American Fiction (2023)

Oh, boy, this is a clever satire on the state of American literary circles. Meet Monk: he’s a writer of fiction who gets no reviews, no awards and hardly any book sales. In frustration, he writes a manuscript about a black man who murders his father and then goes on the lam. Everybody and his uncle (Sam) love it. He gets offered a huge advance to publish it, but he doesn’t want to, because he knows he was just f*cking with the white bread publishing system. When he gets offered a multi-million dollar sum to get it produced as a film, he has to hide his identity, for fear of being found out to be an academic.

The sequence where Monk finally starts writing his story reminds me of the same thing that Charles Dickens went through when writing “A Christmas Carol” as seen in “The Man Who Invented Christmas”.

This happened to me when I was writing a play called “Bankrupture” in 1978. Instead of inventing each of the characters and their dialogue, I acted as a secretary, taking down verbatim what they said. They revealed themselves by speaking their own words. In my experience, this was unprecedented. I was able to do this because I based the main character, Elmer, on myself. This is known as being an author surrogate.

So, I can relate, yet again.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend that you do so. It’s as good as they get.