The Fly vs. Pine Barrens
I’d like to start by acknowledging that when I go for a new show, I go HARD, and rarely listen to other people’s recommendations. My own tastes and instincts tend to lead me towards TV formulas I already sense are ripe for my passion. I also have, like, an ego problem where everything I watch is awesome and everything you watch is stupid. But my friend (let’s call her Flooble) campaigned so hard for Breaking Bad that I forced myself to move past the lukewarm experience of the pilot episode and give it a real shot. Now my days and nights are bathed in the warm glow of a laptop screen and so many simmering pots of meth. Total immersion. Helpless obsession. Thanks, Flooble!
She recently reminded me of this episode, “The Fly,” which was supposed to come near the end of Season 3 – but I had no memory of seeing it. Call it exhaustion or just A FUGUE STATE, but I had finished Season 3 already before realizing my mistake. I have a thing about seeing a show in perfect chronological order, and I was also just emotionally gutted from the finale, so I actually grumbled a bit before I forced myself to view this lost gem.
It’s a little sad I didn’t see it before the finale, because although it’s one of those rare stand-alone masterpiece episodes, a little isolated narrative island, it does important work for the show and the season in particular. Firstly, “The Fly” exposes our anti-heroes Walt and Jesse with the results of their criminal activities and pivotal decisions thus far. We see just how broken Jesse is, still crumbling under the weight of Jane’s upsetting death (and more importantly, the loss of a pure and simple love). A sick kind of energy animates him everywhere except in his eyes. He hangs off the edge of the earth, and Walt is his only tether.
But Walt, that dubious mentor, is another story altogether – completely conflicted, sliding down a muddy, bloody road to hell and struggling with SERIOUS dead ends. There’s no way out of his doomed business arrangements. His family life will never be happy or normal or even satisfying. He is the sole bearer of terrible knowledge and responsibility concerning Jane’s death. And most interestingly, Walt still wants to die. It’s been hinted at before, but Walt is the only one who saw his cancer as a blessing, an excuse to let his id run wild and leave this world with a bang and a flurry of crisp dollar bills. Now that the cancer is no longer a threat, Walt has to deal with his self-hatred and the fact that maybe…he deserves to die anyway.
“The Fly” also shows us how things are, and how they will be. This is the episode that solidified the loyalty between Walt and Jesse, and retrospectively (for me) added a lot of dimension to the finale. Here we get a taste of those still waters running deep; all their trauma and poor moral choices have led them to each other, to a fierce emotional place where defending each other, defending the partnership, is paramount. To lose the other would be a surrender of their own identity. That subtext lends a raw and touching desperation to their dialogue – and the episode is ALL dialogue. For two people who rarely discuss things at length, much less themselves, this was a real departure.
That’s why I thought about “Pine Barrens,” that completely brilliant Sopranos episode, so much during “The Fly.” For those who haven’t watched The Sopranos…well, first of all, GET RELIGION. Your life sucks without it and you don’t even realize it. But anyway, “Pine Barrens” is the archetype of “The Fly,” much as The Sopranos is the archetype of Breaking Bad. The episode is a precious calm bubble inside an intense fictional world. Plotwise, it provides a respite from the proverbial “crazy shit going down” by distilling its story arc into stark simplicity.
A maybe-unnecessary metaphor: Imagine going on a road trip along a dangerous, busy highway. To avoid a clusterfuck accident, you turn into an abandoned side street. You spend only a few minutes outside the action, but it’s enough to refocus you. Staring at the highway in both directions, you can observe the chaos for what it is, and consider your entire journey. Episodes like these two are side streets. They’re textually pointless but subtextually indispensable; the story’s just a flimsy vehicle for serious character psychology. And once our characters are back on the highway, they’ll never forget how weird and frightening it looked while they were outside.
“Pine Barrens,” like “The Fly,” takes place near the end of the third season. Silvio has the flu, so Chris and Paulie resentfully make his collections for the day. One chump, Valery (The Russian) refuses to surrender the cash quietly; their tense conversation quickly devolves into flying tempers and bullets. Long story short, Valery gets shot and stuffed in the trunk, and Chris and Paulie drive to the Pine Barrens in South Jersey (a giant snowy forested expanse) to bury him. But Valery, a former spy, survives and manages to lay the smackdown on the two before escaping. Thus Chris and Paulie, two unpleasant characters with a sour history, are left to fend for themselves in the tundra. Their existential despair and spiral into madness is at turns hilarious and disturbing.
The episode worked on so many levels. Firstly, it encapsulated the darkly comedic tone that elevated Sopranos beyond just a wise-guy mob show. The mentor/mentee (or awkward friends) relationship between Chris and Paulie mirrors that of Walt and Jesse in many ways, but the Italians are a hell of a lot funnier. Chris bedgrudgingly respects Paulie because that’s the way familial allegiance and criminal hierarchy works, but he also resents being told what to do. And Paulie is, beneath his veneer of mafia professionalism, an insecure middle-aged weasel. Their sniping is often light relief to the heavy drama/action surrounding them, but if there’s one thing Sopranos makes clear, it’s that one wrong remark can land you six feet under. The key word that stands between Chris and Paulie, like a monolith, is distrust. Throw these two in an abandoned truck, in the dead of winter, with no food, for hours, and you’ve struck GOLD.
In one of these special extended moments of isolation, painful truths are revealed. The two become delusional with panic, imagining the other is hatching a murder plot with intents of cannibalism. “Don’t make me pull rank on you, kid,” Paulie snarls. “Captain or no captain,” drawls Chris with his signature defiance, “right now we’re just two assholes lost in the woods.” With no Tony, no criminal empire, no one to whack, they’re just the pathetic byproducts of two lifetimes of bad decisions. And after this encounter - after they’re rescued from the wilderness and the proverbial narrative holding cell - things are never the same. “Pine Barrens” echoes in a million little ways, from Chris’ drug addiction to the disintegration of order among Tony’s most trusted advisors. What seemed like an irrelevant jaunt was actually a tool to expose the scary cracks that we, as viewers, only imagined we saw in the periphery.
So back to Breaking Bad: what I loved about “The Fly” was that it brought real…pathos into the mix. Despite all the wrenching sadness and talk of life’s dead ends (Walt: “There is no room for error anymore”), the dedicated fan could also spot satisfying emotional payoff between our two beloved cooks. Without that sense of futility, exhaustion, irreversible damage, would Walt ever confide in Jesse about his marriage? Would Jesse ever let himself talk as long and sincerely as he did, about his dead Aunt Jenny? And most importantly, would the two have ever revealed those unprecedented levels of loyalty and tenderness towards one another? Swear to God, my heart swelled just watching Walt hold that ladder for Jesse, gazing up at his foolhardy young arms waving that fly-swatter around. Apologizing for the pain he knew he caused. Watching the knowledge rise in Walt’s eyes: that if he had never come along, maybe Jesse’s soul would be whole. And Jesse’s obvious respect, maybe love, for Walt was so poignant and raw and tangible. Their relationship, usually too complex to parse, suddenly also seemed precious and essential. That groundwork made Jesse’s actions in the finale not just terrible and pitiable, but ABSOLUTELY INEVITABLE. He knew he was killing the last of his goodness inside when he shot Gale, but letting Walt die was not an option. Damn.
Okay, this went on for way too long. But my thoughts runneth over, for real. “The Fly” was genius to me, and inspired me to think back to more classic literature masquerading as television. To write an episode like “Pine Barrens” or “The Fly” takes utter courage and conviction in the story - the mini-story, and the big story. This is art, BITCH!
“Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote. To not understand the way that those two statements would reverberate in the minds of, respectively, young men and young women is to not know very much at all about those types of creatures. Thompson’s work was illustrated by Ralph Steadman’s grotesque ink blots, and early Didion by the ravishing photographs of the mysterious girl-woman: sitting barelegged on a stone balustrade; posing behind the wheel of her yellow Corvette; wearing an elegant silk gown and staring off into space, all alone in a chic living room.”
Uh…I’m sorry but I hate this entire passage. I hope this is not a widespread interpretation of either Joan Didion’s impact as a writer, or writing “for women” in general. Because you know what? WOMEN ARE NOT INNATELY ELEGANT AND ISOLATED. Why would I want to stare off into space in a chic living room, when I could have PIG-FUCKING AND TEQUILA???
ugh.
So real quick. I just read about this season’s finale of Dexter and was completely BAFFLED. APPALLED. DISAPPOINTED. It came just in time, as I had recently considered getting back up to date.
I quit the show (literally) in the middle of this season’s premiere episode. Season 5 had really soured me due to several factors:
Since Rita had been set up as a divine exception to the evil/questionable morality of Dexter’s existence, her death should have crumbled his internal structure immediately. Even a slow-roasted crumble would have been acceptable. She represented all that was holy and true about life, and since Dexter made a business of taking life, he needed her more than air. When she died, it should have signaled big changes in a show that welcomed seismic shifts in tone and style.
But suddenly, it didn’t. Dexter, after some well-executed initial shock, returned to a wooden and inflexible world. And not in the sense that other characters could not understand his grief fully, but in the sense that the actual rules of Dexter’s fictional universe had been re-set. In what seemed almost like a panic, the writers returned to the routine established in the beginning of the show: Dexter is a sociopath; he kills because it’s all he knows; his friends and family are oblivious against all odds; he has only the unconditional love of Deb (once Deb and Rita) to ground him in humanity. It seemed that having made the courageous move to, for lack of better words, GO THERE with Rita’s death, the writers just didn’t know what to do when they GOT THERE. You left us viewers raw, and primed for a wildly creative implosion of all we thought we knew about Dexter. And then you fucking chickened out.
Which brings me to my pre-point, which is a short explanation of what brilliant shows do when they reach their ceiling. There are several disappointing routes that many of my favorites have taken:
1. Self-parody. Happens all the time when Glee references an incredibly loose plot end/bad idea with a wink (“Remember when Artie got magic legs that broke the next day?”). An in-joke as a punchline, which alienates new fans and draws a laugh that’s more wistful than anything else.
2. Wish fulfillment, or what I like to call Rubik’s Pairings. A good example is Andy Bellefleur and Holly Cleary of True Blood, two disposable characters who wandered around in the same dusty narrative corners until they came together in a sudden sorta-cute-but-equally-disposable romance. These kinds of pairings come from bored fanfiction writers and also TV writers whose wells have run dry. They’re remixing stale elements in hopes of creating surprising moments. I envision the process as rotating a proverbial Rubik’s cube of characters until one spots the two most unlikely blocks next to each other and says “why not?”
3. Subtext as text. The most egregious of scripted programming sins. This is the fate that Boardwalk Empire seemed to be suffering at the outset of Season 2. When you have relationships that work because of things unsaid, you must be doubly careful when actually saying them. That moment, the peeling-back of veil upon veil of dialogue, must be worked with the same precision that these characters have applied to keeping their feelings locked down. I deflated totally when Richard Harrow stared at Jimmy Darmody and asked, “Would you die for me?” and Jimmy replied, “Of course I would. Right down to the last bullet.” I ALREADY KNEW THAT, because they SHOWED IT and did not SAY IT. This is the power that simmers beneath all truly great fiction, and misusing it can bring art to absolute ruin.
This third sin is clearly what’s behind the “plot twist” of Dexter’s sixth season finale. Spoiler alert - I am about to spoil the twist that spoils the whole show! - but Deb is in love with Dexter. The adoptive sister is in love with her adopted brother. Now, this is something that is totally acceptable in the most sinister depths of fandom, but when it becomes a canon development, we have problems. The writers have problems. And those genius creations, those literary figures who walk among us, our favorite TV characters, have fatal problems.
I spotted the sexual tension between these two early. Some may have started considering it a season or two later. But the fact that it was there, sometimes obvious and sometimes nonexistent but NEVER ADDRESSED, really lent the Deb/Dexter relationship an edge that belied the deepest shocking content of the show. It was so subtle that when I caught myself imagining it, I felt icky. And when I tried to write it off, something nagged at my core. It made me pathological about continuing to watch. It made their story stranger, darker, better than what was written as fact. And it was so underexposed that it began to feel like a natural outgrowth of the characters and events. When we begin to identify the occasional hint of incest as “natural,” well…that is fucking dynamite television.
And now that delicate flourish has been turned into an honest-to-god plotline. It feels like these writers are performing surgery with dinner forks. No sense of subtlety, sensitivity, of big-picture artistry. It’s plain lazy. Milking the soul of a show for a big premature payoff. I don’t need to go back and see all these episodes to know what I’ve been missing - the shoddily reanimated zombie body of a TV experience I once cherished. “The dark passenger” departed long ago, and so too, have I.
Read below for a truly PHENOMENAL reading of last week’s Boardwalk Empire. Just when I thought the show had dried up to the last drop of moonshine, it shattered my world and scrambled my brain! An amazing but confusing episode, critiqued below with a sharp eye:
Georgia Peaches
Spoiler galoshes on? Okay. Angela dies. Among the last words Jimmy says to her are: “I know there are things you think about me that you’re afraid to say”. Fleetingly, it turns out, they were one of television’s great conflicted couples: a mediocre artist and better mom banished to an archipelago of anguish by the once and future king who wouldn’t even marry her, lest he languish in the closet forever.
This greatest theory of all, Jimmy’s gayness, may yet flourish. But at what fucking cost? One angle, the really progressive one, is HBO pushing Jimmy in a more unmitigatedly-Harrowian direction. The other is that they just executed the lesbians. Really, you guys?
I was always whatever about Boardwalk Empire having a woman problem, any more than every show has a woman problem or the whole world has a woman problem. Now I can’t decide if that shit was deliberate or if Angela’s undignified death is shambolic retroactivity at work, a period-perfect excuse for the show not to take any responsibility for itself. Women lived and died hard in the ol backin days, is that the ontology we’re doing business with?
I am ruffled.
Manny Horvitz is still my favorite new character. His hair is steamrolled straight down the middle and if butchers have acumen, he’s got it in kilovolts. He is also a slab of beef you have to cook all the way through, get me? Jimmy Darmody doesn’t.
Jimmy’s like, the worst heir apparent ever. Is there a resource he hasn’t misallocated or decision he hasn’t fucked up? Chris Moltisanti, is that you? We’re going to find Jimmy in a hotel kitchen somewhere, shot by a stranger, and the only thing missing will be the rosary.
Mass wasn’t rewritten soon enough to save Margaret from the world’s most hilarious case of misplaced guilt. After being taunted by her own son, who fakes no feeling in his legs and clearly has none in the rest of him either, she takes a grip of Nucky’s cash and deposits it at the nearest rectory. The priest is like “this is unorthodox” while eyeing the dough like it wouldn’t melt in his mouth. If all Margaret wants is to be absolved of Nucky, why doesn’t she leave his thieving ass altogether? Oh right, bennies.
Technically we’re supposed to validate Margaret despite her Anne Neville vibes. She wants her kids to be taken care of and Nucky is genuinely good with them. But her freaky Beyonce streak from season one is about to peter the fuck out, honestly.
The last shot of Jimmy and the Entering Princeton sign is about the loneliest thing I ever saw. Steady, boychik.
to be a journal (at least, a “hipper,” more “with it” version of my clunky mid-2000s xanga):
A quick rundown of all things life.
1. I had a Halloween party! And it was glorious. I’d originally intended to be Jo Calderone this year, but the wig looked janky beyond belief - and without the wig, you got nothin’. Wig or it didn’t happen. I was also of the [correct] opinion that I would get little to no male attention if I went full drag king. So I slapped together a Mia Wallace ensemble instead, and with a syringe taped to my abundant black-bra’d chest, I think it turned out really well.
Lots of awesome people came; a little more than I expected but not enough to turn my modest little apartment into a disruptive rager. We had a keg, sangria with little plastic fingers in it, cobwebs like none oth! And there was lots of friendly mingling. RV people, Sagehens, Circle people, randoms. Overall good vibes. One big yay.
2. It is now November. This means the wind is picking up, whistling around the crumbly architecture of my LA hood, and California winter is upon us. An awesome season. Perfect for scarves and artful poses where I shove my hands in my pockets and brood. I also desperately need to overhaul my wardrobe, because I feel like I have little-to-no appropriate chilly-weather work clothes.
3. The job. It’s going well. Except for taking the bus, which will change when I purhcase a sparkly used car. My days are long, but fulfilling, interesting. I read astronomical amounts of scripts. Getting used to the format, which I never really liked before – I crave narration and long useless passages of flowery description, but now I’m beginning to appreciate the subtlety of dialogue. Visualizing the whole film rising up around a page of conversation. But only when I read the good stuff, which is few and far between.
Anyway. I really like the other assistants, it’s a fun office, and the independence of having my boss on the East coast appeals particularly to me; I hunker down in my corner and bang out task after task in my own little world. I’m also a sucker for little industry perks like premieres, screeners, chances to inch way too close to an obscure celebrity. So I’m learning to see the good in this business, this kind of job, this town. Wherever life takes me, it’s undeniable that there’s something electric, special, about buzzing like a tiny bee inside the beating heart of film and television. I still romanticize New York, but it will always be there - LA is my home, at least for now, and I gots to embrace it.
I guess that’s it. Have to work on Nick’s birthday prezzie after work. And re-watch Glee, which I was too tired (physically and in a larger fan sense) to process last night.
Gangs of New York (2002)
Just watched. A feverish effort by the great but overeager Scorsese - I’m hypnotized by the director’s passion and those astronomically high production values. But his strain for authenticity rings totally hollow and I’m left wanting for the dirty, simple heart that this film should have had.
A classic turn-of-the-millenium Hollywood history-fest that oversprawled its limits. Imagining/depicting the brutality of our decades past (and romanticizing their vibrancy) can sometimes pack more of a punch on the small screen. It is so much more immersive to experience another time in episodic form, life slowly developing and slipping into the future. I think of this film as as a prelude to the far more effective period pieces that flooded television soon after: Deadwood, Carnivale, The Tudors, Mad Men.
A PACK OF CIGARETTES has to be the most satisfying purchase of any given day. There’s sheer volume, for one thing. You’re not buying five or ten of anything. Not even a dozen. Not you. You’re buying 20 moments. Twenty chances to unfold your ancient lighter, with the associated pleasure of 20 whiffs of butane and the minimum 20 thumb-rasps on the flint. But go further. Twenty trips to the courtyard, where the other smokers gather to lean against doorways, kicking at their shoes. In every city, outside every office, they congregate. They are a nation unto themselves! The handshake. The tapping of the cigarette against the palm. That first curl of smoke against the eye. They’ve bought into something with that pack. Twenty first drags, 20 glances at the sky, 20 conversations about the Redskins or about that rain cloud, about your sister or the other guy’s girlfriend, about how much you hate soccer, about how good the breeze feels when the sun is falling behind the trees.
In another era, these would be our moments of repose, the kind of things painters would concentrate on. In a more forward-thinking culture, you might expect workers to be forced to step outside 20 times a day, to give themselves three minutes out of every 30, to gather in small pods, if only for the sheer accident of conversation. For all their troubles, smokers get this much. They are drawn to it. Despite themselves, despite the flood of warnings and the sidelong glances, despite the castigations of children and government alike, smokers locate themselves in their day and they pause.
Tom Chiarella, fiction editor at Esquire.
Excerpt from from “The Indefensible Position: Smoking Has Its Benefits”
Matthew Weiner better fucking bring it with the next season. He’s made me wait so long, plus he ended last season on a shocking (rather than poignant or groundbreaking or thought-provoking) note.
I am still heavily invested in the dynamic between Peggy and Don. I wanted to add something to the article below: indeed, it’s not all about sex or jealousy. It also strikes me that Peggy might be offended by Don’s behavior simply because, if the roles were reversed, her reputation and career would be crucified. As a high-powered male, Don can take a trophy wife from the secretary pool (not that Megan is only a trophy wife, as the viewers know, but that’s clearly how Peggy and the world see it). And even though it’s “typical” and a little piggish, he’ll experience no ill effects. But Peggy, as a woman (and a sharp one at that), can’t access that kind of clout - she will never find it easy to just pick up a handsome, obedient man. She’ll never command enough respect for her business associates to put her personal life second. And that jealousy of Don - one not borne out of romantic desire, but political ambition - is one of the most fascinating things about the Peggy character.
Granted, it has been a while, but do you remember Peggy Olson’s jaw dropping when Don Draper sprung his engagement news on the folks at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in the Season 4 finale of “Mad Men”?
Turns out that reaction didn’t involve much acting on the part of Elisabeth Moss, the…
I’ve written about these before. I’m pressed to find any prose I fucking LOVE more, every time I read it. I encourage anyone who is shocked and oddly touched by the poignant verse below to read them all.
…You seem to turn me into a beast. It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl, who first led the way. It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. It was you who slid your hand down down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes. It was your lips too which first uttered an obscene word. I remember well that night in bed in Pola.
