Cool Pose and Black Geeks

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

HBO’s adaptation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel Lovecraft Country opens with black and white footage of trench warfare. Series protagonist Atticus ‘Tic’ Freeman (Jonathan Majors) leads the assault through the enemy. He bayonets enemy soldiers, strikes them with his rifle’s stock, and charges through the trench, displaying himself as a formidable warrior. Then his helmet comes off and the audience also sees how frightened he is. He climbs up out of the trench and emerges upon a chaotic battlefield. A voiceover narrates, “This is the story of a boy and his dream. But more than that, it is the story of an American boy in a dream that is truly American” (ep. 1, “Sundown”). The voiceover is derived from the film The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), which links Tic to Robinson, but, taken out of context, also adds new echoes of the complicated place of Black men in America. The use of the word “boy” paradoxically serves to both emasculate and undermine Tic (as Black men were often derogatorily referred to as “boys” in Jim Crow America) while establishing for the audience that Tic is Bradburyesque – a man and a boy at once: delighted and excited by rockets and aliens and fighting monsters, pursuits unsuitable for a warrior man, a boy in a man’s body in that he still has a sense of wonder despite a lifetime of encountering racism and a recent history of violent combat.

An explosion suddenly makes the world color. Tic still has his rifle with bayonet attached, but suddenly energy weapons are being discharged and a larger shot of the battlefield establishes alien spacecraft and monsters. We are no longer in the black and white world of war movies but in the technicolor world of science fiction. Tic sees tripods with heat rays (from H.G. Wells’ The  War of the Worlds), winged octopoid monsters (from the eponymous Lovecraft), and flying saucers stalking the sky above the combat. From one of these ships descends Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars from the novel of the same name by Edgar Rice Burroughs. She hugs Tic and whispers to him. They embrace, only to see a Cthulhu-looking monster approach. It rears up, but is cut in half and killed by Jackie Robinson’s bat. “I gotcha, kid,” Robinson tells Tic, tying the images now to the previous voiceover but also providing contrasting images of Tic’s subconscious, since we will learn that this is his dream (ep. 1, “Sundown”). Once again, Tic is infantilized – Robinson calls him “kid,” as if he were not a man. Paradoxically, however, the statement also implies Robinson’s support of and affiliation with Tic. They are teammates and partners in the fight against Cthulhu, Martian invaders, and the inherent White supremacy of genre literature. Lovecraft’s monster is defeated by Black athleticism and by “cool.” Tic is no longer frightened, as he was in the trench. He has cool pose, holding a beautiful woman in a state of undress, watching a battle unfold that as a soldier he was losing, but as a cool Black warrior, with Jackie Robinson on his side, he just might be winning. In short, the opening of the series demonstrates that iconic sci-fi and horror, with all their inherent racist structures and formulations, can be defeated by Black cool.

This opening also implies, however, that Tic comprehends the world through science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Like most geeks (this author included), meaning for Tic is framed by his worldview, shaped by a lifetime of reading sci-fi and horror. Tic is a soldier, he has cool pose from a lifetime of living under structural racism, which the series goes to great lengths to demonstrate. He is aware of the social realities. Indeed, this opening sequence ends by revealing it was just Tic’s dream as he rides the bus from Kentucky to Chicago, saying, “Good riddance to old Jim Crow,” as he gives the South the finger. The series will show, however, that Chicago is just as racist and requires just as much, if not more, cool pose to survive.

Ending the opening, the bus breaks down and, as he waits for the bus to be fixed, Tic reads A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first novel in Burroughs’ Barsoom series, published in 1912, and the source of the image of the princess descending from the spaceship in his dream. Tic literally eats, sleeps, and lives for science fiction. This makes him a geek. When the bus passengers are driven into town, however, Tic and the elderly Black woman he has befriended on the bus are not allowed to join them and must walk. He did not escape Jim Crow that easily, after all. This opening demonstrates the two halves of Tic’s character: cool Black man and geek.

Ruff stated that one of the inspirations for Lovecraft Country was Pam Noles’ 2006 essay “Shame” about “the unbearable whiteness of Sci-fi.” While the heart of Noles’ essay concerns the SciFi channel’s adaptation of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea, which cast white actors as characters that Le Guin clearly describes as being Brown and Black, the essay is shaped by Noles’ personal narrative of being a young Black reader of science fiction and fantasy and realizing that in the literature and cinema she loved there were no Black heroes or heroines. Le Guin, she observes, “showed me for the first time that my people can have the magic and be heroes, too.” Her essay argues that the challenge of being a Black geek is that you are rejected by the Black community (including sometimes family) for loving geeky things, and you are also  rejected by the geek community for being Black. It was this essay that inspired Ruff to take on genre through a collection of Black heroes in Lovecraft Country. In the HBO series, showrunner Misha Green further explored the dual identity of the Black geek in the character of Tic.

Noles’ contentions are further borne out by Benjamin Woo in Getting a Life: The Social  Worlds of Geek Culture (2018), in which he argues that geek culture is a performance of  the self that for all practical purposes is both the opposite of cool and bound up in whiteness (6-10). Woo locates the origin of the geek as socially inadequate and the opposite of cool in the African-American origins of “cool.” In Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (1992), Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson observe that Black men developed “cool masculinity – or as we prefer to call it, ‘cool pose’ – as a way of surviving in a restrictive society” (2). Woo summarizes, “Performances of cool masculinity are a way for African-American men to cope with frustrated ambitions, humiliations, and real physical dangers produced by personal and structural racism” (7). In other words, Black men are the very definition of cool. As a response to systemic racism, the cool pose seeps into pop culture images of the unruffled, confident Black man. “Where cool is manly and confidentially sexual, geekiness is immature and inept” (Woo 9). The exception to this dynamic, of course, is the Black geek in popular culture, who, by his very geekiness, is far less cool than the other Black people who surround him. For example, in such programs as Malcolm in the Middle, Stranger Things, and Family Matters, the Black character who is coded “geeky” (Stevie, Lucas, and Urkel, respectively) is often a figure of laughter, mocked by siblings as being even less cool than their white friends. Woo concludes that if Blackness is the definition of cool, and geeks are the opposite of cool, then by definition, geekiness is inherently white, which brings us full circle back to Noles.

In Lovecraft Country, Atticus “Tic” Freeman’s name is simply loaded with meaning. His given name echoes the other famous Atticus in a novel about race, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), and his last name echoes the name given to free Black men in the pre-Civil War United States. He is first seen in an imaginary scene from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars—and he then appears reading the book and imagining himself in it, establishing him anachronistically as a geek. The audience is also shown that Atticus was a soldier, and that he is not only physically fit but muscular and can hold his own in a fight. His heterosexuality and skills as a lover are clearly demonstrated through the series, and he is often juxtaposed with his father, who is revealed to be a gay man on the down low, serving to counterpoint Atticus’s cool heterosexuality (despite being a geek). Throughout the series, Atticus demonstrates “cool pose”  and yet also embodies a profoundly geek culture. Atticus is, in short, a “cool geek,” embodying the tension between (“white”) science fiction and its Black fans as elucidated by Noles. Indeed, I propose that it is his status as a “cool Black geek” that allows him to negotiate as effectively as he does the “restrictive society” not just of Jim Crow America but also of an African-American community that considers his taste in literature to be questionable at best.

As in Ruff’s novel, the show repeatedly demonstrates Tic’s affinity for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He is not alone in his choice of literature; his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) is also a huge science fiction fan. In many ways, George is Tic’s role model, both feeding his taste for geeky literature while also modeling cool pose and using language, through his Safe Negro Travel Guide, to help the Black community.

In both Ruff’s novel and the HBO series, Tic’s father Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams), who models an even greater mode of cool pose while hiding his own homosexuality, rejects his son’s fandom, constantly reminding him of Lovecraft’s, Burroughs’ and other writers’ racism.  He never lets Atticus forget that the literature he loves was made by, for, and about racist whites.  However, in order to know of Lovecraft’s racism and the problematic nature of pulp fiction, Montrose has to have read it himself. Indeed, his own taste in literature runs to The Count of Monte Cristo, which he justifies by arguing that Alexandre Dumas, the author, was Black, although none of the characters in his book are. Montrose is a Black geek, like his son, but, just as with his sexual orientation, he hides his literary taste and experience as a survival strategy.

Tic, however, is able to transcend these racialized categories (cool and geek) through the trope of the talking book. Tic is a “talking book” in Henry Louis Gates’ sense: his cool pose is what allows him to find the Black voice in the white text. Yes, Lovecraft is racist, but reading science fiction and horror allowed Tic to better understand and survive his experiences in Korea, and then his experiences in Ardham. The series shows time and again that living, loving, and understanding science fiction aids one in the quest to protect the Black community, fight the evil sorcerers in the Chicago police, and eventually attain some level of security. In the fourth episode, for example, Tic and Leti (Jurnee Smollett) argue in the library and are shushed by a young Black boy who is reading Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth (“A History of Violence”). It is his own knowledge of the novel that allows Tic to negotiate the underworld when he and Leti enter it later in the episode. In the second episode, at Braithwhite Manor, the main characters discover an abundance of sci-fi tomes by Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, and Clark Ashton Smith. While George is excited by the find, he and Tic recognize the inherent danger this literature implies: they realize the devotion to the occult in the house before it is made manifest (“Whitey’s on the Moon”). Cool pose helps you survive racism, the narrative says, but so too does geeky literature. Danger is recognized and solutions found if one knows one’s Verne, Wells, Lovecraft, and Burroughs.

What Gates notes of slave narratives, we might observe about Atticus’s interaction with pulp literature: Atticus makes “the white written text speak with a black voice, [which] is the initial mode of inscription of the metaphor of the double-voiced” (131). By speaking with two voices – Black voice and white written text – Tic can successfully negotiate the occult world that others cannot. The fantasy opening of the series sets the model for Tic’s interaction with geek literature through the rest of the series: it is just as much a survival tool as cool pose. He is a Black geek, which is why he can do what no one else can. Indeed, he makes being a geek cool.

In the novel, and even more in the HBO series, Tic is thus able to combine cool pose with geek culture. He finally reaches a healthy understanding of his own identity as a Black man who cares for science fiction. His reading of these texts and his identity as a geek is not uncritical, but it becomes an Afrocentrist one and an Afrofuturist one. He never denies the racism of the texts, but his cool and his geekiness combine to allow him to transcend that racism without denying it.  Pulp literature, like the society that produced it, remains racist. However, the cool geek knows how to move through it unscathed and emerge on the other side stronger and better equipped to face the forces of darkness, whether they be shoggoths or the Chicago police.

 

Works Cited

Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Green, Misha, creator. Lovecraft Country. HBO, 2020.

Majors, Richard, and Janet Mancini Billson. Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America. Touchstone, 1992.

Noles, Pam. “Shame.” The Infinite Matrix, 4 Jan. 2006,

Ruff, Matt. Lovecraft County. Harper Perennial, 2017.

Woo, Benjamin. Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture. McGill Queen’s University Press, 2018.