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Five and a half minutes into Nickel Boys, young Elwood stops to watch Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “How Long, Not Long” speech. It is broadcast on a stack of televisions in a storefront window. As the TVs click on and the picture comes into focus, Elwood’s grandmother, her friends, and other passersby stop and watch the face on the screen, to listen to his faithful claims that the injustice America inflicts upon its Black citizens will soon come to an end.
We see this crowd gather not directly, but in the reflection of the storefront window where the faces Elwood and the others blend with that of Dr. King, his declarations growing stronger in their repetition. That’s the first time we viewers see Elwood—layed as a child by Ethan Cole Sharp, as an adult by Daveed Diggs, and as a teen by Ethan Herisse—but not because he’s been absent from the film’s first scenes. Rather it’s because director RaMell Ross uses first person perspective almost exclusively in Nickel Boys.
Although author Colson Whitehead mostly uses third-person narration in the film’s source material, the 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray tell their adaptation virtually only through the point-of-view of Elwood and Turner (Brandon Wilson), two friends who bond at the abusive and segregated Nickel Academy reform school. More than a mere gimmick, the first-person viewpoint in Nickel Boys underscores the film’s themes about the enduring trauma of racial injustice and thus adds a new tool to the language of cinema.
How We See Stories
First-person perspective is common to fiction because it allows the author to develop characters while also filling out the world in which the story takes place. Jane Eyre’s passions are informed by her descriptions of Rochester’s home. Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man presents his Russian milieu as a reflection of his own impotence. Humbert Humbert’s description of American motels in the travelogue section of Lolita underscores his broken moral compass. As this last example demonstrates, first-person narration allows for unreliable narrators, storytellers whose limitations (ethical, situational, or otherwise) make the reader doubt the person guiding them through the world.
Try as they might, filmmakers haven’t had as much success translating the technique to screen. Even if we understand the limitations of the frame—that some things exist outside of the camera’s gaze, or that some things are in focus while others are not —we viewers still take the image as more or less objective. That’s why Rashomon, Atonement, The Last Duel, and other cinematic examples of effective unreliable narration show us the same events from different perspectives. We need multiple perspectives to triangulate the truth between the narratives rather than simply doubt the narrative as it’s being given to us.
Even worse are the movies that attempt sustained first-person POV for reasons other than unreliability. The noirs Lady in the Lake (1946) and Dark Passage (1947) both use first-person for much or all of the movie, the former to replicate Raymond Chandler’s propulsive prose, and the latter to hide the protagonist’s face until he can remove bandages after his extensive surgery and reveal that he looks like Humphrey Bogart. Without question, some found footage movies have effective first-person POV. But as the 2010s showed, for every The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, there are dozens of imitators that never transcend the gimmick.
Time and again, cinematic first-person POV is nothing more than an attention-grabbing trick, one that only increases the distance between the viewer and the subject. And that makes Ross’ use of the technique in Nickel Boys all the more astounding.
Witnessing the Past
Most of Nickel Boys takes place in the late 1960s at Florida’s Nickel Academy where the introspective Elwood has been sent after accepting a ride from a car thief. The restrictions of the school, made barbaric by the Jim Crow laws of the era, are particularly rough on the sensitive Elwood, who spends his days separate from the other boys until he forms a connection with the outgoing Turner.
The boys meet while at lunch and, as usual, their first conversation plays out through Elwood’s perspective. But after Elwood thanks Turner for sticking up for him, the camera takes the latter boy’s point of view, first in a time-lapse sequence while riding in a train car and then to replay the same conversation we just watched. From that point on, the movie mostly alternates between the two boys’ perspective, never catching their faces in the same shot until late in the film when the two of them look up at a mirror on the ceiling.
Ross’ decision to replay the conversation isn’t to reveal new information we may have missed. Instead it established the movie’s concept of subjectivity, something hinted in the aforementioned scene of Elwood watching King on television. Elwood doesn’t become Elwood, not a full person, until someone else sees him and recognizes him. It’s not just that we finally see Ethan Herisse’s face. It’s that we understand what Turner sees when he looks at Elwood, regarding the boy’s tendency to keep his head down and hide his intelligent eyes.
Put another way, switching between the two boys’ POVs show how their identities and understanding of the world aren’t just singular. Yes, they may only see from their own perspective, but that perspective gets reinforced and corrected and shaped by the perspectives of others.
That communal reinforcement is paramount while at Nickel because the school’s administrators work so hard to undermine the boys’ identities. Whether its the school’s head Mr. Spencer (Hamish Linklater) telling them that he’s whipping them for their own good or older Black man Blakely (Gralen Bryant Banks) spreading his internalized racism to them, Elwood and Turner must fight to believe what they see with their own two eyes.
Never Look Away
As in Whitehead’s novel, Nickel Boys will sometimes jump ahead to the life of the adult Elwood, who makes a modest living with the moving company he founded. Scenes with the adult Elwood don’t come through his POV. Rather the camera sits directly behind him as if the viewers constantly look over his shoulder.
The shift in POV captures the haunted way that Elwood lives his life as an adult, particularly in his relationship to Nickel Academy. By virtue of seeing him as an adult, we know Elwood escaped Nickel, but many others did not. Those stories, and often their bodies, have been buried under mountains of lies, as history remembers Mr. Spencer as a great and caring man, remembers Nickel as sometimes imperfect, but by and large a positive institution. Adult Elwood is desperate to tear down those lies and find more proof of what he knows.
The distance between the viewer and adult Elwood captures the distance audiences sometimes seek in depictions of real atrocities. Whitehead based Nickel Academy on the Dozier School for Boys, which closed in 2011 after the torture and murder that occurred there could no longer be ignored. It’s a horrible thing and it’s only natural that viewers would want to look away, especially white viewers (like this writer), who resemble the villains more than we do the heroes.
Throughout history, movies have given viewers outs to look away from racist atrocities. Even beyond the canon of films that valorize the Confederacy and the Old South, movies have white heroes with whom audiences can identify: Robert Shaw in Glory, Skeeter in The Help, Agents Ward and Anderson in Mississippi Burning—even Tony Curtis’ Joker, who begrudgingly comes to respect fellow chain gang prisoner Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) in The Defiant Ones, a movie Elwood watched at Nickel.
Given the many failed attempts to make first-person work in movies, the technique could have been another way for viewers of Nickel Boys to look away. We could get so distracted by the technique that we spend more time talking about its successes or failures than we do the actual themes of the film. But Ross never lets the movie’s technical aspects overshadow its people or their relationship to real suffering. When we watch through Turner’s eyes as Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, in an absolutely rich and layered performance) come in for a hug, when Elwood shuts his eyes to prepare for his whipping, when the adult Elwood sees a traumatized adult revert back to the battered child he knew at Nickel, the technique recedes and the immediate human emotion takes over.
It’s only later that we realize what Ross has done, adding a whole new vernacular to cinematic language without ever losing the humanity that makes art matter in the first place.
Nickel Boys is now playing in theaters across the U.S.
The post Nickel Boys Is a Masterpiece That Can Change How We Watch Movies appeared first on Den of Geek.
