The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Friday, March 22, 2019 — 5
“All things keep getting better,” goes the “Queer
Eye” theme song, a pulsing, techno-dance anthem
that always manages to get the dopamine factories
churning. This is a show about striving toward self-
improvement and recognizing betterment not as a
stopping point, but
as a way forward.
And
against
the
backdrop
of
a
world
decidedly
not getting better,
there’s something
about that conceit
that makes it the
most
uplifting
thing on television.
The
third
season of “Queer
Eye,”
Netflix’s
rebooted
version
of
the
2000s
Bravo reality hit
“Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy,” was
released
quickly
after the second,
which
aired
in
June.
The
Fab
Five — the diverse, gregarious team of lifestyle
experts unleashed upon average Joes — are back,
and it’s almost like they never left. (Almost being
the operative word here: There are the requisite
number of French tucks, but *gasp!* not a single
avocado to be found.)
What makes “Queer Eye” so fun to watch is
that it’s a perfect combination of all the best, most
cathartic pop culture tropes: part talk-therapy and
part movie-makeover scene with a little HGTV
sprinkled in. Each episode follows the Fab Five —
Antoni, Tan, Karamo, Bobby and Jonathan — as
they tackle new “projects,” well-meaning people
whose friends and family members have nominated
them for life overhauls.
By the end, not only do the clients look better
and dress better, but they also communicate more
effectively and sincerely. The Netflix version has
shuffled off the “for the Straight Guy” suffix,
allowing the Fab Five to be equal-opportunity
transformers. And in fact, the most affecting
episodes this season center around women — “Jones
BBQ,” about the owners of a Kansas City takeout
spot, and “Black Girl Magic,” about Jess, a gay Black
woman disowned by her adoptive parents.
The show reaches graceful, emotional heights
when the Fab Five let on that they didn’t spring from
the earth fully self-assured, that they have their own
vulnerabilities and
traumas to grapple
with too. Bobby,
who often alludes
to his difficulties
growing
up
gay
in an evangelical
Missouri
household,
is
remarkably
well-
positioned
to
comfort
Jess.
Jonathan, running
a comb through the
hair of a recently
widowed
single
father, recalls the
depressive episode
he
endured
following
his
mother’s
cancer
diagnosis.
In
previous
seasons, the show struggled to reconcile its feel-
good energies with its risky ambitions to heal
divides and bring people together. That often
resulted in tone-deaf moments: Karamo’s clash
with the Trump-supporting cop made over in the
first season is a little too neatly resolved. Bobby’s
discomfort with the church last season — borne
of his childhood trauma — is chalked up to a mere
cultural difference. They seem to have abandoned
that clumsiness this season. But it is frustrating
that the show has continued to ignore the elephant
in the room: The time and means required to have
a tailored wardrobe and a grooming routine are out
of reach for a lot of people.
To its credit, though, “Queer Eye” is already
operating under a premise fraught with racial and
class politics of its own. The idea that everyone is
deserving of love and self-care and acceptance —
what’s more radical than that?
‘Queer Eye’ just gets better
MAITREYI ANANTHARAMAN
Daily Arts Writer
The
headlines
about
21
Savage’s
arrest
and
deportation proceedings last
month seemed straight out of
an Onion article. The whole
thing has been surreal for
fans: One of Atlanta’s poster-
boy rappers, alongside artists
like
Gucci
Mane,
Future,
Young Thug and 2 Chainz …
was born in London?
On the morning of Feb. 3,
rapper 21 Savage
was
arrested
and
detained
by
Immigration
and
Customs
Enforcement.
ICE
released
a
statement
that
day
saying
21
Savage,
real
name She’yaa Bin
Abraham-Joseph,
is an “unlawfully
present
United
Kingdom
national”
who
came to the U.S.
in
2005
and
overstayed
his
visa that expired a
year later. A CNN
reporter
quoted
an ICE spokesman
who claimed “His
whole
public
persona is false.
He actually came
to the U.S. from
the U.K. as a teen
and overstayed his
visa.”
The
most
bizarre
part?
According to ICE,
21 Savage first came in 2005
— when he was already twelve
years old. That’s too old to
get rid of an accent, right?
(I happen to know someone
personally who also came to
the U.S. from London at twelve
and can testify to his thick
British
accent.)
Combined
with zero public knowledge of
21 Savage’s birthplace, it reeks
of an intentional coverup. A
plot twist, if you will.
In the next few days, his
lawyers
followed
up
with
a statement that countered
ICE’s accusations. According
to his legal team, 21 Savage
came to the United States at
seven years old (which would
much
better
explain
him
losing his accent), went to the
UK for one month in 2005,
then returned on a visa that
expired in 2006, leaving him
without citizenship. They also
alleged that his immigration
status was not hidden from
officials as he applied for a
special type of visa in 2017
granted
to
crime
victims
and could help with ongoing
investigations.
Like a coping mechanism
to deal with the unexpected,
the
hip-hop
community
began chugging out memes
the moment Twitter got word
of his arrest. In an interview
with The New York Times, 21
Savage said of the memes: “I
been shot — what is a meme?
A meme is nothing … I look at
bullet scars every day, so it’s
like, a meme, bro?” Something
I
unironically
find
highly
eloquent.
21 Savage was granted an
expedited hearing on Feb.
12 and released on $100,000
bond the next day. The 21
Savage saga is still ongoing —
an immigration court hearing
is set for April 11, and it
looks like it might come to an
uneventful close. He has since
opened up to many media
outlets
about
his
ten-day
detainment and experience
growing
up
without
legal
status. But there’s one thing
that’s stayed on my mind after
the whole ordeal.
21 Savage went lyrically
conscious about immigration
politics prior to his arrest.
Most
notably,
during
his
performance of “A Lot” at the
“Tonight Show ” days before
his arrest, he added new
lyrics: “I can’t imagine my kids
stuck at the border / Flint still
need water /
People
was
innocent,
couldn’t
get
lawyers.”
It’s not like
21
Savage
has
been
dropping
conscious
lyrics
for
years.
Even
just a couple
years ago on
Issa
Album,
his raps were
chiefly about
trap music’s
lyrical
holy
trinity:
sex,
drugs
and
money.
So
when he was
arrested
days
after
he criticized
ICE
for
their
(mis)
handling
of
children
at the U.S./
Mexican
border
on
national
television, an alarm should’ve
gone off in everybody’s head.
By all measures aside from
citizenship, 21 Savage is an
American. That much is clear.
He may have a felony drug
charge under his belt, but that
was expunged and sealed, and
he’s been a positive influence
on his community since then.
So why would ICE suddenly
pursue him, when the Trump
administration’s
priorities
are
on
criminal
illegal
immigrants?
It’s funny and surprising
to learn that he’s from the
UK. But there is more to 21
Savage’s arrest than meets the
eye.
Hip hop’s best plot twist:
The saga that is 21 Savage
DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer
TV REVIEW
NETFLIX
BOOK REVIEW
MUSIC NOTEBOOK
Queer Eye
Season Three
Netflix
The 15 stories in Maryse Meijer’s second collection, “Rag,”
frequently begin with chance encounters — a high school-aged
boy working at a pizza parlor has a strange series of interactions
with a girl who has a miscarriage in the bathroom, a man
befriends a woman he meets during jury duty for a murder case
and becomes fascinated with the scars on her arms, a lifeguard
saves a boy from drowning and feels an attachment to him
indistinguishable from the visceral memory of the incident.
The plots of these stories stay in this space of plausible chance
encounter for as long as they possibly can, teetering in the space
right before decisive, concrete action. In the meantime, Meijer
recounts the often subliminal reactions her main characters
have on what’s unfolding in front of them, as they reckon with
what they want out of the situation and what’s possible for them.
Meijer has written that “while I consume — and seek out —
quite a lot of explicitly violent and sexual work, I don’t write
it.” This statement might seem odd in relation to a collection
where sexuality and violence proliferate fungally in nearly every
story, but in truth, very little actual violence and sex happens
in Meijer’s stories. She is instead interested in exploring the
psychological tendencies that lead up to violence, suspending
her stories in a space just adjacent of horror. Her stories tend
to end right at the point where something is about to happen,
leaving any conflicts unresolved, the plot abandoned at its point
of maximum tension.
In the process, Meijer fuses sex and violence into an almost
singular entity, and uses attraction and repulsion as a pair of
emotions that fuel each other. In her story “The Brother,” a
teenage boy at once desperately wants to be his stepbrother and
feels a seething, jealous hatred for him. Other stories often track
the progression of a dreadful longing right up to the point of
unspeakable action. “Francis” sketches an uneasy juxtaposition
between a protagonist’s job euthanizing dogs and his taking care
of his deaf brother: “The needles rattle in my bag. One full dose
and they’re done. No convulsions. No knowledge. Just the eyes
turning to glass. My brother is asleep on the couch, the blanket
half slipped from his hip.” It’s a situation full of the tense
potential for violence, but that’s all it ever is. The story ends
without anything definite happening, and we get the impression
that things could just as easily slip into violence as they could
dim back into nothing.
Part of what makes these stories so effective is Meijer’s
striking prose style. She alternates long, tumbling sentences
with short, clipped ones, like someone desperately trying to
avoid thinking about what they’re recounting. It resembles
a kind of oral storytelling in its simplicity, albeit maybe one
performed under interrogation lights. The opener, “Her Blood,”
is particularly terse, the language an integral part of the story’s
sense of mounting dread:
“There’d been a trail of blood from the bathroom to the counter
to the booth to the door, blood on the medics’ blue suits as they
carried her out. I imagined having what she had, a place in my body
that could splash an entire room with my insides and then let me
walk away. I got an erection though I didn’t mean to. I pushed my
hands into the front pocket of my hoodie and rubbed them against
my crotch, grimacing, not feeling good at all.”
Her clipped and to-the-point sentences are bolstered by her
breathtakingly precise word choice. The word “splash” in the
passage above is a fulcrum around which the rest of it revolves;
the word “blue” emits a garish, clinical color against the goriness
of its content.
Meijer’s virtuosic use of language can work against her at
times, especially when her stories are less than compelling in
premise or plot. When she abandons the dread that fuels the best
stories of the collection, I was left with the sense that nothing
is really being communicated. The rather tedious story “The
Lover,” which tracks the progression of a relationship between
a young orphan girl and a pedophile, is a good example of this.
Meijer’s style is one that reads like it’s designed to disguise
hidden depths, and in a story like “The Lover” in which
the awfulness is on the surface, it comes across as a kind of
melodrama. “It was important to the Dane that no one see her
come into his house, so she came only at night, through the
back door, with a key he’d given her, worn always around her
neck. After he fell asleep she would go out into the garden to
pull weeds or pick snails off the vegetable beds, his garden more
beautiful than any place she had ever been, even in the dark.”
The hyperbole of the story is certainly justified given its subject
matter, but it sticks out in comparison to how meticulously
restrained Meijer is elsewhere in the collection. “The Lover” is
also one of the only stories in the collection where the lines of
desire Meijer cultivates intersect in a meaningful way, and thus
it feels like a wholly different animal than the more open-ended,
bristling stories that make this collection a definite standout.
‘Rag’ is unsettling, compelling and so simmeringly sexy
EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer
Meijer’s style is one that reads like
it’s designed to disguise hidden
depths, and in a story like “The
Lover” in which the awfulness is
on the surface, it comes across as a
kind of melodrama.
By all measures aside from
citizenship, 21 Savage is an
American. That much is clear. He
may have a felony drug charge
under his belt, but that was
expunged and sealed, and he’s
been a positive influence on his
community since then.
Rag
Maryse Meijer
FSG Originals
Feb. 12, 2019