In this episode of Messy Liberation, Becky Mollenkamp and Taina Brown dive into a layered, messy, and necessary conversation about storytelling, race, motherhood, power, and who gets centered when Hollywood tells “political” stories.

Using three recent releases as our jumping-off point — Sinners, One Battle After Another, and His and Hers — we unpack what happens when art claims to be subversive… and whether it actually is.

We talk about:

• Why Sinners feels intentionally campy, unapologetically political, and rooted in Black culture, music, ancestry, and collective survival
• How One Battle After Another leans on harmful tropes about Black motherhood, revolutionary violence, and white male centrality — and why “satire” isn’t a get-out-of-harm-free card
• The racial reframing of His and Hers and how changing the main characters to Black women fundamentally shifts the story’s meaning, stakes, and power
• Who gets empathy, who gets invisibility, and who’s expected to carry the labor — on screen and off
• Why representation alone isn’t enough, and why who tells the story matters just as much as what story gets told

This is a spoiler-heavy episode that assumes you’ve either watched these films or are okay hearing the full critique. It’s also an honest conversation about discomfort, trigger warnings, and the exhaustion of watching your lived experience turned into “prestige art” for someone else’s enlightenment.

If you care about media literacy, liberatory storytelling, and calling bullshit when “art” punches down — this one’s for you.

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Becky Mollenkamp and Taina Brown dig into the U.S. military action in Venezuela, and why calling it “surprising” misses the point entirely. What’s happening in Venezuela isn’t new. What is new is how little the U.S. is pretending anymore.

Discussed in this episode:

• Why the U.S. arrest and removal of Venezuela’s leader is colonialism, not “law enforcement”
• How oil, capitalism, and empire are always the through-line
• The danger of pretending America is a neutral or moral global authority
• Why “how you do anything is how you do everything” applies to geopolitics
• The direct connection between capitalism, rape culture, and power grabs
• Why nuance matters—and why refusing false binaries is not the same as defending dictators
• How white discomfort gets mislabeled as “lack of safety”
• Why joking about colonization isn’t harmless (and what listening actually looks like)
• What it means to be able to critique U.S. actions without claiming expertise over other nations

RESOURCE: Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism by Eve L. Ewing

They also wrestle in real time with fear, grief, learning out loud, and the possibility that America’s increasing global isolation may be both terrifying and inevitable.

This conversation isn’t tidy. It’s not optimistic. But it is honest—and rooted in the belief that refusing empire starts with telling the truth about it.

Next episode preview: Becky and Taina shift gears (a little) to talk about Sinners and One Battle After Another during awards season—with opinions they already know won’t be universally loved.

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New year, same bullshit? In this first episode of the year, Becky Mollenkamp and Taina Brown tear into the pressure cooker that is “New Year, New You”—and why it’s a capitalist scam designed to make you feel broken so someone else can profit.

They talk honestly about aging, bodies, wrinkles, weight loss drugs, and the impossible beauty standards women are asked to carry—especially as hyper-thin culture makes its deeply unwelcomed comeback. Becky and Taina reflect on what it means to age in public, to feel tenderness toward softness, greys, and change, and to reject the idea that looking older is a personal failure.

The conversation also widens to business: the pressure to “start fresh” every January, the myth of endless growth, and the exhausting reality that there is no finish line—just maintenance, repetition, and showing up again. They share how they’re approaching the year differently: slower, more collaboratively, more honestly, and more in tune with their actual capacity.

This episode is a permission slip to stop reinventing yourself on capitalism’s timeline and start listening to your own body, rhythms, and seasons instead.

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