Justin Simien: Queer Black Cinema
Podcast Transcript Season 3 Episode 48
Interviewer: Liz Goldwyn
Illustration BY Black Women Animate
Justin Simien is the creator of the incredible film and Netflix series Dear White People, which is now in its third season, and the upcoming film Bad Hair. Liz spoke to this renaissance man about queer Black cinema; being the target of alt-right trolls; how he learned to market films before he made one; Buddhism; Carl Jung, Terence Nance and more.
The following is a transcript of the interview from the episode:
Liz Intro:
Hello, and welcome to The Sex Ed podcast. I’m Liz Goldwyn, your host and the founder of The Sex Ed, your #1 source for sex, health, and consciousness education. On our website TheSexEd.com, you can read original essays written by our network of experts, watch live talks and videos, listen to past episodes of this podcast, and sign up for our weekly newsletter. You can also follow us on Instagram @TheSexEd.
The Sex Ed is postively orgasmique to be partnered with GUCCI for your listening pleasure on this season of this podcast. That’s right, oh yes, GUCCI baby! We’re so grateful to GUCCI for sponsoring this episode and helping us answer everything you wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask.
Today, my guest is writer, producer and director Justin Simien. Justin is the creator of the incredible film - and Netflix series - DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, which is now in its third season, and the upcoming film BAD HAIR. I spoke to this renaissance man about queer black cinema; being the target of alt-right trolls; how he learned to market films before he made one; Buddhism; Carl Jung, Terence Nance and more.
Liz Goldwyn:
I just have to start by saying that you have a very sexy brain.
Justin Simien:
Oh, thank you.
Liz Goldwyn:
I've been doing my research on you. I know you went to Chapman and you majored in film, but you seem incredibly intellectually curious and able to converse on a myriad of subjects from the Renaissance to Greek art, cinema history, technology. Like where does that come from?
Justin Simien:
Oh my God. I don't know. I don't know. I just get... I tend to get obsessed, and I don't know if there's like a thing that links all the things that I'm curious about yet. Probably there is. But when I get curious about something, I need to know everything about it, right away, and I need to know, not just details, but what's at the heart of it. What's the essential thing that makes it tick? So whether that's a genre or that's a psychological concept or it's a Nebula, I don't know, what I get excited about something I have to figure it out.
Liz Goldwyn:
And you were always like that even as a kid?
Justin Simien:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I was always sort of trying to figure it out, like what was really going on behind something, what was the meaning of something? That was just always there.
Liz Goldwyn:
And I know you, when you grew up reading the Bible, so did you start questioning religion at an early age?
Justin Simien:
Yeah, I mean, I remember... Because I was Catholic and I remember in catechism raising my hand and being like, "Why are there three gods? What's that about..." And I remember the teacher giving me this answer that wasn't in the Bible and also didn't independently make sense. And so yeah, I began reading about the Bible, but the historical context of it at an age that was probably very young and confusing to my mother and catechism teachers.
Liz Goldwyn:
So did you give a lot of lip then? Were you questioning things and they were annoyed or they were going with it?
Justin Simien:
Look, I'm a gay black artist to grew up in a world where none of those things were things. And so I learned not to give lip. I learned to internalize what I saw and make decisions that way. But outwardly, once I realized I couldn't really go there with them. I didn't try to, over the years that would evolve into all kinds of things. And currently, I practiced Buddhism. I've been practicing Buddhism for six years. But that same curious spirit as to, well, why is this what we're talking about and what we're doing and what we believe. That never left me for sure.
Liz Goldwyn:
When was the first time you felt like you could be around minded people? Was that in college at Chapman or later?
Justin Simien:
I think it was high school. I had the incredible fortune of getting into a performing arts high school in Houston, Texas, and it was called HSPVA. And that's really where I began to figure out who I am as an artist, what turned me on as an artist, but also like, yeah, I was surrounded by lots of people... I'm friends with more people from high school than I am from college. And I think it's because we all kind of... We're in this singular performing arts environment where we were encouraged to be ourselves and to explore ourselves and explore why we liked things and why we hated things pretty actively on a day-to-day basis.
Liz Goldwyn:
And were you directing and writing back then or?
Justin Simien:
I was, yeah. I couldn't afford camera equipment growing up. So when the school got it's... The government of the school got one of those cool iMacs, an iMac became cool and a digital camcorder in the library. And I ingratiated myself with the woman who ran the library and got access to this camera and this editing equipment. And I made commercials. I was in the theater department, so I made commercials for all of our plays. And when I wasn't doing that, I was making little shorts that were really just me copying Kubrick. But I did that for a long time and that's how I kind of got that going. And then on the theater side I got to write and direct plays and things like that as well.
Liz Goldwyn:
It's interesting that you were making commercials because I know you also worked in the studio system in publicity, which-
Justin Simien:
I know.
Liz Goldwyn:
... a lot of artists don't have that business marketing side, but you've got such a good experience. I know you worked on Brokeback Mountain, right? In the theater.
Justin Simien:
Yeah, I was an intern at Focus then. And part of the reason why I felt comfortable... Because it was hard to get internships in production. It was hard to sort of apprentice a working director, but I felt very comfortable working or interning in publicity departments just because of what you said that in high school I was able to be creative. Not just telling a story with my shorts, but telling a story about another story, sort of promoting a play or crystallizing the thing about it that would be interesting for audiences and for young people. We were doing Romeo and Juliet and School for Scandal and all this stuff. And my job was to translate that for high school kids. So they'd come to the place. And I liked that. I enjoyed that. And so, yeah, I felt very comfortable in that space. And it turned into a career by accident. But for eight years I was doing PR.
Liz Goldwyn:
But also I feel like as a filmmaker, it kind of helps you, because a lot of times it's about preparing people to watch something or to deal with the subject matter that they might not be comfortable with or have seen before.
Justin Simien:
Well, I realized pretty early on that the kinds of things I was going to make were likely to be difficult or provocative or outside the box or something other than what a traditional audience might expect. And so to me it became very important to figure out how to sell... How to figure out what the essential thing is about what I was doing and get people on board with that before they saw it. And I saw that happen with Brokeback Mountain in a very really strategic step-by-step way because we all knew that the movie was great, but we also knew... We weren't sure if audiences were ready. And even though I was an intern, I really got a front row seat into how James Shamus and Adrian Bowls and all the brilliant people that focus sort of introduced audiences to this movie that they likely hadn't really seen an analog for. And that was very informative and it's something that I try to take... Not try to, that I depend on actually, as I make work and navigate putting it out.
Liz Goldwyn:
And at the time... I mean, and still there is a large lack of representations of the queer black experience in cinema. So what were you looking to? Was there any sort of plan?
Justin Simien:
Yeah, there wasn't much. Patrick Ian-Polk was kind of the lone soldier when I was coming up in terms of making black queer content. And I've certainly had many a script not get made because there's just... It's very difficult for a bunch of reasons to get really high quality, high caliber content produced about the black queer experience. So I think what I’ve always done is tried to find ways to express that part of me and a part of my point of view that could sit alongside other things that people were more readily open to, which is why Dear White People is an ensemble and why... Even my movie Bad Hair, which is about the black female experience, it has a queer sensibility to it.
Because, growing up, I think most black gay boys, we have to kind of find ourselves in black female culture and among black women, that's usually where we're accepted first and the side of blackness that we get to know first and get to know it really well and cherish it. So you find ways, but I don't know, the ultimate goal would be to bring something that's black and queer right to the mainstream at some point.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. I loved Terence Nance's Random Acts of Flyness.
Justin Simien:
That's so great.
Liz Goldwyn:
And I know that segment where it's about the invisibility of the bisexual black male.
Justin Simien:
Yes, yes. So great.
Liz Goldwyn:
And that's probably, even though that's mainstream, it's HBO, it's still quite a... It's pretty arty. I mean he's an artist, just not quite mainstream.
Justin Simien:
Yeah. And it's very revolutionary. And the thing about queer expression is that it struggles to find a place within the black community as well as outside of a black community. It's kind of like, as an art form, it experiences a double jeopardy that way. So, I don't know, I was just talking to Terence for my podcast actually, and I was telling him when I watch his work, I'm always so struck because it's like, "God, if I was braver, I would have done something like that." And he was very... His response to that was very interesting. But yeah, I watch a lot of his stuff in awe.
Liz Goldwyn:
I think he's brilliant. He's one of my favorite artists out there right now. I would refer to him as an artist.
Justin Simien:
He's fantastic.
Liz Goldwyn:
But when you-
Justin Simien:
He's got a great mind.
Liz Goldwyn:
He's got a great mind, yeah. And also like you he seems very much a Renaissance man where he has... His influences come from so many different places and genres and he's super intellectually curious, which is a quality that I admire in anyone.
Justin Simien:
Thank you.
Liz Goldwyn:
So when you made Dear White People, when you first made the film this sort of millennial take on black experience in white America, there was not a blueprint. It was before Get Out, Sorry To Bother You. What was the reaction?
Justin Simien:
It was really difficult. It's like you said, now there's plenty of articulate millennial cinematically shot ensembles in TV and film. But at the time it was like, I knew that these things would work. Like I knew that if we told an ensemble story that was satirical about young black people in white spaces, I knew that that would work because it was my experience. It was my daily experience. But it was very difficult convincing people to fund that or to get on board that train. And so, one thing that... One immediate benefit of working in publicity and PR was that I knew that I had to get people on board with the vibe of it in a way that I could never do in person or on the page. And so that's really where I made a trailer for Dear White People before it was a movie.
But I tried to make the trailer so good that you thought it was a movie. And at the end of it, instead of saying, "Coming soon," it says, "This is not a movie. It's a movement. Don't you wish there were movies like this? And if so give me some money." People did and it went a little viral I think, especially for the time. But that was me just again, just trying to figure out like, I know this is a thing and if people could just get a sample of it, they would get why it's a thing. And so, I don't know with Dear White People, I just took the next step every chance I could. It was a very, very difficult time though to get that movie made.
Liz Goldwyn:
And I heard that you went deep on the message boards, on the 4chan and reddit message boards with alt right trolls.
Justin Simien:
Oh, man! I did. And my soul is still recovering. Yeah, I mean I think I'm always trying to metabolize my trauma and when I put out the first season of Dear White People... Or actually before the show even came out, just the title it produced such a ridiculous ire in the alt right that I couldn't understand, especially because the movie had already come out. We had already gone through this with the movie. And so what was this renewed craziness against the title, which I'm like, "Okay, well, I could see that before the movie came out, but not that the movie’s come out and you realize that the title is misnomer. It's not really even about white people. Like, it's not... This is not what this is. Why are people so angry?" And I had to understand it.
And so yeah, I did a deep dive to try to figure out what was going on. And in a lot of ways I felt like I was realizing a lot of the things that led to Trumpism and Trump and trolls on the internet and Russian bots and all that stuff. I was sort of kind of uncovering some of that and turned a lot of what I uncovered into season two of Dear White People, but Dear White People each season and the movie itself has always incorporated the response to Dear White People in it. Like I remember with the movie, there were people on Twitter, isn't this reverse racist? How dare you? All that kind of thing. And I incorporated that point of view into the film because that point of view is part of the fabric of a young black person's life. This sort of irrational resistance to my just being alive and expressing myself. And I felt that was an important thing to reflect in the work. And so I always work the response into the show and the film into the show.
Liz Goldwyn:
The mind of a PR, of that PR background. You gotta see what the reaction is.
Justin Simien:
I guess so.
Liz Goldwyn:
But didn't you find out that a lot of the trolls were bots?
Justin Simien:
I did. Well, I suspected that. And then when we got deeper into Trumpism and all the articles came out showing how that was exactly the case and it was happening to like Black Panther and it was happening in bigger levels, then I was sort of like, "Okay, so maybe some of those people weren't real or if they were real, they were using this as an issue to rile people up." There was just a lot of bad faith commentary about the work, which was fascinating once I was kind of removed from it a little bit.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah, it's interesting. I had someone say... A white person say to me the other day who grew up pretty, pretty sheltered, in a family that votes for Trump and who's very liberal say that they didn't even understand what white privilege was until a few years ago because they'd never had it pointed out to them. They just didn't grow up in an environment where anyone had ever said that phrase, and they were working with someone who pointed it out to them. So probably a lot of those people on those message boards, this is all like super new, and they're not taking your POV, which is if I don't understand something or if I'm in curious about something, let me find out everything about it before having a knee jerk reaction or opinion.
Justin Simien:
I was very lucky in that... Going to performing arts high school and studying theater in particular, the first thing that they taught us is to be curious about your knee jerk reactions to lean into work because you're going to miss out on a lot of really brilliant things if you just go on your knee jerk reaction when you encounter art. And instead of asking yourself... Ask yourself why you're having this reaction and then ask yourself, "Does that by chance what the artist wanted to provoke? And if so, why?" And they taught us to find a way in to art that might have remained impenetrable to me at a really young age. And so I make work that requires that from audiences because for me, as much as it is difficult to serve, meet resistance and it is difficult, I'm very sensitive, and I have all the childhood wounds you might expect from a gay boy in the South with not enough money to have a camera when he knew he wanted to be a filmmaker.
But to me it's worth it because.... I don't know, it's just such a joy to be able to experience art in that way and particularly to experience art with black faces in it and for black audiences, for everybody, but specifically for black audiences. I want more folks to be able to enjoy that. And it's just a richer, it creates a richer life.
Liz Goldwyn:
And to expand your own consciousness. I feel that a lot... That's the same thing when it comes to talking about sex or religion we find is a lot of people have an immediate, "Well, I'm definitely not into that or that freaks me out." But actually like they could potentially expand their pleasure potential. You can look at something that someone else is into and maybe just keep an open mind before you categorically deny that that's ever something that you would fantasize about.
Justin Simien:
Yeah. And I think it's like... It's part of the human condition. It's like we always reject... We always reject the thing that might destroy the grip we have on reality currently. So if someone's like, "Oh God, I got to think about it from that point of view." That's a normal human response. But I think one of the many goals that art can have is to condition people just beyond that. Because like you said there's so many things to enjoy. I talk about this a lot, but I hated 2001: A Space Odyssey so much for years. And I watched it... I tried to watch it maybe seven times, probably more, and didn't get it. And I was so mad because like the whole world seemed to think this was a masterpiece.
And then I took a philosophy course in college and without any explanation, they just put the film on at the end of that course. And suddenly, I not only understood the film, but I had what I would call a religious experience watching it because I realized like, "Oh my God, he's saying so many deeply profound things without really a lot of words and cinema can do that." And I just wasn't ready. And now that I'm ready, Oh my God. I had such an experience with that film that I just... I already knew I wanted to be a filmmaker, but for me, that's when it was really locked in. I was like, "This is a vocation. This is like a powerful thing I can do as a human being."
Liz Goldwyn:
Did you get to see the Kubrick show at LACMA where they had all his Zeiss lenses and everything?
Justin Simien:
I did. I actually lived down the street from LACMA when that was there. And I was also... I think I was out of work at the time. And so I found myself walking to that exhibit just about every day, and I watched all his short films and got to watch all of his movies with audiences, which I'd never been able to do before. Because I just experienced Kubrick on DVD up until that point. And yeah, it was really thrilling.
Liz Goldwyn:
So I want to talk about Blair Underwood actually.
Justin Simien:
Oh, great.
Liz Goldwyn:
I mean he's such an amazing sex symbol, like my childhood and you totally brought him back in the third season of Dear White People. And I liked this take on, because I feel like this happens actually a lot in Hollywood. The classic male sex symbol who's also a sexual predator. And this idea of being glamoured by someone which is so often happens in cases of fame or power of wealth. You just think this person is such a God.
Justin Simien:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean well, when I had met Blair shooting my movie Bad Hair which he is also fantastic. And when we were sorting out season three, I knew that I had to start... Because season three is... Every season of Dear White People is such a... It's a diary. It's an emotional diary in a lot of ways for me and the writers, and one of the things I was going through is like the mourning quite a few celebrities that have become problematic. But for a black boy, black celebrity is different. It's not just like, "Oh, I love this person and I'm projecting onto this person." But it's like in many cases, like that's the only person that looks like me that's doing something in that space. And so whether we're talking about Bill Cosby or R Kelly or Michael Jackson or whoever it is, that mourning process is very specific for black people and it's psychologically really dense because you're having to break up not only with your fantasy of this person, but also the parts of you that gained strength from that fantasy.
And the parts of you that think that you could... The only reason that you could do it is because they exist. And I wanted to take a character through that. And so, it required having a very charismatic actor in that role who we would both love and be despised... Or have sort of be repulsed by at a certain point. And Blair was just so game to go there. And I don't know. I think he's just one of the coolest dudes. He really is like... He is really a generous and kind actor. And he's one of those people, you tell him what the thing we're doing is like, what the story is, like what your character functions in the story is. And he just gets so excited and he goes for it.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. Because he's like the handsome good guy just traditionally. So it's such a twist, but I mean, I see that in Hollywood all the time that those classic, handsome, good guys behind the scenes are doing a lot of fucked up shit. And they don't get called out on it still, even though everybody likes to say, "Oh Hollywood is doing such a good job of being PC and cleaning up."
Justin Simien:
It's a dream factory. So that's the fucked up underbelly of Hollywood is that everyone in it, whether you have good intentions or bad intentions, is very good at selling the dream, selling the thing that the audience wants to see, whether or not they actually have that to give the audience. It's a very tricky town. That's all I can say.
Liz Goldwyn:
Do you feel like... With all this talk of diversity and inclusion, do you feel like there's been real change in the last 18 months?
Justin Simien:
I think so actually. I think it's... Yeah, there has been real change. I think that there is a real push to find, at least in the director side of it, which I'm most familiar with. There is a push to find women and people of color and people from marginalized communities. It's not as pervasive as I think people would have you believe, it's not assault, it hasn't solved the problem. And there's a lot of people who are eager to pat themselves on the back as if it's already a done deal. But I have certainly seen doors open for artists that were not open when I started, doors that were not open for me and I've been able to open doors too, and so I know it's changing. How much is it changing? I'm not sure. Are we there yet? Not by a long shot, but I do see change.
Liz Goldwyn:
How important do you think it is like people like Robert Rodriguez back in the day had his studio in Texas and now Tyler Perry has his studio of people kind of going and creating spaces like that, that are outside of the system?
Justin Simien:
I think it's great. I think it's probably what everybody longs... Not everybody, but a lot of us long to one day do because the system that most of us have to play in, this Hollywood system, it creates a lot of scars and it can be very demeaning at times and very difficult in ways that you can't really express to other people cause nobody would understand it outside of the context of making a TV show or making a movie or something, which... I think most people think of it so glamorous. Like why would you have anything to complain about? And so, you can create your own little world outside of it. You can provide some safety from it. And from my side of it, I try to... We have like a... My production company is called Culture Machine and we have a social media aspect component to it...
Where we're just trying to foster community you know, that’s what we can do right now. I can't really go and build a studio someplace at the moment. But we can at least foster community and bring people who normally don't get to ask their questions about storytelling and how to break in and how do you find writing partners and that kind of thing. We can engage those folks with other content creators in a way that I would have killed for, when I was starting out. So I don't know. I think a lot of us have our eye on that particular prize of having our own space sometime.
Liz Goldwyn:
I feel that COVID and this pandemic might fast track some of that because there's a lot of people who are now making content from their living rooms, which suite people were before. But this whole idea of celebrities being a little offended right now or celebrities having to compete on social media for that gaze that they are accustomed to.
Justin Simien:
I know.
Liz Goldwyn:
And like who's doing a good job of it and whose real colors are coming out. Like I don't know if you watch... I love watching Cardi B peel a mango with those long fingernails and interview Bernie, someone like her comes off real well and then someone like Ellen, be like, "Okay. All right."
Justin Simien:
Right. Yeah, I mean it's definitely revealing. And for me when all of this went down, my first thought wasn't like, "How do I get more views?" I kind of ran away from social media for a really long time. I just hid under the covers. I didn't want to know what people were doing that work out. I didn't know what recipes they were trying. I didn't want to know what bread they were making. And every time when these COVID ads comes on, it's about people. And we are here for you. And then I find out they're selling me chips or car insurance or something. I find it maddening, but I-
Liz Goldwyn:
It's very gay pride 2019.
Justin Simien:
Yeah, it's odd.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. Like the corporate sponsorship to sell you...
Justin Simien:
Yeah. I guess it's really about the issue that... You're just using the issue as a billboard really. But I've also found none that I've kind of come out of the covers from the beginning of the pandemic and it feels really good to be involved in some way because people are at home and you can have a conversation with 100 people on a Tuesday now on Instagram and there is an access to some people that normally no one would have access to. And so there is some real good there too. Just a balance. You've got to balance it.
Liz Goldwyn:
Like everything. Yeah.
Justin Simien:
Yeah.
Liz Goldwyn:
So what's going on with the fourth season of Dear White People, and tell me about Bad Hair. I'm so excited about this movie.
Justin Simien:
Yeah. Well, for the fourth season, we have been writing over Zoom, me and the writers room were about halfway through our process when the stay at home orders happen. So we've been able to continue writing and doing all of like the preparatory work for the show while we all wait to find out when really the industry will get going again. And for Bad Hair, I mean this has been a very long gestating project. I shot it... Or I started shooting it maybe two years ago or a year and a half ago. And it's about a woman who gets a sentient weave in the late 80s. Why is that what it's about? Well, I really wanted to explore... I think what's so powerful about psychological thrillers from Psycho, which I think is the beginning of the psychological thriller on to now is like the best ones.
They entertain us because there are so anxiety inducing and there's a formula to them that keeps your heart pumping. But the best ones like Rosemary's Baby or Get Out or Stepford Wives are also like these kinds of Trojan horse social commentary bombs that really reflect on the horrors of our everyday life. And I really wanted to examine passive white supremacy, the way in which we are all culturally conditioned by white patriarchy to nip and tuck and make ourselves over to be as marketable as possible and what hidden sins are not sins, but what things were lost in that process that we actually might need to survive. I wanted to say something really serious about that and also about the violence against black women, which doesn't always seem obvious.
And I felt like as a gay man, I had a point of view there that could be unique and so it's many things, it's a bit campy, it's funny, it has music in it because it takes place in the New Jack Swing era. But it's also a very serious movie too about these issues that I think... I don't know. I thought I could shine a light on it with that genre that hadn't really been done before.
Liz Goldwyn:
This is sort of based on the Korean horror genre, like the killer hair.
Justin Simien:
Well, I was inspired because hair is a horror element in a lot of Korean films and there's even like... there's a movie called The Wig and there's a movie called Exte, which is hair extensions and these movies are wild. They're wild. And I felt like there was a way to tell a story about Killer Hair in a black context that would be singular. And so that's what I tried for.
Liz Goldwyn:
I can't wait to see it. Do you think- are you waiting for a theatrical release or you think it will be streaming later this year?
Justin Simien:
It will be streaming later this year, no matter what. Hulu bought it at Sundance. And when they bought it, we were talking about the agile release, although I think we like every film is... We have to revise what that even means week to week. The truth is we don't know what theatrical release will look like and the windows that we're talking about. But in any case, the film will be out this year. I'm very happy to say, and Hulu is very excited about it and it's going to be a thing.
Liz Goldwyn:
I'm curious, because you said that Psycho you think is the first psychological thriller, so you wouldn't consider Cape Feare or Night of the Hunter to be psychological thrillers because those are earlier, no?
Justin Simien:
No, that's true. You're right. I would say... I think Psycho is a turning point though for the genre because-
Liz Goldwyn:
It’s more horror, right?
Justin Simien:
Yeah, it sort of broke certain taboos in film that didn't seem possible before it and that even a person like Hitchcock doing it, it was so shocking at the time. Things like killing the girl that normally is the final girl, but killing her in the middle. The sort of combination of sex and violence. I think when I say Psycho thriller, I'm kind of referring to like a... It's not just that it's a thriller, but it also involves aspects of society that are like very taboo sort of in the thing it's examining that I see through Rosemary's Baby in particular and the remake of Body Snatchers in the 70s, you start to compare it to what was happening before Psycho and there's a different like insanity level. It's like just turn... It's like cranked up or something. I don't know.
Liz Goldwyn:
What do you think is the most taboo subject that you could possibly make a film of besides white supremacy?
Justin Simien:
Oh God, I don't know. I mean I think that there's something going on in our understanding of our sexuality and our gender that could be interesting. Although I would be afraid to make a movie in that space because I don't know that I know enough about... I don't know that I know enough to make a statement. Like one of my favorite psycho thrillers is Dressed to Kill by Brian De Palma. But the conceit at the heart of that movie is so incredibly problematic now in ways that I don't think he could have predicted in the 80s. I'm very afraid of making that mistake. So I'll let Terence do it first and then I'll tip toe in behind him.
Liz Goldwyn:
You'll throw him to the wolves.
Justin Simien:
He's bold man. He breaks the ground.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah.
Justin Simien:
But I tried to start... To me, good art does one of two things. It breaks new ground or it synthesizes ground that's been broken in a way that audiences can accept it. Like when you get to something like Star Wars, that movie is so brilliant because it's synthesizing a lot of ground that is broken in the 70s in art film culture. And certainly George Lucas came from art film. That movie is a synthesis point. And I like to have a balance in my movies, I like to be synthesizing some things and putting things together that have already been figured out, but we maybe never thought they could go together. I certainly do that in Dear White People. And I do that in Bad Hair too.
And then I try to find areas where I can break ground because I enjoy the experiment of art very much. But at the end of the day, I'm a teacher, I need to have a connection with the community. I want to make sure that they got it. And I want to make sure that enough people I'm making my work for are picking up what I'm putting down. That's an essential element for me.
Liz Goldwyn:
What are you still learning about sex?
Justin Simien:
Right now I'm in a very like... I'm really into Jungian shit right now. I'm reading a book about trauma in the body right now. Like Jungian psychotherapy and where it meets up with the traditional Freudian psychotherapy that I think most of us fall into with our therapists. I'm really into that right now, and the way our sexuality has shown up as gods or mythological figures in the past as a kind of thing inside of our heads that's trying to communicate something to us. I'm very much in that vein right now. And I don't know, it's really... I don't know what to make of it yet. That will probably be the next movie. But it's fascinating. It's fascinating.
Liz Goldwyn:
What's the book called?
Justin Simien:
It's called The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit. And it goes into... It's basically like why are... It really pinpoints the specific ways in which artists and creative people are crazy, like me. But of course has to touch on sexuality to do that. And it is... I just love it. It really is trying to thread a needle between all these different schools of thought to describe exactly what is it that... How is it that we drive ourselves crazy and I'm kind of getting my life from it, but it's so dense and ridiculous. Like I don't know how to really talk about it except to say, "Go read it if you want to. And don't be mad at me if it's impenetrable."
Liz Goldwyn:
Thank you.
Justin Simien:
Every sentence has a word I don't know, but I'm making my way through it.
Liz Goldwyn:
That sounds up your alley though.
Justin Simien:
Yeah, it is. Really, it is.
Liz Goldwyn:
You can go on spirals.
Justin Simien:
Yes, absolutely. And I don't know, there's a lot of work out there too about gay archetypes. Usually gay love is not really dealt with or talked about, not only on the societal level, but also within the studies. And so there's a lot of Jungian stuff, but very little of it actually touches on the specific queer experience of sexuality. And actually there's a lot out there though. One of our first myths, Gilgamesh, is a gay love story. That means something about humanity, and there's not enough about that stuff out there to read frankly. But when I find it, I do.
Liz Goldwyn:
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin.
Justin Simien:
Well, that's a classic. I mean-
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah.
Justin Simien:
... everything Baldwin...
Liz Goldwyn:
That one particularly, I love that love story. I read it when I was in high school and was really struck by it.
Justin Simien:
Yeah, same.
Liz Goldwyn:
We have it on TheSexEd.com. We have a bookshelf feature and we have a lot of beautiful historical gay and queer love stories on there in the literature section.
Justin Simien:
Oh, I love that. I love that.
Liz Goldwyn:
Well, thank you so much. I could talk to you forever. You're just fascinating brain. I've got an intellectual crush on you.
Justin Simien:
Aw, thanks. Likewise, and this was a great conversation. I really appreciate it.
Liz Goldwyn:
I hope I get to meet you in person.
Justin Simien:
Yes. One of these days.
Thank you so much. This was really great.
Liz Outro:
That was my conversation with Justin Simien. You can watch DEAR WHITE PEOPLE on Netflix, and BAD HAIR on Hulu later this year. You can follow Justin on Instagram and Twitter @JSim07.
Once again, a huge thank you to GUCCI for sponsoring this episode. You can find all things GUCCI via their website, GUCCI.com, and on instagram, @GUCCI.
Until next time, you can read exclusive content on TheSexEd.com, follow us on instagram @TheSexEd, and listen to past episodes anywhere podcasts are streamed. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts.
The Sex Ed is hosted by me, Liz Goldwyn. This episode was recorded and edited by Jeremy Emery and produced by Chloe Cassens. Lewis Lazar made all of our music, including the track you’re listening to right now.
As always, The Sex Ed remains dedicated to expanding your orgasmic health and sexual consciousness.