Critic's Chair: Guy Somerset watches the Oscar winning short action film Two Distant Strangers and the near-flawless, Amazon Prime slave hunting series The Underground Railroad
I had the strangest dream this week. Does it mean anything? As Sigmund Freud was wont to say, probably.
I dreamt the darkest ever episode of Mad Men. In it, Don Draper is goaded by a mugger, who has grabbed Don’s pre-teen daughter Sally, into shooting him in the head after wrestling for the mugger’s gun. The episode goes on to explore Sally’s questioning of Don’s lie to police that he had no choice except to fire the gun, and of the witness statement in support of him by the taxi driver against whose car the struggle took place.
In the dream, the episode exposes the overarching story at the heart of Mad Men. It’s not Don’s journey towards the real final scene of the show, in which it is implied he goes on to create the I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing Coca-Cola commercial, as ambiguous a series conclusion as that other puzzler, the last episode of The Sopranos.
The ad – depending on your degree of cynicism and how much you buy into its vapid uplift and the inspiration for it – is either a redemptive end to, or the ultimate fag end of, Don’s emotional and spiritual d/evolution.
In my dream, however, Don’s killing of the mugger and the disillusionment it instils in Sally sets in motion a different overarching story of the show: that of Don’s deleterious impact on Sally and her subsequent life.
The dream has nothing to do with this week’s review – at least I don’t think it does – but I thought I would share it anyway. Why? As Freud was also wont to say, why not?
I do have some inkling as to where the dream might have come from.
Don is a middle-class white man in advertising, a profession where he lies for a living, so of course he is believed by police. Even in a dream.
Earlier in the week, I had been watching the Netflix trailer for Two Distant Strangers, which won the Academy Award for Best Live Short Action Film at this year’s Oscars. And then after the dream I watched it in full.
Two Distant Strangers is a parable about the waking dream and living nightmare of the Black American experience – the one that gave rise to the police killing of George Floyd and of so many others whose deaths are marked by the Black Lives Matter movement and in the closing credits of the film.
There is a touch of gallows humour to the opening credits, where we are told it is a Dirty Robber Presentation and one of the other production companies is Six Feet Over.
The style and mood of the film are further established by an early shot of a couple of books, one about David Bowie and the other James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.
Written by Travon Free and directed by him and Martin Desmond Roe, Two Distant Strangers stars Joey Bada$$ as a Black graphic designer stuck in a Groundhog Day loop where he repeatedly wakes up in the bed of a first date (Zaria Simone) and is killed by a white cop (Andrew Howard) whenever he leaves her apartment building to return to his own apartment and the dog waiting for him there.
The killing is brought about by different circumstances and happens in different ways – the first a Floyd-like choking – but it is never avoided.
Bada$$’s character refuses to accept his killing as his destiny, declaring: “It doesn’t matter how long it takes, or how many times it takes, one way or another I’m getting to my fucking dog.”
Inspiring words, but so far it has taken him 100 times with no different outcome, and the mournful irony of the song playing over the closing credits’ litany of lost Black people is hard to get past: The Way It Is by Bruce Hornby and the Range.
Two Distant Strangers joins a wave of other recent screen offerings that have had to shapeshift storytelling genres in order to capture Black American ‘reality’.
We’ve also had the warped take on superheroes of Watchmen and the revisionist horror of Lovecraft Country and Them.
Even The Underground Railroad, Amazon Prime Video’s big new 10-parter, has a magic realism element to augment its otherwise orthodox depiction of the slavery era, the psychic wound responsible for so much of the Black American experience that has followed.
And of course, as James Baldwin understood all too well, the Black American experience is inseparable from the white American experience, and vice versa. The knot can’t be untied.
Based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, The Underground Railroad literalises the idea of the underground railroad network of abolitionists and safe houses that helped runaway Black Americans escape Southern plantations and other sources of slavery in the mid-19th century. In Whitehead’s novel, and now in an amazing actualisation on screen by series creator and director Barry Jenkins, the railroad is indeed underground, with tracks, steam trains and stations.
Given the existential influence of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground on such pivotal Black American novels as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son, it’s a powerful literary conceit.
Jenkins – an Oscar winner for his 2016 movie, Moonlight, and critically acclaimed too for his 2018 follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk (another James Baldwin book) – cements his reputation with this ambitious and almost wholly successful adaptation.
It’s not for the fainthearted. The actors had an on-set counsellor to help them cope with the harrowing material and at times the viewer can’t help but wish there was one for them too. You come to read the ratings closely and brace yourself or ease up depending on whether it is “18+ High impact graphic violence, blood and gore, high impact coarse language”, “18+ Sadistic cruelty, offensive language, graphic violence”, mere “18+ Violence, cruelty” or in one merciful episode “16+ Drug use”.
It’s kind of Amazon Prime Video to put the series on at the same time as Neon’s fourth season of The Handmaid’s Tale. Another show for which the viewer needs a counsellor.
The Underground Railroad follows escapees Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu) and Caesar Garner (Aaron Pierre) as they flee the plantation where they are slaves and are pursued by slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) and his sinister Black child assistant Homer (Chase W Dillon).
As they encounter different stations and the states in which they are, they also encounter different white thinking towards slavery and Black Americans, but even the most benign-seeming can prove (self) deceptive.
Jenkins is in almost complete control of his difficult material and sensitive to its requirements – searing one moment, softer another. He doesn’t flinch visually (not even from a Black man being burned alive by his ‘owner’), but knows when to let words do all the talking about horrific acts.
It’s a visually stunning show, from the brimstone and fire of a burning Tennessee to the painterly beauty of golden and ironically Edenic plantation landscapes, the camera moving fluidly and cinematically around all in its path.
Jenkins’ use of sound is perfectly judged too, weaving in composer Nicholas Britell’s tremendous score when necessary, but knowing when to leave us with silence, or with the fine detail of the ambient noises around the characters, or simply with what they are saying or doing.
To play those characters, he has gifted himself a cast of astonishing range and ability. Mbedu and Edgerton, a South African and Australian respectively, excel as the show leads: she suffused with by turns sorrow, terror and trauma, with occasional glints of joy and underlying charm; he slowly adding up to more than the black-clothed, cold-hearted sadist we first see, thanks in no small part to a back-story episode involving his father, played by Peter Mullan. (As the show goes on, Edgerton increasingly comes to sound like and resemble Mullan, even in their shared darting of the eyes.) At one point, Cora says to Ridgeway: “You carry more of the past with you than anyone I ever knew. I don’t know how anyone could be carrying that weight on their spirit.”
Dillon as Homer could be the most frightening child presence on screen since Damien Thorn in The Omen, although as much as Homer is Ridgeway’s accomplice he is another of his victims too, perhaps the most perversely damaged one.
If the show has any flaw, it is that, Homer aside, its Black characters are so uniformly virtuous and not permitted their full dimensionality. They are beautiful souls suffering and/or surviving. Nothing worse. And nothing more. James Baldwin understood this problem, writing in his essay Everybody’s Protest Novel about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, excoriating Stowe for the lack of complexity in her Black characters. The characters in The Underground Railroad are more complex than Stowe’s, but they could be more so still: sinners as well as saints.
That this doesn’t derail the show is down to everything else it has going for it and all it has to teach us about how the harms it dramatises have rippled through American history, at times swelling to tsunami-like proportions, but never not there.
Another Cora line: “Makes you wonder if there ain’t no places to escape to, only places to run from.”
Two Distant Strangers (Netflix); The Underground Railroad (Amazon Prime Video).
