Is Being fundamentally a state, or an act? Is humanhood something we are, or that we do? For Heidegger, we only exist as relational creatures, embedded in a web of connections, and it is through our attempt to comprehend the nature of those relations that we arrive at a full understanding of ourselves as Beings. His was a philosophy against alienation, against the obliteration of individuals into mass society which he deemed a “dictatorship of the ‘they.’” Writing in Weimar Germany, he was frightened by the onrush of crowds and consumer goods, of images in entertainment and mass media, of a state defined by competition and envy. He feared that Being was being destroyed.
But what if this Being, our humanhood, is something other than the opposition of I and They? What if it’s an exchange? Your humanity for mine, our mutually reinforcing recognition. This is the basis for all equality, any love approaching healthy love, and in its most radical form it blurs the border separating the other and the self. There is no out there, no in here: to see is to be, to be seen to have been.
But humans do not want to love other humans; any metric of equality is painful to us. We imagine borders, conjure distinctions, invent networks of irrational signifiers to blind ourselves, to place us apart. Not for nothing did Barbara and Karen Fields compare the process of racialization to belief in witchcraft, by which “an active, well-populated invisible realm that manifested itself in the realm of the seen, as real things, events, and persons.” If all visual avenues are oriented towards the imagined, if “the real action creates evidence for the imagined thing,” there can be no exchange, no vision.
So how to reopen those avenues to recognition, to sight? In his 2019 manifesto, “Renew the Encounter,” the filmmaker and photographer RaMell Ross declares that “the act of looking makes a mirror of being.” As long as there have been images of black Americans, he writes, these utilitarian images have existed to observe, classify, exploit. Cinema has only accelerated these trends, yoking past narratives to the racial status quo, generating real images that reinforce imagined things to create a record not of looking, but of being looked at. Yet if the cause is visual, the solution can be, too. “Point otherwise,” he commands. “Be elsewhere.” See in ways which have not historically been seen.
With his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys, Ross actualizes this demand, creating a film which literally directs our gaze elsewhere, and compels other gazes back to us. The gaze in question belongs, at first, to Elwood, a young boy from Jim Crow Tallahassee, literally placed behind his eyes in a first-person perspective which Ross and his cinematographer Jomo Fray call the “sentient camera.” When he turns his head, we turn with him; when his field of vision narrows, our eyes focus too. Most of Nickel Boys is in this sentient perspective, and the effect is so simple, so natural, that within minutes you forget how radical this all is. From the very first image — a young boy lying on the grass, looking at the sky — Ross has reversed the historical role for black Americans, as objects to be seen, and made Elwood a subject, the center of his own visual universe.
Nickel Boys proceeds at the speed of his attention, a gaze which can be shy, curious, defensive, creative. Through him we see playgrounds, card games, kitchens, classrooms, a Malickian montage of private life lived against the backdrop of history and nature. Elwood notices especially those small details which a more typical narrative would excise as insignificant — a puddle, a flipbook, a girl’s loose shoelace — and then, with the dawning consciousness of an artist, spins them into moments of imagined synchronicity: the music made by a skipping record, two women stepping in unison across a shop floor. These moments run alongside and intertwine with the brutalities of Jim Crow, but are not reliant upon them, and Elwood’s political awakening is neither distinct from nor wholly determined by the ambit of his vision. Segregated Tallahassee is both beautiful and violent, with neither zeroing out the other.
This is true even when Elwood is falsely convicted of stealing a car and then imprisoned at a reform school called the Nickel Academy. Impoverished, brutal, and so deeply segregated that the black and white “students” only interact at an annual boxing match, Nickel is a zone of ubiquitous exploitation, a place where the black inmates, some of them small children, are sentenced to work in the orange groves, and all are at the physical and sexual mercy of the guards, administrators, and one another. Yet even here the camera rests on spiderwebs, lizards, Christmas lights, fruit rinds, refusing to reduce the vividness of his life to the dull viciousness of his tormentors.
Early on, at lunch, Elwood is mocked by a group of bullies, and then defended by his seatmate, a teenager named Turner (Brandon Wilson). Then the scene resets, and we see it play out again, but this time through Turner’s eyes, so that for the first time we really see the face of actor Ethan Herisse. Until then we have only seen him softly, quickly, as the reflection in a window, in a steam iron as it passes by. It is through Turner’s gaze that Elwood and Herisse come into view, presenting both characters with an equal who might notice, observe, and appraise their individuality.
I’ve heard some complain that Ross’s creative choice hampers his performers, that, by hiding the face of the “central” character in each scene, the expressive potential of any performance is reduced to the reactions it generates. We are used to watching actors perform, to standing apart and taking them in. But Ross is trying to collapse the distance, to put you inside of the moment, the interaction, the injustice with them — to transform the viewer into participant. So often, characters will look down the lens at Elwood, and directly into your eyes, and whether their look is of love, disappointment, hatred, terror, the feeling is communicated as if directly to you, generating an empathy so intimate and so pervasive you would need to physically obscure the image to deny it.
Whitehead’s novel was inspired by real events at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a reform school operated by the state of Florida. Excavations conducted in 2012 in and around a cemetery on the northern end of the campus, until desegregation the “colored” section, exhumed the remains of fifty-five students; in 2019, ground-penetrating radar identified twenty-seven more in unmarked graves. Of the roughly one hundred students who died during their time at Dozier, fully three quarters were black, beaten, tortured, and even outright murdered by staff.
Dozier survivors reported an environment of overwhelming, institutionalized cruelty: forced isolation; whippings with a metal belt; children as young as nine brought to a dedicated “rape room”; a boy locked inside a running laundry dryer. The school was investigated several times, reformed several times, and yet, for one hundred and eleven years, the brutality continued. A report published by the Department of Justice in 2010 found that more than twenty percent of the school’s current inmates had been sexually abused in the past twelve months.
This sort of pervasive, persistent violence has a shattering effect on the psyche. Long after the blows end, victims remain dissociated from their bodies and selves. Periodically, Ross’s film leaps forward to various points in the future, where we see a grown Elwood (now played by Daveed Diggs) going on with his life. But “see” is no longer the right word. For where before we saw through Elwood’s perspective, now the camera is locked, statically, behind his head, a set-up which obscures his face and a good part of the frame. When he moves, we move, but heavily, without clarity. What he’s looking at, who he’s talking to, even the work he’s doing with his hands; everything we took for granted is now hidden, blocked by a figure who is often out of focus. Yet we are still in Elwood’s perspective, now fractured, even on his end.
There is a deeper narrative explanation for this, and I will get to it. But Ross is also deploying film form to illustrate the damage abuse does to the soul, showing us how a man’s life might cease to be his own simply through his relation to the camera. In one encounter with another Nickel survivor, the movement of Elwood’s clenched shoulder often blocks the other actor from our view, an act of obfuscation which leaves a blurred void at the center of the frame.
Even in the past, Ross repeatedly turns away from moments of outright violence, sublimating them into the sound design, the movement of the camera. Elwood and Turner look down, black out, dissociate, trying to dull the knowledge of what exactly is happening to them. When Elwood is beaten by Spencer, the school’s prim and proper administrator, the camera physically detaches from his perspective, before cutting with each blow to a pixelated digital close-up on a shroud-like face, images in a jpeg which future Elwood is clicking through. He doesn’t need to show us the immediate blow: this long legacy is the real wound, the violence that lives within the survivor for as long as they can withstand it.
Around this Ross hangs a third perspectival frame, deploying images from news, film, and especially the African American Home Movie Archive, often in juxtaposition with the story of Elwood and Turner. Sometimes these juxtapositions are relatively straightforward, like the use of news footage to mark the passage of time, or like the images of the moon landing which tracks with the pair’s decision to escape Nickel. But others, the home movies of young boys using cinematic tricks to disappear and transform themselves, are more ambiguous, their intimate nature imbued with a dangerous charge in proximity to these fictional images of imprisonment and abuse.
Despite being old, none of the imagery here is settled. Ross wants for us to see these unknown boys as fundamentally like his characters, and subject to the same predations. “Repeat after me,” he writes in his manifesto: “the God of the camera is a colonizer. Hey, look here. The rest is history. The receiver of this gaze dies a certain death, a peculiar death of the imaginable.” To be seen in this way is to be racialized, meaning captured, described, cataloged. “These varying degrees of death are often presented as varying degrees of life,” Ross asserts, but this is a lie, a deliberate diminishment. The “utilitarian” imagery that he deploys throughout, culled from educational films, law enforcement recordings, public service announcements, was designed to depict black boys in a way that guaranteed their imprisonment and abuse at Nickel and Dozier. Systems of visualization become indistinguishable from systems of oppression. “Race,” say the Fieldses, “is the principle unit and core concept of racism.”
But images are pliable, flexible; one system’s documentation can become another’s evidence. Throughout the film, we are shown close-ups of damaged and corroded items — a belt buckle, a penny, a collection of marbles — all being exhumed from the graves at Nickel, a reckoning which is just beginning to take shape. As Elwood clicks obsessively through all the evidence, he finds a call for Nickel’s survivors to come forward and testify. But a reckoning with the past always requires reckoning with oneself. For when Elwood tried to escape Nickel, he was shot by a guard. His murder fractures both Turner’s life and the filmic form, causing that switch from first to third person which defines the scenes post-Nickel. Adopting Elwood’s identity, Turner disappears into the indifference of the official record, a journey which Ross captures as a flood of original and archival imagery, of birth certificates, news events, photo booth strips, and home movies, images of a counter-life snuffed out that recapitulate the film’s early joys in a tragic key. Though Turner survived, it’s clear that he never escaped Nickel, and now that he has been given the chance, he is going back for Elwood.
Human life is both immanent and transcendent. It arises from our immediate surroundings — body, family, community — yet harmonizes in a series of increasingly vast scales: the species, the planet, the cosmos. Whether we perceive them or not, we exist on all of these scales simultaneously, and we share them with so many others that a distinction between I and They is ultimately impossible. It is clear that many would prefer to deny this harmony between the micro and macrocosm, between the self and the other. But to do so does real violence to humanity as a whole, and also to one’s own.
Don’t misunderstand me. Plenty who deny the humanity of others live seemingly full and normal lives as members of the human race. Many who ran Dozier died without facing punishment or experiencing guilt or doubt. Even that coward Heidegger retreated from the radical horizons of his own work, and fled back into the suffocating comforts of race, nation, Volk. Yet there is a stunting, a warping, like a tree bent and cropped to serve some industrial purpose. Looking out at the CPAC hordes cheering on the destruction of their fellow citizens, I cannot but feel that this is not life.
It is corrosive to live a life weighted down by cruelty. When we decide to destroy a person, a community, an ecosystem, we surrender some fraction or some quality of the Being which remains in us, whatever still connects us with the world into which we were born. Existence is social, it only comes to fullness when shared. Recognition is a mutual activity: in beholding others, we allow others to behold us in turn. Ross’ central image is the mirror, a surface which intermingles perspective and perception, the interior and the exterior, the self and the other. It is through Turner’s eyes that we truly see Elwood, and it is Elwood’s gaze which allows Turner to fully perceive himself. Remember: “The act of looking makes a mirror of being.” What kind of existence do you want to see reflected there?
Ross ends his film with another image of the open sky. Yet this time, Elwood enters the frame, and offers Turner his hand. To stand would be to testify, retrieve, resurrect, exhume. There is so much at Nickel that Turner has spent an entire life hiding away from, as if averting his gaze. But in Elwood’s eyes, he is no longer that fractured man; he is whole again. So Turner takes the hand, and he rises.