[The story of “Queen & Slim” is propelled by an arbitrary
traffic stop, in which a police officer detains a couple on a first
date, played by Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith]
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THE POWERFUL PERSPECTIVE OF 'QUEEN & SLIM'  
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Jelani Cobb
November 27, 2019
The New Yorker
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_ The story of “Queen & Slim” is propelled by an arbitrary
traffic stop, in which a police officer detains a couple on a first
date, played by Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith _

, Andre D. Wagner / Universal Pictures

 

[View movie trailer.
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Last month, five days after the former police officer Amber Guyger
was sentenced in the fatal shooting of Botham Jean, an unarmed
twenty-six-year-old black man, whom she shot in his home, and five
days before Atatiana Jefferson, a twenty-eight-year-old black woman,
was killed in her home by the police officer Aaron Dean, “Queen &
Slim” began previews in a small theatre just off Bryant Park. The
film is the product of the vision of two black women: Lena Waithe, who
wrote it, and Melina Matsoukas, who directed it. (Waithe and James
Frey, the shamed memoirist, collaborated on the story.) It means
something that a movie that was conceived years ago could land so
squarely in the midst of dual tempests involving firearms, police, and
black people whose lives expired violently, prematurely, at the hands
of white people who were sworn to protect them. The fact that both
Jean and Jefferson were at home when they were killed underscores a
central conceit of the film: that a system capable of dispensing such
arbitrary deaths cannot be trusted in any context, least of all to
administer justice on behalf of those whom it also victimizes.

The recognition of this fact changes the implications of the story
that Waithe and Matsoukas tell with this film: about a couple on a
first date who kill a police officer in self-defense, and their
subsequent life as fugitives. Early buzz around the movie pegged it as
a “Bonnie and Clyde” tale for the Black Lives Matter set, but that
would be an entirely different film from “Queen & Slim.” “Bonnie
and Clyde” is the story of two outlaws who are fleeing justice;
“Queen & Slim” is a meditation on a system of justice that treats
innocent people as outlaws. This is not a novel undertaking. It’s
hard to overlook, for instance, that this movie arrives in theatres in
the same year as the thirtieth anniversary of Spike Lee’s “Do The
Right Thing
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That film follows the events of a single day in Bedford-Stuyvesant and
culminates in the death of a neighborhood fixture named Radio Raheem,
at the hands of the N.Y.P.D. In 2014, in the aftermath of Eric
Garner’s death from a choke hold administered by a New York City
police officer, Lee spliced together video from Garner’s and
Raheem’s deaths, one cinematic, one chaotically real, both somehow
true—a diptych of life and art relaying the same subject matter.
As I wrote at the time
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however, Lee conceived of the Radio Raheem scene after the death of
Michael Stewart, a black graffiti artist who died in police custody,
possibly as the result of a choke hold, in 1983. “Do The Right
Thing” was not prescient in forecasting Garner’s death, it was
archival in rendering a version of Stewart’s. But eight, years
before Stewart’s death, the film “Cornbread, Earl & Me,” which
features a fourteen-year-old Laurence Fishburne, tells the story of a
rising basketball star, played by Jamaal Wilkes, who is shot by police
in a case of mistaken identity, and it shows the ways in which the
system protects the officers who killed him. And so it goes, act and
depiction, tumbling all the way back to some unknown original insult.
The capricious loss of black life is so common a reality as to have
inspired an entire body of art addressing its implications.

The story of “Queen & Slim” is propelled by an arbitrary traffic
stop, in which a white officer detains a couple, whose names we do not
know yet, played by Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith. When the
officer fires his gun to prevent Turner-Smith’s character from
recording the incident on her cell phone, we are anticipating a
scenario that has become a dispiriting cliché of social injustice,
the indefensible but somehow bureaucratically justifiable death of a
black civilian. But the gun is wrestled away and goes off during the
struggle, killing the officer. The shooting, captured on the squad
car’s camera, is a Rorschach test that asks all subsequent
characters, and, by extension, the audience, what they see when they
look at the incident. The officer himself is like Patient Zero in an
outbreak: his actions set in motion the decisions made by everyone
else whom Queen and Slim encounter en route to the film’s finale.
Each television screen or cell phone upon which the footage plays
serves as a kind of exposure to a pathogen, as everyone reacts to a
different reading of the situation. Everyone is moral but no one is
right.

Matsoukas has touched upon these themes previously. She directed the
much-lauded video for Beyoncé’s “Formation,” which was
criticized by police groups for provocative imagery of a police car
sinking below water in a Hurricane Katrina-like flood. In “Queen &
Slim,” the system is inundated by a metaphorical flood. In the
opening scene, Turner-Smith and Kaluuya are on an awkward first date.
She, we learn, is an attorney whose client was sentenced to death
earlier that day. It’s the intimacy of her relationship to the
criminal-justice system that makes it all the more damning when she
demands that they go on the run rather than attempt to explain to
other officers what happened. The hypothetical implicit in the scene
itself is: what would have happened if someone like Eric Garner had
fought back? What would have happened had Botham Jean or Atatiana
Jefferson shot first? And what are the probabilities that anyone
fighting back against unsanctioned police violence could be thought of
as anything beyond a thug or a murderer by the greater public?

The connections between “Cornbread, Earl & Me” and Michael Stewart
and “Do the Right Thing” and Eric Garner form a daisy chain in
which the question is less about whether art or life is imitating the
other and more about the ways in which art serves as a bridge between
tragedies that occur at irregular intervals but with such similarities
that they have formed a canon of the wrongly dead. This is part of
what makes “Queen & Slim,” such a brilliant, indelible departure,
and it’s most of the reason that I continued to think about it
obsessively in the weeks after I saw it in that theatre in midtown.
There is an accidental homicide, but it is not committed by a police
officer. There is no template of bureaucratic responses, no corps of
surrogates deployed to dispel the innocence of the victim in the
media, no hedging of the deaths with reminders of how dangerous the
shooter’s line of work is and what he means to the rest of society.

When the eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was killed by the police
officer Darren Wilson, five years ago, in Ferguson, Missouri,
the _Times_ ran a piece that led with the description of Brown as
“no angel,” to which outraged critics in Ferguson and beyond
shouted that they didn’t know he had to be. The system here is no
angel. It is the story of two people—a black everyman, played with
sublime reserve by Kaluuya, and an attorney who is both sincere and
cynical in equal measure, compellingly brought to life by
Turner-Smith.

There are a great number of other implications to this story: the
brilliant inversion of a slave narrative, in which two people flee
from a Northern free state into the Deep South to seek freedom; the
thorny and complicated ways in which other African-Americans respond
to them en route; a twist in the middle of the film that unsettles any
sense of moral simplicity that the viewer might have indulged up to
that point. Most provocatively, the incident at the heart of “Queen
& Slim” is framed in the context of a May, 1973, incident on the New
Jersey Turnpike, in which members of the Black Liberation Army,
including Assata Shakur, were involved in a shootout in which the
police officer Werner Foerster was killed. Shakur, who is referenced
multiple times in the film and serves as a kind of historical
inspiration for the decisions Turner-Smith and Kaluuya make after the
shooting, escaped from prison, in 1979, and has remained a fugitive in
Cuba for nearly four decades. The State of New Jersey and the F.B.I.
maintain rewards for her capture; she has been denounced by successive
New Jersey governors. At the same time, her memoir, “Assata
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mainstay of African-American-studies courses and has remained in print
for thirty years.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
Pete Buttigieg Discusses America’s Crisis of Belonging
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This is not a divergence in the responses to Shakur; it’s a
divergence in people’s views about the credibility of the system
that arrested and imprisoned her and of its representative who pulled
her over that day. These different points of view are implicit in
“Queen & Slim”—it is emphatically told from the vantage point of
people with the vindicating view of Shakur. If we’re unaccustomed to
grappling with these questions in film, it is because it’s been so
long since they were raised. Matsoukas did not create a gangster-moll
story for the modern era; she created a blaxploitation movie. The
reference is not “Bonnie & Clyde,” it’s “Sweet Sweetback’s
Baadasssss Song.” Melvin Van Peebles’s indie film, released in
1971, is another audaciously black story that grapples with an
African-American who attacks police officers and goes on the run. It,
too, was a movie that took its audience’s understanding of systemic
injustice as a given. It, too, recalled history, albeit not the strand
of it we prefer to highlight in the United States.It was raining the
night that I saw “Queen & Slim” and, after the screening, I stood
outside the theatre beneath a construction scaffold sorting through
the layers of the film. The movie reminded me of a historical
reference buried deep in my memory. A hundred and nineteen years ago,
a black man named Robert Charles sat with a friend on the steps of a
building in New Orleans near where his girlfriend lived, waiting for
her to get ready for a date. He was approached by several police
officers, one of whom grabbed him. When a fight ensued, Charles fled
after he and the officer both opened fire. Police tracked him to his
apartment, where he killed two officers. A police manhunt terrorized
black communities in New Orleans, but Charles evaded capture for
several days, until he was tracked to an empty building, where, in the
course of a standoff, he shot more than twenty more white men. The
official versions of this story held that the men who set the building
on fire and shot Charles as he exited were heroes. Black people chose
a different protagonist. The journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote of
Charles that “white people of this country may charge that he was a
desperado, but to the people of his own race Robert Charles will
always be regarded as the hero of New Orleans.” People subject to
the same abuses Charles suffered were unconcerned with whether he was
an angel. What mattered was the number of white men who would now
think twice before trying to pull the same stunt.

“Queen & Slim” is an extrapolation of thoughts that run through
the heads of black people each time we’re called upon to mourn
publicly, to request justice like supplicants, to comfort ourselves
with inert lies about this sort of thing stopping in the near-future.
That kind of insular honesty is rare in any kind of art but
particularly perilous in cinema. This is a film that stands as strong
a chance of being hailed and lauded as it does of being denounced and
picketed, but it understands the inescapable fact that heroism is
entirely a matter of context, that heroes need not be concerned with
explaining themselves, and that it—like the characters at its
center, like the history it draws upon—stands a great likelihood of
being misunderstood. And, gloriously, neither its writer nor its
director appears to give a damn.

_Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of
“The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress
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