I liked it at first, but... [Spoilers]

...then I thought about it a little more.

While I was watching American Fiction, I was mostly entertained. It was very funny in parts and felt like a much-needed corrective to some of the attitudes commonly found among our enlightened intelligentsia. However, I've been reflecting on the film for the past few days and I've come to the conclusion that it’s actually quite deeply flawed, for a number of reasons.

1. There's too much uninteresting family drama and not enough satire. The films spends at least half its running time dealing with Monk's new romance, his brother's various problems, his sister's death, his family's housekeeper's marriage and his mother's illness. While the last issue is important to the overall plot, the others aren't, and they make the film drag. The plot tries to cover too much ground with very little of it related to the central premise. If the film-makers wanted to show that black Americans lead full, rich lives totally unlike the shallow gangster lives depicted in My Pafology, they could simply have focused more tightly on Monk's relationship with his Alzheimer's-affected mother, which when properly written could have provided a huge amount of pathos and depth. Instead, the mother's story is treated perfunctorily, and has little impact. The same is true of the other relationship stories. The film could have achieved much more by trying to do much less.

2. There's also an issue with verisimilitude. The 'ghetto lit' phenomenon, which is heavily satirised in the film, existed in 2001, when the source novel Erasure was written. However, it was short-lived and in retrospect not of much significance. While there are certainly many white American reviewers around today who are obsessed with celebrating 'raw', 'authentic' black voices in the media, there is simply no way even the most pandering of modern wokists would fete the basic and offensive stereotypes found in My Pafology and We's Lives In Da Ghetto. The literary tropes land with very little satirical force because they simply aren't recognisable to modern audiences. They badly needed updating to align with well-known modern black novels like The Help, Luster or The Good Lord Bird. Given that these books are far more subtle and nuanced than the ones satirised in the film (Sapphire’s Push, perhaps), it's understandable why the film-makers chose to rely on outdated tropes. However, the result is a satire on something that doesn't exist.

3. American Fiction also satirises people who don't exist, committing the same crime that it accuses white people of, and coming off as a little racist as a result. While great effort is expended in trying (and failing) to portray black lives as meaningful and complex, all of the white characters in the film are two-dimensional stereotypes, from the woke student with coloured hair, to the publishing staff, books award reviewers and the producer of the film adaptation. Not a single white character has relationships, an inner life or any kind of depth to their presentation. They are a race of shallow, conformist drones, more plot devices than people. Perhaps it was the film-makers' intent to present white people in the shallow, demeaning way that ghetto lit presents black people. If so, it's a clever if unsatisfying device. Couldn't just one of the white characters have rebelled against the progressive orthodoxy of the others? Would the straight-talking, take-no-BS working class reviewer really have wholeheartedly endorsed My Pafology? By having him rebel and then be forced to conform, the film-makers would have shown that it's an ideology that they're trying to satirise, not a race of people. But perhaps that was never their intention.