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Sep. 1st, 2016 03:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionThe Night Of
Spoiling all:
0. The pilot, if that's the right word for an HBO miniseries opener, was probably the all-time best and I was neither surprised nor much disappointed that what followed, while frequently excellent, couldn't match it, especially in terms of excitement. Is the finale an exception? I can't quite tell. It was bewildering and wounding, which are hard effects to pull off. And there were some choices that I can't tell if they were brilliant or not. I guess an episode where you can say it even might be as good as the Night Of pilot must be pretty great?
1. The Indian lawyer was very funny. Gene Wilder style, actually. Wide open eyes are best for deadpan?
2. Both mentally disturbed African American suspects were also very funny, initially scary-funny. The white ones were just vaguely loathsome. Maybe not the best racial balancing there, but whatever. Points enough were scored elsewhere to offset it. And maybe there was some method to it, since they weren't the guilty ones (well, presumably) - makes the audience complicit in the system's method of finding the nearest black person who looks guilty. The extreme degree of guilt-lookingness is what makes for the hilarity, though. Does that soften the tactic, given the offered takeaway (discussed below), or just muddle things?
3. I caught that the financial advisor was being downplayed too much, so did tentatively assume it was him, but can't fault the downplaying since it matched the suspicion level of the investigating characters, all of whom focused on minority males or the stepfather. I.e. it was a trick that served a purpose other than tricking. Plus, it always feels sucky to have guessed right by paying attention to the storytellers' actions rather than the presented facts - a bit like when you realize some cast member has too high a profile to be acting in a small part thus must be the killer.
4. It was strange how often I found myself imagining how Gandolfini would have played the various Turturro scenes. I think the eczema stuff would have come across as more comic. With Turturro it had a different spin, or ultimately did - HE was trying to take it comically, and kind of failing, which ended up seeming more horrific than if he hadn't. You felt a lot of dark beyond the lamplight, as it were. Whereas Gandolfini's whole thing was very superficially seeming like Squiggy - irritable, amiable, dumb, mildly cunning - and being something worse underneath, pain-feeling and -dealing. Where minor mishaps, even cumulative ones, would feel like comedic underminings of that - pretty much an inversion of Turturro's take.
5. I also became increasingly curious about Criminal Justice, though also more and more ambivalent about actually learning about it or watching it - a) because the title, while better than The Night Of because anything would be, gives the game away (one again hears Jesse's initial description of Saul: "you don't want a criminal lawyer, you want a cri-mi-null lawyer"), b) because if it's as good as this it makes this less important, and this feels important, c) because if it's as good as this we live in a world where nobody will tell you when something as good as this has been made.
6. Was the detail of a 6-6 deadlock political? It felt political. Esp. given the consistently, uncomfortably close contest between (apparently) pure empathy and pure bullshit-with-broken-glass-in-it that's been each recent presidential race.
7. Closest thing to a flaw in the finale was the great frequency of shots framing window dividers and railings as bars (even in among the wholly admirable sequence depicting the number and types of doors separating inmates from freedom at Rikers) emphasizing how various characters could be seen as imprisoned even though not in prison. No one notices that sort of thing on The Walking Dead because no one thinks anything's there to be noticed on that show, meaning blatancy makes a point about that unnotice. A different core audience and a much different set of genre/format signals make it feel too hard to miss, here. They were doing something interesting even with that, though, by making a sort of window-like free space in each of these shots, which the characters would often inhabit or enter. Notch to the maelstrom, as it were. Which sets up the ending.
8. We fear Turturro has become one of the guilty-voting 6, as it were, or like one of those cops who has their beer and doesn't care. But then see it's exactly because he's instead like Box, like the other 6, that he can stare straight at the Sarah McLachlan-y damaged pet ad without flinching. He's serene because he's done the little he could. Which for one little creature is a very big thing.
I'm the sort where depictions of animal welfare stuff in narrative kicks my soul around. The show's pretty much betting that most of us are. Or maybe half? But it risks tearing me away utterly from whatever else is happening. When he took it back in that box and the clerk said "Oh no" ... Had things turned out otherwise I would want to forget the show forever, ridiculous as that may be. Would have been fine with Nas being found guilty, or revealed guilty, or dying even - sad, but with no hard feelings toward the show itself. Because such things happen. Whereas with animals they do but CAN'T.
And with things like this that brush that limit, like Umberto D, like Upstream Color, even when they pull back there's a price: I'm not entirely sure if what I've seen is unspeakably beautiful art or if I'm just really, really fucking relieved. And maybe there's also a lingering question about whether art has a right to do that to me. There's trigger warning territory, but there's also territory make-believe simply should never enter - stuff that would trigger anyone, it feels like. Or maybe the half you can talk into feeling-like in the first place.
Half, of course, has a magic to it that no other fraction does, because it suggests a split difference between whatever fullness we hope for and whatever total absence we fear. Life gives and takes, but there's no way of counting up just how much of each occurs - or how much would be worth it. We can feel it as worthy of going on with or not, but can't turn that into math. You run out of paper before either cons or pros.
And part of that magic is the magic of rounding up. That optimism was imported into math itself makes one optimistic about people. Though only if one's that way inclined.
Spoiling all:
0. The pilot, if that's the right word for an HBO miniseries opener, was probably the all-time best and I was neither surprised nor much disappointed that what followed, while frequently excellent, couldn't match it, especially in terms of excitement. Is the finale an exception? I can't quite tell. It was bewildering and wounding, which are hard effects to pull off. And there were some choices that I can't tell if they were brilliant or not. I guess an episode where you can say it even might be as good as the Night Of pilot must be pretty great?
1. The Indian lawyer was very funny. Gene Wilder style, actually. Wide open eyes are best for deadpan?
2. Both mentally disturbed African American suspects were also very funny, initially scary-funny. The white ones were just vaguely loathsome. Maybe not the best racial balancing there, but whatever. Points enough were scored elsewhere to offset it. And maybe there was some method to it, since they weren't the guilty ones (well, presumably) - makes the audience complicit in the system's method of finding the nearest black person who looks guilty. The extreme degree of guilt-lookingness is what makes for the hilarity, though. Does that soften the tactic, given the offered takeaway (discussed below), or just muddle things?
3. I caught that the financial advisor was being downplayed too much, so did tentatively assume it was him, but can't fault the downplaying since it matched the suspicion level of the investigating characters, all of whom focused on minority males or the stepfather. I.e. it was a trick that served a purpose other than tricking. Plus, it always feels sucky to have guessed right by paying attention to the storytellers' actions rather than the presented facts - a bit like when you realize some cast member has too high a profile to be acting in a small part thus must be the killer.
4. It was strange how often I found myself imagining how Gandolfini would have played the various Turturro scenes. I think the eczema stuff would have come across as more comic. With Turturro it had a different spin, or ultimately did - HE was trying to take it comically, and kind of failing, which ended up seeming more horrific than if he hadn't. You felt a lot of dark beyond the lamplight, as it were. Whereas Gandolfini's whole thing was very superficially seeming like Squiggy - irritable, amiable, dumb, mildly cunning - and being something worse underneath, pain-feeling and -dealing. Where minor mishaps, even cumulative ones, would feel like comedic underminings of that - pretty much an inversion of Turturro's take.
5. I also became increasingly curious about Criminal Justice, though also more and more ambivalent about actually learning about it or watching it - a) because the title, while better than The Night Of because anything would be, gives the game away (one again hears Jesse's initial description of Saul: "you don't want a criminal lawyer, you want a cri-mi-null lawyer"), b) because if it's as good as this it makes this less important, and this feels important, c) because if it's as good as this we live in a world where nobody will tell you when something as good as this has been made.
6. Was the detail of a 6-6 deadlock political? It felt political. Esp. given the consistently, uncomfortably close contest between (apparently) pure empathy and pure bullshit-with-broken-glass-in-it that's been each recent presidential race.
7. Closest thing to a flaw in the finale was the great frequency of shots framing window dividers and railings as bars (even in among the wholly admirable sequence depicting the number and types of doors separating inmates from freedom at Rikers) emphasizing how various characters could be seen as imprisoned even though not in prison. No one notices that sort of thing on The Walking Dead because no one thinks anything's there to be noticed on that show, meaning blatancy makes a point about that unnotice. A different core audience and a much different set of genre/format signals make it feel too hard to miss, here. They were doing something interesting even with that, though, by making a sort of window-like free space in each of these shots, which the characters would often inhabit or enter. Notch to the maelstrom, as it were. Which sets up the ending.
8. We fear Turturro has become one of the guilty-voting 6, as it were, or like one of those cops who has their beer and doesn't care. But then see it's exactly because he's instead like Box, like the other 6, that he can stare straight at the Sarah McLachlan-y damaged pet ad without flinching. He's serene because he's done the little he could. Which for one little creature is a very big thing.
I'm the sort where depictions of animal welfare stuff in narrative kicks my soul around. The show's pretty much betting that most of us are. Or maybe half? But it risks tearing me away utterly from whatever else is happening. When he took it back in that box and the clerk said "Oh no" ... Had things turned out otherwise I would want to forget the show forever, ridiculous as that may be. Would have been fine with Nas being found guilty, or revealed guilty, or dying even - sad, but with no hard feelings toward the show itself. Because such things happen. Whereas with animals they do but CAN'T.
And with things like this that brush that limit, like Umberto D, like Upstream Color, even when they pull back there's a price: I'm not entirely sure if what I've seen is unspeakably beautiful art or if I'm just really, really fucking relieved. And maybe there's also a lingering question about whether art has a right to do that to me. There's trigger warning territory, but there's also territory make-believe simply should never enter - stuff that would trigger anyone, it feels like. Or maybe the half you can talk into feeling-like in the first place.
Half, of course, has a magic to it that no other fraction does, because it suggests a split difference between whatever fullness we hope for and whatever total absence we fear. Life gives and takes, but there's no way of counting up just how much of each occurs - or how much would be worth it. We can feel it as worthy of going on with or not, but can't turn that into math. You run out of paper before either cons or pros.
And part of that magic is the magic of rounding up. That optimism was imported into math itself makes one optimistic about people. Though only if one's that way inclined.
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Date: 2016-09-01 03:42 pm (UTC)