American Fiction was one of this year’s Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. It in turn is based upon Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. I read the novel and watched the film in pretty close proximity to each other.
Let me just start by saying that both are excellent. Of the ten films nominated for Best Picture, I would place it in my personal top two or three. The novel is the perfect combination of being amusing, fun to read, having compelling themes, and being an unconventional read.
The closest parallel that I can think of is the film Memento vs the short story upon which it was based, Memento Mori. The screenplay was by Christopher Nolan and the short story was written by his brother Jonathon.
They are both outstanding examples of their respective forms. They clearly share a source DNA. Even though from the same material, their messages are different. In the film, it’s a complex, clever, twisted, whodunit. The short story is much more philosophical. Given the main character’s short term amnesia, this results in almost a multiverse situation where every few moments a new person inhabits the amnesiac’s body. Most of these new people are idiots. Every now and then, for a moment, a genius inhabits the amnesiac’s body. It is paramount that, when a genius does step in, that they figure out some way to leave breadcrumbs so that when the next genius occupies the body, they can pick up where the previous one left off. It’s an interesting idea to explore that appears nowhere in the film.
Similarly, although their plots are nearly identical, Erasure and American Fiction have different messages.
In both, the protagonist is Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. Monk is highly intellectual. His father, brother, and sister are all doctors. He eschewed the practicalities of medicine and studied esoteric theories of literature. He is now a published author. Since his books are literate, sophisticated, reinterpretations of Greek classics, they are not best sellers. His agent encourages him to write more Black. He finds this infuriating since he is a Black man and, by definition, anything that he writes is Black, be it about a Greek classic or not. While he is having trouble getting his current novel published, he notices that another Black author is experiencing wild success with her crude, stereotypical depiction of Black culture.
All of this comes to a head when his sister is killed. She was the primary caregiver for their mother, who is rapidly beginning to degenerate mentally as she ages. Monk is forced to give up his university position and move to the East Coast to take care of his mother. Faced with astronomical healthcare costs, his novel not being published, and his frustration at seeing other Black authors succeed with fare that he considers offensive, he lashes out in fury and pounds out the most horrible, hackneyed story of being Black in America
Called My Pafology, he sends it to his agent as a joke. The agent sends this monstrosity out to publishers and, lo and behold, it immediately gets interest. Ultimately Monk receives hundreds of thousands of dollars for the publishing rights and millions of dollars for the movie rights. When Monk, still raging, insists that the title of the book be changed to Fuck, if anything, interest becomes even more intense.
On the one hand, Monk has now averted a serious financial crisis brought on by having to take care of his mother. On the other hand, he now hates himself for being part of the problem of Black representation in American culture. When he is interviewed under the book’s nom de plume of Stagg R Leigh, although he just sits there silently, the inevitably white interviewer is simultaneously thrilled and terrified to be in proximity of such an authentically Black presence.
The film presents all of this wonderfully. Jeffrey Wright is amazing in the role of Monk. Having seen four of the five Oscar nominations for Best Actor (including Wright), I think that Wright would have received my vote. He does a great job of portraying the conflict that this brings to Monk. The rest of the cast brings their A Game as well. It is simply a very well done film.
Of course, I won’t spoil it since the film is so new, but the ending is possibly the best ending that I’ve seen in years. The ending was shocking, funny, and brought all of the main issues to conclusion. Beyond that, it was also meta-fictional.
The reason why I specifically called out the meta-fictional component of the film is that it’s a callback to the novel. The novel is more sophisticated in its structure than the film. Written in the first person, there are several novel in a novel elements. For one, the entirety of Monk’s novel Pafology is included in Erasure. A short story, a metaphor of how stacked the world is against Black people and how greased the skids are for White people is hilariously told in the form of a game show. Strewn throughout the novel are partially developed story ideas. There are conversational snippets among various historical avant garde artists suffering from cultural oppression. Also interspersed are fishing anecdotes. I mean, seriously, the film ends with a Latin quote from Sir Isaac Newton. The novel is a rich stew of literature and I was there for all of it.
I’m guessing that this probably would have been one of those films that would have never been noticed by the Academy before it started taking significant steps in diversification in recent years primarily due to the #OscarsSoWhite movement. I saw over twenty-five films that were released in 2023. On the one hand, that’s a lot. On the other hand, it’s a small fraction of the films that were released. I’m just so happy that this film somehow was raised so that it caught my attention. Not only that, but the film in turn sparked my interest in the novel and my newfound desire to read more of Percival Everett’s work.
dorkenstein 