We Need to Talk About Luce

Not sure if this is intentional on Onah's part or not, but I see that there's a play on the ambiguity between code-switching and sociopathy, in which the line is blurred depending on whether Luce's intention is to uphold a certain image in front of his family/teachers vs his friends, or to manipulate the situation to pursue some passive-aggressive twisted sense of justice at some particular moments. I'd say that this ambiguity was successfully played out by Kelvin Harrison Jr. which has kept a lot of audience members including me confused but intrigued at the same time.

I think being taken out of a war-torn Eritrea and an ex-child soldier to be in a comfortable American family, Luce knows exactly what freedom means, at least in this large national setting. It is what every American wants to believe in: the freedom to change your narrative, the freedom to be the master of your own destiny, to be EXACTLY who you set out to be. While America may be freer than Eritrea in some senses, this particular narrative is nothing but an illusion. Race, gender, social-economic background, and lots of other elements can affect the course of one's life (i.e. Orlicki and potentially his dog being Dartmouth legacy students while DeShaun's whole future relying on his athletic scholarship.)

Though Luce is appreciative of what Mr. and Mrs. Edgar have provided for him and he has worked hard to show it, he's slowly figuring out through Harriet and other adults that although he is black and he has other black friends and teammates, he is treated differently because of the progress he has made comparing to his undeniable past. Like most Americans, these people love a good glow-up, and Luce is their poster boy, seen as an exceptional person that transcends race and other challenging circumstances, and most importantly, an asset (Notice how Principal Towson has referred him as his thoroughbred, and jokingly, someone he would like to clone... Get Out much Towson?) Although Luce is aware of this unfairness, he's probably ill-prepared by his white parents about the larger injustice a young black man like him might face in the world outside of this academic bubble, something Harriet knows too well. While all the Edgers ever wanted (mostly just Amy) is to protect Luce from his past and to give him the fresh start he deserves, Harriet wants to protect him from his future – a future where it doesn't matter if you are a star athlete or a debate champion, black people have a higher chance to be arrested or worse because of the color of their skin. On top of the personal experience of injustice Harriet might have faced by simply being an adult black woman in America, she has probably witnessed countless of times of cops unjustly mishandling her mentally unstable sister and not treating her with basic decency that any human deserves. So to her, there's no way for someone to break out of this figurative box unless you're exceptional and extraordinary like the way she expects Luce to be – a future Obama-esque figure. There's perhaps this flawed zero-sum logic that she has, and the way she carries out her lessons is unprofessional and potentially breaching the ethic codes at the least. Like Luce, Harriet operates on some sort code of justice informed by her limiting worldview: she wants Stephanie Kim to be the voice that stands up against rape culture regardless of her personal wishes (Still pretty f*cking messed up that Kim just brushed off the Santa Claus game like it's nothing) and makes Deshaun a scapegoat as a warning to other black track athletes.

To Luce, Harriet is just an instrument of the system she's trying to protect her students from, making her an unfortunate target of Luce's resentment and his borderline sociopathic and passive-aggressive path of retaliation. Having adoptive and liberal parents who constantly worry about losing his trust if they overstep, Luce probably gets away with a lot of things growing up and has learned how to deal with social situations (locker room talk, toxic masculinity, or treating girls with respect) with little parental guidance (Peter automatically equates the word stern with bitchy when it's used to describe women). He is smart enough to know how to lie and uphold the good boy image in front of the adults and remain a cool sociable dude who's down to smoke a blunt in some hidden cabin, but he is still trying to figure out who he is other than his past when everyone else sees him as the prime example of nurture trumping nature. In his mind, he's trying to make things right for Deshaun and Stephanie, but the ways he manipulates them into doing the dirty work reflects the limitation of his empathy and just how ill-constructed this 17YO's sense of justice is.