Changing Yourself to Survive Your Environment
By: Marcus Rone
Tags: Cinema, Film, Movie Review, Movies, Filmmaking

Changing Yourself to Survive Your Environment

Alex Wheatle is a fantastic coming of age film that tells the all too real story of killing your inner self in order to fit in Marcus Rone Dec 22, 2020·4 min read

Image: Amazon Prime Video

Whenever you enter a new environment your instincts tell you to do whatever possible to fit in. Unfortunately that sometimes involves us hiding aspects of ourselves or changing who we are all together, all for the sake of conforming to our new habitat. What is so poignantly captured in Steve McQueen’s film, Alex Wheatle, is just how difficult that struggle of transitioning to a new life can be. Perhaps we end up being something great on the other side (as is the case with Alex Wheatle), but that doesn’t make the journey to getting there any easier. Are we killing our false self in order to become who we were meant to be? Or are we denying who we are in order to survive, becoming someone who is false in every sense?

Alex Wheatle is based on the real living and breathing author of the same name, who’s literary works have gone under the radar from the world stage but have won many awards and accolades over the years in the United Kingdom. In the film we follow Wheatle in his youth as he goes from one home to another, an unfortunate circumstance due to his orphanage. We see how Wheatle’s innocent attitude towards the police and what it takes to survive in his new environment, informs who he will become over the coming years. The dramatic shift in Wheatle’s personality is an unfortunate and predictable outcome of the brutal violence and racism inflicted on minority communities by mostly white police. Wheatle’s priorities and passions shift gears, and one has to imagine where he might be in his life if not for these hardships. In no way are those trials and tribulations that Wheatle went through justified, but they nonetheless made him who he is today.

Anyone who has read the amazing works of Virginia Woolf knows of her thoughts on “killing the false being within” and becoming who you were meant to be. The only mystery that we can never fully know is if/when we do kill part of our inner self, are we getting rid of the imposter or our true being? In the film, Alex Wheatle talks about how music was always the one thing he really cared about in his life, and yet, he ended up being an author. In a just society where Wheatle had a loving family and didn’t have to face the evil realities of our racist world, could he have been something else? It’s a bit of a useless question, for to know the answer requires humans to know what could have been. All that we can know is what is and who we have become up and until this point. Wheatle is a very talented author and has made a significant and vital impact on his community, and that is sometimes the best we can hope for.

Image: Amazon Prime Video

Starting a new life isn’t just filled with the confusing philosophical and psychological quandaries mentioned above, a lot of it can be the joyful foundations of who we become. While what people struggle with in their individual lives can be relative, human suffering and human joy is universal. Moving to a new home and reinventing yourself can be scary and unnerving, but you also have the opportunity to make new life long friends, and as is the case with Alex Wheatle, find new callings. I’m not sure if Wheatle would have become such a prolific author if not for his journey up until this point, and whether or not the struggles along that journey are worth it is another question entirely (you would have to ask Mr. Wheatle). What I do know is that he barred what he had to given the circumstances and carried that into his passions in order to communicate to younger folk in his books the lessons of the past. I for one am grateful for who Alex Wheatle has become.

This being one of five films in an anthology series by director Steve McQueen, many critics have pegged this as the weakest iteration of the series. While I can’t say Alex Wheatle is my favorite in the collection (my pick goes to Lovers Rock), the movie asks very interesting questions about how we got to be who we are, whether or not that journey was the right path, and questions the very essence of who we are as humans. As a queer person, I’ve on many occasions questioned who I am as a person and struggled with my identity in my upbringing. I know from experience that wrestling with these questions are just about the most important thing anyone can do for themselves.