‘They Cloned Tyrone’: Racial dystopia, comic delirium and narrative torture

Everything Everywhere All At Once premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas on March 11, 2022. The film’s path since then is well known. Its influence on other films has started to become clear, from its narrative daring and artistic creativity, to the audacity of its unbridled fantasies, to the creation of a universe that crosses the border of science fiction to become a social and moral tale.

It is always difficult to trace the conception of a film from its birth in its creator’s mind. But They Cloned Tyrone, released on Netflix this Friday shares much of Everything Everywhere All At Once’s openness to the imagination. In his first feature film, Juel Taylor, the director of episodes of minor series and co-writer of Creed II: The Legend of Rocky, has composed a strange (and tiresome) science fiction conspiracy comedy. It combines racial commentary and social elements for a film that echoes the tone, perspective and narrative freedom of the film that swept this year’s awards season, combining fantasy, absurdity and surrealism. While those elevator doors to the forbidden, to the secrets of power, hidden in food store refrigerators, can be reminiscent of Being John Malkovich, the main plot wraps political commentary within a street-level fantasy.

A drug dealer, a pimp and a prostitute, played by John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris, are in charge of discovering, between laughter and some violence, what is hidden in the dark measures imposed by the government. The investigation takes the film to the original territory of the comic dystopia arising from a blaxploitation political satire. Its science fiction is cluttered with so many explicit references to cinema and popular culture, thrown out without rhyme or reason, that it ends up exhausting: Kevin Bacon and The Man Without a Shadow; SpongeBob, Patrick and Squidward; Rambo and the X-Files; 50 Cent; Spiderman and A Clockwork Orange and even The Muppets, to name a few.

The surrealism of the series Atlanta blends with the cumbersome plot twists of Everything Everywhere All At Once. Now that they’re letting us, let’s write strange things, authors like the Daniels and Taylor seem to say —strange things that, of course, they believe that they must try to explain, but that no one fully understands. That is not surrealism, just rhetorical delusion. At least the sociopolitical essence of They Cloned Tyrone, set in an indeterminate time period that underscores the systemic oppression of African-Americans, is understandable. And it is implicit in a sentence from the first minutes of the story: “Enough of the violence between blacks!”

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