Nickel Boys
“The language is evolving, and the form needs to evolve with culture's reflexive relationship with the content”. - Ramell Ross
From the time I’m writing this, Ramell Ross’s Nickel Boys adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name has begun its wide distribution. Bluntly, the film is about the systemic and abusive process of demeaning and commodifying those with darker skin. It’s about the trauma that lingers from those decades after it, with the lucky bunch who made it out of that situation alive and the conflict of reclaiming your life and keeping your peace. It’s about the reclamation of a black person's image, both in the practice of making the film and in the text. It’s a fictional documentation of real-life horror. An intersection of facts, subjectivity, identity, and emotional, purposeful, precise storytelling.
“How many more Nickels are there?” -Audience speaker in a live Q&A with Ross
Ross created the film to be in direct dialogue with the viewer with more choices than just the filming style (which I won’t spoil here for even the slimmest chance someone wanted to go in blind). We understand the characters through more than just the writing. We feel what they feel, what they prioritize, or how they absorb the life and history that is changing around them. Violence against marginalized groups is purposefully entirely left out of the frame but never forgotten. We are never under the impression that sick things are not happening in Nickel, but the story is about its character's reaction to this white oppression not the concept of white oppression itself. These black lives are the priority of the story and commentary on how their image and bodies are used is made by being candid about how it is happening to them. And that it did happen to them.
Ross had no answer to the last written quote but rather raised a question. “How many do we not know about?”. This is about the film's main location, a boy's correctional facility an hour out from Tallahassee. One that functionally enslaved young boys and put them in the ground if they fell out of the arbitrary favor of the state-sanctioned staff that kept them in a prison without fences.
Nickel Boys fights against the white gaze and our preconceived notions of how oppression is expressed in art. It speaks for itself, and in general, there’s nothing a review can do to supplement that experience- but that’s particularly true for this film. I implore the reader to see and support this, it’s timely and important, and more of it is needed-
There is nothing like Nickel Boys, there should never have had to be.
Writer: Tony Molina
Artist: N/A image courtesy of MGM
