They Cloned Tyrone.
The first time I tried to watch They Cloned Tyrone, the intensity at the beginning—the way we’re immediately thrown into the action—made me tell my partner hold on let’s watch this later I’m not emotionally ready. I knew there were clones involved, and I knew Jamie Foxx was in it so maybe it’d be funny eventually, but it wasn’t funny yet. Multiple people were in already trouble, somebody gets hit by a car, somebody, in his car, tenses up his whole body and tries to—under split-second pressure—make a life-or-death decision. Eventually the movie unfurls itself, becomes kind of a thriller-comedy, which is one of my favorite genres, but before that, here, at the beginning, we’re not unfurled yet.
We’re not unfurled and, in fact, spend a lot of time in cars? The amount of creativity it takes to make a good car scene has always left me impressed with those who pull it off. They Cloned Tyrone does this incredibly well—it reminded me of the car scenes in I’m a Virgo (which has similar vibes in general) and the very specific car scene in Atlanta’s “North of the Border” episode, where Earn picks a fight with Paper Boi after a college event goes wrong, and they fight in the car in a way that makes the car feel like the whole world in that moment, like everything we need to understand is somehow all right here. There’s the car scenes in Moonlight too, and the colors of Moonlight show up at the beginning of They Cloned Tyrone as well, gorgeous plays with dark and blue as the main character Fontaine tries to figure out—under all of the pressure in the world—how to see his way through.
I wasn’t ready for the intensity of it all the first time I tried to watch it, but this time, I held my breath. I wrote colors in my notebook and also cars. I kept watching as the movie builds from the sense of inevitable death in ‘90s hood films like Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, going from there to some place a lot stranger and at the same time a lot more possible for Black life.
After the beginning, things get really weird really fast in the best of ways. There is, in fact, clones involved, and the way we find out that there are clones involved was so originally rendered to me. Fontaine and his crew—Yo-Yo and Slick (played by Jamie Foxx)—stumble upon the truth, and they’re joking the whole time, but the combination of that joking with the seriousness of the situation juxtaposes the moment in a way that is carefully rendered, balanced throughout. The movie considers surveillance and White supremacy and capitalism, and it doesn’t handle these things lightly, even as the movie itself often feels light. The dialogue is chef’s kiss, and the specificity of the humor in it allows us room to breathe, even as the undertone of what’s happening is daunting and becomes more so the further we move into the film.
The speculative nature of the movie and what it highlights about our reality definitely puts They Cloned Tyrone in conversation with Get Out to me, and how the heaviness of the moment is balanced with a sense of humor that’s Black-centered, humor as a means of getting through, also reminded me of Get Out (and the novel Boom Town, which similarly balances a daunting mystery with funny moments). The humor in They Cloned Tyrone felt unique to this movie in how specific the writing was, in how it pinpointed a feeling with an image that I never saw coming, like when Fontaine was freaking out about the clones and his friend asked him if he might need a drink of water (lol), the abstract continually brought back to earth by the concrete. Maybe the world isn’t what it seems, but also, maybe you’re just dehydrated?
I liked the sense of humor here, and I liked the specificity of the dialogue, and how much the film was able to bring out in car scenes (Queen & Slim is another great example of this). It was a Certified Black Weirdo piece of art for me because of how the screenwriters, the actors, everyone involved seemed to use the strange, the unlikely, the bizarre to move us past the incredibly sobering and traumatizing rules of our reality, especially as Black people. This movie looks beyond the real while also keeping one foot within it to consider other more possible ways of being. What if we could come back after we die and multiply, team up with those like us that we don’t like, look past all that to figure out how to insist on living?
Image: Netflix
