Warning: Spoiler Alert!

What the Film?

After binge watching the last season of Blood & Water, I find myself conflicted on the question of what should be the parameters of good Black entertainment. Should everything really be positive? Aspirational? Or do we need a little violence and trauma to balance out the fantastical nature of “fiction”?

Blood & Water is one of the most beautiful pieces of visual art that I’ve ever seen. Visually and literarily up there with Queen Sugar. But the third season took a turn that seems to be consistent with a lot of Black episodic content distributed on major, white-controlled platforms. While the violence rampant in Season 3 of Blood & Water is not nearly as bad as the theatrical ratchetry that Empire became towards the end of its third season, or the slightly insulting storylines that took over Scandal in its last years, there seems to be an arc of Black shows that these exemplify so strongly: the unraveling of strong, semi-aspirational storytelling into a problematic denouement forcing viewers to ask WTF?

Blood & Water is not like The Wire, where there seemed to be almost no happy endings, but it went from primarily uplifting content–with a drama level that was manageable even for a utopian like myself–to leaning very much into the genre known as Black Pain Porn.

A Model for Black Television?

In case you don’t know, Blood & Water is a South African series produced by Netflix in which a high school student sets out on a quest to identify her sister, who has been missing since birth, as one of the most popular students in her elite high school. From the casting to the costumes, every detail has been carefully thought out and intended for intelligent audiences who will appreciate thorough and appreciable character development, valuable historical references and light but poignant social commentary. If you’re a sucker for gorgeous melanin, this one is a hard one to ignore. 

One of my favorite things about the show is its profound ability to render the nuanced dynamic at the intersection of indigenous African cultural practice and “westernization”. Unlike most of the Nollywood content I’ve consumed, Blood & Water is proudly South African, inviting a thoughtful understanding of the socioeconomic and cultural friction that defines daily life for many South Africans. Queen Sono does this nicely as well. Kunle Afolayan’s Anikulapo and other films, along with earlier films by Tunde Kelani tend to be the exception in a Nollywood too often consumed with the need for western approval; something that South African content appears to be less gripped by.

And So…?

So what’s my point? I’m asking us to think a bit more deeply about our content and how institutional forces may shape the content and stories that become part of our daily psyche and subconscious emotional environment in the Black world. We need to understand and analyze film and content with a bit more rigor–asking questions like:

1. Why does strong episodic Black content seem to downturn so drastically around the third season or beyond?
2. How do the cultural backgrounds of the people funding and directing our content influence the level of violence and trauma present in Black stories?
3. Is there a need for ongoing bloody violence in shows that initially present as though they will uplift the Black race? Is there sufficient balance between mostly-positive and mostly-negative Black content allowing for Black Pain Porn to continue to be an essential ingredient in widely distributed Black content? 
4. How can Black storytelling be more intentional about the emotional and psychological effect it has on Black lives without losing touch with reality?

So What Do We Do?

Many will say, If you don’t like it just stop watching. And Don’t disparage Black content no matter how bad because if we do the powers that be won’t let us have more content. Well these positions are flawed because they fail to understand the profound impact that media and storytelling have on the realities we experience as Black people daily. The more violence we see, the more violence we expect, thus the more violence in our reality. The more trauma we experience–even through “fictional” media–the more we program our genes with the belief in trauma as normalcy.

So what should we watch? From TikTok to YouTube to OWN to CNN, there is a constant conflict between aspirational Black storytelling and Black Pain Porn. If we lived in a world in which Black joy was a dominant experience for People of African Descent, these negative stories wouldn’t do such harm. Because the human trafficking and loss of lives rampant in Season Three of Blood and Water is actually the desperately tragic reality so many African people face, it’s almost as hard to watch it as it is to ignore it. I appreciate that in such stories as Blood & Water and Queen Sugar, the protagonists often win over their antagonists, even if lives are lost in the process. But I just wonder when we will create and produce primarily stories that show us how to eliminate these wicked possibilities, rather than how to deal with them when they come up, as though they must always be part of our reality.

Some of us are realists, some utopians. Ultimately, we will watch what gives us what we need in the moment. But I hope that more of us seek and create storytelling that eliminates the trauma of our oppression and chooses to help us collectively visualize what it could actually be like to be free. Forever.

If you’re making such films, please connect with NOIR FEST.