My friend made the comment that he would see the film despite his reservations. "What reservations?' He said, "Going to see it is like listening to India Arie, its okay but you do it because it feels like the right thing to do." "What?" My friend continued, "Look, the Tuskegee Airmen though a great moment in African American history falls into the same stories that always get told about African American people. We are long suffering, noble, proud, square jawed, yadda yadda, yadda. It seems each one of these types of noble negro movies (initiated in the post WW II liberal Hollywood ex. Home of the Brave (1949) and perfected by Sidney Poitier), becomes a justification for our presence here and now. The same types of stories keep getting told when there are a whole lot of other types of stories about our lives that just aren't getting told."
Flash forward a day later, enter a story that damn sure needs to get told. IF you are living in a culturalized zone (i.e. one where the new cultural expressions are displayed consistently) than when it gets to your town do your self a huge favor and go see the new film, Pariah.
Pariah, is the story of a gay teenage girl in New York whose is juggling her sexual identity along with her familial and social identity. First time director Dee Rees gives the viewer a jagged and real story, that avoids political grand standing and depicts a young woman trying to figure out how to be who she is in her world. Adepeo Oduye plays Alike, a a 17 year old high schooler, who knows she is woman identified but is playing a cat and mouse game with her family. Her parents played by Charles Pernell and (doing a Mo'Nique turn) long time comedienne Kim Wayans artfully depict the extremes of homophobia. The mother avoids articulating the fact that her eldest daughter is gay but announces it in her constant attempts at imposing a hetero-girly identity on her daughter. "Don't you like the new blouse I bought you? It shows off your figure." And the father, forever cherishing daddy's little girl, is in deep denial about what everyone else seems to know.
The film excels at exploring the nuanced world of a mature self awareness having to live in an immature environment. Alike knows who she is and is settled in that identity. There are no scenes of self hate, self recrimination or shame for being who she is. What we see are the beginning, exploratory and at times uncertain, steps of a a girl consciously becoming the woman she wants to be. Alike only once describes herself as gay and only to repeat it to her mother after her mother calls her a "dyke" and to finally burst her father's denial.
Not all of the characters respond to Alike's sexuality with hostility, captured is the reality of the open sexual curiousity and flexibility of Alike's peers. As another student says within purposeful earshot of Alike, "I like girls but I love boys." Alike's new "friend" Bina, played by Aasha Davis recognizes Alike's social awkwardness for what it is, discomfort with the assumed discomfort others have with her and seemingly embraces her, only to play sex with an aversion to lesbian identity ("I'm not gay. I'm just doing my thing . . . You don't have to tell anybody, okay?"). And Laura, (Pernell Walker), Alike's closest friend, a young out lesbian, estranged from her mother and working while studying for her GED, understands Alike's mix of social and sexual confidence and uncertainty, yet is estranged from her broad cultural consciousness (Alike is a poet and aesthete).
What is excellently depicted is/are the floating sets of relationships to same sex sexuality and gender bending. The overlap of class, culture and sexuality in Alike's life and the complexity of responses to these overlaps realizes a much more convoluted coming of age story. Pariah is more than a gay outsider story but one that makes real the possibilities of life for LGBT teenagers. The community and institutions that provide support for Laura are islands of escape that show worlds of affirmation. Being an LGBT teen does not make Alike and Laura essential outsiders to their communities but hetero-normativity and homophobia are at the margins of their worlds and exist as aberrant sensibilities. There are no depictions of evil lesbians in this film. What is depicted as evil and monstrous are the family members that turn their backs on daughters and those that manipulate earnest feelings.
Pariah is a mesmerizing painfulful and beautiful film whose emotions are as crisp as pen and ink sketches yet whose yet whose feelings are suffuse with deep colors. It in some ways reminds me of the 1992 film Just Another Girl on the IRT, in that it is able to transform a sociological question into a living breathing person without descending into caricature, stereotype or broad and simplistic judgment. In short these movies are the type that need to be made about Black people, movies about Black people.
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