SXSW 2019 Review: THE DAY SHALL COME: A Flat Piece Of Satire With No Aim

Whenever the contemporary American zeitgeist rears its ugly head and begins a screaming match about the ethics and political “correctness” of satirizing charged topics or issues, the conversation is almost always derailed the moment it is framed around sensitivity, or the lack thereof, instead of responsibility. By rooting this dialogue in a question of feelings, rather than real world implications, pundits, and those who take their bait, dilute the potential impact of satire, obfuscating its power and stakes so that it becomes as relevant as a dirty joke said by a teenager over the dinner table.

The YouTuber Contra Points recently published an excellent, as usual, video essay on this very issue, demonstrating how, so often, when we talk about problematic satire, we are also talking about bad, lazy satire; the kind that doesn’t add anything new to the conversation, but relies instead on its perceived “edginess,” on the supposed courage it takes a person, usually a mediocre white man, to merely brush up against controversy, without taking the time to consider its weight or its possibility for genuinely novel ground. I would like to nominate Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come to the overcrowded ranks of the aforementioned bad, lazy satire.

Morris’s first feature in nine years, the film follows the escapades of Moses Al Shabaz (newcomer Marchánt Davis), a radical Miami preacher who advocates for “Black Jihad,” the parameters of which are never actually explained. Even though his organization, the Star of Six Farm, has only four members and doesn’t seem to do anything besides literally farm, the FBI decides to lay a trap for him by baiting him into accepting money and weapons from men on the FBI’s payroll who are posing as Islamist terrorists.

Said men Reza Mohamed Pahlavi (Kayvan Novak) and Nur Al Din (Pej Vahdat) are, of course, not even given the dignity of a nationality, even though they have thick Iranian accents, and speak Farsi occasionally. The former’s name is even a simple shuffle of the last shah’s name. He is also a pedophile, a fact that is mined for many a joke, including a scene where he is on a date with a noticeably younger girl. Hilarious. On the FBI side, we mostly follow Kendra, an Anna Kendrick-type played by Anna Kendrick, a spunky young agent who, in between sabotaging the lives of black and brown people, displays wokeness by calling out her co-workers for their chauvinism.

What History?

The film claims that its events are based on hundreds of true stories, which is not a stretch given the horrific, and well-documented, history of domestic espionage conducted by the FBI, among other American law-enforcement agencies. But that only makes matters worse. Given the countless black organizations that have been targeted, infiltrated, and sabotaged by the FBI, Morris’s decision to portray the Star of Six Farm as a dimwitted, and ignorant group of people who abandon their most fundamental principles at the first chance they get to make money (at one point, they agree to sell weapons to a white supremacist group because apparently there are no other ways to make money), speaks volumes to his grotesque view of radical black organizing.

With little more than vague proclamations, the group seems to be a hodgepodge of notable historical black organizations, most obviously the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. But unlike these actual groups, the Star of Six Farm doesn’t seem to have any kind of coherent ideology or set of goals. They wax poetic about a brighter future, but don’t seem to do anything that could possibly get them closer to that. Even worse, Moses’s motivations are never fully clear.

At times, it seems as though his heart is in the right place, but his mind is incapable of making a right decision, in others he is a borderline conman, and a pathological liar. Either way, the film never wastes an opportunity to portray him as an idiot. There’s a scene early on where his landlord tries to evict him because he doesn’t pay rent for the property, and he proposes to pay him back in potatoes he had just acquired, only to realize that he had been sold a bag of literal wooden blocks.

Raging Against the Void

Any kind of sympathy extended towards him or the other members of the group thus becomes inherently condescending, their story becomes a comedy of errors, instead of an allegory for the tragedy that is the orchestrated demise of black activism and organizing in America. It would have been logistically impossible to confirm whether or not there were ever such small-scale groups whose stories were as absurd as this, but that doesn’t matter.

At best, Morris and co-writer Jesse Armstrong didn’t do their work, at worse, they poured over the rich and vast history of black radical thought, activism and organizing in America, only to reduce it to a joke, to a delusional, possibly mentally ill, man who rides a horse around Miami dressed in a shower curtain.

This is, of course, not to mention the monstrosity that is Kendra. She is, simply put, the most vile kind of white woman imaginable, she who would call her coworkers sexist as she diligently plans the ruin of black and brown communities. The film by no means exonerates her, but it doesn’t give her half the condemnation she deserves either.

In fact, the film goes out of its way to emphasize her mixed feelings about the whole ordeal. We get countless, excruciating close-ups and medium shots of her huffing and puffing at the messiness of the whole affair, even as she pushes all the buttons that ensure it happens. Morris would like you to know that this woman, whose job is to lure black and brown people to crime so that they may be incarcerated for the benefit of the state and its propaganda machine, has a conscience. Why does that remotely matter? It, of course, doesn’t. And neither do any of this film’s shallow “insights”.

The Day Shall Come: Conclusion

So the question becomes: what is the point of the satire here? Why subject an audience to ninety minutes of black people being duped and terrorized by smirky FBI agents, only for the latter to have the happy ending? Why portray this group of “radical” black organizers as so debased, so detached from the most fundamental tenants of decency, that they’re willing to sell weapons to a white supremacist group, Nazi/Confederate paraphernalia and all, just for money? Your bet is as good as mine.

Morris doesn’t seem to have anything interesting to say with this material. The closest he gets to any kind of coherent statement is: “FBI bad,” but that should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been remotely paying attention to modern American history. But even if that were not the case, the story is so cartoonish, so utterly divorces from any semblance of reality or historicity, that it just doesn’t feel believable, even let alone possible, let alone historical fact.

What are your thoughts on responsibility and satire? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

The Day Shall Come premiered at the 2019 South by Southwest Film Festival.