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The very first scene of American Fiction tells you everything you need to know about who this movie is for and who it intends to skewer. Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a Black literature professor played by Jeffrey Wright, stands at the front of his classroom with a befuddled look on his face as a white girl with green hair points to the whiteboard in anger and offense, insisting something is offensive and MUST be removed.
The camera pans and we see that Monk has written the title of a Flannery O'Connor story on the whiteboard. The title contains the word. You know the one.
Nigger.
The green-haired girl is not swayed when Monk explains that everyone in the room is an adult and they are there to study literature, whether it abides by modern sensibilities or not. Exasperated, Monk tells her, “With all due respect, Brittany. I got over it; you can too.”
But Brittany has no intention of getting over it. She stomps out of the classroom, teary-eyed and mouth set in anger. Then she files a complaint. Monk, who has presumably taught this text many times without incident, is hauled before administrators to explain himself.
This is the setup for the entire film, delivered in under two minutes. A Black man's authority over his own experience and his own discipline is overruled by a white person's discomfort. A white woman, specifically. And the institution sides with her discomfort, because discomfort is the currency of this particular economy. If you have been paying any attention at all to the state of American publishing, academia, or corporate life in the last decade, you already know exactly what kind of economy this is.
American Fiction is Cord Jefferson's 2023 directorial debut, adapted from Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It earned five Oscar nominations total, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Wright. The film grossed $23 million on a modest budget and became one of those rare satires that audiences across the political spectrum claimed as their own. Conservatives saw it as a takedown of woke culture. Progressives saw it as a critique of institutional racism. Both camps were partially right, and both were partially projecting, which is itself a testament to how well Jefferson threaded the needle.
But this is a magazine about fiction and storytelling, so the question I'm interested in is a craft question: why does this particular satire work so well?
The Publishing Machine
Monk is an accomplished novelist. He has published multiple well-reviewed books. He’s also broke, because well-reviewed and well-sold are two different things in contemporary publishing.
Meanwhile, Sintara Golden, played by Issa Rae, is enjoying a packed book festival event for her debut novel, We's Lives In Da Ghetto. Sintara is an Oberlin graduate who grew up wealthy. She has never lived in a ghetto. During her reading, she performs the cartoonishly offensive dialogue of her characters, and the overwhelmingly white audience eats it up. Monk sits in the back of the room, seething: This? This is what readers think “black literature” is?
