Review: In Amazons Swarm, Donald Glover Pokes The BeyHive. But To What End?

Engaging in any form of discussion about the story Donald Glover is telling can often feel like falling into a trap set by experts. That's twice the price of his latest project, Swarm , the toxic pop-horror comedy releasing in full on Amazon on March 17. Anyway, let's get started.

For reasons that soon became clear, Beyonce's name was never mentioned on the show. But Glover and Atlanta and Watchmen graduate co-writer and executive producer Janine Nabers go out of their way to convey that they are the basis for fictional megastar Nija (Nireen S. Brown). Born in Swarm's hometown of Houston, Ni'jah is suddenly releasing an album of visual classics, headlining major music festivals, marrying a hit rapper and riding a white horse in some of her most iconic looks. Her booth uses bee emojis on social media like Swarm, BeyHive. Myths and rumors about her world are the same ones spread by Beyoncé fans. Also, each episode begins with the following on-screen text: "This is not fiction. Any resemblance to a real person, living or dead, or to random events."

What Glover and Neighbors portrays as a clear reaction to the sanitized depiction of black women in popular entertainment and what makes the show compelling, and in my opinion, Swarm's character is very different from Beyoncé's. Awkward, childish and obsessively devoted to her idol, Ni'Ja, Dominican Fishback's Dre is a young woman with the allure of a wild child. The first thing we see is him opening an envelope with a new credit card, activating his account and depositing a seemingly non-existent $3,600 into a pair of Nijah tickets. It's complicated, but it's also good that he's owed his dear roommate Marissa (Chloe Bailey, protégé of Beyoncé's R&B duo Chloe x Halle) a birthday present for years.

© Quantrell D. Colbert - Prime Video crush Quantrell D. Colbert - Prime Video

Dre and Marissa grow up together loving Ni'ja, a local boy like Farmer Roy. But while Dre was stuck at twelve forever, Marissa was growing up. She has other friends, a boyfriend (Damson Idris) whom Dre dislikes, and a future career as a makeup artist. As Marissa shows signs of letting go of the woman he calls "number one," Dre's already tenuous grasp of reality begins to wane. At the end of the first episode, he embarks on a cross-country road trip filled with violent, insane fans, a kind of unconscious search for belonging.

In the middle of the seventh episode of the season, the creators appear to be preparing a horror comedy about the psychopathic undertones of the Sten culture. While the term — and the social media landscape that fueled Stan's worst attacks — is modern, the horrors associated with obsessive fans stretch back decades, to films like Les Miserables and The Fan . It's thanks to executive producer Fishback, who has become one of Hollywood's most exciting young talents, that Swarm remains so interesting through the first three episodes. Not only does he move seamlessly between innocence and anger, making Dre look pathetic, menacing, or downright grotesque, but he captures aspects of the character that struggle within him without saying a word. It's an interesting show that I haven't seen on TV before.

Glover won the audience's patience, and while it took a long time to get there, Swarm eventually developed a more ambitious theme. Along with well-known Atlanta character types (the condescending "racist" white woman, the middle-class black family farm) and cameos from pop kings like Billie Eilish and Paris Jackson (Michael's daughter), the series punched holes in the original. bright modern. True crime with predefined heroes, villains and pop ghosts.

© Dominic Fishback at Prime Video Swarm Prime Video

At first glance, Beyonce's wealth of references seems deliberately provocative, if not downright malicious. But Glover and Nabers were involved in more than nihilistic exploitation of the state, to their credit. In episodes like "Black Bieber," "Champagne Poppy," and "Born 2 Die," Atlanta explores how the images of real-life musicians (Justin Bieber, Drake, and D'Angelo, respectively) interact with pop culture to shape the subconscious. . Fantasies, nightmares and expectations that speak volumes about mainstream events like race, fame and romance. At the Swarm event, the creators (and the Twitter users whose posts helped spark the idea) spoke about wanting to critique what they saw as over-representing black women as glamorous, invincible superhero saviors view. No pop star fits that final description quite like the notoriously flawless profile of Beyoncé, whose work is often cited as the apotheosis of black femininity.

I think Dre's point of view, despite being a black woman from Houston, is the complete opposite of everything Beyoncé is expressing. This forces the character to remind us that the black female category is no more monolithic than the white male category, and that it is unhealthy to erase the diverse experiences of black women that bear no resemblance to the truth of "being" or of have ecstasy. "Drunk." Fall in love.” Along with Beyoncé, Forgive Me, Nija and Dre are yin and yang: one goddess, the other monstrous, both necessary to create the whole.

How effective you find this allegory depends in part on whether you agree that the archetype of black women in entertainment today is a paragon of excellence. Though we've seen many tall, strong Black women on television since Shonda, Hollywood still disproportionately portrays Black women as violent or sex objects, and old clichés like "Jezebel" linger. I'm having a hard time letting go of some of the ideas the show lets go about sexuality, gender, and (though the creators overcomplicated those elements a bit) parenting, which is as odd as Dre, on the verge of the best, on the brink of the worst. receive . Ideal as a privacy screen for Swarm Fishback. As a cultural critic, he can be interesting and sometimes insightful. But at its psychological core, the show conflates personality with pathology in an overly simplistic and potentially destructive way. While that's not the only accusation that could put Glover in the BeyHive spotlight, I doubt the crush is worth it.