Barry Jenkins is easily one of the greatest directors of our time, and he proves it with this episode.
There's always been a serious problem with the way comedy television depicts violence. The odd tonal shift, the humor at the crime scene of dramadys like Psych or Monk. The horror of a dead body and the trauma of violence go totally effaced by the conventions of humor. People's distance from violence, from blood, from dead bodies, from the barrel of a gun, these distances let shows like these get away with maneuvers like this. And don't get me wrong. I love what a comedy can accomplish by ignoring certain realities. It is, after all, fiction. But I have still marveled about how such an unrealistic rendering of something terrible can not shatter one's suspension of disbelief.
Jenkins offers a powerful antidote to those generic conventions in the otherwise comedic Dear White People. Jenkins truly captures the terror of the gun on screen for all to see. The way he escalates the conflict and perfectly positions the daily traumas one might observe as relatively benign, and how they link explicitly to police gun violence toward Black people is excellent in its execution but appalling in its reality.
Marque Richardson acts his behind off in these scenes. Facing down the police officer's gun. Sitting in his dorm room on the floor in the aftermath. It is rare that I see something so deeply moving on the screen.
Richardson, Jenkins, and of course Justin Simien have given us something truly special with this episode that both interrogates genre conventions by displaying an altogether superior aesthetic practice and making manifest the daily reality of racial oppression directed against Black people in the United States.
American Gods is the only show to portray accurately what it feels like to be kicked in the balls.
