“They Cloned Tyrone” Eviscerates the Black Professional Managerial Class
Sourced: Captured, Netflix
The satire They Cloned Tyrone is an absolute delight. It's essentially about a group of Blaxploitation archetypes (i.e., a portmanteau of Black and exploitation describing films that perpetuate offensive stereotypes about the Black community) as they are brought together in the wake of an unusual murder. Along the way, they uncover a conspiratorial plot in their community of Glen that cuts to the core of white supremacy in America.
There are many lenses from which to deconstruct this film. The most obvious is perhaps how it humanizes stereotypical archetypes — "the pimp," "the thug," "the ho" — that have been the butt of our white supremacist society’s jokes for years. These characters use skills they have learned in their lives to correct injustices, expanding the viewer’s empathy and providing a bit of excellent catharsis along the way. (As a personal note, I loved how Yo-Yo used her passion for Nancy Drew books to help solve this mystery).
One thing I want to narrow in on is how this movie treats the Black Professional Managerial Class (i.e., a term used to describe people who control production processes not through the owning of capital but via their high places in management). The film sees them not as a vanguard for liberation but rather as barriers at best and, at worst, tools of the Black working class's obliteration.
White Supremacist capitalism
To cut to the chase of what the plot of this movie is, a white supremacist organization with ties to "those in power" is experimenting on the community of Glen and communities all over the world to learn how to control people of color.
This movie could have personalized this conspiracy through individual actors, as has been standard in many Hollywood films where racism is the product of one particular individual's bigotry (see Hilly in The Help), but instead, it's more amorphous. We don't even get to meet the big bad at the very top of this conspiracy. As one minor antagonist says when asked if he's in charge: "No, everyone's got a boss. Mine's a real hardass." There is no simple villain we can point to to blame everything on.
Rather, the film places its ire on a system, and not just any system, but that of white supremacist capitalism. Black people are not being controlled overtly but subtly through consumption. The conspiracy, in particular, is doing so through items of consumption closely associated with Black culture — fried chicken, grape juice, club music, etc. These products literally have components meant to distract, subdue, and pacify those in the community of Glen.
We see this in the real world, too. Fast food, for example, may not be direct mind control, but it has long been studied that these foods take advantage of quirks in human biology to make them as addicting as possible. Fast food companies then place their stores (which, again, have psychologically addicting products) in Blacker and Browner neighborhoods, taking advantage of these groups and furthering a sense of dependence on their products.
On average, this is compounded by the fact that Black people in America earn less than their white counterparts, have less wealth, and own less property. We may have moved past direct bondage (at least partially — see the prison system). However, groups at the bottom of our racialized caste system are still systemically denied the means to access high-end resources. This reality means that many must rely on subpar food, housing, and the like, which, on average, reduces Black people’s overall standard of living: a fact the film satirizes at every turn.
Tyrone & The Black Professional Managerial Class
Knowing this, one might think that when this film reaches its climax, we would have to hear a monologue from some white CEO or political figure running the facility below Glen about how white people are "superior," but They Cloned Tyrone is far more nuanced than offering a simple binary condemnation. It instead places its contempt, symbolically at least, at the Black Professional Managerial Class and how they often collaborate with that system to stifle actual change.
A central conceit of this film is cloning, and one of the main characters, Fontaine, has been cloned many times. A minor antagonist Fontaine has to "face off" against is a wordless clone of himself called Chester. Dressed in a suit ("professional attire"), Chester is forced to obey the orders of his superiors, a very telling and somewhat sad portrayal of what the Black Professional Managerial Class must become to obtain power. While Fontaine uses that lack of agency to ultimately free himself from capture, Chester is not redeemed following Fontaine’s triumph. Instead, he is left motionless, no longer having any orders to follow.
Furthermore, when we meet the manager of the facility beneath Glen, it's Fontaine, well, at least the original Fontaine, a brilliant scientist who perfected the cloning program. Original Fontaine is working for this white supremacist organization partly because he wants to resurrect his dead brother (a nod to how many Black professionals serve large companies and organizations that actively harm their communities for personal gain) but also because of his philosophical outlook. As he monologues to cloned Fontaine:
“… It's not enough to think the same. We have to be the same. My work in the cloning initiative helped me track 378 unique genes that separate you, and your ghettos, from your counterparts in the suburbs…Once I sequenced them all, I approached my superiors with an addendum, and I'm sure you’re aware of our first test subjects… [the managers], not complete successes, but they pass…
… We have since perfected the process….this won’t happen overnight Fontaine. It’ll happen over generations. And now we are at the precipice of our true national rollout. Assimilation is better than annihilation.”
Original Fontaine essentially wants Black people to be white, to cling to whiteness so hard their Blackness, impossibly, disappears. There has been a long historical tradition of Black intellectuals arguing over how best to tackle White Supremacy, and not all of them have been revolutionary, but like original Fontaine, assimilationists, albeit not as heightened as in the movie. Booker T. Washington— a man around during the mid-1800s to the early 1900s — notoriously argued for this viewpoint, saying in a speech in 1895:
“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.”
Washington here is essentially advocating for Black Americans to ignore discrimination and instead focus on material prosperity. Others have pointed out that this viewpoint concedes political power for vague promises of future acceptance. In the words of W.E.B DuBois in a widely cited essay in 1903: "Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission…Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things, — First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights, Third, higher education of Negro youth…"
Indeed, there is much to believe the film would be more in line with DuBois than Washington. When you take a step back, Original Fontaine's plan is actual annihilation. He intends to use breeding to slowly replace the Black population over the course of generations until everyone is the same. He may think he's serving the community, however, everything he is doing hurts the community of Glen. Not only does he hold internally racist viewpoints, such as believing the differences between races (a social construct) are genetic, but he is willing to condemn his people to a slow withering away in the name of "progress."
They Cloned Tyrone is decidedly not in the pro-assimilationist camp. It's telling that Cloned Fontaine has to kill off this professional version of himself. There is no redemption for the Black Assimilationist, it seems.
A Fringe Conclusion
Ultimately, freedom for Glen doesn't come from the top — and it certainly doesn't come from the middle — but below. The people that society thinks are worthless — those who "keep the rents" down so that the conspiracy can conduct its experiment — are who ultimately raid the facility and bring its abhorrent behavior to light.
Throughout the movie, we are shown over and over again that "forgotten" people have more insight and power than our society gives them credit for. Whether it is the man in front of the liquor store who knows precisely "what's going on" or the gang members willing to go to bat, violently if necessary, for their community — it's the people below, the movie suggests, who have the power to bring our white supremacist society to its knees.
And in an age of rampant inequalities, that is a lesson worth considering.