Donald Glover and Richard Pryor, or the Chokehold of the Minstrel Show
(Part II — Atlanta)
Atlanta constantly engages in this kind of navigational, reflective double consciousness, unsettling and threatening the possessive, owning Western gaze through consciously communicating figures of the Black imagination that it cannot seize, contain or explain — that it does not and cannot “know.”
Throughout the first and second seasons, the show even stages the original reflections and masking of minstrelsy, but with performances that befuddle rather than comfort: a chubby brother from the neighborhood inexplicably shows up at Alfred’s door in a Batman mask and runs off; an equally chubby grade-school boy breaks the will of his teachers, attending class as he smirks at them through white-face makeup. And then, in the episode, “Teddy Perkins,” Donald Glover himself, spectacularly and eerily dons the mask of multiple reflections: a Black man masked as a Black man masked as a white man. Through the horrific persona of Michael Jackson, viewers had witnessed a similarly grotesque, yet sickly entertaining performance for decades. But, they didn’t know how to process it. Glover processes it and through some of the codes of the Gothic horror film, subtly accuses viewers of complicity in the incessant torture necessary to the pleasures they enjoyed all of those years.
Atlanta further defies the structures of white Western rationality and knowing with unexplained characters such as a man dressed like a Black Muslim, who eats a Nutella sandwich and pedantically tests Earn's authenticity before mysteriously disappearing under cover of flashing police-car lights. And a rapper drives away under a hail of gunshots in an invisible car, knocking into bystanders. Viewers laugh uproariously at the spectacle, coldly unconcerned about the welfare of the bystanders or a setting where gunshots are common place. Such callous inattention to cruelty — the type of mental structure that enables evil to thrive — occurs again and again in Atlanta. Al, Darius and the viewer focus on other things (on the plot!), all but ignoring the murder of a terrified man by an ice-cold drug dealer. In the final episode of the first season, a search for a lost jacket drives the plot before viewers breath a collective, chilling sigh of relief after police murder a fleeing suspect rather than one of the main characters that everyone has come to care so much about. An ignored woman screams and cries in the background.
Meanwhile, the show induces the unsettling sense of white double-consciousness with the unfamiliar yet all too familiar narrative of crazy white people replacing the crazy Negro stories that dominated news media representations of African American for two centuries. Whimsical “Florida Man” inexplicably murders an innocent Black teenager (again callously ignored), beats his wife’s lover while she gives birth, rips apart a pink flamingo, and eats the face of one of his victims with the relish of Jeffry Dahmer, the true-to-life serial killer that raped, murdered, dismembered and ate men of color throughout the 1980s. These scenes evoke a coded, shared Black consciousness negotiating the horrific, bizarre, surreal, crazy-ass world made by the fictions that sustain whiteness and oppression.
From its very first scene, the second season, Robbin’Season, takes such American horror onto entirely unexpected levels. After a robbery, and typically cinematic American gunfight, where none of the bullets hits its mark, an escaping car stops at the exit of parking lot of a fast food chain whose employees also sell drugs. The car disgorges a bloodied, unknown woman before it callously drives off (like a less self-conscious plot), leaving her behind. Collateral damage. She stands in the parking lot screaming, a ghost-like figure, expressing the deep terror of African American existence in a surreal world of unspeakable, uncaring cruelty. Beyond words, her wail shatters the scene and the giddy joy of viewers that had been choreographically aroused by the American gangster clichés of yet another gunfight. The scene sets the mood for the season as it presents the deep, spell-breaking tonalities of that voice; a voice often captured and disseminated through the great Black musical tradition that profoundly impacted Glover during his childhood. In a January 2017 interview with Wired magazine, Glover describes this impression:
I remember listening to some of my dad’s music as a kid, like Parliament. I’d hear a woman moaning and groaning, and it was so scary because she sounded terrified … That music was filled with so many different real emotions and feelings that you could listen to it again and again.
These scenes echo the levels of consciousness conveyed by the voices of Pryor’s chokehold performance. “Niggers going: ‘Yeah we know that.’ White folk: ‘No, I had no idea.’”
This effect of Black shared consciousness and unmasked, white double-consciousness gets deftly amplified in the “North of the Border” episode as Al and his entourage find themselves in the menacing, banal world, of a typical college campus where they go to perform in a “Pajama Jam” concert. Through the incessantly vulnerable gaze of these interlopers, viewers see the campus as a forbidding alien place full of bizarre rituals with a constant menace of deadly, body-crushing violence. Still, unlike other narratives in the horror tradition, Atlanta does not simply follow the predictable code and allow the horror to lurk beneath the surface through a dramatic irony and conventional plot that pushes viewers to the edge, compelling them to knowingly shout with their minds at characters to not go in there as they brace for the coming blood and gore. For Alfred, Earn, Tracy, and Darius, the horrors of daily American life are always already present. To them, the menacing un-dead mobilized by the horror flic are familiar spirits and cavalierly inhabit their world. They literally embody the menace, the black creatures of the unknown, hiding out in the forbidding wilderness of the white American imagination.
The episode overflows with the suppressed, disturbing scenes — the unsettling white noise — of daily American life, constantly cycling in the news on televisions across the nation, but which also set the lives of the four main characters, who emerge as dream walkers, standing in for the gazing audience in the red, purple and blue silk pajamas that they donned for the Pajama Jam concert. The episode then tackles two of the most powerful and violent open secrets of American life — police violence against African Americans and the rape culture of college campuses. Both the specter of lynchings and that of the white woman’s ravaged body have a venerable place in the codes and doggedly sentimentalist structure of American entertainment. Through its own re-coding of these tropes, the episode deftly returns the gaze as it undermines the conventional expectations of viewers and the predictable construction of white innocence, which inexorably relied on the domesticated feminine figure it pretended to protect and then used again and again like a rag doll to justify the racist terror of the lynching of Black men in small Southern hamlets so similar to the college town they visit. As the four men escape from a potential brawl at the concert, the blue flashing light of law enforcement flashes behind them. Danger. They duck into the trees. There, they solemnly gaze at a ritualistic American procession. A campus security cart drives by with a catatonically traumatized, disheveled white woman college student slumping on the open back seat. The eye of the camera, and indeed of the viewer, navigates between the dark bodies hiding behind the trees and the retreating, broken, slumped body of the college student.
I've seen such staging before. To me, the scene relates back to and reverses the minstrel performance codes of the first blockbuster American film, Birth of a Nation (1915). This film set the tone for the still resonating rhythms of American cinema. Almost single handed, it ignited the lynching culture of the early 20th century. African American writer, James Baldwin, called D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film and such scenes “an elaborate justification of mass murder.” In fact, one of the most devastating images of that film presents the gaze of an African American man — played by a white man in black face. His gaze structures the role of African American men in entertainment and the American mind. A renegade, he threatens the peace, domestic tranquility and vulnerability of whiteness, structurally embodying the familiar plot-driven, “ticking-time-bomb” scenario that drives the film and modern day Hollywood entertainment, such as the Avengers, which must protect the "wall," policing the boundary between the known and knowable white world against the disorder and mayhem of blackness and the unknown. In this scene, the film focuses its lens on the rapacious, blackened face of the renegade Gus, as he longingly gazes at an innocent, childlike, unprotected white woman. At once, the audience, which lives in a world built on violent racial oppression, maintains its innocence of all crimes by imaginatively projecting their suppressed desires onto Gus, producing in him an uncontrolled and uncontrollable desire for the privilege of their hard-earned whiteness — an uncontrollable desire for rape. The film forces the white woman off of a cliff rather than allow her to submit to the unspeakable.
I cannot help but again read this scene through Harris’ Reckless Eyeballing, where he analyzes the longing gaze of Gus, which there focuses onto the titillating figure of Pam Grier from the Black exploitation films. Through its experimental form, this film dismantles and reverses the deeply embedded codes of Hollywood cinema and its insidious production of the banal white gaze. Although packaged as popular entertainment, Atlanta complements this work as it re-stages the gaze of Gus through those of the four Black, unmasked, contemporary renegades (both Al and Earn are on parole), hiding out in the trees. They know what they are seeing — the violent ravages of patriarchy that will easily, joyfully and without punishment do onto them what it has done onto the young female student. For young Black men, merely seeing such a figure spells trouble. “Fuck man,” says Tracy, voicing the unspoken, giving voice to their gaze. The lens then turns to the face of Earn. He is the native informant — “go-between” at the nexus of the world of the campus and his friends. He has been to an American university. He dropped out of Princeton, now an infamous Ivy league school where “22 percent of undergraduate women say they were victims of non-consensual sexual contact.” He knows the danger. “We’ve got to get off campus,” he pleads. Still, he tries to disarm the terror by blaming it all on the "crazy" Black woman who started the brawl by jealously tossing water on Al while he was chatting up two other students.
Yet, like Hansel and Gretel drawn by the witch’s crumbs (a story that Glover delightfully references in his New Yorker interview), the conventions of a horror story plot — along with the smell of weed wafting on the air — drags the four deeper into danger. Their odyssey into the strange, unfamiliar world of American college campuses continues. Within seconds, the four find themselves seeking succor and finding ample amounts of weed — contraband for which Al constantly risks his life and for which several "background" characters have died — at a fraternity party. For African American audiences, the scene evokes a real Gothic terror that deliberately surpasses the familiarly structured horror of a film like Jordan Peele’s academy award winning work Get Out (2017).
When comparing the horror of Get Out to the subtle chords of actual American evil presented throughout the entire second season of Atlanta, I can’t help but think of James Baldwin’s review of the quintessential American horror film, The Exorcist, in his essay, “The Devil Finds Work.”
The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks — many, many others, including white children — can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet […] The grapes of wrath are stored in the cotton fields and migrant shacks and ghettos of this nation, and in the schools and prisons, and in the eyes and hearts of the wretched everywhere.
In his final analysis, Baldwin evokes the ravages of the Vietnam War. Atlanta furthers this, presenting more contemporary images of American bondage, which are not only reminiscent of Southern slavery, but of American culpability in the cavalier, unfeeling torture of prisoners (enemy combatants) at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This occurs as the Black fugitives from the woods and the hood naively enter the domesticated light of the frat house, and as a startling, hooded, naked white figure is herded into another door in the background. A few moments later, Al and Earn find themselves casually smoking the weed they came for while sitting on a couch backed by a huge confederate flag. Guns adorn the walls. It is a lodge of hunters, predators and white American alpha males. The seemingly formulaic plot tension builds (Get Out!, my mind screams).
The scene instantly reminds me of the work of Stanley Kubrick, a filmmaker who made a career of defamaliarizing the conventional violence of film, returning the gaze and sadistic desires of cinema spectators, implicating them in the brutality that he used as the substance of their entertainment. Here, it is impossible for me to forget the establishing scene of Kubrick's infamous film, A Clockwork Orange (1971), and the gaze of its raping and murdering main character, Alex, who violates the norms of film conventions ("Don’t look at the camera!" shouts Francis Ford Coppola in a cameo role in his 1979 film Apocalypse Now), and glares directly into the lens with fuming, accusatory rage. At first, “North of the Border,” with its yellow lighting also resembles the staged, perverted orgies of the elite "one percent" in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). But it also seems to take a cue from the filmmaker’s obsession with the unsettling cinematic trick of one-point perspective, as it unnaturally balances Al and Earn on two ends of a couch at the conclusion of two, parallel lines of kneeling, hooded, naked, disturbingly-familiar Abu-Gharaib-like pledges. The Confederate flag fixes the point of vision — of American consciousness! — at the middle of the scene. Meanwhile, like Jack Nicholas in The Shining (1980), an insanely high, creepy, frat-brother-fan of Paperboi orchestrates the scene, at once fawning over Al and, slave-master-style, forcing the naked pledges to stand, dance and snap their fingers to the infectious three-beat tones of his favorite rap song, Laffy Taffy, that he plays on his smart phone. Al and Earn seem caught in an elaborate cinematic and real trap. Like the sacrificed little sister of Birth of a Nation, they are defenseless, vulnerable, and easy prey, who are both very high and unusually ready to be sacrificed — Al and Earn have been here before with guns pointed directly in their faces or carpet-knives held to their throats. Yet, despite relentless set-backs and humiliations, the characters of Atlanta are never, easily understood or conventionally recognizable pathetic victims, placed at the mercy of a formulaic plot, and who serve to arouse in spectators comfortable and un-conflicted emotions.
The show has found a way to break the code. Through scenes like this, Atlanta breaks free of the chokehold of minstrel performance.
I t does this much as African American writer Toni Morrison, in her brilliant 1987 novel Beloved, broke the pathetic code of works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone with the Wind, Roots, and even more contemporary, reactionary, throwback-films such as Twelve Years a Slave. She undermines the sentimentalist representation of enslavement through the use of African cosmology; presenting the surreal aspects of American violence and African American life; and adapting the conventions of the horror story and the Gothic genre to a revision of the history of slavery in American memory. The second season of Atlanta equally adapts and revises the codes of the horror movie genre as it stages the contemporary experience of living Black in America.
The surreal elements of Atlanta do not merely work to transform an American television show into a “work of art,” or a “show to watch.” They finally help produce the white double-consciousnes that unsettles the chokehold of a Hollywood cinematic gaze that does little more than prepare viewers, as citizens of a destructive disintegrating empire, for self-sacrifice, suicide, murder and death. The surreal of Atlanta, American ghettos, jails, prisons and abject suffering is the result of the ravages of a neo-liberal order, a hegemony, that now threatens the survival of the very planet — it is the world that gaze has made. Although it is ruefully, very, very funny, Atlanta also teaches Americans shame and the lesson that their entertainment should not benumb the audience, but return to them the same sense of Black consciousness and of the humanity deeply embedded in the returning gaze of Al, Earn, Darius, and even Tracy. “Fuck!”
In contrast, all other shows, all other popular entertainment, seem, at best, like a tremendous and dangerous waste or, at worst, like a massive, concerted propaganda effort to prepare the citizens of the most militarily powerful country in the world for lives of supporting constant war, execution, torture, imprisonment, and world-wide devastation through endless images of: brutal, fear-inducing murder staged for detectives to brilliantly solve; pornographically choreographed revenge; victims pleasurably sacrificed to the needs of simplistic plots; evil villains locked in a formulaic orgy of victimizing that justifies their cathartic comeuppance; heroes who torture and murder because “it’s a dangerous world” (as if they are not the very danger they are warning about); law and order prosecutors thwarted by the civil rights of unquestionably guilty "perps" (underpinning a carceral society where it is worse for a guilty person to go free than an innocent one to live eternally in chains); relentless state terrorism and militarism made necessary by the absurd endlessly repeating scenario of the ticking time bomb imaginatively made plausible and real by its dramatization; random, absurdist dramas and comedies that give up on any notion of a moral core driving human life; and characters who exist to represent "the good life" as one of brand consumption and quasi-religious reconciliation with the global products and images of Hollywood, Walt Disney, and Madison Avenue.
African American writer Ishmael Reed has observed that these fictional images have broken through the fourth wall of stage and screen, cast a spell over audiences, and emerged into our "real" lives, laying waste to the physical world, wreaking havoc, sowing fear and trembling. As an artist, he says, his job is to use all of his magical powers to put these characters back into the fictions where they belong. It's a daunting task. But healing sick imaginations — rather than obeying orders delivered by shabbily constructed ghosts of the unreal — should be the urgent work of all artists. Life on this planet depends upon it. Back in 1986, Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, describes the formidable obstacles standing before any artist working in an age where neo-liberal fictions have displaced reality, where the world appears as one never-ending episode of a reality TV show.
How do you shock your readers by pointing out that these are mass murderers, looters, robbers, thieves, when they, the perpetrators of these anti-people crimes, are not even attempting to hide the fact? When in some cases they are actually and proudly celebrating their massacre of children, and the theft and robbery of a nation? How do you satire their utterances and claims when their own words beat all fictional exaggerations?
This is the role of the surreal, and of returning the gaze in Glover's Atlanta.
The city of Atlanta, like other cities such Detroit or St. Louis, where I live, has specific cultural resonance as devastated end-points of the popular American imagination. Indeed, the city inhabits our minds as a tragic ghost, a moldering remnant or ruin of a lost, once great civilization. One of the most important of the original, blockbuster, Hollywood films, David O Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939), effortlessly constructs for the white, Jim-Crow imagination, images of antebellum Atlanta, happy slavery, and Tara, a robust, thriving plantation of white privilege and masters who are never seen raping or torturing the human chattel that made possible the opulent wealth coveted by film-going audiences. Then, it all gets reduced to fiery rubble — gone with the wind — by Northern General Sherman's "March to the Sea." Although the film ends on a note of the indomitable white will of Miss Scarlet, its main character — who proclaims "Tomorrow is another day" — , it leaves her behind in a wasteland of an American imagination unable to cope with the ruins and the ultimate wages of whiteness or what James Baldwin calls: The price of the ticket.
Thus, as a trope, the city of Atlanta resonates with the rhythms of an apocalypse. Yet again, another, decoding experimental film by Harris reconstructs my own gaze as I watch the series. This time, Harris turns his lens on the Black community in St. Louis where he also grew up, and which had transformed into a sprawling ruin. His 16 mm, black and white film, Still/Here, produces an anti-Hollywood consciousness in viewers that renders them painfully aware of the sentimentalist gaze that had made them complicit in yet another banal American atrocity — the cliché blighting of an American city. Michael Sicinski describes the film in Cinema Scope magazine:
Harris sets his black-and-white camera loose to wander through the city’s decaying north side neighbourhoods […]. Gliding down empty streets, across the facades of once-elegant homes, entering condemned buildings, the camera makes a detached but ultimately damning portrait of civic neglect and apathy. Poignantly, human beings are rarely encountered; their presence haunts the soundtrack of eerie footsteps, an unanswered telephone, and sparse voice over commentary from found sources.
The TV series does similar work with the city of Atlanta, though living humans dominate the foreground, while the archaic, 20th century sounds of an ever present train horn of a diesel locomotive — a trope of inevitable doom — sounds ominously in the background. The contemporary lens of the series takes over: it picks up where Sherman's march left off, reveling in a post-industrial world where nature threatens to reclaim human habitation. It's a space of strip malls, human inhabited storage lockers, nail salons, fast-food franchises, crumbling buildings, decaying playgrounds, defunct shopping malls. It's a city abandoned by the American imagination like the wailing woman, who was abandoned by the heartless thugs after the shootout in the parking lot.
In the interview for the New Yorker magazine, Atlanta director Hiro Murai describes his vision of the city.
Atlanta is Wild West-y — every corner of the city is trying to get by under its own rules. There’s no single narrative. At the outer edges, the overgrown parking lots and project blocks, the city is a few yards away from apocalypse, and if you slow down it could engulf you.
Such a vision presents the end of the European way of understanding existence and its confinement by its own fictions. It reveals the absurdist surreal of the neo-liberal capitalist order in its death throes. Such a system, hollow of any real meaning, simply cannot sustain life. It forces us all to live, like Earn, in a storage locker — a mere thing among things.
Still, the series is not without hope. The enslaved and their descendants have lived this apocalypse for hundreds of years and may yet show the world (or at least the deadened robotic executives of the popular media industry) the way toward survival. Its disruption of the enraptured mechanics of the Hollywood gaze may be our only chance.
As Pryor had shown, such techniques of disruption are not new. He needed to return to a communal context that nurtured the ancient Black knowledge of struggle and survival in order to thrive. This way of knowing has thus guided the hands, the bodies, and the voices of people such Glover, Pryor, Morrison and Reed. It stirs in the deepest resonances of the culture. In the interview with Esquire magazine, Glover acknowledges his debt to the inspiration of Marvin Gaye, of Great Black Music, and of its immemorial lessons about surviving in the void, aesthetically restructuring the toxic imagination and struggling — against all odds — with a vast, empty, globalized culture of death. The music exudes the recalcitrant force of African American cosmology and the saving, High Jon de Conquer root that helped deliver Frederick Douglass from slavery. High John de Conquer, observes novelist and folklorist Zora Neal Hurston, taught the African survivors of the American surreal "how to play the tricks of making a way out of no-way. Hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick … Fighting a mighty battle without outside-showing force, and winning [a] war from within.” Despite Western, rationalist efforts to submerge its incessantly rhythmic pulse, this powerful magic posses a revolutionary force that enabled the success of the Haitian Revolution through the practices of Vodoun, and the Cuban Revolution through those of its sister religion, Santeria. This hidden spirit of West African cosmology suffuses Black culture and music. It is the relentlessly healing, saving spirit, of "making a way of no-way" that Glover hears as he speaks about internalizing the music of Marvin Gaye.
You listen to What’s Going On — I get a very intense feeling whenever I hear [Gaye] singing. Who’s willing to save a world that is destined to die? That’s such a real, honest thing. It’s like, why even raise children? Why raise a puppy? Why put so much care in something where you know destruction is part of the process?
There is hope. Indeed, for Glover, the city of Atlanta does not represent the same abyss of the imagination to African Americans that it may represent for everyone else. It's a space of remarkable struggle. "I needed people to understand I see Atlanta as a beautiful metaphor for black people,” he told New York magazine.
A s popular entertainment, Atlanta seems to have achieved the impossible. It resists Hollywood realism, sentimentalist narratives, and the traditional pathos of Black representation. Only the most zombified viewers think the show is a conventional “comedy,” feel sorry for Al, Earn, Darius, or Van, or locate the familiar "lovable loser" in any of their characters. These are not victims or pathetic characters. Instead, they are agents of the most liberating aspects of the relentlessly uncontrollable, suppressed blackness that Western society has struggled to subdue throughout the modern age — beginning with slavery. They effortlessly figure the revolutionary, healing, recombinant power of Great Black Music — ancient to the future — embraced by the revolutionary musicians of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. And they teach a disintegrating world of capitalism, now relentlessly reaping the desiccated crops of its own destruction, that it is still possible to live lives of hardship, betrayal, struggle and joy amid the ruins produced by the unyielding renegade characters of Hollywood fictions.
I thought of these lessons about Atlanta and my hometown St. Louis as I recently attended a reception for faculty of color at my university. During a round of introductions, each of us presented our research interests. Then, a colleague, a biologist from Puerto Rico, blew my mind, as he spoke about his work among the vacant, brick strewn lots of the once striving African American community, which looks to many like an archetype of a post-industrial, dystopian landscape. He had amazing news. For decades, I had read about a population of beings that seemed to track the hopelessness of sustaining life on a planet, "destined to die." Biologists had been sounding the alarm about a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Something had decimated the population of pollinating bees so necessary to the production our food and the maintenance of our lives. Whole species of bees were dying out in rural areas. This problem does not exist in the ruins of North St. Louis, observed, Gerardo Camilo. Instead, the bees were thriving there! “We have discovered," he told a reporter for St. Louis Public radio, "a disproportionately larger [level] of bee diversity in St. Louis, compared to the rest of the state.” In fact, that part of the city is a perfect habitat for wild bees. They had escaped!
The bees, the Black surviving citizens of the American surreal, and the TV show Atlanta teach us that there is hope yet — if we could only develop the consciousness, the double-consciousness, that would force us to stop gazing; finally see ourselves; see our devastating role in the wrecking of lives of others; escape the bonds of being characters; and become beings of liberating blackness, peeking out from — no, joyfully thriving! — behind the mask.
For a related story, check out Kitanya Harrison's:
