You are the monster

(As requested by Albert in the comments some weeks ago, I’ve been watching season 3 of Atlanta - if you want to hit me up with a request, drop it in the comments - of this piece or any piece - or hit me up)

Trying to write this piece is legitimately the longest it has taken me to write anything on here outside of Lunch Eater. Perhaps not the mechanical writing of it but thinking this through.

Here are some openings I didn’t go with:

“I’m not equipped to write about this.”

“I’m not sure that this show is meant for me.”

I think both of those statements may still be true but as I’ve thought more and longer about this, it didn’t feel right to shy away from writing about Atlanta Season 3.

On the most obvious level, it reminds me of season 2 of Master of None. More formally audacious than what came before it but perhaps less insightful. Perhaps that isn’t fair.

Let’s go back.

I love Atlanta. If this, and Childish Gambino, is why Donald Glover dropped out of Community then I can’t be too upset. Well, at least with this. Childish Gambino I’m pretty ambivalent on as a project. But Atlanta. That’s good TV.

Donald Glover is definitely a talent. I hesitate to use the word genius because I think it’s lost its meaning. But talent, he’s definitely one of those.

I mean, look at this season of television. I’m not sure I’m sold that it is amazing (we’ll come back to that) but it is very good and thought provoking. And it speaks to a tension inherent in American society right now.

Perhaps then the companion show to this is Watchmen which looked racism in America dead in the eye. Sure, they do it in very different ways (and in some ways Atlanta is better at talking of those things) but they both are products of the current climate when there are silly voices that say that racism is a thing of the past and that the sins of the past don’t matter.

Okay. Atlanta Season 3 sees the crew of Paper Boi, Earn, Darrius, and Van on tour in Europe. But it’s not just that. Every odd numbered episode isn’t following the crew, it’s an anthology show. Each of those episodes is self contained and doesn’t have any overlap with any of the other episodes. Except that’s not true because a guy in the first episode appears in a later anthology episode and then in the post credits sequence at the end of the season. But maybe none of that matters.

The season opens with a teaser of two guys on a boat in the middle of a lake. A white guy, White, and a black guy, Black. They talk about how the lake is where a town of black people used to be that was flooded by a mining company. Now the ghosts of those people haunt the lake.

Smash cut to a young black boy waking up from that dream in a classroom. That leads us into “Three Slaps” which gives a fictional recount of the Hart family murders (look it up, grim stuff).

That opening teaser is the thesis statement for the season. Everything, even when it isn’t explicitly said, is about race. But we’ll get to that.

When Reddit watches TV

I sometimes feel like the recap culture that went mainstream with Game of Thrones (don’t think that was the point that happened? You’re wrong. Suddenly every site on the internet was doing recaps) has lead to TV being watched in a really weird way.

Suddenly, everything is a game. Who will end up on the Iron Throne? That seems like bad tactics from Jon Snow? As though those are the questions to ask about TV and the arguments to have.

This all accelerated with Westworld. A show pretty much designed to be solved by the hive mind of Reddit.

Westworld is not good TV (fight me but the good parts of the show in its entire run, of which I have watched all, are the pilot and the last episode of the first season. That is it). It is bad storytelling wrapped in a mystery box in the hopes that you won’t notice. The first episode plays a trick on the audience but doesn’t clue them in that anything is up so they are only confused. And if they are not confused then it means they worked out the twist very early on and so when the turn comes late in the season it falls flat.

And once that’s out of the way the remainder of the show is high school level philosophy that would get a D from even the most generous of teachers.

But enough of that. My point is it has conditioned today’s audience to try and pull apart every show. Sometimes I can understand that instinct - for instance, Twin Peaks: The Return where it appears a mystery that can be solved is at play (or, the audience is just baffled by the images in front of them they need a hive mind to try and understand it). But it’s with everything, even things where it isn’t warranted.

So with this season of Atlanta, of course the hive mind kicked into overdrive. Are the anthology episodes dreams, as suggested by the boy waking up in the first episode? Are they part of the normal Atlanta universe, which has always had the hegihtended elements of invisible cars and black Justin Beibers? Are they in conversation with the other ‘normal’ episodes? What does it all mean?

I think it doesn’t matter.

All of that is just a game that the internet likes to play. An affirmative to any of them doesn’t actually illuminate what the season is trying to say. For my money, if you forced me to, I would say they are all (even the normal ones) episodes that take place in a universe solely their own. Even though the normal ones have the same faces, and the crew are on tour in Europe during those episodes, I don’t think it matters if they all take place in the same continuity or separate. And if they do take place in the same continuity then the timeline is borked anyway.

And I kind of like that maybe they are a dream but if they are I think it completely undercuts things being said in, particularly, the last episode of the season with Van’s insane jaunt through Paris.

But I guess this is how we watch TV now. The substance and the message matter less than trying to work out a mystery that isn’t there.

What we mean when we say Lynchian

OR

Lynchian is what white folks say when they haven’t heard of Afro-surrealism

A friend that had watch the season before me said there was a real Lynchian vibe to it. At the same time, I’d read some early coverage of the season suggesting there was an element of horror to the season.

And my friend wasn’t wrong. And those critics weren’t wrong.

They just misnamed it.

Atlanta has always played in the wheelhouse of afro-surrealism. Those invisible cars. Those black Justin Beibers.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Think of Get Out. The Sunken Place. Those moments in black media that depict the uncanny and how it impacts black people.

The thing is, often when we talk of this stuff, and we speak of Lynchian, it gets misconstrued as weird. Which it isn’t. I know that a lot of people think Lynch is doing weirdness for weirdness sake. That it’s all just so crazy and weird. But it’s not.

Lynch heightens uncanny states to explore themes. The logic he follows in his storytelling is dream logic. People that look the same except their hair is different. Underground and otherworldly locations. Ourselves reflect back at us as dark mirrors.

Take Twin Peaks. Sure, it could be kooky. It could be strange. But it wasn’t about the dancing midgets (but it was about that also). The show was always about the violence men inflict on women. Hell, there’s an arc in the middle of the The Return that makes this abundantly clear.

And sure, there’s this…

But that’s part of the dream state being created to be able to interrogate the horror of the modern age. (For the record, I’m still not sure what that particular scene was all about - I suspect it’s that the evil that was unleashed on the world at Hiroshima has slowly infected everyone up to today - which is a weird fucking sentence to write).

Afro-surrealism mines a similar vein. The creation of heightened, uncanny states to be able to interrogate the ‘now’ for black people.

And so it is here. The season is constantly asking who profits from the work of black people? Examining the violence inflicted by white people when they stumble into black spaces. What can black people do to thrive? What do they have to become to be able to exist in white spaces? What is blackness? What happens when white people believe they are being allies but aren’t?

It’s incredibly dense. The mode it uses to pose those questions is often one of satire. A club owner beating who he thinks is Earn because all the Dutch fans are in black face as Sinterklaas. Absurd situations arise to consider the questions. But then, and it almost is this way, the hammer drops.

A white man has his home taken by the descendant of a black man who the white man’s descendant owned as a slave. All across the country the same thing is happening to the white descendants of slave owners. It’s funny in a tension comedy kind of way. Then the white man ends up in a hotel bar where he has a drink with another white man that has experienced the same thing (and is in fact White from the teaser of “Three Slaps”). The other man is at piece, black people are owed this he says, he’s happy for them, they deserve it. Then he goes outside and shoots himself.

At the same time, there are episodes that forego the laughs for pretty much horror. “Three Slaps” isn’t a funny episode. It just gets more and more awful as it goes on. Then, fortunately, there is release.

It’s incredibly clever. It would be too easy to try and have a season of a show talk about these issues and have it end up like some sort of 12 Years a Slave. Dour. Depressing.

But maybe we should be depressed even as we are laughing because everything, all of it, even when it is at its most absurd and Alexander Skarsgard is eating a human hand in Paris, it is all so very true.

But is it any good?

Can something be more clever than it is good? If it’s clever, and is never bad (as is the case here) then isn’t it just good?

I think for me, I watch Atlanta to laugh. That may be shallow of me but I do watch certain shows because I want certain things from them. Laughter is what I want when I put this on.

And… it’s not a season of TV that makes me laugh all that much. But then, I’m not sure it is trying to make me laugh. And if that’s the case, can I hold that against it? It’s one thing if something goes for jokes and they don’t land. That’s just bad comedy. But that’s not what is happening here. I laughed at the parts that were jokes. I laughed at the absurdity of a bunch of white people assisting the suicide of a black man that maybe was Tupac.

But a lot of the time, that’s not what the show is caring about. The show wants to be in dialogue with its audience, asking those questions above.

I kept coming back to the question of “is this for me?”

It may be reductive to ask that. It’s a show by a black creator about black people. So is the target audience of the show black people? It doesn’t have to be but it could be. A show that speaks to the horrors of their everyday life.

But more often than not, the satire (because that is the show’s favourite mode this season) is very broad. Which makes me think that isn’t the target audience. That this is a show made for everyone. It is a way for Donlad Glover to express the horror and tragedy of being black in America to an audience that may think they’re woke but just get in the way (see the misunderstanding in “The Old Man and The Tree” that happens from Darius talking to a woman that thinks he is trying to pick her up that spirals into a mob of white people that believe she said “All Lives Matter” chasing after her).

So if it is for me, is it any good?

Good isn’t a word I want to use here. I think you should watch this show. I think you should listen to it. It’s funny. It’s horrific. It’s got a fucking bizarre Liam Neeson cameo in to that I will never understand how they got him on board for. It’s never bad but it may not always be what you are wanting to put on. And as much as it’s Lynchian, and surreal, and has scenes that are unique on TV, I think it is a show that comes from a place of hope.

Whether that is “Three Slaps” rewriting the grissly ending to the Hart family murders. Or a black woman pissing on a man for money while looking at the Eiffel Tower at night.