#untilthequietcomes

“Until the Quiet Comes”

In the opening image of “Until the Quiet Comes,” a human body is suspended underwater as the red jacket that clothes the body billows in the water. The body is turned away from the camera, its face not visible. In its suspended state, the body appears to be either drowning or coming up for air. Then the scene changes, and the camera presents an image of a young black boy in jeans and a white tee-shirt standing in a large, empty concrete swimming pool. The boy makes the sign of a gun with his hand and makes a firing motion at the pool wall. Out of nowhere, a real bullet ricochets off the walls of the pool and hits the boy in the chest. He falls and starts bleeding heavily; the blood flows down into the lowest point of the pool, beginning to fill it. In the next scene the boy is alive again. He interacts with a black male teenager surrounded by other kids. They trade candies and run around the block, and then the camera lands on a body lying on the ground. It is the body of the teenager, presumably dead, and as the music plays, everything seems to become suspended in time. The teen rises spasmodically and begins to dance in the style of “bone-breaking,” removing the tee-shirt he wears. Once he discards the shirt, which reads “J Dilla Changed My Life,” he continues to dance in a fluid and elegant way, floating past the frozen spectators. He dances past them and even brushes against a few, but they seem unable to move or look at him. As he approaches the street, a tilted car bounces with hydraulics to approach the curb. He slowly dances his way into the car, at which point the car, still tilted, glides away and out of sight.  

The video’s story world seems to engender cyclical time. But the presumed death, the ghostly encounters between dancing and still bodies, and the moments of suspension depicted therein contributes to the surreal effect of the combined audio and video. The two boys could be related, or just know each other; the fact remains that they are both black male youth, and they are both dead or at least injured by the end of the video. Against this backdrop of relational interaction, once the older boy is shot and falls to the ground, time slows. But people around him seem to be looking on. However, once he takes off his shirt – a symbol of community and black cultural expression – the people around him seem to lose all connection with him and become stagnant. The theme of suspension is also very prevalent in this video; it points to a broader real-life theme of stagnant progress. This is especially significant due to the political climate surrounding Black Lives Matter and racial violence. It is implied that these young black male figures are victims of gun violence, and it is clear that they have been attacked in places assumed to be familiar to them, surrounded by neighbors who are unable to react to, or even register, what has happened. This is much like the fact that many Americans refuse to admit the existence and prevalence of racialized violence, and there can be no progress until the suspended disbelief ends.