The negative stereotyping of Lupita Nyong’o.
Beautiful dark-skinned Lupita Nyong’o has the misfortune of personifying the guilt of the new racists. In her role as Samira, a terminally ill poet fleeing extraterrestrial monsters that have descended upon New York City in A Quiet Place: Day One, she strives to escape downtown and get home to the symbolic black enclave of Harlem.
Every horror movie presents a metaphoric rendering of the psychological or social crisis of its time. In the Quiet Place franchise (scare tactics based on an invasion of alien creatures who react to the slightest sound by attacking human beings), it’s a First Amendment metaphor: the fear of speaking out during an era of media and Big Tech oppression. (The franchise began during the Trump administration.)
But in the new prequel, director-writer Michael Sarnoski uses Nyong’o to elaborate another metaphor similar to that in his debut feature Pig. Through Samira and her pet cat, Sarnoski shrinks the nuclear family of the first two Quiet Place films (the nuclear family being in disrepute) and depicts the fatality and terror of Americans who are victimized by the current censorship regime.
It’s no surprise that mainstream media ignored this aspect of the franchise — as if censorship was another “conspiracy theory.” Go-along reviewers congratulate Sarnoski for continuing the rather stupid, tip-toeing premise, substituting the attachment of the very Otherly Samira to her feline pet for his earlier porcine-inflected view of loneliness and isolation. (The tag-along human refugees played by Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff, and Djimon Hounsou are irrelevant.)
In this twisted metaphor, Nyong’o’s race is used to authenticate Sarnoski’s Millennial noir. Scenes of urban apocalypse evoke 9/11, but a more socially conscious film might help us comprehend alien invasion as the political threat that media and open-borders politicians warn us to be quiet about. The “Death Angel” aliens (they have flapping limbs and leap awkwardly upon their prey) are the goofiest movie monsters since The Creature from the Black Lagoon, only less phylogenetic. And there’s Nyong’o, modernizing Samira’s panic beyond typical gothic fright.
Hollywood repeatedly abuses Nyong’o under the ruse of acknowledging the history of black American suffering. (She won an Oscar in 2011 for portraying the repeatedly humiliated slave concubine in 12 Years a Slave: “I stink so much, I make myself gag!”) Yet none of the industry’s left-wing guilt has inspired a comedy or a love story for the delicate, emphatic histrionics of Yale Drama graduate Nyong’o. There’s no romance in her film career, only catastrophe and horror.
As an icon of the new racism — the look-like-me canard by which show business justifies its Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) hires — Nyong’o drags us back, past the mid-20th-century “tragic mulatto” stereotypes, to old scandals of bug-eyed, terrified “spooks,” now popular again after Get Out.
Consider the media’s endorsement: CNN’s Brian Lowry says A Quiet Place: Day One “relies heavily on Nyong’o’s facial reactions, and it’s hard to think of an actor who can say more with an expression.” The Associated Press lauds Nyong’o as “powerful and heartbreaking.” In Variety, Peter Debruge praises Nyong’o as “an insightful actor wrestling with . . . someone who, on paper, probably read as an ingratiating empathy magnet.” NPR’s Aisha Harris says that Nyong’o is “masterful at playing characters who must keep it together on the outside while falling apart inside.”
These raves don’t connect Nyong’o to cinema’s great mimes Garbo, Lillian Gish, and Lon Chaney. Instead, this naïve praise resembles the esteem routinely heaped upon black Democratic politicians who achieve “history-making” prominence in proportion to how much they embrace victimhood as the basis for their electoral success and status. A meretricious sense of self-worth comes from validating the hoariest racist stereotypes. Progressive Hollywood can’t think beyond stereotypes, so Nyong’o’s sympathetic roles fall into the category of ungodly misery like Samira’s. We no longer have filmmakers like Melvin Van Peebles or Robert Downey Sr. to satirize this, only the grim metaphors of A Quiet Place: Day One.
Nyong’o’s other roles in the horror comedy Little Monsters and Jordan Peele’s Us fail to match the work of ’70s Blaxploitation-era actresses Judy Pace, Beverly Todd, Brenda Sykes, Tamara Dobson — who all shared Nyong’o’s ebony mien but were presented positively. Elizabeth of Toro in 1984’s Sheena remains regal, as does Grace Jones, who is always inimitably Grace Jones. Nyong’o told Variety: “What I came to realize is that it’s really important to be reminded of our mortality.” So in A Quiet Place: Day One, Nyong’o agrees to her own stigmatization — a perpetual victim archetype in another shabby enterprise.
