Spoiler alert: This text discusses, in depth, the ultimate two episodes of Amazon’s Swarm.
When you’ve completed streaming Swarm, Donald Glover and Janine Nabers’ Amazon horror comedy a couple of younger girl’s murderous obsession with a pop star who's clearly meant to reflect Beyoncé, permit me to welcome you to the land of Huh?! You probably did, in spite of everything, simply watch Dominique Fishback’s serial-killer stan Dre—full identify: Andrea Greene, now residing as a person underneath the alias Tony—journey off at the back of a limousine together with her idol Ni’jah. Besides Ni’jah, who's portrayed by Nirine S. Brown all through the present, through which she’s normally noticed from afar, now has the face of Dre’s greatest good friend and adoptive sister Marissa (Chloe Bailey), who kills herself within the premiere.
So, was this surreal denouement all a dream? We’ll get there! Earlier than we do, I wish to talk about not simply the finale however Swarm’s penultimate episode, a mockumentary that follows a detective constructing a case towards the “actual” Andrea Greene. In a way, every imagines its personal alternate ending to Dre’s homicide spree—one apparently grounded within the details of a true-crime case and the opposite the final word fantasy-come-true for a fan who makes John Hinckley Jr. look sober by comparability. It’s price taking aside every episode by itself phrases, then contemplating them as two halves of a complete (similar to Dre and Ni’jah, however extra on that later). That may even imply delving into the present’s loaded depictions of Dre’s gender and sexuality, which I discovered to be probably the most irritating facet of a collection seemingly designed to impress robust reactions.
Swarm Episode 6: “Fallin’ By means of the Cracks”
For viewers weary of following the terrifying Dre from slaughter to dead-eyed slaughter, this episode provided a short respite. Framed as a true-crime documentary known as Falling By means of the Cracks, it facilities round Maj. Loretta Greene (Heather Simms from Luke Cage), a Memphis police detective who begins to attach murders she believes have been dedicated by a uncommon Black, feminine serial killer. The place Dre is chilly, lonely, violent, and brittle, Loretta—a widow who’s proven, early within the doc, feeding a home-cooked breakfast to her two youngsters—comes off as heat, community-minded, nurturing, resilient. In fact, she faces an uphill battle getting higher-ups in regulation enforcement, who are usually not Black ladies like her and Dre, to take her idea significantly.
What’s fascinating about Loretta is that she’s exactly the type of character Glover and Nabers have been attempting to subvert with Swarm. Within the collection’ manufacturing notes, Nabers recollects that the concept got here to Glover when a Black girl he adopted on Twitter “mainly tweeted that she was uninterested in watching exhibits the place the Black ladies have been all the time therapists, had their shit collectively, or have been saviors. She was like, ‘What’s up with that? We will be serial killers too, proper?’” Whether or not or not you agree that an excessive amount of constructive illustration is the most important drawback surrounding Black, feminine TV characters (I don’t), it’s laborious to disclaim the proliferation of the hypercompetent-Black-woman trope. Such characters—from the ever present “Black girl therapists” Aisha Harris first observed in 2018 to Noma Dumezweni’s unflappable lawyer in The Undoing to The Queen’s Gambitmentor ex machina Jolene (Moses Ingram)—have a tendency to look as robust but sane and soothing presences charged with repairing white protagonists’ damaged lives.
Loretta turns into a extra layered character than these predecessors via her investigation of—and insights into—Andrea. It's the detritus that Andrea (performed on this episode by London Rose) leaves at her crime scenes, like skincare merchandise and Sizzling Cheetos, that convinces Loretta she’s searching for a Black girl. Curiously, she feels sympathy for her suspect. Their shared final identify evokes identification. “What if we’re kin?” Loretta asks, questioning aloud how Andrea would possibly’ve turned out if she’d been raised by Loretta’s loving household. When she appears at Andrea, Loretta displays, “Generally I see nothing, and generally I see myself.” Andrea Greene and Loretta Greene: opposites but additionally doppelgängers.
Though Loretta makes regular progress within the case, “Fallin’” ends by noting that she remains to be pushing for Andrea’s arrest. In a coda, we see Glover (showing as himself) discussing “this present I’m engaged on proper now with Chloe and Damson and Dom Fishback” on an Atlanta pink carpet. (It’s in all probability price noting that “Fallin’” shares a co-writer, Karen Joseph Adcock, with Atlanta’s nice season 4 mockumentary, “The Goof Who Sat by the Door.”) This implies that the opposite episodes of Swarm are imagined to exist as fiction in a world the place Loretta and the documentary are nonfiction, somewhat than as an easy account of occasions unfolding in “actual life.” That is essential to know, going into a very wild finale.
Swarm Episode 7: “Solely God Makes Glad Endings”
In the direction of the top of “Fallin’” it’s revealed that Andrea Greene is now residing as a person. Certainly, the subsequent time we see Fishback, her hair is lower quick, she’s sporting males’s clothes, and her character introduces himself to a feminine love curiosity, Kiersey Clemons’ Rashida, as Tony. They meet exterior an Atlanta membership in June 2018—the identical month Beyoncé and Jay-Z launched their collaborative album, Every part Is Love, because the Carters. Rashida wants a journey residence together with her roommate, a blackout-drunk white girl, which Tony, who has been sleeping in his stolen hatchback, eagerly gives. As soon as they’ve dumped the roommate within the bathtub to sober up, Tony and Rashida get to know one another. After a false begin through which Rashida reveals that she hates Ni’jah and he pulls away, they reunite simply as Tony loses his automobile and appear to fall in love.
What’s notable about Tony—apart from the gender transition, clearly, which I’ll come again to—is how relaxed he appears. Rashida observes that he’s calm sufficient to make an excellent medical scholar—or, she teases, serial killer. Because the season has progressed, we’ve watched the initially creepy, unsettled Dre develop ever extra comfy and even socially savvy as she’s blossomed from repressed stan into self-actualized assassin. Type, delicate, and assured virtually to the purpose of flamboyance, in a flashy beaded jacket, Tony begins to look able to residing a standard life with a associate whose love he reciprocates. Rashida accepts his trans id, and her mother and father welcome him into an upper-middle-class residence so idyllic that father and daughter dance collectively within the kitchen after dinner. May this be the caring household Loretta imagined for Andrea?
However the home bliss can’t final. Rashida successfully signed her demise warrant the primary time she spoke ailing of Ni’jah. So in fact she winds up useless on her beloved Anthropologie sofa, after refusing to accompany Tony to a Ni’jah present on the evening of their anniversary and blowing up at him for spending lease cash on such expensive tickets. The final time we see them collectively, Tony falls asleep embracing Rashida’s useless physique. This is a crucial shot as a result of it means that every part that follows may very well be Tony’s dream. One other trace is the timing. Would there actually be sufficient time after Rashida comes residence on the finish of a workday for Tony to shock her with the tickets, kill her after she rejects them, snooze for a bit, burn the physique, drive to the Ni’jah live performance, homicide a scalper, and enter the venue simply in time to catch her idol’s efficiency?
After which there’s the efficiency itself. Tony pushes to the entrance of the gang, drifts onstage, and is grabbed by safety guards. “Cease. Let her go,” says Ni’jah, whose physique is unchanged however whose face is now that of the late Marissa. “Sing for them,” she urges Tony. “Don’t be afraid.” “I really like you all,” Tony manages to mumble. With some silent encouragement from Ni’jah, the gang roars its approval. She and Tony exit the venue huddled collectively, as followers scream and flashbulbs pop. Behind the limo, Ni’jah embraces Tony. “Thanks,” he babbles.
Whether or not or not these scenes are the dream Tony has whereas sleeping on his girlfriend’s lifeless physique isn't, finally, so necessary. They're already a part of a fiction inside the world the place Loretta’s documentary is actuality, which is in flip a fiction inside the true world the place you, I, and all different viewers of Swarm exist. So, what can we make of the finale’s title, “Solely God Makes Glad Endings”? This fairy-tale ending, the place a newly minted Prince Charming rides into the sundown together with his Frankenstein Cinderella, is simply joyful for a protagonist who’s additionally a villain—and it’s a fantasy, no matter whether or not Tony awakened in time to make it to the Ni’jah present. An truly joyful ending would’ve seen Tony genuinely remodel into the well-adjusted individual Rashida thinks he's, or Loretta apprehend Andrea earlier than she might kill once more.
What's Swarm attempting to say—and what's it truly saying?
When you begin searching for doppelgängers among the many 4 characters on the heart of Swarm, it’s inconceivable to cease discovering them. If Andrea and Loretta are two sides of a coin known as Black womanhood, then so are Dre and Ni’jah—the feral little one and the glamorous girl. Till her suicide, Marissa, who’s so stunning and nurturing and poised, serves as Dre’s real-life avatar for Ni’jah—a psychological projection made literal within the finale. Dre and Marissa are one other pair, twin sisters in each sense however the organic one. As a unique ultimate of Black womanhood, Loretta is the matronly, earthbound model of Ni’jah, who's in fact a stand-in for an actual girl named Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter who actually is worshiped as a goddess.
Enterprise additional down this highway, and also you’ll keep in mind Billie Eilish’s white-woman wellness cult, an equally unhinged mirror picture of Dre and the remainder of the Swarm’s Ni’jah obsession. You may additionally recall that Chloe Bailey is famously part of a sister duo, and that she and her sister Halle bought their begin as preteen miniature Beyoncés, importing covers of her songs to YouTube. And at last there are the twin finales of Swarm, one a “true” story of a hero’s persistence in pursuing a serial killer she’s on the verge of arresting and the opposite a darkish fairy story whose villain will get to reside out (or not less than dream) his final fantasy. In each instances, Tony’s destiny stays a thriller.
With all this in thoughts, I believe Glover and Nabers are pushing to a surreal, horror-comedy excessive the argument that Black womanhood encompasses each the beliefs we see enshrined as Optimistic Illustration and their polar opposites. Whereas cis males and white ladies pop up all through the present, usually as unwitting accomplices to or obstacles for Dre, it’s Black ladies whose relationships and conflicts, similarities to and variations from each other, drive the motion. Greater than therapists or legal professionals purpose-built to help the character viewers are literally invested in, they’re complicated sufficient to assemble an entire, bonkers story round.
That is all compelling sufficient, I believe, to partially redeem Swarm from an underwhelming first impression. Horror tales about deranged followers are nothing new, and the three episodes that open the season felt mild on different insights. What continues to journey me up, although, is the Tony transformation. It doesn’t fairly come out of nowhere. Dre’s wardrobe turns into extra masculine in episode 5, when she returns to Houston. And her repressed want for ladies is alluded to in early episodes; she caresses Marissa’s pores and skin and grows uneasy round a lesbian couple within the wellness cult. “There’s a closeness with women that doesn’t all the time must imply they’re… humorous,” Marissa’s mom explains within the mockumentary, referring to her daughter’s relationship with Andrea. However she sounds as if she’s attempting to persuade herself greater than anybody else.
But the connections the present suggests between sexuality, gender id, standom, and psychopathology really feel each disappointingly simplistic—when you’re fascinated by a well-known individual, you should actually wish to sleep with them—and willfully evocative of historic depictions of queer and particularly transgender folks as criminally insane. The trans or cross-dressing serial killer, as seen in Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill, The Texas Chainsaw Bloodbath, and extra just lately in J.Okay. Rowling’s pseudonymous novel Troubled Blood, is a very noxious trope. And this, it virtually goes with out saying, is a fairlyhorrendoussecond to resurrect it.
It’s laborious for me to consider that Glover and Nabers are both blind to this historical past or actively hostile in direction of the trans group. One clue as to their true intentions is that they’ve stated Swarm was impressed, partially, by the sometimes-brilliant, often-controversial movies of Australian provocateur Michael Haneke, who has been recognized to make inflammatory public statements like “each movie rapes the viewer.” (Ni’jah’s husband, Caché, shares a reputation with Haneke’s masterpiece.) The shock and offense operate as exclamation factors on the subtler arguments he makes about human distress and likewise, in a manner, liberate these finally moralistic motion pictures from fees of ethical rigidness.
Study Dre’s transition via that very same lens, and also you come again round to the evils of stan tradition—of pretending you've gotten an intimate relationship with an artist who doesn’t know you exist. Does Dre turn out to be Tony as a result of her adoration of Ni’jah has revealed to her that he’s who she actually is, or does Dre turn out to be Tony as a result of that’s merely who she must be to get nearer to Ni’jah? So far as I’m involved, these have been by no means the present’s most fascinating questions. With that remaining, pointless swipe at a weak group, Swarm turns into its personal evil twin: a delicate allegory whose mirror picture is overtly offensive—an excellent present and one of many ugliest issues on TV.
When you or somebody you recognize could also be experiencing a mental-health disaster or considering suicide, name or textual content 988. In emergencies, name 911, or search care from an area hospital or psychological well being supplier.
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