“Has anybody got a mirror?” —Steve
“Shit.” —Steve
101. The Third Rule, Verse 4
“This is the new Double Deuce,” says Frank Tilghman. We are at the start of an all-hands staff meeting, and Tilghman is pointing to the concept art for the bar’s redesign. But standing nearby is his latest hire, Dalton. It is through Dalton, with Dalton, in Dalton that the new Double Deuce will be achieved. Dalton embodies the new Double Deuce. He is its future.
When Dalton takes over as cooler he becomes more than just the chief bouncer. His role is not to handle a series of discrete incidents, but to institute sweeping reforms that will eliminate such incidents forever. “It’s going to change,” he states—not a threat, not a promise, a fact. His bouncers, too, must change for this to take place. As below, so above.
Bouncing on the Dalton Path is a matter of following “three simple rules.”
This, for the fourth time, is the third.
3. Be nice (continued)
“I want you to remember,” says Dalton, “that it’s a job. It’s nothing personal.”
Thus far, Dalton has explained the third and simplest of his Three Simple Rules in comparatively painstaking detail. He has articulated its Great Commandment. He has preached the Parable of Someone Getting in Your Face and Calling You a Cocksucker. He has emphasized its communal nature. And now he says it’s nothing personal?
I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to a man named Gyp Rosetti.
ROSETTI: “Bone for tuna.”
TONINO: What?
ROSETTI: “Bone for tuna.” What the fuck’s that’s supposed to mean?
TONINO: Oh. The kid’s Irish. The pronunciation was off. I think he meant—
ROSETTI: I know what he meant. Who the fuck is Nucky Thompson to wish me good luck? And in Italian, no less, like he’s mocking me? He’s real cute, I’ll fucking tell you. Sets me up to lose, pulls our whiskey deal at the last minute, then it’s buon fortuna like he’s rooting for me to get back on my feet. Push me off a cliff, why don’t you.
TONINO: Sure, I mean—
ROSETTI: Good luck flapping your arms on the way down! Am I right?
TONINO: Sure, I mean—
ROSETTI: Real attitude on him. Scrawny Irish prick. I need his blessing to make my way in the world?
TONINO: He w—
ROSETTI: I need him? To lecture me? “Nothing’s personal”? What the fuck is life if it’s not personal?
So you can see Dalton’s dilemma. Here he is, new in town, new in the job, new to these men, whose job it is to physically fight, restrain, and eject other men. His first order of business is to fire two of their coworkers, neither particularly well-liked, but each emblematic over his power over their employment and thereby their lives. He’s told them It’s my way or the highway and rattled off a list of undesirables who frequent the bar, a state that’s going to change. The implication is clear: His way is superior to theirs, which has demonstrably failed. From there he launches into a disquisition on bouncer conduct that is rife with paradox and contradiction as well as comprising a nearly diametrically opposed approach to the craft than that which they have heretofore pursued. After all this, after telling these violent men how to do their violent jobs by moderating their interactions with other violent men under the threat of termination, Dalton has the temerity to tell them that when the time comes and they are being pelted with verbal and physical abuse and they must decide whether and how to strike back, that all of this is nothing personal? Doesn’t he see how they would take this? Doesn’t he know it reads as insanely pollyannaish at best, insulting at the most reasonable, and downright dangerous at worst? When confronted with well-meaning advice by someone with whom you are at odds—and what is a worker if not at odds with the boss—even the most anodyne bromide, like wishing an associate “good luck” in his native language when a business deal goes south, feels like fighting words. Doesn’t Dalton realize that telling these men in this context that this job is nothing personal is tantamount to throwing down the gauntlet and fucking daring them to take it personal?
Yes. Yes he does.
If you think this sentence is confusing, then change one pig.
(to be continued)
100. Pain don’t hurt
Look, all he’s saying is that it doesn’t bother him that much. Why would you doubt him? You’ve just read his life story in the form of a medical file. Thirty-one broken bones, two bullet wounds, nine puncture wounds, and four stainless steel screws. To these you are about to add nine staples, to close the knife wound he incurred in the process of physically fighting multiple armed attackers in his employer’s office. He’s a bouncer by trade, and taking it is as much a part of the job as dishing it out. More so, perhaps. The fight has to come to him, not the other way around. Until someone’s ready and willing and able to hurt him he’s off duty. So he turned down the anesthetic, so what. Pain is how he clocks in.
But there’s more to it than that, you suspect. Because the non-standard subject-verb agreement is…it’s cute, you guess, but you know he knows better. In that job, with that body—you’ll afford him the working-class hero affectation, but that’s what it is. Again, you’ve read his medical file. You know he went to NYU. You know he keeps this information in his medical file, for some reason. You suspect, in the minute you’ve known him you suspect, that he’s put real thought into the things he says, for better or…
Beautiful eyes. Blue. He has a blue-eyed smile, too, you think, unsure what that means, sure that it’s right.
You’ve been with violent men before. There, now you’ve thought it, now it’s out in the open. Not with you, never with you, not really, no not really, though you’ve heard things since then that you have a hard time believing yet also believe the moment you hear them. What’s that girl’s name? The blonde woman. She was with one of his boys, and you were with him, and you left town, and he went nuts, and now she’s with him and the boys have moved on, you suppose. Not with you, though, not really.
But Brad didn’t need to hit you to hurt you. His charisma, his worldliness, his ease with success, the way he promised you everything and meant it: When you saw it for what it was—for its casual cruelty and gross acquisitiveness and lack of empathy and small-minded understanding of what “everything” even means—and the life you’d planned to last forever kindled and burned and crumbled to ash in the light of it, oh, he hurt you then. He hurt you so badly you ran to get away from it, like the feelings lived in that godawful mansion and you could leave them there mounted on the wall, immobile, unable to reach you again.
Has he ever been hurt, you wonder? Hurt like that, you mean? Has Dalton comma James, he of the thirty-one broken bones, two bullet wounds, nine puncture wounds, and four stainless steel screws—and nine staples, don’t forget those—has this man who literally trailed blood into your hospital tonight ever tried to run away from the pain, only to learn just like you did that you take it with you no matter where you go?
You want to check his medical file for the answer. You wonder if maybe it’s on the same page that lists his alma mater. You want to laugh but that would be inappropriate.
But you have your answer. You may not want to believe it, because it’s safer not to. But the working-class hero with the NYU degree and the studiously sculpted body and the equally studiously sculpted speech, with the blue eyes and the smile, with the thirty-one broken bones and two bullet wounds and nine puncture wounds and four stainless steel screws and, soon, nine staples—he told you already.
He told you, when he said Pain don’t hurt.
No, you think. By comparison? No. No, it does not.
You’re still smiling, you realize, you’re still smiling and he’s still smiling as you turn to grab the stapler. As you feel his body through the latex of your glove and begin to repair what was broken you think Pain don’t hurt and you wonder how long the smiling will last.
“The Act” thoughts, Season One, Episode Five: “Plan B”
For the first time in her life, Gypsy Rose Blanchard has plans of her own. It’s 2015 now, and as The Act resumes for its fifth episode, she’s dressing up in provocative clothing to have cybersex with her internet boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn. She does this several times throughout the episode. It’s all kinds of blackly comic given Nick’s woeful lack of proficiency with regards to the dom-sub power exchanges the two enjoy. (In Gypsy, a woman whose entire life has been defined by her Munchausen-by-proxy mother and Disney movies, Nick, a man who blows his promotion at a pizza parlor, may have found the one person on earth he could convince to call him Daddy.) And since we know where it’s all headed, it’s sinister too.
099. The Phantom Menace
WESLEY: This is my town. Don’t you forget it.
DALTON: So what does he take?
RED: Who?
DALTON: Brad WesIey.
RED: Ten percent…to start. Oh, it’s all legal-like. He formed the Jasper Improvement Society. All the businesses in town belong to it.
DALTON: You’ve gotten rich off the people in this town.
WESLEY: You bet your ass I have. And I’m gonna get richer. I believe we all have a purpose on this earth. A destiny. I have a faith in that destiny. It tells me to gather unto me what is mine.
RED: Twenty years I’ve watched Wesley get richer while everybody else around him got poorer.
TILGHMAN: Anyway, I’ve come into a little bit of money.
TILGHMAN: This is our town. And don’t you forget it.
098. James
Dalton’s first name is James. There it is, in black and white, in his medical file, next to a drawing of his bare ass. (Not technically true, but you have to admit the resemblance is remarkable.) I forget this, frequently. I forgot it for the entirety of this project, until I happened across this frame while searching for something else in this scene, the one where he meets the Doc. Nothing’s gained by knowing Dalton is more than a mononym. For one thing, it costs him a certain air of humility. Jack, Hank, Younger, Ketcham, Karpis, Stella, Judy, the Uncredited Bartender—half the cast is not afforded the dignity of a name uttered onscreen. Why should Dalton be any different? Because he’s the cooler? That presupposes that, like Superman, he is like them but he is not one of them. That’s not a presupposition I’m willing to make. The Dalton Path is a path of humility, and you must trade in your Mercedes for a hooptie in order to travel it. I wonder if Dalton eschews the use of his first name, to the point where no one, not even his lovers and closest oldest friends, even use it, in order to annihilate the self in this way—like a maester dropping his house name, like a nun adopting the name of a saint, like Jack Napier calling himself Joker to represent his broader brighter outlook on life. Maybe that’s why my brain purges itself of this knowledge regularly, and then purges itself of the knowledge of the purging. It’s not like I could tell you when I learned Dalton’s name, but I know that I did, and I know I forgot it, and I know that I’m remembering it rather than discovering it for the first time, and I couldn’t tell you when any of those events originally took place. There’s a bit in Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, where the young Batman must dive off a bridge to save the infant of the young James Gordon. In the process he removes his mask, or his mask is removed, or he was dressed as Bruce Wayne all along and had to blow cover to make the save, which was to him more important than preserving his secret identity. Gordon gratefully accepts his still-living child from this strange man, then graciously lies that he’s misplaced his glasses in the confusion, and couldn’t recognize a face glimpsed without them if he tried. I’m sorry; what were we talking about?
‘Game of Thrones’: Everything You Need to Know for the Final Season
We swear it by the old gods and the new: The last time we stepped foot in Westeros back in August of 2017, Game of Thrones had just finished its most ambitious and high-fantasy-epic season to date. (Three words: zombie ice dragon.) We know it’s a matter of logistics and visual-effects production that has kept the series from returning for over a full year, but let’s be honest: Didn’t it feel like everyone involved just needed a breather?
Indeed, if there’s a single takeaway from GoT‘s Season Seven, it was this: Houses divided cannot stand. After six years of Starks, Lannisters, Targaryens, Baratheons, Boltons, Freys, Greyjoys, Tyrells and Martells tearing each other apart, the time came at last for the disparate nobles of the Seven Kingdoms to come together and make a last stand against an apocalyptic army of White Walkers and walking-dead wights.
We realize it can be hard to keep track of all of the show’s numerous story strands, especially after seven dense seasons filled with formed (and broken) alliances, numerous deaths and various players being moved all around the show’s geographical chess board. Don’t worry: Our Game of Thrones cheat sheet will catch you up quickly, so that when the beginning of the endgame begins on April 14th, you’ll know exactly where everyone stands — or flies.
I wrote a cheat sheet for Game of Thrones‘ final season for Rolling Stone.
“Billions” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Four: “Overton Window”
When “Billions” is at its best, as it certainly was tonight, recapping is a dicey proposition. Focus on one element and you inevitably give short shrift to another equally entertaining aspect.
And more than any other show currently airing, “Billions” deploys a whole lot of very different ways to entertain you: a satire of extreme wealth and power as well as an alluring recreation of it; a financial and political thriller, tag-teamed with a comedy of manners; a parade of terrific character actors knocking around crisp, reference-heavy dialogue like a badminton shuttlecock; a sensitive and idiosyncratic depiction of a gender-nonbinary character, mixed with a humanizing and nonjudgmental depiction of sadomasochism within the context of a loving relationship.
This week’s episode was all that and more, and it forced a dramatic shift upon the entire series.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.
097. “Anyway, I’ve come into a little bit of money.”
Frank Tilghman has just met Dalton for the first time, after what one assume is years of hearing tell of his exploits from other barfolk. He explains he runs a little nightclub called the Double Deuce just outside of St. Louis. It used to be a sweet deal, he says. Now it’s the kind of place where they sweep up the eyeballs after closing, he laments. His face falls, ashen. He looks out over the bustling crowd at the Bandstand, the club where Dalton currently works, but it’s as if he doesn’t see it at all. Then he turns back toward Dalton and, with the most normal facial expression imaginable, he says “Anyway, I’ve come into a little bit of money.”
Oh, is that a fact?
In the past, when fleshing out the romantic backstory between Tilghman and Pat McGurn, I’ve theorized that one of Tilghman’s ex-wives’ doting mother left him a small fortune, having turned out to be much fonder of her daughter’s former husband than the daughter ever was. Perfectly harmless. I’ve also speculated that he was involved in one of those “seduce an old lady, get written into her will, and dump her overboard during a cruise” schemes, like Not Great Bob’s boyfriend did (allegedly) in Mad Men. You have to admit it’s possible.
But look at that grin again. Look at that rictus of arrogance and cruelty. This is the face he’s choosing to display to a man he’s going to spend top dollar on, a man who will turn the struggling Double Deuce into the hottest nightspot in a hundred miles, a man who will run the bad element out of the bar, a man who will almost singlehandedly destroy the organized crime ring run by the richest man in Jasper. Until he dies, that is, slain in the course of the battle with Dalton.
Slain by Tilghman.
The new richest man in Jasper.
You know the 7-Eleven, the Fotomat, the mall, christ, the JC Penney? Brad Wesley brought them to town, he says, and no one contradicts him. But if I were Dalton, I’d spend some of my mid-six-figure yearly salary on a forensic accountant. Shell corporations within shell corporations within shell corporations are involved, I’d imagine. And what address is listed for those corporations, in the end? Whose name is on the dotted line?
Cui bono?
096. Estimate
“Well, Mr. Dalton, you may add nine staples to your dossier of 31 broken bones, two bullet wounds, nine puncture wounds, and four stainless steel screws. That’s an estimate, of course.”
Is it, Doc? Is it really? Because it sounds to me like you’re at first reading, then reciting from memory, actual statistics from the medical file that Dalton carries around with him. (“Saves time.”) Thirty-one broken bones, two bullet wounds, nine puncture wounds, and four stainless steel screws—that’s pretty specific. Not a lot of guesswork involved, I shouldn’t think. Unless you mean the nine staples you’re about to administer may wind up being ten staples, or eight stapes, and you can’t tell until you start. Or unless previous doctors whose notes are contained in that file threw up their hands and were like “I dunno man, this guy’s fucked up what can I say,” and that this is recorded in the file somewhere, perhaps in the place where it says what college he graduated from, which is admittedly a thing that it says and thus an indicator that this is a potentially very unorthodox medical file.
But if none of this applies, the smart money is on “the writers wanted Doc to say something that sounded smart, like ‘that’s an estimate of course.'” It isn’t smart at all of course. But I’ll say this for Kelly Lynch: She makes rattling off a bunch of specific injuries and then saying “just blue-skying it here” come across like you’re in the presence of a Dead Ringers–level eccentric medical genius. That would explain some of her wardrobe choices, and her taste in men. That’s an estimate of course.
095. Tilghman’s Affect
Frank Tilghman has affect issues. That’s one way to describe it, and probably a mild way. At virtually no point during the entirety of Road House does the demeanor selected by actor Kevin Tighe track with the reality of his character’s surroundings. It’s why he spends the opening sequence grinning like the Joker even though from a narrative standpoint he’s more like Commissioner Gordon. It’s why he reacts to firing his piece-of-shit bartender (my own headcanon notwithstanding) like he’s getting divorced. And it’s why, when the Double Deuce is in the throes of a full-scale riot launched when a husband with a cuckold fetish decks a dude for refusing to pay to kiss his wife’s tits and his own bouncer goes berserk in response, he signals to Dalton with a smile and a “hey hotshot, come on up and see me sometime” finger point gesture. At that very moment he can see every piece of furniture in his seating area getting smashed into splinters, he can see human beings flying over the bar and into the bottles and glasses behind it, he’s watching people commit felony assault and attempted murder, he’s seeing people incur injuries that will potentially last a lifetime, and his face and body are doing the equivalent of that “chk-chk” sound you make when you wink at someone. It’s possible he’s the weirdest man in Jasper. It’s possible he has less concern for the lives of others than Brad Wesley. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled…
“I’m There Right Now”: Inside David Lynch’s Scariest Scene
When I love a horror film, I want to live in it. I mean this as a physical proposition. If a horror movie I adore has a great scene set in a memorable enclosed space, my instinct, no matter how awful the things that happen in that space are, is to walk right into it. I’d like to be in Leatherface’s bone room, in the Overlook Hotel’s elevator lobby, in the bare wooden attic where the Cenobites kill Frank Cotton, in Scarlett Johansson’s black liquid void. I want to feel the walls, tap the floor with my foot, smell the viscera. You know, make myself at home.
I’d eventually like to leave again, of course, which is usually what separates me from the people who do visit those places within the movies themselves. But there’s weird, cold comfort in those spaces. They’re inviting, to me anyway, and it is not my custom to go where I am not wanted.
From the Red Room in Twin Peaks to its blue counterpart Club Silencio in Mullholland Drive, David Lynch has created many of these spaces. As a director, Lynch is to ambient room tone what Martin Scorsese is to gangsters listening to “Gimme Shelter.” Evoking a sense of space, and what it’s like to be within four particular walls (curtains optional), is a major part of his project.
In one such space, he even threw a party.
I wrote about the Mystery Man scene from David Lynch’s Lost Highway for The Outline.
094. Trustees of modern chemistry
“Bad element over there,” says Brad Wesley of the Double Deuce when he and Dalton first meet. Brad Wesley should know, of course, because Brad Wesley has several of the protons and electrons comprising that bad element on his payroll. That’s the way we tend to think of the Double Deuce’s lowlife patrons, the people Frank Tilghman hired Dalton to clear out. Pat McGurn and Morgan, members in good standing of Wesley’s goon squad, in Pat’s case a thief and in Morgan’s case a rageaholic sadist. Stella, the coke-dealer waitress, and Steve, the bouncer who likes the bar’s patrons and his sexual partners the way Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen like giant gorillas named Mighty Joe: young. Sharing Husband and Well-Endowed Wife, who’ve decided to turn the Double Deuce into a theater for their loveplay. Gawker, who ain’t got twenty bucks. Foxworthy, who sexually harasses Carrie Ann. Nipple to Nipple Guy, who sexually harasses Denise. Men who throw bottles at the faces of blind guitar players when they announce they’re taking a break from the set to use the bathroom. A Knife Nerd in a Hawaiian shirt. Mr. Clean. The Fuckemtheyre Brothers. Tinker. You get the picture.
But look at these two lost souls. No, not Younger and Jack, though I can’t imagine they’re feeling like they’ve found their calling at this particular moment in time. The woman in the upper left is seated alone at a relatively isolated table, where she is having an agitated conversation with no one. She’s screwed up her face angrily, and makes the occasional wild gesticulation. Is she drunk? Yes, probably. Is she also severely mentally ill? Almost certainly. She’s one of Dalton’s infamous “trustees of modern chemistry” insofar as the chemistry in question is lithium.
And that old man passed out on the floor? He’s the one person we see Frank Tilghman involve himself personally in ejecting from the bar, when he orders Younger to give the guy the heave-ho. He’s not propositioning women with his hands, or stabbing anyone, or throwing anyone through a table. He’s an elderly alcoholic who, if he doesn’t sleep there, is going to sleep on the street. “Get him outta here,” Tilghman says. Tilghman, who employs Pat and Morgan and Stella and Steve and has a bar full of the worst motherfuckers on the planet, is effectively installing one of those benches rich areas of big cities use where there’s curves or bars or jagged spikes at regular intervals to prevent any homeless people from getting too comfortable.
What we’re seeing here is the Reagan/Bush-era destruction of the social safety net in microcosm. With mental institutions shuttered due to lack of funds, people wind up out on their own with no one and nothing to help them. Some wind up in the Double Deuce, waving off imaginary interlocutors underneath Tilghman’s office window, or passed out on the steps along the way. Later on in the film Dalton will spare a similar old man—the same old man, quite possibly, though it will require further review—the fate of expulsion from a diner whose owner is pissed that he’s nodding off at the counter. But no such luck here. No one takes this woman or this man and powerbombs them through a table, but they’ve fallen through the cracks nonetheless.
093. When Tinker Attacks
This, as you know, is Tinker. Broadly speaking he is the comic relief in Brad Wesley’s brute squad, which if you’re familiar with people like Pat McGurn and O’Connor is really saying something. He lurks in the margins of Dalton’s first visit to the Double Deuce, making time with some lady while sitting next to where Morgan’s posted up at the bar. We get our first good look at him approximately five seconds before the Bleeder reads him to filth, to the point where it would probably be better for him if he hadn’t show up at all. His goonsmanship after this scene is largely undistinguished; like most Wesleyans he exists primarily to get his ass kicked, but unlike, say, Jimmy or Ketchum or Morgan you never see him wreck shop in any way. He is the sole survivor among the goons, that’s how little Dalton considers him to be a threat. He gets knocked out of the final fight when Dalton dumps a stuffed polar bear on top of him, during which maneuver Tinker carries on like he thinks the bear has come to life and is about to maul him, like Tuunbaq has come to Jasper to exact further revenge against the colonizers. He is even granted a sort of clemency by the cabal of old men who show up to save Dalton’s ass by Sonny Corleone-ing Brad Wesley: Instead of killing him too, they ask him to participate in the cover-up, which in his own moronic way he does.
But look at this shit up above. Look at it! We’re in Tilghman’s office, where Tinker and O’Connor are muscling him into rehiring Pat. At this particular moment, Dalton is tussling with O’Connor after having broken Pat’s nose and roundhouse-kicked him through a plate-glass window. What did Pat do to occasion this treatment? Whip out a gigantic knife with no provocation and attempt to murder Dalton with it. Having observed all this firsthand, what does Tinker do? You guessed it!
Things wind up going for Tinker much the same as they did for Pat. Dalton kicks him with both feet, forcefully enough to push himself and O’Connor through the shattered window as well. Tinker gets knocked onto the couch, where the other bouncers find him and proceed to immobilize and pummel him. Like one of them holds his arms and the other punches him in the gut. It’s heel tag-team shit, but frankly he deserves it.
Why? Because as we’ve mentioned before, here’s the thing about Tinker: He comes closer to actually killing Dalton than anyone does until the climax of the movie. That knife he whips out and holds aloft like Anduril, Flame of the West? He slashes Dalton in the side with it while Dalton’s in the middle of fending off O’Connor, and if Dalton’s turn toward his new oncoming attacker had been timed just slightly differently his intestines would be hanging out. Dr. Elizabeth Clay would be calling his time of death, not asking what particular philosophical discipline he studied at NYU.
Maybe there’s a lesson in this for us, if we care to look for it. We are all occasionally much better at being ourselves than is our standard. Tinker is, for this brief moment, very good at his job of being a goon—too good, almost, insofar as he came within a hair’s breadth of murdering a man in front of about a hundred witnesses, but good regardless. Most other moments I wouldn’t hire Tinker to whack a piñata, much less the (second) best damn cooler in the business. There’s a Tinker in all of us—a killing machine and a stammering goofus bested by taxidermy. Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar, well, he eats you.
The Act’s Co-Creators Are Making Real Art From True Crime
That’s another thing that sets The Act apart, maybe more than anything else: It’s a show almost exclusively about women, written mostly by women, directed mostly by women, with a woman co-creator and co-showrunner, who’s also the woman who wrote the article it’s based on.
Dean: It has a slightly different feel. “Intimate” is the word I often hear, like, around our world of executives. [Laughs.] It was a very conscious choice, in part because of the nature of the story.
Antosca: We took it from real life. It’s two women, in a house, for many years — that’s the core of the story. And their neighbors were mostly women — the Chloë Sevigny and AnnaSophia Robb characters are composites of neighbors who lived throughout the community. It was important to have a mother-daughter counterpart to the Dee Dee and Gypsy story.
Dean: The nature of the story is about mothers and daughters, and there’s a specificity to that experience — especially this idea that mothers dress their daughters up as kind of their dolls, which a lot more people than Gypsy would report that as being their experience, right? And also, some things about the tropes of good mothers that trapped Dee Dee.
Antosca: When I read Michelle’s article, I didn’t take away from it, “Oh, this is a lurid true-crime story.” I took away, “This is a powerful story about a young woman discovering who she really is and doing whatever she can, using the only tools she has, to escape the prison of lies she’s been trapped in.” Imagine how unstable your identity would be, how your sense of self would be destroyed and malleable, if you were raised like that and shaped like that — a case of long-term medical child abuse and radical gaslighting.
Gypsy is such a complicated character. She’s deceiving the world along with her mom, but she’s deceiving herself too. Ultimately, she’s using the skills of deception that her mom taught her, which are the only thing she knows at that point, against her mom. She had access to countless drugs, so she could have poisoned her mom. Or she could have stabbed her herself. But she couldn’t do it, because she loved her mom. So she had to use the skills that her mom gave her to reach into the outside world and bring somebody else in to kill her.
Dean: When I interviewed her she would always say, “My mom was my best friend.” Which is really sad. The protective impulse that is still in her, and the ways in which it trapped her, is something I think about a lot.
“The Act” thoughts, Season One, Episode Four: “Stay Inside”
This week’s episode of Nick Antosca and Michelle Dean’s extraordinary true-crime series begins with bodies. The body of the landscaper Gypsy Blanchard sees through her window and lusts for. Gypsy’s body — Gypsy’s adult body — as she submits meekly to Dee Dee’s infantilizing bathing routine. (Gypsy’s menstrual cycle rebels, at least, much to Gypsy’s delight.) Dee Dee’s body, rebelling against her, as she is diagnosed with diabetes — though Dee Dee snatches victory from the jaws of defeat when she realizes the care she’ll require will force Gypsy into even tighter enmeshment with her. “I’m gonna need you now,” she drawls to Gypsy, “every…single…day.”
092. “Fuck ’em, they’re brothers.”
Sibling rivalry. Toys, games, grades, sports, popularity, attention, romantic success, money, status, a parent’s love: There are plenty of reasons to fight with your brothers and sisters, and they evolve over time just like you do. It’s hard to imagine now, as a father and stepfather myself, but time was me and my brother would go at it hard, physically, rumbling around in our basement after some dispute or other. Someone would want to play with something the other one had, or was using, or wasn’t using, or some dumb nonsense. I didn’t like how he’d make fun of me sometimes, and I assume the feeling was mutual. We made up mean nicknames for each other. We’d get each other in headlocks and someone would cry and our mom would tell us to knock it off. During any kind of tussle with my siblings—we have a sister too and if she’d join in with my brother I’d like physically back her away by putting my head against hers, which I did to my brother all the time too, like I was moving them with my mind—I’d kind of stick my tongue out of my mouth and bite down on it in determination, which they referred to mockingly as “tongue power!”, which I absolutely hated. It’s wild, that we fought, partially because I’d flip the fuck out if my kids started laying hands on one another, and partially because we always got along. When I think back on my relationships with my siblings (I am the oldest of three) I can’t think of a single time any of us argued or fought about anything in any serious way. The physical spats had no meaning. I think in my last fight with my brother he bloodied my nose, and after that we both realized without saying so that physically fighting each other was a bad idea.
Family relationships take very sharp turns sometimes. Certainly ours has, both within our original unit and in our own lives with our own families. Time and circumstance have shown me, though I didn’t consciously realize it at the time, that I would I would die without hesitation for these people whom I love so much, without any hesitation at all. I’d imagine they’d say the same if I asked them, which I won’t. I’d rather them never need to know.
Anyway, here are two grown men in denim, throwing haymakers and decking each other onto and off of a pool table in the middle of a crowded bar. Who knows why. Who knows why anyone in the Double Deuce during its Mos Eisley Cantina phase does absolutely anything, or why they choose to do it there of all places. “Fuck ’em,” says Horny Steve the bouncer when Hank interrupts his crude attempt to pick up a teenager to point out the altercation. “They’re brothers.” Once they were children who played together, like my brother and I did. Maybe they fought occasionally like we did. Maybe they spent the preponderance of their time, like the vast overwhelming majority of it, playing whatever the period-appropriate equivalent of He-Man and G.I. Joe was, or watching Star Wars or wrestling or The Goonies or Clue, like my brother and I did. And then they grew up and assaulted each other in the worst bar in Missouri. I know roads like that exist for people. I never ever want to go down one.
091. Hillbilly elegy
Past two rocking chairs,
Emmett slips into the house
where he lives alone.
The 25 Best Twilight Zone Episodes
1. To Serve Man
A seemingly benevolent alien civilization solves all of Earth’s problems. Then the visitors invite the grateful public to travel back with them to their home planet, brandishing the titular book as a combination bible and instruction manual. A pair of cryptologists (Lloyd Bochner and Susan Cummings) manage to decipher the name of the tome, but it’s only when the former has already boarded the ship does his partner discover the truth about what’s actually inside the covers. We then get the most famous black-comedy punchline in The Twilight Zone‘s hallowed library, with a twist like a diamond in its simple perfection. No doubt that’s why the episode is so fondly remembered — after all, it’s not like millions of Americans would ever blindly follow someone who’s promised to solve their problems but is actually determined to make those problems worse, right? But it also exemplifies what Serling’s groundbreaking show did best: take a fantastic premise, add equal parts existential horror and irony, then marinate it all in metaphor and let the whole thing simmer. Suggested serving portion: an ever-growing legion of satisfied fans.
I wrote about several of the best Twilight Zone episodes of all time for Rolling Stone.
“Billions” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Three: “Chickentown”
“I used to try and pretend I was dreaming all of the pain, but don’t you kid yourself: Some things have to be endured. And that’s what makes the pleasures so sweet.”
Whether as shorthand for their feelings, metaphors for their predicaments, or models for their aspired-to lifestyles, characters on “Billions” simply love dropping pop-culture quotes on one another. In fact this week’s episode, “Chickentown,” takes its name from a bowdlerized version of the famous “Forget it, Jake …” conclusion to “Chinatown,” referenced when Bobby Axelrod and Wags Wagner stop their mad-dog lieutenant Bill Stearn, known as Dollar Bill (Kelly AuCoin, delightfully amoral), from salvaging an insider-trading scheme by wiping out a poultry farm. (It’s a long story.)
Still, to the best of my recollection, no one on this quotation-happy show has yet referenced Clive Barker’s sadomasochistic horror film “Hellraiser,” whose undead antagonist Frank Cotton I’ve quoted above. No, not even Chuck and Wendy Rhoades, who can at least attest to the veracity of Cotton’s claim about pleasure and pain as a sexual matter.
Yet after watching “Chickentown” I want to set up a “Hellraiser” screening in Bobby Axelrod’s home theater just to make everyone wake up and smell the suffering. Axe, Chuck, Taylor Mason, even the lovably loathsome Dollar Bill — they all seem to require intense adversity to be at their best, whether they realize it or not.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.