Black Nerd Problems

by William Evans

  We saw this with Luke Cage too, where there are still plenty of people that claim it’s the best of the Marvel Netflix shows. Which seems laughable to me, as some of the acting and the derailed third act of the first season alone take it out of any “great” qualification for me. But I did enjoy Luke Cage about as much as any of its rivals. And I wanted it to win. I needed it to win. And it did win enough when it was all said and done. Even if it wasn’t the big prize.

  In a similar vein, I wonder how history will treat Lovecraft Country. Here we have Black, pulpy horror, the likes we haven’t experienced on TV. It captivated so many Black TV fans that yearned for more each week. But after the first few episodes, the cracks begin to show in the narrative. Some decisions the showrunners made didn’t do them any favors. There was the trope that to show passion in lovemaking, someone had to come close to being physically hurt. You had the producers patting themselves on the back for including a transgender character that neither spoke during the show or had any significant involvement. And just a lot of “if Black people had the power, they’d terrorize white people” vengeance fantasy at work. In a dark and almost affirming way, maybe it shows that Black writers and creators are mainstream enough where they can be held accountable for the same social miscues that their white counterparts are. But honestly, nobody wants to enjoy their art with that lens.

  Essentially, it comes down to what do we, as Black consumers that want to support Black artists, owe those artists if the work doesn’t hit the level we want? I don’t believe in any way, shape, or form that Black art has to be exceptional to warrant support. I think work that doesn’t rise to some profound level should be supported, regardless (provided it isn’t straight up damaging or harmful). I really wish that Proud Mary crushed at the box office, even if I don’t think it is a good film (it didn’t, by the way). But the why is worth investigating.

  The film was shown in the second-lowest number of theaters of any that grossed in the top ten during the week of its debut. Much was made about the disparate marketing for the film before its release. It seemed that Sony/Screen Gems had given up on the film before it was ever birthed. What began as a modest but respectable marketing push dwindled to the point that screenings weren’t even held previous to the release. When questioned on the curious move, Screen Gems would state that because Proud Mary wasn’t a critic-friendly film, that it would let filmgoers decide for themselves. Well, that worked out great. Because the people that make movies may be a lot of things, but idiots probably isn’t one. I’d say there’s a more realistic answer. I would venture to say that it may have never had a shot at being a great film. With an estimated production budget of $14M (and making a little over $20M domestically), it’s hard to imagine putting it in the same ballpark as other big-name action films. The Commuter, which opened on the same weekend, had a budget of at least $40M, and that looks like a younger sibling to your average Liam Neeson not-as-smart-as-it-pretends-to-be action film. Neeson hasn’t made a financial blockbuster film as the lead since the last Taken movie in 2014, but my dude’s dance card is full for the foreseeable future. How many more action films does he have in his future, you ask? More than Taraji.

  At the same time that Black art doesn’t need to be monolithic in its content, neither does it need to be in its quality and output. I’m not an advocate for more bad or uninspiring art in the world, but I also believe that not all art has to be all things to all people. And this is mostly true. But the stakes for Black art that doesn’t hit a particular greatness threshold always feels at risk of being reduced to scarcity, or being critiqued for not doing more. Not every Black movie needs to justify its existence by being Moonlight. But not every Black moviegoer should feel they have to go to every Black movie just to keep Black movies being made either.

  For Dark Girls Who Never Get Asked to Play Storm

  WILLIAM EVANS, aka Preacher of the Mutant Gospel

  THE NERD COMMUNITY is a really tough bastard to please. The Black nerd community, maybe even more so. Still, because we, the Black nerd coalition, rarely get what we want, throwing us a bone is often a good way to buy yourself some goodwill and keep our adamantium claws from coming out. Storm of the X-Men is probably the biggest get-out-of-jail-free card that may never get played. In 2014, Bryan Singer, who gathers accusations like Google inquiries, announced that he had found Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Storm for the next X-Men films. You may now know these films as X-Men: Apocalypse and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Or more accurately, the movies that basically killed the X-Men franchise.

  Now, the first thing that pops up is how young the actors were when they were cast. Like, could be Famke Janssen’s (the original X-Men movies’ Jean Grey) kids young. But that’s not very surprising. X-Men: First Class was a prequel to the original X-Men films, and X-Men: Days of Future Past was a sequel to First Class (which was still a prequel to the original films), but then Days of Future Past does some time travel shit and kind of erases the timeline of the original and… you know what, everyone is younger now. Just take my word on this. It’s trash but it’s canon. Like Jar Jar Binks.

  So, we can talk Sansa Stark playing Jean Grey (we saw how that turned out) or Tye “You Might Remember Me from Mud, Actually Naw, You Probably Don’t” Sheridan playing Cyclops, but come on, fam. This is a Black Nerd Problems production… you know we’re gonna talk about Ororo da Literal Gawd.

  I do not come to bury Alexandra Shipp, however easy she makes it. We could talk forever about Shipp equating the conversations about colorism in her being cast as Storm as racism toward her. Or about her stating most racism she experiences is from Black people (starting to get the idea Alexandra might need a primer on the definition of racism). We could talk about how we should’ve seen her uninspiring performance coming based on her performance in the Lifetime Aaliyah biopic, which to be clear was a train derailing while passing through a forest fire. Even bad movies like that can be a vehicle for the brilliance of its lead, like Chadwick Boseman in Get on Up. Or most small films that Tom Hardy stars in. Or Viola Davis on planet Earth. None of that came from Shipp’s performance in Aaliyah, and I sincerely hope folks younger than me don’t associate that with the singer’s legacy. But that’s kind of the point: none of this is about Shipp as much as what it represents in Hollywood. Which would really suck for her in that position if she weren’t so terrible at handling the complexity of it.

  What this is about is the way that Hollywood continues to pretend that no impact or history lies in the darkness of someone’s skin. Well, when I say “Hollywood,” I mean directors like Bryan Singer. And when I say “someone’s skin,” I really mean Black women. Brothas can fall victim to skin shade discrimination as well, but outside of skin color, they don’t have to deal with the impossible beauty standards of women, let alone a dark-complected woman. Plenty of people will say (with or without venom): “What’s the real issue, it’s not like they cast a white woman as Storm, does it really need to be this complicated?” Yeah, you bet your all-shades-of-Black ass it does.

  Even as a fictional character, Storm is a feminist symbol for Black women the way that most assume Wonder Woman has been for women all these years (the box office response of the first Wonder Woman film bears that out). Storm has always been powerful, goddess-like, and African. And no, not Charlize Theron South African. Her dark complexion has been depicted throughout her comic book history (there are exceptions with some artistic liberties over the years, but few and far between). Storm has become a beacon and symbol for women with darker skin for decades now. The unwillingness to recognize that is just another thunderbolt in the side of a demographic of women who frankly are plenty used to it by now.

  The stigma of Black women that are darker being deemed ugly, less desirable, or just plain less than goes back a lot further than the X-Men. Unfortunately, time has done little to eradicate that notion. It’s why Lupita’s rise to fame was constantly met with “I don’t get it, I don’t see why people think she’s beautiful.” Or the New York
Times calling Viola Davis “less classically beautiful than [Kerry] Washington.” Or why there were about seventeen things wrong with Zoe Saldana playing Nina Simone, but one of the most talked about is how much lighter she was than Nina was. Black does not equate all Black. For Nina, to disregard her struggle in the world because she was dark-complected is to disregard her true story. Now, Storm is a fictional character, she does not have a daily grind, struggle, and catalog of insults, dismissals, and microaggressions that have to be accounted for. But living and breathing Black women that embrace the idea of Storm do. I think about Tiffany Onyejiaka’s essay on colorism where she states, “And this is what Hollywood needs to realize: That casting agents, producers, and directors tend to gravitate toward a very distinct type of black girl who fits the ‘Halle Berry’ aesthetic: slim, light-skinned, and classically attractive in a Eurocentric sense.” She wrote that in 2017 and little has changed.

  You would assume that comic book movies and shows are where you would see the quickest change to this, because of the blank-slate nature of new castings. It’s easy to create excitement or at least headlines with comic book portrayals. There has been a slight uptick in casting dark-skinned Black women in these TV shows and movies, though the lion’s share seemed to happen in Black Panther. Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, and Letitia Wright are incredibly uplifting to see on-screen, breaking the norms. But again, they’re all in the same movie more or less. Outside of Wakanda, you have a few actresses like Lashana Lynch in Captain Marvel, Viola Davis in Suicide Squad, and Anna Diop on Titans. After that the well runs pretty dry for significant roles. This isn’t an easy measurement. Is progress a film like Black Panther with a large grouping of darker-skinned actresses? It certainly can’t be the promised diversity of Wonder Woman, where a quartet of Black women show up on Themyscira with little to do and even less to remember about them. I think progress may look like a lead protagonist role or, dare I say, a love interest. You’ve got Lupita in Wakanda then like Zendaya and Zoe Saldana. That’s your list. (Never sure how to count Zoe considering she’s green in Guardians of the Galaxy, but her skin tone absolutely counts in, say, the Star Trek movies.)

  I do empathize with actors and actresses in these cases to some extent. This is a passion and an art for them, but it’s also a job. And regardless of the state of the economy, turning down a gig ain’t really something you’re trained to do. I have no idea if Shipp was a Storm fan previous to accepting the role. Maybe the symbol that is Storm was a source of power and pride for her just like many other Black women. But that empathy doesn’t really do much to alleviate the consistent knocking in the back of skulls of Black women that have been passed over because they were too dark. To simply dismiss this as a nonstarter of an issue is really just another level of “I don’t see color,” but instead it’s “I don’t see the difference between one Black person to another.”

  Because (somehow) I’m still an X-Men fan and because I’m an Ororo Munroe stan, I was hoping Alexandra Shipp would kill it. Lord knows that we were in need of a good Storm performance after all these years (for the record, I think bad writing did hurt Halle in the first X-Men; everything went downhill after that though). Are the number of darker Black women in roles growing? Ever so slightly. Can women like Lupita and Danai be game changers? I certainly hope so. We don’t know how we would be getting Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau without the prior representation of those women. I’m happy to watch all these women kill these roles, but let’s be honest. None of these roles is Storm. That’s just math. Or weather. Whatever. But with more attention paid to colorism in casting than before and actresses like Dominique Jackson, Janelle Monáe, and Yetide Badaki openly petitioning to play the goddess, it feels like there’s at least a chance. Black women of all shades, especially those that are often passed over for glamorous roles, deserve a chance to see themselves throwing lightning from the sky.

  How My Black Ass Would Survive Every Horror Movie

  OMAR HOLMON, aka The Guy Keeping Freddy from Getting Shut-Eye

  THERE COMES THAT point when I am watching a scary movie (having been forced to) where the suspension of disbelief just straight up shuts down. I hate how Black folk get axed in horror movies by doing out-of-culture shit. Neither I nor any of my peers—dare I say, any Black person—ever gone to investigate a strange noise heard in the distance while outside. Yet, Black folk still die first in the horror movies. Or they die as fodder for the white characters to get away. What the fuck?! How, yo? If Black people got more accurate portrayals in horror movies, those movies would be over in minutes. The monster or killer wouldn’t even happen to cross paths with the Black folk in horror movies. I’m not saying we’re better survivors, I’m just… Actually, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Maybe it’s just me, but I see plotlines going way differently when facing off against some of the horror icons. I’ll take the forefront with how I would handle these certain horror villains and thriller situations.

  Let’s start with one of the biggest horror icons in the game, Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy got the claw hand thing going and he mostly merks folks in their dreams. Cats would usually try to stay awake in order to avoid Freddy, but when that fails, they’re stuck in a nightmare where he is in control. That does seem scary, but there’s a reason Freddy’s ass kept that shit in the burbs. He wouldn’t be trying to get in Omar Little from The Wire’s dreams.

  Freddy should know better than that—all I’m saying is, he tries going in a Black dude’s head? He getting jumped. Early. Timberland boots contouring his face on sight, and immediately after that me and my whole squad are gon’ roast him for what he’s wearing. “Look at your fit, boy! Look at his watered-down Fruit Roll Up–looking-ass Where’s Waldo sweater, doe! This dude out here with beef jerky skin thinking he gon’ scare somebody?” Freddy wouldn’t even be able to handle the fucking jokes being snapped on ’em at damn near light speed. There’s nothing to protect Freddy once a brother gets in his Toph earthbending roast stance with the hand at an acute forty-five-degree angle.

  Also, what Freddy gonna do in a Black woman’s dreams? Not a damn thing! He’ll get crushed by the tempered glass ceiling they face. Oh, it ain’t a problem for them since they gotta punch through that shit daily, but Freddy can’t. Freddy Krueger ain’t winning a fight against any sister in her dreams, period. The man’s already bald but would get snatched bald again somehow. Freddy never been in a dream where the white privilege is working against him. I would have loved seeing Freddy try to come up in my mom’s dreams. He’d be doing the dishes, taking out trash, filing her taxes, and using his knife gloves to do mani-pedis QUICK! I’m not hearing it with you, Fred.

  Let’s talk about the other horror movie MVP, Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th. First and foremost, I’m nowhere in any part of America where walking round with a machete and a hockey mask is a regular thing where no one bats an eye. I see a dude in a hockey mask and there isn’t a goal, a referee, or ice in the vicinity? I know it’s time to go. Also, I’m pretty sure everyone hears that ch-huh-ch-huh-ch-huh-ha-ha-ha-ha sound when Jason is around, more than likely because he is making it himself. As far as tactics, I’m running. Now I know everyone is like, “Ooooh, Jason is slow but he catches you.” FUCK. OUTTA. HERE. WITH. THAT. SHIT. They always trip over something in the woods (I’m convinced everyone has been tripping at the same spot in the same woods in movies for years). I ran track in high school for this occasion fucking specifically, man. You’re not just running for your life; you’re running for the team. I’m making it to my fam to be like, “Man, you ain’t gonna believe the shit I just saw… I was out soon as I saw dude. I fuckin’ ran, man. Y’all woulda been proud of me.” Worst-case scenario, I know Jason is weak against water, so in that case I’m gettin’ Sharkeisha or Solange to take Jason down ’cause their fighting style might as well be waterbending from the Avatar: The Last Airbender series.

  Man, this is easy survival shit. Who else y’all got? Aliens and Predators? W
hat, you thought you were gon’ trip me up with that one? NOPE. Not a problem. Dealing with Aliens is simple. I’m not going into space. If I was one of those folks that applied to go on that one-way trip to Mars mission (remember that shit?), then I’d have a more strategic answer, but since I have common “nah, I’m good” sense, Aliens wouldn’t be a threat. However, Predators are a bit different. Predators go to planets looking to start shit, so there’s no avoiding that shit—the hunt is their rite of passage. Predators are similar to the Black experience with police, as they lie in the cut and then decide to come at you because they got the power to do so, because (as we’ve been reminded) we’re the most dangerous game. The main difference is there’s a code with the Predators. You fight back to take ’em down and they’ll dap you with respect, as Michael Harrigan (Danny Glover) showed us. Or you can help them out in the field against an enemy like Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan) did. Alexa teamed up with a Predator to take out some Aliens and she was rewarded by getting a Predator insignia recognizing her as a warrior by the clan (#NotAllPredators?). So, at best, I’m helping out Predators somehow. I’m straight up telling them, “Look, man, I’m showing my allegiance with you, so who we goin’ after? Drug lords again or Aliens, ’cause I don’t like either of those motherfuckers no way no how anyway.”

  I’m tryina tell y’all this shit is way easier than they make it out to be in the movies, man. All right, who next? Y’all gon’ say I forgot about Michael Myers from Halloween? That I did not. I’m straight up going toe-to-toe and pound for pound with Michael Myers. You wanna ask why? ’Cause fucking Busta Rhymes gave him the fucking jumping front kick (in Timbs!) out of a window. Since that is technically a WWF move, and I hold true to the theory that whoever gets hit with a WWF move in a fight automatically loses (even if they win), I’m nailing Myers with that HBK Sweet Chin Music and letting the chips fall where they may.