LateReg wrote:A while back I had promised you a response to your thoughts about Lost over in the Lost/Twin Peaks thread, but I realized that all I wanted to say there was that I really appreciated finding someone who simply loves the show at this point. For such a significant program with a huge following, it's rare to find anyone nowadays who will defend it as a totally great show despite its flaws, or to praise its finale, and it was very refreshing to see you do just that. I feel that so many people haven't gone back to the show to see if the finale actually makes the most sense after all, which I believe it does...and I have to admit that I was very upset about that finale at first, but had a friend who helped me think my way through its actual meaning. I finally made my way through the entire series with its meaning in mind, and ended up being blown away by the finale, purely on an emotional level.
What I really wanted to reply to you about was Top of the Lake to clarify my "wild unconventionality" comment. You're totally right: the weakest element of Top of the Lake: China Girl is the glaringly coincidental plot points, which could be read as very conventional indeed. But the way the show moves and feels - it feels disconnected, unbound by conventional approaches to pacing or the crime genre, and it feels very messy - extremely messy! - loose, wild, throwing shit against the wall and not even caring if it sticks. The random dream sequences, her one-off and never-returned-to encounter with the villain of the first season, the entire nonchalant, is-he-or-isn't-he-or-who-cares characterization of Alexander...the whole thing just feels like it's sort of floating, unfinished. That's how it feels to me, which is why the more conventional plot points are so puzzling.
I also wanted to say something about Atlanta. This might come as a shock to you given our other conversations and what they've revealed about my taste, but I actually don't see Atlanta being as unconventional as everyone says. Oh, I think it's the best "comedy" on television outside of Bojack Horseman, and it's probably going to finish as the 2nd best season of TV in 2018 (behind The Americans, namely due to how it absolutely nailed those last couple episodes!, and ahead of Bojack), but that's mostly because I have a so-called "objective" side that recognizes it as being obviously great. I love Atlanta's aesthetics, top to bottom, it has its own look, mood, etc.; the performances are great, and so is the writing; and yes, episode to episode, you don't really know what to expect. Yet within that, nothing seems all that unconventional to me. I don't know the proper way to say this, but I feel a lot of the "unconventional" praise heaped upon it is due to the culture/race that it focuses on, and how it breaks from the norms and the expectations we attach to such films/series. Is it strange to say that just because Atlanta focuses more on a culture rather than a genre, when we praise stuff for breaking down genres all the time, and when Atlanta seems to belong to no genre whatsoever? Is it strange to say that it doesn't really even feel "black" to me like so many other programs about the black experience? Obviously all that makes it groundbreaking as genre/topics/culture/etc are important to consider when it comes to breaking down boundaries in art, but I wonder if, say, another cultural mash-up like Master of None would be nearly as praised in particular for its unconventionality if it contained some of Atlanta's exact same, less conventional flourishes? Are there any other shows about hip-hop culture that contain so many seriously surreal touches, for example? The praise for its surrealism is therefore slightly overblown, in my opinion, as is the praise for it being so unpredictable. Matt Zoller Seitz even published an article about how it is a miracle season - and I would agree with that, as even though I feel that it lacks the emotional wallop of Leftovers season 3, it is otherwise just as flawlessly written and similarly divided into a series of borderline perfect yet somehow unique standalone episodes that build into a whole - and he focused in part on how you never know what to expect from episode to episode. But ain't that the thing about situational comedy in the first place? Aren't countless other shows, such as (especially) Master of None, doing the exact same structural thing right now to varying degrees of success? I guess partially what I'm getting at is that I feel that something like The Return (which I view as so far ahead of Atlanta/most things in its unconventionality/subversiveness that it shouldn't even be brought up here) or China Girl, which in their longform film structure can't rely on episodic segments, are more impressively unconventional because they are telling a continuous story that still keeps you not only on your toes but totally off balance despite the sameness of the episodes/parts, often through the elemental force of the basic tenets of filmmaking (cinematography, editing, pacing, tone, atmosphere, scoring, etc) applied to and enhancing an equally unconventional - but not necessarily twisty (simple twists often are nothing but that) - story that is uninterested in typical narrative beats or plotting, resulting in beats that are difficult to tap along to (as opposed to plot points or diversions that are simply unexpected). I also must admit here that I have a distrust of Glover. This is gonna sound weird, but I get the impression when I'm watching Atlanta that he's doing some things simply because he KNOWS they're good, not necessarily because he's good. I know that might sound like a load of bullshit, and as long as the product is good it maybe shouldn't matter, and maybe I'm just dead-wrong, but the difference between being that good because it comes from your soul and doing something just because you know its good is something that I think is interesting to think about, and which I can't shake when it comes to Glover, whose music I was familiar with long before Atlanta. None of this is meant to take away any of the off-kilter brilliance of Teddy Perkins or Woods and such. I just don't see Atlanta as being quite so unconventional as others do and I ponder how much that unconventionality is linked to its culture rather than filmmaking in general. In other words, I can think up and jot down a long list of things it does differently or better than a lot of "similar" programs, but while watching it, it mostly seems like a normal slice of life show to me with a few surreal touches and many brilliant moments.
Lots to unpack here! I think Lost suffered a similar backlash to TP, and DKL in general, circa the post-S2 era (particularly the completely unjustified hating on FWWM). When the whole culture invests so deeply in something that ends up being kind of a mess, the pendulum swings irrationally toward mockery and loathing, almost like the jaded emotions of a spurned lover. It has something to do with the “mystery” element of those shows, as if people felt conned or taken in due to their own investment, and resented the creators because of that. As a contrast: For me, Dexter is probably the quintessential example of a once-pretty-great drama that COMPLETELY shit the bed starting in late season 2, and never really recovered. But I rarely hear people complaining that the early seasons of Dexter wasted their time, the way most people do with Lost. People mourn how awful Dexter got and wish it had ended better, but no one seems to feel that something was taken from them or that the show wronged them in some way on a personal level, the way people seem to feel about Lindelof, and once felt toward L/F & co. It’s the fact that the mystery didn’t pay off that really pissed people off at those series, which to me shows that those audience members were missing the forest for the trees.
I get what you’re saying about TotL:CG, and I definitely appreciated much of the season on that level as I was watching it. It was only the last few hours (probably starting around the time that Alexander pimps out Mary) that the show really started to unravel for me. I keep coming back to the Al assault as an example of a piece of filmmaking that works like gangbusters as a self-contained visceral experience, but feels like it breaks the show’s reality for me when considered as part of the whole. But maybe that’s part of the point: both Alexander pimping Mary and the Al assault feel random and out of place and just WRONG in the world of this show, exactly as sexual assault likely does feel to the victim when it occurs. It’s the kind of thing where I might feel entirely different after a second viewing, but for all its power and hypnotic beauty, CG still ended up feeling like a letdown after the perfect blend of sustained dreamy mood and narrative cohesiveness of the first season.
I get what you’re saying about Atlanta. I agree that Master of None is in a similar class. Episodes like “First Date” and “Thanksgiving” last season were touching, innovative, hilariously brilliant short films in their own right. Along with Louie, I think MoN is easily one of the best TV series of the past decade. As with Louie, unfortunately, MoN now comes with some real-world baggage which we won’t talk too much about here due to board rules. But for me, while an artist’s real world actions don’t negate the work, they can certainly lead to a much more complicated viewing experience, especially when the real world stuff ties so closely to the themes the series frequently addresses. It makes it a little harder for me to relate to Dev as Ansari’s sweet well-meaning onscreen avatar. In any event, even putting that aspect of things aside, I do think an episode like “Teddy Perkins” elevates Atlanta beyond even MoN by saying something specific and unique about the black experience in the music industry, in a way that takes hairpin turns between being absurdly funny, skin-crawlingly creepy and deeply sad. That remarkable control of tone and ability to navigate between moods from moment to moment, even within an episode, is one of the things that makes the series so powerful to me.
All that being said, I also get what you’re saying about Glover. If you haven’t read
this New Yorker profile of Glover, it’s a long but fascinating read. He comes across as self-involved, evasive and narcissistic, even literally going to the Lennon “bigger than Jesus” well at one point, and talks about “hacking the code” of show business and life (the article mentions a run of talk show interviews where he charmed the hosts by telling completely bullshit stories about encounters with animals, as a ploy to come across as genial). In a way, it reinforces your view of him. But I also think the fact that he is so upfront about his inability to connect, and his determination to manipulate the system to his own ends, is in itself a form of honesty, almost a Kaufman-esque celebrity-as-performance-art. I do think Atlanta comes from a place of truth in terms of his inability to relate to the world at large and his complicated relationship with his race and the way that his race is perceived culturally. But unlike Louis CK and Aziz Ansari, who essentially chose to play themselves on their shows, Glover disguised himself slightly by inverting his own compulsive ambitiousness into an underachieving slacker version of himself. Like most art, a complicated dance between self-revelation and obfuscation.
As to Bojack (since you were nice enough to mention it
), I think this season did an incredibly subtle thing in doing a wonderfully funny but relatively straightforward/on-the-nose #MeToo episode early on (calling attention to the hypocrisy of Mel Gibson’s comeback), and letting Bojack be the ironic hero that we sorta-kinda cheer for in that episode, then reminding the audience throughout the season of the terrible things Bojack has done, leading to a dark turn in the penultimate episode that even most live action dramas would be hesitant to let the lead character take. I think it was an extraordinarily brave and brilliantly-plotted course, to take the viewers to a point where we have to consider the prevalent Hollywood archetype of the abusive “difficult man” (as a character archetype, but much more importantly, also as a prominent personality type for real-world creators/show runners/actors/artists/celebrities). Without forcing any particular message, it left the viewer room to breathe in determining how much we are, or should be, willing to forgive in the name of creation, and the value and the danger of second chances. Bojack is fascinating to me as a show that actively engages in the Mad Men-style “damaged man of privilege” genre, and frequently finds new compelling twists on that archetype, while simultaneously serving as a suicidal call-to-arms that maybe it’s time to retire this type of lead character for now (somewhat similar to South Park’s kamikaze #CancelSouthPark / The Simpsons campaign this season).