Microcosm – a small place, society or situation that has the same characteristics as something much larger.

It’s been a long time, for all of us. A lot of days went by, in these seemingly godforsaken lockdowns. Life itself has become no less complex, but the pace of life and its’ focus seemed to dramatically shift. Suddenly the home became the space for various unexplored facets of our lives, our work and our long buried hobbies came scuttling out of the corners of our rooms, our kitchens, our beds. Certainly for some more than others, the dimensions of our spaces collapsing into the home has made day-to-day routines feel changed in ways too numerous to detail. Lives taking place across the smorgasbord of geography have been narrowed to the small pools and swamps of our localised environments; minature walks to the shops replacing dreams of distant lands or sun-drenched shores (unless you’ve been lucky enough to live near a beach).

Maybe this is why Friday (1995, Dir. F. Gary Gray) has resonated with me so, in a time of internal solitude. To be present with yourself from day-to-day is an immense achievement of self-awareness cultivated over time, and life’s distractions never cease to multiply around you pulling continuously on your attention, the endless possibilities of the day around you. In Friday, our day is spent with Craig and Smokey, Ice Cube and a relatively then unknown Chris Tucker. What Smokey and Craig want to do primarily is chill out and do nothing on a Friday; sit on the porch getting high and try to alleviate the monotony and malaise of modern living circa 1990s Los Angeles.. Craig’s brand new unemployment wraps itself around his face, his demeanor and energy. His family off to the side stand bemused, cereal with water fills up the belly of anyone not contributing properly to the household today. Smokey on flip side runs his mouth louder than he runs his brain, laziness overtaking his processes and running his small time weed selling into dangerous waters. Adrift in the urban sea, they take up their positions on the porch to chill out.

The problem with doing nothing though, is it doesn’t necessarily mean nothing is gonna happen. In a recounting of the film’s legacy, Ice Cube says that “Everything in Friday happened on my block at one point or another. It’s really a lot of different Fridays wrapped up into one day, so that’s why it’s so authentic – because it’s all real to an extent.” So while they try to put the brakes on life, life accelerates with fantastical abandon towards them, as a carnival of characters crash through the screen.

The film’s very inception was concerned with a more dynamic, richer and more human portrayal of hood culture, humour as the vehicle to reveal understanding and empathy. Ice Cube’s very own career had taken him through John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood (1991) in his acting debut, which had left him marked in understanding the need for a vision of his own community which captured the humour of daily life, as opposed to its’ violence. What takes place then is a transformation of a film’s own internal confines, it’s guiding principles shifting the perspectives of the representation on screen. Suddenly the world comes to our doorstep, and we are on its porch. Being broke means the public spaces you can occupy are limited, ringfenced off, hidden behind locks, keycards, money, status, social standing and an endless array of other concerning factors. But the porch is both public and private, a seat in the audience and a stage itself. The street becomes theatre, neighbourly disputes and relations become observed, studied, amused and entertained by or working to instill fear. While we journey through a couple of locations (Smokey’s house, a liquour store etc.) poverty brings with it a stillness of space, a dimming of spatial potential. There is no real place to be, and not much point in going anywhere else.

But in this stillness comes clarity, and the expanse of time is stretched across one long revelatory Friday for both characters. The carnival comes to them, and its’ attractions are many. From moment to moment they adapt and change their archetypes, without ever leaving the same space. They are friends, getting high and hiding from their parents. They are Smokey, forced to break into a house at one moment and forced to relieve himself behind his own in another, his unwillingness the only binding factor to his moment to moment transformations. They are momentarily under assault from Deebo (former WWF wrestler Tiny “Zeus” Lister Jr.), only to potentially begin an assault on the little bicyclist Lil’ Chris (Jason Bose Smith) who keeps knocking over everyone’s trash cans. Craig is confronted with issues of masculine identity, on how to exercise power in a world filled with barely thought through violence. Smokey’s eyes bulge outside of his head not just from hilarious ad-libs and asides, but from the genuine fear of retribution, as his machinations only further sink the two into trouble with Smokey’s dealer Big Worm (Faison Love). The characters themselves are allowed to fill a whole expanse of our mind’s canvas, their place in the world only growing with each passing second. They are not characters unfolding themselves onto the world, but they are people who through the film’s unfolding begin to inhabit the various character masks of life.

The day unfolds around their world, and their place in our world comes into focus with a cool organic momentum which grows and grows. Friday still subscribes to the narrative archetypes of fiction which keep stories strung together as easy to understand nets; good triumphs over evil, hero over the villain etc., there is no reason to even disparage Friday for doing so. Friday turns hood culture inside out to walk along comedy’s left shoulder as opposed to tragedy’s right arm, but it does that wrapped up in the archetypes of a fable; lessons are learned by the journey’s end.

In it’s production perspective, Ice Cube’s image and persona was locked into media consciousness as a member of N.W.A, and he had long been living in the crossroads between the media, violence, culture and both self and othered representation. It took conscious effort to conjure Friday’s archetypes of people in the hood, portraits filled with authenticity which could communicate a world not well media travelled outside those who lived in its’ streets. It takes vision to ground them in the narrative frameworks that echo across dividing lines of history, cultures, nations and peoples, and integrity to do it in a way which elevates those characters to become more human over time not less. Craig may stray closer to a mythic hero when he finally slams that trash can down on Deebo’s head, but it is only because he has strayed from the fringes of his community’s doorstep right into the heart of a matter which puts them at risk and him at its crossroads.

What do we need champions for, who do they work for and why? Who knows whether questions like this ever troubled those who actually made Friday, but as the world begins to figure out how best to step outside again, I find a tremendous amount of understanding wrapped up in a tale so effortless that on its surface seems barely noticeable. A Friday, one of many caught up in a calendar of even more. Days can just slip into nothing like that. But then, what is the nothing they slip into? Maybe they are worlds of real moments; of underappreciated gems and the peoples always around us in our lives; champions of spirit who live amongst material poverty. Communities and stories which can exist in their own right and which validate themselves by their own presence and joy. Perhaps this is far too an esoteric understanding of what has largely lived as a cult-classic stoner comedy from the mid-90s, but then perhaps there is more to this which lies underneath it’s casual surface.

And that makes me laugh. A lot. Even if I wrote this on a Thursday.

-Alex

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