17 Sep How Zola Challenges and Subverts the Racial-Pairing Paradigm
BY LEA ANDERSON
You know it even if you think you don’t. Cher and Dionne in Clueless; Bianca and Chastity in 10 Things I Hate About You; Torrance and Isis in Bring It On. More recently, we can look to Paula and Olivia in The White Lotus; and Vivian and Claudia and/or Vivian and Lucy in Moxie. Look further back and you’ll find Lora and Annie, and Susie and Sarah in 1959’s Imitation of Life; Beatrice and Delilah, and Peola and Jessie from the 1934 original; and who could ever forget Scarlett and Mammy in Gone with the Wind? These films, along with countless others–not to mention centuries of literature, theater, advertising, and other vehicles used to establish cultural narratives–can collectively be termed “racial-pairing texts,” (as coined by scholar Paula Connolly) demonstrative of what Dr. Brigitte Fielder refers to as the “the racial-pairing paradigm.”
According to Fielder, the racial-pairing paradigm refers to the dynamic wherein “racial-pairing stories do not work primarily to generate white sympathy for black characters,” but more often exemplify how “literary models of interracial sympathy tend to universalize and prioritize whiteness and white life experience as normative positions of readerly identification.” While the term “racial-pairing text” can refer to any interracial pairing–from depictions of coworking relationships (Lethal Weapon, Men in Black) to romances and familial dynamics (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Save the Last Dance)–this piece focuses on gendered friendships, and the fact that more often than not, paired models of interracial feminine friendship are constructed to orient themselves around and in service of their white characters. By privileging the perspective of its Black lead, the 2021 film Zola not only flips the script on all this, it also repurposes the racial-pairing paradigm to tell a coming-of-age story that may not leave its audience with warm fuzzies but raises essential questions about the limits of interracial friendship and what it even means for a white person to claim they love a Black person.
While the racial-pairing paradigm might be a new concept to many, people might be more familiar with the tropes it produces. Caricatures like the Mammy, Magical Negro, or Black Best Friend essentially reflect relational fantasies. They’re not just how white people imagine Black people to be but reflect the ways the white imagination expects us to relate to them, each other, and ourselves. A Black Best Friend–like the Mammy and the Magical Negro–is empty of characterization beyond their relation to and service of the white character’s development. As a byproduct of the broader pairing paradigm, the trope reflects the relational dynamics desired, propagated, and policed by the white imagination.
Fielder traces the origin of modern racial-pairing texts to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly. Constructed with the explicit intent to reimagine relationships between white and Black individuals from a place of Christian benevolence, paternalism, and saviorism (as opposed to violent hatred), nowhere in the novel is this more evident than in the pairing of the “angelic” Evangeline St. Clare and “wicked” Topsy.
“Little Eva,” as she’s often called, is an aspirational figure within the text: the embodiment of Christian piety and purity. This characterization is established through the patience and kindness she expresses to the enslaved characters around her–among them, Topsy, often regarded as an incarnation of the pickaninny caricature. Defiant and willful upon her arrival, she is repeatedly described as “goblin-like,” “wicked,” and “heathenish,” her character constructed in almost perfect binary opposition to Eva in order to erect a narrative where Eva’s goodness can “save” Topsy. But, as Fielder muses, one “wonders at the nature of the relationship between a slaveholder and her ‘slave-friend.’”
She calls this dynamic “stewardship” or “interracial non-friendship” for the precise fact that consent, agency, and care are not equally distributed between the two girls. In actuality, the depicted relationship is one predicated entirely on the absence of mutual trust, mutual respect, and capacity for “reciprocal interracial exchange,” which is to say, Topsy–or any enslaved person–did not have the capacity to say “no,” by the very nature of enslavement in the first place.
Wealthy/white people love to imagine that their servants (“the help”) love them. The Mammy figure is a testimony to this, though the impulse actually transcends race, gender, and sexuality (consider Dorota from Gossip Girl). Again, it’s a relational fantasy: a reflection of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal desire and utopia, where the underclass not only know their place but happily perform the roles prescribed to them as an essential part of the familial structure. The narrative between Topsy and Eva in effect established a model of interracial feminine friendship that equates white girlhood with benevolent martyrdom and Black girlhood with devoted subservience. In short, as Fielder puts it, “Eva and Topsy illustrate the limitations of interracial friendships that prioritize white feelings over black suffering.”
These are the precise relational dynamics Zola seeks to unpack—that is, before the project goes ahead and tosses the whole suitcase out the window.
A’Ziah King couldn’t have penned a more perfect introduction to the now infamous Twitter thread which forms the film’s basis: “Y’all wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” Out the gate, she shatters the foundation of what we’ve been socialized to expect from racial-pairing narratives. For one, the story is hers, and two, we know from the start that the friendship ends.
Played by Taylour Paige, Zola represents the film’s emotional center, and her lens is the one through which we’re invited to experience; a lens that extends beyond events, circumstances, or plot points to the other characters themselves, particularly Jessica, whose name becomes Stefani (Riley Keough) in the film. “The Story,” as King calls it, is explicitly about how “me and this bitch here fell out.” It’s not so much the story of an interracial friendship, as the dissolution of one–a notion inconceivable within a standard, white-centered pairing text. Because such pairing narratives necessitate the preservation of white subjecthood, they almost unilaterally end either in death or the friendship equivalent of happily ever after, extremes which imply that no other way exists to navigate such dynamics. Whiteness can’t imagine its own rejection. Zola, by contrast, is a pairing text that centers its Black lead and therefore depicts just that, enhanced by the context of sex work which further throws these dynamics into stark relief by revealing how libidinal economies drive economies of care.
The plot is fairly straightforward. Zola is a waitress and part-time dancer who first encounters Stefani as a customer at the restaurant where she works. Almost immediately, the two get to “vibe over [their] hoeism,” and within a 24-hour turnaround, Stefani invites her on a weekend road trip to dance at a strip club in Tampa. Needless to say, the trip is not the trip Zola expects it to be. The pair is joined by Stefani’s boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun), a simpering hapless white boy, and her pimp, X (Colman Domingo), a mercurial, shadowy figure who spontaneously breaks out a continental African accent during his most extreme moments of aggression. Dancing becomes full-service work becomes the threat of ongoing non-consensual sexual slavery—unless Zola can finesse the situation enough to escape it.
To see this world clearly is to observe folks do some wacky ass shit. Sometimes there’s a charm to it, a harp’s shimmer twinkling the background. But as the film illustrates, our very survival often requires us to see through that charm and to do so posthaste. Like the thread, there’s an incredible amount of humor in this film, born of its excruciatingly high stakes, but also because relational duality is the primary focus of the camera’s gaze. Zola and Stefani are constantly depicted next to each other, facing each other, facing themselves in mirrors, phone cameras, and various social media posts, and, ultimately, through the viewer’s gaze: a unified juxtaposition that defines pairing narratives as pairing narratives. But even as Zola acts as narrator and audience stand-in, writer-director Janicza Bravo and co-writer Jeremy O. Harris wield the omniscience of the camera’s gaze to emphasize distinctions between the two women that specifically affirm Zola’s perspective.
We hear Stefani’s gum-smacked blaccent next to Zola’s authentic use of AAVE; we notice Zola’s absolute silence at the periphery of critical moments while Stefani, often at the center, continuously escalates tensions; we see Zola’s clear pee in the stall next to Stefani’s neon yellow bowl. The effect is to flip the established pairing paradigm on its head, and, by proxy, reveal the preposterous absurdity that comes with being a Black woman–or a Black person of any marginalized gender identity–forced to navigate white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Zola and Stefani aren’t the only pairing narrative the film offers. Also relevant are Derrek and X, the masculinities they embody and perform (which carry the weight of their own stereotypes and subversions), and how these masculinities intersect with and inform both women’s experiences. As we come to find, Zola is essentially a mark, the “brunette” in the Ebony and Ivory fantasy X intends to sell. Stefani outright lies, manipulates, and indeed preys on Zola, knowingly and intentionally placing her in a circumstance of real and immediate danger. This comes to a head in a notable hotel scene between the two women, where Zola snaps, “Bitch, you got me fucked up! This is messy! You’re messy. Your brain is broke.”
Her estimation is spot on. Stefani is the essence of an unreliable narrator. Her judgement is clearly not sound. She lacks discernment, self-awareness, self-regard, and consistently, strategically victimizes herself to coax Zola into increasingly dangerous scenarios while both acknowledging and abetting the danger X poses to them both. Derrek reveals along the way that Stefani had done this before to other girls—that this was a pattern of behavior. “I don’t fuck with you. I don’t like you,” Zola makes clear while the two get ready for yet another nights’ work she does not want to do. Off camera, Stefani maintains she “didn’t do anything wrong.”
Zola presents what some critics disparage as a characterization inconsiderate of Stefani’s plight as an exploited victim, but such critics miss what this film is trying to accomplish and actually demonstrate the very bias the project satirizes. It’s a film overtly concerned with the fact that because experience is racially gendered, narrative is racially gendered, as are the politics of storytelling, whose perspective is allowed to dictate “truth,” whose truth audience members are most willing to accept as fact, and how these politics have implications that extend far beyond the confines of the theater–a thread that connects the interpersonal to the structural and systemic.
These tensions are laid bare in the brief interlude entitled @stefani. Prefaced with the statement, “On October 30, 2015, Stefani Jezowski recounted the following on reddit,” here, the film shifts perspective to privilege Stefani’s account, in keeping with the real-life Jessica’s actions after Zola’s thread went viral.
Dressed in a bubblegum pink skirt suit, Stefani recalls a very different rendition, about a lunch with her “community leader, Jonathan” and the “very ratchet, very Black” waitress who injects herself into the weekend because “I’m broke. I need welfare.” She repeatedly asserts she is “a Christian” who “fear[s] god” and only “fuck[s] with Jesus” as she degrades Zola in equal step. A reenactment supports her revision and here, Zola wears a trash bag, a permanent scowl, her hair undone while Stefani calls her “dirty,” amongst other racially charged, misogynoirist epithets. Her summation of the whole thing can be reduced to “everybody loved me” and Zola is “a jealous bitch.”
In casting herself as Little Eva, the aggrieved heroine who did nothing but generously extend herself to a “very ratchet, very Black” “dirty” stranger, Stefani–and her real life counterpart–attempt to play on the anti-Blackness of the public imagination in order to escape accountability for harm caused.
The inclusion of this segment points to the slipperiness of memory, narration, and perception—but also highlights the degree to which this too is racialized, and subject to white violence. In interviews, A’Ziah King has disclosed the fact that the thread was a work produced to help her heal from the trauma that followed her experience. Though both the thread and film present “The Story” in an absurdist, bombastic form, they do so to highlight the extraordinary prevalence of these tactics of revision and victimhood as a covert tool of control and dominance that ultimately endangers and actively harms Black people through strategic dismissal of our own accounts of our own experiences. To minimize or deny such harm is a refusal of accountability that literally enacts the very behavior the project seeks to critique—a type of passive witness activated by the absence of action, the willingness to just roll on by and let it happen.
When the film snaps out of Stefani’s metanarrative, the camera’s gaze places us back inside the car as it rolls by a scene of police brutality but does not stop. The man being beaten says over and over again that he just wants to go home, a sentiment Zola repeatedly expresses herself and is similarly ignored.
The film is realistic about its portrayal of sex work and the inherent risk it involves. That Stefani appears impervious to this recognition, even as Zola is hyperaware, is part of what makes her so dangerous, and increasingly escalates the likelihood of harm. This culminates in a harrowing scene where, as they walk up to their date’s door and Zola begs her to reconsider, the door opens, and Stefani is forcibly dragged inside. Zola takes off, calls on Derrick and X who treats her like a suspect because she was “supposed to be looking the fuck out for her!”
The expectation that Zola is meant to endanger herself to protect this white girl she doesn’t know, who manipulated her into a situation where her attempts to leave were met with violent threats, demonstrates mammification in action. No matter our age, the circumstances, or what stage of life we’re in, Black girls and women–particularly dark-skinned and fat girls and women–are expected to caretake literally everyone, are villainized if we refuse, and villainized if we simply can’t.
“The device of interracial friendship,” as Fielder puts it, has been a form of worldbuilding that instills these covert values and expectations in its audience. White girls learn that they are Main Characters and Black girls are Sidekicks and then they carry the expectation of that treatment and power dynamic into their real-life encounters. Further, they then feel justified in their quests to punish (or “humble”) anyone who dares put themselves first, and because whiteness is power, the flex is typically supported. Which is how we get X, who supposedly “takes care” of Stefani, offsetting that responsibility to Zola.
In what amounts to the film’s thesis, she looks him square in the eyes and asks, “Who’s looking out for me?”
Of course, he never does answer. Instead, he drags her right back to the room and offers her up in exchange for “his bitch.” The events of the film’s conclusion are both disturbing and abrupt, and while I’ll leave out the specifics for those who’ve not yet watched, I would like to make note of Stefani and Zola’s final exchange. Once again in the car, chaos in the background, Stefani turns to face Zola in the backseat, her lip busted, and wistfully declares, “Girl, you know I love you.” It’s her last-ditch attempt to gaslight and manipulate. Zola has no words for her. Instead, she rolls down the window and lets the air blow through her bullshit.
Whether Zola and Stefani were ever really friends is undoubtedly the question the film wants its viewers to ask, to practice a degree of discernment we aren’t always taught how to have. Historically, pairing narratives have been a tool to model the power dynamics and expectations of a given interracial relationship, but primarily they’ve served to inculcate white children into awareness of their own social dominance and standing, and to teach Black children how to decenter themselves in preparation for a life of centering the needs of whiteness. These same dynamics are then replicated and reinforced at all life stages. Topsy and Eva become Bianca and Chastity become Lora and Annie.
In casting Zola as the Main Character of her own life, King, Bravo, and Harris repurpose the pairing narrative to demonstrate how hard this world makes it for Black folks to say no, and still survive. It doesn’t just challenge the racial-pairing paradigm—it subverts it altogether by giving its titular character the option to reject whiteness and assert her own humanity through assertion of subjecthood, while being honest about the danger that can accompany this perceived boldness. While most twenty-first century pairing texts still fail to model what Fielder describes as “antiracist interracial alliance,” in which an interracial friendship navigates, confronts, and collaborates against anti-Black racism, Zola casts aside that endeavor altogether and models the more necessary skill of how to discern when we should just get out.
Zola is currently available to watch on Amazon Prime.
Lea Anderson is a horror scholar, critic, and freelance writer. Working at the intersections of Black feminism and monster theory, her FANGORIA column, “Be(ware) The Swallowing” explores the many manifestations of the devouring Other as it appears in horror films. She has written for Bright Wall/Dark Room, Collider, Shudder’s The Bite, We Are Horror Zine, amongst others, and lives just outside Los Angeles.
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