“Waves” Reminds Us To Humanize Blackness

By Alexandria Millet, Culture Staff Writer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=74&v=EhnNf9PDCUs

A movie trailer with a couple at a beach, a wrestler and a family sitting in church pews is getting a lot of early buzz. A24, an American independent entertainment company, is releasing the film “Waves” this November.

The movie follows a family in south Florida as they navigate, “love, forgiveness, and coming together in the aftermath of a loss” (A24, 2019). Before you get too comfortable with this plot, it must be said this is a black family.

From the initial description of the film, most would imagine a white family—because of how central whiteness is to America and the entertainment industry. However, “Waves” is allowing this black family to existent in a cinematic space where they can be all of who they are, their storyline isn’t just that they are black (A24, 2019).

The film stars Sterling K. Brown from “This Is Us” and Alexa Demie from “Euphoria” and will capture an American family in their fullness. For this family’s blackness to not be central to the plot, it humanizes blackness. It affirms that a black character does not have to be a martyr or a victim for it to be a good film.

Rather, the film will capture simply a family experiencing life, making the revolutionary claim that black people are people too. The lives of black people go on when there isn’t a march, when there isn’t a cop killing an unarmed black boy and when the television crews go away. This movie reminds the viewer that life happens to everyone.

This simplistic experience of blackness has been overlooked in popular cinema in recent years. The biggest blockbusters about black people have been “trauma porn”—defined as “any type of media—be it written, photographed or filmed—which exploits traumatic moments of adversity to generate buzz, notoriety or social media attention” (Telusma, 2019).

Movies that fall into this category include “The Hate U Give”, “Fruitvale Station”, “See You Yesterday” and “When They See Us”. All of these movies were critical stories that needed to be told (and all of them are on my shortlist of favorite movies), but they all are hinged on the topic of black pain. It is just as critical to see black joy, and when and if those movies exist, they do not get the acclaim.

The movies that are written to show the ordinary and mundane parts of life are rarely written for black actors. If by chance a black actor gets one of these roles, a role that was not written for them, it seems odd to the viewer that their blackness is not acknowledged via the character traits or dialogue.

Even though “Waves” does not explicitly address blackness, the trailer makes clear that the family is fully aware of what being black means. Sterling K. Brown as the dad says to his son in the trailer: “We are not afforded the luxury of being average” (A24, 2019). This plays on the classic trope of black parents: “You have to be twice as good to get half of what they got” (A24, 2019). By saying all of this in the trailer, A24 is acknowledging blackness, however, they are not creating the entire movie around it.

When Sterling K. Brown won his Golden Globe in 2018 for Best Actor in a TV Series for his role in “This Is Us”, he acknowledged this paradox of the black actor by addressing the creator of the hit show: “You wrote a role for a Black man. That could only be played by a black man” (NBC, 2018). Brown continued, “What I appreciate about this thing—I am seen for who I am and being appreciated for who I am. And it makes it that much more difficult to dismiss me or dismiss anybody who looks like me” (NBC, 2018).

Black actors and joyful black narratives deserve to be seen. More roles need to be created for black actors to just be seen in their full humanity. Not to fit in the role of the martyr—or what Hollywood has painted black people to be—but roles that allow black people to be exactly what they are: human.

The 1990s and early 2000s saw a renaissance of this craft of showing black people living lives that are not centered around a tragedy. Films like “Love and Basketball”, “The Best Man”, “The Wood”, “Brown Sugar”, “Love Jones” and “Deliver Us From Eva” allowed black actors to be in romantic comedies without being that one black friend. These movies allowed the black audience to walk away feeling something outside of anger at a system that does not see them.

“Waves” can open a door for films like this to return to the forefront and introduce seeing black people as not as compartmentalized tropes, but as complex people with lives beyond the protest.

On November 15th, “Waves” will remind a country that once named black people as only worth 3/5 of a person that black people are fully human and deserve to be seen.

Sources: