“This Is Messy! You Are Messy! Your Brain Is Broke!” Zola, Queer Interracial Desire, and the Absurdity of White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy

Abstract

This article takes up Black/white interraciality as a queer form of desire and as an object of state and interpersonal surveillance. Rejecting the conscription of interraciality into the larger, overlapping projects of anti-black surveillance, “knowability,” sexual normativity, coupling, and state regulation of desire, this project instead asks after the possibilities of interraciality when visuality and biopolitics are decentered, and when we make space for its full sensorial dimensions. Accordingly, I examine Janicza Bravo’s Zola (2021) to consider how the soundscapes of interraciality materialize in unconventional ways through the genre-specific potentialities of tragicomedy. I argue that Zola employs dark humor and critical questioning to frame listeners’ interpretation of the absurdity and dangers of whiteness, misogynoir, and toxic masculinity. I suggest that Zola’s counter-narrative, or re-visiting of the events through participatory storytelling, asks us to attune ourselves to the ways that the sensorium can be recruited both in service of oppression and in service of liberation, and argue that Bravo animates Zola’s survival through the senses of sound and touch.

1. Introduction: The “Thotessy”

A mesmerizing story affectionately termed the “Thotessy” by Black Twitter1—riffing on Homer’s The Odyssey in terms of storytelling prowess, genre-defining ingenuity, and presence as part of a larger oral tradition—Zola2 (2021) tells the story of a road trip (or “hoe trip3,” per Zola) turned disastrous. Directed by Janicza Bravo and co-written between Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris—a playwright perhaps best known for Slave Play (Harris 2018), which also addressed interraciality and its sexual politics in the afterlife of slavery (Hartman 1997) and “broke the record [at the time] for most Tony nominations after its Broadway premiere” (Metcalf 2022)—Zola is an adaptation of approximately 148 tweets originally authored by A’Ziah “Zola” King (@_zolarmoon on Twitter) in 2015. The film was produced by A24 and received 7 nominations in the 2022 Independent Spirit Awards, the most of any film across all award categories (e.g., Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, etc.)4. King, a Black female erotic dancer, and later writer and producer, took to Twitter to process and describe a traumatic and absurd road trip that she experienced with a white female sex worker (Stefani) in Tampa, Florida. King’s compelling and evocative storytelling was immensely popular in its initial circulation online (Wortham 2021), and still held a place in collective memory years later, when Bravo proposed adapting it for film. According to an interview in Vulture magazine, Bravo contacted her manager about adapting the story on the same night that the tweets were released, immediately understanding it as a fully formed narrative and work of art (Handler and Bravo 2021). Not only were the tweets an early example of “going viral,” but in sharing her story through the platform, King completely altered the way that users would engage with the app moving forward. Her original tweets were released “before Twitter had even implemented its capability for ‘threading,’ [or] linking tweets together so that they could be read in a serial format, in chronological order” (Metcalf 2022). After King’s story, Twitter altered its platform to create what we now know as threads, profiting from the creative labor of its Black users without compensation or acknowledgement, per usual.

Framing the story as “a love letter to the internet,” Bravo (2021) understood King’s narrative as both an epic poem and a testament to the times—a moment of collective witnessing made possible by the digital (Parham 2019; Steele 2021). In an interview during the press tour for the film—much of which happened virtually due to COVID-19, which also delayed the film’s release—King explains that for her, “telling the story was just me kiki-ing with my friends,” specifically the community created by Black women/femmes and Black queer people on the platform. In addition to being a love letter to the internet, Bravo also wanted the narrative arc to resonate queerly, as a failed romance or ruined love ‘letter’ between Zola and Stefani. Across several interviews, she mentions that she wanted Zola to carry some traces of the film Clueless (Heckerling 1995), which she characterizes as possessing “that feeling of ellipses…when you fall in love with somebody and they break your heart, sometimes it doesn’t have an end, it just has the dot dot dot” (Bravo 2022). I argue that this sense of lingering, longing, grief, and inconclusiveness matters to the characterization of Black/white interraciality between queer women and femmes as a whole, which often operates in the past conditional tense, posing the question, “what could have been?” The question explores the ways in which systems of supremacy, and in particular, white internalization and investment in them, tamper with our ability to connect with one another across difference (Brown 2017; Lorde 1984). Throughout the film, we witness the extraordinarily brief “heaven,”5 or euphoria, that the two women experience when they dance together at the club in Detroit; their initial connection about being erotic dancers, and the ease/”flow” they experience when they go out that first time6, are manifestations of what “could have been” through the potentialities of movement/dance. However, Bravo, Harris, and King make clear that that intimacy becomes irredeemable due to Stefani’s investment in white supremacy; not only does she fail to be in solidarity with Zola, but she actively sacrifices Zola through withholding and betrayal. In this case, “what could have been?” is more concrete than speculative: we see precisely what is being lost, given that we glimpsed its potential earlier (Zola’s trust and their relationship).

In the film, Taylour Paige plays the titular role of Zola, and Riley Keough plays Stefani, a Black woman and white woman, respectively, who enter into a pseudo-friendship based on their shared experiences as erotic dancers. Importantly, the way that each woman inhabits the category of “erotic dancer” differs, primarily on the basis that Stefani is willing to do sex work in addition to dancing, while Zola is not, which serves as a key source of conflict in the film. The story begins with Zola accepting an invitation from Stefani to dance in Florida, and follows them as it unfolds in chaotic and traumatic ways due to Stefani’s duplicitousness, coercive and violent gender politics, and the vulnerabilities of dancing and sex work as part of a set of survival economies lacking workers’ protections. As the story unfolds amidst escalating threats of sex trafficking (as opposed to the consensual agreement to dance), Zola employs dark humor and critical questioning to frame listeners’ interpretation of the absurdity and dangers of whiteness, misogynoir (Bailey 2021), and toxic masculinity. Zola as a film poses fraught and generative questions about interraciality—as coupling, friendship, temporary intimacies, desire/hope7—the betrayals of white “solidarity,” and the circuitous, non-linearity of queer temporalities. The film stands out for several reasons: because of its unprecedented position as adapted from a Twitter thread, and how that facilitates challenging ideas of “canon” and authorial voice; the ways that it bends the conventions of genre and deploys subtle and inventive cinematic techniques to stage critique; the ways that it centers the subjectivity of a Black woman erotic dancer; and the ways that it opens up conversations about interraciality that refuse and transcend the sanitized, romanticized version of the “couple form” (Stallings 2015). How might an interracial reading of Zola offer different avenues to consider the surveillance of desire, queerness as sexual “deviance” (Cohen 1997), and practices of “dark sousveillance” (Browne 2015)? This article takes up Black/white interraciality as a queer form of desire (Cohen 1997; Somerville 2000; Stallings 2015) and as an object of state and interpersonal surveillance (Browne 2015; Moran 2001; Musser 2014; Pascoe 2009; Sexton 2008). In this article I will analyze both the content and form of the story, examining how the film presents interraciality thematically as well as how the genre and medium influence the affective and sensorial experience of different forms of interraciality. The study is particularly attuned to the sonic, or the soundscape of the film, including the score, sound effects, diegetic and non-diegetic sound. The study also covers multiple modalities, in that I consulted the original Twitter thread, the screenplay, and the film together, thereby including all forms of source material.

I understand the film to be in conversation with a larger body of Black feminist work that has worked to center the erotics of interraciality, particularly as it relates to pornography and BDSM (Miller-Young 2014; Nash 2014; Stallings 2015). Zola poses questions about the fields of sex work and erotic dancing as embroiled in the politics of racialized desire, but with critical departure from Mireille Miller-Young and Jennifer Nash’s work in the sense that Zola’s ability to fully consent is compromised over the course of the story, so rather than exploring the possibilities of exhibitionism, addresses the ways that she carves out moments of interiority, dissociation, and strategic escape amidst precarity. Ariane Cruz (2016) positions interracial sex in pornography as part of the cuckold sub-genre, in which the “thirds” or other implied interested parties—referring to whoever is dominantly imagined as the “right” partner for that person based on racialized gender and compulsory heterosexuality—of the sexual encounter are deliberately present in the scene and/or tacitly invoked, specifically in regard to “somatically absent but symbolically present whiteness” (4). Cruz not only situates interracial sex as a phenomenon unrestricted to the literal bodies of the couple or those engaging in sex acts, but notes that pornographic renderings of interracial sex “might best be imagined as a fantastic queer orgy wherein a panoply of figures—anxiously animated by the unsettled binaries between black and white, man and woman, past and present, gay and straight—people the erotic scene” (2016, p. 133). Troubling the boundaries of both the “couple” and the “family,” Cruz explains that interracial cuckold pornography “eroticizes the failure of monogamy and the incestuous perversion of familial desire (mother-son, father-daughter)” (2016, p. 143). In disrupting the assumed impermeability of these categories, her work excavates their interrelatedness, such as the ways that the “cult of white womanhood has historically functioned as fodder for a white male phobia about black male sexuality that can only be understood as queer” (p. 147).

Within the context of Zola, therefore, the characters of Derrek (Stefani’s boyfriend) and X (Stefani’s pimp), are not only truthful to the story, but they also stage a conversation about white supremacist heteronormativity and its “thirds,” as Derrek (first) and X (second) are the “ideal” partners for Stefani if following that logic. That Stefani believes her closest relationship to be with Zola, rather than a white man (Derrek) or a Black man (X), speaks not only to the anti-black forms of labor she expects/extracts from Zola, but also the film’s commentary on queer interracial desire. The “erotic scene” of Zola operates within several different layers of interraciality, exploring points of connection between not only Stefani and Zola, but X and a white woman called Baybe, Stefani and X, and briefly, Derrek and Dion (who kidnaps Stefani). In this way, Zola interrogates interraciality across multiple different “thirds,” or as part of a “fantastic queer orgy” (Cruz 2016, p. 133) through various forms of relation:

• Flirtation/Desire (Zola and Stefani, X and Stefani, X and Baybe);
• Temporary or strategic ‘friendship’ (Zola and Stefani, Derrek and Dion);
• Professional (Zola and Stefani, X and Stefani, Stefani and the women at the Tampa club);
• Domesticity (X and Baybe);
• Betrayal (Zola and Stefani, X and Stefani, Derrek and Dion8).

The film’s critique of domesticity emerges through juxtaposition: in one scene, we see Baybe pulling a gun and telling X that she would kill for him, and later, we find her in the kitchen, casually asking him if he “wants a smoothie” when the group seeks refuge in their house after X shoots Dion. Domesticity, in this case, serves as a cover for and is held together by violence; we are made to reconcile the absurdity of this interracial couple ‘playing house’ after engaging in such abusiveness, their apathy and serenity unnerving. Moments later, Baybe is counting money at their kitchen table while simultaneously encouraging Derrek to “do it” when he suggests he is upset enough to throw himself from their balcony. The absolute chaos of this scene—a coupled interracial pimp team hoarding all of the profits from their exploited, and exploitative, interracial erotic dancers/sex workers (exploited: Stefani’s sexual labor and Zola’s business acumen; exploitative: Stefani’s treatment of Zola), beside the intra-racial dynamic of whiteness continuing its pathology to its logical end (with Derrek attempting suicide and Baybe, ruthless and unfeeling, egging him on)—is made legible through the affective experience of absurdity.

Finally, in terms of the larger political context of the film’s release timeframe, it is worth mentioning that the summer of 2020 was marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the subsequent global uprisings in defense of Black life. In the United States in particular, we witnessed calls to #DefundthePolice and #AbolishthePolice, and growing literacy about and engagement with abolitionist demands, dreams, and futures, largely as a result of grassroots organizing and accessible political education through social media platforms. Pride month also occurred during this time, alongside the anniversary of Loving Day (June 12) and Juneteenth. In other words, many publics were exposed to conversations about the necessity of Black liberation; the linkage between Black liberation and collective liberation; the ways in which prisons and policing were designed to inflict racialized violence and uphold white supremacy; the relationship between Blackness and queerness; the queerness of abolition; and a reminder that interracial marriage was legalized only 53 years ago in 1967. Digital spaces were erupting with conversations about Black/white relationality more broadly, and at times, interraciality specifically, such as the ways that white people presume an entitlement to be in a relationship with Black people9 and a right to be in Black spaces (Brown 2020), making this time period particularly ripe for the conversations that Zola encourages.

1.1. Structure and Intentionality

One of the most immediately noticeable changes between the source material and the film is the relative absence of voiceover from Zola in the film adaptation, clearly indicating a tonal shift from the Twitter thread to the film, with the former resonating as humorous and the latter landing as comparatively melancholy. Going into the film, I had expected to hear from Zola directly through voiceover, as if the Twitter thread were ‘coming to life’ in real time, with voiceover allowing for a secrecy and communication directly with the viewer that she did not have access to in the moment. However, throughout the film, Zola actually audibly speaks somewhat infrequently—she is often a quiet observer speaking through her facial expressions and body language, or per J. Wortham, her “body gone still with hypervigilance, eyes bright with alarm or annoyance” (p. 34). I find it a meaningful directorial choice that we do not hear many voiceovers, as opposed to the Twitter version of the story, which we hear exclusively in her voice. I think that the lack of voiceover, or allowing Zola to remain quiet throughout the film, is not only realistic to how she would have experienced the moment initially, but it also keeps the viewer present and closer to Zola’s state of mind, given that her voice and analysis would probably come to her after she had time to process. The viewer is unable to “zoom out” or distance themselves from the current moment of danger/precarity, because unlike the Twitter thread, there is no future Zola telling the story after the fact, but rather, you are with her as it happens. This stylistic choice makes it so that the viewer is captive in the moment, with very little comedic relief, bringing the viewer closer to Zola’s experience of the event, which is one that is frightening, disturbing, and unpredictable. Whereas the Twitter thread brings comedy to the forefront, as a coping mechanism to manage absurdity as well as a storytelling style, the film shifts the tone drastically.

Bravo explains the structure of the film as loosely drawn from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500) (Yu 2021). The painting is a triptych which depicts humans, animals, and other beings progressing through scenes of heaven, earth, and hell, from left to right, pushed forward by their pursuit of and vulnerability to sin. Broadly speaking, Bravo considers these three categories—Heaven, Earth, and Hell—as useful ways to measure moments of transition and plot development throughout the film. Moreover, the Museo del Prado’s official description10 of the Garden of Earthly Delights notes that the “Paradise” of the first two panels serves to “deceive the senses,” leading to hell, thereby framing both the sensorium and the act of deception as central to the structuring logic. Whereas Bosch charts his narrative development through the lens and teachings of Christianity, Bravo’s adaptation diverges in important ways. I would argue that Bravo still charts a process of deception, but rather than emerging from religious doctrine, Stefani’s deception emblematizes the absurdity of white supremacy11; in this sense, Zola’s counter-narrative, or re-visiting of the events through participatory storytelling, asks us to attune ourselves to the ways that the sensorium can be recruited both in service of oppression and in service of liberation. As a result, I have structured this essay into the sections of Heaven, Earth, and Hell, as well, charting the sensory dimensions of queer interracial desire and betrayal. Embodied sensations of elation, confusion, disillusionment, and terror signal our progression through this narrative arc, and in so doing, bring us closer to Zola’s experience. I argue that Bravo animates Zola’s survival through the sensory, primarily through sound and touch.

In adapting the film and writing the screenplay, Bravo and Harris collaborated directly with King, with Bravo specifically noting that they sought King’s blessing to do the film. Bravo, a queer Black woman, notes that she felt that “[she and Zola] were very similar the day [she] read those tweets” and therefore felt a strong need to protect King’s narrative, to “usher it into being and care for it in the way [she’d] want to be tended to” (Handler and Bravo 2021). After the circulation of the Twitter thread, Bravo remembers that the primary response from white audiences and institutions (such as Rolling Stone12, who did a feature on King) was one of disbelief. King’s credibility was heavily questioned and undermined, in part due to a long-standing racist refusal to see Black women as victims/survivors rather than ‘aggressors’ (Wanzo 2009). Critics (primarily white) not only accused King of lying, but engaged in the same kind of anti-black adultification of Black girls and young women that is weaponized against Zola by the characters in the story; Zola is only 19 at the time of the road trip, but characters such as X and Derrek expect a level of responsibility and care-taking (Collins 2000) from her that they do not from Stefani, who engineered the whole fiasco but is read as always-already “innocent” and childlike due to her whiteness. These kinds of responses deeply informed Bravo and Harris’ approach to the film, anticipating and building in forms of protection for Zola (Wortham 2021), preemptively pushing back against the indignities of disbelief, which add insult to the injury/trauma Zola had already experienced (Dotson 2011; Enloe 2013; Wanzo 2009). The genre of absurdity is pivotal in this effort, allowing the filmmakers to call attention to the absurdity of white supremacy, not the presumed absurdity of Zola’s memory or her storytelling. This is part of why the film’s tone is so sobering and melancholy in comparison to the Twitter thread, because in order to redirect the designation of “absurdity”—toward these people’s actions and the systems that nurture these behaviors and ideologies, not toward Zola—one must unsettle predictable affective rhythms, thereby making the familiar strange.

We witness the clarifying power of absurdity (as a genre) through many different cinematic choices which I will elaborate upon throughout the article, but by way of an overarching example, I would like to foreground Zola’s minimalist dialogue. As mentioned previously, in this particular context of the road trip and her increasing vulnerability, Zola is not one for lengthy sentences or run-on monologues—her speaking style is exceptionally direct and straightforward. Her speech could not contrast more sharply with that of the other characters, whose commentary is much more performative and cryptic. Any time that Zola asks Stefani a perfectly reasonable direct question, Stefani responds evasively. She dismisses the need for information—“you ask lot of questions”—or redirects to the earlier topic of the conversation, such as when Zola asks who’s going on the road trip, and Stefani just repeats, “be ready by two!” In another instance, when Zola tries to reassert her boundaries with X, Stefani’s pimp, she is exceptionally clear in both language and tone: she speaks slowly, as if X’s listening capabilities are somehow compromised, saying “I appreciate your confidence in me, but I came to dance,” punctuating each syllable. Stefani, X, and Derrek all appear impervious to basic logic and reason, a maddening dynamic that recurs throughout, adding to both Zola and the viewer’s sense of feeling trapped. Their steadfast refusal to engage in honest conversation contributes to escalating feelings of terror, and contributes to the sense of madness13, or the insanity of the situation.

1.2. Literature Review: The Sensorium and Black/White Interraciality

Black studies as a discipline—including scholars such as Uri McMillan (2015), Amber Jamilla Musser (2018), and Christina Sharpe (2016), to name just a few—has labored to make clear the ways that Blackness has been made to seem one-dimensional within white supremacist, surveillant logics, and the ways that the sensorium figures into this anti-black racial project. Nicole Fleetwood (2011) and Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016), for example, argue that hegemonic understandings of sight and sound aim to fix Blackness within the body, or to bolster essentialist and biological understandings of race. Blackness has been rendered hyper-sexual so as to be always-already available for touch and sexual exploitation (Spillers 1987; Richardson 2013). Temporality and spatiality have been manipulated to situate Black subjects as unbelonging, or regressive/primitive and therefore “out of time” (McMillan 2015), as well as displaced or “ungeographic” (McKittrick 2006). In what follows, I offer a truncated review of how these sensorial dimensions have been disciplined or colonized by white supremacist patriarchy in order to demonstrate the stakes of recovering the sonic as possessing liberatory potential.

1.3. Sight

Scholars across disciplines have thoroughly and diligently traced the ways that vision has been implicated in scientific racism, damaging forms of cultural production, and everyday forms of racializing surveillance (Browne 2015) and racial violence. Building her theory of racializing surveillance, Simone Browne draws from the work of Donna Haraway, arguing that even when racialized subjects do not face an embodied white subject/looker/surveiller, the dominant reading praxis or way of seeing is ideologically white; the “conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1988) is one that is “always unmarked, and therefore already markedly white and male, and one that claims a power to ‘represent while escaping representation’” (Browne 2015, p. 49). Similarly, Alexander G. Weheliye (2005) notes that it is precisely the alleged “incorporeality” of vision, or the ways it was assumed to be disembodied and detached from emotion, that made it particularly susceptible to being wielded as the “apex of scientific rationality” (p. 45). Weheliye also lays bare the stakes of white ways of seeing, reflecting on both Du Bois’ and Fanon’s esteemed work on the co-implication of visuality and racialization: “the look of the white subject interpellates the Black subject as inferior, which, in turn, bars the Black subject from seeing him/herself without the internalization of the white gaze” (2005, p. 42). Elaborating on the power conferred upon the (white) surveiller within these scopic regimes, Nicole Fleetwood (2011) also notes that the “spectator [is made] to do certain work, to perform a function as arbiter, or decoder, of visual signs that become aligned with blackness” (p. 7). Finally, according to Jared Sexton (2008), as long as interraciality is only ever apprehended through the primary register of visuality, it will continue to solidify misconceptions of race itself as biological, as biology and vision are linked through phenotype. In short, the power that white subjects have to see, to decide how Black subjects are seen, and to attach value and meaning to Blackness, has been a central element of anti-blackness for centuries.

1.4. Sound and Touch

As part of a larger effort to decenter visuality and white scopic regimes, many Black studies scholars have examined sound, but not uncritically and not as entirely separable from visuality14. During the 19th century, white elites deeply feared sounds that they imagined to be “irrational and emotional,” qualities which were always-already attached to both femininity and Blackness (Stoever 2016, p. 25). Offering a brief history on the topic, Weheliye (2005) argues that sound and temporality have been jointly wielded to position Black subjects as ‘luddite,’ in part due to the dominant erasure of what he calls Afro-diasporic sound technologies. In other words, part of how Afro-diasporic populations have been characterized as ‘left behind’ and cut off from Western modernity is through the language of the ‘digital divide,’ which fails to consider sonic forms of Black cultural production, or sound recording and reproduction technologies, as technological (Weheliye 2005, pp. 2–3), despite their long history at the forefront of popular music and their centrality to “modern formations” (pp. 20–22) in general.

Sound also has a distinct place within the history of disciplining Black/white interracial sexuality. Stoever (2016) refers to the racialized surveillance and policing of sound as the “sonic color line,” and explains that its enforcement came, in part, out of a history of interracial sexual violence. During the 1850s, when it became more difficult to assess racial identity through skin color due to generations of white sexual violence, white Southerners increasingly attached racial meaning to sound in order to continue to surveil Blackness outside of visuality (Stoever 2016, p. 39). During this time period, for example, runaway slave ads in Southern newspapers featured aural descriptors such as “‘loud,’ ‘manly,’ ‘strong,’ and/or ‘whiny,’ sonic affects amplifying the gendered binary of race for Black men as hypermasculine/feminized” (2016, p. 29). These aural markers not only attempted to fix Blackness within the body, but also further solidified racialized gender, and functioned to track and prevent fugitivity (2016, p. 39). Additionally, while Stoever notes that intergenerational white rape affected the usage of the sonic as an instrument of racializing surveillance during the 19th century, she also comments that trans-historically, the “white female scream hovers in the nation’s sonic imaginary as [supposed] confirmation of a rapacious black masculinity” (2016, p. 22). In the wake of slavery (Sharpe 2016), in other words, one of the aural resonances of Black/white interraciality derives from the persistent, unfounded, and malevolent myth of the Black male rapist15.

Much of the scientific discourse employed to account for sound has also been affected by interracial surveillant epistemologies, or has been filtered through the framework of preventing the ‘contagion’ of Black/white interraciality. Nineteenth-century scientists initially theorized sound as a form of “vibrational touch,” and believed that sound was “promiscuous” and “penetrat[ed] the ear canal” (Stoever 2016, p. 37), further evidencing the ways that sensations can be disciplined by “science.” This scientific theory was mobilized to surveil and contain Black life through multiple sensory registers. The dissemination of this theory affected the practice of listening in everyday life, as Stoever reports that many came to understand listening as “increasingly, thrillingly, and uncomfortably material and erotic, as the notion of being touched by sound vibrations seemed suddenly more concrete and less metaphoric” (2016, p. 37). Dominant scientific discourse at the time, therefore, suggested the need for sensory segregation, to prevent allegedly ‘Black’ sounds from “penetrating” white ears, thereby quite literally suggesting that interracial sex could take place over sound waves (Stoever 2016). This example demonstrates not only further evidence of the ways that Blackness has been treated as hyper-sexual, but also the ways that white people have tried to deploy sound as a mechanism of racializing surveillance and how interraciality has been inextricably linked to this deployment.

However, even though sound has been deployed in anti-black ways and is tied up with visuality, I remain interested in its liberatory possibilities. Unlike most forms of dominant visual representation, which have historically been “critical to the exercise of biopower” (Campt 2017, p. 76) in making Blackness seem “visually knowable” (Fleetwood 2011), I would suggest that sound has, in some ways, evaded recruitment by the state’s apparatus of racializing surveillance. Tina Campt (2017), for example, attests to the multi-dimensionality of sound, explaining that “sound need not be heard to be perceived. Sound can be listened to, and, in equally profound ways, sound can be felt; it both touches and moves people” (p. 6). Given that sound can function outside its ostensible primary mechanism of aurality, can actually cross over into tactility, and defies stillness and singularity16 through movement, it seems well-suited as a form of sensory engagement that is slippery enough to challenge surveillant epistemologies. Campt (2017) further demonstrates the ways that visuality can be pushed by aurality through her concept of listening to images. She differentiates between listening to and “looking at” images as “a conscious decision to challenge the equation of vision with knowledge” (Campt 2017, p. 6), thereby positioning her methodology as one that problematizes anti-black surveillance and white scopic regimes. Similar to Weheliye (2005), Campt (2017) mobilizes sound specifically because it has been “critical to Black Atlantic cultural formations” (p. 6) and because it destabilizes the surveillant power dynamic between “sight and observer” (p. 42). As something that can be felt within the body even when it is not heard17, also called “felt sound,” sound taps into embodied knowledge and emotionality, which have both been historically dismissed as less sophisticated and less cerebral epistemologies (Campt 2017). Given that vision pretends to be ‘incorporeal’ (Weheliye 2005) or objective and rational, how might “felt sound” point us to a kind of embodiment that rejects vision’s alleged omnipotence while also refusing corporeal essentialism? By interpreting sounds that operate at “lower frequencies” (p. 7), or forms of “quiet, stasis, and refusal” (p. 9) that are not visible upon first glance at an image, Campt argues that we can witness more “quotidian reclamations of interiority [and] dignity marshaled by black subjects in their persistent striving for futurity” (p. 11), thereby suggesting the centrality of the sonic and of listening in devising critical futurities.

2. Results and Discussion

2.1. “Heaven”

At the film’s beginning, we see Zola and Stefani in a mirrored room, “much like a little girl’s jewelry box” (Bravo and Harris 2018, p. 1), applying lipstick and admiring themselves in the mirror while “soft, ethereal music,18” a harp glissando, plays in the background. Not only does the literal mirror imply a sense of doubling, but in addition, the two are mirroring one another’s movements as they get ready. The mirror also invokes associations with deception, hiding, and manipulated realities, as is the case in a house of mirrors. The screenplay describes Zola as “Black, 20s, wide-eyed and mostly sure of herself,” and Stefani as “white, shifty-eyed, and ratchet.” We only see each character from the chest up, but we can see that Zola is wearing a bejeweled, turquoise/black tube top, while Stefani wears a green alligator print tank top with thin straps. They each put an index finger into their respective mouths at the same time, and quickly pull it out, ensuring that no lipstick is left on the inside of their mouths. They also lay down their baby hairs19 simultaneously, each using a toothbrush to sculpt small waves and brush the extraneous hairs into their ponytails. The sensuality and synchronicity of their movements, paired with the hypnotic harp scales, creates a particular allure, even as they do not appear aware of any audience. This mirrored room appears to be outside of time—there is no one else in there with them, and we don’t have a clear sense for where they are (we cannot see if they are in a club, or even a bathroom)—it looks dreamlike, with warm colors and gentle lights, suggesting comfort but without specificity or groundedness, almost suspended in space/time. The current of sensuousness and anticipation animating the scene—“What are they getting ready for? Where are they going? What is the nature of their relationship?”—is interrupted by Zola’s question: “Wanna hear a story of how me and this bitch here fell out? It’s kinda long but it’s full of suspense…” Zola speaks in the scene itself, but the sound is non-diegetic, rather than voiceover, as it appears that Stefani cannot hear her. In this way, we have a moment of privacy with Zola, something that at this time, we do not know we will rarely experience again throughout the film. The music and Zola’s question work together to set a tone of both arousal and foreboding.

After this point, we are carried into the next scene by “But Not For Me” (1958) by the Clickettes, a late 1950s/early 1960s doo wop group consisting of four young Black women20. The song feels lighthearted and romantic, and is characterized as such by the closed captioning, but resonates as unsettling; its presence reflects a common trope in horror and thriller genres, wherein filmmakers use overly syrupy sweet or “old timey” romantic music to foreshadow or directly accompany something disturbing, capitalizing on the contrast between the aural and visual. That the film is otherwise meant to be highly specific to the year 2015 makes this particular musical accompaniment all the more notable. I would argue that “But Not For Me” not only conjures horrific undertones writ large but also specifically invokes the late 1950s Jim Crow racial politics, demanding that we draw parallels and trace historical synergies between the time periods.

When the dialogue starts, one of the first things we hear is Zola’s co-worker, Gail, describing an unpleasant scent that she “could taste before he walked in the door”: “it was fart, it was egg, it was nasty.” She follows this description with a question, asking Zola “what you call it again when they skin get red like that?” to which Zola answers, “rosacea,” suggesting that Gail was referencing a white man in the anecdote. In this way, the opening dialogue of the film plunges us into an interracial encounter of some kind, one characterized by repulsive smells and an inflammatory skin condition. While we are not offered more context for her story, and surely we need none, what we take from it is a description that immerses the audience in a sensory experience of disgust; through Gail’s few words, we relate to this white man as someone who is dirty—based on connotations with flatulence and with reddened or otherwise unclear skin as “poor skin hygiene”—a vitally important reversal of the white supremacist trope of people of color, and Black people specifically, portrayed as “dirty,” while white people are assumed to be “clean” (Vargas 2014; Vergès 2019). Gail poses the question, “why it get like that?”, a genuine medical curiosity, but also gesturing to the implied embodied effects of adhering to dominant versions of whiteness in a literal sense (e.g., “ugly on the inside, too!”), and productively opening a larger forum to consider the question of “why” in relation to whiteness more broadly. While it is factually inaccurate that rosacea is an inherently white condition—people of all skin tones can get rosacea—I am not mentioning her question for purposes of medical accuracy, but rather, for its cultural association with whiteness. In other words, it does not matter that Gail’s comment is inaccurate, but rather, that it productively indexes a sense of confusion about white bodies and white ways of being, allowing for a decentering of whiteness and for making whiteness “strange,” or even, absurd.

When Zola first approaches Stefani and Jonathan’s table, Stefani does not even look up from her menu when she asks if “y’all got jalepeño poppers?” When Zola replies in the negative, Stefani looks up and something shifts as she trains her eyes on Zola, titillated. She exclaims, “damn bitch, you got perfect titties! I wish I had titties like that! They look just like apples.” The action in the screenplay21 immediately following is clear: “Zola blushes. The attraction is mutual” (p. 5). They are immediately policed, as Jonathan interjects, “oh so you’re just gon’ do that dyke shit in front a me and not include me?” This line establishes a conservative backdrop for their flirtation, given that the “dyke shit” in question was relatively “mild” compared to an “outright” expression of attraction; queer desire between women is often dismissed as “envy” rather than attraction, with the explanation being that straightness could be upheld if the woman does not want to “be with her,” but rather to “be her,” a differentiation that supposedly suggests normative jealousy rather than desire. That even this ‘mild’ level of flirtation, and importantly, de-centering of the man in the equation, receives immediate surveillance and rebuke, is indicative of the forms of toxic masculinity Zola will face as the film progresses.

After this interaction, we cut to Zola with her back to the camera after she has walked into a clearly marked employees-only area of the restaurant, supposing that she has withdrawn to this area both to continue her work, but also to attain some momentary respite from customers. However, the shot from behind suggests that intrusion is imminent; Stefani’s voice interrupts her, making an advance: “I feel like we met.” The assertion need not be factually accurate—and is likely not, given what we later learn about Stefani—for it to achieve its desired effect, which is to ignite a present-day connection augmented by some amorphous sense of memory or felt sense of “before”; in this way, Stefani insinuates that Zola is memorable and sets an affective pretext for their relationship, designed to encourage a sense of inevitability. I want to suggest that doing so is specific to her goal of entrapment, and also a relatively common declaration for interraciality more broadly—the recycling and over-saturation of our collective memory and “image environment22” (Davis 2003) with Black/white interracial encounter facilitates a possible lapsing between conceptual familiarity and genuine memory, in addition to white supremacist ways of knowing that conflate all Black people, and would thereby suggest that any Black person could stand in for another. The film certainly supports the latter, as one of the indignities that Zola has to endure are white patrons comparing her to Black women with whom she shares no resemblance, such as Beyoncé and Whoopi Goldberg. This anti-black conflation and over-familiarity with Black/white interraciality are both important to my argument, attesting to the sensorial staying power of Black/white encounter, and are drawn from my prior work in situating interracial desire as a regularly surveilled entity (at both the state and interpersonal levels).

After establishing that they both dance23—that’s how they would have met—Stefani takes a step closer to Zola, and the two women stand opposite one another, maintaining intense, unblinking eye contact. Their bodies do not touch, but the space between them is charged, visually symbolized through an animated heart that pops up, mimicking the “liking” function on social media platforms. Stefani asks, “you wanna go somewhere with me?” an ambiguous invitation that reads more flirtatious than work-driven; even though we later learn that such vagueness is a hallmark of her practice of withholding and manipulation, in these early moments, its lack of specificity reads as open to possibility, and intentionally suggestive of queer undertones. (If this were a different genre, a romantic comedy for example, agreeing to go “somewhere” indeterminate—with the only context being that it would be done together—would resonate within the dreamy, seductive affect of a crush, with “somewhere” standing in for virtually “anywhere.”) Upon presumed agreement, we find Stefani and Zola back in the mirrored room, as they continue to stare at one another, as if transfixed, without speaking. Stefani then leads Zola out of the frame and down the figurative rabbit hole, an intertextual reference intensified by the accompanying harp music, which feels alluring, suspicious, reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, and indicative of absurdity to come.

Ostensibly that same night, Zola and Stefani “go somewhere” together in Detroit, and we see them dancing at a local club, with a kind of smoothness and fluidity to their movements that establish them both as experienced performers. The scene description notes, underlined, that “Zola is really good at this,” and that “Stefani is also good at this (in a different kind of way),” again suggesting a degree of compatibility or alignment between them that goes beyond direct dialogue. They mostly perform separately, but at times they are entangled, “mov[ing] together like two snakes” (p. 7). Bravo and Harris emphasize the corporeal, noting that “their white and black shoulders rub against each other,” and that “a black thigh meets a white torso as Zola wraps her leg around Stefani’s waist,” suggesting the sensuality of interraciality as well as a deliberately curated form of flirtation/desire between queer women; we do not know to which degree this desire is curated for profitability from male clientele and how much of it may be organic or personally desirable for the women.

When Zola and Stefani are in the Detroit club VIP area, they bond by lamenting what they each have learned about the underhandedness and double standards of their industry: “same bitch that would never dance to make money is the same bitch that be out on the block,” with Zola responding, “same bitch that be smilin’ in your face- be the same bitch that gon’ come for you later.” After which point, they each exclaim “Period!” and “On God!”, or per the screenplay, “this feels good. Each feels seen. Each feels heard” (p. 8). In this way, Bravo and Harris go out of their way to emphasize that Stefani and Zola did have a genuine connection to begin with, but that it was ruined. Moments of ease like this are so starkly contrasted with the rest of the film’s tension and distrust, which speaks to their initial chemistry as well as Stefani’s facility with entrapment24. I find it interesting for the script to make it clear that it is possible for each of them to feel seen/heard, even though the story begins already in failure (we already know that they “fell out”). These glimpses of ease and agreement allow the film to avoid the time-honored catastrophizing of interraciality as a doomed project, and instead call attention to Stefani’s actions that cause harm, heightening a call for accountability, as the audience has a clear sense of “what could have been,” and exactly how it was “ruined,” as opposed to assuming ruin from the beginning. Even as their relationship moves further toward permanent damage or further beyond repair, we still see the occasional bid for connection or solidarity, thereby demonstrating not just Zola’s kindness but putting into high relief what was lost or sacrificed between them.

When the night comes to a close, the screenplay dialogue has Zola reflect, “tonight was dope. I missed that,” while she and Stefani exchange numbers, melding an act that ensures future contact with a degree of nostalgia. While this exact dialogue is absent from the film, the same feeling of nostalgia is palpable, as the two women sit comfortably on the hood of Stefani’s car, relaxed in their moment of relative privacy now that they are outside the club. We can understand the experience as a whole as enhanced not only by their chemistry, but this sentiment (“I missed that”) suggests that Stefani helped Zola return to something, to revisit, to reawaken old feelings/experiences. Although it was not interraciality specifically that was required for her to revisit dancing—it was correlated rather than causal—Stefani’s role in initiating plans facilitated the experience. What Zola missed was dancing—not dancing with Stefani—but it feels notable that that yearning for a past experience was fulfilled through their collective performance of interracial sexuality.

2.2. “Earth”

On the way to Tampa, however, we begin to witness their transition from “heaven” to “earth,” such as when Stefani and Zola go to the bathroom together at a gas station. The camera takes an aerial view over the two stalls, and we watch the two women, mirroring one another on the surface, but taking radically different approaches: Zola squats over the toilet seat, while Stefani sits down fully, with her skin touching the seat. Stefani’s urine is dark yellow, indicating that she is dehydrated, while Zola’s is a light yellow. Zola uses toilet paper, while Stefani just walks out of the stall. This brief scene accomplishes so much—their differences suggest not only that Stefani has lower self-regard than Zola (not taking care of her body through the basic task of hydration), but also makes a wider commentary on white people being historically dirtier (sitting directly on the seat) in terms of personal hygiene than people of color, despite racist stereotypes that suggest the opposite (Vergès 2019). Further evidence of the characters’ differing sense of self-worth emerges when Zola is counseling Stefani on setting up her Backpage ad; Stefani grossly undervalues herself, and Zola is shocked, exclaiming, “pussy is worth thousands, bitch!”

Upon arrival in Tampa, Stefani greets the women at the club with a level of familiarity that suggests they have worked together previously. Notably, Zola’s interaction with these women, all of them Black, is the one of the only times in the entire film that we see Zola smile. It is the only time that Zola gets to interact with other Black women, and she affirms them with a spirited “amen” after they finish their collective prayer/intention setting for the evening (in which they pray for wealthy clientele). The fact that we witness the women engaging in this very playful prayer draws on Black oral tradition as well as L.H. Stallings’ (2015) theorization of Black strip clubs as sites with the potential “for sacredly profane communal erotics that employ rhythm as an inhuman force that sweeps away time’s barrier between the living and the dead” (p. 204). In this way, Stallings (2015) discusses dance as a portal through which human/nonhuman, or human and ancestral spirits—”per the African diasporic concept of ancestral presences…that walk with us, guide us, and visit us” (p. 153)—can intertwine through the opening of androgyny, and that “when presented with a funky beat they can possess and ride anybody” (p. 201). Stallings (2015) specifically names the limitations the framing of “sex as work,” and suggests “sex-as-art” instead, allowing us to “comprehend strippers as not simply objects of sexual desire but another gender25 altogether” (p. 204). While the dancers at the club mostly perform separately (as far as we can tell, at least), their intention around “communal erotics”—both by praying to the ancestors and by standing together to do it—suggests an investment in life forces beyond the human, and in the ability for erotic dance to serve as a way to access that multidimensionality.

Zola proceeds to find a station in the back room of the club and prepares herself to go onstage. She begins by looking in the mirror and asking, “who you gonna be tonight, Zola?” Upon voicing this question, we are transported from the club back to the mirrored room, only this time, Zola is alone, with four additional versions of herself. The same “soft, ethereal” harp music from the beginning of the film plays in the background, as the five Zolas try on different outfits and personas for her performance. Through this playful moment of fantasy, we glimpse Zola’s interior world, and get the sense that Zola might typically find dancing empowering, perhaps as a form of self-making and experimentation. The question implies an ontological dimension, that she could temporarily be someone else, depending on how she adorns and presents her body; such an opportunity to become another, or be possessed by another, supports Stallings’ (2015) insight that erotic dancing can upend Western gender schemas and enter a new dimension or plane in which androgynous ancestral connection is possible. The temporal element of asking about “tonight” also suggests fluidity and ephemerality, implying that her answer could change on any given night, or even within the same night. The question also speaks to Zola’s autonomy—she is on this particular trip with Stefani, but she does not need or want Stefani to be involved in her preparation for performance/visibility; she has a time-honored routine and an approach that is all her own.

The momentary peacefulness and possibility of her visioning and self-fashioning is truncated by Stefani’s voice, declaring that Zola will need to wear pasties to cover her breasts. Zola challenges this requirement, stating that she is “a full-nude type of bitch,” but Stefani insists that it is state law. Stefani then plants herself squarely in Zola’s lap, and begins to take photos, rapid-fire selfies of the two of them, which are accompanied by the splashy iPhone sound of the camera’s capture. Shortly after Stefani sits down, we hear Zola through voiceover, priming us with a warning: “from here on out, watch every move this bitch make” (0:22:27). Helpless to physically intervene but alerted to danger, we watch as Stefani employs touch and sound to feign closeness (similar to what we saw her do in the restaurant, when she entered the employees-only area to ask Zola out). Although witnessing exploitation can feel voyeuristic, in calling us to watch, I argue that Zola employs a form of “dark sousveillance”—or “black epistemologies of contending with anti-black surveillance…[that] plot imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being” (Browne 2015, p. 21)—and recruits us to assist (Browne 2015; Bailey 2021). She suggests that by looking back at Stefani—who wields the surveillant gaze of the camera and who has been surveilling or targeting Zola since they met—we might retroactively restore some of Zola’s agency; she was manipulated in the moment, but through retelling the story and inviting her audience to collectively scrutinize Stefani’s actions, in a small way, she renders herself more safe, more protected after the fact, by calling upon a circuitous, participatory queer temporal intervention (Parham 2019).

As we watch, Stefani forces unearned intimacy, and lies about what the pictures are for, suggesting they are just because “we look cute”—furthering the sentiment of Stefani’s sapphic desire for Zola—rather than as visual accompaniment to entice men on the Backpage ad. In this way, Stefani packages interraciality for sale without Zola’s consent, an act which is augmented by the surveillant sound effects of image capture, alluding to the camera’s historic racialized violences and its modern-day permutations (Campt 2017), preserving Zola’s likeness—and specifically, her Blackness, as well as their interraciality—for later exploitation. Zola, thinking that the pictures are just for the two of them, holds her index and middle finger up to her mouth in the shape of a V, sticking out her tongue through the opening between her fingers, a gesture commonly associated with cunnilingus, and specifically, lesbian/queer sexuality. Using these photos on the Backpage ad, of course, suggests at a minimum that they work together, potentially that they are willing to have sex with one another as exhibitionism, or at least that both of them are available for sex work, even if separately. Not only does Stefani want to profit from being associated with Blackness, but more specifically, to market their ostensibly queer interraciality as available for consumption, as she consumes Zola through objectification. Through this moment of violation and manipulation, we witness an example of the visual, sonic, and tactile imbrication of queer interracial desire and surveillant epistemologies.

Bravo notes outright that she wanted to draw special attention to the sound effects of the iPhone, such as the sound of typing, the sound of tweets posting, the sound of sending or receiving a text, or even the sound of clicking the phone shut when you want the screen to go black. These sounds work to immerse the viewer in particularities of the digital era, as well as consistently remind the viewer of the source material for the film. I want to add consideration of the film’s silences, both in the sense of diegetic sound, or Zola’s lack of dialogue, but also non-diegetic sound, or the moments when there is music overlaid such that the audience can see characters speaking but cannot hear them. Bravo describes Zola as “almost a silent film character” given the ways that she retracts/withdraws over the course of the film, increasingly providing one-word answers or refusing to speak at all, the more dangerous her situation becomes (Handler and Bravo 2021). I argue that Zola’s silence functions as a form of “dark sousveillance,” or a subversive attempt to evade surveillance and precarity, with Bravo noting that “she goes silent and becomes the watcher…silence becomes her power, and it’s almost like the less you say, the more in charge you could be” (Handler and Bravo 2021). The silence is striking in part because you have such a strong sense of her voice from the original source material, that when you watch her experience visualized on screen, you know what she was thinking in the moment (because she tells you after the fact) but cannot hear her26.

There are several moments throughout the film where dialogue is withheld or overlaid, such as when the foursome arrive at the motel and two kids are dribbling a basketball; when X gives Zola a gun on the hotel balcony; when Zola runs down the stairs after Stefani has been kidnapped; and when Zola cannot get through to X during an in-call. Moreover, many of the film’s dialogic silences are interspersed with singular focus on a particular sound, such as bodily functions, sounds of travel/transition, and sounds of either compliance or refusal. When they arrive at the first motel after an extraordinarily long, two-day drive, for example, Zola has just experienced Stefani’s offensive, anti-black monologue and upon seeing the poor quality of the lodging, begins to have doubts about the experience as a whole. When they exit the vehicle, two young Black boys are dribbling a basketball on the balcony above, and the regularity of the bouncing resonates as a heartbeat, ostensibly Zola’s heartbeat as she takes in her surroundings and tries to stay calm amidst escalating fears. This is one of the sonic indicators that we are in the “earth” section of the narrative, or the second scene of the triptych, being brought back to reality after the earlier “heaven,” or dream-like sequences of their initial meeting. The isolated heartbeat sound is commonly used in films when a character is feeling unnerved, able to focus only on their own heart rate quickening as an embodied indicator of danger. The fact that the young, Black boys are the ones providing the heartbeat sound allows not only for diegetic sound that blends into the scene, but also for the reminder of childlike intuition, an innate sensibility that can get clouded by adult rationale and material conditions.

There are also two separate scenes where we are forced to listen to X urinating and grunting, against an otherwise silent backdrop. He does this immediately upon arrival at two different hotel rooms, as if christening the space, non-verbally re-establishing dominance by subliminally asserting that his needs must always be met first. These sounds echo throughout the room, their bold audibility underlining that he is making a choice about his own exposure, about not closing the door—as opposed to the ways that Stefani and Zola are deprived of agency at every turn, unable to even sleep privately—and that he wants to perform comfort, in contrast to the ways that Zola, Stefani, and Derrek are all made to walk on eggshells.

2.3. “Hell”

After the first time that X ‘disciplines’ Zola, threatening to stalk, harm, or kill her if she disobeys—“I know where you live”—we are confronted with another set of sounds that reverberate through silence, and seem to last just a bit too long. X concludes his tirade, which included a shift in accent, by commanding Zola to put her seatbelt on, undoubtedly to decrease his liability if she were to get injured and to establish her as his ‘property’ that he wants to protect. As she attempts to do so, the seatbelt jams about five or six times in a row, indicating that she is pulling too hard, likely out of fear. The fact that we linger in this moment just a beat or two longer than it requires—typically, putting on a seatbelt is one fluid motion, rather than several repetitive, harsh sounds that prevent or suspend the completion of the task—externalizes the shared shock and angst between Zola and the audience, while also gesturing to the sickening irony and hollowness of X insisting on such “safety” theater27, when he has just made Zola feel profoundly unsafe.

After a busy and profitable night, thanks to Zola’s revision of the Backpage ad28, Stefani and Zola are finally able to sleep, sharing the bed and sleeping with their backs to one another in identical fetal positions. They resemble, yet again, a perfectly mirrored image. Sunlight gently washes over them through the window, while the space between them as they lay back-to-back seems indicative of the growing chasm between them, suggesting a turning away, rather than toward. Their brief moment of quiet is forcefully interrupted, as X rips off the top sheet to wake them up. Prior to taking off the sheet, we see him lingering briefly, watching as they sleep. Stefani asks how long he has been there, to which he responds, “about an hour.” The timing is perhaps meant to sound courteous—“I didn’t wake you up as soon as I got here”—but plays into the increasing sense of their vulnerability, as they were unaware of his presence and surveillance while they were sleeping. His open admission to watching them sleep, combined with the abrasiveness of ripping the sheet, and the fact that he immediately joins them on the bed when they are awake attest to visual and tactile dimensions of interracial surveillance. Zola brings her knees to her chest, protectively sheltering herself from his touch. Later, in a scene which Bravo names as the transition to “hell”—marked by the chaos of Zola finding out they are expected to continue with the Backpage in-calls, X finding out Derrek exposed Stefani as a sex worker on Facebook, and X pulling a gun on the group—X finds Zola alone on the balcony, and joins her out there, closing the glass door after himself. He and Zola start speaking, and he pulls out a handgun and gives it to her, redirecting it to her when she attempts to refuse. In this moment, we watch helplessly as X deputizes Zola once again, charging her with keeping Stefani safe, completely disregarding Zola’s own safety in favor of protecting his “property,” as well as indicating that neither woman possesses subjecthood in his mind.

After using the hotel room for one night, the next night Stefani and Zola make house calls, during which aural dynamics structure the scenes yet again. At one location, they are introduced to about five men who all go by the name Juan. The men allege having talked with X, who supposedly negotiated prices for “two women” and for a “gang bang,” neither of which Zola wants to happen. Upon Zola’s rejection of their terms, one of the Juans suggests that he will settle for “head,” to which all the Juans reply in unison, “we ain’t proper.” To verify the terms of the arrangement, Zola calls X in panic, only to be met with a busy signal. She calls him repeatedly, and as we wait with her, the busy signal proceeds to overtake the rest of the audio in the room. Listening to the busy signal drone on ad nauseum, we cannot hear anyone speaking as the men advance toward Stefani, making a circle around her. The alarming nature of the men talking in unison, as if rehearsed, serves to heighten the sense of danger, as they function as placeholders for the threat of toxic masculinity and the enclosure of heteropatriarchy; speaking simultaneously is a common horror film trope, calling into question how much of what we are about to see was premeditated, and more broadly, whether the speaker is human or some other form of non-human machine with unnatural, pre-recorded speech patterns. The sense of repetitiveness—not only in speech, but in sound—is merciless as the scene develops, with the busy signal dragging out the time of waiting, punctuated by unchanging, unsympathetic beeps.

Bravo and Harris juxtapose this scene, of Zola’s attempt to protect both herself and Stefani, with an immediate cut to Stefani’s “version of the story,” which she posted on Reddit three days after Zola published her tweets. This perspective shift is signaled by a high-angle shot of Stefani talking directly into the camera; the angle positions the viewer at the same height as if we are looking down at her like one of the men surrounding her, the same angle at which she would perform oral sex on them, or ostensibly on us. Unsurprisingly, she steals Zola’s introductory line—“wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch here fell out?”—replacing “it’s kinda long but it’s full of suspense” with “it’s long but I’ma speed it up.” In Stefani’s version, the fabrication is immediately clear: in the first shot, we see Stefani dressed entirely differently, wearing a pale pink suit with her hair pulled back into a bun, clearly meant to suggest professionalism, “styled and framed as if she is in an infomercial for shady legal services” (Wortham 2021, p. 35). From the beginning, she spins the story so as to position Zola as a laborer, but not herself; she suggests that they met “at the place where [Zola] works,” failing to mention that she was also working, and narrates her pimp instead as her “community leader.” The tone is deeply satirical, underlining the distortion it would take to classify a pimp as a “community leader.” She proceeds to characterize Zola as “very Black,” using “Black” as derogatory and to mean “ghetto,” “unsophisticated,” “unclean,” etc., as per white supremacy, which is, of course, ironic given that we know Stefani to be very appropriative of Blackness. This shift is far from unique, as many white people participate in this same pattern: leeching what they consider to be of value from Blackness, treating Black people as disposable, and seeking refuge in the privileges of whiteness when they want to garner sympathy and credibility.

Stefani tries every trick in the proverbial book of anti-blackness: hyper-sexualizing Zola and suggesting that Zola pursued Stefani; distancing herself from any attraction to Zola or any traces of queerness by claiming “I’m a Christian, I fear God”; suggesting that Zola needs welfare and portraying her as wearing a giant trash bag rather than clothes; arguing that she was not aware of various forms of sexual labor, such as what it meant to “dance” or what Backpage was, prior to meeting Zola; declaring that the club would not allow Zola to dance because “she dirty”; and suggesting that Zola needed saving from Stefani, who “everybody loved,” and who was capable of making more money than Zola. Stefani’s lies are so outlandish, and so vitriolic, that her narrative is unmistakably revealed as misogynoir, or a hatred of Black women (Bailey 2021). The disturbing venomousness and clownish absurdity of her narrative and its blatant lies underscore the intensity of the anti-blackness that Zola was facing throughout the trip, and speak to the inherent absurdity of white supremacy; while it is easy for viewers to watch this narrative and see how warped and untrue it is, the sobering reminder comes from the fact that the context is what’s particular to this framing, not the language or the arguments. In other words, the audience is confronted with a stylization and illustration of the narrative that makes its ridiculousness overly clear, when in reality, the material for this spiteful, delusional rant was culled directly from the real-life Stefani’s Reddit post. What we can see through her story recalls the phrase, “what’s truth is stranger than fiction,” or that sadly, white supremacy needs no embellishment, as it is always-already absurd. Visually cutting between these two scenes, Zola’s attempt to protect Stefani from a “gang bang” and Stefani’s unbridled disrespect for Zola, foregrounds a conversation about white women’s lack of reciprocal solidarity for Black women and reaffirms yet again that interracial encounter/attachment/experience is not indicative of progressive or anti-racist values.

Moreover, the fact that Stefani is able to so easily suppress the obvious cognitive dissonance29 between appropriating/desiring Blackness and making such blatantly anti-black comments further cements the absurdity of whiteness. This rant also recalls an earlier scene from the film, the second day of the road trip, when Stefani attempts to entertain the car with a racist story of the same vein: she maligns a coworker by calling her a “dirty” and “nasty” “nappy-ass bitch.” Zola is alarmed, and turns to look away (this time out the window)—as becomes her habit throughout the film—only to see the passing landscape littered with a cross and a confederate flag, foreboding indicators of how white supremacy will structure their trip.

After Stefani’s version of the story, we return to the car, where the threesome (Stefani, Derrek, and Zola) are driving between house calls. The camera is zoomed out so that we see the car, alone on the road and passing through traffic lights with the kind of ease only accessible in late night or early morning, as nighttime envelops the car visually and affectively. Darkness takes up the majority of the screen, and the driving sequences feel overly long, accompanied by a repetitive, unnerving musical score, and uninterrupted by any dialogue. At one point during the drive, the car approaches a Black person on the side of the road being brutalized by police officers. Stefani and Zola’s vehicle is the only car on the road, and as we pass by from the viewpoint of a passenger, the audio is heightened and we can hear everything from the scene. The officers accuse the man of “resisting arrest,” familiar rhetoric routinely weaponized against Black subjects, and we listen and watch as the police use their taser guns on him, backlit by the bright, unrelenting lights from the police cars. The camera framing is such that we stay with the unnamed, unarmed man, lingering on him through the back window even as Derrek drives past the scene without stopping. The audiovisual decisions for this scene are noteworthy—the audience cannot ‘look away’ or refuse to hear the violence. This scene calls out so many of the structuring logics of white supremacy that Zola is also facing: namely the surveillance of Black people by state and interpersonal forces, the presumed criminality always-already attached to Blackness, and the deputization of white people, and people in positions of power, to levy violence without consequence (Walcott 2021). On the heels of Stefani’s vitriolic monologue, Bravo and Harris use a scene of police brutality to stage a very direct conversation about whiteness and white people as vampiric and predatory, and to speak to the ways that cultural, interpersonal practices of theft are intertwined with state practices of dispossession and violence.

This scene of brutality is directly bookended by another scene of appropriation; when Zola and Stefani arrive in the lobby of the next hotel, they pass two white people playing the steel pan drum and dancing. We hear the steel pan prior to seeing it, reveling for a millisecond in the beauty of its sound, before seeing who is actually at the helm of the instrument. The juxtaposition of the sweetness of the sound with the disconcerting absence of Black people playing a historically Black instrument, as well as the levity of the white people dancing compared to the anti-black violence we just witnessed, is sickening. Auditorily—through Stefani’s verbal blackface, the calls for help from the unnamed Black man, and the steel pan music being enjoyed by whites—we are guided to a reckoning with cultural and literal practices of white consumption and Black disposability under white supremacy, with all three examples facilitated by some kind of interracial contact or encounter.

Even still, as they approach a hotel room, Zola asks Stefani if she’s cold, a tactile, embodied entry point into what Zola imagines to be her larger sense of discomfort or dread. Building from this embodied point of connection, Zola offers Stefani solidarity, yet again, reminding her “you don’t have to do this.” Stefani does not respond verbally, and enveloped by silence once again, we watch over her shoulder as Zola processes the absurdity of her rejection. Far beyond the point after which their friendship has corroded from Stefani’s betrayal, Zola extends a form of generosity that is not only unreciprocated but suggests Zola’s ability to make a larger structural critique, to understand the root violence of patriarchy and to depersonalize the situation even as she is being deeply personally affected. Wortham recognizes this dynamic as painfully rehearsed and borne out of survival, or “a study in the particular type of neurosis that Black women and femme-presenting people regularly deal with: feeling undermined yet forced into performing grace to avoid harm” (Wortham 2021, p. 34). I would also add that this scene, and the film as a whole, speaks to one of the many ways that whiteness harms white people: Stefani does not have the same degree of respect for herself and commitment to her own safety and sovereignty that Zola does. We can read into this betrayal a simultaneous disregard for Black women and a disregard for the self (Barkley Brown 1992).

In one of the final scenes, when Zola runs away down the hallway after Stefani gets snatched by Dion, we watch as she makes a panicked phone call while rushing down the stairwell, but we cannot hear her heels hitting the concrete or her voice as she calls for help, only the musical score. In perhaps one of the most terrifying moments of the film thus far, we cannot hear Zola’s words, which worsens our feelings of panic and calls us to pay closer attention to her body language. Again, the viewer grapples with a sense of helplessness, watching her flee while being forced to have a similar affective experience to Zola, having to imagine, or remember (depending on the viewer’s positionality), what it feels like to scream into a void; her voice goes unheard for us as the audience, just as her desire for protection and escape are fully ignored/dismissed within the narrative (we know that within the film context, the person on the other end of the phone can hear her in a literal sense, but will not heed her cries for help). This allows us to imagine or remember, in turn, the nightmarish feeling of calling for help without making any noise. Withholding certain sounds and amplifying others brings the audience closer to Zola’s lived experience, as it forces us to feel the destabilization rather than passively witness it. In having one of our sensory dimensions artificially altered, we lose some control, and are forced to reckon with how our minor degree of sensory deprivation and forced auditory imprecision pales in comparison to the coercion and lack of agency Zola is experiencing.

In the aftermath, rather than reassuring Zola of her safety, X blames Zola for the kidnapping, lambasting her for not “looking out” for Stefani. Zola responds by inverting the question: “who’s looking out for me?” This question is particularly haunting given that Zola was sexually assaulted by Dion after she is forced to enter the room with X; her assault creates enough “distraction” that it “allows [all of] them to escape the group of men” (Metcalf 2022). The historical accuracy of Zola being subjected to dehumanization and deprivation of bodily autonomy in service of white supremacist patriarchy is chilling. In this way, the film speaks to the historic and contemporary hyper-sexualization of Black subjects, which has served to enable white sexual violence, portrays Black subjects as “unknowable” within white, Western binary gender categories (Richardson 2013, p. 8), and attempts to erase Black interiority (Quashie 2012). Hortense Spillers (1987) traces this unknowability to the ways that Black women’s bodies “became flesh during the Atlantic slave trade,” such that Black women were deprived of control over their own sexuality and were instead made “available for the use of others” (Musser 2014, p. 160). Rejecting the racist burden of care placed upon Black women to care for white women and to treat them as fragile, Zola challenges the insinuation that she and Stefani only exist in relation to one another, or that she exists for Stefani. Her inquiry is neither answered nor even acknowledged, as X and Derrek continue to panic and strategize about Stefani in the background. Her question—“who’s looking out for me?”—functions as a chilling callback to the Combahee River Collective’s (1977) assertion that “we realize that the only people who care enough about [Black women] to consistently work for our liberation is us” (p. 108), and epitomizes her experience on the trip as a whole. That Zola’s question was not rhetorical, but was met with silence, suggests an unfinished, unresolved nature to the question of solidarity, while also refusing to resign to what has been the historical precedent.

3. Conclusions

I want to return to the title of this piece: “This is messy! You are messy! Your brain is broke!” In just these few words (directed at Stefani), Zola offers an ingenious and succinct cautionary tale about queer interraciality between Black and white women. While Zola and Stefani had palpable initial chemistry, Stefani’s adherence to whiteness perverts their connection into something absurd, devastating, and dangerous for Zola, or, in a word, messy. I argue that such messiness is often constitutive of Black/white interraciality more broadly. I also argue that by positioning Zola as a narrative of queer interracial encounter, we allow ourselves to understand Zola’s predicament with more nuance, historical context, and care than without such a framing. Moreover, by attuning ourselves to both the sonic and haptic dimensions of the film, we can honor the affective landscape, or the “felt sound[s],” that attest to Zola’s agency and refusal of the conditions in which she finds herself30.