It’s only been a month, but I’m already calling Radha Blank’s The 40-Year-Old Version (2020) my favorite film of 2021.
In this movie, high school teacher Radha grapples with the renown she received as a playwright in her youth versus the professional stagnation she has experienced in the past ten years. As she nears forty, she starts to embrace a new creative endeavor: rapping.
Blank excels in this role: she’s witty, vulnerable, self-effacing, and, at times, powerfully assertive. In the beginning, her character is all too willing to call out the racist expectations of the theater industry, a choice that embarrasses and frustrates her close friend and manager Archie (Peter Kim). When Radha first pitches her play Harlem Ave to J. Whitman (Reed Birney), a wealthy white producer, he responds by pushing her to “dig deeper” into the suffering of Black people. She steps back. She does not want to capitulate to his racist desire for poverty porn. There’s a fight off-screen.
Here, the story proffers a critical question: What does it mean to make art when the gatekeepers are the white elite barring you from entry unless you subscribe to their rubric?
Of course, “selling out” proves to be far more complex in reality.
Radha is struggling to make ends meet. She wants to fulfill her artistic passions, but can’t find a foothold anywhere. So when she turns to rapping, it is a moment where her world brightens again. Finally, she is creating—but solely for herself, not for others. Her lyrics are funny, painful, raw. Radha is no longer the object of another person’s gaze, nor is she silently looking at someone else. She is looking at, and admiring, herself. This potent symbol of emotional self-reinforcement establishes a narrative where she is able to validate the existence of her unique personhood.
But then, the bills come. Archie cannot find anyone to produce her play. With these very real external pressures, Radha swallows her pain. She meets with J. Whitman. And she changes Harlem Ave to fulfill the capricious needs of the white theater society.
While watching The Forty-Year-Old Version, I was often reminded of Percival Everett’s Erasure. In this novel, the protagonist, Monk Ellison, frequently submits his academic research for publication, only to have it consistently rejected. Eventually, his agent articulates a truth that Monk has known for years: his work fails to properly represent “Blackness.” This affirmation proves particularly infuriating for Monk because his work has never focused on racial issues, but on classical Greek history. Only when Monk writes My Pafology, a story about an unlawful, violent Black teenager, does the literary sphere enthusiastically catapult his book into superstardom. Erasure describes Monk’s struggles with a publishing industry that defines the “authentic” Black experience as a world of poverty, drugs, and criminal behavior. The popularity of works like My Pafology, novels rife with demeaning racial stereotypes, illustrates the broader cultural acceptance—and perpetuation—of Black oppression as the social norm.
Like Radha, Monk faces relentless literary “othering” because of his skin color, which undermines his dreams of academic validation. Although he persistently toils to fulfill his ambitions, professional discrimination hinders him from reaching a status of prestige or power.
According to anthropologists Marcyliena Morgan and Dionne Bennett, “Stereotypes…tell us how a culture controls [a group of people], how it bullies them into submitting to or evading the representations that haunt them.”
At first, Radha attempts to “evade the representation” by writing a play centered explicitly on a Black experience that she knows, one that is complicated but also full of warmth and love. Yet her work contradicts the racist expectations of the white bigwigs in control, who anticipate a gritty, two-dimensional account of “Black life.” Forced to contend with a complete disregard toward her literary voice, she tiredly succumbs to their offensive beliefs by altering Harlem Ave. She “submits to the representation.”
In Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, Melissa Harris-Perry describes a cognitive research trial that led test subjects into a crooked room and seated them in crooked chairs. When instructed to align themselves vertically, a large majority aligned themselves crookedly to match their surroundings. Harris-Perry compares this experiment to the “crooked” reality of racial bias: “Bombarded with warped images of their humanity, some…[must] tilt and bend themselves to fit the distortion.” After encountering a constant refrain that repeatedly emphasizes that she is never “enough,” Radha at first bends to the limits of the crooked room.
When the white public swiftly and fervently herald the play as an “honest” representation of the Black community, Radha’s expression grows pained, uncomfortable. After years of refusing to fit within a simplistic, narrow-minded definition of “Blackness,” after years of failure, her suspicions are fully validated with the play’s triumph: cultural norms tolerate—no, push for—reducing the “Black” narrative to one that includes hackneyed stereotypes, displaced accents, and a white savior who can swoop in and offer a “new” perspective on gentrification.
Again, the film reveals the contradictions in Radha’s life: her integrity is professionally and financially worthless—and she only acquires success when she conforms to disreputable social norms. Either way, Radha loses.
Yet, Radha is able to take control of her narrative again whenever she raps. At one point, she makes her way to Brooklyn to meet with D (Oswin Benjamin), a young and talented music producer, in his homemade studio. He nods at her, taciturn, while she rambles about her ambitions. Radha looks at him, a little annoyed by his wordless demeanor. But then he starts playing a few beats. She puts on the headphones. And Radha unleashes a rap that is searing, authentic, and, as always, funny. It is a musical monologue that makes D sit back in his seat. She’s the “40-year-old version” of herself and she’s not afraid anymore. She is just herself.
This is not a film that is interested in charting Radha’s struggles to make it in the rap world, nor is it solely focused on the professional realities of being a playwright. Rather, it weaves in these plotlines together carefully, introducing a story that instead ponders what it means to make art, real art, when the world keeps making it so damn hard. Radha is a Black woman and both the racism and misogyny she must confront are cultural tools that seek to fence her out of her dreams.
Yet, Radha refuses to simplify her own existence, or chip away at her complex identity.
After the premiere of Harlem Ave, Radha stands onstage in a stunning suit and skirt combo, confident about her abilities for the first time in a long time. She sighs. She tells the audience the truth—this play is hot garbage.
And then she waltzes offstage to meet with D, who ends up being one of her biggest supporters. They walk down a sidewalk at night, eating Funyuns, the lights of New York flashing in the sky, and they talk. They laugh. In the distance, this black-and-white film slowly dissolves into color.
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