One thing you should know about me is I love black mess.
As a bonafide cinephile, book worm, and binge watcher extraordinaire, I live for all forms of fictional media where black people get to be messes: to stumble, make bad decisions, regress, give into their worst impulses, get it wrong, fuck up, fail. Even when it’s bad—especially when it’s bad—any movie, series, book, song, or story with compelling black characters who get to be all of the things is welcome in my home. Black excellence is boring; black mediocrity is where it’s at. And 2023 is shaping up to be a great year for writers brave enough to enter those uncharted waters of unadulterated black failure.
(Me watching black characters flounder.
I’ve been thinking a lot about black messes since I finished watching the Amazon Prime original series Swarm, co-created by Janine Nabers and Donald Glover. The show stars Dominique Fishback, in a truly career-defining performance as Dre, a socially outcast superfan (the kids call them stans now, mom) who begins murdering haters of her fave artist Ni’Jah (played by Nirine S. Brown), a Beyoncé-coded pop star and object of the titular fanbase’s affection. After a personal tragedy pushes her over the edge, Dre goes on a nationwide murder tour, switching identities like Count Olaf and offing anyone who fails her killer pop quiz: “Who’s your favorite artist?”
At a time when major distribution companies keep churning out dozens of exploitative true crime documentaries and damn near everybody seems to be caught up in the cult of white male serial killer worship, Swarm is exactly the kind of show we need on television today, especially since it remains rare to see thoughtful fictional media about complicated black women who “articulate rage,” as Jeanine T. Abraham puts it. And boy oh boy, does Dre rage. Granted, Swarm is much more critical about Dre’s killer stan chronicles than your typical serial killer saga. It even takes its own audience to task for our desire to watch such media, as I’ll touch on later. But it still lets Dre (and us as viewers) dwell in the kind of messy ethical ambiguity black horror characters hardly ever get to indulge. Thanks to that vicarious pleasure, along with the show’s perceptive writing, uncanny performances, and perfectly imperfect exploration of pathological blackness, I absolutely relished every deliciously demented second of Swarm.
But despite the hoopla over Swarm’s allegedly “dubious milestone of Black female sociopathy, Dre is not the first black woman to join the ranks of “smiling [white] psychos” in horror. In fact, Swarm joins an emergent horror genealogy featuring dynamic portrayals of black women’s pathology. Fans of American Horror Story: Cult (2017) will recall Adina Porter’s masterclass in mad black womanhood as Beverly Hope, the righteously rageful (and criminally underutilized) accomplice/killer of a blue-haired Trump-era cultist. Mercedes Morris also made a shocking turn in Slasher: Solstice (2019) as Jen Rijkers, the sister in a Billy Loomis/Stu Macher-esque sibling revenge plot. In Tragedy Girls (2017), Alexandra Shipp gave a similarly unhinged performance as McKayla Hooper, one half of a homicidal true crime duo who blog about their murders to gain social media clout. (And even though it’s been nearly 30 years, I’m still pissed that Scream 2 (1997) script leaks kept Elise Neal from being our first Black Ghostface. We were robbed!)
If that list just sounds like a bunch of black girl bit players, don’t worry: there have been solo slashers as well. Tamika Shannon recently shined in the very Dre-coded titular role of James Schroeder’s rape revenge-cum-serial killer origin story Nicole (2020). Rising scream queen Jasmin Savoy Brown (shoutouts to my Yellowjackets fans!) also demolished as a queer, hearing impaired, synesthete serial killer in the Finnish-American slasher Sound of Violence (2021). And lest we forget verifiable black horror icon Octavia Spencer (she’s literally mother!) and her immortally-memefied performance as Sue Ann in the soon-to-be cult classic Ma (2019).
The point is, Dre is in good bloody company. There has been no shortage of killer black women in recent horror media, during a time when black women are increasingly embracing horror as a medium to fully express the depths of their humanity. But let the representation politics police tell it, Swarm is a uniquely humiliating piece of work that is “unrealistic and unfair,” “cluttered with misogynistic and racist tropes,” and most importantly, the final nail in the coffin proving that Donald Glover is “not beating his ‘dislikes black women’ allegations.” *cue deep, heavy, negro spiritual sigh*
Lets Talk About Respectability Politic(k)s
In the wake of Swarm’s polarizing debut, think piece after think piece after think piece have blasted Donald Glover, no stranger to controversy, for his purported misogynoir. Far be it from me to minimize valid critiques of black creators who perpetuate harmful tropes in their work. I’ve also taken Glover to task for his masculinism, colorist casting choices and overall New Black tendencies (I still can’t stand “This is America”). However, even if you feel Glover’s involvement is “impossible to separate from Swarm,” the series is a collaborative effort developed by a multitude of black writers and directors including Janine Nabers, Karen Joseph Adcock, Jamal Olori, Kara Brown, Ibra Ake, Stephen Glover (come on black nepotism!), and Malia Obama. At a certain point, prioritizing these ‘gotcha’ moments exposing Glover’s alleged proclivities obscures the creative agency of his black women collaborators who outnumber him, and that in itself constitutes its own form of misogynoir. Like damn, at least give Nabers, Adcock, Brown, and Obama some antiblack credit—black women can fuck up, too!
I can appreciate that even negative reviews contribute to a show’s prominence. As Canadian writer Kathleen Newman-Bremang explains, “people need to stop viewing fair criticism as a public berating and see it as it is: an interrogation and extension of the work.” Many reviews have meaningfully engaged with Swarm’s shortcomings. However, generally speaking, folks are way too hard on black creators, especially in horror, and though many critiques stem from a place of good faith engagement, others stem from a place of respectability politics. When people say things like ‘I’m sick of slavery movies’ or ‘every black movie is about trauma and struggle love’ or ‘x movie misrepresents y group’, etc., what I really hear is that this work validates what white people think of us, so we need to prove them wrong. And to that, I quote Crissle West in last week’s episode of The Read (1:33:13, for all you timestamp lovers): “Everybody not worried about impressing white people.”
Yes, we need black rom-coms and quirky coming-of-age stories and sci-fi fantasies, too. Yes, black creators can perpetuate damaging narratives about black people, too. But, as Dr. Kadian Kow writes, “When we limit ‘good’ representation only to portrayals that uplift Black people, we do a disservice to all the Black creators who want to sink their teeth into the complex humanity of our Blackness. This includes the darker parts that we would prefer to hide from a general audience.” Let’s take it a step further: when we reduce black art to simply corrective promotion and rehabbing black people’s image for non-black audiences, we do white supremacy’s job for free.
And to that I say: Fuck white supremacy. Fuck the white gaze. Fuck positive representation. And frankly, fuck this obsession that chronically online people have with making nebulous ad hominem arguments about creators’ personal politics and psychosexual pathologies instead of critically engaging with the complexities of their art. I’d much rather y’all focus on Dre’s sex life than anyone else’s.
Trust and believe, Swarm does exactly that. But like any show social media pundits get their hands on, nuance got lost in translation when a clip from the pilot episode went viral, featuring a virginal Dre watching her sister Marissa (Chloe Bailey) take backshots from her boyfriend Khalid (Damson Idris). Unsurprisingly, Black Twitter made this a grossly sexist talking point, with many a horny loser debating whether Chlöe and Damson were having real sex, further cementing claims from the anti-Chlöe brigade that ‘she’s trying too hard’. Bringing us back to reality, Swarm’s intimacy coordinator Sasha Nicolle Smith (25 minute mark) explains that neither Marissa nor her boyfriend’s lackluster stroke are the crux of the scene: “it’s an insight into Dre’s disturbing internal world.” (And for all you puritans who swear sex scenes don’t contribute to a plot, Smith gives plenty of insights into the symbolic complexities of this, and other, sex scenes.) Thus, establishing this charged eroticism between Dre and Marissa sets the stage for a powerfully complex psychosexual dynamic that manifests in all of Dre’s subsequent relationships with women. And that’s where my real critiques come in.
The Spectres of Queerness and Gender-Noncomformity in Swarm
As Shamira Ibrahim notes, Dre’s “various female intimacies” throughout the series occur with white or light-skinned characters, many of whom even look, act, and sound like Marissa, whereas Ni’Jah, “the paragon of virtue,” is dark-skinned. Nabers claims this was a “very, very purposeful” choice to enhance Swarm’s hyperreality. So why was a dark-skinned woman’s mugshot used to represent the ‘real’ Dre in Episode 6’s clever meta-documentary about the ‘true’ crimes that ‘inspired’ Swarm? Recent research in the US has linked colorism with increasingly punitive sentences for dark-skinned people; perhaps that’s true for Dre’s reality, too. Still, for a show that seeks to upend colorist narratives in its worldmaking, I find it strange Swarm’s meta-writing wouldn’t challenge those conditions as well. In fact, all the dark-skinned women in Swarm occupy tropes we’ve seen on TV before, like the Black Lady Cop (Detective Loretta Greene, delightfully played by Heather Simms) and the Magical Negro-Mammy combo (Ni’Jah is the mother to end all mothers). Why is the ‘real’ (dark-skinned) Dre nothing more than a violent criminal relegated to a mugshot, while the ‘fictional’ (light-skinned) Dre gets to enjoy a vibrant digital life in an Amazon Prime original series? Were the writers intentionally trying to drum up that reality to further upend dichotomies of black women’s representation in media, or do these slippage between fact and fiction inadvertently expose faults in Swarm’s representation politics?
I have similar questions about Swarm’s treatment of queerness, though that would require its own post. I’m always happy to see complicated queers in horror, especially antagonists (in undergrad, I wrote a paper on the subject titled “‘You Meddling Kids!’: Unmasking The Queer Villain”). With Dre, however, queerness is only ever expressed subtextually, making it difficult to parse out how the writers connect her non-normative gender/sexual desires to her parasocial worship. Accordingly, many reviewers have reduced Swarm (and its tagline, “Stan correct”) to “obvious” satire that “balks at the challenge” of truly uncovering the depths of violent fandom in the digital age. Yet, as NPR’s Aisha Harris writes, even though Swarm bypasses “the many ways artists can fuel these responses, either directly or indirectly,” it offers in replacement a stunning exploration of “the absurdities of social media and the ease of slippage between internet selves and ‘real’ selves.”
[***EPISODE 7 SPOILERS AHEAD***]
I think that’s why the series finale left me so deeply unsatisfied. Dre’s transmasculine turn as Tony changes the entire tone of the series and confronts us with the truly absurd depths of standom. Irresistable Damage editor Jackson points out that “Dre was really quiet and inhibited as a woman, but became a confident ass nigga as trans man Tony.” And throughout the episode, viewers are led to believe, however naively, that through authentic self-expression Dre/Tony has left the swarm and entered the real world (writer Kiana Fitzgerald suggests the prominence of SZA’s “Normal Girl” in this episode is “the culmination of the entire show”). This makes it all the more devastating when the other shoe finally drops and Tony, agonizingly, chokes his Ni’Jah-phobic girlfriend, Rashida (Kiersey Clemons), to death. Perhaps Tony’s gender was incidental to Swarm’s cisgender writers, merely another slippage in Dre’s pathology revealing her inability to escape her mental prison of codependency and celebrity worship syndrome. In any case, ending the series on such an inconclusive note (gender and plotwise) left me unsettled, as did the absolutely gut-wrenching final shot of Tony in weeping embrace of Ni’Jah (deepfaked with Marissa’s face), thanking her for seeing him.
I wish Swarm’s writers could see him, too.
On The Beauty of Being a Mystery
At any rate, I could speculate more, but as Morgan Cormack writes, “Trying to understand Dre is kind of useless in this series as her mystery and unguessable behaviour propels the wild rollercoaster you’re taken on.” Trying to understand the writers’ decisions is equally as futile. The work must speak for itself.
That hasn’t kept even laudatory viewers from being unsatisfied with Swarm’s conclusion, or lack thereof, like Aisha Harris, who says that while she was overall impressed by the series, in the end she was “not quite entirely sure [Fishback] or the writers kind of figured out who she was supposed to be.”
But I disagree. I think everyone involved with Swarm (yes, even Juvenile Crimeboss) knew exactly who Dre was supposed to be: a mystery.
Dre may be a lot of things—a killer, a lover; a foster kid, a honeybee; queer, transmasculine; emotionally detached yet fiercely present; full of potential, completely undone—but one thing she’ll never be is decipherable. However, if anyone stands a chance of understanding her, it’s Dominique Fishback, who gives the performance of a lifetime. Every line, every gaze, every eyebrow raise tells a soul-shattering story that ultimately transforms Dre into a fully fleshed out, lived-in, beautiful, awful black mess.
In an interview with W Magazine Fishback admits she avoided studying serial killers and fandom to prepare for Swarm: “Dre loves her sister. She loves Marissa, and she loves Ni’Jah. That’s where I went with it.” She also felt it unnecessary to label Dre’s mental state, despite many folks placing her on the spectrum, because embodying this character required “be[ing] present and not hiding the fact that she had an experience or a feeling.” Fishback is a preternatural talent as is, but interestly she describes the experience of playing this role as a kind of “freedom at Dre’s expense,” which suggests paradoxically that Dre exists somewhere trapped in her manic little dreamscape, or else behind bars, or else 6 feet under. But to me, Dre is alive, and terribly free, freer than any of us will ever be. Because as poet Rita Dove writes, “if you can’t be free, be a mystery.”
During a 2017 talk at the Paley Center with her How To Get Away With Murder castmates, Viola Davis, who played one of my all-time favorite black messes, Annalise THEE Keating, complained that “no one explores the black pathology, at all,” encouraging writers everywhere to tell those stories: “I don’t even care if it’s a wrong decision. I don’t care if it pisses anyone off… And she doesn’t have to be a hero. She doesn’t have to represent some social message, she just has to be human so you can understand when you come and you watch her on the screen, she’s just like you. And that’s the most revolutionary thing we can do right now.”
I hope Swarm will encourage more black creators to take up Davis’ call to do the dirty work of exploring black pathology, for better and for worse. After all, we all got a little Dre in us. I hope more of us will write black characters who are nasty, inscrutable mysteries so we can explore those facets of our lives. I hope more of us will write characters like Dre, or even real-life black women serial killers whose legacies continue to be overlooked in film, television, and literature, like Hannah Mary Tabbs, Clementine Barnabet, and Roberta Elder. I hope more of us will write for the right and wrong reasons. I hope more of us will write our own beautiful black messes.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more of my kooky thoughts now that the spring semester has taken its foot off my neck.
The Poetic Xenolith*: Black Queer Media Musings 