If Beale Street Could Talk

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If Beale Street Could Talk feels especially timely right now, due to a sequence where two old friends open their shared wounds. The pain they express is familiar — Black people traditionally seek comfort for this kind of emotional injury among ourselves. (To the detriment of our mental health, we’ve also had to cyclically explain it to white Americans who, until recently, have mostly avoided such introspection.)

In Jenkins’ film adaption of James Baldwin’s searing novel If Beale Street Could Talk, Fonny (Stephen James) and Tish (Kiki Layne) are lovers separated by racist authorities after a woman falsely accuses Fonny of rape. Before that arrest, in the drama’s most evocative scene, Fonny spends some time catching up with his childhood friend Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry). [1]

Baldwin draws a connection between racism and fear, suggesting that bigots use intimidation tactics to suppress black people. Throughout the novel, he portrays fear as something that keeps young African Americans like Fonny and his friend Daniel from addressing their own oppression. What’s more, it becomes clear that this kind of racism is institutionalized, meaning that the structures of power surrounding Fonny and his loved ones actively work to disenfranchise them. Daniel, for his part, understands this well because he has already spent time in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, and now that he’s finally out of prison, he’s even more frightened than he was before, too scared to strive for true freedom because he simply can’t fathom a life unbridled by hatred and persecution. In this way, readers see that white America oppresses people like Daniel and Fonny by putting them in positions of powerlessness and then scaring them out of standing up for themselves. Baldwin also shows readers how racist power structures turn young black men against one another, which is what happens when the District Attorney tries to scare Daniel out of serving as a witness in Fonny’s case. As such, Baldwin highlights how America’s unjust and coercive systems of power put black people at a severe disadvantage, ultimately using fear to isolate people like Daniel and Fonny from their peers, which makes it even harder for them to advocate for themselves. [2]

Plot

The story is set in the 1970s in Harlem where 19-year-old Tish (Kiki Layne) and 22-year-old Fonny (Stephan James) have been friends since childhood. Over the years, their relationship has deepened to the point that they are ready to get married. We see the beauty and the bounty of their love in a scene where they are separated from one another by a prison glass wall. He is incarcerated after being falsely charged with raping a Puerto Rican woman (Emily Rios); Tish is optimistic that she can get him released soon. Both of their hearts are warmed with Tish's momentous news that she is pregnant.

After seeing Fonny, Tish shares the news with her family — her mother Sharon (Regina King), her father Joseph (Colman Domingo), and her feisty sister Ernestine (Teyonah Parris). They react with joy and total support. But when they invite Fonny's family over to tell them, whereas his father is excited about becoming a granddad, his sisters are cool, and his mother, a "Holy Roller Christian," declares that Tish and Fonny have sinned and she goes so far as to curse the baby in Tish's womb.[3]

Controversy

Cinematographer James Laxton employs only one camera during the conversation sequence, and relies on pans rather than cutting. The camera’s action loops three times during the scene, with Fonny serving as the starting point on each loop. The repetition of pans traps the camera’s lens inside the room. It also traps white viewers through both the camera’s hypnotic looping and the unguardedness of the conversation, forcing them to absorb the unavoidable hurt. As the camera repeatedly fixes its gaze on the slightly less aggrieved Fonny, then wavers back to Daniel’s broken image, the visual metaphor for Daniel’s PTSD and this inevitable racial discussion gains tension, deterring viewers from searching the room for escapist distractions.

In the past, when Black writers, creatives, and activists have undertaken the unenviable responsibility of expressing past racial grievances, white viewers have either opted out en masse, or escaped into their own comfortable, self-affirming culture, like ''Driving Miss Daisy'' or ''Green Book''. In this scene, the hypnotic, repetitive camera movement and Tyree Henry’s deliberate performance lull the white members of the audience into remaining in the conversation. As Fonny, Daniel, and many other Black people have been expected to fix their gaze to this trauma, white people must now do the same when confronting their hand in police violence and institutional racism.

Still, a glaring question remains: What happens when public pressure on the white populace lessens? In ''If Beale Street Could Talk'', Daniel and Fonny’s near-inescapable melancholy is only broken by Tish announcing dinner. Nevertheless, after listening to Daniel’s memories, Fonny can’t shake what he’s heard.

After witnessing the footage of George Floyd’s death, or listening to the inexhaustible stories of racism in public office and private businesses, does white America, like Fonny, know that racial discussions are unavoidable? Or must African-Americans perpetually feel hopeless because our harshest traumas are not redressed, even after they’re laid bare?

''If Beale Street Could Talk'' concludes with the near-permanent unjust imprisonment of Fonny, martyred by a malicious, overtly racist legal system. In current events, the martyrs are Arbery, Taylor, Floyd, and the unreported Black victims of police killings not caught on video. African-Americans are frustrated counting the uncountable martyrs, while one side avoids the conversation we can’t avoid.

If white America embraces conversations regarding race in perpetuity, just as Black Americans and Daniel and Fonny must — if they continually broach the subject of racism instead of veering into escapist tendencies, no matter how difficult — then sustainable change is possible. The hangout scene in Jenkins’ ''If Beale Street Could Talk'' is a model for white America, a road map to confronting issues of inequality, and severing itself from its escapist detachment. [4]

References