After the wedding scenes that 3005 soundtracks in the screenplay, the script cuts to The Boy playing piano at his mansion as people start to arrive for yet another party, prompting the beginning of Act 3, the aptly-titled “Playing Around Before the Party Starts.”
“It was the closest you could get to having powers.”
BTI Screenplay, Act 3
The mansion is starting to get messier and messier, and apparently the cleaners have stopped showing up because they weren’t being paid. There’s trash everywhere, surfaces are sticky, and you can’t slide around on the floor. The script mourns this: “Now, dried alcohol stops you before you even get to the kitchen door. The Boy really loved sliding into the kitchen when he was a kid. It was the closest you could get to having powers.“
In our first ever video analysis, we break down the 3005 music video (above).
BTI Screenplay
Still in Oakland, the crew head to a hotel for the night and see a wedding happening in the lobby. The crew leaves, but The Boy stays to watch the wedding. While filming the couple dancing, an older Indian dude comes up to The Boy, a sort of “meeting with the mentor” in traditional literary structures on The Boy’s current “road of trials.”
As Act Two begins, The Boy examines the sleep-walking existence he’s been living. This process is slow, and fittingly, Act Two begins with the instrumental track “Dial Up.”
With his 2013 album Because the Internet, Donald Glover sought to construct a transmedia world by weaving together physical, sonic, visual, and online material Under his pseudonym Childish Gambino. For the most comprehensive compilation of the world’s components, visit S7 co-writer Camden Ostrander’s piktochart.
Dissect Season 7 on Because The Internet by Childish Gambino begins NOW, only on Spotify.
Go deeper into the BTI world with our visual guides and the Because The Internet screenplay. For the most immersive experience, view both the visual guides and the screenplay excerpts before or after an episode.
Season 7 will be exclusive to Spotify until January 2021. Podcasts are FREE on Spotify – don’t need a premium account to listen.
“I wanted to make something that says, no matter how bad you fuck up, or mistakes you’ve made during the year, your life, your eternity. You’re always allowed to be better. You’re always allowed to grow up. If you want.”
Donald Glover’s open letter, posted to Instagram, describing his 2013 album, Because the Internet, released under his pseudonym “Childish Gambino”
Donald McKinley Glover Jr.
Born on September 25, 1983 at Edwards Air Force Base in California, Donald grew up with his siblings Bree and Stephen, as well as a steady flow of foster children. His mother Beverly ran a daycare from their home in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and his father, Donald Sr, was in the Air Force and later was a postal worker.
Pictured left to right: Bree, Donald Sr., Beverly, Stephen, and Donald.
“It’s an Internet cesspool that’s cashed in big on senseless fight videos. The site’s popularity has created a sort of voyeuristic feedback loop, in which disassociated bystanders immediately videotape violent incidents and act as if they’re already watching a video on the Internet”
“Blow up / Worldstar before rap you already know that”
The album’s animated cover exemplifies Gambino’s first words on this track, “Blow up,” suggesting violence and explosion, but also the process by which a person or piece of content can go viral. This duality of violence and virality will reverberate throughout the track.
“Blow up / Worldstar before rap you already know that”
The album’s animated cover exemplifies Gambino’s first words on this track, “Blow up,” suggesting violence and explosion, but also the process by which a person or piece of content can go viral. This duality of violence and virality will reverberate throughout the track.
Left, the camera zooms out from the burning house, emblematic of the curse; right, the camera continues to recede in the next shot, this time travelling backward through a Louisiana Bayou. These two shots help the viewer travel from the haunted house in chapter 5 back to Madewood Plantation for chapter 6.
CH. 6 – ACCOUNTABILITY
“I come from a lineage of broken male-female relationships, abuse of power, and mistrust. Only when I saw that clearly was I able to resolve those conflicts in my own relationships.”
Beyonce, Vogue Magazine September 2018
Left, the grounds of Madewood Plantation from the perspective of the master bedroom; right, two young Black girls, a symbol of the future, run up the stairs of the plantation house, a symbol of the past.
Left, two young Black girls playing with dolls on the bed; right, the hands of the girls fixing their dolls dress and jumping on a bed. They represent one of many generations of Black women quite literally overcoming the past by healing in this historical place.
“nothing like your mother…everything like your mother”
A young girl watches Beyoncé’s beauty routine admiringly, and the spoken word implies a yearning to see herself in the same image.
New Orleans chef and activist Leah Chase, otherwise known as “The Queen of Creole Cuisine,” an iconic representation of the strength, resilience, and wisdom of generations of Black women who “cannot be contained.”
Beyoncé dancing with her girlfriends, claiming “I ain’t thinking about you.” These acts and symbols establish a reclamation of power and agency in the face of the Madewood Plantation, an “impossible Black place.”
The final shot of “Apathy,” a group of five women walking into the wilderness, naked, symbolizing both courage and vulnerability as Beyoncé embarks on a new path, “far away” from her husband.
CH. 5 – EMPTINESS
Beyoncé as Pomba Gira
Left, Beyoncé encircled in fire, adorned with a blood red dress, a metallic bib necklace, and a spiked, bejeweled headpiece; right, a depiction of the Afro Brazilian spirit, Pomba Gira. Followers of Brazilian religions Umbanda and Quimbanda call upon Pomba Gira to aid them in matters of love, sex, and vengeance.
The long hallway
After a black screen and the sound of a door unlocking, the camera enters this long, eerie hallway, centered on an ominous red light at the end of it. Perhaps symbolic of “the curse,” the heart of the legacy of slavery and its inter-generational wounds inflicted upon the identities and relationships of African Americans.
The “House of Slaves” on Goree, an island off the coast of Senegal, the site of “The Door of No Return.” This doorway, opening out the Atlantic Ocean, is observed today as a symbol of the final threshold enslaved Africans passed through before boarding slave ships embarking on the tortuous Middle Passage to the Americas.
President Barack Obama looks out the “Door of No Return” during a tour of the Maison des Esclaves Museum on Gorée Island, Senegal, June 27, 2013 (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy). The site has also been visited by Pope John Paul II as well as Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
The camera dollies forward, giving the viewer a sense of compulsion and helplessness, drawn powerlessly forward toward this curse at the end of the tunnel.
