David E. Kelley Offers Love And Death - And So Much More

 

As we come closer to the time for Emmy nominations it was always likely I was going to end up watching Love and Death. With the Limited Series category wide open due The White Lotus being submitted in the Best Drama category, there were many contenders I knew I would have to get caught up on. I’d have to finish The Patient, get started on Daisy Jones & The Six and finally get around to watching Dahmer. The fact that Love and Death had dropped on HBO Max (soon to drop the HBO) Thursday just meant that it was there.

My lack of eagerness was in part due because the story being told was one that I had, in fact, been told in a limited series just last year. Hulu’s Candy, with Jessica Biel in the title role, had been one of many limited series that had received early Emmy buzz from the streaming service. Dopesick and The Dropout were the ones I ended up following, I refused to watch Pam and Tommy and I’ve only recently starting to look at Under the Banner in Heaven.  Indeed Elizabeth Olsen who plays Montgomery here learned about Biel’s adaptation two months before Love and Death started told her that HBO Max was planning its own adaptation. Biel thanked her and continued to make her version.

Perhaps my eagerness to see this series might have increased had I known that it was the handiwork of David E. Kelley. Kelley since the debut of Big Little Lies has become the master craftsman when it comes to female-centered limited series. Perhaps the only shock is that Nicole Kidman is merely  the producer and not the lead. That choice, as you shall see, was a brilliant one because when it comes to the character of Candy Montgomery, Kidman would have been the wrong choice.

Elizabeth Olsen has been a sensation for her work as Wanda Maximoff in the MCU, and as a result has rarely been able to work in other features in the last decade. This has been a disappointment because since she burst onto the scene in the masterpiece independent film Martha Marcy May Marlene she has constantly been demonstrating what a brilliant subtle actress she can be particularly when it comes to damaged characters. Perhaps that is why she was cast as the Scarlet Witch, who from the moment we meet her  has spent her entire life being damaged and manipulated by the world to the point that she finds happiness in the arms of Vision.

In part that may very well been the reason Wandavision was so riveting. Throughout the series Olsen demonstrated a character so utterly incapable of dealing with her emotional trauma that she was literally willing to destroy the world around her so that she could live in a fantasy no matter how much collateral damage there was. That in most of the ‘episodes’ she was playing a housewife and mother living a happy existence may have been part of the reason Kelley chose her to play Candy Montgomery; in the world of Love and Death, Candy is unsatisfied with the life she wants to live and needs to find a way to break out of the mold.

As the series begins in the small town of Kyle, Texas in 1977, Candy is married to the sweet but dull Pat (Patrick Fugit finally gets his first role in nearly two decades to demonstrate his range.) She has two children, she sings in the church choir, she is beloved member of the community – the perfect mirror of the 1970s comedies that Wanda lived in.

But Wanda clearly wants more. Her major outlet in the first couple of episodes is being part of a creative writing class, one that her husband does not appreciate. Then while playing in the church volleyball league she runs into Allan Gore and is struck by something.

Allan is the husband of one of her closest friends, Betty (Lily Rabe). Betty is something of a control freak, who is trying to become pregnant the first time we see her and directs sex like traffic. Allan is understandably frustrated by his wife who has been going through post-partum depression “since before the baby came.” Jesse Plemons, who has been playing doughy faced innocents since Friday Night Lights, seems to be playing an adult version of Landry, though it is hard to tell just how much of depth he has (we all know there can be more beneath the surface of them in shows such as Breaking Bad and Fargo.) Nevertheless, he is understandably surprised when Candy knocks on the window of his car, gets in and says: “Would you be interested in having an affair?”

Eventually Allan calls her for lunch and talks about the state of his marriage and genuinely tells her that he wants to think it over. We expect the series to cut immediately to fierce pounding in a motel room, but Kelley’s subverts our expectations. Rather we see both Allan and Candy weighing out the pros and cons (Candy on colored indexed cards, Allan on notepads) and they seem to go through weeks if not months of strategizing before they come up with a set of rules. All of this is frankly hysterical, particularly in the final ‘strategy session’ when Candy writes down the ‘dos’ and don’ts.’ Allan nods alone and makes sure that “Don’t fall in love’ gets moved to number one.

Finally they decide to meet for their first rendezvous. Even then, Kelley subverts our expectations. Candy shaves her legs, makes lunch which she puts in a picnic basket, drives down to a motel, neatens it, sets out the lunch and then Allan shows up. They have a sweet meal together and finally the two of them kiss – and Candy is kind of surprised that Allan has never French kissed before. The sex scene happens and then Candy goes into the shower. (There’s more than that before the first episode ends but I’ll save that for later, even though its not exactly a spoiler.

It says something as to how remarkable I found the first episode that I came as close to breaking my rule of binge watching. Rather than wait my self-prescribed week, I watched the next episode roughly forty-eight hours later.

To be clear, there’s a lot of sex in the second episode (though by the standards of HBO and indeed even some broadcast TV, it’s almost chaste by some standards.) But what the second episode does very clearly is show the relationship between Allan and Candy beginning to change. They discuss details of their lives they are either proud of or ashamed of (you need to hear what Allan’s is because its kind of delightful). They go to a county fair together. They have discussions about how poor the new minister of their local church is compared to the one who has just left. And it is clear to both of them that the relationship is deepening, but neither Allan nor Candy want to let go of it. Allan, however, feels that he has to try and save his marriage to Betty and they go to the church version of marriage counselling.

It is a measure of how good a writer Kelley is that having spent much of the first two episodes making Betty look like a harridan, he then does everything he can to reveal that she is vulnerable and is in pain. She does want to be desired by Allan and Allan genuinely loves her. How they begin their reconciliation is indeed hysterical (let’s just say she uses an f-word that would not get censored anywhere) but there’s something genuinely sweet about it when you see the two of them renew their vows. Unfortunately, Candy has been babysitting the past week and even if you don’t know how the real-life story (I didn’t  but the opening shot of the episode does) you know this won’t end well.

Love and Death is another in a string of masterworks Kelley has done so far in the 2020s and its clear from the start that his choice of Olsen over his regulars Kidman or Reese Witherspoon was absolutely perfect. Olsen has the ability to show vulnerability in the same way both of those women to do but while she is as sexual a being, there’s something less glamorous about her appearance that is far more fitting to the role of Candy Montgomery. It’s clear that Candy is a precursor to so many of the housewives at Monterey – as she tells her minister before embarking on her affair, she has the same doubts about whether this is all there is -  but there’s clearly an anger about her that is far more obvious. When Allan gives a hint that the affair might be coming to an ending, there’s a spark of bitterness that is not present in any Kelley heroine so far, and when she goes out for a night on the town, she seems angry when confiding in one of her best friends: “He didn’t know how to French kiss before I met him.” The second episode ends with her silently grinding meat with a blank expression that bodes no good.

The rest of the cast is superb: Plemons and Rabe are up to their usual level of brilliance, Elizabeth Marvel, as she does so frequently, has a great early role as the voice of reason (and as her characters almost always are, it is ignored). I have yet to see Ozark’s Tom Pelphrey in the role of her attorney, but I expect to see good things. Only Krysten Ritter, who plays Candy’s confidant, isn’t used to her full potential in the two episodes I see her in, but perhaps it’s because her usual bad-girl energy is being toned down.

As is the case with every Kelley limited series, music and film is a big part of the series: the opening credits show over ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,’ the Bee Gees and the Hustle are everywhere, and disco tunes are prevalent. (I almost wonder if Kelley chose this subject just so he could have an excuse to the seventies music that is at the background of every series that he’s written have a legitimate reason for being there; he used a Janis Joplin number that he wrapped up the second season of Big Little Lies with at the end of the second episode.) But unlike all his other series, the church is a far bigger factor in Love and Death. All the regulars are involved with the choir and church business and meet there as part of the community; people are outraged when Marvel’s character leaves Lyle and some believe it has to do with her divorce, and there is a lot of hostility towards the new pastor both when it comes to his sermons and how he treats the community. Perhaps Kelley is using this in symbolism: with God not involved in the characters lives they way they were, sin and evil have snuck into the town of Lyle and may never be truly exorcised.

It is very likely Love and Death will be a major contender for Emmys this year: Olsen is a near sure thing for a Best Actress nomination and I could easily see Kelley and Plemons getting a fair amount of love as well. Yet even if it is not a major contender, I still want to see how it ends regardless. I know that I’ll have to wait a little longer due to the new way series are being dropped these days (the first three episodes dropped this weekend, it will air new ones until May 25^th) but honestly I’d gladly wait every minute of it not more. Love and Death demonstrates not only the mastery of Kelley’s craft, but the way television should work when its firing on all cylinders. Even if you watched Candy and see no point in seeing the same story told again, I think the viewer should see Love and Death any way. There are always more than one side of every story, and there’s always more than one way of telling it.

My score: 4.75 stars.

Lost: Collision

 

TV History Note: The actor who plays Ana Lucia’s partner in the patrol car, Michael Cudlitz, was basically unknown in the fall of 2005. In 2009 he would be one of the lead actors on a failed NBC drama called Southland  which he played another LAPD officer. The series would be cancelled after one failed season but be picked up by TNT and run for another five. The show was one of the most critically acclaimed of its era and Cudlitz in particular received much praise and award nominations. Cudlitz himself would win a Supporting Actor prize from the Critics Choice Awards in 2013, the year the show was cancelled. Immediately after leaving, he joined the cast of The Walking Dead and his character would famously meet his end at the hands (and bat) of Negan. His last major role was on the cast of the failed (but fascinating) Clarice. Small world, ain’t it?

 

Collision is rarely considered among the all-time great episodes of Lost, even though it has some of the most powerful moments in the season and perhaps the series. Again, I think this is mainly because of how quickly the tail section survivors became non-entities within a season. But watching this episode, you really get the feeling that was never the plan of the writers. There are so many moments in this episode that make you think that the writing staff clearly had long term plans for all of them.

This is particularly clear in the case of Ana Lucia who becomes the first survivor of the tail section to get her own flashback. Seeing her story unfold you can clearly see the parallels the writers are trying to draw between her and many of the characters we’ve already met. For one, like Jack, she clearly has issues with a parent she’s spent her life trying to live up to. Just as Jack became a spinal surgeon to try and prove himself to his father, Ana Lucia clearly became a cop to live up to the expectations of her mother. (As we shall see, there’s a more direct link than that.) Unlike Christian, Teresa Cortez is more protective of her daughter than Christian was,  but Ana Lucia clearly bucks against her just as much as Jack does Christian and there’s clearly bitterness as part of this. (Teresa may have spoiled the surprise for Ana Lucia because of her true unhappiness as to why her daughter won’t let her protect her.) Teresa wants to help her daughter after the horrible trauma that unfolded but she is blind as to just how damaged Ana Lucia is.

There are also clear links to Kate and Sawyer in that, like them, Ana Lucia killed a man in the past (we saw Sawyer’s murder, we’re about to see Kate’s) and as we learn in the worst possible way,  she has a link to Claire. But the character she has the clearest link to is Sayid.

By the time the episode has even begun, Ana Lucia has permanently torched any possible chance of any civil relationship between them because of her accidental killing of Shannon. One of the great ironies of this is well before we learned anything about Ana Lucia’s past, it was already clear that she and Sayid were far more suited for a romantic relationship that he and Shannon ever were. Both were fundamentally haunted by their actions in the past, both had experience in law enforcement and firearms, and both fundamentally felt themselves as solitary well before they came to the island. When Sayid shouts out that Ana has no plan: “She has only her guilt… and a gun,” it’s clear that he’s been exactly where Ana was so long before.

Ana’s leadership over the tail section survivors has been fragmenting ever since the trek back to the beach and this officially unravels it. Eko’s first reaction to Sayid’s rage is to tackle him, but its done solely to protect further violence. When Ana demands Eko search Sayid for weapons, he is stunned and refuses to help her. Ana’s leadership is now being maintained by gunpoint and when Michael goes to give Sayid water, it’s clear that even he has the measure of Ana now. By that point Eko has made the decision that he must save Sawyer and once he is gone, the rest of it unravels.

There’s something terribly sad about watching Ana Lucia during this episode. It’s been clear for a while she’s been leading based on terror rather than authority and as soon as outsiders began to question what she’d been doing, it was inevitable she didn’t have that any more. When she orders Michael to get her ammo and survival equipment, it’s pretty obvious that she has decided  the only path forward for her is isolation. After Bernard begins to challenge her – understandably – she finally gives up. It’s telling that Jin is the last to leave – he desperately wants to see Sun again, but he knows that if he leaves there is an excellent chance Sayid will not survive.

The last scene between Sayid and Ana Lucia is incredible as well as one of the most heartbreaking. It’s clear that Sayid has resigned himself to his fate and there is clearly a part of him that welcomes it. Shannon’s death has clearly taken all the heart out of him and he doesn’t seem to see a way forward. The former torturer doesn’t have to lay a hand or even say anything to Ana to get her to reveal her darkest secret,

It's just as clear that Ana doesn’t see a reason to live anymore. She reveals something we’ve suspected for a while – the shooting truly killed her spirit as much as it did her unborn child. (The flashbacks have clearly been hinting at it in both her therapy session and the fact that Ana snaps when she hears a crying baby on the distress call.) She can’t bring herself to confess what she actually did to the man who nearly killed her, but when she frees Sayid its clear that she’s hoping that his actions will absolve her of the murders she committed. There are those who say that Sayid’s decision not to torture Ana Lucia showed that he had managed to move forward from his actions. When he tells her: “What good would it do to kill you if we’re both already dead?” there’s an argument that he has entirely given it up. He’s already told Ana that he has spent his life carrying the guilt of his actions; perhaps he thinks it is just as fitting that she carry the guilt of hers.

By the time this has ended, we’re dealing with a new set of circumstances brought about by a different set of reunions. Kate and Jack have spent the season so far calm, charming and by the time we get to this episode, playful with each other again. Then when they are actually in the middle of play, Eko shows up with Sawyer on his back.

Jack devotes his attention to trying to save Sawyer’s life but as much as he tries to hide it, it clearly stings that Kate is able to get Sawyer to take pills that Jack initially gives him. It’s now obvious that the gentleness between them only happened because Sawyer wasn’t in the picture any more.

A meeting that is going to be critical for the season that follows – and doubtless was going to be more important – is the first meeting of Locke and Eko. This is the first time we’ve been back in the hatch for three episodes and its worth noting that we haven’t seen Locke back in for a bit either. The diminishing of Locke’s character hasn’t been obvious for a while, and he’s been making more of an effort to be social in a way he wasn’t in a bit. (He has just learned there’s a real possibility Charlie is using again but he won’t try to deal with that for a bit.) Admittedly, there’s a troubling sign when he asks Jack what’s going on when he brings in Sawyer, and all Jack to say is: “Locke? The button,” to get rid of him.

But for the rest of the episode he’s closer to being who he was. He asks Eko what’s going on, he’s clearly upset Shannon’s dead, and while he’s a little put off as to why Eko won’t take him to his friends, he seems to believe Eko’s explanation.

Jack initially can’t handle Eko’s infinite calm any better than Locke’s faith, though in this case he has a valid reason too – Shannon has been murdered, Sawyer is clearly critical, and there’s a good chance if they stall Sayid will be dead too. But when Eko shouts: “Stop!” and then loudly demands what he hopes to accomplish, Jack freezes in a way we haven’t seen before – with good reason. Many people have challenged and even defied Jack’s leadership over the past seven weeks, but no one has ever commanded him to stop. Jack momentarily tries to challenge Eko, and then he is frozen when he tells him that ‘Ana Lucia made a mistake.’ This shakes him nearly as much as seeing Desmond did earlier this season for basically the same cause: he clearly never expected to learn that someone he knew before he got on the plane was also on the island. Eko will clearly be seen as a connection to many of the characters going forward, but he will never be used in connection with Jack quite as much, though based on the few times they interact going forward it’s pretty clear that the writers were trying to set Eko up as much as a counterpoint to Jack as they were Locke. When you learn the original plan was for the writers was to keep Eko alive until at least the fifth season, much of what you are seeing here is clear.

It’s interesting also to know that at this point Michael is clearly still focused on getting everybody back together more than he is finding his son. He is appalled by Ana Lucia’s decision to tie Sayid up, outright calls her bluff when he goes to give Sayid water, has no problem telling him what’s happening and when he agrees to go and get Ana what she needs, we know very well he has no intention of doing so. At this point his loyalty is to his friends. He makes it very clear to Sun that Jin is fine than he goes to the hatch and is more than willing to help Jack end the standoff with Ana Lucia and is willing to use violence if he has too. At this moment Michael knows the only path forward is part of the team and only an outside event will change that.

The last two minutes are among the most profoundly moving in the show’s history: almost twenty years later I can’t watch it without misting over. Rose and Bernard’s reunion is profoundly moving, particularly from the look of astonishment on Sam Anderson’s face as he finally accepts the reality of what’s been told and L. Scott Caldwell managing to maintain her composure even as he hold him. And then of course there is the equally wonderful moment that we’ve waiting for longer: Sun and Jin’s reunion on the beach; Jin making his way through the bodies to find Sun, Sun doing a double take when she finally sees her husband again, and the look of joy that crosses both their faces when they reunite. The Sun-Jin love story has begun in earnest from this point on and will be one of the great joys of these series the rest of the way.

Then we see Sayid carrying off Shannon’s body, barely acknowledging Jack and Eko as he walks back to the beach. And then there is the most unlikely reunion of all: Jack and Ana Lucia. When they first met Jack seemed wrecked beyond repair and Ana Lucia seemed totally together (though in hindsight its never clear why she seemed so good back then.) Now after forty eight days, things have completely changed. Both have been de facto leaders for that long, but while Jack’s leadership seems to have given a path forward and made him whole, Ana Lucia’s tenure has fundamentally broken and perhaps permanently wrecked her in a way she wasn’t even before she came back to the force. Jack has been able to fix a lot of things. Can he fix Ana Lucia? He might have…had outside circumstances not intervened.

Lost: The Other 48 Days

 The only real flaw in The Other 48 Days is one that I don’t think is the writer’s fault. Given everything we know about the eventual fate of the Tailies, one might be inclined to think that this episode is less important than it seemed at the times. We won’t know for sure until the full truth behind the major actors involved telling us, but I don’t think that was the show’s fault; at least one of the Tailies demanded to be written out of the show within a season and it’s never been clear whether Michelle Rodriguez and Cynthia Watros left the series of their own volition or outside events intervened.

Even if that does hamper the viewers long term appreciation of the characters, none of that diminishes the power of this episode, one of the high points not only of Season 2 but the series as a whole. This episode is significant in many respects because it represents the writers decision to take what the viewer has come to consider the traditional structure of Lost and turn it on its head. From this point on Darlton will do this at least once or twice a season for the rest of the series and on almost every occasion, create some of the high points of Lost as a show as well as some of the greatest moments in TV history.

The opening gives us an indication of exactly what we’re in for: we see a quiet, serene beach – and then there’s one splash, then a louder one and we increasingly become aware of more and noises until a huge piece of wreckage blocks out the screen. Then we see the subtitle Day 1. Now we get a look at the crash of Oceanic 815 from a completely different perspective, and its significant that the person we see it through is Ana Lucia.

This episode has always been classified by the show as being ‘The Tailies’ and that may be so, but from start to finish it is a showcase for Michelle Rodriguez as Ana Lucia. Her performance in this episode stands out as one of the great ones in the entire roster of the cast, as she goes through a range of emotion that some of the best members of the cast will give during the series run.

It’s clear from the fact that the episode chooses to start from Ana Lucia’s perspective that she is being set up as a parallel to Jack. Like him, she has a take charge attitude from the start, trying to take care of the children (Zach and Emma are significant as they, along with Walt, are the only children that survive the crash), taking care of and literally saving another. I think the children are in the tail section for a critical reason: they symbolize innocence in a way that we have not seen in any of the survivors on the beach, save for Walt, and since there are no parents, the camp more or less unites to take care of their well-being first. They are significant to Ana Lucia in this regard.

The events that go on throughout the episode are clearly detailed to deliver direct parallels to what we’ve already seen on the show in similar episodes. The major reason is to show, in a sense, just how much worse the Tail sections survivors have it then the Losties. There’s no food, no water, there’s no doctor and no medicine so the injured succumb from their injuries quicker, and its just as clear early on the any hope of rescue is futile.

The major difference between what is going on between the Tail section survivors is that they clearly have no idea that there is something – strange – about the island. The monster for whatever reason never seems to visit them, and they never see the trees falling and being wrecked. However, the Tail section survivors wouldn’t be able to deal with it they could because of the ‘other’ major critical difference.

The Tailies become aware of the Others a full two weeks before the survivors on the beach even suspect that they might not be alone. For reasons that the show never chooses to make clear, the Tailies are attacked far more directly than the Losties are during this same period. This causes a healthy sense of fear into a camp that has every reason to be panicked already.

Then two weeks later, everything goes to hell as the Others what will be there most direct attempt to attack the survivors of Oceanic 815 until the end of Season 3. It is at that point we see something that the full significance of won’t be made clear of for a while: ‘the lists.’  In this case, it is an actual list with the names of the people who have been taken, and perhaps most horribly the two children are among them.

It’s worth noting the taking of the children is what more or less changes Ana Lucia irrevocably. The first night when she discovers what has happened, this hits her hard. She tries to argue to take everybody of the beach, but when Nathan and Cindy tell her very clearly this is their best chance of being rescued, she backs off. She’s clearly reeling from this, but during the next two weeks she seems to be maintaining a front: she’s still joking with Goodwin, and when Nathan disappears she’s upset but doesn’t get angry. Once the kids are gone, she basically loses any veneer of any civilization. When she attacks one of the Others she has to be pulled off a dead body. She may have been okay with Eko’s vow of silence before; now it infuriates her. From this point on, she basically becomes a paranoid dictator. She keeps pushing everybody to move and only stops when someone challenges her. She only agrees with Nathan because she no longer trusts him and is clearly planning to interrogate him.

She isn’t helped by the fact that most of her few remaining followers don’t raise objections. Libby is already beginning to sound delusional, Cindy seems just as sure Nathan wasn’t on the plane, and Bernard puts up a minor argument and then backs down. Eko is the only one who defies her; its clear he’s been feeding Nathan against Ana Lucia’s orders but he doesn’t object beyond that. Only Goodwin puts up an argument, and as we immediately learn, its based on his own self-preservation.

After Goodwin kills Nathan (and disposes of his body somehow) everyone goes on the move again, only now Ana Lucia has turned her focus on Goodwin. Then they find the Arrow (and they are very clear it’s a bunker, not a hatch) and they find a radio. Goodwin clearly intends to destroy it and then Ana Lucia follows him.

The scene between the two is superb: Goodwin clearly knows that Ana Lucia suspects him but seems just as determined to push her. Ana Lucia’s questioning is slow and easy, much in the same way Sayid interrogated Locke after Boone’s death. Finally Ana Lucia asks a question that Goodwin chooses not to answer and instead tells her what she wants to her. He clearly has every intention of killing Ana Lucia – he knows when he tells her that they’re giving the kids ‘a better life’ it is the exact button to push. That Goodwin ends up on the wrong side of a stick comes as a shock to him.

As exceptional as her descent into paranoia is, Rodriguez’s work after Goodwin’s death is equally remarkable. She returns utterly drained and just tells them: “We’re safe now.” Two weeks later, we finally hear the distress call that Boone made before the Beechcraft collapsed and we see that what Boone saw as a message of hope, Ana Lucia viewed as just another deception. The way she simply says: ‘This is our life now” is almost as heartbreaking as when we see her burst into tears on her own the next scene.

Adewale Akinnouye-Agabje spends most of the episode not saying a single word and rarely showing an expression on his face, so its actually surprising that his work is so revealing to his character. This is the first time since we’ve met him that we’ve begun to think that Eko might actually be a man of faith. After helping the survivors, he takes the children to Cindy and tells her “there is something I must do.’ He then offers prayers over the bodies and as we later learn, helps bury the dead. When Bernard comes to him on the first night, wanting to know if Rose is alive, Eko announces that he will pray for her.

This is keeping with the idea that Eko is fundamentally gentle despite the savagery we’ve seen him capable of, and its not until the night of the attack when we see him standing over the two men he’s killed that we realize there is as much darkness as there is Ana Lucia. Unlike her, however,  he thinks that this is a flaw in his character and he spends the next forty days taking a vow of silence which he clearly sees as penance for his sins. It is fitting than he breaks his vow in front of Ana Lucia; he knows that she needs comfort from someone and she will never ask for it. Ana Lucia is only willing to seem vulnerable in front of Eko.

Then Jin washes up on shore and in one of the best ending sequences in the history of the series, the writers decide just to cut through everything we’ve already seen knowing that at this point it’s little more than a ‘Previously on Lost sequence.’  The big difference is the last minute when we see from Ana Lucia’s perspective just what happened to Shannon. It isn’t until Michael shouts out: “What was that?” that it truly dawns on Ana Lucia what she has done. The episode chooses to end on Ana Lucia’s face as she realizes that while in her relentless drive to find some form of salvation, she has committed an act that will utterly drive a wedge between her and the people she hoped to find companionship with.

The next episode will feature the inevitable reunions that so many of the fans have been waiting for. But just as Eko’s murders on the first night caused him to spend forty days in silence, Ana Lucia’s own penance will be to isolate herself from everyone. Much as Locke as fundamentally been part of the group but never fully belonging, Ana Lucia will essentially fill that same role for the rest of her time on the series. She will be included in quite a few group activities going forward, but she will never be trusted or respected the way the rest of the leaders of the group are. She won’t lead or follow, she’s on her own. And as we shall see in the very next episode, she feels better that way.

 

Rewatch Notes: This episode aired just as Oscar season was starting to heat up. Among the trailers that I saw during this period were ads for the exceptional Syriana which earned George Clooney his Oscar and Walk The Line, which earned Reese Witherspoon hers. Both surely would have been Best Picture contenders had the number of nominees been greater than five, and honestly both films were far superior to the eventual winner that year.

As The Argument For Gender Neutral Awards Continue, A Look At The Performers at the Center of It

 

 

As the end of the lead up to the 2023 Emmy nominations begins, the debate about gender-neutral awards continues to be raised. The most recent example came last week when Liv Hewson, one of the stars of Yellowjackets removed their name from contention for this year’s Emmys, giving the explanation: “There’s no place for me there.”

I had an immediate snap reaction to this, but I’m going to hold off sharing it because it won’t make me look good. In any case, my opinions on this subject have been made repeatedly clear on my column over and over again – I have argued that when it comes to this particular subject, it is a cosmetic change, not systematic; that it will cause more harm to the awards process – particularly in regard to TV – than any good it will do, and that at the end of the day the effect will be minimal when it comes to those are arguing the strongest for it. As in the latter case this argument is being made primarily by non-binary performers I don’t know how any of them can genuinely consider themselves unbiased on the particular subject – they can only see the benefits for their tribe and not a harm it does overall to the system. I would also argue that in quite a few of the more obvious case I have a very hard time believing that they can be objective considering the old system is working just fine for them.

And I think because proving no argument is ever made out of altruism, it honestly might be worth looking at the most prominent examples of these non-binary performers and to question both why they are making this argument in the first place and try to show the hypocrisy involved in it. Because I am an expert on both television, awards shows, and in the cases of certain performance, the work that brought them to our attention, in the first place, I think I have qualified to discuss all of these factors, if not neutrally, then at least from a perspective that can see an argument for both sides.

When it comes to the Emmys, this discussion obviously begins with Asia Kate Dillon. I’m qualified to talk about Dillon perhaps more than most because I remember when they broke on to the scene. Those of you who have been readers of my blog know that I spent many years raving about the quality of Showtime’s Billions. My opinion of it has declined in recent years, but it does not change the fact that when it was its peak – from its debut in 2016 to its fourth season – I thought the series was a masterpiece, worthy of being the equal of all of the series that are considered classics from that era, standing with The Americans, Better Call Saul, This is Us and Mr. Robot. And a large part of that reason was the introduction of Dillon’s character of Taylor in the second season.

At the time of Dillon’s casting in 2017, much was made about the fact that they were the first non-binary actor to play a non-binary character. Little was made about how brilliant a performer Dillon was and how he helped a very good series become, at times, a masterpiece. Every so often a series enters the pantheon of great TV with the introduction of new characters in later seasons – the most prominent examples is the introduction of Saul Goodman, Gus Fring, and in a way, Mike Ehrmantraut, in the second season of Breaking Bad. Lost was good at this in the introduction of Ben Linus and Juliet Burke in the third season as well. But just as often, new characters can add dimension to stories that aren’t obvious in the early episodes – I don’t think I would have stuck with Boardwalk Empire as long as I did had it not been for the introduction of Richard Harrow halfway through the first season, and the introduction of Peter Quinn in the middle of Season 2 of Homeland.

Taylor had that same brilliant ability. The cold nature of Taylor’s persona, the calculations and ruthlessness, and the calm monotone he delivered everything in, made them a scene-stealer among such pros as Damian Lewis and Maggie Siff. Taylor seemed almost inhuman half the time he was on screen, so it was fascinating in later seasons when you saw they were capable of attraction and love – and that their heart could be broken. I’ve rethought many of the tricks that the writers did over the run of Billions that I was considered brilliant and the flaws that made the characters repetitive; I never once felt they stepped wrong when it came to Taylor.

Those of you who may have followed my predictions for the Emmys will remember I spent a lot of time advocating – futilely – for Billions in the first four years of its eligibility. Not to toot my own horn, but in my predictions for the Emmys in 2017 I advocated for Dillon that year. I acknowledged that it would be a headache for the Emmys to figure out where to put them (prescient words) but that Dillon deserved recognition for their work. (I will also confess that I spent so much time struggling over pronoun that I just kept referring to them as Dillon.)

It did not shock me that Dillon did not get nominated that year, nor has since. That being said, while I’ll admit that there might be prejudice involve, it has nothing to do with the identity of Dillon, but rather the Emmys bias against Showtime. It did not help that during the peak of Dillon’s performance on Billions he was competing in the era where both supporting categories were dominated by HBO dramas, first Game of Thrones, then Succession. A lot of very qualified actors and actresses were ignored during their years who didn’t have the added difficulty of having the Emmys try to figure out which category to put them in and I feel that Dillon was fundamentally a victim of that as much as any outside factor.

Now if Dillon wants to argue that gender neutral categories stop people like them from getting nominations, they can do so. Dillon, to be clear, would be hoping that you forget they were nominated three consecutive years by the Critics Choice Award for Supporting Actor and they were there each year. I advocated for Dillon in two of those years, but I knew given the level of the competition (they lost to David Harbour for Stranger Things, Noah Emmerich for The Americans, and Billy Crudup for The Morning Show respectively and the caliber of the other nominees was just as high in each year) that they had little realistic chance. If Dillon really did feel that having to demean themselves to fit into an acting category, they could easily have refused to put their name into consideration, or after being nominated, decline it. In no case did Dillon do so and was at every one of these ceremonies. What does that say about this being a principled fight for them? Let’s put a pin in that for now.

In 2021, Dillon had become more adamant in their argument and interestingly enough, that same year, there was another key non-binary performer who was getting awards and talk – and unlike Dillon, actual awards to go with them.

Season 4 of The Crown is considered the best season yet of the series, and while I remain uncertain of it by comparison, I do admire it for how Peter Morgan chose to frame the struggle at it. During that season Elizabeth (then played by Olivia Colman), who had spent the first two seasons and much of the third being the central force of the series, the representations of the best the monarchy stood for. Morgan chose to introduce two very different figures, both female, that represented a challenge to the authority that she stood for: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) and the eventual Princess Diana, played by Emma Corrin.

If Thatcher represented a force by a challenge to the monarchy’s authority as an outsider, Diana represented it as essentially an interloper, somebody that every one was all right initially with except her future husband, and none of whom cared about her as a person. Corrin was masterful at playing Diana’s fragility in private, who could not understand why wanted to do things her own way, she was loathed by her husband and barely tolerated by the rest of her in-laws. It was heartbreaking watching Corrin’s frequent attempts to win over husband be met by constant cruelty and receive no sympathy from her in-laws fundamentally because they thought the institution matters more than anyone person’s happiness. This was a contradiction to what Morgan had illustrated in The Queen, and it was in large part because of Corrin’s performance that the viewer, whose sympathy had been for Elizabeth to this point, now saw her as unsympathetic and something of a monster.

Like everyone else, I was in awe of Corrin’s work at the time, and while I questioned Corrin being considered a lead actress rather than a supporting throughout the runup to the Emmys, I could not question the caliber of the performance. Corrin dominated the lead up to the Emmys, taking the Golden Globe, the Critics Choice Award, and the inaugural HCA TV Awards for Best Actress in A Streaming Drama. (Corrin was nominated for a SAG award as well but lost to Anderson, who similarly dominated the awards leading up to the Emmys.)

I don’t know when I learned that Corrin was non-binary, but I’m certain it wasn’t until after the 2021 Emmys when they had been upset by Olivia Colman. I do know that Corrin did not lend their voice to the growing argument for a gender-neutral acting category until after they had lost the Emmy. I have a very clear memory of Corrin during the awards season well up to September, and at no point do I have any memory of Corrin having so much of an opinion on the debate that performers like Dillon were arguing for at the time.

I can make less of an argument of this being a fight waged on principle because unlike Dillon, whose character was non-binary, Corrin was playing a female character. Perhaps they thought it made sense to accept the nominations as an actress and not raise a fuss. That being said, I must raise a different argument of Corrin’s integrity: should gender-neutral characters be allowed to play characters of a specific gender? While Dillon does not have enough of a resume to argue one way or the other,  Corrin’s roles would argue that when it comes to being a performer, they are taking roles that identify as female – Corrin has been most recent cast as Constance in Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover. Was does that say about integrity? That when it comes to acting you will take a role for only one gender even if you identify as non-binary? If that is the case, the argument for principles is built on a slippery slope.

This brings me to two different non-binary performers this year in series that will be dominant among the Emmy nomination in a few months: Hewson for Yellowjackets and Emma D’Arcy for House of The Dragon. D’Arcy lent their voice to the discussion saying that they’d given up on these kinds of roles in Hollywood but ended up getting cast as Rhaenyra, the female lead of the series this past year. D’Arcy was nominated for Best Actress in a Drama in the Golden Globes this year and is a likely contender for  Best Actress this year and future years. I didn’t here any argument during the run-up to the Globes of their being upset at being nominated as an actress, but maybe I wasn’t looking that hard. There has certainly been no indication that they intend to take their name out of consideration for the Emmys this year.

So with that in mind, let’s consider both Hewson’s decision to remove their name for consideration and D’Arcy’s silence on the matter. I honestly think that the actions of both speak volumes not only to their opinions on this issue but that so much of this issue by the ones it should effect is posturing and virtue-signaling.

Hewson’s decision might seem like a personal sacrifice. The reality is, even if they were to put their name into consideration, the odds of Hewson getting a nomination was almost non-existent, particularly this year. Given the level of competition in this category among such series as The White Lotus, Succession, The Crown, House of the Dragon and Better Call Saul, there would have been no realistic chance of Hewson getting nominated before all of the actresses who play teenagers on Yellowjackets were considered. Hewson has to know very well that in their own series Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis would be considered before, and that Lauren Ambrose, her adult equivalent, has a better chance than them.

By contrast, if D’Arcy were to take their name out of consideration, it would be significant. With Ozark and This is Us over and Euphoria ineligible, the field of likely nominees for Best Actress in a Drama is smaller than it was before. D’Arcy is one of the few contenders whose nomination for House of the Dragon was considered a near certainty; to withdraw from consideration because of this issue would be the kind of stance that not only the Emmys but other awards shows would have to take seriously. That D’Arcy has not done so and shows no intention to date of doing so speaks volumes.

Seen in that light, both performers are essentially demonstrating their real opinions on the issues by the same thing. Hewson is posturing because they have no chance. D’Arcy isn’t because they have one. This make this argument that all of this talk on this subject is not based on some grand principle but rather the same motivation that essentially grounds any actor in the end: they want to improve their chance of winning a shiny bauble and they are doing everything that they can to improve the odds of it. That is all this arguing for some kind of gender-neutral awards really is: self-interest.

I imagine some of you, particularly those of you who are non-binary, will view me as the kind of person who gets pleasure in tearing down these idols. I don’t see it that way. I have issues with the battle they have chosen to wage, but I don’t think any less of these performers than I did before this. I can’t begin to imagine the struggles that they had to overcome to get to the zenith of their profession. And I do understand the need for heroes and role models, particularly in this case.

For the record, all of these performers are superb actors. I don’t deny any of that. You might say that by questioning their motives I think less of them. I don’t. In a weird way, I actually admire them for this kind of behavior. Acceptance comes when we realize that even the people we admire are not perfect, that they are capable of the same flaws and foibles as everyone else in their profession. Dillon, Corrin, and all the other performers like them are demonstrating that when it comes to getting what they want, they can be as ruthless and determined to step over anybody to get what they want. In other words, they fit in perfectly in Hollywood. If that isn’t a sign that they are no different from anybody else in their profession, I don’t know what is.

 

 

Censorship Series Codicil, A Personal Digression

 

I was planning to write the next article in the series about the importance of systemic change over the cosmetic ones  and why so many people seem to think the two are equivalent. But in order to explain why I feel this way, I believe it is important to understand that I am not coming at this from a view of pure detachment.

As reluctant as I have been to discuss my personal life in this blog, I now realize that in this series in particular it is important to make clear that this is not an issue that I take lightly. I do in fact have skin in this game, and that’s why I think so many groups and people are fighting the wrong battles. So here goes.

When I was a teenager, I was diagnosed with what was then referred to as  a mild form of autism. When I was in college, the terminology had shifted to ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’ and it remained that way for the next twenty years. A few years ago its was changed to autism spectrum disorder, and you now refer to yourself as being ‘on the spectrum’.

It was not until my mid-twenties that my social and personal life began to improve. I joined a series of organizations that helped people with my kind of disabilities, and slowly but surely gathered both a support system and an increasingly large circle of friends. After spending my entire childhood and a fair amount of my adulthood utterly unwilling to change any aspect of my life to make it easier for others, I slowly became more and more flexible when it came to scheduling my routines with other people. From almost never willing to do anything outside of my house, I now have an active social life where I interact with friends and even strangers on a daily basis. I have managed to hold down jobs and personal relationships, something I could not have comprehended when I was younger.

I mention all of this because while I have fundamentally been aware of the gradual acceptance and inclusion of people on the spectrum in the world at large, at no point have I ever thought the change in how we are referred to played any part in it, certainly not when it came to my own life. Has my life improved dramatically during the period when the language was shifting? Yes. Correlation rarely equals causation, and I have never believed in this case.

I have often gotten into conflicts with members of my own peer group in this regard. Indeed, it was in a conversation with one where I came up with the terminology of ‘cosmetic changes’ rather than systemic ones. I really don’t believe in my heart of hearts that our lives become easier because of how people refer to us. Perhaps it is clearer when offensive terms and hate speech disappear from the language, but I’ve never seen any evidence that makes our individual struggles easier. (And I have never held that nicer terms do anything to change a person’s privates thoughts. They might be willing to say your on the spectrum in front of you, but in private they might very well call you a retard.)

This leaves aside the idea that the Overton Window on what is considered ‘offensive’ seems to always be shifting every few years. Cripple was a part of the lexicon for years; then it was set aside for handicap until that was considered offensive; now disability is considered too strong. All of this is based on not wanted to let your overwhelming characteristic define who you are. The problem is, in the case of so many minorities, that’s not enough and never well be. Black was fine for years; then people insisted on African-American, now some are going to black. Same with Latin American, then Latino, then LatinX. There used to be just gay, then gay and lesbian, the LGBTQ+ and I expect the term to change again. It’s bad when one actually uses an offensive term, but it’s not much better when the term you’ve been using is now considered offensive even if you’ve been using what you thought was the acceptable one.

This would  be bad enough on its own, and its worst still when even the idea of debating the concept of change is de facto considered offensive or hate speech. What I find infinitely more troubling is the concept that somehow changing how you are referred to as a person or a group is considered systemic change instead of merely cosmetic change. Because when it comes to civil rights – and that is what all of these groups are arguing for – the loudest voices seem to argue that who you are referred to is some kind of victory for ‘the cause’ when it is the barest of cosmetic changes.

I’d actually call it worse because in the best case scenario, it is posturing. Who was it really a victory for when it became decided that pronouns were a major obstacle to those who do not identify by either gender? I don’t think it even meets the standards of a moral victory, and its barely those of an individual one. I’ll actually be going into much more detail on this in the next article in this series, but for now let’s just dealing with it in the abstract sense. Assume that you manage to non-binary people manage to get universal acceptance for ‘they, them and theirs’ as pronouns. How does that make things better for your cause? Does this reduce the legislative threats that are restricting your rights? Does it make you more accepted by the bigots who already hate you? Does it make any easier to get employment or get promoted? All you’ve done is change how people talk about you in a certain situation. If you really consider this some kind of victory, I don’t think you have any understanding of what a victory is. The people who agree to do this – it doesn’t cost them anything to say this. And you have no idea whether they even think any better of you.

All of this strikes me as laughable, particularly in my case. If a ‘Weight Watchers’ ad aired that said: “For years I said I had Aspergers and my life was miserable. Now I say I’m on the spectrum….and look me now!” We laugh at these kinds of ads every time we see them, and to be clear there is no difference between changing how your outward appearance and how you are referred to when it comes to personal happiness or indeed long-term success. Hell, these days in the age of body positivity, we’d consider an organization like Weight Watchers a hate group because it was denouncing a group of people. So why should any similar cosmetic change be considered any kind of short-term or long-term improvement?

Let me ask a question to every person in a minority group. (And in case the term ‘minority’ is now considered hate speech, let’s consider it as a mathematical term. Don’t pretend any of you represent more than fifty-one percent of the population.)

LatinX, are your lives better off now that you don’t have to bear the burden of being called ‘Latin-Americans’ anymore? African-Americans, do police pull you over less often now that you don’t refer to yourselves as blacks? LGBTQ+ community, are you now not subjected to same slanted looks and bigotry when you hold the hand of your partner in public as you did before you were just gays and lesbians?

Don’t pretend this is a rhetorical question or that it’s a false equivalence. If you truly think that changing how the rest of the country refers to you in public is  a war you want to wage,  a battle that is as important as received full equality under the law, then you’d better make it very clear. If this is a battlefield you want to die on, that’s the only way you can explain to me why this is something you have to fight for more then voting for people who share your interests or organizing for social causes or battling for full equality under the law. And if you do, you have to explain why it’s more important to win the cosmetic battle first, and then concentrate on the systematic ones.

I have spent many articles and pages arguing fundamentally for consensus and compromise and while some might argue that I don’t understand these issues because of my race, gender, or sexuality, let me put it historically. For much of America’s history the doctrine of the land, put into words by the Supreme Court in one of their worst decisions was ‘separate but equal.’  That law and doctrine was eventually overturned. Now however the basic doctrine of every group related to identity politics seems fundamentally to come down to being treated as ‘separate and equal.’ This is no way for a society to try and exist, and yet somehow, that seems to be the idea behind identity politics. African-Americans seem to think their considerations must be prioritized over LatinX, who think their priorities must supplant LGBTQ+, etc. That there is likely overlap between these groups, that their interests might coincide in the overall picture, rarely seems to matter to the loudest voice. It is my group first, everyone else second, and society a dead last. And that leads to loud and vehement disagree of every single subject – including what outsiders call your tribe.

I’ve decried everybody on this blog who stakes their claim based on who they are and what they think needs to be done to help them. They will claim they are speaking for a larger subsection of society, but they’re actually talking about what they themselves want for themselves, no matter how unrealistic or impossible it may be. So before I go any further, I’ll tell you the truth who I am and I want.

My name is David. I’m a critic, primarily of television, but recently expanding to movies, books, history, popular culture and our society.

I suffer from a disability whose name keeps changing. It has never defined me. I do not use it as an excuse for my failings or my successes. I define myself through my likes, my family and my friends. The latter group is very diverse, racially, sexually, generationally and in perhaps the biggest taboo these days, politically. I don’t agree with any of these people a hundred percent of time; at most I agree with any one of them thirty percent of the time. I believe it is our differences that should be celebrated as much – if not more – than our similarities.

Whatever benchmarks you define yourself by – politically, generational, sexual, religious – are nobody’s business but my own. They form my opinions as much as yours do.

As for what I would like done for my tribe, which is at the core of so many of these articles. I want people who are part of it and people who aren’t part of it to work together to help people like me. I want you to make things easier for people like me to find jobs, to find homes, to get promoted. I want you work together to provide a place so that future generations of people like me have a better path forward than I do, that they face fewer obstacles than I do, then they have  a place to go to know they’re not alone in the world.

In order to do this, everyone must contribute. They must give money; they must create agencies and legislation that will make life for me and others like me easier. They must vote for people who not only have my problems but people who will help work to get these problems solved. They must have the patience to work within the system that forms obstacles for people like me and others who have similar issues in their lives. They must understand that this will take patience and time but they must persevere and understand that systemic change is slow and incremental and does not provide quick fixes for anyone. It will be frustrated and maddening for everybody, but they must be willing to not only do the work but understand what the work really is and what it consists of. They must see the setbacks as merely setbacks and not causes for surrender.

It will not be easy. It will not be done quickly. But it is what is best, not only for me and people like me but for all people.

And once we have gotten all the systematic changes we need to make things better for people like me, once we have done the work that makes life better for us, then I’m willing to talk about something cosmetic and relatively trivial as to what term makes the most people comfortable about what to call us.

That is what I consider systematic change. In my next article in this series, I’ll make the argument for what seems to be  a prime battlefield of something that is purely cosmetic.

 

Historical Figures Series: The Career of Hubert Humphrey, Part 2. The Rise of Civil Rights and His First Steps into Presidential Politics

 

In his early days in the Senate, Humphrey was regarded with hostility. In an early visit to the Senate cloakroom, Richard Russell, fully aware of his presence, audibly said to a group of Southern senators: “Can you imagine the people of Minnesota sending that damn fool down here to represent them?”

This had to do entirely with the makeup of the Senate at the time. With the Democratic bloc fundamentally comprising of the South, the Congress to which Humphrey had been elected was fundamentally conservative, anathema to the liberal issues men like him represented. It did not help that the unspoken etiquette of the Senate was that freshman senators should not be speak at all for at least their first year in office. This was just as anathema to a man like Humphrey, who already had a reputation for being known, as Roger Angell would refer to him, as a ‘lifetime .400 talker.”

Senators viewed their station as members “of the most exclusive club in the world.” Those on the inside knew what the dues of membership were in the 1940s. As an aide to Paul Douglas, elected to the Senate same year as Humphrey put it cynically but accurately:

“The quid pro quo was that the southerners, with their lock on the committees and on the money, parceled out their goodies to the trans-Mississippi Republicans and the Western Senators…They worked for segregation when the chips were down.”

Humphrey chose not to seek membership; instead he spent his freshman years violating almost every one of the Senate’s unwritten rules. Within his first week  in office, he and an African-American aide Cyril King appeared in the Senate dining room where the only blacks allowed were the headwaiters. Humphrey insisted that they dine together. He made six major speeches and 230 remarks on the floors in his first ten months in the Senate, something no previous freshman senator would have dared to do. And he introduced legislation which no freshman would have ever done, and almost all of it on the kind of liberal issues that the Southern Bloc was appalled by – anti-lynching legislation, a permanent federal commission on Civil Rights, a bill to abolish to the electoral college were among the fifty-seven bills and joint resolutions he introduced in his first year alone.

For all of these actions Humphrey was ravaged by his fellow Senators, especially when he challenged the financial chair (and extreme segregationist) Harry Byrd. Humphrey took the hits and refused to surrender.

Lyndon Johnson clearly understood the nature of the Senate he was elected to, and behaved like traditional freshman did. He went out of his way to court Richard Russell in those early years, and the two instantly became friends and allies, with Johnson eventually referring to Russell, as ‘Uncle Dick.’ This meant allying himself with the cause of segregation: his first speech in the Senate was an argument in favor of the Southern filibuster. His actions alienated him from most liberals – but Humphrey appreciated and accepted his pragmatism: “He was trying to be a captain (of the Southern bloc) rather than a captive.” His methods were working; after just two years in the Senate, he was elected the whip of the Democratic party at the age of 41.

By 1952, the South had every reason to believe that the civil rights movement was losing steam; Truman, now a lame duck and immersed in the Korean conflict had abandoned it. Russell chose to lead the Southern democrats as their candidate for President at the upcoming convention. However, outside the South he was too much of a liability as a candidate and would receive only 261 votes from the delegations. In the last convention which took more than one ballot to determine a Presidential nominee, the party would end up drafting Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois to head the ticket. Stevenson’s platform was far mor open to civil rights than even the previous one, including changing the number of votes required for cloture in the filibuster and the civil rights plank being passed by unanimous vote. Humphrey had helped pushed the party forward.

At the time, no one seemed interested. By 1952 the Democrats had controlled the White House for twenty years and with the Korean War and the Red Scare major issues, a Republican victory would have been certain with any candidate. When Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of D-Day became the Republican nominee, it was inevitable. Eisenhower’s landslide victory may have been more of testament to his appeal than the Republicans, but there were elements that the Democrats found troubling. Not only had Eisenhower carried four Southern States in his electoral landslide – the first Republican in history to do so well in the South -  the presence of the Alabama segregationist Senator John Sparkman was considered a major factor in Eisenhower receiving nearly forty percent of the African-American vote. The South, the bulwark of the Democratic Party for over a century, was increasingly becoming a liability to it. It did not effect Johnson’s career; in 1953, he was elected minority leader of the Senate. Johnson called Humphrey to ask for his support. Humphrey explained his issue with Johnson was his track record with liberals. Johnson was impressed by Humphrey’s honesty on the issue.

After his election Johnson asked Humphrey and said he was willing to talk about naming liberals to influential committees: “Every single request I made, he filled.” Humphrey had not supported Johnson but he was impressed with his integrity and pragmatism. For the next decade, their relationship would be akin to mentor and student.

Eisenhower’s administration began a moderate approach to civil rights but far more significant was the fact that Earl Warren, the Republican Governor of California, had been promised by Eisenhower the first vacancy on the Supreme Court. He had no reason to suspect that within a few months of his election, the current Chief Justice Fred Vinson would be dead of a heart attack. He would try to retract the offer from Warren, but Warren was appointed and took the oath of office in September of 1953. This decision, as much as anything else that happened in the Senate, would have a vast effect on the professional careers of Humphrey, Johnson and Russell.

On May 17, 1954 the Warren Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the case of Brown V. Board of Education that the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ that had been established as law in the ruling of ‘Plessy Vs. Ferguson’ in 1896’ was unconstitutional. The decision transformed race relations forever and no one was more aware of it than the Southerners in the Senate.

A few months away from becoming majority leader, Johnson privately expressed reservations. Publicly he knew that a Southern revolt against the ruling would split the Democratic party and further alienate the South. Quietly, he worked behind the scenes to undermine the legislative proposals many in the South were introducing.

Russell, however, backed the idea of Strom Thurmond to create what would become known as ‘The Southern Manifesto’ which would be signed by seventy seven Congressman and nineteen Southern Senators. There were three significant refusals, Al Gore Senior and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee – and Lyndon Johnson. Johnson knew the difficulties he was in based on his capacities as a Senator from Texas and as a man who was already harboring Presidential ambitions. Russell never pressured him because of his desire for Johnson to become President.

By 1956 Humphrey’s relationship with Johnson had made him a respected member of the Senate to both the liberal and conservative blocs. So in 1956, he made his first brazen move into national politics. Adlai Stevenson was running for the Democratic nomination again and Humphrey endorsed him in the Minnesota primary, with hopes that this action would lead to Stevenson choosing him as his vice president.

It backfired spectacularly. Estes Kefauver trounced Stevenson by nearly fifty thousand votes. Humphrey would not even be elected to represent Minnesota as a delegate to the convention.

Before the convention Humphrey thought his chances had been renewed when Stevenson told him he was on ‘the short list for vice president’ and he would get the nomination if he could certify himself among Southern Leaders in the party. Humphrey broke precedent and announced his candidacy, and secured endorsements from influential Southerners including Johnson and Russell.

At the convention, Stevenson broke his heart again. Stevenson had decided to let the convention choose his running-mate rather than him. He did not even bother to give Humphrey the courtesy of a phone call before he made his decision. The coup de grace came when Stevenson refused to push for strong platform language on civil rights, including legislation to ensure it. Muriel Humphrey later said it was his worst defeat.

After Eisenhower’s second straight Republican landslide – in which he now had carried five Southern states helped in part by the African-American vote in these states – both parties were looking at it differently. The Republicans assumed a stronger push for civil rights legislation would be a clear path to future victories. Democrats were less sure. Eisenhower’s landslide had given no coattails to the Republicans in Congress – indeed, the Democrats had gained a seat in the 1956 election. Liberals thought if they had taken a stronger path they would have done better in the election; Southerners thought by not directly confronting Eisenhower they had maintained their majority.

The chairman of the DNC Paul Butler believed in the former and after the 1956 election formed a group called the Democratic Advisory Council, mainly to prod Johnson and Speaker Sam Rayburn into more aggressive legislation. Humphrey was one of the few elected members who accepted offers to become a member of that group.

When Johnson – who had declined this invitation- learned of Humphrey’s acceptance, he was enraged. Initially, his anger was such that he wanted to ban Humphrey from his inner circle. In January of 1957, when Humphrey called him to discuss Senate business, Johnson was distant, finally telling him: “You broke faith with me.” Humphrey protested that he was “simply trying to make Johnson a better leader.” In the end, the temperamental Johnson realized that Humphrey was to important to him to cast aside and the two resumed their normal friendly relationships.

And Johnson knew that the Senate had to at least pass some kind of civil rights bill. One was about to come to the Senate: that June, the House passed a major bill helmed by Eisenhower’s chief Attorney General Herbert Brownell by 286-126. The new leader of the Republicans in the Senate California’s William Knowland represented the changing tide for Southern Democrats. Moderate Republicans and liberal Democrats were becoming weary of the alliance with the South.

The 1957 Civil Rights Bill called for no new rights; merely more effective federal enforcement of laws already and guarantees already on the books, among the most significant was giving the attorney general new injunctive powers to fight and prevent violations of voting rights and other civil rights. Russell used this part of the bill to wage the South wars on it, framing it terms of a second reconstruction which he knew would galvanize his southern bloc. He was not helped by the fact that Eisenhower feebly defended the bill when asked about and barely seemed to know of the details about it. Despite his apparent victory, Russell could see the writing on the wall, admitting to a friend that he was fighting a ‘delaying action.’

Johnson fought hard to win the compromise bill across, often chastising the Northern liberals who supported it so easily. “It don’t take a genius to be for civil rights from Minnesota,” he told Humphrey, mocking him when Humphrey told him there were only around 12,000 African-Americans in his state.

Humphrey played a relatively minor role in much of the debate on the bill on the floor, less because he was being overpowered by Johnson’s pragmatism but because his own was evolving. He knew the inflexible doctrine that his fellow liberals embraced was impractical when it came to legislation.

On August 7^th the Senate passed its first Civil Rights bill since 1877: 72-18. The bill was admonished by liberals and African-Americans as ‘half a loaf’ at best. What was important was that it represented the first step at breaking through on civil rights in the twentieth century, something even Strom Thurmond – who engaged in the longest filibuster in history against it – admitted years after the fact.

This triumph, combined with  a meeting with Khrushchev in 1958, would help Humphrey believe that it was his time to try to run for President. Few people thought that he would make much of a splash in his campaign. He would end up making a very big splash.

In the next article in this series, I will follow Humphrey’s first campaign for the Democratic nomination and his first in what would be a decade long struggle with the Kennedy family and how his ambitions and that of his friend Lyndon Johnson were about to collide for the first time on the national stage.

The Movies Of Aaron Sorkin Series, Part 2: Moneyball

 

I don’t know if Aaron Sorkin is a baseball fan. His TV characters definitely are. Anyone who watched the second episode of Sports Night remembers Jeremy delivering a highlight of baseball game that is eight minutes long, enthusing about how a batter standing in the box for fifteen seconds is essential and shouting “That’s a travesty!” when its cut to only the bare minimum. In another episode Dan is enthusing about doing a story on ‘The Shot Heard Round the World’ and wants to grill Isaac, who was in the Polo Grounds covering the game that day – and is stunned when Isaac tells him he’d missed the home run because Ralph Branca warmed up too quickly.

Sports isn’t nearly as essential to The West Wing as it is on Sports Night but every so often the characters will mention a team they follow. Toby Ziegler, who grew up in Brooklyn, roots for the Yankees, and takes no small relish in blaming Bartlet’s opponent for being ‘responsible’ for the Yankees defeat when he goes to a ball game. Amy Gardener (Mary Louise-Parker) tells a candidate she’s managing that it will take Josh a little longer than Donna to figure out his political strategy because ‘the Mets lost last night.’ We then cut to Josh dwelling over that defeat…and two minutes later, he figures out what the strategy is.

So clearly Sorkin has respect for the game even if he doesn’t himself love it as unabashedly as some of his characters do. That is no doubt part of the reason he wrote the screenplay for Moneyball  based on the best selling novel by Michael Lewis. Just as with The Social Network the previous year, Sorkin took a story that many could never see being turned into a film and made another critically acclaimed, box office hit that ended up nominated for Best Picture and earned him his second consecutive Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Given the events of this past week, it is also a far more relevant movie than you’d think – and in a way, a prescient one.

Moneyball is a baseball movie unlike any that had been made before and I don’t just mean the fact that it is set primarily in the front office, barely involves any actual baseball and doesn’t end with a climatic victory. It is tonally one of the most melancholy sports movies ever made. This was almost certainly by design: the casual sports fan knew that Billy Beane, the character at the center of the film, was the front office man for the Oakland A’s, which to that point had not won the World Series since 1989 (and they still haven’t). Nor was this story of the triumph of a great player or a great team, but of a new way of playing the game, one that was extremely controversial and is still not much admired by true fans. I have sometimes wondered whether Sorkin wrote Moneyball not so much out of wanting to tell the story but as a kind of dirge for the man at the center of it.

The quote that Billy Beane says at the beginning of the movie has gone down in film history as he describes Oakland’s prospects after the 2001 season: “There are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there’s fifty feet of crap. And then there’s us.”

Billy is telling the truth about Oakland’s prospects but he’s not being entirely honest about why this is the case, and neither is Sorkin. Ever since Charles Finley moved the A’s to Oakland from Kansas City in 1967, the A’s have been one of the most successful teams in the postseason and one of the poorest at the gate. During their first great dynasty from 1971-1975, where they became the only non-Yankee team to win three consecutive World Series, they could not draw more than a million fans a season. Finley was also one of the game cheapest owners and treated his players abominably. Because of his reneging on the contract of his best pitcher Catfish Hunter, Hunter became the first ever free agent and signed with the Yankees before the 1975 season. When the reserve clause ended up being killed the next winter, it was the beginning of the end of the A’s dynasty and they finished dead last in 1977.

It did not help that Oakland has never truly been a baseball town. During their second great dynasty between 1988-1992, one of the major factors in their doing well was the fact that the Raiders, who had been in Oakland during the 1970s, had relocated to Los Angeles. After the A’s began to decline in the late 1990s, attendance dwindled and despite everything that Beane tried in Oakland it has never recovered. It’s not really a shock that the team has announced this past week that they are relocated to Las Vegas in three years; since at least 1999 there was constant speculation that the low attendance would force them to leave Oakland, with Sacramento or San Jose as the likely contenders. Those fans who will mourn the departure of the A’s really haven’t been noticing how empty the stands have been.

Beane’s decision to stop trying to pay the mounting costs of free agency and find a new way to win was built out of desperation. It does not, however, make what he and Moneyball did either unique or even particularly admirable. Ever since the National League was established in 1876, there has always been a divide between how fans view baseball and everyone connected to ownership do. (I’ve even written my own series about the economic history). Fans view it as a game when it is in fact a business. The owners view the players fans idolize as employees and like all business owners are about the bottom line first and everything else second. They spent a century treated players like slaves so they wouldn’t have to pay them what they were worth, and the moment they were given freedom they continued the war on them they had in the press for over a century that they are spoiled and overpaid. The fans have always been willing to go along with this.

Every major move ownership has ever done – destroying minor league independence so they run and control their own players on the minors, the integration of the sport, fighting the idea of the union, engaging in constant labor struggles, lockdowns, strikes, even going so far as to engage in collusion to break free agency – is all about maximizing profits first. Given what I have recently learned about just how rich even the smallest of small market teams are, part of me honestly wonders whether the desire of those teams not to pay big money on free agents is less about not having the money and more about maximizing their own bottom line even if it is at the expense of their product. Nor is that the only way they will turn a blind eye to help their box office. Moneyball never directly remarks on the presence of steroids that was going to become front page news within a few years of the events in the film, but one of the players who becomes a free agent is Jason Giambi, one of the most notorious users of steroids in the game. Ownership knew steroid use was rampant during this period, and not only turned a blind eye but stomped on those who tried to expose it.

I have little doubt that is why the major figure in Moneyball is Billy Beane. Beane was a major league prospect with the Mets and spent years in the game, eventually getting what they call a ‘cup of coffee in the bigs and spending most of his career in the minor leagues. Beane became a scout in April of 1990 and eventually became general manager in 1997. Much of what we see in the film is fictionalized – Beane had been following the approach of Sandy Alderson, the former GM to focus on sabermetric principles, and it was fundamentally done on orders of ownership to slash payroll. Beane is considered a hero among owners, not because he got his team to the world series but because the A’s were one of the most cost-effective teams in baseball. That’s not the kind of thing that leads to a stirring sports movie. Nor does the fact that despite this brilliant fact of leadership, Billy Beane never led the A’s to the World Series, something that more than a few managers and GMs have criticized his approach for.

Sorkin’s answer to this is to this best to make the movie ‘traditional’ by framing the concept at the end of the 2001 season as a man whose advice is being questioned by his scouts and leadership. He then has the idea foisted on him by a fictionalized version of all the people helped him ‘Peter Brand’, who is played by Jonah Hill. Beane plays it as someone who is reluctant to go along with the idea but whose experience as a player (which we see in flashbacks) show him still wanting to win ‘the last game of a season.’  In this sense, Sorkin adheres to the traditional style of baseball movie by making Beane a player who wants his team to win. If he showed Beane as a GM being driven by spending as little money as possible, this movie truly would have been unwatchable.

It helps, of course, that Beane is played by Brad Pitt. Around this time in his career Pitt, like many heartthrobs of the 1990s and early 2000s, was starting to get older and wanted to turn his career into different roles. It’s worth noting that many of Pitt’s roles starting out were stretches of his acting muscles, movies such as Twelve Monkeys and A River Runs Through It were superb example of Pitt’s early potential before he spent a decade being more famous for the women he was attached to (Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie) then the quality of his films. Starting with his work in the underseen classic The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, Pitt would begin to put together an impressive role of credits for the next decade, much like his fellow Oceans Eleven pack, Matt Damon and George Clooney. (Like Pitt, Clooney received an Academy Award nomination this same year for The Descendants; both would have been notably superior choices to the eventual winner Jean Dujardin for The Artist.)

Because, like professional athletes, there is an unspoken expiration date of an actor’s marketability, Pitt is a perfect choice to play Beane in this context. Billy knows enough about professional baseball that he has just enough persuasiveness to get his incredibly doubtful scouts, front office – and his own manager – to go along with his plans to hire players who can not hit or play outfield but can create runs. Philip Seymour Hoffman has the role of Art Howe, then the A’s manager who has no tolerance for the ideas that Beane and Brand are promoted. When a new rookie is called into play a position that he has never played not even the minors, Beane tells him it’s not hard. “It’s extremely hard,” Howe says deadpan.

Moneyball is a superb film, extremely well-acted and edited, and Sorkin does make an unfilmable subject more than watchable. But I don’t think the movie would have worked without the sense of sorrow around Billy Beene and the A’s. The film frames most of his actions around the 20 game winning streak that the A’s managed in the 2002 season. We follow them through game as it extends, and finally on the night it’s broken. It is the kind of triumph that is usually the climax of the traditional sports film – but three minutes later, the A’s season comes to an end in the first round of the playoffs just like it did the year before (and though the film doesn’t say, the year before that)

The movie then follows Beene to Boston where he is offered a job by the Red Sox to run their team using the exact same methods that the A’s won the division. As we all know by now, the Red Sox had not won the World Series since 1918, but using sabermetrics two years later they broke ‘The Curse’. Beene, however, chose to stay with Oakland.

And that’s the sad part of this movie that I think appealed to Sorkin: like so many creators of a method that other people perfected, Beene never enjoyed the fruits of his labor. The A’s would go into a tail spin after the 2003 season, enjoy some success in the early 2010s, but never made it to the World Series, much less ever won the last game of the season. There was never any sign of huge attendance at Oakland under his tenure and the pandemic was the nail in the coffin. The A’s will become the first established franchise to relocate since the Montreal Expos in 2005.

Meanwhile there are still rich teams and poor teams, though the poor teams may be richer than you think. Almost every team now uses sabermetrics, and as a result a lot of the fun has gone out of the game as bunts, stolen bases and shifts have become prominent until the last year finally got rid of the latter. Players are hired to do one thing well and still command the same ridiculous salaries for it. Billy Beene did change the game, but the changes didn’t help him, his team, and a lot of fans – and I count myself  - think that it really hurt the game. I’m inclined to take the point of the scouts and the managers who argued against Beene’s revolutionary methods, not because they couldn’t see the future but because they could and they knew that it would hurt the game they loved.

The movie ends with a recording of Beene’s daughter, singing a song with the chorus “You’re Such a Loser, Dad.” At the time, I found it mainly funny. Now I think it is deeply ironic, because I’m pretty sure that is how Beene will be viewed in a lot of baseball circles and certainly in the city of Oakland. He still currently works for the A’s and may still have his job in 2027 when they play their first season in Las Vegas. I wonder if he thinks now whether everything he did – including being played by Brad Pitt in the movie of his life – was worth it.