A single, magical day in Los Angeles: Tyris (Tyris Winter), a homeless gay teenager, trolls the streets looking for a restaurant that still serves cheeseburgers; Marquesha (Marquesha Babers) struggles to put her New Age therapist's advice into practice; a rap duo (Bryce Banks and Austin Antoine) catch a lucky break when a local music producer happens to hear them performing outside a medical marijuana dispensary; Sophia (Maia Mayor) stalks her ex-boyfriend and who she believes to be his new lover. We become acquainted with these and other young voices in et cetera-fashion. Some of them only appear in what amounts to a sketch or vignette. Others, like the above-listed, chart a course across the larger narrative, hyperlinked to the rest by chance encounters. All of them are writers and stars of Summertime, directed by Carlos López Estrada.
Estrada's debut feature was Blindspotting, an urban drama written by and starring Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, released in the summer of 2018. In that film, Diggs stars as an Oakland-based mover who is forced to reevaluate his life and relationships on the final three days of his probation. Forming the traumatic psychological backdrop of the story is Diggs' witnessing the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white cop. At the film's conclusion, the troubled Diggs finds his next job is at the house of that very white cop. Having the opportunity and temptation to shoot the man, Diggs instead goes into a rap freestyle in which he expunges his rage about the injustice and inequality of America, the racism of police, and the gentrification of his hometown. A somewhat trite and unearned finale, the end of Blindspotting clearly foreshadows Estrada's directorial follow-up, which amounts to something of an anthology musical that relies on spoken word poetry rather than singing. In Summertime, too, particularly in a climactic vignette in which Marquesha confronts a former high school classmate of hers, we also see the continuation of Estrada's passion for the idea of verse as a therapeutic weapon in lieu of violence, as a tool for expurgating internalized trauma and confronting inequality, be it racist or sexist or homophobic or what have you.
Summertime is a naked love letter to the cultural diversity of southern California. With the background to match, Estrada brings the modern music video director's approach to shooting and editing Summertime, with an eye for the picturesque and sensual. The lingering on graffiti, local food, and publicly funded parks and recreation may at first seem essential for establishing the social and ethnic backdrop of his characters; but nobody actually concerned with how environment informs character could possibly see so much of Los Angeles in such unambiguously glowing terms. The narrative structure and momentum of the film is already too scattershot to let the spectator internalize setting. The objective is not to insinuate, but to overtake; to project a fantasy of Los Angeles that, with its larger-than-life aura, unmistakeable inhabits the same old Hollywood fairy tale. This is still the place where stars are born and die, where the arc of glad tidings bends towards even the lowliest of us as long as we have the talent and commitment to seize it. Necessarily, in recent years, the awning of this promise has had to expand in order to include those previously excluded; just as it has had to adapt to a paradigm in which first Broadway and then Hollywood are no longer monolithic, the attentions of a younger mass audience being pulled in multiple directions by not only new genres of performance but also new media of expression. The fundamental vision of the California Dream, however, remains un-infringed.
Hence, Summertime also operates as a spotlight of its young artists, a self-conscious debut of these rising stars via a more conservative medium to a more mainstream audience largely unfamiliar with their niche performance background. More Americans, particularly younger ones, are probably familiar with "slam poetry" as a genre of spoken word performance, and will recognize what has become its tendency towards lack of rhyming scheme, emphatically stylized vocal delivery, and polemical content in the narratives and performances of Estrada's film. But undergirding "slam poetry" is also its implicit tendency towards competition, which is of course informed by its origin in the "poetry slams" that sprung out of Chicago and San Francisco from the mid- to late-'80s. As competitive performance events, poetry slams seek to challenge rigid and elitist evaluations of poetry by employing the audience as both judges and an atmospheric gauge of the poet's success, encouraging performers to not merely present their material but to provoke and hype up an enthusiastic response. Pioneered and dominated by people of color, women, and queers, the theoretical counter-culture of the poetry slam and "slam poetry" as its product is inevitably compromised by its incentive to appeal and pander; as well as by its replication, rather than repudiation, of an artistic discourse that seeks to canonize "winners" in a competition. The point is not to slam slam poetry, of course, but to simply acknowledge the persistent and terrifying absence of a vision of the role of art and the artist in a society that is mutually supportive at both a material and spiritual level, that does not reduce its value to popular appeal and, thus, in frank terms, does not replace all art with commodity.
Estrada is, after all, not merely an independent filmmaker. Since the release of Blindspotting, he has been prominently vetted by Walt Disney Pictures as Studio and Creative Leadership, which effectively means that he's a consultant to the media giant's sophisticated attempts at both projecting progressive social responsibility while also capitalizing on growing demand for diversity and representation in media. His name is attached to the studio's upcoming Columbia-set animated fantasy Encanto, he co-directed this year's Raya and the Last Dragon, and according to a Hollywood Reporter release from April of last year he's slated to helm a live-action remake of Robin Hood. Don't be surprised if you see members of the Summertime ensemble cropping up in Disney media, either. With the rapid consolidation of media, the House of Mouse looming above it all like Chernabog on Bald Mountain, the broad response of our popular culture will likely be to rehash the same old argument that a career in fluff is the price that artists like Estrada must be willing to pay so that more personal works like Summertime can get produced. But as the economic prospects of its generational subjects decline and the vibrant oasis to which it pays homage catches fire, the bleak ideological symmetry between Estrada's independent venture and the corporate product to which he's attached only becomes all the more apparently insidious. In both cases, overtures of inclusion, diversity, and representation offer plausible deniability to an industry that is, in reality, compelled to consolidate because rates of profit are declining, which in turn means that value and productivity must be all the further extracted from a winnowed-down labor. Our media may become more diverse, but the actual opportunities at every level of the economy are becoming fewer, and the brunt of this devil's bargain will inevitably be born by exactly the sorts of identities that Estrada seeks to champion.
Summertime is, at the end of the day, barely even a movie. It is, rather, a promotion aimed to cultivate and reinforce a new way of thinking about the crises faced by young artists in America, one that could not have been done better by Walt Disney or Coca Cola if they had literally paid for it. Amid the vibrant self-portraiture provided by its participants, one finds an unrelenting subscription to a "grinder" mentality. There are notes of self-help encouragement posted to characters' walls; some free promotion for the exploitative driver app Lyft; and one character, played by Raul Herrera, prides himself in the fact that he works four jobs to survive, all the while maintaining the flamboyant persona of one who is constantly pitching himself but is rarely, nakedly himself. Carrying over slam poetry to a medium in which the audience and performer are necessarily not present with one another, Summertime can only present a cast of stivers whose calculatedly attention-seeking performances are rendered facile. Stitched together, this then makes even the cool 95 minute runtime of the film feel turgid and excessive. The rare development of character which makes for some truly inspired performance - Tyris breaking down and recording a poem on his phone that he then deletes - only points up the fact that Summertime is not about characters. It is about profiles, portfolios, pages and channels. It is about a generation whose narcissism has been culturally cultivated to such an extreme that self-regard achieves the dimensions of a panopticon, with one always acting in accordance with the invisible hundreds encircling and scrutinizing and judging; every moment weighted with the transactional value embedded in attention, what will be liked, retweeted, promoted. The notion of art, like the person, as something that has value and persists beyond a million accumulated micro-transactions is eclipsed by a veritably propagandistic, "forced optimism" about the future.
It's really no wonder that Estrada got the Disney bump. Even in his off-time, his work has devolved into the stuff corporate propaganda is made of; taking the most alienating, grinding, desperate conditions of a new generation's lives and framing it as an organic expression of personal industriousness and flexibility, rather than as a response to and symptom of metastasized inequality and exploitation. And as with In the Heights before it, the accelerating crises of our times have only magnified the disturbing disconnect between the aspirational fantasy of Summertime and moment it seeks to capture. Belated by only a year, here is the feel good summer movie of the hottest summer on record.
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