Messy Liberation: Feminist Conversations about Politics and Pop Culture20 Jan

Sinners vs One Battle After Another: Race, Power, and Who Gets Centered in Hollywood

In this episode of Messy Liberation, Becky Mollenkamp and Taina Brown dive into a layered, messy, and necessary conversation about storytelling, race, motherhood, power, and who gets centered when Hollywood tells “political” stories.

Using three recent releases as our jumping-off point — Sinners, One Battle After Another, and His and Hers — we unpack what happens when art claims to be subversive… and whether it actually is.

We talk about:

Why Sinners feels intentionally campy, unapologetically political, and rooted in Black culture, music, ancestry, and collective survival
How One Battle After Another leans on harmful tropes about Black motherhood, revolutionary violence, and white male centrality — and why “satire” isn’t a get-out-of-harm-free card
The racial reframing of His and Hers and how changing the main characters to Black women fundamentally shifts the story’s meaning, stakes, and power
Who gets empathy, who gets invisibility, and who’s expected to carry the labor — on screen and off
Why representation alone isn’t enough, and why who tells the story matters just as much as what story gets told

This is a spoiler-heavy episode that assumes you’ve either watched these films or are okay hearing the full critique. It’s also an honest conversation about discomfort, trigger warnings, and the exhaustion of watching your lived experience turned into “prestige art” for someone else’s enlightenment.

If you care about media literacy, liberatory storytelling, and calling bullshit when “art” punches down — this one’s for you.

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Episoder(124)

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