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'The American Society of Magical Negroes': You don't wanna join this club
Aren (Justice Smith) and Roger (David Alan Grier) in The American Society of Magical Negroes.
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Aren (Justice Smith) and Roger (David Alan Grier) in The American Society of Magical Negroes.
Focus Features
Lately, I’ve been musing on the concept of time and its relationship to Black art and identity. I keep bumping into this question: What time do we all think we’re living in right now?
In the year of someone’s lord 2024, a recent episode of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans conjured up James Baldwin – the same James Baldwin who once wrote, “I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt” – as a Magical Negro to Truman Capote.
A straight-faced excavation of this old Hollywood trope, which has been on the wane for some time, is startling enough. But now there’s also Kobi Libii’s feature debut, The American Society of Magical Negroes, which attempts to skewer it. The comedy writer and performer imagines an underground network of Black mystics who dedicate their lives to placating white people for the safety of Black people everywhere. “White discomfort,” as one character opines, is the “nemesis” of Black existence.
If this all sounds like the premise for a classic Key & Peele sketch, you wouldn’t be too far off. The trouble is, as far as I can tell, no one involved with writing Key & Peele had anything to do with the Society of Magical Negroes.
The movie has at least two crucial factors working against it. For one, the Magical Negro trope isn’t anywhere near as pervasive in Hollywood as it was when Spike Lee coined the term more than two decades ago. So despite being set in the present day, Libii’s social commentary brings with it no new enlightenment on the dominant stereotypes Black people face now, despite a nearly two-hour runtime.
Second, it has no Black characters. To be clear, there are real Black performers playing these roles on screen. But one would think fully human, complexly written roles ought to exist in a movie where the goal is combatting multiple centuries’ worth of one-dimensional representation. Here, they decidedly do not.
The Illuminati, but make it respectable
In Society of Magical Negroes, Justice Smith plays Aren, a dull and depressing L.A. artist whose specialty is dull and depressing abstract yarn installations. His latest work is on display at an art show, but no one “gets” it. When a white collector mistakes him for the waitstaff, Aren obliges and gets the man a drink instead of trying to convince him to buy his art.
A member of the actual waitstaff has been observing him all night and introduces himself. It turns out he’s Roger (David Alan Grier), a jolly older man who’s arrived to recruit Aren into the American Society of Magical Negroes, a “firm” that views itself as a group of world-class superheroes. He leads him to their secret headquarters, tucked away behind a Black barbershop, with hallowed rooms and halls that resemble Hogwarts or the Clue mansion. The visual world-building in this regard is the film’s sole inspired choice.
Egotistical tech bro Jason (Drew Tarver) is Aren’s first “client.”
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Egotistical tech bro Jason (Drew Tarver) is Aren’s first “client.”
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Each Society member is assigned a white “client” who’s experiencing some sort of crisis and is dangerously close to taking out their anxieties on innocent Black people. (A “white tears meter” assists in monitoring the threat level at any given moment.) The Magical Negro’s job is to befriend and counsel their client through all their issues until they get whatever it is they want. Aren’s first guinea pig is Jason (Drew Tarver), a disgruntled, egotistical tech bro at a software company called MeetBox, who’s angling for a promotion he almost certainly doesn’t deserve. Aren is hired at MeetBox and immediately gets to work practicing his skill of being a personality-less doormat, which has a great effect on clueless Jason.
Did I mention this is also a workplace rom-com? Sure, why not? Aren discovers one of his other new colleagues is Lizzie (An-Li Bogan), a woman with whom he had the gawkiest and most unsexy of meet-cutes at a coffee shop earlier in the day. Lizzie happens to be Jason’s “work-wife,” but he’s also into her, so that complicates Aren’s adherence to his Magical Negro responsibilities and tests his commitment to The Cause.
Maybe we’re all just Magical Negroes
So many disparate ideas and tones are being mashed up here, and none of them gel. Libii spends a ton of time obsessing over the details and internal rules of these proud, respectability politicians. Yet he also has a slippery grasp on the trope he seeks to interrogate. In this world, the Magical Negro is broadened out from its very specific real-world definition – Spike Lee was referring to movies with “magical, mystical” Black characters in films like The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Green Mile – to an all-encompassing label that includes any Black person who’s ever merely decided “Not today, Satan” and resisted the bait when dealing with racial microaggressions at work and Crispus Attucks.
Those muddled conflations would be less jarring if Aren were written as anything other than a convenient vessel for showcasing a convoluted premise. We know nothing about him besides that he’s a failed, self-loathing Rhode Island School of Design alum who’s so spineless he’ll awkwardly hold the door for a parade of oblivious exiting passersby before finally entering a coffee shop for himself. Before becoming a Magical Negro (I can’t believe this is an actual sentence I’m writing), he has no community to speak of – no friends, no real job, and no family, except a white mom he offhandedly mentions. (This is somehow both very illuminating and not at all illuminating at the same time.) Where did he grow up? How can Aren afford to be a struggling artist with a decent apartment in Los Angeles in this economy? Has Aren ever spent any time with Black people? (Magical Negroes don’t count.)
Lizzie (An-Li Bogan) and Aren (Justice Smith) have a tedious meet-cute at a coffee shop.
Tobin Yelland/Focus Features
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Lizzie (An-Li Bogan) and Aren (Justice Smith) have a tedious meet-cute at a coffee shop.
Tobin Yelland/Focus Features
His character arc, if you wish to call it that, concludes with him superficially liberated. In the film’s climax, he gives a grandstanding speech that’s What It’s Like to Be Black 101, a far more grating version of Barbie‘s climactic Feminism 101 monologue. The moment is wholly unearned, and the epiphany lands with a thud because Aren didn’t really start from any place real to begin with. There’s nothing radical or daring about his journey to self-discovery, which hinges almost entirely on his romantic pining for Lizzie. In fact, Libii’s script doesn’t even try to engage with Black radicalism because if it did, The Society would have to come under far more rigorous scrutiny than the film is interested in pursuing. The Magical Negroes, so proud to have single-handedly “raised the Black life expectancy,” at least according to society head Dede (Nicole Byer), exist in a world where the likes of Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers, and Bree Newsome never existed. The movie’s finale seems content with that omission.
What time are we living in now?
Nicole Byer is Dede, head of the American Society of Magical Negroes.
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Nicole Byer is Dede, head of the American Society of Magical Negroes.
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So: What time are we living in now? It depends on who you ask and where you look. Not unlike American Fiction, Society of Magical Negroes is convinced Black people on screen and in real life are, by and large, contending with the same stereotypes and barriers that we were 20 years ago. But that’s its own kind of retrograde nostalgia trap to fall into, the kind that can only be constructed by ignoring key parts of history and the present reality.
There are pressing issues like pay inequities and Black-created TV shows being canceled far too soon. But there’s also been so much exciting work being made by filmmakers on every level over the last decade – emerging voices like Nikyatu Jusu, Raven Jackson and Juel Taylor; newly-minted titans like Issa Rae and Jordan Peele; established vets like Gina Prince-Bythewood. They’ve told stories spanning a breadth of genres, sensibilities and character studies, the stuff their predecessors dreamed of. Amid this landscape, it’s hard not to view the Magical Negro as – thankfully – a relic.
Writing more than 25 years ago, bell hooks lamented how a dominant white supremacist environment forced too many Black artists to be hyperfocused on producing “resisting images,” thus overwhelming their creative and upsetting artistic integrity. At the time, she observed that Black filmmaking was still a “fertile frontier” because of the lack of radical images, but that she foresaw a “far distant future” where Blackness will be “overworked, overdone” just as whiteness has been. We’re a little bit closer to that future than we’ve ever been. But evidently, we’ve still got some ways to go.
Hungarian director Béla Tarr at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011.
Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
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Béla Tarr, the Hungarian arthouse director best known for his bleak, existential and challenging films, including Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, has died at the age of 70. The Hungarian Filmmakers’ Association shared a statement on Tuesday announcing Tarr’s passing after a serious illness, but did not specify further details.
Tarr was born in communist-era Hungary in 1955 and made his filmmaking debut in 1979 with Family Nest, the first of nine feature films that would culminate in his 2011 film The Turin Horse. Damnation, released in 1988 at the Berlin International Film Festival, was his first film to draw global acclaim, and launched Tarr from a little-known director of social dramas to a fixture on the international film festival circuit.
Tarr’s reputation for films tinged with misery and hard-heartedness, distinguished by black-and-white cinematography and unusually long sequences, only grew throughout the 1990s and 2000s, particularly after his 1994 film Sátántangó. The epic drama, following a Hungarian village facing the fallout of communism, is best known for its length, clocking in at seven-and-a-half hours.
Based on the novel by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year and frequently collaborated with Tarr, the film became a touchstone for the “slow cinema” movement, with Tarr joining the ranks of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman and Theo Angelopoulos. Writer and critic Susan Sontag hailed Sátántangó as “devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours.”
Tarr’s next breakthrough came in 2000 with his film Werckmeister Harmonies, the first of three movies co-directed by his partner, the editor Ágnes Hranitzky. Another loose adaptation of a Krasznahorkai novel, the film depicts the strange arrival of a circus in a small town in Hungary. With only 39 shots making up the film’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Tarr’s penchant for long takes was on full display.
Like Sátántangó, it was a major success with both critics and the arthouse crowd. Both films popularized Tarr’s style and drew the admiration of independent directors such as Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant, the latter of which cited Tarr as a direct influence on his films: “They get so much closer to the real rhythms of life that it is like seeing the birth of a new cinema. He is one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers.”
The actress Tilda Swinton is another admirer of Tarr’s, and starred in the filmmaker’s 2007 film The Man from London. At the premiere, Tarr announced that his next film would be his last. That 2011 film, The Turin Horse, was typically bleak but with an apocalyptic twist, following a man and his daughter as they face the end of the world. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.
After the release of The Turin Horse, Tarr opened an international film program in 2013 called film.factory as part of the Sarajevo Film Academy. He led and taught in the school for four years, inviting various filmmakers and actors to teach workshops and mentor students, including Swinton, Van Sant, Jarmusch, Juliette Binoche and Gael García Bernal.
In the last years of his life, he worked on a number of artistic projects, including an exhibition at a film museum in Amsterdam. He remained politically outspoken throughout his life, condemning the rise of nationalism and criticizing the government of Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán.
California’s wet winter continued Sunday, with the heaviest rain occurring into the evening, and more precipitation forecast for Monday before tapering off on Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.
A flood advisory was in effect for most of Los Angeles County until 10 p.m.
Los Angeles and Ventura counties’ coastal and valley regions could receive roughly half an inch to an inch more rain, with mountain areas getting one to two additional inches Sunday, officials said. The next two days will be lighter, said Robbie Munroe, a meteorologist at the weather service office in Oxnard.
Rains in Southern California have broken records this season, with some areas approaching average rain totals for an entire season. As of Sunday morning, the region had seen nearly 14 inches of rain since Oct. 1, more than three times the average of 4 inches for this time of year. An average rain season, which goes from July 1 to June 30, is 14.25 inches, officials said.
“There’s the potential that we’ll already meet our average rainfall for the entire 12-month period by later today if we end up getting half an inch or more of rain,” Munroe added.
The wet weather prompted multiple road closures over the weekend, including a 3.6-mile stretch of Topanga Canyon Boulevard between Pacific Coast Highway and Grand View Drive as well as State Route 33 between Fairview Road and Lockwood Valley Road in the Los Padres National Forest. The California Department of Transportation also closed all lanes along State Route 2 from 3.3 miles east of Newcomb’s Ranch to State Route 138 in Angeles National Forest.
Los Angeles County Department of Public Health officials say beachgoers should stay out of the water to avoid the higher bacteria levels brought on by rain.
After storms, especially near discharging storm drains, creeks and rivers, the water can be contaminated with E. coli, trash, chemicals and other public health hazards.
The advisory, which will be in effect until at least 4 p.m. Monday, could be extended if the rain continues.
In Ventura County on Sunday, the 101 Freeway was reopened after lanes were closed due to flooding Saturday. But there was at least one spinout as well as a vehicle stuck in mud on the highway Sunday, according to the National Weather Service. The freeway was also closed Saturday in Santa Barbara County in both directions near Goleta due to debris flows but reopened Sunday, according to Caltrans.
Santa Barbara Airport reopened and all commercial flights and fixed-wing aircraft were cleared for normal operations Sunday morning. The airport had shut down and grounded all flights Saturday due to flooded runways.
In Orange County early Sunday afternoon, firefighters rescued a man clinging to a section of a tunnel in cold, fast-moving water in a storm channel at Bolsa Avenue and Goldenwest Street in Westminster, according to fire officials.
A swift-water rescue team deployed a helicopter, lowered inflated firehoses and positioned an aerial ladder to allow responders to secure the man and bring him to safety before transporting him to a hospital for evaluation.
Heavy rains continued to batter Southern California mountain areas. Wrightwood in San Bernardino County — slammed recently with mud and debris — was closed Sunday except to residents as heavy equipment was brought in to clear mud and debris from roadways, the news-gathering organization OnScene reported.
After canceling live racing on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day due to heavy showers, Santa Anita Park also called off events Saturday and Sunday.
After several atmospheric river systems have come through, familiar conditions are set to return to the region later this week.
“We’ll get a good break from the rain and it’ll let things dry out a little bit, and we may even be looking at Santa Ana conditions as we head into next weekend,” Munroe said. The weather will likely be “mostly sunny” and breezy in the valleys and mountains.
Millie Bobby Brown in the final season of Stranger Things.
Netflix
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Netflix
After five seasons and almost ten years, the saga of Netflix’s Stranger Things has reached its end. In a two-hour finale, we found out what happened to our heroes (including Millie Bobby Brown and Finn Wolfhard) when they set out to battle the forces of evil. The final season had new faces and new revelations, along with moments of friendship and conflict among the folks we’ve known and loved since the night Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) first disappeared. But did it stick the landing?
To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy.
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