Driven by Adepero Oduye’s emotionally powerful performance, Pariah tells the story of Alike (Oduye), a seventeen-year-old high school student trying to navigate her surroundings as a lesbian. However, this is less a film for lesbians as much as it is a film with lesbians in it. What I mean to suggest is that Alike’s struggles with her sexuality are tertiary. She knows who she is, and she knows what she wants. The impediments are her mother’s demons and her own uncertainty how to express herself sexually.
It’s not that Alike’s mother (Audrey, played by Kim Wayans) doesn’t recognize that the “tomboy” phase has become more of a lifestyle than a statement. Rather, she refuses to acknowledge that it can’t be changed and that “God doesn’t make mistakes.” And, this is where the film goes deeper than sexuality-based discrimination. The problem depicted is ultimately one of race and a constant drive to avoid segregation that stems from internal racism. Within any minority culture, there are subsections that divide the society into the most and least desired. Historically, we could cite such models as the “paper bag test,” a sort of euphemized gauge between the field slave and the house slave. Pariah illustrates something similar, but instead of focusing on shades of skin, the film focuses on sexuality as a detractor, primarily because lesbianism – to take a God-fearing approach, which also ties into Adurey’s ideology – prohibits procreation. Therefore, it also stifles the minority community as a whole in a sense that true equality in a hegemonic society requires equality in numbers. Therefore, Alike is not only disobeying Audrey’s God, she’s also turning her back on her race to pursue selfish pleasures.
Director Dee Rees does a fine job using this rhetoric as a building block in Audrey’s personality as opposed to making it her sole purpose. In fact, it seems that Audrey’s entire world is an illusion. Alike, her younger sister Sharonda (Sahra Mallesse), Arthur (Alike’s father, played by Charles Parnell) and Audrey live in a Brooklyn brownstone, or rather, the basement of a Brooklyn brownstone. However, from the outside, they inhabit the entire building. Likewise, Audrey wishes to present an idealized image of the American family, one in which she is the doting mother, cooking for her husband, and bringing her children to church every Sunday. But this veneer is thin: Audrey’s marriage is crumbling. Though never confirmed, it seems that her husband, a detective on the NYPD, is having an affair, and he hardly ever eats the dinners Audrey prepares, preferring take out to any aluminum-foil donned plate on the counter, complete with pink Post-it note lovingly scrawled with “Arthur.”
In a country with a fifty-one percent divorce rate, one might ask why Audrey keeps playing the game. Simply, she doesn’t want to be a statistic; more importantly, she doesn’t want to be the stereotype: a single, black mother with a philandering baby daddy. Forgive me for the crude assessment, but Pariah is often about the existence of stereotypes and the challenges of dispelling them. As an African-American woman, Audrey is twice magnified by this lens, whether it’s held by another race or her own, a theory that explains why Audrey distances herself from her young co-workers during lunch. As they chatter along with semingly perfunctory profanity-patois, listening to songs that melodically resemble the overtly sexual “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)” (the opening song to the movie), Audrey sits in a far booth, eating vanilla yogurt and reading the Bible. (While not ripe with blatant metaphors, the vanilla yogurt certainly qualifies as one, though it didn’t bother me as much as it did in Monster’s Ball.) To avoid being the minority of a minority, Audrey needs to present her self as clean and pure as possible.
In truth, it’s difficult to blame Audrey for his distressing over social appearances. Rees makes a point to illustrate that this dialectic is diffuse. As Arthur visits a bodega-owning friend on a random Brooklyn street, a young “bull dyke lesbian” enters, gathers items to purchase, and approaches the counter quietly as she is berated by a friend of Arthur’s: “what does pussy taste like?…Do you eat pussy because you like it or because you’re too ugly for any man to want you?” Perhaps he’s the insensitive extreme to garner sympathy from the audience, but it seems more than this. His blunt crudeness manifests itself in subtle whispers, smirks, and quiet chuckles from other characters in the film: students in Alike’s high school, people discussing this new “women’s club” that opened by the water, Audrey’s co-worker who refers to Alike as “your other daughter.”
It’s apparent that Alike understands the social pressure her mother faces. While she doesn’t agree with it, she often acquiesces to what her mother wants to see: returning from a club on the bus, Alike strips off her collared polo shirt and hat, exposing a tight white t-shirt that says “angel,” something we can presume her mother purchased for her, just like the non-revealing pink blouse. She leaves for school in the same getup, only to change immediately in the girls room.
Overall, the ultimate issue for Alike is finding a way to express herself. She’s a writer, and, apparently, she’s rather good, but even those who condone her sexual orientation are little help. Her best friend, Laura, is constantly focused on getting Alike laid, but having never been able to emotionally express her sexual desires to anyone else, getting laid is not the priority. Rather, she wants her desires to be understood and reciprocated, emotionally, not just sexually. Here, Rees also creates a contrast between straight-sex-endeavor films like American Pie or Superbad and Pariah. In the former films, the goal is sex, but their narratives don’t suggest that the characters have never had any physical contact with their objects of desire. Sex is the apex, but there are a number of ledges to hang out on until they reach the summit. For the males in American Pie and the like, there are plenty of options and opportunities, and eventually they’ll find a girl who will let them score.
For Alike, her sexual orientation, her family, and her race, combined with the trials and judgments of high school life, limit the number of conquests she can seek out, and they also make sex the starting and ending point of any relationship, something that’s emotionally stunting and painfully illustrated by her relationship with Bina (Aasha Davis), a friend who isn’t “gaaay gay,” but sees her time with Alike as more of a notch of experimentation in her sexuality.
There are many aspects of Pariah that could have been overdone, but Rees maintains a steady hand here. In such a short time, the characters are given more depth than just stereotypical facades, and this provides the film with earnest people, some that we like more than others, and some that we want to shake in the end, but all of whom we can understand – even if we initially refuse to.
