USA: Film “American Fiction”: Your personal ghetto superstar

Things aren’t going well for the black writer and intellectual Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), the main character in the multiple Oscar-nominated film “American Fiction.” Nobody wants to publish his new novel, the Californian college where he works even forces him to take a break from teaching, and when he goes to his family in Boston, he finds that his mother has Alzheimer’s and is in need of care.

As if that weren’t enough, Thelonious, known to everyone as “Monk” after the legendary jazz musician, attends a reading at which the educated black author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) presents her new successful novel “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto”, a ghetto story brimming with stereotypes and written in the appropriate slang, which depicts the lives of black people as the public and the cultural sector imagine it with their racist and classist prejudices.

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Monk is disgusted and decides to hold up a mirror to the publishing industry by writing a superficial ghetto novel under a pseudonym, which his agent is reluctant to offer to publishers. But “My Pafology,” as the title says, sends white publishers into a frenzy; Monk not only receives an advance of $750,000 for the manuscript, but also sells the film rights for four million.

The film “American Fiction”, which has already won several awards, is a bitter and accurate satire on the racism and the attempted wokeness of the bourgeois white educated elite in the US cultural scene. The directorial debut of Cord Jefferson, who also wrote the script for the racism-critical and Emmy-winning HBO series adaptation of the superhero story “Watchmen” (2019), is the adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel “Erradiert” (2001, unfortunately out of print in German).

The 67-year-old Everett is currently being featured in the feature pages because of his novel “James”, a retelling of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the slave Jim, which is currently being published in the USA and here at the same time. In the novel “Erased” on which “American Fiction” is based, Everett plays with numerous cultural references to Black America. As mentioned above, the name of his main character Thelonious Ellison is made up of the first name of the famous jazz musician Monk and the last name of the writer Ralph Ellison, whose book “Invisible Man” about black identity is considered one of the most important American novels of the 20th century.

Despite the serious subject matter, “American Fiction” is a wonderfully staged comedy that tells the story of how it becomes increasingly difficult for Monk to deal with the unbridled success of his book, which was not meant to be taken seriously. In order to remain anonymous, he poses as a fugitive criminal to the publishers on the phone and intones his would-be-cool tirades in full-bodied ghetto slang while shaking his head and rolling his eyes, which give him the necessary credibility. The white publishers, as well as a Hollywood director he meets with, are enthusiastic about him. To avert the worst, Monk tries to stop the process at some point and demands that the publisher change the book title to “Fuck” otherwise the deal would fall through. But the publishers are once again enthusiastic about their ghetto superstar, who also gives unrecognizable TV interviews.

The book is not only financially successful, it also ends up on the nomination list for a book prize, in whose jury Monk, of all people, sits. In the jury sessions it becomes clear once again how superficial and idiotic the anti-racism of the white educated middle class elites is: And it also becomes clear how much these cultural industry stereotypes reproduce and permanently establish racist hierarchies. Of course, “Fuck” gets the coveted literary prize.

But how should Monk behave at the awards ceremony, the grand finale of this film? There are numerous differences between the novel and the film, especially in the final resolution, which escalates Monk’s cultural prank, which is critical of racism, to the maximum. But the film also lives primarily from the sensitively staged family story, which is about generational conflicts, responsibility versus independence, secret affairs, being gay, romantic encounters and a lot of solidarity, which always has to be fought for.

It is difficult to understand why this film, which has been in cinemas in the USA since September, only made it to the streaming cinema in this country. Don’t we trust the local audience to understand a satire on the US cultural scene, whose products we constantly consume? Admittedly, “American Fiction” best unfolds its full effect in the English original.

»American Fiction«, USA 2023. Director: Cord Jefferson. Starring: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz. 117 minutes, available on Amazon Prime.

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