I thought Blindspotting was gonna be plot-driven to a certain clichéd place based on the trailer: Police shooting leads convicted felon on last days of parole to make terrible, heart-breaking decisions. (The trailers for upcoming movies like The Hate U Give and Monsters and Men kind of feel like they are on rollercoaster tracks, which is to say nothing about the actually films.) But Blindspotting ended up being much more than that. It’s a dark comedy and a lyric homage to the city of Oakland.
I learned a word that I haven’t heard before a few days ago while listening to an interview about the first season of Pose on KQED this past weekend: de-center. (I can’t find the interview/forum yet, so I’m not sure if it was posted, but it was a Q&A with a reporter and one of the showrunners Steven Chanels. I’ll try to post a link if I find it, or if someone sends it my way). As in, the white, cis male is being decentered in pop culture as we tell new stories and show new perspectives. We’ve been having that conversation for a bit in our discussion of black surrealism, but it seemed worth mentioning before launching into a review.
Blindspotting lampoons hipsterism and the embarrassing and conflicting aspirational impulses that go along gentrification. Collin’s woke mother raises a younger son who loves playing violent video games. She says she won’t sell her house “now that there are nice places to eat around here”. Daveed Diggs’s character Collin ends up liking the expensive kale water at the corner market he only buys to impress his health-conscious ex Val. Collin seems at once hesitant and also a little wistful for the peace and sanctuary provided by the hipster parties playing alternative indie music. The two PoC with tired faces who’ve been invited as token black friends give us a different flavor of discomfort and alienation that occurs in a world separate from Capts Miles’s and Smiles’s Oakland.
The film does some interesting things with flashback storytelling so that we can see Collin before he grows a conscience, even though he mostly plays the straight man to his hot-headed friend Miles in the present day. Actually feels a lot like a successful gimmick from Bojack Horseman in that way. There are a lot of elements of magical realism in the storytelling. The dream sequences aren’t as poignant as the waking PTSD hallucinations. The moments when the lyrics bubble up are the coolest, most original elements of surrealism. In a lot of ways, it feels like listening to a Shakespeare play, where you have to sit and let yourself marinade in the sound of the dialogue. The dialogue is playful and rich like Shakespeare too.
Blindspotting smiles daggers at you, bleeding you dry with papercuts of dry wit. It’s not like anything else out there. It drifts from scene to scene lightly without feeling weighed down by its subject matter. Worth a watch before the summer’s end.
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