Hiro Murai is having a moment. We’re nearing the halfway point of 2018 and you could make the case that the Tokyo-born director is the filmmaker of the year, and he hasn’t even made a feature. Between several exceptional episodes of Atlanta—including the haunting, beguiling “Teddy Perkins”—a couple of solid outings orchestrating the increasingly violent action on Barry, and the starkly confrontational video for Childish Gambino’s new single “This Is America,” Murai has become pop-culturally omnipresent; that’s his signature in the bottom corner of your DVR. (A confession: I haven’t seen his episode of Legion—what the hell is Legion?—though in principle I am in favor of having Aubrey Plaza throw Bond Girl shapes and huff nitrous oxide to musical accompaniment by Nina Simone.)
Building on an already healthy, agile body of music-video work ranging from Britpop to hip-hop, Murai has cultivated his own private (head) space on the periphery of the mainstream, experimenting with conventions and engineering images caught between art-gallery austerity and the subtextual infectiousness of social-media memes.
Take the faceless, bespoke mannequin encountered by Darius near the end of “Teddy Perkins,” a hovering effigy with the blank menace of a 4chan Slender Man rendering, or the shot in “North of the Border” where Earn and Paper Boi sit stoically stoned on a frat-house couch in front of a massive Confederate flag, framed by two rows of naked, hooded, white pledges. The former is horror movie stuff, except that it’s hard to get a bead on why it’s scary; the latter is a provocation in the form of a sight gag, like a New Yorker cartoon without a pithy caption. You can’t shrug these things off even though that’s exactly what the characters do.
The power of Murai’s aesthetic is bound up in the balance between the camera’s visual overstatement and its subjects’ deadpan dismissal. He has directed nearly two-thirds of Atlanta’s episodes to date, and if the show’s unique power resides in its refusal to show its hand as it moves between comedy, character study, and City in a Forest cartography, it’s Murai’s handle, as much as creator-star’s Donald Glover, that guides it. He’s got a wicked crossover.
Go back to the beginning of Murai’s work in music videos and you can see an artist who thrives on the idea of discombobulation. Few 2000s bands had a worse ratio of song-quality-to-video crappiness than Bloc Party (“I Still Remember” one of the catchiest tracks of 2007 getting wrecked by faux–Michel Gondry nonsense), but Murai’s thrifty clip for the Armand Van Helden remix of 2009’s “Signs” reversed the trend. Reportedly shot for $2,000 with a crew of film-school friends, the video mined the same rich vein of body horror as vintage Tool and Aphex Twin. Its grainy inventory of nightmarishly grafted gadgets and plug-in body portals was a superb example of lo-fi technophobia, like homemade Cronenberg.
The budgets went up over the years, but Murai’s interest in simple, striking effects would continue as he gradually became a go-to guy for indie light-heavyweights like Spoon and St. Vincent. In “Do You,” a dashboard cam captures the former’s frontman Britt Daniel driving through a city under siege by skyscraper-sized toddlers.
It was a pretty good representation of dad-rock-aged anxiety, with apocalyptic tableaus more memorable than any of the kaiju high jinks in Cloverfield or Pacific Rim. The play with scale is even more sly in “Cheerleader,” which begins with the camera caressing Annie Clark’s body in fetishistic closeup before pulling back to reveal that she’s bound and on display for a group of Lilliputian observers in a miniature gallery—a setup that simultaneously satirizes the star’s arty tendencies and somewhat-less-than-outsized celebrity. As she gradually gains her feet, Murai implicitly dramatizes the song’s defiant, fuck-off message. The creepy, rhinoceros-sized frog that shows up near the end of the video for Earl Sweatshirt’s “Chum” is another wry touch that shows Murai’s gift for yoking imaginative flourishes to concrete lyrical cues. As Earl keeps repeating at the beginning of every verse, there’s “something sinister to it.”
Murai’s knack for existential dread would find its fullest expression when he started collaborating with Glover, whose Childish Gambino persona has always been shrouded in doubt and self-deprecation (which gave the pinpoint pricks of joy all the more illumination). The dexterously shot “3005,” which finds Glover rapping to a hipster-hatted teddy bear on a Ferris wheel, slowly undermines its carnivalesque charm through glimpses of a city on fire just over the horizon. It’s only at the apex of the wheel’s ascent that Glover—and we—can perceive the danger beyond the fairground. Here, as in the knowingly Being John Malkovich–ish “Sweatpants,” which is structured as an experiential loop featuring many Glovers in one small diner, Murai and his star use the Childish Gambino character as an avatar of something larger and ineffably sad.
The melancholy is one of entrapment. In most of their work together, Glover seems hemmed in by his director’s immaculate frames. For most of this season of Atlanta, Earn has been self-effacing, almost to the point of invisibility. At times, though, Murai’s direction has proved uniquely liberating. Glover’s porcelain-ghoul act as the title character in “Teddy Perkins” was an amazing bit of acting, walking a trip-wire of mawkishness and mockery (mostly of Glover’s Y-generational hero Michael Jackson) and gaining resonance in the end as the duo’s most baroque variation yet on the their running theme of celebrity—however minor or fleeting—as a form of identity crisis.
Which brings us to “This Is America,” which once again finds Glover playing “himself”—or himself once removed as Childish Gambino—and charges Murai with showcasing and undermining his talents in a spectacular fashion. The combination of show-off formalism (including an incredibly complex, whirling long take that takes up the bulk of the running time), semiotic confusion, and spontaneous carnage marks it as an early culmination of the director’s style, while also begging the question of how much further he can push it in the future.
The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla wrote that “This Is America” is “the first music video in ages to warrant, and reward, repeat views.” Leaving aside the fact that Superorganism says hello (and please leave a comment), he’s completely correct that Murai’s video—which has amassed more than 20 million views in two days while sucking up about as much of the online discourse as possible, post-Kanye—is designed for return engagements. I’ve watched it a few times now and it hasn’t played exactly the same twice. The reason it’s so quickly become a conversation piece is because—like those Atlanta tableaus—it’s semiotically charged, but its signs are just ambiguous enough to sidestep didacticism. Again: Whatever else you want to say about it, it can’t be shrugged off.
“This Is America” is set in a sprawling, emptied-out warehouse. Murai loves to move his camera through the architectural equivalent of negative space, and he knows how to pressurize an environment so that it seems like something terrible can happen at any moment. This is certainly the case in Barry’s virtuoso stash-house-raid sequence. There, the blocking and choreography of Bill Hader’s and Anthony Carrigan’s mercenaries suggested precise professionalism becoming unraveled while the camera looked on impassively. It’s a rare thing to see an action scene on television that eschews close-ups in favor of a more wide-angle spatial coherence.
Murai is good at sudden bursts of violence, from the Barry set pieces (including also the horrific final moments of the sixth episode, as Barry and his friends drive into an ambush) to the shotgun blasts that wind up “Teddy Perkins” to the savage beating (again, captured with aloof, middle-distance patience) at the end of “North of the Border.” “This Is America” is a performance piece, built mostly around Glover’s shirtless, spasmodic dancing, but it’s also punctuated by bursts of gunfire: right off the top as a hooded figure seated in a chair is shot in the back of the head and a couple of minutes later as the members of a church choir are mowed down in a row.
The evocation here of the Charleston massacre is deliberate and uncomfortable in a way that both meets and arguably exceeds Murai and Glover’s aims as cultural provocateurs. As its title suggests, “This Is America” is intended as a state of the union, riffing visually and conceptually on the normalization of gun violence against the country’s black population, with perhaps a bit too much emphasis on its creators’ artistic daring. And yet questions about the value of artistic representation—and the conduct and motives of the artist—are at the very heart of the matter as well.
As in “Do You” and “3005,” the background of “This Is America” is rife with evocative, out-of-focus action—police cars and massing crowds; rows of kids capturing the chaos with cellphones—while Glover plays desperately to the lens with hybridized moves inspired in equal measures by South African folk dance (already transported to the U.S. via Rihanna at the 2018 Grammys), Atlanta hip-hop, and Jim Crow–era minstrelsy. Through this lens, Glover is less a figure of resistance than complicity, including the startling fact that he’s the one wielding the guns against exclusively African American victims. (A hideous detail: The guns are collected and gently wrapped in red silk after they’re used, tools afforded more respect than the human beings they’re used against.) His grinning gas faces don’t appear natural, as if he’s smiling through some mental block (shades of Betty Gabriel’s lobotomized cheerfulness in Get Out) and can’t quite sync his impulses with his expressions. His Dance Apocalyptic is less defined by joy than denial; it’s the end of the world as we know it, and he feels fine.
As microcosms go, “This Is America” is spacious and pared down at the same time. What it omits in the interest of national portraiture is at least as important and suggestive as what’s there. As with the isolated, overstuffed Gothic mansion of “Teddy Perkins” or the eponymous pastoral backdrop of “The Woods”—another Atlanta Season 2 storytelling exercise that exiles Paper Boi to the forest, where he’s accosted by strangers, both real and possibly imagined—Murai excels in melding psychic and physical geography, and my feeling is that, no less than “3005” or “Sweatpants,” the world of “This Is America” is a state of mind. It’s Glover reckoning with his place and role as a black entertainer in a moment when insisting that the show must go on is jaggedly double-edged. The shots in the video’s coda of a wild-eyed Glover suddenly trying to escape the grounds while being pursued by an angry mob are as shadowy and obscure as the show-off Steadicam style of the first few minutes is absurdly exuberant.
Whether their pursuit is meant as a comeuppance for his crimes, a manifestation of a guilty conscience, or an illustration of Young Thug’s devastating outro couplet—“You just a big dawg / I kennelled him in the backyard”—the scene is nightmare fuel worthy of Jordan Peele. And it doesn’t look like Glover is going to get out any time soon.
Stepping back a bit, the question of where Murai goes next—with and also without his friend and collaborator—remains open. (Last year, there were rumors that he would be tapped for the long-awaited live-action version of Akira but that production has stalled.) It’s one thing to be a filmmaker of the moment, and another to stick around. My bet is that Murai will be worth writing about in 2019 and beyond.