'Pariah': Finding Love and Loving Hip-Hop

After only hearing about Pariah, Dee Rees' smart, heartbreaking film of a young black lesbian growing up in Brooklyn, a friend of mine compared it to Boys Don't Cry. Meaning: It's obviously another one of those feel-good-about-feeling-bad, issue-heavy melodramas that pop up on the indie film landscape every few years. Pariah however, goes to great lengths to confuse and confound its potentially in-built audience of civic-minded, liberal cinema-goers.

Pariah begins in a strip club. Gritty, hyper-stylized shots of grinding dancers and dollar bills floating around are set to Khia's raunchy early-2000s hit "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)." It looks like a scene out of Hype Williams' high-contrast 1998 rap classic Belly. The club is girls-only, though, so here's a strip club full of women enjoying themselves, joyfully objectifying one another, and acting as obnoxious as men. And the film seems fine with that, reserving judgment even as it gradually introduces Alike (Adepero Oduye), whose concern is her curfew, not grabbing as many girls' phone numbers as possible.

When Rees' camera eventually locates Alike — 17, gay, yet to be kissed, quasi out-of-the-closet at school, hiding it from her judgmental mother (Kim Wayans) and gruff father (Charles Parnell) — it's apparent that she's feeling out of place and perhaps a bit grossed-out as her best friend Laura performs "playa" (cuddling with girls), and boasting that she gets "more pussy than your daddy." Music, particularly hip-hop, and poetry play a significant role in Alike's life, not partying and hooking up. She's an aspiring writer — the film is prefaced with an Audre Lorde quote: "Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs" — and rap songs, usually female-fronted, are often playing in the background, soundtracking her coming-of-age.

One telling scene finds Alike watching rap videos before church, while ignoring her mom's orders to "put on a skirt." Rap's brash confidence has rubbed off on Alike. Her friend Laura (Pernell Walker) is a symbol of the under-discussed give-and-take between queer club culture and mainstream hip-hop style, as well as the subversive and communal aspects of both. Rappers like 2Pac and Lil Wayne, tough and gorgeous, rugged yet charming, have engaged in a fashion-conscious conversation with similarly-styled drag kings, AGs, and studs for years!

Given how brilliantly Khia's single is employed at the start of the film and Rees' sly deconstruction of thug imagery, it's unfortunate that this indie film's modest budget presumably prevented more use of, and commentary on, popular hip-hop. But that probably wouldn't ring true to Alike's character, anyway; she rather smugly tells Bina (Aasha Davis), an acquaintance she misreads as square, all about "underground" and "conscious" hip-hop. It turns out, Bina is more hip to underground rap and local open-mic events than Alike, and even introduces Alike to indie rock. This scene suggests a knowledge of hip-hop culture that few films feel comfortable enough to exhibit. Alike isn't portrayed as wise — she's the prototypical, insecure hip-hop snob.

Movies like Pariah are supposed to reject hip-hop's aggression, praise rock's elegance (or whatever), and at least celebrate conscious rap snobbery, right? Later on, in a sequence of events I refuse to spoil, it's the open-minded but flighty world of bohemia that hurts Alike in a way that hip-hop culture, with its in-your-face honesty and hard-headed provincialism just could not. "Gangsta" is not the enemy here. Laura, out and aggressive, sporting a rapper's style, is Alike's mentor, and remains her best friend when the film ends. It's the confluence of sounds — lewd rap, conscious hip-hop, indie rock — rattling around in Alike's adolescent mind, that elicits a stir of rebellion. Her family, an understanding but in denial dad and a well-meaning but cruel mom, have no reference point for what she's hearing, and try to silence it.

Here's the thing: Alike's mom is not a villain. She's a middle-class woman who desires normality more than anything, and obsesses over it to such a degree that she wrecks the family. After her mom refuses to say "I love you" back to a now-out-of-the-closet Alike, the camera lingers on the mother's Bible; as the shot continues, the film turns oddly sympathetic to the older woman's ignorance, cognizant of the fact that for now, at least, she's the one with a problem: She's frozen within a doctrine that makes it okay to reject her homosexual daughter. It's these moments, when so many other films reach for melodrama and audience-pandering condescension -- Brokeback Mountain's epilogue in which Jack Twist's father is portrayed as a mean-mugging Red Stater — that Pariah humanely holds back judgement.

The movie doesn't reward sympathies or make villains of anyone — it drops viewers into a situation that is at its breaking point and then pulls them out at the moment when it's not as bad anymore. As the credits roll, very little is resolved, and the sense that this situation will work itself out eventually, months or years afterwards, is not guaranteed. It's devastating because of its quotidian lack of resolution. Pariah begins with that quote from Audre Lorde, but a simple quote from a hip-hop classic seems more apt for its ending: "It's like that, and that's the way it is."