Vigilante After Valentine's
Coffy tomorrow + a new love being sold
Coffy is a 1973 blaxploitation classic starring Pam Grier. The Whitney Review is presenting a screening at Metrograph tomorrow (Saturday Feb 15, 6pm).
The story is about a vigilante who seeks violent revenge against a heroin dealer responsible for her sister’s addiction.
Brandon Harris wrote an essay about blaxploitation and the recent narratives historicizing it for the last issue of The Whitney Review — a meditation on the legacy of radicalism being commodified, including Kamala Harris’s campaign: “It’s not the first time Washington learned Hollywood’s lesson — the iconography of Black radicalism is sellable to whites.”
That’s where the idea to screen the movie came from, but then in the meantime, Luigi Mangione happened.
Maya Kotomori (who’s going to lead the post-screening discussion tomorrow) offers this frame: “Coffy (Pam Grier) is a nurse who goes undercover as a prostitute to exact revenge on drug dealers, and I can’t help but think about Luigi Mangione, a vigilante ‘folk hero’ who exacted revenge on an insurance company CEO (one could argue that UHC CEO = drug dealer, but that’s neither here nor there). I’m thinking of similarities/differences between the Coffy and Mangione’s vigilantism, how both acts respond to real life issues that were contemporary to those acts.”
Maya also happened to mention Coffy in her review of Lauren Conrad’s infamous mascara tear, also in the fourth issue of The Whitney Review: “Black and wet, she rolled down Lauren’s cheek and stole the show, for a single episode at least. It’s a performance that rivals even Faye Dunaway’s red lip in Chinatown or Pam Grier’s Afro in Coffy.”
Filmmaker Kiernan “Knives” Francis and artist ThugPop are going to join Maya and Brandon for the post-screening discussion. Not to be missed! Copying everyone’s bios at the end of this post. And then we’re going to celebrate after with Gotham and have a little drink, bite, nearby at 99 Canal.
It wasn’t intentionally planned to be the day after Valentine’s day, but maybe the day after this performative pageant of romance, you absolutely do want to watch 91 minutes of violent revenge!
People used to complain about how Valentine’s was this capitalist invention, a fake tradition marketed by Hallmark and jewelry stores. A holiday to make you buy stuff.
Then the last couple of years, it’s really morphed into a new kind of commercial opportunity now — less hetero-couple and more a galentines vibes, craze glaze lip gloss, pink typewriters, branded activations.
A writer pitched me a story the other day that used the term “pro-monog athem” to describe a love song. I’d never heard anyone call anything “pro-monog” before, but Valentine’s does seem “post-monog” now, probably because they focused-grouped it and it’s safer to sell things this way. But does it still maybe feel like a win maybe? If you believe in queer resistance to the family form. Aaina explained it better last night when we were having a cigarette outside a reading Sam Falb organized/anointed “Meeting of the Lovers” well-supplied with festive heart-shaped lollipops. Nora Treatbaby’s review of Max Fox and Madeline-Lane McKinley’s fag/hag feels relevant (and one of my favorites from the last issue of TWRNW).
I read at that “Lovers” reading. One of several Valentine’s things I was conscripted for: Paris Review on things your ex recommends, a Pleasure Lists reading at McNally sponsored by an affordable eyeglasses company (recapped on Elephant by Emmeline), and a Byline zine (out today) and reading (next week) sponsored by a design-forward zillennial morning-after pill. Accumulatively, I got $500 and a free pair of glasses.
In this economy, we’re all whores. In Coffy, the Pam Grier character just dresses up like one to exact her revenge.
Our lovely panelists contributing to the post-film screening talk tomorrow:
Brandon Harris is the president and co-founder, with the director Shaka King, of I’d Watch That, author of MAKING RENT IN BED-STUY (2017), director of REDLEGS (2012), contributing editor to Filmmaker Magazine and a recovering streaming era Hollywood studio executive. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, VICE, Variety, and The New York Review of Books.
Kiernan “Knives” Francis is a writer-filmmaker, casting director, and stylist whose work explores queer subculture and young adulthood. His featurette BACKSEAT OF THE COUCH, a downtown coming-of-age story, and his short film TRIAL PERIOD, now streaming on The Criterion Channel, showcase his signature blend of hedonistic realism and vibrant underground talent.
Maya Kotomori is a writer, editor, and cultural critic who just quit her job as Document Journal’s Associate Editor. She earned her Master’s Degree in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University for a thesis coining the term deepmeaning, a way of reading deepfakes within modern documentary footage. (Maya also cameos in this report I wrote on a basement bookshop for Family Style).
ThugPop is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, video, collage, music, and woven tapestry. Both cinema and self-representation are central to their work, and they’re recognized for a fiercely lethal approach to glam that echoes the spirit of Pam Grier’s most iconic roles.
