Possibly everyone’s been saying this but I haven’t seen it yet so: Milchick’s moment with the marching band in 2x10 is specifically him as drum major, which is a band role unique to the HBCU style, practiced, as the name suggests, at historically Black colleges and universities, such as Jackson State:
Obviously, these guys absolutely ate and Milchick’s routine is much chiller—they’re 20 and he’s not—but to everyone saying it’s Milchick’s theater kid moment, I think it’s actually his Black band kid moment.
To me this feels very compelling for his arc this season, where he’s clearly been grappling with the erasure of his blackness as a Lumon employee, divorced from that part of himself except for the moments in which Lumon chooses to aggress on him (police his vocabulary, glass cliff his employment record, for god’s sake the kier blackface “gift”.) I’m obsessed with the implications here—Tramell Tillman’s quote about whether or not Milchick “knows he’s Black” is answered in seeing him perform this very Black art form with the energy he brings to all the other moments in the show where he gets to set the tone. He’s creative and loquacious and weird and he plays games with the innies and dances to defiant jazz with them! And Lumon does NOT seem able to stop him from doing that, performance review be damned.
On the very key OTHER hand: the HBCU style and its drum majors has roots in American minstrelsy. It originated in military bands, which was then used by minstrel performers, then reclaimed by Black performers, adapted by marching bands in Black institutions in the midcentury, and finally solidified into the iconic HBCU style that we see in modern universities today. So is this performance actually Milchick’s? Why does Lumon have a department of mostly Black musicians, when there are a total of four Black employees in all the other departments we’ve seen?
If we take this as Milchick’s own planned moment to shine, though, it also builds implications for his life before Lumon: he seems to have so much more cultural world to pull from than the likes of Cobel—I would argue he was clearly not raised in the Lumon cult in the way she or Miss Huang have been. I absolutely love the writing for this character and how complex his role is in this world as arm of a corporate power that also stamps the life out of him. His self-flagellation with the paper clips vs his self-display with the band…
So much of that is down to Tramell Tillman’s work. If he doesn’t win an Emmy for this season we riot, obv.
Anyway, I’m not Black, nor am I a band kid, so if anyone wants to weigh in, prove me wrong, or anything else, please do. I want to hear every Milchick thought yall have forever
