A Quiet Place: Day One.
When I was a teenager, I was very into thrillers. I didn’t like gore, and I didn’t like demons, but I loved a tight, suspenseful situation that people had to find their way out of. My mom used to take me and my sisters, sometimes me and my friends, to Blockbuster, and we’d each get to pick a movie. Sometimes we had to collaborate, pick a movie or two together, and we always chose something a little scary. Not The Ring scary or The Grudge (!), but apocalyptic scary like Cloverfield or Quarantine.
While I gravitate more to dramas these days, I still like to be spooked in this sort of peripheral way every once in a while. I liked A Quiet Place, and my boyfriend wanted to see this prequel. We are AMC A-Listers (!) so we went. While I can’t advocate for the movie itself, which was a little messy in its logic and made some decisions plot-wise that had me in my Studying Racial Representation Rage Zone, one thing I loved about it was Lupita N’yongo.
Before the movie became end-of-the-world hectic, it proceeded like a drama. N’yongo’s character is at a hospice because she has cancer, and she’s the only youngish person there. Because of this, she makes friends with one of the nurses, also a person of color and around her age. There isn’t quite romantic tension between them, just a chill friendship brewing, which was cool to see. N’yongo’s character is mean in a funny way—can’t be bothered to indulge in niceties. She wears a beanie most of the time, has a cat she takes everywhere on a leash. She’s a poet.
Watching N’yongo play this character, I realized I hadn’t seen her in anything resembling contemporary real life. She was an evil doppelganger in Us, a warrior-girlfriend in Black Panther and (to my utter ire) a tortured slave in 12 Years a Slave. Watching her be all of these fantastical and/or historical people, some good roles, some less good, it was very refreshing to see her play just an everyday person living their everyday life, even if this was all a prelude to an apocalypse. I could’ve watched a whole movie of her being this before-the-world-ends person, dealing with the fact that she’s dying young, dealing with her childhood baggage, writing insulting but funny poems while she waits for whatever’s coming next.
It made me realize that the movies like that, movies where Black people are just living their lives, indulging in drama that is not otherworldly and is not explicitly and indulgently racial are few and far between. TV shows are more prevalent (thank you for your service, Insecure), but when was the last time you went to a movie that starred a Black person (a Black woman!) just vibing?
Part of the problem, according to Black film history, is that many White people won’t pay to see a movie that doesn’t star someone who looks like them (hence the White buddy that later does not leave N’yongo’s side in this film). They won’t pay to see a movie where they’re not centered unless the non-White person centered instead is teaching White people a lesson (cue the very bizarre popularity of slave movies, the many, many awards for playing someone who is getting tortured by White people in order to teach White people that torture was/is bad). It makes me frustrated, the lack of interest in indulging in a story that isn’t about you. It makes me impatient, considering how long (the entirety of American film history), people of color have had to watch White people take center stage while other people were casted just to make White people’s dreams (or nightmares) come true.
My wish for everyone is to be open-minded enough to see anyone on screen, living their lives. To quiet this impulse to have everyone else’s lives come back to yours in some way. My wish for Lupita is to be that person on screen, alive. No systemic oppression to fight, no otherworldly monsters who will consume you if you make a peep, just writing poems, just walking your cat on a leash, staring out the window, maybe—the opportunities are endless. Maybe she doesn’t even have to have cancer. She could be just dwelling in existential angst like people do. What does my life mean? Who do I want to be? I want time for pondering for all Black stars. I want it for all Black people. An opportunity to dwell in your angst, to write some things down, to go to Blockbuster (or the modern-day equivalent of Blockbuster) and pick a movie about anything. Sink into it, see someone like you doing the range of things people do.
Image: Paramount Pictures
