The Queer Thing About the Johnson's: a film still in the cocoon

Queer: strange, odd, unusually different, mentally unbalanced...deranged. I'm sure you thought I was going to do a complete gay review of Ari Aster's short film "The Strange Thing About the Johnson's" but that would just be too easy and this film is complicated, stirring, creepy, and unnerving.  I liken my reaction to the film like the net phenomenon 2 Girls, 1 Cup but what was more popular were the reaction videos that were Internet comic gold, especially Questlove of The Roots and, most famously, Grandma Marlene's impulse to shun the image from her psyche. Yeah, I embedded it below...


The film opens with the gruff, methodic rumphling of the youngest Johnson under his quilted covers doing what young johnsons do best. In pops the bright eyed, bubbly, reassuring poet and father.  What is strange is not the advice he gives to his son, but the strange foreboding carress upon the cheek he gives his son. Dad exits. Camera moves to the left to focus on the picture the son has been masturbating too. 2 Girls, 1 Cup had nothing on this.  In the real world, we try to move past people's fetishes and just say, "Eh, they like it, I love it." This is beyond fetish. This is beyond the Oedipus complex. This is the Oedipus complex turned upon it's head and riddled with gun shots and covered in that gelatinous strawberry gel in the produce section. We ask ourselves why. We feel the need to pray after this grave revealing of the son being an incestuous succubus in this primped, proper, and polite high society Black family.  Can we please find the real Johnsons who have the usual family conflicts we can digest a bit easier?

The Strange Thing About the Johnsons pushes our limit on what we can accept about the perverse nature of families when the doors are closed and the curtains are drawn. We want to like the Johnsons because their drapes are of the finest linen, their parties are filled with champagne and polite guffaws at the latest polite jibe.  But what lurks behind the holes in our fences is not the best picture.  The things that go on at the Johnsons...it makes you clutch your pearls and compels the desire to burn sage in your child's bedroom.
*SPOILER ALERT*

When I first watched The Johnsons, I felt myself pushing back in my chair as if a monster were to jump off the screen. I wanted to yell out my repulsion or just give out an "eeeewww" to console myself.  The film is filled with blows of a child who's development went wrong somewhere.  I kept asking myself, how could a boy be sexually attracted to his father? Is this a strange twist of nature vs. nurture?  Was the mother that much of a "cold heartless bitch" as the son later recalls - or could we even trust his poignant reproof of his mother?  Young boys love their mothers first and clichely ask to marry her at some point in his childhood...right?  The film left me questioning what is normal when a child goes wrong.  But how do we come to absolve the father as a victim who simply takes his son's fellatio with a look of still horror, shame, and guilt?  Perhaps it's the Oprah effect on us all to know the body deceives victims of sexual abuse but HOW does the father become a victim! That's not a question.

As our film club sat in horror watching the film pan out and end in one bloody mess, we are filled with more questions all beginning with WHY, WHY, WHY?

• Why didn't the father correct his son's twisted behavior and advances early on?
• Why did the son hate his mother so much?
• Why did the father longingly gaze while his son went the distance with that New Year's kiss to his awkward and silenced wife?
• Why didn't the mother get up off that bed?!!!!

Ari Aster has shied away from any press for the film and via email told the fine folks at Shadow & Act blog that the film is merely a "What Would Happen" as it relates to liberal parenting...that answer falls flat to the floor like the plot's potential setup. Are we lead to believe that the mother's fixation on outward appearances and the dad's obvious androgynous presence can create such a monster?  Spoiled, entitled kids have tantrums over ice cream; they don't rape their father to make that point.

Our good friend Chandra Kamaria, founder of Harkins House Productions and host of the JetSet podcast believes The Strange Thing About the Johnsons represents a dangerous direction in Black film in which troubling storylines and wicked perversions are giving birth to the new Black archetype. Has the Hollyweird creations of Tyler Perry and Lee Daniels taken it's toll on film students or does race even matter in this short? Aster does not think race plays a part, and merely convenient since his good friend played wicked son of Johnson.

I wanted to like the film for intellectual reasons because I wanted to unravel this yarn and analyze the struggles of a father who is sexually repressed and silenced by his son AND wife.  I wanted to understand the man within the cocoon he had built around himself, not the one the audience believes was placed onto him.  He is not a victim of circumstance.  Once I got past my repulsion, I wanted to dig deeper and understand why. Maybe why! What Aster offers us are butterflies for dinner. We are hungry, but we are reminded that we are not a pouncing cat.  He has to offer up some type of explanation...maybe in a cup.
/ 5 Black stars

New Year & A New Review Attitude!

Happy new year to you all!

Thanks to all the supporters and local chit chatters who are pumping Black Film Review of Memphis. We are excited about the new slate of reviews we plan to post each week.  We believe there are great Black films to be seen that represent the diverseness and nuances of Black people from around the world.  And then, there are others that need to die in the same box their straight-to-DVD existence was shipped in.

Black Film Review of Memphis is a film club that is justifiably sadity about the films we critique because we are serious about our Black representation. The last thing we need are shucking and jiving Black folks on film literally shucking corn and jiving to a beat.  Do filmmakers really need to beat us over the head for us to "get it"?  Our film club toes the lines on the long-standing Alain Locke vs. WEB DuBois debate.

As we continue to grow and give you the reviews about the films for us, by us, and about us, we hope you will share the good news with friends.  Follow us on Facebook and follow me on Twitter @melohello!

Looking for our Lost Tribe: BFR Memphis on Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest

Michael Rappaport’s directorial debut, “Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest”, initially fascinated me with a slice of hip hop history.  I found myself head bobbing and bouncing my hands up and down as if mimicking the motion of a hydraulic low rider.  I giggled quietly in the theatre after hearing Monie Love’s break down of Tribe’s “Bonita Applebaum” and wondering myself if Tip used her fat ass as the muse for “Vivrant Thang.”  I was amused by Black Thought of The Roots who called Tribe the “Miles Davis of Hip Hop” – because of their unpredictable and outlandish style they flaunted, which, perhaps, gave birth, of sorts, to the Black conscious boho style. Such a look has been lampooned – a proverbial attack on Black self-determination – yet, a critique that Tribe frontman, Q-Tip, brushed off.  It’s not how the clothes define the movement, he believes, but the ultimate message of a unified community.  Indeed, I wanted to believe, as one of the members of The Jungle Brothers put it, “They just know about some shit we’re not up on.”

The neon glow of the animation in the opening credits is just as blaring and fascinating as the Black men’s pain throughout the film. Growing up in Jamaica Queens, Phife Dawg (Malik Taylor) and Q-Tip (Kamaal Fareed) were surrounded by hip hop’s stomping grounds. Thankfully, the film didn’t seek out the overwrought story of poverty and how hip hop kept them from gang violence whilst Black girls double-dutched in the background.  We get a sense that both grew up in well adjusted homes where their fathers were present and the streets weren't after them. On the other hand, their inner pain takes a back seat to the initial fame and ultimate turmoil.  Throughout high school, Q-Tip watched as his father’s emphysema progressed before his eyes, and resolved to deal with his pain by knocking out hip hop beats on his school desk. Phife quietly dealt with Type 1 Diabetes (group mates didn’t find out until 1991), and used hip hop to escape from his grandmother’s Seventh Day Adventist observances.  Much isn’t known about the quietly centered DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Discovering the magic of disc jockeying was a definitive moment in his youth growing up in Brooklyn; he watched local DJs set up shop in school yards across the street whilst sitting on his gilded fire escape in Brooklyn.  Another member, Jarobi White, is relatively unexplored by Rappaport’s lens, though he is credited by Tip as the spirit of Tribe.  His heartfelt love and connectedness to each member seems to be the most present and unveiled on the screen.

I truly believe God loves hip hop. Destinies aligned for A Tribe Called Quest at Murry Bergtraum High School, despite the looming threat of incarceration of New York City’s police headquarters literally across the street. Linking with classmates The Jungle Brothers (member Mike G helped coin the group’s name), this moment should be a creased page in the annals of hip hop history. One member of The Jungle Brothers was the nephew of the legendary DJ Red Alert who was given their demo. And the rest…Black is Black.  Early on, these young wordsmiths had a way of recapturing the angst and apathy that plagued a faltering community.  On the seminal “Black is Black”, such lines capture their frustration in their treatise:

“Your fantasies will get you killed/ Reality is Black is Black/ I try to tell my people/ We all are one, created equal/ Before we master, we must plan/ Is that so hard to understand?/ Today’s the day we get together/ To try to change and make things better/ If not, where will we be tomorrow?”

To live hip hop is to give homage to music history. Q-Tip is an unquenchable crate digger – finding lost gems in music’s time capsule, the record store. His ability to find seconds-worth of drum patterns and melodies, even one note from Minnie Ripperton, makes him a quintessential hip hop archivist and loop master.  His gift is not ego driven as if he gives life to this lost music. Numerous times in the film, he notes his father’s influence; from putting him on to Lonnie Jones and qualifying hip hop as this generation’s bebop.  It poignantly shows how hip hop is a revival of the talking drum.  Outlawed and scorned slaves of the hip hop beat used jazz and soul samples as a springboard from the turntable.  It made lost connections to jazz, blues, funk, rock, and soul and mediated cultural consciousness across the generations – a transcendent homage that appeared as the Tower of Babel but a veiled pretext that leads to freedom. Hip hop today has lost its soul and enslaved by a beat machine. True fans of real hip hop respect the history and embrace the genre crossing; this equivocates to the power of music without drawing a line in the sand. Hip hop blows in the wind. The mic gleams like the North Star.

What happens once they step away from the mic seems to be the film’s focus.  Tip is painted as an egotistic perfectionist who is annoyed and concerned yet ignorant to Phife’s growing resentment and hysterics toward him during Tribe’s waning.  Phife was the inconsistent, unmotivated, and temperamental five-footer who never understood he was a hip hop god. They were primmed and balanced by Ali Shaeed Muhammad’s quiet demeanor who “talked with his hands” and gave beats life and were restored by Jarobi’s jolly nature.  Eventually Tribe went on to create a powerful community of hip hop thought that was much bigger than one dimensional depictions of Black victimization via violence, drugs, and police brutality.  In the spirit of Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation, Native Tongues was at the core A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and The Jungle Brothers and later included Queen Latifah, Monie Love, Black Sheep, Leaders of the New School, and Chi Ali.  With a message of “lofty” empowerment, they represented a new dimension of Blackness. It was bold. It made you daydream of freedom. It was the jazz in our head bob.

Pressing past the "golden" era of hip hop, the film takes an interesting turn. Phife’s emotionality palpitates grossly across the screen.  Tip is constantly reproved by the films lens as the habitual line stepper, whether it’s the failed attempts to get Phife to eat and to exercise to control his diabetes; or maybe his creative control of every album until it’s just right; or maybe his desire to keep everyone in “the hut” as they worked on a brewing album. Phife likens Tip’s antics as the complex that separated Diana Rose from the Supremes or differentiated Michael Jackson from Tito…Phife points the finger at Tip. Tip points the finger at the industry. It boils down to respect.

1998 was a pivotal year for hip hop. Sitting with label execs, Phife and Tip saw the end of their quest. Seemingly heartbroken from the lack of respect from the label and the new wave of artists like DMX, Big Pun, and Cam’Ron who would redefine hip hop as a gritty, dangerous landscape, Q-Tip and Ali accepted the looming break-up; Phife was left reeling. The former went on and  made their way into successful solo projects. Phife, who passively claimed he could go “with or without” hip hop, embraced his hoop dreams and becomes a high school basketball recruiter, yet the lost brotherhood seems within reach and is held back by his bitterness. He even spits venom by noting he did not give approval/acceptance of Tip’s solo career.

Ten years later, Tribe comes together for the 2008 Rock the Bells concert, and Phife is still hypersensitive for unfounded reasons and takes offense to Tip’s on stage free verse, “Look alive/ Look at Phife dawg." Phife goes silent and Tip tries to talk it out, but the scene ends in high drama.  After this turbulent moment, Tip is counseled by Maseo of De La and Ali backstage.  Visibly frustrated and hurt, Tip yells out one of the most haunting lines in the film, "It’s about the fucking unit, B. Its all about us." Maybe we all want to believe in being your brother’s keeper. That the tightest bonds are your 100 grand friends.  Any community we create has its ups and downs, but once the beats and rhymes play themselves out, all we have are our natural voices and swirling thoughts.  Perhaps hip hop hasn’t learned how to take those very lyrical lessons and put them into action. The music is therapy to a degree but perhaps its pretense hasn’t been resolved due to an industry controlling its subjectivity. Rappaport thinks the film’s greatest promise is that we will understand the contribution of Tribe to hip hop but it’s much bigger than that.  When the film entered the film festival circuit, much of the beef between Tribe members and his directorial control boiled down to how Tribe wanted to depict their story. And smart move on Rappaport’s part to change the name of the film from Beats, Rhymes, and Fights but that still isn't enough. We've all read about the back and forth, and the infamous email, and some more back and forth.  Rather than basking in their success and influence, it makes one conjecture if this film further detracts from Tribe's bond or delivers us the real...

Telling our stories in such a fickle industry is about as difficult as one of the most telling lines from way back when all A Tribe Called Quest had was each other and “Black is Black” under their belt: See my soul and not my face. One hopes that the film, like the typical drama, will resolve itself in a hug and some dap. The future is unclear for A Tribe Called Quest and true fans will leave the theatre with a renewed love for real hip hop and these legendary and influential figures all over again, yet puzzled on why these brothers can’t work it out.  – Md Gaines-Griggs

/ Five Black Stars