A cultural note

Early in 2021, Netflix released the Oscar-winning short film Two Distant Strangers. The film sees the main protagonist, Carter James, a black cartoonist, relive the same morning over and over again. He awakes in bed the morning after a first date, in the apartment of his lover. We see him get dressed and prepare to return home preoccupied with the thought of needing to feed his dog. After a few loving exchanges, he says goodbye, hoping to see the woman he met the night before again in the future. However, this is the morning of his death. Carter never gets to feed his dog or to go home. Instead, when he leaves the apartment, in an act of gratuitous and overzealous authority, a police officer racialised as white stops him. The exchange escalates into a scuffle and Carter is suffocated to death.

The gut-wrenching movie replays the police encounter and murder again and again. Each time Carter is killed he awakes from the nightmare, in bed with his lover. However, this only leads to him soon reliving death and dying as he is killed once more in somewhat different yet similar circumstances, by the same police officer as he attempts to go home.

Powerlessly witnessing the repetition of Carter’s gruesome death evoked a strong visceral reaction in me. In part this was no doubt due to the temporal proximity and cognitive salience of the murder of George Floyd, in adjacent circumstances. But perhaps more critically here, the sense of inescapability and Carter’s futile attempts at wrestling again and again against the finality and outcome of his encounter with the police felt disturbingly familiar. As I watched the movie, I felt disorientated by the director’s use of the temporal. Lost in time. Connected to despair in a way that echoed so many of my own encounters with anti-blackness.