Black Cake review – one of the most visually stunning shows in recent memory
It is hard enough to lose a loved one, to wake up each morning and remember that you won’t ever see them again or hear their voice. That whatever distance there was between you, your relationship has no more opportunities to be mended. And when it comes to mothers and children, the relationship being grieved is rarely straightforward. But few periods of mourning are as emotionally difficult as what Byron (Ashley Thomas) and Benny Bennett (Adrienne Warren) face in Disney+’s latest miniseries, when they discover that not only did they not really know their mother Eleanor (Chipo Chung), but that’s not even her real name.
In the Oprah Winfrey-produced adaptation of Charmaine Wilkerson’s epic novel, the pair learn that their mother is not Eleanor, who grew up in an orphanage, but Covey, who was raised on the idyllic coast of the Caribbean with a Chinese father and a Black mother, but fled after a number of unfortunate events and faced further tragedy away from Jamaica’s shores. In the present, her high-achieving offspring are grieving her loss, but in a series of posthumous recordings they learn of their heritage (in a rare moment of humour, Benny delightedly exclaims: “We’re Chinese!”), and Eleanor’s darkest secrets. They hear their mother speak about her childhood as a champion swimmer and surfer and her love for the ocean that she would eventually pass down to them. Covey’s parents only passed down pain, her mother abandoned her at age 11 and she spent the rest of her childhood in the care of her gambling-addict father who drove her family to financial ruin.
Even if Benny and Byron didn’t really know their mother, they can take some comfort in knowing that she broke the cycle and loved them as much as she did the sea. But for reasons that slowly become apparent, she couldn’t share her story. Her evolution into Eleanor spans three continents and is filled with twists and tough decisions. Actor Mia Isaac is transfixing, subtly changing and growing as Covey is robbed of innocence and perfectly in sync with what Chung performs in the present before the character dies, making Eleanor enigmatic but soulful.
Her son Byron is now an “ocean scientist” but has long known that being Black (and now Black and Chinese!) meant he’d be considered “other” while doing his PhD and riding waves. Outside his complex grief, we see him struggle to connect with his sister and in the workplace, where he feels consistently undervalued by white colleagues. The prejudice the family face across the generations comes in different forms, with their Chinese grandfather never being fully accepted by the Caribbean community, Covey being sneered at as “fresh off the boat” when she reaches the UK, and Byron’s surfboard raising eyebrows in the present.
Any keen Black swimmer will find this sadly familiar (I was once told by an instructor on a lifeguarding course that my “Black skeleton” would mean I was more likely to need a lifeguard than be one), but swimming is a shared release for them all, and Covey/Eleanor credits it with helping her reach a better understanding of who she is. As Byron says in the opening scenes, his mother taught him that: “Some people think that surfing is a relationship with the sea when it’s really a relationship between you and yourself. The sea is going to do whatever it wants.”
That is literally true and a metaphor for the show’s central premise – that Byron and Benny’s relationship to their mother is about themselves. She is an unknowable entity and learning her story is a process of coming to better understand their own identity after her death. The series bisects into them grieving in the present, and unspooling Eleanor/Covey’s true origins in an intertwined coming-of-age story. It seeks out difficult emotional truths which does honour the complex themes of Wilkerson’s source material, but does not always make for cohesive storytelling; at times, the two plots feel disconnected from one another.
The miniseries wears its ambitions on its sleeve and ultimately achieves them with style. Though it tackles heavy themes around race, grief and gender, Black Cake is still one of the most visually stunning shows in recent memory. Even away from the turquoise seas of 1960s Jamaica, where every character is styled to within an inch of their life in exquisite period costuming, the show has a commitment to elegance. The production design in London mansions and Pacific coast townhouses are just as striking, and even when Covey’s life becomes difficult, it remains beautiful.
The story takes its time and the eight hour-long episodes require patience and focus, but the payoff is worth it. Black Cake is a highly intelligent and skilfully crafted piece that deserves to be slowly and thoughtfully savoured.
• Black Cake is on Disney+ now
ical. “Our people are better than your people,” reads one large panel. “More intelligent, more powerful, more beautiful, and cleaner. We are good and you are evil. God is on our side. Our shit doesn’t stink and we invented everything.”
This is Untitled (Our People are Better Than Your People), from 1994, a premonition of the Orwellian language of Trumpspeak, which she returns to in her three-screen Untitled (No Comment), from 2020. Amid the hysterical laughter accompanying pouting, out-of-focus selfies (only the lipsticked mouths stay in focus), and the Instagram pics of pussycats in toilet bowls and Lady Gaga’s manipulated visage, Kruger asks, “What do you want from me? What do you want me to want from you?”
She then goes on to quote French writer Voltaire, “Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”, then Austrian writer Karl Kraus: ‘The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they’re as clever as he is.” Now here come some stupid hair plaits and designer beards, with a guy playing an accordion whose squeezebox bears the words: “Ghosted, Trolled, Ripped, Ranted, Rented, Flamed, Screwed and Owned.”
Phew. No Comment is filled with verbal riffs, sight gags, non-sequiters and stuff found on the internet. And more cats, as well as a voice that sounds like former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. At one point the words flood three walls in a surging tide. “This is about a world in shambles,” Kruger says. Or rather the words say, if they are Kruger’s. She’s in there somewhere, along with Kraus and Voltaire and US rapper Kendrick Lamar, and an acrobatic contortionist tying herself in knots.
“I shop therefore I am.” Who said that? Was it René Descartes? Kruger’s consumerist play on the 17th-century French philosopher’s dictum first appeared in the 1980s, a time when, for most, the internet hadn’t happened yet. Since then our brains have been scrambled. In 2007, Kruger’s bold statements, white on red, black on white, filled Selfridges department stores and appeared in their winter sale advertising campaign. They were seen on TV and appeared on posters, becoming part of the background noise that accompanies our lives. But the background has now become the foreground, mediating our lives as we stare at TikTok while we wander into the traffic.
A 1989 poster made for the
Women’s March on Washington, in support of legal abortion, depicted a woman’s head, half in positive, half in negative, and declared: “Your Body is a Battleground.” It became a rallying cry. Here, it is reworked on a large digital screen, the words flipping to assert that “My Coffee is a Motorboat”, then morphing into “Your Will is Bought and Sold”, and “Your Humility is Bullshit”. It goes on to a murderous conclusion.
Beginning with pre-digital pasteups and collisions of word and image, Kruger has extended her range while staying absolutely true to herself. She has always been pithy and sardonic, sometimes obvious and sometimes opaque and abstruse, playing games with the methods and manners of mass communication and often investing phrases with calculated menace and subterfuge. There’s horror in there as well as a desire to unpick and to analyse.
When she was young she tried to be a poet and gave it up, only for a kind of poetry to sneak back in. Her recent Untitled (The Work Is About) – in which the titular phrase recurs in a litany of statements of intent, sliding up the wall like a movie’s end credits – began its life in a 1979 magazine article under the title Job Description.
The Work Is About mentions “the punishment of binaries, sex and perpetual churn … audience and the scrutiny of women, spectacle and the enveloped viewer … race and damage and brutality … privilege and the tyranny of exclusion … narrative and the gathering of incidents … dreams and the sliding of meaning … dogma and bloated pieties … money and the velocity of power”. It goes on like this for over five minutes. A stenographer could hardly keep up.
Kruger’s aphorisms lodged in the mind from the start and stayed there, along with all the other junk that already fills our heads, ready to be trotted out in the ticker tape of ready-made catchphrases, commonplaces, advertising slogans and oft-repeated punchlines that provide the junk food of everyday conversation and which pass for thought. It is as if we were speaking in slogans, delivered in Futura Bold Oblique and Helvetica Ultra Compressed. With a self-evident, sans serif finality that brooks no argument and eschews all ambiguity, Kruger’s words come at us like orders, subtle as a brick in the face. But words are tricky, and they slip and slide.
As a succession of oneliners, incontrovertible truths, lies, misdirections, fallacies and opaque pronouncements, Kruger’s work unravels then reconfigures itself as we watch and we read. Much of the time it is as if she were replacing our own inner commentaries with hers. To begin with, her art felt fun but limited – and, although she is still reworking the same territory, she’s been deepening the game all the while. There’s no end to it. Kruger’s words are timebombs, prophetic detonations that never stop.
• Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You is at the Serpentine South Gallery, London, 1 February until 17 March.
‘Our people are better than your people,’ reads a panel. ‘More intelligent, more powerful. We are good and you are evil’