Talk to Me: A Post-Soul Allegory

Abstract

This chapter treats Talk to Me (2007) as a post-soul allegory, in which Lemmons pits the liberated and authentic blackness of Petey Greene against the successful assimilated blackness of Dewey Hughes. This battle for true blackness in the post-soul era is reflected in these characters—a sort of Melvin Van Peebles versus Sidney Poitier. The trope is not new, and indeed appears in blackdirected films from the 1970s 1980s and 1990s, from Gordon Parks’ “Shaft” to Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” or John Singleton’s “Boyz ’n the Hood.” Each envisions a dialectic between a streetwise, often criminalized, but true and unrestricted blackness with a more internally conflicted, accommodationist, upwardly mobile blackness. Using formalism and critical race theory, this chapter argues that Lemmons attempts to challenge the “false reality to this binary” in a nuanced way, by installing the conflict of black identity into a classic Hollywood structure.