Amazon’s Them (2021): Fighting The Cult of ‘whiteness’
…and the dismantling of anti-blackness.
*Warning! Spoilers ahead.*
Amazon’s Them (2021), despite all of my predictions in my trailer analysis, did do something vital and imperative: critique ‘whiteness’ and white supremacy. I clocked a lot of the series themes in my initial analyses of the trailer, so if you’d like to read that first I’d highly recommend you do so.
Them immediately lets you know that the main characters are constantly in danger from internal and external forces (seemingly beyond their control). Indeed a malevolent entity, that was once human, is orchestrating a percentage of the woes that befall them in California, but everything else in their lives has been instituted and facilitated by whiteness encroaching upon their moments of safety, agency, and autonomy.
This series navigates the tightrope of this dichotomy well, by showing that the physical and psychological trappings of white supremacy are destroying the white characters from within as well. Beyond the fantastical elements that occur in…
