I tried watching Them and noped out after the first episode. Glad I did from what I’m reading here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-04-09/amazon-them-covenant-little-marvin-lena-waithe-violence

One of the things I think about a lot, probably more than I should, is what place does racialized violence have on the page/screen. What purpose is it serving. Is it something the reader needs to experience to appreciate?

The answer is almost always no.

(This extends to sexual violence as well).

The important part of violence in storytelling isn’t the terrible thing itself, it’s the *impact* of that terrible thing on the characters. Racialized violence shouldn’t be about shock value. It should be about the trauma that remains.

So much of media right now centers racial violence as a shocking genre beat. But the reason Get Out works so goddamn well is it doesn’t rely on shock and awe to convey its message. It relies on great storytelling.

And I think about a lot of really hard stories that do this, that have something shocking and horrible, that work so well because WE DON’T SEE THE VIOLENCE. we see the aftermath. The trauma. The struggle to heal.

The impact of the violence, those ripples a single moment can cause, is always harder to deal with narratively than the violence itself.

Violence on the page and on the screen should be earned.

And it rarely is.

Anyway, you should all check out the scholarship of Kidada E. Williams whose scholarship on racialized violence and the importance of contextualizing that violence by fully humanizing the victims is really, really important to these convos.