Master

dir: Mariama Diallo

2022

Master is the kind of horror flick that’s not really a horror flick. It feels like someone had what they felt was a trenchant or powerful story to tell, and then someone with money / power said to them “what if you made it into a horror flick / maybe turn it into a trilogy?”

That’s not entirely fair. The horror is there in the story, because something horrible happens to someone, but if this was an episode of Scooby Doo, the captured and tied-up villain at the end, when their mask is pulled off, would be “white supremacy”.

And they would have gotten away with it… wait, they did get away with it, every time.

But there is no mask pulling off ceremony at the end. There’s just certain people realising there’s nothing they can do in the face of overwhelming, insurmountable evil.

The title comes from the fact that one of the main characters is appointed the “master” of a halls of residence at an old university called Ancaster. The university is as old as America, we are told, and everything implies that this place is built on the bones of slavery, despite being in a state that isn’t renowned for its racism, in some mythical place called New England. I was sure that it had to be somewhere like Pennsylvania, but other reviews refer to rural Massachusetts or even that it’s meant to be an equivalent to Yale in Connecticut, where the director herself studied.

Almost all of the faculty and the student body are white. Almost suspiciously, predominately white. So the “master” being appointed, being African-American (Regina Hall), is either ironic or part of the overall project of whitewashing / blackwashing(?) the university’s legacy and paying lip service to current notions of diversity and inclusiveness.

Jasmine (Zoe Renee), from her very first orientation day, is pretty much doomed. Within seconds of appearing on campus she’s pretty much told she’s staying in a cursed room and that she’s going to die because some witch was hung centuries ago and then the first African-American woman to go Ancaster hung herself in the 60s.

Clumsy, clumsy exposition. She is so young, and smart, but unprepared for uni life. Every option, every opportunity to slight Jasmine is taken up, and enjoyed, in an almost surreal fashion, by everyone around her. There are countless examples, but my “favourite” in terms of how surreal it is, is when she goes for a meal to the cafeteria. All the behind the scenes staff and serving staff are black. The hearty African-American woman serving students food is high energy, super friendly, and very expressive in her comments “How are you doing sweetie, aren’t you looking wonderful, have a great day / week / year, Jesus loves you” to student after student. To white student after white student.

The second it’s Jasmine’s turn, the server not only stops talking entirely, but she just death stares Jasmine the entire time. I don’t even think she serves her food!

That’s just poor customer service, that is. But it’s so pointed yet surreal, like the thousands of aggressions, micro or macro that Jasmine will endure during her time at Ancaster.

When she meets her roommate’s friends, one of the dumber (but hotter) ones starts just saying random prominent black people’s names, as if to somehow imply Jasmine somehow looks exactly the same as Beyonce, Venus and Serena Williams, and I think that he mentions that she looks like Denzel as well, because surely they all look the same. Jasmine kinda just goes “hee hee not really”, not being a confrontational sort. She meets all of these slights with either confusion or perplexity, or good grace, which is more than any of them deserve.

In her interactions with her professors, the odd one for whom she is meant to write critical analyses of The Scarlet Letter as an example, she finds her ideas ignored or ridiculed, and those that pay lip service to black oppression / inclusiveness pieties (from the other obviously white students) applauded and championed, even by the one other apparently African-American member of staff (Amber Gray). When she writes an essay and ignores the “critical race theory” approach dictated by the lecturer, because she doesn’t think such a lens is applicable, considering how people of colour don’t play a part in the story of The Scarlet Letter, she is given an F and told “everything is about race.”

Hmm. It’s almost like the flick agrees that liberal professors at colleges are losing their woke minds or something.

Jasmine lodges a complaint, which means she starts having more contact with the college’s master, who you would think would be sympathetic to the difficulties that Jasmine has been experiencing. She, being Professor Bishop, isn’t seeing all the other shit that Jasmine is experiencing (because she’s not watching the flick we’re watching), but she is having strange experiences of her own. The bells in what would have been the servants quarters in the house she lives in as ‘master’ keep ringing for no reason up in the attic. There are boxes that seem to contain ‘research’ papers about phrenology and just how sub-human African-Americans are. At one point she finds an old mammy cookie jar which is so, so racist. And there keep being maggots everywhere.

Plus she’s either hallucinating or experiencing…something from the past.

Jasmine, as well, is hallucinating a lot, or at least seeing some supernatural stuff. She suffers from vivid, damaging nightmares, but also seems to be losing time, to use the vernacular, where she will be shown being attacked somehow or seeing something unnatural, but then wakes up in a completely different place or doing something she didn’t know she was doing.

She also starts being attacked with hateful, racist vandalism, nooses, burning crosses, the whole cornucopia of American post-racial society that seems decidedly stuck in the Jim Crow era.

As well as these visions of horror, Jasmine keeps investigating what happened to Loretta Weeks, the African-American student who killed herself in 1965. This is the film’s greatest implausibility – the school or library has Ms Weeks’ actual journals in storage, which seem to replicate both Jasmine’s experiences as a student in a very racist college, but also the brushes with the supernatural, that at least indicate that she fears a witch’s ghost is coming after her to kill her.

Jasmine fears the same thing is happening to her. We see the ghost-like figure lurking behind her sometimes, or seemingly coming after her, chasing her both in her nightmares and her waking life.

And who knows, maybe the ghost really is after her.

Ghosts have strange, implacable motivations in movies sometimes. Revenge, lust, rage, I’ve seen all that a bunch of times. I don’t remember a lot of racist ghosts, though, whose motivation it is to make an African-American character feel bad only because they’re African-American.

In this case the ghost would at least be doing what most of the other people at Ancaster are trying to do to Jasmine. It’s all so hateful. It’s not only the deliberate stuff, or the casual cruelty or indifference. The one time Jasmine seems like she’s having fun at a party, when a certain song comes on the students, male and female, all white, seem really, really jazzed about singing the n-word in such close proximity to the only African-American any of them can see in the room.

That’s the thing – it’s filmed in such a way that you get the sense that that’s how it feels to Jasmine, rather than that’s what’s actually happening. And here’s where the film either starts to show the levels that it’s operating on, which is at least four, or to put it less succinctly, it’s where the film tries to have its cake, eat it too, fuck it as well and then kick it into the wall and then still have the same exact amount of cake at the end.

Poor Jasmine, completely overwhelmed by moving to university, and being completely unprepared for college life, feels ostracised, excluded and targeted. And we know she is (we know the racist graffiti / noose / burning cross are real, because other people see them as well), so we wonder if depression, anxiety or something else has maybe contributed to a disassociation in her mind, meaning she’s imagining the supernatural stuff.

And after a terrible scare, let’s just say the “master”, Prof Bishop, comes to realise how little she knew what Jasmine was going through, even as she urged Jasmine to stay, to stick it out, to endure the suffering, and to return to the place that was killing her, just like she did when she was a student at Ancaster many years ago herself.

In a manner that Bishop thinks is helpful, but is actually draining and fills Jasmine with despair, she tells the young student that the thing she is terrified of (racism), is everywhere, not just at Ancaster, so even if she left the school, the ‘entity’ would still follow her. Without knowing it she’s telling Jasmine that she’ll never be safe anywhere.

But something was happening. Someone, either supernatural or not, was targeting Jasmine.

And then the Amish come into the picture… Maybe the Amish were trying to scare Jasmine.

Out of fucking nowhere, Amish people start playing a part in this already strange story, but it leads to an ending that I am pretty sure no-one on this green earth could ever have predicted, even as they wonder to themselves “that strange teacher who Jasmine lodged the complaint on, isn’t she a bit reminiscent of that lecturer with a fondness for braids in African-American studies who was revealed to not really have that deep connection to African-American people that she claimed she had, called Rachel something?”

I am not going to spoil anything further, and there’s not much more to be spoiled, but this is a strange flick combining and weaving a lot into what it’s trying to say, and I don’t know if it all works, but I can so clearly hear what the director is saying about racism in general and white supremacy in academia specifically that it’s impossible to dismiss so easily.

It’s enough for our hearts to break over how someone like Jasmine is made to suffer in this flick, but there’s got to be something more. She is a symbol, a stand-in, for every African-American, for every marginalised minority, who believed the lie that everyone who works hard and tries to do good will be rewarded eventually by this world or Divine Providence, but ends up crushed instead.

It’s a special film that can take banal seeming phrases like “she’s getting what’s coming to her” or “it’s everywhere” or “I’m not going anywhere”, and making them truly chilling.

Regina Hall is great, as she is great in most things, but she doesn’t overshadow Zoe Renee as Jasmine, who unfortunately has to suffer so much for our sins. Not only do I feel sorrow for her character’s suffering, but I feel fucking angry about it as well.

If Master is trying to make one point (and it isn’t), it’s that in the same way that just because Barack Obama became president didn’t wipe away centuries of inhumanity and slavery, an African-American woman being made “master” at a institutionally racist college doesn’t necessarily improve the lot of all the students. If anything, these achievements are used as justifications for all sorts of new cruelties, and somehow for a peculiar form of revenge.

Not revenge on those being cruel: revenge from those who feel the prominence of people of colour somehow takes something away from them, and they will not let it stand.

What a world we live in.

7 times Master leaves me too tired from all the racism to be able to come up with a pithy pun out of 10

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“It's not ghosts, it's not supernatural, it's America and it's everywhere.” – yeah, and it’s not just America, either - Master