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Jul. 8th, 2015 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionLasted like 17 days.
Haven't watched 3 yet.
So that character's arc is ... what exactly? Decent, then utterly disempowered, then makes a devil's bargain to try to take it back, but that just makes things worse, makes him worse, makes whatever he touches worse. Until he has nothing left to lose and becomes reckless? Or looks like he's about to be and is silenced? His last conversation with Macadam (Macadams? Can never remember) could have brought that on as easily as his last couple with Vaughn (Vaughan?). And of course the "Black Mountain" guy fits the build of the shooter, and he was acting all shifty and whatnot, and has a lot to lose if he doesn't comply with the powerful people trying to secure those overages. Though maybe the camera was just low, or the weird murder mask was real tall.
But his motorcycle suicide attempt makes him the wild card here, if anything, though that could have been used by the state people to their advantage - he earlier tries to use his Black Mountain past when his job's endangered, as some sort of appeal to patriotism (hard to imagine this working with Blackwater). So since that's known to his superiors, maybe they figure they have an assassin under their thumb? Not sure how this fits with the repressed homosexuality thing, or what's being made to look like that. The latter, one hopes, as that's a bit cliche by this point, though if somethiing genuinely new or insightful is done with it then sure, whatever. Nothing's feeling particularly either so far though.
The more interesting route is to have MacAdams (?) be the one who had him killed. The manager's body was transported to her turf, and pretty gratuitously. His corruption is presented in detail. Hers is not - though she brings her people into a risky and pointless raid as part of a bizarrely aggressive intervention on her sister, who's presented to us as off drugs, hence in command of herself. Reactionary stereotypes in the audience's mind about porn (conceivably accurate ones) are perhaps being appealed to so as to conceal MacA in plain sight, I guess? She has knives all over and seems to expect sexual violence from men, and survived some kind of cult that was either really terrible or just misunderstood by her, blamed for her mother's death.
No clue what to make of "the universe is meaningless in God's eye" and "God wouldn't make a meaningless universe." I mean, the obvious way to out those together is that there's no God, but why the speaker would be conveying that is unclear given the context. And why Pizzolatto (why can't I spell names anymore?) would, for that matter, given the last scene of season 1 and that gnostic tent sermon from early on. Possible spins could include: a universe cannot be meaningful to God thus he creates those for whom it would be, seeing through whose eyes it becomes meaningful to him; a universe that is self-creating, hence God, may be mindless but it cannot help creating significance simply by the orders new substances fall into with the related ones from which they emanate. Perhaps those are consonant with one another? But what might they have to do with a noir narrative. If he's secretly preaching atheism it might be of Dostoevsky's "everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden" strain, or whatever that line is. Which, if that Dostoevsky pedophilia anecdote is true, might suggest a very specific sense of "everything." And even if it doesn't - his importing the same revelation into The Possessed was about his own horror at where he supposes the secular-liberal slippery slope to lead. So maybe that's where Pizzolatto's heading? The cult may be about telling the powerful what they want to hear, that it's sweet and right to do whatever they like, and that only they get to have this special knowledge. That the universe wants them to be like it, powerful and limitless and unbeholden. And given the dead guy's weird porn house and Macadam's laptop staring perhaps he has something to say to or for those reactionary impulses himself?
Also not quite sure yet what to make of the "already dead" motif. The four, or maybe 3.25, main characters all seem to have survived the shatterings of worlds they thought would stay normal. We get less of a sense of this with Kitsch, I guess, though the repeated "you can have your old room" thing seems to suggest a lost home - hopefully not a mother-son incest one, but whatever. Things can be done with that too. Hypothetically.
Sigh.
Chinatown marries The Crying of Lot 49 to The Big Sleep - well, modified versions of each, and just more or less, but that fusion's pretty much been the California noir template since, a union presumably blessed by Pynchon himself in Inherent Vice though I didn't get far in that. A nice new place where people can be happy goes to hell when people start showing up, or whatever the scavenger is that follows them around in the night, but it's all so bright that you don't notice it's been made inferno until it needs you for fuel. Or till someone close to you is burning. But these people have all been burned. What can you do with that? Unburn them, I suppose. So Farrell (sp.?) could be priming us for other corrupt people hitting bottom and thus bouncing free of that corruption. Not that he, you know, did. But he may have meant to, in what he said to Macadam. S. Mac Adam? Eugh.
Does seem like something Bosola-like's being done with Vaughn. We're not yet seeing the worst things he's done, and all the truly awful people (absurdly slimeful mayor, Catalyst guy, Russian mobster) are amusing themselves by cutting him out, and above all our hate's been surgically drained by that vivid and horrific reveal about his childhood. His corruption of Farrell seems to involve a lot of ambivalence. Though the sad faces could of course instead be about the feeling that he's going to need to kill him, either out of fear of going down with him or because killing him will get more attention paid to the investigation, which might flush out whoever's doing this to him.
The shotgun to the genitals thing might also suggest, er, Rachel, given how she's presented. And the acid to the eyes of someone who "likes to watch." Maybe he belonged to the cult or something, since his psychiatrist seems to have been involved. So this could just be a revenge thing against a rapist that she knew she'd become the investigator on, based on proximity, thus could quash any evidence pointing to her. Wanting to know how corrupt Farrell was might have been her attempt to assess whether she'd have to kill him or could maybe buy him off. She may have something to do with the apparent blackmailing, then? Or found out her sister was blackmailing him? Beats me. But that was Farrell's piece of proactivity, finding that out, so that might have led her to bring him down. She says "sure" when Kitsch wants to leave and doesn't press the lazy, Wire season 1 type stuffed suit detective about his own leaving. Whereas the detective who wavers about wandering off may be her problem. Could she be involved in the railway business, or might that just be a coincidence? She doesn't answer when asked if she knows about Vinci ("I conquered" - meaningful? Capitalist-patriarchal domination?), thus by the laws of television does. As she's next up on the protagonist dock and they killed the first one they might want to keep her at least redeemable, though. So this may be a dummy plot.
The missing girl connected to the cult suggests that there's something rapey going on there. The Hollywood proximity is also being wink-winked an awful lot. Maybe the younger sister doesn't even know how bad it was? Her sister obsessively watching out for her might make even more sense if she remembers little, or was somehow kept out of it. The slimy mayor's weirdly obvious silence when asked whether he socialized with the manager suggested he did, and his remarks about acid suggest he'd fit the cult milieu that likes-to-watch was part of, so we may be back in Carcosa territory - which was basically Chinatown anyway. Where the greatly powerful purchase one-sided sexual freedom, cover it up, repeat.
The waitress with the cut face wasn't a bad synecdoche for Farrell's missed opportunities, and was probably a necessary adjunct to his suicide innuendo with Vaughn, since we're used to the notion that people who say these things don't mean them. But by refusing her he clearly does - he's just done. Maybe not psychologically plausible, but if you're going to run this particular narrative risk you're not going to want us feeling too hurt, rather than shocked. Having a character go Alec Baldwin on their son is an even more effective to make us not mind his brutal murder, of course.
I dunno. All I got for now.
Haven't watched 3 yet.
So that character's arc is ... what exactly? Decent, then utterly disempowered, then makes a devil's bargain to try to take it back, but that just makes things worse, makes him worse, makes whatever he touches worse. Until he has nothing left to lose and becomes reckless? Or looks like he's about to be and is silenced? His last conversation with Macadam (Macadams? Can never remember) could have brought that on as easily as his last couple with Vaughn (Vaughan?). And of course the "Black Mountain" guy fits the build of the shooter, and he was acting all shifty and whatnot, and has a lot to lose if he doesn't comply with the powerful people trying to secure those overages. Though maybe the camera was just low, or the weird murder mask was real tall.
But his motorcycle suicide attempt makes him the wild card here, if anything, though that could have been used by the state people to their advantage - he earlier tries to use his Black Mountain past when his job's endangered, as some sort of appeal to patriotism (hard to imagine this working with Blackwater). So since that's known to his superiors, maybe they figure they have an assassin under their thumb? Not sure how this fits with the repressed homosexuality thing, or what's being made to look like that. The latter, one hopes, as that's a bit cliche by this point, though if somethiing genuinely new or insightful is done with it then sure, whatever. Nothing's feeling particularly either so far though.
The more interesting route is to have MacAdams (?) be the one who had him killed. The manager's body was transported to her turf, and pretty gratuitously. His corruption is presented in detail. Hers is not - though she brings her people into a risky and pointless raid as part of a bizarrely aggressive intervention on her sister, who's presented to us as off drugs, hence in command of herself. Reactionary stereotypes in the audience's mind about porn (conceivably accurate ones) are perhaps being appealed to so as to conceal MacA in plain sight, I guess? She has knives all over and seems to expect sexual violence from men, and survived some kind of cult that was either really terrible or just misunderstood by her, blamed for her mother's death.
No clue what to make of "the universe is meaningless in God's eye" and "God wouldn't make a meaningless universe." I mean, the obvious way to out those together is that there's no God, but why the speaker would be conveying that is unclear given the context. And why Pizzolatto (why can't I spell names anymore?) would, for that matter, given the last scene of season 1 and that gnostic tent sermon from early on. Possible spins could include: a universe cannot be meaningful to God thus he creates those for whom it would be, seeing through whose eyes it becomes meaningful to him; a universe that is self-creating, hence God, may be mindless but it cannot help creating significance simply by the orders new substances fall into with the related ones from which they emanate. Perhaps those are consonant with one another? But what might they have to do with a noir narrative. If he's secretly preaching atheism it might be of Dostoevsky's "everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden" strain, or whatever that line is. Which, if that Dostoevsky pedophilia anecdote is true, might suggest a very specific sense of "everything." And even if it doesn't - his importing the same revelation into The Possessed was about his own horror at where he supposes the secular-liberal slippery slope to lead. So maybe that's where Pizzolatto's heading? The cult may be about telling the powerful what they want to hear, that it's sweet and right to do whatever they like, and that only they get to have this special knowledge. That the universe wants them to be like it, powerful and limitless and unbeholden. And given the dead guy's weird porn house and Macadam's laptop staring perhaps he has something to say to or for those reactionary impulses himself?
Also not quite sure yet what to make of the "already dead" motif. The four, or maybe 3.25, main characters all seem to have survived the shatterings of worlds they thought would stay normal. We get less of a sense of this with Kitsch, I guess, though the repeated "you can have your old room" thing seems to suggest a lost home - hopefully not a mother-son incest one, but whatever. Things can be done with that too. Hypothetically.
Sigh.
Chinatown marries The Crying of Lot 49 to The Big Sleep - well, modified versions of each, and just more or less, but that fusion's pretty much been the California noir template since, a union presumably blessed by Pynchon himself in Inherent Vice though I didn't get far in that. A nice new place where people can be happy goes to hell when people start showing up, or whatever the scavenger is that follows them around in the night, but it's all so bright that you don't notice it's been made inferno until it needs you for fuel. Or till someone close to you is burning. But these people have all been burned. What can you do with that? Unburn them, I suppose. So Farrell (sp.?) could be priming us for other corrupt people hitting bottom and thus bouncing free of that corruption. Not that he, you know, did. But he may have meant to, in what he said to Macadam. S. Mac Adam? Eugh.
Does seem like something Bosola-like's being done with Vaughn. We're not yet seeing the worst things he's done, and all the truly awful people (absurdly slimeful mayor, Catalyst guy, Russian mobster) are amusing themselves by cutting him out, and above all our hate's been surgically drained by that vivid and horrific reveal about his childhood. His corruption of Farrell seems to involve a lot of ambivalence. Though the sad faces could of course instead be about the feeling that he's going to need to kill him, either out of fear of going down with him or because killing him will get more attention paid to the investigation, which might flush out whoever's doing this to him.
The shotgun to the genitals thing might also suggest, er, Rachel, given how she's presented. And the acid to the eyes of someone who "likes to watch." Maybe he belonged to the cult or something, since his psychiatrist seems to have been involved. So this could just be a revenge thing against a rapist that she knew she'd become the investigator on, based on proximity, thus could quash any evidence pointing to her. Wanting to know how corrupt Farrell was might have been her attempt to assess whether she'd have to kill him or could maybe buy him off. She may have something to do with the apparent blackmailing, then? Or found out her sister was blackmailing him? Beats me. But that was Farrell's piece of proactivity, finding that out, so that might have led her to bring him down. She says "sure" when Kitsch wants to leave and doesn't press the lazy, Wire season 1 type stuffed suit detective about his own leaving. Whereas the detective who wavers about wandering off may be her problem. Could she be involved in the railway business, or might that just be a coincidence? She doesn't answer when asked if she knows about Vinci ("I conquered" - meaningful? Capitalist-patriarchal domination?), thus by the laws of television does. As she's next up on the protagonist dock and they killed the first one they might want to keep her at least redeemable, though. So this may be a dummy plot.
The missing girl connected to the cult suggests that there's something rapey going on there. The Hollywood proximity is also being wink-winked an awful lot. Maybe the younger sister doesn't even know how bad it was? Her sister obsessively watching out for her might make even more sense if she remembers little, or was somehow kept out of it. The slimy mayor's weirdly obvious silence when asked whether he socialized with the manager suggested he did, and his remarks about acid suggest he'd fit the cult milieu that likes-to-watch was part of, so we may be back in Carcosa territory - which was basically Chinatown anyway. Where the greatly powerful purchase one-sided sexual freedom, cover it up, repeat.
The waitress with the cut face wasn't a bad synecdoche for Farrell's missed opportunities, and was probably a necessary adjunct to his suicide innuendo with Vaughn, since we're used to the notion that people who say these things don't mean them. But by refusing her he clearly does - he's just done. Maybe not psychologically plausible, but if you're going to run this particular narrative risk you're not going to want us feeling too hurt, rather than shocked. Having a character go Alec Baldwin on their son is an even more effective to make us not mind his brutal murder, of course.
I dunno. All I got for now.
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Date: 2015-07-08 11:51 pm (UTC)