The shame, animalistic chaos and existential dislocation that Moon Molson’s devastating Pop Foul so eloquently evokes makes me think of nightmares. Its palette of dark nocturnal blues, often accentuated with the pallor of cool street lights and the garish nighttime loneliness of ghetto baseball fields, has the feel of an angry fever dream, at once firmly rooted in the conventions of narrative filmic storytelling and the melancholy lyricism that clearly marks Mr. Molson as an auteur to watch. Though Pop Foul hasn’t inspired actual nightmares within me, the sustained, oh-so-conscious dread that is reawakened in some part of my being, one that I’m reminded of time and again while walking home through the Bed-Stuy night, is hard to shake. I haven’t seen Pop Foul in quite some time, yet it continues to haunt me.

For in this tale of a frustrated pre-teen boy, who struggles to negotiate the aftermath of an assault his father endures at the hands of a local thug while walking home from his little league baseball game, there is little hope for redemption, understanding or growth. One senses we’re witnessing the beginning of a promising life gone permanently adrift. The pain, clawing empathy, and psychic terror that realization inflicts on the astute viewer is not to be so easily dismissed.

When we first glimpse him, he is angrily beating a little league fence with a bat. The boy’s young father walks him home from the field, clearly annoyed by his son’s behavior. He delivers an unconvincing lecture to his volatile son about the wages of manhood and the code of conduct that comes with it, insisting that he control his emotions and act with dignity. Soon however, the boy learns just how empty those words are. A pearly white Escalade stops with on the Jersey sidewalk next to them, and out hops one large, menacing black man who seems to believe the boy’s father has been talking shit about him “on the block.” His hypocrite of a father claims ignorance, although the man isn’t convinced. The gargantuan assailant is all bulk behind a tight green t-shirt and steely gaze. He’s ready to bust some ass because some sucka half his size called him a punk, yet he, in some odd way, only seeks the truth. It’s the father’s boldface lie, his “aw shucks, why would I call you a name” look of mock innocence, that incites this man’s fists with such abandon.

In the aftermath of this shocking encounter, the father enlists his son to deceive his mother about the swollen eye he received from his attacker, his paternal instincts clouded by his desperate attempt to save face, grasping to retain what shards of his shattered masculinity are left to pick up. The false explanation: during the game, he was struck by a pop foul off the bat of the son.

The sins of the father revisit the children with emotionally brutal results here, but Molson’s primary interest is the zero-sum, insecurity-driven cock-measuring that informs its inciting incident and the tragic masculine anxiety enflamed in its violent aftermath. Years after the cycle of self-important, sentmimental “hood” movies (anyone catch Straight Out of Brooklyn recently? Yikes. Matty Rich, wherever you are, please, keep it real) thankfully disappeared from American commercial movie screens, Pop Foul is the first to visit these themes with such unadorned pain, insidious intelligence and aesthetic grace.

There is fury in the filmmaking, in its treatment of a Newark milieu at once familiar and yet, as rendered by Molson, otherworldly, at least to the uninitiated, that tends to leave even the most equipped viewer more than a bit unsettled. While there is tenderness, need and love within these people, we see it add up to nothing but shame and destruction in a way that leaves one very little to hang some hope on. I know of one major, resort town centered, American short film festival that didn’t program the film, despite its clear brilliance, because of its terrifying ending, in which the boy, revisiting the field late at night, stops taking out his rage on the fence and in one swift blow mortally wounds an even more innocent victim. This brutal manifestation of the cruel, backward lessons his father’s carelessness and mother’s outrage have taught him, didn’t sit well with this particularly sensitive programming committee.

Time and time again, mostly at African-American film festivals, I have experienced palpable audience discomfort as viewers refused to surrender to the film’s visionary subtext. I often encounter these audiences hiding behind cheap laughter during the film’s harrowing opening moments, only to find themselves without a place to hide by its final passages. Certainly, the spectacle of young black boys being called to violence has been a ripe canvas for American independent (and of late, international) filmmakers of all colors to project their aesthetic, narrative and thematic preoccupations upon, but rarely have I seen the roots of violent behavior articulated with such brevity, force and tragic empathy. The danger that lurks in its dark heart is too much for many audience members; its challenge to the basic tenets of post-civil rights, pre-Obama, ennui ridden working class Black American masculinity cuts entirely too deep. So be it.\

— Brandon Harris

Tags: adolescence, fathers-and-sons, Moon Molson, Pop Foul, violence