master of none — Bloggery — Touched with Fire Media

It’s been a few weeks — I got discombobulated when the blog’s domain expired. I was told by Hover that I would have the opportunity to buy it back, but I’ve checked almost every day for a month and it seems that somebody, somewhere, has decided that my old website is a domain that they need to have and I don’t. This reminds me, more than anything, of the time I left my bike helmet clipped to my bike outside a supermarket, and some jerk stole it. What’s the point of stealing something with no value to anyone but its owner? To increase global chaos? To teach “society” a lesson? I don’t know.

I’ve been watching a few shows that have entered the zeitgeist since we last spoke, dear reader. Each, in its own way, strikes me as being less than what its hype would lead one to believe. Two of them hold little interest for me at all.

The best of these shows is the new Netflix outing, Jessica Jones, in which Krysten Ritter (of Breaking Bad and Veronica Mars almost-fame) plays a hard-bitten private dick doing battle with a creepy English sociopath named Kilgrave. Wait . . . did you notice what got left out of that summary? Two things, one not very interesting, the other more so:

1. Everybody’s got superpowers.

2. Kilgrave, played by The Internet’s Boyfriend, David Tennant, once used his superpower (mind control) to subject Ritter’s titular character to a form of sexual slavery.

The show is based on a little-known-outside-the-comics-world Marvel book called Alias, and its tone is bleak, its affect blank and sarcastic, its cinematography artfully dark. Though the show is nominally a superhero offering, it does most of its stylistic cribbing, not from comics, but from film noir. This is a wise choice for a number of reasons, but chief among them is that the attitude of cynical gloom that infested noir well matches a protagonist who is a fairly recent survivor of sexual assault. The makers of Jessica Jones — possibly the author of the book on which it is based — intuited something: noir ethos is a rendering of PTSD.

Think about your typical noir hero. He drinks too much, has trouble maintaining meaningful relationships, often works obsessively, is driven by demons that roil beneath the surface but are never coherently exposed. He has usually severed relationships with old partners, and now works alone, conducting most interactions as a form of hostage negotiation. Violence comes easily to him. Much of the time, he wears a trench coat.

That trench coat might just seem like a tic, but it’s actually key to unlocking the hard-boiled detectives of noir film and dime novels all over the English-speaking world. Why? Because it hints at the big, unspoken Trouble that lurks behind all the small trouble that drives the story: he’s a veteran. Sam Spade, the ur-hard-boiled-detective, the trench-coat-wearer-in-chief, is almost certainly a veteran of the First World War, like his creator. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Spade’s literary career began in 1930, when a lot of people had suffered the privations of the First World War, and then blossomed after America joined the Second. For two generations, the world was full of hard-drinking, disjointed men who didn’t feel at home in the America they’d been raised to believe in. Detective fiction and the film noir embody that alienation, and make it beautiful.

Jessica doesn’t appear to be a veteran of any war, but she is a veteran of sexual assault, which sometimes has very similar psychological impacts.* If one is going to aestheticize her world, especially in the pomo remix culture that dominates the discourse these days, it only makes sense to turn to the language of noir to do so. This is where the show most succeeds.

*I should make it clear here that I’m speaking entirely second-hand here. Though my life has not been untouched by tragedy, it’s been my good fortune never to witness the violence myself. I have known some people and read some books, that’s all.

It’s less interesting in other areas, frankly. The superhero stuff feels rote and second-hand, very tired and standard. People were experimented on as kids, blah blah blah, they came out the other side with powers and feeling like freaks, blah blah blah. Rinse, repeat. There’s nothing insightful or interesting in most of this backstory, and frankly I found myself wondering about how the show would work if none of it were included — would Jessica Jones be worse if Kilgrave was simply a magnetic sociopath, Jessica a hard-drinking detective, and her various relationships not negotiated through the medium of her being vaguely super? I can’t imagine it would. The show would of course be different, but I’m not sure the difference would be for the worse. Almost all the superhero stuff is cliché by now. I get it, the normals are afraid of the supers. (I saw The Incredibles and X-Men.) Yes, having great power comes with great responsibility. (Superman.) Your powers are a metaphor for trauma. (Like every superhero movie or comic ever.) None of this illuminating or even very fun anymore. Can we move on?

Of course, Jessica Jones wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for its superhero pedigree. It’s a part of something called the MCU, or Marvel Cinematic Universe, which encompasses several titanically popular movie franchises and a few less-popular TV ones — most notably The Avengers and all its offshoots. Suffice it to say I have a lot of what my friend Isaac would call “feeeeeeelliiiiiiiings” about the MCU, most of them not very positive. I find most of the movies samey and dull. I’m not allergic to a good action sequence, and even the occasional superhero movie can be fun (the Christopher Reeves Superman is a favorite), but the fact of the matter is that the MCU represents, at least to me, the triumph of the corporate over the individual, the engineered over the created, and the glib over the nuanced. The real problem with the MCU, at least at the film level, is that superheroes like Iron Man and Captain America and the Hulk lack specific psychology, almost by necessity: they are the creations of many hands, and can only be made so specific if they’re going to stick to their archetypes: a superhero is almost always basically one thing — RAGE!!! (Hulk), revenge (Batman), technology (Iron Man), etc. There’s only so much of that kind of shit I can take before I start to get bored. Couldn’t we quit blowing stuff up and have a conversation, man? Like, about a specific day in 1993 when a cute girl named Ciara laughed at a joke you made and for 22 years since then you’ve been trying to recapture that, to slip gently into the slippery glow of an adolescent boy who just realized he liked girls because he made a pretty girl laugh, and that’s why 99% of the things that come out of your mouth are meant, in one way or another, to be humorous?

Jones, I think because the character is obscure, is less subject to the vicissitudes of mass manufacture — Jessica has been wronged in very specific ways, and has committed very specific wrongs of her own. While under Kilgrave’s spell, she punched a woman in the chest so hard that her heart stopped. The ramifications of this act compose some of the central tension of the show, which takes place about a year and a half after it happened: (1) She has allowed an innocent busdriver to take the rap for running over her victim (though he is not held legally responsible, he feels morally tortured), and (2) she grows morbidly obsessed with the dead woman’s widower, who she eventually falls into bed with.** This is pretty good stuff, allowing the show to explore the ways in which lack of culpability does not always lead to a lack of guilty feeling. But then, there’s all the stuff about how the people were experimented on as children, all of which should have been left on the cutting room floor.

** This character, Luke Cage (Mike Colter), is due to get his own Netflix show next year, following in the footsteps of both Jessica Jones and Daredevil, a show that has received outlandish critical praise and generally bored your humble correspondent shitless.

There’s a lot to recommend Jessica Jones. Chief among these is the performance of Krysten Ritter,*** whose previous work has consisted mostly of comedy (Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23, Veronica Mars) and minor character work (Breaking Bad). Ritter here combines notes she’s played before (disaffected, sarcastic) with ones she hasn’t: angry, conflicted, smart. Even in her best previous work, which is quite good, Ritter usually plays someting of a ditz or a flibertigibbet, a person who isn’t wholly engaged with the serious and ugly parts of life. Not so here. David Tennant is good, too, though his character eventually devolves into a cackling cliché without much more to say than, I’m gonna geeetttt youuuuu, Jessica Jones! Carrie-Ann Moss is strong as Jeri Hogarth, a high-powered lawyer embroiled in an ugly divorce from her do-gooder doctor wife.

*** I was once in a bar in New York City with a woman I was dating, and Ritter was there. I didn’t talk to her — I wouldn’t have had the nerve, even if she wasn’t famous, because she was, quite simply, the most beautiful human being I had ever been in a room with. It’s kind of hard to explain how beautiful she was. The television certainly doesn’t do her justice. There was just kind of an aura around her, one so powerful that it was hard not to stare in her direction. Other good-looking people looked plain in her presence. My girlfriend at the time had a harder time not staring than I did, and I had a pretty hard time.

But it’s not without flaws, many of them embodied in the character of Robyn (Colby Minifie), Jessica’s notably weird upstairs neighbor. Through most of the show, Robyn is a sort of formless collection of eccentricities, many of them centered around her twin brother / roommate / possible fuck buddy, Reuben. The character is meant as comic relief, I think, but she’s basically a pain in the ass. And then, for reasons that are never made wholly clear, she becomes irrational, vindictive, and dangerous. The action is not totally unmotivated — Reuben dies, after all — but it’s not well-motivated, and Robyn rapidly becomes more of a cog in the plot than a character. Robyn, in short, sucks, and she’s not wholly unrepresentative of how supporting characters function in Jessica Jones. Luke Cage, for instance, remains kind of featureless and bland, defined mostly by being handsome, noble, and kind of super, powers-wise. The references to the MCU tend to be heavy-handed and silly. And there are, of course, plot holes you could drive a Mack truck through. But then it wouldn’t be a superhero show if there were none of those.

The other, lesser shows I’ve watched — though neither in their entirety — are Master of None and The Man in the High Castle.

Master of None is Aziz Ansari’s venture in the direction of Louie-like TV auteursim. Ansari co-wrote almost every episode, along with fellow Parks & Rec alum Alan Yang, and directed a few episodes, as well. The show is amusing, and kind of cute. But it’s also very self-congratulatory, and far more interested in making its viewer feel good than think very hard, which is probably the chief difference between it and Louie. Master of None has some Important Things to Say, and I’m glad it’s getting its day in the sun — the truth is that Hollywood, like many (if not all) American industries, remains dismayingly white, and the world of entertainment has been allowed to get away with quota-ing and type-casting in ways that are insulting and destructive. But I also think the show has a problem: it’s not actually that good. It’s funny sometimes. It’s got some pretty warm vibes. But psychologically incisive it is not. It is, in fact, hopelessly didactic and dull. Though it says some stuff about race and the entertainment industry that needed to be said, in most respects it’s not challenging or complicated at all. And many of the performances are for shit.†

† Yes, I know those are Ansari’s actual parents. So the fuck what?

The other is The Man in the High Castle, based on Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel about an America conquered and divided by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The show is amusing, but that’s about it, as far as I can tell. Almost all of the principal actors have transparently been cast for looks rather than ability (the only exception being Alexa Davalos, who is also, paradoxically, breathtakingly good-looking), and the formulation of the plot undermines the book’s key strength — a depiction of the many brutalities, large and small, of colonialism. Though the show isn’t terrible by any means, it does Hollywoodize the book in such a way as to turn it into a lie: by adding an American resistance, it injects a plot that is basically about the triumph of the good guys that in fact doesn’t track with the very concept of the show. The point of The Man in the High Castle — I would argue that the point of history — is that the powerful dominate and the efforts of the powerless to dislodge them are almost always fruitless. Power persists in part by creating a state of tactical apathy, a form of pandemic depression that helps the powerless deal, but also prevents uprising most of the time. The TV show, by seeding a resistance through this, perpetuates the lie that the good guys will win in the end. No, they won’t. Look at the world. Seriously. The bad guys almost always win. Love does not overpower fear. Honor does not defeat cynicism. Violence destroys pacifism. All the time.

Of course, the real reason I’ve quit watching The Man in the High Castle is that it’s on Amazon Prime, which I don’t have, and the picture & sound on my illegal stream were so bad. So maybe there’s more to it that I will never learn about.