Looking Up
By Kelli Weston
Nickel Boys
Dir. RaMell Ross, U.S., Orion/MGM
Twelve years ago, anthropologists unearthed dozens of remains on Dozier campus, a Florida juvenile reform school plagued by allegations of rape, torture, and murder long before it finally shuttered in 2011. The official findings from the Department of Justice traced these “failures” to “a systemic lack of training, supervision, and oversight.” Whatever bureaucratic blunders fostered this crisis, the report (corroborating some of the grisly charges levied by alums) details the kind of sanguine cruelty borne of an irredeemable rot—far beyond Dozier—that remains indifferent to conventional accountability measures. Colson Whitehead based his 2019 novel The Nickel Boys on the horrors there, an elegy to all the many disappeared boys, but it was not a new story. And by now it is, grimly, a familiar one. For years the bones have testified. This January revealed some 215 people buried behind a jail in Jackson, Mississippi. First Nation elders found a mass grave of 215 Indigenous children in May 2021 at one Canadian residential school; and a month later, 751 unmarked graves were discovered at another. Terrifying numbers sacrificed to the unslakable appetite of the state.
After his acclaimed feature debut Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), the much-anticipated sophomore effort from director RaMell Ross is an ambitious adaptation of Whitehead’s novel, now abbreviated Nickel Boys. Terrible luck befalls precocious high-schooler Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) when he is arrested by police after unwittingly hitching a ride in a stolen car. With that, Elwood is summarily dispatched to Nickel Academy, a draconian reform school teeming with racism (the white boys plainly enjoy a more pleasant stint), abuse, and murder. Facing cruelty from custodians and peers alike, the principled and determinedly idealistic Elwood stumbles upon a comrade in the charming, pessimistic Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson). But Elwood’s integrity (he models himself after Martin Luther King, Jr.) eventually tests their friendship and endangers their very lives when he threatens to reveal the corruption nested inside the institution.
These classical contours—the messianic crusader meets the cynical lifer, leaving the latter transformed—are rendered via a patchwork of visual modes, its own story unfolding in the margins. Pensive excursions into contemporaneous black-and-white photography and archival footage carve a path backwards, creating an ornate record of the past, for better and for worse, an intricate tapestry of identity, cultural and personal. Naturally, MLK, Elwood’s hero, makes several appearances. So, too, The Defiant Ones (1958), famously skewered by James Baldwin for its racial myopia and crude sentimentality, makes an intrusion that's especially withering given how much Nickel Boys concerns seeing and perspective. “As spectators,” bell hooks once observed, “Black men could repudiate the reproduction of racism in cinema and television…by daring to look.”
“Sight” is also where Du Bois crucially located Black difference. Among the more protean dimensions of his scholarship, he proposed that beyond how Blackness is perceived, for him the layered capacity of Black vision, our “peculiar” and rooted economy of (in)sight—the internal negotiation of disparate perspectives, the encounter with the Other versus the encounter with the Self—characterized Black life in this country. It is no accident, then, that this generation of Black filmmakers in particular are such studied disciples of the gaze. And it’s certainly no coincidence that this gaze claims so magisterial a place in the screen adaptations of Whitehead’s two Pulitzer Prize–winning novels (his most accessible, it might be argued), both of them, above all, ghost stories. Hauntings require all the senses to make shape of what often eludes the naked eye.
By the time he lavishly translated The Underground Railroad in a ten-part miniseries for Amazon (also the distributor for Nickel Boys), Barry Jenkins was already an inveterate purveyor of seditious looking. His characters have a habit of staring gracefully into the camera: temporality-bending interludes of moving portraiture, a willful inversion of the colonial eye that birthed cinema and still organizes the grammar of the visual world as we know it. Jenkins’s adaptation was accompanied by his operatic short film An Act of Seeing: The Gaze (installed at Museum of the Moving Image for more than two years), as much a showcase for the ideological impulses that forge his aesthetics as Caroline Eselin’s scrupulous period costume design. In lush sequences—a rhapsodic collage of animated photography—the series’ background actors regard the screen, holding presumptive viewers spellbound in their unwavering gaze, so arresting precisely because we all intuitively understand it is the spectator who traditionally enjoys visual preeminence. Perspective is agency. Jenkins does not merely trouble this conventional arrangement in his projects, but disrupts the racial order that historically informs it and achieves something like an empowered on-screen subjecthood.
At this year’s New York Film Festival, which Nickel Boys opened, Ross explained, “I remember at some point reading the script, and wondering when Elwood was raced. Like, when he became Black. And that, I think, is a perceptual thing largely.” It’s true that Du Bois describes his earliest collision with himself made Other when a white classmate rejects him (and the card he offers her) “with a glance.” Likewise, Frantz Fanon would write of his own racial self-awakening, “I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” Much of Nickel Boys unfolds in first-person perspective that flips between Elwood and Turner: an ostentatious exercise, to be sure, and one that, by Ross’s own admission, seeks to rescue these boys from the racializing camera/gaze and make of them authors. Jomo Fray’s cinematography, in no small part, eases some of the natural ungainliness this experiment entails. And it is most effective where it invites a detour from its generic lineage.
Few filmmakers have really dared to embellish upon the skeleton of the prison break genre (to which The Underground Railroad itself may reasonably belong), an otherwise saccharine Hollywood commodity that must not disturb the very spine of the lies we tell ourselves about “justice” in this country; consider the enduring preoccupation with redemption and innocence, which Nickel Boys largely maintains. American tales of captivity invariably restage the slave ship and the plantation, an arrangement scarcely elided by the white men who overwhelmingly helm these big screen fictions. But Elwood and Turner liberate each other through recognition, visualized as a kind of late mirror stage where they finally find acceptance and wholeness. In that way, the film’s restricted perspective (tragically) forecasts, as the mirror stage must, the assimilation of identity.
Like in The Underground Railroad, perspective frees Nickel Boys to remodel the racially wobbly generic architecture it inherits. You can hide things in subjectivity. The depraved violence that leaves Elwood’s body marred is tucked away, off frame, in the shadows. But then, shadows, Annie Dillard reminds us, are “one of the ways the eye knows that things have shape.” And the adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs), always pictured from behind, carries shadows with him everywhere. Impressively, characters come alive in the camerawork. The first half of the film anchors us in Elwood’s avoidant gaze. He has an endearing (if melancholy) propensity to evade faces, unsurprising for a Black boy terrorized into deference under the Deep South’s relentless pogroms. But we also sense something poetic about the way he sees, which is how Turner falls in love with him, too. Elwood embraces the world around him with rare grace, an attraction to details and a surrender to pure sensation unencumbered by any trace of cynicism. In a few frames, Fray conveys more of a world than any dialogue might ever hope to express. We catch fleeting glimpses of him as a toddler, then a boy in transparent surfaces, but nothing quite compares to the moment of revelation when Elwood (captured tenderly by Herisse) appears to us through the eyes of Turner: a spindly, awkward boy, it turns out, with a hurried gait and diffident countenance who plops down, eyes shyly averted of course, at the cafeteria table.
Many may well object to this first-person framework on purely aesthetic terms, or the frustration of limited perspective. But it’s also worth considering the implications of this collapsed proximity. There is the paradoxical consequence that absolute subjectivity may alienate the audience. Functionally, we never quite achieve full immersion or identification, constantly reminded of the dissonance between our two experiences. But what else to make of this proposed intimacy? Perhaps we too readily overlook the jagged corners of Du Bois’s early work (his masculinist sensibilities, the spiritual essentialism), but the brilliance of the gaze he described was that he cogently illuminated not just a way of looking but a psychic condition.
The formal dualism of the film’s extended point-of-view cannot quite approximate this state; even if it never intends to, we are left with something flatter, which may well leave the boys avatars for an emotional experience that swathes of the audience (whether satisfied by catharsis or uneasy in this compelled closeness) will retreat from, perhaps no closer to grasping the dignity or humanity of the real children who daily find themselves prey to the predatory state. A racialized gaze, forged in opposition and so specific in its configuration, resists translation and is arguably disempowered by the democratization of absolute subjectivity.
In one scene, Elwood watches his grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), recount the harrowing story of her father’s lynching. “Because your portion,” she concludes, “is pain.” Despite its radical form, the film still relies upon certain familiar expressions—tragedy, grief, resilience—that stories of racial injustice typically beckon. (The state-sanctioned murder that has proliferated the mainstream conscience suggests empathy is not always as mobilizing a force as we once thought.) But even this compassion seems provisional, given Elwood’s unimpeachable honor—embodied by his uncomplicated admiration of King—and Turner’s boundless charisma. They are not given over to murkier emotions like rage, bitterness, vengeance. It is rage, for instance, in the novel—unfettered fury, to be exact—that even lands Turner in Nickel. But the film, interestingly, does not disclose how he came to be there. Certainly no one can deny the craft of Nickel Boys, nor the profound beauty of liberating its Black characters from the traditional confines of spectatorship. In one gleaming moment, Elwood and Turner, arms looped around each other, look up at their reflection, pleased with the image.