♥ of Darkness

It's just another spring day serving fast food for one "Zola" (Taylour Paige), a 19-year-old black girl who lives with her boyfriend in the Chicago 'burbs and, on occasion, makes much better money moonlighting as a stripper. But this is also one of those days where the Fates conspire; one of those days that happen all the time and never at all; one of those days that, as Philip Roth wrote, stupefies, sickens, infuriates, and embarrasses the imagination of any novelist. Today is the day that Zola meets Stefani.

There's no point in proceeding with this synopsis without acknowledging the unorthodox and novel source of Zola (stylized as "@Zola"), director Janicza Bravo's sophomore feature film, co-written with playwright Jeremy O. Harris. Adapting a 148-part series of tweets by the real life Aziah "Zola" King - who is credited as an executive producer and consulted on the film's production - the filmmakers make no bones about amplifying the original storytelling and the medium through which it gained brief infamy. Whenever Bravo and Harris's script quotes directly from King's original tweets, we get the iconic sound effect of a tweet being published, a coded invitation to the spectator to check the source. Zola isn't about social media, but social media in general and King's tweets in particular (dubbed #TheStory by fans, published at a time when Twitter did not yet have a "Story" feature) are nonetheless both formalistically and thematically integral. Zola is not subordinately, but rather symbiotically intertextual, hyperlinked to #The Story via persistent innuendo. Zooming out further, an essential component of the narrative and thematic texture of the film is social media as its own implied setting and environment, an invisible panopticon that informs upon the psychology of its characters just as much as physical environment and performances of race, culture, and gender. The result, while at turns blackly comic, is also a work of deep social horror.

Stefani, portrayed by Riley Keough, is a "white bitch" with dreadlocks who speaks with a heavy affectation of "blackness." We never learn very much about either girl's background, which means that Stefani in particular seems spawned from the ether. Bravo and cinematographer Ari Wegner opted to shoot Zola on a very granular, 16 mm film stock. In comparison to a work shot on digital or on a finer-grain or larger format film stock, the resulting surface image is rougher. The more granular film stock also diffuses light more, thus contrasting the rough surface texture of the image with a relative softness and shallow focus on the scene, an effect that is amplified by what appears to be Bravo and Wegner's decision to deliberately over-expose some key scenes, like the one where Zola and Stefani first meet. With Zola as our surrogate, we perceive Stefani as creature rather than as person, the softness of her pallid make-up and her bleached hair contrasted by the sharp, anachronistic, and vulgar way she speaks, heaping lascivious attention on Zola's body and look while back-talking the middle-aged black man who is taking her out. With the sun through the diner windows acting as a key light, she could be an angel with broken wings, or an imp on a temporary mission from Hell.

There is an ambiguity to Stefani's tentative attempts to already insinuate herself into Zola's orbit. On one level, there is a bemusing quality to wondering if this "white bitch" is for real. Is she more Iggy Azalea or V-Nasty? At the same time, there is the unmistakeable hint of danger, a predatory intent masked by shallow niceties. Coyly juxtaposed, Zola effectively opens with a seduction, made explicit by Bravo's decision to superimpose a Twitter-styled "♥" or "like" between the two as Stefani makes her move and invites Zola to dance with her that night as a duo. To some spectators, the attraction between the two, beyond the sexual, will remain completely illegible. What possible allure could such a shallow figure pose to Zola, who otherwise appears so self-possessed? This is, of course, "the point."

To reduce the viral spectacle that accompanied King's tweets to merely morbid interest fails to fully account for both the motivation behind it as well as the viral fandom that it inspired on October 28, 2015. According to David Kushner's Rolling Stones piece from the month following its original publication, King had actually "posted and removed the story twice before and no one cared." The form of #TheStory with which most people became familiar was one that King consciously embellished with sensational details, such as a hotel-room shootout and a bipolar fiancé's attempted suicide, because the more frank story got nowhere in an ecosystem where one's social value is implicitly a transaction of superficial content in exchange for "likes" and attention. Some, such as Cady Lang for Time, continue to praise King's "easy humor" and "cheeky turns-of-phrase," but the prose of #TheStory is largely functional. Not only the form of the tweet itself, but also the perverse incentives created by social media, ensured that our only window into King's subjective would be one of compensatory confidence and detachment from the horrific implications of the allegedly factual content she published. In the absence of much besides the lurid, people read what they wanted, or perhaps needed, into #TheStory. Director Ava DuVernay gave its amateur author what is apparently the highest praise -- "She can write!" -- and then assumed that King represented "untapped talent in the hood." The comparison of creative talent to crude oil or booze never really sits right with me, but the more important thing is that, as King would be forced to clarify, for the benefit of many besides DuVernay, she was not "in the hood." #TheStory is not a "Tale from the Hood." Then again, if all you praise about a writer is their content, you can't blame them when they don't actually set the scene for you, or consider how getting to know them as a character might be advised. But, again, that's "the point." Nobody actually gives a shit about Aziah "Zola" King. They just "♥" her content. And in our hyper-extractive, cruelly atomized society, that is the most that someone like King, the author, and Zola, the character, can hope for; another crude transaction.

Rather than resolving it, Bravo and Harris's adaptation maintains and extends, via hyperlink, the underlying horror of #TheStory and its cannibalization via "discourse." In adapting King's tweets, it refigures Zola and Stefani as characters who we need to watch, listen, and sit with, and thus languish in the unknowing. We can, or must, read into it, but we are no longer flying by 140 characters of pure content and shallow affectation. We now must read the affectation and what the affectation hides, as embodied in Paige and Keough's tremendous performances. We now no longer ask a question like, "Why would someone go on a trip from Chicago to Tampa with three people she doesn't even know?" in some scrounging demand for authenticity as part of the obsession that social media fuels to take sides and wage the discourse in the absence of any spiritual momentum in our lives. Instead, we ask the same question, and must read an answer in the imagined presence of actual human beings.

In King's original posts, she characterized her decision-making as hedonic and financial: "So THE NEXT DAY I get a text like "BITCH LETS GO TO FLORIDA!" & I'm like huh??? She's like "I'm going to dance in Florida, let's go!!" ... Now I'm skeptical like DAMN bitch we just met and we already taking hoe trips together???? BUT I had went to FL 2 months prior & made 15K ... So lowkey I was down."

Bravo and Harris, on the other hand, dramatize a seduction, where the tension rests between two types of affectation and the subtle insecurities that they mask. It is one thing to read that two girls are "vibing." Bravo and her performers make sure you see and feel the vibration. What is communicated in the night before Zola fatefully agrees to go with Stefani to Tampa is not simply "hoeism." (Roughly translated, "hoeism" is a subculture and social performance that reappropriates signifiers of the "whore" and embraces it in the presentation of the self-confident, empowered woman who is sexually independent and all about her paper.) Rather, what we feel is the profound sense of alienation, the desperation to be "seen," the need for some sense of our value with respect to something beyond ourselves and our own utility, our own salability. Add to that the soul-destroying tedium of lives increasingly deracinated from anything resembling social interdependence, in which we are locked into a hedonic pursuit of cathartic pleasure in the absence of actual contentment with our place in the world, to say nothing of the organic limitation of the youthful brain, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Hence, Zola agrees to go to Tampa with a girl she just met, as well as two others she doesn't even know: Stefani's simpering white fiancé Derrek (Nicholas Braun), and another unidentified, middle-aged black man (Colman Domingo). Consistent with King's original story, Zola will not even learn the latter's name until they are already 48 days into their "hoe trip." Here is another subtle way in which Bravo and Harris expertly sustain the tension of the unknown established by #TheStory: Why doesn't Zola just ask his name? Why does she not care? It isn't long before Zola realizes that Domingo's character - credited as "X," the unknown - is actually Stefani's pimp, and that the two of them have been grooming and trafficking Zola to "trap" with them, to sell sex for money. #TheStory reveals itself, in far more elaborate and cinematic terms, to be a true crime parable. But whereas King's original writings were compromised to present this narrative twist as more content, Bravo and Harris's film follows upon the logical conclusion of elaborating #TheStory, so as to further imply that Zola's traumatic disassociation long preceded the overtly dangerous situation in which she now finds herself. This disassociation is not in any sense a question of only Zola's personal pathology; it is practically ideological, embedded in the very fabric of collective thought in America.

Zola is presented as a "mostly true" story, per some opening text, but the "truth" embodied by the film really isn't a matter of literal, factual authenticity. To borrow from Tim O'Brien, even with respect to what King admitted she fabricated for #TheStory, it is perhaps the most exaggerated aspects of the film that are the most true, whereas the most likely details are themselves distorted and surreal. One particularly genius flash of stylization comes from Bravo's synchronization with composer Mica Levi, who provides Zola with one of the best abstract or ambient scores in the years since it became the lazy norm for indie features. As the four primaries get out of X's car, stopped at some ratty motel, a pair of kids on the upper landing of the complex play with a basketball. Apparently training, the bouncing of the ball is exact and rhythmic, becoming a diegetic instrument of the score. Undergirded by the stream of nearby traffic, the simple composition suggests the ticking of a clock, a time-bomb counting down, or the beat of Zola's heart. It also impressively renders an otherwise undefinable aura that overcomes one when arriving at an unfamiliar location after hours on the road. Zola is, in part, a road movie, albeit of the crime variety, but it's debatable if anyone since Monte Hellman has been able to so capture the feeling -- rather than, again, just the content -- of being on the road, and thus endearing us to the interiority of a story's characters. One can not discount these minor moments of stimulation from the hedonic forces that call to Zola. The allure of the "hoe trip" isn't just the music, the salacious dancing, the drugs and drinking. It's the little things, too. It is also these little things, however surreally presented, that certify the truth of the film.

*        *        *

The hyperlink nature of Zola to King's original tweets is not restricted to those publishings. It necessarily and subtly enfolds the "discourse" surrounding #TheStory; the weeks following in which major publications from Complex to DailyMail to Rolling Stone tried to get "the real story" from its major participants; and a WordPress fan-page created by one "zolavsjess" to provide amateur sleuths with the social media captures, news items, and arrest records they needed to defend King against charges that not only had she fabricated her story, but that she was in effect assassinating the character of the 21-year-old Jessica Swiatkowski, the real-life inspiration for Stefani. The real-life inspiration for "X," Akporode "Rudy" Uwedjojevwe, is scheduled for parole on July 12, having served 5 years and 4 months of a 16-year sentence for one count of sex trafficking and one count of coercion. From the beginning, Swiatkowski maintained that it was King, not herself, who trapped in Florida when they made the trip in March, 2015. But the veracity of Swiatkowski's version of events - and its implicit defense from the accusation that she was complicit in sexually trafficking and coercing King - is undermined by the facts of the following April, in which Uwedjojevwe attempted to coerce two more women into prostitution in Reno, Nevada. As it happens, both victims would end up implicating Jessica, establishing a pattern of her having procured women for Uwedjojevwe to exploit.

At around the midpoint of Bravo and Harris's film, X has Zola and Stefani holed up in a swanky hotel suite to await their clientele. Zola goes off on Stefani, and while the latter meekly apologizes, upon realizing that Zola's sympathy and forgiveness are not forthcoming, she retreats into antipathy and disregard. This establishes a pattern for Stefani that is repeated at least two more times before the film's conclusion: shallow apology, followed by a slipping of the mask to reveal a much darker individual pathology. But the characterization of Stefani reaches its most extreme at what is bound to be one of the most controversial moments of the film. Arriving at an out-call, Stefani is about to engage in a gang-bang, when Bravo and Harris suddenly shift into a vignette titled "@Stefani." Clearly inspired by Swaitkowski's real-life interview with Complex magazine from October 30, 2015 and a subsequent Reddit post (much of which Swaitkowski simply plagiarized from the previous interview itself), Stefani now steals the narration from Zola, addressing the audience while dressed in a stylish, pink suit jacket and matching khaki shorts. In it, she attests to her Christianity, presents X as a respectable businessman and friend, and portrays Zola as a "very black" hoe, Paige now presented with "nappy" hair and wearing a black trash bag. This creative choice seems calculated to completely disenchant the spectator of any sympathy with Stefani, taking a character who is otherwise, contextually, also a victim of sex-trafficking and coercion, and allowing her to blossom into a final, borderline Yakubian state. X may be the pimp, but it's clear which monster stands to live truly rent free in the head of Zola as a character, and thus the spectator following their dissociated surrogate.

In her fantastic review of film - originally published on February 5, 2020 and now available on okayplayer. - Jourdain Searles at once praises Zola for its depiction of how its white characters "perform Blackness when they’re having fun and revert to whiteness whenever circumstances get difficult." However, Searles ultimately concludes that the film is rhetorically unfocused: "The moral distinction between stripping and more intimate sex work is constantly addressed, positioning Zola as the victim and Stefani as a lost cause. It’s hard to know what Zola aims to accomplish. Are we supposed to be laughing at the white people only or sex workers as well? Stefani is a clown, but she also comes off very troubled."

The problem of reading the film, however - and this has been repeated ad nauseam in reviews of the film - is embedded in the particular liberal monoculture of our media discourse and its completely inadequate semantic framing. Zola is not a movie about "sex work." It is a movie about sex trafficking. Entrapped by postfeminist concepts of sex positivity, "sex work" itself has descended from a well-meaning attempt to remove the pejorative connotations of words like "prostitute" and "hoe" into a reactionary compromise with the inequality and exploitation that is inextricable from both "sex" and "work" under patriarchy and capitalism. If Zola demonizes Stefani at all, then this is an appropriate reflection of the manufacturing of consent, the broader phenomenon occurring at the level of political economy infecting even the more granular notion of sexual consent.

The black comedy of Zola is undeniably there, but to attempt to boil it down to making fun of white people or sex workers entirely misses the point, which is the tension created by attempting to adapt King's tweets in a way that is more dramatically fleshed out, while also accurately replicating the profound alienation that informed the entire circumstance of its writing, publication, and viral infamy.

The black comic highlight of the film occurs in that same hotel suite, after Stefani has just finished with her first client, who pays her $100 for her troubles. Zola, once staring at the wall, disassociating herself from the trauma of her situation, now suddenly finds herself incensed by Stefani's undervaluing of herself. "Pussy is worth thousands," she says. In a minute, Zola is editing Stefani's Backpage ad, upping the ask to $500-a-pop. She even takes new pictures of Stefani, offering her creative direction. "No teeth," she says, because teeth makes men think of biting. "Girl, I be using too much teeth when I suck dick, for real," says Stefani; a diamond bullet of dialogue that may clown on the "lost cause" Stefani, but nonetheless endears her in a brief, subtle way that Bravo and Harris deliberately avoid repeating. This kernel of the pathetic, of actual self-deprecation as opposed to constant, racially-coded posturing, hints at humanity precisely because of the "WTF" face it inspires in Zola. It is something that, ironically, cannot be embellished by seduction, anger, or condescending sympathy. This is the real, unsalable Stefani.

By the next morning, Zola and Stefani have made $8,000. With the intertextuality of the film always in mind, it is this episode that drives at the heart of what made King's storytelling - not her writing - so popular. #TheStory reveals itself to be less true crime and much less tabloid, and more new media pulp literature. More than this, even, King's presentation of her experiences take on the timeless connotations of a tall tale, presenting Zola as a modern day folk hero in the black American tradition. Instead of Iceberg Slim the pimp, we get Zola the madame, turning the tables on her captor and stealing his hoe, pimping his "white bitch" better than he can. The appeal of the "badman" - or the "hoe" in the modern, postfeminist context - is precisely in its allowing a repressed and alienated audience to live through a cathartic imagining of bad behavior as a performance of true freedom. Bravo and Harris expertly channel King's evocation of folk archetypes, both modified and new: the Queen Hoe (Zola), the Simp or Cuck or "Captain Save-a-Hoe" (Derrek), the Deglamorized Male Pimp (X), and, of course, the Crazy White Bitch (Stefani).

But while briefly embracing the allure of this new folk tradition, it isn't long before Bravo and Harris proceed to its deconstruction, descending from this peak of brief, hedonic fantasy between Zola and Stefani in the hotel room into the abject horror that undergirds #TheStory. And as always, there is a sustained tension between King's truth and what appears to be credible, the discourse around #TheStory becoming an implied part of the narrative itself. When X is incredulous at the idea that the girls managed to make so much money with only one of them turning tricks, one can practically hear the disembodied voices throughout the social media universe who either took to Swaitkowski's defense, or simply refused to believe that King herself didn't trap in Tampa. In response to aspersions against King for not sympathizing with Swaitkowski as a victim of coercion and trafficking herself, demanding that she should have done more to hold their mutual abuser Uwedjojevwe to account, we get a scene of Derrek witnessing a man being brutalized by police officers, and simply driving away. That is, as if to say, "What have you done, lately?"

Despite Searles's assessment, neither Derrek nor Stefani really "revert to whiteness whenever circumstances get difficult." Indeed, even during the @Stefani sequence, Stefani continues to affect the same drawl coded by immersion in a stereotype of black vernacular, effectively weaponizing the costume of blackness against her "very black," "nappy," "dirty" portrayal of Zola. Searles continues the pattern of authors who neglect the significance of whites appropriating stereotyped black culture and speech as reflective of their total alienation from not merely the absence of "white culture," whatever that is, but also from the increasingly cruel, extractive, asocial environment that is the logical conclusion of capitalism and white supremacy. Whether it's the cuckolded Derrek or the demonic Stefani, the appropriation of blackness has evolved over decades of increasing precarity into a form of hedonic disassociation, a response to trauma. If Zola has a genre, it is situated in that cycle of "suburban nightmare" stemming back to works like Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge (1979), but pioneered in earnest by the films of Larry Clark and Harmony Korine, particularly Bully (2001), Ken Park (2002), and Spring Breakers (2012). Bravo and Harris, however, are able to do what Clark and Korine could not, which is to extricate the subliminal white reaction embodied by the suburban nightmare film, in which the "blackness" of white characters dangerously teeters on the suggestion of the degeneration of classic American values via proximity and cultural miscegenation. Bravo and Harris present cultural appropriation, white privilege, and the weaponization of stereotyped blackness against a black protagonist as part of the traumatic texture of their social horror, but they do not obsess over them. Indeed, the filmmakers consistently imply space for solidarity that transcends gender and race. Neither Derrek nor Zola really want to be any part of this world, and in the hotel we get a brief glimpse of some kind of solidarity between Zola and Stefani as sexually-exploited women. But real people - the truth of the film beyond factuality - are not 4.0 students in a college sociology class. They are adrift in a world where the aperture of what is possible is constantly foreclosed by the brutal realities of drudgery and exploitation, where the only thing that matters about a person is their transactional utility, where there is no point in doing anything that doesn't sooth or satiate the ego. We are locked into a cycle of trauma, disassociation, and hedonic catharsis. When we watch the @Stefani sequence, we are not watching the filmmakers demonize the crazy white bitch. We are not watching the censoring of "sex work." There is no meaningful "consent" involved here. All of that, the economic and the sexual, is manufactured beforehand. We are watching Stefani disassociate from a gang-rape.

The brutality of Zola is all but doomed to be lost on a critical and media authority that can only promote content, calling it a "wild ride," and calculatedly deploying the hot socially conscious lingo, like "sex work," without ever once interrogating how words and images have a form, the analysis of which is the only way to access its meaning. But just as the film's form, hyperlinked to social media, is dependently intertextual, so too must we read the response to and interpretation of Zola as effectively part of the film. We must not simply identify with the protagonist as a surrogate to a parade of social horrors, but rather allow ourselves to be enfolded into her as archetype of our universal sense of hopelessness and alienation. It is remarkable that our discourses on the necessity of representing strong, active, female and POC protagonists should be pointed up so blisteringly by a work such as this, in which the marginalized protagonist's character is strong, but she remains largely passive and disassociated within the narrative itself, like one watching a movie spinning out of her control. But when the movie gets too real, it's time to give credit to Bravo, Harris, Paige, and King herself, as artists who, in the long run, did not settle for the appeasement of an individualist power fantasy. It's time to sit in the body and consciousness of one who is locked behind both literal and metaphysical screens, watching the rape of the world, and reckoning with what sacrifices are required to get out of it.