Black women don't get to be flawed on screen. Why not?
Teyana Taylor played a character who made bad choices. Some people lost their minds about it.
One Battle After Another won Best Picture last weekend. Six Oscars total. And somewhere in the middle of all that celebrating, a real conversation was happening that deserves more room than it got.
Teyana Taylor plays "Perfidia Beverly Hills" in the film. She is a revolutionary who is also deeply, genuinely flawed. She makes choices that hurt the cause she's fighting for. She's dealing with postpartum depression. She's complicated. She is, in other words, a human being.
And some people were not okay with that.
Scholar Daphne A. Brooks called the film "a Black feminist 911 emergency." Critics described Black women in the film as "highly racialized, sexualized," positioned within "conditions of violence." Some audience members felt like the characters were "caricatures working in the service of white narratives."
I take that criticism seriously. I do. It deserves to be heard.
And also... I want to push on something.
Teyana herself said: "Everyone deserves empathy, especially when it comes to complex characters." She said she loves when films create healthy dialogue. She said it felt powerful to see Perfidia "shake the table." She wasn't apologizing for the role. She was leaning into what it asked of her.
Here's the thing about flawed characters: they're the interesting ones. The ones we remember. The ones we talk about for decades. Walter White is a monster. Tony Soprano is a monster. They get to be messy and broken and we call it "complex storytelling." When a Black woman character is messy and broken, the conversation shifts to "disrespect."
Fully human means all of it. The brilliant and the broken. The revolutionary and the self-destructive. A demand for only positive portrayals... that's also a cage. A prettier cage, maybe. But a cage.
The real question isn't whether Perfidia was a "good" character in the moral sense. The real question is: was she real? Was she written with intention? Did she serve the story? The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, said the film wasn't designed to be heroic. He said they were always aware they weren't crafting a heroic narrative. That's not a disclaimer. That's a choice.
What I want filmmakers and actors reading this to think about is this: are you creating characters of color who are allowed to be fully human? Or are you creating characters who exist to represent, to inspire, to carry the weight of an entire community's expectations on-screen?
Perfidia shook the table. That's worth something.
I'm curious what you're thinking! Let's talk about it. Click here to leave your comments here.
Rooting for you,
Nicki
