The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Monday, February 10, 2020 — 5A

I didn’t know who Mac 
Miller was until he died. 
I knew he dated Ariana 
Grande. I knew he wrote a song 
about that one guy who hosted 
NBC’s 
“The 
Apprentice.” 
I 
knew I didn’t like Blue Slide 
Park when it came out. These 
were my thoughts as I read 
“RIP MAC MILLER” from a 
slab of ply-wood leaning on 
a frat house on my way back 
from a football game on Sept. 
8, 2018. I didn’t have many 
more thoughts until later that 
night when I first listened to 
Swimming. I sat in my dorm 
room with the lights off and 
played it once all the way 
though, sorting its highlights 
like “Ladders” and “What’s 
the Use” into various playlists. 
I hadn’t listened to an album 
that captured depression quite 
like it, and I wished I could’ve 
heard it at least once before 
Mac’s passing. 
The wounded album trailed 
Mac’s 
shattered 
interiority 
following a career grounded 
in a seemingly high-spirited, 
humorous 
demeanor. 
His 
struggle with drug addiction 
and depression weren’t new 
topics as much as they were 
pillars to a notoriously fun 
discography. Take “Rain” from 
Faces: “That’s a flex though, 
cover up the issues that I kept 
close / Sober I can’t deal, I’m in 
the corner with my head low / 
Runnin’ from my shadow, never 

ending chase / Ease the pain 
and the battle that’s within 
me / Sniff the same shit that 
got Whitney, the high heel 
depression / My temple feel 
the metal comin’ out the Smith 
& Wesson, bang / Say a prayer, 
leave my brains on the tile 
floor.” Swimming amalgamated 
these themes and the emotions 

that easily hovered under the 
radar and slipped past the 
media’s gaze. Whereas The 
Divine Feminine is an ode to love 
and togetherness, Swimming 
is 
lonesome. 
Swimming 
is 
stopping to catch your breath 
after a long jog. Mac struggled 
to stay afloat amid a livelihood 
accustomed to the support of 
others. Whereas sonic soulmate 
Ariana 
Grande 
seemingly 
moved on romantically with 
ease, Mac was emotionally and 
mentally stagnant. 
Circles is an album designed 

in the same mindset of its 
sister Swimming. Envisioned 
alongside 
another 
concept 
album that never came to 
fruition (Oblivion), Circles was 
left nearly complete when Mac 
died. The early versions of the 
album were worked through 
Mac and producer Jon Brion, 
who took the initiative of 
finishing the album following 
Mac’s 
passing. 
“This 
is 
a 
complicated process that has 
no right answer. No clear 
path,” Mac’s family wrote in 
an Instagram post. “We simply 
know that it was important to 
Malcolm for the world to hear 
it.”
Circles was developed to loop 
back to Swimming. This idea 
harkens back to Swimming’s 
closer “So it Goes,” an eerie 
reference to death in Kurt 
Vonnegut’s 
“Slaughterhouse-
Five.” “My god, it go on and 
on,” he raps. “Just like a circle, 
I go back to where I’m from.” 
Both albums are centered on 
depression 
and 
its 
ensuing 
anxieties, but Circles is a lot 
more optimistic, more willing 
to wait out the storm. On 
Swimming track “Come Back 
to Earth,” Mac raps “I just 
need a way out of my head / 
I’ll do anything for a way out 
of my head.” Circles responds 
to 
this 
predicament 
across 
multiple songs. He is “spring 
cleaning” in plucked single 
“Good News” and recognizes 
that “(it) is getting pretty 
cluttered” and hard to “clean 
up” the mess he’s made in his 
head on “Complicated.” Mac 
tries to clean up a lot on Circles, 

whether it be his head or his 
public image. 
Circles depicts Mac as lonely, 
but still alongside others. He 
isn’t afraid to question his 
capacity for love on “Woods.” 
Produced 
by 
longtime 
collaborator 
E. 
Dan, 
Mac 
questions his own emotions 
following a rift in a relationship. 
“Do I, do I, do I love?,” he sings 
in the chorus. Mac does rap on 
songs like “Hand Me Downs” 
but the aura is loose and 
contemplative. With Baro as 
the album’s only feature in the 
chorus, Mac envisions a future 
alongside a family: “You remind 
me / Shit, I need to stay in line 
/ You damn well are a great 
design,” Baro croons. “You, 
despite being an only child / 
Say you need more of a family 
‘round / Let’s turn these genes 
into hand me downs.” 
Thematically and sonically, 
Circles 
is 
his 
most 
naked 
release. 
The 
album 
never 
breaks 
out 
into 
traditional 
rap with the exception of 
“Hands,” a song about negative 
self-destructive behaviors in 

the sound and style of Faces. 
Despite Jon Brion finishing 
much of the production for 
Circles, the aesthetic is very 
Mac. 
The 
lo-fi 
beats 
and 
soulful, jazzy glimmers gather 
the same energy as Mac’s 
Space Migration Tour with 
The Internet in 2013. Circles is 
iridescent. With a hypnotic grip 
on elements from Mac’s ever-
evolving music style, it grooves 
as easily as a traditional Mac 
album. 
Whether it be Mac laying 
in his grave in his final music 
video “Self Care,” the eerily 
fated prediction to “join the 
27 club” on “God Speed” or his 
posting “So it Goes” as his last 
Instagram story, the writing 
on 
the 
wall 
and 
fatalistic 
undertones grip you. This is 
not the case with Circles. Mac’s 
exhaustion coats every lyric 
but with a subtle, gentle hope. 
Whereas Swimming considers 
living in the long term, Circles 
takes itself one day at a time. I 
think a lot back to the moment 
in “Complicated,” where Mac 
sings, “‘Fore I start to think 

about the future / First, can 
I please get through a day?” a 
reprise to the first verse: “Some 
people say they want to live 
forever / That’s way too long, 
I’ll just get through today.” 
Circles was a surreal release 
for me; I never expected myself 
to 
know 
the 
anticipation 
of waiting for a Mac Miller 
album. 
The 
circumstances 
were completely different, but 
Circles looped me back to my 
discovery of Swimming. I knew 
a lot more about Mac this time 
around, and I knew that this 
album would resonate with me, 
something I hadn’t expected 
from 
Swimming. 
Circles, 
as 
anguished and tired as it is, is a 
comfortably ephemeral closing 
to Mac Miller and the legacy he 
left behind. This album takes 
us back to the heartbreak of 
Swimming; we’ll never know 
how Mac would’ve progressed 
beyond this point. The one 
thing I do know is that there 
couldn’t have been a better 
musical send off to Mac than an 
album that epilogues his spirit 
and style the way this one does. 

Swimming in ‘Circles’: On 
Mac ’s posthumous release

ALBUM REVIEW
ALBUM REVIEW

DIANA YASSIN
Daily Arts Writer

WARNER RECORDS

Circles

Mac Miller

Warner Records

“Briarpatch” 
opens 
on 
a 
99-degree 
morning 
in 
San 
Bonifacio, Texas. A landlady, who 
is also a police detective, exits her 
apartment to inquire about the rent 
from a standoffish upstairs tenant. 
She gets into her cruiser to leave for 
work and is promptly killed in a car-
bomb explosion.
From its opening moments, 
“Briarpatch” presents itself as a 
trope-subverting, 
expectation-
destroying amendment to the neo-
noir genre. Following the disturbing 
explosion sequence, “Briarpatch” 
introduces its reluctant heroine 
Allegra Dill (Rosario Dawson, 
“Luke Cage”) who returns to the 
small Texas town to mourn her 
sister, the murdered detective. 
Allegra sweeps into San Bonifacio, a 
chaotic town plagued by corruption 
and a recent zoo animal breakout, 
with a cool exterior entirely at odds 
with the heat and confusion of her 
surroundings.
As 
Allegra 
digs 
into 
the 
circumstances of her sister’s killing, 
her career as a private investigator 
for 
a 
Senate 
sub-committee 
interferes. She is soon asked by her 
employers to depose an old friend 
Jake Spivey (Jay R. Ferguson, “Mad 
Men”) about his role in an organized 
crime network surrounding an 
elusive fugitive, Clyde Brattle. 

Allegra, compelled by her work 
and complicated feelings for her late 
sister, has no choice but to immerse 
herself back into the town she left 
12 years earlier, after a mysterious 
accident that killed her parents. 
Soon injured in another car-bomb 
explosion, Allegra and her stoic 
composure begin to unravel as she 
delves deeper into San Bonifacio’s 
bizarre world of lies and corruption. 

“Briarpatch,” 
based 
off 
the 
novel of the same name, seeks to 
separate itself from other works of 
the neo-noir genre and present a 
unique response to tired tropes in 
TV crime drama. Dawson shines 
as the guarded and self-assured 
Allegra. Confident and unflinching, 
her character takes the “hardened 
private investigator” role to new 
territory, especially with her status 
as a woman of color in a mainly 

white, Southern town. 
In one scene, Allegra interrogates 
a 
police 
beat 
reporter 
(John 
Aylward, “ER”) over dinner at the 
local press club. Upon seeing her 
charm the Latino wait staff, he 
remarks, “How come they treat you 
like white man?” By acknowledging 
the racist past of its setting and 
genre, “Briarpatch” again subverts 
viewer expectations and skillfully 
places power back into Allegra’s 
hands as a competent and talented 
protagonist.
Part Southern Gothic and part 
surreal, the visuals of “Briarpatch” 
reinforce its impact on audiences. 
The show weaves the worlds of the 
ultra-wealthy and impoverished 
seamlessly into its backdrop to 
create an unmistakably American 
setting. With the added pressures 
of political and economic factors, 
Allegra’s journey to avenge her 
sister works as a representation 
of how difficult navigating the 
country’s moral climate can be. 
“Briarpatch” 
knows 
exactly 
what it is and what it wants to be. 
With this self-awareness in mind, 
the show near-flawlessly resurrects 
the noir genre with equals parts 
grit and levity. The solid cast and 
compelling writing hold up an 
already intriguing premise and 
bring life to a world simultaneously 
real and fantastical. If the beginning 
of “Briarpatch” is any indication, 
the show will continue to captivate 
its audience with its gorgeous 
conspiracies and abundance of zoo 
animals. 

‘Briarpatch’ is a breath of 
fresh air for neo-noir genre

USA NETWORK

ANYA SOLLER
Daily Arts Writer

Briarpatch

Season 1, Episodes 1 
and 2

USA Network

Thursdays @ 10 p.m.

TV REVIEW
TV REVIEW

“West of Arkham the hills rise 
wild,” begins H.P. Lovecraft’s 
famous short story “Color Out of 
Space” and the 2020 film adaptation 
of the same name. The movie starts 
off with the story’s entrancing 
opening passage in which its main 
character, a water surveyor, details 
a particularly creepy woodland 
in Massachusetts. The new film 
sets this monologue to shots of a 
dark, nearly otherworldly forest 
which seems almost normal, if 
not for certain patches of strange 
trees and some deep shadows. 
This scene captures what makes 
Lovecraft’s work so haunting. His 
terrors typically remain unseen, 
but are always felt, lurking in the 
dark. 
The movie departs from all 
of this pretty quickly. From the 
second scene on, “Color Out of 
Space” becomes a mess. Essentially, 
the story is this: a meteorite lands 
on a family’s farm and carries with 
it a life force that mutates the flora 
and fauna around it and grows like 
a cancer. While this sounds like an 
intriguing premise (and makes for 
an amazing short story), the movie 
wastes it. Highbrow, literary sci-fi 
horror is shredded into B-movie 
carnage and camp. Basically, it’s 
as if the team behind “The Room” 
made “Annihilation.” The dialogue 
is atrocious, the characters and 

their decisions are nonsensical 
and, along with some terrible CGI, 
frequently threaten to derail the 
entire movie. 
Yet Nicholas Cage (“Mandy”), 
who plays the father, does what he 
does best and raises this seemingly 
destined-to-be forgotten schlock to 
another sublime level. He gives the 
most Nicholas Cage performance 
possible, filling every one of his 
scenes with (often unintentional) 
hilarity. His wild-eyed, screaming, 

lisping, expletive-hurling, alpaca-
milking persona is so extreme that 
it will live in one’s brain long after 
the plot and all its details have 
disappeared. 
Sadly, however, when Cage isn’t 
on screen, no one else can carry 
his manic weight. The scenes 
without Nicholas Cage in “Color 
Out of Space” mostly drag, with 
characters exchanging abysmal 
dialogue and making exaggerated 

facial expressions to match. The 
screenwriters also must have 
determined that a modern audience 
would have difficulty following the 
relatively simple story, so multiple 
characters spell out what exactly 
is 
happening 
multiple 
times, 
draining the situation of any kind 
of Lovecraftian mystery. Even if 
certain images still retain some 
shocking, cosmic horror, they’re 
frequently deflated by overused 
CGI and bad acting. When a 
hippie character played by Tommy 
Chong (“Cheech and Chong”) tells 
another character in painstaking 
detail what the alien inside the 
meteorite is doing, one can almost 
feel Lovecraft turning in his grave. 
Yet somehow, again and again, 
Nicholas Cage shows up to remind 
us to keep watching. His insanity 
frequently and impossibly eclipses 
itself in each progressive scene. 
He seems to be in an entirely 
different film, though what kind 
is impossible to tell. His personas 
change on a dime, and he flits 
between 
conserative 
farmer, 
drunken dope, psycho murderer 
and tragic hero over the course 
of the story. If anything’s from 
an alien planet, it’s definitely this 
deranged shapeshifter. 
“Color Out of Space” would be a 
great movie for late on Halloween 
night, after a party or two, when 
one can just sit back, half asleep, 
to watch the wild, blood-soaked 
hilarity. It’s pretty terrible but, 
thanks to Nicholas Cage’s heroic 
efforts, pretty terrible in all the 
best ways.

Color Out of 
Space

The State Theatre

RJLE Films

ANDREW WARRICK
Daily Arts Writer

Cage enlivens otherwise 
drab ‘Color Out of Space’

RJLE FILMS

FILM REVIEW

