American Meta-Fiction

Cord Jefferson's film is far more subtle and complex than the trailer makes it out to be

Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction

---

When I first saw the trailer for the new Cord Jefferson film, American Fiction, I thought, “oh, no.” As portrayed there, the film was a comedy about a Black author of literary fiction who, frustrated by the commercial failure of his own books and the success of his melodramatic poverty-porn competition, decides to write a parody of the latter, only to see his joke become a best-selling success, and the fictional persona he created to author the book replace his real self. It looked heavy-handed and obvious, a one-joke sketch concept stretched out to fill a feature film.

So I wasn’t sure I would bother seeing it. But other members of the family were interested, and I felt like I ought to know what all the fuss was about, so we all wound up going together last week. And I’m very glad I did. The film depicted in the trailer isn’t remotely accurate to the film as a whole—indeed, I think the trailer is best described as bait for a trap that the rest of the film springs with real subtlety and panache.

Everything that happens in the trailer happens in the film, of course. The author, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is upset that his agent can’t find a publisher for his latest novel (an adaptation of Aeschylus’s The Persians) because it isn’t “Black” enough, while Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) achieves superstardom with her new book We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. He does decide to write a parody of that kind of fiction called My Pafology; he does create an uncomfortable fictional persona for himself, Stagg R. Leigh, a wanted fugitive who drew on his life for the incidents in the book; and the book does sell immediately for a huge sum. The White characters in the film are indeed all one-dimensional stereotypes played for laughs. But the satire of the publishing world and White condescension more generally is obvious for a reason, because something more subtle is going on behind it.

Nestled inside the satire is a fairly conventional but still compelling family drama. Monk’s sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) dies suddenly of a heart attack. His mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams) is diagnosed with Alzheimers, and Monk has to arrange for her care or care for her himself. (The sudden financial burden associated with long-term care is one justification for his book stunt, which suggests that he always suspected his joke would sell straight.) Monk’s brother, Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), recently out of the closet and newly divorced from his wife, shows up repeatedly to cause disruption of one sort or another. A woman living across the street from his mother, Coraline (Erika Alexander) takes a shine to Monk, offering him the chance at a real relationship, if he’s willing to be real. There are revelations about the past—Monk learns that his father was a philanderer, and we learn that his father committed suicide. There’s a wedding—the family maid, Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor) marries a local cop, Maynard (Raymond Anthony Thomas)—as well as a funeral (for Lisa). And there’s a lot of warm lingering on the texture of upper middle class Black life in a town on or near Cape Cod.

This is the story that seems to matter most to the film, while the satire of publishing, and of dealing with the White world more generally, seems to be there to sit in contrast with it, and force us to ask: would we be watching the family drama without the satire? Would the family drama even have been made into a film, or found success as a book?

It’s an interesting question, and it doesn’t have a simple answer. It’s not like there haven’t been books about the Black upper middle class, after all. Stephen L. Carter’s first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, was published only a year after Erasure, the novel that American Fiction is based on. Carter’s book had a genre element—a murder mystery—to anchor it, so perhaps it’s not a perfect point of comparison, but it did receive a multi-million-dollar advance, and was explicitly marketed as “not just a book for Black audiences” (which is, to be fair, very don’t-think-of-an-elephant as a strategy, but nonetheless not something we could easily imagine happening in the world of American Fiction). A few years later, Colson Whitehead published his coming-of-age novel, Sag Harbor, which I understand is now being adapted into a television series. (Carter’s book was supposed to be adapted into a film, but it never happened.) But of course, Whitehead—already a literary success—first achieved big mainstream success a few years later with a very different kind of book, The Underground Railroad, a magical-realist fable about slavery with a Steve McQueen-esque zest for lingering on Black suffering, which was quickly adapted into a miniseries for Amazon Studios.

I couldn’t help thinking about these books (and I’m sure there are many others I’m not aware of) and these writers as I watched Monk writhe on screen in the straightjacket of his own making, and the way that the satire gets at something true by flattening the complexity of actual truth. And then came a moment that revealed to me: the filmmaker knows that. One of the satiric bits of the film involves Monk’s joke book being up for a prestigious fictional literary award which he himself is asked to judge. His nemesis, Sintara, is one of the other judges. The two of them both condemn the book, he because it is a tissue of stereotypes, her because of its soullessness and cynicism. It’s a notable contrast: she, the reader, is seeing it from the inside, while he, the writer, is judging it from the outside. Then, at the one point where he is alone with her, Monk confronts Sintara about her opinion, asking her how his book differs from hers. She defends the realism of her book, saying that she did extensive research, that some of the dialogue came directly from interview transcripts. But Monk won’t let go. He questions why anyone would write a book like hers when that’s not her life; it confirms White people in their worst opinions, but Black people have the potential to be so much more. To which Sintara responds that she doesn’t have to write about her own life, she can write about whatever interests her—and, the kicker, that potential is what people talk about when they think what’s there isn’t good enough.

After that scene, I realized that the overt satire of American Fiction is as crude as Monk’s joke book, and that therefore the joke is on the audience for having bought it, while Monk’s true “pafology” is internal, his true enemy himself. The heart of American Fiction isn’t a satire at all, nor is it family drama. It’s a character study of a lonely, angry, emotionally closed-in Black man of considerable talent with an enormous chip on his shoulder about how that talent isn’t recognized. There’s satire in that too—the descriptions of Monk’s books read like a parody of self-consciously literary fiction—but that satire isn’t banged home with a hammer. Instead, it sneaks up on you, as you start to wonder why these are the kinds of books Monk is writing. Yes, he has talent—but is his writing motivated by genuine feeling? Or is he really motivated by that chip, the need to prove something to the world about who he is or what a Black man is capable of?

The end of the film finds Monk working with a White director, Wiley Valdespino (Adam Brody) on a film adaptation of his own story, the story we’ve been watching all along, groping for the right ending. Monk originally wants an open ending, where we don’t know what happens after his joke book wins the award. Wiley (correctly) says that this is unsatisfying and a cop-out. Then Monk suggests an alternative ending, one where he gets his girlfriend Coraline back (in the “real” world she won’t return his calls)—but Wiley (correctly) points out that this is a pat rom-com ending while they’re going for something more “real.” So Monk suggests a satiric ending, where Monk is at the podium, about to confess his fraud, when the cops burst in and shoot him dead, thinking that he’s Stagg R. Leigh, fugitive from justice, and that his award is a gun. This, Wiley says, is perfect.

So Monk writes it—because that’s the job of a writer in Hollywood: to write what works. And then he goes outside to encounter a Black actor, probably an extra, dressed as a slave for a period drama. They have a moment of recognition before Monk gets into his sparkling new red sports car, and drives away.

Is that ending satiric? Are they both slaves to a system that sees neither of them as real? Or is Monk finally being real, no longer nursing his grievances but instead taking his task as a writer—and his desire for success—seriously? The ending is open, but the metafictional loop is closed, because the movie we’ve just watched is the movie that Monk wrote.