Tanner Vaughan: It is hard to talk about Nickel Boys without addressing perspective. Two relevant facts about director RaMell Ross: one, his formal education is not in filmmaking, but photography, and two, his only prior feature film is a documentary (Hale County This Morning, This Evening). Make no mistake, while both statements may seem to assert his novice, I mean no insult to his evident expertise. The intended insight, which will not be lost on anyone who has already seen Nickel Boys, is that Ross approaches image-making as a photographer, and narrative as a documentarian—two fields where perspective foregrounds much of the critical discourse.

The documentary field will always demand discussion of perspective. For a documentarian, it’s not merely an aesthetic decision, but an ethical one. Documentary can liberate. The camera can give voice to those without one. Or, it can stifle and suppress. The medium’s inherent implication of truth is a dangerous thing. Nickel Boys exists at a peculiar juncture for this discussion—a film adaptation of a novel (Colson Whitehead’s 2020 Pulitzer winner) that constructed a fully fictional story from true events that happened at a Florida reform school in the sixties. Whitehead’s writing exists to give voice to those that were silenced. Ross holds true to that impetus for creation and transposes it to the screen by making full employ of cinema’s unique capacity for first-person perspective.

Ross’s approach to first-person perspective is invested not only in seeing what his characters see as a matter of positioning, but in seeing how they see—highlighting the care with which they dwell on certain subjects, the tenderness of their gaze, and making a point of peripheries when that gaze is averted. Ross has no interest in staging long, complicated takes, finding montage better suited to replicating the reality of distracted attentions and stolen glances. As focuses shift, insert shots construct poetic meanings from the things people turn to for solace when their agency has been diminished. These nickel boys have little left, but they can still choose where to look.

You have probably noticed that while Nickel Boys is filmed in first-person, I have referred to its viewpoints in the plural. About a half hour into the runtime, Ross makes a pivot. One day in the Nickel Academy cafeteria, Elwood, the bright-eyed kid whose perspective we first inhabit, meets Turner, a more cynical fellow student of longer tenure. Suddenly, Ross gives us a replay—the same interaction through Turner’s eyes. For the remainder of the runtime the edit swaps perspectives with regularity, and as the boys’ bond grows, they begin to assimilate each other’s attributes, which lends an increasing fluidity to the trade-offs. Ross lets us witness not only how these boys see, but how they are seen—not by their oppressors, but by a peer, their closest friend, the only person who might comprehend the core of their sadness.

Ross only breaks his film’s rigorous dedication to perspective in two contexts. The first is through archival footage, a documentarian’s technique that gives us a glimpse at how Ross himself makes sense of this story. In a way, those moments are his perspective. The second is Elwood’s life after Nickel Academy, his adulthood consumed by research of abuse investigations conducted in the wake of that Florida school’s belated closure. These scenes (shot with something like a reverse Snorricam worn by actor Daveed Diggs) force a cleaver into the film’s established intimacy—we no longer see through Elwood, but from just outside of him; affixed, yet detached; clinging from a distance. But it is not just the camera. It is Elwood himself. He is dissociated. Consumed by thoughts of his days at Nickel, his trauma no longer permits him access to an interior self. He has lost the boy he once was. He’s cut off. He’s adrift.

***

Olivia Stowell: In theatre (my disciplinary training in undergrad) and in media studies (my disciplinary home now), there is a shared emphasis on “affordances”—an object’s perceived characteristics or potential uses. In theatre, we often spoke about the “affordances of the space”: the architectural and affective features of a performance space, where it positions its audience, its size and scale. The directors I worked with noted that every space affords both possibilities and limitations, but also that limitations themselves could become sites of possibility. 

As I watched RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys—a staggering feat of filmmaking, which deploys a first-person perspective style, so that the audience sees what the point-of-view character is seeing rather than seeing the character themselves—the concept of affordances as both possibility and limitation kept returning to me. The choice to utilize first person perspective (a technique not commonly used in U.S. narrative cinema) destabilizes the audience from the jump, unseating expectations of how cinematic spectatorship should work. It is an affordance of the film, one that Ross makes profound use of.

This affordance, of course, has limitations. The actor’s body is a central medium for meaning in film—think of the power of the lengthy close-up, lingering on the planes of an actor’s face as they metabolize emotion, or the choreography of two or more bodies in space together onscreen, reacting to one another. By using first person perspective, one could argue that Nickel Boys deprives its central actors (Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, who play the young Black teenagers imprisoned at the abusive, segregated Nickel Academy, and whose points-of-view the film sees from) of many of the tools in their actorly toolkit. We almost never see Elwood (Herisse) and Turner (Wilson) interacting with each other within the confines of the screen itself. Instead, we see how they look at each other, and hear their conversations. 

But while not being able to see both actors’ faces in the sequence of a scene may initially seem like a limitation, Ross sees and makes use of the possibilities it affords. His camera catches truly beautiful, uniquely framed images, set askance or askew. It also rejects gratuitous representations of violence and trauma, refusing to turn its characters’ suffering into a spectacle for the audience to revel in. With Nickel Boys, Ross shifts the cinematic encounter to one of looking with, rather than looking at. 

Ross’s directorial approach also affords critique of the spectatorial gaze itself—withholding both conventional shot/reverse shot cinematic grammars and conventional representational strategies that push audiences to “empathize” or “identify” with what occurs on screen. Instead, he brings us into what his characters see, while also holding us at a place of generative distance. This formal style—alongside the interjection of archival footage and historical photographs and documents throughout the film—creates a distancing effect, pushing audiences to see, think, and feel historically. We find and position not only Elwood and Tucker within history, but also find and feel ourselves in history as well, watching their story from the vantage point of the present. Far more than a stylish gimmick, Ross’s direction reworks what it means to sit in the darkened space of the movie theater and look.

Tanner Vaughan received an MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a thesis collection of short literary screenplays. He spends all his free time keeping up with popular music and film, occasionally writing about it when he gets the urge.

Olivia Stowell is a PhD candidate in the department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, where her dissertation project examines race, gender, and labor in contemporary reality TV. Because she has correctly predicted at least 18 out of the 23 Oscar categories for the past three years running, she is now considering betting money on the Oscars.

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