Swarm, comedy, horror, and what faux pop stars say about our actual world

The brand new Amazon Prime sequence Swarm begins with a well-recognized disclaimer turned on its head: “This isn’t a piece of fiction. Any similarity to precise individuals, dwelling or lifeless, or occasions, is intentional.”

Screenshot from Amazon Studios

Firstly, it’s a nod to 1 Mrs. Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter and her Swarm doppelganger Ni’jah. Every little thing about Ni’jah is a thinly veiled allusion to Beyoncé — from her glittery bodysuits to familial elevator fights to shock album drops, the similarities are infinite. However the disclaimer goes past simply the singer, referring additionally to the world that revolves round her. Ni’jah has a loyal BeyHive fan base that calls her Queen Bey Bee and floods social media to debate each morsel of details about her. In depicting not simply movie star, however the cult of movie star, Swarm has began to determine easy methods to painting a determine that’s lengthy been misunderstood and misrepresented by TV & movie: the Pretend Pop Star.

Everyone knows the Pretend Pop Star. You’ve seen her in The Bodyguard, A Star Is Born, Get Him To the Greek, and many extra. Each story in regards to the Pretend Pop Star tries to make use of her as a vessel to say one thing shrewd and insightful about tradition. As an alternative, they grow to be unintentional time capsules for our restricted and misguided notion of pop stars.

Swarm boldly goes the place no Pretend Pop Star has gone earlier than by wanting on the archetype via the lens of a deranged supe fan named Dre. Half darkish satire, half psychological thriller, Swarm embraces the reality about actual pop stars we’ve been reckoning with over the previous few years: that fame, fandom, and pop stardom is horrifying shit. All too typically, the Pretend Pop Star will get performed for laughs; Swarm goals for — and will get — gasps. However to actually respect what makes Swarm so distinct in its depiction of a Pretend Pop Star, you must first perceive the trimmings and troubled historical past that plagued the Pretend Pop Stars who got here earlier than.

The pop star as punchline

Whereas the trendy Pretend Pop Star character could be traced again to tales from the ‘80s and ‘90s, the archetype was by no means extra outstanding than it was within the 2000s. On the flip of the century, Pretend Pop Star characters had been quite a few, but monolithic — the identical look, the identical sound, and nearly all the time serving the identical goal: punchline.

Take Cora Corman, a Pretend Pop Star within the 2007 rom-com Music and Lyrics. Earlier than we correctly meet her, our first glimpse of Cora comes by way of a Rolling Stone cowl with a telling pull quote: “I don’t assume anymore … I simply exist.”

It’s no secret who the character is modeled after. Clearly, it’s Britney (bitch). Cora’s blond hair, blue eyes, and inexperienced two-piece have her wanting all however a python away from a 2001 VMA-era Britney Spears. In 2005’s Monster-In-Regulation, a Pretend Pop Star named Tanya Murphy units the plot into movement when her mere presence drives Jane Fonda’s character right into a psychotic break. In 2011’s Violet & Daisy, a pop idol named Barbie Sunday motivates the titular teen assassins to tackle a success job to allow them to afford her new merch. 2005’s Simply Buddies options Samantha James, a useless, unhinged, talentless singer who upends her supervisor’s life. The message is obvious: Pretend Pop Stars, (You Drive Us) Loopy.

© 2007 Warner Bros. Leisure Inc.- U.S., Canada, Bahamas & Bermuda. 2007 Village Roadshow Movies (BVI) Restricted

Ostensibly, the Pretend Pop Star is utilized in these movies for commentary on fame and gender, however what precisely these movies are saying about Britney and the pop princess trope is puzzling — particularly when any commentary on the hypersexualization of adlescent pop idols often depends on the hypersexualization of the younger actresses taking part in them. In Music and Lyrics, then-newcomer Haley Bennett was plucked from obscurity at 18 to play Cora Corman, a personality whose physique will get extra display time than her face as she spends a lot of the movie writhing round in barely-there outfits. Actress Stephanie Turner additionally made her onscreen debut in Monster-in-Regulation because the pop star, a 16-year-old character who wears little greater than star-shaped pasties. Each second is performed for laughs, however what — or, extra exactly, who — is the butt of the joke? In all these cases, it appears to be the teenager starlets, not the music business that produces them or the plenty that eat them.

After all, Britney isn’t the one actual pop star referent, however irrespective of who the character is predicated on, the joke is all the time the identical. There’s a Pretend Pop Star in Get Him to the Greek named Jackie Q, a visible and sonic knockoff of actual pop star Lily Allen. Jackie, nonetheless, swaps Allen’s intelligent lyrics stuffed with social critique (“I’m a weapon of huge consumption/It’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to operate”) for base sexual innuendo (“A hoop round my soiled posey/My rear pocket is so match and so rattling cozy”). It seems like Get Him to the Greek doesn’t perceive the actual pop star it’s parodying and, extra damningly, doesn’t need to. It merely goals to suit Lily Allen’s persona into the reductive thought of a pop star it each assumes and desires her to be.

© 2018 Warner Bros.

Get Him to the Greek options one other unlucky recurring trope the Pretend Pop Star faces: positioning her as a foil to a male artist, with their distinction designed to affirm the masculine, “genuine” realm of rock. It’s an idea most notably on show in 2018’s A Star Is Born, a movie that takes the highest prize for Most Complicated Commentary On A Pretend Pop Star. Numerous assume items have been written in regards to the second halfway via the movie when Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) grows distant from Ally (Woman Gaga) as she embraces pop, performing the banger “Why Did You Do That?” The way you interpret that track’s worth and Jackson’s response basically determines your studying of the complete movie, however the messaging, as Constance Grady wrote for Vox, couldn’t be extra muddled: “It’s a irritating thematic struggle, and it typically feels much less productively ambivalent to me than the results of an incoherent standpoint driving the movie.”

A Star Is Born is a decidedly totally different movie from the aforementioned examples. It’s a straight drama whereas the opposite Pretend Pop Star tales mentioned up to now are comedies. On the floor, drama, a style that may maintain house for nuances and battle and actual feelings, could seem to be a greater match for tackling the Pretend Pop Star. Nonetheless, dramas rank among the many most critically panned Pretend Pop Stars tales (see: The Bodyguard, Glitter, Nation Robust) due to how simply they will devolve into melodrama. They fall prey to the identical points mediocre biopics run into: cliche-ridden plot factors, one-note characters, and a self-seriousness that may verge on camp. The Pretend Pop Star dramas can’t assist however grow to be comedies.

The story of pop stardom is finest informed via the eyes of a fan

After Hollywood’s lengthy battle with making an attempt to convey this character to life, a key shift within the Pretend Pop Star timeline happened with 2019’s Black Mirror episode “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too.” In a meta piece of casting, Miley Cyrus performs exploited pop star Ashley O, held hostage by an abusive conservator and finally rescued by a loyal listener named Rachel. It’s an imperfect story (tonally confused and sometimes too lighthearted to make the commentary land), however it launched an progressive thread to the Pretend Pop Star narrative: a fan’s perspective. When Rachel helps Ashley O get up from a six-month coma, breaking her freed from constraints and evading nefarious henchmen, all Rachel can assume to say is: “I’m such an enormous fan,” and, “That is so cool.” Whereas it’s seemingly performed for laughs, the phrases can’t assist however really feel unsettling. Rachel has grow to be so connected to Ashley O’s music and empowering messaging that even whereas Ashley O is in disaster, Rachel can’t actually take it in. She will be able to solely see Ashley O via her personal fandom.

Which leads us to Swarm. The sequence follows Dre (Dominique Fishback), a disturbed younger girl with an unhealthy obsession for Ni’jah (the Beyoncé stand-in, performed by Nirine S. Brown). Like a lot of co-creator Donald Glover’s work, it’s a hard-to-categorize present, however the primary style Swarm attracts from is the place the Pretend Pop Star clearly belonged all alongside: horror.

The allegory might sound apparent, with so many grim tales of actual pop stars having come to gentle (i.e. Kesha, Demi, Britney). Swarm finds new horror not by taking us behind the scenes with a pop star, however by staying far-off and how we put them on a pedestal. It’s really easy to really feel linked to celebrities, particularly pop stars who supply messages of hope in a time of despair or particulars about their private lives in a second of loneliness. Swarm, like the perfect horror, forces us to confront one thing about ourselves and does so by analyzing the downfall of an unhealthy parasocial attachment.

It’s a narrative of poisonous fandom in its most excessive and heightened kind: Dre is a serial killer out of contact with actuality, decided to take out anybody who slanders the nice identify of Ni’jah. Not like the Pretend Pop Star tales of yore, Swarm doesn’t posit Ni’jah as a trigger for Dre’s insanity, however an outlet for it. Because the sequence progresses, so does Dre’s deteriorating psychological well being, main her to consider she is aware of Ni’jah and that Ni’jah is aware of her. However it’s all in Dre’s head. The story is informed largely from Dre’s standpoint, with Ni’jah solely showing in fleeting glimpses, all the time at a distance. The sequence by no means tries to grasp Ni’jah — however not like different Pretend Pop Star tales, it’s an intentional alternative right here. Swarm exhibits the futility and hazard of making an attempt to assume we all know them.

Quantrell D. Colbert/Prime Video

Mileage could range for Swarm. Its usually optimistic opinions have been coupled with critiques of it falling into misogynistic trappings (this time largely leveled on the depiction of the fan, not a lot the pop star). In making an attempt to point out the Pretend Pop Star in a brand new gentle, the sequence is likely to be a tonal overcorrection — if something, going too darkish (a high quality allegedly shared by HBO’s upcoming The Idol). The Pretend Pop Star could have landed in the precise style, however she’s nonetheless on the hunt for the right story.

Possibly, although, the right story will all the time evade the character so long as we proceed to misconceive the real-life counterparts: Shortly after Swarm’s launch, actual pop star Chloe Bailey, who pops up all through Swarm in a pivotal non-singing function, confronted a tidal wave of on-line feedback relating to a quick intercourse scene within the first episode. Some viewers had a tough time wrapping their heads round the truth that Bailey, who discovered fame as a baby star, is now a 24-year-old girl taking over extra mature material. As Marcus Shorter wrote for Andscape, the real-life discourse ended up “probably making the purpose even higher than the creators ever imagined” about parasocial dynamics:

Finally, these dissatisfied in Bailey’s selections consider she did one thing they by no means see themselves doing. To them, her selections now not replicate her; they mirror these of a complete fan base dedicated to a romanticized model of Bailey that doesn’t exist.

Even the actual pop stars aren’t truly actual. There’s all the time a Miley Stewart-Hannah Montana divide, even when the identities share the identical identify. Chloe Bailey the human being and Chloe Bailey the pop star are two separate entities, and there are penalties to Chloe Bailey the human being once we maintain her to the usual of our imagined beliefs for Chloe Bailey the pop star.

Ultimately, Swarm — onscreen and off — illustrates how we mission onto others what we need to see. All through the sequence, Dre’s murderous tendencies go hand in hand together with her bingeing meals and, in a state of delirium, Dre errors Ni’jah for a chunk of fruit and bites the Pretend Pop Star. Dre actually tries to eat Ni’jah.

Should you watch the opposite Pretend Pop Stars with the theme of projection in thoughts, they begin to appear inadvertently insightful. The introductory quote from Music and Lyrics’ Cora Corman — “I don’t assume anymore … I simply exist” — seems much less like a joke and extra like a disquieting reality. And, in context, coincidentally prescient: Music and Lyrics was launched on February 14, 2007. That day occurred to be the beginning of an notorious week for Britney Spears, as she checked out and in of two totally different rehabilitation clinics, had an altercation with the paparazzi involving an umbrella, and shaved her head. Whether or not she was being glorified by followers or crucified by critics, we had been watching. Britney was handled as somebody whose existence was for our consumption.

In 2007, it appeared like comedy. In 2023, it’s horror.

It all the time was.

Ari Saperstein is a multimedia journalist with bylines within the New York Occasions, the Wall Road Journal, and the Advocate. He’s the creator of the award-winning documentary podcast Blind Touchdown. You could find him on Twitter and Instagram.