Lost Rewatch On VHS: Follow The Leader

 

VHS Notes: Not much in the way of previews for movies we haven’t seen, save for a DVD preview of the release of one of the Underworld films. We do get some more interesting previews for episodes of TV to come. The most interesting is the third season finale of Brothers & Sisters, which involved the final episode of Balthazar Getty as a regular. The more interesting preview is for the 100^th episode of Grey’s Anatomy which we are led to believe will give the wedding of Meredith and McDreamy but actually was the marriage of Alex and a still deathly ill Izzie Stevens

 

Before we begin, this is the third and last episode of Season Five where Finding Lost and Lostipedia disagree as to who this episode is centered around. Nikki Stafford ranks this episode as ‘Everyone’ whereas Lostipedia lists it as Richard-centric. I think the latter is more likely correct than the former, partially because almost every time the episode cuts from the present to the past, we focus on Richard first. And in the larger context of the episode, Richard being at the center makes more sense.

This is also the third and last episode of Season Five that takes place entirely on the island.

 

Follow the Leader is exactly what Nikki Stafford thinks the episode is about: leaders and followers. This has been an underlying theme of Lost since the Pilot but its rarely been more focused then it is in this episode as we are looking both in the present in the past, in the Others and in Dharma, who is taking the reigns of leadership and who is willing to follow them. It’s for that reason I think that this episode is Richard-centric.

As we have followed all of the time jumps over Season Five, we have been reminded of Daniel’s discussion of our need for a constant. And if there has been a constant throughout the jumps, it’s Richard. It’s now clear that Richard has been on the island for a very long time and yet somehow he looks exactly the same now as he did in 1954. But while Richard has clearly been on the island longer than all of the Others, we’re still not sure of his role. In Season 3, he seemed to be Ben’s inferior and then we learned he’d been on the island when the Dharma Initiative was there. In Cabin Fever, we saw that he’d been following John Locke since he was born (and now we know that it’s because Locke told him too). He’s always seemed calm and unperturbed through everything that happens.

Then when Eloise shot Dan at the end of last week’s episode (we see it play out again) he’s clearly unsettled. It’s also clear that Charles Widmore and Eloise Hawking have a role in leadership on the island (we’re not sure who is in charge now) and while he told an underling that he didn’t answer to them when it came to heal a young Ben Linus, when Eloise gives orders in this episode he follows them, albeit unwillingly.. In the present, when he and Locke are reunited, it’s clear that not only does he not know where Locke has been for three years, he has no idea what the time jumps have involved. And while he doesn’t agree when Locke says he wants to see Jacob, Locke reminds him he’s the leader and Richard decides to go along with it. So who is Richard?

We get our first clear picture from Ben at the beginning of the episode. He tells Sun that he’s ‘a kind of advisor and that he’s held that job for a long time.” It’s also clear that Richard is the only person on the island who has any access to Jacob, certainly he’s the only person who knows where he is. This explains a lot, including why Richard doesn’t age. If Jacob is the god of the island, he’s been here for even longer than Richard and in order to make his job permanent, he needs an advisor who’s immortal. (The writers may be giving us a subtle hint as to how Richard got here when we see him in the present. He’s building a ship in a bottle and it’s pretty clear the ship is the Black Rock.)

In both 1977 and 2007, Richard has to deal with disruptions to the island and we can’t tell yet which one might be the more dangerous. What is clear is that Jack has decided to accept that the idea of his destiny is to follow through with what Dan said he was here to do and detonate a hydrogen bomb so that Oceanic 815 never crashes and none of the last three years ever happen.

Before we get to how this breaks down., it’s rare that moral arithmetic can be equated with actual arithmetic. When Oceanic 815 crashed, 324 passengers were onboard. At this point, we are down to Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sawyer, Sayid (who we finally are reunited with) and Jin in 1977. In the present, Locke and Sun are the only ones left. It’s possible that Claire and Rose and Bernard are still alive but the show hasn’t told us yet. If Jack is right, all 324 of those passengers live. That would seem to be a moral good. Of course, even if he’s right that bomb if it goes off will probably kill all the Others on the island as well as the Dharma Initiative. By the time episode ends all ‘non-essential personnel’ are on the sub but Jack doesn’t know that.

But as we know even when Jack tries to argue the moral high ground, he’s still self-righteous and he still wants to ‘fix things’. When he tells Kate all this misery will be behind us, he’s not talking about all of the people who died in the last three years but all the suffering he personally has been through. Jack’s life was pretty horrible before the crash, but it got exponentially worse afterward. On the island he had to watch patient after patient die without adequate supplies, watch people he’d come to think were friends die because of his decisions and have his way of thinking challenged by Ben Linus and John Locke over and over. He then spent the next three years lying about it, watching as a wedge came between him and the rest of the Oceanic 6, got engaged to Kate but then destroyed it, and became an alcoholic, drug addicted, suicidal mess who was willing to come back to the island he’d been so desperate to leave without returning. Even the possibility that the bomb might kill him is preferable to the existence he has now.

Kate takes a lot of abuse in this episode for her behavior, but it is worth remembering that if the plane lands in LA, she’s headed to prison probably for the rest of her life. She is the only person who managed to build a happy life for herself and came back to the island for an unselfish reason, none of which Jack seems to care about. She has the moral high ground here.

It's worth noting, though, that she undoes a lot if it with pure stupidity. Once she and Jack are in the hands of the Others, she does nothing to help Daniel before he’s about to get shot or after. Once she’s being kept at gunpoint, and its her best interest to go along with Jack’s story, she’s remarkably stubborn. That she thinks she can just walk away from the Others and not get shot is ridiculous considering everything she’s been through with them, past and present. And that she really thinks she can talk Jack out of something when he sets his mind to it means she truly forgotten what it was like to be around Jack before. She’s lucky she only got thrown on the sub at the end of the episode: she should have gotten killed a million times over.

No one who comes with Jack on his dive into the bomb is a willing follower. Richard is only going along with this because Eloise ordered him, it’s clear he doubts every step of the way. Eloise is willing to go along with Jack because she’s been offered the chance to save her son, something that Jack can’t promise is true. And the fact that Sayid is willing to follow Jack honestly says more about him then his belief in the mission. Sayid by this point has even less to lose than Jack does by trying this, but when he says: “At worst, this will put us all out of our misery” we know he’s not joking about it. The last three years have been more of a nightmare for Sayid then they have been for Jack and there’s nothing for him in civilization. Maybe Nadia will be waiting for him if this works but as we remember back when this started, he had his doubts whether Nadia was waiting for him in Los Angeles. There’s a part of Sayid who believes oblivion is better than he deserves, and unfortunately for him things are going to get even worse.

Sawyer and Juliet are in the middle of being beaten up by Radzinsky who, in keeping with his paranoid nature, turns on people he’s known for three years. We’ve known there was a megalomaniac in Radzinsky from the moment we first met him and now he’s using ‘Lafleur’s’ betrayal as an excuse to do what he’s wanted all along. He seizes power from Horace and when Chang comes in to tell him that the island is in danger, he makes it very clear he doesn’t give a damn about anybody but himself. He wants two things: to eradicate the Others and to get his precious Swan done. The only reason he’s willing to give Sawyer and Juliet a ticket off the island is so that he can realize both his goals. Nikki said she was kind of glad Radzinsky would blow his head off in the future; I wish he’d done it before.

As for the rest of the group Miles is finally beginning to realize that ‘whatever happened, happened’ isn’t going to fly any more or maybe he just realizes how dour the situation. When his father confronts him, Jin and Hurley he decides that he has to try and keep his group alive and that means getting as many lives of the island as possible. It’s not clear if he was going to try and board the sub himself when he sees Sawyer and Juliet about to board but at this point he seems to have less faith in Sawyer than Hurley does. (And that’s really weird.)

In 2007 the leadership dynamics have clearly changed. I’m pretty sure Ben was planning to resume his old spot when all this began in Namaste but now that Locke’s back, he’s unnerved in a way we haven’t seen him before. From the way Richard talks to Locke and ignores Ben, he knows his time is over for good.

What’s fascinating in the scenes between Michael Emerson and Terry O’Quinn is that now we see how clearly the dynamics have been reversed. When Locke asked Ben to join him and Richard, Locke is doing this for the sole purpose of showing him that he is now in communion with the island in a way Ben never was. Emerson is magnificent in a way we’ve never seen before as he’s astonished by what he is seeing.

To be fair, so are we. Somehow the island has dropped Locke right back on the island just in time (pun intended) for him to give Richard instructions on the second flash we saw in the season premier. The scene plays out basically the way we saw it before but now we realize the man who told Richard what Locke had to do...was Locke. It seems that Locke is here to close the loop that began when Richard gave Locke the compass back then; he has to make sure everything happens according to plan. But it’s worth noting this stuns not only Ben, but Richard. He clearly is stunned when Locke tells him he did die.

O’Quinn is just as brilliant. As Richard says, he seems different. And he is. Locke has a sense of purpose and certainty that we never saw the previous four seasons. He seems to have the answers not just about what’s going to happen and where things are on the island, but also certain secrets. When he tells Ben that he knows he’s never actually seen Jacob, Ben is so gob-smacked that he doesn’t even bother to deny it. This is a man to whom lying is second nature but when Locke says he knows this, Ben is struck dumb.

Locke then takes control of the situation that the old Locke never had when everyone returns to the camp. It’s clear he’s trying to use mob rule instead of the appearance of democracy, but he’s also using psychology. We all knew when Ben was in charge, he claimed that he was the only person to talk to Jacob and that no one else had ever seen him. It’s clear now that Richard has been filling the breach for the last, who knows how long, and years of frustration by the Others are finally summoned by Locke. We’ve got the feeling that though no one liked Ben when he was in charge, they were willing to listen to him because he was Jacob’s mouthpiece. We’ll never know what happened to them in the last three years, but they’ve clearly been waiting for a leader to tell them what to do. Now that they are told that they can finally see the man behind the curtain, Locke manages to manipulate both them and Richard into taking him to see Jacob.

It's worth noting while this is going on we’re getting hints that Locke is not as benevolent as he seems. He lies to Sun outright when he says Jacob can get them back to their people something Richard didn’t tell him and which may not be possible. He’s been refusing to be docile the way the old Locke was. We suspect when he begins to bring everyone there that his motives are not altruistic – but we’re as shocked as Ben is when he tells him that the only reason he wants to find Jacob is so that he can kill him.

I remember how shocking this was at the time and the only motive I could come up with then was simple. Locke had always thought his destiny was the island and he wanted to serve it. His death had brought him back wrong and now he had twisted his motives so that he could kill Jacob and take his place as the Chosen One. I was only half right.

The teasers for the season finale tells us of violence that is to come but they do a perfect job of hiding the real secret of what the season finale will be – the biggest game changer since Through the Looking Glass.

Great Movies I Found While Looking For Porn: Bound

 

An ex-con just out of prison arrives at their new job and the first person they see is a drop dead gorgeous woman. The job involves the two being in close contact. The dame invites the ex-con to her apartment under what are clearly false pretenses. The sparks are obvious. Soon the two are engaged in a clandestine affair. The dame is attached to a man who is abusive and is connected to powerful, dangerous people. The dame comes knocking on the convict’s door in tears, wanting a way out. She knows how to get money and she wants to make a break for it. The ex-con is skeptical but their attraction wins out and they hatch a plan to get the money, blame the boyfriend and get out clean. It goes wrong and there’s violence and a lot of death.

The scenario I’ve just described has been standard for dime detective novels and the film noir genre since the 1930s. You find variations on it in Double Indemnity and The Postman Rings Twice. In the 1970s and 1980s we see it play out in such films as Body Heat and the undervalued classic After Dark, My Sweet (which may make an appearance in this series later) I have seen variations on it to this day, most recently in Out of the Blue a movie so by the numbers you really wonder what a director once as gifted as Neil LaBute would have seen in the project. But when Bound came out in 1996, it was seen as an utter reinvention of the genre for one vital reason: the ex-con was not only a woman, but a lesbian.

If you were a teenager growing up in the 1990s, you no doubt rented Bound from your local video store at least once for a very critical reason. I’m not judging, as you can tell by the title of this series, I did the same thing. Unlike many teenagers, I was well-versed in the criticism of Roger Ebert at seventeen, and I knew in advance that both he and Gene Siskel had been very high on the film: Ebert put it in his top ten of 1996 and asked the Oscars to consider the Wachowski Brothers (as they were known then) to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. Knowing this, however, was not the reason I rented the film initially. However, because I actually watched the entire movie I was stunned by how good it was.

Even at eighteen I was beginning to get a grip on what made a movie a work of art and I was aware of the tropes of various genres. Now there have been several thrillers in the aftermath of Bound which have included this flip on the genre but none of them bothered to work with the high-wire intensity that is apparent in every moment of this film. Bound clocks in at less than 110 minutes and not a second of it seems wasted. Considering how bloated almost every film the siblings have made since then, it’s one of many reasons I’ve thought they’ve lost their way. (There are others but we’ll get to that.)

The opening shows Corky (Gina Gershon) in the title position, bound and gagged. The flashback begins with Corky showing up at her new job and seeing Vi (Jennifer Tilly) walk by. She’s living in one of those apartment buildings that looks like one of those places that only the downtrodden and the criminal reside in. It soon becomes clear that Corky is both.

Corky has taken a job as a handyman in the building. As Roger Ebert pointed out, this was logical in 1996: this was the kind of position he’d seen lesbians working and it fit the trope. One day Vi knocks on her door and says that she was washing dishes and her ring fell down the sink.

The scene that follows has even more sexual tension then when ‘that scene’ happens. The job takes place, Vi thanks Corky and offers her a drink. The flirtation begins almost immediately. Corky has already seen Vi with a man but its clear she’s been through this scene before. Eventually Corky puts her hand between Vi’s legs. “You dropped your ring down the sink on purpose?” she says. “If I say yes will you take your hand away?” Vi manages to gasp out. Vi begs Corky to kiss her which she doesn’t need much bidding. I don’t know which of these kisses earned a nomination from the MTV movie awards for Best Kiss but it might very well have been this one.

What seems inevitable is interrupted when Caesar, Vi’s boyfriend walks in. Immediately hostile, he calms down very quickly when he sees that Corky is a woman. One of the reason Bound works as well as it does is because of the era: Caesar is jealous of his girlfriend but he is convinced she would never cheat on him with a woman. That night when Corky goes to a lesbian bar, Violet is waiting for her in the back of her pick up truck. The two of them ‘pick up’ right where they left off.

The scene that unfolds is one of the most erotic I’ve seen in any film in 1996, lesbian, hetero or otherwise. In an era before the intimacy coordinator was considered and all lesbian scenes smacked off voyeurism the Wachowski made sure that the scene was coordinated so they did not offend anyone. It doesn’t make the scene any less tense – though it was so graphic that it was cut from theatrical release to make sure it still received an R rating – and when Corky rolls over and says: “I can see again” you can see how the cynicism has fallen of Corky’s eyes.

Caesar is, as we already know, connected to the Mafia in Chicago. The names are already known to Corky and we’ve gotten a very clear sense Caesar is so comfortable with his girlfriend that he has no problem letting the enforcers beat the crap out of people in his apartment. Vi is terrified of the company Caesar keeps and she knows that his job is to launder money for the mob. In this case, it’s literal as well as figurative: we see laundry lines of hundred dollar bills, strung across the apartment.

Vi, naturally, comes to Corky with the plan. Corky is skeptical – and it’s worth noting, more so then a man might be in this scenario. She knows that Vi might very well have used her just for this very purpose and she has no interest in going to prison. She also knows all too well how dangerous these people are and is extremely reluctant to cross them.

Eventually Vi, after watching Caesar for a while, comes up with a plan that she thinks will work. It will require pinpoint precision and timing, it has to happen a certain way, and Vi’s performance has to be perfect. If it works properly, they’ll get $2 million and Caesar will blamed and end up dead. Needless to say, it doesn’t work.

Several studios read the script and said that if the character of Corky was changed into a man, they’d buy it. The Wachowskis repeatedly declined. “That movie’s been made a million times, so we’re not really interested. They managed to get the movie made through Spelling films of $4.5 million dollars and didn’t even make its budget back. But the critical response was fantastic. The National Board of Review gave the movie a special award and the movie loved in many circles, especially GLAAD Media, which gave it’s prize for an Outstanding Film in Wide Release. Curiously it was received a lot of admiration from sci-fi and fantasy award groups, including the Saturn Awards which gave it five nominations. The Independent Spirit Awards only nominated it for Best Cinematography, but then again 1996 was a huge year for independent films.

Aside from the brilliant work of the Wachowskis and the technical aspects, this movie rises and falls on the power of its three leads, none of whom were either well known or highly regarded in 1996.

Known for her distinctive voice (which has gotten her a lot of work in animation as Family Guy fans are all too familiar with) Tilly’s career has been almost entirely in movies that are, frankly, beneath her. In an earlier generation she would have been the queen of B-Movies; most of her films have gone straight to video and are not much better than the quality) Her best moment came in the 1990s when she appeared in some movies and TV that were actually used her well: the racetrack comedy Let It Ride, the cheating wife in Liar Liar and the gangster’s moll John Cusack is forced to cast as the lead in Bullets Over Broadway. But in none of those films, even Bullets, did she get credit: her Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress was considered one of the worst in the history of the Oscars at the time. She had a brief moment after 1996, but it quickly petered out and aside from the occasional good film (The Cat’s Meow) her biggest roles have been in many of the Child’s Play franchise. (For the record, she’s brilliant as Tiffany.)

Looking at Tilly in Bound and Bullets you sometimes wonder if Hollywood believed that the movies made the actress and that this was all she deserved. Perhaps if she had lived in the 1930s and 1940s she could have worked brilliantly as a femme fatale or the dame down wrong: it’s telling that her most critically acclaimed movies involve organized crime to a degree. The key difference between this and almost every noir I’ve seen is that Vi genuinely does feel passion for Corky and is willing to do anything to have a future with her. Near the end of the movie this becomes crystal clear.

Gina Gershon had been working for years in Hollywood, mostly in television. In 1995 she had gotten her film break in Showgirls and while that movie cratered the careers of co-stars Elizabeth Berkeley and Robert Davi, Gershon had managed to get cast in Bound in her next film which saved her career. She managed to move out of B-Movies into more mainstream success not long after: she had a supporting role in Face/Off, then The Insider and after a while she was able to stand on her own. She has done as many B-Movies as she has done film and TV but unlike Tilly many of her projects have been in prestige shows. She had recurring roles on Rescue Me ,Brooklyn Nine-Nine and even Riverdale.

Gershon, like Tilly, often gets cast as the villain, so in a sense her work here is closer to an anti-heroine that anything she’s done in much of her career. Corky knows the ropes, knows that she’s being played but she still spends the movie letting her heart lead her. We never forget for a moment that there’s a mind underneath and that she has the ability to pivot when things go wrong. Even as things unfold in a disastrous fashion in the final thirty minutes and the bodies keep piling up, she remains level-headed until a momentary flicker gives her and Vi away.

We all know how gifted a character actor Joe Pantoliano is by now (he’d already been working for 20 years by the time he was cast as Caesar) so I’d like to talk about his hair. By this point I’d seen him in many times on TV and movies but I was not sure about his appearance tonsorially. In The Fugitive and U.S. Marshals, he had a full head; in NYPD Blue (he was one of Steven Bocho’s favorite actors) he had a mustache and was wearing a cap and in Bound he has a full head and looks relatively attractive. Of course in his most famous role as Cypher he was bald but had muttonchop whiskers, in The Sopranos he was clearly wearing a toupee and in Memento he had a cropped haircut and a mustache. I sometimes wonder if how much we can trust Joey Pants bares proportion to how much hair he has on his head in a given role.

I mention this because in Bound, even though we know that Caesar is technically a bad guy  he’s essentially being set up by Vi and Corky to take the fall for their crimes. Every time we see him around his fellow mobsters (especially Christopher Meloni’s character, at a point in his career when he had hair) you can see just how nervous he is. When everything starts to go out of control, he becomes panicky and begins to spiral. With good reason: he’s seen first hand what happens if you cross these guys. All of the deaths that follow are at his hand, but he keeps panicking with each new corpse, trying to find a way out of it, turning in desperation to VI to help him. To be clear we know by the end of the film just how much of a monster he is but given that we’ve known more than he does the whole time, we’re not entirely unsympathetic. You know until Corky’s tied up in the closet and Vi’s in a similar case in the tub.

When the Wachowski’s broke through with The Matrix three years later, they became a household word and the darlings of Hollywood. Roger Ebert, however, was disappointed. He liked The Matrix but he didn’t go into raves over it: he compared it very unfavorably to Dark City which had aired the year before and which he considered one of the great cinematic masterpieces. Furthermore, having raved about Bound, he saw what he considered a well-made but traditional blockbuster a disappointment from those filmmakers.

And in hindsight he was right to feel that way. It’s not just that the sequels were immensely underwhelming (though Ebert actually thought higher of them then most critics) it’s that ever since the Wachowski’s have abandoned the humanity that was very clear in Bound in favor of gorgeous cinematography and visuals with stories that have nothing behind them. All of their films – V for Vendetta, Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending  - have been all spectacle and no substance. Only briefly in their work for the Showtime series Work In Progress did we get a hint of that humanity and they immediately followed it up with another Matrix film. The Wachowskis got lost in The Matrix and never really been unplugged; they seem to be working on yet another sequel even after the fourth one bombed critically and financially.

This year marks the 25^th anniversary of The Matrix’s release. Already many will no doubt celebrate it as a notable event in the history of cinema. I’m inclined to view it as a day of mourning. Bound showed two filmmakers who had created a versatile original noir with all the hallmarks of love-story that ended, unlike almost other noirs, with a note of optimism and humanity. The Matrix showed two filmmakers who have since embarked on a career where humanity is the least interesting thing about the world to them. To those who might choose to pillory me for this pronouncement, I urge them to seek Bound out. Then I’d give them two pills and ask which they’d rather the filmmakers had taken. The Wachowskis went into Wonderland with The Matrix. Bound shows just how good they were if we never had to go down the rabbit hole at all.

 

How TV Of The New Golden Age Laid Bare The Lies The First Golden Age Sold To America, Introduction

 

 

In an episode of Homicide Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) and Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher)  are discussing how many times they have delivered the news to the relatives of the recently murdered. Bayliss tells Frank that it didn’t used to be like this. The always skeptical Pembleton asks what he means. Bayliss says: “Back in the 1950s. You know, I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver. These kind of things didn’t happen back then.” Pembleton doesn’t even take a breath: “Any of these shows show a bunch of men in white robes burning a cross on a lawn?” Bayliss, deadpan, says: “I don’t remember that episode.”

So much of the conservative movement power is built in the nostalgia factor. I don’t deny the racist undertones, but much of it also based on the idea that change is scary and that in the past things were better. Recent sociological studies show that this is a belief held by many people the concept that no matter how much evidence there is things are better and safer now, they were better before. Many of these people surveyed consistently believe it was better before they were born.

I don’t pretend the world today is perfect or even very good. But I find it impossible to believe that, voluntarily, any American would want to live thirty or forty years ago. That so many conservative politicians in their twenties and thirties seem to long for an era that ‘perished before they were even born’ is particularly ironic considering how much of their rise to prominence would not have happened without social media. Yet across the globe so many politicians who have lived their entire lives before the 1950s constantly seem to argue that their countries would be better if they could return to ‘the values’ of the 1950s.

Anyone who does even a cursory history of America alone in the 1950s knows what a turbulent time it was. There was the Red Scare, the looming threat of the Cold War, the battle over civil rights in the South in the 1950s which increasingly were violent, the repression of women to domestic live and the denial of the existence of homosexuals. So why do we have this belief that the 1950s were a halcyon time? Because of Hollywood. The fact that during same period the blacklist was in full force and destroying the careers and lives of hundreds of people was no doubt a partial reason that so much of the product we got, particularly on television in the 1950s was that of wholesomeness and with no controversy at all. That so many of the writers in that medium chafed at the restrictions put on them by the censors apparently never made it public knowledge either: Rod Serling essentially wrote The Twilight Zone because in a sci-fi universe he could tell the stories he couldn’t in the real world.

So much of the controversy against Hollywood by the right – basically as long as I have been alive and even before – has been based on their certainty that everything was good in the world until Hollywood started putting sex and violence in the movies and TV. They always wanted to put them in their films and TV, they just weren’t allowed to for a very long time. Hollywood couldn’t do it until the ratings system was created in 1969; TV couldn’t really do it until cable TV became a force in the 1990s. But the right believes correlation equals causation as much as the left does which is why whenever they look back to the past, they always start with the 1950s. That’s the America they believe existed even though it was just TV. They are counting on the nostalgia factor and the belief the past was better to win over the public – and it has worked more than Democrats want to admit.

One of the more interesting things about Peak TV has been that it has been poking holes in the idea of institutions. This started with HBO, of course and while it’s clear in all of the three classics that started the era, it applies the most to The Sopranos.

There are quite a few things you notice about The Sopranos. Perhaps the clearest tragedy of Tony Soprano – aside from, of course, being a psychotic killer – is that he’s a dinosaur trapped in an institution that is dying. Tony knows this even at the start of the show: “I feel like I came in at the end,” he tells Melfi in the Pilot and that’s true.

Always underlying The Sopranos is the fact that the Mafia as it was in the past is coming to an end as a force in organized crime. David Chase makes it clear on multiple occasions how small the world Tony and his crew live in is compared to reality: the first time in the second episode when Paulie and Silvio visit a coffee shop and its clear how out of touch they are. The more critical story is something we don’t note but is very apparent even on the first viewing of the show. It’s not just that all of the people in Tony’s world are white males; it’s that none of them are very young.

This is a truth that plays out throughout the entire show. Most of the ‘new faces’ are in fact former gangsters who have gotten out of jail after long stretches and themselves are out of touch with the world, much less that of how organized crimes work. The entire series takes place either in New Jersey and New York, which is the extent of the Mafia empire by the late 1990s. The Italians no longer have the control they once did and they no longer have the reach they once did. They are clinging desperately to a way of life that is going to expire.

And its telling how often in the series how much the characters quote The Godfather and its other movies. You wonder sometimes how many of them ended up becoming gangsters as much because the movies made it look glamorous as well as the fact it was in their families. It’s also telling how much time Christopher (Michael Imperioli) spends in the series yearning for Hollywood, wanting to be a screenwriter and eventually helping make a low-budget film with a TV writer (Tim Daly) he met in AA.

Christopher, it’s worth noting, is the outlier on The Sopranos in which he’s the youngest member of the Soprano inner circle. Most of the younger characters on the show, beginning with Chris’ friend Brendan in Season 1 and ending with Jackie Aprile, Jr in Season 3 are among the most notable casualties in the series. The message, which the show makes very clear, is that the Mafia is a dying institution because the younger generation, trying to find their own way, can never please their elders of which Tony is the most prominent.

Tony is a dinosaur because he can’t understand any part of the world he lives in. He constantly references old Hollywood when he needs to find a way through life. “Whatever happened to the strong, silent type?” he tells Melfi at one point. “Like Gary Cooper.” It’s telling that Tony keeps longing for an actor to find his model for reality. He constantly quotes films from the golden age of Hollywood and seems constantly disillusioned by everything. Tony is running Jersey, but he is the head of a pond that will just keep shrinking. He reacts like so many other white men, lashing out at any change, stuck in the past and constantly making sexist and racist tropes and unwilling to let even his family have any freedom beyond what they want. You wonder if the sole reason he leans so much on Christopher is because of his disappointment with his son, who he never seems to truly understand and is always harder on then Meadow. A.J. is a disappointment to both parents but Tony is far more brutal to him, particularly when he begins to read philosophy and poetry. He is just as brutal to Christopher, who never does anything to please him.

Even before he betrays Adriana to Tony, Christopher has been shot and laid near death and developed a heroine addiction. At one point he tells Adriana that his Uncle Tony is ‘the man I’m going to hell for.’  Christopher had a chance at one point to become part of the film industry in Season 2, but Tony’s utter disapproval and disdain for it essentially stomp it down. Tony believes in a way of life that is going to destroy everyone around him but as far as he’s concerned his nephew is not entitled to take his own path. When he finally kills Christopher near the end of the series, the only real shock is that he chose to dirty his hands with it: at every opportunity, Tony has chosen a dying institution over anyone else’s free will.

That the final episode of The Sopranos is called ‘Made in America’ is a great irony. Tony Soprano was made in America, but he has devoted his entire life based on an outmoded version of it rather than the one that exists. Whether or not he dies in the aftermath of the finale doesn’t matter he never really lived in the real world.

I must say, even with that, I can’t see Tony ever becoming a Trump supporter. It’s not just his whole attitude (“The mouth on this guy” he’d say) but Tony’s from Jersey and he got firsthand exposure to how Trump did ‘legitimate business’. If Tony had ever spent thirty seconds with 45 on a deal at anytime during the series run (or before given Trump’s early career) the Donald might have ended up in concrete under the ‘other’ Four Seasons even before he hosted The Apprentice.

Much of the best TV in the 21^st Century has been when it exposes the past as to show that the sepia toned way we looked at it was not only never real but worse than we imagined. There are any number of series that could illustrate this but for the purposes of this series, I intend to focus on four shows that have aired mostly in the last decade and that take a deep look at parts of the 20^th century that the nostalgia factor is highest for. All of these shows won multiple Emmys, two of them won Best Drama multiple times, one has won Best Comedy and one of them is an underrated masterpiece that I consider one of the greatest shows of the 2010s.

The series that will be the most familiar to readers are Mad Men, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Crown, specifically the first two seasons. The less familiar one will be Masters of Sex, Showtime’s fictionalized drama about the lives of groundbreaking sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

If you know these series you are no doubt aware that all of them focus primarily on Caucasian white people and mostly wealthy and middle class ones. This is a deliberate decision. While there have been many brilliant recent series that have shown the reality of minorities in this era – most prominently Lovecraft Country -   the stories I want to focus on the stories of those in the world that has been reflected in the ‘50s and 60s comedies and drama of that era and reveal the darker truths beneath them.

Mad Men will look at the turbulent 1960s from the perspective of the so-called ‘silent majority’ and shows that even there the revolution was affecting the privileged and the dissatisfaction was evident even among the privileged. Masters of Sex looks at two people who were blamed by many prominent people for turning America prurient and making most Americans sexual deviant when the show makes it clear that all of these practices  - particularly homosexuality prostitution, and all the different sexual positions people take – were always there and all they did was report it. The Crown shows by looking at England through its most cherished institution – the monarchy – shows not only how broken the system but it how corrupts the people within in and shows the rot at the center of Great Britain even when it ruled the waves. And The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel looks at the sea change of the entertainment industry in the 1950s and 1960s to show the flaws within the family unit post-World War II and whether professional success is ever worth the cost of personal relationships.

So many people believe in the idea of devoting their lives to, if I may quote Elaine May, ‘a way of life that perished long before they were ever born.” By looking at these shows, we will take a look into that era and reveal that even the people who lived that life were not only not celebrating it but were looking back even then to a previous era.

 

Shogun Final Assessment

 

 

In the midst of what was a mostly positive review for FX’s reinterpretation of Shogun, a Japanese-American writer said that the series suffered from a ‘Japanese-superiority complex’. His argument was that, for all the impressive virtues of the remake, it was clearly in love with the old Japanese lifestyle, including the code of bushido and that the character of Toranaga supposedly benevolence glossed over the military code of the Shogun that lasted well past the Meiji restoration and essentially led to the militarization that led to the rise of Japan in World War II. 

I can understand why that interpretation could be possible but having gone over the final episode and looking at it in context with the entire series, I believe the writers and Hiroyuki Sanada were actually taking this into account in ways that were so subtle they may not have been apparent on first viewing.

Warning: Spoilers for the entire limited series follow.

In the first nine episodes of Shogun we are led to believe that Toranaga is essentially exhausted from a lifetime of battles and has been manipulated by the Council of Regents, primarily Ishido, into a position where he will be forced to surrender his power and eventually be murdered. Throughout the first eight episodes we view Toranaga as a man who is only acting reluctantly and defensively in every move that he makes both in public and private. Sanada brilliantly plays him as a man who doesn’t want to fight and who chafes at every suggestion made by his councils to carry out his war. Near the halfway point of the series, when it seems his brother has outmaneuvered him, he surrenders and we continue to believe he has lost the will to fight.

There are signs even before his final scene with Mariko that all of this is manipulation but they are fleeting based on the other devotion so many of his vassals, even Yabushige who is constantly switching sides to save his own skin, not only to his honor but that he is a man who is basically good and does not want power. The fact that Blackthorne and his own son chafe at his unwillingness to fight only adds to that belief and by keeping him out of the penultimate episode, we are led to believe the last images we saw of him in the eighth episode was that of someone who was still improvising his way out of a struggle.

So I think there’s an argument that the Toranaga we see in the final episode may actually be the real Toranaga and that both the writers and Sanada are making a very clear point. Toranaga may be the main character of Shogun but in a way he is just as much an antihero as we’ve seen in so many American based dramas. It’s here the comparison to Game of Thrones may be the most accurate, as Toranaga has clearly been not only as manipulative as all the lords who wanted his death, but at his core just as brutal.

When we see the return to the village, there are claims that Blackthorne’s ship has been destroyed by a rogue element and that Toranaga is hunting the village for the traitors. We see the heads of the people he’s had executed on pikes, the first clear sign we’ve had as to just how brutal he is. He then orders Yabushige to commit seppuku, something that Yabushige has clearly expected and then agrees to appear as his second. (I’ll return to this.) Blackthorne then requests a meeting with Toranaga and orders the village not to be destroyed to the point he wants to be punished instead. Toranaga looks away from him and when Blackthorne is about to kill himself, stops him. We learn eventually it’s not because he admires the man’s sacrifice but because he still wants to use him and he now thinks that the man will be loyal to him. (He also later confides that even if his ship is rebuilt he’ll just sink it again.)

Perhaps the sign of his true coldness comes when he is greeted by many of his former ladies and he cuddles his son. He admits there have been many sacrifices but when one of his ladies mentions the passing of the son who killed himself, he brushes it off. “I will have other sons. Starting with this one.”  We’ve known him to be manipulative before but the fact that he doesn’t even seem to mind his sons death anymore is truly unsettling. The only person he truly seems to mourn is Mariko, but considering how abominably he treated her – and in fact sent her off to die – mutes this.

I think the penultimate scene of the series where Yabushige, about to meet his fate and Toranaga are together may be the key to his entire character. In a sense I’m reminded of the cliché of the Bond villain confessing his evil plan except Toranaga actually makes sure his audience is dead when he finishes. I also think that Toranaga is doing this because Yabushige is the last of his former advisers still alive and he wants to tell him this – not to confess but because he’s the only one left who can appreciate what he has done.

And indeed when Yabushige learns how well Toranaga has manipulated everything so that Setsu, mourning the death of her old friend Mariko, has promised to leave Ishido’s side and will now back him, he is impressed. Toranaga has prevailed but he has not had to get his own hands dirty: everyone else has been willing to die for him and his image has been perfectly maintained. Now he can take the title of Shogun and build the empire he wants. Yet even here he refuses to give Yabushige the satisfaction of knowing that he is, in his heart, as monstrous as all the others. “Why should I tell a dead man the future?” he says before Yabushige puts his sword in his stomach. He knows that the legends of who he is will outlast the truth even if there were anyone who were around to know it.

So it’s clear that Sanada and his writers know all too well that in this last scene the Shogunate is going to be built on a lie. The myth of Toranaga will be that the Shogun came to power out of a need for benevolent leadership in a time of war. The truth is that he was just as bloodthirsty and power-hungry as Ishido was – he just hid it better. But Toranaga is fully aware that the legend outlives the truth even when he was alive. It will be just true when he is long gone.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t heroes in Shogun – or more accurately, heroines. The most prominent, of course, is Mariko. She spent her entire life subject to disgrace and manipulation but she found a purpose in her final weeks that she never had before. She was aware of Toranaga’s manipulations more than anyone but unlike his other followers she did so with her eyes wide open and with a certain awareness that not even Toranaga had. Toranaga was unable to understand why the Consort loathed him so much. Mariko made it very clear: “a woman is always at war.” She had accepted her fate when she when she went to Osaka but it was very clear she did so of her own free will. Anna Sawai was superb throughout the entire series, but she took her work to a new level in the next-to-last episode right up until the moment she was about to kill herself. It will never be clear if she expected to survive what was going to happen after Ishido gave her the permits but when the attack came, her decision to let herself be killed by the attackers was a move that I seriously doubt even Toranaga thought she was capable of. It was an act of independence that guaranteed him his victory – but just as importantly to her, saved her soul.

Similar credit must be given to Setsu who spent the entire series being just as slyly manipulative as Toranaga was. She clearly had hated Toranaga for the way he had used her as protection and was willing to go to Ishido’s side for the sole purpose of being the power behind the throne. But it’s clear that she was shocked by the maneuver of Mariko in the penultimate episode and she was trying as much as anything to talk her old school friend out of killing herself. When she made her final move at the end of the series to support Toranaga, I think it was more out of admiration and respect to Mariko than her disgust at Ishido. She had decided to pick the winning team, something I’m not sure even Toranaga realized.

Usami Fuji also did  a superb job as a woman who started the series with the death of her husband and who wanted to join them in death. Her part as consort to Blackthorne gave her a purpose. It’s worth noting that, aside from Mariko, Toranaga had the deepest relationship with Fuji and it showed in their final scenes. When he learned she was planning to take the veil, he protested it because of his admiration for her but he clearly respected her decision. The fact that he chose to help her dispose of the ashes of her husband and son – and she helped him say goodbye to Mariko – was one of the most moving moments in the entire series. Blackthorne is right: Fuji will be a good nun.

But there’s an argument that the biggest winner in this episode was Gin, the geisha who headed the Japanese consorts. She saw through the ruse that Toranaga was doing well before anyone did – as was clear in ‘The Stick of Time’ when she told him she wanted in his new city a center not only for her women but for the future. It was clear she was as devoted to her rise as he was and she knew that he had the vision and ability to realize her dream. Toranaga maintained his façade in that episode but the fact that he chose to allow it to happen in the next one speaks volumes as to the respect he had for her boldness.

It's now clear that, even though there was some disappointment about the final episode, the gamble on Shogun has paid off. As of today’s writing, it ranks on imdb.com as the 36^th highest rating television show of all time. And it was more than worthy of that ranking. As I mentioned in my original review, Shogun has restored the idea of epic to the limited series and done so without sacrificing any of the great character moments that have some of the best limited series of the past decade. All of the performances from Sanada and Cosmo Jarvis as well as Tadanobu Asano as Yabushige and indeed the entire cast have been master-classes in acting. The lion’s share of these performers, while well known in Japan, have been unknown in America; indeed while many of them have a list of credits on imdb.com that go back decades, they don’t have accompanying pictures because they have no record in American productions. I suspect this will change rapidly in the days and weeks to come, particularly as we come closer to awards seasons.

The question is: can Shogun match its predecessor at the Emmys this year? Any other year that might be a given, but as it is we’ve already had quite a few extraordinary limited series: the most recent installation of Fargo, the brilliant Fellow Travelers, Capote Vs. the Swans and  Lessons in Chemistry and flashier productions such as Night Country and The Regime. At this point it’s a given the series will be among the five nominees for Best Limited Series (and seriously Emmy voters, if this year doesn’t convince you to expand the number of nominated series, nothing will) and it is certain to dominate most of the technical awards.

As for acting, while there are many nominees who will likely contend, it remains to be seen if any actually have a chance of winning in a ridiculously strong field all around. Sanada already will be going against Jon Hamm for Fargo, Matt Bomer for Fellow Travelers, Tom Hollander for Capote Vs. The Swans and almost certainly Andrew Scott for Ripley. (There are any number of strong contenders to get the final slot and I’m not willing to predict it yet.) I don’t know if Anna Sawai will ask to be nominated as lead actress or supporting Actress but it’s a tough field either war. In the former category she would have to face off against Jodie Foster from Night Country, Juno Temple from Fargo, Brie Larson from Lessons in Chemistry and Naomi Watts from Capote Vs. The Swans. Supporting Actress isn’t much easier as each of the series I listed for Actress has a similarly formidable contender: Kali Reis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aja Naomi King, and Diane Lane and possibly a host of other Swans. Even the vast array of Supporting Actors will have a hard time getting into an already crowded field. It’s not just that they might all lose to Robert Downey Jr, but there’s also Jonathan Bailey for Fellow Travelers, Lewis Pullman for Lessons of Chemistry and the late Treat Williams for Capote that could also be formidable contenders as well as any number of the supporting actors in Fargo. And all those are just the certain choices; the whole field has a plethora of actors that could serve as wild cards. This is without considering among others, A Murder at the End of the World, Monsieur Spade and Masters of the Air as well as any other wild cards such as Apples Never Fall and Baby Reindeer.

Right now, Gold Derby has put Shogun ahead of Fargo for Best Limited Series for the first time and it’s hard to argue with the choice. I think it unlikely the show will win any acting awards at the moment, which would make it the first limited series to do so since HBO’s masterful Chernobyl. Like that series, both shows were brilliant historical pieces that relied perhaps more on atmosphere than great performances (though their were just as many in the latter) But it is still a great accomplishment and one of the best shows of 2024 even in April. And for those of us who were left wanting more, Clavell did right five more novels in his Asian saga and Shogun was actually the third one. Of course if they wanted to do it chronologically, the next one would be Tai-Pan. They made a bad movie of that one. Perhaps now they can give it the limited series treatment it deserves. I’d watch and judging by the audience response, so would a lot of people.

My Score: 5 STARS.

Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate at 20: Just as Attuned To Its Eras Politics As the Original

 

John Frankenheimer’s adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate was one of the greatest films ever made, considered a classic when released and then put out of public view for twenty years afterward. The comparisons to Oswald were prominent in 1963 and even without seeing the movie the title had entered the vernacular by the time it came out both on TV and home video in the mid-1980s.

Frankenheimer always claimed that the movie was a black comedic satire rather than a thriller but the great thing is it works brilliantly as both. So many of the lines delivered by the Chinese and Russians play as deadpan humor, the scene where the captured troops believe they are attending a garden party is both frightening and hysterical in different context and the entire film is based on one of the greatest ironies of all: the Communists are planning to take over the United States by the use of a political candidate whose primary pull is anti-Communist rhetoric. The film is terrifying half the time and the other half you’re not sure how seriously to take it; the fact that so many people may have thought it could actually happen is a tribute to that.

When Jonathan Demme remade the movie in 2004, it already entered under a considerable burden. Even after his brilliant movies such as Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia Demme had never been regarded anything near the great directors. He had followed Philadelphia with Beloved, which was seen as an Oprah Winfrey vanity project despite the fact that critics admired it and he had followed that with a remake of Charade that was justifiably loathed. The Manchurian Candidate was his follow-up to The Truth About Charlie and no one expected much despite the incredible cast. Released in August of 2004, the film received  a mixed critical reception. Some critics like Roger Ebert and Kenneth Turan immensely admired but the lion’s share chose to consider it an unnecessary remake of a classic. It didn’t help that it was a political satire being released in an election year and that so much of its message, which might have resonated years later, came at a time when even making anti-government films was considered aid and comfort to ‘the enemy’. The film died at the box office and was ignored in the awards circles that year.

Demme spent the rest of his career working in documentaries, music videos, independent films  and television. He still had the touch in movie: his last film major film Rachel Getting Married was a classic and he worked in several Emmy nominated and winning series, including Enlightened, The Killing  and Seven Seconds which won an Emmy for Regina King. But Demme almost never got a chance to direct another film of the scope of Manchurian Candidate again. Which is a great pity because I have seen the films several times in the 20 years since it was originally released and not only is it a real grower, the more you watch it the more it seems fitting to the era it was made in as the original was.

Indeed, just like the Frankenheimer version, Demme’s version is as fitting both in the terms of a thriller and a political satire to the 2000s as the original was to the 1960’s. While Demme has changed several details, he is fundamentally true to the formula of the original but I’d argue his satire is far deeper and darker. In the original Eleanor Shaw is determined to make her husband President and is using Anti-Communist rhetoric to arrange a Communist take over of the Country. In the 2004 version, Eleanor is determined to use the flag and patriotism (a big deal for the War on Terror) and allow a sleeper agent to take over the country for her corporation. In both cases, the means are an end so that she can herself run the country. Eleanor is so enraged by her son being used as the assassin in the original that her first act when being brought into power is to enact revenge on her own handlers. In Demme’s version, Eleanor is essentially using Manchurian Global as a means to realize the power she herself never could, something that enrages her fellow conspirators. There’s an argument that in Demme’s version Eleanor is far less caring. Angela Lansbury loves her son but is infuriated that he is being used as a tool by the Communists, something she didn’t want for him. Meryl Streep is not only fully aware of her son being used by the powers that be but in her final scene with him makes it very clear that she thinks she did this for his own good. “It’s so you could have what I never could,” she tells Raymond as she tenderly bathes him. By this point she’s already used him to kill the woman he loved and doesn’t seem to care about it: she got in the way and therefore had  to be ground into dirt.

Streep in 2004 was in the midst of the career revival that has continued to this day: she had won back to back Golden Globes for Adaptation in 2002 and Angels in America in 2003. She would be nominated for Best Supporting Actress for this film (the only major award Manchurian Candidate was during the entire 2004 Oscar season) but lost to Natalie Portman for Closer. (Cate Blanchett ended up taking Best Supporting Actress for The Aviator.) It’s hard to ever claim an example of Meryl Streep being robbed by the Oscars of a nomination, far too many of her roles are an example of her being nominated, as Jared Leto once said as a joke, ‘in accordance with California State Law’. But I honestly think Streep’s work in Manchurian Candidate is superior to quite a few of the films in the 21^st century she was nominated for; I certainly prefer it to the one she got the Oscar for in The Iron Lady.

I have noticed a distinct shift in the kind of roles Streep took ever since she tied Katherine Hepburn in 1999 for most nominations any actor had ever gotten. Overall watching her work in this century you see a looser, freer Streep who seems to take a kind of pleasure in the roles she takes more than she did in the 1980s and 1990s. Ever since she awed us with her comic performance in Adaptation her work has been just excellent as ever but far more often she seems to be taking more pleasure in it then she did, say, in Sophie’s Choice and Out of Africa. In her brilliant work as Miranda Priestley, Julia Child and Florence Foster Jenkins you can see she’s clearly just as great a performer as before but now she’s actually having as much as the audience.

This is seen to a great extent in her interpretation of Eleanor Shaw. It’s obvious that she’s modeled after Hilary Clinton, particularly her pantsuits, but you get the thing that Streep is playing the version of Hilary that the right-wing has been claiming she’d been for the past decade and the one that they still believe she is. Eleanor is threatening the Democratic elders to destroy the party’s chances of winning in November if they don’t put her son on the ticket, treating her fellow Senators with complete disdain, complaining her fellow male conspirators on Manchurian Global don’t have the balls to do what’s needed. And in all of the people she speaks with she regards with the infantilizing tone that so many Republicans truly believe Democrats think of everybody. Even in the final scene with her son, she chides him like a child. “The assassin always dies,” she tells him. “It’s necessary for the national healing.” You almost find it refreshing when she’s giving orders to kill people; at least she seems to be honest with her emotions. Streep is clearly having the time of her life, and that’s telling because so much of the rest of the film is dark and solemn.

Another reason fans may have turned away from the movie was because of the performance of Denzel Washington in the lead as Ben Marco. Oddly enough this may be one of Washington’s greatest performances for the same reason it isolated so many people at the time. Washington is best known for being a charismatic leading man, filled with dynamism and energy. This was true as much as when he plays heroic characters such as Malcolm X as it was with his Oscar winning role in Training Day. That’s not the Washington we see here, any more than it is the one we would see in other Oscar nominated roles such as in Flight or as Macbeth.

Ben Marco, in Frankenheimer’s version, started out as heroic but was suffering from nightmares and delusions. Eventually he confronts them and the government gets on his side and Sinatra’s heroism comes through. We never see that in Washington’s version. Indeed after the introductory scenes, we see that Ben Marco has followed his delusion down the same rabbit hole that so many conspiracy nuts have over the years. Furthermore, in keeping with the nature of Internet, the Army considers his ravings an embarrassment and after a certain amount of time, they cut him loose because they believe he’s deluded. The only person who seems to trust him is Rosie, played in this version by Kimberly Elise. Washington plays the entire movie looking like he can barely hold things together and that he is doing so with both hands. It’s such a radical departure from what we’re used to him that I’d actually rank it as one of his best performance purely because its so atypical. He’s given great performances since but rarely has he tried something this daring again.

In Frankenheimer’s version, Shaw is aware of what is going on almost from the start and it has made him arrogant. Laurence Harvey’s version was that of a spoiled brat who barely could hold contempt for himself. He derides the remarks everyone’s made about him; he knows no one could stand him in the unit.

Live Schreiber takes on a different tone. Throughout much of the film he comes across as the Medal of Honor recipient and war hero we believe him to be. He is something of a cats-paw to his mother but he’s more defiant of her then in the original and more obviously in love with Josie Jordan (Vera Farmiga in one of her first major film roles). During this film Shaw thinks Marco is troubled and delusional, an idea carried out when Marco bites him in the midst of a public meeting. By that point, even though the viewer knows that Marco is on the right track, we’re still inclined to think he might be wrong about Shaw.

That may be the most daring change to the original: Shaw is the Vice Presidential candidate and not his father. For that reason while we see Shaw commit the same crimes in the brainwashing scenes then before, in the present he doesn’t commit any major violent acts. Then when Tom Jordan (Jon Voight in one of the rare, restrained performances of his career) confronts Eleanor and Raymond, Eleanor uses Raymond to kill Jordan – and then Josie. One of the images I’ve rarely forgotten is the sight of a brainwashed Raymond walking blankly through water up to his waist, calmly apologizing before he drowns Jordan – and then almost as an afterthought the woman he loves.

The brainwashing has been moved to the First Gulf War but we are clearly meant to think of the one going on in 2003, and the fact that Manchurian is now essentially a global corporation rather than Communism is a deeper meaning, one that almost certainly hurt the film at the box office. By August of 2004, the shine was officially off the War in Iraq and the battle lines had been drawn, with patriotism on one side and oil in another. Perhaps some people thought that when Jordan says Shaw was going to be ‘the first corporate Vice President in America’ they thought it was too soft; many Democrats had the opinions of Dick Cheney already and they might have wondered why a corporation would be this clandestine. Aren’t the campaign contributions enough, they might have thought.

The film also has a much higher body count then the original. In the film, most of the soldiers come back alive from the attack. In the film we see two murdered and by the time it begins most of the rest of the troop has died of ‘natural causes’, though Marco is clear none of them were natural. (One of the victims is played by Pablo Schreiber, Liev’s brother, who was on the verge of becoming a great character actor in his own right.) At the start of the movie, the sole remaining survivor, besides Marco and Shaw, is Al Melvin, played by Jeffrey Wright in a brief but chilling performance. By this point Melvin is a paranoid mess, ranting and raving in the sight of Shaw. That he dies later in the film is far from a surprise; we can see that the difference between him and Marco was that Marco was, at least for a while, better at hiding his problems.

The final half-hour of the film is vastly different from the original. But it is worth noting that in his positive review of it Ebert said that he liked the changes. In his own reviews of the original Ebert wrote that he had theorized that Sinatra had been similarly brainwashed and that Rosie was in fact his controller. I don’t know if Demme read Ebert’s reviews and decided it was a good idea or whether he came up with it on his own, but the last half hour closely parallel Ebert’s theories.

How the original film ends I will leave you to discover, but I have to say it too fits in with the model of changing the movie for the times. In Frankenheimer’s version, Raymond makes a sacrifice beyond measure to destroy the conspiracy and Demme’s version carries out  a different variation with different trigger men and different players on the podium. The ending also has a satiric finish that I appreciate as a different set of powers that be arrange a manipulation of the truth to make sure that the right people are punished and that no one learns just how badly they blundered what happened.

As we enter another election cycle it may seem like Demme’s Manchurian Candidate is as quaint as the original seems to be. I believe both films are incredibly on point. It is true Frankenheimer’s is more evergreen than Demme’s was but that doesn’t make his film any less pertinent or indeed satirically brilliant. Just like Frankenheimer’s, Demme holds all the sacred cows  and ideologies to a twisted mirror that still reflects a world we can see to this day. If the only difference between now and twenty years ago is that the crazies seem to be legitimate and in some cases more prominent in elected politics, that doesn’t mean the links aren’t there. We’ve seen many TV shows since Demme’s version take a similarly twisted view of DC – House of Cards and Scandal for drama; Veep for comedy -  but Demme was there first and in many ways, his version is superior because he saw the darkness in the message. The politics may have been a joke. The message behind it, deadly serious.

The Sympathizer: Come For Four Robert Downeys, Stay For A Brilliant Satiric Post Vietnam Limited Series

 

The gimmick to draw viewers to HBO’s brilliant new comedy-drama The Sympathizer is admittedly a brilliant one. Not only does it have Robert Downey Jr appearing in his first TV role since his incredible one season stint on Ally McBeal nearly a quarter of a century, it shows him in four different roles as if one Downey character wasn’t enough to make us watch.

As I mentioned in my review of Lessons in Chemistry, I’ve frequently thought that one of the sins of the MCU is that it robbed us of the work of some of the most talented actors in history to iconic comic book characters. Few of the losses were more intense than Downey’s. You can’t say it didn’t work out for him. Downey’s tenure as Tony Stark not only solidified a comeback for an actor who for the first twenty years of his career – as he himself said in acceptance speech at the Oscars -  was constantly having trouble getting insured and staying out of jail. The risk not only paid off for Downey but for the Marvel Cinematic Universe – though I’d argue the existence of the latter was far more harmful to cinema and much of TV. Downey is so synonymous with Tony Stark that in the last fifteen years he’s had few opportunities to do any major films or TV outside of it. It wasn’t until his character finally sacrificed himself in Endgame that he was free to do other things. Critics and audiences got a very clear picture of that in his incredible performance as Levi Strauss, the antagonist at the center of the Oscar-winning – and box office record breaking – Oppenheimer. One of the many pleasures of watching it make its way to the Best Picture this year was getting to see Downey finally receive the Oscar for one of his greatest works.

Now there is an excellent chance, that with the work he is doing in The Sympathizer, he will become the first male actor to win an Oscar and an Emmy in the same year. Downey now takes on a task that few before could master as he plays four completely different American characters in The Sympathizer. I’ve only seen the first two in the first two episodes: Carl, a CIA man who is on the side of a North Vietnamese general in the fall of Saigon and an LA academic who says all the right things about being politically correct in public and private while he infantilizes Asians at the same time. Downey will also be playing a director and a politician in later episodes – and a teaser indicates all four characters will at one point be onscreen at the same time.

This is hallowed ground played by such masters as Peter Sellers and Alec Guiness as well as Eddie Murphy in multiple films. What’s striking in the early episodes is, given the chance to chew the scenery, something Downey himself knows he’s known for (and doesn’t always consider it a compliment) he doesn’t make it particularly obvious in the episodes I’ve seen. Perhaps it is the nature of the characters: Carl is the CIA man and he has to move through the shadows more than ever and the professor doesn’t want to obviously make himself the center of attention (though it’s clear at an academic function he doesn’t like it when that happens) But there might be a subtler reason: Downey knows that while he is there for the entertainment purposes and probably the draw, he doesn’t want to take attention away from the main story.

And the thing is, he has a point. I might not have tuned into The Sympathizer were it not for Downey’s presence. But after just two episodes, I think it could stand on its own with Downey less of a factor. To be sure I seriously doubt this series could have gotten greenlit even on HBO without Downey’s involvement. His production company is responsible for it. But this is not an easy story to tell even though its very clear we need it told.

Like many limited series adaptions I hadn’t read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel and I’m not sure I would have sought it out voluntarily. The Vietnam War was a tired trope when I was a teenager and I didn’t know if there was anything new that could be milked from it. I clearly underestimated the novel and the story Nguyen is telling.

The story is being related in a confessional from a character we know only as the Captain (Hoa Xaunde). It is framed as a confessional being told from a reeducation camp by the Captain which he has apparently told many times before and in fact keeps retelling it as we hear it. The Captain is of a Vietnamese mother and a French father, which makes him bi-racial and bi-lingual. He also received an American education and when he returned to North Vietnam  all of these capacities have made him a trusted aide to a delusional General, who at the start of the series is ‘the most feared man in the North and  by some in the South.’  What no one knows at the start of the series is that the Captain is a double agent, working for the South Vietnamese government. We see him in a cinema at first with the general and Carl, who is the general’s closest aide, watching a spy be tortured for a list of critical names in his office. They are demanding she give up her contact which makes the Captain nervous – because he’s the one who not only gave them to her but arrested her in the first place.

The Sympathizer begins with the war practically lost – Saigon is about to fall before the first episode is even half over. And it is here that the episode plays what is its greatest trick. Because for all the films and TV shows we’ve seen about ‘The War’,  almost none of them dare to look at it from the perspective of the Vietnamese.

I have little doubt this was at least one of the intentions off the original novel of Nguyen to lay bare that, for all America’s arguing that Vietnam was a wound on the psyche we’ve never recovered from, it had everything to do with us and nothing to do with Vietnam. The General himself states it in the first episode: “They liked playing cowboys against Communism for a few years and now that they’ve gotten bored, they’re leaving.”  I imagine many leftists will be glad to hear this said in the series – but they’ll be far less happy when the Captain gets to America and right into the housing of 70s academia, the heart of the student protest movement. In the scenes where Downey plays the Captain’s former educator, he plays on several single infantilizing cliché the left is guilty of. He talks to his half Japanese secretary as if she doesn’t know the ‘right way of being Japanese’, tells the Captain “there’s nothing wrong with the word Oriental’, dresses him in a peasant jacket for a party and gives him  a homework assignment asking him to explain the difference between his ‘Oriental and Occidental side’. The part that really hit home is when a student interviews the captain and assures him: “We were all on your side, you know.” The Captain benignly asks: “Which side was that? How do you know I’m not a Viet Cong?” The student freezes before the Captain jokes and assures him that he’s one of the good ones.

I’ve been watching movies and TV about the Vietnam War my whole life. It is not until I saw The Sympathizer that I realized not only what I was missing but the whole divide between the left and right on every issue.  Thousands of students marched in the street to protest the war and were willing to burn draft cards. I don’t remember any marchers chanting “Hey-Hey-Hey LBJ, how many Vietnamese did you kill today?”  The Sympathizer makes it clear that Vietnam might as well have been Argentina or Nigeria for all the real importance it meant to either extreme. It was about Americans dying in a meaningless war. The Vietnamese who got killed were just details and that was true to both sides. If you can’t see the parallels to our conflicts in the Middle East over the first twenty years of this century, you’re clearly not looking that hard.

The Sympathizer is adapted by two undervalued peers of the film industry. Park Chan-Wook is one of the great filmmakers of South Korea, best known for Oldboy and Don McKellar, an actor, writer and director for independent films, such as 32 short films about Glenn Gould, The Red Violin and one of my personal favorites Last Night, the most optimistic film I’ve ever seen about the world ending in history. I think McKellar’s tone is the more dominant one in The Sympathizer mainly because he has always been more of an experimental filmmaker and so much of the first two episodes take on the idea of experimental. We are constantly rewinding back to earlier points in the story as The Captain remembers pieces he’s left out before and then goes back to earlier places that came later, all of which unfold like a tape rewinding. It’s clear with the opening itself. The logo of HBO comes up but then we enter it like it is the lens of a camera and it follows the level of a filmstrip. In part this is clear as to how the Captain tells his story. When he learns that he is about to be sent to America, he said that he planned on telling off the general in a style that was pure Hollywood. He constantly talks of westerns, there are trick shots that evoke war movies and when he has sex we are given an image that is purely out of the kind of pornography of the era.

The Sympathizer can vary from intense comedy to dark violence very quickly and never is this more clear than at the fall of Saigon itself. The General has insisted on riding through Saigon (momentarily retreating) on a motorcycle in dress uniform with a military guard. When he gets to the hangar and the rockets are falling, he’s infuriated that he and his family don’t get their own seats. But as the bus they are in rides down to the runway, it dodges the falling rockets – until it can’t. The Captain and his friend and his young wife and child run for the safety of the plane – but a missile hits them and Boa’s wife dies. The Captain pleads for Boa to run with him – and it’s not until the next episode’s end we learn that not only his wife but infant son died.

The episode takes a similar run to insanity involving the General in America. He dresses in full uniform in a refugee camp, expecting to be greeting with honors by ‘his people’. When they throw food and try to grab him, he is shocked and is certain that there is a spy among them. The General’s delusions are ludicrous: by the time he buys a liquor store and sees that a painting has been drawn to resemble the famous photo, he is convinced it is black ops work when as the Captain tells him: “It’s probably just a racist.” He then has a meeting of old followers in this liquor story with the certainty that he will return to power and demands the spy be found and killed. All of this would be utterly hysterical except everyone’s taking it dead seriously – especially the Captain.

While back in LA, the Captain begins an affair with the professor’s much older Japanese-American secretary. Sandra Oh is nearly as great a draw to the proceedings as Downey, as she adds yet another brilliant character role to her ensemble since her departure from Grey’s Anatomy. I may draw wrath from Shondaland for saying this, but I always thought Oh’s talent was wasted in that show and its been clear in the roles she’s taken since leaving it as to just what we’ve lost. From the seduction dance she had to do in the title role in Killing Eve to her undervalued work in the Netflix comedy The Chair Oh has shown depths she never got to as Christina Yang. Like everyone else she seems to have the Captain’s number at time: she knows that he’s playing a role as the ‘Good Little Asian’  but she doesn’t care enough. The Captain seems attached to her but she makes it very clear “the only kind of love I believe in is free love.” Later episodes promise other cameos from David Duchovny as a temperamental director and John Cho as an  Asian actor who dies in every movie.

There is also a very valid reason to doubt the Captain as a reliable narrator. He has been an outsider all his life, part of many worlds, belonging to none. We’ve been told that this is the latest statement he’s given to his captors, which just means that he may be leaving out – or putting in – more this time then the next one. As someone who has spent the last five years enjoying shows where I never was quite sure to trust the reality of what I was seeing – from Atlanta to Barry to Fargo -  I’m inclined to find that a strength, not a flaw.

As HBO enters its new corporate leadership as well as the end of so many flagship programs the last few years, many have doubted whether it will be the same network it was. I confess I’ve had some doubts myself given the most recent overblow limited series so far this year: I was not a fan of either Night Country or The Regime. I’m also not waiting for Euphoria to return and I’m not particularly sad that Curb Your Enthusiasm is finally over. But that doesn’t mean that there still isn’t good stuff out there: The Gilded Age looks certain to contend for Emmys this year and The Last of Us seems to be everything you could hope for. Comedy has always been more slipshod but I look forward to the return of Hacks next week and Somebody Somewhere down the road. The problem has been limited series, once one of the networks strengths: given the quality of the two we’ve had so far in 2024, I was beginning to think they’d lost their way. But The Sympathizer is a return to form not merely from an acting and writing standpoint but from a technical one: it’s the most daring series I’ve seen of that level since the undervalued Landscapers in 2021 – another series that leaned into the cinematic levels of the medium. So watch The Sympathizer. Robert Downey deserves to be marveled over and recognized but he clearly saw something in this story that made it worth him attaching his name to – and that could have worked just as well without him. (Though to be clear, I’m glad he’s in it.)

My score: 4.5 stars.