“Everything we do is a performance”, writer and director Boots Riley tells Pitchfork magazine while talking about his mid-summer, Afro-Surrealist epic, Sorry to Bother You. He is just one of the many recent black filmmakers creating visual art that is urgently expositional and reliant on a certain spectrum of surrealism. Since the twentieth century, Afro-Surrealist artists have sought to recapture legacies through transformative analysis of the past, present, and future. Its artists radically subvert whiteness, exposing the absurdity of its structures to form realized, truthful, and transcendent black narratives reflective of the present. Coined by writer and activist Amiri Baraka in 1974, the term Afro-Surrealist has been used to describe the literature of Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison and the artworks of Wilfredo Lam and Kara Walker. As described in D. Scott Miller’s Afro-Surrealist Manifesto, Afro-Surrealism upholds the innateness of human and earthly nature as mediums for surrealist inspiration while encouraging artistic excess as necessary to communicate subversion.
Recently, Afro-Surrealism has glided into popular film and television. Filmmakers and writers such as Jordan Peele (Get Out), Donald Glover, Stefani Robinson, Toafik Kolade (Atlanta), and Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You) have created content that visually exposes the ironies, injustices, and absurdities of racist American institutions and structures through the narratives of modern day black Americans. Interestingly, the content created by these artists share similar visual tropes; most strikingly, animal imagery.
When first watching Get Out, I was drawn to the animal imagery presented throughout the film but initially didn’t read too much into it. Then, while watching this year’s second season of Donald Glover and Hiro Murai’s Atlanta, I found myself watching a presentation of the same animal imagery. Maybe it was a coincidence? Was the strategic placement of deer carcasses in the path of inadvertent protagonists a random add-in or did it signal a more significant, consequential plot development? And then Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You burst into the scene. In May, I attended an advanced screening in New York and remember being equally astounded and delighted by Riley’s introduction of animals halfway through the film. The experience cemented my desire to further look into Afro-Surrealism’s impact on these films, deconstructing their influences and symbolism to better interpret their messages.
Analyzing the use of animal imagery provides stronger insight into the storylines of the content being examined, illuminating critical reflections of our current reality stitched together through Afro-Surrealist influence. As I began reflecting on these films and TV shows, I recognized that these aforementioned writers and directors may be attempting a confrontation of scientific racism.
Scientific racism was a tactic that American slave-owners used to justify colonialism and enslavement through comparison of their black and brown slaves to non-human primates and livestock. This notion transcended the plantation and was encouraged politically and academically. Scientific writers such as Samuel Morton and Louis Agassiz promoted this idea as justification for Enlightenment-backed white supremacy. As the abolition movement gained traction in the 19th century, scientific racism spurred Black abolitionists to argue their humanity, campaigning with rhetorical questions such as “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”. In “The Narrative of Sojourner Truth”, the abolitionist details the horrors of slavery, recounting being treated like a horse and sheep during her experiences in bondage. Sojourner Truth and other abolitionists including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ann Preston attempted to destabilize scientific racism by re-purposing human-animal comparisons as a means to promote anti-slavery rhetoric, gain national sympathy, and ultimately persuade a total emancipation from slavery. Fast-forward to today, the creators of Get Out, Atlanta, and Sorry to Bother You utilize human-animal metaphors as a means of immediate reflection, holding a mirror to the right now: the scientific racism still ruminating in America’s subconscious and its subliminal effect on contemporary perceptions of black individuality.
In one of the first scenes in Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror dramedy Get Out, the protagonist Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is sitting in the passenger seat when his girlfriend, Rose Armitage (Alison Williams), accidentally runs over a deer on their way to Rose’s childhood home. Chris exits the vehicle to assess the damage and watches, his eyes watering with eerie recognition, as the deer slowly dies at the side of the road. The dying deer reminds Chris of the internalized childhood trauma surrounding his mother’s death and his lingering guilt over her abandonment. But, Peele also utilizes the deer as a motif, warning the audience of the fate that awaits Chris at the Armitages. Its abrupt interruption of the action hints that the deer/buck symbolism will make surrealist reappearances throughout the film, as later seen by Chris’ visit to The Sunken Place.
When Chris and Rose meet up with Dean Armitage, he praises Rose for hitting the deer, rants about their infestation of neighborhoods, and advocates for their mass extermination. Dean’s rant is a strong indicator as to how the Armitages view the black body and its place in modern society. They equate corporeal blackness with the value of deer which can be hunted and made into trophies that solely serve the purpose of, in this case, a white master. The term “black buck” was historically a racist slur against black men who resisted white authority in post-reconstruction America. Therefore, it is no surprise that the room Chris is detained in towards the end of the film contains the looming head of a buck mounted on a wall. In order to escape, Chris uses the buck’s head as weapon, ramming the antlers into Dean Armitage.
The act is Get Out’s most stunning example of reclamation and resistance. Chris metaphorically overcomes his mental trauma that Missy Armitage sought to exploit through hypotonization while physically overcoming Dean Armitage who sought to physically appropriate his body. Jordan Peele’s inclusion of the deer/buck motif is a powerful attempt to exploit scientific racism’s deconstruction and animalistic perversion of blackness by utilizing Afro-Surrealism to transform a racist symbol into a tool of black power.
At the beginning of Season 2, Epsidode 4 of Donald Glover’s TV series Atlanta, Earn (Donald Glover) and Van (Zazie Beatz) are on their way to a Fastnacht festival in Helen, Georgia when Van immediately slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a wild boar. Like Get Out, the seemingly random introduction of an animal represents a foreshadowing break in the action. Director Amy Seimetz and writer Taofik Kolade use this imagery to hint at the disruptive, mostly white space that Van and Earn are about to encounter at the German festival. On a larger scale, the sudden introduction of the boar allows the creators of the series to signal that Atlanta is further delving into an Afro-Surrealist agenda that will extend beyond the fourth episode.
The correlation between animal imagery and Afro-Surrealism is especially striking in Season 2, Episode 8’s “Woods”. After a tumultuous afternoon with an old friend, Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles (Brian Tyree Henry) is mugged by three fans when they realize that he is alone. Beaten and bruised, Alfred escapes into the woods to avoid a gun-wielding fan but soon finds himself lost as the sun begins to set. As he wanders further into the woods, Alfred stumbles upon the decomposing, fly-infested carcass of a deer. Soon after, Alfred is approached and followed by a seemingly mentally unstable man named Wiley. An increasingly frustrated Alfred tries to shake off the man but the two come across the same deer carcass as before. “That’s you”, Wiley says laughing, pointing to the deer’s exposed guts.
The episode's writer Stefani Robinson utilizes the imagery of the gutted deer to juxtapose Alfred’s past trauma and current depression with his current state in the entertainment industry. In Afro-surrealism, nature plays an important role in exposing one’s identity in relation to their environment. Therefore, through his journey in the woods, Alfred is repeatedly confronted by his past and is forced to ponder his identity as a black entertainer in America. After almost being attacked by Wiley, Alfred finally escapes from the forest and finds himself outside a gas station. Relieved, he enters to find something cold to drink. Inside, a white fan recognizes Alfred, and unfazed by the rapper’s bloodied and disheveled appearance asks for a selfie. Paper Boi complies, seemingly settling into his role as an entertainer.
Alfred’s interaction with the white fan signals back to his mugging by the three black fans earlier in the episode. Both parties seek to exploit Alfred for personal profit. The black fans see Alfred as someone who can bring them wealth through violent theft of his possessions. The white fan, blind to Alfred’s injuries, seeks the increase of social status or clout that comes with an association with Paper Boi. Alfred’s interaction with the white fan abruptly reintroduces him into the exploitative cycle of societal consumption and the abrasive entitlement of whiteness.
Afro-surrealism weaves through Robinson’s writing as she establishes the decomposing effect this consumption has on black individuals through representations of physical and mental trauma. Alfred’s journey through nature allows the rapper to momentarily escape the excess and surveillance of society and become enlightened to the issues his body and mind are facing. The grotesque image of the deer reminds Alfred of how he is viewed, and more frighteningly, what he might become. An emphasis is put on the expectations for Alfred to constantly perform, not just as a rapper but as a Black individual in America.
Ideas and expectations of performance and its effects on black identity permeate Boots Riley’s 2018 film, Sorry to Bother You. Through refinement and application of his “white voice”, Cassius “Cash” Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is quickly promoted to the role of Power Caller at a telemarketing company named RegalView. At first, Cassius is wary of using his white voice to make sales but his anxieties are cast aside as his Power Caller status introduces him to a variety of perks: larger paychecks, an office on the top floor of RegalView, and the privilege of disembodying himself the growing unionization of RegalView’s underpaid and undervalued entry-level employees. Cassius’s decision to continue working with RegalView despite the unionization of his friends and the realization that RegalView is collaborating with another company, WorryFree, to distribute weapons and human labor, represents the dilemma that performative whiteness poses on its subjects. Cassius’ close relationships with his girlfriend (Tessa Thompson) and friends begin to dissolve, and his self-accountability becomes more obscured, as he further settles into this white voice.
And that’s just the beginning. Things take a turn for the bizarre when Cassius attends a party at the home of WorryFree CEO, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer). There, Cassius is randomly asked by a crowd of mostly white party-goers to perform his blackness by rapping about “n***a sh*t”. Through this performance, Cassius satisfies the crowd’s idea of blackness; what it sounds and looks like and how it should be performed. It’s an unnerving representation of how constructs of whiteness and blackness are frequently used to manipulate and mold people of color in a society that objectifies and villainizes them.
So where do the animals come in? After the party, Cassius has a one-on-one meeting with Steve Lift who enthusiastically encourages him to snort a white substance. Cassius excuses himself to use the bathroom, and while there, runs into a half man-half horse hybrid who begs for his help. Stunned, Cassius runs into Lift who casually explains that the creature is an “equisapien” created by WorryFree in order to increase profits through the utilization of a disciplined, man-horse hybrid workforce.
It’s an outrageously absurdist plot-twist but one that Boots Riley incorporates to establish that Sorry to Bother You is a modern Afro-Surrealist exercise. The introduction of the equisapiens allows Riley to examine how American institutions and corporations attempt to police and discipline black bodies. 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucalt wrote extensively about how societal institutions seek to regulate and discipline bodies so that they are “subjected, used, transformed, and improved”. Riley effectively updates this theory for a 21st-century audience, meditating on American, late-stage, technologically bolstered capitalism and its influence on the freedom and movement of black bodies.
The writer and director’s choice to use horse imagery is purposeful. Historically, the horse is an animal that has signaled social status while advancing transportation, profit, and entertainment for its handlers. From 17th to 18th century New England, horses were often traded in exchange for slaves and were used as labor alongside slaves on plantations. The film’s equisapien plotline emphasizes how workplace discrimination, racial wage gaps, and the prison-industrial complex reflect the current exploitation of black labor for profit. Like Get Out and Atlanta, animal imagery in Sorry to Bother You invokes an absurdist element that awakens the protagonist and exposes present moral dangers. After his equisapien meet-and-greet, Cassius ditches RegalView and WorryFree and joins the employee protests. He is even able to free a few equisapiens who use their newfound hybrid strength as resistance against police-sanctioned attempts to end the protests.
On a larger scale, Sorry to Bother You questions: to what extent can black individuals thrive in a society rooted in whiteness, one that constantly consumes, restricts, and ultimately dehumanizes black bodies? How do we effectively communicate, form individualistic identities, and nurture each other when our attempts for transcendent and purposeful liberty are surveilled and policed. These questions circle back to the film’s theme of performance. Cassius ability to embody stereotypical expectations of whiteness and blackness afford him access to previously restricted spaces and tax brackets. But, at what cost? Sorry to Bother You’s final scene answers with unbridled irony, exemplifying the transformative mutilation of identity that follows this performance. The antidote: communal, structured, and unequivocal resistance.
These creators of Get Out, Atlanta, and Sorry to Bother You have produced work that delves into the surreal, combining humor, fear, and perseverance to promote modern magical realism that seeks to critically and triumphantly deliver the black American experience. The content is visually and thematically complex but ultimately rewarding, requiring multiple viewings to fully absorb. The consistent use of animal imagery in these films and television shows highlights the creators’ attempts to frame truthful and responsive narratives around Afro-Surrealist thought. The use of metaphors and motifs highlight America’s long history with racism and the lingering manipulative and reality-altering effects.
The influence of Afro-Surrealism has now been transmitted to living rooms, packed movie theaters, and world-famous museums (Kehinde Wiley’s official portrait of President Barack Obama). As more creators seek to capture the current absurdity of the black American experience, Afro-Surrealism’s influence will increase, manifesting in artwork across various mediums, continuing to interrogate the past while informing the present.
