Terence Nance’s daring look at race
Filmmaker’s new HBO series explores the issue with cinematic variety
In late June, writer and director Terence Nance, who has a luxuriant Afro and a mellow disposition, was facing a deadline to finish post-production on his new HBO series, Random Acts of Flyness, when something in the news emotionally derailed him.
In east Pittsburgh, a black, unarmed 17-year-old named Antwon Rose was shot and killed by a white police officer. The boy had seemed to foresee his own destruction, pleading in a 2016 poem he wrote for school that his mother would not bury him, like the crying black mothers he had seen on TV. On the news, a protester read the poem through a megaphone, and Nance, in a windowless, white-walled editing suite in Brooklyn, where he lives, watched through tears.
“It kind of shut me down for the day,” he recalled earlier this month in the same editing suite, flanked by computer monitors, a lonely snake plant and a vacant minifridge. The story had made him think of his own young nieces and nephews, and of the children he might one day have. The next day, however, he rededicated himself fully to finishing the show, which he saw as both an act of creation and resistance.
“The main function of white supremacy,” he noted later, paraphrasing Toni Morrison, “is to distract you from your work.”
“Random Acts of Flyness,” a kaleidoscopic, nearly unclassifiable variety show that accentuates the experience of being young and black in America right now, will have its première Aug. 3. It is partly informed by stories like those of Antwon Rose, but its interests are far-reaching and its tone skews toward the surreal and absurdly comedic.
Each of the first season’s six, half-hour episodes explores an array of modern social and political fault lines — gender nonconformity, sexual harassment and assault, police violence — in short segments that are brought to life using an even broader medley of cinematic techniques.
In one segment from the pilot, featuring a mock talk show called “The Sexual Proclivities of the Black Community,” a story of a date gone awry is illustrated in detailed stop-motion animation.
In a subsequent episode, a running theme of toxic masculinity culminates in an eight-minute original musical. The effect is a dreamlike carnival of images and ideas that suggests a toothier “Adult Swim,” or “In Living Color” as filtered through Nell Irvin Painter.
The series’ arrival adds a striking new frequency to the spectrum of black life available on television in 2018.
Like “Insecure” (with which it shares a network), “Atlanta” and “Dear White People,” Random Acts distinguishes itself by prioritizing the cultural vernacular and subjective experience of black communities over the presumed gaze of white audiences. But partly because of its loaded themes and formal slipperiness, and partly because of Nance’s sure-footed direction, the show is more raw and freewheeling than any of its predecessors.
Before Random Acts, Nance, who grew up in Dallas in a family of artists, was best known for his debut feature film, “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” which debuted at Sundance in 2012.
Oversimplification grew out of his time as a fine arts graduate student at New York University, and to say that it broke the rules of conventional narrative filmmaking would misrepresent the facts, and the movie’s charm, by implying such rules were acknowledged in the first place. In effect a visually rich and meticulously constructed love letter to “The One That Got Away”, it was elliptical, impressionistic, self referencing.
At Sundance the film won raves from critics even amid competition from other celebrated debuts — including Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and Colin Trevorrow’s “Safety Not Guaranteed” — turning Nance from a 29-year-old fine artist with no exposure to Hollywood into a filmmaker-to-watch overnight. (Among those who took notice: Jay-Z, who later lent his name to the film as an executive producer.)
After the festival Nance shopped another inventive script for a second feature that had little in common with Oversimplification, an absurdist political satire called “The Lobbyist.” But while some of his Sundance peers moved on to direct second and third films, agents and financiers in the industry, many of whom had professed admiration for Oversimplification, showed little interest in his new idea.
“A lot of people just stopped responding to my emails,” he said, with more detached amusement than distress.
“I’m a skeptical person — I walk into most things not expecting help from anyone. But you read stories about what’s happening for people around you, and part of your brain starts to wonder, ‘Why is that not happening for me?’”
Nina Rosenstein, executive vice-president for programming at HBO, said the fact that the series didn’t look like anything she’d seen before was a part of its allure. “It encourages conversation, and that’s exactly the kind of show we love to offer our audience,” she said.
One of the tag lines for the show is “shift consciousness,” which is both a mission statement and a reflection of Nance’s psychedelic influences. “He’s a hippie, bruh,” said director Barry Jenkins, a longtime friend.
Asked to define what a shift in consciousness might look like, Nance again brought up his nieces and nephews, the ones that sprung to mind when he read about the shooting of Antwon Rose. By using his platform to ventilate social norms, like those around masculinity, he hopes to influence their understanding of the world.
“Maybe my nephew will watch and think, ‘Oh, if boys hug each other, it’s not that weird, ’” he said in the editing room, as if he’d had the thought before. “I have total faith that something I had no idea could happen will.”