Medicine for Melancholy: Love in a Hopeless Place

We know almost from the beginning that this scarcity of color will signify something. When we first meet the weary and wiry Micah, he’s hunched over a bathroom sink rinsing his face and brushing his teeth with a finger. Jo’ awakens and joins him but doesn’t say a word. The silence is stark, awkward; the absence of chatter takes up space, just like the absence of color. Is their dynamic chilly because they barely know each other? Or is some other discontent brewing? At first, it doesn’t seem likely that the two will start a relationship. Micah is hungry to connect, and after the pair leave the apartment where they spent the previous night together, he talks her into sharing a taxi with him. Afterward, he tries to coax Jo’ into lingering; his gentle eyes burn with earnestness and curiosity. But she rejects him, only to relent hours later when he tracks her down at her apartment to return the wallet she lost during their cab ride. Before long, a sense of intimacy grows between them, and we realize they are bursts of color amid the colorless backdrop. The potential for romance provides heat in an otherwise coldly forbidding environment.

Micah and Jo’s morning after unfurls into a whole day. We learn that he installs aquariums for a living, and that the job brings him pride and peace. She remains something of an enigma but reveals that her white curator boyfriend is away in London on business. Micah is annoyed that Jo’ is in a relationship with a white person, and angry at the politics of desirability that make it less likely for people of color to date each other. “You have a real issue with race,” Jo’ says. She finds a MySpace post dedicated to his former partner—a white person—and the aching heart she has left him with. The anxiety he feels over loving his ex seeps out of him, and he pours it into his interactions with Jo’, hoping she can help him resolve it.

The characters’ uncomfortable conversations anticipate tensions that would emerge in the wake of President Barack Obama’s election in late 2008. Medicine for Melancholy premiered on the film-festival circuit early that year. Obama’s victory, made possible by a coalition of voters that included white “Reagan Democrats,” catapulted words like postracial into the zeitgeist. Some pundits insisted his election signaled that racism would soon cease to exist. Others questioned the necessity of antidiscrimination legislation and affirmative action, and recast the heroes and triumphs of the civil rights movement as irrelevant to the new social reality. This cultural shift unfolded alongside the Great Recession, in which Black residents lost their homes at a rate disproportionate to their share of the American population. While test-driving their possible relationship, Micah and Jo’ animate opposite ways of being in the world. Born and bred in the city, he’s zealous about maintaining an awareness of its indignities and keeping a torch lit for Black San Francisco. He wonders if Jo’ ever thinks about how the Black community makes up only 7 percent of the city’s population, a decline from 11 percent in 1990 and 13 percent in 1970. A transplant still “figuring it out” on the career front, she wants to get past the politics, acknowledging these injustices but refusing to feel them or fixate on them.

Micah’s militant loyalty to a collective dream leaves little room for a self, while Jo’s denial of any sense of shared loss or joy makes her detached. Like a lot of twentysomethings, they are self-conscious and brazenly self-assured at the same time, holding on to their respective points of view as if any softening might unmoor them. But what are our twenties if not a time to act out a likely to be regretted self-righteousness? It makes sense to cling tightly to an identity that is still in the process of forming.

Questions of race and solidarity are an undercurrent even in the characters’ choice of activities. After Micah rejects Jo’s suggestion that they head to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (“What’s wrong with MOMA?” she asks; “No comment,” he answers), the pair end up at the Museum of the African Diaspora, where they silently walk through an exhibition about Gorée, an island off the coast of Senegal. They listen to a passage from the 1789 autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano describing a slave ship and its “multitude of of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow.” The exhibition evokes the literal meaning of diaspora—a term that derives from a Greek word that means “to scatter”—as well as its historical association with the experience of traumatic separation. In the quiet, dark space of the museum, they are taken to ground zero of their own alienation, but they are together in their aloneness.

The contemporary San Francisco depicted in Medicine for Melancholy is the antithesis of the location invoked in the title of If Beale Street Could Talk, which Baldwin understood as both an actual place and a metonym, an Anytown of unselfconscious Black living. San Francisco and Beale Street are historically linked, though. The real Beale, located in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, was home to the South’s first Black millionaire and first church erected by the newly emancipated. Numerous Black physicians, attorneys, cobblers, dressmakers, and tailors established their headquarters on the thoroughfare, and it became the heart of Black nightlife in the region. But the rise of white vigilante violence damaged this vibrant community and inspired many of its members to go west. Thanks to transcontinental train routes, African Americans moved from the South to California in large numbers starting in the 1940s, as part of the Second Great Migration. The multicultural Fillmore was one of the few parts of the Bay Area where they could find housing. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the federal government issued Executive Order 9066, mandating the incarceration of Japanese American citizens, a large number of whom lived in the Fillmore. Soon after, the district came to be known as the “Harlem of the West,” with many businesses and entertainment venues catering to Black clientele. But in the 1960s, “urban renewal” resulted in the razing of storefronts and old housing stock in the neighborhood, displacing, according to some estimates, as many as twenty thousand residents. Most never returned.