‘American Fiction,’ ‘The American Society of Magical Negroes’ and the endless debate over good Black movies

Academy Award winner Cord Jefferson was backstage answering questions about his film American Fiction when he was asked about the types of Black films recognized for awards.

“A story with Black characters that’s going to appeal to a lot of people doesn’t need to take place on a plantation,” Jefferson, who won for best adapted screenplay, told reporters. The statement reinvigorated a discussion about whose stories should be told and whose stories are disregarded. The comments are also complicated by Jefferson’s American Fiction and another film, The American Society of Magical Negroes, which remind us that movies that aren’t set at plantations, projects and trap houses aren’t innately more loving to Black folks either.

At first blush, it feels borderline blasphemous to put American Fiction, which is about a writer navigating the white world of publishing, in the same space as The American Society of Magical Negroes. The latter centers on a secret group of Black people who develop magical powers to help white people not be so angry — and it’s floating around 30% on Rotten Tomatoes and struggled to earn a million dollars in its first weekend in theaters. After all, American Fiction has some things that The American Society of Magical Negroes does not, namely a competent plot, compelling characters, a genuine desire to say something important, and a story that kept my interest throughout. American Fiction was enjoyable for the most part. In contrast, The American Society of Magical Negroes — with its unoriginality, banal attempts at comedy and incomprehensible ending — was simply one of the worst movies I’ve ever tortured myself into finishing. But both films did share a common flaw: There needed to be more time spent on the beauty of Black folks and less on the horror and prevalence of white supremacy.

In that regard, the two movies aren’t too dissimilar from the works they’re attempting to satirize.

American Fiction and The American Society of Magical Negroes both come from a desire to criticize art that presents a reductive look at Blackness. The former is aimed at books and movies like Precious, which included an endless barrage of trauma for every Black character, while racking up six Oscar nominations, winning two (Mo’Nique for best supporting actress and Geoffrey Fletcher for best adapted screenplay). The American Society of Magical Negroes focused its criticism on the trope, originally coined in 2001 by film director Spike Lee, in which “magical” Black characters exist in films simply to make white main characters’ lives easier or more fulfilling. Think The Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance.

As the two films focus their ire on this criticism, they aim to present a different side of Blackness. Yet, when I watched both American Fiction and The American Society of Magical Negroes, I couldn’t shake a familiar feeling I had when watching films filled with trauma porn. For instance, when I saw 2016’s The Birth of a Nation, a supposedly triumphant movie that was promoted as the real-life story of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion, I believed there was so much shown about the brutality of slavery and so little about the actual ingenuity and bravery of the revolt, that by the time any enslaved person was freed, I wanted to leave the theater. While American Fiction is far from trauma porn, it spends so much time honing in on the ridiculousness of microaggressions and white supremacy that some of the beautiful Blackness in the story gets lost.

For instance, I never quite got the feeling that the characters Monk (Jeffrey Wright) or Sinatra Golden (Issa Rae), two Black writers trying to make it in the white world of publishing, were even that great at their craft in American Fiction. Viewers never see the beauty of Monk’s words or Sinatra’s genius, which she had to tamp down for success. By the time we get a moment of genuine love between Monk and his brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), they’ve gone through so much bickering and disappointment that it doesn’t feel satisfying. When it comes to The American Society of Magical Negroes, there isn’t anything celebratory about Blackness in any crevice of the movie. Yes, Black people have magical powers, like teleportation and mystical PowerPoint presentations, but they wield them in servitude to white people. The climatic rant is just about how miserable it is to be Black in white spaces.

Both films made me angry and frustrated by scenes involving white passive aggressiveness. Neither made me feel much pride about the characters’ Blackness.

And therein is the problem with many of the movies that have received critical acclaim. Precious, The Green Book and the like don’t do anything to make me feel good about being Black. And their appeal is directly to audiences that want that type of Black subservience and subjugation. But they’re not bad because they take place in the projects or Jim Crow. They’re bad because they don’t love us.

You can’t watch a show like The Underground Railroad or read a book like The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr., which occur during slavery, and not feel the love in every scene or page. You can’t watch a movie like Crooklyn without seeing a movie about love. Meanwhile, films such as Queen and Slim and The American Society of Magical Negroes feel like they were made with the explicit goal of making Black people believe they are doomed to be under the thumb of whiteness.

In the early 2000s, a new measurement for how to judge movies for how they treat women called the Bechdel test came into vogue. The test asked a simple question: Does a movie feature scenes in which women talk to each other about anything other than a man? Since then, critics have proposed similar tests that revolve around race. The “DuVernay test” proposed by New York Times critic Manohla Dargis asked for movies in which “African-Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.” These are both valuable but are primarily focused on movies by white people. It wouldn’t hurt to have one for movies for and by Black people that ask if the amount of screen time exploring the beauty of Blackness outweighs the amount of time demonstrating the oppressiveness of white America.

Contrary to Jefferson’s comments, the setting of Black films isn’t the problem. The time period isn’t the issue. The problem is the way these movies treat Black people and show us on the screen. A movie can be as anti-Black and violent as possible in a mansion and as gracious and kind as it wants to be on a plantation. The Black experience is complicated like that.