On Feb. 6, the Student Life Cinema at Florida State University (FSU), published an Instagram post announcing a film showing of Till on campus. The date of the viewing coincides with Black History Month, but the event was not specially labeled. Till, released in October 2022, portrays the aftermath and journey taken after Emmett Till’s brutal lynching in Mississippi.
In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was visiting family in Mississippi when he had an encounter with a southern White woman. The interaction resulted in the woman accusing Till of either allegedly wolf-whistling at her, flirting or generally affronting her (as deemed by the standards of the Jim Crow era); the exact details behind the catalyst of the lynching are uncertain. Four days later, Till was brutally beaten, mutilated and shot. His body was sunk and later found in the Tallahatchie River.
Emmett Till was only identified due to an engraved ring that he wore.
His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley sent his body to be buried in Chicago, his native city. There, Till-Mobley held an open-casket ceremony, where all tens of thousands of mourners viewed the corpse of her son placed on display. David Jackson took a picture of Emmett Till’s corpse, bloated and mutilated. The photo was published in Jet Magazine and released to the public. With the image, there was tangible evidence that lynchings were occurring and had occurred in the United States of America. Till-Mobley’s decision to demonstrate the effects of racism through her son’s corpse and subsequently publish the picture prompted outrage from coast to coast. The Emmett Till case was pivotal in the Civil Rights Movement, especially after Till’s murderers were acquitted of their crimes before an all-White jury.
Due to the infamy of the case, many attempts to tell the story of what had occurred to Till through film were made. However, the majority of them were thwarted. Small pieces of Emmett Till’s lynching and the story throughout it all have been used in popular media. Such as in To Kill a Mockingbird and themes in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. have stemmed from conversations with Mamie Till-Mobley. The producer and co-writer behind the 2022 Till movie, Keith Beauchamp, has done extensive research regarding the case. Beauchamp states, “As Black people, our stories are still deemed controversial in many ways.”
The Till movie is a depiction of the Emmett Till story but not in the sense where the brutality that occurred to Till is the focal point. Rather, it follows the actions that his mother took for the crime to receive national and global attention. Unlike many narratives that feature Black traumatic events, Till-Mobley had been calling for a movie made about her son since the ’50s. She approved of a biopic and fought hard to terminate the possibility of a film focused on her son’s murderers.
It took 67 years for a film to be released regarding the Emmett Till lynching. Beauchamp, who worked closely with Till-Mobley and endearingly referred to her as “Mother Mobley,” stated that Till-Mobley would state something along the lines that, “‘Keith… must continuously tell Emmett’s story until man’s consciousness is risen, because only then will there be justice for him.’”
The Till movie featured no scenes displaying the violence that occurred to Emmett Till, only snippets of dialogue leading up to the crime. Although, the creation of the film itself has led to debates in the Black community questioning the necessity of additional media about the hate crime.
These reactions are not uncommon as they also occurred when Amazon Prime released their original series, Them, which was a supernatural tale regarding a Black family that moved into racist White suburbia. The series was graphic and contained several scenes of brutality toward the Black family. Them is not based on any reported happening and was labeled by critics as Black trauma porn. “Trauma porn” is a fairly new term coined to describe media where the trauma of a group is excessively exploited for the reason of entertainment.
Chinoye Chukwu, the director of Till, emphasized her attempts to focus solely on Till-Mobley and her non-interest in showcasing the violence that was inflicted upon Till. There were no dramatizations of the event, but rather a chilling screen pan during the scene in which Till-Mobley placed her eyes upon her son’s corpse at his open-casket ceremony. In regard to the lynching, Chukwu reported to CNN, “As a Black person, I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to recreate it.”
The countless researchers and filmmakers behind the Till movie have argued that the classification of Till being “trauma porn” has ignored the efforts made to bring the story to the film limelight. The film was supported, perhaps, to even say that trauma porn is an umbrella that is not applicable to all stories relating to Black history and traumatic events.
Kalima Young, who is an assistant professor at Towson University, states that the term “trauma porn” conflates real-life videos and creative work. She said, “It takes some nuance out of the conversation.” However, this conversation pertaining to trauma porn will continue as long as more films and events considered traumatic will be released into the public sphere.
The Till film is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and other platforms such as YouTube. The Askew Student Life Center will be showing the film Saturday, Feb. 11 at the Student Life Cinema where viewing movies are complimentary for FSU students.
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