This Film Reminds Me to Never Shrink Myself in Relationships
By: Rebecca Theodore-Vachon
Tags: Relationships, Film, Culture, Black Love, Black Women

This Film Reminds Me to Never Shrink Myself in Relationships

Sanaa Lathan as Zora Banks in “Disappearing Acts.” Photo: HBO Films

I remember the first time my ex-boyfriend hit me. We were in the kitchen making dinner and arguing about whatever it is young couples in love argue about. I don’t recall the words exchanged, but I do know we were both upset, and then POP! A searing pain shot through the left side of my face. My boyfriend had slapped me. It was so quick, so surreal. It took me a few seconds to process what happened. I saw fear and regret in his eyes. He quickly apologized and hugged me. He whispered in my ear, “I’m so sorry, baby.” He made the empty promise that abusers make the first time they hurt their partners: “It will never happen again.”

Naive as I was, I forgave him, because I loved him. But it did happen. Again and again. The look of fear and contrition on his face soon disappeared. He became unrecognizable to me, cold and frightening. The abuse escalated. He slammed me against the wall and twisted my arm so hard that the pain made my breath turn into a quiet scream lodged in my throat. The open-handed slaps turned into punches that would land upon my body without warning or provocation. The apologies soon dried up, turning into blame. “You shouldn’t have made me so angry.”

And I believed it was my fault.

“I should be more supportive as he grieves the loss of his father,” I thought. I would make his favorite meals, do the laundry, keep the apartment tidy, doing anything and everything I could think of to appease him. But it didn’t matter. A fun evening together would quickly turn into me nursing a bruised cheek or a bloody lip alone in front of the bathroom mirror. I could barely look at my reflection because I was too ashamed of the bruised and battered woman who stared back.

In the midst of this abusive relationship, I came across the novel Disappearing Acts when I noticed numerous Black women reading it on the train during my daily commute to work in the city. I picked up a copy at my local bookstore and was immediately immersed in the world that author Terry McMillan crafted. I saw so much of myself and my then-boyfriend in Zora and Franklin. I found a secret comfort in knowing that even with these fictional characters, I wasn’t alone in navigating a difficult relationship. This is real Black love, right?

Or so I thought at the time.

I broke free from my boyfriend a year and a half later after a final and violent confrontation, but the emotional and psychic scars were hard to escape. When the film adaptation for Disappearing Acts premiered on HBO in 2000, I saw it with a group of friends at a watch party because I didn’t want to be alone, triggered by memories of such a painful chapter in my life.

Now, as the film turns 20 years old, curiosity led me to revisit it, and the novel, to further explore the connections between my story and Zora’s. As both a viewer and a writer, I have always advocated for more representation of Black romantic love in film and television. But with age and experience in my own personal relationships, I’ve grown to question some of the underlying messages relayed to Black women, specifically in heterosexual pairings. In a culture that socializes young girls to grow up to become “ride or die” girlfriends and wives, how do we find the line between healthy and loving relationships and emotionally toxic ones? Unfortunately, in most rom-coms and romantic dramas (whether Black or mainstream), there is the persistent Hollywood trope that women have to change who they are to be in a relationship. In the seemingly harmless “transformation” montages where the female protagonist loses weight, revamps her wardrobe, or tones down her career ambitions, there is a signaling to female viewers that they are not “enough.” That as Black women, we have to make ourselves smaller to make space for our partners’ love and fidelity.

I’ve learned that real love doesn’t have to hurt. It is imperfect, yes, but real love will challenge you to show up for yourself every time.

Even more troublesome is the idea — often seen in film — that women need to take on more emotional labor when their male partners cannot meet their needs. There is a problematic blurring of what constitutes a Black couple in love dealing with day-to-day challenges with romanticizing a physical and emotionally abusive relationship. We see that in Disappearing Acts.

The film adaptation stayed true to the spirit of the novel and, with it, the dysfunction and trauma that consistently plagued the relationship between Zora (Sanaa Lathan), a music teacher, and Franklin (Wesley Snipes), a construction worker. Katherine Marshall Woods, a licensed clinical psychologist who read Disappearing Acts and watched the film as a teenager, discussed coming away with much different observations two decades later. She picked up red flags from the beginning of Zora and Franklin’s relationship. “Zora desires to have this man in her life in any way, shape, or form,” Marshall Woods says. “She was aware he was struggling to contribute to the household, or bring something to the table, as we would say. However, through that generosity, there were a lot of times where there was a lack of communication and agreement and understanding between the couple.”

Indeed, Zora was being the dutiful girlfriend by providing most of the financial support in the relationship due to Franklin’s inconsistent income. Marshall Woods points out there was a failing of both parties in not explicitly articulating their needs and expectations, in what she describes as a “relationship contract.”

“Each individual communicates with each party regarding what it is that they want from themselves out of their own life, and they communicate what they feel like they need from that partner,” Marshall Woods says. “And if the partner is able to fulfill it, great. If you cannot, how will this person respond after time if these things do not get placed in the relationship? And so then it would need to be some sort of negotiation and compromise.”

The lack of communication and dishonesty between Zora and Franklin manifests in very troubling ways. Like the novel, the film shows Franklin withholding the fact that he is not divorced from his estranged wife, and that he has two children. Zora fails to disclose to Franklin that she has epilepsy, and when she becomes pregnant, she lies to Franklin when she plans to terminate the pregnancy. When Franklin confronts her, he begs her not to “kill their baby.” While Zora and Franklin try to rationalize their behavior under the guise of protecting the other, Marshall Woods found it to be emotionally manipulative. “We are upset about him lying and withholding from her, and now she is doing the same. This relationship, their level with being honest with one another, is just really problematic,” she says.

There were, however, violent instances in the book that did not make it to the screen. Toward the end of the novel, when Zora has had enough of Franklin’s excessive drinking and abusive behavior, she asks him to leave. Later that evening, Franklin comes upstairs and forces himself on Zora. Gina Prince-Bythewood, who directed the film and helped in the rewrite of the script with screenwriter Lisa Jones, was adamant that the sexual assault not be included: “That was something I was not going to put in the movie, because there is no way her character comes back from that, and the audience cannot come back from that. And I would not want to have that.” Marshall Woods adds, “People absolutely would have felt differently about this film, and I doubt people would have seen this as romantic. Those two provocations in the book, I think, would have spoiled the idea of what the movie offered.”

Prince-Bythewood instead gave the movie a hopeful ending. I asked her if she were to make Disappearing Acts today, would she have scripted it differently? “Knowing what I know now, I guess my vision of love, I do not think they should have gotten back together. I do feel that there was toxicity in that relationship. They absolutely both grew from being apart, and in getting together when they did not have their life together yet stunted both of them, and in breaking free, they were able to find themselves,” she tells me. “So, there is a beauty in that. I think probably if I made that today, they would have stayed apart.” Prince-Bythewood adds that she would focus more on Zora and Franklin cultivating a healthy friendship to co-parent their child.

Marshall Woods advises viewers to sift through the harmful messages that our favorite Black romance films, like Disappearing Acts, can carry. “What I think would be necessary is for each individual who is watching these sorts of films to see the possibilities of relationships,” she says. “[We should ask ourselves,] ‘Is this something I want to get myself into? Could I actually do this?’” So it leaves them with a way to explore who they could be with in a relationship, which I find to be very helpful.”

Years later, I am in a much different headspace since my introduction to Disappearing Acts. Revisiting the world of Zora and Franklin no longer feels like a place of solace but only serves as a reminder that I have outgrown the need to lessen myself to be in love. I get to be my authentic self and create the boundaries in a relationship that ensure my physical and emotional safety. If my partner violates those boundaries, it doesn’t lessen my worth as a woman to say no and walk away. Most important, I’ve learned that real love doesn’t have to hurt. It is imperfect, yes, but real love will challenge you to show up for yourself every time.