The Enemy of My Enemy...

My latest down-time project has been an ongoing survey of the Showtime series Dexter.

I watched the first two seasons years ago, but I read something the other day that reminded me that the series might be worth watching. It's been long enough that I felt I should refresh myself before moving onto the unseen episodes, so I re-watched the first two seasons again and have continued on, now up to Season 5 (season 8 is currently filming).

I've dived into several TV series over the years only to have my interest flag after a season or two (Weeds, Rome, The Tudors--the exception to this rule has been the original Law and Order; I seem never to tire of that). Maybe this is because there are a limited number of variations one can make on a given theme. The last time I watched Dexter I filled up on the plot points that have to accompany this kind of story--the tensions, the near-misses, the twists and turns. But I'd forgotten how delicious it is. The essential concept--a bad guy you root for--isn't especially new, but for the most part it's well-written and -acted and otherwise skillfully done. The writing is terse and often darkly funny, and the core characters are quite magnetic.

For the uninitiated, Michael C. Hall plays Dexter Morgan, a blood-spatter analyst for the Homicide Division of the Miami Metro Police Department. He's very good at his job, thanks to a sharply analytical mind and a vivid imagination that enables him to put himself inside the heads of the perpetrators. He can do this because--the main detail that everyone knows--Dexter is a serial killer in his free time. This could be the most horrific subject matter possible, but the details, however improbable, make the idea... acceptable. Dexter's deceased father was a cop, and he recognized early on that his son was improperly wired, as it were. So the father basically taught Dexter how to give vent to his antisocial urges in a way that will keep him out of prison and that provides a net benefit to society. So Dexter lives a more or less normal life and his "hobby" is only exercised on... bad people. It's this delicious sense of vigilante justice that makes the premise palatable--even (dare I say it?) satisfying.

And the story is told with a dollop of humor. Dexter's normal-seeming daily interactions are often served up with a voiceover of his darkly comic twisted interior monolog, and a couple of his workmates provide comedy relief. His younger sister is a junior detective on the police force, a passionate and good-hearted kid with an incredibly foul mouth and a thin skin. He shares lab work with forensics investigator Vince Masuka, an über-nerd with a gaping social skills deficit and a penchant for saying scatalogical or wildly-inappropriate sexual things at precisely the wrong moment. The rest of the office is more typical cop fare. Detective Angel Batista is another good-hearted cop trying to navigate life's turbulent waters, and the office is overseen by Lieutenant Maria LaGuerta, a competent cop in a tough job.

Pitted against these "good guys" is an array of criminals who are dispatched--some legally, some otherwise. And there's always someone on the police force itself who just gets a bad vibe from Dexter--despite his sister's fierce protection--and this keeps the heat on Dexter to some degree.

Maybe watching them in short order this way, this immersion, makes everything seem more compelling than it would be with some space. But I find myself daydreaming about the characters as though they were real people. That's kind of disturbing in the case of Dexter himself.

And I can't help thinking about the mechanisms for writing an ongoing story where we root for the bad guy. For eight continuous seasons. Part of it involves making the bad guy as sympathetic as possible; Dexter's voiceovers tell us how deranged he is, but he often seems the smartest guy in the room, and he often manages to imitate sympathetic human behavior better than those who supposedly feel these things for real. Another part of this like-the-bad-guy formula involves making his victims really odious so that we're not unhappy to see them go--our sense of justice is satisfied this way, and our natural dread reaction is kept at bay. Once these lubricants have seeped in and eased the resistance, we find ourselves pulling for, well, the serial killer. It's especially delicious to see Dexter in a dangerous situation where a normal person would be shitting their pants with fear--fearing their own death or some such; but Dexter knows that no one arrayed against him really poses much of a challenge. The character is given extraordinary talents in stealth and jiu-jitsu, and his easy dispatch of people who are targeting him is, well, very satisfying.

But good drama naturally hinges on conflict, and it's not all smooth sailing for Dexter. The series goes from one near-miss to another, typically with someone we've come to care about hanging in the balance. It's often Dexter himself, but not always. And I think it's this tension that I get filled up with eventually. There is typically some resolution in each episode, but the underlying tension of a serial killer hiding in plain sight never abates fully. And I can see having a limited appetite for that, no matter how brilliantly presented.

I have Seasons 1-6 on hand, and Season 7 is available on disc now. We'll see if I make it to the end.

The Empire Builder

I'm not in the habit of promoting television. My antipathy for broadcast TV is one of my worst-kept secrets, * and so promoting any television show is reflexively difficult for me.

But I've never claimed there is nothing of value to be found on television. Currently I'm working my way through two series that have made waves, Season One of HBO's Boardwalk Empire and the first season of the British series Downton Abbey. I was taken enough by the first two episodes of Downton Abbey that I've stopped watching until Susan and I can watch together. And now I've finished the first season of Boardwalk Empire.

Boardwalk Empire comes from producer Martin Scorsese, who also directed the very ambitious pilot episode--which allegedly cost $18 million to produce (more than the budget for Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). The pilot was a big hit, and the season continued with another 11 episodes.

The story, for the uninitiated, plunks us down in Atlantic City, NJ during Prohibition. The city is under the control of its treasurer, one Enoch "Nucky" Thompson. His real job--which is how a treasurer runs a city--is boss of the criminal enterprises in Atlantic City, and especially the now-illicit liquor trade. In this he must deal with / struggle against competing criminal elements from New York City just to the North and Chicago further distant. While Nucky Thompson is a fictional character loosely based on an actual crime boss "Nucky" Johnson, many of the other criminals in the story are actual historical figures: Al "Scarface" Capone, "Lucky" Luciano, Arnold Rothstein, Johnny Torrio.

I suppose I'm more likely to get sucked into this series than others because I have a particular love of this era of history. Prohibition especially (as Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's recent three-part PBS documentary shows) had a transforming effect on American culture, making criminals out of very many people and introducing vast waves of money and corruption where they did not previous exist much. This brought out a huge and colorful array of characters of myriad talents. The era of flappers and jazz and women's suffrage and Art-Deco-themed cross-country trains and stills in the woods and Tommy guns and fedoras. The era of organized crime.

This is all engaging enough in itself, and makes for a most compelling backdrop; but the series really soars on the strength of several key characters. Steve Buscemi plays Thompson, a powerful man but one who can be maddeningly hard to pin down. As the head of a criminal enterprise, he is not squeamish about harsh measures; and yet he is generous and can be soft-hearted. He seems common and approachable, both friendly and amiable and also a bit short-fused. And yet he is measured and confident as the need arises. His second-in-command is one Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), a kind of surrogate son to Nucky who served in WWI and returned to work for him. But Jimmy's ambitions soon place him on Nucky's bad side. Nucky, who is unmarried, has an affair with a young Irish immigrant widow in Atlantic City, Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald). And Nucky is constantly under investigation by Prohibition agent Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon), a "good guy" who is pretty deeply fucked up.

I love that none of the characters is a single, pure substance. The bad guys are varying degrees of bad, with everyone having their humanity mingled with the necessary brutality. And the good guys are inevitably fallible, some egregiously so. And some are just a question mark, staking out territory on neither side of the line. This sets up a war of expectations in the viewer, a constant tension between what we expect and what actually happens--which as often as not differs quite considerably.

It is the relationship between Thompson and Margaret Schroeder that seems the most fascinating and well-drawn to me. Kelly Macdonald might almost be a young Meryl Streep, able to brilliantly do accents and to project a very broad range with complete conviction. I think of her as being kind of mousy in No Country For Old Men, (where her thick Scottish brogue was blithely replaced with a Texas trailer-trash twang) but she plays a much more nuanced character here. A member of the Women's Temperance League and a very pious woman married to a violent and abusive man, she is very far from Nucky Thompson's world as the story begins. When he begins an affair with her, she only dimly--and reluctantly--sees who and what he is, exactly. And this takes, well, the whole season to effect. By turns she becomes reconciled to things that were anathema to her not long before, and Macdonald manages this in remarkable fashion, neither surrendering Margaret's will nor making her foolish or indecisive. There's something deeply human in her character that is thrilling to watch. Likewise the great enigma of Nucky himself. Buscemi (who won an Emmy for the role) plays a complicated character, a back-slapping politician who runs his world behind closed doors with an irascible iron hand. I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just say that I was surprised many times at the writing and the character.

One other intriguing character--a smaller character--is Jimmy's friend and deputy Robert Harrow (played by British actor Jack Huston). Jimmy meets Harrow, another WWI vet, at a VA hospital where both have gone for treatment. Harrow sustained severe facial damage in the war, and he wears a tin mask over nearly half his face--his left eye, nose and half his mouth. The mask makes for a nearly-normal face (I'm especially taken by the fact that half of Harrow's moustache is depicted on the mask side), but the effect is strangely ghoulish; it's impossible not to stare at him. But Harrow seems an upright, if severely tested, man. Jimmy is taken by something in Harrow's pure but knowing nature, and befriends and recruits him. Masks are not a new mechanism, I know, but its effect here is to keep us continually off balance. Harrow speaks with difficulty and a croaking voice, but he is a skilled marksman and he has seen terrible things.

Despite very high marks for the series, there has been some criticism that it's slow-moving. But I reject this out of hand. One can get only so far with gun battles, and it is the (mostly) quiet interaction between characters that drives everything here. I was shocked at how quickly I dispensed with 12 episodes and was distressed that there were no more available. Season Two is in the can and will see a DVD release later this year. Season Three has been commissioned, and presumably production is underway. All credit to a story well-told that I'm anxious to see what will unfold with this cast of characters.

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* About my tiresome antipathy toward network television: I'm convinced that if I could somehow eradicate television altogether society would benefit handily from it--the things of value we'd lose, and the impact they have, would be far outstripped by all the bad shit that went away at the same time. Much of what ails us in this life stems, I think, from the influence of big money and unchecked market forces working on the collective human psyche--inevitably working for the benefit of others. And with a step back we can see that television exists almost exclusively as a tool for players in these big-money fields. It is a key weapon in the commercialization of society, a  propaganda tool for manipulating the thoughts and desires of a mass market (the largest market possible before the internet came along). It tells us what is news (and what isn't), we're supposed to want--and THAT we're supposed to want, what behaviors our friends will find hip, who we should listen to, what we should think about ourselves and what we should value; all the things we historically got from our community.

TV shows are vehicles for selling things. Make shows spectacular and lurid so we'll watch; watch the shows so you'll see the ads--the ads are really the whole banana. It now strikes me as positively harmful to let kids sit in front of the thing, or to have it blathering inanely in the background, filling our heads with jingles and catch phrases, all carefully engineered to sell shit that we might not otherwise buy. Some of it is stuff we need and which actually benefits us; but as with political ads I'm sure television is not the way for us to suss out what is true from what we're told is true. I steer clear of the whole mess by never watching live TV in any circumstances, and by waiting for series to be vetted by critics before renting or buying the DVDs later (I'd much rather pay for the shows themselves than let the advertisers pay and then make me watch the ads). In this manner I've watched all of Ken Burns's documentaries, and some of the dramatic series The Sopranos and The Tudors and Rome. I sampled a bit of Dexter and Weeds, and--wandering further afield--I've long been a fan of the original Law & Order.

Essentially these are my convictions. But I know there's nothing intrinsic to the medium of television that prevents it being used for profound communication or artistic expression like film; it's just that in practice these higher-brain values take a back seat to the tremendous money-making potential in the titillation of a carefully-cultivated mass audience (a phenomenon that has worked its way into film as well).


Even to me my fervor seems a bit paranoid and nutty at times. But since I haven't watched network TV for 15 or 20 years, I'm appalled now every time I run across it. It really is base and horrid, looking like something out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.