'Suits' - Seasons 1-5

That Was A Big Binge

My better half has been watching this show regularly and I've sort of shrugged at it because the aesthetic of the show was way too smooth and manicured. I like my law shows a bit grittier; my fave law show was 'The Practice' back in the 90s where Dylan McDermott played criminal attorney Bobby Donnell and each week had a big trial speechifying moment. Of course the same person who created 'The Practice' also created 'Ally McBeal' so ... what can I say? Maybe 'The Practice' wasn't as gritty as I remember it to be - Wikipedia lists its genre as comedy drama. I sure don't remember laughing a whole lot watching 'The Practice'.

Anyway, I decided to take the plunge because FetchTV served it up on a platter, and I was researching how to write a series and it seemed appropriate to see what a multiple award winning show did. Plus, my better half is the better half for a reason. She has a sharp eye for character drama. It couldn't be bad at all to go through it all, could it?

80 episodes is a long journey to go through, but having gone through it, I think I at least understand what the hell is going on in the show, and why it might appeal to audiences. The one benefit of watching a show about lawyers is that they do it without special effects or masked vigilantes saving the day. It's nice watching something that is ostensibly content for grownups, and in most part it is.

'Suits' seems to hark back to the 'L.A. Law' style of slick lawyering show that inspired another generation. You can see how this works - the constant glamorising of the law sucks in the ever aspirational into a turgid career pushing paper. I once met a woman who wanted to be a trial lawyer who explained to me just how far one had to go just to be the kind of lawyer that gets up and works a trail. After her explanation it seemed to me law shows were far more misrepresentative of the career allure of its profession than medical dramas. Yes it takes a long time to become a surgeon too, but you don't exactly go into not expecting to see blood and gore.

'Suits' gives the impression that lawyering is not only glamorous, it might just be easy enough that you can watch a few episodes of 'Suits' and then you too can go into court and argue for a client. It is fanciful. But then so is 'My Kitchen Rules' or the Six o'clock News.

What's Good About It

The best thing about the show is the premise whereby a savant turns out to be a en excellent lawyer in practice but has no qualifications to be practicing law. Much of the tension in the series is built on whether the character Mike gets found out for this brazen fraud. The show teams up Mike with Harvey who is meant to be the sharpest lawyer going, and Harvey is complicit in the fraud because he can see the immense potential of Mike.

The show isn't as good a survey of the law as something like 'The Practice'. It's relatively light on the sort of procedural law show tropes. Instead, it spends a lot of time exploring the hierarchy and institutional strengths and weaknesses of a top flight law firm.

Gabriel Macht who plays Harvey is a very solid leading actor with great range. you can see why the show is so successful watching him. He has more range than the character he is playing so he surprises you at least once every few episodes. The show hangs on him more than the other main character of Mike played by Patrick J. Adams. Adams is also good, but when you watch 5 seasons in a row you start seeing his limitations. He just repeats certain moods and moves over and over again. It wouldn't be noticeable if you saw the show once a week, but it sticks out when you watch the series in a row. He's simply not as varied in voice or elocution or body language as Macht.

What's Bad About It

The writers of the show can't resist quoting movies. It's just time-wasting fodder when real character stuff could be explored. The show has many moments where they're just spinning wheels, which are more apparent when you sit down and binge watch 5 seasons. You get to hone in on which narrative lines are important and which ones aren't, and you find yourself watching quite a number of tedious exchange built on quotes from movies.

The worst moment was when they started quoting 'Mad Men' when 'Mad Men' clearly informed the template for the office politics. It was just bad writing, bad execution. The moment they likened a situation to 'Game of Thrones' was also terrible. I'm sure they meant it as an homage, but it killed tension and the sense of place of this show. It was these moments where the writers gave in to their own anxiety of influence.

Also some of the lesser characters seem have difficulty breaking out of their two-dimensional characterisation. Louis, the strange obstacle character, spends a better part of the five seasons until he finds himself enough to stand in solidarity with his cohorts. It's just not believable that somebody so smart could be so dumb about their circumstance - especially a circumstance the character claims to love and cherish above all else.

What's Interesting About It

The whole exercise turned out to be quite instructional on how to formulate a long-lasting TV series. The show has an overarching problem - that Mike Ross is a fraud - but it also has secondary story arcs that last the season where the show presents with a antagonist who seeks to destroy the firm or take it over. There is a tertiary arc where the character interactions reside whether it be romantic love interest or professional regard for one another or simply bickering over process; and only after then does something happen in each episode to nudge things along on all the arcs.

Some times you wish they spent more time on the big arc, while other times you're happy watching the lawyers do their TV lawyer thing. The tension between the story arcs goes a long way to pushing the show out to 5 series and counting.

Defending The Indefensible, Arguing the Implausible

The trick to writing a good lawyer show seems to be capturing the ability of lawyers to and do and say things normal people would never consider doing. The system is there to give a fair trial to people and that means somebody has to argue to the best of their ability in favour some unsavoury people and things. Take our foreign minister Julie Bishop who as a lawyer defended Big Tobacco and James Hardie in the famous cases before she turned to politics. I know some well educated people who hold this against her as a sign of bad character but you watch enough law shows, you quickly understand that those trials wouldn't have been fair trials had Big Tobacco and James Hardie not had their lawyer in their corner arguing the implausible to defend the indefensible. To that extent I sure don't hold Julie Bishop's legal career against her as having bad character. For our society to be as moral and ethical as it claims to be, somebody needed to be in that corner for the system to work.

In many ways the fun of watching these law shows is watching the lawyers do and say these extraordinary things. Harvey Specter then, is an interesting lawyer character because he often opts to not go to trial. Instead he looks to make sure he cuts the best deals for his clients. That is an interesting wrinkle because for a show about lawyers, they don't seem to go into the courtroom anywhere near the frequency that the lawyers in 'The Practice' or 'L.A. Law' or 'for that matter 'Ally McBeal' did. Instead we're treated to a world of finding the leverage and pressing hard to get outcomes. It's indefensible at times, implausible at others, but it sure makes for interesting viewing.

Race, Gender, Faith And The System

The main characters are palimpsests of American anxieties about race, gender and faith.
I was watching the series and it struck me that Harvey Specter was a dead giveaway name. Harvey is like the imaginary rabbit from the eponymous movie, and Specter is actually spectre, a ghost. He is the least present of the characters in the show, and so he gives us the least information of himself or what he is truly about. Harvey is also unlike any standard American character in that he hates his mother. That's something you don't see everyday in American media. He seems to be living out a WASP nightmare of repressed feelings and memories which are finding expression in his angry outbursts and terrible treatment of those around him. By season 5, he is sent packing by the writers to go see a Psychiatrist which creates its own troubles.

Mike, in stark contrast, is a Catholic boy haunted by a sense of guilt. He finds moral purpose where other sane, normal people might not choose to find them, but given that his character pretty much is at the centre of the main problem in the show, you sort of accept the whole thing. Mike is constantly flip-flopping about what to do, essentially weighing up what makes him feel less guilty as he goes along, but all the while repressing the fact that he is indeed a fraud.

Louis is a man full of self-loathing and a strange sense of satisfaction at his own idiosyncrasy. He's a man in search of one good friend, and he can't maintain friendships because he perceives his social standing only in hierarchical terms. If he is meant to be comic relief, then it is pretty psychotic. It is revealed Louis is Jewish by birth and upbringing but he seems to have devoted his faith more to the church of Harvard Law school as an institution than his own naive faith. It's not clear what exactly drove him to the self-loathing, but what seems to soothe his self-loathing is prestige. It is comic but also profoundly sad when put next to the fabulously WASP and cool Harvey, or the Catholic and empathic Mike. Louis' pettiness is the foil to distract us from the repressed anxiety of Harvey and repressed guilt of Mike.

The managing partner Jessica is a stern black woman of considerable fortitude. She protects her turf because she alone understands how far things can fall, and she is determined not to let that happen. And so her story combines the emancipation of both women and blacks. The system does not play by the rules it advocates, and so Jessica is eternally committed to managing the firm in a way to stay ahead of the volatile ructions of the system. The absolute lack of faith she shows in her staff except Harvey is very revealing. It asks, can Black people ever come to peace with the system that has prosecuted them for so long.

Institutional Elitism

The less appealing aspect of the show is the affirmation of a two-tiered society where the chosen elite reign supreme over the unsuspecting masses. The lawyers in the fictional law firm Pearson Specter Litt are all recruited from Harvard Law School and from that school alone. The other 20 or so leading law schools are given short shrift for most part simply out of snobbery. The characters in most part believe in the snobbery and the importance of maintaining this snobbery which reaffirms their social standing. It's quite unappealing even if Mike who is not from the school runs rings around these lawyers because in most part the status quo is affirms over and over again. The maintenance the elitist institution takes such precedence over so many real concerns.

In a sense a show that strives to give us diversity chokes itself by giving us an institution that would resist diversity as the party for whom the audience supports. There are moments in the show where you just ant to vomit all over the worship of Harvard University. It is all too reminiscent the misplaced awe in which University of Sydney graduates were once held. There probably are law firms that only hire from one place and make it a hallmark of their firm. It's an ugly look.

Because the law is by its nature conservative affair the show never really gets close to undermining the institutional elitism that underpins the socius in the show. Nobody really breaks free, nobody questions the validity nobody really finds the gait creates with the rest of the world to be  serious problem. Louis, at the end of Season 5 is forced to consider graduates from other law schools but by then the firm is in too much turmoil to make good.

Donna Paulsen is clearly a outsider to the coterie of Harvard educated lawyers. She looks in as she contributes mightily to the fate of the law firm. But for all her extraordinary talents and accomplishments and personal guidance to the lawyers, she will never be acknowledged the way Joan Holloway is acknowledged in 'Mad Men' when she ends up owning a share of the advertising firm. Interestingly enough they're both redheaded women.

The Law Is A Sorry Ass

When you watch 80 or so episodes of a show, you come see many moments where characters reverse course of action. And then characters apologies to one another for having done the 180 degrees. Sometimes a character is forced to do two 180 turns within the space of two episodes. Then the apologies ensue.

There'a whole lot of apologies going on in five seasons. If you run a show long enough, the characters end up being n bad enough conflict to have to apologies to one another so often. It's no surprise Harvey ends up seeing a shrink in season 5.

The Law Can Kick Ass

The central tenet of the show seems to be the law can be made to do anything. If it's written down anybody can argue anything and there is a whole posse of lawyers trying to push an agenda. It's interesting because the law is seen as a utilitarian guide to the smooth and fair running of a society.  It's a far cry form the conception of the law that comes from above and perhaps this is why there are so many characters that play fast and loose with the law in this show.

That being said, the procedures and protocols seem to be rigidly enforced and judges seem to frown on most anything bought in front of them. You can imagine being a judge in America is like being asked to intervene in so many idiotic disputes that one's initial response is to frown at any document being thrust under your nose.

There is a lot of document thrusting. And for the sake of the show, most of the characters take one look at the first page of any file and seem to understand the entirety of the content. It's like magic.

The Magical Characters

For all the talk about Harvey being the superhuman amazing lawyer, he doesn't seem to live up to his billing all too well. Instead it is Mike with his amazing photographic memory and Donna's telepathy that saves the day more than once. There are quite a number of episodes that hinge on the fact that the talents of Mike and Donna are simply not normal. If this were Marvel or DC it would make sense. The fact that it happens in a law show reveals that American fiction really is degenerating.

'Mr. Robot' - Season 1

The First Rule Of Hacker Club Is...

Maybe the world is changing after all. Way back when 'Fight Club' was made, it caused such a stir with Twentieth Century Fox who funded it, that Rupert Murdoch made his execs promise never make such an outright anti-corporate film ever again. Judging from the tenor of films and shows being made after the GFC, perhaps those shackles have come off across the American industry as a whole. 'Mr. Robot' seems to be a more contemporary re-telling of the 'Fight Club' story, albeit without the fighting.

Anyway, here's the spoiler alert and a shout out to FetchTV where I caught the whole series.



What's Good About It

If one wanted to know how the Millennials yearn for a just society that was promised to them but never existed, then this show might be the primer. The very technological world that enables our hero Elliott is also the reason the corporations screw over the general populace is screwed over so badly. The crippling student debt on Gen-Y has replaced the terrible burden of Mutually Assured Destruction which hung over the Baby Boomers and Gen-X. This startling break in history is finally manifesting itself as this sharp socially motivated series.

The politics of it aside, 'Mr. Robot' also goes deeper in to the very schizoid nature of this problem, as it delves with a sense fractured self that arises from the multiple persona people sustain to interact in the world, both real and on-line. The gap between the real person and their persona becomes the great "exploit hole" over and over again in this show - and in instances we recognise how our strengths are our weaknesses as well as our weaknesses being a hidden strength. For a very active guy, the main character Elliot appears to be passive and pensive because he asks us to consider things with him.

This results in a wholly cerebral psycho-thriller that goes somewhere interesting, imagines something different and lands on the doorstep of the unknown. It is - in an old way of saying - very cool.

What's Bad About It

Sometimes the show gets very ahead of itself and we're forced to catch up to ideas in piecemeal. The great abstraction of the great debt that hangs over people is not actually explained - it's assumed we share inits burden. This leads to a sense of there being less moral or ethical certainty about how the characters behave. Anarchism is fine, but the sloganeering becomes hollowed out. The series also staggers into the realm of high end corporate politics and is a little less nimble with its grasp of how these things go. As such, it's hard to share in Angela's moral indignation when she should have been able to put it together herself.

The insight into the mechanism of money is shallower than it should be, considering how much importance is place don te topic. There isn't enough of the abstract exploration in this area, and way too much time is spent on the relationship between cash and criminality. I know it's a cyberpunk sort of vision that dates back to William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' ("Hello Wintermute!"), but it's also been a generation since 'Neuromancer'. It needs to be newer than it is in this series. The Future was Now back then, so it follows the Future Today has to be much newer.

What's Interesting About It

This show is Cyberpunk in the present tense. It is as if we've finally arrived at the future envisaged back in the mid-80s. There's a lot less Virtual Reality and 3D CGI whiz-bangery, but we've seen all that and it is in most part a parlour trick. The nitty gritty has gone back to hacking and in this series we can see that hacking is indeed the new language, new mode of thought. If we don't write code and manipulate networks of computers like a magician, we are effectively illiterate.

We've moved into a new era for espionage and encryption. The language and number games of the past are now wielded by a new literati and they are the technologists with code and structural access to computing. That, is the vision presented by this show, and it is startlingly refreshing. Hackers are the heroes in a world of technology, necessarily because in every human preoccupation, there is somebody who masters the field as an art.

Just as the climax of the event Bond movie 'Spectre' converged on hacking as a solution to the problem, the technological world demands that future denizens be hackers of some description. The best ones will rise like magic users. The Green Arrow in the Arrowverse and The Flash need somebody to hack for themes they can physically intrude upon a particular space. They need somebody to countermand the existing surveillance or work surveillance in such a way as to offer up intelligence. It is increasingly the modus operandi of the agent at large to have this support.

Naturally the logical next step is to make one of these hackers the main character - which was what Henry Dorsett Case was in 'Neuromancer', but it has taken until this show to really make that formulation work.

Operation Mayhem By Any Other Means

The challenge that exists for Elliot and his team are the same as 'Fight Club'. If you want to strike at the heart of capitalism as we know it, then the biggest way to do it is to erase debt. The good news is that modern world debt is all none virtual location, in the cyberspace of computers. So if you can physically destroy the computers, you can destroy the debt and therefore offer up the debt jubilee. Back in the 1990s, this computer apparatus was concentrated in a cluster of buildings, so the end of 'Fight Club' shows us those buildings being demolished by the Space Monkeys.

Mr. Robot takes that same premise but parses it out for how it would look today, and the way it looks is a lot more complicated than in 'Fight Club'. The degree to which our technological society has evolved around and incorporated computer technology is so vast and still expanding, it presents a greater deal of complexity in trying to achieve the debt forgiveness project.

Just as an aside, the ancient Babylonians and Phoenicians and Greeks practiced debt forgiveness. Through this, they were able to revitalise their empires. Rome did no such thing, but its refusal to forgive any debts resulted in the Dark Ages, according to the Monetarists. It's worth contemplating this notion. I wouldn't really benefit directly from such a debt forgiveness action because I hardly owe anything on my credit card and I have no mortgage. But you can imagine how big a deal erasing everybody's debt would be. It's no wonder the idea keeps coming back.

Secrets Are A Girl's Worst Enemy

I've been watching a good chunk of American TV lately, and there seems to be a repeating pattern. The main character has a special talent, but with it comes a secret. Sometimes it is that they are masked heroes like Arrow, The Flash, and Daredevil. In other shows like 'Suits' and 'Bloodlines', it is that the character in question has a peculiar secret that needs to be protected.

What inevitably happens is a scene where the girlfriend/love interest/wife gets mightily upset because they're not being told the whole truth. They demand to know the truth because there should bene secrets in a relationship, they reason and plead and nag. Of course, it happens in this show as well. Having seen a great bunch of these, I'm inclined think there must be some screenwriting guru who is advocating this trope.

Movie Doubles - 'Bridge of Spies' & 'Pawn Sacrifice'

Cold War Nostalgia




Today's Movie Double is from two movies on Fetch TV, back-to-back, about how the Cold War was engaged. 'Bridge of Spies' is about how significant spies were exchanged, as all parties pretended there was no quid pro quo when it was all about a quid pro quo; and 'Pawn Sacrifice' is about Bobby Fischer's epic win over Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972. Both films feature a tremendous amount of ambient paranoia about the communist Russians and weave their stories through the tacit embrace of the paranoia of that era.

Both are true stories - though the usual caveat is that they're true-stories-loosely-based-on-fact. The looseness of the 'loosely' hangs pretty loose with both films, but they make for good entertainment.

Steven Spielberg seems hell-bent on recreating the images of his youth through his film about the late 1950s and easy 1960s. Front and centre to the story is the threat of mutually assured destruction through nuclear war. To avoid the war, the participants must step back just a little bit from their ideological rhetoric, and as it turns out the main character played by Tom Hanks gets to walk that distance the longest because he's a man of American Principle. It's actually quite ra-ra about America, even though the CIA agents that help him seem to want to negotiate for part of that principle.

Edward Zwick's film by contrast seems to delve deeper into the paranoia infecting the mind of the protagonist Bobby Fischer, who plays off against the Russian cheese master in a surrogate confrontation in the Cold War.  If War is diplomacy through other means, then it stands to reason that under Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios, Chess is War through other means. In a very unnatural way, the paranoia of the US government becomes the paranoia of the intensely unhealthy mind. It's hard to say for sure whether Bobby Fischer would become the kind of paranoiac he became had he lived in another time. Perhaps it is the contention of the film that Bobby Fischer too was a figure rooted in his era when at least a little bit of paranoia was healthy trait.

America As Inept Underdogs

In both films, American engagement with the Russians seems to come from a position of relative innocence and amateurish engagement with the problem. In order to negotiate the exchange of spies, the Americans send in a civilian lawyer with plausible deniability of its own involvement. The Russians are happy to engage with James Donovan at the state level, accepting his negotiation with the tacit knowledge that they reindexed dealing with the US Government.

Similarly, there is a sense in 'Pawn Sacrifice' where the American chess fraternity is amateurish and disorganised compared to the state-sponsored prestige teams from Russia. Thus it falls to Bobby Fischer to try and beat these Russian chess masters, as an individual. It is evident that the US Government has tremendous interest in Fischer doing well, but it cloaks itself in the same plausible deniability it bestows upon James Donovan.

One imagines this positioning of America as a kind of naive underdog suits the narrative for both films where the seemingly ordinary guy manages to secure the right deal, or the ingenious individual triumphs over the collective that is the Soviet Republic. It's a bit cheesy because it understates the actual power America exercised during the Mid-Twentieth Century.

It is also questionable if Bobby Fischer's win over the world champion would have been such a seminal moment had the grand master at the time been from India or Africa. Without the context where the prestige of the state is on the line, the conflict in the story would have weighed less to the world. The drama was heightened exactly because the oppose number Boris Spassky came from Russia.Yet in an evenly matched contest of state power that was the Cold War who can reasonably claim America was the underdog?

Their Paranoia Is Our Paranoia And Vice Versa

The sense of pervasive paranoia of the 50s and 60s is essentially the backdrop to both films. Looking back on the era, it is easy to imagine that the Americans looking at how the Russians finished off the Germans in brutal fashion decided the Russians were truly frightening. Equally, had the Russians looked closely at how the Americans finished off the Japanese in the Pacific theatre, then they equally would have had cause fro alarm. That mutual suspicion would have played out equally through the post-World War II era as both sides developed their nuclear arsenal and had to ponder the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine.

The public that surrounds James Donovan in 'Bridge of Spies' is palpably scared. The children are scared of nuclear war, the adults are scared of communism. Even being the lawyer to represent a Russian spy is enough to elicit the violent response of the mob. It's not that far from the terrain of Atticus Finch in 'To Kill A Mockingbird'. It is easily conceivable that somebody growing up in this climate of fear ends up with the paranoid thinking that sees conspiracy everywhere. It's natural to to be paranoid when the state exercises paranoia as default option - and so the Bobby Fischer we see in 'Pawn Sacrifice' is a prisoner of his own fears.

The real Fisher seems to have been a fan of Hitler and more of a self-loathing Jewish person. It's hard to come at how somebody turns into that as well as one of the greatest chess masters ever, but then there's nothing to say these things are mutually exclusive or that Fischer saw any problem with it. The film is, if anything, a little light on the questionable ideas that informed the personality of Bobby Fischer. In any case, "paranoid nutcase" seems to have been the best description of Fischer, and that part seems eminently the product of the era in which he came to maturity; The unintended consequence of the Cold War as propaganda management where a citizen was driven nuts by the ramifications of the Cold War.

The Better Self

The logic of the Cold War is pretty unforgiving, and the courting dance of spies negotiating for their respective states has something of a zero-sum game about them. Each and every escalation in threats of violence is reciprocated with an equivalent or higher threat of violence. The incremental shift upwards is like an endless game of poker with the chips forever being mounted up as the players 'raise", but never being able to "call" because of Mutually Assured Destruction. To "win" in this scenario means the same as losing, so the necessary enterprise is to prolong the game rather than rush to its conclusion.

In this context, Tom Hanks' James Donovan makes a point of appealing to people's better selves. Whether it be an anti-communist judge or the Supreme Court or the CIA or the Russian KGB counterparts, he is constantly appealing to people to make a better judgment, to behave in light of their better selves. He is persuasive, although it might be Spielberg's deft hand at manipulating the audience into thinking that Donovan is a deft hand. (Speaking from personal experience, you're unlikely to be able to appeal to your horrible boss that way). Nonetheless the story of 'Bridge of Spies' depends upon the fact that even the hardened negotiators of the KGB and East German Stasi are willing to be their better selves to make the deal stick.

Of course a similar moment appears in 'Pawn Sacrifice' where Bobby Fischer's lawyer friend Paul appeals to Bobby to be his better self. This being Bobby Fischer, his better self turns out to be a single-minded but singularly brilliant chess player and nothing else. It's a bit sad that that is the entirety of Bobby Fischer's better self, but it may also be an indictment of the Cold War that produced such a warped individual. As we're shown in glimpses, it's not as if Boris Spassky is any less crazy as a result of his chess career undertaken in the shadow of the Soviet state.

The Anti-Climactic Climax

The funny thing about both these films is that the climax is so subtle it's almost non-existent. The big moment in 'Bridge of Spies' consists of three people crossing a couple of bridges on foot. The big moment in 'Pawn Sacrifice' is a chess move that convinces Spassky he has lost the game, prompting him to get up and applaud Bobby Fischer. As cinematic moments go, it's a far cry from the world of comic book movies that dominates the box office these days, where you know the climax is going on because buildings explode and cars flip and the sound track roars with orchestral music at a crescendo. There's none of that in either of these films. I don't know if this subtlety is the new riposte to an American cinema mainstream where the content has gone completely juvenile and stunted - but it was certainly refreshing to see, in both these films.

In the olden days it used to be Spielberg making the kiddie content and earning himself critical scorn. Times have sure changed when Spielberg is the elder statesman serving up content for the adult table.

Quick Shots - 15/Feb2016

'Black Mass' - a.k.a. The Depp-arted

The Whitey Bolger story starring Johnny Depp as the eponymous criminal, is a pretty tedious movie. Especially after 'The Departed'. 'The Departed' might have been a little silly in parts but it was  more entertaining, thanks to its source material also being the Hong Kong hit movie 'Infernal Affairs'.
As it is, this one goes through the motions with not much energy, and you do get the feeling as to why this story turned into 'The Departed' but the truthiness story of this one is nowhere near as exciting, gripping or intriguing as the outright lie that was 'The Departed'.

It's going to be debated for a long time whether the Academy fucked up in not giving Martin Scorsese any Oscars for his classics and then sheepishly handing him is director Oscar for 'The Departed; but this one, is simply tedious and unimaginative and makes the Scorsese movie look like a masterpiece. And they managed to do the 70s wrong - this might be its worst sin. It's generally a crappy movie, even with the amazing talent assembled to be in it.

'Inherent Vice'

A Paul Thomas Anderson film set in the West Coast of the USA during the early 1970s, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the down and out private eye. Should have been much more interesting than this turned out to be. It's not funny, it's not well put together as a private eye movie, even with echoes of Elliot Gould's turn in 'The Long Goodbye'; it hardly makes any bloody sense. The hair's nice and the cars are cool but as 70s movies goes, this too is a fail.

I wanted it to be. There are some promising moments, but it never really builds towards anything. It abdicates from its responsibility to tell a meaningful story. Instead it loses itself in the stage flow it creates for itself. When it ends, I drew a sigh of relief because I certainly couldn't take it any more.

'Show Me A Hero'

Oscar Isaac as the mayor of Yonkers, fighting for desegregation an public housing. That description doesn't exactly set the imagination alight, but it turns out to be a very interesting series about the nature of public housing and prejudice. Some of it is a bit didactic and there are stretches where it's hard to care about everybody, but eventually the mosaic of stories comes together and builds a bigger picture of the significance of the housing. The 80s and 90s look like the distant past in this series. I guess they now are, but it's really quite acutely nostalgic watching this series.

Bob Balaban and Winona Ryder are in it, which is an interesting bonus.

'Fargo' Season 2

This is how you do the 70s well. In fact, the whole damn thing is amazing. The soundtrack is pumping and it has some beautiful performances from the whole cast. Great writing, great directing, great editing, not much you can fault about this season of 'Fargo'. Very witty, very stylish.
If you have not seen this, go watch it.  Don't waste time on 'Black Mass' or 'Inherent Vice', this is where your 70s fix can be found.

Gang warfare on the screen hasn't been quite this visceral in a long time, and the mixed vernacular of the narrative makes for a heady cocktail of black humoured fun and wanton gun violence. It is simply breathtaking how the show goes from quiet and macabre to head-spinningly violent and bizarre. Unlike the stilted feel of the first season, this season has a fluidity and easiness of narrative that just keeps dragging you along.

I want to come back and do a proper entry on this one. It's really good.

'Supergirl'

This is also really good. The pre-season trailers were already looking good, but this series sure has the goods. As DC comic universe items go, this is much more fun than 'Gotham'. Melissa Benoist as the main character Kara/Supergirl is a standout. The rest of the cast is a bit shaky except for Calista Flockhart who shows the way. Who would have thought Allie McBeal would have amounted  to much, but no, Flockhart makes a great foil for Benoist's dorky straight female-Clarke-Kent routine.

Dean Cain and Helen Slater make appearances as the foster parents of Kara, which is kind of cute, but also in the tradition of previous Superman cast members that make an appearance in the new iterations. I know this will get howls of sexism thrown at me but... Benoist punches "like a girl"; but that's probably the point, seeing that she's Supergirl and not Superwoman.

'House of Cards' Season 3 - Netflix

What's The Point of Getting Netflix?

Rhetorical. It's to binge watch the amazing 'House of Cards'. Netflix has finally arrived in Australia and you can get a hold of it through Fetch TV, which is just swell because it's like having 2 suppliers on the one box. I guess that's what it is.

So yay Netflix and yay Fetch TV. Spoiler alert! I might spill something.

What's Good About It

Now in its third season, Frank Underwood is the President, and we get to see just what kind of policy maven he actually is. The cut and thrust being a caretaker President makes for good viewing. As with the previous seasons the acting is superb an the directing remains stylistically consistent from episode to episode. The tension mounts ever so slowly, and there's quite a lot of intrigue unfolding before our eyes which makes for much brain-teasing fun.

Francis now has a nemesis in the Russian President Viktor Petrov, a character that is a flimsily-loosely based on Vladimir Putin but is much taller. He also has a domestic rival in Heather Dunbar who is running against him in the 2016 election, and she too presents well. Frank is doing this without Doug who is in a long B-plot of his own through the season. So Frank is doing a lot of stuff, even as his own trusty marriage to Claire begins to fray.

The dramatic tension is always high and the intrigues keep you wondering so they've stuck to the method of the earlier seasons, and it works very well.

What's Bad About It

There are limits to what Frank can do given his method in his rise to power. This gives rise to a lot of wheeling and dealing scenes that are subtle and expository, but it's too much like 'The West Wing' without a plan. Frank wings it a lot, and every time he does, you sort of wince. You hope Barack Obama doesn't just wing it like this. You know George W Bush must have winged it much like this - and his record speaks for itself.

The policies Frank pursues are also bad. They're not picaresque bad, they're just flat out disagreeably awful. I'll go into it a bit later but basically it's not much fun rooting for a bad guy to win if his plan is something that you think is not exactly great. After all it would be hard to root for a film about say, the Nazis in power because you'd inevitably have to discuss the Final Solution and that's just the worst of a government full of bad policies.

It's one thing to root for the bad guy to get to the top through dastardly tricks he winningly shares with the audience. It's another when he then goes off and becomes a President that's worse than Nixon. It was hard rooting for or sympathising with Nixon in Oliver Stone's 'Nixon' film. It's hard to feel much for Frank when he bangs on with crappy policy.

What's Interesting About It

The show seems to be straining at the seams. It wants to tell us so much more and go into politics itself much more but it can't without looking like other shows and films. Frank Underwood then does something drastic and crazy but in most part it comes across as hokey. What we seem to be finding out about Frank in Season 3 is that for all his ambition and gusto and conniving and scheming, the Presidency itself is his endpoint of the Peter Principle. He is good enough to rise to the office but having achieved it, he is not up to it.

In this we can sort of see echoes of 'Richard III' by Shakespeare where they got the device of the bad guy main character addressing the audience. Richard III himself came to power under cloudy circumstances and didn't really reign for long, and was brought down by a rebellion; from which you can draw a certain conclusion that he couldn't have been terribly good at the King-ing business. Frank Underwood does whole lot less of it in this season because... well, he looks awfully busy; too busy even to talk to us.

The end of Season 3 leaves you with a cliff hanger of sorts but having sat through this season, I thought the road ahead isn't terribly long for this show. The UK Version had 3 seasons and finished with Francis Urquhart getting assassinated and turned into some kind of martyr for politics. In the case of Urquhart, the character starts as a conniving conservative and ends up as a kind of full blown fascist so you don't mourn for him so much as feel relieved the whole damn show is over. Frank Underwood starts off as a Southern Democrat so you wonder just how far to the right he can go, and what exactly that means.

The Third Pole

As dumb and stifling as the two party system is and the kind of politics it engenders, from time to time it throws up people who want to start a third pole. Some of these are well-meaning like the Australian Democrats of old or Malcolm Fraser who was trying to put something together in his dying days. But other instances they seem to be Trojan Horses for the Far Right and lunar Right. Like Ross Perot or the Golden Dawn in Greece. The point is, most instances of the third Pole seem to be far right insurrections, posing as centrists sitting between the two parties.

Frank's positioning of his policies are deeply, deeply suspect. He wants to get rid of welfare, raid the coffers for emergency relief and just employ people or pay employers to employ people. it's fanciful as the economics is crackpot. Frank wants 100% employment and there is no discussion of what that would mean. He is also against minimum wages because that would limit the number of people getting jobs. It's like the corporatist heaven where people can be fired at will, and be totally fungible. Naturally people resist the inanity of this vision, but somehow Frank Underwood is totally convinced this is the best policy direction.

The subsequent gyrations involved in craving for this crappy third-pole-fascist policy takes up a lot of screen time and he keeps telling us this is the legacy wants to leave behind. Dismantling the welfare state and replacing it with guaranteed 100% employment: The ultimate small-government fetishists' dream. When you consider such policies essentially drive labour out of its own negotiating table and sends them to the below-poverty-line wages of Walmart, you wonder how this could even be considered by the show runners.

In The Absence Of Marxism

Over the years - thanks to Facebook and such - I've come to realise just how distant Marxist theory is from American political thinking. What's even more interesting is how the US Democrats try to pose as the party of the broader Left without any actual theoretical framework except an old kind of small 'l' liberalism. As such, the US Democrats have rarely taken a policy framework that could alleviate the issues of the working poor which has existed since Reagan came to power.

Watching 'House of Cards' unfold in the US has been far more enlightening as to just how little framing goes into the thinking over policy. It's free, but it's un-moored so it is oblivious of its drift to the right. If nothing else, Marxist theory would give some of these policy makers a kind of sextant to know just how far off the middle they are drifting. But the ingrained fear of a Godless communism has made any consideration of Karl Marx, all but nought. In its place is an absurd kind of identity politics that allegedly starts with the individual, with a bloated sense self-importance typical of identity politics. If this is black rappers from Compton or the LGBTQ population in San Francisco, that's one thing. But white southerners bearing the Confederate flag trying to assert identity politics only serves to show how stupid identity politics is when pursued to the reductio ad absurdum.

Frank Underwood's position is that if everybody had jobs, they would have the freedom to exercise their identity politics to the full. In other words, he himself might not be a racist, but he supports the ideological framework that gives rise to racism in the absence of Marxist analysis. And he's supposed to be from the US Democrats. Honestly, that is so stupid, but he seems totally unaware of where that would all go. The problem right there is that when I watch the show, I'm smarter than the allegedly smart main character; and that makes it pretty boring.  The rest of it becomes a sort of choreographed sequence of political tactics, but his centrepiece policy really is fucked.

He really is like Shakespeare's 'Richard III' - truly deserving of a terrible end.

Cheering For Psychopaths

Frank Underwood is of course a psychopath so the picaresque essentially works on cheering on the psycho, in the same way we did that for 'Dexter', except he's not killing one or two people, he's killing swathes of people from the seat of power as President. Viktor, the re-imagined Putin is equally a psycho who only understands power through the prism of Machiavelli's 'The Prince' but with a further discount on scruples. Frank's wife Claire remains a psychopath as well. Heather Dunbar says all the right things but she has hints of psychopathy as well. After three seasons I'm a little fatigued with the constant cognitive dissonance of cheering or spending time observing these head cases. What used to be edgy is now grating. What used to be intriguing is now blatantly obnoxious.

Maybe this is the point the show is trying to make; that it takes a genuine psycho to rise to the top and get things done, and this is what is really rewarded in democracy. Plato thought so, so it's not a new idea, but you'd think there was something a bit more to go on than psychopathy. At this stage I'm longing and waiting for the moment Frank is assassinated, but I guess Season 4 is going to be about how he wins re-election and goes onto a second term.

It is however interesting in how it exposes the frailties of American political thought. They're a lot more interested in politics than policy.

"You're Entitled To Nothing."

If you thought TonyAbbott and WTE Joe Hockey saying this kind of stuff was going to lead to a more egalitarian society, you were wrong. Tony and WTE Joe proceeded to devise the least fair budget in the short history of Australia. Which gives rise to the notion that people who bang on about entitlements are those who are most motivated to hold on to their own entitlements while stamping out the entitlements of others. This is the basic nature of politics in a zero-sum game, and this rhetoric is true of both sides of politics. When Leftists talk about ending entitlements, they're talking about Private school funding and special tax rates for the rich and franking credits on dividends and so on, without giving up on any of the Left's favourite programs.

Rightists are of course, worse. Nobody seems to think about what Machiavelli wrote in his 'Discourses' but it's worth noting that the baseline clause of good government is stability, the second clause is building the benefits to maximum number of people in its constituency. Taking away benefits and replacing it with nothing isn't good government.

Of course it goes without any surprise that Frank Underwood kicks off his national address with "In this life you are entitled to nothing." It's true in a libertarian sense but a society run on libertarian sense is no society at all. Small Government is a myth concocted by people who think governments are run like corporations. Worse still, the psychopathic end of this crowd think that if you could cut government services altogether and privatise everything, government would be reduced to nothing. The purest of Libertarians would like government stop and simply disappear; the US Republicans seem to want to cut it so there's nothing but the military and the police and a perpetual war on drugs and terror. The Australian Coalition Government wants to cut the government in such a way that all tax dollars collected go to service their class only.
Frank Underwood wants to dismantle welfare and make everybody work for less than poverty wages.

While one isn't entitled to anything in particular, you'd think one's government would be doing better than sending us back to the 18th century. In the real world, this means we really should be sacking this Coalition government in Australia on grounds of lack of competence.