This is the third column in a four-part series by Nicholas Whittaker on black horror. Read the first two here.
In his final masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon attempted to diagnose, among other things, a “pathology of atmosphere.” The atmosphere in question was that of colonial Algeria, in the midst of a war of independence from French occupation. One of Fanon’s central arguments was that this war—more precisely, the brutalities of the French—had resulted in not only physical but psychic suffering for the Algerian people. The argument that war breeds trauma may sound obvious now. But at the time, in the world of philosophy and clinical psychology, Fanon’s suggestion that psychic health is dependent upon social conditions was revolutionary.
Revolutionary does not mean wholly new. As Fanon himself noted, in the wake of two world wars, wartime trauma had become a more acceptable concept to the medical establishment. Fanon’s work is revolutionary for two reasons. On the one hand, his interpretation of that trauma opened up new possibilities for discussing and treating its effects. But even more radical was Fanon’s choice of subject: not shell-shocked European soldiers but colonized Africans only barely seen as human beings. He observed:
[One] particular form of pathology … had already called forth attention before the revolution began. But the doctors described it by portraying it as a congenital stigma of the native, an “original” part of his nervous system where, it was stated, it was possible to find the proof of a predominance of the extra-pyramidal system in the native.
The pathology in question is “a generalized muscular contraction”; “the extra-pyramidal system” refers to the neurological systems that sustain reflex control, learned movement control, the inhibition of involuntary movement, postural adjustment and the “naturalness” of voluntary movements. “Generalized muscular contraction,” then, refers to a global rigidity and uncontrollability of muscle movement: a shuffling, zombielike fugue state, bodily autonomy on holiday.
Fanon tells us that the preponderance of this zombism among the colonized population was presumed to be natural: preexisting colonization, written into the very biological makeup of “the native.” This is unsurprising: the history of racial domination includes sustained efforts by European medical, scientific and philosophical communities to naturalize and medicalize tendencies apparently observed in non-white populations. Phrenology—the study of skull shapes—is one particularly well-known example. Fanon here reveals another.
He also vehemently protests it. He insists that “this contracture is in fact simply the postural accompaniment to the native’s reticence, the expression in muscular form of his rigidity and his refusal with regard to colonial authority.” Fanon declares this to be a psychosomatic response: “the disorder being at the same time a symptom and a cure.” The contraction occurs when an Algerian’s psychic resistance to colonization manifests in his body. Not only does this “pathology” not simply predate colonization; it is a direct response to it.
In describing the pathology itself, Fanon has this to say:
[It is] found in patients of the masculine sex who find it increasingly difficult … to execute certain movements: going upstairs, walking quickly, or running. The cause of this difficulty lies in a characteristic rigidity … No relaxation can be achieved. The patient seems to be made all of a piece … The face is rigid but expresses a marked degree of bewilderment.
The patient does not seem able to “release his nervous tension.” He is constantly tense, waiting between life and death. Thus one of these patients said to us: “You see, I’m already stiff like a dead man.”
I am already stiff like a dead man.
These words are haunting. They are a feeble attempt to articulate an experience that seems unimaginable to most of us: total alienation from one’s own flesh. “Like a dead man” is no mere metaphor for stillness, although that element is crucial. “I am like a dead man” may not be a logical contradiction, but it has the air of one; for uttering it is the precise sort of thing a dead man cannot do.
Imagine experiencing yourself as something past the limit of your own experience. Imagine—as best as you can—experiencing that which no living creature ought to be able to experience: the stiffness of death, the lack of movement, of kinetic energy, which constitutes the processes we imprecisely call life. Perhaps then we can begin to approach the alien and apparently unimaginable meaning of these words: I am already stiff like a dead man.
●
This sentiment evokes a particular moment in the low-budget black-horror film J.D.’s Revenge, directed by blaxploitation mainstay Arthur Marks, written by the underappreciated Jaison Starkes and released in 1976. That moment is made so rich, so thrilling, by Glynn Turman, the film’s lead. Turman plays two characters in the film: a law student named Ike and a gangster named J.D., who inhabit one body. J.D. died in 1942. Thirty years later, his spirit begins to possess Ike. A brutal struggle for dominance ensues, in which J.D. is eventually triumphant. He takes over Ike’s body and his life, completes his final act of revenge against the men who killed him, and then vanishes of his own accord.
The moment I speak of occurs in the police station, after J.D. has vanished. Ike is being held, but is in no danger of being prosecuted for J.D.’s crimes. They have accepted his story, thanks to the interventions of one Elijah Bliss and one Roberta Bliss, the brother and the biological daughter of the man J.D. was after: Theotis Bliss. Elijah has convinced the police department that Ike was, in fact, possessed. J.D.’s reputation as a notorious gangster thirty years prior certainly helps matters. Ike is being held, then, merely for questioning. They wish to know what he remembers. Nothing, he tells them.
Ike is, one must imagine, grateful for Elijah’s intervention. But he is not exactly thrilled. “You mean,” he says—still wearing the clothes J.D. had bought for him—“I can just be walking down the street, and get taken over by some demon, out to get revenge on somebody?” Elijah responds: “It can happen anytime, anywhere. You were possessed, there’s no doubt about that.” Ike takes a moment to consider this. “Is it over? How do I know it won’t happen again?” “There’s no way to know that,” Elijah says. Ike laughs, a tight, mirthless, choked chuckle. “That’s crazy.”
Ike’s eyes are marvelously dull throughout this exchange. He appears to look past everything in front of him, sliding out of this perceptual plane altogether. Out of focus, the world becomes strangely expressionist, a collection of jagged edges and colors uncannily reminiscent of forms one knows. It is there: firm, solid, unmistakable. And yet it is out of focus; one cannot say precisely what that “it” is.
We could describe Ike’s experience of his body in much the same way. It must be emphasized that Ike does not remember what happens when J.D. possesses him. What he is contemplating here is not “becoming someone new.” Ike does not become anything when J.D. arrives. Ike disappears. Ike dies. And yet his body continues to move and act, warped into a hunk of flesh; in this moment, Ike is forced to experience himself as something past the limits of his own experience.
The horror of this moment is the horror that, I suspect, filled Fanon’s patients. In the last installment of this column, I discussed the possibility of experiencing the world as precarious. I characterized that as the infection of what is present with what is not present; the sense that there is something parasitic on perceptual reality that organizes it, shapes it, and yet remains wholly inaccessible to us. One word for this is haunting; the other is possession.
With suave, confident, B-movie aplomb, J.D.’s Revenge digs even deeper into this philosophical space. It is one thing to experience the world beyond you as precarious. It is quite another to experience yourself as incomprehensible. What both Fanon and J.D’s Revenge realize is that that experience depends on the body: that hunk of flesh, that cluster of swirling atoms, that null space in the great expanse of the world, that site of unimaginable horror and unmistakable bliss.
●
The central drama of the possession subgenre of horror seems psychological, or spiritual: a psychic entity—a demon, perhaps, or the spirit of a dead human being—infects a living person’s consciousness. This infection is often described as the “inhabitation” of that person’s body, as though the flesh remains unchanged by it.
But Turman knows better. In his hands, possession becomes more than the eviction of a prior tenant. Along with the whole ensemble of J.D.’s Revenge, he provides a master class in the physicality of acting. Ike’s body transforms when it becomes J.D.’s body, contorting into previously unimaginable and inaccessible shapes. J.D.’s Revenge reveals that possession horror might be better understood as a subspecies of body horror: that subgenre that derives its horror from grotesque, alien and violently mangled bodies. The bodies of Ike and J.D. are incredibly distinguishable; not by posture or appearance, but by movement.
Ike, we learn immediately, is tense. His friends, his girlfriend, constantly tell him he works too hard. He studies law, he plays community football, he drives a cab. A doctor begs him to “smoke some weed,” to do anything he can do to relax. He refuses to drink anything harder than beer; he’s too tired to sleep with his girlfriend. He looks top-heavy, as though his chest is slightly leaning forward, held aloft only by locked muscle. His limbs swing as single pieces. He speaks as though he is perpetually holding his breath.
But J.D. moves like a greased serpent with the devil on its tail. When he enters a room, his eyes roam feverishly: isolating any threat, any woman, any potential for pleasure or pain. In a flash, his hand darts out, reveals a straight razor, unfolds it and strikes. Or he doubles over, kicks his legs back and saunters away, limbs spastically leaping as far from his body as they can go, fingers poised horribly and hungrily. His jaw extends and retracts, dragging his face from scowl to hyena howl to a silent, grimacing smile. He moves—with such precision, such ingenuity, that it feels as though that movement extends to the cellular, perhaps even the subatomic level. J.D.’s whole being crackles with events. His flesh seems animated by a constant, pulsing narrative energy. One can watch Turman’s face with the same sacred attention one brings to the most intricately wrought historical epic or melodrama. It is exhausting to watch him, to try and keep up.
Tension, as Fanon describes it, is the arresting of voluntary action. One strains against one’s own body; one strains to move it. Yet it resists; it is “incapable of the slightest voluntary relaxation.” This way of talking implies the presence of a ghost in the machine: a will, capable of voluntary action, capable of desire, yet removable from the flesh. To speak of straining against one’s body is to imply a fundamental freedom from it, a freedom that typically manifests as control over it but here is disordered into a helpless antagonism against it. J.D. unlocks the chains of muscle and sinew that restrain Ike’s will, Ike himself. He is free; he is able to move, to act, to translate desire into brute reality. And J.D. certainly seems free. He does what he pleases. He laughs, he smiles, he articulates desires and pursues them. What else is freedom? And yet…
Late in the film, J.D. is in a cemetery. He sidles toward the camera, hands in his pockets, along a columbarium wall. Then he stops, bows his head, mumbles something and crumbles, bracing himself against the wall to keep from falling. After a moment, he gathers himself and continues. His gait is reduced to a shuffle. His hand lingers on the wall before he pulls it back, lips pursed in disgust. It is only then that his eyes catch the two niches in front of him; but he does not look surprised to see them. The first reads “J.D. Walker, 1911-1942.” J.D. places his hands on his own grave and pleads—to whom?—“Please, let me go.”
So much for freedom. One can imagine Ike, channeling Fanon’s patients, straining against his own immobile flesh, moaning: Please, let me go. This film asks us to look at J.D.—at his eternal motion—and hear him make the same plea. He stands before the dead flesh Fanon’s patients are becoming and begs to become thus. His mobility is a prison too.
This moment suggests that the imprisonment J.D. suffers is not simply that of physical immobility. What, then, if not the stiffness of death?
●
Sometimes, flesh moves. Sometimes, it is still. We assume that we generate those states. We assume that we pilot this automaton, this body; that we control it, that it is as we decide it to be. What unites Ike and J.D. is not mobility or immobility, but a profound, sickening, paradoxical realization that they are their flesh, and yet their flesh outstrips, and defies, them. This is alienation at its most staggering, because it is not escapable or correctable. The question is not how to regain control—one never had it—but how to live with its absence, how to accept the mysterious, ungovernable flesh that one has no option to refuse.
J.D.’s movement changes form when we consider it under the category of impulse. This is not because we begin to realize that his movement simply is impulse, but because we begin to find it difficult to judge. The boundaries between the voluntary and the involuntary begin to blur.
Let us take a seemingly throwaway scene, halfway through the film. Ike’s episodes of possession have deepened in severity. What began as momentary flashes are becoming sustained events. In this particular episode, Ike is driving an elderly white woman in his cab. A sermon—preached by Elijah Bliss—is blaring on the radio. Then Ike looks into the rearview mirror and sees J.D.’s face; the face, that is, of the man himself, from 1942 (furiously portrayed by David McKnight). With that, Ike is no more. J.D. wrenches on the car wheel, sending it spiraling in donuts throughout the streets of New Orleans. The passenger wails and howls in fear, before slamming her head against the window. The glass shatters, and her head flops forward, covered in blood.
J.D.’s face—wrenched in a sickening smile—settles into a scowl, and he stops the car in an empty parking lot. He gets out and walks to the passenger’s door—the camera pulls back, so we can see his bizarre, promenading gait—and opens it, tossing out first her suitcase, and then the woman herself, moaning in pain. “Come on, get the fuck on out of my gotdamn car.” His voice is hauntingly unfamiliar. We realize that the woman is moaning “Please don’t kill me,” and J.D. does too. “Kill ya? Bitch, get off of me; what the fuck is wrong with you, is ya crazy?” His laughter is sickening. He pulls out her purse and rifles through it. He takes out a wad of cash. He throws the purse aside. He looks around, as though searching for inspiration. Then he tosses the wad away, sidles back into the car, and drives off.
One sees impulse, bodily movements that cannot reasonably be called human. J.D. brutalizes an innocent woman for no reason. She does nothing to insult him. He does not want anything from her: her money, her body, her life. He simply, for an instant, wishes to harm her. So he does. And then he drives off. Watching this, I was haunted by Hillary Clinton’s infamous 1996 “superpredator” speech. In it she urged for “an organized effort against gangs,” which were, she warned, “not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators’: no conscience, no empathy.” Clinton here was borrowing from political scientist John DiIulio, whose theory of the “superpredator” argued that “moral poverty”—“the poverty of being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong”—produces a particular kind of “predatory street criminal.” What distinguishes the superpredator from a “normal” criminal—it is difficult to call this claim anything but literal dehumanization—is that the former is governed solely by immediate instinct. With “literally … no concept of the future,” the superpredator is reduced to their “natural” impulses for violence and physical pleasure. One looks at J.D. and one sees “the buzz of impulsive violence, the vacant stares and smiles, and the remorseless eyes” that DiIulio sees in the children in juvenile detention who earn his dubious appellation.
J.D.’s Revenge transforms Ike into a superpredator. He desires sex and violence but nothing more complex than that, besides his drive for revenge. And we cannot imagine him as some noble, single-minded crusader. He takes his sweet time before pouncing on Theotis; in the meantime, he does “what comes ‘naturally’” to him. Most notably, he twice batters and attempts to rape Ike’s girlfriend, Christella, portrayed by the fantastic Joan Pringle. The savagery of these episodes is staggering. At one point, I turned away.
It is not simply that J.D. does terrible things. He does them for no more reason than that for a moment he wanted to. As the film progresses, it becomes more and more difficult to see a complex human being within Turman’s performance. He becomes a caricature, pure impulse, kinetic energy given cartoon form. Can we call his actions voluntary with any conviction? Does he not become a jumble of ragged nerves, caught in eternal reflex? The superpredator lacks an executive function. Their actions are not governed by some reflective, thinking mind or soul. He is pure flesh, pure matter, locked in eternal yet purposeless motion, skipping and lunging as pulses of electricity rattle through it.
If the cemetery scene humanizes J.D., it is not simply because it introduces his feelings for Betty Jo. It is his plea: Please, let me go. For a moment, there is a flash of something else in this body: a ghost in the machine. J.D. strains against himself here, for the first time. His stumbling fall toward the grave is an attempt, however feeble, to become more than impulse; not by controlling his flesh, but by abandoning it.
●
J.D.’s movement, in other words, is not a liberation, but its own form of imprisonment. His flesh offers him no more solace than Ike’s does. For both, their body erupts as an antagonist (it bears repeating that this body is one both share). It outstrips them; it acts without them. But that is imprecise. For they are their flesh, as are we all. Neither J.D. nor Ike can simply abandon their body, either literally or emotionally. They cannot disavow it. Ike cannot simply say to his girlfriend: “I did not rape you; my body did.” He cannot pretend that the fugitivity of his body means nothing to him, that it does not implicate him in any way.
What I have been trying to uncover is the curious, unsettling experience Ike and J.D. suffer. Their body—that which we most take for granted—becomes precarious: neither theirs nor not theirs, neither voluntary nor involuntary, neither familiar nor alien. This single body is refracted through an uncanny kaleidoscope, transformed into a baroque swirl of flesh. This is one possibility of horror: that it reveals our flesh, and thus our very selves, as precarious. J.D’s Revenge and Fanon both plumb the depths of this horror. They do so with black flesh; in this film, as in Fanon’s case studies, black flesh becomes precarious.
If neither Ike nor J.D. can have confidence in the humanity of their own flesh, how can we? As we watch the film, Turman’s flesh takes on a mercurial anarchism. It becomes genuinely unclear whether, in any given moment, it is voluntary or not, human or not. This uncanniness results in a profound unease. Flesh—Turman’s, yours, mine—reveals itself as no less precarious than the rest of the world. Our apparently privileged access to our physical experience—our ability to understand and control it—does not disappear, but becomes troubled, unsure, inadequate.
This is the third column in a four-part series by Nicholas Whittaker on black horror. Read the first two here.
In his final masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon attempted to diagnose, among other things, a “pathology of atmosphere.” The atmosphere in question was that of colonial Algeria, in the midst of a war of independence from French occupation. One of Fanon’s central arguments was that this war—more precisely, the brutalities of the French—had resulted in not only physical but psychic suffering for the Algerian people. The argument that war breeds trauma may sound obvious now. But at the time, in the world of philosophy and clinical psychology, Fanon’s suggestion that psychic health is dependent upon social conditions was revolutionary.
Revolutionary does not mean wholly new. As Fanon himself noted, in the wake of two world wars, wartime trauma had become a more acceptable concept to the medical establishment. Fanon’s work is revolutionary for two reasons. On the one hand, his interpretation of that trauma opened up new possibilities for discussing and treating its effects. But even more radical was Fanon’s choice of subject: not shell-shocked European soldiers but colonized Africans only barely seen as human beings. He observed:
The pathology in question is “a generalized muscular contraction”; “the extra-pyramidal system” refers to the neurological systems that sustain reflex control, learned movement control, the inhibition of involuntary movement, postural adjustment and the “naturalness” of voluntary movements. “Generalized muscular contraction,” then, refers to a global rigidity and uncontrollability of muscle movement: a shuffling, zombielike fugue state, bodily autonomy on holiday.
Fanon tells us that the preponderance of this zombism among the colonized population was presumed to be natural: preexisting colonization, written into the very biological makeup of “the native.” This is unsurprising: the history of racial domination includes sustained efforts by European medical, scientific and philosophical communities to naturalize and medicalize tendencies apparently observed in non-white populations. Phrenology—the study of skull shapes—is one particularly well-known example. Fanon here reveals another.
He also vehemently protests it. He insists that “this contracture is in fact simply the postural accompaniment to the native’s reticence, the expression in muscular form of his rigidity and his refusal with regard to colonial authority.” Fanon declares this to be a psychosomatic response: “the disorder being at the same time a symptom and a cure.” The contraction occurs when an Algerian’s psychic resistance to colonization manifests in his body. Not only does this “pathology” not simply predate colonization; it is a direct response to it.
In describing the pathology itself, Fanon has this to say:
I am already stiff like a dead man.
These words are haunting. They are a feeble attempt to articulate an experience that seems unimaginable to most of us: total alienation from one’s own flesh. “Like a dead man” is no mere metaphor for stillness, although that element is crucial. “I am like a dead man” may not be a logical contradiction, but it has the air of one; for uttering it is the precise sort of thing a dead man cannot do.
Imagine experiencing yourself as something past the limit of your own experience. Imagine—as best as you can—experiencing that which no living creature ought to be able to experience: the stiffness of death, the lack of movement, of kinetic energy, which constitutes the processes we imprecisely call life. Perhaps then we can begin to approach the alien and apparently unimaginable meaning of these words: I am already stiff like a dead man.
●
This sentiment evokes a particular moment in the low-budget black-horror film J.D.’s Revenge, directed by blaxploitation mainstay Arthur Marks, written by the underappreciated Jaison Starkes and released in 1976. That moment is made so rich, so thrilling, by Glynn Turman, the film’s lead. Turman plays two characters in the film: a law student named Ike and a gangster named J.D., who inhabit one body. J.D. died in 1942. Thirty years later, his spirit begins to possess Ike. A brutal struggle for dominance ensues, in which J.D. is eventually triumphant. He takes over Ike’s body and his life, completes his final act of revenge against the men who killed him, and then vanishes of his own accord.
The moment I speak of occurs in the police station, after J.D. has vanished. Ike is being held, but is in no danger of being prosecuted for J.D.’s crimes. They have accepted his story, thanks to the interventions of one Elijah Bliss and one Roberta Bliss, the brother and the biological daughter of the man J.D. was after: Theotis Bliss. Elijah has convinced the police department that Ike was, in fact, possessed. J.D.’s reputation as a notorious gangster thirty years prior certainly helps matters. Ike is being held, then, merely for questioning. They wish to know what he remembers. Nothing, he tells them.
Ike is, one must imagine, grateful for Elijah’s intervention. But he is not exactly thrilled. “You mean,” he says—still wearing the clothes J.D. had bought for him—“I can just be walking down the street, and get taken over by some demon, out to get revenge on somebody?” Elijah responds: “It can happen anytime, anywhere. You were possessed, there’s no doubt about that.” Ike takes a moment to consider this. “Is it over? How do I know it won’t happen again?” “There’s no way to know that,” Elijah says. Ike laughs, a tight, mirthless, choked chuckle. “That’s crazy.”
Ike’s eyes are marvelously dull throughout this exchange. He appears to look past everything in front of him, sliding out of this perceptual plane altogether. Out of focus, the world becomes strangely expressionist, a collection of jagged edges and colors uncannily reminiscent of forms one knows. It is there: firm, solid, unmistakable. And yet it is out of focus; one cannot say precisely what that “it” is.
We could describe Ike’s experience of his body in much the same way. It must be emphasized that Ike does not remember what happens when J.D. possesses him. What he is contemplating here is not “becoming someone new.” Ike does not become anything when J.D. arrives. Ike disappears. Ike dies. And yet his body continues to move and act, warped into a hunk of flesh; in this moment, Ike is forced to experience himself as something past the limits of his own experience.
The horror of this moment is the horror that, I suspect, filled Fanon’s patients. In the last installment of this column, I discussed the possibility of experiencing the world as precarious. I characterized that as the infection of what is present with what is not present; the sense that there is something parasitic on perceptual reality that organizes it, shapes it, and yet remains wholly inaccessible to us. One word for this is haunting; the other is possession.
With suave, confident, B-movie aplomb, J.D.’s Revenge digs even deeper into this philosophical space. It is one thing to experience the world beyond you as precarious. It is quite another to experience yourself as incomprehensible. What both Fanon and J.D’s Revenge realize is that that experience depends on the body: that hunk of flesh, that cluster of swirling atoms, that null space in the great expanse of the world, that site of unimaginable horror and unmistakable bliss.
●
The central drama of the possession subgenre of horror seems psychological, or spiritual: a psychic entity—a demon, perhaps, or the spirit of a dead human being—infects a living person’s consciousness. This infection is often described as the “inhabitation” of that person’s body, as though the flesh remains unchanged by it.
But Turman knows better. In his hands, possession becomes more than the eviction of a prior tenant. Along with the whole ensemble of J.D.’s Revenge, he provides a master class in the physicality of acting. Ike’s body transforms when it becomes J.D.’s body, contorting into previously unimaginable and inaccessible shapes. J.D.’s Revenge reveals that possession horror might be better understood as a subspecies of body horror: that subgenre that derives its horror from grotesque, alien and violently mangled bodies. The bodies of Ike and J.D. are incredibly distinguishable; not by posture or appearance, but by movement.
Ike, we learn immediately, is tense. His friends, his girlfriend, constantly tell him he works too hard. He studies law, he plays community football, he drives a cab. A doctor begs him to “smoke some weed,” to do anything he can do to relax. He refuses to drink anything harder than beer; he’s too tired to sleep with his girlfriend. He looks top-heavy, as though his chest is slightly leaning forward, held aloft only by locked muscle. His limbs swing as single pieces. He speaks as though he is perpetually holding his breath.
But J.D. moves like a greased serpent with the devil on its tail. When he enters a room, his eyes roam feverishly: isolating any threat, any woman, any potential for pleasure or pain. In a flash, his hand darts out, reveals a straight razor, unfolds it and strikes. Or he doubles over, kicks his legs back and saunters away, limbs spastically leaping as far from his body as they can go, fingers poised horribly and hungrily. His jaw extends and retracts, dragging his face from scowl to hyena howl to a silent, grimacing smile. He moves—with such precision, such ingenuity, that it feels as though that movement extends to the cellular, perhaps even the subatomic level. J.D.’s whole being crackles with events. His flesh seems animated by a constant, pulsing narrative energy. One can watch Turman’s face with the same sacred attention one brings to the most intricately wrought historical epic or melodrama. It is exhausting to watch him, to try and keep up.
Tension, as Fanon describes it, is the arresting of voluntary action. One strains against one’s own body; one strains to move it. Yet it resists; it is “incapable of the slightest voluntary relaxation.” This way of talking implies the presence of a ghost in the machine: a will, capable of voluntary action, capable of desire, yet removable from the flesh. To speak of straining against one’s body is to imply a fundamental freedom from it, a freedom that typically manifests as control over it but here is disordered into a helpless antagonism against it. J.D. unlocks the chains of muscle and sinew that restrain Ike’s will, Ike himself. He is free; he is able to move, to act, to translate desire into brute reality. And J.D. certainly seems free. He does what he pleases. He laughs, he smiles, he articulates desires and pursues them. What else is freedom? And yet…
Late in the film, J.D. is in a cemetery. He sidles toward the camera, hands in his pockets, along a columbarium wall. Then he stops, bows his head, mumbles something and crumbles, bracing himself against the wall to keep from falling. After a moment, he gathers himself and continues. His gait is reduced to a shuffle. His hand lingers on the wall before he pulls it back, lips pursed in disgust. It is only then that his eyes catch the two niches in front of him; but he does not look surprised to see them. The first reads “J.D. Walker, 1911-1942.” J.D. places his hands on his own grave and pleads—to whom?—“Please, let me go.”
So much for freedom. One can imagine Ike, channeling Fanon’s patients, straining against his own immobile flesh, moaning: Please, let me go. This film asks us to look at J.D.—at his eternal motion—and hear him make the same plea. He stands before the dead flesh Fanon’s patients are becoming and begs to become thus. His mobility is a prison too.
This moment suggests that the imprisonment J.D. suffers is not simply that of physical immobility. What, then, if not the stiffness of death?
●
Sometimes, flesh moves. Sometimes, it is still. We assume that we generate those states. We assume that we pilot this automaton, this body; that we control it, that it is as we decide it to be. What unites Ike and J.D. is not mobility or immobility, but a profound, sickening, paradoxical realization that they are their flesh, and yet their flesh outstrips, and defies, them. This is alienation at its most staggering, because it is not escapable or correctable. The question is not how to regain control—one never had it—but how to live with its absence, how to accept the mysterious, ungovernable flesh that one has no option to refuse.
J.D.’s movement changes form when we consider it under the category of impulse. This is not because we begin to realize that his movement simply is impulse, but because we begin to find it difficult to judge. The boundaries between the voluntary and the involuntary begin to blur.
Let us take a seemingly throwaway scene, halfway through the film. Ike’s episodes of possession have deepened in severity. What began as momentary flashes are becoming sustained events. In this particular episode, Ike is driving an elderly white woman in his cab. A sermon—preached by Elijah Bliss—is blaring on the radio. Then Ike looks into the rearview mirror and sees J.D.’s face; the face, that is, of the man himself, from 1942 (furiously portrayed by David McKnight). With that, Ike is no more. J.D. wrenches on the car wheel, sending it spiraling in donuts throughout the streets of New Orleans. The passenger wails and howls in fear, before slamming her head against the window. The glass shatters, and her head flops forward, covered in blood.
J.D.’s face—wrenched in a sickening smile—settles into a scowl, and he stops the car in an empty parking lot. He gets out and walks to the passenger’s door—the camera pulls back, so we can see his bizarre, promenading gait—and opens it, tossing out first her suitcase, and then the woman herself, moaning in pain. “Come on, get the fuck on out of my gotdamn car.” His voice is hauntingly unfamiliar. We realize that the woman is moaning “Please don’t kill me,” and J.D. does too. “Kill ya? Bitch, get off of me; what the fuck is wrong with you, is ya crazy?” His laughter is sickening. He pulls out her purse and rifles through it. He takes out a wad of cash. He throws the purse aside. He looks around, as though searching for inspiration. Then he tosses the wad away, sidles back into the car, and drives off.
One sees impulse, bodily movements that cannot reasonably be called human. J.D. brutalizes an innocent woman for no reason. She does nothing to insult him. He does not want anything from her: her money, her body, her life. He simply, for an instant, wishes to harm her. So he does. And then he drives off. Watching this, I was haunted by Hillary Clinton’s infamous 1996 “superpredator” speech. In it she urged for “an organized effort against gangs,” which were, she warned, “not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators’: no conscience, no empathy.” Clinton here was borrowing from political scientist John DiIulio, whose theory of the “superpredator” argued that “moral poverty”—“the poverty of being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong”—produces a particular kind of “predatory street criminal.” What distinguishes the superpredator from a “normal” criminal—it is difficult to call this claim anything but literal dehumanization—is that the former is governed solely by immediate instinct. With “literally … no concept of the future,” the superpredator is reduced to their “natural” impulses for violence and physical pleasure. One looks at J.D. and one sees “the buzz of impulsive violence, the vacant stares and smiles, and the remorseless eyes” that DiIulio sees in the children in juvenile detention who earn his dubious appellation.
J.D.’s Revenge transforms Ike into a superpredator. He desires sex and violence but nothing more complex than that, besides his drive for revenge. And we cannot imagine him as some noble, single-minded crusader. He takes his sweet time before pouncing on Theotis; in the meantime, he does “what comes ‘naturally’” to him. Most notably, he twice batters and attempts to rape Ike’s girlfriend, Christella, portrayed by the fantastic Joan Pringle. The savagery of these episodes is staggering. At one point, I turned away.
It is not simply that J.D. does terrible things. He does them for no more reason than that for a moment he wanted to. As the film progresses, it becomes more and more difficult to see a complex human being within Turman’s performance. He becomes a caricature, pure impulse, kinetic energy given cartoon form. Can we call his actions voluntary with any conviction? Does he not become a jumble of ragged nerves, caught in eternal reflex? The superpredator lacks an executive function. Their actions are not governed by some reflective, thinking mind or soul. He is pure flesh, pure matter, locked in eternal yet purposeless motion, skipping and lunging as pulses of electricity rattle through it.
If the cemetery scene humanizes J.D., it is not simply because it introduces his feelings for Betty Jo. It is his plea: Please, let me go. For a moment, there is a flash of something else in this body: a ghost in the machine. J.D. strains against himself here, for the first time. His stumbling fall toward the grave is an attempt, however feeble, to become more than impulse; not by controlling his flesh, but by abandoning it.
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J.D.’s movement, in other words, is not a liberation, but its own form of imprisonment. His flesh offers him no more solace than Ike’s does. For both, their body erupts as an antagonist (it bears repeating that this body is one both share). It outstrips them; it acts without them. But that is imprecise. For they are their flesh, as are we all. Neither J.D. nor Ike can simply abandon their body, either literally or emotionally. They cannot disavow it. Ike cannot simply say to his girlfriend: “I did not rape you; my body did.” He cannot pretend that the fugitivity of his body means nothing to him, that it does not implicate him in any way.
What I have been trying to uncover is the curious, unsettling experience Ike and J.D. suffer. Their body—that which we most take for granted—becomes precarious: neither theirs nor not theirs, neither voluntary nor involuntary, neither familiar nor alien. This single body is refracted through an uncanny kaleidoscope, transformed into a baroque swirl of flesh. This is one possibility of horror: that it reveals our flesh, and thus our very selves, as precarious. J.D’s Revenge and Fanon both plumb the depths of this horror. They do so with black flesh; in this film, as in Fanon’s case studies, black flesh becomes precarious.
If neither Ike nor J.D. can have confidence in the humanity of their own flesh, how can we? As we watch the film, Turman’s flesh takes on a mercurial anarchism. It becomes genuinely unclear whether, in any given moment, it is voluntary or not, human or not. This uncanniness results in a profound unease. Flesh—Turman’s, yours, mine—reveals itself as no less precarious than the rest of the world. Our apparently privileged access to our physical experience—our ability to understand and control it—does not disappear, but becomes troubled, unsure, inadequate.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.