When we watch a series, there are often characters that mark us, to whom we become attached and that we will follow until 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 linger in your mind long after you have seen them.
Recently, I felt that 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 dramedy (mixture of comedy and drama), Glover plays Earn, a young black man struggling to survive in the neighborhoods of Atlanta and who becomes by chance the manager of his cousin, the rising star of local rap Paper Boi.
Silence and discomfort
In episode 2, after a misadventure between bosses, Earn finds himself at 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 comical, only at the beginning. One of these men arrested, dressed in a hospital gown and used to the police station, suffers from a mental illness. “Shut up, kid,” asks a policeman when Earn asks why he is here rather than in the hospital. A few moments later, after drinking water from the toilet to spit it out on a (white) policeman, the man in a smock is beaten up and screams in front of Earn, who prefers to say nothing and look down to hide his discomfort.
In the days that followed, I thought a lot about that scene, which went from comedy to horror in an instant, and all it could say about America today, where tensions between the black community and the police are still high. And yet, Donald Glover and director Hiro Murai (director of the brilliant clip of “Never Catch Me” for Flying Lotus) do not insist heavily on the national context, they prefer to let silence and unease settle in so that we can wonder all alone about what we see. This same discomfort that we read in Glover’s eyes on the screen.
I was like, ‘Let’s do something that shouldn’t air, something controversial’
This tension, which symbolizes the 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 “nigger”. Later, when the hero asks him to tell this story again in front of his rapper cousin, hoping for a tough confrontation, the white man omits the word. Earn, disconcerted by this hiding of the sad reality, is silent once again and takes it upon himself, leaving it to 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 ready to do anything to reach the spotlight. In Atlanta, the heroes want above all to escape the darkness of their vi(ll)e. Our eyes can only see the desperation of an urban community wondering if there is still a piece of the expired cake that we call the American dream.
As the site Mashable writes very wellthis series “is the closest, most candid look around modern ‘how to make it’ through black life 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 could have made it in Princeton, but he ends up at the police station asking his girlfriend to post bail. Paper Boi may be a rising star that people want to photograph, but he spends a lot of time smoking with his lit pal Darius, dreaming of leaving the rotten sofa in which they wonder what dangerous life awaits them outside. The strength of these moments, which always oscillate between comedy, drama and poetry, is to sit next to these characters, by their side.
At TimeGlover explained about it:
“The thesis was: How do you 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 aired, 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 you know that the young man of 32 years has long hesitated to assume.
Glover’s Return to Black America
Until today, Donald Glover was known for his many talents. Comedian, 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 reproached him more or less explicitly for the fact that he did not assume the fact of being black, in particular by cultivating an image of nerd and indie which appeals more easily to a white audience. In 2013, for example, the late Gawker site wrote during one of his concerts that he was “so strange, so uncomfortable in his own skin”.
Coincidence or not, Lena Dunham had hired him the same year to 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 published a series of tweets where he explained in an ironic way why he would like to be “white rapper”. “I hope to get too big and too white, but I’m just a black man. I’m a nigga”he dropped in a salvo of tweets since deleted.
The most important thing was that it had to be funny
Today, The Ringer website estimates thatAtlanta is “the moment when Donald Glover is the darkest of his career” with a “complete landscape of a black city with black characters, black music, and black life issues”. Same the authoring team is made up entirely of black peoplean exceptional setup in the world of television where even a primordial series like Orange is the New Black does not include any black screenwriters while many of the characters are.
And yet, Donald Glover has denied any desire to engage politically or artistically. On the Vulture website he asserted:
“The most important thing was that it had to be funny. I never wanted it to matter. I never wanted this show to be about diversity, all that stuff is not for me.”
Too late Donald Atlanta is already part of our unmissable series this fall.