Film / American Fiction

The dumber I behave, the richer I get.

Arthur: You wrote it.
Monk: As a joke.
Arthur: Well, now it's the most lucrative joke you've ever told.

American Fiction is a 2023 dramedy film written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, Tracee Ellis Ross, Adam Brody, and Issa Rae. It is based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett.

Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is a black author and academic. Though his works are respected by critics and his peers, he struggles to sell books because audiences only want to read books from black writers if they wrote about "black things." As family financial troubles start mounting up, he writes a stereotypical "black" novel on a whim in one night to prove his agent wrong. Only problem is...publishers love it, and so do audiences.

It won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay out of its total five nominations.

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American Fiction provides examples of:

• Actor Allusion: Adorably, Coraline is a lawyer slash public defender, which is a Call-Back to the actress, Erika Alexander, from her famous role on Living Single where she played Maxine Shaw, Attorney At Law.
• Adaptational Name Change: Juanita Mae Jenkins from the novel becomes Sintara Golden in the film.
• Advertised Extra: Tracee Ellis Ross because her character dies fifteen minutes into the film. Issa Rae is in around ten minutes overall, but is still on the poster with the other more important characters. Even Keith David's name was thrown around a lot in the film's press despite him only appearing in one short scene.
• All Gays are Promiscuous: Cliff is newly gay and gets around a lot as a result of it, as do all his partners.
  Cliff: I've only been gay for like, five minutes.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: An in-universe example. Monk harshly criticizes Sintara's urban fiction for tapping into what he believes are black stereotypes meant to play on White Guilt, but it turns out that her novels are based off of actual research and interviews she conducted within impoverished and crime-ridden communities.
• Ambiguous Ending: Monk steps up to the award show microphone to admit the truth and the film cuts to black. He says to the director he didn't say anything at the awards regarding being the true author of Fuck/My Pafology. The director knows this—he addresses Monk as "Monk", and the film they're making is about Monk's experience in writing the book—but it's not clear who else does (though the last scene implies that Monk has let Cliff in on the secret).
• Anti-Hero: Monk isn't a bad person, but he's grumpy, cantankerous, and snobbish even at the best of times.
• Ate His Gun: It's heavily implied this is how Monk's father died. Coraline accidentally blurts out that she thought the house was haunted because there was a rumor that "an old man blew his brains out in there" and then she realizes it's the old man's son she's talking to and she profusely apologizes and offers him a drink to make up for it. They hit it off after that.
• Berserk Button: Monk has little tolerance for White Guilt pandering and the Minority Show Ghetto.
• Big Damn Hug: Lorraine gives Cliff a big hug after telling him that he can't impose on her because "he's family." Cliff, who at that point feels rejected by his mother and Monk, is clearly deeply moved.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Ellison family has so many issues that it's readily apparent why Monk avoids them. His mother is a judgmental homophobe. She means well, but she says cruel things to her children at times like calling Monk fat when he's pretty much the average weight for a man his age and later telling the recently outed Cliff, during one of her Alzheimer moments, "I always knew you weren't a queer." His sister has been divorced since her husband cheated on her and is back to smoking again, which is possibly what kills her in the first act. His father committed suicide and was cheating on his mother the entire time he was a kid, but since Monk loved him so much, he never caught on and had to be told by his siblings later. Then there's Monk himself, who is a brilliant writer, but he is also judgmental and sharp-tongued, often insulting anyone who angers him to the Nth degree, and it ends up costing him a loving relationship with a woman he truly liked.
• Black and Nerdy: Monk actually has to lose the glasses and try to dress more casual when he's forced to do a face to face meeting with the executive who wants to buy the movie rights, so he lowers his voice and tries to use more slang to sell that he's an ex-con fugitive. He does fumble with the persona, though, and asks for a Sauvignon when the waiter comes by, which is not something your average ex-con would order.
• Black Jezebel Stereotype: A large part of My Pafology/Fuck, and Sinatra's novel, involves women that fit this stereotype.
• Brick Joke: Early in the film, Cliff talks about a college student at a gay bar mistaking him for Tyler Perry. Later on, after it's revealed that the whole movie is a screenplay of Monk's experiences in writing "Fuck", he tells Cliff that Tyler Perry will be playing him.
• Broken Pedestal: What happens to Monk when he finds out his father cheated on his mother the entire time he was alive. Monk loved and idolized his father, so of course he never noticed, but his brother and sister knew the whole time, which is why they bonded with one another and not Monk nor their father. His sister even saw his father kiss a white woman, which they all felt was just not okay.
• Character Name Alias: Monk writes his terrible book under the pseudonym "Stagg R. Leigh." Apparently no one picks up the reference to the famous song "Stagger Lee".
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Lisa says she started smoking again "right after the divorce."
• Comically Missing the Point: After reading Monk's movie script about his experiences, Wiley thinks it needs a better ending. When Monk jokingly pitches one where he is gunned down by the police when they raid the awards ceremony to arrest Stagg R. Leigh, he loves it, showing that he completely missed the script's message about how the media silos black characters into specific stories like police brutality.
• Condescending Compassion: This is the attitude of most of the white characters Monk comes across. While they continually espouse the need for more black stories and their desire to make their voices heard, they only want to do so through what they consider the best stories and on their own terms. It's most obvious when the white Literary Award judges decide to give "Fuck" the top prize and completely ignore Monk and Sintara Golden's objections to the novel's "merits".
• Contrived Coincidence: It is a bit contrived that Monk returns home just before his sister dies, leaving him needing to step up and take care of his mother and form a bond with his very troubled brother Cliff as well. He initially doesn't want to sell the book despite the truly insane advance that's offered to him—$750,000—but after his sister dies and he finds out his mother has early onset Alzheimer's, he reluctantly takes the deal.
• Crusading Lawyer: Coraline works for the city as a public defender. Monk asks what it's like defending people who are likely guilty; she says she believes that people are more than their worst deed.
• Dead-Hand Shot: Monk can see Lisa's feet moving as the ER team tries to revive her, when they stop, he realizes that she's died.
• December–December Romance: Monk's mother's housekeeper rekindles a romance with a cop from the town where they have a beach house and she has a Fourth-Date Marriage with him, but it's portrayed as a good thing and not something irrational. They obviously had a prior thing for each other and decide to waste no time since both of them are probably in their sixties, if not older.
• Did Not Get the Girl: Sadly, Coraline doesn't return his calls after their big fight. It's possible over time, maybe she forgives him and reaches out, but the ending is with him alone again and it was a hard lesson for him to learn.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Erasure has Lisa killed by an anti-abortion extremist, rather than a heart attack.
• Differing Priorities Break Up: Monk was already on edge because of the stress of his mother's failing health and the book blowing up when he hates it, so when he finds a copy in Coraline's bag, it makes him snap at her rather nastily. Coraline, however, does not take his judgmental abuse and breaks up with him over it, sadly not returning his calls and texts when he eventually realizes his folly and wants to apologize.
• Disappeared Dad: Monk's father was mentioned to be a chronic cheater who traveled around under the pretense of "going to conferences" but instead, he was cheating on their mother for years. His mother later reveals that she knew, and he cheated because he was a genius, and she points out that geniuses are notoriously lonely because they can't connect to the average person, and that's why she stayed with him in spite of all the infidelity. Sadly, this rocks Monk to the core, as he loved his father and had no idea about the affairs, but his siblings did. Cliff points out that he was his father's favorite, so he didn't bond with his siblings, which made them all distant and slightly resentful of each other. He does end up mending fences with Cliff, though.
• Everyone Has Standards: Sintara Golden may have become successful by writing urban fiction that taps into negative stereotypes about black people, but even she finds "Fuck" to be a soulless story full of Uncle Tomfoolery pandering.
• Fauxshadowing: There's a brief scene of Monk taking off metals to put through a scanner before he sees Lisa, and she talks about a metal detector. In the book, this is foreshadowing for Lisa's murder by an anti-abortion activist. In the film, she dies of a heart attack.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: When Lisa and Monk are talking about their mother, Lisa says it will "hurt", and then winces in obvious pain. Five minutes later, she has a heart attack and dies.
• Foil: Sintara and Monk are foils to one another. Both are black authors who write urban fiction, but Sintara has accepted this particular type of black culture while Monk soundly rejects it, stating that it causes white people to think they can't be anything more than people who struggle. Sintara argues that he is instead mad at white people for believing black people are stereotypical struggling thugs and hoes, not at her and not at the black community. This causes Monk to have a bit of an epiphany, even though he disagrees with her.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In contrast to the Fauxshadowing above, shortly after their conversation about the metal detector, Lisa tells Monk that she's started smoking again since getting divorced. This is presumably foreshadowing Lisa's heart attack, since that's how she dies in the film instead of being murdered by an anti-abortion activist.
  • After the very tough scene where his mother tells him "I always knew you weren't a queer," Cliff decides to fly back and candidly tells Coraline, "This family will break your heart." Sadly, he's right. Monk snaps at Coraline when he finds a copy of "Fuck" in her bag and she defends the book to him, so she breaks up with him over his rude comments.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: We do know that time is passing throughout the film, but we don't know quite how much, so we have to assume that Lorraine and the cop have gone out a few times in years prior and they are rekindling their romance in their golden years, resulting in a sweet beach wedding that Monk attends.
• Fourth Wall Psych: The novel's opening line is Monk's voice over a black screen saying "Let's begin." When the picture comes in, it's revealed that he is speaking to his class.
• Freudian Trio: The three siblings. Lisa is the superego, as the rational and wise sibling, and the only daughter. Monk is the ego; he steps up for his mother but My Pafology/Fuck'' shows a more reckless side. Cliff is the id, as a newly divorced gay man who does a lot of drugs.
• Fugitive Arc: Monk pretends that his pen name, "Stagg R. Leigh", is a wanted fugitive as an excuse not to show up in person when he can.
• Funetik Aksent: As in the book (Erasure shows the whole thing), My Pafology is shown to be exclusively written in an exaggerated "black" vernacular.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": Monk spreading Lisa's ashes into the beach is interrupted by a nosy complaining neighbor that Cliff has to chase off.
• Gallows Humor: His sister's final letter for her surviving family members is exactly this and it's fitting given what we see of her before she unfortunately passes away. It visibly makes Monk and his family chuckle as they cry before dispersing her ashes in the ocean per her wishes.
• Gone Horribly Right: Frustrated Monk writes an intentionally bad urban fiction book to highlight the publishing world's hypocrisy, only for it to blow up as a best seller and beloved.
• Head Desk: Monk's response when some businesspeople approve of his ironic proposal to rename My Pafology to Fuck.
• Healthcare Motivation: A major factor that pushes Monk into writing My Pafology is the need to provide high-quality nursing home care for his mother’s worsening dementia and the $750,000 advance and the later incredibly lucrative movie deals then help him out. He lies about it to his brother, though, until the very end.
• The Hedonist: Cliff has recently come out, spending most of his free time indulging in casual sex, drinking and taking drugs.
• The Hero Dies: The Story Within a Story My Pafology/Fuck apparently ends with the protagonist getting killed by a police officer. The movie Wiley and Monk make about the events of the publication of Fuck also ends with Monk being killed by the police, since that is the only ending Wiley feels will be good and profitable (despite Monk's objections).
• Hollywood Pudgy: invoked Discussed in-universe. His mother says You Are Fat (which he agrees with). Lorraine tells him that in Arkansas, he would be a "beauty queen."
• Hope Spot: Monk sends Coraline a text message apologizing and asking her to be his date for the awards ceremony. The dots in front of her name indicate that she's typing a response, only to abruptly stop, showing that she's changed her mind and decided to ignore him.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Judges for the Literary Award talk about how Fuck is important as a sign that people are listening to black voices, when three of the five judges present are ignoring the black man and black woman actually rejecting the idea that Fuck is worthy of an award. The camera shot even drives home the point, with the three white judges sitting across from the two black ones.
  • Cliff teases Monk about having once brought home a white woman, even though he himself was married to one, as Monk points out. He denies being a hypocrite about this, because according to him, "Beards don't count".
• I Am One of Those, Too: When Monk is interviewing the movie director Wiley and pretending to be a fugitive who was once in prison as part of his persona, Wiley reveals that he has been in prison for a month. Monk has to be vague and secretive about his experience to avoid tipping Wiley off that he was never actually in prison.
• Insufferable Genius: Monk is clearly an intelligent man and talented writer, but many characters point out his pride and temper tends to get in his way.
• Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple: Cliff and his many boyfriends are portrayed this way. He doesn't behave in any stereotypical manner, but the brief interactions with his lovers show he prefers effeminate men.
• The Masquerade Will Kill Your Dating Life: A type 1 version. Monk becomes increasingly hounded by the stress of My Pafology/Fuck, which results in him becoming more irritated and irritable. He becomes increasingly offhand with Coraline, and eventually snaps at her after finding a copy of Fuck in her bag. When she says she liked it, he calls her stupid, prompting her to break up with him.
• Meaningful Release Date: Invoked. The publishers suggest releasing Monk's novel full of urban black tropes and stereotypes on Juneteenth, as black people will be celebrating and white people will be feeling guilty.
• Meet Cute: Monk bumps into Coraline when he's about to go inside and she drops some tomatoes out of her bag, so he goes over to help her and then strikes up a conversation and a friendship that later leads to romance.
• Minority Show Ghetto: invoked In-universe. Monk is a talented writer, but his manuscripts keep getting rejected by publishers that want him to write more "Black" stories and his books are even put into African American studies section of the bookstore despite having nothing to do with it. He writes My Pafology/Fuck as a parody of the tropes in this.
• Multiple Endings: Monk pitches Wiley multiple ways to end the movie based on his recent experiences;
  • The story ends just as Monk gets on stage and is about to confess something. Wiley rejects this for being too ambiguous.
  • Monk abruptly runs out of the award ceremony to Coraline's house. Wiley rejects this one for being too cheesy.
  • An annoyed Monk pitches an ending where the police raid the awards ceremony after Monk's confession that he is Stagg R. Leigh, mistake his trophy for a weapon, and gun him down in a hail of bullets. Wiley approves of this one.
• Named After Somebody Famous: Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is obviously named after Thelonious Monk given his nickname.
• Nice to the Waiter: While Wiley is polite and pandering to Monk, he later browbeats an intern for bringing him a beverage can moist from condensation.
• Noodle Incident: The family doesn't elaborate on when Monk went out with a white woman, but it's a Running Gag that they did not approve when he brought her around at some point. It apparently runs in the family since his sister said she saw their cheating father kiss a white woman once.
• Not So Similar: While Monk initially believes that Sintara Golden’s book We's Lives In Da Ghetto is the type of pandering Uncle Tom Foolery book that Fuck is satirizing, a conversation with her shows that despite her background she did do actual research and interviews with actual people and even put in direct quotes while Monk made everything up and thus she recognizes Fuck as the lie that it is.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Monk's sister, Lisa, is an OB/GYN and his brother, Cliff, is a plastic surgeon. When Monk says that Lisa is a doctor, she says "so are you", and he has to point out that he's not a medical doctor (presumably a doctorate holder as a college professor). It gets reversed on him when Monk expresses worry that Cliff gave Oxycontin to Lorraine, only for Cliff to tell him that that helps "if [they] need to revive a sentence."
• Old Retainer: Lorraine. When Cliff suggests firing Lorraine, their housekeeper, Monk replies that Lorraine is family.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Monk is never referred to as "Thelonious", not even by his mother or siblings.
• Opinion Override: The film opens with Monk teaching a college literature class where a white Soapbox Sadie objects to the class having to learn about The Artificial Nigger because she finds the title offensive. Monk tells her that if a black man like him can accept the title, a white woman like her should be able to too. Her refusal to do so leads to him shouting at her, causing her to leave the class in tears and Monk subsequently being disciplined by the college.
• Oscar Bait: In-Universe, Wiley is a producer of what Arthur calls "Oscar-baity issue movies" which is why he's very interested in adapting Monk's novel. Arthur mentions he had recently done a film about the Middle Passage.
• Parental Favoritism: Lisa says to Monk that their father always favored Monk, leading to Lisa and Cliff becoming closer to each other to compensate.
• Parody: Monk writes "My Pafology" / "Fuck" as a parody of the urban fiction books he despises so much, so of course it immediately blows up and nets him an advance of freaking $750,000. When he hears this, he is absolutely speechless.
• Pet the Dog: It's not entirely within her control due to Alzheimer's, but Monk's mother, like a lot of black boomers, seems intolerant of gay men...until the wedding reception. She is seen dancing with Cliff's two gay lovers and seems perfectly content doing so, which is nice considering earlier when she just destroys Cliff's spirit by saying, in a spell of her condition, "I always knew you weren't a queer" while slow dancing with her.
• Playing Up the Stereotype: Monk is a black professor from a well-off background, and resents how the white-dominated publishing industry only wants to sell stereotypically black stories (i.e. about racism, urban crime, etcetera). As a joke, he writes a "hood" novel filled with stereotypes like deadbeat dads and drug addiction, and passes himself off as a thuggy ex-con (even affecting a ghetto accent). It gets rave reviews.
• Rage Against the Author: When Monk is initially writing My Pafology, he imagines the scene of the two characters he's writing. When one shoots the other, the shot character calls Monk out in annoyance.
• Refuge in Audacity: This trope fuels the entire film. Monk writes an intentionally bad urban fiction book, and so of course, it blows up and becomes a bestseller, netting him a $750k advance and not one but TWO movie deals. He is absolutely mortified at all of it, which is the conflict of the film.
• The Reveal: Parodied. When "Fuck" wins the Literary Award, we see Monk go up and take it from the host, about to reveal himself to the world...and then it cuts to black and we find out Monk wrote a screenplay about his life and experiences and is pitching it to the executive who's making "Plantation Annihilation." He also mentions two other endings before the real film ends shortly after.
• Rule of Pool: When he and Coraline find Monk swimming at night, Cliff pulls Monk into the pool.
• Running Gag: Monk's family teasing him about bringing a white woman home one time.
• Scary Black Man: In-universe. Fuck revolves entirely around black stereotypes, including two black men, who are secretly father and son who are also hardened career criminals. They recite cliched lines about being like "apes."
• Show Within a Show: There's the fake talk show that has his fake persona Stagg on briefly, but the movie also transitions into showing us that Monk wrote a screenplay of his life and experiences and then pitches it to the douche who's making "Plantation Annhiliation" in a fairly smooth and creative cut.
• Smash to Black: Discussed. The film seems to end on a Smash to Black just as Monk gets up at the awards dinner—but no, it's just the first ending Monk pitches to Wiley the director.
• Springtime for Hitler: Monk wrote My Pafology to spite itself and prove audiences that White Guilt books are not good literature and when publishers and audiences love it, he doubles down trying to make it worse, only for them to love it more. Even renaming it Fuck doesn’t stop its success with the novel eventually becoming a best seller, getting a movie deal, and winning a prestigious award, becoming Monk's most successful work, much to his chagrin.
• Straight Gay: Cliff is portrayed this way, so much so that Monk either didn't notice or didn't care to notice. Cliff also is a very late bloomer for coming out, as he didn't do so until well into adulthood and after having a wife and kids. It's not fair, but it is understandable that his wife and kids hate his guts since as soon as the news got out, the whole family was humiliated by their own community. That being said, he doesn't display many of the gay stereotypical behavior except for having a lot of sexual partners and they're quite a bit younger than him. Despite this, it's not a negative portrayal of a gay man.
• Take That!:
  • Understandably, there are a few shots taken at Tyler Perry, given that his empire is built upon pretty much nothing but films about Uncle Tomfoolery and other negative black stereotypes.
  • The entire film itself is a HUGE Take That at the publishing industry and the movie industry for being majority white and only caring about works depicting black pain that appeal to their own sense of White Guilt, never black joy or black success.
  • Wiley's film Plantation Annihilation is one towards "black trauma horror" films that exploit racism as a device to tell horror stories.
• Truth in Television:
  • Most of what's portrayed about the publishing world is spot on in accuracy. The American publishing industry still remains between 80-90% white and is 74% female.
  • Traditionally published authors (and some indie/self-published/hybrid authors) do actually randomly visit big box bookstores to see if their books are being stocked and what section they're in, so Monk isn't just being neurotic here—it's accurate to what plenty of authors can't help but do. Some of them ask for permission to sign their books as well and depending on the store, sometimes they're allowed to do so to add value to the purchase.
• Token Minority: Cliff is the film's sole gay character, which colors how he interacts with his family (who largely disapprove of his life choices).
• Uncle Tomfoolery: Monk writes this type of book, featuring black thugs in a crime-ridden community, to spite the trope, but it becomes a success.
• Where The White Women At:
  • Monk's father once kissed a white woman while still married to his mother, which his sister saw. It's a Recurring Gag.
  • Monk also gets made fun of by his siblings and mother for having brought a white woman home at some point, while his brother Cliff was also married to a white woman, though he declares that "Beards don't count."
• White Guilt: Wiley is a movie producer that specializes in these types of films with his latest one being a horror flick, Plantation Annihilation.

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