What Price Sincerity?

When I heard that AMC had cancelled Rubicon a few weeks back, I felt more than a twinge of disappointment. While the plot—which tracks intelligence analyst Will Travers’s attempt to uncover a criminal conspiracy led by his agency’s chief, Truxton Spangler, and a shadowy company called Atlas MacDowell—breaks no new ground, I admire the writers’ willingness to eschew action-heavy sequences for taut exchanges whose true import often surfaced only episodes later. However, the show’s failings often overwhelm its merits. Many of the key characters never come into focus—I can’t bring myself to care about Grant’s failing marriage or Tanya’s drug problem because the writers spent so little time showing the damage these problems inflicted. And even I (an intellectual snob if there ever was one) have grown irritated by the writers’ insistence on cramming as many literary references as possible into each forty-five minute segment. Worst of all, Rubicon lacks a sense of humor. It’s like the writers think cracking a joke from time to time would rupture the show’s patina of erudition and high moral seriousness. If the staff of The New Republic sat down to dream up a thriller television series, it would probably look a bit like Rubicon.

One of the show’s most frustrating aspects is Will’s incompetence at clandestine investigation. He smashes an electric bug to pieces, although this will alert the Atlas MacDowell goons that he’s discovered their surveillance. He goes to visit Katherine Rhumor (widow of an Atlas MacDowell executive) in broad daylight, knowing he could be followed. Of course, Will has spent his previous professional life behind a desk, so you wouldn’t expect him to instantly morph into a super-spy. The problem is that Will doesn’t learn over the course of the season. As late at Episode 12, he makes a confidential phone call to his colleague Kale Ingram on an undoubtedly bugged office phone.

Why would Rubicon’s creators make the show’s protagonist look like an idiot? I suspect that their true aim is not to demonstrate Will’s stupidity, but his aversion to duplicity. Driven by moral fervor and impatient for answers, he can’t pretend ignorance of the bugs, or that he has ceased contact with Katherine. The writers may view Will’s allergy to deceit as a weakness (more on that anon) but they also laud it as a rare virtue. The show envisions an America corrupted by the military-industrial complex and tottering on the brink of catastrophe (the title, as anyone familiar with Roman history knows, evokes a point of no return heralding the triumph of tyranny and imperialism). The writers suggest that the nation’s moral decay manifests itself through the erosion of truthfulness and transparency. Three of the show’s thirteen episodes bear titles that foreground this anxiety: “The Truth Will Out” (Episode 7), “No Honesty in Men” (Episode 9), and “In Whom We Trust” (Episode 10). Within this iniquitous fictional universe, Will’s guilelessness testifies to his pureness of heart.

Rubicon’s antipathy toward pretense hearkens back to the sentimentalist tradition. By “sentimentalist,” I don’t mean mere mawkishness, but rather a specific literary mode developed during the eighteenth century. Locating morality’s source in the emotions rather than measured rationality, sentimental literature glorifies sincerity as a chief virtue. Playwrights such as Cibber, Steele, and even the more convivial Sheridan and Goldsmith take as their hero the “man of feeling,” who experiences ardent emotions and expresses them openly. Eighteenth century literary protagonists are forthright to point of artlessness—think of School for Scandal’s Charles Surface, Fielding’s Tom Jones, or even the infuriating Pamela. (Kate Hardwood’s adept role-playing provides an exception to the rule). By contrast, the period’s villains—Joseph Surface and Master Blifil (conniving brothers to Charles and Tom), along with Millwood in The London Merchant—prove consummate performers, gleefully enacting personas antithetical to their true natures. Sentimental writers recognize the need to exercise some measure of restraint over emotions; the transgressions of Romanticism remain some decades in the future. But whatever the hazards of impetuous sincerity, they see it as infinitely preferable to artifice.

Although no one would mistake Rubicon for a sentimental drama, it participates in the sentimentalist cult of sincerity. Almost all the virtuous character share Will’s inability to dissemble. In “The Truth Will Out,” an FBI team forces all agency employees to take a polygraph in hopes of uncovering the source of a leaked file. During the test, Will’s subordinates—Grant, Miles, and Tanya—quickly reveal their darkest personal secrets. Maggie, whom Kale Ingram has hired to spy on the other team members, exhibits such anxiety and guilt that anyone but Will would suspect something was wrong. By contrast, Rubicon’s villains, like their eighteenth century counterparts, lie prolifically and well. After a terrorist blows up an oil tanker in Galveston Bay, Spangler, in passionate but measured tones, asks his employees to find out “the truth—just the truth” behind the explosion—all the while hiding the truth that Atlas MacDowell set the attack in motion. Spangler’s co-conspirator James Wheeler also appears convincing as he reminds Katherine Rhumor of his affection for her dead husband (and Wheeler’s friend) Tom, whom Wheeler and other Atlas MacDowell executives had ordered to commit suicide. Significantly, Wheeler loses his ability to lie persuasively the moment he succumbs to doubts about Atlas MacDowell’s actions; when he assures the other conspirators in Episode 8 that Katherine Rhumor has stopped asking questions and “moved on,” his words ring hollow, failing to convince his auditors. Rubicon suggests that not only the act of deception but the talent for it indicates moral turpitude.

The character of Kale Ingram disrupts the show’s otherwise polarized moral universe. A former CIA hit man who drinks ginseng tea and lives with his long-term boyfriend, Ingram defies categorization. While the writers hint that he was once (and perhaps even recently) involved with Atlas MacDowell, Ingram spends the season feeding information to Will and attempting to protect the latter from MacDowell operatives. This is a man who shows apparently genuine concern for Maggie even while using her, who can reminisce pensively about the assassin and (perhaps) former lover whose body he had previously ordered dismembered and thrown into the East River.

Ingram is also a master of subterfuge. Faced with the polygraph, Ingram insinuates that he is more than capable of beating the test—an assertion borne out when he successfully deflects questions about his sexuality and the existence of covert operations within the agency. In his verbal sparring matches with Spangler, Ingram, as played with meticulous restraint by Arliss Howard, masks even his fear behind a crafty intelligence. Ingram is the only character to employ deceit in a noble cause; he covers for Will when the latter breaks into Spangler’s office and finds a safe house for Katherine after her life is threatened. In fact, the dénouement of Katherine’s subplot underscores both the ethical merit of Ingram’s actions and the danger posed by his colleague’s heedlessness. Having installed Katherine in the safe house, Ingram instructs Maggie to stay with her no matter what. Shortly thereafter, Will phones Maggie, begging her to bring him important documents; he also tells Katherine that, although he wants her to stay put, he also needs to view a clue-containing video owned by her dead husband, which only she knows the location of. Maggie abandons her post and Katherine opts to leave the safe house and bring Will the video, getting murdered in the process. Will, Maggie and Katherine’s actions are nothing if not sincere, driven by a deep loyalty to each other and to their dead friends and family members. But their recklessness inadvertently leads to Katherine’s death—a death that proves pointless as well as unnecessary: Maggie delivers the files too late to stop the Houston tanker explosion, and Will, distraught over Katherine’s murder, fails to notice that she dropped the video as she collapsed.

Although Rubicon’s creators creep toward a more nuanced ethical calculus, they retain their suspicion of artifice, even when it serves altruistic ends. They undercut Ingram’s growing moral stature by painting his caution and cool-headedness as evidence that he lacks human warmth. During the rooftop confrontation in Episode 13, Ingram urges Will to temporarily suspend his investigation and regroup, telling him that “intelligence is largely a failure business.” Will responds heatedly that the investigation is not “business” but “my life—David Hadas’s life. This is not a score-sheet—there are dead bodies here!” The characters’ contrasting vocabulary is telling—Ingram views their work as a series of calculations; Will agonizes over its effect on other people. The writers suggest that, useful as Ingram’s capacity for detachment may be, it marks him as untrustworthy. Rubicon may expose the flaws in sentimentalist ethics, but it never abandons their fundamental premises. This commitment generates missteps that undermine the show’s considerable promise.

           

           

           

Going Over The Top: Trash And Excess On "True Blood"

“What do you think we would be like if we were normal?” (Sookie to Bill, Episode 3.11, True Blood).

Since its inception, True Blood has scrutinized the ways America defines normalcy: What is it? Who is it? Is it even worth having? This season’s story lines—the Vampire Rights Act campaign, Jessica’s struggle for self-definition, Russel’s plans for world domination, and the revelation of yet more supernatural beings—werewolves! werepanthers! witches! sorcerers! fairies!—have all served to intensify that focus. Moreover, True Blood is the third major HBO series, after The Sopranos and Big Love, to depict members of ostracized minorities attempting to assimilate within mainstream American culture; indeed, this particular narrative has become something of an HBO specialty. But while The Sopranos and Big Love present themselves as serious dramas, True Blood revels in its own trashiness. Indeed, it has incorporated a whole range of disreputable genres—horror, gothic romance, WiP film, biker movies, and, in the episode 3.1 Sam-Bill dream sequence, porn.

Most commentaries have addressed the series’ high-minded social commentary and lowbrow format as separate entities. The New York Times' Ginia Bellafonte describes the show as “a mishmash of Flannery O’Connor aspirations and Anne Rice pop blood hunger.”   In fact, True Blood’s formal elements mirror its thematic concerns. In verbal and written analyses of True Blood, one word that crops up repeatedly is “excess”. Excess is what unites the show’s examination of marginalized groups and its juggling of marginal entertainment forms. Excess is True Blood’s true subject.

American television tends to locate normalcy among the white suburban middle class; this is the case in The Sopranos and Big Love, as well as Weeds, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. Atomization and anomie stalk these mythic suburbs; having shrugged off the traditional bonds of ethnicity, religion, and region, they suffer from a kind of vertigo. At the same time, they straightjacket themselves within their own petty conventions, all designed to maintain a manufactured homogeneity. The conception of social life and social identity that popular culture now attributes to suburbia was actually created by the European and, later American middle classes beginning in the seventeenth century. As it acquired increasing political power and socio-economic status, the middle class constructed standards of behavior opposing the more relaxed mores of the rapidly declining aristocracy. These standards precluded all forms of excess: drunkenness, extravagance, and sexual license. Interpersonal violence, such as dueling, was increasingly delegitimized. Individuals and groups who persisted in excessive behavior were criminalized or otherwise exiled to the margins of the dominant culture. This antipathy toward excess remains central to American definitions of normalcy, and to HBO’s attempts to grapple with those definitions. The violence that Tony Soprano and his compatriots engage in, along with their flashy SUVs, expletive laden speech, and touchy machismo, all strike the viewer as just too much, and this excessiveness simultaneously repulses and entertains. Big Love’s preoccupation with excess is encoded into its title:  while most men make do with one wife at a time, Bill Henrickson takes three or (for a brief while last season) four.

The rise of middle class values also coincided with a move toward realist aesthetics, which likewise disdained excess.  Although Realism with a capital R would not be invented until the end of the nineteenth century, even eighteenth century playwrights such as Lessing and Diderot avoided the titanic emotions of French Neoclassical tragedy and gory violence of the Jacobeans. They preferred to portray smaller scale domestic conflicts resolved by tear-filled reconciliations. Over the next century and half, explicit sexuality and extreme violence would increasingly be exiled to lowbrow genres like melodrama, cabaret, and the Grand Guignol.  These forms of excess have remained on our culture’s unseemly periphery ever since.

Contemporary lowbrow entertainment—Lady Gaga, the Super Bowl half time show, monster trucks, Real Housewives, Machete—doesn’t just permit excess, it gleefully embraces it. Why walk onstage in real clothes if you can wear a bra that shoots off sparks? If you’re going to crush a bunch of old cars in a 15,000 seat arena, why not do it with a dragon-shaped, smoke-blowing, fire-breathing robosaurus? (The first part of the video is kind of boring. Skip to 0:57 to see the robosaurus). If your hero is going to escape by jumping out a window, why not have him do so just as the building containing said window blows up? Better still, why not show all this in slow motion, in order to expand the moment even further, show every particle of exploded glass and metal and every drop of blood in loving detail? 

Such lowbrow performances achieve their popularity by allowing audience to vicariously experience the excessive desires and behaviors forbidden in “normal” life. And yet, because contemporary American culture still largely equates normalcy with restraint, we disavow our own fascination with excess by dismissing such entertainment as trashy. Some of my friends enjoy discussing True Blood in tones of knowing irony. Now, the show has at times earned these sneers. (Remember in season two when Sookie told Bill: “You have a heart….even if it no longer beats”? I harbor the unhappy suspicion that the moment’s humor was wholly unintentional.) However, I’d wager that the primary reason some viewers adopt an ironic tone when talking about True Blood is to disguise just how much fun they’re having watching Russell Edgington rip out the newscaster’s spine (Episode 3.9), or Bill and Sookie having loud, nasty sex on the floor of her wrecked living room (Episode 3.8).

Most trashy entertainment encourages viewers engage in this kind of dissociation. Over-the-top violence, in particular, tends to be framed as either a threat to normalcy (things were going just swell for the Nostromo crew until they decided to check out that distress signal coming from the “abandoned” planet), or justified as necessary to maintaining normalcy (got a zombie problem? time to break out the chainsaw!), or, often, both. The standard of normalcy itself is never seriously challenged.

True Blood places itself in a paradoxical position. It has achieved its present success by giving viewers precisely the voyeuristic experience of excess they desire, and giving them more of it, and better, than any other show currently broadcast. At the same time, True Blood refuses to provide viewers with a comforting standard of normalcy. This is a world in which the local bartender is a shape shifter, the waitresses are Wiccan or part fairy, the nursing home attendant is the descendant of sorcerers, and the meth dealers down the road morph into panthers once every twenty-eight days. “Regular” humans are actually a little thin on the ground. Furthermore, the South, and particularly the rural South, has long figured as a cultural “other” in the American imagination. Film and television have largely portrayed it as either a locus of backwardness and bigotry (Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, The Color Purple) or of traditions, familial bonds, and authenticity that mainstream America has lost (Fried Green Tomatoes, Forrest Gump) It is also a region seen as host to various forms of excess, many of which True Blood cites in its opening credits: violence (the drunks fighting over a woman), fanatical intolerance (the “God Hates Fangs” sign and the child in the Klan uniform), and Pentecostal Christianity, whose flamboyant, emotive style of worship, as much as the beliefs it promulgates, often makes it an object of suspicion or ridicule within the dominant culture.

Some (for example slate.com's Jason Zinoman) have criticized the increasing presence of supernaturals on True Blood, arguing that if non-magical humans become the minority there will cease to be any standard of normalcy for the other characters to either aspire to or reject. It seems to me that this is actually the whole point: on True Blood, normal does not exist. The show suggests that in some fundamental sense America is a gothic fantasy land inhabited by beings hiding terrifying, thrilling alternate identities.

After Russell relieves the newscaster of his spine, he speaks directly into the camera. We the viewers see him through the TV screen in Nan Flanagan’s limo, which is, of course, also our own TV screen. His speech to the presumably horrified fictional humans watching is, by implication, addressed to us as well:

Now, the American Vampire League wishes to perpetrate [sic] the notion that we are just like you and, in a few small ways, we are. We’re narcissists, we care only about getting what we want, no matter what the cost, just like you. Global warming, perpetual war, toxic waste, child labor, torture, genocide: that’s a small price to pay for your SUVs and your flat screen TVs, your blood diamonds, your designer jeans, your absurd, garish McMansions—futile symbols of permanence to quell your quivering, spineless souls.

As Russell concludes his speech, he clasps his hands in front of him—one dead white, the other dyed red with blood. Rather than underscoring vampires’ ambivalent relationship with violence, this image actually captures True Blood’s somber view of human character.  The show suggests that irrational drives—consumption, sex, aggression—constantly explode the constraints of reason, altruism, and tenderness. As Jessica tells Hoyt during this season’s second episode, “Getting so mad that I do bad things…..it’s in my nature.” True Blood simultaneously thrives off of and critiques its viewers’ voyeuristic fascination with excess—a fascination fueled, it suggests, by our refusal to recognize the impulses toward excess buried within our seeming normalcy. We are the monsters we love to watch.