Celebrate Juneteenth with “Atlanta”
This year, spend the holiday with Earn and Van in FX’s Atlanta!
While Juneteenth is being weaponized in the current political climate, let’s look back at its irreverent and honest depiction in the brilliant show Atlanta.
Though technically a comedy, Donald Glover’s brainchild oscillates between comedy, drama, horror and surrealism with subtlety and ease. With more of a focus on tone, the non-linear structure makes way for absurd and compelling television. There’s room for stand-alone episodes like “Teddy Perkins” and “Woods”, which serve more as short films from the psychological horror genre and also “B.A.N.” which takes place inside a parody of BET.
This creativity and playfulness makes for a varied structure, point of view and humor.
In a New Yorker profile, Glover stated that he wanted Atlanta to be like “Twin Peaks with rappers”; a David Lynch-ian ode to the Black experience in today’s America. The daily ins-and-outs of racism, barriers and the odd occurrences through the scope of its Black characters. Atlanta’s Juneteenth episode (S1E9) is a microcosm of all of that. It simultaneously gives a nuanced portrait of relationships while highlighting the eccentricities of discussing race.
Nuanced relationships
Earn (Donald Glover) and Van’s (Zazie Beetz) relationship is real, uncompromising and refreshingly conflictual. Oftentimes in television, matters resolve themselves within the timeline of an episode. So if a relationship exhibits any conflictual behavior at the beginning of an episode, it will be resolved by that episode’s end. In Atlanta, we see Earn and Van acting like people from the real world, not the TV world. They have a child together, but their relationship is undefined. They might make efforts for one another or occasionally fool around, but they can also be petty, mean or self-interested.
“At FX, they didn’t get Earn and Van at all,” Glover mentioned in The New Yorker profile “I said, ‘This is every one of my aunts — you have a kid with a guy, he’s around, you’re still attracted to him.’ Poor people can’t afford to go to therapy.”
The usual confines of sitcoms are not being strictly adhered to and it makes for a more subtle interpretation and a three dimensional vision of the main characters. In “Juneteenth”, Earn and Van attend a Juneteenth party hosted by wealthy socialites. Van is interested in networking and feels like Princeton-educated Earn is an immediate “in” amongst this crowd. Since this is an image-based world, she feels conflicted that she needs to have a man or husband by her side to be taken seriously but eventually caves in and asks Earn to come. She picks him up at his current girlfriend’s house and they argue on the way over, Earn making it very clear from the start that he doesn’t feel comfortable.
This ties into a larger motif throughout the series where Earn can’t seem to find his place. Literally, in trouble in finding a home but also fitting into a social circle. Not quite at ease with Darius and Paper Boi, not committing to Van, and also now uncomfortable amongst Atlanta’s odd upper crust.
Discussing Race
An eerie feeling permeates throughout the party. Earn immediately notices that it’s like “A Spike Lee-directed Eyes Wide Shut”. The hosts Monique and Craig are both a basket of oddities and toe the line between being comically friendly and sharply condescending.
The mood of the party seems undecided, almost making light of slavery. The music in the background plays “Summertime”, a chorus of men sing spirituals and the serving platters on the buffet are shaped like slave boats (see picture under “Nuanced Relationships” title). And wait till you see the cocktail list!
If this cutesy take on slavery isn’t a metaphor for the Southern sanitization of the Confederacy , I don’t know what is.
In this strange atmosphere, Craig comes through as the most surreal, over-the-top embodiment of the white guilt and white savior complex. The surrealism behind his character belies an honest truth about the difficulty with addressing race or racial issues in this country. In today’s landscape, there is a lot of performative activism vis-à-vis the Black Lives Matter movement and it’s important to note what is actually helpful and what is harmful. Though Craig probably means well, he does more harm than good.
He makes art based on Malcolm X quotes, performs slam poetry about Jim Crow, urges Earn to discover his African roots and quotes “For Colored Girls” back to his Black wife. He even went so far as to tell his wife’s grandmother her collard greens were poorly cooked!
His confidence in his knowledge of the Black experience makes him overcompensate, which in turn makes him judge other people’s “Black-ness”.
Through his attempts to celebrate Black culture, he is actually reducing the guests’ individuality. Off the bat, he meets Earn with micro-aggressions like being too touchy and chummy, giving him an intricate handshake, and asking him “don’t i know you?”. Craig has such an obsessive fixation on African-American people that it feels like he should belong to the Armitage family from Get Out.
No one, not even his Black wife says anything against him because he provides her with the stability of financial support. This is something Monique is acutely aware of and confesses to Van in a rare moment of letting her hair down: “I like Craig, but I love my money”. Essentially never letting her husband understand the implications of his problematic behavior.
So because of the eccentric characters, we see the complexities of marriage and the difficulty in addressing race. We go knee-deep into displaying the issues surrounding race in a subtle way.
While the political climate is making Juneteenth a political talking point, Atlanta delivered an artful episode about the importance of the holiday and what it’s really about: freedom.
