Next week Donald Glover, the chameleon-like actor known for his role on the sitcom Community as well as his surprisingly successful rap career under the moniker “Childish Gambino”, will unveil a new TV show called Atlanta to the world. The advance buzz is unanimous in its acclaim as it seeks to impart a funny and honest-to-experience take on black culture. 

 

Glover chose to bring in his frequent collaborator, music video director Hiro Murai, in as the primary director for the TV show, and in light of this, we thought it interesting to revisit the duo’s most notable narrative project heretofore, Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, a 24min short film from 2013. Due to the star power involved (Glover + Chance the Rapper and Flying Lotus) the film was a success online, with over 5M views to date, however, because of its length and lack of a straight-forward narrative, the film was received by audiences as somewhat perplexing. With the benefit of time though, and the removal of expectation, it is easier to appraise the film and recognize it as a fascinating, and noteworthy, artistic achievement; a film that is not difficult to decipher, yet rewarding of the effort, as it complicates cultural narratives surrounding success and fame. 

 

Taking place over the course of a day at an opulent mansion Glover inhabits with a cast of collaborators, family, and friends, a surface reading of the film sees it as a braggadocios ode to the good life. Glover fills his day making music, smoking weed and hanging by the pool. There is a somber nature to Glover’s performance though; he is not without light, or humor, but there is a palpable reserve to his interactions, like that of a man preoccupied with a cloud hanging overhead. 

 

The film makes no secret to what that is. The day is bookended by phone calls from a collection agency that Glover curtly shuts down. The good life that Glover is experiencing, the fantastic hideaway, the luxury accoutrements, the hangers on he is supporting, are all on credit and the bill is coming due, and this knowledge colors all that follows.

 

The film, written by Glover, was released as a preamble to his sophomore album which he recorded in the very same house as the film, a 14.5M dollar L.A. mansion rented from basketball star Chris Bosh. This fact lends an auto-biographical sensibility to the proceedings, and makes it an interesting twist on the conventional hip-hop narrative—8 Mile, but at a later point in the climb. Freed from the burning desperation of poverty, but weighed down by expectation, the film ends up being a document of the existential angst of “why?” and “for what?”. As Glover grapples with these questions, creeping anxiety begins to take its toll. 

 

The film is patiently observational, taking its time through various vignettes of Glover going about his day, but any attempts towards documentary realism are punctured by two potent symbols that address the concerns listed above. The first is the mysterious woman that Glover nor anyone in the house seems to know. She is the white rabbit. Played by porn star Abella Anderson, she is the testosterone-driven goal of a successful rap career, a gorgeous woman, DTF, and whom will do so with uncommon skill. Glover is chasing her, but doesn’t really recognize it. Her ephemerality is banged home by the late interaction where she walks past Glover’s fed up question of “Who are you!?” without answering. 

 

The second is easily the gnarliest sequence, where Glover pulls a golden tooth out of his sinus cavity. Again, the meaning of this surreal element is fairly straightforward, especially in light of the conversation around recurring dreams that takes place in the garden while harvesting lemons (related by Danielle Fishel, famous as Topanga on TV’s Boy Meets World). Losing a tooth is one of the most famous and common dreams that exist, one I’ve experienced many times, and is widely understood by psychologists as a manifestation of anxiety. The golden aspect of the tooth is simply to connect the anxiety back to the platonic hip-hop lifestyle that Glover is pursuing. 

 

So, while not dauntingly deep, the film is intellectually pleasing via its symbolism, and disarmingly authentic in the way that Glover is relating the deep anxiety surrounding him as he records his much-hyped followup. The question naturally though is did it really need to take 24min to relate this? The loose shagginess of the film, its frequent aimlessness, is certainly one of the most difficult elements for viewers, testing our notoriously low attention spans. While certainly the point could’ve been made more concisely, I’d argue that it is a valid, and indeed bold, decision to stretch the film out. 

 

The reason connects to the “why?”. Glover is chasing the cliched signifiers of success, somewhat unconsciously, and the stresses of it, both financially and psychologically are made clear. Rather than a laudable goal, the length of the film exhibits the hollowness of the pursuit. The film is a Sofia Coppola picture in miniature, comparable to her under-loved work Somewhere in that it meticulously documents the trappings of success, while revealing its profound loneliness. The ennui and dissatisfaction could be related more directly, but like an Antonioni film, it can be more interesting to have audiences experience this fact for themselves rather than have it communicated to them. The shambling arbitrariness of the film’s scenes, often held for exaggeratedly long takes, is not designed to obscure pointlessness, but is in fact the point, as audiences traverse in the same path as Glover from vicarious delight in the material ostentatiousness, to boredom and dissatisfaction. 

 

This boredom, while fostered by Murai, is fortunately tempered by him as well,  as he, along with his DP, long-time DANIELS collaborator Larkin Seiple, does gorgeous work in crafting the visuals. Shot with mostly natural light on 16mm film, the idyllic beauty of the surroundings is never obscured, and maintains the fruitful tension between ideal and reality that powers the film emotionally. “Look at all of this, it’s FANTASTIC. Shouldn’t it be enough?” 

 

Among the music video cognoscenti it can be argued that Murai currently holds “the belt” as the best in his industry. He doesn’t do the biggest videos, or win the most VMA’s, but Murai has unimpeachable credibility among his peers for the way he can marry high concepts to thoughtful, grounded scenarios less reliant on VFX and kinetic editing than many of his peers. His further collaborations with Glover, most notably the video for “Sober“, showcase this sensibility—the deft juggling of tones with dashes of the surreal. His outsized involvement on Atlanta (he directed 7 of the season’s 10 episodes) can be further explored via a recent podcast he did with Vimeo, and is the largest of many reasons that I can’t wait to check out the show.