John Singleton Tribute (pt.3) What’s In YOUR Heart: a Portrait of Lucky (Poetic Justice)
This week we lost acclaimed director and filmmaker John Singleton. Known for classic films like Boyz N The Hood, Poetic Justice, Baby Boy, Higher Learning, Rosewood and many more. Reflecting on his dynamic body of work, I realized just how much of my own perspective of the world has been directly influenced and shaped by his stories, his portraits of Black masculinity. Never flat, his Black male characters were always nuanced and complicated. For the next couple days, I’m highlighting a few of those portraits in tribute to this great story-teller.
Full disclosure, I never saw Poetic Justice, well, not before this morning that is. It’s not my favorite Singleton movie. Honestly, I abandoned my endeavor at least twice as the pace of the film was arduous and the story a bit heavy-handed throughout. But I made it through and I’m glad I did. Poetic Justice centers on a young woman name Justice (Janet Jackson) who is reeling from the trauma of witnessing the killing of her first love. When she meets Lucky (Tupac Shakur) she’s cold and bitter, his dirty fingernails and his cocky approach doesn’t help the situation very much. However, forced together on a road trip between L.A. and Oakland something eventually begins to shake loose.
Lucky, like most of Singleton’s characters, is anything but one-dimensional. But what captured my attention is the fact that for much of the film, Lucky attempts a kind of one-dimensionalism. Like many young Black men, he hides behind a mask of virility and deference, feigning indifference and disconnect. He twists his postal uniform cap to the back while delivering mail, sips 40s from a paper bag as he chops it up with a car full of gang bangers, and refers to women as ‘bitches and hos’ with nearly every other word. Yet his character (as his mother acknowledges) has an ‘honest job’. He is a doting and dutiful father, even going as far as to rescue his daughter from her basehead mother. He also has ambition and vision. At one point he lashes out at his quasi-homie Chicago (Joe Torry) for downplaying the efforts of another man trying to do something with his life. It isn’t until deep into the fateful road-trip that the façade Lucky exudes begins to dissipate. As he strolls through an African festival with Justice, she questions his sudden silence and introspection. “I’m just thinking,” he replies, “It’s hard to think in the city”.
Lucky doesn’t really appear until this moment, when he begins to abandon the stereotypical facade. When he begins to be vulnerable. He becomes and example of what happens when we ultimately let our guard down. And we get to experience this trip with him. The further away they get from L.A. you can observe Lucky transform, almost like the changing landscape of the California coastline. And the backdrops perform as elegantly as the actors in the film. Throughout the road-trip, scenes of lush parks, mountains, and the Pacific Ocean crashing against the cliffs, contrast starkly to the arid cityscapes. Early on, the violence implicit in the remnants the L.A. riots, drug-infested projects, and a police presence so constant that they bleed into the background help us understand what Lucky means when he says it’s hard to think in the city. That violence is reiterated when Lucky finally arrives in Oakland to find his cousin and creative partner Khalil has been shot to death.
It is this constant violence or threat of violence which explains why Lucky (and many Black men) performs a kind of hyper-bravado, despite the contradictions of his actual being. The violence is a glaring and tenuous reality and for Black men, and it is more often than not, a hindrance to any kind of respite one might discover by way of being vulnerable. But as revealed in the end, that kind of emotional nakedness is equally essential for survival. The one-dimensional version of Lucky was too rigid, to committed to an idea of himself that he stood in his own way. As he softened, he grew almost exponentially.
When things finally cooled between Lucky and Justice, she returns once more to his dirty hands. She pulls out her kit and begins to give him a manicure. Though the conversation centers on her own traumatic story, at that moment, Lucky’s submission to Justice becomes a rare moment of intimacy. And perhaps a subtle reminder that despite the fact that this world is harsh on us it’s important to remember that self-preservation also includes allowing those who love us to help take care of us.
