The Gratuitous Surrender of Black Bodies - On 'Queen & Slim'

(SPOILERS!! BEWARE!!)

Those who know me well know that I’m a huge movie buff. I used to write movie reviews for a nationwide local youth magazine at just 15 years old, and it’s still something that excites me today. If someone told me I would have to choose between my life’s work and being able to watch a single movie ever again, I’d genuinely be torn. After all, movies have so much power to convey depth through image, sound, character…in ways that are subtle but immutable. It’s just as commanding an artform as stage theatre, and I’m always in awe of it. So, in my last week in Washington, DC, I made a mad dash to see every movie I possibly could.

One of those movies was ‘Queen & Slim’.

Daniel Kaluuya as Slim, left, and Jodie Turner-Smith as Queen from the film “Queen & Slim,” directed by Melina Matsoukas. (photo: Universal Pictures via Associated Press)

I can’t say what I was expecting from the movie. I mean, I’ve loved Daniel Kaluuya in every thing I’ve seen him in since ‘Black Mirror’, but that was the only real draw I had. I only knew Lena Waithe from ‘Ready Player One’ (where I thought she was great), and the snippets of Netflix’s ‘Dear White People’ (I only now know she produced the movie). Other than that, I knew that it was about two black people on the run. And, honestly, with the exception of the passable Tyler Perry movie, which Black Bodies Movie™ isn’t? I can’t say that those movies are for me. I still watch them when I can, to learn something about purpose and dramatic payoff from them, but very few of them have me coming out of the theatre moved and hopeful…with the exception of Jordan Peele’s horror movies, and that’s kind of apples to oranges.

Still, I was intrigued here. Two women of color, one of them queer, team up to tell a what’s marketed as a daring black story. Waithe, who wrote the script, made a note in some interviews that not a single note from a white person was taken in the making of the film. And, I’ll be honest, I think that’s dope as hell. But, after watching the film, I wonder now what those notes might’ve been. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a strong film. It’s just that it sends…a very mixed message about black bodies, or at the very least a message that leave me unsettled.

The film’s first half actually goes incredibly well - a deliberately antagonistic inciting action forces our leads to go on the run, and frogleaps from minor setback to minor setback on their only mildly anxious journey. But then, they meet a young man who’s excited to lay eyes on the two people who killed a cop and lived to tell the tale. He seems inspired by them. We find out just a couple scenes later that he’s so inspired that he goes to the film’s parallel to a Black Lives Matter protest, specifically to antagonize a police officer, and eventually kill one, himself. He’s got a brand new gun and everything. To be clear, a young black man goes to a protest against police brutality to kill someone.

The matter’s made worse by the fact that the police officer that he does encounter is a black man, who goes out of his way to ask this young man to leave for his safety. He’s polite, deliberate, and doesn’t want this boy to go to jail. When the boy pulls his gun on him, instead of retaliate, he just stands there like a deer in headlights. The boy shoots him dead. In the middle of a peaceful protest. Then the film kills the boy offscreen.

The best part? This scene is intercut with our leads, ‘Queen’ and ‘Slim’, having sex.

I’m still not sure what this scene was supposed to mean. Does it advocate for black people to attack the police? Is it saying that some police officers are the ‘good kind’ (especially the black ones)? Does it think that Black Lives Matter protests are violent and harmful? Does the movie think it should be violent? Or that people are inspired to protest by the wrong things? I still have a headache from all the questions. Not that the film is particularly interested in the answer - the boy’s off-screen death is handled in a thrown-away line to our protagonists before focusing on the central conflict to the story; their escape. In a way, the boy doesn’t even die. He just disappears.

When we’ve fully forgotten about the boy who senselessly lost his life to prove perhaps no point at all, we are met with a most problematic ending. Queen and Slim are almost at the finish line, but the person who needs to get them there is some random black man (that’s what his character is named on IMDb. No joke.). Some might say he was more caricature than character, but that’s not truly my concern. What irks me about his character is that it’s made clear at the end that he sells them out to the police, after making it clear to them that he thinks that they gave black people ‘something to believe in’ (it be your own people, I guess?).

And this is where things get really messy. Queen and Slim, who have developed a loving relationship over the last six days of fearful road-tripping, are smack in the middle of their getaway plane and a sea of cops. They try to have a tender moment, attempting to confess their love for each other. But a policewoman interrupts their conversation with a gunshot. Queen is down. No death saves. No last words. Just. Gone. Slim, distraught, decides to pick up her body and mournfully walks toward the police. These officers, now fully aware that his hands are full of dead body, instead of subduing him any other way, riddle him with bullets as he walks closer. Aaaaand that’s all, folks. Glad you came to the movie. Reach home safe. (Okay, that’s not entirely fair - there’s a funeral scene, then a scene with the man who sold them out counting his reward money, then a scene of our two leads on autopsy tables, then a scene of the two leads immortalized as graffiti art. Cool. Coolcoolcool.)

Here’s my question, though - is there any other way that a screenwriter of color and a director of color could’ve thought of ending a love story about two people of color? Even Stony made it out of ‘Set It Off’ alive, and she was an actual criminal. These two, victims of racial profiling turned violent, got everything except what they deserved, after six days of struggling to find hope on the run. Just when these two mostly unlovable characters find joy in each other, they…just die. And not even with a last fighting breath or a sorrowful final kiss.

Again, this is a good movie. If you’re not black, and/or not traumatized by bodies of color under autopsy sheets, you should certainly see it. But as a black person (albeit one who’s only lived 4 months of anxiety around what US police officers see when they look at him), I was just left wondering what it all meant. These deaths meant something, because they occurred in a deliberately crafted collection of scenes that we call a film. And, in this film, three black bodies (two of whom we spend the entire on-screen week with), are gratuitously surrendered before us. Our two leads don’t even get a chance to plead their case. The third and youngest of the fatalities basically throws his life away in the midst of other black people fighting against injustice - and it’s juxtaposed to Daniel Kaluuya’s naked ass. As I type this, I’m literally making the Jackie Chan meme face.

This might be a harsh thing to say, but perhaps black folks making black films isn’t enough? The black stories that we deserve are thoughtful, deliberate (and maybe, perhaps, hopeful) ones that call us to action, bring our gaze to injustice, and carve a path out of it for us. If Jordan Peele can let Daniel Kaluuya fight his way out of the Sunken Place, the least we could’ve done here is let him bleed out on a getaway plane with his new girlfriend. If we can’t give ourselves justice in our own fiction, then where will we find it?