Practicing Integrity in Systems Without Any

Let's talk about American Fiction

How do we practice our integrity within systems that don’t have any?

Have you seen the movie American Fiction yet? If the answer is no, run, do not walk to a theater near you. The movie provides funny, incisive social commentary on publishing, the media, and the racism of white liberals. But it also contains a tender, poignant, deeply moving portrayal of a family who are, in many ways and for a myriad of reasons, alienated from each other.

That the family depicted is made up of highly educated Black doctors and PhD’s who own a second house on the beach and employ house staff isn’t fantastical. Such families exist. But we don’t generally see them, or the emotional and practical complexities of their struggles to care about and for each other, in mainstream films.

We also don’t usually see a Black man like Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, the main character— played with masterful subtlety by Jeffrey Wright— with a family or without. Monk is a literature professor who has written a few well-respected but commercially unsuccessful books based on Greek myths. He is cranky, resentful, argumentative, smug, self-righteous, and highly intelligent but also emotionally stunted. The source of his debilitating discontent is displayed to hilarious effect in a scene of him visiting a bookstore to find his books are relegated to “African-American studies” despite not being about race. He angrily moves them to the fiction section while a hapless, young, white, male retail clerk trails, flustered, behind him. It’s also on display in one of the opening scenes, in which a young, white, female student insists that she is “triggered” by Monk’s explicit use of the word nigger when discussing Flannery O’Connor’s short story, The Artificial Nigger. Monk’s blunt and testy response? “If I can handle it, so can you.”

Is this response fair? I’d say so. Is it careful or patient? (both of which we expect from Black people, always) Definitely not. Monk is equally careless and impatient with his family, who we meet after he’s placed on unpaid leave following the student’s protest. He returns home to Boston to find an elderly mother who is suffering from dementia and a exasperated, overworked sister, Lisa— a doctor in a reproductive health clinic— who berates him for being emotionally distant and leaving her to organize their mother’s care.

Their sibling banter is delightful, but gets cut short when Lisa abruptly dies. Then sibling number three enters, recently divorced and out-of-the-closet plastic surgeon Clifford. Cliff and Monk’s sibling banter is less delightful and more contentious. Through the course of their conflicts we come to understand that their father, who was also a doctor, killed himself. Before his suicide Monk was his favorite and they share, Cliff notes, a similar emotional aloofness and barely suppressed rage. It’s also revealed that their father was repeatedly unfaithful to their mother. This fact surprises Monk entirely, though Cliff insists his lack of knowing is simply emblematic of his position as the favored son. He could afford to not really know what was going on.

Lisa’s death and Cliff’s refusal (or financial inability due to his recent divorce) to help, means that their mother’s care falls to Monk. This is where the family drama connects back to the wider social commentary of the film, because Monk’s recent forced leave from his job and his inability to sell books because, as his editor suggests, they’re not “Black enough” for publishers means he doesn’t have the money to pay for the level of care their mother requires.

In a fit of despair and indignation, Monk sits down and drunkenly writes a book under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh (points if you get that cultural reference) which he entitles My Pafology. The story echoes a book he has recently witnessed being embraced by the mainstream, white publishing world, whose author (played beautifully by Issa Rae) galls him. My Pafology is laden with the racial stereotypes so common to urban trauma porn— violence, drugs, rappers, and deadbeat dads— not to mention African-American Vernacular English (dialect, in other words), which Monk finds abhorrent. It’s a joke in many respects, a darkly comic middle finger to the industry, which it never occurs to Monk they will buy. Of course (queue the satire), they do, offering more money both for the book deal and movie rights than Monk needs or has ever seen.

From there, the movie ricochets back and forth between Monk’s increasingly high-stakes attempts to deal with the unexpected explosion of the book and the media frenzy that accompanies it and his inability to deal with the emotional complexities of his life and family. (His editor has characterized him as an on-the-run convict to make him seem more “ghetto”, but really to protect his true identity, which means no one, including his girlfriend and family, know what is happening.)

In the end, when the book wins a literary prize that Monk is chosen as a judge for, his subterfuge is exposed, but the story offers no clear resolutions. Multiple endings are presented; there is no clarity regarding outcomes. Only the poignant reality of complicity and the intractability of racism.

Movie reviews have their own perspective; the reviewer focuses on what’s important to them. In the dozen or more reviews of American Fiction I read in preparation for writing this piece all the reviewers agreed that the film offers necessary and important commentary on society. Some then focused on the film’s criticism of the film industry, others on the publishing industry critique, and still others on the ways in which white liberals are skewered repeatedly. One I read offered a substantive critique of the storytelling, arguing that the female characters were simply thinly developed vehicles for advancing the stories of the male characters. Upon reflection, I don’t disagree.

I’m the one I am, though, so what I was struck by was how effectively the film depicted the challenges of practicing your integrity within systems that don’t have any, that restrict access to power to a chosen few and dehumanize everyone else. The book upon which the film is based (written by Percival Everett and published in 2001) is called Erasure and Monk’s last name is an ode to Ralph Ellison, the author of 1952’s classic novel Invisible Man. Monk clearly feels invisible in the publishing industry, that there is no space for the kind of work he wants to do and the kind of man he is. As importantly, he has to grapple with how his distancing of himself from his family has rendered them largely invisible to each other. The personal and public invisibility and discontent become more inextricably intertwined as he becomes responsible for supporting his mother who is spiraling quickly into dangerous dementia.

It’s from this place of entrapment between familial responsibility/intimacy and a world that doesn’t see him that Monk strikes out, writing My Pafology. He doesn’t actually mean for what happens to happen, but isn’t that the way it works for all of us? We strike out with frustration, perhaps even, like Monk, a long-simmering rage and discontent, and things spiral quickly out of control. Our impact gets jet-fueled by our emotions rather than our consciously-stated intentions.

Those emotions may be utterly justified, to be clear. None of the ways in which Monk and his family are made invisible by our cultural institutions are actually fiction. The publishing and film industry do profit from peddling racial stereotypes. They do often marginalize storytelling about and by people of color that doesn’t deal with explicitly racial themes, that just shows people being people. Discontent and rage make sense in response.

The compelling twist, though, is how the film shows the tie between Monk’s understandable rage at the world outside and his resulting inability to connect to the people that actually care for him. His emotional distancing of his family, which it appears is a trait he inherited from his father, is a symptom of his rage turned inward. Directing that rage outward instead should be better; at least he’s directing it where it belongs. Yet the way he has gone about it involves so much emotional flailing he ends up trapped in lies that cut him off even further from the people that care for him.

There is no clear and tidy remedy for systemic racism. The multiverse of endings presented (including the way the smarmy, white movie producer picks and chooses between them), as well as the poignant final moment when Monk, having finally attempted to make a space for himself to openly tell his truth is confronted with a young, black actor on the movie lot dressed as a slave, make this tragically clear. Any truth Monk has been able to squeeze through tiny cracks in the system might not change anything, but it seems to have changed him. He is more humble in the end— less self-righteous, more connected— driving off into the sunset with his brother, laughing ruefully.

As much as I adored Wright’s portrayal of Monk, I equally adored actor Sterling K. Brown’s portrayal of Cliff. Cliff is a lot— very aggressive, very juvenile, very unapologetically and stereotypically gay (there is an argument to be made that he is problematic, as a result). In the end, though, having been deeply wounded by their parents never really knowing or seeing him, he reaches out and sees Monk.

There is a gorgeous moment at the wedding of their former housekeeper. Monk has, as usual, set himself slightly apart. As everyone else is dancing and laughing, he’s perched on the porch railing gazing regretfully at the home of the girlfriend he has lost because of his lies and self-hatred. Cliff comes to him to interrupt his isolation. He places his hands on Monk’s face, kisses his forehead, and tells him, “People want to love you, Monk. You should let them love all of you.”

For me, if there is an answer to how we practice our integrity within systems that don’t have any, it is this. We must refuse to let our understandable and justified anger at the systems that constrict us turn inward upon us, and we must let our people see us so they can really, truly love us. If integrity is an expression of wholeness, then we must carve out spaces and relationships in which we can be all that we are. Where we can be vulnerable and imperfect, tender and angry, righteously indignant and afraid, joyful and grieving.

To receive it requires us to offer it back out. To care for our people, love them up hard, and remind them continually of their wholeness and intrinsic worth. In the face of the fear propagated by the systems that seek to constrain and control us— that tells us we aren’t enough, that there isn’t enough to go around, that some “other” is always poised to take what little we have— we must be fearless in our love, defiant in our surety of abundance, and honest, always honest, about what we see in and need from each other and the world. We may not always get what we need, but it won’t be because we didn’t try with our whole hearts.

Go see this brilliant movie. Let it worm it’s way in and set you to thinking.

XO, Asha

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