It’s been a couple of weeks since I last saw Pariah, directed by the decidedly talented Dee Rees, and it’s taken me that long to appreciate the movie for what it is. Going into the film expecting a narrative channeled through a conventional method (for no reason other than the movie having a sweet plot), I found some jumps uncomfortably shifty, some camera styles and angles off point, and some chunks that I couldn’t pull together. As the movie ended, I felt dissatisfied, but oddly curious. Why should a perfectly good story on the surface be told in such a way?
I came to wonder, and eventually accept, that this initial impression I had was not the movie’s fault but my own hardness toward some of the ways the concepts are captured by the movie, which I now see as quite masterful. It feels off balance, teetering on one foot, and on the brink of falling: some situations that a conflicted youth without a place to go might experience.
It’s the feelings the movie conveys, efficiently and, usually, without the clumsy medium the story could have been told through. We get to meet Alike (played by Adepero Oduye), a high school girl growing up in Brooklyn, as she tries to solidify her identity as a lesbian while hiding it from her God-fearing parents. The relationship we have with the character is less a sequence of events that brings us closer through her development and more a layer of emotions and habits Rees hands to us well, not focusing on the order as much. Not that there isn’t that sequence, but we focus on the latter more.
As we get into the thick of it, we truly believe that Alike is torn, and not like the lame conflict that presents two pristine choices to the protagonist who can dawdle on the problem to make a plot. We are stressed watching her struggle in this situation. She obviously can’t throw away who she is. She also can’t escape her family (mother and father played by Charles Parnell and Kim Wayans, respectively). They aren’t intentionally cruel. They just have a pre-designed image of who their daughter is going to be, and their mind is made up. Even when we see them at their most ignorant and misunderstanding of their daughter, we see them as human, which makes their judgement, as incorrect as it may be, plausible to a young girl who hasn’t had the chance to sort out what she sees as right.
For those movie viewers who may still be discovering their orientation in one way or another and can sympathise with the described lead character, there’s something to learn from this film, as long as you look at it the right way. If anything, Pariah does a beautiful job of giving us a diverse world, one that stays ultimately unchanged with the emergence of harmful stereotypes and discriminatory ideals and gives way only to the choices of the individual. It’s more natural to come to tolerance and cooperation than tension. Does Brooklyn care that Alike is the way she is? Within the pure environment, the question doesn’t even come up. There are places of peace for her, something the movie touches upon with its resolution, whether it be physical and mental. But it’s difficult for her to find, mostly because the only shelter that she recognizes is the one that doesn’t understand her. It’s painful for her, and we know it, uncomfortably.
For those who relate with this young girl, Pariah teaches that they’re in the right. The world isn’t your enemy, and you’re seeing its small, bad, poorly representative side when it tries to tell you can’t spread more love around. We can never have enough.
Pariah invites you to continue.
