Contemporary American Myth: Queen and Slim

Spoilers for Queen and Slim follow. 

For the majority of the film, their names are left unspoken. When we hear them at the end, it feels like an afterthought, the curtain pulled back on a fairytale, feeling like Hans Christian Anderson’s moralism coming to the fore over the slick, Disneyfied version of the story. The Disney version of the story is always obfuscated, its morals platitudinal, its lessons spelled clearly. The bad guy loses. The good guys win. The Hans Christian Anderson versions are more and less complex, their macabre cruelty taking root in your brain differently, a literary trauma, I don’t want to do whatever these characters did to end up this way.

Melina Matsoukas’ Queen and Slim is a fairytale, and despite the gruesome outcome of its titular characters, it’s not a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale. It’s a testament to the power of mythmaking, an exploration of conditions that create the refrains that keep us moving, that become the outlets that channel our anger. The outcome of Queen and Slim is semiotic. Even though the characters don’t make it, their image does, printed on t-shirts and posters and pasted on walls as murals. It’s the visual encapsulation of something like Eric Garner’s final words, I can’t breathe, which became emblematic not just of the cruelty of policing, but a metaphor for the feelings of black and other racialized voices in America.

In a way, Eric Garner’s story, or Oscar Grant’s (Immortalized in Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station), or Trayvon Martin’s, or Srinivas Kuchibhotla’s have become fairy tales. Not Disney ones, sanitized and whitewashed. Not Hans Christian Anderson ones either, where the violent outcome is a cautionary tale for the non-conforming or the disobedient. No, they’re American fairy tales, ones that examine a complex life lived simply, and interrogate the nature of the violence that deemed it moral to cut those lives short. The American fairy tale made cinema in Queen and Slim isn’t content to say I told you so and instead asks who has the right to the final outcome of the American fable, and also, more importantly, why. 

There’s moments of near magical realism. There’s questions of poverty, of wealth, of class, of power, and an examination of the way racial bonds supersede those things and is superseded by them. It’s a series of interruptions, of what approximations of normal lives racialized people can live while under white supremacy are intruded upon by a duo emblematic of the anxiety inherent within every racialized experience. This anxiety starts from the opening moments, where a black man is pulled over by a white cop for not signaling and shoots him in self defense. We never know what Slim’s job is, but he has a lot of shoes in his trunk. His car is perfectly mediocre. His favorite diner is a black owned business. Queen’s an attorney aspiring to excellence. Slim asks, why do we always gotta be excellent?

Queen and Slim’s mise-en-scene is an examination of cultural difference, of what wealth in poverty looks like. A rich man in the Treme is a poor man anywhere else, but he makes it work for him, a king in a black mold castle. An injured man is driven urgently to the nearest hospital, and it’s hard not to think what will this cost him? Prisoners in some southern state till fields at the behest of a white master. A mechanic takes all of the money in exchange for fixing their car, sure, I’ll help you, but I’m not giving you a discount, I don’t agree for a second with what you did.

It’s an element of the American landscape hollowed out by capitalism and white supremacy, of the diversity of racialized experience pushed into parallel societies and bound by the fact that the plurality wants nothing but their labour, the affect of their culture and the wealth it produces. The only time someone snitches is when they’re forced to take shelter in a white neighborhood. There’s cops white and black, who know how the game is played but whose faces are riddled with the question of whether or not they’re actually making the game more fair (They’re not. ACAB). There are other cops who don’t give a shit. 

There’s two scenes near the end of the film worth examining: One, where a young boy who crosses paths with the main characters goes onto shoot a black cop at a Black Lives Matter protest, and another where the main characters are found by a black cop, who beckons them to go, and says nothing to his colleagues. I mentioned I didn’t like these scenes, that they felt like they broke the myth, to stop and teach us a lesson on the fluidity of violence, on the nature of “good” cops. The friend I saw it with said no, it’s about the ambiguity and complexity of race. 

And that’s given me a lot to think about. It’s what inspired me to write this. To exist on the margins of a society is to exist liminally. It’s to find joy in moments of solidarity, it’s the minority head nod to the other brown guy in grocery store, it’s an assessment of your aspirations, of your sexual desires, it’s to exist tenuously, and to know that whatever you do in this world, there’s an element of risk that you have to factor in that the majority does not. It’s to always be at odds with the question of who you are, how much you’re giving to the superstructure, and to be unsure, perpetually, of what your liberation is. 

A few years ago, I was at a party having a heated discussion with a wealthy white lawyer who happened to be in town, and she was telling me that she was more oppressed than I was, because as a man of colour, I still, on paper, made more money than a white woman. When I was driving home, I realized, in retrospect, I should have asked her where my being 10 times more likely to be killed by a police officer factored into her equation. Upon further retrospection, I realized that to even engage with her on that level would have been justifying a bankrupt frame. Marginalization, period, is anathema to the majority. It stretches and tears at people differently. It pushes some people to limits others cannot comprehend. It pyrrhically rewards other sthrough fetishization, and coddling. There’s cruelty many experience that I will never truly know. But I do know that liberation, in the purest sense of the word, is sensitive to those people, to their trauma, their poverty, and their need. It’s also sensitive to mine. 

And what Queen and Slim understands is the assumptive cruelty implicit when you ask the question of who has it worse? It understands that the moments on the journey, the shared cigarette on a street corner, a fleeting moment of shelter, a conversation with someone you will never meet again, are simply a better way of seeking freedom.

The simple nature of recognition, of glancing at someone and seeing an element of your pain in them, is what propels us to move forward, to liberate each other, to hold each other up in a struggle against the forces that would crush heterodoxy. Ranking the position of our suffering à la a buzzfeed list is meaningless in the face of shared experience, of empathetic touchpoints from which we ascend, together.

The creation of our modern human myth, the postmortem figureheads of our movements becoming olympian in meaning, the stories we tell, of our friends and colleagues and families that did not make it through the struggle, but became the struggle, only exist because of a shared experience. Of empathy and an understanding that all of us who fight to live, and live better, and live liberated are all in the shit, together, and we can only pull ourselves out, together. Even if we hate each other’s guts. Even if we don’t like the method. 

In Queen and Slim, the expression of American myth is the manifest expression of solidarity, and there’s a lot to take away from that.

Not all of us make it to the end of the journey.

That doesn’t make the journey futile.