The American Society of Magical Negroes: It’s quite interesting that there would be people shouting 2024, for this year the episode ‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’ came up with the image of James Baldwin – yes that James Baldwin who wrote the words – “I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; I prefer not to like people who’ve been so accidented as to deserve my contempt”, turning into Capote’s Magical Negro.
The grim-faced reveal of that fading trope of old Hollywood is abrupt enough. But now there is also Kobi Libii’s directorial debut, The American Society of Magical Negroes that is a variation of this trope. Libii explores the idea of black magicians who have created an entire black magic network for the protection of black people, because as an on-screen character puts it, “white discomfort” is the “bane” of black people.
If this all sounds like a plot of a Key & Peele sketch, you won’t be too far off. The problem is that, as far as I can recall, no writer on Key & Peele appears to have contributed to the Society of Magical Negroes.
Like several such cinematic projects, this film seems to have at least two important factors working against it. For one, the Magical Negro trope is not anywhere near as structural within Hollywood as it was over two decades ago when Spike Lee first mentioned the term. What is interesting is that even though the movie is located at the present, Libii’s social critique does bring to the table any fresh insights about the prevailing dominant stereotypes that the Black people have to contend with even though the movie is nearly two hours long.
Thirdly, it has none of the Black characters. To be clear, there are actual Black actors embodying these characters in the movie. Maybe it is a reasonable expectation that fully human, well-rounded characters should be presented in a film that seeks to address the issues of having been depicted in a superficial manner for the last hundreds of years. Here, they most definitely do not.
The Illuminati, but let’s add some respect to their name.
In Society of Magical Negroes, Justice Smith takes on the role of Aren, an uninspired, lifeless L.A. artist whose works include the equally uninspired artwork of the abstract yarn installary. Exhibition held earlier, Aren is present there, but nobody “understands” his work. When a white collector takes him to be one of the waiters, Aren takes the opportunity and serves the man instead of advising him to purchase his art.
A man from the actual waiters has been watching this activity for the entire night and now he decides to make himself known. It turns out he is Roger (David Alan Grier), a rather pleasant old man who came to get Aren for the American Society of Magical Negroes, ‘a firm that sees itself as a cadre of supermen’. He takes him to their base – behind a black barber shop – all its splendid rooms and corridors like Hogwarts or a Clue mansion. The visual world-building in this regard is the one and only the film’s inspired choice.
Every member of Society gets assigned a white “client” who is in distress and appears to be on the verge of venting his rage on the innocent Black people. (Along with the presence of a ‘white tears’ meter which can predict the possible level of threat at any given time). The Magical Negro is there to help and persuade his or her client into overcoming a few of their issues until he or she gets what they’re after. Such is the case with Jason (Drew Tarver), a bitter and arrogant tech bro working for some software company named MeetBox, desperately trying to secure a promotion for himself which he will not get, and trying to woo Aren. Aren is also employed in the same company, so he goes through with allowing himself to be a personality-less door mat, even though it works effectively on clueless Jason.
Let me remind you that it’s also a romantic comedy. Why not? A few scenes later, Aren finds one of his other new co-workers to be Lizzie (An-Li Bogan) and the last time they met it was probably in the most awkward of all meet-cutes in the history of coffee shops earlier that same day. Lizzie is actually Jason’s ‘work-equivalent’, so she does a fair amount of confusion with Aren’s application of the role of Magical Negro and his loyalty to The Cause.
Or maybe we are all just Magical Negroes
Here so many fragmented concepts and tones are attempted to be synthesized and none of them work. Libii spends a lot of his time losing sleep over the minutiae of these self-appointed respectable political figures. He however also seems to have a very loose understanding of the figurative language he seeks to critique. In this context, the idea of the Magical Negro is grossly expanded out from its narrowly employed, real life context — as Spike Lee described, a film with “mystical black characters such as Baggar Vance or The Green Mile’s Georgia and Chestnutt.” Rather, it is a blanket term that includes any black person who for whatever reasons are faced with racial micro aggression at a place of work and decides ‘not today’ to the taunts — such as Crispus Attuck.
These tangled and confused mechanics would be more tolerable, were Aren presented with any characterization other than being a cardboard cutout of a character used to portray a very heavy handed idea. We don’t learn anything about him other than the fact that he’s a bitter drop out of the Rhode Island School of Design and is so pathetic that he will simply hold a door open for many people walking out of a cafe, so that he can walk in afterwards. Before being a Magical Negro (yes, I know this is a ridiculous sentence to be writing), he has no community – no mates, no proper work, and no family apart from a white mother he casually mentions. (This is both very helpful and not helpful at all somehow.) But where was his childhood days spent? How is it that Aren can be a poor artist yet afford a reasonable home in Los Angeles in these hard times? Has Aren ever come into contact with Black people? (Magical Negroes do not constitute this term.)
If we may put it this way, his character development reaches its resolution when he is pretentiously free. “What It’s like to be Black 101,” this is what he says in the climax of the movie in a self pompous speech, which was more excruciating than the proverbial Barbie feminism rant at the climax of that film.
Aren does not earn the epiphany since he did not start from anywhere realistic. While the protagonist does take some daring steps on his journey to self-discovery, his author’s block almost serves his purpose as he is majorly focused on pining for Lizzie. In fact, there is even no attempt by Libii’s script to address Black radicalism, for if it did, The Society would not only have deep layers but would also be gruesomely critiqued; something the film isn’t out to do. The Magical Negroes, who are so proud of the fact that “the Black life expectancy has been raised,” or so claims society leader Dede (Nicole Byer), happen to live in a society where Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers, or Bree Newsome never existed. The last scene of the film is happy with that exclusion.
What does the Society of Magical Negroes think the current time is?
So what time are we living in now? This, like many other questions, depends on who one asks and where one looks. Makes one sad to think, not unlike American Fiction, Society of Magical Negroes believes black people on screen and off the screen are still fighting the same battles and grappling with the same stereotypes that we had 20 years back. But such ploys are doomed to backfire, in as much as they ignore the essential building blocks of history in relation to contemporary society.
The sadistic factors are too many like the pay gaps and Black made television shows being pulled off air after a season. But there’s also been so much exciting work being made by filmmakers on every level over the last decade – new comers like Nikyatu Jusu, Raven Jackson and Juel Taylor; new power players like Issa Rae and Jordan Peele; and old stories like Gina Prince-Bythewood. Such artists have developed narratives that span across various genres and character studies that their predecessors only wished for. Considering this context, one can only view the Magical Negro as a thing of the past.
More A quarter of a century ago bell hooks pointed out the nefarious structures of white supremacy that obliged too many black artists to become too fixated on generating “resistant images” as to neglect their artistic in a perverse way. Deborah was comfortable describing a Black struggle with images because even back in the late 80s, ‘the cinematic image has not yet been created’ — it was the ‘Jackson frontier’ of struggle. However, she predicted a ‘very far away future,’ in which blackness will be ‘worked to death,’ in the same way whiteness has been. And today, we are a little more close to that future than we have ever been. Howbeit, we still have some way to go.
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