It is a film about the prejudices and stereotypes that American society suffers from, reflected in its literary and cinematographic production.

The story is about a brilliant black writer, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), who maintains exceptional literary quality throughout his career but fails to sell his books massively, until he discovers that a writer of the same level, Sintara Golden, He gets great success selling junk literature. Sintara's books sell like hotcakes, thanks to completely stereotyped African-American characters, to the taste of the WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant) population.

Monk decides to experiment with that same literary genre and gives his editor, as a joke, the original of his latest production. To his surprise, the publishers fight to publish the book and even offer to turn it into a film script.

«American Fiction» is a dramatic comedy that plays with irony and double meaning all the time, a bit in the Woody Allen style. Parody, even of himself, is the order of the day.

Even the title has a double meaning: it refers to the fictional literary genre written by American authors, but it also refers to the American dream as something fictional.

If not, how do you explain that throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, so many black artists have been awarded the Oscar for best actor and best actress, but none for best director.

Spike Lee won an honorary Oscar and another for best screenwriter in 2018 and Denzel Washington, two Oscars for best actor.

The North American population wants to consume stories about black people with a lot of "gutter language" as one of the characters says. But she doesn't want to see herself reflected in those characters and their life stories. Because then I would have to admit that we are all very similar with similar conflicts. 

Reality refutes the hypothetical difference in nature between people of different ethnicities. Monk's family and emotional environment, full of love but also of arguments, betrayals, jealousy and envy, where, for example, Agnes does not want to assume that her son Clifford is homosexual while she consents to continue being married to a man who leads a double life. , or Monk's girlfriend, Coraline, who openly expresses her joy at not being white and consumes any book she finds on the shelves of bookstores, whether quality or not, just for the fact that it was written by a black author and with characters of the same ethnic group, demonstrates that prejudices and the inclination to stereotype and discriminate those who are different and sometimes even oneself, is an intrinsically human conflict, which can be observed anywhere and in any society, regardless of gender, race or religion.

There are two scenes in particular that explain very well how power is structured in the current American political and social system. The most obvious consists of a general shot of the meeting room of a literary jury, where the group of five judges can be seen debating which book to award a prize to.

Being part of the jury, we can count three men and two women (first problem: women are a minority in high positions where decisions are made).

The three Caucasian jurors are seated on one side of the table while, in opposition, are the two black jurors: second problem: African-Americans are a minority in American society as a whole and in positions of power and, furthermore, opposite to whites.

Among men there is only one homosexual (third problem: non-binary genders are practically alone when it comes to making important decisions).

But there is another additional problem: when making the final decision, the one who stands up and writes on the blackboard (white earthenware, by the way) the title of the winning work, that is, the one who takes the The initiative to stand on her feet and say the last word is the Caucasian woman (as if she were not obvious enough, tall and blonde, too) while Sintara, although she has abilities similar to those of Monk, ends up submitting to the opinion of her colleague. man without being, herself, completely convinced of her own decision.

Here the director spins a little more finely and tells us that American society allowed its white women to emancipate themselves, but did not do the same with its African-American women.

How different everything would be if they could work as a team, valuing the capabilities and potential (which reveals so much to Monk) of their own and others, for the sake of a common goal.

The ending of Thelonious's script is open because no one knows the future. Not the same one who writes it. It is the “uncertainty principle” that we all have to endure in our daily lives. Do we want to have to endure it in the cinema too? the film seems to ask us. How many times have we heard someone say: “If it's something to think about, I'd rather not go, I'm just going to have fun at the movies.”

Wiley (Adam Brody) does not like a happy ending where the main couple reunites to settle their differences, something that would be extremely necessary in a violent world like the one we live in. Wiley finds it corny, too “romantic” more typical of a comedy.

But a spectacular ending with a lot of explicit violence on the part of FBI men murdering a black citizen without even a second of time to defend himself, that is the ending that Wiley wants for his film, an ending that will give him millions. , because that is the ending that the American public wants and that they receive every day, like a drug in their veins, when they watch the news on television. 

But since this is a framed story: the book within the book, the film within the film, we are missing the ending of Cord Jefferson's American Fiction. Monk leaves the set where his brother Cliff is waiting for him, with whom he finally seems to understand better. The latest model car, convertible and red, stops for a few seconds and we see a shot/reverse shot of Monk and a black actor dressed in simple clothes and a straw hat.

They look at each other. The actor is probably there resting from a long day of work, in which he plays a 19th century slave for one of the many Hollywood productions.

The camera leaves us suspended in the air, in a large general shot of the car moving away towards the horizon while the actor continues in the same place, with the same poor slave's clothes from bygone eras.

Maybe that is the future that awaits us. Not only a future in which the differences between the poor and the rich become more acute, but even worse, a future in which we all return to the ultra-past slavery of the 19th century, but this time in modern clothes, like Cliff's red convertible car. .

A different, although more terrible and perverse, slavery, which will make us believe that we are free because we have shiny and modern goods, but living in a world where we will not be able to express what we think and feel.

Where our books will not be read, unless they contain endless prejudices and stereotypes rooted and branded in the minds of consumers of “junk” literature and cinema.

Without culture and art we are condemned to the worst of slavery, one of the best films of 2023 seems to tell us, although it only won the 2024 Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

“American Fiction” is available on the Amazon Prime Video platform

Trailer