The Space Between Fiction and Reality: A Conversation about ‘Swarm’ and the Crucial Project of Cinematic Representation

Swarm (2023) is a streaming television series created by Donald Glover and Janine Nabers about a super-fan of Ni’Jah (read: Beyoncé)—who becomes a serial killer, driven by her love of Ni’Jah. Jacqueline Nkhonjera studies race, gender, and postcolonial media, and Yvonne Gonzales studies fandom, queerness, and affective attachment; they have come together in this dialogic essay to process this piece of media that pulls their interests together in new—and sometimes horrifying—ways.

Yvonne Gonzales (YG): I want to start this conversation, before we get into more of our research-based analyses, with a discussion of just how this work made us feel. I found myself viscerally uncomfortable so often. I flinched away from the screen on several occasions, and it was actually hard to finish. I admit, I’m generally averse to thrillers, but that last episode was rough. If this is a comment on its quality, which I don’t intend it to be, Swarm is incredibly powerful. It inciting discomfort is intentional, but it was definitely a difficult watch. How did you find yourself responding?

Jacqueline Nkhonjera (JN): I agree—there were several parts of the series that were difficult to watch. I found myself covering parts of the screen with my hand, with one eye shut, as I waited for the more visceral murder moments to end. I am also averse to thrillers and gore, so this was unsurprising. But I found myself sitting in discomfort beyond those scenes as well. I struggled with awkward exchanges between Dre, the main character, and the people in her life. I was consistently on edge each time Ni’Jah appeared on screen, afraid of what reaction her presence would elicit from Dre. Nothing about this series is comfortable—from the casting to the storyline, down to minute cinematic choices made by the creators. Why do you think discomfort was such a key tenet of this watching experience? What was achieved?

YG: I’m so glad that you brought up the discomfort not only with the murders and violence, but with the seemingly normal human-to-human interactions and Dre’s constant failures. As for why discomfort was so central, I think that might be a better question to loop back to, as it’s so tied up with another facet that’s integral to Swarm: its relationship to reality. It even starts with the bold text on a black screen: “This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional.” That attachment to reality is, for me, a major part of the discomfort. I found myself watching Dre obsess over Ni’Jah with a massive poster of BTS hanging up behind me and wondering is that supposed to be me? I’m a super fan—one who doesn’t kill anyone or get into fights with strangers on the internet, to be clear—and one major effect of the discomfort of Swarm is that I found myself reflecting on my own parasocial attachments to my celebrity love objects; maybe that’s the point, or one of them.

JN: Swarm did not remain within the confines of my screen either. The series bled through the frame and into my day-to-day life. I thought of some of my friends, who are Beyonce super fans, and I heard Dre’s dialogue in their voices at certain moments. When Ni’Jah dropped the visuals for her new song Festival, I was taken back to the year Beyonce dropped the Lemonade (2016) visual album. It made so many people in my life feel seen—like the songs were made for them. Depictions of that cathartic experience created some of the most powerful moments in the show. It is a beautiful joy to witness and one that I have felt as well. I agree that this is the point at which the discomfort sets in. Relating to Dre’s connection to Ni’Jah—even to a small extent—while also possessing a deep fear of that attachment creates an unsettling tension. Her character moves audiences to introspection in a way that I find fascinating. Dre is the canvas upon which we are invited to negotiate our own relationship to the affective attachments in our lives.

YG: Absolutely, it very much forced a reckoning with reality. I found myself struggling, though, as someone who has devoted my whole career to studying the real-life joy of the fan experience, with the pathologization of Dre’s fannishness. Her murders are framed as a direct result of her love of Ni’Jah; in Swarm, being a fan is, in itself, a sickness. The only other Ni’Jah super-fan we see is within the true crime episode, where he briefly talks about the supportive community but then switches into something of the lines of “yeah, we’ll attack people online, but we don’t murder.” Especially since Swarm very intentionally asks us to attach this story to reality, I don’t love this dismissal of fans and fandom in general as insane, as the cause of violence, without addressing the actual purpose of fandom, which is often to provide community to marginalized people. In many cases, fandom is where people can explore queer identities—which I would love to get into with Dre’s unspoken queerness—but also, in the case of the Beyoncé fandom, to facilitate a community of Black women around an object that they can take inspiration from and comfort in. What does it mean to turn a space of historical marginalization into a pathologized mental illness that produces violence?

JN: You have, so aptly, put words to some unnamed feelings that I am sitting with. The predominantly Black cast was what initially drew me to the series. I never thought I’d say this and wouldn’t have guessed that I needed it but: it feels liberating to see a Black woman casted as a serial killer. It’s exciting to see Black women play roles that are largely played by white men, even when they are frightening or uncomfortable. We deserve the complexity, range, and nuances of roles that are afforded to those with social positions that are lauded in our society and—by extension—the media industry. A role like this pulls Black women in from the margins and suggests that we too can make a home of the weird, the scary, and the spine-chilling. There’s a lot of power in that.

That said, I found myself feeling protective over Dre’s character. Her fandom, as you noted, was persistently positioned as an illness, and her personhood outside of it was left quite bare. There was a vacancy to Dre, her personality and dialogue an echo of her past. “Who’s your favorite artist?” she commonly asked her victims before killing them. To invoke Audre Lorde (1985), there are no new ideas with Dre, only new ways of making them felt. With her character being so deeply attached to her fandom, it was difficult to humanize her. The joy and safety that fandom provides is easily overlooked in the series. Instead, she is presented as a victim of it, like she has no choice but to attack her victims due to her allegiance to Ni’Jah. This depiction of Dre strips her of agency and humanity in a way that I found quite jarring.

How can we better walk the line of representing marginalized groups and individuals in new ways without reproducing hegemonic stereotypes? In this case, Swarm reproduces common depictions of Black women as senselessly angry, for instance. And it doesn’t end at that—there is much to be said about representations of her queerness as well.

YM: Wow, there’s so much to respond to here. You’re right, it’s such an uncomfortable balance: how can Black women be represented as complex and imperfect and boundary-breaking and terrifying without falling into stereotypes? What we’re really talking about here is what is good and bad representation? I would argue that portraying a queer Black person’s—I hesitate to use the term “woman” for Dre, but we’ll come back to that—attempts to find community and love through her attachment to an idol as illness is… not necessarily bad representation, but complicated representation. Because you’re right, it’s rare to see Black women treated with the same care that Netflix uses for Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy, and that care is deserved. But then, is this harmful? Is this going to dissuade Black women from engaging in fandom and forming homosocial relationships like the one Dre had with Marissa before her death? And especially when you bring in all of Dre’s other identities—queer, gender non-conforming, foster child—why must she be the villain? Again, what does good representation mean, and where do portrayals like this fit? 

JN: Right, and how do we engage in representation that honors the intersections of different identities? This depiction of Dre centers her mental illness, for instance, and marginalizes other parts of her identity. Her queerness is not given the attention or care that the storyline demands. Also, when dealing with questions of desire and wanting—it’s difficult not to consider this facet of her identity in relation to her attachment to Ni’Jah. The scene where Dre bites into a red apple, as a representation of Ni’Jah’s neck, feels deeply erotic on both a functional and symbolic level. The fruit, a common symbol for affection and forbidden desire, suggests a consumption of—and hunger for—Ni’Jah. An exploration of that hunger in relation to Dre’s queerness would have complicated Dre’s character in a way that would’ve felt more human. Good representation doesn’t just consider parts of people. It creates room for those parts to exist in messy dialogue with one another. We need to be willing to get messier.

YM: That’s so bold to say, when I feel like Swarm already revels in the mess. Maybe the fully intersectionality-aware version would be a few episodes longer! But to return to the apple (or was it a plum?), the forbidden-ness really feels key. I think there might be a reading of Swarm in which Dre’s murderous impulses come from her suppression of identity. You see in the interviews with Marissa’s mother some remark about how women could still be friends without being “...funny.” All of Dre’s murders, too, start with some slight—however imagined—against women. Even her outburst as a child was because she viewed some girl as harming Marissa. And then once Dre (as Tony) gets together with Rashida, she (he? they?) goes for at least a year without killing (as far as we know), maybe because they’re living in their true identity and are satisfied. That is, at least until Rashida offends Ni’Jah.

Again, I don’t think this is a definitive reading of Dre’s queerness, but it’s an argument that we commonly see about other serial killers, like Dahmer or Gacy: murderous intent as a result of oppressive heteronormativity and internalized homophobia. I feel like I’m writing a long Tumblr conspiracy post with this one, but I think it’s important to look at when marginalized identities can be read as the cause of mental illness in the media, and why the creators set it up that way. Maybe the way to segue this rant into something more productive is a question: what do you think the intention of Swarm is, for the creators?

JN: This makes me want to get back on Tumblr—I need more Tumblr conspiracies in my life! What an interesting read on suppression, queerness, and violence in the show. This is the mess I was looking for! By “mess,” I mean the interconnectedness of things that don’t feel like they can or should be related, the narratives that are imperfect and confusing but valuable still.  From what you’ve just shared, it’s true that some of that weaving and connecting needs to be left to the audience. After all, media are co-created by both maker and watcher. As for the intention of Swarm, I think that there are many.

One thing that we haven’t touched upon yet is the show’s commentary on social media and technology through Dre’s attachment to her phone. This relationship is put on full display when she spends time at Eva’s cult-like get away. Dre becomes frantic when Eva takes her phone away, and she ends up running over her with her car. The need to stay close to the phone seems to stem from her desire to stay informed about Ni’Jah-related news on her Twitter “stan account.” The account and her phone also become a space of affirmation. In a world where people don’t seem to understand Ni’Jah’s power and excellence, a community of like-minded people are only a click away.

The digitalization of her community, thoughts, and feelings is also made evident in the texts she sends herself through Marissa’s phone after she dies. Dre’s phone is a space of mourning and celebration all at once, a space of both loneliness and community. In the final episodes of the show, when Dre starts dating Rashida, there are significant changes in her gender expression, walk, and voice. She almost feels like a different person. She also no longer has a phone. Whether the loss of her phone—and all that it represents—brings her closer or further away from a potentially suppressed self: I don’t know. But I think that there is something to be said about people who find refuge in the digital world. This could be the intention of the creators or just another Tumblr conspiracy! What are your thoughts on representations of social media and technology in this project?

YG: I loved the focus on technology; especially in the early episodes, every time Dre pulls out her phone we hear a buzzing swarm in the background. When she opens her phone in that first episode and sees all the missed texts from Marissa, the swarm becomes overwhelming. Technology, for Dre, is both a lifeline and a manifestation of obsession. A lot of the people she kills, she kills because of things they said about Ni’Jah online. She kills Eva because she took away her phone and, by extension, her connection to time and Ni’Jah. The phone becomes her connection to Ni’Jah once again when her lack of a phone prevents her from getting her tickets replaced. The thing that seemingly pushes her to get her shit together and settle down as Tony in Atlanta is the deactivation of Marissa’s phone; for her, “normalcy” as we understand it requires her to be separated from technology and, by extension, Ni’Jah.

I think the facet of the online fan experience that really gets glossed over and forgotten is how fandom functions most centrally as a community, not between fan and performer but within and between fans themselves. She talks about her Twitter followers as friends, no matter how often people say things like, “Those are not your friends, those are some crazy ass fans. They don’t give a fuck about you, it’s not real.” For Dre, though, the digital is the most real. And often, as we discussed before, online spaces exist to bring marginalized folks together around the things they love. The dismissal of her social life, as it exists through technology, further alienates her from real life social interactions. We’re really in the mess here, but technology provides access to some forms of social life and community, while also preventing access to others. It can be all consuming and warp perceptions of reality, specifically in the context of “the Swarm” or “the Hive.” This contrasting portrayal of technology as both negative and positive is a great example of how technology and social media actually do function—they can be wonderful, and they can be terrible. Did you find yourself being critical of your own social media use after watching this?

JN: Absolutely, it made me interrogate my own connection to social media, technology, and my “digital” communities. As a diasporic subject, my connection to my physical home and communities across southern and eastern Africa is highly mediated. I cultivate and strengthen relationships through a screen and—in many ways—technology keeps certain parts of me alive. Living in the West, where certain parts of my identity remain severely undernourished, I often turn to my devices to resuscitate the parts of myself that I do not want to forget. If people around me aren’t talking about a political event or afrobeats album drop, for instance—I turn on my phone to find the people who are!

I was raised in multiple countries, and I sit at the intersection of several identities. I exist between borders, both physical and metaphorical, and I have made homes of spaces between the digital world and my off-screen reality. Social media is one of the few spaces where I find comfort in my liminality; where I can easily engage with people who have similar lived experience, and where I am able to tend to multiple parts of myself. I think that this is also indicative of the realness of digital spaces and communities. Conversations like this are an invitation to take that more seriously. Swarm encourages us to do the same.

YG: I think Swarm makes that uncomfortable, though; no one takes Dre’s online love seriously, and while we occasionally see tweets praising Ni’Jah and calling her a goddess, we see far more of the negative aspects of online communities like fandoms. For example, I know that through fandom, I can find people all over the world whose couches I could sleep on. Hell, when I moved to LA, a Twitter follower gave me their couch; it’s still in my living room and great for naps. Swarm doesn’t show any of that, not really. There is a little taste of that when Festival drops in the first episode and Dre transforms suddenly into a sexual, confident person, but it is immediately overshadowed by Marissa’s death. I wish we got to see how beautiful the internet can be, especially for marginalized people. Fandom was instrumental for my own gender and sexual exploration, and many of the people who are part of these intense fan communities are queer.

I think Dre’s queerness is an important part of Swarm, too, but not one that the show spends too much time on. Why do you think that by the end, Dre is Tony—both in the final episode, and in the pseudo-true crime episode—but there are no conversations of gender? The closest we get is Rashida bringing Dre a tampon and saying “I don’t care.” We also see Eva kiss another member of the cult and Dre’s confused face in response, like she wasn’t aware that was something people could do comfortably. Yeah, I just want to push towards an understanding of how gender and sexuality function within Swarm and how we can read it as an audience.

JN: Agreed, however I think that Dre’s attachment to her online world—no matter how uncomfortable it may make us—still depicts an important reality that many of us have experienced. That said, it is true that it is not portrayed in the most positive light and that felt like a missed opportunity in the series.

You bring up an interesting point about the absence of conversation around Dre’s gender despite the shift in Dre’s presentation as depicted in the final two episodes. To an extent, I don’t think the creators wanted audiences to read Dre as a definitively trans character. Is Dre’s change in appearance a reflection of gender or is it a reinvention driven by a need to remain under the radar? These tensions, and the development of Dre’s gender across the series, felt frustratingly simple. This is often what it comes down to in conversations around representation: which identities are granted the privilege of particularity? And which ones are rendered ambiguous and open to debate?

As you mentioned, the vagueness around Dre’s gender is heightened by the true crime episode, where it’s revealed that Dre is now living under the alias Toni. What an interesting episode—I found the stylistic shift to a mockumentary fascinating! Stylistic boundary-pushing within film and TV is an incredible way to reimagine on-screen representation. It creates room for audiences to get to know characters in ways that aren’t as easily attained in traditional filmic formats. Shows like Dear White People serve as an example of this—the main character’s radio show is used as a space for her to air out personal grievances and frustrations that nuance the audience’s understanding of her life and actions.

What role do you think the medium and stylistic choices of the show play in the ways that fandom, Black womanhood, and queerness—for instance—are represented in Swarm? What can we learn from them? This is an important question to ask for this show and other on-screen projects that center the narratives of marginalized folk.

YG: I want to tattoo your response on my forehead, specifically that question: which identities are granted the privilege of particularity? Gender is one of those identity aspects that feels impossible to pin down, and through this discussion, I am coming to appreciate the embrace of that ambiguity with Dre; the debate itself becomes generative. There’s just a particular tension with portraying a potentially trans person as a serial killer in the political environment we are experiencing in 2023, which might explain my sensitivity to the portrayal.

As for the true crime episode, that was the part of the show that really had me thinking. No joke, I googled “Andrea Greene” at the end of that episode just to make sure, 100%, that this wasn’t a dramatization of a true story. In that episode, they censored every mention of the pop star Dre was obsessed with, and they referred to the fandom not as the swarm but as the hive. On top of that, the mug shot they showed at the end was not Dominique Fishback but some other actor; the family interviewed were also not the same actors who played her foster family in the previous episode. And then that red carpet footage of Donald Glover talking about how he’s working on an adaptation with Janine Nabers and Dom Fishback—I truly believed it was real for a second. That in itself says so much about the fact that this is a believable story, or at least, it presents itself in such a way that it could be real. As much as we argue for authentic representation, a part of me believed this story either way.

True crime is also a genre that is most primarily consumed by white women, so what does it mean to tell the story of a Black woman through this specific medium? And the title of that episode—“Falling Through the Cracks”—speaks heavily to identities and unequal distribution of attention, especially when the detective is also a Black woman. Medium says something, so what does this medium and the perceived consumption of it say in this instance?

JN: I googled “Andrea Greene” too! I also called the number at the end of the episode and reached a voicemail where a pre-recorded voice asks if you have any information on the whereabouts of Andrea Greene. The person is then interrupted by, who I assume is, Andrea Greene. Andrea asks the speaker who their favorite artist is, and the speaker starts to scream. The voicemail is then cut short. This is another example of, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, the ways that Swarm (quite literally) bleeds through the cinematic frame and into our day-to-day lives. From a functioning voicemail feature, to several real-life references, a mockumentary episode, and the use of interview footage of the creators—Swarm challenges storytelling traditions in a new and interesting way. It is a multimedia offering that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, the digital and the non-digital.

The consumption of such a project, keeping in mind the racialized consumption practices of true crime that you brought up, elicits a discomfort because it is unusual and unexpected. This also circles back to our conversation around the politics of discomfort and the use of the “uncomfortable” as a tool. The question remains: when is instrumentalizing discomfort effective and at what point does it become harmful? Swarm, even in its representational shortcomings, provides powerful insight into the good and the bad of on-screen representations.

YG: That’s a great question to leave this conversation on: when is discomfort effective, and what does it tell audiences about themselves? This conversation has become so generative from the starting place of discomfort, and it invites us to ask ourselves why certain things make us flinch away from the screen. Swarm is a great vehicle to ask these questions and masterfully forces us to do so. I’m going to be thinking about this show for a while.

JN: Agreed! The question of why we respond the way we do and—with reference to our dialogue on mediums—how this is achieved by creators is an important place for us to land. I’ll be thinking about this too.

Biographies

Jacqueline Nkhonjera is a Dual Masters candidate in Global Media and Communications at the University of Southern California and the London School of Economics.

Yvonne Gonzales is a doctoral student at USC Annenberg.