Master (Mariama Diallo, 2022) (Patreon)

[NOTE: This review contains spoilers.]

In his review for the 2014 comedy Let's Be Cops, Wesley Morris observed, "all movies choose their moment. It's called a release date. Some moments, however, choose their movies." He was of referring to the "coincidence" that a dumb buddy movie about two guys pretending to be police officers to exercise above-the-law privileges came out less than one week after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. Mariama Diallo's debut feature Master first arrived at the beginning of this year, premiering at Sundance. But it opens in cinemas and on Amazon Prime at pretty much the exact same time that its basic premise is playing out in real life.

Watching a collection of smug, grandstanding senators "question" Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is difficult, for a lot of reasons. It demonstrates that the entire American political process is nothing more than partisan theater, as Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham, and others try to cajole the judge into producing a left-leaning viral soundbite. It of course demonstrates that these clownish white millionaires have no compunction about talking down to an accomplished jurist simply due to her race and sex. But above all, it demonstrates the unique double-bind that Black women face within American racism, a situation that has come to be known as "misogynoir." No matter how blatantly offensive the senators' questions get, Judge Jackson is required to remain polite and dignified. And simply because she has expected to be treated fairly, and hasn't been deferential to the Senate in her responses, a professional toad like Charlie Kirk can send up a dogwhistling flare, claiming that the judge has "an attitude."

Master takes place in the elite halls of academia. The fictional Ancaster University is a kind of amalgam of northern upper-crust whiteness. Filmed on the Vassar campus, its name suggests the Lancaster, PA of Franklin & Marshall, while Diallo herself has stated that the various racist micro- and macro-aggressions depicted in the film reflect her time at Yale. Much like the remote suburb in Get Out, Ancaster is a generalized nether-zone of unreflexive privilege, a place where whiteness is the default, regardless of a few professors of color insisting otherwise. Diallo considers this toxic environment from two distinct positions. Prof. Gail Bishop (Regina Hall) has just become the first Black woman to serve as "master," an antiquated academic post that signifies a guardianship over both students and university tradition. Meanwhile, Jasmine (Zoe Renee) is a first-generation Black freshman who is starting her first term at Ancaster.

Like a lot of debut films, Master suffers a bit from a glut of ideas, not all of which are fully articulated. As I've noted in the past, this seems to be a common response to a first-timer's anxiety that he or she may never get to make another film. (Think of all the promising young auteurs who ended up directing TV episodes.) But one imagines that for a woman of color, this pressure is even greater. So Diallo can certainly be forgiven for Master's occasionally scattershot approach. But at the same time, this muddled sense of purpose reflects on the film's very themes. There may be no reason for Master to tarry with the supernatural (aside from the fact that genre films are more easily funded). But as Dr. Bishop explains to Jasmine near the end of the film, "it's not supernatural. It's America. It's everywhere."

In other words, the alleged haunting of Ancaster, the apocryphal connection between the woods around the campus, the mysterious hood Mennonites nearby, the witch trials, and Jasmine's dorm room, are all a red herring. This is a space that is "haunted" by racism. We see this in the way the white students treat Jasmine -- as an annoyance, an exotic conquest, or nearly subhuman. In a key moment of Master, we see the Black women who work in the dining hall, smiling and joshing with the white students in an ingratiating manner. When Jasmine walks up, they don't perceive her as a kindred spirit, but snub her, as if she is an "uppity" young woman trying to move above her station. Race and class are simply discrete moments in analysis, but in lived experience they are unavoidably implicated with each other. (By the time there's a burning cross on the lawn outside Jasmine's dorm, this shocking hate symbol seems almost extraneous.)

Similarly, as Bishop literally moves into the "master's house," she finds artifacts from various moments in history before her humanity was properly recognized -- a grinning "Mammy" cookie jar, a phrenology diagram likening Black skulls to those of chimps, and various dusty photos of white men holding court over their exclusive dominion. Still, having earned her place at Ancaster, Bishop is recruited by her colleagues to evaluate the tenure case of Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), the only other woman of color on the faculty. Gail Bishop, after all, is the committee's human sigil against charges of racism, should Beckman's case go poorly. She has been allowed inside, but only as a talisman of "diversity" and "inclusion," meaningless official badges that are there to prove that the racism she, Beckman, and Jasmine experience cannot possibly exist.

Master has a definite point of view on racism, in the academy and elsewhere. Diallo could reasonably be called an "Afro-pessimist," in the sense that the Black woman in the film are never allowed to fully exist as subjective agents, and they are in fact situated within a racist institution to function as living alibis. By the end, circumstances have even turned Bishop and Beckman against each other, as if only one BIPOC professor can be Ancaster's "final girl."

In trying to figure out who or what is haunting her, Jasmine discovers that her dorm room was once occupied by Ancaster's first Black female student in the 1960s, who committed suicide by hanging. Diallo seems to suggest that the earlier student may actually have been lynched, but when Jasmine suffers the same fate, it's quite clear that wasn't the case. No one needed to lynch these young women. The dehumanizing racism they faced on a daily basis was enough to psychologically destroy them, and this is perhaps Master's most critical insight. Black women have traditionally, stereotypically been praised for their great strength and forbearance, dutifully keeping the family together in the face of unspeakable oppression. As we are seeing once again in the Jackson hearings, America has decreed that it is Black women's job to smile politely and take it, like human punching bags, until the white power base decides to generously afford them the most basic subjectivity. Master rejects this narrative. It is about the murder of Black women, body and soul, something for which the rest of us can no longer avoid accountability.