OCS GO – ON DEMAND – SERIES
The first two seasons showed it, Atlanta is a series that moves at its own pace, does not forbid anything and only expresses itself when it has something to say. Which makes the four years that will have separated the second season from the third, which has just started on FX in the United States, on OCS in France, both logical and bearable.
With spectacular episodes – a parody of black television in season 1, a number of whiteface uncomfortable in season 2 – the series, created by Donald Glover, has given itself the mission of stating what it means to be black today, in the United States. To do this, it takes all possible detours and calls on all genres, with a marked penchant for dark humor and, especially in its second season, an appetite for “black horror”, this way popularized by the filmmaker and actor Jordan Peele (Get Out, in 2017, Us, in 2019) to use the codes of horror films to tell what racism does to bodies and souls.
It is also on a terrifying sequence that opens the first episode of this new season, which features two men, one white, the other black, sailing at night on a lake. When the white man tells his friend that the lake is haunted by black residents of a town flooded during the construction of a dam, the scene takes a sinister turn. The story is inspired by the sad fate of Oscarville, an autonomous community decimated by racial violence at the beginning of the 20th century.e century, today drowned under Lake Lanier, near Atlanta (Georgia).
Memory, guilt and complex
This astonishing episode in the form of a preamble continues on the misadventures of Laquarious, a little black boy placed with a couple of white women following a report. A parable around the memory of slavery, white guilt and the “savior” complex, this sequence refers to another news item, the suicide of two women and the murder of their six adopted children in 2018. The tone of the season is given: Atlanta will not deviate from its program.
Earn’s wanderings are strewn with these images, these words and these interactions which do not have the same meaning depending on the color of the skin.
It is in the following episode that the series reconnects with its usual characters. Far from Georgia, Earn (Donald Glover) accompanies his cousin Alfred “Paper Boi” (Brian Tyree Henry), a rising hip-hop star, on a European tour. He drags with him Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), Alfred’s roommate, and Vanessa (Zazie Beetz), his ex-girlfriend, without us really understanding why. From Amsterdam to London, the four companions become acquainted with this Europe which welcomes them, at first glance, with open arms. Paper Boi fills the halls, collects cash, plays poker with high society. When he is briefly arrested by the Dutch police, he is served a four-star menu, and the crowd calls for his release under the windows of the station. But it’s Christmas, and the streets are filled with people dressed as Zwarte Piet, the friendly bogeyman who accompanies Santa Claus up the chimney, and whose faces are blackened with soot. Each encounter becomes an aggression, the threat hovers.
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