pariah film analysis essay

Pariah (Film)

By dee rees, pariah (film) analysis.

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Bus ride to bus ride. These are the bookends to a film about expression and choice. Near the beginning of Miss Rees' film, we watch as Alike changes out of her club clothes in order to wear something that will appease her mother. And then, the film ends with Alike on a bus leaving Brooklyn for Berkley, California in order to begin a writing intensive. One bus represent the choice to be trapped by ones circumstances, allowing fear to be the motivator for why we do what we do and thus the reason for why we become who we are. The other bus represents the freedom to choose our life, no matter how painful our environment or hurtful our relationships are, nothing has the power to drive us away from anything or anyone. This is a choice, and Alike choosing not to run away from her mother, but to run towards her dreams.

This is a bold statement about identity. We live in a world where many people live in a way that meets the needs of another person's standard for how they should live and who they need to be. But, the only way to ever have wholeness and fulfillment of design is to allow the expression of what's good and true to come out from within, and if there is any trace of hatred there is a chance that it will infect you to do a thing to spite someone else. And, Alike does not do this. She loves her mother in spite of her hatred, and that is what makes this movie so powerful and meaningful.

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Pariah (Film) Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for Pariah (Film)

Pariah (Film) study guide contains a biography of Dee Rees, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Pariah (Film)
• Pariah (Film) Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Pariah (Film)

Pariah (Film) essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Pariah (Film) by Dee Rees.

• Interaction of Food with Power and Masculinity within "Pariah" and "Brokeback Mountain"
• Parallel Exile in Pariah

Wikipedia Entries for Pariah (Film)

• Introduction
• Reception and legacy

Movie Reviews

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Alike is 17 and never been kissed. A bright Brooklyn high school student, she dreams of being kissed by a girl. For years, she has accepted her lesbianism, it appears, but hasn't come out to her parents, her sister or really anyone except her gay friend Laura. Yet everybody sort of knows. She lives in a condition familiar to many families, where something has long been sensed but never acknowledged. Home life is a process of evasion. Words take on more than one shading.

Alike (pronounced a-LIE-kah) is played by Adepero Oduye , in a performance so natural and touching that she does what every director hopes for, she brings the character into being without the need of explanatory dialogue or obligatory set-up scenes. She is an A student, being raised by Arthur ( Charles Parnell ), an affectionate policeman, and Audrey ( Kim Wayans ), a churchgoing mother. It's clear that both parents know their daughter is gay, but that's never acknowledged and is consigned to that category of family realities that are either (1) behavior the girl will outgrow and correct, or (2) is somehow the other parent's fault.

Situations like this are not uncommon in many families, and apply not only to homosexuality but to any area in which a teenager has entered a realm of her life that parents choose to remain blind to. Alike shares a room with her sister, Sharonda (Sahra Mellesse), who like many siblings, knows the story, thinks it's no big deal and goes along with the official family denial. Alike's best friend is the butch Laura ( Pernell Walker ). They go to a nearby lesbian club, which Alike visits with sweet shyness, making wardrobe adjustments between home and destination so she can pass in two roles.

Her mother knows the story on Laura and wants Alike to stop seeing her. She encourages a friendship with Bina ( Aasha Davis ), the daughter of one of her church friends. Ironic: Laura has never made a pass at Alike, but Bina wants to cuddle and kiss, and Alike at last acts on her sexual feelings. But Bina is the solution to no problems.

"Pariah" is probably too loaded a word to be the title of this film. Alike lives in a world where homosexuality is far from unknown, and her problems will grow smaller in a few years as she moves away from home. This story, so tellingly written and acted, is about the painful awkwardness of that process. What makes it worse is that there's repressed hostility between her parents, and Alike's sexuality becomes the occasion for tension with deeper sources.

The film is an impressive debut for writer-director Dee Rees . It's said to be somewhat autobiographical. It began as a 2007 short subject, was brought to maturity at a Sundance laboratory, and one of the film's producers is Spike Lee , whose presence in Brooklyn must have been an inspiration for Rees. On a low budget, she takes advantage of the vibrant photography of Bradford Young , who also shot the original short subject.

So what we're seeing here is the emergence of a promising writer-director, an actor and a cinematographer who are all exciting, and have cared to make a film that seeks helpful truths.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Pariah (2012)

Rated R for sexual content and language

Adepero Oduye as Alike

Pernell Walker as Laura

Aasha Davis as Bina

Charles Parnell as Arthur

Kim Wayans as Audrey

Written and directed by

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A Good Daughter, But A 'Pariah' Among Her Own

Ella Taylor

First Love? In Bina (Aasha Davis, left), Alike (Adepero Oduye) finds a focus for the feelings she'd been coming to terms with privately. Focus Features hide caption

• Director: Dee Rees
• Genre: Drama
• Running Time: 86 minutes

Rated R for sexual content, language

With: Adepero Oduye, Charles Parnell, Kim Wayans, Pernell Walker, Aasha Davis

(Recommended)

From its opening scenes, Pariah , a vital first feature worked up from a short film by director Dee Rees, draws you into a world largely untapped in American black cinema. The setting is a nightclub where AG's — "Aggressive Lesbians," members of a subculture marginalized within their own black community, let alone the rest of the world — can frolic with joy and humor, acting out a raucous, good-natured belligerence denied them in their everyday lives.

Yet the movie is anything but combative. Pariah is a tender, sporadically goofy, yet candid examination of emergent identity, a film whose lack of attitude sets it apart from much of the hard-bitten, thug-life storytelling that's dominated African-American cinema for decades. If anything, its source genre is the coming-of-age movie, and though the universe its freshly hatched lesbian inhabits is all black, Rees is blessedly unwilling to confine herself in any kind of ghetto, whether racial, sexual or aesthetic.

Beautifully played by Adepero Oduye, the movie's heroine, Alike ( Ah-lee-kay ), is a shy, open-faced teenager, a straight-A student and aspiring poet from a stable family. Though she has no doubt about her sexual orientation, Alike has yet to explore her identity, never mind come out to her folks. She feels closer to her father (Charles Parnell), a handsome police detective, than to her overprotective mother (Kim Wayans). Distracted by their own floundering marriage and by a barely articulated homophobia, both parents seem determined not to know what they undoubtedly do.

The only port in the quiet storm of Alike's life is her best friend, Laura (a very good Pernell Walker), who is out to the world and getting on with life as best she can, given that her own mother has frozen her out for good. Unsure that Laura's AG crowd is for her, Alike fumbles her way into a romantic encounter with vivacious, seemingly assured Bina (Aasha Davis), the daughter of her mother's colleague.

Like most earnest newcomers to love and sex, Alike may be expecting more than the night can deliver. I can't tell you whether her tryst with Bina is love or a hookup, but it's accomplished with such delicate eros that it seems like a benediction any parent might wish for their child.

Rees is an NYU film-school alumna and a protege of Spike Lee, who's one of the film's executive producers, and Pariah is as fresh in its theme and execution as Lee's 1986 first feature, She's Gotta Have It . Meanwhile, the striking palette, shot in Brooklyn in gorgeous deep reds and blues by the talented cinematographer Bradford Young, surely draws inspiration from Lee's 1989 Do the Right Thing .

Yet the movie's expressionist lyricism and wistful mood recall Charles Burnett's 1979 masterpiece, Killer of Sheep , while the hypnotically incantatory dialogue and sympathetic focus on a family saddled with unexpressed anger and sorrow carry echoes of Burnett's quiet 1990 domestic drama To Sleep With Anger .

A hit at last year's Sundance Film Festival, Pariah is the finest coming-of-age movie I've seen in years, the work of a fledgling artist who fully deserves the support she received from the Sundance Institute and other indie promoters of a new generation of black filmmakers.

Yet it's worrying that Rees' distributor, Focus Features, is trying to position the film as a long-shot Oscar winner. Rees needs time and space to grow her abundant talent slowly, and instant fame has rarely been good for a filmmaker as contemplative as she is. Announcing an important decision to her chastened father, Alike tells him quietly, "I'm not running — I'm choosing." Sounds like a plan. (Recommended)

The Feminist Spectator

Ruminations on how culture shapes our lives . . .

Rees’s semi-autobiographical film does a beautiful job of narrating the double-life of Alike (Adepero Oduye), a very smart high school senior who dresses as a conventional girl under her mother’s disciplining eye, but then changes in the bathroom as soon as she arrives at school into the t-shirt and sideways-worn ball cap of the butch lesbian she knows herself to be.

Pariah is a family study and a coming of age film that illustrates the shifting mores of a particular slice of mostly middle-class African American life. Alike’s sister and her high school peers, for instance, are indifferent to or intrigued by her gender performance, but those of her parents’ generation eye her with antipathy and suspicion.

Her mother, Audrey (beautifully played by Kim Wayans), frantically tries to enforce Alike’s waning heterosexuality, buying her a deep magenta sweater with ruffles down the front that couldn’t be further from her daughter’s self-presentation.

Much to its credit, Pariah is a coming of age story, rather than a coming out story. When Rees first introduces us to Alike, she’s already very clear about her identity, though she’s yet to have sex. Much of the film details her flirtations with other women, including her devastation at the hands of coldhearted Bina (Aasha Davis), a straight young woman who befriends and seduces her, only to dismiss Alike the morning after.

But Alike’s certainty about who she is—and that “God doesn’t make mistakes,” as Audrey claims and Alike agrees, but from diametrically opposed perspectives—drives her toward her own liberation.

Still, Rees details with compassion the enormous costs that remain for these young women. Laura, Alike’s butch mentor through the world of clubs and dating, has been kicked out of her family home and has left school. She lives with her understanding older sister, Candace (Shamika Cotton), both of them struggling to make financial ends meet while Laura studies for her GED.

When a dyke club opens across from a bodega that Arthur (Charles Parnell), Alike’s father, frequents, the male customers eye the women who stop by the store with hostility. One calls out a young woman, who listens to his disparaging remarks and then casually insults him right back, much to the amusement of Alike’s father and his friends.

Although the scene is tense, and pregnant with the possibility for gendered violence, the young dyke saunters out of the store with the upper hand. The tide of public opinion, Rees suggests, is turning.

Alike’s sister, Sharonda (Sahra Mellesse), teases her older sibling mercilessly. But when she crawls into Alike’s bed one night for comforting, as they both listen to their parents’ incessant nighttime quarreling, Sharonda whispers, “You know I don’t care, right?” She isn’t specific, but they both know that Sharonda is talking about Alike’s sexuality.

In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Sharonda bursts into Alike’s room when Alike and her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), are fitting Alike with a large white dildo and harness. But Sharonda is unfazed and promises not to tattle. This younger generation makes common cause along a set of new sexual mores—Sharonda is eager to have heterosexual sex—against parents who cling to an older notion of sexual and gendered morality.

When she finally passes the test, Laura returns to her family’s home, where her disapproving mother opens the front door warily—and only halfway—listening with stony hostility to her daughter recite her recent achievements and saying not a word in response.  When her mother closes the door in Laura’s face, you can feel Laura’s heartrending loss and humiliation at her mother’s rejection.

Pariah  upends expectations by refusing to succumb to genre stereotypes.  For instance, although the bar Laura and Alike frequent is in what Arthur (who’s a detective for the NYPD) calls a “bad neighborhood,” the bar is represented as a place of heightened sexuality, experimentation, and lustful openness, but never as a site of violence or invasion.  The women in the bar create their own space; since the film is set in the present, no police harassment spoils their fun.

Likewise, when Laura and her friends hang out on the piers smoking dope and drinking, Rees construes the public space as open and free, rather than one in which her characters might be victimized.  Laura observes another young woman talking to a john in a car about a potential trick; in a different movie, Laura would start turning tricks herself to help pay her expenses.

But in  Pariah , the characters’ grit and dignity insist on hope.  Alike and Laura are smart and capable.  Only their parents’ blindness to a sexual and gendered future in which their choices are acceptable hampers their way.

Because the film is semi-autobiographical, art and creative expression finally free Alike.  Her supportive high school creative writing teacher encourages her to “dig deeper” with her poetry.  After Bina breaks her heart, Alike knows something of love and loss.  Davis plays Bina with a nice balance of cruelty, warmth, and her own sexual confusions.  Her scenes with Oduye, as the two girls are forced together by their mothers and then gradually form their own bond, ring true and complicated.

In the film’s climax, Audrey physically attacks Alike when she admits she’s a lesbian, cutting her cheek with her ring and knocking her daughter to the floor.  But Bina’s cruelty and her mother’s violence only shore Alike’s resolve, and she finds her creative voice.  Her poems express both her emotional pain and her fierce determination and her talent launches her out of her family and into the future.

How lovely to see a film about a young lesbian that ends with a journey toward a life of promise.  It’s worth marking how differently this story can be told in 2012 from the way it was 10, 20, or certainly 30 years ago (think films like  Personal Best  in 1982, or  Lianna  in 1983, or even  Kissing Jessica Stein  in 2001).  And how lovely to see a film about a young lesbian of color instead of the typical young white women moving through this story.

Pariah ‘s advertising tag line offers the dictionary definition of the word:  1.  A person without status.  2.  A rejected member of society.  3.  An outcast.  Rees’s film narrates how Alike turns those understandings around one by one.

The actors are uniformly terrific in a cast that should have been honored with one of the many ensemble award acknowledgements going to films like  The Help .  Oduye is wonderful as Alike, conveying both her youthful inexperience and her self-knowledge and desire in ways that honor the complex character Rees creates.

Walker, as Laura, brings dignity and depth to a role that could have easily fallen into the sidekick stereotype.  She and Oduye create a friendship layered with loyalty, tinged with lust, and shot through with its own complicated desires, always balancing the power shifts that rock their relationship unpredictably.  Alike, after all, still has parents and a home; Laura has been exiled from a family she clearly still loves.

Pariah ’s   only less convincing characters are Alike’s parents, who too often seem like vehicles for her story rather than full-fledged people of their own.  Arthur, her father, is successful professionally but unhappy personally.  He’s clearly having an affair and barely tolerates his hovering wife.  Audrey is simply unhappy, and takes out her resentments by berating her husband and too tightly controlling her daughters.  As a mother, she’s a shrewish monster, whose desperate insistence on Alike’s heterosexuality displaces her own failed intimacies.

Naturally, Alike identifies with Arthur, who recognizes his oldest daughter’s sexuality but can only support her tacitly.  He’s too weak-willed to stand up to Audrey, fleeing instead to solace outside his family and letting his daughters bear the brunt of her wrath.  After Audrey attacks Alike, Arthur begs her to come home, but Alike stays with Laura, firmly refusing, until she graduates high school early and rides off to San Francisco to accept a scholarship at UC-Berkeley.

Her relationship with her parents makes Alike’s story conform a bit too closely to the stereotype of the father-identifying lesbian alienated from a malignant mother.  But Wayans and Parnell bring nuance to these conventional roles, representing as they do a way of thinking about sexuality and gender that,  Pariah  argues, is becoming quickly anachronistic.

When Meryl Streep won the Golden Globe award as best actress for her performance in  The Iron Lady , the gracious actor took the stage and acknowledged not only her fellow nominees, but also Adepero Oduye, who wasn’t nominated for a Globe or for an Oscar.

Streep’s gesture was generous and true.   Pariah  might still be in limited release, and might never achieve the box office of a bigger film, but as an artistic statement, it’s vivid and important.  The film was nominated for the 2011 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance (where Bradford Young won for Pariah ‘s cinematography) and for various other awards, but escaped notice by the most visible, prestigious committees.

What a shame.   Pariah ’s is a story that needs to be seen, heard, and told and told again. Rees’s version is moving, beautiful, and deserving.

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Review: Pariah

By Ina Diane Archer in the November-December 2011 Issue

Adapted by Dee Rees from her award-winning 2007 short, Pariah is one of a handful of contemporary coming-of-age features that depict the transformative experiences of adolescent African-American women. It may be the only recent film that also portrays the coming-out process of a young person of color.

As the title suggests, Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year-old lesbian, could be perceived as the ultimate racial and sexual Other. She is introduced in the dynamic first scenes of the film hanging out with her friend Laura (Pernell Walker), a flashy and charming playa, trying to navigate the scene in a local women’s nightclub. Among butch women Alike is initially hard to distinguish from a young man with her dark, baggy clothes, do-rag, and baseball cap. But despite the gangsta pose, her face reveals both wonder and uncertainty in this setting. On the bus home, like a quick-change artist she adjusts her clothes and demeanor, transforming into a feminine teenager. This compelling opening suggests that Pariah will be exploring an exotic subcultural space, but in fact Alike’s story shares the most basic concerns of coming-of-age narratives: affirming burgeoning sexual (and cultural) identities, negotiating friendships, separating from one’s parents, and, overall, learning how to “be in the world” as Rees puts it in the press kit.

An excellent student and promising poet, Alike lives with her small middle-class family in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Race is important (she has an African name) but without conflict since the world of the film is entirely African-American. Moreover, Alike isn’t conflicted about her sexuality although she hides it from her parents (Kim Wayans and Charles Parnell), as any teen might. Her real struggle is how to express her desires and to attract a girlfriend. Forced by her mother to associate with and eventually befriend Bina (Aasha Davis), a co-worker’s daughter, Alike develops a serious crush.

Alike, like her peers, channels her identity through distinctive fashions and musical savvy. Chameleonlike, she adopts different garb throughout the film, seeking the style and sounds that will represent her with the same authenticity as her poetry. With Laura, who prefers hip-hop, she’s a boyish “OG,” later she mirrors Bina’s multicultural, ethnic Afro-punk accessories, and otherwise resists being straitjacketed by her mother’s wishful, infantilizing pastel-sweater suggestions.

Color is important in the film’s overall design and in Bradford Young’s cinematography. Although the setting is distinct, the action seems to exist outside of a particular physical locale. The characters are often photographed in tight close-ups, large and in sharp focus while background lights melt and form patterns of bright colored dots. This effect recedes as Alike resolves to leave home (as opposed to running away) after which she is shown within a legible local context, first on the streets and, as her perspective matures, on the rooftops overlooking her neighborhood. She also begins to outgrow the unfulfilling borrowed styles that accord with the expressive “conscious” soul music she favors, though maintaining her ties to that which is supportive in her family and friendships.

At 87 minutes, Pariah feels a little abbreviated, and one can sense the short that preceded the feature. Perhaps this is why the film’s frustrated parents feel under-motivated. The reasons for their troubled marriage and her mother’s hostility towards her daughter’s development are unclear, although there are hints that past infidelities may have resulted in Alike’s birth and her “difference” in the family. On the other hand, all the scenes between the young women, and especially with Laura, are affecting and natural.

The day after the screening I wondered if this was a period film since the retro boho, gangster, and punk fashions looked so much like the styles I remember from the early Nineties. But this cultural mélange is actually what makes Pariah contemporary. Still, the film’s sensibility is reminiscent of a short-lived spate of independent black coming-of-age movies of that period—Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the IRT (92), Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (97), and Pariah executive producer Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (94). Hopefully, Pariah will help to revitalize interest in projects that portray the worlds of Others whose experiences only appear to be marginal to mainstream taste.

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Film Review: “Pariah” and the Untold Stories in Black Cinema

Adam serwer.

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Adepero Oduye and Sahra Mellesse in writer/director Dee Rees' "Pariah" (2011). Photo courtesy of <a href="http://focusfeatures.com/pariah/photos">Focus Features</a>

It’s hard to portray adolescence in film without nostalgia or fantasy. Adults would rather remember their teenage years as better than they were, and teenagers are always trying to escape their own suffering. Dee Rees’  Pariah , a kind of emotional autobiography of a young Brooklyn teenager named Alike (Adepero Oduye) who is navigating her coming-out process, captures adolescence in all its awkwardness and tragedy like few films in recent memory.

Oduye is a master of conveying startling sincerity without earnestness, and her portrayal of Alike demonstrates how the utterly specific can be entirely universal. That’s essential, because Pariah is almost as much a film about growing up as it is about growing up as a lesbian in Brooklyn. Alike is almost as much of a pariah at home hiding her sexuality from her parents as she is at the strip club, surrounded by women in Starter jackets tossing crumpled bills at bare flesh. Early on, we watch Alike literally put her closet back on as she rides the bus home from the club, slipping off her jersey to reveal the pink shirt with the sparkly writing underneath. Alike is stuck being neither what other people want her to be nor who she wishes she was—which, in a broad sense, is exactly what adolescence is.

Rees knows about her subject’s struggle. Though Rees (who wrote Pariah while working as an intern on Spike Lee’s Inside Man ) is originally from Nashville, Tennessee, she told an audience at an early screening of Pariah at Washington DC’s E Street Cinema in November that her coming out took place at least partially while she was living in Brooklyn. “When I went to my first lesbian club I felt like I wasn’t hard enough to be a butch, but then I wasn’t soft enough to be femme,” she explained. “I felt like I was caught in the middle of somewhere so I felt kind of invisible, and that is Alike’s struggle as well.” She was always certain that coming out was about more than simply discovering she was attracted to women.

“It was clear that I loved women, that wasn’t my question,” Rees said. “My question was more how to be.”

“How to be” is Pariah ‘s central concern as well, and all else—even New York City, which too many directors use as a sort of visual MSG to add depth and flavor to bland stories—takes a back seat. If not for the tells—the accents, the trash cans on the sidewalk, the ambient sound of the elevated train—you wouldn’t actually know Pariah takes place in New York. You don’t see a skyline until the penultimate scene in the film. Instead, Rees’ camera maintains an unbroken intimacy with its subjects—especially Alike, who is caught in what Rees calls a “tug of war” between a best friend who “is trying to impose a way of being on her that is not really her” and “a mother who wants her to be a different way that is not her either.”

Alike knows she is a lesbian. She does not need to get used to it, and she does not need to admit anything to herself. It is the rest of the world—from her fearful and lonely religious mother to the liquor store clerk scowling at women in durags to the pretty girl who dismisses the idea of a relationship because she is not “GAY gay”—who have what we might call “issues.” Alike is not coming to terms with being a lesbian—the world is coming to terms with her being lesbian. Pariah is moving in no small part because of its timeliness—the opposition to the gay rights movement in America longs for a past when society might have shamed gay people into invisibility. They know that time will never come again, yet, like Alike’s mother, they cannot bring themselves to accept the simple, devastating truth that, as Alike quietly says, “there’s nothing wrong with me.”

The film has a gentle didacticism to it—its politics are obvious, and there are few mysteries about where the characters are going. The clueless and controlling parents, the doomed first romance, the confusing, porous walls of best friendship with those from whom we might want more—all of this is familiar. Nevertheless, Pariah doesn’t feel as typical or preachy as it should, because of Rees’ direction, Oduye’s performance, and a cultural context that rarely makes it into movie theaters.

Pariah ‘s unique milieu is most apparent in how Rees’ movie seems unconcerned with white people. Her cinematic eye rarely leaves the faces of its subjects, let alone the Brooklyn neighborhood where Pariah takes place. That focus is an implicit reminder that although black people’s relationship to white people remains a central drama in American film, it is not necessarily all that central to how most black people actually live their everyday lives. Perhaps the only explicit reference to whiteness in Pariah comes when the old “flesh colored band-aid” joke is repurposed to new meaning and hilarious effect.

It’s hard to remember the last good black coming-of-age film that was not a mere exploration of human misery. Pariah has almost nothing in common with the mainstream black films of the past two decades, most of which consist of romantic and ensemble comedies with bloated casts containing as many random celebrities as actors. It also doesn’t quite fit with prior critically acclaimed bildungsromans made by African-American directors, most of which have focused on the bleakness of ghetto life and the bloody yield of the illicit drug trade. Have any film characters suffered more than the black children of American cinema? When not being shot to pieces by gangbangers ( Boyz in the Hood ) or raped by their HIV-positive parents ( Precious ), they’re being given away to live with white families, which is apparently the only place they can find happiness ( The Blind Side ). It’s not that these sorts of films never ring true—it just seems they’re the only kind being made.

There is joy in being young and black, though evidence of this in American cinema is difficult to find. You can only watch The Wood or Love and Basketball so many times. But even in a story about an adolescent caught in the ebbing tide of American homophobia, Rees and Oduye manage to get that joy across.  Pariah leaves you aching, not only because of the story it tells, but because it whispers softly of all the stories that haven’t been told.

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Women and Homosexuality in “Pariah” by Dee Rees Essay

Introduction, women, homosexuals, and the society in the 1930s-1960s, racial undertones in pariah, a pariah in social, political, and historical contexts, conclusions.

Ever since its creation, cinematography served as a mirror of society. Through the representation of different opinions, norms, and traditions in cinema, it is possible to make an impression about the social and cultural tendencies of the time period as a whole. The representation of women and sexuality has been steadily shifting ever since the beginning of the 20th century and well into the 21st century. Bit by bit, women claimed their liberty for social and sexual representation in films. The views on women in cinema are evolving along with the society. Acceptance of women as individuals and as independent characters comes hand in hand with acceptance and normalization of different sexual identities. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the image of women and homosexuality in modern cinema by analyzing the film titled “Pariah” (2011) by Dee Rees and compare it with the standard staples of the Production Code films, aired in the 1930s-1960s.

Before we talk about “Pariah,” it is necessary to talk about the Motion Picture Production Code. It was developed by Will H. Hays in the 1930s, and its purpose was to protect the society from “disruptive influences” and susceptibility to low moral standards (Halberstram, 2017). In other words, the Production Code was a censorship tool. Among the most frequent offenders of the Code were scenes of murder, open sexuality, homosexuality, and rebellions against racial and gender norms. The majority of the movies featuring gay characters or women trying to lodge their way into independence or push away from traditional gender roles were usually set up for a tragedy or failure (Smelik, 2016).

This trend reflected the views of the society towards women and homosexuals in the 1930s – 1960s – homosexuality was considered a hard taboo, whereas women who did not wish to comply with their roles were perceived as morally weak and unworthy (Rudy, 2016). One of the examples of vilification of homosexuality can be found in the 1941 film titled “The Maltese Falcon,” which depicted one of the characters, Cairo, as morally bankrupt, in order to avoid persecution by the followers of the Hay’s code. The Code was officially abandoned in 1968, which heralded the gradual return of women and themes of female sexuality into the American cinematography.

“Pariah” is a unique film. The majority of the motion pictures involving the descriptions of black communities typically revolve around crime, gangsters, and the so-called truths of “thug life” (Cooper, 2016). Alike is a break from the norm in that it refuses to reinforce the negative stereotypes regarding her race. She is a girl from a middle-class family, with her father and mother being respectful members of society. Alike is good at school and is an aspiring poet. Her choice of friends and companionship revolves around her interests and preferences, and she is not a part of any gang. This perspective helps the audience perceive her as a real person rather than a combination of staples and stereotypes typical to modern cinematography.

“Pariah” is centered on the coming-of-age. This particular genre focuses on teenagers, their growing pains, and facing the challenges of maturity for the first time. While the subject of teen love has been explored in various pictures before, the number of films dedicated to coming-out and openly declaring homosexuality is slim. Another particular trait of this movie is that the main hero – Alike, is portrayed by a black actress, which further tests the viewers in their acceptance of race, gender, and sexuality.

Despite having been filmed relatively recently, “Pariah” can be considered an old movie. American society had changed for the better since 2011. In 2015, the White House was colored rainbow to celebrate the acceptance of the same-sex marriage ruling. In 2017, male dominance over cinematography has been finally shattered with a cascade of scandals, rape allegations, and the #MeToo movement (Smelik, 2016). In 2011, the society was different. While not nearly as radical and restrictive in its views as it was in the 1960s, the issues of acceptance, one’s own sexual identity, and familial ties are present here.

Alike, the main hero of the film is a black teenage lesbian girl who seeks to find someone who would love her for who she is. Her parents are oblivious to their daughter’s obvious sexual identity and remain as antagonists towards her choices for the remainder of the movie. “Pariah” dismantles the images of a well-off family as well as highlights the hypocrisy of moralistic churchgoers by including Bina as the “traitor” among their mist – a perfect little church girl who turns out to be a closet lesbian.

“Pariah” puts an emphasis on three major themes throughout the movie. The first theme is the theme of conflict between members of the old and the young generation. Although this theme is present throughout the film, it is magnified in the coming-out scene, where Alike tries to tell their parents about herself being a lesbian, which leads to a confrontation (Rees, 2016, 00:43:30). Although the father is not as critical and vocal in his opinions when compared to the mother, they are more or less in agreement regarding their daughter. This attitude illustrates the transcending homophobia that is present in the American society – the generation taught by films of the 1930s -1960s is critical and unaccepting of Alike’s homosexuality, while she, having been raised in the atmosphere of gradually-increasing freedom of the 2000s, does not share her parents’ views (McLearen, 2016).

The second major theme of the film is the realistic portrayal of homosexual relationships and sexuality in general. Many modern movies fall into the trap of rewriting Romeo and Juliette, only with a gay pairing involved. “Pariah” features no such thing – Alike’s first sexual experience with another woman leaves her heartbroken (Rees, 2016, 00:40:00). What seems to be a sensual and heartfelt scene with Bina turns out to be only a one-night fling. It also demonstrates the strength of the character, as instead of being ruined for life, she recovers from the ordeal and stays faithful to who she is. Alike treats it as a lesson of life and later reconciles with Laura, who had been by her side all along.

The third, and, perhaps, the most powerful message of the movie is illustrated in the last scene, where Alike reconciles with her father and attempts to reconcile with her mother as well, before leaving home in order to pursue her own life (Rees, 2016, 01:02:00). This scene is especially poignant, as it represents Alike’s choice to go not as a retreat or an attempt to run from her problems. The girl states that it is not an attempt to run – it is her choice, which speaks volumes about the maturity of her character. In so doing, Alike formally declares herself as an independent adult, who, while still wanting and longing for acceptance on her family’s part, does not depend on it for survival or even functioning. She puts her own happiness and identity before the ideals of her family. The father accepts it while the mother does not, meaning that the rift between generations could never be fully mended. Alike leaves home on a journey to the west, which is also described by her poem, to signify the power of her decision further.

“Pariah” is, perhaps, one of the few modern movies to realistically portray the coming-of-age as well as the gripes with the sexuality of a typical teenage girl without overly simplifying the issue, idealizing one side or the other, or painting the story in black-and-white rather than in shades of gray. It avoids the stereotypes not only about the black community but also about the subject of female homosexuality in cinema in general. It portrays a realistic story about a young girl with her own worries, desires, and vulnerabilities, overcoming the obstacles of her own naiveté, prejudices of her family, and issues of personal independence. The main point of this movie is that we choose who we want to be. Individuality is not to be sacrificed to accommodate anyone. Although it can be inconvenient and sometimes even hurtful, staying true to oneself is a better option than lying and trying to please everyone. As Alike said in her final words to her father, she is not running but choosing.

Cooper, B. C. (2016). But some of us are brave: Black women’s studies (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Feminist Press.

Halberstram, J. (2017). Trigger-happy: From content warning to censorship. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42 (2), 536-542.

McLearen, C. (2016). Homophobia in film. Web.

Rees, D. (2016, December 16). Pariah – full movie. [Video file]. Web.

Rudy, R. (2016). The depiction of homosexuality in American movies. Humaniora, 28 (1), 59-68.

Smelik, A. (2016). Feminist film theory. New York, NY: Wiley.

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IvyPanda. (2020, September 4). Women and Homosexuality in "Pariah" by Dee Rees. https://ivypanda.com/essays/women-and-homosexuality-in-pariah-by-dee-rees/

"Women and Homosexuality in "Pariah" by Dee Rees." IvyPanda , 4 Sept. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/women-and-homosexuality-in-pariah-by-dee-rees/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Women and Homosexuality in "Pariah" by Dee Rees'. 4 September.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Women and Homosexuality in "Pariah" by Dee Rees." September 4, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/women-and-homosexuality-in-pariah-by-dee-rees/.

1. IvyPanda . "Women and Homosexuality in "Pariah" by Dee Rees." September 4, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/women-and-homosexuality-in-pariah-by-dee-rees/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Women and Homosexuality in "Pariah" by Dee Rees." September 4, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/women-and-homosexuality-in-pariah-by-dee-rees/.