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What is is the image worth it? What exactly is the image of a dead black man for? If you had to guess how far you think the image of a dead wounded black man would go, his body cold as a puddle of blood against the pavement … In the form of Africa, just in case the symbolism is not clear — the adjacent forms?
Not sure? Too uncomfortable thinking? According to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this man — and the stories of his death, rather than the stories of his life — deserves the highest distinction in Hollywood: Oscar gold.
James, thankfully, is not a real person. Played by rapper Joey Badass, he is a fictional protagonist Two distant strangers, A screenplay by screenwriter and comedian Travon Free that won Best Live Action Short Film at a Sunday night event. James, unfortunately, yes it wants to be a symbol. He wants to represent the gross inevitability of black manhood in America: the target of white supremacist terror.
The film uses a science fiction gimmick to make its plot. Think about it Marmot Day, but fear. James is stuck in a loop of time, and what starts the best day of his life becomes the worst and last. The real evil of the plot is how his disappearance is played out: Throughout the film, James is killed 100 times by a white police officer. If killing 100 times is extreme, if you think it’s inappropriate, that’s the point – the police are on the verge of panic that a black man was shot dead, the film says blacks can never wake up to a nightmare.
Everywhere you look, the fear of blacks is terrifying and dying – persecuted walking down the street, stop and interrogate while driving. Through camera-phone images, we see them destroyed without thinking for a second. The spectacle of pain is not continuous, it is a confusing recital of the trauma that leads to the end of life, and not what happened. Camera phone recordings in recent years have been critical in exacerbating racial issues. But awareness and amplification go hand in hand with the toll. The cost of care for blacks is a constant reminder of our suffering. The phenomenon cannot be escaped, despite the effort. It goes from lived reality to television to social media. It’s all the time. It will never end.
And so on pop culture machinery is properly transformed, based on images soaked in a kind of retrograde myopia. It is the last instance They. An Amazon series centered on a black working-class family moving to a white neighborhood in Los Angeles in the early 1950s. Two distant strangers: Blacks, and Blacks in life, are unwanted objects. Misery is the only prism to know and understand the Emory family. They suffer from animal abuse, but they hide other horrors in their new neighborhood, some more pronounced than others. They are surrounded by suffering, hatred. They can’t escape him. It’s the reason they fled North Carolina, and it’s also the reason they greet the seemingly heavenly Compton wood. The series recycles the same stomach-churning view of pain and cultural emptiness awarded on social media, a tariff on the physical and cultural theft of bodies.
In both They and Two distant strangers, they beat the bodies. Again and again the bodies are beaten. Bodies are raped, corpses are burned, corpses are fetishized, corpses are killed. Bodies become vectors of unimaginable vitriol, of homemade racism. And in this version of black suffering, in this hokey and overly simplistic symbolism, witnessing such a constant torment runs the risk of being witnessed. For these projects, being black is traumatizing, alone and always.
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