Boots Riley's *Sorry To Bother You*

Codeswitching, and more specifically the act of African Americans using a "white voice," including accent, intonation and pitch, to meet the expectations of white teachers, employers, colleagues and the broader society, is a culturally and politically informed practice now extensively discussed in the public discourse. Any number of writers, politicians, rappers, and other figures have explored codeswitching; there is even an NPR program with that title. It also provides a thread in numerous current TV and cinematic shows--think of Issa Rae's Insecure, Kenya Barris blackish or Donald Glover's Atlanta--but Boots Riley, a 47-year-old musician, artist and filmmaker from Oakland, makes it the central premise of his first full-length feature, Sorry to Bother You, and what a dope film he has dreamt up! It requires no hyperbole to say that Sorry to Bother You is easily the most original and unpredictable feature of this year--or many years. In it, Riley takes the idea and practice of his premise literally, so literally in fact that it quickly shifts into productively absurd territory, only to keep ramping things up from there. (Riley makes great use of literalism's formal and conceptual possibilities.) The result is a speculative, progressive, Afrofuturist, fantasia that manages to produce laughter, provoke thought, and present far-too-rare onscreen plight of working-class people, transracial and ethnic labor solidarity, the voraciousness and utter lack of ethics of US conglomerates, and the perverse, almost science-fictionally rotten core of contemporary capitalism.

Lakeith Stanfield as Cash Green
& Tessa Thompson as Detroit

Sorry to Bother You unfolds in an parallel-universe Oakland (and dystopic US) and centers on the experience of underemployed Cassius "Cash" Green (the super-lowkey LaKeith Stanfield), residing in the garage of his uncle Sergio's (Terry Crews) single family house. Living with him is his performance artist/guerrilla activist girlfriend, Detroit (chill Tessa Thompson), who exudes charm in deuces. Cash is four months behind in rent, compounding Sergio's danger of losing his house, which  now in arrears. In the story's foreground, a commercial spurs Cash and his best friend Salvador (Jermaine Fowler) to find jobs as lowest-level telemarketers at Regalview, with Detroit eventually ending up there as well; in its background, viewers see ads for and signs underpinning the conglomerate WorryFree Corporation, whose businesses operate as latter-day slave systems, providing housing and other amenities for works, but requiring a lifetime, unbreakable contract. Reilly also shows viewers that the socioeconomic and political crises that allow a WorryFree Corporation to exist in the first place can coexist, as they do today, with working-class and poor people making do--eking out whatever living is possible--as best they can.

Omari Hardwick
as Mr. ________

Becoming an effective salesman, let alone "Power Caller," stumps Cash, as many a novice salesperson has quickly figured out. Cash rides one elevator up to his floor, yet spots the golden portal to the realm of the "Power Callers" off to the right. Stanfield's hunched posture and furtive glances convey more effectively than dialogue how he views himself and the plight of so many blue collar workers today. What galvanizes Cash is a tip, both bizarre and reasonable, from his neighboring telemarketer, Langston (Danny Glover), who urges Cash to use his "white voice" to make the sales. Here, codeswitching isn't just metaphorical, nor the "white voice" merely literal. Glover suggests something aspirational, performative in the deepest senses of that word, brandishing a ludicrously stereotypical-sounding white voice that spurs Cash, with some coaxing, to conjure his own (fulfilled by David Cross), which proves to be a winner. What follows is success beyond his wildest dreams, including meeting the eye-patch sporting Mr. ______ (played with brio by Omari Hardwick, his voice squeaked onto screen by Patton Oswalt), who serves as a guide, mentor and fellow traveler, but he is able to help Sergio pay off his debts and buy his own lavish apartment. Out of the garage, into an aerie, literally.

Stanfield and Armie Hammer,
as Steve Lift

Many a filmmaker might have stopped there, in terms of the concept, to examine how a black working class figure, now suddenly empowered, maintains the exceptional instruments--voice, personality, psyche, etc.-- that have furthered his advancement, in the face of constant and countless work-place challenges. In effect, it could have been a more woke, black Office Space. For Riley, however, the stakes of the larger picture, even if somewhat in caricature, is at play. Cash's co-worker and eventual friend, Squeeze (Steve Yeun), is a union organizer, and his goal is to bring all of the first floor telemarketers into the union shop. To press the case, he organizes a strike, a plot touch that feels so appropriate as conservatives and billionaire donors continue to push for "right-to-work" laws in state after state. Yet by having Cash ascend the ladder, the film raises important existential and ethical questions, underscoring the black exceptionalist scenario that has been so common in innumerable fields. Where do Cash's lie? With management and the elites whose bidding RegalView is undertaking, or with his working-class girlfriend, Detroit, and buddies Salvador and Squeeze. His "white voice" takes on new resonance as the emblem of his growing estrangement from his past. The film poses questions that have long seem foreclosed in our media? Can workers still unionize? What are unions good for? Can unionized labor really gain workers a better deal? Returning to our protagonist, will Cash cross the line and whose side is he really on, especially after he crosses the picket line, and ends up with a head wound, bandaged so evocatively that it becomes a symbol of the wounds festering inside him.

LaKeith Stanfield as Cash

As Squeeze's labor organizing efforts unfold, viewers learn about the unnerving ties between the telemarketing firm and WorryFree; I found them almost too neat, but they serve the plot's purposes. At the same time, Regalview's "Power Callers," Cash fathoms, are engaged in nefarious work on behalf of WorryFree, meaning that he will be helping to wreak global havoc. Star that he is, he joins a truly exclusive group that includes Mr. ______ (his name, like he, is a cipher in the screenplay), and gets invited to a party at the mansion belonging to WorryFree's owner, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), the name a play on Apple's legendary former leader and guru. WorryFree's virtual slavery practices are only one component in its evil efforts across the globe, and Cash picks the wrong bathroom door and happens upon a horrific scene that shifts the film into a different narrative gear, Lift shares with Cash not just an apparent mega-line of cocaine but his plans for even worse, transhuman corporate vision that would make Victor Frankenstein or Dr. Moreau jealous. I am being somewhat vague here so as not to give away too much, but I do want to say that Riley manages to wrap nearly everything together by the film's end, including the unionized, striking Regalview workers, Detroit's pro-African art, the national and global financial system's links to WorryFree, and literal revolt, while adding yet another twist that he had expertly set up during Cash's bathroom encounter and subsequent meeting-confrontation with Lift.

Steve Yeun as Squeeze

Riley, a self-described Communist, has produced one of the better and coherent--despite its antic quality--overtly political satires I have seen in a while. I would label it less a Communist work of art than a Democratic Socialist one, because in its vision for the future, Sorry to Bother You centers a reformed and reformable capitalism instead of the system's end, with workers having greater say as opposed to the proletariat destroying the rotten system wholesale. One can see this in Left Eye participant Detroit's art, from her wry earrings to her performance piece, a masochistic on-stage event protesting the mining of coltan in the Congo, that turns the focus inward on her, instead of outward. Even the film's chief guerrilla organization, Left Eye, a clever femmage to the 1990s R&B group TLC's beloved late singer and, more obviously, a Left-perspective activist group, seem more interested in playful critique and subversive performance than in armed revolution, more in line with the Situationists than Bolsheviks. Perhaps, I surmised, Riley is suggesting that before the endgame there might be alternatives in the war against the violence of capital--and the capitalist system--than just more violence, though that occurs here as well. But a spirit more poetry than prose runs throughout the film, and it is hardly a surprise that six years before Sorry to Bother You was made, because Riley struggled to find funding, he and his Afro-punk/hip hop band released a version of the screenplay in musical form, on his 2012 album The Coup, that gives glimpses of the richly imagined world, in Oakland and in his mind, he would eventually portray onscreen.

Thompson, featuring Detroit's
amazing earrings

That playfulness seems informed at times by cartoons--there's even a claymation instructional film embedded in it--and at others by music videos, but Sorry to Bother You has the heft and complexity of a very short novel, and feels informed as well by the long history of African American satirical literature. As is the case with its exploration of class, its deft treatment of race, often wry and light-handed, deserves high praise. One such moment, at the WorkFree Party that is one of the film's highlights. Lift asks Cash to perform, and after the new star salesman demurs, Lift and the nearly all-white party attendees start to chant "Rap! Rap! Rap! Rap!" Cash finds the perfect way to satisfy them, allowing Riley to critique the inanity of certain strains of contemporary rap and the insistent desire among some white people to utter the "n-word" with impunity. It is but one of several such moments or touches, verging on silliness or slapstick yet which turns out to have real bite, that underline Riley's gifts as a writer and thinker.  Another way in which Riley flips the script racially is by including the presence of a key Asian-American character, presented without stereotype, and a Black-Asian American romantic encounter so rare that it astonished me. (On the other hand, strangely enough, though a number of characters have Spanish first names and Tessa Thompson is herself an Afrolatina, this alternative Oakland seemed strangely devoid of Latinxs--Chicanxs especially--though perhaps I should see it again. But this was one thing I--and C--noticed separately as watched. Hmm.)

Jermaine Fowler as Salvador,
Yeun and Stanfield

One might argue that despite its successes, the film does not fully cohere. I would counter by saying that given all that Riley sets out to do in this one film, fully aware, one suspects, of the long and ugly history of black filmmakers' struggles with Hollywood to make more than a brilliant one-off, or two films if very lucky, in careers that should include dozens of offerings, he pulls it all off. The shifts in tone are central to the film's aesthetics. Its political vision goes further than almost any recent comedy I can think not directed by Ken Loach. The actors all embody their characters with an effective combination of the comic and serious. From the film's opening frames, Riley establishes a foundation for speculation that could go in any direction, so the final transmogrification, while surprising, is one he and Sorry to Bother You earn. The film, in sum, makes the sale, while also accounting for how much it also may disturb us; both in its title, as throughout its 111 minutes, Riley never takes the simple route, and I for one hope that we will see more from him, much more, in whatever forms his vision takes him.

Black Panther, Cinematic Milestone

BLACK PANTHER

This weekend brought the debut of Ryan Coogler's newest directorial triumph, Black Panther,  a Marvel Studios production distributed by Walt Disney Studios. Based on the eponymous Marvel Comics character, Black Panther, which features a black director and a nearly all-black diasporic cast, raised incalculable expectations for black moviegoers, comics fans, critics and the film industry, and, having seen it yesterday, I can say hesitation that it more than satisfies them. It manages to be a thrilling fantasy movie based on a comics foundation, a visually arresting and movingly acted wok of cinema, and a politically aware, multilayered film that keeps the viewer thinking even after the final credits and post-credit clip have rolled.

The film's plot mirrors similar superhero tales, but is, as has been widely remarked, anchored in and deeply informed by an African(ist) futurist aesthetic. The story's hero must assume the mantle of his father, and shoulder the profound responsibilities for his people, but the script, by Coogler and John Robert Cole includes twists, include two villains, one far more significant than the other, and a tale of familial revenge, linked to differing ideas of cultural socialization (African vs. African-American) and liberation, that I cannot say I have ever seen in any other superhero film. (One sees echoes of this, however, in a TV show like Black Lightning, which I wrote about last week.) Indeed, the deeper conflict in the film, rooted in the idea of family, now underpinned by the DNA testing industries and genealogical research, about the relationship between those in the Diaspora and those, like the Wakandans, who have remained in the African homeland, may pass over some moviegoers' heads, but to me was one of the most stirring aspects of the film. Another was the film's baseline feminist perspective; Wakanda may be presided over by a king, and Black Panther may be a cis-heterosexual male, but this is no patriarchy, and women are equals--as warriors and citizens--to the men, the ruler notwithstanding. As a template for the new century, and for black children and children of all races, this is a powerful model to internalize.

Lupita Nyong'o, Chadwick
Boseman, & Danai Gurira

What underlines this portrait is the fictional Wakanda's almost singular status as an uncolonized and unconquered country; it and its people, the comics' and films' writers tell us, avoided the fate of almost every other non-Western country in the world. (Watching the film, I immediately thought of its closest African model, Ethiopia, a site of ancient knowledge and civilization, a religious center, the home of a proto-Enlightenment preceding that of Europe, and more, which nearly withstood all attempts at subjugation, until Benito Mussolini's firepower briefly won control of its territory (1936-1941).) What if Ethiopia, in addition to all of its advances, had possessed an element so powerful it might transform the world? Another analogue I thought of is the contemporary Republic of Congo, whose lands contain a host of precious and invaluable resources now used in the high tech industries. Centuries of slavery, colonialism and empire, however, have created tremendous challenges for the people of Congo, and other resource-rich African nations, to pursue their destinies to the fullest, though a cursory glimpse at the economic, political and social developments in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa underline that advancements of all kinds are underway.

To give just a glimpse of the plot, Black Panther unfolds with a quick prologue, set several centuries back. In a world parallel to our own, a meteor bearing the fictional metal vibranium, the rarest and most powerful element known to humankind, strikes central Africa. As five tribes wage war over the magical resource, a member of one of the tribes ingests a "heart-shaped bulb" that has been transformed by the vibranium, giving him special powers that lead him to become the first Black Panther. He unites four of the five tribes as the nation of Wakanda, with the fifth, the Jabari, remaining semi-independent in a loose confederation in the snowy mountains above. (A scene later in the film gives us a mini-tour of this aerie-perched nation; what was not clear was where most its women were, as if it were a kind of black Sparta in the clouds.) Rather than exploiting this remarkable resource, Wakanda chooses to guard it, presenting itself to the outside world as an impoverished, sleepy "Third World" member of the international community, while inside its borders, it is a technological powerhouse.

Lupita Nyong'o and
Letitia Williams

The film's real action opens in 1992, in an apartment in a housing project in Oakland, California (where the original Black Panther Party was established in 1966). Outside, a group of black boys are playing basketball. Inside the apartment, two young black men, whom we think are African Americans, appear to be plotting a revolution, stockpiling firearms. We soon learn that one of them, royal Prince N'jobu (Sterling K. Brown), really a Wakandan with aims of arming oppressed black people worldwide, is the brother of Wakanda's King, T'Chaka (Atandwa Kani), has arrived to bring his brother back for violating one of Wakanda's chief tenets: betraying the country by working with an outsider, arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis, exuding malevolence), who has stolen a cache of vibranium from Wakanda. N'jobu's co-conspirator Zuri (Denzel Whitaker, related directly to neither of his namesakes!) turns out to be a fellow Wakandan and spy who has ratted him out. When N'jobu attempts to kill Zuri for snitching, the King slays his brother, and departs with Zuri for Wakanda. As their airship zooms away, one of the boys on the playground looks up at the apartment, and notes the fleeing spacecraft.

We flash forward to the current moment, which includes references to our contemporary world, in which the noble Prince T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) is set to assume the Wakandan throne after the assassination of his father, T'Challa (now played by veteran South African actor John Kani). We meet his younger sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), Wakanda's resident tech genius; his mother, the grieving Queen Ramonda (a suitably regal Angela Bassett); and the head of the Dora Milaje, the Wakandan state's all female guard,  General Okoye (Danai Gurira, embodying an electrifying blend of brilliance and ferocity). Before T'Challa's coronation begins, he and Okoye retrieve his ex, Nakia (a radiant Lupita Nyong'o), now a deep operative in Nigeria, the sparks still evident between them. As part of his ritual installment, before a royal audience outdoors, above waterfalls, and presided over by a much older Zuri (Forest Whitaker), T'Challa must face a challenger from any of Wakanda's tribes, all of whom, including his best friend, W'Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya), beg off. The Jabari tribe's head, the strapping (6'5" and stoutly built) M'Baku (Winston Duke), does raise a challenge, only to eventually tap out after being subdued by T'Challa. This is one of several rituals the viewer witnesses, giving a sense of the depth of the culture and the reverence with which power is transferred.

T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) facing off
against Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan, at right)

The plot then moves first to South Korea, where the trio of T'Challa, Nakia and Okoye seek out Klaue (and Black Panther's creator, the legendary Stan Lee, makes a brief cameo), with a brief detour in London, before returning to the familiar confines of Wakanda. In the British capital, in a museum displaying African artifacts, we encounter another of the film's major characters, the oddly named but cinematically galvanizing Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who devours the screen every time he is on it. In fact, he moves through the script as a literal antithesis to Boseman's T'Challa. Where the new king is restrained, dignified, almost placid, personality traits Boseman portrays effortlessly, Jordan's Killmonger is all confident swagger, a mental and physical paragon (he nearly scorches the screen when he takes off his shirt for battle), pulsating with rage born of vengeance and, the viewer eventually learns, a sense of profound abandonment. Why, he asks, was he--like Black America--left to fend for himself, a question that the film suggests is the question of the entire Diaspora; yet, as we know, Africa itself has had a centuries-long battle on its hands too. When Killmonger reaches Wakanda, he upsets the social and political cassava cart, a civil war included, and the heart of the movie turns on whether his vision of the world, or T'Challa's, will prevail. (No spoilers!) As I noted above, their senses of duty are parallel; each seeks to rule, but in the service of an idea, and communities, beyond themselves. For Killmonger, is is black and other oppressed people of color across the globe; for T'Challa, it is his birthright, Wakanda. In the end, we see how the visions merge.

The acting is uniformly strong, and the viewer gets the sense that everyone in the film is enjoying themselves. Winston Duke and Letitia Wright are among the many breakout stars, if there are rolls for them down the road, and it was invigorating to see Boseman, Jordan, Nyong'o, and Gurira in roles other than biopics, historical narratives or realist tragedies, important and necessary as such films are. In 2006 and again in 2012 I wrote about the increasingly Diasporic cast of black Hollywood, and this film fully represents that shift, drawing its talent from across the globe, while bringing together venerable figures like Kani, Academy Award winners like the senior Whitaker, and beginners like the younger Whitaker. As other commenters have noted, the films is that rare Hollywood product that also seems not beholden to colorism, particularly for its leading actresses. How rare--and needed!--to see dark-skinned women not relegated to the background, but in the forefront of a story, yet this felt organic, not forced, like most of what the film offers its viewers. Cinematographer Rachel Morrison deserves praise for the rich imagery and her skillful blending of realism and CGI, and the score, by Ludwig Göransson, with contributions by Kendrick Lamar, and others, complements and enlivens what the viewer sees.

Michael B. Jordan, as Erik
Killmonger; Daniel Kaluuya,
as W'Kabi at right

I have so far not commented much on any of the film's white characters; in addition to Klaue, who functions mainly as a plot feint and device, there is another, CIA agent Everett K. Ross, played by Martin Freeman, who occupies a pivotal place in the plot. Ross appears in the original comics as a fairly timid, low-key character, I believe, but the filmmakers expanded his role and pumped up his personality, making him not just essential to what unfolds, but memorable as well. (It paints the CIA in a favorable light, despite the agency's less than honorable history in advancing US neocolonial, imperial and capitalist aims in Africa and elsewhere.) As a thought experiment, I asked myself, what if he had been played by a Latinx actor, say, or, given China's growing role in Africa, by a major Chinese-American or Chinese star? Would Hollywood ever have allowed that?

I then wondered about future iterations of Black Panther, which because of its box office success (like $200 million earned over the opening weekend, with receipts set to keep rising, and a fan base that dots the globe); will the original comics' template, and Hollywood's desire for viable white stars, shape the storylines, or will the films' directors and screenwriters delve a little more deeply into other parts of the world, considering South Korea, for example, not just as a scenic backdrop, but Korean and Korean-American actors--and other Asian American and Asian actors, actors from Latin America, and so on--for key roles? What would a big budget but decolonized, Afro-futurist and Diasporic, plural cinema look like? Would Disney, let alone Marvel Comics, allow it? Black Panther certainly provokes the question.

T'Challa (Boseman) again
facing off against Killmonger (Jordan)

I will end this review am not familiar enough with all of the past iterations of Black Panther to know which Coogler and Cole drew from, but I believe in one of the newer versions, Okoye, in addition to being womynist, is a lesbian. In this film, her love interest is W'Kabi, however. (They generate little heat on camera, unlike T'Challa and Nakia.) Will queer Wakandans make an appearance in future iterations of the film, or will wariness on the issue win out? Also, and this is just a minor quibble, but there is a patriarchal, pro-monarchist ideological strain in the film, connected to a quite different but related notion of Afrocentricity--"we are descendants of kings and queens"-- that I found a little unsettling. Of course some of us are descended, however distantly, from royals, and African Americans may find, upon receiving their DNA results, that our royal roots go in multiple directions (Africa, Europe, etc.), but the reality for most of us is that we come from the people who did the work to build most societies and cultures up, that is, from the bottom up, and there is nothing in this to be ashamed about. Patriarchy under any guise is problematic.

Moreover, at a time when democracy feels especially precarious, in the US, in the Americas, in Europe, in Africa, and across the globe, I hope that the writers of Black Panther's sequels can figure out a way to weave a vibrant representative democracy and republican structure into their portrayal of Wakanda's government.  I have nothing against noble black kings and queens, but everyone needs to see decent, dedicated politicians, black and of every hue, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, etc., taking the right and judicious steps, on behalf of the people they represent and the globe, which may include not only keeping each other, but kings--and presidents--on the just path.

Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

Stephen Tyrone Williams, in
Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood o

Bill Gunn's 1973 film Ganja and Hess is one of the treasures of black and 1970s cinema, and one of the most original and unforgettable films to appear during American film's last true heyday. In an era that also coincided with the rise of Blaxploitation movies, Ganja and Hess marked out new narrative and imaginative possibilities that have, unfortunately, only intermittently been fulfilled by subsequent filmmakers. In its original form, Ganja and Hess's visually arresting, philosophically profound narrative earned critical praise and a Cannes Film Festival Prize, but although it is now available on Netflix (in DVD form) and screens periodically across the country, it probably has been seen by far fewer people than it would have had it not had such a complicated release history, which involved its producers infamously butchering and renaming the film The Blood Couple (another version was titled Double Possession) so that it could be released as the less complex, exploitation-style genre film they had expected when they first brought Gunn, a noted writer, director, actor, and intellectual, on board to write and direct it.

Inside Hess Green's Martha's
Vineyard mansion

Among the directors Ganja and Hess has influenced, you can count accomplished veteran Spike Lee, who heavily anchored his most recent, controversially Kickstarter-funded 2014 film Da Sweet Blood of Jesus on the seabed of Gunn's masterpiece. (One benefit of Lee's film may be that it sends viewers back to Gunn's original.) Acording to Scott Foundas, chief film critic at Variety, who reviewed Lee's film, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is "in fact a remake--at times scene for scene and shot for shot--of Ganja and Hess...Bill Gunn’s landmark...indie that used vampirism as an ingenious metaphor for black assimilation, white cultural imperialism and the hypocrisies of organized religion." A remake, yes, and an homage, but also a revision, with some significant flaws. In the new film Gunn's use of vampirism's figurative possibilities remains, as do a number of the original film's plot's particulars, but Da Sweet Blood of Jesus also shifts things up enough such that he has created what I find to be one of the queerest films by a straight black male filmmaker I have seen in recent years.

An agonized Hess Green (Williams),
after a kill

As in the original, the plot turns on the research of stylish bachelor Dr. Hess Green (the striking Stephen Tyrone Williams, in a severely controlled performance). He is the sole heir to a Wall Street fortune, with a 40-acre estate (of course, because this is a Lee film, though there is no mule) on Martha's Vineyard, complete with a butler; and a Rolls-Royce and driver, as well as fabulous home in New York. He attends the local church but shows no enthusiasm for religion; in fact, as rendered here, he initially verges on being a cipher. Through his studies, Hess finds an ancient Ghanaian knife that unleashes a primeval bloodlust, which he shows to his assistant, Lafayatte Hightower (Elvis Nolasco), after which trouble ensues. Hightower grows increasingly unhinged under the accursed knife's influence, climbing a tree with a noose dangling beneath him, and then he eventually uses the knife to kill Hess before committing suicide, though the knife's spiritual and metaphysical power brings Hess back to life. From there, Hess's pattern is set. He must feed off blood, not by biting necks in the traditional sense, but by drinking blood however he can get it. Those he kills become undead too, though not blood-feeders, the film seems to say, unless the knife is used. (Or perhaps I misunderstood this.)

Hess (Williams) and Hightower
(Nolasco) struggle with the knife

As in the original film, once the Lafayette Hightower character--packed in a freezer downstairs--is out of the way, his wife, Ganja (Zaraah Abrahams, in a sparkling performance) arrives looking for him. Lee's Ganja is a Briton, no-nonsense, a bit of a diva. Although her husband was only a researcher and she complains about funds he owed her, she takes to Hess's lifestyle as if she had been born to it. We get brief glimpses of the social world Hess runs in, and the distinctly different, plainly working-class and poor world from which he draws his victims, on the Vineyard and in New York City. Eventually, Hess seduces her into his life, first as a lover and then as an accomplice, the symbolic murder initially wreaking havoc upon her, and after a particularly gruesome encounter with one of his childhood friends, Tangier Chancellor (Naté Bova), he realizes he can no longer bear the death-centered undead life much longer. There is a way out, involving Christianity and riffing on Spencer Williams's 1941 film Sweet Blood of Jesus, which he takes, but Ganja decides she will continue on the path of blood--though not alone.

Hess (Williams) and Ganja
(Abrahams) connecting

Frame to frame, image to image, Lee's composition and mise-en-scène are painterly, and Daniel Patterson's cinematography makes the screen hard to turn away from, even during the goriest moments. (There are several.) If only the screenplay matched the imagery! It is in the writing and editing, in part based on deeper conceptual conflicts that emerge the plot, that the film fails to find its footing. I wish Lee had found a stronger writer to build upon Gunn's original or to reconceptualize it completely, but instead, we get sometimes wildly inconsistent patches of dialogue and action juxtaposed that jar. For example, when Hess and Hightower first talk about the knife's powers, they engage in a conversation that not even robots would engage in, let alone academics. Yet when Tangier arrives and Hess and Ganja begin entertaining her, the exchange flows so authentically it rings utterly true. A musical scene at the church, starring singers Raphael Saadiq, formerly of Tony! Toni! Toné!, and Valerie Simpson, of Ashford and Simpson, runs too long, turning a resonant epiphany into a narrative annoyance. Then there are the usual Lee tics, like the tracking float of a character through space that add little. (His siblings Joie and Cinqué succeed in their brief appearances.) Instead of the unsubtle exposition and explanation, a more skillful hand, drawing upon the evocative images Lee assembled, would have sufficed.

Ganja (Abrahams), now
among the undead

Two deeper issues seem to be rending the story, class and religion. While Gunn's take on both felt novel at the time, for Lee too much remains unresolved, especially at period in our history when economic inequality is widening, the wealth gap between whites and black and brown people is vast, and, if recent studies are true, adherence to traditional religions is on the wane. Lee could have pushed any of these a bit, or a lot more, toward satire, or inward, with a great emphasis on Hess's psychological split, but he doesn't. Hess does not seem especially comfortable with the trappings of hyperwealth--this is not your usual doctor, PhD or MD--but he also does not fit in at the projects, where he grooms one victim, a young mother. He gains no succor from the power the African-based religion imparts, yet we get no sense that the local (black) church provides much comfort either.  Hess is figuratively lost and almost dead at the crossroads, with no way out except through an obvious approach that cannot result in real liberation, but a return to psychic, physical and spiritual death, and yet I had trouble believing he would take this route, since it felt too easy. Not even a willing partner in Ganja placates him; the disquiet roils at a level that the film doesn't articulate but makes legible from start to finish.

Hess (Williams), examining
the sacred/accursed knife

In a sense, the film suggests a deeper malaise not just at the heart of this story but for its anyone in the position of its director, a black man who currently has one home on the market for $20 million dollars, an unimaginable sum for the majority of Americans, especially black folks, when the housing crisis has devastated black communities across the US, and who has publicly denounced the very gentrification of his former Brooklyn neighborhood that he in part helped to bring about, meaning it will never again--short of a combined second global economic collapse and the election of the most progressive federal, state and city administrations in American history, which right now seems unlikely--return to anything close to the "Bed-Stuy Do or Die" world he depicted in his 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing or the later, less successful 1994 film Crooklyn. As with class, so with religion; the importance the black church is without question, but Lee's film appears to ask without answering what can it offer today, particularly for black people who find themselves at a distance from their familial and cultural pasts. Though great wealth does not have to lead to estrangement, but social, political and economic isolation can exacerbate the need for a spiritual lifeline. Ganja's choice, rejecting (black American) tradition, in favor of a queer life of undeath, appears, interestingly enough, the side on which the film falls.

I mention queerness because unlike Gunn's original--and Gunn was a queer man--Lee literalizes the ways in which the blood-cult's spirituality queers everyone and everything around it. I found this, alongside the cinematography, to be one of the most intriguing aspects of the film. There is full male (Williams, and Nolasco), as well as female frontal nudity, and open eroticism within and across gender lines. The voyeuristic tone about lesbianism that was evident in Lee's failed 2004 film She Hate Me has given way here to a depiction that is far less sensationalistic, though his male director's gaze persists. There is the openly queer butler, Seneschal Higginbotham (Rami Malek), who next to Ganja is Hess's closest associate. (There is also the ironic scene of Hess's reaction to blood with HIV, which occurs when he seduces, stabs and feeds on Lucky Mays (Felicia "Snoop" Pearson), a sex-worker he picks up, leading him to get a blood test and seronegative result.) There is the undercutting of heteronormativity, after a beautifully presented church-sanctioned wedding outdoors, when Tangier shows up, and the film cements this queer direction at the film end, with Ganja's putative partner. Where all this queerness takes the film is another matter; liberation for black or queer folks, especially if they are in the 99%, isn't part of the picture. Unspeakably rich, indescribably beautiful, and uncalculably undead, with a thirst for blood that will stretch on in perpetuity, may be one kind of queerness and also may be as perfect a metaphor for our current plutocratic moment as anyone could envision. It's where Da Sweet Blood of Jesus takes us, though it's an often bumpy ride to get there.