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jonahdeforest · 1 year ago

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Zola: Digital Storytelling and Racial Performance

“Y'all Wanna Hear A Story?...”

Zola is a glittering piece of postmodernism, filtering the infinite jest of touch screen technology through the medium of film. This is appropriate, considering its source material – a 148-Twitter thread from 2015. Narrated with lacerating wit by Aziah “Zola” King, the thread details the Detroit-based waitress’ wayward excursion to Tampa. Packed with suspenseful twists and turns, it's only natural that it eventually became a feature length film. After years of middling in development hell, Zola was eventually released in 2020. Directed with auteur sensibilities by Janicza Bravo, Zola uses a road-trip from hell to interrogate (or subvert) American race-relations, transaction and bodily autonomy.

The plot unfolds on the heels of a newfound friendship. Zola (the magnetic Taylour Paige) meets Stefani (Riley Keough) at her waitressing job and the two strike up a bond. Both strippers on the side, they appear to be cut from the same cloth – funny, street-smart hustlers and practitioners of a particular brand of femininity. This femininity is one patterned off of Black womanhood and Stefani, who is white, is shameless in her racial posturing. With stray braids, slicked down baby hairs and the unmistakable accent of a white girl imitating Blackness, Stefani represents a post-racial spectacle of appropriation. Keough delivers a comic tour-de-force performance, ringing each AAVE-inflect line with the appropriate amount of misplaced conviction. That Keough is the granddaughter of Elvis is not really relevant, but it does add just a pinch of subversiveness to the proceedings.

Shortly after they meet, Stefani invites Zola to strip with her in Tampa. Joining them are Stefani’s misbegotten beau (Nicholas Braun, giving a masterclass in patheticism) and her enigmatic, increasingly shady “roommate” (Colman Domingo). Zola comes to discover that she is in the throes of a trafficking scheme and that Stefani’s intentions may not be as innocent as she proclaims them to be. In her essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” author/academic bell hooks writes of cultural appropriation and its manifestation in the media at large. She writes that, “The overriding fear is that cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate – that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten.”

In many ways, Zola functions as a story of otherness – specifically White consumption of the other. Stefani is the walking embodiment of white consumption and continual exploitation/coercion of Zola only emboldens this quality. Zola, on the other hand, is expected to look out for Stefani, opining at one point, “Who’s looking out for me?” This line is indicative of Zola’s compromised safety as a Black woman – a figure who is expected to take care of everyone but herself. When Stefani tells her pimp that, “Zola made me a whole new bitch,” she is literally referring to Zola’s help in increasing her net value in the realm of sex work, but more implicity speaking her debt to Black womanhood as a means of adornment.

Zola and Stefani are depicted as mirror images of one another, both literally and figuratively. Bravo follows in the footsteps of many a psychodrama in her choice to present the two as spiritual twins. Walking down a hallway in corresponding outfits or gazing upon their reflections, they are both augmentations of one another and so completely diametrically opposed.

Elsewhere in her aforementioned essay, hooks states that, “Cultural appropriation of the Other assuages feelings of deprivation and lack that assault the psyches of radical white youth who choose to be disloyal to western civilization.” This feels like an appropriate diagnosis of Stefani, someone who exists outside of white parameters and thus adopts Blackness in relation to her perceived outsider status.

Bravo has described her films as existing a step-away from reality. This is fitting for a film like Zola, which renders a stranger-than-fiction story into filmic material. In a profile of Bravo for The New York Times author Jenna Wortham wrote:

Her movies are reminiscent of being on psychedelics — the way even the most mundane interactions become revealing, exquisite and worthy of intense examination, and the way something humorous can seem sinister for a flicker of a second before shifting back into levity. Bravo specializes in exploring the way seeing clearly can happen in an instant and permanently alter your experience of yourself and your life.

Bravo walks a tonal tightrope, but through the imaginative force of her storytelling, manages to pull it off.

Shimmering in neons and buzzing like a smartphone, Zola occupies a distinctive sonic and visual landscape. There are qualities that seem like a callback to old Hollywood: orchestral swells and grandiose title cards. These stylistic nods come across a little cheeky, especially considering the ways in which Zola rejects the Hollywood formula. Aided by playwright provocateur Jeremey O. Harris (who co-wrote the screenplay), Bravo presents a narratively frenetic fever dream that sidesteps convention at every turn. Even though Zola is unequivocally the narrator, the nature of authorial authority is subverted in a sequence where Stefani speaks to the camera, telling her side of the story.

In the Western sphere, stripping is one of the more fascinating, and literal, representations of our bodies’ entanglement with capitalism. The physicality, the need to appease and titilate, the showering of dollars. All of it seems like a particularly charged ritual of commerce. Zola does not incriminate the profession nor does it glorify it. For the titular character, the act of stripping has an autoerotic verve to it: through it she is able to explore the dimensionality of her selfhood. This is most evident in a sequence in which Zola envisions the different personas she can adopt before a performance. Repeating, “Who you gonna be tonight?,” she appears in multitudes, as if in an elaborate musical number (yet another moment that made me recall the stylistic grandeur of Old Hollywood).

If this moment is any indication, Zola is a film in which pleasure and pain are offered up with equal aplomb. It is a disorienting and spellbinding exercise in absurdism, confounded by the fact that its story is ripped from the digital headlines.

Work Cited:

bell hooks, “Eating the other: Desire and resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation, pp. 21–39. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Wortham, Jenna. “How She Transformed a Viral Twitter Thread about Sex Work into a Sinister Comedy.” The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 16 June 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/magazine/how-she-transformed-a-viral-twitter-thread-about-sex-work-into-a-sinister-comedy.html.

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