Why airing Black wounds on screen isn't 'trauma porn'

I recall hearing a collective sigh of relief from a predominantly Black audience gathered in a movie theater in the pre-Covid days of 2017 to watch Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning horror film "Get Out." We all exhaled a sigh of relief when hero Chris Washington (played by then-unknown rising star Daniel Kaluuya) defeated his treacherous White girlfriend Rose Armitage (played by Allison Williams), who had duped him into a prison set up by her villainous middle-class suburban family.


We'd been holding our breath because a police cruiser had pulled up to the scene, and we'd braced ourselves for a deadly confrontation between law enforcement and a Black man. We breathed a sigh of relief when, instead of a white cop, Chris's Black friend Rod Williams (played by comedian Lil Rel Howery) emerged from the cruiser to help.


Rod, who has provided comic relief throughout the film, delivers Peele's well-planned intervention with levity. For those of us in the theater that night, it restored the balance of justice while also eliciting raucous applause from the audience.


Peele revealed in the film's DVD commentary that he had originally planned a different ending, in which our Black hero did indeed confront a White police officer and was wrongfully imprisoned. Peele foresaw that after the prolonged experience of racial violence inflicted on its Black male lead, audiences would have revolted against such a dark and tragic conclusion, regardless of how true such experiences are to real life.


Such an anticipated revolt appears to be taking place right now on social media, as Black audiences express their displeasure with the latest Black stories that are now streaming. Amazon's horror series "Them," in particular, has been chastised for exploiting Black pain and trauma, as has Netflix's Oscar-nominated short "Two Distant Strangers."


Our creatives are learning to speak more directly in this era of diverse storytelling and increasingly diverse Black storytellers. Stories like "Them" and "Two Distant Strangers," as well as films like "Antebellum" and "Queen & Slim," which have also been chastised for their portrayals of Black pain, are learning to tell the quiet part aloud. Storytellers, like Peele, may need to know their audience, but audiences can also learn to meet them halfway and appreciate different modes of storytelling. More stories of Black joy and thriving are needed, but we ignore stories of Black pain at our peril.


Unlike "Get Out" and Peele's second horror film, "Us," neither "Them" nor "Two Distant Strangers" provide the much-needed comic relief that occasionally erupts in the horror or sci-fi/fantasy genres. Neither story provides enough escapism, despite the fact that both are immersed in supernatural realms: the former in ghosts, the latter in an alternate reality of a never-ending loop akin to "Groundhog Day."


History, like inventive storytelling, appears more digestible when it is mitigated by storytelling devices such as comic relief and escapist triumphalism. Escapism is a different type of relief, as demonstrated by HBO series such as "Watchmen" and "Lovecraft Country," both of which visited the tragedy of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 but provided vigilante justice, the former in the reimagining of "superheroes" and boss women such as Regina King's Angela Abar/Sister Night taking on the forces of White supremacy. Surprisingly, many Black audiences' main reaction to these dramas has been one of appreciation for empathizing with traumatic Black experiences from the past.


Is it a failure of storytelling if humor and escapism are conspicuously absent? I've been thinking about this because I found "Them" and "Two Distant Strangers," both created by Black storytellers – Little Marvin for the former and Travon Free for the latter – to be compelling and brilliantly realized studies of the traumatic Black experience.


"Them" captures the nightmarish pursuit of Black home ownership in the 1950s, which is consistently thwarted by white Jim Crow racism, whether in the rural landscape of the South or in the hostile suburban setting of sunny California. It focuses on racial, sexual, and medical assaults on Black women through its lead character, the ironically named Lucky (played by Deborah Ayorinde), who rebels against these oppressions and is labeled as a "crazy Black woman" as a result. The season finale implies a supernatural confrontation, but it remains unresolved, which may have contributed to some viewers' accusations of "trauma porn," given how we are denied an escapist triumph in the ensuing drama.


Similarly, "Two Distant Strangers," set in the present and focusing on one day in the life of a Black man (played by Joey Bada$$), is racially profiled and gunned down on his way home, and is trapped in this nightmare on repeat. Again, neither the film's hero nor the audience can escape, resulting in a reenactment of collective emotional trauma.


This tenacity, on the other hand, does not feel exploitative or cruel. It's realist storytelling inserted into an absurdist "Groundhog Day"-style premise that should be absurd if it weren't for our country's own grim reality. We couldn't even breathe a sigh of relief when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd before learning that Ma'Khia Bryant, a young 16-year-old, was gunned down by police in Columbus, Ohio, at the exact moment Chauvin's verdict was announced. There is no way out.


Following emancipation, formerly enslaved African Americans chose silence to protect their children and grandchildren from the horrors of enslavement. However, the silence persisted. Quite loudly.

 

The horror subtext in "Them" is unspoken trauma, particularly when young Gracie (played by Melody Hurd) guesses at her mother's trauma of rape and infanticide shaped by White oppression, claiming that ghosts spilled her secret. Despite the choice to remain silent, this is how trauma is passed down through generations.


This is similar to the silences Toni Morrison broke (quietly) about that "unusual institution" casting a long shadow on America's race relations in her ghostly novel "Beloved" (adapted for film as a flawed ghost story in 1998) People of African descent have learned as a community to only hint at the trauma, to speak subtly about it, to use coded words and double entendre for it. Expect a dose of humor if we tell you about our pain because we will always tell it in a roundabout way, never directly. If we are to heal, we must sometimes tell our stories straight, without the filter of humor or escapism. 


According to Hooded Justice's granddaughter Angela Abar in HBO's ""Watchmen": "You can't heal while wearing a mask. Wounds require oxygen." Some of our Black storytellers are finally letting their wounds be known.


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