Can Zola Capture the Delights of AZiah Kings Twitter Saga?
If you tried removing from Hollywood history any film that portrayed or otherwise depended on selling sex, there might not be a whole lot left. But the framing is all; it helps, when using sex for entertainment, to wrap a bit of critique around it. In my favorite Barbara Stanwyck vehicle, Baby Face (1933), which for 70 years after its initial release was accessible only in censored form, the protagonist, Lily Powers, pimped out by her father since her early teens to the patrons of his small-town speakeasy, follows the advice of an avuncular Nietzsche aficionado and starts taking charge of her own (inevitable) exploitation. After hopping a freight train to New York City with a friend, Lily makes her way, man by man, into a job and up the ranksshots pan up the buildings exterior to mark her riseriding out and even capitalizing on the ensuing scandals, accruing cash and other goodies, and, ultimately, finding love, with a husband whos capable of admiring her savoir faire. When Baby Face fell victim to the Hays Code in 1934, the most blatant cuts and alterations were not aimed at the sexual subject matter per se (without which thered really be no plot at all): It was Nietzsche and the happy ending that got the chopas the butchered version spelled out, there is a right way and a wrong way to seek ones fortune, and since Lily made hers the wrong way, she could not be allowed to keep it. Between that era of economic desperation and this one, the line on whats too explicit for mainstream film has of course moved very far, and yet unspoken rules still govern portrayals of sex for profit: The sexually appealing characters shouldnt have too much fun for too long, make too much money, or enjoy too much comradeship among their ranks. The generally buoyant, sweet, sympathetic tone of Lorene Scafarias 2019 Hustlers, based on a real-life group of strippers who drugged and ripped off their Wall Street clients, felt like something of a departurea pole-dancing crime caper that was really a high-femme love story. And Janicza Bravos Zola, which she wrote with the playwright Jeremy O. Harris based on AZiah Zola Kings intricate, dramatic 2015 viral Twitter thread, at first promises to be more like Hustlers than the movies that came before: a summer romp in which the women like themselves and one another, and the audience roots for them to make off with as much cash as they can. Without the industry censorship of old, theres little to hold these characters backexcept, that is, for the strictures of social media.