Matt Zoller Seitz explains what’s wrong with Terence Winter’s sumptuous but slightly shaky Boardwalk Empire, which returned last night. I appear to enjoy the series a lot more than Seitz does, although I agree with him that it hasn’t hit the heights of the likes of Deadwood or The Sopranos. But vanishingly few shows in the history of television have, after all. If Boardwalk Empire was the worst we could do, we’d be doing pretty damn great, which Seitz has no problem saying.
Seitz’s complaint is that despite being exquisitely dressed, shot, and acted, the show writes character in a comparatively perfunctory and haphazard way, especially compared to the evident glee it takes in delivering gangster genre goodies. In other words, his critique is the mirror image of my circa-Season-One-finale praise, which is that (unlike The Walking Dead) it takes genre stuff I’m predisposed to like (which The Walking Dead has) and surrounds it with lusciously pleasurable filmmaking on other levels (which The Walking Dead doesn’t have). That it has a hard time going further than that — that the writing is inconsistent enough (cf. my complaint about Margaret’s yo-yo morality) to prevent it from getting there — is Seitz’s beef.
The thing is, though, that I do think it has greatness in it. Richard Harrow’s explanation of why he doesn’t read anymore, for example, is maybe my favorite line in television history. “It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.” That is the most brutally bleak thing any TV character who isn’t Livia Soprano or BOB has ever said in my hearing. What makes it even more vicious is that it’s an indictment of the very enterprise its writer was engaged in at that moment. This is followed by a scene in which an unusually empathetic Jimmy Darmody takes Richard back to Johnny Torio’s brothel to relax, at which point some small talk about Jimmy’s piece gradually becomes, to the viewer’s dawning horror, a litany of the arsenal possessed by Harrow, a man who has just professed feeling no connection to the rest of humanity whatsoever. Here’s an example where not only is there brilliant, philosophically minded character work being done, but it actually enhances the bloody, scary gangster stuff in the process.
Harrow is, I think, the emblematic figure for what I believe to be the theme of the show, a theme Seitz hasn’t been able to put his finger on, which is that violence, in war and elsewhere, is just run-of-the-mill corruption and shittiness with its mask off. The Great War that made monsters of Harrow and Jimmy also provided Al Capone with a readymade backstory for why he’s the tough customer he’s made himself out to be, and is used by the Colonel as a justification for the sneak-attack slaughter of a warehouse full of black people, and is echoed in the sectarian strife of Ireland that pops up here and there among Nucky Thompson’s Hibernian politician pals, and on and on and on. If The Sopranos is about how people will choose to do the wrong thing if it’s easy enough, and Deadwood is about the price of doing the right thing anyway, Boardwalk Empire is about the pervasiveness of the wrong thing, so that you’re all but locked into supporting it in one way or another. In his essay, Seitz wonders what Jimmy Darmody’s motivation is — I think it’s your basic post-Great War Lost Generation nihilism. Why constantly bite the hand that feeds? Why not?
Again, Seitz is absolutely right to say that the inconsistent character work muddies the waters. The kindness in Nucky that Margaret saw in Season One and which separated him distinctly from Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen is a lot tougher to detect when he’s complicit in the Ku Klux Klan’s hatecrimes. And Harrow’s bracingly direct expression of human disconnect doesn’t jibe with his now apparent obsession with idealized family life. But somewhere in here there’s a statement about the enormity of man’s inhumanity to man that’s fixing to be made. As long as the show continues to be so pleasant to watch as it meanders its way in that direction, I’ll meander with it.
Tags: Boardwalk Empire, TV
I like the show for all the reasons you do, but I have a couple of quibbles with your take on the characterization:
Nucky isn’t complicit in the Klan’s crimes, certainly not the way Jimmy and the Commodore are; he’s just willing to say nice things to these scumbags for political gain, which is consistent with how he’s been portrayed so far. (Also, given that the Klan in New Jersey almost never went in for terrorist action the way they did further south, Nucky may have correctly guessed that their attack on Chalky was more of a mob hit than a hate crime.) And we did get to see his kindness, in the scene with Margaret’s son– even though, again consistently with Nucky’s character, it was undercut by his habit of resolving everything with bribery.
Harrow’s scrapbook is only out of character if you think that a nihilist can’t be a deeply sentimental man. On the contrary, I think it’s pretty likely that someone who would bother to make such a hyperbolically nihilist intellectual pronouncement (as opposed to a more basic response of “life sucks, people suck, and books are stupid”) is someone with a huge sentimental streak and a need for connection, who did a violent 180 against it when things looked hopeless, but who can’t maintain that stance now that he’s got a little comfort. Harrow is a young guy, remember.
And I don’t see Jimmy as a nihilist at all. He’s just a very angry, very ambitious guy with no impulse control, he thinks he’s been cheated out of any chance to make it in the non-criminal world, and he has no patience for the level of bullshit in Nucky’s world, so he’s opted to be a straight-up thug. The “Lost Generation” thing fits in terms of his age and his contempt for the previous generation’s institutions, but his attitude isn’t “why not” so much as “fuck you” – he takes things personally.
I know Nuck didn’t help pull the trigger the way Jimmy, Eli, and the Commodore did, but…I dunno, revving them up with smacktalk about “the obstreperous Negro” is a bridge too far for me — father than Nucky’s been shown to go in the past. I mean, we’re still operating in a world where the only people who get killed are killers and criminals, which is odd, but even though shooting up a bootleg operation is different than (say) blowing up a church, shooting up a bootleg operation because the bootleggers are black (no matter the motives of the people who pointed you in their direction) is different than shooting up a bootleg operation because they’re rivals of your own. It was extra gross to see Nucky bend to political expediency in dealing with the architects of this particular massacre.
Good point about Harrow, though. I’m reminded that the set-up for his line about people not having a connection with each other is that he used to enjoy giving books to his niece.
You know, I think it’s Michael Pitt who’s preventing me from agreeing with your take on Jimmy. If Leonardo DiCaprio was playing that character and it was written the exact same way, I’d agree with you. But DiCaprio’s squint-eyed baby-faced rage in such roles is here swapped out with Pitt’s laconic, dead-eyed performance. He’s obviously angry, but that flat affect makes it tough to interpret his actions as motivated by revenge or rage or jealousy or whatever else. Rather they come across as the actions of a man stymied by problems who sees murder as a valid solution among many.
Well, Nucky’s behavior sure is gross and opportunistic, no argument there – I just don’t think this is anything new. He’s always given himself way too much credit for being less of a racist asshole in private than his peers, and the show paints him as someone who sees prejudice as an annoying silly distraction and/or political obstacle rather than an injustice to be remedied; he mostly just wants to get people to calm down, not make trouble, and vote for him. I don’t think racial violence is on his radar at all – he just doesn’t think it’s something that really happens (note that in the real world at least, the KKK in New Jersey didn’t go in for lynchings – they were more or less just the weird blowhards that Nucky regards them as; and on the show, the last time he suspected them of a murder [and sicced Chalky on the kleagle], it turned out not to be them) – so he sees no risk in giving an inflammatory speech. It’s one of his many privileged blind spots; his attitude toward women is full of those too (e.g. despite his weird murderous chivalry on behalf of Margaret, he still curses her out for using birth control).
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