Soul is a film about the bureaucratizing functions of the white racial state on black life and black death, both of which can and will at every turn seek to be subsumed, commodified, standardized and weaponized against the historical pasts and futures belonging primarily to black people in this world. We see this in what the film terms as The Great Before and The Great Beyond, two zones in which the film’s protagonist, an Amerikan black man, Joe Gardener spends inhabiting. These zones are surveilled by Soul Counselor’s or Sorter’s (Before) all of whom are named Jerry (some weird fucking meta-comment on the commodification and alienation of work IDK), and a singular omnipresent figure, the Soul Counter (Beyond) who is named Terry. In The Great Before, souls who have yet to pass into the Beyond are chosen according to a system that is never explained, to mentor new souls in the ways of life before they are born on Earth so that those souls can be given the tools to find their purpose. This zone is very cute, light and flora interact in majestic beauty, the Counselors are amicable and have pleasant voices, guiding and overseeing the rigorous pairing of souls yet to pass on and new souls. The new souls are child-like, sponges for learning. The Counselors oversee the “You Seminar,” the place where new souls develop and must obtain their badges (7 or 8 of them) which will activate an Earth Pass (yes like a passport) so that they can be born. This is in stark contrast to The Great Beyond which is simply void minus the bridge that takes dead souls into the light. Terry the Soul Counter is out of sight, in the background making sure that every soul who has passed ends up in the light. Terry is drab, calculating, only focused on the task at hand. He’s a cop, and very proud of it. There is never interaction between Terry and souls passed on.
These zones of action are what I would term, bureaucracy, made up of agents who seemingly have complete authorial control over what happens in the world that we know based on a system that ultimately benefits them. And of course, the film brings together two aberrations, one Amerikan black man and one Amerikan white woman to comment on.. it’s unclear really but the seeming post-racial/multiracial Amerikan fascist project is evident. But I read these two aberrations as the film’s indirect attempt at showing the gaps in a system such as this (it’s all bullshit). And before someone comments, yes, #22, the aberration who has resisted seemingly thousands of years of being born because she thinks Earth isn’t worth it or whatever and she’ll never find her purpose is a white woman. She tells Joe Gardner that she can choose any voice she wants to but specifically chooses the voice of a white woman because it is “annoying.” Of course the assumption here is that the voice of a white woman would annoy a black man (an idea not at all flushed out because at that point in the film she doesn’t know that he is black YET the point remains because even after that she sees his memories– with her hundreds of years of knowledge from the likes of Abraham Lincoln and other historical figures– she chooses to stay with this voice). The film specifically chooses these two actors, these two agents of explosive historical racial-schema as its main protagonists. They knew what the fuck they were doing. Everyone has already commented on how fucked it up it is that a white woman inhabits the body of a black man, that he gives up his life so she can find her purpose and all of that, but the ending truly shows how this bureaucracy is founded on the punishment of blackness. So Joe Gardener has given up his Earth Pass and and is about to go into the light when a Counselor stops him and gives him a second chance. And this is what she says:
We’re in the business of inspiration, Joe, but it’s not often we find ourselves inspired. So, we all decided to give you another chance.
This is where I was like.. WOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE. First of all, of course they are a business, a corporation. There is something behind the word “business,” the “You Seminar,” the exploitation of souls that just want to die but are coerced into mentoring new souls, new souls that cannot escape the purgatorial zone until they are inundated by the anti-black human project; the fact that this business can only be sustained through GREAT people and their mentoring capabilities. If you remember, when they were going through all the souls that failed with #22, it was all famous people, people who some might deem great, including who Joe Gardener was supposed to be, a world renowned doctor. Who or what chooses this system of inspiration, of greatness? Surely a failed black jazz artist could never be human, could never be great in this system, could never be inspiring to the sonic universal, to the white universal at large, because blackness is not inspiring for the world. It is only consumable, it is only fungible. The fact that these counselors could just say fuck their whole planned and rigorous system, fool Terry into thinking Joe Gardner actually passed, and give him a second chance based on inspiration of his GREAT action shows how horrifying this system is, in that, if he DIDN’T INSPIRE the omnipresent Counselor’s, he would not have been given a second chance. His life and death would not have been deemed “different” or worthy of inquiry. Be an exceptional nigga or you just another nigga dead. The two zones elucidate the economy of the reward and punishment, ah yes, more dialectics.
Further notes:
It is a film in which black myth and metaphysics as they pertain to sound are congealed into the white sonic universal (getting into the zone while soloing or improvising in jazz music) as opposed to their historical and present realities of black improvisation connecting us to a black radical tradition that is greater than any great beyond or before. Now, I’m no musician, but even I have felt that startling moment when I conk out an aberration (mistake, realization) using the blues scale on the piano or the trumpet and I am Horace Silver, I am Bud Powell, I am Mary Lou Williams, I am Don Cherry, I am Woody Shaw. I know that this moment cannot be contained in some universal “zoning out” which the film shows, in which every human activity acts according to the same predetermined and pre-ordained laws.