It’s Time to Revisit “Pariah” Almost Ten Years Later

Dee Rees’s Pariah (2011) is unfortunately a hidden gem among White-centric coming-of-age stories. What is so common in self-discovery among queer women has finally been brought to life on the big screen — and in a big way.

Whether it’s the all-Black, predominantly-women cast that gets you or the fact that it’s written and directed by a Black lesbian screenwriter and filmmaker, Pariah is going to make you question why there are only a handful of popular dramas made by Black lesbians about Black lesbians.

It’s been almost a decade since Pariah was first released, but it’s time we take another look.

Just about every film starring a Black cast right now is normalizing a pretty damaging theme wherein the crisis of said films has something to do with the characters being Black.

It is never just good enough to be Black onscreen — you must somehow suffer from it too if your story is to be marketable to a sizable audience.

Pariah doesn’t play that game, though. Because every character is Black, the subject of race is of course, present, but no tragedy comes from it.

Adepero Odeye plays Alike, or “Lee”, a strong-willed seventeen-year-old experiencing growing pains in modern-day Brooklyn. She does well in school, has a pretty great social life, is ruthlessly stubborn, and knows what she wants.

With her boyish grin and curious, wandering eyes, we find Alike in a nightclub, surrounded by women. Queer, boisterous women, that among which Alike, despite how hard she’s trying to fit in, appears rather childlike in the crowd. She pouts alone in a seat while her best friend Laura, (Pernell Walker) gets friendly with a woman on the dance floor. On the bus ride home that night, she bursts from a chrysalis of baggy clothes and a cap. She transforms in front of our eyes when she can’t muster the same swagger around her mother that she had around Laura (Pernell Walker).

Alike’s mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans), greets her in her bedroom to reprimand her for breaking curfew and to compliment her figure in the nightshirt she’s wearing.

And so for the first time, we see Audrey’s reins around Alike, pulling her into the comfort of traditional values and away from her sexual liberty.

There are no bullies or broken homes in this story. Though there is some significant homophobia within the home, Alike is not without a support system and the drama of her awakening does not come from the damage others inflict onto her. Pariah is the story of how Alike learns to remove her mask and lean into her queerness for the first time.

Perhaps the most authentic aspect of Rees’ script is that she chose to write Alike to be self-assured in her sexuality. Surrounded by queer culture, Alike has dived feet-first into the knowledge that she likes girls well before Pariah takes place. Her inner turmoil? Not being ready to come out to her parents, and not feeling “hard” enough or “femme” enough to attract the ladies. She may wear snapbacks or scarves, depending on her current crush.

Dee Rees adapted Pariah from a short years earlier, and her muse for Alike’s perspective came from being a Black woman navigating her own sexuality. An interesting choice on her part was to imply that everyone already knew about Alike’s preferences, but no one ever addressed it.

Alike shares a lot of similarities with her father, Arthur, (Charles Parnell) a Brooklyn detective who feels the strains of a failing marriage and tries to maintain his masculinity among his peers. Maybe this is why he sees some light in Alike, whose mother is much more critical of Alike’s bold sense of style.

Rees is brilliant in the way she works in shades of grey — never molding any character’s personality in merely black or white.

This is particularly evident in her choice of lighting throughout the film. Oduye is often cast in rays of blue or red or purple, depending on the tensions of the scene. Her first queer relationship is washed in a deep magenta and the scenes between her and her best friend Laura are dipped in greens and cool blues.

Because Alike spends so much of her time trying to fit in, the color gradience that follows her story as she tries to lift the veil of other people’s expectations is a beautiful tool in her self acceptance. By Pariah’s end, Alike is surrounded by bright, natural light and she is no longer a shadow in her own story.

Rees is also careful to make sure that none of Alike’s relationships are ever fully black or white, either. Her father is understanding, but the pressures of his career and status make his parenting strategies faulty. Even faultier are Audrey’s methods when she tugs frilly pink blouses over Alike’s braids and tells her that “God doesn’t make mistakes”. Her first girlfriend is at first a dream come true for Alike, but it doesn’t take long to realize that there are a few complications within that narrative.

The violence that comes from the homophobia in Pariah never feels voyeuristic. In fact, the film plays out without much of any at all. There are a few scenes where Alike faces extreme discrimination for her sexuality, but those scenes are quick, to the point, and serve the plot.

“Pariah” isn’t the film to watch if you are used to seeing Black people abused on television for no narrative purpose.

There’s a market for films honing in on the experience of identity, regardless of race, and while the Pariah experience isn’t a wholly universal one, many aspects of it are.

There are no bullies or broken homes in this story. Alike is surrounded by women just like her. Her favorite women’s nightclub is the host to dozens of her peers, and she is never alone in her sexuality. Even though sometimes she feels like one, Alike is not the outcast of her story. She has a loving sister who occasionally taunts her about her sexuality, but will just as easily turn around and tell her she accepts her for who she is.

Lesbian relationships are so prominent in “Pariah” that it’s almost expected that every recurring character will be revealed as queer.

The reason Alike feels so alone in the world, though, is because she spends much of her time contorting into the shadow of whoever her family and friends wish that she was. It’s liberating to watch such a self-assured girl come to terms with herself in the ways that Alike does by the end of Pariah- it’s what makes the film so universally understood.

If a film almost wholly centered around coming into your own light and reclaiming your identity based on what it means to you is such a familiar, common struggle, why then are there only a few coming of age films like Pariah that aren’t written and cast by White people?

Dee Rees had to jump through her own hoops — that’s why. A film about a teenage Black girl in Brooklyn doesn’t get the moneymaker’s mouths watering quite like the same story from a White girl’s perspective. It’s admirable that Rees wasn’t willing to change her story for the sake of some grant money. Like Alike, I assume that Pariah was also a test of Rees’s strength as a director in deciding which hats to wear and which ones she wasn’t willing to take off for a bigger audience. I suppose it’s a great way to weed out the viewers that aren’t here to stay for the bigger picture.

The jump from 2011 to 2020 in terms of Black lesbian filmmakers making it big in the feature-film business hasn’t made nearly as big of a splash as it should have in ten years. There are women that are telling these stories who are not being heard and there are women who can’t afford to tell these stories when they know that what “sells” to the masses is a filtered version of the grittier stuff. Ask yourself, “What other films directed by Black lesbians have I seen that document the Black experience?”

I bet that if you can think of any from the last ten years, only The Watermelon Woman comes to mind.

Stories like Pariah are too universal to be so few and far between. There are young girls that have watched Pariah and thought, “That’s me. Finally.”

More stories like Rees’s are out there, we’re just not listening.

Know any others? Review them for diversity at Incluvie.com!