They Cloned Tyrone Review
Tupac is alive, Michael Jackson ain’t dead, and Toni Morrison might just as well be sitting at a coffee shop nodding, I told you to everyone that passes by. Her presence certainly seems to loom large over They Cloned Tyrone, where you very quickly learn that almost no proclamation is unworthy of consideration, if only for an infinitesimal amount of time.
She, Morrison, articulated the searing effect the white gaze has on black life, giving voice to something that for centuries was a constant, but was so potent and lethal that it was unspeakable. Here it is, recaptured in the film’s opening image of an advertisement with a white man grinning obscenely, overlooking a group of black people having this very debate (about Tupac and Michael Jackson). It sets the stage for the inevitable clash between history and perception, ready to play out in the fictional neighborhood called The Glen.
With art, oftentimes one must at least wonder, if not ask who is the audience, or to put it another way, who did the artist have in mind when they made this? It is assumed, pejoratively, that black movies are made for black audiences and that there is no category called white movies. Movies like Oppenheimer are less impressive to me for the technical feats they accomplish than their ability to craft a historical narrative about post World War II America and what follows that is somehow completely devoid of black people. But alas, it is a movie, made for the movie going audience. Black movies must exist for the supplication of some other category of people.
This particular film (Tyrone) offers commentary on the issue of whether or not things naturally are the way they are, or if they were made to be that way, and swallows up the entire category of living with its questioning. It drops you into the lives of its characters and instead of asking you to wonder why they are like this, which is less of an honest question than it is a silent judgement, it forces you to consider who really stands to benefit from these people’s lives being this way?
Everyone has their own unique response to the question as the answers are revealed. Fontaine (John Boyega), Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), and Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) cycle between moments of doubt, denial, and defiance towards their encroaching reality as they take stock of how complex the machinery of what is happening to them really is.
What it means to have a self, and whether that self is a creation, or the by-product of circumstances is another central theme. Does it even matter, is what the film seems to be asking, because in the end, the self may only be a set of ideas, yours, or mine, made to fit together and promulgated through the body. The trailer and title make it known that clones play a part in the film, in the literal and metaphorical sense. Fontaine discovers he has been cloned, but even before this physical manifestation is shown, the ideas that he embodies appear to be nothing more than the repackaged ideas of someone else, which seems to be true for most of the people surviving in The Glen.
In this way, trauma becomes a common occurrence, and writ large, the private theater of the mind becomes a communal hive. Characters wrestle with what has happened to them and the burden of their nearly forgotten possibilities. Whether one becomes a hero, or a villain seems to hinge on the manner in which they resolve these issues.
Some people never recover from the loss of innocence. One death in particular crystallizes this, but regardless, most characters seem to have had to give birth to an identity much too soon and are thus forced to cling fiercely to it given their vulnerability. Parents are conspicuously absent, and everyone must become their own mother or father much too soon with far too little guidance. Perhaps this is part of the message—parents are, after all, are one step closer to being elders, who function as the collective memory of a community. Memory is a form of safekeeping, without which any group of people is rendered unable to remember the brilliance and tragedy of their history, and thus makes themselves vulnerable to the most wicked ignorance. This is personified by a character whose life is a reminder of what happens when your entire history, past and future, is overshadowed by your worst experience.
The women in the film are the ones who display the courage and intelligence to fight back and injure the cycle that is harming so many, and perhaps break it entirely. They seem to never lose sight of who exactly this is for, and thankfully the film spares them from the fate of being cast as nothing more than accessories to the salvation of men. Yo-Yo dares to dream despite conditions that threaten to suffocate her very existence.
The story is entertaining and even heroic in some moments and fails only if neat and clean resolution is what one seeks, which is certainly forgivable, and fitting given the nature of what it deals with. A quest to discover one’s identity, in this instance, benefits from the inclusion of clones and science fiction but would be no less perplexing without them.