Seeing Yourself Onscreen Is Good, however Not Good Enough
WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me, by Aisha Harris
Being a Black critic in a time of remarkable artwork made by Black individuals has immense rewards and myriad dangers. “Wannabe,” the debut essay assortment from Aisha Harris, a co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” is at its finest when partaking with these dangers and the thorny questions of her occupation. In what methods does identification inform a critic’s work? And ought to it?
Harris can chuckle in regards to the calls for of endorsing constructive representations of Blackness, irrespective of how trite (“When encountering Black art out in the wild, be on the lookout for Black Girl Magic, Black Love, Black Excellence and the direct involvement of Common and/or John Legend”). She cheekily pushes Issa Rae’s now-famous awards present proclamation — “I’m rooting for everybody Black” — to its most absurd extent: “It’s only right we take her at her literal word and support all Black artists and art, no matter how questionable, incompetent or just plain offensive they might be.”
But when a podcast listener chastises Harris for locating the Will Smith film “King Richard” middling, she roars again. “I don’t want to ‘just be happy’ about ‘King Richard,’” she insists. “I want interiority and surprise and characters who feel as though they have a reason to exist beyond retelling history.”
It’s sophisticated, although. Harris recounts conflictedness about being dissatisfied by “A Wrinkle in Time,” which was directed by Ava DuVernay, whose movie profession was firmly on the rise. Harris, who wrote film critiques for Slate and is a former editor at The New York Times, anxious {that a} lukewarm piece may imply it will “be decades before another studio handed a movie of this stature to a woman of color.” Looking again, she arrived at a spot that was “true to my own reactions to the movie without being scathing.”
“Wannabe” is a mix of memoir and cultural evaluation, framed as “reckonings with the pop culture that shapes me.” Harris flaunts a variety of references, shifting simply between many years and arenas. She makes good use of Roger Ebert on Fellini, revisits “Key & Peele” sketches and dissects bell hooks’s evaluation of the experimental movie hero Stan Brakhage.
The guide is very efficient when its writer leans on her private expertise. Harris grew up in Connecticut, in “predominantly white and suburban circles,” and he or she tenderly illustrates the trials of rising up “The Black Friend” in white environments.
“These Black Friends,” Harris presents, “were a reminder of my isolation and the fact that I often felt as if I was a blip on the radar of the many white peers I attempted to befriend.”
Harris braids her private ache with incisive critiques of the trope and its limitations, setting up inner monologues for well-known popular culture examples, like Gabrielle Union’s Katie in “She’s All That” and Lamorne Morris’s Winston in “New Girl.”
She deftly connects the rise of the personal brand and the toxic cultures of online fandom (“The overpersonalization of pop culture begets acrimony and pathological obsession”); confronts her determination to not have youngsters by means of the prism of “The Brady Bunch” and Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up”; and quotes from her own LiveJournal about a hurtful memory involving an oft-forgotten scene in Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls.”
Still, for all its range, “Wannabe” contains occasions that demand more rigorous engagement. Contending with Dave Chappelle’s thorny legacy is limited to an aside: “While I recognize that present-day Dave Chappelle suffers from transphobic diarrhea of the mouth,” Harris writes, “I cannot pretend as though some of his old jokes no longer slap.” (She goes on to quote several of them.)
And the recency of the pop references in “Wannabe” is both a strength and a weakness, and risks dating the book.
The groundbreaking success of Disney’s “Encanto” and the multiple Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is likely to matter for a long time; Warner Bros. Discovery’s cancellation of the “Batgirl” film or the Harper’s letter on “Justice and Open Debate” might lose potency for the reader not engaged with the mostly-online #discourse.
But enlisting movies and TV to explain the world is Harris’s expertise, arriving at “inadvertent self-formation by way of popular culture.” For readers already inclined to read culture to understand themselves, “Wannabe” is a compelling affirmation that they’re looking in the right place.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a podcaster and the author of “Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces,” a New York Times Notable Book in 2022.
Source web site: www.nytimes.com
