You’d be forgiven if, judging solely by the film’s marketing materials, you thought American Fiction was all biting satire, a full-throated indictment of the publishing industry and the well-meaning but coddled white liberals who populate it. But American Fiction — based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, and the newly crowned winner of the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay — is secretly a dual narrative: There’s the story of the perpetually misunderstood writer who doesn’t want to be boxed in by his identity, but there’s also the domestic drama, the one involving that same man learning to open up to the people who love him. It’s this second element that lends the film its emotional heft, and in the same way the movie’s trailer elides some crucial story beats, American Fiction gradually unfurls itself as a narrative of both external — as in societal, institutional — and internal struggle. The effect is something akin to a cinematic Trojan horse. We’re lured by the promise of a treatise on big-picture issues (Racism! Identity politics!), but the film also has much humbler ambitions, and is at its most affecting in scenes that read as simple character study. It’s about the ways people can be kind or terrible to each other on a one-on-one basis, and how the existence of systemic problems doesn’t absolve a person of individual responsibility. Another recent film that relies on this sleight of hand is Shortcomings, adapted by cartoonist Adrian Tomine from his graphic novel of the same name. It’s a relationship drama disguised as fodder for the discourse — it has a lot to say about the way racism is internalized by Asian-Americans, even those who’ve bypassed the typical constraints of immigration and xenophobia. But like American Fiction, the smaller in scale it gets, the more effectively it plays, and at its core, it’s the story of one deeply flawed man resisting connection at every turn.
American Fiction follows Monk (Jeffrey Wright), a Black professor and novelist with middling success who’s frustrated by the state of modern literary fiction. He watches, with both contempt and exasperation, as other Black authors are showered with accolades for books that, in his mind, amount to little more than trauma porn, filled with gang violence and absent fathers and dripping with exaggerated vernacular. Monk fancies himself a contrarian, telling his agent in an early scene, “Do you know that I don’t even really believe in race?” That’s not entirely true, of course; he doesn’t so much not believe in race as he wishes it weren’t a factor in his career. In a fit of drunken desperation, Monk hammers out a book like the ones he detests, cashing in on stereotypes about Black men trying to evade the police and claw themselves out of the cycle of poverty — a kind of life that is frankly alien to him but that he knows is catnip to the self-flagellating white reader. Much to Monk’s chagrin (but not to his surprise), the book, which is published under a pseudonym, is an immediate success, overtaking all of his past work and confirming his worst suspicions about the industry he’s toiled in for years.
As his social experiment of a book is taking off, Monk returns home to care for his mother (Leslie Uggams), who has Alzheimer’s. At the same time, Monk is processing the unexpected death of his sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and reconnecting with his brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), who’s recently come out and has an uneasy relationship with their mother. At his family’s beach house in Massachusetts, Monk meets and strikes up a romance with neighbor Coraline (Erika Alexander), who confesses to being a fan of Monk’s earlier work. Coraline becomes the skeleton key to unlocking both Monk’s personality and the closest thing American Fiction has to a thesis. When they first meet, conversation turns to Coraline’s job as a public defender and whether the prospect of defending criminals ever fazes her. “People are more than their worst deed,” Coraline posits. When Monk agrees, Coraline isn’t surprised. “You’re a writer,” she says. “Writers have to be nonjudgmental. You can’t write interesting characters if you’re critical of every bad decision they make, right?” She’s flattering him, to be sure, but she’s also gotten at something crucial about why writing appeals to Monk, and why it offends him so much to see other writers puppeting characters who possess a kind of predetermined morality.
Things go great with Coraline, who remains a support system for Monk as he deals with his family drama, until they don’t. In a later scene, when Monk sees Coraline with a copy of Fuck (originally titled My Pafology), the book he’s penned under his pseudonym, he unleashes on her. “Books like this reduce us, and they do it over and over again,” he says, despite the fact that he, well, wrote it and is actively profiting from it, “because too many white people — and people, apparently, like you — devour this slop like pigs at a dumpster to stay current at fucking cocktail parties.” He’s being cruel and unfair, and he knows it, but it’s like the full force of his frustration can’t be contained, and he’s punishing Coraline for the big, structural problems he can’t change.
By this point, it’s clear the film is less concerned with capital-R race as it is with Monk as a person, a prickly, sometimes confrontational, intellectual renegade (or so he thinks) who would rather win an argument than have a measured conversation with someone who actually cares about him. It’s a subtle thematic heel-turn, but one that the film pulls off because it’s already established Monk as a righteous figure battling obstacles outside of his control. We know Monk is a respectable person, but is he a nice one to be around? Even amongst all of American Fiction’s real-world preoccupations, this one might be its most compelling.
In Shortcomings, we meet Ben (Justin H. Min), a film school dropout and the manager of a local arthouse theater who might as well be sleepwalking through his life and his relationship with his girlfriend, Miko (Ally Maki). For Ben, movies are a solitary activity — most nights, he lies on the couch after his Miko has gone to bed, taking in a black-and-white foreign film with the sound turned down low. He struggles to connect with his younger coworkers, a bunch of superhero-obsessed teenagers who’d sooner pick Feige over Fellini (the most memorable of whom is played by Jacob Batalon, a.k.a. the best friend from the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies). Ben is Japanese-American, but he’d rather not talk about it — he’s the type of person you could easily see agreeing with Monk’s assessment that he “doesn’t believe in race.” When Ben’s best friend, Alice (Sherry Cola) asks him about growing up in predominantly white schools, he responds that he did feel like an outcast, but not because he was Asian. Alice finishes the sentence: “…because of your inherent bad personality.”
It’s a lighthearted moment that’s played for laughs, but Ben’s denial doesn’t mean race isn’t a constant factor in his life. When Miko accepts an internship across the country and puts their relationship on pause, Ben takes the opportunity to date around, zeroing on two white women, Sasha (Debby Ryan) and Autumn (Tavi Gevinson), who aren’t so much love interests as they are fulfillments of long-dormant fantasies. (A point of contention in Ben and Miko’s relationship is that he only watches porn with white women in it.) Ben has little in common with either of his romantic pursuits, and Autumn happens to be his direct report at work, but none of that matters — he takes their very existence as a kind of provocation, a bucket-list item he’s been dying to check off. As he and Sasha are about to get into bed, Ben takes a beat to say, “This is the first time I’ve ever been with…” He trails off, but the combination of sheepishness and pride tells us everything we need to know.
When both flings fizzle out, Ben ventures to New York to surprise Miko, where he learns she’s been lying about her internship and secretly dating a fashion designer named Leon Alexander (Timothy Simons), who is white, fluent in Japanese, and obsessed with martial arts. It’s not hard to put two and two together, and Ben is obviously incensed, not just because his girlfriend has been cheating on him (debatable) but because he thinks she’s debasing herself by playing into someone else’s fetish. As Monk does with Coraline, Ben tries to conflate his anger at Miko with anger on her behalf. Ben might be right, but that’s not really the point. When Miko tries to counter that his idea of her relationship with Leon is insulting, that it takes away her agency, Ben isn’t listening — in his mind, he’s doubly vindicated because he’s not only caught Miko in a lie, but a self-incriminating one at that.
Race also informs Ben’s sense of self in other ways, complicating our idea of his victimhood (or lack thereof). Shortcomings opens on a thinly veiled spoof of the hotel lobby scene from Crazy Rich Asians, in which the Michelle Yeoh stand-in (played by none other than Stephanie Hsu, Yeoh’s onscreen daughter in Everything Everywhere All At Once) effectively solves racism with generational wealth. Not really, but it’s pretty close to how Ben feels about the scene, which is part of a movie that’s being screened at the Asian film festival Miko works for. Ben can barely hide his disdain in front of his girlfriend and the other programmers, one of whom concedes, “I know it’s a little glossy, but it’s ours!” This moment is a neat way to sum up the conversation around “representation” in the movies for Asian-Americans, as well as a reflection of Ben’s thinking. Like Monk, he’s fed up with the idea of treating race as a genre, and you can sense how much he wishes Asian-led movies wouldn’t get graded on a curve. But scarcity breeds a different set of standards, and the overcorrection of a problem doesn’t negate its root cause, which is the dearth of art made by and for Asian people in the first place.
Like American Fiction, Shortcomings tackles race in a satirical way that never loses sight of its real-life target. One of the best running jokes in Shortcomings, in fact, is not in the text itself but in its casting, the meta-ness of which deserves its own essay. In addition to Batalon and Hsu, Shortcomings also stars Sonoya Mizuno and Ronny Chieng, both of whom appeared in Crazy Rich Asians, and the film’s director, Randall Park, had a lead role in Fresh Off the Boat, possibly the most-watched network sitcom of the 21st century featuring an Asian-American family. The insularity of this group underscores the urgency of the questions raised by the film. We’ve still clearly got a long way to go, if the same few faces are standing in for all of Asian America in movies and TV.
Monk and Ben both exist in an in-between state of suspension — both want to live in a post-racial world, but race is, for better or worse, baked into their professional and personal lives. Owing to their relative privilege, the versions of racism they experience on a day-to-day basis isn’t the stuff of bigotry or overt discrimination, but it’s simultaneously more subtle and more pervasive. Monk’s fight is one against tokenism and the sanding down of his artistic edges, of fending off white peers falling over themselves to tell him how real and raw his “fake” book is, or to prove their so-called allyship by proclaiming their newfound dedication to police abolition.
Ben’s dating life is dominated by a constant need to sort people into those like him (Asian) and those not (meaning white), and he seems constitutionally incapable of seeing women as fully fleshed people outside of those confines. No matter who he pursues, he ends up unhappy. His anger at Miko and Leon’s relationship isn’t entirely unjustified — he’s right to raise an eyebrow. But he’s also being a hypocrite, because we’ve seen how he reacts to the white women in his life with the same reverence tipping over into fetishization. It’s not a perfect equivalency, but it’s enough to take the sting out of his harsh words towards Miko. And if Ben can’t be happy, no one else can, either. When Alice begins a relationship with sophisticated Barnard professor Meredith (Sonoya Mizuno), Ben jeopardizes it almost immediately, cracking crude jokes on their outings together and making insinuations about Meredith’s own parents (her father is white and her mother is Asian). All this despite Meredith’s abundant acts of generosity, like housing Ben in her apartment and making a genuine effort to get to know him as a part of Alice’s life. “I know you’re going to want to blame this on society, or on your race, or whatever, but this really is just about you,” Sasha tells Ben as she’s breaking up with him. Sure, he’s right about the cheesy movie at the film festival, and he’s probably right about his ex’s new boyfriend. And yes, there are systemic forces at play much bigger than him, but being an asshole is a choice — and one he needs to stop making if he wants any semblance of intimacy in his life.
American Fiction takes a similar approach, showing us that not all of Monk’s problems are of his own making — but at least a few of them are. His breakup with Coraline is the definition of self-sabotage; she’s the only person in his life who seems willing to engage earnestly with his writing, both the old stuff and the book she doesn’t know is his. She’s his source of comfort and intellectual equal, but rather than looking inward, Monk wants to blame their split on a difference in values. It’s his brother, Cliff, who reminds him not to close himself off to the world. “People want to love you, Monk,” he says with a tinge of regret. “You should let them love all of you.” Cliff laments the fact that he never got to come out to their father, who passed away years ago. And there’s a part of him that knows the old man might not have been accepting, but now that he’ll never get the chance, it serves as a kind of cautionary tale for Monk. It’s one more connection that was severed before it could even begin.
Shortcomings ends with a touching coda that brings things full circle: Ben is on a flight home when he sees an elderly Asian woman, seated a few rows ahead of him, being moved to tears by the movie he was so quick to dismiss at the beginning. When you’ve waited decades to see yourself onscreen, even crumbs aren’t to be taken for granted. It’s not a concession on Ben’s part, but an acknowledgment of a different perspective. American Fiction has a similar moment of near-catharsis. When Monk comes face to face with Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), the author of one of the outrageously stereotypical books he has modeled Fuck after, he discovers a surprisingly grounded person who’s neither friend nor foe. She’s just another artist trying to survive, even if that means pandering to the lowest common denominator. When Monk presses her on her methods, she pushes back, saying, “I don’t need to write about my life. I write about what interests people. Is it bad to cater to their tastes?” Possibly, but her objective isn’t so different from Monk’s. They both crave the same thing — to be read and to be praised — and anyway, it’s not Sintara he’s frustrated with, it’s a system that rewards mediocrity.Monk and Ben both chafe against the social confines they find themselves in, but their respective stories are about thinking smaller, not bigger. It’s clear that they both crave love and affection, and they’re both learning not to turn away from it or to make excuses. In one of American Fiction’s final sequences, Monk fantasizes about showing up at Coraline’s door with a perfect apology, and all is forgiven in an instant. (In reality, Coraline won’t return his calls.) He knows what he wants, even if it remains out of reach. Ben’s future is a little more open-ended — when his story ends, he’s still single and Alice has moved in with Meredith, but he seems at peace with the idea of being alone for a while. In both American Fiction and Shortcomings, race is an important dimension of the story, but there is just as much focus on emotional growth, on its characters learning to receive and reciprocate love, and trying to unravel how race has shaped their desires and ambitions. Ironically, like all great films about race, they ask more questions than they answer, but if you scratch under the surface, there’s plenty to ponder about how to show up for the people in your life.
