Pariah: Song of the Self

Rees had long planned Pariah as a feature, but she shot part of it as a short film—her second one—for her NYU graduate thesis project, with the same title and also starring Oduye. It follows, then, that the feature spends no time on throat-clearing. Here is a chance to speak, at length. As a filmmaker, Rees has made speech the very ground on which her characters’ identities are shaped, in circumstances largely beyond their control. The TV movie Bessie (2015), starring Queen Latifah as Bessie Smith and Mo’Nique as Ma Rainey, brims with the urgency of expression. To constitute a self is to assert a voice. Rees—working with cinematographers Bradford Young (Pariah), Jeffrey Jur (Bessie), Rachel Morrison (Mudbound, 2017), and Bobby Bukowski (The Last Thing He Wanted, 2020)—builds imagery as if it’s coming from within the characters’ internal monologues. The scene is not merely a setting, a space where the action unfolds, but a force propelled by spirits. Bessie and Lee seem dissimilar beyond the fact of identity. Okay, queer Black women. But, with her voice, Bessie goes there before you can even buckle in. In her attempt at self-expression, Lee sputters in a series of effortful false starts. Bessie is performing, while Lee is writing. One sings, the other doesn’t.

Whenever Lee identifies a crush, the goodness of it is caught up in the bad. Why does this girl, Mika (Afton Williamson), talk about her within earshot, saying she herself isn’t gay but likes girls, while stealing glances? Doesn’t even know her name before an indifferent friend offers it? Why is the dubiousness of it all so irresistible to someone as shy as Lee? She ushers in the glimmer of recognition, begs Laura to try to hook her up with Mika through mutual friends. Asks Laura to buy her a strap-on, which she’ll sport beneath the school clothes her mother doesn’t see.

The strap-on sequence is broken open by the mix of excitement and trepidation contained in its promise. It’s a beige dildo—a white dick. Lee can’t believe it; Laura half jokes that the Black one would’ve been too big for her. Here a previous implication suddenly finds its full light. Rees seems to ask, Is Lee tasked with hiding not only her masculine impulses but also certain “Black” ones? Is Laura a bad influence not merely because she’s clearly a stud but also because she’s a little hood? Here, lesbianism becomes associated with economic precarity, dashed hopes and ambitions, lack of respectability. For Audrey, Laura’s class position is the reddest of flags, her lesbianism an irredeemable stamp. For Lee, Laura offers a bridge into a world that exists beyond the influence of her family—a take on the coming-of-age film’s rebellious-friend trope, the one who lives and teaches you how to do the same. In this moment, Pariah tears itself away from a lingering assumption that’s it’s a Black girl’s version of the coming-out story and instead infuses itself with the complications embedded within Blackness as a proposition, as various states of being. Where, in this vastness, is queerness? Where is stud life? Where is Fort Greene, the gentrifying yet still mostly Black (at this point) Brooklyn neighborhood where Lee’s family strives to embody respectability? Will the space she’s in still exist when she lets people know who she is?

Rees and Young tuck Lee into purples, blues, and warm yellows. The colors merge into a kind of bluesy sunset, which offers Lee an unshakable aura, a lingering cloud. When Lee is on, the camera stays close to her; when she shuts down, it retreats to a medium shot. Thus, Lee finds ways to disappear throughout the film’s first act, before emerging in its final movements. The effect is enlivened by Oduye’s sensitivity and timing. The actor and the camera engage in a tentative waltz. Editor Mako Kamitsuna, who has worked on each of Rees’s feature films, allows the story to move as a series of encounters. Lee plays basketball with her dad, Arthur (Charles Parnell), a character who is as significant for his absence as his presence. The camera clings to them as they goof around on the court, the bond between them wordlessly breaking through the block established at home. This relationship doesn’t offer so much a psychological portrait as a tactile one. It’s a welcome diversion from the torment of Lee’s teenage romantic life. Lee longs to touch and be touched, yet, the way she sees it, reaching out poses great personal risk. Nearly every encounter in the film is ruled by precariousness; the camera tells us this. But Lee can’t bear to keep a distance. She tentatively strikes up a friendship with the daughter of a colleague of her mom’s.

Bina (Aasha Davis) is freer, more reckless, less ashamed. She’s sweet yet privately seductive. Her attention is a surprise, suspicious. Lee is shy at first yet gradually open, ready. Once in, she doesn’t imagine anything but a continuation of what has so far come. Her quick vulnerability almost hurts, because we all know it, whether in romantic or familial love, friendship, ideology, or ambition. Bina is light-skinned, thin, pretty, vague; Lee goes ahead. There’s nothing that can or should be done to stop her. It’s at this moment that the film alights on its own welcome contradictions, culled from its literary references. It’s not that Lee’s vulnerability is her strength but that it is her. Usually, by the time coming-of-age protagonists become more aware of their surroundings and more certain of what they need to do, they seem to climb upward, barreling through obstacles, relying on reserves of previously underutilized strength. Pariah, unlike many contemporaneous films focused on women’s empowerment, refuses this metaphor. For Lee, everything about herself that she keeps from her mother, that has her quiet and writing poems, that is inconvenient or awkward, need not be overcome.

Lee’s final poem, the one that “goes deeper,” is resolute in the idea that becoming is not a radical transition but a version of being. You may or may not have been “born this way,” but you always already are yourself. By the film’s conclusion, there is no extraordinary shift in personality, affect, or even courage on Lee’s part, but a new chosen outlet for them. Lee wants to be who she is in an environment that will reward her disposition. She says, “See the light shine out through me? / I am broken, I am open, I am broken open.” It’s a claim that is born from the many literatures of Black women poets, poets who have had to insist “I am” and not “I will be.”