America, the facade: On American Honey

Andrea Arnold’s 2016 road epic chronicles a summer with a mag crew, all while immortalizing a foreshadowed document of a disenfranchised America to come.

The following is the introduction to a triptych covering the film’s central themes.

I wish I could say that I love America for the very reason that I could perpetually criticize it, but those are James Baldwin’s words and not mine. That’s for the very reason that I can’t do the former without the latter overtaking it.

The truth is, I don’t know if I’ll ever come to love America (and I don’t) the way that some people persist to in spite of its greatest flaw, which is fearing the unknown about itself, or at least acting as if its fearlessness of the unknown is the viable solution to restoring a nation from their most irreparable state.

Nonetheless, a matter of optimistic nihilism is only one of so many themes that paint Andrea Arnold’s richly layered portrait of America itself; perhaps the most understated then, but in the wake of Trump’s recent acquittal, has transformed into a chamber of echoes rippling across the surface of the great fish tank that is American society, and America as the stagnant mecca of capitalist realism.

Amongst other things, American Honey is not only a complex portrait of American society, but the subservience of its dream, and only being slightly aware that its most disenfranchised are writing their requiems from door to door. It says more about America than many American films would even dare to say themselves — that includes a large majority of New Hollywood staples that only end up posing as post-Vietnam portraits in comparison.

And it’s crazy to think that these films are considered to be at the fore of mediated criticisms on America as a whole, as if Americans themselves can create a summation of itself without being unapologetically uncertain of its own conditional identity.

Any filmmaker can perpetually alleviate one’s love for America, and there would be no wrong answers. But it takes an eye as visceral as Andrea Arnold’s to perpetually criticize it; a form of reasoning that belongs to James Baldwin, but most importantly, one that resonates with the rawness that makes American Honey an important document of America.

And unlike many American films, it does not offer immediate answers.