Aisha Harris

There’s a scene in “Superbad” in which Seth (Jonah Hill, in his breakout role) admits to his best friend Evan (Michael Cera) that when he was younger, he had an obsessive habit of drawing penises everywhere. In flashback, a classmate discovers one of those pictures and tells the principal — and Seth is forced to see a therapist, forbidden from eating phallic-shaped foods.

“You know how many foods are shaped like [expletive]?” Seth asks. “The best kinds.”

Or it could have been the uber-nerdy Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) showing off his fake ID card, and a flabbergasted Seth and Evan dissing his choice to go by the singular name McLovin. “What, are you trying to be an Irish R&amp;B; singer?” Evan groans.

Whatever it was, after I saw “Superbad” in the summer of 2007, when I was 19, it promptly became a favorite of mine. I bought the two-disc “unrated” special edition DVD. I quoted the movie in casual conversation. (“Samesies!” “I’m going to be there, for sure. Full throttle. ‘Charlie’s Angels 2.’ ”) At a time when Facebook was little more than a bulletin board on which to declaratively pin the facets of your personality through the groups you joined and the pages you liked, “Superbad” earned its place on my profile.

Every now and then I would return to the movie, and it would be (mostly) like old times. At some point I was troubled by the casual, unchecked homophobia peppered throughout the dialogue, an unfortunately all-too-common side effect of revisiting the things you loved in your more oblivious youth.

During a more recent rewatch a couple of years ago — it might have been around the dawn of the #MeToo era — I was hyper-aware of the inherent bro-iness of the film: The piggish jokes the police officers, played by Bill Hader and Seth Rogen, make about Hader’s character’s wife (and ex-wife), whom we never see on screen. Seth’s horndog remarks about women’s body parts that suggest both fixation and revulsion. (“Have you ever seen a vagina by itself? Not for me.”) The woman Seth dances with at a house party, credited as Period Blood Girl. The flatness of Jules (Emma Stone) and Becca (Martha MacIsaac), who exist solely as the objects of Seth’s and Evan’s affections.

Yet “Superbad” was far from ruined for me. It’s still fun, and what I probably appreciate the most now is the film’s surprisingly progressive (for its time) view that taking sexual advantage of drunk women is really not OK. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve also reexamined why I was drawn to certain things when I was younger. When it came to “Superbad,” it was all about optics.

At some point as a kid, I unconsciously inherited the belief that to be a girl was to be less than and thus undesirable. Classmates mocked throwing/kicking/running “like a girl” in gym class. The boys and men in the movies and TV shows I consumed were usually the protagonists, the ones the audience is supposed to identify with from beginning to end. Girls and women were often outnumbered and peripheral, siloed as the love interest. For every “Never Been Kissed” or “Love and Basketball,” there’s a seemingly infinite supply of “American Pie.”

And so I attempted to identify with the male heroes of these stories, perhaps to the point of overcorrection. I couldn’t feign even a passing interest in ESPN, but when I became obsessed with all things movie-related around middle school, it was easy enough to channel my own version of the “cool girl” (as Gillian Flynn so astutely defined women who assume the identity of a demeaning male fantasy in “Gone Girl”) into film nerd-dom.

When you’re an impressionable teen entering that vast world, you’ll look to devour the canons and seek out the so-called authoritative voices on film. The “definitive” lists of the “best” and “must-see” movies. You might date guys who insist Wes Anderson is God and Quentin Tarantino’s gender and race politics aren’t up for debate. Your film history class may only devote one session to female filmmakers for the entire semester.

And if you’re a woman or a person of color, you may not immediately notice that hardly any of the movies or filmmakers in these collections speak directly to your existence because the erasure is so deeply woven into the fabric of pop culture that it seems unremarkable. You’re just reveling in your obsession.

I saw — and still do, to some extent — one’s movie preferences as a deliberate form of sartorial display. As much as I enjoyed “Superbad,” there was also a bit of performance to my enjoyment. It was a way for me to both conform and stand out as a black girl who could love a raunchy, cartoonishly violent buddy comedy relying heavily on penis jokes. Putting, say, “Mean Girls” on my dating profile when I was in my early 20s was to be expected. (Based on its cross-cultural popularity in the mid-’00s, “Anchorman” was also predictable.) “Superbad” was a “cool” and edgy choice; it showed men that I was chill. Or so my regrettable thinking went.

I look back on that version of myself now and cringe. Earlier this summer, I caught up with “Booksmart,” Olivia Wilde’s directing debut about two overachieving high school girls determined to break out of their self-imposed social segregation and party with their classmates (and maybe hook up with their crushes) before graduation. As critics have noted, it shares much of its DNA with “Superbad” — Jonah Hill’s younger sister Beanie Feldstein even plays one of the leads.

I couldn’t help but feel sad that I didn’t have more films like “Booksmart” when I was actually a teenager, movies that centered girls’ perspectives and friendships but still had that spike of raunchiness and subversion. “Superbad” was surrounded by cohorts — all of the Frat Pack films, “Napoleon Dynamite.” Yet even in 2019, “Booksmart” feels like an outlier in the same way “Bridesmaids” did in 2011 and “Girls Trip” did just a couple of years ago. The number of women with leading roles in major film releases remains abysmal, and were I younger now, I might still buy into the lie that women’s stories just aren’t that important. I don’t blame my younger self, though. I’ve grown wiser now — Hollywood could stand to catch up.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/arts/superbad-me.html" id="51041958-2a1c-3942-a903-0df1316df89b">The New York Times</a>.

Maybe it was the ridiculously detailed penis doodles that hooked me.

'Superbad' & Me

But how much (non-singing) Queen Bey should audiences expect to hear in this reenvisioning of Pride Rock?

Though the new film is 30 minutes longer than its predecessor (118 minutes in 2019 vs. 88 minutes in 1994) and features additional scenes for the adult Nala, Beyoncé’s screen time is fairly comparable to Moira Kelly’s in the original.

At my screening of the remake, I tallied 35 lines spoken by her character — interpreting a “line” as being any dialogue a character speaks before another character follows up, whether it’s one word or multiple sentences. Some of those lines are simply the exclamation “Simba!” I tallied 46 lines for Kelly, several of which are also “Simba!”

Beyoncé’s musical contributions to the remake vastly outweigh that of Kelly, who did not sing in the original. (Singer-songwriter Sally Dworsky performed Nala’s part in the first “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”) Besides her duet with Donald Glover (who plays the adult Simba), Beyoncé gets an additional musical moment — her own “Gonna Fly Now” sequence in the form of the chorus of the new song “Spirit,” which plays over Simba’s triumphant gallop across the desert. Both songs feature Beyoncé’s signature riffing.

For some, the ratio of promotion to actual screen time may disappoint. But hey, it’s still Beyoncé, playing a Lion queen — to her most zealous of worshippers, none of us are worthy.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/movies/beyonce-lion-king.html" id="2e53278d-bc22-3751-a6d3-023611876260">The New York Times</a>.

To hear Beyoncé speak is such a rare occurrence that any new instance of it, no matter how fleeting, feels special, like catching a glimpse of a shooting star. So naturally, her involvement with Disney’s remake of “The Lion King”— she voices the adult Nala and created a companion album featuring new music inspired by the movie — has dominated the film’s promotional tour, complete with a meeting between Queen Bey and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, at the British premiere.

How Much Beyoncé Does 'The Lion King' Have?

Unlike almost everything else Khaled pronounces in his music and on social media, the statement hardly felt hyperbolic: This was a career-defining performance for Beyoncé, who became the first black woman to headline the festival since its debut in 1999. For nearly two hours, she and an astounding cast of dancers, singers and musicians wove together a beloved, unparalleled collection of hits and deep cuts, interpolated with music from the “Dirty South” and civil rights activists like Nina Simone — served against the visuals and iconography of historically black colleges and universities.

A year later, as the second weekend of Coachella approaches, the memory of Beychella looms large; no accumulation of star-studded guest appearances or secret movie reveals in the desert from this year’s lineup can gin up the same excitement. Which is what makes the Wednesday release of the Netflix documentary “Homecoming” — accompanied by the surprise release of a corresponding live album — even more of a coup. She may not be headlining this year, but we’re all going to pay attention and bow down anyway.

At almost 140 minutes, the majority of “Homecoming” is what many viewers have already seen (and, perhaps, seen again and again) this time through a greater variety of angles and Instagram-like filters. The performances from the first and second weekends (denoted by the differing color schemes and costume choices) are seamlessly intercut; this technique is particularly effective early on, when the performer’s outfits shift from all-yellow (Weekend 1) to all-pink (Weekend 2), just as “Crazy in Love” drops an infectious sample of Juvenile’s “Back That Thang Up.”

The “intimate” and “candid” moments touted by Netflix are brief in comparison, appearing between long, uninterrupted musical segments from the show. Those moments will be enough to satisfy the overzealous Beyhive (though what Beyoncé-related content doesn’t satisfy the Beyhive?) and probably more casual fans and admirers, too. Montages reveal footage of the rehearsal process; performers practice, smile, make funny faces at the camera, gush about the experience of working on such a momentous event with perhaps the biggest star in the world. There are cameos from Jay-Z and their eldest daughter, Blue Ivy, who sings “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

There’s Beyoncé, in voice-over (which is mostly how we hear her voice in these segments), talking about trying to balance family and getting in shape after the birth of her twins. (Her diet, which she describes as no bread, carbs, dairy, sugar, meat, fish or alcohol ... sounds extreme and not at all fun.)

As with the film “Lemonade,” which included a Malcolm X audio clip, the singer puts herself directly in conversation with voices from black American history. The sage words of Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, W.E.B. DuBois, Toni Morrison and others sprinkle “Homecoming” with inspiration. The overarching theme here is ostensibly education: Beyoncé schools her audience on the beauty of black culture, yes, but also on the importance of preserving and encouraging the legacy of historically black colleges and universities, which she stresses throughout the film.

Above all, “Homecoming” is about Beyoncé, who served as the writer, director and an executive producer, asserting, yet again, her power and control. In part because of preconceived notions about what it means to be a pop star and a black woman, questions around her claims to authorship of her own music and image have always lingered closely behind. It doesn’t help that she has usually chosen to let the work speak for itself, avoiding interviews that rise above surface-level promotion — not a bad thing for an artist to do, to be sure, though it allows plenty of room for doubters to deny her credit.

“Homecoming” reinforces the idea that Beyoncé the performer is also Beyoncé the creator. In voice-over, she speaks of the weeks spent in preparation. In footage, she oversees the music and dance rehearsals and advises on the visuals. At one point, she politely but forcefully communicates to her team that she’s not getting what she wants — it’s “janky” and “not translating,” she says, bluntly.

It’s Beyoncé exactly as she wants us to see her and has always wanted us to see her: as a perfectionist, and as the hardest-working person in show business. “I definitely pushed myself further than I knew I could,” she says, as we watch footage of her sweating it out profusely.

“I will never, never push myself that far again,” she adds, with a chuckle: a chuckle that suggests Beyoncé — who, two decades in, keeps finding new ways to set the bar higher — can’t convince even herself that such a thing could possibly be true.

‘Homecoming' is not rated. Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/movies/beyonce-homecoming-review.html" id="f584feb1-b693-3786-afe4-2de1c0e3f6e7">The New York Times</a>.

About midway through Beyoncé’s performance at Coachella last year, the booming, disembodied voice of motivational ad-libber DJ Khaled proclaimed that, henceforth, the music festival would be known as “Beychella.”

This Teacher Takes You to School

In Jordan Peele’s horror hit “Us,” Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), a wife and mother of two, is haunted. During a visit to the Santa Cruz, California, pier as a child, she was briefly separated from her parents and stumbled upon an eerie funhouse — and her doppelgänger, Red. She hasn’t been the same since.

Now, as an adult returning to that same beach on a vacation with her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), and two children, her fears have returned. Stirred by the memories of that fateful night, Adelaide confesses what she saw to Gabe. “My whole life I feel like she’s still coming for me,” she reveals. A disbelieving Gabe cracks a joke, but moments later, Red (also Nyong’o) and the counterparts of the entire family descend on the house, determined to claim what they believe is rightfully theirs.

“Us” is awash in cultural references and cinematic nods, but perhaps more than anything else, it feels like “The Twilight Zone,” the classic TV series that Peele is reviving next month on CBS All Access. In creating Adelaide and Red, Peele has reimagined a classic character and trope found in that anthology series: the protagonist forced to reckon with another version of him or herself, and the desperate need to be someone else.

The twisted path that connects “The Twilight Zone” to “Us” leads most readily to the Season 1 episode “Mirror Image,” which Peele has cited as an inspiration for his film. In it, Millicent Barnes (Vera Miles) waits at a bus station, and realizes she has crossed paths with her doppelgänger. Only she can see the curious figure; no one else at the depot believes Millicent’s claim, and she slowly begins to unravel.

Millicent explains to Paul, a man waiting for the same bus, that there must be a parallel universe and each person has a counterpart. For unknown reasons, the two worlds can converge, allowing the counterparts to enter our realm. “In order to survive,” she continues, “it has to take over — replace us, move us out, so that it can live.”

The doppelgängers in “Us” aren’t explicitly described as coming from parallel universes, but Red calls her connection to Adelaide a “tethering,” an unshakable bond — and the movie makes it clear that once the two meet for the second time, as adults, they cannot coexist peacefully.

A version of this conflict between selves plays out heavily across many other “Twilight Zone” episodes. Season 5’s “Spur of the Moment,” for instance, follows Anne, an 18-year-old engaged to a stuffy but father-approved investment banker, who encounters an older woman in black while horseback riding. The woman, also on horseback, screams at Anne and chases her before losing ground.

By the end of the episode, it’s revealed that the miserable woman is Anne 25 years later, trying to stop her younger self from making the mistake of marrying the wrong man.

And in “Nightmare as a Child,” a young girl suddenly appears outside Helen’s apartment door; the girl turns out to be her younger self, there to remind her of a long-buried trauma that occurred when she was a child, and to warn her about how it will come back to haunt her in the present.

Throughout “Us,” Adelaide shares with those “Twilight Zone” characters and others a psychological unraveling — there are flashbacks to her childhood soon after the hall-of-mirrors encounter, in which she overhears her parents confessing their worries about her to a therapist. At the beach, Adelaide’s eyes dart uncomfortably as she tries to maintain a dull conversation with the vapid Kitty (Elisabeth Moss), and she has an anxiety attack when she briefly loses track of her son.

On the other side of the mirror, Red’s motivations echo facets of “Twilight Zone” conundrums, too. There are traces of the Tethered in “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”; the Major — like Red — is not content to remain trapped in a giant cylinder, and is desperate to rally the others to escape. “The After Hours,” in which department-store mannequins institute a rotation where one of them gets to live along humans for a month at a time, gets at the same how-the-other-half-lives ideas as “Us.”

Both episodes approach those yearnings for a better life in a decidedly more elegiac fashion than “Us,” which uses violence to demonstrate the overthrow of the ruling class. When Red and the others attack Adelaide’s family at the house, she pointedly describes Adelaide as having a shadow that lives a much less cushy lifestyle. While Adelaide had celebrated happy Christmases, married a “handsome prince” and had lovely children, Red’s existence was the opposite: cold, empty, sad.

Later, in their final showdown, Red expresses even more bitterness. “You could have taken me with you,” she grunts, referring to their first encounter in the funhouse.

But Adelaide didn’t. Instead, as we learn in the movie’s twist, Adelaide is actually Red, and Red is actually Adelaide — just as Millicent is ultimately replaced by her doppelgänger in “Mirror Image.” (Paul has her arrested for her erratic behavior.) This reveal brings more questions than answers: What are we to make of the fact that Red swapped places with Adelaide, and we’ve been unwittingly rooting for her all along? Is there a class below the Tethered, waiting to overthrow them next? Are any of the characters, whether Tethered or not, actually good?

Whatever the conclusion, it’s meant to unsettle us, like the best of Serling’s “Twilight Zone” episodes. As Peele told The New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff, “I love human beings as the monster, as the horror.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/arts/television/us-twilight-zone-mirror-image.html" id="5aa40ed3-7a3c-3d18-a88b-2fd646036316">The New York Times</a>.

Major spoilers for “Us” (and some decades-old episodes of “The Twilight Zone”) are ahead.

'Us' Reflects a Mirror Image of 'The Twilight Zone'

“Surviving R. Kelly,” the six-part documentary about R&amp;B; singer Robert Kelly, who has faced accusations of child and sexual abuse for decades, underscores the theme of accountability — not just of Kelly or his many personal enablers, but of us all.

Clinical psychologists, music journalists, activists and others who are interviewed in this Lifetime series echo one another in their explanations of how the musician has managed to escape severe repercussions, legally and professionally, for decades.

Chief among them: the shielding powers of money and fame; society’s indifference toward the suffering of black and brown girls and women; a perception by some that the attacks on any black male celebrity, no matter how credible, are part of a larger racist conspiracy.

Another key factor: Laughter. Two cultural touchstones that helped shape the public’s perception of the Kelly accusations are only mentioned in passing in “Surviving R. Kelly.” But “(I Wanna) Pee on You,” a 2003 sketch from “Chappelle’s Show,” and a 2005 episode of the animated series “The Boondocks” titled “The Trial of R. Kelly,” embody many of the points made in the documentary.

Revisiting them in light of “Surviving R. Kelly” demonstrates how, for years, those who laughed at Kelly were able to ignore the charges against him. It also emphasizes how much the cultural climate has shifted in the era of #MuteRKelly protests, and how much it has stayed the same. (Kelly, who was acquitted in 2008 on charges of child pornography, has denied all allegations related to abuse of and sex with minors.)

In his sketch, comedian Dave Chappelle took a straightforwardly silly approach to the allegations concerning a sex tape that appeared to show Kelly urinating on a 14-year-old girl. Dressed not unlike Kelly, in a pair of dark sunglasses and a bandanna, Chappelle stars in a music video in which he sings about wanting to urinate on the object of his affections. (“Your body is a porta potty.”) The melody aligns closely with Kelly’s song “Feelin’ on Yo Booty,” which is itself a rather preposterous song. (Kelly finds several comical ways to ad-lib the word “booty” at the end.)

The set is bare bones in comparison to a typical Kelly video; most of it takes place in front of a long white curtain, as Chappelle sprays a garden hose — which is very explicitly labeled “R. Kelly’s urine” — on an ensemble of gyrating women.

That’s an important distinction to make: The actors here are very obviously adult women, not pubescent girls. “(I Wanna) Pee on You” compartmentalizes the Kelly allegations and completely divorces it from its insidious facts; it’s easier (and safer) to poke fun at a grown man’s fetish than to wrestle with claims that he performed his fetish on a minor. (The Detroit Free Press reported that Chappelle, among other celebrities, declined to be interviewed for the documentary series.)

“The Trial of R. Kelly” is the second episode of “The Boondocks,” which centered on the misadventures of the socially conscious 10-year-old Huey and his more brazen, politically incorrect little brother Riley, both voiced by Regina King. Creator Aaron McGruder pulled no punches. With the singer’s highly publicized trial happening close to home, the boys head to Chicago to witness the circus, Riley carrying a “Free R. Kelly” sign.

When they encounter their nerdy neighbor Tom DuBois, who is representing the prosecution against Kelly, Riley lets loose an impassioned — and ridiculous — defense of the singer. Tom, shocked, counters that the alleged victim, depicted in the episode with pigtails and knee socks, is a little girl. Riley is having none of it. “I’ve seen that girl! She ain’t little; I’m little. Gary Coleman’s little.”

He argues for “personal responsibility,” suggests that the girl should have just moved out of the way of Kelly’s urine and adds that he doesn’t want to “miss out on the next R. Kelly album,” should Kelly be sent to jail.

“Boondocks” depicts Riley’s rhetoric as poisonous and the trial as a scathing farce. In the episode, Kelly’s white defense lawyer jumps through absurdist hoops to prove to the predominantly black jury that Kelly is a victim of racism. (He presents Kelly’s NAACP Image Award as evidence, and tells the jury, “They don’t want R. Kelly to be free because they don’t want you to be free!”)

By the end of the episode, Huey, the moral voice of reason, is standing up in the courtroom, admonishing the jurors and everyone else in attendance for giving Kelly a pass because he made good music. Every black person who is arrested “ain’t Nelson Mandela,” he scolds. Later, in voice-over narration, he laments that “ignorance won” and he is “vexed at my people.”

As a scathing critique of Kelly’s deeds and black people’s complicity, unlike the Chappelle sketch, this episode still feels fresh, mostly. (Just look at comments on social media blaming the alleged victims in response to “Surviving R. Kelly.”) But McGruder’s stark delineation between Kelly’s supporters and dissenters plays into ugly stereotypes around class: Outside the courtroom, a loud, overweight black woman snacks on fried chicken while voicing her love for the singer; and three male protesters in suits are referred to by a news reporter as “scholars, activists, pillars of the African-American community.” (One of them looks just like Cornel West.)

In reality, black people of all demographics have supported Kelly. As noted in the documentary, the same day he pleaded not guilty to the child sex tape charge, he went to a church event in Chicago, where he performed alongside children, and was embraced by the congregation there.

McGruder overstepped the theme of “we are all responsible” by including the 14-year-old victim in his courtroom scene. (In the real trial, the girl identified as the alleged victim denied it was her in the video.)

In the episode, the girl’s testimony echoes Riley’s earlier argument to Tom: “If I didn’t want to get peed on, I’d just move out the way,” she says with an attitude. It’s hard to imagine this episode airing today and not inspiring backlash. It’s also entirely possible that McGruder wouldn’t make this same creative choice today.

But back when Kelly was still a consistent hit maker, the Chappelle sketch and this “Boondocks” episode were really funny. I can recall laughing about the skit with my friends in college, gleefully reciting lines like “Drip drip drip, pee on you.” I’m sure I chuckled the first time I heard the sassy black victim proclaim she’s not a victim on the stand. Even before the allegations, which I didn’t pay much attention to at the time, I was never much of a Kelly fan — I imagine “I Believe I Can Fly” is playing on loop somewhere in The Bad Place — but I did find him to be an excellent punch line for a long time.

Now, however, it’s impossible for me to watch those episodes and not think about the magnitude of everything Kelly has been accused of.

In the fourth episode of “Surviving R. Kelly,” music journalist Ann Powers suggests that “Trapped in the Closet,” Kelly’s bonkers episodic soap operetta, was a strategic career move. “I think at some point he probably figured out that playing sex for laughs was a way that he could continue to avoid absolute condemnation for what he might have been doing behind the scenes,” she observes.

It’s hard to argue with this point — even now some have found humor in “Surviving R. Kelly,” roasting him for his rumored inability to read or write. Looking back on “Chappelle’s Show” and “Boondocks,” it’s clear that there was more than one way to let Kelly off the hook, and comedy was one of them. Even if I was never defending Kelly, I was still laughing at him, and effectively ignoring his alleged transgressions.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/arts/television/surviving-r-kelly-dave-chappelle.html" id="f06030d8-88ca-3fc0-a6a4-aeb21b2279c2">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook)

Laughing at R. Kelly at Our Own Expense

The first time we see Victoria Rogers in Barry Jenkins’ “If Beale Street Could Talk,” she stands solemn and alone on what appears to be a rooftop against the backdrop of a dusky sky. She doesn’t say a word. Instead, in voice-over, the film’s protagonist, Tish, introduces Victoria as the woman who has declared she was sexually assaulted by Fonny, Tish’s fiancé.

The scene doesn’t vilify Victoria, but it does present her in direct opposition to the movie’s adoring portrait of Tish and Fonny: After a beautiful, tender flashback to the couple’s first night together, a powerful expression of mutual love, there’s an abrupt tonal shift to Victoria’s scene, with composer Nicholas Britell’s haunting score evoking a sense of ominousness and sorrow underneath her image. Tish’s voice-over is punctuated with pointed resentment toward Victoria.

She’s resentful because Fonny could not have been the assailant. As Tish explains, Fonny was at home with her and a friend at the time, far from Victoria’s attack. And a white police officer — who has had a menacing encounter with Fonny — seems to have coerced Victoria into the accusation. Officer Bell even claims to have seen Fonny running away.

The pervasiveness of injustice is a persistent theme of “Beale Street,” and it held firmly in my mind as I read, for the first time, the James Baldwin novel on which the movie is based, and, later, while I watched Jenkins’ adaptation, twice. The couple and their families pay dearly for the false accusation, and it wasn’t hard for me to connect their sense of injustice to the long and sordid history of black men falsely accused of rape (and often paying for it with their lives). It lingers right there in the text.

Yet the role that Victoria, a Puerto Rican mother of three, plays in “Beale Street” complicates that familiar historical narrative in the present moment, especially when our culture is more attuned to the pain and anguish of rape victims’ accounts than it was when Baldwin published “Beale Street” nearly 45 years ago.

Though Victoria’s accusation roils Tish (KiKi Layne), Fonny (Stephan James) and their families, who sacrifice everything to ensure he has the best legal counsel possible, Victoria is written and portrayed (by Emily Rios) sympathetically. As I wrestled with “Beale Street,” the many accounts from assault victims that have made headlines in the last year weren’t far from my mind, right alongside the story’s clear indictment of a legal system that upholds racism by any means necessary.

In a later scene, Victoria is filtered through a softer lens. At a restaurant with her sister, Ernestine (Teyonah Parris), Tish wonders if Victoria was actually raped. Ernestine believes she was, but also believes that Victoria has “no idea who did it.” Fonny was “presented to her as the rapist, and it was easier for her to say yes than relive the whole thing,” Ernestine continues, echoing Baldwin’s words in the novel.

This gets at the trauma of sexual assault and how it can manifest itself in far-reaching ways, while placing most of the blame on Officer Bell, who clearly has a vendetta against Fonny. Notably, Jenkins leaves out a line from the book that suggests a slightly more cynical read on Victoria: “Of course, she’s lying,” says Baldwin’s Ernestine. “We know she’s lying. But — she’s — not — lying. As far as she’s concerned, Fonny raped her and that’s that.” Perhaps Jenkins wanted to avoid such charged language at a time when victims still struggle to be believed.

It’s not until Victoria finally gets to speak for herself in the movie’s third act that I felt the full weight of her circumstances. Tish’s mother, Sharon (Regina King), has gone to Puerto Rico to try to convince Victoria to retract her accusation; it is a “journey to save Fonny’s soul,” as Tish puts it.

That journey comes with a price, and you can sense that Sharon knows this deeply, as Jenkins’ long, ruminating shot of her putting on her wig and makeup implies. In the courtyard of Victoria’s home, Sharon treads carefully at first, gently trying to find common ground with Victoria, woman to woman (or as mothers, or as a mother talking to her daughter). As Victoria takes a step away, visibly uncomfortable, Sharon, her desperation bubbling to the surface, moves with her: “You pay for the lies you tell,” she says to Victoria. Sharon insists Victoria never saw Fonny the night of her assault; she knows this because she’s “known him all my life.”

And finally, she touches the cross hanging from Victoria’s neck: “Daughter, in the name of God.”

Victoria is resistant, clearly re-traumatized by having to remember that night all over again. Wary at first, she is adamant that she did see Fonny during the attack. As Sharon holds up a photo of Fonny and Tish, Victoria looks at it, then back at Sharon, with contempt: “One thing I can tell, lady, you ain’t never been raped,” she spews.

“They took me down there,” Victoria continues, “and they told me to pick him out.” At this point, her voice becomes a bit more high-pitched and cracked. “So that’s what I did. I picked him out.”

The sequence unfolds close to the way Baldwin originally wrote it, with several lines lifted directly from the book. But it takes on an added significance that Baldwin couldn’t have anticipated. While the story primes us to side with Sharon and her family, I found it painful to hear her echo statements we’ve heard from men and women coming to the defense of their friends, partners or family members who have been accused of sexual assault.

Even though it’s clear Fonny didn’t do it — and most of those real-life cases involved people who were previously acquainted with one another — Sharon’s suggestion that he’s innocent because she’s “known him all my life” feels like an unintentional denial of Victoria’s experience as a victim.

And yet Sharon is in an impossible situation, compounded by the fact that Fonny is black, and their family is not wealthy. To reach out to Victoria is the only hope Fonny has left.

In an essay for The Nation published a few years before “Beale Street,” Baldwin assessed systemic racism in the workforce, law enforcement and education in the United States. He described instances of police brutality against blacks and Puerto Ricans in his birthplace, Harlem; textbooks “controlled by the Southern oligarchy”; and the fact that people of color were “virtually the only people pushing trucks in the garment center.” He noted, “None of these things (I would say) could possibly be done without the consent, in fact, of the government.”

This is the conundrum of “Beale Street” — for Baldwin, nothing is unrelated. Fonny is in jail because a white man harassed Tish at the market and he defended her against the man’s advances, only to come to the attention of Officer Bell. Fonny is in jail because a woman has been raped, and Officer Bell, seeing this woman as the perfect vessel to enact retaliation upon Fonny, pins the crime on him. Fonny is in jail because the woman has left the city, most likely whisked away with the help of the prosecutor’s office, so that his trial can be postponed, and eventually lost and forgotten in the blur of the city’s many dubious cases against black people. Fonny is in jail because a system of laws wields and upholds racism.

All the central characters, including Victoria, suffer for it. At the conclusion of that scene between Victoria and Sharon, Victoria breaks down screaming and is helped away by neighbors. Sharon is left alone in the courtyard, still holding the picture of Fonny and Tish; she buries her head in her hands. King and Rios play the scene movingly, conveying the push and pull of a tense exchange in which it’s clear that no matter what the outcome, both women will end with their spirits broken. It was the most difficult moment for me to endure as both reader and viewer.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/movies/if-beale-street-could-talk-metoo.html" id="3fafca6c-bd69-37c5-a48b-19c4cec7588a">The New York Times</a>.

How #MeToo Changes 'If Beale Street Could Talk'

<h1>In Showtime’s new crime drama “City on a Hill,” Jackie Rohr is a cocaine-snorting, corrupt and racist FBI veteran who longs for the days when the “bad men” were in power, and Decourcy Ward is a principled new assistant district attorney from Brooklyn, determined to “rip out the [expletive] up machinery” in 1990s Boston.</h1>

The characters — played with flamboyant vigor by Kevin Bacon and simmering fortitude by Aldis Hodge — shouldn’t like each other, or even be able to work together. And for much of the pilot episode, they don’t.

But one morning last April, as Bacon and Hodge filmed a scene for a later episode in Decourcy’s office — actually a set at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn — the mood was different. The characters were on good terms, maybe even kind of pals.

Decourcy shared his uneaten eggs with Jackie. (In between takes, Bacon joked about being too full to partake in the handsomely stocked craft services.) Both sported shiners on their faces but they didn’t give them to each other; Decourcy’s came from a confrontation with a church minister, Jackie’s from an “alcohol-induced haymaker” at the VFW. When their easy chatter was interrupted by a distressing call Jackie received on his period-appropriate oversized mobile phone, Decourcy expressed concern and moral support.

Decourcy and Jackie “don’t trust each other, but kind of need each other,” Hodge said later during a phone interview. “They both represent two sides of the same coin. One is a dark looking into the light, one is a light looking into the dark.”

That could be the tagline of “City on a Hill,” which takes place during a time when crime rates and racial tensions in Boston were exceedingly high until a coalition of community groups developed an anti-violence mission that would prove successful in the late ’90s.

The show was created by the relatively unknown writer (and Boston native) Chuck MacLean, but it sports an impressive pedigree of Hollywood veterans, including the executive producers Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Barry Levinson. It’s a sprawling ensemble piece that’s part procedural and part machismo-fueled interracial buddy tale: Decourcy and Jackie are brought together through their mutual interest in taking on a family of armored car robbers in Charlestown led by Frankie Ryan (Jonathan Tucker). By the end of the pilot, they’re swapping personal stories and strategizing how to build a potentially career-defining case over drinks in a bar.

Their dynamic may call to mind Tibbs and Gillespie or Murtaugh and Riggs, but the show’s origins lie in “The Town,” the 2010 crime thriller Affleck co-wrote, directed and starred in, which also centered on criminals in the working-class, heavily Irish Charlestown neighborhood.

Affleck was inspired to develop “City on a Hill,” he wrote in an email, after “doing so much research for ‘The Town’ and not being able to tell the scope and scale of the story the research yielded.” The series offers a more expansive means “to explore the city and in particular what was going on politically, socioeconomically, racially and culturally at the time I kind of came of age there,” he wrote.

Affleck tapped MacLean, a self-described “bum from Quincy, Mass.” with an unmistakable accent to match, who had worked with Affleck’s brother, Casey, on a script for a movie about the Boston Strangler that never got made. The veteran writer and producer Tom Fontana, who specializes in character-driven dramas set in distinct environments (“St. Elsewhere,” “Homicide: Life on the Streets,” “Oz”), was impressed by the pilot and came on as the showrunner and an executive producer after “City on a Hill” was picked up by Showtime.

While this high-wattage project is MacLean’s first foray into TV, his fascination with Boston history — his home in Los Angeles contains “wall-to-wall” crime and newspaper memorabilia stretching back to the 1930s — made him a good fit for Affleck’s vision.

“I didn’t want to spend five years talking about bank robbers and I don’t think he did either,” MacLean said. “So we started talking about the different things that were going on in Boston in the early ’90s.”

A lot was going on. The city was plagued by violent crime and racial tension, generating plenty of headlines that the series occasionally rips from, à la “Law &amp; Order.”

It begins by citing the notorious case of Charles Stuart, a white Bostonian who in 1989 claimed that a black gunman attacked him and killed his pregnant wife. More than two months passed — during which the police went on a manhunt and Stuart eventually identified someone as the attacker from a lineup — before Stuart’s story fell apart. His brother Matthew went to the police and outed him as the real killer.

The incident exacerbated the already tense relationship between law enforcement and the black community. “The Boston police and the city of Boston — from the end of World War II, there was at least one time in every decade where they became a national embarrassment,” MacLean said.

“The Stuart one was the first time that I think the circumstances lined up that it was particularly bad, but then in the aftermath of it, it allowed for a lot of good to happen,” he added. “That’s the theme that I wanted to look at.”

MacLean, 33, was a child during the era of “City on a Hill.” But the journalist and author Michele McPhee, a writer for the show, was then a young investigative reporter at The Boston Globe, and recalls well the city’s struggles during those years.

“A little girl gets shot off a mailbox,” McPhee said. “Jermaine Goffigan — whose face I’ll never forget — he’s counting Tootsie Rolls from Halloween, still in his costume, when he gets hit by a stray bullet.”

“The city had had enough,” she added.

Jackie and Decourcy serve as the thematic entry point, their unlikely partnership an explicit allegory for the Operation Ceasefire program — also known as “The Boston Miracle.” Black clergy members, police officers, probation officers and outreach workers — once unaligned with one another — joined forces under the direction of the Harvard University criminologist David M. Kennedy to focus on black youth in high-crime areas. After it was carried out in 1996, Boston began to see a decline in homicides, and similar programs were replicated in other cities like Cincinnati with success.

“These two characters are polar opposites,” Fontana said. “But for at least a period of time, [they] need each other and are willing to overlook certain things in an effort to achieve something greater.”

The show’s creative team is primarily white, a liability for a story that aims to authentically portray a time and place defined largely by racial tension. (This season there was one biracial writer, J.M. Holmes, and one Latino writer, Jorge Zamacona.) But “City on a Hill,” doesn’t shy away from depicting its setting’s deeply ingrained racism: Within the first minute of the first episode, Jackie flippantly slings around the N-word.

“That was the world I grew up in,” MacLean said.

But, he added, he spoke frequently with Hodge and Lauren E. Banks, who plays Decourcy’s wife, Siobhan, about their perspectives. “As much as I wanted my story told correctly, I wanted everyone else’s involved in this to be told correctly,” he said.

Hodge said he “chimes in quite a bit” when it comes to the show’s depiction of Decourcy, who is partly inspired by Boston’s first black district attorney, Ralph Martin.

“That’s something that’s a priority going forward, just to get more black voices in the writer’s room,” he said. “Unless you’ve actually been the victim [of racism], you actually don’t know what it is.”

Stories about such fraught but fruitful partnerships risk turning a racist like Jackie into a sympathetic figure by having him work well with Decourcy. But in the early episodes, at least — the first 3 of 10 were made available in advance — the show is less about Jackie learning to not be a terrible human being than Decourcy’s struggle to take down the (white) status quo without becoming like it.

Decourcy is the “hero of the series” who must “deal with the devil” Jackie, MacLean said.

For Hodge, the question is: “How far will he go before he turns into Jackie Rohr?”

As for Jackie, a defining quality, Bacon said, is that he’s “so narcissistic that his belief that the ends justify the means” allows him to behave unethically. (The character is a loose composite of the FBI agents H. Paul Rico, who was indicted on a charge of murder shortly before his death; John Connolly, who aided the mob boss James (Whitey) Bulger; and Dennis Condon.)

The creative team strove for authenticity in depicting the city of Boston as well, even though it rarely films there.

The pilot was shot in and around the city, but the production moved to New York once the series got picked up — exterior scenes were shot in Staten Island, New Rochelle, White Plains and the Bronx. (A few scenes have since been filmed in Boston.)

This decision came down to practicality: Boston lacks soundstages and the city is generally “much prettier now than it was” in the ’90s, said McPhee, who served as a kind of Boston credibility consultant.

“I was getting ready to eye-roll and say, ‘Oh God, we’re never going to get Boston,’” she said. But she was impressed with the attention to detail, adding, “There’s a set that represents [the] Bromley Heath [apartments] that I felt like I was walking through the halls of Bromley Heath.”

(“Believe me, it wasn’t my decision,” MacLean said of the move to New York.)

It’s too early to know whether there will be a second season of “City on a Hill,” though MacLean said he’s plotted out five seasons’ worth of material for the leads. According to Affleck, the plan is to move the action from Charlestown to Roxbury if the show gets renewed, and then to a different neighborhood each season, similar to the “The Wire” and its thematically distinct chapters.

“You meet two people from Boston who talk, they never talk about Boston — they talk about the neighborhood where they’re from,” MacLean explained. “The neighborhood is their vision of what Boston is.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/arts/television/city-on-a-hill-showtime-boston.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

In 'City on a Hill,' a crime-ridden Boston before the 'miracle'

The characters — played with flamboyant vigor by Kevin Bacon and simmering fortitude by Aldis Hodge — shouldn’t like each other, or even be able to work together. And for much of the pilot episode, they don’t.

But she’s a woman, and her father won’t consider her for the job. It’s against tradition.

Cue the Broadway-style (em)power(ment) ballad: “I can’t stay silent,” the princess belts more than once in a new song written for the film, adding during the chorus, “All I know is I won’t go speechless.”

This is not the Jasmine of my youth, the one whose main preoccupation was marrying a prince of her choosing. This is Jasmine 2.0 — an ambitious, career-focused heroine whose belly button is never exposed.

This is supposed to be a good thing: It’s progressive and more inclusive!

Maybe Disney hoped that I — a millennial who grew up on a steady diet of Disney princesses and “SingAlong Songs” VHS tapes — would latch on to Jasmine 2.0’s journey and appreciate that she’s ostensibly evolved beyond her animated predecessor in the 1992 blockbuster. After all, as the studio’s executives have said repeatedly, the company is committed to embracing industry trends and being more inclusive.

Yet sitting through reheat after reheat of animated movies from my childhood, I’ve found it difficult to take comfort in the unsubtle attempts to correct past sins. The shoehorned-in progressive messages only call more attention to the inherent crassness of Disney’s current exercise in money-grabbing nostalgia.

Jasmine isn’t an outlier. And Disney’s other pandering do-overs tend to be just as awkward and clumsy. Before the 2017 release of “Beauty and the Beast,” the film’s publicity team stumbled into an easily avoidable gaffe when the film’s director, Bill Condon, gave an interview in which he teased an “exclusively gay moment.” That turned out to be a deflating blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of LeFou and another man dancing together in the final scene — hardly exclusive, considering LeFou spends the majority of the movie flamboyantly signposting his attraction to Gaston.

Tim Burton’s steampunk take on “Dumbo,” released in March, introduces several characters that weren’t in the 1941 film, including Milly (Nico Parker), who serves just two purposes: Dumbo interpreter (I’d guess at least 75% of her dialogue is a description of whatever the poor baby elephant is doing or feeling at that moment) and “girl who would rock the male-dominated STEM world had she been born in the right era.” As written, she’s not so much a person as an avatar for surface-level girl power.

Even when cultural sensitivity is more smoothly integrated, it hardly justifies these Disney remakes. It’s great that Jon Favreau’s 2016 “Jungle Book” ditches the coded minstrelsy of King Louie, the orangutan nuisance modeled after Louis Armstrong, in the 1967 animated film. It’s nice that Ella (Lily James), in the 2015 “Cinderella,” is all about women helping other women. Emma Watson’s Belle is not only bookish, but also a clever inventor? Cool.

But the primary function of the remakes (aside from taking your money) is to reignite our passion for the originals. And for many people — especially those in my generation who were squarely in Disney’s target audience during the so-called renaissance of the late 1980s and early ’90s — those memories are intense, and not so easily buried. As the studio’s longtime animator Glen Keane once said when describing his approach to rendering the character Pocahontas, care must be taken: “The Disney version becomes the definitive version.” (Look up “Pocahontas” on Google Images, and the first thing you’ll see is not the historical figure, but the cartoon.)

Is it possible for the Disney version of the Disney version to become the definitive one? That’s probably not the point, though the studio has used this opportunity to signal to consumers that it’s no longer an entity that would thoughtlessly depict a siamese cat playing the piano with chopsticks while singing about fortune cookies. A key part of the publicity campaign for the new “Aladdin” has involved assuring would-be viewers that it will not make the same mistakes as the old “Aladdin,” which featured a predominantly white voice cast and invoked uneasy stereotypes about the Middle East. (Among other issues, a lyric about cutting off ears was replaced for the 1993 home video release following protests — though the city of Agrabah was still described as “barbaric.” In the new “Aladdin” it’s now “chaotic.”) Some have argued Disney has made new mistakes this time around.

Disney has been more persuasively progressive, however, in its original films of the past several years. The superhero fantasy “Big Hero 6” seamlessly incorporated a multicultural voice cast into a futuristic setting known as San Fransokyo. “Frozen” has princesses (and a would-be Prince Charming), but it prioritizes sisterhood over romance. “Moana” features a Pacific Islander heroine, and “Coco” (from the Disney-owned Pixar) has a Mexican hero (and Hispanic voice actors); both stories manage to represent their cultures respectfully while still being accessible to global audiences. And, on the live-action front, the Disney-owned Marvel movie “Black Panther” was important for its depiction of the black diaspora.

These films don’t have templates to trace over in the way “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin” do. Once they get all of the basic Disney elements in place (dead parents, faithful nonhuman sidekick and so on), the new creators don’t have to concern themselves with paying fan service.

That makes for better movies, more interesting stories and a stronger sense of Disney’s sincerity in its repeated claims of inclusivity. Yes, its filmmakers have fumbled on more than one occasion — the ill-conceived brown-skin Maui Halloween costume, the muddled racial allegory in “Zootopia” — but at least they’re starting from a clean(er) slate rather than trying to cut and paste diversity onto a work that’s already embedded in the collective consciousness and impossible to delete.

The inevitable remake of “The Little Mermaid” could depict Ariel as an entrepreneur who specializes in making body-positive clamshell bras, and it still won’t be enough to erase 30 years’ worth of impressionable children who have seen the original film and the unrealistic beauty expectations her rendering (as well as that of other Disney princesses) puts forth.

I grew up loving Disney movies and still do, despite their troublesome aspects. Part of growing up means learning that many, if not most, of the things you loved are problematic — then spending your adulthood trying to counter all the harmful lessons you might have unconsciously taken away from them. It’s good (and good business) for Disney to acknowledge the shameful parts of its past. But the best way to do this is by leaving behind the past and creating more films like “Coco” and “Moana” — definitive versions in their own right.

This article originally appeared in <a id="6a1375cc-9834-4298-b130-44b926ae8335" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/movies/aladdin-disney-diversity.html">The New York Times</a>.

Rewriting the past won't make Disney more progressive

(Critic's Notebook): It’s 2019, and Princess Jasmine doesn’t want to be a princess any longer. In the Guy Ritchie-directed “Aladdin,” Disney’s latest live-action remake of one of its animated hits, Jasmine (Naomi Scott) has her sights set on succeeding her father as the sultan of Agrabah.

That was how Jerrod Carmichael ended his 2017 HBO stand-up special “8”; after nearly an hour of riffs, the comedian just casually presented this idea to his audience.

“What else should we talk about?” he continued, right before the special jarringly cut to the credits.

It wasn’t a grand-finale punch line Carmichael had been obviously building toward throughout the 50-plus minutes that preceded it. It lacked catharsis; as an out-of-left-field observation, it could be interpreted as the most deeply personal moment of the performance, or as an absurdist misdirect meant to tease viewers’ expectations.

Maybe it was a bit of both. On Sunday evening, HBO hosted the premiere of “Home Videos,” a loose half-hour of cinéma vérité documenting Carmichael’s off-the-cuff chats with some of the women in his life during a visit to his hometown, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Instead of performing onstage, the comedian plays an affable investigator, interviewing his subjects about topics like beauty standards, R. Kelly, blackness and sensitive family history.

In one conversation with his mother, Cynthia, he brings up his father’s infidelity and “multiple children outside of the relationship.”

“I’m not going to say the hurt and anger didn’t try to build, because I’m human,” Cynthia tells him. “But — maybe I suppressed some of it — but talking, and asking enough questions, I don’t know. I’m pretty much content.”

She adds that it’s up to her husband to prove to her that he can be trusted again, and that as far as she can tell, he has.

When I sat down with Carmichael at one of his frequent New York City haunts, ABC Kitchen, on a warmish afternoon late last month, the ostensible connection between “8” and “Home Videos” was the first thing I asked him about. While crafting that closing line a couple of years ago, did he have a sense he would return to it?

“It’s an emotional mountain my family has had to climb and is still climbing it in some ways,” he explained. “Saying it at that point, that was as far as I was willing to go, kind of out of respect.”

“Home Videos” might be his most revealing project yet; it’s certainly his most intimate. Over a few days in January,Carmichael directed and shot the special on film (Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” was an inspiration) with one camera and a small crew in and around the homes of his mother, his sister and a family friend. Short vignettes between the segments show him playing around with his nieces in their quiet suburban neighborhood.

It’s difficult to pin down what exactly “Home Videos” is supposed to be. Carmichael isn’t sure either, though he described it as equal parts “investigative piece,” “just videos” and a “prestige reality show.”

“I didn’t know what it was, but I knew the intention, and just off the intention of it (HBO) trusted me to go and make something.”

The idea was born in part out of a desire to see the black women in his life represented on-screen in ways he hadn’t seen before. He pitched the show to his family as having an “honest conversation” and prepared no questions beforehand. He had one rule for his subjects: “Just don’t lie.”

“‘Even if you don’t want to talk about something, tell me,’” he told them.

He added, “‘No performance for the camera. Me and you, we’re here. Let’s see what happens.’”

What happens is not unlike an episode of his acclaimed but underseen family sitcom “The Carmichael Show,” which ended after three seasons in 2017, or one of his stand-up routines: an ever-curious Carmichael pokes, prods and interrogates comfort zones and widely held beliefs and customs.

When he teases his older sister Valencia, their closeness and ease with one another is palpable, and it feels as if “Home Videos” is dropping in on a conversation they’ve had many times before.

Carmichael described their dynamic as involving a lot of passionate debate and the occasional “clash.” He ribs her about her vocal defense of black womanhood, he said, to “make sure she believes it.”

“I want to kick the tires, and I want her to do the same for me,” he added. “That’s just what our relationship is; I love it.”

In another scene, he speaks with 11-year-old Joliet, Valencia’s bookish daughter, about school, role models and whether she sees herself represented in film and TV. When he asks her to tell him the secret to being happy, she responds, in part: “You have to know what you want, not what everyone else wants.”

Carmichael is taken aback. “Who the (expletive) are you?” he says, laughing.

I asked him if today’s kids and teens made him feel hopeful about society’s future.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I think what black kids were to sports and entertainment, they’re going to be to nuclear physics or biochemistry.”

He added, “Even my hood cousin’s kids sound like Tia and Tamera,” referring to the Mowry twins, the precocious stars of the ’90s sitcom “Sister, Sister.” “I don’t know how that happened. They have an awareness their parents didn’t have, their aunts and uncles didn’t have.”

This perspective is a stark pivot from “8,” where he stated his wish that black people as a collective were “further along,” and which largely consisted of Carmichael’s agonizing over his inability to feel for or care about, well, anything. (Including, but not limited to: animals, weddings, the “I Have a Dream” speech.)

He admits that at that time he “felt passionately about my lack of passion for certain things.” Now, he said, he can better acknowledge his own feelings, particularly as they relate to Joliet.

“It’s funny — with her, I would die for her. Like, actually die for her,” he said. “And that’s a thing that, being honest with myself, I didn’t realize I felt until — just this moment you look at her like, ‘Oh wow, this is incredibly powerful, what this is.’”

It’s the conversation with his mother in “Home Videos,” however, that most implies Carmichael is a bit more sensitive than he’s seemed in the past. At one point, he asks if she finally accepts that she, a dark-skinned woman, is in fact pretty.

“She’s always struggled with that,” Carmichael told me. “She’s a beautiful, beautiful person, and watching her not be able to come to terms with that — as a son, it breaks your heart.”

When it came to his mother’s relationship with his father, Carmichael said there were things he had sensed while growing up but hadn’t dug into deeply. While he approached this opportunity to discuss it with his mother as if it were their “last conversation ever,” he was also careful not to press the issue too much.

“I wanted to protect her from going too deep on certain things that might be too sensitive,” he said.

If he held back, the conversation as it appears in “Home Videos” is still striking to watch. There’s no hedging or hesitancy in Cynthia’s answers to her son’s potentially awkward questions about her love life and rocky marriage to his dad.

And Carmichael’s statement that he’s hooked up with men — an off-handed remark following his question of whether she finds other women attractive — is dropped in unexpectedly in the middle of their chat, and just as quickly left behind, in “8”-like fashion.

Carmichael has talked about dating women in his comedy and on “The Carmichael Show,” but until this point had not publicly discussed his relationships with men. When I asked him about this, he was reluctant to consider the comment as worth remarking on. “It’s a thing I said to my mom,” he said after a long pause, laughing.

“That was it,” he continued. “A thing I said to my mom. I was just talking to my mom. Thing came up. I said it to my mom. Now we’re eating peas at ABC Kitchen. But that’s how I feel about everything that’s in there — it’s just like, ‘Yeah, and then that happened.’”

“Home Videos” ends on its own kind of post-credits cliffhanger: Carmichael meeting one of his half-siblings for the first time. The week before we met, Carmichael had gone back to North Carolina to shoot what might be another installment of the show with his father, Joe, and uncle.

At the time of our interview, Carmichael wasn’t sure if the episode would be released, but he did say that his grandfather, who had more than two dozen children with his wife and other women, was one of the topics he discussed with his uncle.

He said he didn’t know if his father had been completely forthcoming during their conversation. “Obviously you would like to believe everything,” he said. But “you look at history, you look at patterns, and like, it makes it difficult.”

“But,” Carmichael added, “he was willing enough to explore his feelings and explore logic and that type of thing.”

NEW YORK — “The only thing weirder than finding out your father has a second family — is finding out that you guys are that second family.”

Aisha Harris

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