Morgan Rowland, mjr182@uakron.edu
My personal favorite movie of 2023 was “They Cloned Tyrone.” It's a sci-fi dramedy about a majority black neighborhood. The plot revolves around three main characters: Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Slick Charles as they try to find out what's going on when Fontaine is shot dead but pops up the next day with no memory of it ever happening. What I love so much about the movie is how smart and conscious it is of what can be considered universal experiences for Black Americans. As the title suggests, people in this neighborhood are being cloned and when the originals die above ground (often at the hands of other people in the neighborhood) they are replaced by their clones. These clones have no memories of dying and go about life unaware that they ever died to begin with.
Another character is a man named Nixon, who works for the government (and has an assistant who’s a clone of Tyrone). When Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Slick Charles uncover the conspiracy of the U.S. government cloning black people, Nixon explains it’s because people like them (Fontaines’ a drug dealer, Yo-Yos’ a sex worker and Slick Charles is a p*mp) are needed to maintain the ecosystem of this neighborhood for the government’s experiments. The government in this world has been working with institutions in black neighborhoods across the country (the church, the hair salon, and the chicken place on the corner) to make black Americans subservient and content with their oppression. They’ve put something in the communion wine, the relaxer, and the chicken that makes black people perfectly content with the violent nature of anti-blackness in this country. Nixon tells them that they’re existence as drug dealers, pimps, and sex workers is the reason their neighborhoods are the way they are. So when they die at the hands of their lines of work, a clone replaces them to keep the neighborhood from being gentrified and ruining the government's experiments.
This sends specifically Fontaine on a moral spiral where he questions himself as a person and his purpose in life but eventually he recovers from this and realizes that Nixon is wrong. Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Slick Charles are not responsible for impoverishment and violence in the black community, the oppressive systems of anti-blackness rather are. Most pimps, sex workers, and drug dealers get into these fields out of survival, having no other options available to them because of systemic oppression that leads to impoverishment and desperation. All the government has to do to keep sex workers, pimps, and drug dealers on the street is continue to systematically oppress black people in this country, but that takes time. The government is cloning people because these people are the reason for the oppression in the black community they’re simply cloning them to keep a consistent number of people with “inappropriate” jobs on the streets until the young people are forced to live under the same conditions that make these people grow up.
Despite Fontaine and Slick Charles going back to their regular lives, Yo-Yo doesn’t give up on investigating what’s going on. Which leads her to being kidnapped by the government and taken to an underground lab facility where the government is doing a host of tests on black people from the neighborhood. They try to use the relaxer which makes black people ditzy with content but she’s wearing a wig and so it doesn’t work. To save her Slick Charles and Fontaine rally the neighborhood and storm the lab facility and release all the black people and all the clones that are being kept in the facility. The point of the community coming together to storm the facility is that we protect us. The antithesis of this oppression, of white supremacy, is community. Banding together to take on that which seeks to harm us is the only way to keep us safe from that which seeks to end us.
While in the facility Fontaine runs into the head scientist who is an older Fontaine. We find out that the original Fontaine from the beginning of the film is a clone of this older version of Fontaine who is a scientist searching for a way to make all the people in the world white. His desire for this is based on the fact that his younger brother (who our Fontaine also has memories of) was killed as a result of gun violence. This drove the original Fontaine to become a scientist looking for a way to end gun violence and the conclusion he came to is that the way to do this is to make everyone white. If everyone is white, in his logic, white supremacy would cease to exist and there would be no more oppression and everyone would live in peace because the root of all problems in the world are our differences. This is absurd logic which the story lets us know by having our Fontaine kill scientist Fontaine. Scientist Fontaine’s logic is deeply flawed, it postulates that all non-white should conform and become the “default” of white. It puts the cause of oppression and violence on people of color for not being white and not on white supremacist for being white supremacist.
The whole story is a beautiful mockery of the prolific idea that black people are the cause of our own oppression. If we just weren’t drug dealers, or sex workers, or pimps, or we didn’t talk how we talk, or eat what we eat, or dress how we dress, or do black how we do then we’d be fine. The idea that if black people conform, all will be well, calls for black people to give up our personhood in the name of making white society more comfortable. This film says no to that. No, we should not conform, we should not maintain the status quo, we should fight for what we believe is right and stand for it. Using the vessel of clones to tell this story is particularly brilliant because a common paranoia amongst older black people is that if you give the government your DNA they will clone you. It’s an absurd conspiracy theory that’s based on the very real fear black people have of being used as a test subject by the government which has happened in the past (see the “Tuskegee Experiments”). This is a common conspiracy most all Black Americans have heard before and so this movie really taps into elements of black culture and history to tell this story.
“They Cloned Tyrone” is a black movie for black people, if you aren’t black there are certain intricacies and cultural moments that you simply won’t get. The movie is a beautiful love letter to black people and culture while also being a scathing critique of the systems of white supremacy that lead to impoverishment, cycles of violence, and people taking on careers of survival such as drug dealing, sex work, and pimping.
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