Blunt Cinema in the Age of Trump

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The homepage for the Trump International Hotel New York features the slogan "Subtlety is not our strength, Indulgence is." The slogan nicely characterizes the values of the Trump era. How can we best engage politically in popular culture and create politically charged media in an age where racism and antisemitism are as subtle as more than two hundred white nationalists demonstrating in Charlottesville, eleven innocents murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and a president who antagonizes Black women reporters by calling them "racist"?

What I find worrisome about the Trump era's lack of subtlety is its bleeding into visual culture. This bluntness loses consideration for the nuances of existence, which too often means centering cishet Black masculinity at the expense of diverse representations in popular culture and political discourse. Intersectional scholars have long demonstrated how to reclaim nuance by centering difference, offering intersectionality as the antidote to this epidemic. Audre Lorde tells us that "human blindness" in all its forms (racism, sexism, homophobia) stems from "an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force."1 While Lorde's conception of difference stems from a Black lesbian dialectic, the difference that's most centered in popular discourse of late has been Black masculinity, allowing for the rise of Black writers and artists like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jordan Peele who foreground a particular aspect of Black masculinity that I think of as conspicuous disdain. This popular foregrounding of Black masculine conspicuous disdain isn't surprising given the link between Blackness and "the political" within the western imaginary, but what are the stakes of using the Black male subject to represent it?

While this subtlety-free climate has been ideal for the success of political films like The Post, Get Out, Fahrenheit 11/9, 13^th, and even The Purge: Election Year, it has also been ripe for the resurgence of filmmakers like Spike Lee who have built entire careers on their frank political arguments. Lee released the TV adaptation of his 1986 film She's Gotta Have It on Netflix in November 2017, while releasing his Cannes Festival hit BlacKkKlansman in summer 2018. Lee is known for his bluntness, but he doubled down on it in his speech at Cannes, calling the President a "motherfucker" who "did not denounce the motherfucking Klan, the alt-right, and those Nazi motherfuckers" when given the chance.2 In this same vein, BlacKkKlansman is filled with heavy-handed references to both Trump and Charlottesville, including a scene in which David Duke (portrayed by Topher Grace) toasts his fellow Klansmen with the phrase "America First," referring to the Trump Administration's foreign policy. Of course, "America First" dates back to the 1940's America First Committee, but Lee keeps the tone current by jam-packing the scene with other Trump references.3 The film ends with footage of the Charlottesville demonstration and a tribute to Heather Heyer, the thirty-two-year-old woman killed in a car attack during a peaceful counter-protest. While these elements are characteristic of Lee's filmmaking, critics have questioned whether the objection to blunt white supremacy like that of the Ku Klux Klan is as important from influential Black filmmakers like Lee in an era when hypervisible racism like burning crosses or police brutality gets more attention than insidious symptoms of systemic racism like infant mortality or the persistence of redlining. If we are in a day and age with more open discussions of thinly veiled antagonism, isn't it the job of seasoned artists to contribute nuanced perspectives?

In this new Black Media Renaissance characterized by the success of films like Moonlight and Black Panther, and shows like Atlanta and Insecure, it is increasingly obvious when films don't have Black audiences in mind.4 Lee's BlacKkKlansmen is just one of many prominent films that package Black identity for white audiences, appealing to viewers who might need to hear Donald Trump's alleged "N-word tape" to finally identify his racism. Sorry to Bother You director Boots Riley pointed out this flaw in the film, citing Lee's receipt of over $200k from the NYPD to help create ads to "improve relations with minority communities" as evidence of Lee's misguided intentions.5 BlacKkKlansman is more about a Black character explaining to his fellow officers why they're problematic and patting them on the back for acknowledging their bias, than it is Ron Stallworth's story. Almost the same can be said of George Tillman Jr's The Hate U Give, in that it functions as a Black Lives Matter 101 for privileged audiences, a far cry from Angie Thomas' more complex, feminist novel. Seeing this pattern in recent Black films highlights the insidious way in which conspicuous disdain in Black masculinity has come to stand in for a lack of subtlety.

The brand of Black masculinity I'm thinking of is exemplified by the onscreen personas that actor Michael B. Jordan often portrays. Having played villain Erik Killmonger in Marvel's Black Panther, Adonis Johnson Creed in Creed & Creed II, and Guy Montag in HBO's Fahrenheit 451, Jordan has come to be associated with the embodiment of scornful Black men. While most of these characters are staples of Ryan Coogler's directorial vision, they all use the embodied hypervisibility of cishet Black masculinity to articulate their social frustrations, with Killmonger, Adonis, and Guy attempting to murder, punch, and burn away their discontent. While these Black male-centric cinematic narratives have advantages, they fail to provide nuanced and inclusive images of Black identity, often neglecting Black womanhood or even depicting violence against Black women. Black queerness is erased in similar ways through an emphasis on Black heterosexuality as a defining characteristic of masculinity, or, in the case of Barry Jenkins' Oscar-winning film Moonlight, detailing queer masculinity in conjunction with pervasive stereotypes of Black womanhood rather than depicting solidarity in the Black LGBTQ community as a whole, as done in Wanuri Kahiu's Kenyan film Rafiki.6 This lack of nuanced depictions of queerness brings to mind the flattening of James Baldwin in documentaries, like the 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro. While Raoul Peck's film seeks to expand on Baldwin's thirty pages of an unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, in many ways, the film eclipses the intersectionality of Baldwin's work to hone in on a heterosexual Black male experience.7

Through the monopolization of media by a certain Black masculinity, Black representational victories have remained hollow and, in their lack of refinement, arguably harmful to women of color. Centering intersectionality is the first step toward bringing back the subtlety and nuance we've been missing, because demographics that are doubly marginalized often have a greater understanding that oppression is sometimes subtle, especially to the eye of a privileged viewer. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined "intersectionality" to describe the subtle ways in which institutions like that of America's legal system have failed to defend Black women that have suffered from the particular overlap of race and gender bias, but the subtlety she mentions is only subtle from the perspective of a privileged audience, because that suffering is obvious to those enduring it. An eye for subtlety allows us to be more cognizant of those who do not benefit from the visibility afforded to masculinity. We can combat the bluntness of the Trump era with nuance, by centering the voices of women of color. This is not to repeat the popular mantra among progressives "Black women will save us," since it is rarely beneficial for the marginalized to burden themselves with more labor. I am instead suggesting that Black women have already provided us with a rich legacy of this practice for us to learn from and use collectively.8

Brittney Cooper makes a similar argument in her memoir Eloquent Rage, in which she builds on the legacy of Audre Lorde to explain how "Black feminism insists that we center [black women and girls], that we talk about them, that we build a world for and with them, that we fight alongside them.... Black Feminist Rage can change this world."9 Cooper insists that we center Black feminism to express our rage in productive ways that build change, rather than propagating misogynoir and various other biases pervasive in current popular discourse.10 In practice, this looks like doing more to highlight art from queer women of color like Janelle Monáe, rather than continuing to award the blunt political commentary of artists like Kendrick Lamar with a Pulitzer Prize. Expressing a more "eloquent rage" is merely one of the many steps necessary to combat the lack of subtlety in our specific political era, but it is one way to move beyond the limited hypervisibility of Black masculinity to highlight that which has been salient long before the Trump era.

Chamara Moore is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame. She is currently completing a dissertation project that reads Black womanhood through speculative fiction, sequential art, and adaptation. Her other musings can be found on her film blog Not So Magical Negress.

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