jeen-yuhs (part 3)

jeen-yuhs (part 3)

While Part 1 + 2 benefited greatly from the kind of fly-on-the-wall inside access that Coodie (the primary filmer) had to Kanye’s struggles to achieve that first taste of mainstream success, Part 3 loses that, largely, and spends a lot of time compiling media footage and offering commentary.

Coodie reunites with Kanye to a limited extent after the release of Life of Pablo and there is some limited more verité footage from the period between 2016-2020, though the amount of it is somewhat limited and tends to not be quite as compelling.

At several points in the final leg of the film, Coodie repeatedly turns off the camera because he finds it somewhat unethical to be filming Kanye’s rambling monologues that seem to originate from a place of mental instability.

Perhaps the most noteworthy segment, for me, is a scene in which Kanye is listening to Tucker Carlson talk about the media’s perception that Kanye “is going insane” being a result of his espousing of Christian values like being against abortion. He seems to wholeheartedly agree with Tucker’s assessment.

Scenes like this one suggest that Kanye’s turn to religion is very serious for him, but also work in some way as a stand in for how any number of Trump supporters regardless of race can come to see themselves as laughed out of the public square by a media elite who have no use for their traditional values, the losers of a culture war who are looking for a champion to charge into battle on their behalf.

While I am not attempting to be an apologist for either Trump or Kanye, I do think that there is a lesson to be learned from this moment regarding the dangers of being dismissive of people’s fundamentally held beliefs and attempts to tightly constraint the limits of acceptable speech. It’s easy to be cynical about someone like Kanye and view his every move as a form of publicity stunt, but the final act of this documentary perhaps tries to first and foremost remind us that he is also a person… and that no amount of success can wipe away the human capacity for grief, frustration, and alienation.

I suppose that at some level what I’m trying to say is that we should seek to understand first rather than to judge first when someone says or does something that is offensive to us. I’m not saying it’s easy, nor am I saying that anyone should be faulted for being unable or even unwilling to do so (goes against the entire premise of my argument, in fact). I’m saying though that perhaps it’s worth holding as an aspiration, one that might do more to change the toxicity of our culture than almost anything else.