Ashley Newenle
Professor N. Nicoludis
ENG 21001G- Spring 2021
May 24, 2021
Trauma Porn as Black Entertainment
I want to note that a lot of this information is background knowledge. A lot of what I am talking about affects me and my community and I count my blackness as a source.
From the time that the film Birth of a Nation was produced and shown to the public, Black representation has been based on racial stereotypes and trauma. If the context is not the tone-deaf trope of the angry Black woman, then it is the sickening reality of Black men getting killed by the police. These tropes have been flowing in and out of films, especially right now because of the rise in Black Lives Matter protests and the “new” understanding of racism in the United States. Everyone is rushing to push out content that they know will get them an award, not for bringing awareness, but rather for traumatizing their Black audience and amusing their white audience. The director of this movie wanted to bring awareness to the public about what it was like to be a Black man in the United States, but there is a lot of concern around this considering the controversy that followed soon after. Throughout this essay, I will be analyzing the Netflix film, Two Distant Strangers.
Two Distant Strangers is a film that takes place in present-day America. The plot is similar to “groundhog day for a black man”; the main character is stuck in a seemingly endless loop of police brutality. Every time he wakes up and leaves his partner’s apartment, he is met with the same fate of being unjustly killed by a police officer. He goes through 100 different loops where he gets closer and closer to getting home alive, but he always ends up dead, even at the end when he makes it to the front of his building. The main idea of this movie is that no matter what a Black person does, nothing will change the mind of a police officer. There are a lot of issues with his movie that plays into horrible tropes and stereotypes that have been plaguing the Black community since slavery.
Exhibit A:
At the beginning of the movie, the main character, Carter James, is waking up in the morning after a one-night stand with Perri. To the general audience, this seems like a regular scene, but to the analytical eye, one would ask why the black characters in a movie are being promiscuous. As was mentioned before in the introduction, Birth of a Nation was a film that encouraged the idea that Black men specifically are hyper-sexual “monsters” who need to be tamed by the police or the KKK. This ties back to Two Distant Strangers. There is nothing wrong with promiscuity, however, when it is put into the context of 2 dark-skinned Black people, this adds to this notion that Black people are hypersexual and this translates to not having autonomy, self-control, and needing to be policed.
Exhibit B:
When Carter goes downstairs the first 10 times, he is killed because of 2 things. A cigarette and a roll of cash that he had in his hand or his book bag. Sometimes they happened at the same time. This stood out in the film because there are actual cases where Black men have died for selling cigarettes, disgusting joints as cigarettes, and having “too much money”. Since the war on drugs, and even before then, Black men have been perceived to be addicts who would do anything to get their drugs (this does not exclude nicotine addiction). In the movie, Carter is accused of disgusting a joint like a cigarette. Not only does this feed the addiction stereotype, but this also feeds into the trope that Black men are deceptive because they know they are guilty of something. The hostility that Caters then experiences because of this is identical to what happens to Black people in real life.
The idea that a bookbag on a Black or Brown person means danger is also what is at play here. When Black people have on bookbags we are perceived to be hiding something. This is obvious when people think about what happens on New York train stations: Black and Brown’s people are stopped by police at tables so that they can get their bags checked. There is nothing inherently wrong with someone carrying a bookbag but, police are given the power to assume wrong is being done, and they use their racial biases to police people. They claim you can say no, but most times this leads to situations escalating because now the police think that the person is hiding something. In the movie when Cater has money in his book bag and the cigarette is perceived to be a joint, the police officer insinuates that he is a drug dealer.
The controversy:
The controversy was also really inappropriate as well. In 2014 a Black Journalist wrote an article about what it is like to be Black in America with a groundhog day-like context. She went into great detail about police brutality and how there was nothing a Black person could do to not be killed by the police. Then in 2016, an Asian woman produced a film on youtube with the same context. This is where the problem begins. This is not her story to tell, however, she felt like the concept was for everyone to adopt (it is not). She made Tiktok videos expressing how she felt like her concept was stolen by the director of Two Distant Strangers. This raised many eyebrows, simply because a non-Black person felt like they needed to produce a film about a Black specific experience, and then tried to say that the idea was stolen when the experience was not hers, to begin with. This is not something that can be capitalized off of and trademarked as if it is creative to put Black pain on screen. And this is why Trauma porn is not a genre of entertainment. The fact that Two Distant Strangers fell into the “sci-fi/drama” genre furthers this point. There is no way to label movies like this accurately because nothing is “sci-fi” about Black people not being able to avoid death. Nothing is “dramatic” about the wicked reality that Black people are constantly targeted by institutions.
My disapproval:
Yes, this film is supposed to imitate life and spark conversation around policing, but I know that this was unnecessary for many reasons. The first reason being that most people know that police have too much power and they abuse that power against Black bodies the most. The police started as slave patrol to kill, capture, and imprison Black people “after” slavery. This bleeds into the current state that policing is in because exactly that is still happening. Black people are being killed in the streets, and being institualized in any context to “maintain order”. There are thousands of black people being put into prisons, foster homes, hospitals, etc. just to make sure that they do not live normal lives.
We did not need a movie to display black death in the most graphic ways. Most of us already see it in person and online against our will. It is very strange how people even advocate for these kinds of films because they think it’s “raising awareness”… We do not need to raise awareness about an issue that we have been watching to happen since 1492. As a society, we have progressed past the need to see all of this because of lynching. Black people were and still are, hung or shot in public where tens of people can see, recorded for billions more to see, and then still made out to be the criminals in situations where they can only, reasonably, be the victims.
Work Cited
“Groundhog Day For A Black Man.” YouTube, YouTube, 5 Dec. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEMIUy_ySA4
“Killing of Eric Garner.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Apr. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Eric_Garner
“Two Distant Strangers.” Netflix Official Site, www.netflix.com/search?q=two+&jbv=81447229
