous Black men who harm women) she simply didn’t care about what he was accused of. Presumably, this “woman of God,” saw the scars on the Monster’s wife and children and dismissed them, excused them. She “healed” the Monster with her bosom, like Iyanla VanZant squeezing Jonathan Majors to her chest and Meagan Good marrying him after his domestic violence conviction.

Her god was the Monster. Divine shirked her own divinity as a mother when she bore the Monster a son, Ezekiel (Josiah Cross), and raised him to deify the Monster—a father he’d never met before, because the Monster abandoned them the second he was acquitted of his crimes, changing his name and fleeing town to start a new life without all of them.

Still, Divine built an altar to the Monster from his left-behind items: a can of Barbasol shaving cream, a razor, a shirt, a tie. He left this pregnant woman behind like so many toiletries. Yet Divine stomps around her pulpit in boots as silver as the coins Judas earned when he betrayed Christ, just as she betrayed God and her children to side with their oppressor. She even built the Monster a church, and grew him a cult congregation that speaks and moves in unison, that wears all white like the bride of Christ, waiting diligently for his return.

But he’s not coming. Racine tells Divine how pathetic her decades of waiting and willing submission to the Monster are when she realizes the role Divine played in supporting their Monster in the immediate aftermath of his crimes against them. This earns Racine Divine’s wrath. “You are septic with rage!” Divine chastises her for simply telling Divine the truth. The truth-tellers are often dismissed as demonic and angry. Even Anaia chastises Racine for her inability to stay quiet in the face of Divine’s foolishness, fearing an inability to get the information that they need. Racine proves Anaia wrong: you can tell the truth, shame the devil and still accomplish your mission.

I thought this was all evidence of Is God Is being a treatise on patriarchal women and the ways they uphold men and the violent system of patriarchy to the detriment of themselves and other women and children.

Janelle Monáe’s character Angie was, I thought, the culmination of this message. Just as guilty as Divine, if not more so, Angie married the Monster after he was acquitted and changed his name. She had two twin boys with him, Scotch and Soda Riley, and she was aware that he had had other children with his first wife. Her only concern, however, was with whether they would have to pay child support. He told her that the girls were dead with their mother. Angie thought she was different, the exception to his monstrous violence. Until she wasn’t.

“She should’ve left!” Angie screams about God when confronted by the twins for her part in their misery. Angie was in the process of leaving the Monster—and her two boys—behind. She’d been planning this for some time after more than a decade of his abuse. She was smarter than God was and therefore “deserved” to get free, unlike God, who deserved her fate, she says. Up until that point, maybe Angie was yelling at herself for staying with the Monster far longer than God ever did. Women who suffer abuse can internalize that shame and lash out at other women and girls who remind them of their own shame. But then Angie curses God. Says the Monster’s violence was God’s fault for being “ghetto trash.” That kind of victim-blaming of women and white-washing of violent men has to die. So Racine made sure Angie did.

And then that ending changed what I thought I knew about this movie’s message.

Until I interviewed Harris, I didn’t know that Is God Is was meant to be a Greek tragedy —epic in scope yet tragic in its ending. Perhaps I would’ve been better prepared than thinking it would be a rah-rah revenge film à la Kill Bill where the Bride gets to kill Bill and live happily ever after, but for Black women, for once.

That’s not what happens.

After Racine kills Scotch and Anaia kills Riley, they have their showdown with the Monster. They tag-team beat him into submission just the way God told them: “destroy the spirit first, then the body, like he did me.” The Monster staggers away from his girls into a poetic dead-end: the bathtub. Just as he had doused God in alcohol and lit her on fire in the tub, they do the same to him. The literal definition of revenge. But it doesn’t satisfy. Racine, the closest to him physically—and, the movie argues, spiritually—gets pulled into the tub by the Monster and burns alive as Anaia escapes.

The foreshadowing of Racine’s elimination and the justification for it had already begun much earlier. Divine had cursed her. The attorney Chuck Hall (Mykelti Williamson) who defended the Monster in court and got his tongue ripped out by the Monster as gratitude deems Racine just like her father “in the eyes.” Angie called her an animal. But it was Anaia’s disgust with Racine that revealed her fate from the beginning.

“You gon’ get struck down,” Anaia says to Racine when Racine calls their mother God for the first time. In a patriarchy, where women and children exist primarily for the benefit of men, that kinda thinking will get you killed.

“What if he grabs one of us on the way down?” Anaia asks and predicts Racine’s demise as Racine brainstorms ways to kill the Monster, including pushing him off of a building.

“You’re enjoying this too much!” Anaia yells at Racine before Racine had even killed anyone yet. Can’t a girl hype herself up to “Guillotine” by Death Grips with the windows down and a blunt in hand while on a retributive road trip without judgment?! Damn.

Anaia’s reaction to Racine’s killing of the “bougie bitch” Angie let us know how the film feels about it too. Racine’s anger is out of control. Scotch (Xavier Mills), who humiliates Anaia in front of all of his friends by calling her ugly, doesn’t deserve for Racine to kill him in Anaia’s eyes. “But I am though!” Anaia says, revealing how she feels about herself and moreso how she’s treated in the world.

In our patriarchal society where beauty is currency, being ugly means being unworthy of love, care, humanity. Because Racine was “pretty,” she could be mean and fight back against their oppressors; she had a right to. Anaia, as she said in the beginning of the film, was “too ugly to be mean,” so Racine had “both of their mean.” Even the framing of Racine as “mean,” when really she didn’t bother anyone who didn’t bother them first, already created the image of Racine as unreasonable, unruly. Racine kills Scotch for calling Anaia ugly because he was complicit in the world in which ugly meant a loss of humanity. Not only was he complicit and a direct beneficiary of that world with his wealth and handsomeness and closeness to their father, he had the nerve to delight in the inequality at Anaia’s expense.

When “ugly” means “unworthy,” and Anaia shouts back “But I am though!” All of her behavior throughout the film makes sense.

Ol’ Dude, the unknown man Anaia has unprotected sex with, only allows her to have sex with him if her back is turned and he doesn’t have to look at her face. This is the father of the baby she’s secretly pregnant with. When Racine asks Anaia to think of what her life would be like if the Monster hadn’t burned them up, Anaia fantasizes about facing Ol’ Dude, sitting in his lap in the backseat of a car (presumably where they have sex) and him telling her how pretty she is. (GIRL. Aim higher!)

It is no wonder, then, that when the opportunity arises, Anaia chooses her half-brother Riley (Justen Ross), with whom she’s had only a five-minute conversation, over Racine who has protected her their whole lives and warned her that Riley was dangerous. Of course, it takes Riley 10 seconds to try and murder Anaia, and Racine has to swoop in and save her and almost gets killed herself in the process.

By the time it’s time to kill their Monster, all it takes is some tender-talking for the desperate Anaia to believe the Monster’s lie that it was God who grabbed ahold of Anaia while she was burning and that’s why Anaia is so badly burned. It took literally nothing but a soft man’s voice whispering literal sweet nothings for her to doubt her mother. We know his story that Anaia’s burns are her mother’s fault isn’t true because, 1) he literally lit the fire. Everything that came after that was his fault. And 2) Though the scene is a black-and-white close-up of the Monster’s face—the main tool Harris uses to let the audience know that we’re watching a flashback—there is no actual scene of God grabbing Anaia or the Monster trying to stop her. Because it didn’t happen.

When God tells her story, on the contrary, we are there in the scene with God. We know the Monster is lying in his sick justification for setting God on fire (“she wouldn’t let me hold her”) because we see God let him touch her and hear her explain why she let her guard down for a deadly split second (“men like your Daddy always got a tender side).” And then we see him choke her unconscious immediately. One would think that a man capable of the evident depravity engraved in Anaia’s own face could easily tell a soft-spoken lie.

But not Anaia. She’s immediately skeptical of her mother’s story, if not completely trusting of the man called Monster. “Just her,” the Monster tells Anaia of his evil intentions with the fire he set close enough to burn his children regardless of his excuses. “Not you.” Well then! Let me put down my weapon and have a seat with dear old dad! Let me desperately grasp at his promise to bounce my unborn baby on his knee—in a grandfatherly way, not the I tried to murder my whole family and you’re next kind of way!

I’m so glad Racine was unconscious during her sister’s dumbassery and didn’t have to witness it. Between this, Anaia’s immediate trust of Riley and the fact that she’s pregnant by a man who only has sex with her from the back so he doesn’t have to look at her scarred face—it’s easy to conclude that Anaia is as male-centered a pick-me as Divine and Angie. Of course, it took the Monster seconds to go from caressing to slapping the spit out of Anaia’s face on the side that is the most scarred from burns. He says her unborn baby is the only thing stopping him from cutting her eyes out and making her eat them. I don’t know that I believe him. If he could kill his living child, what’s an unborn baby?

This betrayal of her trust is what inspires Anaia to stay on her mission to kill him. Unlike Racine, Anaia’s kills of Riley and the Monster count as self-defense because she was in imminent danger of death. Racine’s “self-defense” has passed the statute of limitations and is simply cold-blooded murder. Even as their flesh still burns from the crimes against them daily. Even as steam still rises off the flesh of God more than twenty years later, the time for retribution in many people’s minds is still never.

Instead of a deconstruction, Is God Is couldn’t be more Christian in its assessment that seeking justice against and consequences for the people who harmed you makes you “just as bad” as them. “We come from a man who tried to kill our mama and a mama who wants to kill that man,” Racine says to reject Anaia’s claim that they aren’t killers. “It’s in the blood.”

That blood, Harris argues, has to die.

In our interview, Harris describes Racine’s death as “poetic,” having been birthed in a way, by fire and dying in the same way. I would argue a far more “poetic” end for Racine would’ve been to survive both fires, twin bookends for a new life that she could have, that was a bit more joyful, a bit more free. What could her path towards healing with these evils behind her have meant for her character? What could it have meant for all the Angry Black Girls in the world who are constantly told that the problem isn’t the injustice waged against them but their reactions toward it?

In my 2019 review of Queen & Slim, which I called “an artful wound with no medicine,” I coined the Hurston-Walker Test. Quoting from Alice Walker’s brilliant introduction to Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon, the Hurston-Walker Test is how I engage with Black art that depicts our difficult history and reality: “Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief. At the moment they show us our wound, they reveal they have the medicine.”

We know well the wounds that makes us angry. But there is no medicine in this ending for the Angry Black Girl. There’s no healing. There’s only a continued message that even the ones closest to you—the ones you’ve spent your life fighting for—will see you and your anger as the problem, and will be happier without you.

In the end, Anaia stands alone, herself reborn a God, holding her newborn creation: another daughter. Is God Is, indeed. But what kind of God is she going to be? Her sense of shock at Racine’s demise seems to melt into what I can only describe as relief. Racine, it seems, was the one holding her back all this time, and now she and her baby can go be happy and live in peace without Racine’s angry energy.

The Angry Black Girl gets sacrificed in favor of the softer, quieter, patriarchal woman who can benefit and borrow from the Angry Black Girl’s fire when it suits them—just long enough to survive til the end—then blame the Angry Black Girl for stirring up the fire that saved them in the first place.

“I think there’s something kind of complete about cutting off that energy [of the Monster in the killing of Racine] because Anaia doesn’t carry that energy,” Harris told me in our interview below. “And for the story, I don’t think that Anaia could go off and rock that baby and live a semblance of a normal life with Racine at her side. I really think Racine would have continued to escalate.”

But this is a fictional film, and Racine neither had to die nor escalate her violence in the unwritten future. With all respect to the God of these characters, that idea of Racine is also not supported by the text of the film.

As Racine and Anaia set the Monster on fire and watch him burn, Racine’s first thought isn’t glee and rejoicing or even blood thirst, it’s conviction over what she’s said to her sister when they were fighting over Riley earlier. Racine apologizes to her sister for saying mean things to her, and holds her hand. At no point was she ever a physical threat to her sister, putting down her rock-in-a-sock murder weapon to prove as much. When Anaia turns her back on Racine to save Riley, Racine never touches her. She’s too hurt by her sister’s judgment. The only thing worse than anger is being alone in the anger you thought was shared. She’s devastated when Anaia runs away with Riley, not violent. She lets them go until Anaia’s life is in danger and then she saves Anaia and her unborn baby from Riley.

Yes, Racine is angry. And she’s also full of love and devotion.

The most devastating moment of the film comes at its midpoint, when the twins begin their walk to the Monster’s home. While trudging through open fields, they find a water fountain oasis. They laugh and gulp the water from the fountain, Racine the most drenched and quenched. “Twin, do you feel like this is too good to be true?” It turns out, it was just a dream. There is no water oasis for these burning twins; only Anaia alone.

What a cruel thing to tease that the angry Black girl’s fire might get to be quenched with justice that rolls down like a waterfall and righteousness that flows like a mighty stream, only to snatch it away in the final moments of the film. What a choice to make her destiny be one of eternal burning, too angry for the world and therefore too malignant to exist. It simply did not have to be that way.

At least in Harris’ original play, Anaia does not feel relief at Racine’s death. She goes back to God to tell her about the Monster and Racine and God is indifferent to Racine’s demise. It upsets Anaia. This was at least some evidence that Racine deserved to live and that her death was unjust, and that, most of all, Anaia did not think she was better off in the world without her sister.

In my reading of the play, Anaia hears God’s indifference and does what Racine would do: brings that rock-in-a-sock down on God’s head. This was the deconstruction of religion that I thought was happening, that uncaring Gods who “don’t want nothing but blood” are not our makers, or at least don’t have to be. We could choose our loving selves.

But Harris told me in our interview that my interpretation of the play’s ending was incorrect. Anaia doesn’t actually kill her mother in the play and she rewrote the ending in later versions to clear up that common confusion. Anaia simply puts down the sock and walks away from the violence for good, showing that the Monster’s energy would not continue with her or (fingers crossed) her baby. While both endings are disappointing in light of this new information, I still much prefer the play’s ending and Anaia’s confrontation with God over Racine’s death rather than this damn-near gleeful Sound of Music ending where the wicked witch is dead and Anaia is free.

Racine, the one who worshipped at the feet of the Matriarchy; who was pretty enough to abandon her sister for the burden of a man’s affections, but smart enough not to trust “pretty” or men, and aimed for a higher calling; who defended her mother and sister to the death—this was the one fit to be sacrificed in order for happiness and peace to be restored. It’s cruel.

Aleshea Harris has written a compelling world and characters that I loved and rooted for and has given fantastic debut direction to this film. Kara Young is a star, Mallori Johnson is one to watch, Erika and Vivica make everything better. Sterling K. Brown is exactly who he thinks he is. Alexander Dynan’s cinematography is incredible. The music from Moses Sumney is haunting.

But damn. That ending.

Is God Is could’ve been iconic, offering Black women the fullness of their righteous rage, satisfaction in their revenge and a salve for their burning scars. Instead, it offers final judgment, giving fire and brimstone to the Angry Black Girl who is simply too angry and unhealable to let live.

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Stay watchin’

Brooke

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WATCH: Writer-Director Aleshea Harris on all the details of ‘Is God Is,’ why she chose that major death and how her film differs from her play (and read the play below!):

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****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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