OZ Looked At The Horrors of Our Criminal Justice System Before It Was Hip

 

 

There’s a part of me who wonders if everybody was so enraptured by the brilliance of The Sopranos that no one bothered to ask the very obvious questions about it in the aftermath of all the shows on HBO that followed up. By and large female critics like Emily Nussbaum chose to ignore it when it was on the air and it’s only a quarter of a century after the fact that the questions are being raised at all – though tellingly not to David Chase himself even a quarter of a century later.

Because the real reason The Sopranos is an outlier among not just great television but every series HBO itself did in the immediate aftermath and well past it is frankly just how much of an argument for how much it epitomizes the worst parts of our history and today. As I’ve written before on numerous occasions the Soprano families, both criminal and by blood, were entirely and completely dominated by white cis males. The New Jersey and New York the Soprano family was a part of didn’t seem to have a single African-American, LatinX or Asian people in it: there was never at any point in the six seasons it was on the air that there was a single regular who was a person of color. This sticks out like a sore thumb with the next three HBO dramas that were to follow The Sopranos: what does it say that Deadwood had roles of more depth for minorities during three seasons than The Sopranos ever did? As I’ve mentioned before the female characters were little more than there to show how they reacted off Tony than anything else (Six Feet Under from the start did more to let its female regulars expand from the roles of mother, daughter and girlfriend) and the series was more homophobic and unwilling to show range than any of the dramas of that period and well past it. (There was no Omar Little of any kind in Jersey.)

Chase can argue about the story of humanity he was trying to tell about how given the opportunity people will take the easiest choices possible but that falls apart when the vast majority of your characters are white males who  by definition in the world have more choices then the rest of us. It’s even harder to make that choice about humanity when all around you are white people in suburbia who by definition seem to have made one of their choices to stay away from the ‘real world’ as possible.

That may be one of the biggest reasons that OZ was never really considered being as groundbreaking – or perhaps tellingly, more critically acclaimed – as The Sopranos was. Ironically when Tom Fontana was given the choice to make his project for HBO, he decided to make a series where almost everyone we met from the start to the finish was in a place when they had no choices at all. We’re told that very clearly by Diane Wittelsey in the first five minutes (“We will tell you when to eat.” When to sleep. When to piss. Follow the rules.”)  McManus (Terry Kinney) uses Em City as an experimental wing in an effort to build a better life for his inmates and from the start we see he is considered a joke by the majority of the staff and only tolerated by Leo Glynn (Ernie Hudson). Kareem Said when he enters Em City and is told that he will be treated as an equal says humorously: “How ironic. To finally be treated as an equal and I do not have the freedom to enjoy it.”

Fontana also made it very clear from the start of the show to the very end to make as difficult as possible for the viewer to have any sympathy for the prisoners. Every time he introduced one of the prisoners, he would show us in great detail what they had done to get there and with few exceptions it was always an act of horrible, graphic violence. Then he would have his narrator Augustus Hill made it clear what it was like. “Oz is where I live. Where I will die. Where most of us will die” he tells us in the first minute of the show. And this is a mission statement Fontana keeps for nearly every regular we meet: the only way to leave Oz is in a body bag.

And Fontana made no effort to skimp on how horrible this was in the Pilot: we see an incoming inmate get stabbed in the first two minutes, we witness (not graphically) a rape and assault of one we’ve just met, there is a beating of one inmate, a suffocation of another and by the end of the episode the character we’ve been led to thing will be the lead is doused in gasoline and burned alive. If anything Fontana kept doubling down on that whenever he had a chance to, and he never let us forget just how horrible the crimes committed were every inmate we met, making it harder to feel anything resembling sympathy for many.

OZ was also, perhaps even more The Wire would be a few years later, an indictment of the criminal justice system in all his horrors. This could also have been a reason why so many critics reacted poorly to it. To that point in television, police procedurals had illustrated the cops as unequivocally the heroes and the people they locked up unequivocally the villains. (It’s worth noting with a few key exceptions, much of today’s procedurals still lean very hard on that definition.)  Fontana had tried on a few occasions on his previous show Homicide to give humanity to some of the killers that were arrested in Baltimore but he and his writers were still sympathetic to the detectives more than the criminals. OZ asked a lot of its audience: not just to try and empathize with drug dealers, rapists and killers but to argue that they were worthy of being treated with dignity, if not sympathy. And it did so, it’s worth noting, without bothering to show any efforts to reform or rehabilitate many of these same criminals: OZ made it very clear that these men were just as violent and brutal locked up as they were on the outside. (Orange is the New Black, for all its brilliance, couldn’t help but be more sympathetic to the prisoners then it was to their crimes.)

The series made its most direct attempt to argue this in its first season, focusing almost all of its action in Em City. (Later seasons would spend more time in some of the other cell blocks at Oswald.) This unfolded through two parallel storylines, one focused from without, one from within.

The outside was the actions of Governor Jim Devlin (Zeljko Ivanek), who was essentially the real villain of OZ. Devlin was apparently elected governor on a tough on crime policy and the effects were constantly being felt throughout Oswald. In the first episode smoking is banned in the prison; in the second, conjugals are. Not long after Oz brings the death penalty back and Devlin makes it very clear he wants Jefferson Keane (Leon) to be tried and executed under this standard. As Sister Pete points out Keane is being executed because he is an African-American male and that is done to quell the mob. (Perhaps in aware of this in the second season we will meet Shirley Bellinger, the first woman to be sentenced to death in nearly a hundred fifty years.)

It’s worth noting we constantly hear news reports about Devlin and how he is facing corruption charges, is being accused of infidelity and has made it clear he won’t resign even if he’s impeached. Ivanek does some of his work as an actor playing Devlin as loathsome, corrupt and without a single sense of humanity. He constantly compares himself to Zeus and untouchable. Fontana’s sickest joke of the series is that Devlin is right, in the course of the series he survives an assassination attempt, is reelected governor (and makes it clear that the shooting probably helped him) and by the end of the series arranges for the man who did the most to get him elected to be killed in order to protect himself. This comes out at the end of the series but by that point McManus is cynical enough to believe he’ll still wiggle out of it.

Every time Devlin shows up at Oswald or  on television, he makes it very clear that he doesn’t view the prisoners as human beings. Devlin at one point makes it clear to McManus that this view is held by his constituents and the public at large. The sad truth is the position is also held by most of the guards, the staff and probably the warden. Only a relative few see them as human being and they are often punished for that.

When Said shows up he makes it clear in his first interaction of what he’s planning: “We can take this prison at any time,” he tells Glynn and McManus cheerfully. Glynn says: “You can take it but can you hold it?” Said smiles. “That remains to be seen.” It’s clear from the start Said intends to unify his Muslim brethren (another radical idea in 1990s television) and makes it clear of his own attempts. When he is threatened by Jefferson Keene, he orders one of his new followers to hit him again and again until he bleeds. Keane is struck by this.

He will eventually convert to Islam but not long after his actions come back to haunt him and he ends up being sentenced to death row. Said serves as his spiritual adviser  during this period. In a truly powerful moment he walks with Keane towards his final resting place: “Death is not to be feared.” When Keane says he doesn’t have his kufi, Said hands him his.

It’s clear throughout the season that Said is trying to mobilize the prison to his side. This becomes the clearest in the penultimate episode when after one of his followers betrays him he orders him shunned. Not long after he commits suicide and Said uses the opportunity to stage a press conference to suggest there are questions about his death. Glynn calls for a media blackout. (“Why is blackout such a negative term?” Said jests. “You can get whiteout in a little bottle.”) During this period McManus aims a shot at the Muslims telling them they can not use their religious apparel, such as mats or beads. Said is the first to hand his kufi over. “This is a meaningless gesture,” he assures them.

What’s striking is throughout this entire season (and for several seasons afterward) Said is constantly arguing a path of non-violent resistance and it is working among his brethren and impressing his followers. He intends by the end of the season to stage the riot but in one of those great ironies, it happens without him.

By this point the inmates of Em City have been boiling for what may have been months. In addition to everything else the recent murder of a guard and a weapons raid has led to much of their privileges being taken away and so many random beatings by guards that most of the guards are on suspension. Everyone knows something is coming but it starts by accident: two inmates start a fight over a game of checkers and it starts to spread. One of the inmates overpowers a guard. Within minutes the remaining guard have been grabbed, and Father Mukada (B.D. Wong) has been taken prisoner. Chaos has all but overridden, the inmates have taken control of the doors and McManus’s office and are throwing furniture everywhere. At that point Said takes control, pulls out a gun (which he was given during the last episode) and fires a shot in the air. “Now let’s get organized!”

Within a very short time the inmates have barricaded the doors and are moving the hostages around. Glynn has shutdown every cell block and he and McManus (who was out of his unit at the time) run to Em City. He demands to know if there’s anyone we can talk too. Said’s name is shouted. Everyone starts chanting Said’s name. “What is this about?” “If you have to ask Glynn, we have a long day ahead of!” he says as he dons his prayer beads to a shout of reverence.

By this point we know most of the leaders of the riot Said, Miguel Alvarez (Kirk Acevedo) leader of the Latinos, Scott Ross (Steve Gevedon) who controls the Aryans and the bikers, Simon Adebisi (Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje) leader of the gangsters and Ryan O’Reilly (Dean Winters) who has no power but has spent the season manipulated the prisoners as well as Said has into a position of influence. Said takes a position of delegating responsibility but its hard to no how much control he really has. However, he manages to get them to work together on a list of demands.

We are told in later seasons the riot lasts three days but because the entire series is set indoors we have no clear idea of the passage of time. What we do know is that soon enough Devlin shows up and makes it very clear of his law and order type doctrine. He makes it clear he’s going public and calls in the National Guard. Not long after the rioters ask for food, something Devlin scoffs at but Glynn overrules. McManus agrees to go in with in order to find out about the hostages. “You’re even dumber than I thought,” Devlin says dismissively.

McManus does go in and sees that two of the hostages – Armstong and Mineo – need medical attention. He offers to trade himself for the two of them and Wittelsey, not just the only female but his former lover. Ross starts to flex saying they don’t have to let anyone go but Said says they will live up to their bargain. When he’s asked why he says: “Because if we don’t, we become just like them. And we won’t get our list of demands.” Eventually the leaders agree to let Armstrong and Mineo go but not Wittelsey. O’Reilly hands over a letter explaining the exchange and the demands.

We never get a clear idea of the full list but Glynn later says most of them are harmless “bringing back conjugal visits, smoking” Devlin says bluntly: “I don’t negotiate with animals.” “Then how do you expect to handle this?” “The old fashioned way. With force.” That Devlin thinks the same thing of the hostages as he does the prisoners shows that all he cares about is looking tough on crime.

It is during this period that McManus demands to talk with Said and the parallels to what we have been seeing onscreen are made direct as McManus reveals his background:

“I grew up in a town in upstate New York. And the only thing there was a prison. Everyone either worked at the prison or made money off it…My dad ran a diner. I was about to celebrate my tenth birthday and I was very excited. A few days before it happened, there was a riot at the prison. It lasted four days but then the governor called in the National Guard and ordered them to take the prison back. They did. Firing at anything that moved. So when the tear gas cleared 31 prisoners and nine guards were dead.

Said: “Attica.”

McManus: Three of my friends fathers died. Instead of going to my birthday we went to a memorial.

Said responds with scorn. “And that’s what Em City is? Your birthday party?”

McManus then utters some of his most memorable lines in the series, ones that are called back later.

“We’re on the verge of disaster; we’re on the brink of oblivion. Now before we join hands and jump, I want another chance.”

Said: Not mine to give.

McManus: YES IT IS!

Said: NO ITS NOT! Because even the best prison wouldn’t be good enough!

Said then delivers his own impassioned speech:

I’m going to try to explain this to you one last time. I’m not saying the men in this prison are innocent. I’m saying they are here not because of the crimes they committed but because of the color of their skin! Their lack of education! The fact that they are poor! This riot isn’t about getting smoking back, conjugal rights. It’s not even about life in prison. It’s about the hoary judicial system. We don’t need better prisons, bigger prisons. We need better justice. Now what can you do about that?”

McManus, of course, has no answer to this question. Instead he puts it personally:

If we don’t resolve this, you and me, and soon. People will die. You could die.

And Said makes his nobility clear.

“I am willing to lay down my life for change. Now those deaths at Attica brought real change and real reform. But everyone’s forgotten the lessons of your home town. It’s time to wake this country up again…You want to save this place. I want to destroy it. Brick by hypocritical brick.”

Not long after this the troopers do storm the prison. Six prisoners and two guards are killed, twenty more are injured. McManus himself is shot and nearly dies as a result. In the outcry over the deaths Devlin forms a commission to investigate the cause of the riot but its clear what he wants is for them to clear him of any wrongdoing and to blame all of the prisoners for what happened. He is more than willing to bribe and bully many of them and he offers the position of attorney general to the head of the Commission.

I may go over the episode in a later article but I will deal with the results. At the end of the investigation Devlin is infuriated by the results which doesn’t involving charging the prisoners. The head of the commission Alvah Case (Charles S. Dutton) tells him why:

Case: “From a legal standpoint the evidence is circumstantial. From a moral one, it’s laughable.

Devlin is angry.

Devlin: “I want those bastards tried on television.

Case: Look governor as far as I can see those deaths are a direct result of your actions. Yes the Commission cleared you, but you can’t have it both ways. If the prisoners are guilty so are you.”

For perhaps the only time in the series Devlin is put in check by one of the few characters on the show with any pure integrity. As a result of the commission, the rioters are let back out with no charges and Em City is eventually rebuilt with new rules. And everyone seems to have learned some lessons from this: while tension and violence flow throughout the rest of the series, nothing even close to the events of the riot ever happen again.

OZ is a far darker show than The Sopranos is but it’s far more realistic – and in a funny way, more optimistic – then the one Chase ever put together. Death comes at a more constant rate in Oswald then it does in Em City but in argues even in a place where all of your freedom has been taken away, you can still find ways to change and grow. That it does so in a maximum security prison that should represent the worst of humanity (even compared to Tony and his crew) shows that for all the grimness of Fontana’s setting and the bleakness of the souls of the inmates and some of the staff, you can find optimism in what should be a hopeless place.

That was likely too much for some critics and even viewers during this period to handle and it may be part of the reason that few may write testimonials to OZ the same way they have The Sopranos and so much of HBO’s other extraordinary dramas. But Fontana and his cast were asking questions that are, if anything, more relevant today as we wrestle with the consequences of mass incarceration, the death penalty and the rights of prisoners, particularly in a world that seems even more polarized on the issues that they were in 1997 and the impassioned arguments made by Said during that period are no less relevant today than they were then. And that it does so with a cast that has been part of the television landscape ever since it aired showed how much impact it had one how the Golden Age unfolded.

That’s also the reason I think OZ is a more important and better show than The Sopranos. It’s not just that it had a more diverse cast, had better roles for women and dealt with issues of homosexuality that were the first real steps towards it becoming part of the television landscape. It’s that it was about something in a way that The Sopranos wasn’t, but that The Wire and Deadwood were. It makes you feel sympathy for men who frequently have to work to rise themselves to be antiheroes and gives an explanation for who they are in a way The Sopranos just says everybody is. And unlike Chase, Fontana argues that they do have the capacity to change even if they may not think themselves possible of it or if no one in the outside world ever sees it.

 

The Oscars and International Directors, Part 3: The 1980s

 

 

For most of the history of Hollywood to this point by and large international directors had not made much of an impact in the traditional American film system  and with the exception of Antonioni and Truffaut very few American actors had been involved in them. Perhaps it was fitting that the director of the first  international film to receive a best picture nomination would cross that barrier.

After his groundbreaking Z Costa-Gavras had spent the 1970s continuing the make movies in France. Then in 1982 Universal Pictures had given him the greenlight to make his first American feature. Missing tells the story of how during the Chilean Coup which overthrew the Democratically elected Marxist leader Salvador Allende and installed the Pinochet regime (a measure sanctioned by the Nixon administration) an idealist American writer (John Shea) goes missing and his wife (Sissy Spacek and father (Jack Lemmon) go to Chile to try and find him. Released that March the film became one of the most critically acclaimed of 1982 and essentially told the kind of story Z had in a more American based setting. The film would win Best Picture and Best Actor at Cannes and be nominated for five Golden Globes.

The movie would be nominated for Best Picture that year in one of the better lineups of that decade: ET, Tootsie, The Verdict and Gandhi. Jack Lemmon received his eighth – and last – Academy Award nomination while Sissy Spacek received her third for Best Actress. Costa-Gavras was nominated for Best Screenplay but of the five nominees for Best Picture he would not receive a corresponding Best Director nod  - for reasons he might sympathize with.

The previous year one of the nominees for Best Foreign Film by the Golden Globes was Das Boot, the story of a German U-Boat stalking the North Atlantic during World War II.  Billed as ‘The Other Side of World War II, it had been a box office smash in America earning near $12 million in U.S. It also shot to international attention Wolfgang Petersen, who had been directing West Germany since he was 24.

That year Das Boot made history when it received more Academy Award nominations then any international film in history with seven. Among them were two for Petersen for directing and screenwriting.

Immediately after that Petersen would be signed to direct The Neverending Story. This decision was immensely decried as many thought he had sacrificed his eye for detail for ‘standard commercial Hollywood blockbusters’. The fact remains that many of those movies are among the most highly regarded ‘commercial Hollywood blockbusters’ by critics, not just Neverending Story but the masterpiece In The Line of Fire and such well received films as Air Force One and The Perfect Storm. Petersen’s shifting to Hollywood was the first sign of a sea change in how international directors would be willing to work with American studios.

Costa-Gavras would make films in both France and America. His most acclaimed one in America would be Music Box in which Jessica Lange plays a lawyer who defends her father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) accused of being a Nazi war criminal. Lange would be nominated for Best Actress for her work. His last film he made with an American studio was Mad City where Dustin Hoffman plays a reporter trying to take an advantage of a hostage situation to resurrect his career. In 1997 it may have been only slightly ahead of its time.

1983 witnessed one of the most notorious slights in Academy history. That year Barbara Streisand had astonished the industry when she became the first actress of any note to write, directed, produce and star in a major Hollywood film with Yentl. While the film was polarizing – the movie was nominated for Razzies as well as Golden Globes, it made history at the latter. The film won Best Comedy or Musical as Barbara Streisand became the first – and still the only – woman to win Best Director for the Golden Globes. An Oscar nomination in every category seemed all but certain.

But on the day of the nominations Streisand was completely skunked even though Yentl was nominated for five other Oscars. It wasn’t the most bizarre of the oddities that year: The Right Stuff was nominated for Best Picture but writer-director Philip Kaufmann was completely ignored while Silkwood was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay but not Best Picture. What led to the biggest uproar was who one of the Best Director nominees was.

In 1982 Ingmar Bergman had made what he claimed at the time would be his last film (he would back away from that) Fanny & Alexander. Nearly four hours long and one of his most autobiographical movies to that point, it told the story of two young Swedish children and the comedies and tragedies of their family. The film had been highly regarded by Critics from the moment it debut; it won Best Foreign Film in LA and New York Film Critics and the New York Film Critics had given Bergman their Best Director prize yet again. The film had won Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes and Bergman had been nominated for Best Director – and tellingly the Directors Guild Award while Streisand had not been. But the nominees had also included Philip Kaufman and Lawrence Kasdan for The Big Chill and they had been excluded as well; the fact that Bergman was included was a bridge too far and not just for those who were devoted to Streisand.

On Oscar night Fanny & Alexander was, with the exception of Terms of Endearment the biggest winner with four Academy Awards, winning Best Foreign Film, Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography. Bergman never directed another film but he continued to write up until 2003. By that point, however, the Oscars had their fill of him; he never received another nomination of any kind.

If the events of 1983 caused a firestorm what would happen two years later caused an earthquake. In 1985 Steven Spielberg, at this point known as the most successful director in Hollywood, famously said: “I’m going into the deep end of the pool. That meant making his first truly serious film. Collaborating with Quincy Jones he would work to adapt Alice Walker’s already iconic novel The Color Purple to the big screen.

While he would be treated with mixed opinions by critics at the time and while several African-Americans were annoyed that a white man was retelling the story of an African-American woman, it is impossible to believe in 1985 anyone but Spielberg had the clout to get the film greenlit, much less directed it. The movie opened slowly on Christmas weekend but it very quickly became a box office sensation and shot its unknown leads Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey to superstardom.

Then on the nomination day The Color Purple was nominated for eleven Oscars, tied with Out Of Africa. But none of them were for Steven Spielberg. And in what was an eerie echo of 1975 when he had been slighted by the Academy for Federico Fellini, it was even harder to look at it differently this time. Spielberg had been nominated for the Directors Guild Award and three of his fellow nominees were present: John Huston for Prizzi’s Honor, Peter Weir for Witness and Sydney Pollack for Out of Africa. Hector Babenco had been nominated for Kiss of the Spider Woman but the movie had been nominated for Best Picture, Actor and Screenplay as well. No one complained about that. It was the fifth nominee that sent everybody in alarm.

Akira Kurosawa was one of the greatest filmmakers in history. The reason he was known only to a relative few in 1985 was because he was Japanese. Anyone who knew anything about films at all knew that meant nothing. The movies he wrote and directed are ranked among the greatest of all time by even the casual film lover: Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, The Hidden Fortress, Throne of Blood. We see the impact of his movies in America for years, sometimes more directly than others – The Magnificent Seven and even Star Wars bear his imprint. And yet in large part to the frequent European drive towards international film, not a single one of his films had even been nominated for Best Foreign film or anything else.

Then at 75 he made a film that is considered one of his greatest Ran. With influences in King Lear it tells the story of an elderly warlord who retires and hands his empire to his free sons. Their new power corrupts them causing them to turn on each other and on him. A project Kurosawa had been trying to get made for nearly twenty years he had finally done so by 1985.

The film put Kurosawa back into the spotlight among his lovers and critics went out of their way to recognize him. The National Board of Review gave them their prize for Best Director and his movie dominated the foreign film awards across the globe. The film would be nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes but would lose to Argentina’s The Official Story. Still everyone thought that would be as far as it went.

Then on nomination day Kurosawa was nominated for Best Director and Spielberg wasn’t. The movie world went into an uproar. Spielberg would end up being given his first Directors Guild Award almost as a consolation prize but in what was the biggest shutout in Oscar history The Color Purple didn’t win a single one of its eleven nominations. When Out Of Africa did – ironically Kurosawa was one of three directors who ended up presenting Best Picture that year – it stunned Hollywood that had never thought that much of the film to begin with. That The Color Purple was unrecognized is a stain on the Oscars during that period; for Spielberg sadly, it was just another slight he had to live with.

The last major slight of the 1980s came just two years later and while it hasn’t ranked in the historical record as much as those that Spielberg and Streisand underwent, it makes the Oscars look even worse. That said, it would be yet another indication of how the world of Hollywood was letting in more directors.

One of the more surprising critical sensations and box office sensations of 1987 came from a Swedish import but it bore nothing resembling of the tone that Bergman had let them know. My Life as A Dog was a simple, wistful comedy telling the story a young boy in small town Sweden named Ingemar who is sent to left with relatives while his terminally ill mother is in her final stages. We see him live in a small town, dealing with charming people and watch him fall in love – though he doesn’t know it – with a tomboy. Much of the story centers around the boxing matches between Ingemar Johnson and Floyd Paterson, the second of which is the climax of the film.

This sweet, simple film was the product of Lasse Hallstrom, who might have been known even in his home country for his direction of the music videos of ABBA more than anything else. The film warmed the hearts of critics across the world, winning Best Foreign film from the LA to New York, the Independent Spirit Awards and the Golden Globes. Still when he was nominated for the Director’s Guild Award, no one thought much of it.

And then on nomination day, Hallstrom was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay. It was considered a miracle by those who’d never even thought it could earn distribution in America. But one person who didn’t think so was James L. Brooks.

That year Brook had directed his follow-up film to the Oscar winner Terms of Endearment Broadcast News an exceptional story about a love triangle between a news producer, a self-doubting reporter and a new anchor. The film had been a critical and box office hit and one of the biggest award winners leading up to the nominations. Holly Hunter had dominated the prizes for Best Actress, Albert Brook has won the Boston Society of film critics prize for Best Actor, William Hurt continued his hot streak that had started with The Big Chill and the film had swept the five top prizes at the New York Film Critics  -Picture, Director, Actor (Jack Nicholson, who also was honored for Witches of Eastwick and Ironweed) Actress and Screenplay.

And then on nomination day Broadcast News was nominated for Best Picture, along with Hope & Glory, Moonstruck, The Last Emperor and Fatal Attraction. Brooks was the only director of a nominated film who was nominated. Just as with Color Purple the year before, Broadcast News was completely shutout, though because it was a comedy that was less shocking than Color Purple.

Just before presenting Best Director Robin Williams, himself a first time Oscar nominee that year, stated “And along with an Oscar, this year the Academy is giving out a green card”. Neither Hallstrom nor Bernardo Bertolucci (who would receive the prize) seemed to find this funny. But in a sense it was a reality for Hallstrom.

Like Petersen, he would find acceptance in Hollywood. Unlike Petersen, no one could accuse Hallstrom of selling out as his sweetness and attention to detail led him to make some of the most quiet and critically acclaimed films of the 1990s. These would include such works as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, which earned Leonardo DiCaprio his first Oscar nomination, The Cider House Rules which would be nominated for seven Oscars including a second director nomination for Hallstrom and Chocolat, best known for its overpromotion at the 2000 Oscars but still a sweet film. Later films tended towards overblown romances (Dear John, Safe Haven) but the touch is still there with some of them.

In the final piece of this series I will deal with the 1990s and how it laid the groundwork for the official reopening of the Academy Awards to international films that we see to this day.

A Man Spoke on The Floor of the Senate Tonight - And It Gives Me Hope and Makes Me Proud

 

 

In the narrowest  sense of the word what Cory Booker has done  for the past 25 hours matters very little to the grand scheme of things. He endorses no legislation or is saying nothing that has not been said in some sense countless times before over the last decade and will no doubt be said countless times again.

In another sense it is little more the kind of performative activism I have railed against in this column so many times and which I find loathsome. Nothing Booker does will likely changed the most vehement opposition to his point of view, which at best is held by half the country and may very well be held by more of the still unenlightened minds which will forever fill the nation and the world.

It's even possible that this will do nothing more than accomplish a momentary stir in the news cycle which seems to change on a minute by minute basis. Given what comes out of Washington these days in mere minutes all of this may change again and our attention will go to something else. It depends just how many people are even paying attention now.

But the thing is even if nothing is changed immediately or long term, its impact on me and maybe the rest of the country needs to be remembered. As someone who has more insight into political history then most I am more aware of the significance then the average millennial or social media user. Perhaps even the self-styled progressives will still scoff at is as meaningless. But for anyone who argues that America is not capable of changing, who still wants to hold to the idea that we are still essentially the same country that we were when the republic was founded and that America can not and will not change, what Cory Booker did – and is doing – gives lie to that very concept that America is still the same nation it was in 1619 or 1776. And while there are many ways to define it, I think the very best way is to talk about two men who, save for the fact that they both served in the Senate, have nothing else in common and for good reason.

The first is J. Strom Thurmond. Thurmond was born in 1902 and died in 2004. His life spans, for all intents and purposes, the entirety of 20^th century America. This era that brought about transformative and radical changes – all of which, it’s safe to say, Thurmond was against for his entire life.

He came from South Carolina, the state whose secession from the Union was the final step that led to the Civil War. Thurmond would have been the first to tell you otherwise but make no mistake the war was solely about the right of men of the white race to own men of the black race to make them rich on land they would never own from birth to death, toss them aside and use their children to work the same land.

When the war ended South Carolina did little to acknowledge anything had changed. They didn’t enslave black men but they were just as free to kill them for any reason and deny them basic human rights. The North, which had ostensibly gone to war to free them, had little use for them as a citizens in the South and for the better part of three quarters of a century let Jim Crow reign.

Thurmond was born and completely embraced the idea that ‘the Negro’ was naturally inferior to white men and deserved no humanity at all. Back then, black women were for practically property so he had no problem to have ‘relations’ with his domestic and father a half-black daughter with him. This only troubled him – slightly – when he decided to enter politics. Not because South Carolina would find what he had done criminal but because it might hurt him in a campaign down the road. So he bought the domestic’s silence and his daughter’s existence only came to light after he died nearly a century later. It certainly did nothing to make black people human beings.

He was a Democrat only because there was no other path to political power in South Carolina. He had little use for the New Deal aside from what it could do for South Carolina and while he fought in World War II he saw no contradiction in fighting to stop an ideology based fundamentally on racism overseas and going back to his home state to protect that same ideology. He would soon be elected as Governor and in 1948 – reluctantly – became the Presidential candidate for the so-called Dixiecrats, a wing of deep Southern Democrat representatives who thought Harry Truman’s efforts into civil rights a betrayal of their way of life. Thurmond would proudly speak of segregation and win 4 states in the electoral college, including South Carolina.

Not long after that he would run for Senate as a write-in candidate. Still a Democrat and increasingly angry against the movement for civil rights coming from ‘Northern agitators’, he would be more inflexible then even some of his more senior Southern Senators. As the Supreme Court and other institutions moved forward he wanted to make sure the South stayed where it had always been. For that reason he crafted the Southern Manifesto and gathered signatures from Southern Congressmen and Senator, making it clear the South would vigorous oppose any bill that involved civil rights.

And in 1957 when Eisenhower’s administration combined with majority leader Lyndon Johnson to introduce the first Civil Rights Act of any kind since Reconstruction, he demanded that Richard Russell and his fellow Senators filibuster it. When they refused on August 28^th, he spoke for 24 hours and 27 minutes, shattering the record for the longest speech in Senate history. This speech was denounced by Russell and his fellow Senators – no fans of civil rights – as grandstanding and making a cheap stand for his own reelection.

The bill – weak as it was – did pass. And Thurmond spent the next half a century in the Senate. Eventually he would leave the Democratic Party altogether when President Johnson endorsed another Civil Rights bill, a much stronger one. He’d never really been comfortable in the party anyway and spent the rest of the century as the clearest representative of how the conservative movement which would involve the Republican dominance of the South and for all intents and purposes the very worst aspects of what America truly is.

Now consider Cory Booker. Cory Booker is the kind of man who Strom Thurmond would consider unworthy to shine his shoes. He would use all the epitaphs that we use for African-Americans in private – and in his state in South Carolina he would have said them in public. The idea of a man like Booker serving in the U.S. Senate would have been abhorrent to him when Thurmond was young and was, no doubt thankfully to him, something he barely had to endure in all his years in public service. Thurmond died in 2003, one year before a young man named Barack Obama would become the first Democrat African-American to be elected to the Senate.

Booker was elected as Mayor of Newark and would run for the U.S. Senate to fill the vacant seat by Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey in 2013. He would win election in his own right in 2014, one of the few Democrats to hold that his seat in a bad year for the party. He would attempt a run for President in 2020, something else that Thurmond was not thrilled with while it was happening in his lifetime and is likely not happy that in his own state of South Carolina, a ‘Negro’ holds the seat he once held. Say what you will about Tim Scott but Thurmond would have never eaten dinner with him.

Booker will now be in the Senate until 2026 at which point he will have served longer in the Senate than any African-American in the history of the body. Never mind it’s ‘only fourteen years’; the previous record was held by Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and he lost reelection for his third term in 1978. The wheels of progress move slowly but they do move.

And now consider what Booker finished accomplishing tonight. He has spoken for 25 hours and 30 minutes about the problems facing America led by a party that Thurmond did everything in his power to help mold in his image and is led by a President who I know he would have great respect for in every way. He has defeated a record in the august body of the Senate that was made by a man who hated everything America was becoming and was determined to stand in the way of. Strom Thurmond represents everything that is abhorrent to me as an American and that he was admired and respected by so many in that institution personally disgusts me in every way possible. He represents the most odious and loathsome aspects of our humanity.

So in a sense I could care less about what Booker actually said during those 25 hours but rather who and where he made it. For the first half of the nineteenth century the Senate spent as much time as possible trying to paper over the problem of slavery. When it was abolished, they made a token effort to fight for the rights of African-Americans and then left them on their own, largely because men like Thurmond were the rule in both parties of Congress when it came to black men. Thurmond was no worse than his predecessors from South Carolina even in the 20^th century but by the time he came to Washington the tide was irrevocably beginning to turn towards equality and he chose to keep the South as close to antebellum and was the representative of all that is the worst aspects of our political system. His ‘record’ in the Senate is not a dubious one but a disgraceful one.

Like so many people I have had trouble finding reasons for hope the last several months. I have argued for optimism even in the face of the dark forces that Thurmond represented and still are held too in to much of the country but I have found little concrete things to hold on to. And now Cory Booker has taken one of the more disgusting hallmarks of the Senate and turned it into a footnote. That was one of the biggest legacies Thurmond had in the Senate. And now its gone. Forever. His mark has been erased by a man who represents everything that Thurmond hated in life and is still idolized by too many.

Those on the far right will try to argue its irrelevant. Those on the far left will argue the same thing but for different reasons. But neither side will be able to erase it from the pages of history. An African-American senator has taken something away from Strom Thurmond forever. And that makes me proud. To be a Democrat, to be an American, and as a member of the human race.

Cling to that when times are dark.

There IS A Way To Measure Success in The Culture War - But Don't Expect One Side To Acknowledge It Soon

In an article I published last month I wrote that the so-called culture war, like all the war that we wage against wars is as foolish a concept as the War on Terror or the War On Drugs. What I left out was that, unlike all of these other ‘wars’ where so many of the goals are unachievable as well as what victory is, there are at least some metrics to measure whether one side is winning or losing. They are imperfect and subject to interpretation, but they at least exist in a way that almost none of the other political wars can be measured.

As I’ve mentioned countless times before and apparently will have to drive into the ground, Hollywood is a business first and anything else second. The reason this should be a positive when it comes to the culture wars is because business has a very simple standard to consider whether something is a success: whether or not it makes money.

By some standards this should be the way to truly determine whether so many of the battles in the culture war are being won in Hollywood: the bottom line. Success in Hollywood is dependent on the traditional model of New Deal liberalism: if what you do is a profit to your industry, it leads to the success of everyone around you. The rest of the problems are resolved by that success. This has been how almost everyone who becomes successful in Hollywood works: if your film/TV show/album/etc. is a huge success then you are allowed to make another. The bigger the success, the more risks you are allowed to take and the people who were in your orbit – collaborators in the process – are given my proximity to that a chance to work on projects of their own. By that metric, the people who help you with that project are allowed to go on their own, and so on.

This has been the tradition of how successful people in the industry get their career started. Martin Scorsese becomes a successful director and his screenwriter Paul Schrader is allowed to direct and write films of his own. Matthew Weiner works as a writer on The Sopranos and is allowed to make Mad Men. George Harrison success as a Beatle allows him to become a solo artist and Ravi Shankar, one of his collaborators gets his own career. And so on. The tide of success lifts up all individuals. Work is done and you are allowed to work on other projects. At  a certain point you may be able to coast based on institutional memory as you have work that isn’t as successful but as long as you make money for someone you’re allowed to work.

The problems have really become clear when the new model of the left – always predominant in Hollywood – has begun to increasingly drive the train. Much of this has been built in the same argument that drives so much of the left when it comes to any institution: the idea that it is irrevocably tainted by white supremacy, misogyny and homophobia and that it is time for the minorities to take their rightful place. This has always been something of a flawed metric as it basically argues that every successful creative force in any industry was given an in simply because they were a white male. Anyone who knows the history of Hollywood knows the blatant lie in this: being a white actor/ director/screenwriter/ or any other creative profession in the studio system didn’t make you any less an indentured servant to the studios than women or anyone else. And this system is still basically in play no matter what. Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola could not just walk up to studio boss with their first script and be handed millions of dollars to make their movie with no limitations, simply because they were white men. They had to earn their success like everyone else. In Hollywood you’re only as good as your next project and that’s been true of everybody.

I don’t pretend that there isn’t toxic masculinity or  white bias in Hollywood. But I’m not naïve enough to believe that the solution to the problem comes by simply removing all of the white male bosses and putting in female bosses, African-American bosses, Latin X Bosses, LGBTQ+ bosses et al. I’ve seen enough about the behavior of certain showrunners on set to other members of their cast – including the ones of their own identification – to know that’s not the case. For my first witness I call Ellen DeGeneres, who for all the ceilings she knocked down is  now very much considered an unpleasant person to run a show. This isn’t a white, male problem, it’s a wealth and power problem and they have the ability to reveal a person’s true nature. She was allowed to get away with it for the same reason that the Harvey Weinstein’s and Les Moonves were: she was making money for her industry and that covered up any number of sins. You could argue, I suppose, that’s a sign of true equality: a lesbian was able to prove that given the opportunity she could be as horrible a boss and colleague as her white male counterparts.

Indeed I’d argue the true measure of success in any industry is if someone who is a minority is given a position of power and influence and is just as much a failure and a monster as any white male studio boss. The problem, however, has come from the sides of the constituencies of the left who consistently argue differently that they want to define it. By those standards accusations of abuses are naturally done out of sexism, racism, homophobia et al. usually led with that battle cry: “If they were a white man…” That statement in their minds ends the argument. The fact that they have been arguing that this bad behavior in white men is something they should be held accountable for somehow doesn’t enter the equation.

This brings us to the more basic issue about numbers. I have frequently heard over the years from conservative colleagues and websites such tropes as ‘people are saying’ about certain projects that involve ‘woke’ characters for known intellectual properties involving basically any reboot of an old property. I dismiss that term out right because I know that’s hearsay. The other argument about box office or ratings being inflated for certain projects is more grounded in reality because I know studios do inflate numbers in ads or official announcements to make projects sound like they are more successful then they actually are. But by and large I dismiss these arguments because I am more inclined to believe numbers don’t lie.

The larger issue is one that has become more striking particularly when it comes to movie remakes of properties with gender/race swaps; ‘modernization’ of older properties or live action remakes of animated films and they fail. To be clear – and I always have been – I find all of these kinds of things done with any property, film or television, mostly unnecessary if unsurprising. As I’ve said before Hollywood, like all business, is concerned with making a profit. In the entertainment industry, particular film and television where revenues are shrinking across the board, the best way to do is to make a product that is appealing to the widest possible audience causing the least possible controversy.

And over the last decade in particular this has run in to the stonewall of so much of the left that is driving Hollywood in particular, demanding that the studio makes projects where they are at the center of them front and center and in the case of remakes either swapping the genders or races regardless of the flak that is drawn for doing so. It is here we clearly see the politics in play in which the institution must address these actions because they are the moral thing and not out of any other consideration. This has been clear numerous times in the 21^st century but the furor seems to have started in movies with the all-female remake of Ghostbusters.

Just as with Star Wars, comic books and really everything else, I never understood why the internet got so angry about a 1980s comedy hit that was nowhere near the funniest movie of the decade. This was not a movie that deserved a remake of any kind in my opinion mainly because it was a product of its time. This was a film that worked because of the era – in 1980s New York was such a shithole you could believe ghosts could inhabit the city and we’d just walk it off. New York is not the same place in 2016 as it was in 1984 or 1989. Flipping the genders wasn’t going to change the situation. People didn’t take Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd seriously because the subject is ridiculous. If the argument is that no one will take a supernatural threat seriously because  Kate McKinnon and Melissa McCarthy are telling me that, I can assure you I wouldn’t believe it if Adam Sandler and Chris Rock were.

Yet this film essentially became the cause celebre for the worst aspects of male bullying on the internet, which sadly is to be expected. This could have been overcome, however, had there been in a surplus of female or LGBTQ+ audience coming out to see in the theaters. That did not happen. Nor was the critical response  - legitimate critics, not internet trolls – any kinder. Ghostbusters failed because not because of toxic masculinity but because no one went to see it.

That should have been a lesson to all concerned that doing this kind of gender or race swapping on iconic properties to Hollywood was not worth the economic reward for the furor it caused. And yet, perhaps in result to the election of 2016 more than anything else, the studio system seemed more willing than it should have been to double down on this. In some cases it clearly worked, particularly for films such as Black Panther, Wonder Woman and Crazy Rich Asians. As entertainments they were very rewarding I’ll grant you.

The problem seems to have come when this new breed of filmmakers – and in some cases TV showrunners, began to take the increasing position that films based on other properties that did not work – particularly in franchises in comic book movies that were badly underperforming at the box office – were not, in fact, failing. They increasingly took the argument that many of these films –  particularly ones such as Captain Marvel or Blue Beetle that were increasingly underperforming at the box office – were somehow victims of this white misogyny of the internet. As someone who saw – unwillingly in some cases – many of these films I can tell you Captain Marvel was as good as Ant-Man: Quantumania. Which is to say it was terrible. It didn’t underperform at the box office because there was a vast conspiracy by studio heads or the industry to tank their own movie: Hollywood doesn’t want to lose money on anything. The free market ruled. They were given a wide release and the audiences hated them. You can’t get fairer than that.

If anything services like Amazon, Marvel and so many other streaming services have been ridiculous patient with so many of the streaming shows that have come from Lord of the Rings; the Star Wars franchise; comic books, et al. They have been willing to stick their necks out for so many projects and are willing to give diversity to so many of these fantasy projects, knowing that they will take a shit-ton of abuse for doing so. But at a certain point, they are a business and they have to cut their losses. Columnists may whine all they want about studios giving into the vitriol of the internet by cancelling certain shows or with films but if those people choose not to watch those shows or not go to the movies, well, are they supposed to just keep making these projects and losing money solely to please a relative few? In the binary moral thinking of the left, the answer is obvious. In the real world, it’s just as obvious. And as we know those two worlds rarely, if ever, overlap.

What’s the reward for Hollywood if they make movies with an African-American Captain America and it underperforms as badly as those with white leads? What’s the point of trying to do a revisionist version of Snow White – a fairy tale collected originally in the 19^th century, as a reminder – and no one bothers to attend? If these were films that, as those on the left will argue, people actually were crying out for then by any definition the box office would have been through the roof. Instead, its clear both films are primed to be the kind of box office bombs that can kill the careers everyone associated with it – and in the past have brought down studios themselves. Yet even now there are writers – to call them a critic is a disservice to the term – who look at the failure of these big budget films that were massively promoted and say they failed because of ‘the system’. The system allowed those projects to get greenlit and produced in the first place. But in the corkscrew logic of the left, that is never the point.

I should remind everybody involved that I say this as someone who doesn’t like any of these projects to begin with and speaks of it with what I would like to think is objectivity. I’ve made my position on many of these franchises very clear over time. I don’t have a dog in this fight as a fan. As a critic, however, I do judge because by making every single film or TV show a battle for the soul of America, reviewing certain shows seems to mean that you are making a political statement. That’s funnier, frankly, than any joke in the remake of Ghostbusters and  about sixty percent of the 1984 film

So for those of you who want to argue that The Acolyte failed because of the homophobia of society, that Shang-Chi failed because America is racist, that Mrs. Marvel got canceled because of bigotry, I won’t stop you. (Mainly because I know you will anyway). You want to argue that the corporate overlords should have promoted the project, stood up for it more, and that they weren’t supportive, you will anyway. I could argue that probably even ten years ago they wouldn’t even have been greenlit. And I would argue that if these had been huge successes the corporations would have no doubt kept fighting for it.

But I can assure you that when I choose not to watch your precious film or TV show, it’s not because I’m a racist or a homophobe or a sexist but because I don’t particularly want to see it. I have free will and I can decide not to see your film or TV show. If I do see it and, like far too many films based on these properties, I find it lacking I will give you the same treatment I do if I hate a film done written or directed by white men. Believe me, I’ve seen more than enough of their projects to know they can suck as badly as yours.

And for the record, if your film bombs or your TV show gets canceled and you decide to blame the industry or any part of society for it failing, that’s your right. Don’t be surprised if you don’t get to handle another project any time soon. Your failures are not society’s failures or the industry’s failures. You were given a chance. Many people in your position – and I speak about white men as much as any group of identity politics – never get one at all. That’s how a fair society works. You want to argue it should work differently, well, that’s what the internet’s for after all.

 

 

 

Yellowjackets Episode Recap: A Normal, Boring Life

 

In the final third of Season 3 of Lost it seems like rescue has come to the survivors of Oceanic 815. A pilot claiming to have come looking for another survivor says that her freighter is just off the coast of the island and that it will take them all home. During the season finale Ben, the leader of the Others, becomes aware of this and does everything in his power to stop the survivors from calling for help. “If you do, it will be the beginning of the end,” he warns Jack repeatedly. At the climax of the episode the pilot is about to call for help when she is stabbed in the back by John Locke, who has arrived because ‘the island’ has told him that he has to do this. A stunned Jack makes it clear he’s going to make this call, despite the warnings of both of them and does. By this point, the viewer already knows that the people on the boat are not who they claim to be.

When Season 4 begins Locke learns of this from one of the other survivors. To be clear, he didn’t know this before he killed the pilot but finding a chance to use someone who is already weak – his closest friend on the island died during the effort – he pushes him to manipulate the rest of the survivors into going with him rather than staying on the beach and being rescued. This leads to the biggest divide in the survivors so far. A team of scientists then arrive and make it very clear that ‘rescuing you isn’t their first priority’.

We are at roughly the same point in the past in Season 3 of Yellowjackets when rescue looks like it has come (and I don’t think its by chance that it comes in a group of scientists.) But after watching ‘A Normal, Boring Life’ last night’s episode it’s already clear of the critical differences between this and a similar point in Lost. True, the moment rescue seemed apparent the most delusional member of the survivors Lotte put an axe in the back of one of the scientists but we already know from the previous episode, this attempt will fail. And it raises a question that probably never occurred to any fan of the show to this point, certainly not to me? Is it possible the only reason the survivors got rescued was because they didn’t have a choice in the matter? There’s a lot more to unpack of course but let’s start in the past.

From the very first minutes of Season 3, it has been clear that not only have the teenage survivors lost any sense of morality but have now become focused only on the wilderness and nothing else. We’ve seen how selfish and self-centered they’ve been so many times during the season but this point is driven home when they finally tie up Hannah, the woman who they just chased through the woods and threatened to kill and started to pepper her with questions about why nobody has come for them. The fact that they’ve killed her husband and the threat of violence is very clear to her is bad enough that they think they can just talk to her normally, but when she tells them that she doesn’t have the answers about what happened to them and they take that as a reason she can’t be trusted shows that at the end of the day how narcissistic so many of them have become. They have given in so fully to the idea of being chosen by the wilderness and their ‘specialness’ that the idea the entire world stopped when their plane fell from the sky is a concept that they can’t grasp.

For the record, if we’re going by the calendar of the show it’s at least the late summer of 1997. There’s been a presidential election, Bill Clinton is in the middle of the scandals that will threaten his presidency and there’s a very real possibility that the world is obsessed with Princess Di and Dodi Fay-Ed right now. And this isn’t an airliner going down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; this is a prop plane with a lacrosse team going down in the Canadian wilderness. The internet and social media didn’t exist in 1996 but the idea that what happened to a small plane carrying a group of teenage girls having a life span of more than a few weeks in even the eyes of local media is ludicrous.

At this point we’re seeing the signs of a clear divide in the Yellowjackets, one that comes to a head at the end of the flashbacks. We already in the present how this will end so it’s worth pointing out that the people who are currently leading the argument to stay – Lottie, Tai and Shauna – will all eventually be among the saved. This leads to my strong suspicion that when it happens it will come only when the Yellowjackets have no way to back out of it.

As to the divide, it’s worth noting right now who wants to go back: Natalie, Travis, Van and Misty (for the moment). Natalie (Sophie Thatcher)and Travis (Kevin Alves)  as we clearly see absolutely don’t buy anything regarding the wilderness. Travis has clearly been trying to persuade the other survivors that this is just lunacy but by now he knows that he’s in the minority. This would explain why Nat and Travis kept getting drawn to each other in the present: it wasn’t just their shared trauma but the certainty that they were the sanest ones among the crazy people.

As to the ones who want to stay there are multiple ironies in play. The biggest is clearly with Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown). In her scene with Van, who clearly wants to go home, she’s worried about what will happen if the truth comes out and the amount of lies they’ll have to tell. She’s clearly afraid about the rest of them to hold the cover story in play. Of course, as we all know, the cover story did hold for 25 years and Tai was among the most instrumental in blowing it up in the first place. There’s now a very good chance that one of the major reasons Tai and Van ended up breaking up had to do with the fact that she wanted to go home and Tai didn’t.

Shauna’s motivations (Sophie Nelisse)  are vague at this point but I’m increasingly beginning to believe that she sees this as her chance to be Jackie, unencumbered by rules. She doesn’t believe in the wilderness any more than Nat or Travis do; she just sees it as a way to be in charge. At this point whatever remaining sympathy we might have for her in the past or the present is completely gone. We know that Shauna is going to win this argument and be responsible for the deaths and almost certain cannibalism of these two innocent people for the sole reason of being the leader. It’s worth remembering that Shauna had just been given the crown the moment rescue came. This is the first time she’s had absolute power of any kind and she’s already made it clear that she has no intention of giving it up.

And in the present, it’s now very clear how deep that narcissism still runs. She has entered the home of the daughter of one of the scientists who we knows she’s killed with a knife in her hand. Then the woman comes home and she sees she has a daughter. I have little doubt at this point Shauna would have killed her and her daughter. What stops her is the sight of the woman’s wife. She clearly sense something and picks up a knife of her own. It is here we learn of a new survivor, Mari. (Hello, Hilary Swank!)

This comes as a momentary shock to Shauna because the others have thought Mari was dead. We later learn Mari faked her death and has been living a false life as the lover of the teenage survivor and it has become real. Shauna’s first reaction is telling: “Was this because you couldn’t have me?” Gone in a moment is the pretense that this is because she wants to keep her daughter and husband safe – or if she even loves them.

The conversation between the two takes up the majority of the episode in the present (yes, there’s more I’ll get to it) and it is doubtless the episode Melanie  Lynskey should submit for consideration for an Emmy. It is in this conversation we realize her darkest, deepest secret – and it’s not even that surprising. As an adult Shauna can’t get over the fact that she peaked in high school and it is impossible for her to believe that anyone else misses the glory days. When Mari tells her she has a normal, boring life and that she’s happy, Shauna dismisses the idea outright because the only time she was truly happy was when she was in the wilderness, the center of everyone’s attention. She couldn’t accept the rest of the world wouldn’t know about what had happened to them (meaning her) and she can’t accept anyone would be happy with a normal life.

So much of what has happened in the present has been set in motion by Shauna, and while we initially thought it was just by happenstance Mari makes it very clear Shauna likes blowing up her life. Shauna continues to deny it saying her daughter knows who she is and she loves her. “Now who’s lying?” Mari points out quietly.

And it’s worth noting while this is going on Callie and her father have come to the realization of just how toxic Shauna is, if not entirely how dangerous. Callie has realized it in the last episode and Jeff is beginning to realize it himself. Jeff has been willing to be led by Shauna far too much this season, so when he makes the decision first to check out of the hotel without telling his wife and then to reconnect with the Joels (where tellingly, his deal goes much better without her). There are signs he’s beginning to realize that if he wants to keep his family safe, it has to be away from their mother.

That may be the best answer for everybody. Throughout the episode Shauna continues to argue about the constant death threats against her, this time choosing to blame them all on Mari. Considering she blamed them all on Misty just two episodes ago, it’s increasingly becoming clear of just how deeply paranoid she is. And it’s clear just how crazy Shauna is well before the final moments. Even when Mari keeps telling her about everything that happened to her, including Natalie’s death and Lottie’s cult Shauna starts making excuses for it even though she wanted to have Lottie locked up in the first place. Shauna looks at all of the horrible things that are happening around her and can only see a world where she is the victim. “The only way to be safe is to be the last one alive,” she tells Mari simply. The idea that she was ever under threat in the first place is not something she will accept.

What’s becoming nearly as unsettling is that at this point in the show Misty – Misty! – is looking very much like the only survivor who still has anything resembling a moral compass. She calls Jeff to tell him where Shauna is and what happened – something that her husband had no idea about it – and asks him if he can tell her where she was when Lottie died. Showing what might for her be considered tact, she stops short of telling him what she told Shauna. When she learns how bad things are for Van she tries to be a caregiver, only to be stopped by Tai who demands they go to palliative care. Then she watches in horror as Tai tries to prepare herself to kill a dying man in an effort to keep Van alive. Misty is horrified (which is something) and gets Tai out of there before she can be caught. It’s pretty clear that she couldn’t do it for long and one wonders what she’ll think if she finds out what ‘Tai’ did in the aftermath.

At this point in Season 3 the writers are reversing our expectations of everyone we thought we knew about those who came back and that is especially true for Misty. We’re not sure what she will do in the past but her actions in the present now seem to be less of a person who is a spy and busybody and more of a woman who is, in her twisted way, trying to atone for her actions. It’s not clear yet if she’s accepted her role in Natalie’s death but it seems to becoming obvious that she is realizing that the people she’s been trying to protect all this time not only don’t appreciate her but may not be worthy of her protection. It’s still unclear at this point if Misty ever believed in the Wilderness the same way that many of the others did but she clearly took Coach Scott’s death very harshly. That may be one of the reasons why Natalie came to her in Season 1 rather than Tai or Shauna even though both were more outwardly respectable. She remembered the break in the past and she knew how dangerous both of them might be.

And at the climax in the present Shauna finally reveals to all of us how dangerous she is. In the most horrific act she’s done that can’t be excused she leaps on Miri,  bites a piece out of her, and demands she eat it. “You really are crazy,” Miri says. At this point, the only one who might still be able to deny it is Shauna herself.

Amanda Seyfried Raises Long Bright River Into A Superb Limited Series

 

The first time we meet Mickey Fitzpatrick in Peacock’s Long, Bright River she is playing a recording of Faust to her son before he goes to his school. During that episode her son Thomas (Callum Vinson) does his homework and relates the narrative of Faust and what the story is about. (I don’t know which version is so I can’t judge.) Later that day Mickey comes home to find Thomas upset, she initially assumes because of bullying. Instead Thomas tells her that he got a bad grade on the project because he got the interpretation wrong – the one his mother no doubt told him it was. Rather than admit she made a mistake Mickey tells her son that ‘stories are subject to various interpretations and you can choose her own.”

And that pretty much sums up everything we need to know about Mickey even before we get her backstory in the series. One of her cousins has a blunter interpretation: “Mickey lies.” We already know this after three episodes (the number I’ve seen to this point) but Mickey herself would simply say that’s she simply interpreting the world in the way she sees fit. What Mickey seems unable to realize is that her interpretation has basically put her where she is right now and that everyone else – including Thomas – can see the flaws in her façade.

It may tell you everything you need to know about Mickey that she is portrayed by that extraordinary actress Amanda Seyfried. Seyfried has been acting since she was fourteen and with the sole exception of her breakout performance in Mean Girls her gift has been playing characters who are wise beyond their years. This has been true in particular in work for television, from playing Lily Kane on Veronica Mars to her extraordinary work as Sarah on Big Love, the teenage daughter who only wants to get out of the mire of her polygamous family to her brief but memorable stint in Twin Peaks: The Return to her long overdue Emmy winning performance as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout. Her next TV role was playing an investigator in Apple TV’s acclaimed The Crowded Room and one could see her work as Mickey, a Philadelphia police officer walking the streets in the midst of the opioid epidemic trying to solve a serial killer of the ‘girls on the block’ combined with the search for her own sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings) who has gone missing and cut from the same cloth. Indeed I suppose some could just see this as the second season of Mare of Easttown we never got.

But there are key differences between the characters played by Kate Winslet and Seyfried. The most critical is that Mare managed to at least be the position of chief of police in her small town to acknowledge her sense of superiority. Mickey has never managed to rise above beat cop and like everything else, it’s not a position she particularly likes. We see her in early scenes with her mentor Truman (Nicholas Pinnock who teaches her everything he knows about being a cop. We also see him bust a girl with pink hair in a bodega and Mickey all but begs her to let her go. It’s not until after he does it she reveals that the girl is Kacey, her sister.

We learn that Mickey went to college, trained as an oboist, and had to drop out for reasons were not clear on yet but that we can assume had to deal with her becoming pregnant with Thomas. We know that Mickey and Kacey were orphaned when their mother died of an opium overdose, inflicted on them because their junkie father got her hooked on the drug and left them behind. We know that Mickey was basically the stickler for rules and clearly thought she was meant for greater things – something her family genuinely seems to hold against her and she makes no secret in their interactions that she does feel she’s better than them. We also know that Kacey got hooked on opioids herself, struggled with sobriety, and Mickey finally turned her over to the cops when she stole a piece of jewelry that belonged to their mother. Kacey has clearly never forgiven Mickey for that fact and Mickey has spent much of her life as a cop trying to look after her sister. As of the beginning of Long Bright River, she’s been gone for two months.

As the story begins it becomes clear that there have been a bunch of deaths among girls on the block. Ahearn thinks they’re ODs but Mickey believes their murders. Almost single-handedly she managed to push the start of an investigation into a serial killer, something that truly annoys her boss. And it’s clear by this point in the series that even this investigation into the killings is just a cover for Mickey to see if she can find out what happened to her sister.

Yet even that is not the truth. During the opening episodes Thomas has been given an assignment for a family tree something that Mickey considers ‘presumptuous’. The only member of the family she has apparently let Thomas interact with is her grandfather (John Doman) and it’s clear every time they get together that she’s only doing it for her son’s. Gee knows this very well –  in their interactions he ‘jokes’ that “she’s too good for the likes’ of the people in the bar he owns. Mickey has lots of cousins and uncles but she never lets them to interact, claiming her job gets in the way. In the third episode Thomas finally erupts at her, saying that “she lies all the time and that she never teaches me the things that matter.” Thomas is smart enough to know that his mom has been lying to him for years and it’s not because she wants to protect him from the truth but because she’s clearly ashamed of where she comes from. After a Thanksgiving dinner with the cousins (where Thomas is happier than we’ve seen him so far) he asks about the ‘girl in the pink hair’. It’s now clear that for all Mickey’s determined to protect her sister now, she’s never once told Thomas that she has one.

We know that Kacey, at least in part, has been traumatized by the circumstances that led to them being adopted by their grandparents and that was at least a partial reason for what happened to her now. In the sense that Mickey is not living on the streets or addicted to drugs she’s doing better than her sister but her cover is clearly her sense of superiority and trying interpret stories her own way. In her world she is the only person who can be fully trusted with events and everyone around it can sense it. Her family thinks she’s above them, and the people on her beat she’s trying to protect know all too well about her own agenda. When Truman was shot, she clearly cut him out of her life and only comes back to see him when she thinks she’s in danger. Even then she refuses to tell him all she knows about what’s going and follows angles that nearly get her killed without telling him. Her current landlady (Harriet Sansom Harris) thinks she’s trouble and Thomas’s father is very much out of the picture. Mickey has been able to survive as a single parent but she’s utterly unwilling to let people in – something Truman finally calls her on when something so horrible happens and she still refuses to open up about why.

This is the reason that Seyfried is absolutely perfect for the role. She has always had the ability to play performers wise beyond their age but for the first time as Mickey she’s plays someone where that’s clear a front and one that everyone else can see through. Truman tells her that she has to let the people who are there for you in and cut out the people who keep letting you down. Kacey is clearly one of the latter  - Gee tells her as much dismissively -  but Mickey’s guilt won’t allow her. So much of what is happening around here is clearly bringing up painful memories and so much trauma and she has to this point resisted telling anybody – even her own son – the truth.

Long Bright River is based on the best selling novel by Liz Moore, who is one of the head writers of the limited series. Like almost every limited series adaptation of a book on TV, I have gone in knowing nothing about it though I was aware of the book first. The series is also being created by Nikki Toscano and indeed most of the writers and directors for this limited series are female. Toscano has worked in TV for a very long time, starting procedurals such as Detroit 1-8-7,  the cult hit Revenge and her most recent project The Offer for which she wrote six episodes is one of the most highly ranked series on imdb.com. This is the first project she’s had complete creative control over and shows the steady hand of someone who lifts what should be a traditional story we’ve seen before in recent years and actually tells what I can tear my eyes away from.

We are coming close to the end of the 2024-2025 Emmy eligibility period and it remains unclear what some of the major contenders for Limited Series save for The Penguin, Disclaimer and possibly Monsters which got the vast majority of award nominations in a period by and large dominated by contenders from the previous year. It’s hard to know if Long Bright River will contend – for one thing, it is on Peacock a relatively new streamer that has yet to have an Emmy nominee in any of the major big three categories. But in recent years the streamer has upped its game across the board and this year may very well be its breakout for awards. Day of the Jackal has already been nominated for Best Drama by every major awards group so far and  Poker Face is due back for a second season in just a few weeks. Seyfried would be a worthy contender and so might Long Bright River itself. I’ll have to wait until the end of the series to make my final judgment. But unlike some of the other major contenders this year – particularly The Perfect Couple and Monsters – this is one I’m actually glad I started watching early and can’t wait to finish. That’s the benchmark of superb television.

My score: 4.25 stars.