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WARNING: In case you’re one of the three people in the world who hasn’t seen the movie yet, this post contains spoilers for Barbie.

Barbie ends with Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie, henceforth just “Barbie”), having become human, being delivered to an appointment of some sort by Gloria (America Ferrera) and Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), the human mother and daughter who have befriended her. They wish her good luck, and she gets out of the car, entering a nondescript building.

My assumption, at this point, was that she was either starting her first day of a new job or arriving at a job interview. I figured it was decent odds the job would actually be at Mattel™. But after almost two hours of watching Greta Gerwig’s exceptionally smart film, I should have known better; I should have been better prepared for Barbie telling the receptionist that she was there to see her gynecologist.

A simple job or job interview would have been pedestrian; a job at Mattel™ would have been too neat, too much of an obvious endorsement of the naïve utopianism embodied by the Barbie brand. Perhaps more significantly, such an ending would provide a sense of continuity undermining the film’s more shrewdly subversive elements. By contrast, meeting with an OBGYN is a rather more startling note on which to end, though of course it shouldn’t be—for someone suddenly endowed with a functioning reproductive system where none had been before, it makes perfect sense.

And while gynecologists cover a wide range of care not necessarily specifically related to childbirth or conception, the obvious implication is that Barbie is either pregnant or seriously considering it.

[EDIT: Got a lot of pushback on this assertion, which is fair: whatever my qualifier, it’s not necessarily “the” obvious implication that Barbie’s in baby-making mode. I should say rather that it’s a possible implication, or even just go with the indefinite article and say it’s an obvious implication. But yeah, my own lack of any necessary interaction with a gynecologist makes me a wee bit myopic here. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any Ken-based puns about male obtuseness about obstetric care.]

There are a few ways to read this ending. A less charitable reading might see it as a betrayal of the feminist messages otherwise powerfully conveyed in the previous two hours of cinema—seeing it, in other words, as a normative gesture suggesting that, once human, Barbie is compelled to submit to a biologically determined destiny of motherhood.

That is one way to read it. I would disagree, however. Quite emphatically. (To be clear, I have not seen this interpretation anywhere. So far as I know, it’s a straw man of my own creation.) Another tack would be to see Barbie’s prospective procreation as consonant with the way the film explores the theme of mothers and daughters: the characters of Gloria and Sasha comprise the story’s moral and emotional core, with Barbie and her various other iterations providing a comic but poignant symbolic counterpoint to the fraught and complex question(s) of how to be a woman in the world. Barbie’s transformation into a human, after all, happens when she meets her creator and symbolic mother Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), whose last name she assumes.

There’s a lot going on in this movie, and I’ll be getting to a fraction of it in this post. I would never have imagined a film about Barbie, which was made under the auspices of Mattel™, would or could contain multitudes. But here we are. A friend and colleague of mine posted to Facebook that he’d never have imagined that he’d emerge from the theatre thinking about all the ways he’s now planning to reference Barbie in his literary theory class this fall. I had an identical reaction: given that I’m teaching an introduction to popular culture this fall and a seminar on postmodernism in the winter, there’s going to be a lot of Barbie popping up in my lectures.

I might write posts along those lines in the future, but at the moment it’s my upcoming utopias/dystopias course with which the film is really resonating. (I actually just emailed all my currently enrolled students that their summer homework is to go see Barbie. Given that it’s a reasonably good chance most of them already have, it’s not really much of an ask.)

This will be the second time I’ve taught the course, though it will be the first time I’ve done it in a physical classroom. I last taught it in the winter term of 2021, while we were all still on lockdown and all teaching was being done remotely (and yes, teaching a course on utopias and dystopias in literature during a global pandemic is a bit on the nose—or it would have been if my other class that term hadn’t been a graduate seminar on post-apocalyptic literature. I suppose you could say I was leaning in.) What became immediately apparent then, and what I’m working through again now, is the fundamental asymmetry one finds in utopias vs. dystopias. Which is to say: while we don’t lack for utopian literature stretching back to Plato’s Republic, two things leap out: (1) aside from Plato, Thomas More’s genre-defining novel Utopia, and such novels as Erewhon and Herland, there aren’t many titles that will be familiar; (2) the volume of utopian literature is dwarfed by a magnitude by dystopias. In fact, the entirety of the list of utopian works on Wikipedia is matched by just the YA dystopian fiction from just the past twenty years.

Which, to be fair, is hardly surprising. Perfect, idyllic societies don’t tend to be fodder for gripping narratives; by contrast, everything going to shit, where everyone either needs to grab a shotgun to kill zombies or flee from omniscient authoritarians, makes for exciting reading. Hence dystopia’s claim to the vast amount of market share.

But that asymmetry of market share is balanced conceptually, by which I mean that where dystopia is straightforward and easy to understand, utopia is far more complex and fraught. It is one of those concepts that fractures and expands and grows more elusive the more you examine it. It is both an impulse and a goal, a collective ideal and profoundly idiosyncratic. There comes a point where it can become simply too broad to be a tenable concept, given that it can be applied to any and all endeavours seeking to improve the human condition. Not least of which are works of creative imagination like filmmaking or fiction-writing: Northrop Frye characterized literature as “collective utopian dreaming,” in which even the bleakest and most nihilistic dystopian ideation is, in the act of its creation, a utopian gesture.

Or to put my point more succinctly: utopian thought is a necessary precondition for dystopian dreaming.

But what does this have to do with Barbie? You might well ask.

Or perhaps not: the utopian elements of Barbie are quite straightforward. Or they start out that way, at any rate. Barbie lives in Barbieland with all the other Barbies who have been iterations of the original doll: Barbies of every race and ethnicity, Barbies of every body type, Barbies of every profession. Barbie is the embodiment of capable, competent, accomplished womanhood. This enviable state of being is of course reflective of Barbie’s evolution, as she kept pace with societal change—or, more accurately, as feminist inroads in mainstream culture made it profitable for Mattel™ to create a far more diverse range of Barbies.

Barbieland as presented in the film, it is immediately apparent, is an idealized space of play. It is where Barbie and all the other Barbies exist in the imaginations of the little girls for whom they’re made.[1] It is also, crucially, a space of stasis: Gerwig communicates as much in our introduction to Barbieland, which features Barbie going through her routine of rising, dressing, “eating,” and driving around her sun-drenched pink environs in which all the different Barbies live their similarly perfect Barbie lives.

The discordant note entering this perfect harmony is change, which seeps in from the Real World. Barbie suddenly has thoughts of death, courtesy of her real-world owner—whom we learn isn’t the daughter Sasha but the mother Gloria, who has taken to playing with the Barbie doll out of a sort of sad nostalgia as Sasha grows out of her childhood innocence into the fiercely cynical and sarcastic adolescent intelligence that all adults fear. Thoughts of mortality precipitate change for Barbie: her feet, previously perfectly shaped to her high heels, flatten out; her breakfast “milk” goes sour; and, horror of horrors, she develops a scintilla of cellulite.

On learning that these changes are the result of Real World problems intruding on the Barbieland reality, Barbie is puzzled. We fixed the Real World, she says—the proliferation of Barbies of all races and professions showed that women can be and do anything, and thus resolved all those pesky issues.

This moment, which seems at first glance a comic expression of Barbie’s naivety, is key to the film’s utopian critique. For one thing, it skewers the naïve utopianism—the idea that making the Barbie line inclusive and aspirational substantively effects women’s empowerment—that animates the Barbie brand.

At the same time however it more subtly recognizes the utopian impulse of play and imagination. The point isn’t that an inspirational doll can effect systemic change, but that it opens a conceptual space in which to do so imaginatively. Fredric Jameson refined Northrop Frye’s assertion about art and literature as collective utopian dreaming, stating that it functions to resolve—symbolically and imaginatively—unresolvable real-world contradictions. Gerwig’s film is very aware of its corporate and consumerist framework; no amount of irony or satire changes the fact that Mattel™ signed off on it, and that, for all its subversive tweaks, it still functions as an extended advertisement for a doll that started as an idealization of white, blonde femininity (and no matter how lacerating Sasha’s speech was about Barbie’s pernicious effects on women’s body images, she’s still wearing a pink dress by the end). These, indeed, are the contradictions at the heart of Barbie; Gerwig, to her great credit, makes no attempt to resolve them in a facile manner or otherwise paper over them. As I said at the outset, Barbie ending the movie working for Mattel™ would have been just such a facile resolution.

Instead, Barbie contrasts the brittle fragility of naïve utopianism with the more complex utopian impulse: Gloria’s nostalgic play with the Barbie doll which precipitates the action proceeds from sadness and loss. Perhaps this is why it intrudes on Barbie’s perfect world—not the sort of play that imagines an ideal future, but which mourns the passing of an ephemeral past. One imagines however that for Gloria it is, for lack of a better word, therapeutic. It symbolically resolves the contradiction of what she wishes for her daughter’s future and what she misses from her past.

Nor is there any delusion on Gloria’s part that she can freeze that past in time. When Barbie later tells her that she just didn’t want anything to change, America Ferrera’s expression—sad, fond, wistful—and her intonation of “Oh, honey” articulates the film’s thematic crux. The naïve utopianism of Barbieland is naïve specifically because it imagines its stasis to be the ideal. The pernicious element in utopian thought lies in seeing it as an achievable end and that end as eternal and unchanging. Complicating the distinction between utopia and dystopia is how each contains the seed of the other. How many dystopian narratives begin in what initially seems like a perfect society? How many dystopian narratives are thinly-veiled fantasies about collapsing our arid and trivial modernity and replacing it with something authentic and primal?

It makes sense that Barbieland will continue on, restored from the Kens’ abortive experiment with patriarchy, continuing to be a space of fantasy and utopia and populated with whatever new Barbies Mattel™ creates. That Barbie herself leaves it behind to be human makes narrative sense—she’s not about to be satisfied with her old life—but also thematic sense. The film establishes Barbieland’s utopianism not just as an imagined space, but a space of creation in which fantasy takes physical form. The ending in this respect allegorizes growth and change. Possibly Barbie will have a child of her own, possibly not, but one way or another she will age and die, with each day being different from the previous.

KENDNOTES

1. “But what about Ken?” There’s a whole lot that could be said about the way the film depicts Ken (Ryan Gosling et al), but the principal point is that Ken was created to be ancillary to Barbie, and therefore that is what he is in Barbieland.He was always a concession to heteronormativity, a necessary male partner, but one who could never (a) overshadow Barbie, (b) be anything but bland and asexual, and (c) therefore have nothing approaching a real personality. Ken’s existential ennui proceeds from this indeterminate status that doesn’t allow him to have any real purpose and precludes any possibility that he may consummate his “relationship” with Barbie.

As our narrator (Helen Mirren) tells us in the opening sequence, Ken exists solely for Barbie; his only purpose is to be noticed by Barbie. This, of course, along with Ken’s ruinous (and hilarious) importation of patriarchy into Barbieland in the film’s second half, has not unpredictably gotten under the skin of the usual suspects in the culture wars. For all their sturm und drang (e.g. Ben Shapiro burning a stack of Barbies, dudebros losing their shit over Justin Trudeau and his son posing in pink at the theatre), I suspect that much of the angst proceeds from indignation over Ken’s relegation, seeing it as the film’s wholesale dismissal of men as useless rather than an astute observation about Ken’s literal role in the Barbie mythos.

I’m on strike. My faculty union at Memorial University, after fourteen months of frustrating and fruitless negotiations with an utterly recalcitrant administration, called a strike vote. Ninety-three percent of members voted, of whom ninety percent (myself included) called for a strike. And so now we are in our second week of walking the picket lines.

I’ve never been on strike before, so this is a new and interesting experience for me. I have no idea how it compares to other such job actions, but I can confidently make two observations that may seem to contradict each other: one, everyone is desperate to end this in a satisfactory manner and get back into the classroom; two, everyone is having a blast.

To emphasize the second observation, let’s keep in mind that this strike is happening in February in Newfoundland, which means the weather has ranged from bad to shitty—at best, inoffensive gloom, at worst sleeting rain and blizzards. After our first day I invested in thermal underwear, good mittens, snow pants, and several pairs of thick socks. But once so fortified, walking the picket line for two and a half hours a day has become something I look forward to, because it has meant spending time with my colleagues, who are to a person smart, dedicated, funny, compassionate, and profoundly, inspiringly dedicated to their teaching and research. Those two and a half hours fly past as we chat, joke, talk about our research and writing projects, and—most importantly, perhaps—have very intensive discussions about the strike itself and the broader issues at stake.

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That being said, none of this is a lark. Everyone is concerned for our students; we worry incessantly about the adverse effects this might have on their term; and we worry about the future of the university—both our specific institution and the “university” more generally. What is most heartening and keeps our hope and energy up is that our students are firmly behind us. Every day they come out to the line with signs of their own, often bearing coffee and donuts, shouting and singing their solidarity and voicing the same ire at our current tone-deaf and bafflingly obtuse upper administration. I have little doubt that this strike would sputter and die if we found our students foursquare against us; even just ten years ago, there would likely have been, at the very least, ambivalence and a more pervasive skepticism about tenured professors making a comfortable living demanding more.

To my mind, the signal shift in the present moment is exemplified by our administration’s consistent failure to frame the strike in those very terms. By the old rules of the game, it should be the easiest thing in the world to vilify the striking faculty as a bunch of sheltered, tenured Sunshine List elites making unreasonable demands in a time of economic straits. They have certainly tried, but it seems for once that people—both our students and the public more generally—aren’t buying it. The administration has attempted to make this all about professors asking for more money, but for once the more complex argument is finding a receptive audience. It’s not the salaries of tenured professors that has people’s attention, but the pittance paid to precariously-employed contractual professors on one hand, and the $450,000 salary of the university president on the other.¹ It’s not the putative ivory-towered academics understood to be out of touch, but the university’s managerial class—who for the duration of the strike thus far have issued occasional and increasingly petulant messages making verifiably false claims, refused to accommodate students uncomfortable with crossing picket lines, and forbidden administrative staff and per-course instructors from joining faculty on the picket line on breaks and lunch hours. It’s not so much about professorial compensation as it is about collegial governance and faculty having more of a say in the university’s future.

The fact that these knottier, more complex issues seem to be eclipsing the easier to understand snooty-professors-want-moar caricature is heartening; in my more hopeful moments I think it signals a shift, moving our cultural center of gravity away from the neoliberal dominance of the past few decades to something more humane and empathetic. I’m reasonably convinced that the experience of the pandemic is at the root of this apparent shift: we have a generation of students who endured two years of remote learning, who found their professors to be sympathetic people understanding of their travails and saw them also struggle to do their best in bad circumstances. All of which unfolded in a larger societal context in which prior verities about work and recompense came into question: the category of “essential worker” extended to people working minimum wage jobs in grocery stores; people fortunate enough to be able to work remotely realized they could do the same job in half the time while wearing pyjamas; quality of life became a more pronounced concern, something made plain by the general reluctance for people to return to shitty jobs simply for the sake of having a job; meanwhile, the problem of wealth disparity became ever more glaring as the wealthiest sectors did not share the pain but grew even wealthier.

Much of this is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Hence, I should be cautious and note that what I’m describing is less an objective, empirical reality than a vibe. But it is a profoundly powerful vibe that currently thrums through the energy on our pickets. And, well, I’m a humanities professor: qualitatively considering and analyzing vibes is more or less my stock in trade. To put it another way, I work in intangibles.² In the context of a corporatized university whose administrative class has become increasingly preoccupied with “outcomes” and “finding efficiencies,” this has meant fighting a protracted rearguard action against a pervasive attitude (epitomized by but not limited to university administrators) to which intangibles are anathema.

I’ve devoted a lot of thought over my career as an academic to the question of how to argue for the value of intangibles. Walking the picket lines with my brilliant colleagues and talking with the many, many students who come out to support us has made one thing clear to me: if I’m looking for a concrete manifestation of this intangible value, it’s here, in the human beings who comprise the university.

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The most common refrain among the students articulates this sensibility: professors’ teaching conditions, they say, are our learning conditions. And in the end, it is the classroom that is the most fundamental university space, and the students’ experience that is—or should be—the central focus of the university project. Because if not, then what are we doing otherwise? Professors with time and resources to do research bring that depth and breadth of thought to the classroom; perhaps more importantly, contractual and per-course instructors who aren’t run ragged with massive teaching loads, under constant financial stress, and who have a reasonable chance at converting their precarious positions into full-time careers, are going to be far more effective in the classroom (the fact that so many of them are exemplary educators now speaks to an inhuman level of dedication).

As I write this, the faculty union and the university bargaining team are back at the table. I hope they resolve this satisfactorily so we can resume our real work. But since before this started, it has felt as if the administration is speaking a language with no meaning for the rest of us. And if that continues, I and my colleagues are in for the long haul.

#FairDealAtMUN

NOTES

1. Memorial’s current president Vianne Timmons is paid $450,000 as a base salary, along with an $18,000 housing allowance, $1,000 monthly vehicle allowance, $25,000 research, and the standard travel perks afforded her position (which most recently included travel to Monaco for a conference of—wait for it!—arctic university administrators). The process for “finding” and recruiting Timmons cost the university $150,000. A CBC report about negative responses to Timmons’ lavish compensation quoted someone familiar with her hiring process as saying “Only a handful of people are qualified to lead a university like MUN, and finding that person takes time and money.” I think it’s safe to say, especially given Timmons’ utter lack so far of public statements about the strike—given that a university president’s central task is presenting a public face of the institution—that we’re not getting our money’s worth, and that the remarkable solidarity on display is at least partly a backlash against the assumptions quoted above.

It also needs to be emphasized that this state of affairs is pervasive across academe, something usefully discussed by Amir Barnea in the Toronto Star.

2. Again, I am a humanities professor, so my perspective in ineluctably informed and shaped by that context and training. But I should note that the intangible value of a university education—the intrinsic value of the university experience—transcends discipline. Whether your degree is in philosophy, chemistry, or engineering, if your sole metric of value is your ultimate salary, you’ve sadly missed the larger point. In the end, as I conclude above, it is the human dimension that defines the university.

There’s a moment that happens on occasion in American football, when a running back, having been handed the ball, breaks through all the defenders and sprints into the open field, with nothing between him and the endzone.

And sometimes, rather than making a touchdown, he gets blindsided by a linebacker he didn’t see coming.

That’s what 2021 has been like, especially these past few months.

I was vaccinated in June, and then again in August. We resumed in-person classes at Memorial University in September. Like many people, I felt a massive sense of relief—the pandemic finally seemed to be heading into the rearview mirror, and things were returning to something resembling normalcy. Except … yeah, not so much. I’m writing this at my parents’ house on Christmas day, but we won’t be properly celebrating the holiday until tomorrow because my niece and nephew were possibly exposed to COVID on a schoolbus, and thus need to quarantine for another day. I will myself have to quarantine for five days on returning to St. John’s.

We should be in the clear, running to the endzone with open field, but we keep getting tackled.

This is what I told all my students earlier this term: I wanted them to know it wasn’t just them, it was a general malaise that I was also experiencing. I told them they weren’t alone in feeling anxious, discomfited, or just generally off. I told them that if it came down to it, if they were struggling to get their classwork done, that there was no shame in dropping my course … or any other course they were taking. I told them that I would do whatever I could to help, provided they kept me in the loop. You don’t need to give me the gory details, I said—just tell me you’re having a rough go of it, and that’s enough. We’ll work something out.

I have to imagine there are those who will say I’m catering to the fragility of the snowflake generation in making such accommodations. Anyone having that thought can fuck right off. What saved me from breakdown these past few months was the fact that I had such extraordinary students: as I said to all my classes at the term’s end, they’re the reason why I have hope for the world. As a GenXer, irony is my default setting; for those inheriting the catastrophes of climate change and resurgent fascism, earnestness is their baseline. What would have been radically uncool in the 1990s is quite possibly what will save us all.

On Christmas day, I find myself thinking about all the best parts of the past year. My students are, as they often are, Exhibit A.

I taught a graduate seminar in the winter term that, in spite of the fact that it happened on Zoom, was hands down my favourite class ever. It was called “The Spectre of Catastrophe,” and looked at 21^st-century post-apocalyptic narratives. In spite of the fact that the subject was perhaps a little bit too on the nose for our current situation, it was the most fun I’ve had as a teacher ever (and that’s saying a lot, as my following comments will make clear). The only advantage classes taught over Zoom have over in-person teaching is the comments students can write as the lecture/discussion unfolds. In this particular class, there was always an ongoing conversation scrolling up on the side. I used the ten-minute breaks each hour in our three-hour classes to read through the lively and often hilarious discussions happening in parallel to the actual class.

Getting back into the classroom this past September felt so very, very good. It didn’t hurt that I was teaching a roster of courses that were, for me, an embarrassment of riches: a first-year class called “Imagined Places,” which gave me the (gleeful) chance to teach Tolkien (The Hobbit), Ursula K. Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea), Sir Terry Pratchett (Small Gods), Neil Gaiman (The Ocean at the End of the Lane), and Jo Walton (The Just City) (for the record, everybody needs to read Jo Walton). I also taught, for the third time, “Reading The Lord of the Rings.” I had five, count ‘em FIVE, students in LOTR who were also in my fourth-year seminar “The American Weird: Lovecraft, Race, and Genre as Metaphor.” (I always measure my success as an educator by the number of students who take multiple classes with me. I assume it means I’m doing something right, though it’s also possible they’ve just got my number and know what it takes to get a decent grade).  Given that the Tolkien and the Lovecraft courses were back-to-back, I had something like an entourage following me from the chemistry building in which I taught LOTR to the Arts buildings that was the home of the weird.

I called my Lovecraft students “weirdos,” because, well, obviously. It only offended them the first time I called them that.

Even given the fact that I was teaching a dream slate of classes, this fall semester was hard. I am congenitally incapable of asking for help, or for that matter recognizing that I need help until after the fact; these past few days of decompressing at my parents’ home have been invaluable in offering relaxation and reflection. I have also realized I need to find my way to a therapist in 2022.

But the moral of the story is that the students I worked with this past year kept me sane, and gave me hope. So on this day of prayer (even for those as atheistic as myself) I am grateful for you all. And given how many of you have signed up for yet more Lockett pontification next term, I can only assume I’m doing something right.

Or you’ve got my number. Either way, it’s all good.

“Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible … This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations … But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach.”

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Congressional Hearing on Reparations, 20 June 2019

I’ve been slowly working my way through Barry Jenkins’ ten-episode adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad. I’ve been a huge fan of Whitehead’s fiction ever since I got pointed towards his debut novel The Intuitionist; I read The Underground Railroad when it was still in hardcover, and I’ve included it twice in classes I’ve taught. When I saw it was being adapted to television by the virtuoso director of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, I knew this was a series I wanted to watch.

I was also wary—not because I was concerned about the series keeping faith with the novel, but because I knew it would make for difficult viewing. Whatever liberties Whitehead takes with history (as I discuss below), he is unsparing with the brutal historical realities of slavery and the casual cruelty and violence visited on slaves. It is often difficult enough to read such scenes, but having them depicted on screen—seeing cruelty and torture made explicit in audio and visual—can often be more difficult to watch.

For this reason, for myself at least, the series is the opposite of bingeable. After each episode, I need to digest the story and the visuals and think.

The Underground Railroad  focuses on the story of Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a teenage girl enslaved on a Georgia plantation whose mother had escaped when she was young and was never caught, leaving Cora behind. Another slave named Caesar (Aaron Pierre) convinces her to flee with him. Though reluctant at first, circumstances—the kind of circumstances which make the show difficult viewing—convince her to go. She and Caesar and another slave named Lovey (who had seen them go and, to their dismay, tagged along) are waylaid by slave-catchers. Though Lovey is recaptured, Cora and Caesar escape, but in the process one of the slave-catchers is killed. They make it to a node of the Underground Railroad and are sheltered by a white abolitionist with whom Caesar had been in contact. He then takes them underground to the “station,” where they wait for the subterranean train that will take them out of Georgia.

Because that is the principal conceit of The Underground Railroad: that the rail system spiriting slaves away is not metaphorical, but literal, running through underground tunnels linking the states.

More than a few reviews of the series, and also of the novel on which it is based, have referred to the story as “magical realism.” This is an inaccurate characterization. Magical realism is a mode of narrative in which one group or culture’s reality collides with another’s, and what seems entirely quotidian to one is perceived as magical by the other. That’s not what Colson Whitehead is doing, and, however lyrical and ethereal occasionally dreamlike Barry Jenkin’s visual rendering is, it’s not what the series is doing either. In truth, the literalization of the underground railroad is the least of Whitehead’s historical tweaks: The Underground Railroad is not magical realism, but nor is it alternative history (a genre that usually relies on a bifurcation in history’s progression, such as having Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh win the presidency in 1940 in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America). The Georgia plantation on which The Underground Railroad begins is familiar enough territory, not discernable from similar depictions in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or 12 Years a Slave. But then as Cora journeys from state to state, each state embodies a peculiar distillation of racism. Cora and Caesar first make it to South Carolina, which appears at first glance to be an enlightened and indeed almost utopian place: there is no slavery, and the white population seems dedicated to uplifting freed Blacks, from providing education and employment to scrupulous health care to good food and lodging. Soon however the paternalistic dimension of this altruism becomes more glaring, and Cora and Caesar realize that the free Blacks of South Carolina are being sterilized and unwittingly used in medical experimentation.

In North Carolina, by contrast, Blacks have been banished, and any found within the state borders are summarily executed. The white people of North Carolina declared slavery a blight—because it disenfranchised white workers. Since abolishing slavery and banishing or killing all of the Black people, the state has made the ostensible purity of whiteness a religious fetish. Cora spends her time in North Carolina huddled in the attic of a reluctant abolitionist and his even more reluctant wife in an episode that cannot help but allude to Anne Frank.

Whitehead’s vision—stunningly rendered in Jenkin’s adaptation—is less an alternative history than a deconstructive one. As Scott Woods argues, The Underground Railroad is not a history lesson, but a mirror, with none of “the finger-wagging of previous attempts to teach the horrors of slavery to mainstream audiences.” I think Woods is being polite here, using “mainstream” as a euphemism for “white,” and he tactfully does not observe that effectively all of such finger-wagging attempts (cinematically, at any rate) have tended to come from white directors and feature white saviour protagonists to make liberal white audiences feel better about themselves.

There are no white saviours in The Underground Railroad; there is, in fact, very little in the way of salvation of any sort, just moments of relative safety. As I still have a few episodes to go, I can’t say how the series ends; the novel, however, ends ambivalently, with Cora having defeated the dogged slave-catcher who has been pursuing her from the start, but still without a clear sense of where she is going—the liberatory trajectory of the underground railroad is unclear and fraught because of the weight of the experience Cora has accrued over her young life. As she says at one point, “Make you wonder if there ain’t no real place to escape to … only places to run from.” There is no terminus, just endless flight.

When I say The Underground Railway is a “deconstructive” history, I don’t use the term in the sense as developed by Jacques Derrida (or at least, not entirely). Rather, I mean it in the more colloquial sense such as employed by, for example, chefs when they put, say, a “deconstructed crème brûlée” on the menu, which might be a smear of custard on the plate speared by a shard of roasted sugar and garnished with granitas infused with cinnamon and nutmeg. If the dish is successful, it is because it defamiliarizes a familiar dessert by breaking down its constituent ingredients in such a way as to make the diner appreciate and understand them anew—and, ideally, develop a more nuanced appreciation for a classic crème brûlée.

So—yes, odd analogy. But I’d argue that Whitehead’s novel is deconstructive in much the same manner, by taking a pervasive understanding of racism and the legacy of slavery and breaking it down into some of its constituent parts. In South Carolina, Cora and Caesar experience the perniciousness of white paternalism of the “white man’s burden” variety—the self-important concern for Black “uplift” that is still invested in the conviction of Black culture’s barbarism and inferiority, and which takes from this conviction license to violate Black bodies in the name of “science.”

Then in North Carolina, we see rendered starkly the assertion that Blacks are by definition not American, and are essentially seen as the equivalent of an invasive species. This, indeed, was the basis of the notorious 1857 Supreme Court ruling on Dred Scott v. Sandford, which asserted that Black people could not be citizens of the United States. Though that precedent was effectively voided by the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments—which abolished slavery and established citizenship for people of African descent born in America, respectively—the franchise was not effectively extended to Black Americans until Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights act a century after the end of the Civil War. The delegitimization of Black voters continues: while the current Trumpian incarnation of the G.O.P. tacitly depicts anyone voting Democrat as illegitimate and not a “real American,” in practice, almost all of the legal challenges to the 2020 election result were directed at precincts with large numbers of Black voters.

Later in the novel when Cora finds her way to Indiana to live on a thriving Black-run farm, we see the neighbouring white community’s inability to countenance Black prosperity in such close proximity, especially when Black people flourishing reflects badly on their own failures. The pogrom that follows very specifically evokes the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, when a huge white mob essentially burned down a thriving Black part of town.

What’s important to note here is that Whitehead’s deconstructive process is less about history proper than about our pervasive depictions of history in popular culture, especially by way of fiction, film, and television. Or to be more accurate, it is about the mythologization of certain historical tropes and narratives pertaining to how we understand racism. One of the big reasons why so many (white) people are able to guilelessly[1] suggest that America is not a racist nation, or claim that the election of a Black president proves that the U.S. is post-racial, is because racism has come to be understood as a character flaw rather than a systemic set of overlapping cultural and political practices. Think of the ways in which Hollywood has narrated the arc of American history from slavery to the Civil War to the fight for civil rights, and try to name films that don’t feature virtuous white protagonists versus racist white villains. Glory, Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi, A Time to Kill, Green Book, The Help[2]—and this one will make some people bristle—To Kill a Mockingbird. I could go on.

To be clear, I’m not saying some of these weren’t excellent films, some of which featured nuanced and textured Black characters[3] with considerable agency; but the point, as with all systemic issues, is not the individual examples, but the overall patterns. These films and novels flatter white audiences—we’re going to identify with Willem Dafoe’s earnest FBI agent in Mississippi Burning against the Klan-associated sheriff. “That would be me,” we[4] think, without considering how the FBI—at the time the film was set, no less!—was actively working to subvert the civil rights movement and shore up the societal structures subjugating and marginalizing Black Americans, because in this framing, racism is a personal choice, and therefore Dafoe’s character is not complicit in J. Edgar Hoover’s.  

The white saviour tacitly absolves white audiences of complicity in racist systems in this way, by depicting racism as a failing of the individual. It allows us to indulge in the fantasy that we would ourselves be the white saviour: no matter what point in history we find ourselves, we would be the exception to the rule, resisting societal norms and pressures in order to be non-racists. Possibly the best cinematic rebuke to this fantasy was in 12 Years a Slave,[5] in the form of a liberal-minded plantation owner played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who recognizes the talents and intelligence of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a formerly free Black man who had been dragooned by thugs and illicitly sold into slavery. Cumberbatch’s character looks for a brief time to be Solomon’s saviour, as he enthusiastically takes Solomon’s advice on a construction project over that of his foreman. But when the foreman violently retaliates against Solomon, Cumberbatch’s character cannot stand up to him. In a more typical Hollywood offering, we might have expected the enlightened white man to intervene; instead, he lacks the intestinal fortitude to act in a way that would have brought social disapprobation, and as a “solution” sells Solomon to a man who proves to be cruelly sociopathic.

Arguing for the unlikeliness that most people could step out of the roles shaped for them by social and cultural norms and pressures might seem like an apologia for historical racism—how can we have expected people to behave differently?—but really it’s about the resistance to seeing ourselves enmeshed in contemporary systemic racism.

Saying that that is Whitehead’s key theme would be reductive; there is so much more to the novel that I’m not getting to. There is, to be certain, a place—a hugely important place—for straightforward historical accounts of the realities and finer details of slavery, even the more “finger wagging” versions Scott Woods alludes to. But what both Whitehead’s novel and Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of it offer is a deconstruction of the simplistic binarism of decades of us vs. them, good vs. bad constructions of racism that give cover to all but the most unapologetically racist white people. The current backlash against “critical race theory”—which I’ll talk more about in the third of these three posts—proceeds to a great extent from its insistence on racism not as individual but systemic, as something baked into the American system.

Which, when you think about it, is not the outrageous argument conservatives make it out to be. Not even close: Africans brought to American shores, starting in 1619, were dehumanized, brutalized, subjected to every imaginable violence, and treated as subhuman property for almost 250 years. Their descendants were not given the full franchise as American citizens until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and 1965, respectively. Not quite sixty years on from that point, it’s frankly somewhat baffling that anyone, with a straight face, can claim that the U.S. isn’t a racist nation. One of the greatest stumbling blocks to arriving at that understanding is how we’ve personalized racism as an individual failing. It shouldn’t be so difficult to recognize, as a white person, one’s tacit complicity in a long history without having to feel the full weight of disapprobation that the label “racist” has come to connote through the pop cultural mythologization of racism as a simple binary.

NOTES

[1] I want to distinguish here between those who more cynically play the game of racial politics, and those who genuinely do not see racism as systemic (granted that there is a grey area in between these groups). These are the people for whom having one of more Black friends is proof of their non-racist bona fides, and who honestly believe that racism was resolved by the signing of the Civil Rights Act and definitively abolished by Obama’s election.

[2] The Help, both the novel and the film, is perhaps one of the purest distillations of a white saviour story packaged in such a way to flatter and comfort white audiences. Essentially, it is the story of an irrepressible young white woman (with red hair, of course) nicknamed Skeeter (played by Emma Stone) who chafes against the social conventions of 1963 Mississippi and dreams of being a writer and journalist. TL;DR: she ends up telling the stories of the “help,” the Black women working as domestic labour for wealthy families such as her own, publishes them—anonymously of course, though Skeeter is the credited author—and thus gets the traction she needs to leave Mississippi for a writing career.

I can’t get into all of the problems with this narrative in a footnote; hopefully I don’t need to enumerate them. But I will say that one of the key things that irked me about this story, both the novel and the movie, is how it constantly name-checks Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird as Skeeter’s inspiration. Lee might have given us the archetype of the white saviour in the figure of Atticus Finch, but she did it at a moment in time (it was published in 1960) when the subject matter was dangerous (Mary Badham, who played Scout, found herself and her family shunned when they returned to Alabama after filming ended for having participated in a film that espoused civil rights). By contrast, The Help, which was published in 2009 and the film released in 2011, is about as safe a parable of racism can be in the present day—safely set in the most racist of southern states during the civil rights era, with satisfyingly vile racist villains and an endearing, attractive white protagonist whose own story of breaking gender taboos jockeys for pole position with her mission to give voice to “the help.”

[3] Though to be fair, in some instances this had as much to do with virtuoso performances by extremely talented actors, such as Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Andre Braugher in Glory. And not to heap yet more scorn on The Help, but the best thing that can be said about that film is that it gave Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer the visibility—and thus the future casting opportunities—that their talent deserves.

[4] I.e. white people.

[5] Not coincidentally helmed by a Black director, Steve McQueen (no, not that Steve McQueen, this Steve McQueen).