For too long, film has focused on black suffering. Can Radha Blank’s new
comedy usher in a new era of representation?
“I’ve been working on this social commentary about the white gaze’s eroticism of black pain,” says struggling playwright and would-be
Rapper Radha Blank in The Forty-Year-Old Version. That’s great material for her
music but it is not what her white theatre producers want to hear. They feel her play about Harlem gentrification could really do with a new white character (“We need to grab the core audience”). And couldn’t the teens do a rap number? And wouldn’t she rather write a musical about Harriet Tubman? Blank channels her rage into her rhymes, not least her song Poverty Porn: “No happy blacks in the plotlines, please / But a crane shot of Big Momma crying on her knees / For her dead son, the b-ball star, who almost made it out / Sounds fucked-up enough to gain my film some capital.”
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