D. Smith’s audacious new documentary rewrites liberal discourse on its own terms.
★★★★✰
When the lights went down in the screening room—an upholstered, golden-hued auditorium, protected from rainy London—one couldn’t help but see the irony in Kokomo City’s cold-open anecdote. A black, trans sex-worker recounting in detail an altercation with a client and a handgun that reached an ironically carnal solution was a world away from the pristine theoretics of preceding filmic representations of liberal discourse. But it soon became apparent that this is Smith’s intention: giving the documentary subject their control back, even if that comes at the expense of the viewer.
What narrative there is in Kokomo City consists solely of cut-together anecdotes and opinions from various black, trans sex-workers on their trade and its wider cultural implications. There is no real beginning (the cold open is certainly testament to this), no middle and no end, apart from some loose closing statements. Framing—or more accurately unframing—the subjects in the world outside of the documentary, Smith subverts classical doc and filmmaking practices à la Cassavetes. The audience is not afforded the luxury of terminating their awareness of the subjects when the film ends. Kokomo City is just a window into a real world that we should be grateful that Smith and her subjects are allowing us to snoop around in.
However, even comparison to people like Cassavetes doesn’t do this film justice. Many of Smith’s predecessors captured marginalised groups from the protected, self-serving perspective of hegemonic theories of marginalisation, creating entities representative of victimhood rather than real people. In Kokomo City, the subjects fight back against this filtration by speaking in their own tongue (filled with cultural signifiers and geo-specific colloquialisms), which, admittedly, was often difficult to understand. In these instances, our previously-accepted theories about these people’s lives are nullified, exposing the cavities in our ostensibly pristine liberal ideologies by asking a simple question: if you cannot understand us, how can you begin to represent us?
Speaking to Variety after the film’s double-win at Sundance 2023 (taking home both the Audience and NEXT Innovator Awards), Smith expressed gratitude for the positive response to the film’s three-dimensional characters, calling for a dismantling of “the fortresses that are built around us, keeping us from fully joining society”. The muddied waters of representation today mean that terms like ‘black’, ‘trans’ and ‘sex-worker’ often become reductive tokens to promote patronising and wholly useless sympathy in lieu of real activism. This isn’t to say that all efforts of emancipation are useless, but it means that members of these groups must live both the life of a marginalised person (fearing violence, loss of housing; Smith says that she “started to transition and lost everything”) and fight for an individuality above their victimhood status. Kokomo City eradicates all of this, showing us that the easiest solution to this complex issue is just to allow its subjects to speak for themselves.
Another example to this end is the film’s striking vulgarity around the subject of sex work, which is consistent from cold-open to credits. Sex work has often been a point of contention in liberal discourse. The problems around it are occupational rather than identity related, but are still moulded and squeezed into the latter category, causing people to often forget exactly what the job can entail. Smith is just reminding us of this, often using the fact as a launchpad for other ideas. As much as it is filled with violence and sin, sex work also forms a complex world of secrecy and hypocrisy, Kokomo City tells us.
This rouses both comedy, through accounts of the sort of desires brought to the surface in otherwise ignorant and toxic men, but also illustrates the double-edged sword of mistreatment that these workers have to endure; both exploitation by the male clientele and disdain from wider society. Again, sharply streamlining the film’s message, Smith and her subjects are merely putting the facts to us—if we are offended, then we are inadvertently beginning to understand their plight.
In this way, Kokomo City achieves what many other documentaries and ‘realist’ films fail to: exposing the gritty reality of a marginalised group at the expense of its audience. After watching the film, it feels like there is no other way to explore these issues. We, as the hegemony, can approach liberal discourse artistically, theoretically, or any other way that breaks it down into digestible chunks. But perceiving these issues is not good enough for Smith; she wants us to feel them for ourselves. With the wide laudation she’s received, it’s fair to say she’s succeeded.
The Verdict
Kokomo City is an unapologetic, unfiltered ode to a group of individuals weighed down by their victim status. No matter how this film makes you feel, the people at its centre shine through. Definitely worth a watch.
Words By Oisín McGilloway
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