Conspiracy Theorist

Zakkiyyah Najeebah (left), Rebba Amaris (center), and Ama Chi (right) in Conspiracy Theorist

Conspiracy Theorist (2020)

Created and written by: Rebba Amaris

Directed by Kelechi Agwuncha 

Conspiracy Theorist defies form and genre. It must be watched–multiple times–to be understood. Even then, the film resists our desires to understand its central character, whose experience is so specific and singular, that most viewers can only relate to parts of the narrative. 

Creator Rebba Amaris wrote a story about a woman who becomes a PhD student that loses the reality of shared ground. Though the series is meant to portray a woman with an unspecified disorder, the therapist the woman meets in the short refers the protagonist for further assessment to rule out a diagnosis of schizophrenia.  The phenomenon of neurodivergence is longer than the history of film, yet the ambitious prologue opened a window beyond Hollywood’s demonic gaze on mental health. Generously scored by RP Boo, the opening sequence respects the texture of the quotidian. The pilot lives at the border of four axils of orientation to create a situation from the inner and outer worlds that form culture. Yet, in a testament to Rebba’s sharp writing, the film raises questions about who is really out of step with normative reality: our lead characters or the people in her environment. 

Black women are often treated as if they are exaggerating, lying, or misrepresenting the very real harm and pain they experience. They are often not taken seriously or believed, either as theorists of the world or their own experiences. Moya Bailey makes this case in Misogynoir Transformed, where she makes a connection between how Black women are often denied care by the medical system and how that mistreatment mirrors and is influenced by stereotypes in the media. 

Conspiracy Theorist opens with the lead character in class asking a question of a white male professor. The topic is politics, and the professor is citing a study that “corrects” for race. This is a common method in social science, where identity is treated as a variable that can be adjusted to determine the statistical significance of various effects on different populations. Our lead character questions whether one can do this, particularly given the complexities of a “postracial” post-Obama America where racism still exists. The professor basically pretends not to understand. At the same time, we also see two other Black women–one more vocal than our lead, one more tranquil–appearing beside her with sage and the second more boisterous, cheering her on with snaps. No other student in the room acknowledges these two women, letting the audience know they exist in our lead’s mind. We might be tempted to think that our lead is crazy, but, in fact, she sounds much smarter than her professor. Viewers have embraced these two women as poles of the compartmentalized self. Though classical Freudian allusions to a tyrannical id and internalized superego fail to map onto these visualized parts of a protagonist at the precipice of ego dissolution.

Elsewhere in the narrative, aggression is a projective mirror that mediates encounters with program faculty and white peers as she is met with anxious-aggression then perceived as aggravated. This is a common occurrence where Black people are often perceived as more hostile than their actions. Indeed, this is why Black Lives Matter activists called attention to the many Black people killed for doing completely innocent things, as their innocuous body movement was perceived as a threat to vigilantes and interlopers. 

In the middle of the film, she is meeting with a therapist. Her answers are flatly voiced, as if she’s been through this before, as if the affect has been squashed from her vocal cords. But one of the women in her has a speech to give, a part of the self that many other Black women might agree with (and, indeed, when we have screened this piece, the monologue receives vocal support from audiences):

“I am tired of being muted.

I am tired of white women pathologizing us.

I am tired of leading and being overlooked.

I am tired of being taxed by comparably brilliant idiots.

I am tired of being scaled and psychoanalyzed.

I am tired of being reprimanded and being awake to the bullshit!”

By ending with “awake to the bullshit,” Rebba deftly slips in the argument of the piece: that Black women and people may sometimes sound “crazy” like conspiracy theorists, inappropriate affects out of place, but there is, in fact, lots of evidence that they have been colluded against. This, to put it plainly, is bullshit.  

That monologue is never spoken aloud. Instead, the monologue is internally muted and our lead says: 

“I feel like I’m falling in and out of a lot of different universes, just governed by completely different logics. Like I’m somewhere on the border between mysticism and science and I’m just losing my balance.”

Indeed, we need not imagine–nor does Rebba literally visualize–our lead character moving in and out of different universes. By representing the many different ways other people treat her, we see how every person is a universe unto themselves, moving by very specific logics structured by broader systems of race, gender, class, and other sociocultural identities. It just so happens that Black women might have less agency in defining the rules of any one interaction, such that every moment can be a portal into another person’s warped perception of them. 

Conspiracy Theorist was initially intended to be a pilot for a series. I funded it directly from my research account after I had negotiated a retention from Northwestern University. It was the only project selected for funding higher than OTV’s average licensing fee. Seeing how completing a pilot concept was often necessary to secure more funding for a full series or film, I took a risk on funding Rebba because she had participated in OTV’s first writer's workshop and consistently sent new drafts of her script. It was clear she was motivated, and her complex scripts looked like they could really be innovative. Regrettably, she reported that the project would have been much easier to endure if she had removed herself from the visual frame of the conceptual pilot to distinguish between the self of the writer and the fictiveness of creative work. 

Cinematic representations of mental health patients typically monetize sensational narratives of psychological thrillers and horrific blockbusters  — painting people with a psychiatric history as pathological killers and hazardous figures wreaking havoc to suspend plots that end with massacre or chaotic degeneration. Meanwhile, local news stories monthly report on violent offenders with intimidating diagnoses who threaten the decency of American modernity. Few portrayals have openly depicted discharge from institutionalization to draw a subdued coming-of-age narrative to deconstruct the demonic portrayals of mental illness normality props itself against. “In my naïveté, I hoped filmmaking, or rather the act of creation, could open space outside of stigmatized genre classification and mass imagery proliferating as realism.” 

Today, it exists as a brilliant experimental short film, one of very few about Black women, mental health, and the complexities of their experiences in institutions like academia. 

With impressive direction and camera work, from roving drone shots to shaky close-ups, Conspiracy Theorist is peppered with sharp interludes and montages. We see our lead biking around the southside of Chicago, performing mundane tasks with melancholy, flair, intensity, and beauty. 

It is a portrait of a rich and complex life few Black women are given as characters in film and television. 

Reflection: Recording from the June 2019 Comfort Station Workshop

This reflection includes audio from a soft-screening at Comfort Station in June 2019 with featured discussants Rebecca Ladida and Amina Ross in conversation with Conspiracy Theorist director and creator Kelechi Agwuncha and Rebba Amaris. The panel was moderated by Mycall Akeem Riley. 

Watch Conspiracy Theorist on OTV! 

Much grace and mercy to the following collaborators who offered their gifts to this project. 

Created by: Rebba Amaris 

Co-Director & DP: Kelechi Agwuncha;

1st Editor: Marcus Aubin;

2nd Editor: Rebba Amaris;

1st Cam: Lowell Thomas;

2nd Cam & Gaffer: Luis Treviño;

3rd Cam: Nathan Mansakahn;

Music by RP Boo;

Co-Producer/Casting Coordinator: KB Woodson;

Script Supervisor: Terrence Thompson

FEATURED CAST IN PROLOGUE:

Alexy Ireys

Rebba Amaris

Ama Chi

Terri Hudson

Zakkiyyah Najeebah

Steven Wilikes

Chelsea Holmes

Cait Medearis