You Won’t Believe the Mind-Blowing Brilliance of ‘I’m a Virgo’!

Brobdingnag is somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. In the map included in Volume II of his 1726 satire “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jonathan Swift describes it as a huge peninsula somewhere in northern California. Brobdingnag is the land of giants: when Gulliver is shipwrecked there, he encounters a race of nearly 60-foot-tall, wise and moral people, rebuffed for their depictions of a warlike, corrupt British society. The West Coast is no longer teeming with such gentle giants, but according to the writer-director-musician Riley Bootsthere is a well south of Brobdingnag, near the place Swift designates as P. Monterey: there is a giant who lives in Oakland, California.

Riley’s new Amazon Prime series, “I’m a Virgo,” is a fable from Swift through Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, Alan Moore and Spike Lee. It is, at its core, the story of Cootie, a once-in-a-generation giant who becomes both folk hero and public enemy. As someone tells him in one of the early episodes, “People are always scared and you’re a 13 foot tall black man.” Cootie’s foster parents keep him as sheltered as they can; he grows up watching the action on his block through a periscope. He’s an educated giant — his father asks him to read 10 hours a day — but he’s also electrified by the screens, repeating lines from his favorite reality shows. (Her mantra of his, “From that day forward, I knew nothing would stop me from achieving greatness,” is a quote from a “Bachelorette” show.) His parents, trying to persuade him to stay in the safety of the two. story apartment they’ve built, show him a scrapbook of giants throughout history, many blacks, enslaved or lynched for his gigantism; they clearly fear that he is too visible a man, a projection screen for the fears and desires of others. (This is not a destination reserved for giants only.) But when Cootie finally leaves home as a teenager, he falls in love with this world, in all its sublimity and stupidity. Hearing the bass for the first time, banging on the trunk of a new friend, he becomes an angry poet: “He moves through your body like waves,” he tells his parents. “And he sings you to the bone.”

Riley’s Oakland, like Swift’s own West Coast, is rendered surreal through allegory. It has a housing crisis, police violence, and rolling blackouts, but it also has a community of people who shrink to the size of a Lilliputian pocket (they use clothing receipts) and a fast food worker named Flora who can work at hyperspeed similar to Flash. . There’s also a rogue white comic book artist called the Hero who exacts vigilante justice on his mostly black neighbors, but even the idea of ​​the law-and-order fascist superhero seems vulgar here. This show is not subtle in its vision or its allegories. “As a young black man,” Cootie says, echoing her parents’ warnings, “if you walk down the street and the police see you don’t have a job, they send you straight to jail.” All of her new friends laugh at her gullibility until one responds, “Metaphorically, that’s how it works.”

One of Cootie’s early rebellions is her insistence on trying a Bing Bang burger, the comically unappealing commercials for which she constantly sees on TV. We are shown gaping onlookers making videos before we see Cootie himself, standing in line, hunched over, his back pressed against the burger joint’s fluorescent lights. Actor Jharrel Jerome shows us Cootie’s restlessness by always making him small, leaning his head against his shoulder, collapsing his body inward, his lips in an expectant grin. But when he sees Flora, making burgers in blurry speed, there’s a moment of connection. Cootie expands when he hands her his order and calls him a “great man.” He bumps into the exit sign on his way out.

He’s meticulously, hilariously committed to the part, constantly doubling down on the logistics of Cootie greatness.

“I’m a Virgo” comes on the heels of some clever experiments in television surrealism, from “Atlanta” to “Undone” to the recent farce “Mrs. Davis.” Perhaps Amazon and Riley were emboldened by these examples or energized by the idea of ​​transcending them, because this series has the fearlessness of its conspiracies. His fantastic concept works in the metaphor in the same way that it works in the facts, as he reminds us with proud frankness. Drunk at the club, Cootie waxes poetic to his friend Felix: “Friends,” he says, “can help you feel inside yourself and the rest of the world at the same time.” Felix takes a minute to take that in before nodding his head and responding, more or less, “Hey, bro, that’s real.”

premium cable Networks and streamers have long built their brands around pushing boundaries and taking risk, even as their prestige series often sit on safe and predictable formulas. Then there are the properties like the ever-expanding Marvel Universe, which once may have used superheroes to dramatize truths about our own world, but has now disappeared into its own multiverses, sucked into digital battles and green-screen vistas. “I’m a Virgo” is a visual and ideological counterpoint to all this. She uses the conceit of a 13-foot-tall black man to gain insight into race, class, and injustice, and is meticulously, hilariously committed to the part, constantly doubling down on the logistics of Cootie greatness. Many shows play with television narrative structures or genre conventions, but this show is out to break the most basic visual conventions of how you put humans together on screen.

His fantastic concept works in the metaphor in the same way that it works in the facts.

And so Cootie has to be as real as TV can make it. Most of her scenes are filmed using elaborate forced perspective shots and scale models, not green screens or CGI. You can feel the difference. Cootie tends to look like the walls are closing in, because they are. The claustrophobic, ramshackle genius of the show can be exciting. I remember being stunned watching Christopher Nolan depict the depths of a wormhole using only practical effects; My amazement was no different in watching Boots Riley figure out how to film a slapstick, ultimately, rather sexy love scene between a full-size woman and a 13-foot-tall man without relying on digital effects for every frame. We see Flora and Cootie mostly in close-ups, Flora perfectly centered in her frame while Cootie fills hers to the brim. There are two occasional shots that use dolls as stand-ins, but mostly the scene uses sound to keep the actors in touch. The scene takes up almost half of their episode, as they work to figure out how their lovemaking can be consummated, and Riley figures out how to show it to us, and we learn how to see it, but it’s sweet, not lewd. Usually, in Riley’s frame, the giant man is real, and the world around him is distorted or reconstructed. With Flora, whose own strangeness the show also honors and protects, the world reinvents itself in relation to the giant.

Visual gags coexist with other spectacular fantasies. One of Cootie’s friends organizes a general strike to protest inequities in the healthcare system. There is a guerrilla attack on a power station. A vigilante policeman converts to communism. (Which is a wilder argument: that the power of argument persuades a law-and-order ideologue to abandon prison capitalism, or that a kid in Oakland turns out to be very, very tall?) Riley, himself an outspoken communist , has always been an unabashedly political artist, but what’s radical here isn’t just the politics; it is for what politics liberates the spectacle. “I’m a Virgo” makes the idea of ​​breaking systems of power feel less destructive than limitless, and it does so by tying his political vision to a revolution in the way we view human bodies on screen. His narrative feels almost spontaneous, full of strange and unexpected life. Riley has made his soul feel green, generative, self-sufficient. In the land of the only living giant, that’s real.

Opening illustration: Prime Video source photographs

Phillip Maciak is a television critic for The New Republic and author of the book “Avidly Reads Screen Time.” He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.