She Did Crawl Backwards ’Til She Walked: On Punctuating Nola Darling, Musical Notation, and Enjoying the It You Cannot Have

• In Event: The Urgency of Aesthetics: Portrayals of Black Women in a Time of Emergency

Abstract

Consider for a moment that despite its critical acclaim and renewal for a second season, Netflix’s She’s Gotta Have It premiered to a viewing public in which many had not seen the eponymous 1986 debut film by Spike Lee. Nonetheless, the newer visual offering emerges in a state of emergency, namely the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements (hence the episodes being hashtagged). Signaling an urgency writ large, the dramedy strives for a kind of witnessing: the long-form testimonial of a woman—Nola Darling—whose sexual agency and worth, regardless of historical marginalization, is not bound up in patriarchy (which from a communally internecine perspective one might call Hotepism) or white supremacy. However, the televised re-up of this former cinematic object omits an intriguing originary factoid: Nola’s filmic father, Sonny Darling (portrayed by Lee’s biological father), is a jazz musician who has availed his daughter to piano lessons.
If Nola studied piano, she likely encountered the luftpause, a musical notation that some musicians refer to as having an appearance akin to the apostrophe; according to Maurice Hinson, “[f]or a pianist, this [the luftpause] indicates the end of a phrase” (The Pianist’s Dictionary [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004], 104). Yet the apostrophe in the title of the vehicle that births Nola Darling equally indicates an “end”, and allows us to endow that marking with the potential to read the heroine in a multiplicity of manners. This is to say: Nola becomes a cypher for punctuation and musicality, that being improvisation, which draws a through line to cultural formations of black women and their portrayals in the contemporary.
By reading Nola Darling as an apostrophe, in both the film and the television series, this paper dichotomizes (or even triplicates!) the protagonist, arguing that whatever “it” is, the spectator (and the spectated) enjoys the possibility of what s/he cannot have.

Author

• I Augustus Durham, University of Maryland-College Park