From Novel to TV: “The Other Black Girl”
The book “got it.” Did the series mess it up? I look at both and the classic horror genre that they belong to.
The Book That Got It
“Inspiration struck Zakiya Dalila Harris in Knopf Doubleday’s 13th-floor bathroom.
As she was washing her hands one day, a Black woman she’d never seen emerged from a stall. It was a surprise — a pleasant one — since Harris, an assistant editor at the time, was one of only two African-American people working on the floor.
“I remember being so excited,” she said. “And then being like, ‘Oh, OK, we — we’re not having a moment. Cool.’ I don’t think she noticed any of this.”
As Harris walked back to her desk, she thought about why she had been so eager to connect with this stranger. …“
(From an interview with Zakiya Dalila Harris)
From “How Black Women Describe Navigating Race and Gender in the Workplace” by Maura Cheeks:
“One woman I spoke with, a successful entrepreneur who was interning at a tech startup before going to business school, excitedly described her most recent position where, for the first time in her career, she reported to a black woman. She said she, “performed better” and was “a lot more comfortable and confident.” She described what it might have been like if she had to code-switch instead: “Being judged on your work versus mentally performing well would have been more taxing. Your work is judged plus other intangible things. You second-guess yourself and that affects your confidence.”
…A twenty-something woman at a top-tier consulting company described the first time she worked for a client team that included other people of color. The client was a prison and her team was making recommendations for how to group specific inmates together. “I said, ‘You wouldn’t put Nicki Minaj in a cell with Remy Ma.’ Everyone instantly got it and it was a beautiful thing. I wouldn’t be able to make that analogy on another team. It was the project I performed the best at. That partly had to do with the fact that your clients look like you and it’s easier to build that relationship.” Because she performed so well on the project, she gained social capital with her supervisor. It’s a direct example of how working with people you can relate to can positively influence your career.
When Nella Rogers (played by Sinclair Daniel in the tv series) is introduced to Hazel-May McCall (Ashleigh Murray) she is excited—and dazzled. Finally, another Black woman! And so self-assured! Nella lived every day in a state of anxiety about what she said, what she did, what she wore, trying to negotiate her place as an editor’s assistant at the virtually all-white Warner publishing house. But Hazel seemed to instinctively know just how to be.
“Smooth’d Out,” it turns out, is indeed the ingredient that gives Hazel her relaxed self-assurance. It doesn’t just condition her hair; it also numbs her ventromedial prefrontal cortex, acting as a kind of super-Prozac that boosts social ease and calms anxieties about just about everything from picking the appropriate outfit for the occasion to what to say in a college interview. (“This one’s supposed to make you less anxious,” said the girl with all the metal in her mouth, whose black cabbie hat and box braids were a clear homage to Janet circa Poetic Justice. “Maybe this’ll help me with the SAT?” “Nahhh,” her friend replied. “Go with the Serenity Spray instead. My sister swears by it. And you know she got into Fordham Law.”) But Nella doesn’t know this until much later, and until then she careens over and over from excited bonding to suspicion about what Hazel is up to, and back again. At first, it’s a huge relief to have someone she doesn’t have to code-switch for, and with whom she can vent her frustrations about white colleagues who were both clueless and self-congratulatory at the same time:
Their confusion [about “diversity”] was understandable enough, and Nella did her best to rein everyone back in toward the task at hand with her own small “objective” observations. But she couldn’t bring herself to say that maybe higher-level employees shouldn’t primarily hire people with Ivy League degrees or personal connections, because her own résumé had been boosted by an editor friend of one of her professors at the University of Virginia. And the zinger she really wanted to deliver—Yes, we just published “that Black writer” last year, but that writer, along with the last six Black people we’ve published here at Wagner, was not a Black American, he was from an African country, and while that’s definitely an example of diversity, it’s also really not—wouldn’t work, either. It would only unleash a whole new slew of gradations that Nella didn’t even feel comfortable grappling with on her own yet, let alone with her white employers.
The second hour of the “meeting” was filled with clumsy role play and even clumsier word association games, and naturally things got worse. When Nella offered up the acronym “BIPOC” as a term she associated with “diversity,” her coworkers ooh-yeahed … and then offered their own examples of “diversity”: “left-handedness,” “nearsightedness,” and “dyslexia.” Only when someone volunteered the word “non-millennial” did Nella realize that a return to her own concern about the treatment of Black people both inside and outside of the literary sphere would be highly unlikely. And just like that, faster than it took to utter the words, “what about ageism?” the moderator was bowing her head and lauding everyone—the one hundred or so people in the room, all white save for Nella—for being so open.
…Being the only Black girl in the room wasn’t so hard a gig most of the time. She’d slowly befriended every other individual at Wagner who worked as an assistant in any capacity, and the other people of color who worked at the front desk and in the mailroom knew her by name. But it wasn’t the same as having a “work wife” who really understood her. She craved the ability to walk across the hallway, vomit out all of her feelings about a racially insensitive fictional character, and return to her desk, good as new.
(To hear a longer version of this passage from the novel read aloud, click on this link: https://www.thecut.com/2021/05/excerpt-from-zakiya-dalila-harris-the-other-black-girl.html)
I’m not Black and would never claim that I know what it feels like to be Black, but I can relate to Nella’s frustration.
I grew up in Newark, New Jersey just before white flight began to send more affluent friends of mine into the suburbs. My high school, immortalized by Philip Roth in “Goodbye Columbus,” was dominantly Jewish, but Black and Italian kids were not a rarity. Non-ethnic whites were.
White Christians were exotics to me. We ate bacon and I didn’t get bat-mitzvah’d, but it was still beyond weird to me when the mother of a (non-Italian) Catholic boy who invited me to his house for lunch served milk along with a white bread sandwich. The crucifix on Joseph’s bedroom wall (he was the first “Joseph” I knew who wasn’t known as “Joe”) was scary and mysterious. I knew the story of Jesus—everyone did, the entire country told it (and sold it) every December—but a crèche in front of a church was one thing, a human body nailed to a cross overlooking your slumber (“….and if I die before I wake, I pray to God my soul to take”) was another.
By the time I got my first teaching job, though, the crucifix wasn’t just exotic. The job was at a small Jesuit college in Syracuse, New York, and Jesus hung just above the blackboard in every room. By then, I knew all about the belief that “my people” had crucified “our Lord” and I even had a few students who had learned that we routinely killed our first-born sons. (Some confusion of bible stories there.) My more conscientiously “liberal” students would cheerfully wish me “Happy Yom Kippur!,” clueless about the fact that “happy” is not what one feels as one is lighting candles for the dead. And I still wasn’t entirely sure that they didn’t secretly believe I killed their Lord. In that environment, having Jesus behind my back eyeing me as I taught my courses—some of them among the first feminist offerings in the country—was unsettling.
But—and this is my main point—none of my Catholic colleagues “got it.” For them, crucifixes on the walls were just part of the furniture; they didn’t vibrate with judgment, they didn’t make them constantly aware of how “other” they were as they did for me. The crucifixes were just there. When, emboldened by the rumor that Jesuits were the most progressive of Catholics (which was true of some of my Jesuit colleagues, who became beloved friends) I discussed my discomfort with a member of the administration (not so progressive) he wasn’t just dismissive, he responded as though I was attacking his culture. Love it or leave it. “This is a Catholic school. If you don’t like it, why did you take this job?” (Those weren’t his exact words, but that’s what they communicated to me. I got the same feeling when, in the “holiday” section of the main department store, surrounded by ornamental angels, I complained that I couldn’t find any Menorrah candles. The sales lady looked at me as though I had horns: “We don’t sell those here.”)
In time the culture shock wore off, and I became used to what Jordan Peele in Get Out and Zakiya Harris in The Other Black Girl depict so well. It’s a bind, a no-win, that’s been theorized for decades by race and gender scholars, but rarely given form in popular culture—and never, before Peele, as a kind of horror. When you are the minority in a dominant culture that experiences itself as the norm (so deeply it isn’t even aware of it) there are basically two seemingly contradictory responses to your “difference”:
On the one hand, your own culture can be so submerged as to be invisible. My daughter struggles to shove her hair into helmets whose manufacturers apparently haven’t noticed that Black people do ride horses. The preschool summer camp that she attended (until I withdrew her) started every day with a prayer to Jesus. The head counselor was shocked when I objected. She thought I was making a big deal out of nothing. Nothing to them, sure. And when you stand up for your reality (as I did then, and as Nella does when she criticizes a stereotyped Black character proudly put in a best-selling author’s book for “diversity,’ you will probably be perceived as hostile (or taken as making accusations of racism or anti-semitism.)
The other response: You are so visibly “other” that you are only seen through the screen of your difference—as for the colleague of mine at LeMoyne, who couldn’t have a conversation with me that didn’t refer, in one way or another, to my Jewishness. (“You’re a fan of broadway musicals? Have you seen Fiddler on the Roof?” ) He thought he was being “inclusive,” was so proud of himself for making the reference. I felt like that crucifix was still staring at my back, although in a friendly way, reminding me I was an alien.
The Other Black Girl is full of illustrations of white “liberals” trying to be “allies,” showing off how in-the-know about Blackness they are, while Nella, Hazel, and Malaika (Nella’s best friend, who is suspicious of Hazel’s smoothness from the start, played by Brittany Adebumola in the tv series) roll their eyeballs.
The white characters in the book don’t see the eyeball roll, but readers do, and that’s a big reason for the book’s success. Having someone else in the room who shares your experience is a huge relief. But so, too, is reading a book that gets it. Although publishers saw The Other Black Girl’s potential for a broad audience, it doesn’t assume a generic reader but speaks instead to the Black woman reader who has experienced it all (minus the supernatural hair grease.)
The book isn’t concerned about being “balanced”; it’s deliberately perspectival: “I really wanted,” Harris said in an interview before the book was published, “to look at how this world affected these two Black women, and how they interacted with one another and what they said to one another, and what they felt comfortable doing when people were watching.” Looking specifically at how the world affected the Black women in the book, Harris deliberately doesn’t explain the different codes for the textures of hair, or any expressions or performers that white readers might find baffling. Instead, she puts us in the position of Maisey or Sophie (two of Nella’s white colleagues who ostentatiously parade their “ally-ship”) : If you don’t get it, don’t pretend you do, just go home and inform yourself. It’s not a crime to not know. But you’re a fool if you think I can’t tell that you’re faking it.
Having an author “get it” and put it out there is almost (not quite, but almost) as much of a joy as having another Black girl join the all-white firm. The pleasure of a book “getting it” is why I delighted in Philip Ruth’s early novels, despite the sexism and the more stereotyped Jewish characters. His books were so chock-full of details that were intimately recognizable to me—and that required knowledge of the assimilationist pressures specifically on Jews—that I was willing to overlook his blind-spots. Who doesn’t have them? So he didn’t get what it was like to be a woman—and especially not a Jewish women in a culture with a fetish for blue-eyed blondes (which Roth shared, oh my did he share.) But he got what it was like to be a Jew growing up as the child of unwealthy immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, stealing fruit from Brenda Patimkin’s basement fridge, longing for the easy affluence of the suburbs.
“Representation matters.” You hear that a lot nowadays. But as Nella argues in the novel, “representation” as mere “diversity” can be as racially “problematic” as exclusion. When she objects to Shartricia in Needles and Pins, it’s to a kind of “diversity” that the white, male author congratulates himself on (wow, he made a Black woman a central character in his book!) but that she finds “dangerous” because of all the stereotypes the character embodies. And whether or not you find her reaction understandable or what follows believable is probably not as important as the fact that Harris goes out of her way to avoid stereotypes and cliches in her portrait of Nella, who is nerdy and people-pleasing, but also politically conscious, who feels very, very Black in the all-white Warner publishing house but in college was seen as “not Black enough,” who tries to fit into white office culture but is dazzled and envious of the much “cooler,” hyper-stylish, and more visibly “Blacker” Hazel. Harris wants women readers not to admire Nella as a superwoman who always does the right thing, but someone with whom they can identify.
“Of course there’s code switching, right? But it’s not just that. We really change ourselves.” (From an interview with Zakiya Dalila Harris)
The Other Black Girl mixes workplace satire and social commentary with elements of horror and magic realism, flat-out comedy (Nella’s friend Malaika, easily the most entertaining character in the television series, provides a lot of that) and themes of female competition and intimacy. Because genre-wise it’s such a mixture, it has often been described as a kind of combination dish: “All About Eve at an all-white publishing office,” “Get Out Meets Devil Wears Prada.” Etc. Harris herself has said that in conceiving of the tv series (she’s co-author, with Rashida Jones) she was influenced by Jordan Peele as well as the series Severence (which I deeply miss.)
But while the series, which beefs up the horror with flickering lights and hallucinated images in computers, and makes Nella’s boss Vera much haughtier and bossier than in the book, does have elements that bring both Peele (although more Us than Get Out) and Prada to mind, I was more struck by how The Other Black Girl aligns withThe Invasion of the Body-Snatchers and The Stepford Wives.
All three are parables of the struggle of the individual against the forces of homogeneity and conformity. All three employ a horror-mechanism (pods from outer space, “scientifically” engineered replacement of actual females by robots programmed to please men, magical hair grease that makes the compromises of achieving success in the white workplace easier to bear) as the mode which replaces individual consciousness and resistance with a compliant but happier version of the self. And all three serve as metaphors for actual social pressures toward conformity/assimilation, and anxieties about losing oneself in the process.
One of the time-consuming but delightful pleasures of writing about movies is getting to watch them. “I’m doing my research,” I call out to my daughter, who wants to tell me stories about what happened that day at the barn she works at. But I’m not buried in a pile of articles. I’m sitting in bed with my iPad on my lap and the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers is on the screen. Then, later in the day, the 1975 version. (There have actually been two others in addition to these, but one is terrible and the other is fine but not very interesting.) In the evening, after an order-in dinner (no time to cook when you’re in the middle of a movie binge) it’s the two versions of Stepford Wives. I say “research” only half jokingly. It is research, and I love it.
I particularly love comparing different versions (of the same basic plot, of novel and film, etc.) And refreshing myself on the different versions of these body-and-soul-snatching movies—which I’d seen, some numerous times before—was fascinating, both for the similarities and for the differences.
The 1956 Body-Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel,is straight horror—there’s not a joke in it—and commentators have interpreted the social subtext, variously, as the terror of a communist take-over (big at the time) or, contrastingly, the scourge of McCarthyism. Like “The Twilight Zone” television series—and as such, the grandfather of contemporary horror from Polanski and DePalma to Peele and Harris—it originated the “horror lurking in the everydayness” genre in which the most banal settings (small towns, kitchens, suburban neighborhoods, urban hair parties) are transformed into nightmare environments.
The 1978 version, directed by Philip Kaufman, which Pauline Kael described as “the best movie of its kind ever made” is funnier, with its location in San Francisco during the “human potential” movement, which is already half-way to the “feel good” post-pod mindlessness that will turn amiable hippies and self-help gurus into automatons.(The pods in this setting develop, wouldn’t you know it, from flowers.) But it’s images are also more terrifying (at least, to me) than the 1956 version. Embryonic duplicates wetly emerging from the pods, breathing and multiplying. Close-ups of the take-over of human bodies. And a dog and a person get pod-merged (nod to The Fly) and come out as a dog with a human head.
It was in comparing these two Body-Snatchers that I realized there are basically two types of endings to the body-and-soul-snatching genre. In one, there’s hope for humanity: in the 1956 version, after trying unsuccessfully to convince others that the body-snatchers are real and not the paranoid fantasies induced by a “mass hysteria,” a huge truck filled with pods pulls up and convinces the unbelievers to call in the National Guard. Just what the intervention of government forces will accomplish isn’t clear, but the final image is of Doctor Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) laying his head against the wall, breathing a huge sigh of relief. (This isn’t how director Don Siegel wanted the film to end, but rather with Kevin McCathy weaving through high-way traffic, vainly warning drivers that the pods are coming for them. The studio, however, insisted that Siegel provide a more upbeat ending. The change bothered him for the rest of his career.)
The 1978 version fulfills Siegel’s desire for a more horrific ending, as our hero (still called Bennell, and played by Donald Sutherland), who throughout the film has valiantly fought for individuality and love has himself been “changed.” We don’t realize this until, seeing a friend who is still human (Veronica Cartwright) he points his finger at her and lets out the blood-curdling scream that the “changed” use to alert others that there’s a holdout to capture.
The original Stepford Wives—made in 1975 and directed by Bryan Forbes—has a comparable ending, in which we find Joanna (Katherine Ross), after struggling throughout the movie against the “men’s association” who have been replacing actual women with man-pleasing, cupcake-baking, frilly-frocked replicants, strolling down the Stepford supermarket isles, sweetly greeting the other mechanical ladies, filling her cart with tasty treats for her hubby, while Muzak plays in the background. Joanna is gone.
These scenes, although they’re funny, are also chilling. The 2004 remake of Stepford Wives ends very differently. Having come to the very brink of accepting her impending transformation, Joanna (Nicole Kidman) and her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) decide her individuality is more precious than her obedience, secretly plot to create havoc among the mechanical replicants, and everything falls apart—including Christopher Walker’s head from his shoulders. It’s too chaotic and silly and absurd—and only funny of you’re a seven-year-old—to deserve much more detail than that. The only thing in the movie that got me to laugh out loud was Glen Close saying “Hanukkah.” (Can’t describe; you just have to hear it.)
Why was the ending changed? Audiences at negative screenings didn’t like the darker ending. And so an unambivalently feminist cautionary tale was transformed into an unfunny, intended-to-be-politically-inoffensive mess.
I don’t think lightening things up was the motivation behind the changes that were made in making a television series of the novel of “The Other Black Girl,” and I wouldn’t describe the series as unfunny or a mess (it’s very funny, it retains much of the edge of the novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed gulping it down in one big binge—if only for pleasure of getting to know and watch the actresses.) But I was disappointed—and somewhat baffled—to see the disquieting ending of the novel radically changed. In the novel, Nella, having finally accepted the anxiety-numbing hair grease (a hilarious riff on the body-snatching theme, you don’t have to relinquish your whole body to sell your soul, just rub a bit into your scalp) becomes for other women what Hazel once was for her: a recruiter (keeping with the hair metaphor, “conditioner”) of ambitious, struggling Black girls to the sorority of sistahs who have accepted that (as Hazel puts it) if you want to change things AND be happy “sometimes you just have to be the person they want you to be.”
The new ending—which I won’t describe in detail, so those who haven’t yet seen it won’t have it “spoiled” for them—has become (perhaps partly in anticipation of renewal for another season) part cliff-hanger, part feel-good (or at least feel-better) twist on the original. Other alterations have been made too, some of which were the result of Harris wanting to give the personalities of the characters more nuance and some of which reflect her responses to the cultural changes that have taken place in the years between 2019 (when she was writing the book) and 2022, during which Right-wing protests against critical race theory and the banning of racially-themed books had brought “cultural” racism more into the foreground. The white characters as written in the book, she felt, would seem more old-hat in 2023: “I think a lot of us are experiencing fatigue in terms of like, 'white wokeness' or 'Karens.' These things are no longer surprising. I just don't necessarily find it entertaining when it's not nuanced these days."
For the series, she also wanted to make Hazel into less a sinister schemer and more a sympathetic human being, so there’s back story to Hazel that’s not in the book. Malaika is given more presence and more hilarious stuff to say, which I enjoyed. But there’s also a lot of plot complication that’s difficult to follow, and the horror-metaphor of hair product that tames you, transforms you, or just smooths you out is added to by familiar but arbitrary imagery (flickering lights? Ghost-like manifestations of former publishing house employees? I don’t recall either of these from the book.) One reviewer complained that such changes made the film “unravel under the pressures of modern sci-fi horror…[and] its most interesting ideas of assimilation and race become bogged down by boring tropes borrowed from seemingly every Black horror film since 2017’s “Get Out.” Others, however, found the hodge-podge of comedy and horror “deliciously unhinged.”
I’m less inclined to see the changes as serving either “nuance” or audience-pleasing tropes than as an indication of how difficult it is, in 2023, to make an uncomplicated, cautionary parable about body or soul-snatching. With the present Supreme Court and women’s personhood actually (and not merely in worried anticipation) under attack, it’s hard to imagine how comedy or horror can be injected into a “Stepford Wives” story. There’s too much actual horror happening in women’s lives for that kind of tale to be either a warning (as The Handmaid’s Tale once was) or infused with laughs. And with the GOP behaving like a group entity divested of individuality and “resistance,” there’s no need to imagine pods infiltrating the world from outer space. There already here, home-grown and flourishing. A seemingly unstoppable attack on ordinary human decency (as in the 1970’s versions of Body Snatchers and Stepford Wives) often feels like it’s really happening rather than science fiction. And we know that even if Nella becomes exactly the kind of Black girl that her white colleagues will be comfortable with, she can still be stopped in her car while driving home from work.
So maybe the who-knows-what will-happen ending of the tv version of The Other Black Girl is not just designed to set the series up for another season, but is as optimistic as we can get—and the fact that it’s much messier than the novel a pretty accurate representation of life as we now know it.
For reviews of the novel: https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/the-other-black-girl/