Stefan and I are starting a series of Boiled Leather Audio Hour episodes going in-depth on each of the available sample chapters from The Winds of Winter, starting with a look at Theon I!
“Watchmen” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice”
It’s wild!
No, seriously, it really is wild. It reminds me, in a good way, of some of the most far-out episodes of Lindelof’s Leftovers run—the ones where Justin Theroux near-death-hallucinates that he’s an international assassin, say, or the one where Christopher Eccleston talks to God on a weird cult’s orgy boat before God gets mauled to death by a lion. Where Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen eased you into its world’s weirdness—which to be fair was orders of magnitude less weird than either the Marvel or DC shared universes of which it served as a critique—Lindelof and director Nicole Kassell dump you into the deep end and expect you to do the butterfly, with the aggressive and eerie music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross blaring in the background.
I reviewed the series premiere of Watchmen for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show all season. It’s good!
293. Shirtlessly Smoking
Shirtlessly smoking
His surgeon, she’s standing nearby
Awaiting a word
Gasping at glimpses
Of bottomless buttocks
He runs, wishing he could fly
Only to leap when the house blows sky-high
Wordlessly watching
He waits by the window
For Wesley
That’s the JC Penney guy
Anxious for Emmett and arson explosions
He worries
Did Wade wish him goodbye? Or call him mijo?
They are one cooler
They are two alone
They are three together
They are for the road house
Bound from the barn loft
And bounce by the hay bales to rescue
Your beardy landlord first
Dalton is diving
He’s down to defend from the danger
Maybe rip out throats
And choke them with their blood
They are one cooler
They are two alone
They are three together
They are for the road house
292. Body language
This is Dalton when he has nothing to do but fume. His muscles are taut, arms crossed fussily across his abdomen. His head juts forward, neck straining, jaw tight as he vents his frustration and rage. There’s nothing else for him to do right now—just vent, impotently, at his girlfriend. His body is like one huge knot.
This is Dalton in action. His landlord Emmett’s house has just exploded and he’s leaping to the rescue from his second-story window. But he moves not like someone who needs to brace himself for a fall, but gracefully, soaring rather than falling. His arms are wide, his legs angled just so, his hair flowing in the breeze. Faced with a physical problem, he moves toward a solution like a dancer hitting his marks. This is Dalton as he is meant to be. His body responds to the call of duty just as much as his mind.
291. Take him
“I’ve always wanted to try you. I think I can take you.” That’s what the Knife Nerd said to Dalton in the very first scene of the film, when Dalton breaks up a fight at the club he worked at back in New York. The sexualization of combat was already clear in the man’s choice of words, a language of dominance and submission that glistens and gleams each time it’s used. It happens again and again. “Your ass is mine, boy,” Jimmy tells Dalton when Wesley calls off their fight in the Double Deuce, just for example. And a few seconds from where we now stand it will accelerate to explicitly sexual speeds.
Dalton inadvertently sets the dominoes in motion. “I know exactly who Brad Wesley is,” he snaps at Dr. Elizabeth Clay after she warns him he has no idea what Brad Wesley is capable of. “I’ve seen his kind many times. He keeps taking, and taking, until somebody takes him.” Dalton believes he’s man to do this—to take Brad Wesley, and thus best him. There’s a weird lacuna in the phrasing that invites questions: takes him…where, exactly? takes him down? takes him on? takes him in? You almost can’t help but sub in the sexual connotation of the phrase, since we’re offered so little by way of an alternative. This shirtless mass of muscle and sinew and fine feathered hair wants to take his enemy. You connect the dots.
‘Watchmen’: Here’s What to Know From the Comics
Where Does the TV Show Pick Up?
The show is set roughly 30 years later; during much of that time, Robert Redford has been president. Vigilantism remains banned except under official government auspices thanks to the Keene Act, a 1977 law named after Senator Joe Keene, whose charismatic son is now challenging Redford for the presidency. And Dr. Manhattan, who despite his near-omniscience was unable to stop Ozymandias’s plot, has fled the planet for Mars, where he has lived alone for decades.
Historically and psychically, the TV series roots itself in the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Okla., in which a white mob swarmed the prosperous black part of town, resulting in as many as 300 deaths, with thousands more displaced. In the fictionalized present day, the series pits the Tulsa police force, whose members wear vigilante-style masks to protect their identity, against a militant white supremacist group called the Seventh Kavalry, which has adopted Rorschach’s lethal methods and black-and-white mask.
290. Firestarter
Dr. Elizabeth Clay is not taking Dalton’s shit. That’s the throughline for nearly every word she says during this scene. On Brad Wesley: “You don’t know him.” On the inability of the people of Jasper to stand up to Brad Wesley: a sarcastic “But you can stop him.” On Dalton’s assertion that he never loses: “But what are you gonna win?” She continues: “Who’s this for, anyway? Are you doing it for them?” She answers her own question: “I don’t think so.” She pulls off this rhetorical trick again for the coup de grace: “You think you’re gonna save these people from Wesley?” At the top of her lungs, her voice shredding, her face a grimacing mask of fury: “WELL WHO’S GONNA SAVE THEM FROM YOU?”
BOOM.
At that precise moment, the building visible through the window behind her blows up. It’s the most fortuitously timed act of arson in the annals of Jasper, Missouri, I’d have to imagine. The bomb Jimmy the goon used to blow up the house of Emmett the old man is like an inflammable exclamation mark at the end of the Doc’s rant. It’s as if the ideas she’s bringing up are too dangerous even to give voice to. The world ruptures around them in gouts of flame. She’s a pyrokinetic Cassandra with one message to deliver: In the contest of Dalton vs. Brad Wesley, the only winner is the conqueror worm.
289. “I never lose”
“Brad Wesley picked me,” Dalton tells Dr. Elizabeth Clay, “and when he did, he fucked up. I’m only good at one thing, Doc: I never lose.” The thing to pay attention to here is that Dalton has rarely, if ever, sounded like more of a loser than he does right here and now. His tone of voice is clipped, nasal, truculent. His body language and facial expressions are those of a man who, contrary to what he’s saying, feels he has an enormous amount to prove, and is trying to bluster his way into confidence that he can do so. He’s also, it should be said, being a huge dickhead to the one that he loves and who loves him. She’s there simply to ask him not to put himself in a life-threatening contest of wills with her insane ex-husband, and he’s taken this as an opportunity to whip out his dick and measure it in front of her.
Something’s got to give.
“The Terror: Infamy” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Ten: “Into the Afterlife”
Now here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write today: The season finale of The Terror: Infamy moved me to tears.
Wait, what? We’re talking about the same The Terror: Infamy that squandered its predecessor season’s goodwill by shoddily cobbling together warmed-over J-horror with real-world historical atrocities? The one that employed a central supernatural metaphor that appeared to place the blame for Japanese Americans’ political predicament on Japanese Americans themselves rather than their racist captors? The one that was haphazardly plotted, jerking from location to location and time period to time period with seemingly no sense of narrative balance or emotional logic? The one where the main character chose the moment when he and his family are rounded up by the American government as potential traitors to tell his mom that he got some lady in a family way? That The Terror: Infamy?
Yes, that The Terror: Infamy.
Written by co-creator and showrunner Alexander Woo and directed by Frederick E.O. Toye, “Into the Afterlife,” the final episode of the AMC anthology series’ second season, is an extended grace note for a story that up until now had just been banging on the keys at random. Attentive to the historical import of the time period it chronicles, generous in spirit toward its characters both living and dead, and driven in large part by the season’s most effective and poetic imagery, it nearly makes up for all the dross that’s come before. It left me imagining a season that had lived up to this standard from the start, and wondering how much more impact a finale like this would have had if it had.
I reviewed the shockingly good finale of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.
“Mr. Robot” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Two: “402 Payment Required”
Adding additional layers to an already complicated plot is tricky business, of course. But the mysteries are so intriguing, and Esmail’s command of his craft so sure, that the investment seems sound as a pound.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times. It’s good!
“The Affair” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Eight
From a certain perspective, “The Affair” is the perfect show to explore accusations of sexual harassment and abuse. So much of the #MeToo movement is about re-examining behaviors too long taken for granted or never properly evaluated as the violations of trust and consent that they are. Noah’s alternately amorous and contentious relationships with many women over the course of the series — to say nothing of the many moments his contact with women was fueled by alcohol or extreme emotional distress — is precisely the kind of conduct that can prove worthy of scrutiny.
But I can’t shake the feeling that the show is backfilling a #MeToo payload into a space it was content to leave undeveloped until just now. While individual incidents involving Alison and other women drove the occasional episode or arc, a coherent Noah-as-oblivious-serial-predator narrative is new. Considering how many different vantage points we’ve had into Noah’s life — his own, his ex-wives’, his girlfriends’, his daughter’s, and even that of a guy who once pointed a gun at him in anger — to have these accusations emerge now feels like a narrative cheat.
The alternative explanation — that Noah is right, that these accusations are ginned up and bogus, that the appearance of impropriety is all there is to it — doesn’t seem to hold water, not based on how Noah is portrayed in this episode anyway. The guy keeps stampeding into worse and worse situations of his own making, from denigrating a former student as a publicity hound to tracking his ex-publicist to an award ceremony and grabbing her by the arm in front of dozens of witnesses. Noah might see what he’s doing as only accidentally wrong, but the pattern we in the audience can observe is clear.
So we’re left with a show that has scant hours to go, turning hard against its own co-protagonist. The last time this happened, King’s Landing burned down. Much of the furor that greeted the conclusion of “Game of Thrones” was, I felt, misplaced, given the very clear and unequivocal signs and behavior displayed by Daenerys up to that point. People were upset because they didn’t want to see their hero turn heel. So I find myself asking, is that what’s upsetting me here? Did Noah pull the wool over my eyes all this time? Or is the show spending its final episodes trying to do so now?
I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. Tough to know what to make of it.
“Succession” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Ten: “This Is Not for Tears”
Succession‘s second season finale ends on a high point not just for the episode or the season but the entire series. Until now it’s seemed almost unthinkable that one of Logan Roy’s brood would defy him this dramatically after first agreeing not to. This is more shocking than Kendall’s first attempt to dethrone his dad, since we’d watched him build to that point over several episodes. Our only clues here were implicit and contextual: the presence of Cousin Greg, who kept copies of incriminating documents, by Kendall’s side; the Judas/Fredo kiss Kendall planted on his dad’s cheek when he agreed to be the fall guy required to placate congressional investigators and nervous shareholders alike. With so little fanfare beforehand, watching Kendall actually get up there on the world stage and call his dad out for what he is feels like watching a dog suddenly stand on its hind legs and speak fluent Latin.
I reviewed the season finale of Succession for Decider. I liked it, though people need to calm way down about this thing. As I say elsewhere in the review, dramedies are the coward’s drama.
288. Sweat/No Sweat
Dalton is dripping with sweat when Wade Garrett visits to confront him. Dalton is perfectly dry when Dr. Elizabeth Clay visits to confront him a few hours later. This raises questions, considering that he’s wearing (or not wearing) the exact same thing in both scenes. Does his hair naturally revert to a feathered mullet pompadour when dry? Did he let his body air-dry naturally? Did he shower, and then put back on the same pants? Where does he shower, anyway? There’s no bathroom visible in his barn loft. Does he hose himself off in the nude for bathing purposes, and use some unseen outhouse for his bathroom needs generally?
Whatever the case, his dried, blown-out appearance in the second scene is belied by his demeanor. He’s no more in control here than he was when he was gushing sweat from every pore while yelling at his mentor. True, he doesn’t try to punch Doc in the face full-force, or at all, but he’s just as petulant and broken-sounding as he was with Wade. The situation with Wesley, the admonishments from Wade and Elizabeth, the plight of Red and Strodenmire—it’s all too much regardless of whether he’s toweled himself off. You can cleanse the boy of his flopsweat, but you can’t cleanse the boy of his flopsweat, you know what I mean?
287. Arms
One of the reasons it’s easy to tell that Dalton isn’t holding a cigarette at the start of his confrontation with Dr. Elizabeth Clay, despite the appearance of one in his hand by the end of it, is the positioning of his arms. They’re crossed above his stomach, and stay that way as he turns toward her, ranting and raving about how he’s seen the likes of Brad Wesley many, many times. I can’t say that I’ve seen the likes of Dalton many, many times, at least insofar as I’ve never argued with a shirtless man who walks around with his arms crossed like he’s in a straitjacket. It looks very, very weird, especially when combined with his petulant tone of voice and jut-jawed, neck-straining body language.
But Dalton is in a straightjacket, isn’t he? One of his own making. He refuses to quit the town because of his feelings for the Doc and his anger towards Brad Wesley. But he also refuses to listen to the Doc, who’s telling him to forget his anger towards Brad Wesley and just get the hell out of there. He’s staying behind for the sake of someone who wants him to leave. His motives are crisscrossed, just like his arms.
286. Smokin’
While Dalton is busy ranting and raving, smoke starts wafting up from below the frame. Dalton’s got passion in his pants and he ain’t afraid to show it, but though you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s the source of the smoke, I’m afraid the truth is more prosaic: a continuity error sees him smoking a cigarette toward the end of the conversation but not at the beginning. At no point does he move anyplace where he could conceivably have picked up an (already lit) cigarette after appearing at the window without one in his hand—trust me, I’ve looked. That said, isn’t it marvelous that at some point during the filming they thought what this scene needed was for Dalton to be shirtless, sulky, and smoking? The trifecta, if you will? Given what’s about to occur—without spoiling it, Dalton will soon find he has pressing business elsewhere, without the time to extinguish a cigarette on the way to attending it—the “give him a cigarette” decision could well have led to him accidentally burning down his barn. But by god we want our hero to be a tough guy, and tough guys smoke. Shirtless. In their dancing pants. While they whine. While their girlfriends yell at them. In their (highly flammable) barn loft apartment.
285. Lame
Childish, petulant, angry, sulky, and frightened, Dalton is no longer himself—or is it that he’s become too much himself? Either way, gone are the minimalist barbs that undid verbal sparring partners like Morgan and Horny Steve earlier in the film, “opinions vary,” “is she?”, and so on. When he detects Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s presence in his apartment, apparently his cooler-sense tells him that this time she’s not there to unzip her pants and get junk-on-junk without kissing first. Rather, she’s there to tell him to put a stop to the blood feud with her ex-husband Brad Wesley by getting the hell out of Dodge. What is his preemptive-strike quip this time around? “Little late for a house call, don’t you think?” Because she’s a doctor, get it? Not his best work.
But listen to his delivery and there’s more emotion and meaning in the line than you might realize. When he says “don’t you think” he emphasizes think, hitting the terminal -nk like a light slap to the face. It’s his way of displaying his neck frill and saying to the Doc what he said to Wade Garret: “Leave me alone.” He doesn’t particularly care what she thinks.
284. Dread
Frankenstein’s monster must always turn on his creator, and with one punch directed at Wade Garrett’s face, Dalton renders himself monstrous. Look: You can see his fear of what he’s becoming all over his face. It’s not just that he tried to strike his mentor down, though one can only imagine what he would have felt and done had he succeeded. It’s that the violence within himself, the violence he has kept at bay for years by obeying the Three Simple Rules and walking the Dalton Path, the violence he lets out only when it’s time to not be nice, the violence that has haunted him since Memphis—that violence is besting him, growing beyond his control. The dam sprang a leak and it is only through good fortune and Wade Garrett’s own skill that he was able to plug it back up before drowning. Will others be so lucky?
Dalton thinks—Dalton knows, I suspect—that the answer is no. This is why, when he gainsays Frank Tilghman’s assertion that Brad Wesley is afraid of him, he’s only telling half the story. Dalton is afraid of Brad Wesley because Brad Wesley is not afraid of him—because without that fear Wesley is free to act in such a way as to bring out the side of Dalton that Dalton is afraid of. It’s that side of him that scares him worse than anything.
Perhaps he can see himself mirrored in Wade Garrett’s eyes in this moment. Perhaps he sees what is happening to him as clearly as we do. The horror, the horror of knowing what you’re capable of, and feeling powerless to stop it.
283. Whose house? Red’s house
You can skim through your copy of Road House after writing about Road House for over two hundred and eighty days straight and still catch the occasional detail you’ve never noticed before. Case in point: Red Webster’s mailbox. Just in case you were looking for one of the other R. WEBSTERs in Jasper, I suppose, Red has tricked his mailbox out with hubcaps. Not content with owning and operating an auto parts store, Red brought his work home with him, then made it a part of his home. It makes you wonder if the other luminaries of Jasper society have done the same. Is Frank Tilghman’s mailbox festooned with broken tables? Does Pete Strodenmire’s say “WELCOME TO WAGON DAYS”? Does Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s come in the shape of a colonoscopy x-ray? We may never know; in fact I’ll go so far as to say we will never know; but the beauty of Road House is such that the doors to these possibilities are opened and never shut.
281. A hug is the shortest distance between two friends
For all his erudition where matters of bouncing and cooling are concerned, there are some expressions of emotion that are beyond Dalton’s ability to articulate. His feelings toward Wade Garrett at this moment are such emotions. When Wade, who’s just told Dalton he loves him, bids him farewell, Dalton pauses just long enough for the older man to leave, then attacks his heavy bag with a vengeance, a flurry of kicks and strikes. You can see right away that the salvo is unsustainable, and that this man, who’s already worked himself up so much that even his teeth appear to be sweating, must needs relent in his attack. You figure a quick cut away from the action will be the film’s exit from this scenario.
But instead, Dalton reaches out, wraps his arms around the punching bag, and leans in, letting it partially support his weight. We all need someone we can lean on, but Dalton has allowed that someone to exit his life. He wants to beat the living shit out of him for it, but he also wants nothing more than to collapse into his understanding and embrace, let them buoy him, keep him from slipping under.
If you care about Dalton it’s a hard moment to watch. He’s wrong to feel alone—Wade still cares about him, and so does Doc, and so do the likes of Emmett and Red and, in his bizarre way, Frank Tilghman. But he does feel alone nonetheless. So he’s hugging a punching bag, in lieu of assaulting the bag or hugging a human being. It’s a poor substitute for either, but in this moment it’s all he has.