Tropes permeate the world of entertainment. While many tropes are just repeated motifs, similar to a cliché, and banal some tropes are harmful. Tropes came into widespread attention in the late 90s when Screamhighlighted tropes of the horror genre, spawning spoofs that further highlighted them in the Scary Moviefranchise and Not Another Teen Movie. Sticking purely with Scream, an example of a banal trope from it is, “I’ll be right back.” This is your character tempting fate, and thus they die. A less banal example is: characters that engage in sexual activity die while virgins survive. This trope is harmful because the central targets of most slashers are female characters, so it’s policing women with the concept of “purity” or death. Scream 2highlighted the trope of the black character dying first, a particularly harmful trope because western horror movies tend to be very white to begin with. Revenge of the Black Best Friend from creator Amanda Parris looks at several tropes that negatively impact Black representation on screen, including the previously mentioned one in episode 3, “The One Who Dies First.”
Revenge of the Black Best Friend looks at the tropes through the lens of Dr. Toni Shakur (played by Olunike Adeliyi), who has built a career trying to dismantle this system and take characters like the titular “Black Best Friend” that were subjugated to the sidelines of the story to center stage. The six episodes are ripe with pop culture references and biting commentary.
But it’s not just about these tropes. Toni Shakur is a fully realized character who sets herself up as the bastion for dismantling the white hegemony on TV and Film but, as early as the second episode, we see some fissures in her image that come to the fore in the final episode.
Episode 2, “I Swear I’m In This,” is an interesting one centring an actor who finds out his lead role got reduced to more of a background character. This is a TV show, so it took it to an extreme, but I’ve seen stuff similarly play out when I worked in Hollywood, and it was often BIPOC characters that suffered reductions or eliminations of their characters from pilot to released episode. In Hollywood, TV pilots go through test screenings. Very few shows get straight to series order. Since shows still usually cast white leads, if there are BIPOC actors cast, they tend to be in roles as love interests or yes, the (Black) best friend. The problem with that is oftentimes these characters won’t have much to do in the pilot so they don’t always test well. As a result, the characters end up getting cut. And if they get cut in the pilot, it’s unlikely this actor that was supposed to have a lead role will appear in any future episodes. They can find themselves watching from the sidelines. Though unlike Taye Blak (played by Ashton James), these real-world actors are usually allowed to grieve the loss of their roles in privacy. Though, whether they stay quiet by choice or fear of repercussions is a whole other thing, and you need look no further than Ray Fisher and how long it took him to speak out.
The series features a characterization of a white film director who “knows the deal” wearing a “Stolen from Africa” shirt, so you know he decidedly doesn’t (one of the many LOL visuals). People don’t like to hear that entertainment they love perpetuates harmful tropes, which is why I loved that this series highlighted pop culture and cult classics. The future is now, and it is on all of us, creators and audiences, to demand better representation on screen for everyone historically sidelined. So eventually, there will be no “the ____ always dies first” because the options will be unlimited.
All episodes are available (free) on CBC Gem.
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