Powerful With A Little Bit of Tender

A colourful artistic expression of music, fashion and emotion. This is the best way I can describe Janelle Monáe’s short film Dirty Computer. Having debuted an album under the same title, Dirty Computer shows a multi-faceted artist who has turned her album into a dystopian Afrofuturistic experience. Though immersed in purples, greens, blues, reds and pynks (no, not a typo; check out the album), Monáe displays a grueling world filled with homophobia and anti-blackness. This world is certainly not far from the world we experience. However, with flying police robots, landscapes that are drenched in saturated colours and human abductions that result in experimentation; it is safe to say we are existing in a classic sci-fi universe. 

Throughout the film we see ‘memories’ of Monáe’s character, Jane 57821, being erased. She and her group of misfits — which include her two lovers — are the ‘Dirty Computers’ that need to be fixed and re-assimilated into this society. Each memory sequence is essentially a music video for a song on Monáe’s album. Every music video comes with a new host of to-die-for outfits that represent both Monáe’s feminine and masculine sides; presenting an almost androgynous style that is “powerful with a little bit of tender” (lyrics from Monáe’s hit song, Make Me Feel). The themes of the music videos encompass Black empowerment, feminism, sexuality and just good ole party music; all of which create a lovable character that is being destroyed by a world that will not accept her. Though our heroine and both her lovers are able to escape their treacherous capture, there is an unsettling feeling left by the end of film. 

Has this stopped? and What about everyone else? 

Our main characters may have obtained freedom, but there is no promise of forever; which becomes the end-all-be-all question for this film: Will discrimination ever end?