When we watch a series, there are often characters who mark us, to whom we become attached and who we will follow to the end (namely the dismissal of the actor or his death in an episode). But there is also in my opinion another type of series, which marks you not with characters, but with moments, scenes that still hang around in your mind long after seeing them.
Recently I felt this while watching the first episodes ofAtlanta, a new series broadcast since early September on FX in the United States and produced by Donald Glover. In this drama (mix of comedy and drama), Glover plays Earn, a young black man struggling to survive in the Atlanta neighborhoods and who luckily becomes the manager of his cousin, the rising star of local rap Paper Boi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpEdJ-mmTlY
Silence and unease
In episode 2, after a misadventure between the bosses, Earn finds himself in the police station for police custody with other people, all black. While waiting to find a solution for his bail, he listens to the stories of the men around him and the mockery of the police. The scene is funny, at the beginning only. One of these arrested men, dressed in a hospital gown and used to the police station, suffers from a mental illness. “Shut up, little one”, a cop calls out when Earn asks why he’s here instead of at the hospital. Moments later, after drinking toilet water to spit it out on a (white) policeman, the man in the lab coat is beaten up and yells in front of Earn, who prefers to say nothing and look down to hide his discomfort.
In the days that followed, I thought about that scene a lot, going from comedy to horror flick in an instant, and all it could say about America today, where tensions between the black community and the police are still so strong. And yet Donald Glover and director Hiro Murai (director of the brilliant “Never Catch Me” music video for Flying Lotus) do not insist heavily on the national context, they prefer to let silence and discomfort settle down so that we can wonder ourselves about what we see. The same unease that we read in Glover’s eyes on the screen.
I was like, “Let’s do something that shouldn’t be broadcast, something controversial”
–
This tension, which symbolizes racism still prevalent in the United States, was already palpable in episode 1, where a white character tells a story to Earn using the word “Nigga”. Later, when the hero asks him to retell this story in front of his rapper cousin, hoping for a tough showdown, the white man leaves the word out. Earn, discomfited by this concealment of the sad reality, is silent once again and takes it upon himself, leaving us to draw the necessary conclusions.
“How do you make people feel like they’re black?”
In recent series like Empire or The Get Down, which also show the world of rap and hip-hop, we follow characters who are desperate to reach the spotlight. In Atlanta, heroes want above all to escape the darkness of their lives. Our eyes can only see the desperation of an urban community wondering if there is a piece of the outdated pie known as the American Dream.
As the Mashable site writes very well, this series “Is the closest, the most sincere look around the modern ‘how to make it’ through the life of blacks in Atlanta”. Atlanta, it’s the energy of desperation brought to the screen, where the characters still hope to be able to pay the rent at the end of the month. Earn might have been successful in Princeton, but he ends up at the police station asking his girlfriend to pay her bail. Paper Boi may be a rising star that people want to snap their pictures, but he spends a lot of time with his enlightened pal Darius smoking, dreaming of leaving the rotten sofa where they wonder what dangerous life awaits them outside. The strength of these moments, which always oscillate between comedy, drama and poetry, is to sit down next to these characters, by their side.
Au Time, Glover explained in this regard:
“The thesis was: How do we give people the impression of being black? It became something more accessible than that, but that was the idea. I was like, “Let’s do something that shouldn’t be broadcast, something controversial.” If it’s canceled in ten episodes, I’ll be happy with those episodes. ”
This vision is unprecedented on television, and Donald Glover could acquire a primordial political and cultural status overnight. A fascinating reversal when we know that the young man of 32 years has long hesitated to take responsibility.
Glover’s return to black America
Until today, Donald Glover was known for his many talents. Humorist, he wrote for 30 Rock. Comedian, he shone in Community. Rapper, he confirmed his credibility under the name of Childish Gambino. But often in recent years, critics have criticized him more or less explicitly for not coming to terms with being black, especially by cultivating an image of nerd and indie that appeals more easily to white audiences. In 2013 for example, the late Gawker site wrote on the occasion of one of his concerts that he was “So strange, so uncomfortable in his own skin”.
Chance or not, Lena Dunham had hired him the same year for playing her black boyfriend and Republican party supporter in his series Girls in order to respond to the controversy over the lack of diversity. The following year, after the death of Michael Brown, killed by a policeman in Ferguson, he posted a series of tweets in which he ironically explained why would he like to be a “White rapper”. “I hope to get too tall and too white, but I’m just a black man. I’m a nigga, he said in a burst of tweets erased since.
The most important thing was that it had to be funny
–
Today, The Ringer site estimates thatAtlanta is “The moment when Donald Glover is the darkest of his career” with a “Complete landscape of a black town with black figures, black music, and the problems of black life”. same the author team is made up entirely of black people, an exceptional configuration in the world of television where even a primordial series like Orange is the New Black does not include any black screenwriter when many characters do.
And yet, Donald Glover has denied any willingness to engage politically or artistically. On the Vulture website he affirmed:
“The most important thing was that it had to be funny. I never wanted it to be important. I never wanted this show to be about diversity, all of that stuff isn’t for me. ”
Too late Donald, Atlanta is already one of our unmissable series this fall.
–
