(no subject)
Aug. 15th, 2016 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionNight Of 1.2, 1.3:
No time to write about it but will anyway a bit.
Detective's name is Box - note the box-raised veal analogy and otherwise highly Box-like manipulations of the Michael K. Williams character. As without, so within - hence all the lingering close-ups of holes and cracks and leaks in the system's literal surfaces, e.g. the interrogation table, the windows. The "subtle beast" isn't a particular person but the lot of them. The show's trying to compress The Wire into a single hammer-blow of a season, and sudden-Omar is part of how it's trying to tell us it's doing that. The use of the Laura Palmer trope was thoroughly brilliant, down to the "fuck you, audience" withholdings of nudity and thorough messing up of the visible parts of the gorgeous actor's body. She was to get you in and now you're in. Clank.
Box's explanation to the rookie that the report of his vomiting was necessary was even better than that. He tells him it makes him look like a human being, and the victim look like a human being, erasing the defense's one advantage: that Nas seems too much like a "good person" (for those immune to the anti-Muslim stigma), whereas the victim and the system can be plausibly attacked. It's brilliant because he doesn't connect the dots, meaning we have to think about it for a second, meaning it's prominent enough in our mind tray that its second meaning affects how we see the show: these people really are all human beings, therefore how can we blame them? The ways that we can and what it means that we can't - what the beast really is - become our work.
I don't know how well this bait and switch will work. The Wire pulled it off for some tiny percentage of people. True Detective S1 tried it but few people realize it did, so I don't think we can say it succeeded, and what with the HBO-mandated aspects (meth adventure because Breaking Bad successful, breasty 22-year-olds because ever-successful), ill-integrated supernatural angle (actually quite good as metaphor, just oversubtle given how people were likely to take it) and the more or less improvised conclusion, even those few were mostly distracted away from those ambitions.
But Price and Zaillian came in with cachet, I guess. They have creative control from hell, HBO money, genius-level cinematography people and, given their topic (and Price's knowledge of it), no shortage of important things to say about life-or-death matters. Depending on what they have saved up for us, this has a real shot at being better than The Wire, though I imagine that's the sort of thing it will take the culture at least a decade to admit. And of course they might also devolve into tendentious tedium. What can be achieved via slowness seems to be the tv cutting edge lately. I am not great with slowness but I like that they're trying.
No time to write about it but will anyway a bit.
Detective's name is Box - note the box-raised veal analogy and otherwise highly Box-like manipulations of the Michael K. Williams character. As without, so within - hence all the lingering close-ups of holes and cracks and leaks in the system's literal surfaces, e.g. the interrogation table, the windows. The "subtle beast" isn't a particular person but the lot of them. The show's trying to compress The Wire into a single hammer-blow of a season, and sudden-Omar is part of how it's trying to tell us it's doing that. The use of the Laura Palmer trope was thoroughly brilliant, down to the "fuck you, audience" withholdings of nudity and thorough messing up of the visible parts of the gorgeous actor's body. She was to get you in and now you're in. Clank.
Box's explanation to the rookie that the report of his vomiting was necessary was even better than that. He tells him it makes him look like a human being, and the victim look like a human being, erasing the defense's one advantage: that Nas seems too much like a "good person" (for those immune to the anti-Muslim stigma), whereas the victim and the system can be plausibly attacked. It's brilliant because he doesn't connect the dots, meaning we have to think about it for a second, meaning it's prominent enough in our mind tray that its second meaning affects how we see the show: these people really are all human beings, therefore how can we blame them? The ways that we can and what it means that we can't - what the beast really is - become our work.
I don't know how well this bait and switch will work. The Wire pulled it off for some tiny percentage of people. True Detective S1 tried it but few people realize it did, so I don't think we can say it succeeded, and what with the HBO-mandated aspects (meth adventure because Breaking Bad successful, breasty 22-year-olds because ever-successful), ill-integrated supernatural angle (actually quite good as metaphor, just oversubtle given how people were likely to take it) and the more or less improvised conclusion, even those few were mostly distracted away from those ambitions.
But Price and Zaillian came in with cachet, I guess. They have creative control from hell, HBO money, genius-level cinematography people and, given their topic (and Price's knowledge of it), no shortage of important things to say about life-or-death matters. Depending on what they have saved up for us, this has a real shot at being better than The Wire, though I imagine that's the sort of thing it will take the culture at least a decade to admit. And of course they might also devolve into tendentious tedium. What can be achieved via slowness seems to be the tv cutting edge lately. I am not great with slowness but I like that they're trying.
