Can Us Save Movie Culture?

T he ambitious folk at Inventory Press have admirably sought to resurrect “the film book,” that long-forgotten totem of the mid 1960s to the mid ’70s when movies stimulated thought and discourse. Book publishers responded with assorted printed examinations of films, filmmakers, and film critics — a movement ultimately devastated by the internet. That halcyon development was ended, along with traditional journalism, by what some called “the democratization of criticism.”

The false democratization of opening up criticism (opinionating) to all comers meant that the profession no longer depended on expertise, but Shannon Harvey and Adam Michaels, founders of Inventory Press (IP), pursue a particular kind of expertise in new film books based on the movies Get Out and Us, by Jordan Peele.

It’s telling that the just-released print edition of Us, containing Peele’s screenplay, complete with deleted scenes, photo illustrations, and assorted critical commentaries, revives the film book as IP’s version of intellectual property. It is an artifact of the current intellectual machinations in our culture and politics. Inventory Press is an imprint of Artbook/D.A.P. (Distributed Art Publishers), best known for its gallery- and museum-art books.

As a product of that rarefied, progressive environment, the film book Us represents the liberal, academic mind-set that embraces Peele’s racial politics — movies about black social and psychological victimization. Although Peele works for mainstream Hollywood, his critical reputation is endorsed by the Millennial equivalent of ’60s radicalism.

The publisher’s note from Harvey and Michaels charmingly pays tribute to that series of late-Sixties books on Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Masculine-Feminine published by leftist Barney Rosset’s Grove Press under the Black Cat imprint. Harvey and Michaels recall that those small books “were released with the goal of bringing these important films (at that time relegated to arthouse cinemas) to broad audiences.” However, Us, like Peele’s previous Get Out, were major studio productions, widely distributed in the popular culture. Their critical acclaim was a feature of the pop politics that validate Peele’s cynical, post-Obama vision of America’s racial mindscape.

The surprise success of Get Out fueled corporate media’s validation of Black Lives Matter, a defining moment of “anti-racist” narcissism. It was deemed “the most important screenplay of the 21st century” by the Writers Guild of America, and IP’s book version became, as Harvey and Michaels boast, “a tremendous success, with broad sales across art, film, psychoanalysis, and student audiences, reflecting strong desire for an original source and answers to why and how that important film came to be.”

IP’s Us book perpetuates that cultural curiosity with its supplementary material, a “cosmology” of encyclopedic entries that offer detailed explanations (expanded footnotes) on the theory and origin of Peele’s movie and its imaginary universe.

While Us was received as pop entertainment, this film-book approach combines subculture and academic commentary with mini essays. The amendments, printed in biblical double columns, range from goofy to highbrow, written by connoisseurs of race culture and the art world: Theaster Gates, Jamieson Webster, Mary Ping, Shana Redmond, Jared Sexton, Leila Taylor, and varied remarks by West Coast entrepreneur and Metrograph repertory amanuensis Ted Gerike.

The idea of an academic “cosmology” grants Peele the same limitless significance as the Marvel Cinematic Universe but with the straight-faced solemnity usually reserved for Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Dante. To suggest that the gimmicky Us contains richness that evokes Toni Morrison, W. E. B. DuBois, Carl Jung, Michael Jackson, Home Alone, Sylvia Plath, Paul Robeson, O. J. Simpson, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Micheaux, Jacques Lacan, and “Itsy Bitsy Spider” hints at desperation.

IP’s questionable aim is to expand the cinematic canon through dubious attention to the racial pathologies that are simply Peele’s stock-in-trade.

Peele contrived Get Out, Us, and Nope to exploit the traumas of black identity that Hollywood will parody endlessly. It’s related to the same pathology that popularized the zombie genre both before and after Obama’s presidency.

During the heyday of the film book, artists from Fritz Lang and Fellini, to Bergman and Godard, to Resnais and Antonioni warranted deep exegesis. Scholars Roland Barthes and Robert B. Ray have written about heuristic film studies that required “an interrogative reading.” But the ambitions of this Us film book spoil true intellection; it avoids the sharp interrogation that Peele deserves in favor of race-culture fashion.