Gemini Man (2019).
“The body" is positioned by historical practices and discourses. The body is codified as this or that in terms of meanings that are sanctioned, scripted and constituted through processes of negotiation that are embedded within and serve various ideological interests that are grounded within further power-laden social processes. The historical plasticity of the body. . .speaks to the historicity of its "being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social semiotics.
—George Yancy, Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body
Looking into the presence of Black people in modern mainstream cinema, it’s difficult to pinpoint performances or significant characters that amount to much beyond the banal quirks of glorified caricatures based on platitudinous conventions of pop culture and gender or ethnic identity. Several of the most prominent Black cultural figures having been stripped from existing properties and scrubbed clean for mass viewership: see, for instance, the celebratory imperialist farce that is Black Panther (2018), with its ridiculous pan-Africanist romanticism and supplementary use of popular hip-hop aesthetics to validate itself as “Black cinema” and not just another asinine superhero flick. There’s also the portentous Afrocentrism of Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), a film that blatantly commodifies revolutionary antecedents to substantiate its bafflingly tone-deaf capitalistic iconography, reducing history to a scatterbrained feud between good and evil. By contrast, M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth (2013) and Ang Lee's Gemini Man (2018) refuse such fatuous misrepresentations of Black identity, elevating their Black protagonists to a mythic stature that discombobulates Hollywood race consciousness. The two films position Will Smith, perhaps the most iconic “young Black male superstar” in Hollywood history—at the early stages of his career’s final stretch—opposite younger versions of himself. These come in the moving and uncanny forms of his real-life son in the first film and a younger CGI clone of himself in the second, leading Smith to grapple with his roles as a family man and an aging icon.
In After Earth, Jaden Smith—now a successful hip-hop artist on his own terms, whose documented struggles with child stardom further signify the narratives at hand—plays Kitai Raige, a zealous teen caught between the crushing expectations for him to live up to his father, Cypher (Will), and the guilt of his older sister, who sacrificed her life to save him. The father and son’s tumultuous dynamic reflects Jaden’s chaotic journey through the Hollywood machine under the supervision of his hotshot dad. Gemini Man, on the other hand, employs mass cloning, CGI de-aging, and falsified family histories to serve up a staggering treatise on the state of mass production in Hollywood and the resulting artlessness of today’s mainstream. In a beautiful act of remediation, these films demystify “Blackness” through the modesty with which they characterize their Black male protagonists at the center of two fairly straightforward narratives. Under the boundary-pushing digital lenses of their respective auteurs, these stories are intuitively repurposed to interrogate the very nature of sci-fi blockbusters.
Cinema continues to expand its definitive capabilities as a digital art form, with accelerated advancements in CGI forging an idiom of hyperrealism that suits the dramatic tensions of sci-fi and action-adventure films in ways that we might not have expected. To this day, Ang Lee remains at the forefront of further experimentation with this phenomenon. Whether we’re talking of his earlier works—reserved, poignant dramas of the Taiwanese New Wave and '90s transnational Americana—or his more recent innovations towards a post-Bazinian future with 3D technology, he’s always aimed to revitalize traditional narratives by directly incorporating the delicate craft of his influences into his developing modus operandi. In his last three films—as well as in Hulk's (2003) daring reconfiguration of comic book aesthetics as the cinematic blueprint for its eruptive psychosexual tenets—Lee transforms the digital chaos of modern blockbusters into a more meditative process, concerned with unearthing dormant emotions and exploring a multitude of identity crises, often regarding sexual repression and familial anxieties rooted in globalization. Shyamalan, another titan of aughts U.S. cinema who wears his dramatic influences on his sleeve, similarly engages his otherworldly religious narratives with poised melodrama, adapting the blockbuster’s wide scope as a sensitive outlet for self-discovery. Subjectivity is the focal point within both filmmakers' densely mythological oeuvres: their images are presented in a perpetual state of emotive disembodiment and construction; the questions they ponder reach far beyond the horizons in search of raw, earnest truth. Their eccentric sensibilities appeal for viewers to subdue any critical instincts towards their conspicuous flaws, like the sheer weirdness of their dramaturgy in films like Hulk and The Happening (2008), as well as their tendency to tiptoe around disorganized scripts and underdeveloped arcs, in favor of tapping into that hardboiled connection to the characters and the worlds they inhabit in its purest form.
Shyamalan and Lee procedurally sublimate and re-assimilate the perspectives they individually represent; their images withhold certain revelations that spectators can only uncover by digging deeper into characters’ inner workings. Their methods manifest a wonderful aspect of genre filmmaking, lost to time: one that regards the principles of “Black cinema” without the overbearing indulgences of historical trauma narratives and postmodern identity politics, navigating the possibility of an affirmative future without succumbing to idealist solutions to the problem of race. These films operationalize their adherence to sci-fi conventions as an engaging platform that distills “Blackness” throughout their projections: Black characters aren’t consciously separated into a microcosm by mannerisms or genre trappings tailored specifically to their race, yet their Blackness remains central to who they are. After Earth places a naive young Black boy, Jaden’s Kitai, in the center of a post-apocalyptic landscape, densely populated with threats known and unknown. Shyamalan positions Kitai’s stone-cold military father, Cypher, in a state of vulnerability such that he must subdue his hardened paternal stoicism in order to provide a guiding voice to his son. Gemini Man ponders the turmoil of professional assassin Henry, an older “father figure” played by Smith, struggling to recognize himself and to reclaim his already fractured autonomy in search of, for once, a simple good night’s sleep. After his retirement, he’s double-crossed by his government and forced to go rogue with Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a young federal agent who gets caught in the crossfire of his assassination attempt. Alongside Henry, Lee juxtaposes the story of the shattered psychology of Junior, a young Black male played by a computer generated, de-aged Smith, whose entire life has been dedicated to serving his conniving white stepfather Clay (Clive Owen). Clay is the director of a black-ops human cloning organization titled GEMINI, a paramilitary group whose global agency and power seems to have surpassed even the U.S government. With Henry’s DNA in hand, Clay creates Junior and raises him as an elite soldier with the intention of producing the perfect specimen for his privatized death machine, severing Junior from his history in the process. Their relationship is more akin to a scientist perfecting a formula than a parent nurturing a child, a Frankenstein of the 2010s.
After Earth (2013).
Both films transpose their Black characters’ racialized insecurity from their individual issues into something more temporal, historical, and familial—a radical shift in consciousness, the roots of which can be traced back to their relationships with their fathers. After Earth does this with a simple mantra spoken by a convincingly impassive Cypher to his crestfallen son as he’s unwillingly cast into a world where everything sees him as a hostile outsider: “Danger is very real, but fear is a choice.” Gemini Man directly exposes that fear as Henry—who has been up front about his weaknesses beginning and ending with his deathly bee allergy and his fear of drowning, on account of his father’s rigorously abusive underwater breathing routines—tries to make sense of a debilitating ambush from his unidentified younger self: “It was like seeing a ghost… a ghost with a gun.” Will Smith’s suave yet disgruntled expressiveness and his aged, brooding physicality candidly catalyze the spaces he traverses as grounds for that erratic metamorphosis to unfurl. In this film the actor is a powerhouse, exemplary of a dying breed of Black icons with a real penchant for variety in how they’ve explored Blackness through artistic endeavors. In After Earth, his attitudes perfectly encapsulate Black family men’s assumed defense mechanisms, and the traits they occupy to suppress decades’ worth of marginalized trauma and destabilizing experiences stemming from anti-Blackness: alternating between that old-school panache in the comfort of their own community and that weary, resigned deadpan in the face of adversity, the type of code-switching you’d expect to see from a tired old veteran of war. Smith wears that anguish even better here than he’s ever worn a pair of loose overalls or a black designer suit.
After Earth.
Lee and Shyamalan overlay their images with a volatile digital artifice, embracing their limitations in order to reintroduce viewers to what’s “real” on a plane that just doesn’t reveal itself on celluloid. In these films they're deeply invested in testing and extending the limits of how viewers perceive the human body amidst hyperrealistic digital landscapes. Lee’s artifice works to overlap his digital images with the real; evoking the mystical inventions of the consummate wuxia artist King Hu, a pioneer whose cross-dimensional flummoxing in Legend of the Mountain (1979) and Raining in the Mountain (1979) can be traced within Lee’s works all the way from his own take on wuxia (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000) to his utilization of 120fps and 3D focus to make the real seem unreal (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, 2016). Gemini Man’s impeccable motorcycle chase segment tampers with visual linearity by shifting back and forth between Cartagena shot stunningly on location, and composed as a computerized space, as the digital Smith’s pursuit unfolds. Shyamalan achieves a similar effect—this film demonstrates his love for the Earth and its outlandish tenants—his hypnagogic digital constructs synthesize with nature, reduplicating Cypher and Kitai’s bodies across the virtual and the real. Rather than simply engaging with spectacle, the key is to “see through '' the artifice and be drawn to the forces emanating from the Smith figures between every frame, binding them to the real as they traverse the virtual. Kitai in After Earth wears a futuristic bodysuit that adjusts its design depending on his condition in relation to the environment, inaugurating a symbiosis of aesthetics between his body and the artifice of the surrounding Earth. Both films operate in conjunction with King Hu’s mechanisms of anticipation and intangible collision, but the motion is much smoother. The characters move in and out of sync with themselves, consolidating fluttering acrobatics of wuxia with the constantly erupting meteorology of the CGI world crashing down on them as a gateway towards realizing oneself under the collapsing structures of repression. Using HFR technology, Lee intimately choreographs Henry and Junior’s explosive violence as a sacramental dance that echoes the contemplative grace of wuxia stunts. Likewise, Shyamalan’s camera in After Earth departs from the classical stillness of his films and emphasizes movement, fixating on Kitai’s dexterity and nimble figure; it’s as if his angst and boyish innocence swirl in tandem within him as he attempts to break away from that fragile thing known as adolescence.
Simulations and images in Gemini Man become the true militaristic strength by which the powers that be extend their domain; Lee’s artifice extends itself once more for the finale wherein a third clone appears, entirely lifeless, exhausted, unable to feel, and modified to the point of inhumanity. Here, fully-fledged, we have the manifestation of the modern movie star: an expendable, a soulless pack mule with no free will or ambitions, whose only purpose is to further assert dominance for property owners and executives—men whose singular goal is to capitalize on the authenticity of cinema as an art-form with the intent of eliminating the authenticity of its process. Men like Clay, who says to Junior: “the whole point of this thing was to give you all of Henry's gifts without any of his pain.” This third clone is the Henry/Junior/Smith most representative of GEMINI’s world—a world where tragedy and death are wholly inconsequential, a world defanged of all compassion and eroticism, in which relationships are centered around survival above all else.
Kitai/Junior and Henry/Cypher share common internal conflicts—worldly and metaphysical—suggesting that the Black experience could be assessed as simultaneously post-apocalyptic and dystopian under the parameters of sci-fi, since these conflicts are played straight rather than in reference to contemporary associations with “Blackness” as a misconstrued philosophy of being. Lee and Shyamalan treat these characters with genuine reverence, essentially reassuming the surface-level tenor of their narratives so the actors are given room to organically pivot away from the assumed marginality of the “tortured Black male.” Junior is introduced as a ruthless interloper shrouded in obscurity, but he’s still just a kid rather than a full blown killing machine—there’s still a tangible imprecision to his actions. The truth culminates with every step that son Junior takes towards father Henry. All is finally revealed after he shoots Henry with a near-fatal dose of bee venom and fully realizes their shared weakness. The father’s breath begins to fade away, he’s drowning. “This whole shit’s been a lil difficult,” he says to his son—a ritualistic reconciliation that frees them from their doubt—what could be more profound than the father begetting his son? After Earth invokes a rite of passage in the same vein: Kitai takes his rest for the night after successfully surviving a horrific encounter with a paralyzing alien leech that corresponds with the tone of Gemini’s “drowning” scenes. Cypher recalls the agonizing near-death experience that served as the turning point for his instincts: “The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future." That sentiment alone is enough to paint a picture of the violence of the landscapes Cypher has had to navigate in his lifetime, something he understands that he cannot fully protect his son from. Kitai’s reunion with his father corresponds with the progressive unveiling of Junior’s humanity. Cypher’s literal role in the film as his son’s eyes and ears, his guiding voice, brings him to reminisce about a youth that he might not have realized is worth cherishing, despite how mercilessly he continues to be stung by the loss of his daughter. Kitai learns what it’s like to keep moving on after staring death in the face, putting his father’s pain into perspective; the guilt he feels for his sister’s demise is understood to be a curse that both these men share. Just like Henry and Junior, in witnessing the one’s truth, the other discovers and learns to accept his own.
Gemini Man.
Gemini Man’s most pivotal scene takes us deep into the catacombs of a castle in Budapest that mimics the illusory gothic mazes of Hu’s monumental psychedelia with its labyrinthine structure, enveloped in a transmogrifying darkness that simultaneously amplifies and annuls artificiality in the frame. All of Lee’s tricks and established influences are at play here as we witness Henry’s first formal introduction to his younger self. As the elder attempts to convince Junior that his whole nightmarish existence has been a lie, Henry ashamedly lays bare his own guilt and internal devastation: “Still a virgin, right? Dying to be in a relationship and connect but terrified to let anybody near you because what if somebody actually saw who you are... how could they love you? So everybody's just targets, you're just a weapon.” That quaint notion of two borderline super-humans at their wits’ end, lamenting over their struggles with sexual normalcy and social acceptances speaks volumes about the injustices they’ve endured. A young Black male, looking with disbelief into the future; all the pain he’s known, the sacrifices he’s made and the atrocities he’s witnessed would have led to this, a broken runaway forever haunted by the ghosts of his own creation—is this truly the fate he was destined to achieve?
Lee and Shyamalan’s strongly felt convictions present themselves differently through spectacle and melodrama, but their shared investment in transcending realism raises the question: how can we separate soldiers from the wars they fight? The crux of these films regards an expressionistic stillness that plagues the Smiths to an existential degree: the world advances and culture evolves; they’re left behind to rot, bound to the chains of time itself. It’s all so bleak, yet their interiorized emancipation by the films’ finales renders them free to live and do as they please. This affirms an extraordinary sense of autonomy for these Black men that’s developed over the course of their disparate journeys rather than subsidized by the process of false sentiments and revisionist bromides that’s way too prevalent in today’s Black cinema. All is not well with the world, how could it ever be? Kitai and Cypher are left completely alone with no future in sight but they take their fate into their hands and put their lost loved one’s memory to rest: embracing one another at the end, no longer wrestling with their own being. Junior is given a chance at life that isn’t even in the cards for most Black boys like him. And Henry is finally allowed to reconcile with a side of himself that was supposed to have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, decades ago. They overcome their fears and conquer destiny; they persevere, and the future is bright.