On Black Friday, I went with my family to see Queen & Slim.  As we exited the theater after the credits rolled, our heads hung low, my mom asked my younger brother what he thought of the ending.  “I am not pleased,” he said.  Without him specifying, I understood that my brother was upset because Daniel Kaluuya’s character, the male protagonist Slim (Ernest Hines), died at the end of the movie.  My brother was not the only one upset by Queen & Slim’s ending.  In the last few minutes before the credits rolled, during the montage in which numerous Black supporting characters and extras mourn the deaths of the titular duo, I saw a Black couple stand up and walk out of the theater.

The 2010s have given us Black blockbusters in multiple genres—horror (Get Out), comedy (Little), drama (Moonlight), and romance (The Photograph, set for release on Valentine’s Day 2020) just to name a handful.  In all of these features the main characters live until the end credits and, gasp, are the focus of the story.  We’re experiencing a renaissance of amazing and affirming Black film and television, which is why watching an incredibly dark film like Queen & Slim feels so jarring.  I understand that watching this movie can be a painful experience. 

I recently read an article written by a queer Black woman who had watched the film with her partner.  In the article, she described the film as unnecessarily sad and traumatizing.  So traumatizing that she and her partner had to go out for drinks afterward to feel better.  There is a part of me that feels “not pleased” by the painful ending of this tragic romance film that thematically explores police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement.  I think it is in our nature to reject stories that make us upset, or make us cry when we leave the theater.

I think we have all heard someone describe all the simple strategies Jack and Rose could have employed in the ending of Titanic so that Jack would not have frozen to death.  Always the speaker’s goal is to mock the film’s apparent incompetence for letting a likable, handsome protagonist pass away before the credits roll.  I do not know if this is a human thing or an American thing, but we tend to react to fictional and real life tragedies by deciding that the victims could have made it out alive if they had only tried hard enough or been clever enough to execute an easy escape.

For the record, as upsetting as Queen & Slim is to watch from beginning to end, I highly recommend it.  And I believe that rejecting this film wholesale just because it has disturbing subject matter and a sad ending is at best, a little short-sighted.  At the same time, I acknowledge that the social issues addressed and frightening scenes in Queen & Slim could hit way too close to home for some viewers.  Any Black person who has personally experienced police violence, or lost a loved one to police violence, or is just sick to death of seeing videos of Black people assaulted by police officers on their Instagram feeds, could be re-traumatized by Queen & Slim.  I understand if people with such experiences may want to avoid this film, or step out of the theater during an intense scene—maybe to never return.

Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Queen & Slim even though it terrified me and broke my heart.  I think it is an incredibly well constructed story with every scene helping to develop the characters and their relationship with each other.  I love all the background scenes shot at night, and how the deep blues and purples in the night sky shone on the faces of the two dark-skinned leads.  Further, I think Queen & Slim foreshadowed its tragic ending well, even though I also found myself hoping for them to fly away and live happily ever after in Cuba.

Queen & Slim seems to take some inspiration from the classic film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967).  A secondary character once literally calls Queen and Slim, “The Black Bonnie and Clyde” early on.  Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is a fictionalization of the real life bank-robbing duo active during the Great Depression.  The movie version sees the young lovers robbing the rich and showing mercy to the poor in a symbolic rebellion against systemic class inequality, until the ending when they are ambushed and killed by police in a bloody hail of bullets.

Another film with similarities to Bonnie and Clyde and themes of social commentary is Thelma and Louise (1991).  In this movie the titular women go on a road trip together that takes a dark turn when Thelma is sexually assaulted by a man she meets at a bar.  Louise rescues Thelma by threatening the man with her gun, and then fatally shoots him when he insults the two women.  The rest of the film follows the women on a cross-country run from the law as they attempt to escape to Mexico.  In the end they are cornered by dozens of police at the Grand Canyon and commit suicide together by driving their car off a cliff.

Queen & Slim is similarly about two people framed as the underdogs in a corrupt American society with a warped justice system that our heroes understandably distrust.  However, I liked that this film was not just a “Black version” of those other films.  Queen & Slim is more modern and culturally relevant to Black audiences.  For one thing, in BC and TL, overpowering police officers and robbing corner stores is portrayed as liberating, even comical.  The white characters take enormous pleasure in their law breaking and the narrative influences us to feel their criminality is justified.  By contrast, Queen and Slim’s first crime is something they are forced into.  Mid-way through the film an older Black mechanic scolds Queen and Slim for what he views as their poor decision-making.  He says that if he had been similarly pulled over by a police officer, he would have “taken the ticket and gone on home.”  But in the routine traffic stop scene, the white police officer never gives Slim a ticket.  Not only does the officer fail to back up his assumption that Slim is drunk driving by neglecting to perform a sobriety test, he violates Slim’s fourth amendment rights by searching his vehicle without a warrant.  When Slim merely asks the officer to work faster—because it is cold outside and Slim is in the middle of driving his date home—the officer pulls his gun on Slim and begins screaming obscenities at him.  When Queen tells the officer she will record him on her phone, he shoots her, and then assaults Slim.  Slim reasonably fears for his and Queen’s life, and shoots the officer out of a sense of self-preservation.  As the film continues, Queen and Slim engage in a few minor, unglamorous crimes out of desperation.  They steal a car, and pump gas without paying because as America’s most wanted, they cannot exactly use their credit cards.  And yet, they become increasingly admired by some in the Black community as anarchist heroes.  A young Black boy tells Queen and Slim that if they do not survive their journey to Cuba then they will be martyred and remembered forever; he later takes a Polaroid photo of them.

This made me think of how African Americans found guilty of low-level offenses can end up committing more crimes like petty theft and drug dealing just to earn money for basic necessities like rent and groceries.  Having a record in addition to being a target of racial discrimination makes it almost impossible to get a job and earn enough money legally to survive.  I think the realism is intentional.  Queen and Slim start out as normal people out on a bad Tinder date, but once they are labeled as criminals their options suddenly become much more limited.  The realism of Queen & Slim is why the tragedy of the ending did not necessarily surprise me.

I think that everyone in the theater with me believed that Queen and Slim would escape on that airplane and that most, if not all of them, were shocked when they were instead ambushed by dozens of heavily armed police officers.  Like Bonnie and Clyde, and Thelma and Louise, Queen and Slim are cornered by way more officers than seems necessary to the audience and the cops’ subsequent fatal gunfire that kills the two lovers also feels horrendously excessive.

As heartbreaking and potentially re-traumatizing as it was, I think the writers and cinematographers do such a good job structuring the story to lead up to that ending that I can’t be mad at Queen & Slim for making me cry.  As soon as a supporting character referred to Queen and Slim as “the Black Bonnie and Clyde,” the think the characters’ fates were sealed.  Part of me knew they would die like Bonnie and Clyde.  I think that if the scriptwriters had let Queen and Slim board the plane and live the rest of their lives in Cuba, it would have cheapened the film.  The story had police violence at its focus, and most police violence survivors cannot escape to Cuba to live in peace.

Another way Queen & Slim departs from Bonnie and Clyde (and Thelma and Louise) is that instead of fading to black right after the protagonists’ demise, the film shows us the aftermath.  Newscasters give a surface-level description of what happened, predictably and groundlessly describing the titular characters as “armed and dangerous.”  We see the crestfallen faces of the family members and strangers who did everything they could to help the duo escape to Cuba, who rooted for them to make it, who wanted them to survive.  We see a coroner place his hands over the heads of Queen and Slim’s corpses, as though saying a prayer for them.  We see scores of Black people come together for a funeral grand in scale.  The black and white Polaroid photo the mechanic’s son previously took of Queen and Slim is made into a graphic.  It is plastered on the side of a building, and printed on the t-shirt of a little Black boy.  Queen and Slim are martyred.  Their real names, Ernest Hines and Angela Johnson, are finally briefly revealed on a cardboard sign held by a little Black girl.  The final scenes in the film are of the Black community preserving the image of Queen and Slim that they identify with and root for, instead of the criminal image put forth by the police and news media.  Everything in this montage has happened in the past following Black life lost to police brutality.  If nothing changes, everything in the montage will happen again and again.

We do need uplifting Black movies.  We need knee-slapping Black comedies, and horror movies where characters who look like us live to see the end credits.  But if there is one thing Queen & Slim highlighted, it’s that Black people are capable of resilience in the face of pain and loss.  I think many of us can handle watching Queen & Slim, and I think many others who are unsure can lean on the rest of us to support them through this amazing, heartbreaking movie.