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The first series from Donald Glover following the
conclusion of Atlanta, Swarm obviously aims to provoke — or,
in a more on-theme metaphor, pack some sting.
article here
Glover’s new show is designed to make headlines,
proclaims Alison Herman at The Ringer. Most critics agree with
her that, while packing more punch than most, the series has so much demanding
our attention that it ultimately lacks focus.
The pop star character and her fan entourage at the
center of the seven-episode, 30-minute limited series is figuratively if not
quite literally intended to be Beyoncé and her Beyhive.
Before each episode, a riff on a standard
disclaimer declares, “This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual
persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional.”
The character, Ni’Jah, is a musician whose fans
call her “queen” and “goddess,” and who surprise-drops visual albums that take
over the internet. “[She] doesn’t resemble Beyoncé,” Vulture’s Roxana
Hadadi finds. “She is Beyoncé, and Swarm has no interest
in pretending otherwise.”
The series investigates stardom — or, rather,
“stan-dom” — the obsessive nature of fans and celebrity cults. Swarm is
Glover’s first project under his lucrative deal with Amazon Prime Video and is
co-created with Janine Nabers.
They say they drew inspiration from real events
that occurred between 2016 and 2018, which does happen to include the release
of Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade and the #WhoBitBeyonce
internet debate.
The show is, in some ways, its predecessor’s
inverse, observes Herman. “Atlanta, too, was about music and mega-fame,
but its point of view belonged to the performer. Swarm switches
to that of an obsessed ultra-fan: Dre who’s been part of the Beyhive — sorry,
Ni’Jah’s ‘Swarm’ — since she was a teenager.”
Asked by Variety’s Angelique Jackson just
how far they pushed the truth of these events — and whether they ever worried
about how far Amazon would let them go — Nabers said: “Everything is legally
combed through. If we pushed it, we pushed it to the very, very, very edge, but
it’s legal and we’re proud of that.”
It is in fact Dre, played by Dominique Fishback,
who is the series’ protagonist, and by the end of the first episode she is
revealed to be more than a little deranged.
She goes on a killing spree in honor of her dead
best friend and to protect, as she sees it, Ni’Jah.
Glover explained to Jackson that the concept of a
Black woman serial killer was born a tweet he read.
“I remember them saying like, ‘Why are we always
lawyers and, like, best friends? We can be murderers, too.’ And I was like,
‘That is true,’” Glover said.
Nabers follows this thought up with Ben
Travers at IndieWire, referencing how Dahmer recently
became a huge Netflix hit.
“I think as Americans, we’re so conditioned to
seeing white men be angry. We’re giving them that space for violence on film
and TV.”
She added, “Our writers’ room was completely
Black,” she said. “All our directors are Black, [and] most of our producers are
Black.”
In imagining what it would look like if the serial
killer subgenre focused on a Black woman instead of a white man, the
terminology they used was “alien.”
“[Dre] is an alien in her own world,” Nabers
told Selome Hailu at Variety. “If you look at the pilot, when
she gets to Khalid’s house, there’s aliens on TV. That’s a through line with
her throughout the series. We looked to [Michael Haneke’s] The Piano
Teacher for inspiration. Donald introduced that movie to me, and it
blew my mind. It centers around a woman who has a very everyday way of living
her life on the surface, and then when you peel back the layers of her
complicated psychology, you unearth a completely different type of human that
is very alien-feeling.
“But me being from Houston and Donald being from
Atlanta, we wanted to filter it through a Southern, Black female perspective.
It is a little bit like a sister Atlanta when you look at the
weird family relationships.”
The show’s casting is one not so subtle way of
grabbing headlines. Paris Jackson, Michael Jackson’s daughter, plays a
character who presents as white but calls herself Black because she has one
Black grandparent. Casting director Carmen Cuba apparently pitched Paris
Jackson.
“We were like, “Exactly. That’s exactly what we’re
talking about,” Nabers told Hailu. “I’m a Jewish woman, she’s identifies as
Jewish, so we bonded about that. She really just owned this character of a
light-passing biracial woman who is really intent on letting everyone know
about her Blackness.”
Chloe Bailey plays Dre’s sister and a protégé
of Queen Bey herself, increasing Swarm’s connection to its all-but-explicit
subject.
Episode four guest stars Billie Eilish, who makes
her acting debut on the show as the leader of a women’s cult — an intentional
parallel to her role as a pop star.
Critics largely give the show a thumbs up for its
ambition and subversive qualities.
“That Swarm is only intermittently
successful doesn’t make it any easier to look away from the screen,” says Mike
Hale in The New York Times.
He astutely observes that Swarm inhabits
the space between horror and comedy where Atlanta often
thrived.
Hale adds, “It’s not hard to understand why more
and more filmmakers are choosing the horror genre for stories set in
contemporary America, particularly those involving the lives of people outside
the white-male protective bubble.”
“Think the Coen Brothers meets Atlanta meets Carrie,
with some Basic Instinct and Perfect Blue thrown
in there too,” writes Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre. “Celebrities are
worshiped — and they often turn a blind eye to their obsessed fans’ worst
behavior while milking their fanaticism for every last dollar.”
It also has some the stylistic trademarks of Atlanta which,
like that show, have also made it uneven. Like Atlanta’s
mockumentary episode for instance one episode of Swarm is done
in true-crime documentary style.
“Swarm needs much more clarity on what
it wants to say about fandom in general and the specific fan at its center,”
finds Herman in The Ringer. “Violent, vicious, and extremely
online, Swarm obviously aims to provoke. Once the buzz dies
down, though, there’s not much substance to sustain the hype.”
Vulture’s Hadadi
says, “Swarm feels boldest when it wonders when person-to-person
devotion becomes abstract glorification, and what inner mechanics inspire
someone to give themselves over to another.”
“Thankfully, as the series progresses, it reveals
itself to be much more than a stylized parody centered around what many might
consider obvious internet bait,” writes Kyndall Cunningham of The
Daily Beast. “Beneath the Beyoncé of it all, Swarm is
ultimately a story about grief and isolation.”
Hale is particularly critical, believing that Swarm doesn’t work through or make strong dramatic use of all its ideas and “ends in a formless, non-sequiturish manner. It feels as if no one really knew where they wanted to take things,” he says.
“In the balance of the season, the viscous,
seductive ambience and dream-logic storytelling mostly fade out, replaced by
high-concept, tonally garish episodes that hold your attention but stand alone
like neon billboards, adding little to our understanding of Dre beyond the
facts of her back story, doled out in typical streaming-series style.”
Nabers seems to defend their approach, saying that
they deliberately steered clear of definitive messaging.
“I don’t think that, as a brand, Donald and I
believe in a message,” she commented during a Q&A following the film’s
premiere at SXSW, as Variety’s Hailu reported in a separate
article. “People can interpret it the way that they want to. We hope it
inspires people in some way to create weird punk shit, or to talk
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