Rizvana Bradley — Too Thick Love: On Cinematic Unbearability
A still from Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1972)
In a famous passage from Toni Morrison's seminal novel, Beloved, one of the novel's central characters, Sethe, is indicted by her lover for exhibiting a perilously devoted maternity which could only culminate in disaster. “Your love is too thick,” he declares. While such “too thick” love is qualified as the unthinkable justification for the infanticide that is speculatively recounted in Beloved, and has been taken up and interpreted as an act that points toward the moral, ethical, and political antinomies within a violent world order set against blackness, this essay thinks with Morrison’s novelistic rendering of a “too thick” love as irreducible to those forms of politicality ascribed to the humanist subject.
“Too Thick Love: On Cinematic Unbearability” theorizes too thick feeling as a racially gendered problem for affect theory, one which not only exposes the latter’s residual humanisms, but which opens onto the possibility of thinking with the minor affective registers of black existence. Highlighting the conjunction between black critiques of humanism (principally those of Saidiya Hartman, Frank B. Wilderson III, and Calvin Warren) and the repertoires of what I call wayward feeling that subtend black existence, my reading of too thick feeling moves us through the undertheorized racially gendered declensions and transfigurations within registers of feeling such as slowness, exhaustion, bitterness, and perseverance in film.
Turning from Morrison to Charles Burnett’s 1978 film, Killer of Sheep, a landmark feature which is often taken as emblematic of the black cinematic innovations of the L.A. Rebellion (for an overview see: Field, Horak and Stewart, 2015), I conduct a close reading of a scene which has been called “one of the most intimately melancholic moments in modern cinema” (Brody, 2017).
The roughly four-minute, single shot take featuring the film’s protagonist, Stan, slow-dancing with his wife to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” displays how too thick feeling structures repertoires of intramural love and bitterness as irreducibly entwined. I demonstrate how the aesthetic unfolding of this scene vitiates not only conventional humanist recuperations of its affective force within universalist grammars of suffering and perseverance, but also critical theories that would subsume its affects under the rubric of racial melancholia. In this scene, we witness not so much what Elizabeth Povinelli reads as Stan “capacitating the will to endure” (Povinelli, 2011); but rather a complicated set of racially gendered bearings and displacements, tracked by the synchronizations of and disjunctures between the visualities on-screen and the sonic lyricism of Washington’s song. Within these affective relays, “bitterness” is displaced onto (degraded) earth, within which the black feminine is sublimated — in Washington’s words, as the ‘dust hiding the glow of the rose.’
Without reducing the affective singularities that obtain across Burnett’s black film aesthetics and Morrison’s literary imagination, or ignoring the affective modulations effectuated to Washington’s song as it becomes sonically integrated into Killer of Sheep’s diegesis, I suggest that they are all nonetheless threaded together by the too thick feeling that permeates black life. Although this internally differentiated genre of wayward feeling is enmeshed in various histories, I argue that it cannot, in the first instance, be understood through the historicization of affect.
Parting ways with accounts that historicize Killer of Sheep’s affective repertoires as emblematic of postwar cinema, or as indexical of the transition from Fordist to neoliberal urban regimes, I emphasize (in contradistinction to Povinelli, for instance) how the film’s aesthetic practice reflexively engages with black interdiction from normative spatiotemporality, narrative subjectivity, and linear history. I conclude by analyzing how Killer of Sheep’s dilated event time (apropos Lauren Berlant) discloses the incommensurability of a universal grammar of fatigue, and speculate about what this insurmountable difference might mean for the durative temporality that is assigned to “a life.”
BIO
Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at UC Berkeley. Her book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press, and is a recipient of a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. It offers a critical examination of the black body across a range of experimental artistic practices that integrate film and other media. Bradley’s scholarship and writing on contemporary art, film, and media has been published in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Film Quarterly, and TDR: The Drama Review. Her writing has also appeared in The Yale Review, Art in America, eflux, and Parkett. Bradley has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events at the British Film Institute, London, the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam.