This is For Your (Re)Consideration (briefly “Replay” lol), the segment where I revisit things I didn’t like or I am ready to change my mind about. In this edition, I break my own rules by revisiting American Fiction, which I saw earlier this year. Summaries of the movie and the book are in the footnotes!
After watching American Fiction (2023, dir. Cord Jefferson)1 earlier this year and finding myself incredibly dissatisfied with it, I knew I had to read Percival Everett’s Erasure (2002)2 (from which the film is adapted) immediately to see if what I disliked about the movie could be explained or relieved by its source material. Basically, I wanted to know who was to blame—Cord Jefferson or Percival Everett. RAFTM3 Ashley Bodika and I had anticipated American Fiction together for months and shared a similar experience of watching, so we decided to book club Erasure together. We both loved Erasure, which is an elegant and superior novel (a capital N novel we might say) that is not afraid to indict and challenge everyone, including its author. When we were done, we decided we had to watch American Fiction again. Below, our conversation about watching the movie again through the lens of the book and the impossibility of Jefferson’s sanitized film to capture the strangeness and ambivalence of Everett’s novel. For both of us, on a second watch, American Fiction wasn’t necessarily worse than your average three-star Hollywood film but it definitely wasn’t…Oscar-worthy…sorry!
SPOILERS/GIVEAWAYS FOR BOTH AMERICAN FICTION AND ERASURE BELOW
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