American Fiction

In the 1980s, the world fell in love with a sitcom that featured an all-Black cast but refused to portray them as stereotypical Black. The father was a doctor, the mother was a lawyer, and there was an emphasis on higher education and traditional family values. The show never forgot that the family was Black but also made sure we were getting positive role models and not delinquents and deadbeats. Ignoring the legal and personal issues the show’s star has come into in more recent years, this show was transformative during a time when the world wanted, needed, these types of role models for the Black youth of the world. 

Flash forward forty years to the present day, and the world has changed. Now we live in a world that revels in general stereotypes, and white people feast on media that “celebrates” the “Black Experience” via books and movies that depict the harsh realities of Black people growing up in broken homes, drugs and alcohol, and gang violence. They celebrate this kind of media, seeing it as real and gritty and bringing to life the struggles of modern-day African American existence. They see poorly written, generic stories of street violence as something cathartic, making them feel better about their own lives while pseudo-celebrating things like Juneteenth and Black History Month. Some would look at this phenomenon and be sickened by it. 

One such person is Dr. Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a professor of literature who teaches in Los Angeles. He’s also an author of elite fiction, books that receive academic praise but don’t exactly fly off the shelves. Because of this, though he is comfortable, he isn’t wealthy despite his success. As a Black author, he is criticized for his work not being “Black” enough, which has led to his latest manuscript being rejected by the publisher. On top of that, he is placed on administrative leave at the college over an altercation with one of his students over racial language in the works they are studying in his class. On the advice of his college superiors, he travels to Boston to attend a literary seminar and to visit his family.

While attending the seminar, he can’t help but notice that one author’s seminar is far more heavily attended than the rest of them. This author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), though refined in person, has written a bestselling novel titled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which heavily panders to Black stereotypes. Monk is shocked when, after a dramatic reading from her book, audiences, including a lot of older white women, are moved by the prose and give it a standing ovation. 

On the homefront, Monk is reconnecting with his family, including his medical doctor sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), his recently outed brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), and his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), who is showing signs of Alzheimer’s. When Lisa suddenly dies and Cliff returns home to Phoenix, Monk is left with caring for his mother, needing to find a permanent care home for her but unable to afford the expense. As a personal joke, he writes his own “Ghetto” book he titles My Pafology by Stagg R. Leigh, imbuing it with all the stereotypes he can. To his surprise, the book is picked up immediately by a publisher, and he finds himself having to invent a phony back story for his pen name involving jail time and being currently on the run from the law. On top of that, the film rights sell for a staggering amount of money, and the book is entered into a literary contest that he just happens to be one of the judges of. 

This film highlights something that has become a thing in recent history: the social justice warrior (SJW). When we are first introduced to Monk, he is teaching a course on Literature of the American South. A young white girl with bright blue hair takes offense to the use of the N-word in the story they are discussing. He tries to dispel her concerns by stating what should be obvious: “We’re going to encounter some archaic thoughts and coarse language, but we’re all adults here, and I think we can understand it within the context in which it was written.” He, the black man, understands this and has gotten over it, but she, the white SJW girl, cannot and storms out of the classroom over it. The college, of course, sides with the student rather than the teacher. It’s the same kind of offense white people get over the name of a sports team or the release of something like Disney’s Song of the South rather than being able to view it in the context of the times on which it was made. 

There’s another side of that coin, too. It’s a feeling of guilt that some white people feel is due to them because of things that happened long before they were even born. “White people think they want the truth, but they don’t. They want to feel absolved,” Arthur (John Ortiz), Monk’s agent, quips. And he’s right. We see it in the news all the time with the call for things like reparations to be paid to African American citizens because of slavery in the past. It’s a touchy subject, and people have a tendency to overcompensate when they have this misplaced guilt. 

Arthur tells Monk that his publisher wants a book about the Black experience. Monk’s reply is that it is that since it was written by a Black man, but what Arthur really means is a story about the street life, a story about what white people see as the Black experience. Most people, when they think about the Black experience, they are not thinking about The Cosby Show. They’re thinking about Boyz in the Hood, Straight Outta Compton, or Menace II Society. Monk is fighting against this stereotype, but at the same time, he needs the money for his mother’s care. 

He also cannot reveal himself because his manufactured backstory is part of the reason the book is doing so well and has secured the movie deal. That doesn’t stop him from trying to dissuade those around him from reading it, though, including Coraline (Erika Alexander), his mother’s neighbor who becomes his love interest. When she reads the book, retitled to F*** in Monk’s vain attempt to sabotage the publication, they argue over the merits of what he considers trash and break up. 

The film has three different endings, played back-to-back, much like Clue did back in the 1980s. These endings represent what Monk is pitching the film director who is making his book into a movie. I will not spoil any of these three but will say that the one the director settles on is sufficiently over-the-top and fits with the themes of viewer expectations from Black writers.

This is the finest performance I have ever seen Jeffrey Wright give. I first saw him way back in 1990 in the Harrison Ford film Presumed Innocent, where he made his debut as an unnamed attorney. Since then, he has played a wide array of characters, including the recurring role of Felix Leiter in the more recent James Bond films. He has always been a good performer and has numerous accolades because of that. But this is a film where he really shines. He is not the stereotypical Black man. He comes from an affluent household where all three of the kids became doctors of sorts. We see that he brushes up against those stereotypes because he doesn’t see the world that way, yet he also observes a taxi drive past him and stop less than a block further up to pick up a white family.  

Equally moving, though, is Sterling K. Brown, who doesn’t have a whole lot of scenes but makes the most of them all. He has recently come out as gay, losing his wife and kids in the bargain. He is making the most of his new lifestyle, though, entering into multiple relationships with other men throughout the course of the film. His own pain, including being virtually ignored for years by Monk, who went off to LA and shut his family out of his life for a while, shapes him and his interactions with those around him. He also runs away, too, when his mother uses a homophobic slur at him. Cliff is a man struggling with his own identity, one that is equally underrepresented in our media, the gay middle-aged Black man. 

American Fiction has a lot of heart and a lot more to say about the expectations placed on Black writers. That says just as much about the writers as it does about the readers. There are some definite targets here, especially privileged white people living in the Hamptons who feel like they are making amends somehow by supporting artists who are pandering to their view on Black culture. There are plenty of successful Black people out there, but most people don’t think of them when envisioning Black culture and history. That’s a weakness on their part, a weakness that some Black authors exploit when writing something like We’re Lives in Da Ghetto. While American Fiction is playing things up as satire, it’s really not that far off from the real world. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Ben LeClair, Mikos Karamigios, Cord Jefferson, and Jermaine Johnson

Best Actor: Jeffrey Wright

Best Supporting Actor: Sterling K. Brown

Best Adapted Screenplay: Cord Jefferson (won)

Best Original Score: Laura Karpman

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Release Date: December 15, 2023

Running Time: 117 Minutes

Rated R

Starring: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Issa Rae, and Sterling K. Brown

Directed by: Cord Jefferson