Something about the pandemic makes every movie seem like a comment on the pandemic—every shot either an example of social distancing or a reminder of the before time of drinks in bars and rubbing elbows with strangers. The Fits, at least, is really about an illness and about control over the body or its loss, particularly for black women who are, as usual, being disproportionately affected by America’s lack of care.
Toni, a young black girl who trains as a boxer with her older brother, joins a dance team out of a longing for female companionship. The older girls on the team are overcome, one-by-one, with a mysterious illness that causes sudden seizures. The movie rhythmically moves through training sequences, boxing and dance, which highlight the power and limits of the body. The seizures (known as “the fits” on the local news) are frightening and ecstatic twists on the controlled frenzy of the dance sequences.
Toni starts the film with a longing to be a part of the girls’ group, never stated but shown through her watching eyes and careful rehearsal of the dance moves. Her move from the boys’ realm of boxing to the girls’ world of dancing reminds me of my own desires to belong to femininity, to join a world of women working together, to be close to other women. I don’t know if I would call it queer, exactly, since at least part of what makes the girls cool is their appeal to the boys, but there’s something in Toni’s relationship to the girls that echoes with queer filmmaking and the desire for more female friendship on screen.
This idyllic world of girls training and laughing together is interrupted but also heightened by the fits, which unifies the team even while taking them down one by one. The fear of physical loss of control hits Toni hard, even though her boxing training has made her accustomed to pain and injury—she doesn’t even scream as she pierced her own ear. As the other girls topple around her, it becomes clear that they have given in to something which she cannot accept. Their submission to the fits means they have passed over a threshold she fears.
The “current moment” (I know we’re sick of this phrase) makes Toni’s fear all the more familiar. One of the girls, Maya, the first of the younger girls to get the fits, speaks of the illness as inevitable and almost something to be desired. Now as I write this from lockdown, some governments seem to be thinking the same: it’s desirable for as many people as possible to get the illness so that we can reach some imagined herd immunity. The sacrifice is that millions of people worldwide could die to get there. None of the girls seem to be have been seriously injured in their fits, but what must be sacrificed to pass over this threshold?
As the movie goes on, it is suggested that at least some of the cases are “hysterical”—psychosomatic, maybe caused by the girls’ own desire for the fits. Director Anna Rose Holmer researched cases of conversion disorder and dancing plagues, which are some of the best wikipedia pages to read if you’re born. With my background, the fits recall spirit possession in 11th century, a real cause of illness and distress where the victim falls ill due to the grudge of a wandering ghost. Spirit possession is cured through a medium (miko) who can take the spirit into herself rather than the victim, where a priest can then exorcize the spirit. The miko often goes into violent fits during this process; essayist Sei Shōnagon lampoons this in one section of The Pillow Book where she describes a lecherous priest ogling the miko’s breasts when her robe comes undone during a possession. There is evidence for earlier forms of shamanistic practice which did not rely on the gendered hierarchy of male priest / female miko in dealing with spirit possession. Spirit possession in literature and some of the historical hysterical plagues worldwide can be seen as a manifestation on the body of the psychological trauma of dispossession, of a desire to speak to a society which will not listen—so it’s commonly associated with woman and outsider classes and religious movements which are not recognized by existing hierarchal authority. Fits and certain types of dance are often associated, separated only by thin line of volition.
In The Fits, the illness becomes a form of initiation: it comes to represent an entrance into the club of womanhood and adulthood. You can’t understand unless you’ve had them. It’s different for each girl which gives them something each of them can share with the others. When Toni enters her fit, we see her floating as her feet step off the ground. She has a vision of performance with her dance troupe in their uniforms. She floats, she falls. Each step into a new world requires a loss of control, a small tragedy, with the potential for flight.
