ONE OF MY favorite quotes is from the novelist Taiye Selasi—or, more specifically, Selasi’s editor. Selasi was nervous before the release of her debut novel, Ghana Must Go. How would it be received? What if it wasn’t perfect? She called her editor, and the advice was simple: “Perfection is the Lord’s.”
This came to mind as I watched the final season of Pose, a scripted FX drama focused on the New York City ballroom culture, in which groups of LGBTQ+ people influenced by the fashion industry compete in dance, runway, and posing competitions. Pose isn’t just about trans and queer people as they try to survive the AIDS epidemic; it stars trans actors. It’s moving not just because of its subject matter but also because it’s unafraid to make what many scholars consider a grave mistake in art: crossing the line into sentimentality.
Let dialogue be cheesy. Let characters’ instincts to battle it out on the dance floor after every tragedy be as ridiculous as most musical numbers in Glee. Let feelings be unrefined. These seem to be Pose’s creeds, and I often eyerolled at the show’s adherence to them. And yet I kept watching. It was—there’s no other word for it—love.
The dichotomy reminds me of the Oscars, which has largely prioritized perfection over love for some time now, with the Best Picture category dominated for years by films that avoid sentimentality and tropes. As the critic Owen Gleiberman wrote recently about the 1998 Best Picture-winning romance Titanic, “the fact that people always qualify their love for it, placing themselves above it (‘The script sucked!’) ... is an indication that it wouldn’t have been honored in the same way today.”
Such prioritization of perfection is why many Oscars prognosticators, including me, were shocked by the 2022 Best Picture win by Apple TV+’s CODA. I still haven’t seen the film. Although its trailer made me chuckle and showed an expansion of representation in media, I recognized why it has been compared to a Disney Channel Original Movie. And yet the film impacted Oscar voters, apparently moving them more than the frontrunner The Power of the Dog—which received 12 nominations and ultimately one win to CODA’s three nominations and three wins.
Pose is filled with clichés. It is also filled with revelations. “There is a crack, a crack in everything,” wrote Leonard Cohen. “That’s how the light gets in.” Like Selasi’s editor, he recognized we strive for a godlike perfection and yet must learn to embrace imperfection, knowing the Creator paradoxically uses brokenness to make something more whole.
Da’Shawn Mosley (dashawn-mosley.com) is a former Sojourners associate editor and lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
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