A strange scene in the newest episode of ‘Atlanta’ explains why it’s like nothing else on television right now
In the newest episode of “Atlanta,” there was a moment that looked nothing like I’ve seen on television before. But it did look a lot like something I’ve seen in the movies.
Describing a television show as “cinematic” is a cliche at this point. Since David Lynch made “Twin Peaks” 26 years ago, television’s rules have been broken over and over again. But I noticed something about that scene — and the episode as a whole — that made me realize how “Atlanta” is pushing the envelope even more.
“Atlanta” is about Earn Marks (played by Donald Glover, who also created the show), the twentysomething manager of Alfred Miles, also known as, Paper Boi, an Atlanta rapper, who also happens to be his cousin. Earn is dirt broke and doesn’t live with his his girlfriend and daughter. The show is about the indignities and small victories of trying to make it in the Atlanta rap scene, and about Earn’s relationships with everyone around him. He’s a fascinating character, and Glover is the main reason to watch the show. He has the air of someone who’s better than everyone around him, but he’s also a loser. But he’s not someone we like to see fail out of hubris; he somehow comes out as an underdog.
In the newest episode, Earn wakes up at the house of an acquaintance. He blacked out from a party the previous night and he’s hungover. He can’t find his jacket. The whole episode is about him trying to find his jacket.
What’s amazing about the episode is that the show makes no effort to make us care about the jacket. All we know is that Earn lost it and he needs to find it. We don’t know if it has any kind of important emotional importance, if he left something in the pocket, or if it’s just kind of expensive and he’d like to get it back. He doesn’t seem to have anything more important to do, so maybe getting the jacket is just what he decided to do for the day.
So Earn looks for the jacket. He retraces his steps, searches the house, calls his cousin, and goes back to the (utterly desexualized) strip club he visited the previous night. No jacket.
Finally, Earn joins up with Paper Boi and their friend Darius. He uses his cousin’s phone to call the Uber driver they used the previous night, thinking maybe he left his jacket in the car.
It’s this scene that gets to me. For a full minute, there’s a single shot with the camera focused on Earn with Paper Boi and Darius blurred in the foreground. We hear Earn’s side of the phone call with the Uber driver. But at the same time, we also hear Paper Boi and Darius talking about their Asian cuisine preferences. The show doesn’t prioritize one audio track over the other.
And that’s when it hit me: unlike other shows, “Atlanta” doesn’t care if I watch it.
Television, as a form, is shaped by its medium. If you’re watching television, you can stop watching any time. You can go to a different channel, stream a different show, or just turn your electronic device off. So it’s normally within an incentive for a television show to keep you watching at all times. That could be by having a gripping plot, incredible special effects, fast edits, a steady stream of jokes, or some kind of other stakes that make the viewer want to know what happens from one scene to the next.
That wasn’t the case with this episode of “Atlanta.” For the first half, we’re just watching Earn look for his jacket without knowing if it’s even important. And then in this scene, the show doesn’t even seem to care about Earn’s search for his jacket anymore; it gives it equal weight to two other characters’ conversation about sushi.
It was a technique I’ve seen in movies before. Robert Altman is really famous for doing it in “Nashville,” for example. And it’s also appeared in a few recent realist movies, like “The Kids Are All Right”and especially “Margaret,” where a pivotal conversation in a diner becomes hard to hear because the director decided to listen in on several other tables’ conversations at once, and a lot of them are talking about food.
This is what it means for a television show to be cinematic. It’s about breaking the form of a television show. In a cinema, once you buy your ticket, it’s designed so that you stay in your seat and watch the whole thing, even the slow parts. You don’t get up and leave unless the movie is really bad or if you have to pee. You might prefer for the movie to have something that keeps you engaged at every second, but the medium doesn’t require that. “Atlanta” — like “Margaret” and “The Kids Are Alright” — has a story to tell and wants to tell it in a particular, realistic way. It doesn’t want to contrive plot twists or any kind of ticking bomb. The stuff of real life is compelling enough.
