The frustrating tradition behind Soul’s great flaw

[Ed. note: This essay contains significant spoilers for Soul, including the ending.]
Soulis Pixars first film with a Black protagonist, but the story never accepts the narrative complexities of Blackness. Its a film where the Black character is either a blue blob or a cat for much of the action, but is rarely in his own Black body. Its a film where a supposedly raceless character takes over a Black body, causing the Black character to minimize his own dreams for a symbiotic good. Soul opens as a story about finding individual purpose in life. But when the nebulous character 22 enters the fray, the animated jazz odyssey becomes a wholly different tale.
In grafting a Black lead character onto an initially non-Black story, directors Pete Docter and Kemp Powers and their co-writer Mike Jones portray the comforts of Black life, yet miss its intricacies. Theyve unwittingly crafted whats known as a passing narrative, a story that betrays its Black protagonist in favor of the white good.
As humans, were prone to racializing people based on how they sound. Sorry to Bother You and BlacKkKlansman both play on the idea of Black men using white-sounding voices, to comedic effect. Cassius Cash Green (Lakeith Stanfield) finds telemarketing riches once he adopts a white voice (dubbed in by David Cross), while Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) pitches his voice to higher nasal intonations over the phone to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. While its reductive to say someone sounds white, there is a dominant syntax attached to whiteness that influences its vocal quality.
Souls creators know this. When Black New Yorker Joe Gardner dies early in Soul, and winds up in a pre-life world called the Great Before, where hes tasked with mentoring an unborn soul numbered 22, he takes exception to their voice: Why do you sound like a middle-aged white woman? 22, voiced by Tina Fey, proves they can sound like any race or gender, including perfectly mimicking Joe. But 22 chose Feys vocal identity because others find it annoying. The explanation allows the filmmakers to sketch 22s personality without assigning the character a racial identity. Their generic blue-blob appearance and the voice explanation is meant to make us suspend our racial disbelief, and identify Feys voice not as that of a white woman, but as a parlor trick.
Theres another sound rattling in the Great Before, though: the gatekeeping Jerrys all share the same name and have similar minimalist designs, but theyre voiced by a diverse set of actors, such as English-Nigerian actor Richard Ayoade, Brazillian actress Alice Braga, and indigenous actor Wes Studi. Their insipid accountant teammate Terry is voiced by Kiwi actress Rachel House. Its strange how these celestial beings, who assume simple forms to translate the universes immeasurable power into familiar human terms, remain diverse, as though theyre meant to reflect Joes representative human world. The varieties of voices emanating from the Jerrys and Terry make 22s role as the dominant voice for unborn souls even more glaring.
Even with the films bid for a suspension of racial disbelief, the racial-passing narrative in the second act of Soul is acutely bizarre. Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) agrees to help 22 find the spark that inspires them so he can take their subsequent pass down to Earth, and reconnect with his comatose body. Before Joe fell into a manhole, he was slated to play the gig of his dreams, a one-night set at the Half Note with respected saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) and her jazz quartet. Those plans go awry when he attempts to return to his body, but wakes up in a hospital as a therapy cat, while 22 takes over Joes Black physique. 22 still sounds like Fey to the viewer, but the other characters hear Joes voice emerging from his body. The sonic markers of Feys voice makes it difficult to square the perplexing image of her voice coming from a Black man. And for an actress whose show 30 Rock came under fire for its blackface episodes, the creative decision to play a character passing as Black is doubly strange.
The themes inherent in passing narratives are also found in body-switch narratives. In his book Film Blackness, Michael Boyce Gillespie notes, Passing is also about the boundaries established between identity categories and about the individual and cultural anxieties induced by boundary crossing. Docter and Powers ambitiously upend the racial-passing trope by crafting a narrative where a raceless passer, voiced by a white woman, is publicly recognized as a Black person. The classic passing narrative, seen in movies like Douglas Sirks melodrama Imitation of Life and 1949s controversial Lost Boundaries, is one of betrayal, where tragic mulattos deny their Blackness for the comforts of whiteness. In Soul, 22s tragic existence is stressful and unfulfilling, until they are calmed by the Black experience. Their delight at existing for the first time, through a Black body, makes the reverse-passing narrative in Soul tantalizing.
Take Souls barbershop scene. For Black men, the barbershop is a casual cultural meeting place for open dialogue and safety. Joes barber Dez (Donnell Rawlings) puts 22 at ease, acting as a friend, cheerleader, and therapist rolled into one. In the past, Joe has only talked to Dez about jazz, but 22 pontificates about learning their purpose, and in the process, learns more about Joes friend than Joe ever did. Dez, it emerges, only became a barber because he needed the money after leaving the Navy. This enlightening conversation, along with a soothing haircut, brings 22 some happiness. As Gillespie further elucidates, Passing is about identities: their creation and imposition, their accompanying rewards and penalties.
In his review, critic Kambole Campbell compares Soul to another recent movie about the theft of Black bodies: In a decade of film where Jordan Peeles Get Out became part of our cultural lexicon, it makes one wonder why someone didnt think through the plot device of a character voiced by a white actress piloting a Black mans body. With all the films canniness about Black living, to see such a moment completely divorced from any kind of political thought feels completely bizarre and somewhat infuriating in how easily it could have been avoided.
Soul and Get Out are both swap narratives, but Soul is different in the sense that the white body-thieves are trying to procure Black bodies to live their white lives without the impediment of what they consider inferior physiques. They arent trying to pass for Black when the protagonist, Chris, finds one of his friends possessed by a white man, he immediately knows somethings wrong. In Soul, its clearly implied that 22 is passing, as Joes friends and even his mother comment on his changed, behavior, but still accept him into their normal conversations. And once the rewards of passing become evident to 22, theyre only too happy to play along.
In Joes Black body, 22 swims in the wind wafting from a subway grate, comes to love the music played by a Black subway busker, and adores the subway itself. They also find a Black mothers warmth. When 22 tears Joes suit only a few hours before his big gig, he seeks his mother (Phylicia Rashad) to have her fix it. Joes mother considers her sons music career a dead end, but when he finally stands up to her, she retrofits his dads suit for him and hugs him. The warmth of that touch the soothing hold of a Black mother over the fabric once worn by a nurturing Black father fills 22 with tenderness. Soul could be such an uplifting film if the narrative continued to show Black life as an advantage, rather than an identity denied for whiteness.
Some of Souls issues may stem from the process in the scripts creation. The film began as 22s story, and Joes character was only added later. Producer Dana Murray explains, Once we decided on jazz, we knew Joe had to be Black. Once you start researching jazz at all, its Black foundational music [] So we found Kemp and thats when he came on. But its difficult to map Black themes onto a story that started with no Black characters. An action that plays one way with a non-Black character may read entirely differently with a Black character.
For instance, 22s anxieties about incarnating on Earth engenders the character with a big heap of the storys pathos. Soul starts out as a yarn about Joes dreams, but shifts to become about 22s insecurities. In Joes Black body, with the support given by Joes Black barber, his Black mother, his Black hair, and his Black fathers spankin blue suit, 22 finds their spark. And yet when 22 refuses to relinquish Joes Black body, so he might perform at the Half Note, the filmmakers portray the supposedly raceless, yet white-voiced 22, as the one to be pitied. Its a stunning betrayal of Joe.
Expecting a Black writer to add themes to a story about a non-Black character is like asking a driver to navigate a narrow track in a wide car. Theyre going to hit traffic cones along the way. Docter and Kemp hit plenty of those during Souls final act. 22 is not only positioned as the victim, but Joe falls prey to troubling tropes, as 22s apologetic savior and the magical Black character who prioritizes 22s troubles over his own. After his success at the Half Note, Joe returns to the Great Before to apologize to the soul who took his body and tried to deny him his dreams. Its a serious crime against him, dropped and forgotten as Joe focuses on how he and 22 needed to find their sparks together.
The creative choice leads to a detrimental ending for this Black character. Soul posits Joes individualistic artistic pursuit, jazz, as not his purpose. While viewers might interpret the conclusion as instructional appreciate life, or it might pass you by the American dream, and the ideal of being American, is tethered to the importance of the individual. That dream is rarely proffered to Black Americans. From elections where Black people are routinely asked to fall into line with coalitions rather than standing our ground on Black-specific policies, to the workplace, where up until the summer of 2020, pointing out how workplace discrimination stunts our earning potential, Black people are usually required to sacrifice their individual pursuits for the universal good or more specifically, the white good.
Joe shifting his purpose away from his own creative efforts and toward saving the films supposedly raceless, yet white-voiced character not only perpetuates this cycle, it plays into the most common tropes of the passing narrative, where the passer is the victim. By representing Black life as a comfort to be embraced, Soul offers viewers a form of soul food. But the filmmakers suggest that food is more valuable than actual Black lives. By valuing Joes body, experiences, and tastes more than they value Joe himself, they chart this existential animated odyssey into familiar waters the ones where Black bodies and Black dreams come second to the white good.read more