It always feels small-minded to go all Cinema Sins on fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Such stories depend on the impossible occurring, and the impossible requires a few leaps or gaps in logic. It’s only when the surrounding story falters that those gaps become distracting. If Chester’s supernatural misadventures were better scripted and better acted, or if the monster at their center felt more conceptually sound, I doubt I’d be wondering why no one on the transport plane smelled the rotting zombie in the new translator’s rucksack.
“The Terror: Infamy” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “Shatter Like a Pearl”
252. Bump and grind
The images above are but a sampling of the striptease Denise performs for…who, exactly? The target is clearly Dalton, with whom she barely ever breaks eye contact, against whose lips she passionately presses her own while wrapping him in a sensual embrace. Knowing, as we do from the scene in which she propositioned him, that she is sexually attracted to Dalton raises the issue of whether or how much she is enjoying this performance for her own purposes and pleasure. Certainly when he rejects her at the end, referring to as a pet off her leash, the anger and hurt in her eyes is real, as we will see.
But the architect of the dance is Brad Wesley, her boyfriend and abuser. After destroying Red Webster’s business with fire, he attempts to undermine Frank Tilghman’s Double Deuce in a far less violent fashion, at first anyway: He turns it into a strip joint, with his woman as the star attraction. I’ve watched this movie more times than I can count and I’m still not sure exactly what his game is here. He knows Denise is attracted to Dalton, as he either beat her or directed others to beat her for him for the crime of coming on to the cooler. Whom is he trying to tempt with forbidden fruit here, her or him? Or is this his malign way of providing her with an outlet for her feelings? Does he want Dalton to give in? What exactly would that entail—simply allowing the performance to continue without interference, or an actual sexual liaison after the dance is over? Is he trying to drive a wedge between the cooler and his bouncers, figuring they will either see his authority eroded if he stops the dance or chafe at his enforcement of the rules insofar as they impede their view of this beautiful woman? Has Wesley thought this through at all, or is he just winging it?
And what of the dance itself? Denise’s gyrations are wild, nearly arhythmic. She swivels her hips and head from side to side like a woman possessed. She rolls on the ground and nearly spider-walks her way back up again. Only when she begins to undress do her movements come to resemble the tease-to-the-beat we expect of a stripper, perhaps because she is focused on using her arms, her dress, and an onlooker’s hat to alternately conceal and reveal her breasts. At that point the dance becomes smooth, traditionally sexy, seamless, like Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s equally unusual lovemaking from earlier in the film. At that point Denise feels in control of her body, rather than the other way around. But in control some of the earlier wildness is lost. Is this the kind of tradeoff she’s used to making, when it’s just she and Wesley, with no one else around to watch, no one to help her off the stage he’s put her on?
“The Affair” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Three
In this episode of “The Affair” … well, there’s a lot going on.
There always is. Each installment of Sarah Treem’s series is so rich with incidents and events, often seen from overlapping viewpoints, that writing about them can feel more like cataloging than reviewing. Fortunately, the characters often take on this burden themselves.
Take the Vanity Fair reporter who opens the hour with a Cliff’s Notes version of Noah Solloway’s life story. By her reckoning, he’s a public-school teacher from Brooklyn who wrote a hit book, left his wife and kids, married his mistress, got famous, got reckless, got behind the wheel of a car and ran over his mistress’s brother-in-law, went to jail, went back to teaching underprivileged kids, and wrote a new and better book.
“You’ve come full circle,” she says. It’s a big circle.
Or listen to how Noah describes his breakup with Janelle, his boss-turned-girlfriend, three months after the fact: “You disappeared after my ex-wife’s boyfriend’s funeral and then never returned my calls.” It’s a neat way of eliding the dissolution of the relationship. It’s also a humorous reminder that getting ghosted at the memorial service for the partner of your ex is a rather rare occurrence.
Or get a load of all the houseguests Helen Solloway rattles off to her new boyfriend, Sasha Mann, in flagrante: “My daughter, my son, his boyfriend, my mother, and my neighbor and her baby.” Thanks to a previous conversation, other key details — her ex-husband wants her to tell her daughter to call off her wedding; her mother wants her to move back east to care for her father, who has Alzheimer’s; her neighbor’s baby was fathered by the aforementioned dead partner — are given.
Such lists have the benefit of catching viewers (or recap readers) up quickly. And while boiling the plot and players down to lists makes the show sound soapy, there’s nothing wrong with soapiness, per se. The problem with this reductive approach is that it masks how well the series maps to the messiness that is adult life.
Stop for a moment and think about the problems you’re currently facing, major and minor. You can probably come up with quite a laundry list yourself, right? With the possible exception of dating a movie star (that’s Helen) or having your screenplay rewritten on the fly by one (that’s Noah), we’re not as different from the Solloways as we might like to think.
I reviewed this week’s fine episode of The Affair for the New York Times.
“Succession” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “Tern Haven”
The confab between the broods does afford a few members of the cast an opportunity to stretch their acting muscles, in some cases for the first time…maybe ever? I’m thinking in particular of Brian Cox as Logan. As formidable an actor as it gets—have you seen what he did with Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter? because if not, stop the fucking presses and get on that—Cox does nothing on this show but growl in the same cadence a few dozen times an episode.
But in this scenario, he can’t bully and bluster his way through things; if the Pierces are determined to make him eat a shit sandwich, and they are, he must do so with a smile and say “thank you” in his gentlest tone of voice. Getting caught off guard when Rhea (Holly Hunter), his ostensible go-between with the Pierces, drives up the price they’d already agreed to is the most interesting thing I’ve seen happen with the character to date.
The other acting highlight, and this should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention since his character is the only one who’s written like a human being, is Jeremy Strong as Kendall. As usual, he comes across as painfully pensive, as if he has to examine every syllable he utters for razor blades like candy from a stranger before he lets it slip from his mouth.
Kendall quickly strikes up a…let’s say a kinship with Naomi Pierce (Annabelle Dexter-Jones, rueful and soulful), the Pierces’ equivalent addict. They snort some rails, pound some vodka, nearly take off in the Logans’ helicopter, and fuck in its back seat. Their connection feels sad, sexy, and true.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Succession for Decider. It’s a little better than the norm in places, but it’s still a sitcom with delusions of grandeur.
251. Battle stations
As Denise readies her hostile takeover of the Double Deuce’s stage, she tousles her hair up, up, up, past its already significant poofiness to previously untold-of heights. She’s feeling herself, literally. Hers is the mane of a wild thing, set loose in the Deuce, another runner in the night. She’s sending a message about the dance to come without so much as a single gyration. It’s going to make your hair stand on end, and more besides.
As Wade Garrett watches Denise dance, he too preps himself by running his hands through his hair. But in his case, he ties it back in a half-ponytail, swept back and oddly severe, like a warrior in a fantasy television series. Somehow, his superior cooler-sense in action perhaps, he senses that there will be blood when Denise’s dance is through, and it’s better to fight without your greasy gray locks obscuring your vision and distracting you. Out of sight, out of mind.
Both of these remarkable individuals play a key part in what’s to come—the start of the final round of hostilities, the beginning of the end. It’s gonna get hairy.
250. Whose side are you on?
There’s something a bit unnerving about the alacrity with which Cody and the boys acquiesce to Brad Wesley’s command that they “play something with balls.” Surely one of Dalton’s oldest and dearest friends could be counted upon to reject the orders of the man’s nemesis, even if the end result of following orders is a beautiful woman taking her clothes off to the rhythm of “Hoochie Coochie Man,” right? But no, there they are, rocking out with their proverbial cocks out, smiling and seeming to enjoy every minute of their shared performance. True, Cody can’t see what Denise is doing, but from the hoots and hollers of the audience it doesn’t take Hercule Poirot to deduce what’s happening up there on the stage. Cody even gets a happy little caress out of the deal for himself, as you can see above. Is it as simple as “the show must go on”? Does Cody have an ulterior motive? Are he and his curly-haired compatriots simply being Horny On Main? I don’t have an answer to this one, I’m afraid. Perhaps that’s just one of the ways in which this scene signals the start of the Bad Times to come.
249. “Of course you can dance, honey”
And you thought the dynamic between Dalton, Doc, and Wade Garrett was odd. Fresh from homophobically insulting Red Webster, defending his protection racket as an act of civic pride, and offering to buy the fire department a round (“Well, with a fire like that, nothing they could do,” he reasons), Brad Wesley drops a non sequitur on the assembled staff and patrons of the Double Deuce: “Of course you can dance, honey,” he croaks.
The thing is? No one has asked him if they can dance. So unless there was some inaudible exchange, unless Denise can speak at a pitch too high or too low for non–Brad Wesley humans to hear, this isn’t acquiescence to an existing request. This is an order. It may be couched in courtesy, but it’s still a command.
Based on what we’ve seen of Wesley and Denise’s relationship, she’s probably used to being ordered around. She certainly knows what will happen if she disobeys. But look at her face as she glides past Dalton on her way to the stage, for what will be a show-stopping striptease. She’s beaming. She’s staring right at Dalton and she’s hitting him with a smile bright enough to cast shadows.
As well she might. We know she’s attracted to Dalton. We know that she caught a beating for acting on that attraction, unsuccessful though she may have been. We know that the likelihood of her being free to come on to Dalton again is nil. But here’s her chance to shake her moneymaker for Dalton’s enjoyment—not just under Brad Wesley’s nose, but at Brad Wesley’s behest.
He may think having Denise dance is a masculine power trip, a way to lord his potency over his enemy while simultaneously threatening the rules and order by which the Double Deuce runs. She may be getting something else out of it entirely. Perhaps that’s the best way to understand what is about to occur—and perhaps it’s the most damning thing about how Dalton responds.
248. RELEASE THE KEITH DAVID CUT
I have to ask you about Road House. You’re one of the first credited actors on the film and originally had a much bigger role. What happened?
Road House was great. Road House got me into my new car and it moved me into a new apartment. It was a four-week job that turned into 11 weeks. I had a great role. I got to fight with Terry Funk and a couple of other guys. I had a really good time. The day after the wrap party, [the director] Rowdy Herrington called me. He said, “Keith, I’ve got three and a half hours of movie that I’ve got to cut down to 2:15, so I’m sorry, buddy, but you’ve got to go.”What was your reaction?
What do you say? I’m like, “Oh, shit, okay.”At least you got your car and your apartment.
Not only that, but I got fifth billing on a single card. And I still get residuals. I also got to meet Sam Elliott, who I admired greatly. We got to do another movie [2001’s Pretty When You Cry] years later.
Well, we now have a definitive explanation for The Tragedy of Ernie Bass. But it’s one that raises more questions than it answers. Okay, Keith David’s character was cut for time. This much we can accept. But director Rowdy Herrington told him “I’ve got three and a half hours of movie.” Where is that extra hour and fifteen minutes now? If The Wicker Man can be pieced together from reels scattered across two continents, if Nightbreed can be resurrected after the Universal Backlot Fire and two decades of neglect, then by GOD we can get a full three and a half hour version of Road House. We deserve it. Keith David deserves it. The world deserves it.
247. “Play something, Elvis!” or wheels within wheels
“It’s like a morgue in here,” observes Brad Wesley of the mood in the Double Deuce. When you blow up a local business it’s hard to blame the locals for failing to be festive, but that’s Brad Wesley for you, a man who muscles car dealers for protection money by day and throws shit-happens-when-you-party-naked moonlight swims for his goons by night. Hell, he swerves all over the road by day too, so in a sense the party never stops.
Thus, his command to the band: “Play something, Elvis!” He’s looking right at all three members of the Jeff Healey Band when he says this. You’d be hard pressed to line up three white men who resemble Elvis less, but one gets the sense that Brad Wesley has, as so many older men do, calcified ideas of what constitutes a good time in every respect, music included. A rock and roll singer? Elvis. An actor? I’m guessing John Wayne. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wesley’s entire pop-culture cosmology consists solely of people Public Enemy warned us about in “Fight the Power,” “the Power” excluded of course.
Just after his command, which goes unheeded for a few moments, Wesley makes another proclamation: He tells no one in particular to “Get those firemen in here—I want to buy them a drink!” Seems like the least he can do to pay them back for the arson.
But for Wesley, the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the arsonee, not the arsoner. “Risking their lives for that no-good faggot draft dodger Red Webster” is how he describes the firefighters’ duty that grim night, opening up alllllll kinds of yeeesh-inducing questions about Wesley’s politics, none of which have happy answers. Note that Wesley’s subsequently expressed complaint about Red is that he doesn’t chip in to improve the town like everyone else; knuckling under to Brad Wesley’s protection scheme is the traditionally heterosexual thing to do, apparently.
Red, you’ll recall, moved to Jasper twenty years ago, because he got married to an ugly woman from the area and fell in love with the place even as she fell out of love with him. Actor Red West (yep) was born in 1936, and assuming Red Webster is the same age that would make him 32 or 33 years old in 1969 when the marriage took place—well past the age of conscription, even given that the marriage exemption had been lifted by LBJ some years prior. At any rate, Jasper, Missouri is not exactly Canada, and it seems unlikely that Red had connections who could make a bone-spur deferment materialize for him even if his number came up.
What about Korea, then? We know from Brad Wesley’s big breakfast monologue that he served in that hot Cold War conflict, and from that we could assume he’d take especial umbrage at anyone who managed to weasel out of the service. But Red would only have been in his mid-teens during the Korean War, again placing him out of range of the draft.
All that remains to us, then, is peacetime conscription in the interwar years. And who was the most famous draftee during that time period? A man named Elvis Presley.
And who was in Elvis’s entourage, very much in real life? His old high-school chum Red West. Who was drafted too—and appeared in G.I. Blues, a movie in which he and Elvis were soldiers.
Play something, Elvis. “Reveille,” perhaps.
The Dos and Don’ts of Needle-Drops
DO: Use well-known songs in unexpected ways that still resonate with the original intent.
Recorded pseudonymously under the Derek & the Dominos moniker, “Layla” is Eric Clapton’s finest moment as a songwriter — an admittedly low bar to clear, since nearly all his best stuff was written by Jack Bruce, George Harrison, or JJ Cale, and also Duane Allman’s contribution to the song should not be underestimated. But still! It’s an outpouring of unrequited love for Pattie Boyd, the wife of his best friend and frequent collaborator Harrison, a way for this guy to reforge his broken heart into a merciless series of interlocking riffs and shout-sung choruses. It concludes with a movement that’s as gentle as the body of the song is frenzied, though it’s no less desperate-sounding for that.
Naturally, Martin Scorsese used it to soundtrack the discovery of half a dozen dead bodies.
Why does it work in GoodFellas? Because it gets right at the heart of the mournful, elegiac feel of the original without simply rehashing its overt emotional content. No one is heartbroken over finding poor Frankie Carbone frozen solid inside a meat truck, except perhaps Mrs. Carbone. But there’s still a sense that something has been lost, that the promised happy ending will never arrive.
More than that, “Layla” plays the same role in Clapton’s career that the murders that result in this sequence play in the career of Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway. The song is Slowhand’s masterpiece, and the Lufthansa heist, literally the biggest robbery in American history at the time, was Jimmy the Gent’s. Both Jimmy and Eric were at the top of their very different games here.
Put it all together and it’s a complex, captivating song choice that elevates both the scene it accompanies and the song itself, without the former relying on the latter to do all the dirty work. Scorsese’s library is full of this kind of music cue —as is GoodFellas itself.
SEE ALSO:
• Fargo, “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath
• American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, “Easy Lover” by Philip Bailey and Phil Collins
This one was months in the making: I wrote about how and how not to use music cues in TV and movies for Vulture.
246. Blowback
One of the several hypotheticals Pain Don’t Hurt has entertained at length is my belief that Frank Tilghman is the Emperor Palpatine figure of the story, the secret puppet master behind Brad Wesley who engineered the conflict with Dalton and brought it to a head by orchestrating the murder of Wesley and his associates when they were no longer of any use. Another theory Pain Don’t Hurt has espoused is that Frank Tilghman and Pat McGurn, Brad Wesley’s nephew and Double Deuce bartender, were once romantically involved and that he is therefore and visibly upset about having to fire him. They seem mutually exclusive propositions.
But this is true only if you believe that Tilghman is not just sinister but supernatural. No one can control for all variables, and it’s entirely possible that Frank’s Pat-shaped blind spot prevented him from thinking through the consequences of hiring a man to keep everything on the straight and narrow when your ex-lover is a transparent thief and ringer for the very stooge whose downfall you’re plotting. It’s also possible that Frank knew full well that Dalton would exile Pat from the Double Deuce, and that he deemed this an acceptable loss in service of the larger plan. Indeed, he could have considered it a form of alibi—after all, what kind of man would fire his own ex, for whom he clearly still had feelings, if he himself weren’t morally unimpeachable?
What kind of man, indeed.
“The Terror: Infamy” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “The Weak Are Meat”
War is hell, particularly when you’re reasonably certain a demon has followed you to the front. Such is the predicament facing Chester Nakayama in “The Weak Are Meat,” the strongest episode of The Terror: Infamy yet. It’s far from a perfect episode: The voiceover narration, taking the form of letters sent between Chester and his pregnant girlfriend Luz back home, is frequently creaky, and the nature of the horror facing the characters is irritatingly amorphous. But it’s the first installment to deliver on the core promise of any show calling itself The Terror: It’s creepy.
I reviewed this week’s episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club. This was an improvement for sure.
“Succession” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Safe Room”
Is Succession a TV show, or just a summary of stuff you’ve read on Twitter? This is the unpleasant question each new episode forces us to ask ourselves. “Safe Room,” so called because of the locations to which the Roy family are spirited after a shooting incident at the ATN news network (turns out it was just some guy committing suicide because working there is so awful), is a collection of topics you’ve seen blue-checkmark accounts tut-tut about, wired together by dick jokes.
[…]
Logan and Gerri panic over antifa, Connor and Willa attend the funeral for a thinly veiled Jeffrey Epstein analogue, white nationalist talk show hosts, mass-shooting paranoia, the collapse of legacy news media into the maw of reactionary conglomerates, yes yes yes, we get it. It really does feel like Twitter: The Television Show, because in the end, Succession doesn’t have anything interesting to say about any of these phenomena other than “Look, these phenomena exist.” At this point, that’s almost all there is to be said about, Succession, too.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Succession for Decider. I don’t care for this show.
245. The go-ahead
Brad Wesley has the people of Jasper, Missouri so shook that bartenders ask for permission before serving him, as if the act of pouring a shot for Brad Wesley is like letting a highly inebriated man pull a knife on you for trying to stop his girlfriend from dancing on a table. The bartenders, Ernie and Nameless, look straight to Dalton when Wesley makes his request, and fulfill it when and only when Dalton gives them an affirmative head-nod signal. Suddenly even the bartenders are acting like bouncers on the Dalton Path. Recall that it’s not their job to know when it’s time to not be nice; they won’t know, Dalton will tell them. As there are still a few grains left in the hourglass at this particular moment, Wesley gets his drink.
Given what is about to unfold one wonders if Dalton should have 86’d him right then and there. The numbers game appears—and I stress appears, because Wesley is holding several aces up his sleeve, along with a Jimmy-shaped Joker—to be even, which is to say it works in Dalton’s favor. Assuming Wesley to be a non-combatant, arrayed against Dalton, Wade, Jack, Hank, and Younger we can see Morgan, O’Connor, Tinker, and Ketcham, all of whom have fallen in Double Deuce–based combat already, in O’Connor’s case twice. (Maybe Wesley was right about him being a weak bleeder after all.) And since the bar is largely empty, with most of the crowd still outside watching the fire, the risk to civilians in the event of a brawl would be minimal.
But Dalton is reluctant to start something unless and until his opponent displays violent intent. As we will see, Wesley’s initial gambit is disruption rather than destruction—still a bounceable event, but not yet grounds for expulsion. I’ve never said this once during the course of this project but I’ll by-god quote it now: Man’s gotta have a code.
“The Affair” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Two
In its closing minutes, this week’s episode of “The Affair” shows us a vision of Montauk, N.Y., a few decades from now. It’s nothing short of post-apocalyptic. Gutted buildings, flooded parking lots, shattered streets in which nothing moves but salt water fish brought in by the tide.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.
244. Infiltration
The fox is in the henhouse. The rats are in the cellar. The weasels are in the corn. Using the conveniently timed explosion of Red Webster’s Auto Parts as cover, a large party led by Mr. Brad Wesley has infiltrated the Double Deuce. They expect the same things everyone does when they go to the bar: some drinks, some dancing, a little idle chatter. But they are arsonists and hired thugs, so naturally they’re not the sort of people who’d be allowed in the bar. Indeed, Morgan, Tinker, O’Connor, and Ketchum have all been expelled from the Double Deuce, bodily so in most cases. Only by distracting Dalton, Wade Garrett, and all the bouncers with the fireball outside could they even get in.
The presence of Wesley and his cronies is all but an admission of guilt, but it’s more than that. It’s a sign that Dalton’s control is slipping. He couldn’t stop these goons from getting in. As we’ll soon see, he doesn’t succeed in getting them out, either. Brad Wesley is calling, ordering, and firing the shots here, in that order.
The time to not be nice is here.
243. No one saw a thing
It’s okay. It’s okay, Frank. You’re okay. Just calm down. Everything went according to plan. Wesley did just what he told you he would. No one was injured. You still need Red for Phase 5, and this gets him one step closer. You need Dalton too, and he didn’t get wounded in the blast—despite his best efforts, the crazy sonofabitch. Don’t be nervous, don’t be scared. No one can connect you, and even if they could, no one would believe it. Wesley will be here any minute now with his men—who’d believe he’d show up to intimidate his own boss? Nobody, that’s who. Your alibi is rock solid. But quick, lower the blinds, just in case anyone looks up and sees. Put that poker face back on. Then practice looking concerned, not worried, concerned. How could such a thing happen? Oh, Red, I’m so sorry for your blah blah blah, that kind of thing. They’ll eat it up, the saps. They always have. They always do. But from now on, let’s steer clear of these…incidents. Strodenmire is next on the list, yes. Best not to show up to Wagon Days, then. Let Wesley handle it on his own. He won’t mind, the sad sociopathic bastard. And by the time he notices the money’s been diverted from his account…Phase 5. No one will ever be the wiser. Calm down, Frank. Have another drink or something. Just gotta keep telling yourself, I did it. I pulled it off. Nobody knows anything. No one saw a thing that I didn’t want shown. Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.
242. Hats Off to (Red) Webster
Red Webster’s pickup truck pulls up too late. His auto parts store has already exploded, and when I said yesterday that the fireball reached 100 feet into the sky I may have sold it short by as much as 100%. Perhaps he had sticks of dynamite there among the bottles of motor oil. Whatever the case, this is destruction on a scale Jasper, Missouri has likely not seen before, unless there was an auto parts store on the land Brad Wesley earmarked for the JC Penney. Even a seasoned war dog like Dalton can only stand there and stare, rueful and aghast.
Understandably, Red Webster himself is a sight more emotional than his niece’s new fella. He expresses his extreme dismay the way anyone would, if by “anyone” you mean people who just lost at the dog track, or the coach of the rich kids camp’s baseball team in an ’80s movie, or the Mayor of River City right after learning that Professor Harold Hill has turned the townsfolk against his new pool table at the billiards parlor: He takes hat off and throws it on the ground. That’s his life’s work that just went up in a gout of flame, and his reaction is an emphatic dagnabbit.
241. Fire fighter
When Dalton discovers that Red Webster’s auto parts store is on fire he runs toward the burning building full-tilt. Never mind the fire trucks already pulling up to battle the flames. Never mind that it’s after hours and no one’s in the place to be rescued. Never mind that the place is set to blow at any moment. Dalton, who has never encountered a problem he couldn’t punch, looks for all the world like he’s running over there to physically beat up the fire. Fortunately or unfortunately the building explodes, sending gouts of flame a hundred feet into the air, before he can get too close, and the efficacy of this plan or instinct or whatever it is never gets put to the test. I wouldn’t have laid odds on the fire winning, though. Not in this movie.
There are a handful of moments scattered throughout Road House, like gems in Smaug’s treasure hoard, that illustrate who Dalton is. “Be nice” is one. “Pain don’t hurt” is one. The throat rip is one. The tai chi scene is one. And this is one. It has no pop-culture purchase whatsoever compared to the others; indeed I don’t know many people who’ve watched the movie who even notice it. But to me, it says so much about this man—a man of action, a man of dynamism, a man who wants to punch the fire.
“The Terror: Infamy” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Three: “Gaman”
We open in the Wild West, where everything is black and white and the cowboys speak Japanese.
We’re watching a movie screening in the internment camp where Chester Nakayama and company are being held prisoner by their government for the crime of their ethnicity. The star is John Wayne, but the voices and sound effects (a tambourine doubles for the jingle-jangle of spurs) are being provided live and in person by other residents of the camp. But it’s a strange effect, seeing this bit of American mythology remade by the circumstances of ugly American reality.
And it gets stranger when the Duke starts speaking directly to a member of his audience. “You have to go, Chester,” his dubbed voice proclaims. Now the footage of a shootout in the town square transforms into a black-and-white replay of the death of Chester’s family friend Mr. Yoshida, who himself warned Chester to go before he charged the guards and got himself gunned down.
Taking the advice perhaps too literally, Chester gets up and leaves the makeshift theater to relieve himself. As he does so, one of the camp’s blinding and intrusive searchlights sweeps over him, like the light from a movie projector. It renders him momentarily as ghostly and unreal as the phantasmagorical cowboys themselves.
This opening sequence proves that there’s a smart, restrained work of horror residing somewhere deep within The Terror: Infamy. Peel away enough corny dialogue and spooky clichés and you can work wonders with this premise and setting. But it’s the exception that proves the rule, and the rest of this episode (“Gaman,” which translates to “Persevere”) is more of the wearying, disappointing same.
I reviewed the third episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.