Source: Luce theatrical poster, Wikipedia If you haven’t seen Luce, do. There are no spoilers here, but an exploration of the psychological tension that makes this film one of the most powerful, provocative, and important filmgoing experiences I’ve had in some time. And I see a lot of films.
Luce is intense. The film (adapted by JC Lee and Julius Onah, and directed by Onah from Lee's play) features an outstanding ensemble cast, centered on Kelvin Harrison, Jr. in the title role.
Luce was adopted by white parents at age 7 from violence-torn Eritrea, where a gun instead of a schoolbook was placed in his hands. We see him as a star student at a private school in the Arlington suburbs, delivering a speech filled with gratitude to parents and teachers.
It’s kind of an IG moment. Perfect for the “cameras,” but a little too good to be true. What’s just below the surface will get you thinking long and hard.
I confess, I nearly walked out early on in the film. I actually questioned, for a moment, the magnificent Octavia Spencer’s decision to take on her role as Harriet Wilson, Luce’s teacher. The scene that disturbed me had an authoritative, confrontational Ms. Wilson putting an African-American student on the spot during a discussion of Confederate flags and monuments.
A white student had just made a statement about the subjectivity of what those symbols represented. She basically says the question for the white student is hypothetical—but to the black student, it’s “a matter of life and death.”
My immediate reaction was that I could not imagine a black teacher in her right mind ever scolding a man of color that way, no matter that race is in the room whenever such discussions arise. Such insensitivity, in my experience, only comes from people who haven’t done their homework, in empathy or history. Moreover, I couldn’t imagine parents acting like Naomi Watts and Tim Roth in their roles as Amy and Peter Edgar, Luce’s adoptive parents. Were they being set up as the "White Saviors with Issues"?
Soon, though, we find the situation is extraordinarily complicated, and Ms. Wilson might not be in her right mind, and the parents are not saviors after all. They’re not “to blame” exactly, though. The film’s cleverly and uncomfortably placed microaggressions, stereotypes, and projections brilliantly captured the experience of being a person of color, while also exposing the tragic ways the mind can quickly turn to judgment, blame, and gaslighting.
It’s no subtle strength to be oneself against the limits of a culture’s imagination. This would be no surprise to Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, intellectual, and author of Black Skin, White Masks. Luce chooses to write a paper about Fanon, and that gets him in the crosshairs of Ms. Wilson, who starts making assumptions about his actual identity and views based on his choice of subject material.
Fanon’s book is about precisely that: how the expression of identity is twisted by a devaluing, ignorant cultural lens. Luce’s light, so to speak, is acceptable only when it shines a particular color of the spectrum. Deviate, and risk retaliation and punishment. Luce, for whatever gifts and accidents of fate, shines—but he becomes ever more conscious of the cruelty of the lens that tries to apprehend (in both senses of the word) his humanity. Indeed, less a lens than a gaslight.
THE BASICSThis cultural lens hurts others much more than him. His fellow African American students (played by Omar Brunson and Astro) and the Asian American student Stephanie Kim (played by Kim’s Convenience’s Andrea Bang) might be seen as victims of projection and projective identification, doing their best to express a true sense of self and identity.
The black students in particular, though, seem to tire of fighting stereotypes and assumptions placed on them. They succumb; their every slip draws retaliation. “If this is how you see me, then this is how I’ll be,” they might say.
Projective identification occurs when the conscious or unconscious projections of an individual or culture find some “hook” in an individual, and that person subtly or unsubtly takes on attributes of that projection. For example, if person A angrily insists that person B is evil, and views B that way, B might respond angrily, thus “proving” A’s “point.” With deeply disturbed projections, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The projection is aimed at nailing you, not accepting you.
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Dealing With the Defense Mechanism of Projection Projection, projective identification, and stereotyping predispose us to like and dislike certain people or types of people and lead us to painting them as heroes or villains in the movie in our head. In the film, the adults particularly struggle with this. Ms. Wilson and the Edgars are quick to blame, and have a high “need for closure”: “Just tell us the truth… so we will know who’s at fault.” It’s crazy-making for Luce and the others to be under the scrutiny of adults who just want to find a villain, instead of truly accepting them under their care and providing guidance and support in their quests for identity and belonging.
Luce brilliantly points out the failings of conditioned existence.
We are all products of our environment. Our environment leads us to have certain expectations, insecurities, fears, and predispositions. Our relational experience is paramount. “People become people through other people,” and “we are who happens to us and what we make of the happening.” It’s only with the tools of mindfulness, compassion, and nurturing relationships that we can deconstruct our reactions and stop the blame game in its tracks.
The beauty of existence, though, is that we have a choice. We can commit to the cultivation of understanding and compassion. Or we can re-activate the trauma networks of fear, hostility, scapegoating, and blame, which leads to more suffering. Sometimes we need to have a hard edge in our compassion—“fierce compassion.” Anger is unavoidable and sometimes necessary in human relationships, in my experience. But we can’t let it turn to hostility and close our minds to each other as human beings.
One of the most intriguing scenes of Luce shows him speaking about how his parents couldn’t pronounce his name, so they renamed him “Luce.” We never hear his birth name. He simply offers gratitude for what America has “given” him: a chance to make himself.
We can feel the loss of his precious youth as he speaks. He has certainly been lifted from violence, but he has also been erased, combed over, IG’d in his ID. He is forced to disavow any trace of perceived aggression, even disagreement, to be acceptable.
In a world where even making love—consensually making love—is seen as transgressive, we are left to wonder about the very nature of love and self-love under the all-too-often oppressive, distorting gaslight that men-of-color face in America.
See Luce. It’ll make you uncomfortable in all the right ways.
(c) 2019 Ravi Chandra, M.D., D.F.A.P.A.