Swarm (TV Program)

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    ‘Priscilla,’ Olivia Rodrigo and the Year of Girlhood and Longing

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    When she was just 14, Priscilla Beaulieu, an Air Force brat stationed with her family in Germany, met one of the planet’s biggest pop stars. The pair formed a connection, and when it was time to temporarily part ways, he left her with a keepsake.That gift, an Army issue jacket from Elvis Presley, is an important symbol in the movie “Priscilla,” hanging from her bedroom wall like a poster ripped from a magazine. The film’s director, Sofia Coppola, seems to be making a point about the gaping age gap between teenager and heartthrob (24 and a year-plus into military service), but also about the universality of a girl’s crush — relatable, all-consuming.In class soon after, in a scene that reminded me of Britney Spears anxiously counting down the seconds until the bell in the “ … Baby One More Time” video, a daydreaming Priscilla fidgets at her desk. You can almost see the cartoon hearts floating above her head as Coppola offers this unsettling portrait of an adolescent drawn into an age-inappropriate relationship. But her knowing depiction of girlhood longing stayed with me, too. Because whether you were a teenage girl in 1959 or in 2023, that specific ache — in love, or what you think is love — will probably feel familiar.I noticed that pang — the kind that comes from badly wanting something seemingly just out of reach — surfacing in our entertainments this year: full-throated and kicking down doors on “Guts,” Olivia Rodrigo’s hilarious, if wrenching, relationship album; simmering to a boil in “Swarm,” the series about an obsessed fan with a gnawing hunger; and yearning for validation in “Don’t Think, Dear,” a dancer’s devastating memoir of a ballet career that stalled at the barre. Girls giving voice to their pain even when they couldn’t fully make sense of it. Girls spilling their guts.The Cruel Tutelage of Alice Robb“Ballet had given me a way to be girl,” a “specific template,” Alice Robb writes in “Don’t Think, Dear.”To middle school, she wears her hair scraped into a bun, a leotard instead of a bra. She trains at the New York City Ballet’s prestigious school. At 12, though, struggling to keep up, she’s expelled after three years of study. The rejection is unshakable, and the sting goes on for decades. Desperate for a do-over that never comes, she enrolls in less prominent dance academies, where she’s heartbroken to encounter girls with flat feet and messy buns. She stalks old classmates on social media, and for 15 years, keeps up a dutiful stretching routine that she hopes will maintain the outlines of a ballet body, one that telegraphs her as “special.”“The dream of being a ballerina begins with the dream of being beautiful,” Robb writes. Anyone who has ever pulled on a tutu, this pink puff of fabric imbued with something indescribably feminine, is probably nodding at this assessment of ballet’s initial pull. American girlhood is practically wrapped in blush tones, with ballet as a kind of shared rite. It’s there at every stage: in the aspirant of the popular “Angelina Ballerina” children’s books and in the nostalgic young enthusiasts who’ve recently given the art form’s aesthetics a name, balletcore, playing dress-up with the uniform. But for those like Robb who see ballet not as a phase, but a pursuit, letting go is hard. To fail at ballet is to fail at being a girl.That’s not true, of course. But wounds sustained in girlhood, when you’re not yet emotionally equipped to mend them, tend to linger. With each page, I rooted for Robb, now a journalist in her 30s, to find the position that would let her plant her feet back on the ground.Alice Robb at Steps in Manhattan.Laurel Golio for The New York TimesAnd I thought of an Olivia Rodrigo lyric: “I bought all the clothes that they told me to buy/I chased some dumb ideal my whole [expletive] life.” That’s how Rodrigo, the 20-year-old pop supernova, deals with the anguish of rejection on her sophomore album, “Guts”: She thrashes.Rodrigo realizes that, in its first throes, “Love Is Embarrassing.” (It is.) On that throbbing track, she admits the hold “some weird second-string loser” has on her. On another, “Get Him Back,” she jokingly lays out a conflicted revenge plot as the bridge drops to a whisper: “I wanna kiss his face, with an uppercut,” she confesses. “I wanna meet his mom — just to tell her her son sucks.” She’s cataloging her humiliations, but she’s laughing at them, too.She refuses to wallow for long, and I’m convinced this is partly what gives the album its buoyancy. (It’s an approach that, in hindsight, would have given me more relief than the semester I spent writing love-stricken poetry on tiny notecards at my university’s performing arts library after a brutal breakup.)Headfirst Into HeartbreakGirlhood, strictly marked in years, comes to a close in the waning years of adolescence. But for some, I think this period calls for a less tidy metric, one that makes room for a soft transition into late girlhood, or adolescence — with all of its intensifying feeling — and then post-girlhood, with its own round of heartbreaks. Lauryn Hill was 23 in 1998 when she released a relationship album for the ages. “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” multiplatinum and Grammy-winning, tracked her recovery from a series of rumored breaks: with her hip-hop trio, the Fugees, and one of her bandmates, Wyclef Jean, with whom she was said to have shared a stormy romance. For a generation of us, it was as if she’d found our own love letters and read each one out loud.This fall, reunited with her bandmates, the girl from South Orange, N.J., returned to the stage to breathe new life into that indelible collection. On opening night of a short-lived tour, I watched from the Prudential Center in nearby Newark as Hill wailed the exasperated plea from “Ex-Factor”: “No matter how I think we grow, you always seem to let me know it ain’t working.” It had been 25 years since Hill’s “Miseducation”; a quarter-century for perspective, love and motherhood to right-size once outsize feelings. She sang the words she’d written all those years ago, but this time her voice was tinged with unmistakable joy.Lauryn Hill on the 25th anniversary of “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” tour.Mathew Tsang/Getty ImagesThere is longing in the fictional world of “Swarm,” but little joy. Dre (Dominique Fishback), a socially awkward 20-something, spends her days posting online tributes dedicated to her favorite artist, a Beyoncé stand-in named Ni’Jah.“I think the second she sees me, she’d know how we’re connected,” Dre tells her roommate.Dre is a “Killer Bee,” one of a hive of obsessive fans, and she will live up to the name: She soon sets off on a violent cross-country spree, picking off Ni’Jah’s unsuspecting online critics. After each kill, famished, Dre devours anything she can get her hands on — a leftover apple pie, a sandwich. It becomes clear that she’s not hungry at all; what she’s starved for — longing for — is connection. In that sense, she’s not so different from the scores of women and girls who packed concert stadiums this past summer, adorned in sparkling silver or baring arms stacked with friendship bracelets.A Girl Walks Into Her KitchenWhile I contemplated girlhood and longing this year, I was also cheered by how girls have prioritized their own delight. My favorite entry in that category was Girl Dinner, a TikTok trend that transformed a simple meal, meant to be enjoyed solo, into a satisfying feast — “a bag of popcorn, a glass of wine, some bread, some cheese and a hunk of chocolate,” as Jessica Roy put it in The New York Times this summer.The idea was to put convenience first, ostensibly leaving more time and space for the pleasures that elaborate meal prep and cleanup might not. The concept of Girl Dinner, which also embraces the internet appetite for giving ordinary things a fresh polish by renaming them, felt like an antidote to longing. A reminder that sometimes being full, all on your own, can be just as fulfilling. More

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      When TV Becomes a Window Into Women’s Rage

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      Over the last few years, TV has offered portraits of female rage that are striking within a culture that still prefers women to carry their anger calmly and silently.In art, the image of the enraged woman often represents an ugly, almost talismanic evil: In Adolphe-William Bouguereau’s 1862 painting “Orestes Pursued by the Furies,” the women sneer, brandishing weapons at Orestes. In Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” Judith furrows her brow, half of her face cloaked in shadow, and clutches a fistful of Holofernes’s hair as she plunges a sword into his neck. And Caravaggio’s Medusa, a wronged woman transformed into a monster, is just a severed head, and yet her face is animated with fury, mouth open in a scream, brows creased.Over the last few years, TV has offered similar portraits of female rage — striking scenes within a culture that still mostly prefers women either to carry their anger calmly and silently or to express it within a misogynistic framing (the manic or hysterical woman).It’s empowering to watch a woman rage indelicately, like the recent divorcée Rachel Fleishman, played by Claire Danes, in the FX series “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” During a therapy treatment in the penultimate episode, Rachel lets loose a sharp, achy howl that overtakes her whole body. It takes several attempts for her to fully release this deep-seated scream. The first few are abbreviated and strained but then she seems to unload everything, her mouth opened wide, her face contracting so hard it takes on an all around rosy hue. Who said rage couldn’t be beautiful?In fact, it’s an asset to Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany), a.k.a. She-Hulk, who got her own slice-of-life action court drama on Disney+ last year. Her hero-training journey is truncated because she takes to being the hulk much easier than did her cousin Bruce Banner, the original Hulk.“I’m great at controlling my anger; I do it all the time,” Jennifer tells Bruce in the first episode. “When I’m catcalled in the street, when incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me. I do it pretty much every day because if I don’t, I will get called emotional or difficult or might just literally get murdered.”The series isn’t about her tempering her rage but rather about living with a manifestation of the power her rage has given her: She-Hulk is strong and intelligent, a celebrity and a popular right-swipe on the dating apps.The same is true for Retsuko, the star of the popular animated Netflix series “Aggretsuko,” about a 25-year-old red panda who hates her job, where she is taken advantage of and disrespected by many of her colleagues. She handles the stress and frustration by doing karaoke — death metal karaoke, specifically.The show’s glossy 2D sticker-style artwork, full of heavy lines, loud graphics, straightforward color and bare-bones animation style, recalls other, explicitly kid-targeted brands from Sanrio, like Hello Kitty. Retsuko appears like a critical counterpoint to Hello Kitty, an icon of femininity and softness who famously has no mouth. She’s a blank slate, emotionless, while Retsuko comes alive through her anger, which physically transforms her, her claws bared, her facial fur changing into a Gene Simmons-esque death-metal mask pattern.Feminine rage can be deliciously performative, as with Retsuko’s throaty growl in the karaoke room or with the rap delivered by Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones), a hotel concierge in the Starz series “Blindspotting,” as she trashes a detestable couple’s room.Women who show rage in domestic spaces, like Ali Wong’s character Amy in the hilarious and bruising Netflix series “Beef,” disrupt the stereotype of women who are permitted to rage only in relationship to their roles as caretakers. Amy’s anger, even when warranted, is destructive, and everything in her life crumbles because of it, including her relationship with her family.Well-worn characters like the mother who does whatever it takes to save her children or the faithful wife who gets roped into crime to save or avenge her husband are more digestible, women granted the appearance of being multidimensional and emotionally complex when they are just following a formula.But even when female characters are developed outside of these reductive tropes, often the writing eventually flattens and diminishes them again. Take, for example, the rich emotional complexity that the Disney+ series “WandaVision” uncovered within Wanda Maximoff, which was absent from her next Marvel assignment. In the series, Wanda is caught in a sitcom-style delusion spurred by her anger, sorrow and grief. But in the film “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” she is reduced to fury and nothing else, as fierce maternal protectiveness transforms her into a killing machine. Her personhood is no longer relevant because being an angry mother has become her whole character.In other examples of women raging in a domestic space, there is sometimes comical collateral damage. In Season 1 of “Dead to Me,” Jen, a widowed mother with an attitude problem, takes out her rage about her mother-in-law by punching the cake she got for Jen’s late husband’s memorial. In “Mad Men,” Betty Draper, a 1960s housewife caught in a marriage of spite and deception, stands in her yard in her peach nightgown, holding a rifle pointed toward the sky. With every flex of a manicured pink-nail-polished finger, she shoots at birds as a horrified neighbor looks on, calling to her in horror; she keeps shooting as a cigarette dangles from her mouth.A woman’s rage can be heroic — whether you’re a hulk or Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), bashing in walls at an anger management class. It can be a barometer of what’s gone horrendously wrong in a world that has taken women for granted. Think the irate faces of Elisabeth Moss as Offred in the misogynistic dystopia of “The Handmaid’s Tale”; or the rage of the ill-fated soccer players in “Yellowjackets”; or the magically endowed young women in “The Power,” who sometimes use their abilities for self-defense or revenge.A woman can rage over privilege, as does Renata Klein (Laura Dern), the reputation- and money-obsessed mom in “Big Little Lies,” or over violent passion, as does Dre (Dominique Fishback), the killer stan of “Swarm.” In many cases, rage may be a last resort, a way for a woman to finally get what she desperately desires — catharsis, vengeance, justice, peace. Whether or not that satisfaction lasts, however, is a very different story.These scenes and storylines are not about the anger itself but rather what has led a woman to speak, to act, to defend herself and others, to have the autonomy to express an unpalatable emotion. To be unattractive and merciless. Because sometimes, in order to change her world — for good or for bad — all a woman needs to do is open her mouth and let out a vicious, unbridled scream.Image credits: “Fleishman Is in Trouble” (FX); “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” (Marvel Studios/Disney+); “Aggretsuko” (Netflix); “The Handmaid’s Tale” (Hulu); “Yellowjackets” (Showtime); “Yellowjackets” (Showtime); “Medusa,” 1597 (Caravaggio, Ufizzi Gallery, Florence); “Yellowjackets” (Showtime); “Beef” (Netflix); “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (Marvel Studios); “Jessica Jones” (Netflix); “Blindspotting” (Starz); “Dead to Me” (Netflix); “The Power” (Amazon Prime Video); “Swarm” (Amazon Prime Video); “Big Little Lies” (HBO); “Mad Men” (AMC). More

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      Why TV Can’t Quite Take a Stand on Stan Culture

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      “Dave” and “Swarm” try to demystify extreme fandom but end up pledging fealty to celebrity.The “stan,” a word that comes from Eminem’s seminal 2000 song about obsessive, sometimes violent superfans, has become a locus for celebrity anxiety in recent years. Popular fan bases can be malicious in defense of their idols — see Taylor’s Swifties, Nicki’s Barbz and Beyoncé’s BeyHive. (Selena Gomez recently had to chide her fans for sending death threats to Hailey Bieber because of a convoluted rivalry instigated in part by eyebrow lamination.) It can create an awkward dynamic for the famouses: Denounce your fan base’s zealotry, and you risk seeming ungrateful. And while obsessive fans have existed for as long as celebrity has, the internet, which is conducive to acts of anonymous virulence, has made stan fury particularly potent. It was only a matter of time before scripted TV tackled this subject. In the FX comedy “Dave,” Lil Dicky (Dave Burd), the annoying or — depending on your tolerance for anxiety-ridden white rappers — endearing M.C. at the center of the series, has several uneasy encounters with fans in the Season 3 premiere. While trying to destroy a concrete bust of his head that a fan gives him after a show, he meets a young woman named Campbell (Jocelyn Hudon), and they strike up a conversation. “Sorry, I don’t know you,” she says. Relieved, Lil Dicky confesses that he prefers that anonymity. She invites him to a house party, during which one of her friends inadvertently reveals that Campbell is actually a huge Lil Dicky fan and that her mission was to have sex with him.Later, party guests ask to see Lil Dicky’s penis; he refuses. They surround him, yelling and screaming. They rip his clothes off. Eventually he flees. The escape is played mostly for laughs, but a current of unease and even violence lurks in the scene. FX“Dave” has always possessed a meta, synergistic relationship to fame. Burd, who’s also a creator of the show, essentially plays an exaggerated version of himself; he became popular thanks to his catchy, puerile raps under the same moniker he shares with his alter ego. His hypeman, GaTa, is also his hypeman in real life. Travis (Taco) Bennett, who plays Elz, Lil Dicky’s producer, was part of the rap collective Odd Future. Celebrities like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Justin Bieber, Kourtney Kardashian and Doja Cat have played themselves. During the first season, Lil Dicky desperately desires the spotlight, and the show — as if expressing its bona fides — brings out a constant parade of famous people to heighten its verisimilitude. But what’s notable about the second and third seasons (at least based on the first three episodes) is their focus on fame’s darker side, how it distorts the ego and emboldens zealous, even aggressive fans. Stan worship is taken to its most extreme conclusion in “Swarm,” a new Amazon Prime Video limited series created by Janine Nabers and Donald Glover. The show’s protagonist, Dre (Dominique Fishback), kills anybody who speaks ill of her pop idol, Ni’Jah (Nirine S. Brown), a clear stand-in for Beyoncé, whose fan base is notoriously overprotective, to put it diplomatically. After Dre loses her foster sister, Marissa (played by the R.&B. singer Chloe Bailey), to suicide, she fixates on the people who tweeted something mean about Marissa or Ni’Jah. But Dre’s uncontrollable urges extend to Ni’Jah herself. After some ingenious maneuvering, Dre shows up at an after-party she knows Ni’Jah is attending and — in a winking nod to a Tiffany Haddish story about an actress who bit Beyoncé in 2017 — bites her idol on the chin. In the final episode, Dre, after killing a ticket scalper to get in, commandeers her way to the front row at a Ni’Jah show. The series ends on a deliberately surrealist note, which calls the logic of the entire series into question. But the takeaway remains unclear. The ambiguity seeps into the framework of the show, which, as compelling and mordantly funny as it is, can’t seem to figure out what exactly it’s trying to say about stan culture. Is Dre really a stan? Or a deeply disturbed young woman who fixates on a pop star as a way to cope with grief? Or both? The “Dave” premiere ends in a similarly ambiguous place, though that show’s embrace of sophomoric sexual humor undermines its more salient points about the frightening consequences of standom. Both “Dave” and “Swarm” opt for dark humor, the better to highlight the absurdity of toxic stan behavior — an affection so passionate that it turns vicious. And both shows seem ultimately ambivalent and unsure about this state of affairs, gesturing toward the dangers of such fandom before retreating into fantasy. There’s an odd uncertainty at their cores, a sense that even the writers don’t quite know where to land on the fierce relationships people have with celebrity. The phrase “parasocial relationship” has been bandied about as of late, defining the warped one-sided dynamic that some fans have with their favorite celebrities. But perhaps some of the confusion “Dave” and “Swarm” seem to convey lies in the fact that the critique is coming from inside the house. Their creators — Burd and Glover — are both famous. Both shows question the excessive adoration some fans feel for pop stars but rely in part on securing public figures to appear in them. (In addition to Bailey, who’s signed to Beyoncé’s label, Billie Eilish and Paris Jackson, daughter of Michael, make guest appearances on “Swarm.” And Malia Obama wrote for the series.) As bizarre as Dre and Campbell’s actions are, fame’s corrosive force goes both ways. Nicki Minaj, for example, is notorious for siccing her most rabid fans on people who dare to tweet criticism. Other celebrities (including, notably, Beyoncé) don’t always engage with their fan bases enough to tell them to cool it when their devotion turns threatening. Critiquing such passion while benefiting and sometimes even exploiting celebrity clout is an inherently untenable position.“Dave” seems to understand this tension to some degree; there are plenty of episodes that mock Lil Dicky’s growing egocentrism. “Swarm” doesn’t really engage with Ni’Jah’s celebrity from her point of view. She remains a cipher — another nod to Beyoncé’s real-life inscrutability — but the decision to characterize her that way further blunts the show’s critique of stan culture. Even the “Swarm” brain trust seems to acknowledge their awkward proximity to the show’s main theme. In a recent interview with Vulture, Nabers said she wrote Beyoncé a letter about the show to explain their intention. At another point in the conversation, she mentioned that Glover and Beyoncé are friends. In a different interview, Fishback politely demurs from naming the BeyHive as the inspiration behind Ni’Jah acolytes at all. “It’s an amalgamation of different celebrities and our current climate’s being kind of intense about our love for celebrity.” Their deference to Beyoncé is telling. Even they seem to fear her fans’ venom.Source photographs: Byron Cohen/FX. More