Candyman 2021: Art Reveals Horror
Still from the opening of Candyman.
Review: Candyman. Directed by Nia DaCosta, screenplay by Nia DaCosta and Jordan Peele. Distributed by Universal Pictures, 2021.Spoiler warning
To the fading and warping strains of Sammy Davis Jr.’s “Candyman,” the opening scene of the 2021 version of Candyman emerges with shadow-puppets, silhouetting a Black man being chased. A very aware little Black boy, named Billy, plays out this theme on the wall of his home in the Cabrini-Green projects of Chicago. From there, the film takes up the brutalities of racism, and the theme of police predation resonates through the entire movie, but like most capitalist-realist works of art today, the film stops short of identifying who the real puppet-masters of the police are. This turns out to be a major flaw of an otherwise intriguing and contradictory installment to the original Candyman of 1992.
From gorgeous horizontally-upward sequences, floating through the streets of Chicago, fast forward: Cabrini-Green has been largely demolished and gentrified. Enter the main characters, extremely hip, upwardly mobile African-Americans, living in a lush home. Anthony and Brianna are an artist and art dealer respectively, who live with art, which is normalized as something that well-to-do people can afford. It's based in this that the movie's skewering of both the contemporary art world and gentrification begins to gain some traction, while poverty, hardship, and working-class life is mostly relegated to the past, in flashbacks, most notably around Billy, now William, who is still poor and working in a laundromat. He becomes the couple’s link to everything that the Candyman — real and imagined — means. Supporting her working-artist boyfriend, Brianna is successful and has a condo conspicuously more expensive than most people even working in an upscale art gallery could manage in a major city. As in most American movies, the myth that hard work equals success is unexamined.
Regarding the elephant in the room, I found myself wishing that someone could sit Jordan Peele down and begin a Gramscian discussion of the subaltern. At least, I yearn for more fleshing out of how colonially-exploited populations are socio-economically excluded from the realms and institutions of power. Peele touches on these things, and that’s why his films resonate, but he could go further. He is too talented cinematically — particularly in portraying and examining contemporary racism — to stop short of fleshing out how capitalism and imperialism oppress in today's world. But there is much to digest here, which is why I was squirming — not for the jump scares but for the potential consummation of insights that never quite make it. The closest the film comes is the line: “they like us for what we make, but they don't like us,” which is surprisingly sharp for a mainstream film, but then there is also a reference to “changing institutions from the inside,” and gratuitous backslides to studio-grade Black-on-Black bloodshed. While the film genuinely skewers the contemporary art scene and pushes buttons on racism, there’s not a guillotine in sight.
Before getting to the plotline, this film was made with references to contemporary art; either that or there is some serious synchronicity going on. It becomes evident early on that the main character, Anthony, is transforming into the Candyman, and it's not lost that, as an artist, he has something to important to convey to the world — in both roles. The film’s repeated use of black shadow puppetry fleshes out and make references to brutalities perpetrated upon African Americans. The past, as memory revived, is reminiscent of two major Black contemporary American artists: Kara Walker and Kerry James Marshall. Blackness, as silhouette, stands in for a more complex metaphorical structure and richness. This is a theme that runs throughout their work, and one of the first examples of pitch-blackness in the film is a hole in a wall at the projects, which exists as a deep repository for mythological forces — past echoes of violence. In her often-controversial work, Walker creates large black silhouette cut outs of Antebellum figures, against white backgrounds -- she also uses puppetry and light. They are brutal in their depictions of stereotypes, power relationships, and historical abuses, as historically visited upon Black communities. In Marshall’s case, he uses the Blackest of skin tones, in his genre paintings of figures, to draw the viewer into a mysterious, deep realm of being.
Kara Walker, from the show "Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something)."
Kerry James Marshall, Mastry.
Blackness in the artworld, a world long staked out by white protagonists, is obviously not neutral. Even in the discussion of aesthetics, “value” is a word that describes the relative lightness or darkness of a color. High “value” is light, and low “value” is dark. Even in the less conspicuous discussion of the synonym “key,” it is similarly defined by high and low, as respectively light and dark. Metaphors and descriptors, yes, but whether out of a primordial fear of the dark and/or out of a European contempt for the other, visual language is loaded with the “values” of outright racism. One is reminded of psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s 1940’s “Doll Test,” where African-American children identified darker dolls as being less attractive and “good.” Very young children obviously picked up on (and still do) both overt and implied clues about the “value” of lightness and darkness within the hegemony of white culture — to arrive at this apprehension. Thus, the use of darkness and blackness in art by Black artists is loaded, wonderfully so, and speaks to an extended potential in visual language.
One particularly frightening scene in Candyman involves Anthony searching through the boarded-up remains of public housing. The dehumanizing prison-like architecture embodies capitalism's neglect, in the very designs of these boxes as storage for peoples’ lives. There, Anthony sees on the wall a darkly painted figure of the Candyman, embodying the horror visited upon Black men and the community at large. Graffiti as a modern art form of painting is associated with its accessibility as public expression, out in the open. Adam Turl’s recent Locust Radio interview with poet Richard Hamilton speaks to the idea of palimpsest — as layers of experience etched onto surfaces — like the walls that we see layered with spray paint and dust, materially remixing built up layers of time. But scrawled across the walls of these — interiors — the “street art” unleashes claustrophobia: real horror verses film-genre horror.
It is against this backdrop of layered graffiti, experience, and desperation, that, in a later scene, Brianna is trapped by police, brilliantly silhouetted by the red and blue flashing patrol lights. The shadow puppets have come to life. The film aptly captures the insidiousness of policing, putting on uniforms and becoming monsters, but as mentioned, the question of who is paying them (what cultural forces are taking otherwise working-class people, utilizing their racism and privilege and enacting a monstrous agenda) goes unanswered. Were it addressed in the movie, it would probably have made the film execs’ heads explode.
It is nevertheless refreshing to watch Anthony work through the processes in his newfound artistic obsession with the Candyman — Daniel Robitaille. There is a scene, early on in his exploration where he shows Brianna a painting of the “Candyman” being beaten. Loose references to slain figures in Black American history run all through the film, especially in the shadow-puppet sequences. It immediately put me in mind of contemporary artist Dana Schutz’s controversial painting of Emmett Till in his coffin. Controversial because Schutz is a white woman. I don’t feel entitled to speak to this cultural appropriation except to respect the reasoning of why a great many people are offended by the image. In and of itself, it could have been painted by anyone, (slightly Francis Bacon-esque but with cartoonish qualities of color and shading), but it wasn’t. Processing what happened to Emmett Till, his family, and Black communities everywhere, is something anyone would hopefully consider, but when these considerations make it into someone’s art then the artist has to be ready to deal with the reverberations. The painting itself has a horrible, pensive resonance. Art is like that; it has the potential to reveal. What offends me directly, as a Marxist, as a human being, is that the rich patrons who pay a lot of money to ensure that Schutz’s work remains a sound investment, are the class of people who won’t be voluntarily offering up their fortunes to pay reparations to Black (or Native, for that matter) communities any time soon. Schutz knows her clientele, and that offends me. Her work is for sale to the very hegemonic class that has established Black suffering and poverty for centuries. And notoriety drives up her prices.
Dana Schutz, Emmett Till.
Speaking of which, there are particularly prescient twin scenes reinforcing what drives the prices and interests in the contemporary art market. The first is with Brianna and a dealer, clearly above her in the art-world pecking order – and the pecking order of wheeler-dealers is on full display here. The dealer is also African-American and a woman, who dons the identity of the professional-managerial layer of the upper class like a uniform, and who shows interest in Anthony’s work after some of the Candyman murders make him more attention-grabbing by association. Similarly, there is a scene where a white, female art critic, who had previously dismissed Anthony’s work with excruciating smugness, is also subsequently stimulated by Anthony’s potential — only after the murders. Clearly both scenes let slip that the contemporary art market — like the corporate-news market — thrives on notoriety, controversy, rapid-fire trending, and solipsism.
As the story of the Candyman is discovered by Anthony, we see the layering of a new character atop of the Daniel Robitaille figure (of the original 1992 film) to include Sherman Fields, an outsider who originally gave candy to children. Other Black men killed at Cabrini-Green have also had their angry souls folded into the legend. The rest, about the hook and the wasps, you already know.
So, the film is split between engaging a sympathetic character and what must be the corporate demand for more gore. After Sherman is falsely accused of putting razor blades in sweets, the current Candyman rises to that level of cruelty. He is both an avenger, getting back at bored, well-to-do white teenagers (who play the game of saying his name five times in a mirror) and the murderer of an innocent poor, Black girl: Billy's sister. What Candyman is, and the film spells this out via Anthony's growing awareness, is a collective unconscious, unfolding in layers of identity. Of course, he is ferocious, because the abusive racial capitalist system is ferocious. But things get very muddled, and, in the film’s penultimate climax, it is increasingly unclear who the Candyman is really out to get — exemplified in the aforementioned Black-on-Black violence. Anthony is elevated to a Christ-like figure. Magically, he rescues Brianna from a manipulative lawman, while she's trapped in a cruiser and realizes that she can summon him as the embodiment of the Candyman to free herself. In this scenario, Candyman/Anthony implores Brianna to agitate with the words: “Tell everyone!” But here is where the film’s split between horror movie and and insightful artform confuses. Tell them what? About the history of oppression (that too many are already living day to day), that Candyman is here to magically avenge, tell them to “educate, agitate, organize?” I am really not sure what ending would have sufficed, but I get the point regarding trauma and emerging consciousness. Both as a movie and in the real world, I am rooting for the Candyman.
Laura Fair-Schulz is an artist and an adjunct professor of Fine Art in Potsdam, New York, and a member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective.