The Brooklyn Rail

The very word [use] is stubby plain, workmanlike, its monosyllabic bluntness as bare and unadorned as the thing it names. It radiates overtones of sturdy practicality, bringing to mind images of shapeless overalls and sensible shoes. We tend to equate the useful with what it is plodding, rational, and charmless, to oppose the useful to the dance of the imagination, the play of fantasy, the rhythms and the rollings of desire. 
—Rita Felski, “Introduction,” New Literary History 44, no. 4 (2013)

Obadiah “Fish” Johnson (James Earl Jones) believes in “good, down to earth livin’”—the kind built on habit, precision, and just enough beauty to keep breathing. At night, Fish whispers to himself, almost in solemn prayer: “At your age, why ain’t you dead yet.” And with the same matter-of-fact certainty, he answers: “You’ve got use. That’s why you ain’t dead yet.” Use—its necessity, its function as a condition of being—is the beating heart of The Annihilation of Fish (1999), a lesser-known Charles Burnett film recently resurrected by a restoration (by UCLA and the Film Foundation with Milestone Films) and a limited theatrical release at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

For admirers of Killer of Sheep (1977) or To Sleep With Anger (1990), it may come as a surprise that The Annihilation of Fish follows the familiar arc of the nineties romantic comedy, complete with a meet-cute of sorts, scenes of domestic entanglement, and the gradual softening of hostiles into affection. Yet in Burnett’s hands, the film becomes a decidedly inverse variety: in place of the archetypal bright eyed-lovers, it stages an interracial romance between two late-in-life seniors, each newly landed in Los Angeles for a fresh start. Fish, a Jamaican immigrant released from a decade of hospitalization in New York, and Flower “Poinsettia” Cummings (Lynn Redgrave), a hopeless romantic escaping the ruins of a failed love, find themselves neighbors in an aging Victorian boarding house overseen by the enigmatic Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder). Their story unfolds in the twilight of nineties Echo Park, where, against all odds, they fall in love.

As convention would have it, the two could not be more different. He’s Jamaican; she’s American. He’s measured; she’s a mess. He moves through the world with careful deliberation; she leaves a wake of chaos. Ordinarily, the rom com would summon such oppositions as the grounds for attraction—surface-level difference animated into romantic inevitability, a set of quirks ultimately resolved through the ostensible universality of love. But here, under the sly guise of genre-coded contrast, the film advances toward greater stakes. Beneath the humor of misaligned personalities lies a deeper, more intractable difference: two fundamentally irreconcilable logics of being, embodied respectively by Fish and Poinsettia. These logics—produced by the uneven impress of history, by racialized and gendered economies of worth, attachment, and conditional recognition—yield not simply divergent outlooks, but incompatible structures of meaning. One life is forged under the necessity of utility, of meaning yoked to function and use; the other is formed by an existential need for love.

In keeping with Anthony C. Winkler’s original short story, from which the film was adapted, Burnett renders these conditions with an odd, almost absurdist sense of humor, resisting any temptation to veer off into sociological theses. His protagonists drift through the world in the company of unseen companions—talking, quarreling, even falling in love with people who, for everyone else, just are not there. These are not ghosts in the spectral sense, nor symptoms, nor pathologies. They are psychic projections, systems of survival without which the world would be unlivable.

Fish’s lifeline materializes as a never-ending battle: an immigrant’s fight for survival made literal. His opponent is Hank, an invisible demon who first appeared a decade ago in the wreckage of job loss, widowhood, and a life dislocated from any clear purpose. Each day, Fish rises and throws his fists in the air, trying to wrestle an invisible mass to the ground, a struggle that, for him, becomes nothing less than a cosmic fight between good and evil. In Hank, he finds an enemy and a use: a structure through which his life can still signify something, a struggle by which he can still prove he exists. For Fish, to be useful is to be legible, to be living, to matter in a world structured to forget him—where being Black, aging, and invisible risks slipping into existential nothingness, or, as Fish bluntly puts it, is simply being “dead.”

Poinsettia moves with an entirely different economy of ghosts, one that at first feels lighter, but is deceivingly frivolous. Her invisible companion takes the form of an on-again, off-again again relationship with the spirit of Giacomo Puccini, the long-dead composer of Madame Butterfly. After a string of failed relationships with abusive men, Puccini is a lover that she can trust. He is adoring, respectful, and most importantly, incapable of harm. For Poinsettia, marriage, specifically with Puccini, becomes her ultimate goal, her end-all-be-all. Within a context determined by white femininity, and as an aging yet still attractive woman, marriage functions as a means of reclaiming cultural legibility back toward a visible, recognizable social role. This aspiration is, of course, rendered absurd by the fact that Puccini is dead—no officiant will marry them—leading to their most recent breakup. In her budding relationship with Fish, however, this possibility of marriage—and with it, “normalcy”—seems, for the first time, truly attainable.

Despite the asymmetries that undergird their bond—some of which are not so subtly animated by the racial logic of an earlier era (Poinsettia initially suspicious; Fish instinctively cautious)—the lovers nonetheless arrive at a precarious equilibrium. Living across the hall from one another, they develop a daily rhythm: afternoon card games, walks through the park, tender sex. For a moment, the film entertains the promise that affection might bridge their structural differences that otherwise define their relationship. But this fantasy soon ruptures when Fish registers a quiet disruption to his daily routine: Hank, the once ever present adversary, stops appearing for their wrestling matches. For Fish, this loss isn’t simply disorienting; it is existential. Thrust into a state of melancholia, he comes to believe that his deepening relationship with Poinsettia has precipitated Hank’s disappearance (an erasure, as if by the very force of desire itself). Fish sees only one path forward: to sever ties with Poinsettia in order to preserve what remains of his bond to Hank, and, by extension, his own coherence in the world.

What follows next is heartbreak, yes. But also an act of violence. Convinced that their relationship marked her final chance at a life approximating “normal,” Poinsettia resolves to act, to win Fish back by any means necessary. When Hank returns for one last bout, Fish lunges into empty air; and Poinsettia, watching, lifts a pistol and fires towards the ghost, effectively killing Hank. Fish collapses beside the invisible body, as if shot himself. “You’ve annihilated me,” he whispers, eyes full of tears—devastated. Later that evening, the earlier refrain, once a stubborn declaration of life and refusal, “Why ain’t you dead yet,” reappears now inverted: “You’ll soon be dead,” Fish mutters in the form of a self-prophecy. In the days following, he falls gravely ill, refusing to see Poinsettia; Fish’s illness, unnamed and sudden, suggests that loss of his invented purpose is indistinguishable from the dissolution of the self.

Here, the film arrives at its most incisive and least sentimental crux: a confrontation with the assumption that meaning is transferable (that love might substitute for function). Burnett suggests that this assumption is not only naive, but a matter of life and death. That it is a form of violence in itself. Indeed, it is Poinsettia—guided by a cultural logic that prioritizes love as the highest and most authentic ground of being—who, with misguided but well-meaning intent, destroys the very system that allows Fish to live, believing that her love, or her framework of meaning, might be sufficient for him.

The stakes, then, are at once ontological and relational. The Annihilation of Fish asks whether love can articulate itself across deep histories of oppression and asymmetry—where identity not only describes differences in material existence but also structures entire modes of feeling—and whether these differences make reconciliation not merely difficult, but impossible.

That the film has recently resurfaced and was not lost is fortunate, for twenty-six years later, the questions it poses retain their urgency. In a moment where love, care, and empathy are often marshaled as political imperatives—as substitutes for the labor of material redistribution or action—The Annihilation of Fish complicates the seduction of affect as a sufficient ground for solidarity. It exposes the fantasy of love (an emotion widely figured as the most universal) as a mechanism through which dominant structures may preserve themselves, unsettling whether belief in untroubled emotional reciprocity is itself a privilege of those shielded from its impossibility.

As the film nears its end, it offers a tentative answer. Perhaps love can stretch the bounds of impossibility—but only through profound and reciprocal sacrifice. In the final scenes, Poinsettia dresses as Madame Butterfly, invoking the opera’s own parallel story of interracial love foreclosed by the futility of cultural understanding, another narrative in which love is insufficient to bridge the divide. Believing she cannot live without Fish, she prepares to take her own life across his dying body. But just as she is about to act, Fish stirs, as if resurrected by her imminent sacrifice. He tells her to stop, and confesses that he loves her. With this act of forgiveness, Fish interrupts the fatalism of Madame Butterfly—not with triumph, but with a fragile optimism. The film’s quiet brilliance lies precisely here: with a single gunshot, love is destroyed. And yet, the film refuses to abandon love. Instead, it pieces it back together, stranger and truer for it.