💖Motivation Meows💖
Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of The Black Cat.
As always, here is some Good Black News.
First, a few weeks ago, I spoke to fellow writer Tia Kelly about my journey as a journalist covering tech. You can read my interview on her Substack Cultwoo. Elsewhere, UrbanGeekz partnered with Moovn, a Black-owned ride-sharing app, to share news content with its passengers, and Campus has raised a $23 million Series A extension to connect students with university professors.
This month, I’m reading: La Bête humaine by Emile Zola
This weekend, I can’t stop listening to: Escapism by Raye
💢From the Chatterbox💢
Let me preface this by saying that I actually loved Challengers. I did. I loved the aesthetics and the score. I loved the premise. I love watching tennis and used to play it as a child, so the movie tapped into a certain nostalgia that I rarely see properly converted to the big screen. It’s one of the best tennis movies, hands down. My only notes on the tennis playing were that each set was called Set One, Set Two, Set Three. I have it drilled in my head that it’s First Set, Second Set, Third Set.
“That’s for the people who don’t play tennis,” my friend with whom I watched the movie said when I asked why they were calling it Set One.
I don’t have many notes, but there are a few points of discussion I want to muse on.
I felt the movie did a great job of selling itself, so much so that the hype it created allowed audiences to project their wants and wishes into the glaring omissions within the film. Overall, it fell short of the grand expectations I came to have for it. Zendaya, I will say, has the most amazing ability to sell moves — she has the movie star red carpet quality that doesn’t always translate on screen in her acting chops. I think she’s growing, though, and as she gets more opportunities on film to test her craft — and as she grows up in general — her acting will only improve. I do see, however, that she has a very sharp and ripening producer and director’s eye, as a few critics have pointed out. That doesn’t help, though, regarding my main problem with Challengers. It’s not her; it’s how her character, Tashi, was written.
Tashi felt one-dimensional to me in a way that I expected, given the fact that she is a woman written by a man, directed by a man, and whose story is told through the eyes of men. She, at times, felt like a stock character, one that solely existed so that we could learn more about the men who desired her. She was their fodder. Even the way the two other leading characters (Art and Patrick, played by Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, respectively) spoke about her was with objectification. Tashi wasn’t even a leading character if we are, to be honest — she was a supporting actress, at best, and Zendaya was simply the star power needed to sell the film. Tashi was the leading lady in the way a man thinks about a woman, absorbed and fixated upon, without the intricacies that would make her human. She is an object of desire and a purveyor of lust and passion. I think of all the complex women we have seen on screen this past year — mainly Emma Stone in Poor Things — she, too, was written by a man, but in a way that was not afraid to embrace the madness of womanhood. Tashi was supposed to be angry, but she was only so angry in a way that her white writer could translate to a page.
My point is somewhat proven by the alleged first page of the screenplay that I found someone posted online. Patrick and Art have full character descriptions, while Tashi has only a few sentences.
As one popular Twitter person pointed out, “I think the description of characters—especially of Tashi makes it so glaringly obvious that her character is a background character in this film. Not the prize. Not the mastermind. 33, Black, a former player. No description of what she’s wearing or who she is as a person. Hmm”
The senior culture reporter at HuffPost also pointed it out. “Interesting to see their races identified here when the film doesn't really know what to say about the role of race at all,” they tweeted.
I think Zendaya did the best she could with the material given. But, if I must, I would like to go one step further: I also sensed no tension between her and Faist, and she didn’t believe for one moment that she and he had started a family together; she had kids. The true chemistry was between Faist and O’Connor, and I was also not sold on the idea that they wanted her as much as they desired each other. I think I see where the script wanted to go with Tashi, though. She was a woman who lost her career, so perhaps she was trying to live her life through her husband. For that point to drive home better, I wish her stakes had been better established so we could see what Tashi had lost and her motivations for wanting to continue climbing. It is easy for me to project this, but I would love a scene about just her, her childhood, with her family, more about her emotions, her thinking, so I could better understand who she is aside from a ball bounced between two men. It is not enough for me to see a vindictive woman manipulate two attractive white men for the sake of it. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the interactive character development Zola gives, even to a tree.
After my screening of Challengers, there was a Q&A with the screenwriter. Hearing his thoughts made it worse. He spoke a lot about the class elements he tried to intertwine into the film, which, if that’s the case, also fell short. Faist’s character was supposed to be upper middle class, while O’Connor’s was supposed to be very wealthy. In the film, O’Connor is introduced to the audience as assumingly being poor, which I actually found to be emotionally jerking because it established the stakes of why he was so competitive, especially in contrast to the quiet luxury life Zendaya and Faist’s characters build for themselves. But then we find out that O’Connor’s character isn’t really poor, and we never really learn why he cosplays as being so. I told my friend that this lends to my theory that people are afraid of writing poor people, and making O’Connor secretly rich in this film was a cop-out. It eliminated nearly all the class tension for me because it meant the stakes were never high to begin with.
I would have loved a flashback of Tashi, who is not as wealthy as the two other characters in the movie, trying to keep up with the expensive tennis circuit and how she felt as a person of color in this white country club world. We never get that tension, either. We are sold sexual tension, but even that is not as present as online discourse might have you think — and again, all real chemistry is between Faist and O’Connor. None of these characters develop over the course of two hours, and the time jumps — which were close to outstaying their welcome — do nothing to show the evolution of time. It was a scintillating cinematic purgatory.
Maybe that was the point.
To continue harping on this one point: The screenwriter said he always wrote Tashi’s character with the idea that she would be a Black woman. I felt that was disingenuous; it was something that was only meant to garner more audience attention. People were already very interested in seeing a woman of color seduce two white boys, a play on societal power dynamics. But the past century of women’s tennis has been about dark-skinned Black women, not light-skinned biracial like Zendaya. Everyone knows that Zendaya is Hollywod’s acceptable version of a Black woman, and I thought about how that impacted the film: she played a safe line in the movie by having a certain level of anger and seduction that white audiences could be drawn to. I will say, though, that anger is one of the better emotions Zendaya plays; much of the film had excellent non-verbal communication. But Zendaya herself said somewhere that she doesn’t really like taking roles from Black actresses, and the screenwriter made it seem like the production team was conscious enough to know a woman of color needed to play this role, with the unspoken being that they also had to sell the movie.
Vulture writer Angelica Jade Bastién added to this point in a New York Magazine newsletter about the film. She pointed out that the only time race is mentioned in the film is when Zendaya says she takes good care of her two little white boys. Bastién also pointed out that Zendaya is a producer on the film, which is also part of its selling point. It’s supported by the remarkable achievement of how much agency a young Black actress is getting, something that is rarely seen. But if that is the case, then where were the women and people of color behind the scenes of this movie? The screenwriter said Zendaya came on very early as a producer, and now I wonder how much power she actually had when making this film. Undoubtedly, all of the characters, especially her own, would have been fleshed out if, say, a Black woman had directed the film. But maybe then the studio wouldn’t have made it. We would have been able to see Tashi, though, through the eyes of an actual Black person who perhaps could have better understood the complexities of what it means to be a Black woman under the constant guise of the white man in this white world.
Zendaya never spoke to another woman alone in this movie. During my Q&A, the screenwriter said one of the moments that inspired him to look more into tennis was the infamous line call made during Serena Williams’ match, which ultimately saw her lose to Naomi Osaka — two Black women having a heated discussion under the lens of the cold, harsh world. He spoke about the dramatic elements in tennis, the passion, the bloodlust — he spoke about how Tashi’s character was partly inspired by Roger Feder’s wife, Mirka, and how he always wondered what she was thinking about as she watched her husband play because she always seemed so stressed. I got the impression that this screenwriter was trying his hand at understanding what goes on in the head of a woman so filled with desire and passion she wouldn’t just die for it; she would kill for it, too. Instead, he never quite gets it, which, again, was expected. Race, class, desire, and gender — it takes a special hand to master all at once.
The result is so many almosts. It almost captured racial tension, it almost captured class tension, it almost got it. Instead, I left the theater thinking that, of course, it is every man’s fantasy to be in a love triangle with a hot woman. There is a thrill in that, too, I guess.
My final bit is me sharing my alternative castings: Dev Patel, Henry Golding, or Mena Massoud, alongside Stephanie Hsu or Danielle Deadwyler. I loved O’Connor, Zendaya, and Faist, though, too. After all, their racial casting dynamics were important — the movie needed to be made, and the studio needed to be assured that audiences would see the film. That was the legwork of O’Connor and Faist.
Those were my main notes about this otherwise very fun film. Everyone had different thoughts and interpretations, which means it was good — it inspired discourse, debates, and analysis, which is what art is supposed to do. It also went viral, which I credit almost solely to Zendaya. Challengers is this year’s Saltburn. Any other notes I had are quite irrelevant since, regardless, I’ll probably go see it again, and again, and again, and again.
💫Kitty Talk💫
Here are some interesting articles I’ve read since we last met:
New York Magazine, “Challengers Is Almost a Sexy Adult Drama”
The Paris Review, “Bad Dinner Guest”