Last week, longwinded YouTuber F.D. Signifier released a long awaited deep dive on the Black entertainer Tyler Perry. Perry is a filmmaker whose work is ubiquitous and for a long time felt impossible to escape. While his work is ostensibly for a Black audience, if you watch more than one of his films, it also reveals itself as tedious, formulaic, and at its worst, anti-Black. It's true that Perry is a self made billionaire and by all metrics a success. But what does his success mean for the rest of the Black community?
Gita and Isaiah sat down to talk about this, and the rest of Signifier's epic video.
Gita Jackson: Isaiah! Thank you for joining me in unraveling the four hour YouTube video essay about Tyler Perry from F.D. Signifier that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Coming in on the heels of the America's Next Top Model documentary, this extremely long essay takes aim at another Black capitalist, the Madea Maven himself. I wanted to ask you: what's your relationship to Tyler Perry?
Isaiah Colbert: Lordy. Well, my relationship with Tyler Perry—like most Black trauma—came from my mother. Or, more specifically, my mom owning the VHS tapes of his early Madea plays that she got from local bootleggers that she'd play almost daily when I was growing up. Though by then, I knew the man less than I knew his most famous character, Madea, before she became the mainstream caricature of tough Black love she is today. While I've been able to avoid Tyler Perry for the most part in my mostly autonomous day to day life as an adult, whenever I go over to my mom's for the holidays, she's guaranteed to either have her TV already on to whatever the Tyler Perry channel on her Roku TV or ask me if I've seen his latest produced movie after she's already put it on before waiting for my reply. In short, my relationship with him has been against my will.
Gita: That's weirdly relatable for me? At least in that Tyler Perry is inescapable if you're Black. In college, I was in the cinema studies program and I ended up taking a Black Cinema class, and we spent a lot of time talking about that same distribution and tour model that made Tyler Perry so successful. Getting on the chitlin' circuit and making movies specifically for Black churchgoers was extremely lucrative! But the work itself... well.
I think we also both have opinions on the work. I've never seen a Tyler Perry movie all the way through on purpose, and nothing I have seen of his work makes me want to. Yet, he is one the most successful Black filmmakers of all time. And I think he can be a good actor on occasion—Fincher casting him as a shrewd lawyer in Gone Girl was a stroke of genius.
For me, watching this video brought together a lot of criticisms I've had about Black capitalists like Perry—your Jay-Zs, your Tyras. But also, it really reveals that these films are not loving portraits of Black people. Perry seems to kind of hate us?
Isaiah: Oh, big time. Or at least he's hit too comfortable a stride, similar to Dave Chappelle, where he knows he has enough cultural cache with Black people based on his past good will to know that he can joke about owning a town and treating its people like serfs without realize how out of touch the joke is. But the real joke here is that Tyler Perry can basically pump out the same meat and package it as different items on a fast food menu and he knows folks are gonna eat it up because it has the veneer of being by us for us. In reality its not dissimilar to a King Bach-style Vine with a prestige production machine backing it.
But, like F.D. Signifier's video highlights, it's something a lot of Black folks have been keyed in on with a lot of help from Boondocks living up to how we'll clown on a nigga and have way too much truth layered in our jokes. He's a good character actor who huffs a bit too much of his own farts and thinks he's putting on airs with the slop he's mass producing on his channel. Unfortunately, convincing my mom of that is as easy as having a conversation about genders and my being bi: a lost cause.
Gita: LMAO yeah, when I came out to my mom she didn't believe me and then we never talked about it again. She also doesn't know what my pronouns are because I'd rather not have that argument.
In Signifier's video, he frames the entire long-ass essay around the idea of building a table. I really enjoy this metaphor because, well, so often Black people are waiting for a "seat at the table" of success, of prestige, of financial support. But by the end of the video, Signifier says that Perry has truly built a table to sit at and eat at by himself. To me, that's the most evil part of Perry.
Isaiah: Yeah, not to compare Tyler Perry to Family Guy (lol) but the whole thing seeing how he operates reminded me of the one cutaway gag about a father gorging himself on food while his emaciated family starves and he says they can eat when he's finished. But he's never finished.
But that won't stop a lot of Black folks lauding him as an aspirational tale of Black excellence that every young man should strive to achieve and do the most to sacrifice and claw your way to being at the top. Myself included. I probably can contribute a major part of my being nonbinary because I had a eureka moment in tandem with just not vibing with all the gender standards my family placed on me to what Tyler Perry basically thinks of light skinned men. Basically to be this Christlike figure of masculinity who will sacrifice and save everyone. To be "the man of the house" who commands respect while also being excellent at something that gets me money rather than what I enjoy, no matter how much it's putting myself out, and to never cry about it. Something that's bullshit; men should be allowed to cry and be soft.
And the whole notion of Black excellence is also bullshit. MFers should be allowed to just be Black without having the pressure to be excellent to give their lives inherent meaning. But Tyler, and his works by proxy, are an enduring sentiment from Boomer and Gen-X churchgoers that people from my generation have as much a chance as a pebble of stopping a wave from reaching shores with how his whole enterprise is intrinsically linked to and supercharged by the cultural Goliath that is the Black church. The man is as much a plague to my existence as the McMahon family.
Gita: Honestly, seeing someone look at the empire that Perry has built and declare that the emperor has no clothes was refreshing to me. I remember when Jay-Z was talking about "gentrify your own hood." For a long time, Black millionaires like him were the people I was told to look up to, people who escaped the hood and consolidated wealth for themselves, the rest of us be damned.
A lot can be said for Perry's outright anti-Blackness, especially when it comes to Black men. He motherfucking HATES dark skinned Black men. Hell, he doesn't like Black women so much either. It's hard to say whether or not he holds the same opinions on blackness that are expressed in his films because he is strikingly dishonest, but he has built his entire empire on abusive dark skinned men and wilting, abused Black women. Black capitalists like Perry often say they're doing it "for the culture," but apparently "the culture" only means themselves and their gentrified hoods.
Isaiah: And like, what the hell does "gentrify your own hood" even mean? No more corner stores and everything is cashless and by proxy anti-homeless and anti-baller on a budget? That always rang to me less like building our own and more building for oneself by playing the game that's already disadvantaged Black folks for years, but because you're doing it it's somehow better.
I grew up in Cabrini Green in Chicago, and I can tell you the gentrification of one's own hood seldom comes from the folks who live there because we all got moved the fuck out to make way for dispensaries, mall kiosks, and housing that a rare few of the folks who lived in those project buildings got grandfathered back into after being kicked to the south side. He's a big reason why I just roll my eyes whenever I see someone of his ilk claim his art isn't for everyone while saying it's for me. When in reality, he's just playing in my face. So it was really cathartic to have F.D. Signifier "king of the Blacks" (lol) put all of my deep-seated resentment and complicated history with the man in a video essay that wasn't long for the sake of being long and didn't waste my time or folks who aren't in the know of Perry's bullshit.
A video essay that stays on message without getting long in the tooth is a lost art within itself.
Gita: Right, can we just give F.D. Signifier his flowers for a second? I feel like most video essays are just... long. Not informative, not interesting, and most just don't earn their length. This video did not feel like it was four hours long. I watched it all in one go like, hypnotized. Every single moment of the video was essential! Everything he puts down, he picks back up again! Finally we are eating good on YouTube!
Isaiah: Me and my friend basically raced to text each other that the video finally dropped and finished it before it wound up getting temporarily taken down. We'd been waiting for that jawn for a minute and it didn't disappoint. Cynically, I always assume his videos have the same purpose as Black literature purposely placed on a table at the front of a predominantly white-owned bookstore as the kind of media that's more for educating the children of the chalk on Black existence than necessarily telling me some shit I don't already know.
And with contemporary video essays feeling like an exercise in filibustering a video into the double digit hours just to say a whole lotta nothing, I was a bit worried I'd get a bit of fluff from unc here too since I wasn't too hot on his Beyonce video. But you can really tell that he was in full force with this one, making sure to cover the whole history of Tyler Perry and his chokehold on both the entertainment industry he's carved out for himself and the hot plate he's guaranteed with older Black folks as charitably and brutally honest as necessary.
Gita: Going back to the beginning of the video, you can really see the artfulness of it. I do remember, like Signifier, being in school and having white teachers show us "culturally relevant" movies that centered Black struggle and Black pain. I, too, tired of only ever seeing movies about Black slaves. I remember embarrassing a teacher who cast me, the only Black person in class, as a slave in a table read of something or other. All this then creates an environment for someone like Perry to exist--a filmmaker who, for better or for worse (it's for worse) shows the middle-class Black life as it is often lived.
I especially really loved Signifier's analysis of Black directors in the film industry. You need to serve two masters--white investors and audiences, and the Black as fuck story you want to tell. Yes, it is admirable to see that Perry can build his damn table by centering Black audiences. Too bad he is also an evil man!
By the end of the four hours, I really did feel like I "ate my whole plate." Thank you for those vegetables, Mr. Signifier sir.
Isaiah: Yeah, I didn't know about the history between him and Spike Lee, a cornball in his own right, being the way it was where Lee rightfully called Perry out by all but saying buddy is sending us back but still having to bend the knee to the capital of it all. That, set against the black balling of Monique really hammered home the complex, "the devil you know" of capitalism and how even if not all folk are skin folk, you kinda have to play the game to get fed. Even if the game is from a person who holds his lack of a writer's room like a badge of honor of his auteurship being made of Teflon against oncoming bullets of valid criticism. But F.D. did the damn thing by acting like the meme of the soldier standing in front of the knives while we all sleep knowing more people get to see, as you said, that the emperor has no clothes.
Gita: It's hard to talk about the failures of Black leaders—even when it's obvious that the emperor is nude as hell—because of the way that it can reflect back on the Black community. (I remember when white people found out about being light skinned and dark skinned, like, that is just not information that I want white people to have, I don't want them to have that ammo against us collectively.) But I think when it comes to parasites like Perry, that time is finally coming to an end. We are allowed to gatekeep the Perrys from building their empire on our backs without letting us have a seat at their own damn table.
Isaiah: I'd prefer white folks get keyed in on things like the Tyler Perry as an industry machine and all the folly that comes with that over misusing lingo like gyatt as a noun every two weeks.
