Trapped in Mick Jenkins’ suburban nightmare

Mick Jenkins – Truffles

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Production Company SMUGGLER
Director Andre Muir

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Credits

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Production Company SMUGGLER
Director Andre Muir
Production Co. Pogi Studios
Executive Producer Patrick Milling-Smith
Executive Producer Brian Carmody
Executive Producer Elizabeth Doonan
Executive Producer Bryan Casallo
DP Pat Scola

Edit Company Cabin Editing Company
HP Liz Lydecker
Colorist Mikey Pehanich
Color Producer Ashley Goodwin
VFX Artist Ben Pokorny
Production Designer Kaden Maloney
Editor Nathan Rodgers
Senior Producer Brittany Carson

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The day starts out like any other as Mick Jenkins walks out to water his lawn.

His neighborhood comes to life around him; a jogger runs by, a pair of friends smoke in their driveway, and a family takes their dog for a walk. Truffles paints this morning as alright, but it’s anxious, shown in Jenkins’ weary acknowledgment of his neighbors. With a muted palette and clothing that looks almost drab, Andre Muir creates a neighborhood that is meticulously normal.

And then the day repeats, like any other day, like every day. Trapped in a cycle that feels unbreakable, the nightmare comes alive for Jenkins as his previous Black neighbors get replaced by pastel-wearing white doppelgangers. It’s an insidious, terrifying kind of personalized gentrification that Jenkins witnesses in synchronicity with his own mental breakdown inside his home. The worst part is that the white people in the film don’t even realize what they’re doing. It’s malicious because of the blase way the film treats their movement, as if they’re an inevitability.

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Muir, who is represented by SMUGGLER says, “I’m just super over-critiquing white folks and am all about affirming ‘Black folx.’ So instead I wanted the story to take place in a black world. A black suburb. I also wanted to place it there just because there’s this kind of myth of Black suburbia… like it never existed… The fact that that chorus’s meaning kind of changed with each iteration led to the idea of repetition, which eventually played itself out as a Groundhog Day kind of story, where Mick wakes up each day as his neighborhood slowly gets replaced.”

The ending shot is kind of the culmination of all the ideas of the video, being pushed out of your home while almost looking like a criminal. Who knows what he’s going to do, is he just looking at his old home that was taken from him, is he planning on taking his home back which he would be justified in doing? What would happen if a cop saw him staring outside his own home?”

The aesthetic of the video really came about after talking it through with the DP Patrick Scola. I had really admired the photography of Larry Sultan and William Eggleston and the artwork of Eric Fischl. They all have elements of that kind of underbelly of Suburbia in them and we discussed how we could show that aesthetic but bring that seediness to the surface.”