On Friday, Amazon Prime debuted Them, a 10-episode anthology series from Little Marvin and Lena Waithe. The show, which has already been greenlit for a second season, follows the Emory family’s first 10 days in their new house in Compton, Los Angeles, in the early 1950s—part of the wave of Black families moving out of the South during the Great Migration. Our critics hashed out the particulars of the series in the spoiler-filled conversation below.
Sonia Saraiya: I know I spent a few days last week messaging you about Them and trying to sell you on it, Cassie. I had been taken with the stunning visual quality of the episodes I’d seen up until that point, and finding myself horrified but also intrigued by some of the imagined figures that appear in the show, like the maimed minstrel (Jeremiah Burkett) that haunts Henry Emory (Ashley Thomas).
Then I watched episode five, titled “COVENANT: I,” directed by Janzica Bravo, and abruptly turned against it. The episode returns to the very first scene, where Lucky (Deborah Ayorinde) is threatened by a white woman, and reveals it to be a flashback. From there, what follows is one of the most awful scenes of violence I’ve witnessed onscreen. I’m definitely more sensitive to baby-related violence than usual—I was even watching this screener with my three-month-old. But watching white supremacists dump a baby into a pillowcase and toss it around the room until he’s bludgeoned to death was more than I could take. And the men sexually assaulted Lucky while they were at it.
After this I really struggled to come to terms with the brutality presented in this show. From a political perspective, there’s something deeply off-putting about repeatedly showcasing the suffering of Black bodies. From a dramatic perspective, I felt frustrated that despite a lot of bodily harm, I didn’t have a read on the main characters. There was no dramatic tension, either. Any encounter between Black people and white people, no matter how benign at first, would devolve into some kind of racist aggression; indeed, nothing really happens in the show except for racist aggression.
Cassie da Costa: What’s interesting is that, as you know, the extreme level of brutality you point out in the “COVENANT” episode was foreseen by much of Black Twitter. As soon as the trailer dropped, Black people were complaining about this show’s throwaway aestheticization of anti-Black violence before they saw a single episode. Of course, as critics, we have to form an opinion based on its actual substance, rather than making snap judgements based on advertising, or an overarching idea of what kinds of series “should” be made. But with Them, I found the substance severely lacking, especially in the show’s most violent or disturbing moments. So often, trailers are worse than the movie or TV series themselves; in this case, I thought the trailer was actually more interesting.
I agree that Them is pretty, but not in the way I believe the producers or filmmakers intended. There’s a sheen of off-putting perfection to every image here, which has inspired comparisons to Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us. But in Peele’s work, the beauty is plastic and creepy. In Them, it’s stylish and technical. It has a way of painting over some of the show’s most egregious efforts at social commentary, keeping viewers engaged in how things look rather than in what the images themselves are doing. This is a typical prestige television strategy. But by the time you reach your emotional breaking point with Them—whether while watching episode 5 or episode 1—the paint has cracked. And what’s beneath it, a blunt depiction of racial violence in 1950s Los Angeles, isn’t profound.
Saraiya: Horror is so well suited to the trim claustrophobia of a feature-length film, or even, in this case, a two-minute long trailer. Ten hours, meanwhile, is an awfully long time to try to gin up fear or suspense. The show returns to the same beats over and over. We’re of differing minds on the aesthetics, though, because even though I was horrified by some of the images, others—like the white hands unfolding like a flower to snatch Gracie into the dark, or the way the white paint coated Ruby’s hands when she was trying to fit in at school—shook me.
I can appreciate the depths of the dark fantasies the show wants to spin, and I was intrigued by a few late-season revelations—including the black-and-white flashback to the settlement Eidolon, and Henry and “Da Tap Dance Man”’s conversation in the theater. But on the whole, the show moved away from what I thought was fascinating and genuinely creepy about its opening episodes—the oppressive figures that lived in the imaginations of young Ruby (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Gracie (Melody Hurd)—in order to focus on a blunt story of gruesome violence that is mostly told through Lucky, a supremely shortchanged character. I ended the season feeling that the show was an egregious misstep, a misplaced effort to capitalize on the racially aware horror that has been trendy since Get Out.
da Costa: Beyond Peele’s work—from which the show clearly cribs imagery, not only in marketing but in production—there’s plenty of precedence for Them. Oscar Micheaux was making “race films” in the 1920s, silent films that were unafraid of depicting the brutal violence of lynchings. His characters were not mere symbols or archetypes; Micheaux brought his own sense of Black cultural expression and what he called “potential” to those films, which elevated them beyond the instructional or merely stylish. More recently, Remi Weekes’s 2020 horror thriller, His House, depicted the terror experienced by contemporary Black African migrants, and the drawn out violence enacted by white British social services. That movie is complex in how it takes on colonialism and immigration. It’s not merely interested in educating the audience on what has happened historically, but in using horror to examine the complexities of human behavior and the long term effects of global white patriarchy.
Them fails not merely because of its opportunism, but because it has nothing particularly intelligent to say about the gratuitous violence and compounding terror it depicts.
Saraiya: In her review, Candice Fredrick asked an astute question: “Who are these characters when they are not actively battling or succumbing to the menace of whiteness?” These four Black characters are reduced quite literally to the “problem” of their skin color.
da Costa: Yes, Frederick’s piece got at the core of Them’s emptiness—its refusal to see Black people beyond the scope of their trauma. I wonder what Little Marvin or the other producers intended. Who are they trying to speak to? Something I thought Kasi Lemmons did brilliantly with the depiction of Black trauma in Harriet was to establish each character’s sense of self and of life in every scene. The movie wasn’t just about what happened to Harriet Tubman or her eventual friend Marie Buchanan (played in the film by Janelle Monae), but how they, and the enslaved people Tubman helped free, saw themselves even in the face of potential harm or danger.
Peele’s films are also interested in this question—how do these Black characters, of varying interests, class levels, and personal commitments, understand themselves apart from how white people see them? It becomes the emotional engine for Get Out and ultimately essential to its style—Daniel Kaluuya and Betty Gabriel’s widened eyes and tears; the softness or harshness of the sunlight depending on location. I think the aesthetics don’t really work for me in Them because the relationship between the subject matter and how it is portrayed in the show came off as technically proficient, but perfunctory. They’re showing something, signifying something. But to what end?
Saraiya: Looking back on the show, I see four characters contending with racism in four spheres: work, school, homemaking, and in Gracie’s case, the book she’s reading. But in each, there’s limited character arc and no resolution—just conflict, conflict, conflict. We don’t learn anything about the characters—white or Black—through the repeated juncture of racism. Them has to do a lot of table-setting to explain what makes Compton different, pointing to a conspiracy of redlining and a history of exploitation. But ultimately the nihilistic takeaway is that racism is a force so powerful that it turns people into caricatures and locations into sets.
Them really struggles to structure its story, too. I was struck by how Henry’s preoccupation with Da Tap Dance Man stemmed from his guilt over going to see the movies on the day his wife and son were attacked. That felt rich to me. Yet it’s tacked onto the end of the season, after so much bloodshed has ensued. Lucky’s arc, which took her from her cousins’ apartment in a different neighborhood to a mental institution, just confused me, though at least she got some pulpy revenge in by the end. And what on earth are we to make of Betty Wendell (Alison Pill), who ends up imprisoned in the underground bunker of a dairy farmer, only to be shot and killed when she tries to escape?
da Costa: Alison Pill’s character reminds me a lot of Jena Malone’s in another empty recent work about Black trauma, Antebellum. Both are white racist caricatures, groomed and grinning; stunningly evil, well-resourced, and ultimately eliminated. They each represent a kind of shorthand for white women’s complicity. This has the effect of watering down their behavior. Catherine Keener was much more effective in Get Out as the seemingly chill, New Age hypnotist mom aiding her tone-deaf surgeon husband with his horrific medically racist entrepreneurship. Those characters, even within the exaggerations typical to the horror genre, felt achingly real.
I also wonder about the prestige series construct, and the kind of flashy ticket it offers creators hoping to tackle tricky subjects. People certainly can do great things with it, like Michaela Coel with I May Destroy You, Terrence Nance with Random Acts of Flyness, or Jack Amiel, Michael Begler, and Steven Soderbergh with The Knick. In those cases, their creators refuse to take the form for granted; they work to make the case for their ideas and create a visual world that doesn’t package those ideas neatly for a streaming audience but develops a rigorous relationship to them. Them simply isn’t up to the task.
All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
— Cover Story: Anya Taylor-Joy on Life Before and After The Queen’s Gambit
— Zack Snyder Explains His Long-Awaited Justice League Ending
— Tina Turner Is Still Haunted by Her Abusive Marriage
— Emilio Estevez’s True Hollywood Stories
— Armie Hammer Accused of Rape and Assault
— Why Black Panther Is Key to Understanding The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
— 13 Oscar-Nominated Movies You Can Stream Right Now
— From the Archive: Meet the Real-Life Teen Burglars Who Inspired The Bling Ring
— Serena Williams, Michael B. Jordan, Gal Gadot, and more are coming to your favorite screen April 13–15. Get your tickets to Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour, Live! here.
"really" - Google News
April 13, 2021 at 12:28AM
https://ift.tt/3tehcUP
Who Is the Racism Horror Anthology Them Really For? - Vanity Fair
"really" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3b3YJ3H
https://ift.tt/35qAk7d
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Who Is the Racism Horror Anthology Them Really For? - Vanity Fair"
Post a Comment