the idea in #QueenAndSlim that is most interesting is also the one that is most vexing, I think. #filmtwitter #twitcrit [spoilers follow] >

Over the movie's course, the two unnamed characters transform from quotidian individuals on a tinder date to revolutionary folk heroes. But "transform" is exactly wrong. >

They do change; in partic. their relation to each other changes greatly. But the transformation into folk heroes of revolutionary black struggle is something that happens to them—*they are transformed,* in a process about which they're unknowing & bemused. It happens elsewhere. >

They have done something terrible and fatal, but have done it contingently, by chance, as a necessary reaction to a local and terrible threat, without any planning or purpose. Consequently they need to flee, with Cuba the most plausible destination. >

This inspires the comparison, explicit in the movie, to Assata Shakur, & over the course of the narrative they take on the mythic status of Assata (and similar figures from the peak of the Black Power movement; there is a LOT of visual & spoken allusions to the Panthers). >

Their fate at the end consolidates this and they end as the figures of mythic scope they never meant to be (their narrated ambitions are strikingly personal: to be loved in full, to live on in their beloveds). They become both folk names & inspiration for struggle. >

It's a compelling idea: that Black Power militancy is a social construction satisfying a social need, forged from individual & contingent acts that take on political meaning wi/in the context of constant violence & brutality meted out to black life especially by the police. >

Something about it seems right: political meaning is socially made, it arises from general conditions rather than heroic individuals, your political meaning does not belong to you but even more it does not arise from you. The truth is social, the film wants to say. I'm with it. >

At the same time, I struggle with that. It seems to have a real risk. It's not so much about agency, or even about intentionality, as it is about commitment and engagement and analysis. Because the other side of this idea rests in the implication that other militant figures...>

of black struggle (and beyond) were forged this way, as social myths, in a way that seems to empty out the possibility of people getting together, assessing a concrete political situation, and acting out of commitments, even if dangerous and desperate. >

Which I believe to be closer to the truth of Assata (and Fred Hampton and Huey Newton and many many others) than the story told in #QueenAndSlim. Now, I get that we could recognize both figures, the committed & the incidental revolutionary. >

I just don't think the film is asking me to do that; it is closer to suggesting there is a "real" story of contingent personal desire & self-defense behind revolutionary myths, & I am not entirely sure that is true or helpful. But these are first thoughts; I am still thinking.