Why 30 Years Later ER Is Still A Classic And Why After 20 Seasons, Greys Anatomy Never Will Be: Part 1

 

This year marks the twentieth season of Grey’s Anatomy’s run on ABC. Late this September we will mark another significant milestone: the 30^th anniversary of the debut of ER, NBC’s landmark medical drama that changed TV forever.

I suspect the closer we get to the latter anniversary the comparisons will be made more and more about these two dramas. The argument will be made how Grey’s Anatomy could never have existed without ER, there will be comparisons as to how the latter showed paved the way for the former and how the difference between TV in the 1990s and today is one of the reasons that Grey’s is going strong twenty years later.

All of them, however, miss the fundamental point, and that is comparing Grey’s Anatomy and ER at any level is like comparing apples with a wood carving of an orange.

I realize there are some apparent similarities: both shows were hour long dramas that made their debuts at critical times for both networks. Both shows would lead to revolutions in how television was made. Both would launch many of the cast members to superstardom and both show would last for remarkably long periods.  All of these things are facts but there are several critical flaws in arguing that the two shows are similar and having watched much of both shows multiple times in the past thirty years,  I can tell you that these two shows don’t exist in the same galaxy.

I’ve made no secret I loathe Shondaland and all her subsidiaries; indeed, this column was going to be one deriding a recent interview of hers. But I’ve already done that dozens of times before so I didn’t want to trod old ground. So I thought a fairer way to do it would be to modify an argument of Truffaut: the best way to criticize a TV show is with another TV show. And the easiest way to critique not only Grey’s Anatomy but all things Rhimes was to compare it to ER, which I spent too long diminishing but realize is not only a masterpiece but has a better explanation for what is wrong with Rhimes than any column I could ever write.

So this series of articles will be what amounts to a compare and contrast between these two series: what made ER an infinitely superior series to Grey’s on almost every level, why ER’s place in the zeitgeist made  a greater impact and lasted for longer than Grey’s has, how the nature of the writing and acting showed the critical difference between the series, and how the characters and their respective fates demonstrate who Rhimes’ views basically the entire world.

And the place to start is what is probably the clearest dissonance in all of Rhimes’ series on network TV. The complete and utter lack of professional and  personal ethics that all of her characters in all of her major series.

This has been one of the biggest problems I’ve had throughout the work of Shondaland in the 2010s. It’s not just that her characters have no morals – that hardly makes them unique in the age of Peak TV – it’s that, unlike the criminals that make up the world of Breaking Bad or the Russian sleepers on The Americans, they are aware of what they are doing but have justified it out of some higher good. It’s a flawed construct, to be sure, but the people around them are aware of these flaws and they are constantly called on it.

The inhabitants of Shondaland by contrast are proud of how they flaunt every major rule and standard of America and from beginning to end of Rhimes’ series many, if not all of them, show neither guilt nor remorse at any point. In Scandal, Olivia Pope before the series began engaged in a conspiracy to rig a Presidential election because she believed he was the better man for the country. The fact she was sleeping with him and got a position of power didn’t seem to be a conflict of interest; she only left the administration when people were killed as part of the coverup. Eventually she realized that what she had done was wrong but justified that the truth could never be exposed because it would ‘bring down the republic’ -  a self-serving justification for the woman who’d engaged in that fraud. Olivia Pope then spent the better part of the series helping people of power and privilege keep what they had safe rather than make any attempt to either burn the system down or even make things better for people with her skin color or gender. It was only in the climax of the series that she acknowledged that she and everyone she had associated with were ‘not the heroes of the story, but the villains’ – and even then, it was only to save the skins of her friends.

Even that limited moral awakening was more than we got from Annalyse Keating in How to Get Away With Murder. While Olivia Pope could at least justify her actions because she was playing in the biggest of fields – D.C. – Annalyse’s actions from the start of the series were entirely self-serving. In the first season her husband was murdered by the Keating Five because they believed he had killed somebody. She helped cover it up, even after they learned he was innocent. The woman who was suspected of committing the murder was also innocent – it was actually one of Annalyse’s closest lieutenants. Her other lieutenant then murdered that woman because she held her accountable for everything that happened. Both of these people were innocent bystanders yet a woman who had been sworn to uphold the criminal justice system then spent the next five seasons making sure neither her nor her students were touched by this. As a result, several innocent people – including Annalyse’s clients – were either killed or framed for murder, multiple members of the Keating Five died as collateral damage over the years, and countless lives were ruined as a result. But at the end of the series, rather than face any responsibility for the havoc that had been unleashed in her name, Annalyse was as defiant as ever. In her closing speech in the series, she blamed the system for what had happened rather than take any personal responsibility for the murders and violence that had happened in her name.

I mention this not just to excoriate Rhimes (although I never miss a chance to do so) but to mention that for all her argument that the characters at the center of her works during the 2010s being groundbreakers for African-American women, at their core all they were was just African-American female versions of Walter White or Tony Soprano. That no one ever chose to call her on this double standard speaks not only to how blindly devoted her fan-base will be but because even before we met Olivia Pope, Shonda Rhimes had made it very clear that in Shondaland, all the ethical guidelines that have been carved in stone for generations at every level of our society are just guidelines that not only can be broken when you feel like it, but you will feel no repercussions for them, professionally and not even personally.

To demonstrate this, I’m going to go to ER. To be clear, everyone who worked at County General knew that so many of the rules of medicine were ridiculous and hurt more people than they helped. Throughout the entire series, we would see almost every regular bend the rules slightly so they could help their patients or their families. It was a difficult needle to thread, but most of the staff knew how to do it and they were fully aware that there were dangers involved.

The doctor who was the guiltiest of flouting the rules at ER was Doug Ross, played by George Clooney  in the role that made him  a star. Ross was the most blatant womanizer on the show and that had done much to damage his reputation among many of the other attendings at the hospital. The difference was Ross was usually smart enough not to flout the rules in the face of Cook County.

The bigger problem was that Ross, who was a pediatrician, was willing to do anything for his patient, and that meant not just bending the rules but coming as close as he could to breaking them. The example that will work for comparisons sake will be in the first part of Season Two for reasons which will soon become clear.

At this point Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) had been made an attending. He and Doug were best friends and their relationship had been solid in Season 1. The moment Mark was in  a position of authority, their relationship was going to change. Greene learned in the Season 2 premiere of the hostility towards Ross: his immediate superior told him that when his fellowship came up for renewal in November, he wasn’t going to sign off on it.

A few episodes later Ross was called in to deal with an Asian mother whose toddler her son had been diagnosed with AIDS (Lucy Liu in one of her first major roles). As her son worsened and didn’t respond to the medication, Ross became increasingly aggressive. Greene questioned what he was going to do. “I’m going to do whatever it takes to get this mother more time with her kid,” he told him. Ross thought he was still speaking to his best friend rather than his boss.

In the middle of the episode, as the treatment got progressively worse, Greene finally told the mother what Ross had been withholding from her: the seriousness of his condition and that his death was inevitable. When Ross learned the truth he was apoplectic and Mark for going behind his back. Greene told him: “You’re not helping her by telling her there will be a miracle!” Ross shouted back: “If it were you kid, Mark, your daughter you would do anything for a miracle!”  That night Doug commiserated with a third year medical student Harper Tracy and the next day Mark found out they had spent the night together.

Mark was now angered with his friend on many levels, not the least of which was Harper was dating Carter at the time. This was what was going to be the nail in Ross’ coffin at County but rather than make a stink about it they were just not going to renew his contract. However that night Doug encountered a child who was trapped in a sewer and helped personally save him (the classic ‘Hell or High Water) This made Ross a media hero and it put the hospital staff in an awkward position. They were given no choice but to rehire him and in a public ceremony. Ross, for the record, was planning to kiss them all off in that ceremony (including Mark) but he thought better of it and kept his job for the moment. Doug did learn his lesson and he mostly colored within the lines for the next three seasons.

Now let’s compare this with what was the most significant storyline with Grey’s Anatomy in Season 2: Denny Duquette (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). I should mention that I was genuinely fond of the first two seasons but the longer that Denny’s storyline went on, the more I truly began to question what so many people were seeing in Grey’s Anatomy. It’s a question I’m asking about the show nearly two decades later and about Shonda Rhimes as a whole.

Because during the entire fifteen year run of ER, while many doctors had close relationships with patients, some of which caused them more trouble than others not once did anyone – attending, nurse, intern, resident, - have anything resembling a romantic relationship with one. Showrunner John Wells would do many things to go outside the reality of medicine several times but neither he nor any of his writers ever tried to go this far. Grey’s Anatomy also knew that this was the biggest ethical no-no in medicine – it was mentioned by Izzie Stevens herself. Every intern was aware of it. His attending physician was aware of it. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) who stomped down on her interns when they even seemed to displease her knew about it. This went on for weeks, possibly months. No one did anything. No one tried to even keep Stevens away from Denny. When Stevens told Meredith – who was the daughter of a surgeon and who knew the rules better than most – her answer was: “We can’t help who we love.”

There’s a huge difference, as we all know, between being in love with your attending, even if he’s a married man and a patient you are treating. One is frowned upon, the other has the potential for so many legal problems down the line.

Which is what happened. Izzie got so obsessed with saving Denny’s life that when a heart did become available on UNOS she flew with Burke to pick it up. Hahn was there as well because she also had a patient who was just as in need as Denny was. (I’m going to get back to that.) That patient was ahead of Denny on UNOS. However,  he was ahead of Denny by seventeen seconds.

To be clear, this patient had been waiting as long as Denny. The difference was, of course,  Izzie was in love with Denny and that reason was the justification she had for an action that wasn’t just malpractice but criminal.

She decided to cut Denny’s L-Vat to make his case more urgent. She hinted at this to Bailey and Burke. She did it in front of Karev. She then engaged all four of her fellow interns in a conspiracy to cover it up. So the man she loved could get a new heart.

To be clear the hospital found out about this, and then circled the wagons to cover it up. This was par for the course; I don’t blame them for this: when something this horrible happens to need to do damage control and that means punishing the guilty parties. And their was punishment. The five interns who had engaged in a conspiracy that could have led to the death of a man, that defrauded UNOS, that could have destroyed Seattle Grace as a hospital…

…was to host a prom. For the Chief of Staff’s niece.

Oh sure Izzie Stevens did confess and resign, you know, after Denny died. But the next day everybody at the hospital was doing everything in their power to make sure Stevens went back to her residency. Which she did. She felt bad for a couple of days, maybe a week or so, but then she went back to her residency. She felt guilty here and there, but there were no ramifications.

By this point I think it’s clear that if Ross had heard about this at any point he would have realized he’d spent his career at the wrong hospital. “I try to keep an infant alive and I’m nearly fired. An interns kills a patient she fell in love and the hospital not only covers it up  but welcomes her back with open arms! Hello, Seattle!”

Oh and that patient I mentioned who was behind Denny by seventeen seconds. We see him again in Season 5. He still hasn’t gotten his transplant and has gotten significantly worse. Hahn, who didn’t know why her patient lost the heart, learns about it from the Chief of Staff and is justifiably enraged, and more so when he says: “it’s behind us.” Hahn’s character was written out of the series on the next episode, so supposedly she resigned in protest. But the hospital never faces the consequences. Rhimes doesn’t care about them either, this is when Izzie starts seeing – and having sex with – Denny. (I won’t bother as I might deal with this whole storyline in a different article  - or series.)

I think it was then I first understood what it took me a while to put into words: Grey’s Anatomy is not a medical drama, merely a drama set in a hospital. In that sense Scandal is a drama that is set in DC but is not a political drama like The West Wing, How To Get Away With Murder is a drama involving lawyers but is not a legal drama like The Good Wife and Bridgerton is a drama set in the past but is not a historical drama like The Gilded Age. Indeed to call them dramas is stretching the term.

Grey’s Anatomy is a soap opera, pure and simple. I really don’t know why it’s taken so long for me to realize that because all of Rhimes’ shows are soap opera at their core: the ridiculous plotting , the disregard for any rules and guidelines, willing to sleep with anyone as long as you feel like it, marry and divorce at will – sometimes to the same person multiple times – are all the trademarks of Dallas or Melrose Place. Indeed, if these shows had borne the name of Aaron Spelling or Darren Star, the idea that Grey’s or indeed any of the stories in Shondaland were supposed to be taken seriously would not even be a question. Certainly no one would have ever considered it in the same breath as ER where everything is life and death, but the personal relationships always come secondary to the action on the surgical table.

But because Peak TV has essentially forced us to argue that even cheese has redemptive value and because Rhimes has never been willing to acknowledge that any part of her shows are not realism at its core, the public as a whole has essentially decided that Shondaland is not merely great television but that Rhimes has been one of the great revolutionary forces in television. That all she’s done is basically write the same show for twenty years on multiple networks has been ignored even as the rest of TV  has bemoaned the lack of originality – including Rhimes – have argued about the lack of originality on TV over recent years.

All of that is absurd particularly in comparison with ER. ER reinvented and revolutionized what not only the medical drama but that TV drama could be. As I will write in later articles, ER was groundbreaking in how it dealt not just with episodic storylines but how it told stories over the course of not only an entire season, but in some cases multiple seasons. It was always willing to experiment with the format of network television in a way that few shows on TV had before. Many shows today have taken on episodic models that ER introduced. And while it may have run well past its expiration date – a tendency that to an extent almost every network television show does – there was never a point watching that I thought ER had jumped the shark. There were some seasons in the later years that were weaker and some characters later on I didn’t think stood up to the original cast, but the show itself always had a freshness and vitality to it that few series – not just network dramas but even many cable and streaming series – had over an extended period of their run.

As we will see by comparison, for all the arguments that Grey’s Anatomy revitalized the genre and TV, it never broke the same ground ER did or even met many of the goalposts that ER managed to set in its original run. Whatever creative spark it had burned out very early in its run and the show was running on fumes well before the time most people thought it had been on the air too long. That it has managed to run as long as it has says more about the nature of television today then it does about its overall quality. As we shall see at a later article, ER decided to end things on its own terms and chose to do so in a way that was final but still open-ended. Grey’s Anatomy continues to exist purely because the powers that be are afraid to pull the plug even though a DNR should have been signed long ago.

Author’s Note: I feel obligated to apologize for some of the rhetoric in this article. I have meant to be more measured in this piece but those of you who know my writing are fully aware that Shonda Rhimes has the innate ability to drive me to great furies. I will do my best to restrain it in future articles but if you’ve been reading my work, you know that’s not something I can guarantee. On the other hand, if you want to hear any anti-Shondaland rhetoric even more than ER critical raves, you’re almost certain to get that.

Saying Goodby wTo Reservation Dogs: An Analysis of the Final Season of One of the Best Shows of the 2020s

 

As an observer of television I’ve noticed an intriguing theme during TV in the 2020s. When it comes to series that have the possibility to be all-time classics that aired entirely in this new decade, so far the ones that have greater potential have been comedies rather than dramas.

And as I mentioned in an earlier piece the best comedies I’ve seen so far this decade have been moving away from the often mean-spirited humor that made up so much of even the best comedies of the 2010s (Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm) and towards a comedy that airs towards a sweeter, often more communal kind of humor. This has been best manifested through Ted Lasso and Abbott Elementary, by far the most successful new comedies of the past few years, but it has also been true of several other gems, such more successful (Hacks, Only Murders in the Building); some under the radar (Somebody Somewhere). And one of the best examples of this is the just completed Reservation Dogs which aired for three superb seasons on FX on Hulu.,

Reservation Dogs has always been one of the most brilliantly charming series I’ve ever seen as well as the fact that it broke ground by being the first series cast entirely with indigenous actors as well as being written and directed by them. Sterlin Harjo, the showrunner, was aided in partnership with Taiki Waititi in created a wonderful world that even within the confines of an Oklahoma reservation seemed to have the ability to span not only vast distances through time and generations.

This was made in clear in the major storyline that ran underneath the third season. As I mentioned in my initial review of the series, on his return from California Bear encountered Maximus (Graham Greene) a man who seemed horribly delusional, believing in aliens as well as a deeper psychosis. I didn’t know until the end of the series not only of Maximus’ connection to the reservation but that overall theme.

In a flashback to the 1970s called ‘House of Bongs’ we traveled back in time half a century looking at the teenage versions of the elders we’ve seen throughout the series. The episode took place in the beginning of summer break and Maximus was clearly somewhat apart from the group. Then one night, after a major LSD fueled experience, the young Maximus had an encounter with a flying saucer and his friends didn’t believe him.

In the episode immediately following the elders went out to intervene in Cheese, who lives with his grandmother and who she was beginning to worry about him. The group went out camping and Cheese got them to share their feelings. The scene started as comedy but became much more moving as it was clear that dealing with their darkness was not something the elders had ever been capable of doing. After it ended, they admitted that they’d had a friend like him when they were younger named: ‘Maximus’ and they’d lost him.

The threads came together in Send It where they were all being interrogated for their involvement in a ‘crime’ This had been the work of Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) who had been a friend of Old Man Fixico and that episode had a heart attack and was lying near death. The ‘Res Dogs’ got together for ‘one last job’ to find Fixico’s cousin, who they believed was committed to an institution and bust him out.

The lead-up to the episode was hysterical as it was planned with the intricacy of a heist and the intelligence of, well, a bunch of a teenagers. None of them had the slightest idea of what they were doing at any point when they discussed things like ‘cutting camera wires’ as well as providing a distraction. Bone Thug Dog and White Steve engaged in a scene so utterly hysterical with a clerk that you wondered if she was just doing this to be nice. It was hysterically funny particularly considering no one even knew who they were looking for.

Then Bear and Willie Jack got inside – and it was Maximus. Maximus recognized Bear and told him in fact he was here voluntarily. When Bear encountered him, he’d been off his meds for a while and he needed to get straightened out. But he refused initially to go with them. Bear, in one of the high points of D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai’s tenure expressed genuine rage and made clear that if he’d had a chance to see Daniel again, he’d jump at. Maximus nodded and just checked himself out. To be clear, the episode ended in high comedy – the school bus they’d brought for the ‘heist’ exploded, which was why Big was interrogating them in the first place but there was a sense of closure.

The series finale brought together all the things we have come to love about Reservation Dogs. Willie Jack went to visit her aunt in prison to deal with how she is coming to terms with Fixico’s passing. Her Auntie Hotki (Lily Gladstone) after talking with a spiritual ancestor in the room (I’ll get back to this) explained to her the nature of community and how the fact that through all the lives Fixico had touched, he was never truly lost and it clearly moved Willie Jack. The two have never had an easy relationship over the years but it’s clear that she has found a way to move forward.

The final episode dealt with the burial ritual of Fixico and a gathering of the elders: Uncle Brownie, Bucky, Grandma Irene and Maximus, possibly for the first time since Maximus’ break from the community. They were constantly drinking coffee (to keep the spirits away, they said) and Maximus seemed more stable than he had in the entire season. There was a fair amount of comedy mixed in with the mourning: the elder who showed up was clearly high on weed, they were debating on how much earth they’d need, and a moving moment where Willie Jack dug the first shovel of earth was immediately undercut when it was revealed that they had forgotten the shovels they needed.

But there was also a sense of an ending and new beginnings. Elora (Devery Jacobs) spent much of the episode trying to tell Bear that she was going to college and when she learned his mother had taken a new job far away from him, she was upset and terrified. The scene in the memorial service was moving as Bear made it very clear that he wasn’t upset but proud of Elora. “You’ve been through so much and you’ve come through it all.” There were sense of connections being built, particularly given the way that Willie Jack, who had started the series more lost now seems to be taking on the capability of a leadership role, particularly as she gave the final words over Plaxico’s grave. And it looked good to see that Big (the always wonderful Zahn McClarnon) may actually be able to connect romantically for the first time in his life.

It was inevitable that Bear would have a final meeting with his Spirit guide in the aftermath of the funeral, but this actually had a deeper seriousness to it that all the prior meetings have lacked. Bear has actually learned that he was never alone and that he has a community and a family, even if it is not all by blood. He spent so much of the first two seasons desperate to escape the reservation; now he seems willing to take time to find a way forward. It was funny -  the spirit just had to walk off rather than disappear - but there was a profoundness to it.

We got to say goodbye to the Res Dogs twice. First we saw the four we’ve known and loved for three years as they say tearful goodbyes. And then we cut to the four elders saying to themselves: “We did good.” And the show has earned that departure because we see the love for community that passes down through generations.

There has been a sense of spirituality in the final season even more than before. In Wahoo, Rita was visited by her old friend Cookie, Elora’s mother who died of opioids before Elora knew her. At first the episode was hysterical as Rita justifiably thought she was going crazy and scheduled a meeting with a therapist, even then not dealing with. She then went to a restaurant where they had lunch in public and Rita looked crazier. But then Cookie got to the point: she wanted Rita to see Elora and ask how she was doing. After the visit, Rita said that Cookie had all the answers. And Cookie lost it: “How? I’m always going to be 20. I can never see my daughter. But you can.” The episode ended with Rita telling Bear about her new job and him saying how glad he was she was taking it. Rita and her friends also said goodbye to Cookie, something that they hadn’t done in twenty years.

And in the penultimate episode of the series Elora tracked down her father, whose existence she had only learned about a few episodes ago. She didn’t want to see him but she needed to get financial aid and this was the only way. So she ended up following her father (Ethan Hawke) and when her amateurish efforts failed, he immediately recognized her.

The episode was understandably awkward for several minutes until her father brought her back to his home and gave her pictures of her mother with herself as an infant. Elora had almost no pictures of herself that young and the episode took a regretful turn. Her father made it clear that they got pregnant with Elora to young and that they were never going to work out: both of them were on drugs and he’s only gotten cleaned up within the past decade. The episode then became moving as Elora was introduced to her stepbrother and stepsister and they instantly connected. As they had dinner together there was something sweet and it looks that Elora has a more certain future than just college.

Sterlin Harjo said before he announced that Season 3 would be the last one that at one point he’d had plans for the show to run five seasons. I believe that he made the right decision. Reservation Dogs has been the kind of show that America – not just indigenous people – need. It shows a community that has been completely destroyed by White America but that even with almost every single thing against them, they find a way to keep moving forward and not let the system beat them. I wish there’d been more seasons of Reservation Dogs because I’m sorry its over. But I’m glad to know that it ended on its own terms.

Of course the right terms would be a shitload of Emmy nominations. And given the level of transition TV is in right now that might actually happen. Reservation Dogs  has been a major force in critics groups since it debuted in 2021: it took the Independent Spirit Awards for Best Ensemble Cast and New Scripted Series in 2022 and won the Peabody that same year. It’s received nominations from the WGA every year its been on the air, was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical in 2022 (the year the show wasn’t televised). The AFI named it TV program of the year three years running and the Critics Choice Awards has named the series Best Comedy all three seasons it was on the air and giving acting nominations to Woon-A-Tai, Jacobs and Alexis the last two years. Naturally the Emmys spent the last two years focused on Ted Lasso and Only Murders in the Building. (To be fair, they also have been giving a lot of nominations and awards to Abbott Elementary and The Bear so its not like this is entirely a case of EmmysSoWhite.)

But with the Emmys in transition, the odds for Reservation Dogs have improved. On Gold Derby it currently ranks seventh of probable nominees for Best Comedy and there aren’t a lot of formidable contenders behind it. As for acting it’s a trickier subject but in Best Actress Devery Jacobs is currently ranked seventh. Ayo Edebiri of The Bear, Quinta Brunson of Abbott Elementary, Jean Smart of Hacks (which I can’t wait to review) and Selena Gomez for Only murders in the Building are locks for nominations. The two performers ahead of her are SNL veterans – Kristen Wiig for Palm Royale and Maya Rudolph for Loot  - but the former series isn’t highly regarded and the latter has less potential. Woon-A-Tai faces a harder battle considering that Jeremy Allan White, Larry David, Steve Martin and Martin Short are far ahead of him and Kelsey Grammer has a good chance for the revival of Fraiser. Realistically Alexis, for all her abilities, has no chance getting in against the ensembles of The Bear or Abbott Elementary, Hannah Einbinder for Hacks – and that’s before you consider the frontrunner is Meryl Streep. Jacobs has the most likely chance of the group to get nominated and it could contend for direction and writing.

What I can say is unequivocally that Reservation Dogs is one of the great series of this decade even if the Emmys never give it what its owed. I realize as the whitest of white people I might not be qualified to talk about it, but I recognize that some ideals – laughter, loss, community and family – are universal traits. I’m grateful to have spent time in the world Harjo has created and I look forward to seeing what new projects he comes up with in the future. I also look forward to the third season of Dark Winds whenever it comes around. It’s a different, darker part of that world but I’m just as glad to be part of it too.

 

My score: 5 stars.

How Field Of Dreams Whitewashes Baseball History and The Black Sox

 

 

In August of 2021, Major League Baseball staged what they called ‘The Field Of Dreams’ game. They constructed an old time baseball-field in an actual field in Iowa. They got the Yankees and the White Sox to wear uniforms circa 1920. They got Kevin Costner to do a play by play with the traditional Fox Sportscasting team.

From a strictly commercial standpoint, this game was a huge success. Nearly nine million viewers tuned in, the highest rating for a nationally broadcasted game in years. It seemed to be the kind of boost the game needed after years of stagnating in the national imagination.

In retrospect, however, I really question why baseball decided to make it a signature game. I get the logic in theory: Field of Dreams is a film that has entered the national consciousness in a way most baseball movies – and indeed few sports movies – rarely do. And I need to be clear: I believe that the film is a masterpiece. It is superbly acted from Costner all the way down to Burt Lancaster, it’s superb on every technical level, especially the music but the editing to and it has the ability to move me to tears even after more than thirty years after my first viewing of it.

The problem is, however, in those intervening years I’ve become an expert in baseball history. And I really think the only reason this was greenlit as an idea had to do with an entire generation of executives who only knew about the movie and nothing about the story behind it.

To be clear, I agree completely that one of the most badly aged portions of the film now involves James Earl Jones delivering a monologue in which he stands and argues about the basic goodness of baseball – when he is speaking of an era well before integration. That this never occurred to anyone in the Commissioner’s Office – particularly considering the big problems that the sport is having with African-Americans at every level, whether it be playing or even watching the sport  - would be shocking, if I didn’t know far too well just how tone-deaf the executives in the sport have always been.

But believe it or now the monologue that Jones delivers at the climax of the film is far worse when you consider the context of the entire raison deter for the film’s existence. I’m guessing that when Phil Alden Robinson finally managed to get Field of Dreams released in 1989, he was really hoping that critics and audiences either hadn’t seen or had forgotten a film that had been released the previous year that laid very clear the truth about the Black Sox scandal.

John Sayles’ Eight Men Out is not quite the masterpiece that Field of Dreams is. While Sayles is one of the best filmmakers of our era and is also a devoted baseball fan he tries to be too faithful to the source material, Eliot Asinof’s history of the same name. To be clear, his story is not only more accurate but makes it very clear on what was going on in baseball before, during and in the aftermath of the Black Sox throwing the 1919 World Series. He is sympathetic to the eight players who chose to throw the series to the point that he puts too much emphasis on them being misled by the gamblers and the money, which is giving them too much credit. But he makes it clear that there is nothing majestic or good about the game back in 1919 and he doesn’t see the Black Sox, even Shoeless Joe Jackson, as some kind of saint. A martyr, perhaps, but not a saint.

Now I have to give credit to Robinson where its due. I have read the book that Field of Dreams is based on: W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. And no matter what opinion you have about the film, I have to say he managed to make great movie out of what is horrible material. Because Kinsella’s book, charitably speaking, doesn’t seem to be the thing that could be adapted easily (I’m told it took six years for Robinson to get it to the theaters from the moment he began the project).

For those of you who wonder about James Earl Jones’ role as 1960s writer Terence Mann, this is a complete invention. In the novel Ray Kinsella is told by ‘the voice’ that he must seek out J.D. Salinger and bring him to Iowa. That was never going to be viable and it must have taken years for Robinson to thread that needle. I think that Mann is supposed to be some combination of Salinger and James Baldwin and I honestly think that change is one of the better things the film does. One of my favorite segments in the film is when Annie (Amy Madigan) is in a school board meeting that has to do with censorship and Mann’s books are among the ones under consideration.

This scene stands out better, frankly, then many of the stories on baseball. Perhaps Robinso is trying to equate baseball as much an American institution as the Bill of Rights but he’s subtle enough never to have them come as part of the equation. And the scene where Annie confronts this woman boldly in front of an audience: “Who’s for the Bill of Rights? Who thinks freedom is a pretty darn good thing?” is frankly the kind of thing that more people should see even if they don’t like baseball.

That scene, for the record, is a complete invention of Robinson’s: there’s nothing close to it to the book. Indeed, the final revelation of who Ray has built the field for comes to the forefront early as is the fact that Ray actually has an identical twin brother who shows up unexpectedly. I have to tell you part of me does think that Shoeless Joe is metafiction more than an actual novel (the lead is Ray Kinsella in the book too) which makes it all the more remarkable that Robinson created a coherent and intelligent story. The problem comes, however, with the fact that he still decided to make Ray build a field and have Shoeless Joe Jackson show up.

I’ll be honest. If I had been in Ray’s situation in 1989, there are many other players of that era I would prefer to see come out of the corn. Walter Johnson and Grover Cleveland Alexander to be sure; Christy Mathewson for many reasons (not the least of which is irony.) I’d have loved to see Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s of either of his dynasties or John McGraw’s Giants. I would have wanted to see Babe Ruth and yes even Ty Cobb. But Shoeless Joe Jackson would have been at the rock bottom of my list, along with every one who was banned from baseball.

Because the real heresy of Field Of Dreams is that it made a hero out of not only Joe Jackson but the entire Black Sox team. For a movie that is supposedly centered on Jackson showing up, Robinson does everything in his power to focus on Jackson the legend and not Jackson the man. The metaphor is about how the Black Sox’s betrayal crippled Ray’s father and that’s understandable: the scandal did do immense damage to the sport. But the entire film either argues that Jackson was an innocent bystander or someone who was a patsy. This barely holds scrutiny based on the public record, and even if you accept it  by that logic: the last people Jackson would ever invite to this field were his teammates who just being around led to him to losing his livelihood.

I realize that Field of Dreams is a fantasy and not a docudrama the same way Eight Men Out is, but that only goes so far. That’s actually the biggest problem I have with Jones speech in hindsight: it’s not that he’s arguing that baseball was good in a time when it was segregated; it’s that he’s doing so in the name of a team that was corrupt and did everything it could to destroy the game they played.

And if anything Sayles’ film doesn’t go nearly far enough when it comes to describing just how broken the Black Sox were. Donald Honig, who I have quoted about baseball on numerous occasion is, if anything more reliable a historian than Asinof’s was. In Baseball America where he speaks in reverential tones about so much of baseball, he regards the Black Sox with contempt – and he shows the receipts.

“They were a hell of a team,” a contemporary tells him. “They could go out there and beat you just about any time they felt like it.” Honig then adds: “Didn’t they always feel like it? Frankly no.”

He then quotes Roger Peckinpaugh, a shortstop of the era who was playing with the Yankees.

“I remember one time we went to Chicago and Nemo Leibold (a White Sox who was basically ‘clean)…said “he smelled a mouse. ‘Listen,” (Leibold said something screwy is going on here…You guys just bear down and you should be able to take all four games.’” You never knew when they were going to go out there and beat your brains out or roll over and play dead.”

The idea that Jackson would ‘play for nothing’ as Ray Liotta has him say in the film, is pure myth. The White Sox were among the poorest paid teams in the majors: Jackson, who was one of the greatest hitters in baseball was only making $6000 a year. Men like Cobb and Walter Johnson were making more than twice that.

Furthermore there was no harmony on the Black Sox. There were factions of the level of some of the greatest divisions of all time. Five of the players who ended up throwing the series – Jackson, Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch and Lefty Williams were on one side. On the other was Eddie Collins, Ray Schalk and two of the pitchers Red Faber and Dickie Kerr. During infield practice, no one threw the ball to Collins, who was getting the highest salary by far. Before the 1919 World Series, Gandil hadn’t so much as talked to him in two years. Collins said: “I used to think you couldn’t win without teamwork – until I joined the White Sox.”

And united the bad faction was their hatred of Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner and one of the most stingiest in baseball. Efforts have been made to clean up Comiskey’s reputation by saying he wasn’t as bad as any other owner, which is basically saying he didn’t abuse his slaves worse than any other slave-master. The team manage to win more out of their hatred for Comiskey and that barely overwhelmed their contempt for each other – which led them to throw the series.

And despite what Field of Dreams tells you, Jackson threw the series. Yes he may have hit .375 and was charged with no errors but the fact remains he took $5,000 from gamblers. He was promised $20,000. The one who has the clearest claim to innocence is third baseman Buck Weaver. He took no money and played the series honestly. His crime was that he knew about what was happening but didn’t rat his teammates out. He would have made a more sympathetic protagonist for Field Of Dreams then Jackson would (he certainly does in Eight Men Out) but Weaver was just a good player and Jackson was a great one, which makes for a better story.

I don’t deny Jackson was one of the greatest hitters whoever lived. He hit .408 his rookie year, batting .395 the next year, and hit .382 in 1920 before he was banned for life. His lifetime batting average of.356 is the third highest all time behind only Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby and Cobb himself called him the greatest natural hitter he ever saw. But as Eight Men Out takes clear, he still took the money with the intention of throwing the series. It doesn’t matter whether he followed through or not; he took the money. He also confessed to it before a Chicago Grand Jury in 1920 when the scandal came out.

That’s the other part that gets left out. The White Sox were in close contention for the 1920 American League Pennant when the scandal finally broke near the end of the season. It’s worth noting several of the other players suspecting they weren’t giving their all that year either. Who knows? Maybe they thought if they won the pennant that year they’d have ready made in with the mob. “We did it last year, remember?”

There was a trial but no one went to jail. For one thing, much of the key evidence – including Jackson’s confession – ‘mysteriously’ disappeared before the jury could see it. This was 1920s Chicago and cops were as buyable as baseball players back then. For the record I’m not sure it would have made much of a difference: for all the public dismay at what Jackson and his teammates were doing, they were celebrities and I can’t imagine 12 Chicago Men could have been impartial.

And that’s why I think Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was named Commissioner of baseball even before the scandal broke, acted correctly when he banned the White Sox for life. He had every intention of doing so before the verdict which is why his famous statement began: “Regardless of the verdict of juries…”

Landis is framed by men such Sayles as a showboat federal judge who was basically an autocrat. That’s a fair description and I don’t deny his behavior in later years would more than merit that attitude. But his decision to ban the Black Sox for life was absolutely the right call.

Imagine if they had been acquitted and allowed to return to play ball in the 1922 season. (The trial took place in the summer of 1921.) Imagine it, eight ballplayers known for being willing to sell out the national game just showing up to their old jobs as if nothing had happened. If you think I’m exaggerating this as a possibility, gamblers had already been bribing players to throw games for decades before the scandal and Major League Baseball had turned a blind eye, which is why the 1919 World Series ending up getting thrown in the first place. Hal Chase was listed as having thrown games for three different managers and each time, he was simply traded to a different team. (In one case they fired the manager and named Chase in his stead.) Chase was still around baseball in 1919 and may have served as a go-between for the mob leading up to the World Series that year. He got banned, along with more than a dozen other players, along with the White Sox for this activity.

So Landis really had no choice. These men had sold out the game. And we all know that just because you’re acquitted of a crime or scandal is no guarantee they won’t do it again. No matter how hard you try to polish it up Jackson was guilty of the crimes he was accused of. Because of his standing in the game he has defenders since his exile, and Field of Dreams was just the icing on the cake.

This makes me wonder when he wanders out of the cornfield and asks Ray: “Is this heaven?” where he’s been. Because he sure as hell doesn’t belong in the same baseball heaven that is devoted for Mathewsons and Wagner’s and the Walter Johnsons. Perhaps he and his White Sox have been in a kind of purgatory or limbo all this time, or the ban that has stopped them from playing baseball in life has followed them in death.

That still lends a turn that I’m not fond of because it means that there are no consequences for these men who have decided to betray the sport and leave a stain on it that lasted for decades. Now they get to play baseball in front of people who will only worship them as some shadows of a simpler time.

And it makes me wonder if at the end of the day, when all of these people mysteriously drive up to this field in Iowa whether Ray, desperate to get out of the financial straits his venture has brought him to, might convince these people who know no better to wager on the game they’re about to see. I mean, they’re going to pay $20 without even thinking about, why not go whole hog?

Get the Black Sox to play against any of the teams in this field. Offer long odds for betting on them. Then tell Joe and his friends that they don’t have to win every game. Hell, it’s not like they don’t have experience in this kind of thing already and they’re already dead! What difference does it make? Like Ray said, this isn’t heaven. It’s Iowa.

All right this last part may be a bit too dark and cynical. But the fact remains that Major League Baseball chose to market a game modeled on a team with this history as its signature event. After a century of arguing that Jackson’s legacy besmirched the game, they are willing to use a film that whitewashed it to make money of it. How can truly say they are celebrating baseball history with a straight face?

Baseball repeated the event the following year but has since let it go. Perhaps, given some of the changes that they have made in the past season, they have decided to concentrate more on baseball’s future rather than the past. That is the right idea as long as they remember to revere the figures who gave the game glory rather than to celebrate those who brought it shame. You can enjoy Field Of Dreams, but never mistake it for a true story.

 

Emmy Watch 2024 Phase 3: BAFTA TV and Peabody Nominations

 

 

As we come closer to the end of the truncated 2023-2024 season, we now begin the critical third phase of our watch for this years Emmy nominations that will be coming in the third week of July.

As I have mentioned in the previous article not only are the Emmys in a year of transition but due to the labor stoppage that blocked off nearly five months of 2024. Trying to figure out the major nominees for this year’s awards will involve a lot of hit or miss. To that end, I am continuing to expand the number of awards show I’m looking at for hints for help. In this case, I have decided to look overseas.

BAFTA has done nominations for television for decades but because so much of it favors British TV series and British actors it is hard to find any correlation between their nominations and awards and the American ones. However, given the likelihood that several British made television series will be in contention this year, I believe I have to widen the net. So with the nominations announced and the awards on the verge of being given (the TV awards will be given on May 12^th) I feel I should at least try and see.

Indeed there is  a wrinkle already. While The Crown, the prohibitive frontrunner for this year’s Best Drama prize, led all TV series with eight nominations, it was NOT nominated for Best Drama. However Slow Horses, a  series that is quickly rising as a contender for Best Drama this year as well as several acting awards, was nominated for Best Drama.

The International category mostly focuses on American series and, with the exception of The Bear, all focus on series in 2023. Most of the nominees were among the major awards getters from 2023: Beef, The Last of Us and Succession. However, I give credit to the Brits for also nominating Love & Death which not only the Emmys but far too many American awards shows basically ignored.

Leading Actor doesn’t feature Gary Oldman for Slow Horses. The most likely contender among 2024 nominees is Dominic West for The Crown. Brian Cox was nominated for Succession.

Leading Actress features no one from The Crown, oddly enough, but does show Bella Ramsey for The Last of Us. I should note the presence of Sarah Lancashire from the groundbreaking mystery Happy Valley and Sharon Horgan for Best Interests. She was here last year for Bad Sisters; Horgan is clearly busy.

The major scripting comedy nominated is Dreaming Whilst Black, which some of you may have seen on Showtime this past year.

Supporting Actor features Matthew MacFayden from Succession. However Jack Lowden from Slow Horses and Salim Daw from The Crown loom as possibilities for this year. Harriet Walker and Nico Parker are present for Succession  and The Last of Us, respectively but the Supporting Actress contender is current frontrunner Elizabeth Debicki who has already won nearly every major award in sight for her performance as Diana in The Crown.

Moments voted on by the public for most memorable feature Logan Roy’s death on Succession and ‘A Long, Long Time’ on The Last of Us. No argument on either.

Slow Horses received several technical as did The Last of Us. Black Mirror received several technical nominations as did Sio, The Witcher and Queen Charlotte. Good Omens was nomination for Best Comedy and Best Actor for David Tennant, but it is highly unlikely the series will contend.

Today also marks the 2024 Peabody nominations. As I have mentioned since I began covering them five years ago, while it is hard to fathom the Emmys nominating some of these show, in most cases you really think they should. Such is the case for their 2024 nominations for TV.

Focusing on last year we see several shows that have received recognition from multiple award groups: Poker Face, The Last of Us and Jury Duty. Some of their nominations are shows that should have been contenders such as Somebody Somewhere and Amazon’s remake of Dead Ringers, which many believed would earn Emmy nominations for Rachel Weisz. We also see recognition of Reality, which I am still convinced deserved to win Best TV Movie of 2023.

Likely contenders for this year include The Bear and Fellow Travelers while yet again Reservation Dogs is present. The former two are likely to be major contenders and considering the state of the Emmys comedy awards, the latter is moving up quickly in contention. Possibilities for Best Animated Series is Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai.

On the dark horse side of contention is Lupin a show which has been nominated for Best International Drama multiple times and Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of The House of Usher, which was critically acclaimed and has received multiple nominations from critics groups at the end of 2023.

I should also mention that the Irish Film and TV awards have announced their nominations and while I think there is even less of a chance for any of them to get nominated, I am grateful to see recognition for the brilliant Showtime-BBC collaboration: The Woman In the Wall. I assume that because the awards show is primarily for Irish Actors rather than British ones is why Ruth Wilson has not been included but the rest of the cast, including Daryl McCormack and Simon Delaney have been.

I will return to this group of awards later but my next group will focus on the MTV Movie and TV awards (emphasis on the latter) and the Dorian nominations for TV. I covered both last year and in multiple cases they have been more prescient than some of the other groups.

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.