10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #5 Namwali Serpell's " 'She's Capital!' "

Taylour Paige as A'Ziah "Zola" King in Janicza Bravo's Zola

[I wrote this piece before I decided to stop blogging. I’ve decided to post it. I enjoy writing this series. I think I'll complete it. - J.M.] 

For me, one of the most transfixing movies of the 21st century so far is Janicza Bravo’s Zola (2021). It’s about a part-time Detroit stripper named Zola and the crazy, dangerous road trip she takes to Florida with another young stripper (Jessica), whom she’s only just met. The film pulses with unhinged action and has a jumpy, jazzy, spangled look. A title card near the beginning explains that Zola originated as a Twitter thread.

When I first saw Zola, I was stunned. What an extraordinary movie! Did others feel the same way? I sought reviews that might help me understand my response. Some were effusive in their praise. But they didn’t quite satisfy. Then I read Namwali Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” (The New York Review of Books, July 21, 2022). Boom! A great movie finds its ideal critic. Or, put it the other way, a great critic finds her ideal movie. 

Serpell approaches Zola obliquely. She starts not with the movie, but with various artistic conceptions of whoredom, including Emile Zola’s novel Nana and Édouard Manet’s Olympia. She quotes Marx: “Prostitution is only the specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer.” She’s not sure Marx is right. “Is the prostitute a canny producer or a rapacious consumer?” she asks. All of this is interesting. But, for me, it’s only when Serpell turns her attention to Zola that her piece really takes off. And, man, does it take off! She writes about the movie’s vivid gas station restroom scene:

The effect of Olympia’s maid lives on. Stefani, the white sex worker, is thin and blonde and all-American, but her voice and manner—she combs her baby hairs, twerks her ass, raps along to hip-hop—are infused with blackness. This is meant to reverse some stereotypes. At one point on the road trip, Stefani exaggeratedly mocks a black stripper for being “nasty” and “dirty,” when we’ve just seen Stefani herself being exactly that during a pit stop. In the gas station bathroom, the camera floats above the stalls (the chamber pot again), dividing the screen between Stefani’s stall (she sits; she doesn’t wipe; her urine is an unhealthy egg-yolk yellow) and Zola’s (she hovers; she asks for some toilet paper; her urine barely tinges the water). The white woman, not the black one, is the “dirty ho.”

Okay, Serpell, you’ve got my attention. Never before have I read a comparative analysis of urine in a movie review. But Zola calls for it. Pee color is relevant to its meaning. As Serpell points out, it shows that “The white woman, not the black one, is the ‘dirty ho.’ ”

The centerpiece of Zola – it’s climax, so to speak – is the extended scene at the second motel. Serpell describes it superbly:

Stefani changes into an innocent-schoolgirl outfit straight out of Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time” video. A bearded middle-aged white man arrives. As soon as Zola opens the door, he complains: “I ordered a white chick.” Zola rolls her eyes, negotiates the transaction, then turns away from the bed as her voiceover deadpans, “They start fucking, it was gross.” When the sex is over and Zola hears how little money he has paid, she’s aghast: “Pussy is worth thousands, bitch.” She takes a new picture of Stefani to advertise her services on BackPage, and raises the prices. Soon, as in Nana, the men are practically lined up at the door. For some reason (aren’t we in Florida?), they’re all white.

The film highlights the johns’ interchangeability in their turns with Stefani: they take off their clothes; they manipulate her body; they climax. These shots appear in horizontal rows so we see a sliding blazon of male chests, stomachs, crotches. We seem to be scrolling through them as if we’re on Tinder or Instagram, bestowing exploding heart emojis over pecs and dicks. The grotesquerie of the images is meant to interrupt what pleasure the scene might otherwise prompt. It’s, again, a reversal—men rather than women divided into parts, turned into a series.

My favorite part of Serpell’s review is her description of Zola’s style. She writes,

Its aesthetic, like other films produced by A24, has an air of gentrified graffiti, a palette like a neon bruise. But Bravo beautifully contains the sun-shot pastels of Florida in the manner of a David Hockney painting, and the film deftly references its origins on social media. With a camera-shutter sound, the screen freezes into a snapshot that shrinks into a corner, like on an iPhone; with a cha-ching of change, hearts flash or rise up the screen, like in an Instagram Live; with clickety-clicks and emoji bursts, texts are typed into being; the date and time appear at the top of the screen in a thin white font, then vanish—both with a click; and we occasionally hear the Twitter whistle, as the screenplay explains, “to pay homage when a line in the script is identical to one of @_zolarmoon’s tweets.”

That “palette like a neon bruise” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – every bit as artful and brilliant as the movie it describes.