In Which There Is Nothing To Be Afraid Of

Lady Banjo Eyes

by DICK CHENEY

Breaking Bad
creator Vince Gilligan

True Blood
creator Alan Ball

Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is distracted from his job for a moment, but no more. On his 51st birthday, his wife slowly walks, fully-clothed, into the family pool. She can't get good with the way things are now that Walt is running his own business. She chainsmokes in the home, she begs for his cancer to return, she can barely manage to bake a chocolate cake. Her behavior is so exaggerated that she has turned into the Danielle Steele version of an adulterous wife.

It's a lot harder to write a character sketch like this about the protagonists in the eighteenth season of HBO's True Blood. What's that you say? It only feels like the eighteenth season? No matter. The typical scene on True Blood lasts only the thirty or forty seconds it might take you to get bored of it before moving onto the next character. It's like skipping from YouTube to YouTube, and in every episode, there are over a thousand.

not casting Fred Savage as Godric was an almost unforgivable mistake

The character I least understand on True Blood is Eric Northman. When the show began he was completely committed to the superiority of vampires over humans, now he walks around acting like he's Saint Ignatius. You have never seen a man so completely convinced there is no vampire god. He's become a Christian message board troll who waits for someone to espouse their faith in under 130 characters and then chimes in with a "Not likely!"

Understanding the motivations of a drama's personages is the first step to empathizing with their predicament. I almost admire how much True Blood eschews this. The only time it has its characters even react to the madness that surrounds them is when they cry afterwards. By the next episode, they are generally fine. The rule on True Blood - that everyone gets a storyline - extends even to the most peripheral characters, especially if they were kind enough to offer Alan Ball an on-set blowjob.

Alan Ball and Anna Paquin will not be doing any USO tours, of that much we can be certain

After a time, playing with the lives of fictional people becomes like moving things around on your desk. Alan Ball hates God so completely he had to become him.

Everything bad on True Blood is associated with religion, even the eating of a child. Ball believes that faith is the corruptor, the scapegoat instrument by which evil is wrought. His most sincere and good-willed individuals on the show are completely without faith; they feel lost in the world as he does, and simply by virtue of not knowing exactly what they are, are blessed and imagined as heroes.

No such luck for Walter White. He spent his entire life before he got brain cancer afraid of things, unable to decide who he was or what he should be doing with his life. Once he realized that, his new problems began.

I have lived longer than anyone I have talked about so far in this essai besides Eric Northman. One of mankind's most enduring cliches is that success comes with a price. (This cliche was first associated with Jesus, and later, Kristen Stewart.)

Whatever truth there is in this statement exists completely outside the realm of human experience. For those who aren't successsful, no price is too high. And for those who are successful, like the creators of Breaking Bad and True Blood, there must be some other reason for their unhappiness, an explanation that lies outside themselves. If they actually found they liked being miserable, success would feel like a curse.

taking Nancy Pelosi's dream and bringing it to life

Basically, it's easy to forget that you are the one who knocks. Many years ago my daughter came to me and explained that one of her classmates was afraid of me. What was I going to do about that? I offered to meet the young man, and he came over to our house for dinner. I asked him if he still felt afraid of me. "No," he said. I told him to wait.

Walter White is happy, perhaps the happiest he's ever been, but there is no one to enjoy it with him. Is this what it is truly like to run a critically acclaimed television series? Must there be a feeling in everything that they will be found out as a fraud, a charlatan? Did Matthew Weiner put his blood in a syringe and infect everyone in Hollywood with his identical insecurities?

I noticed some years ago that I find myself happier in the company of sad people, simply by comparison. And when I meet truly happy people - Oliver North comes to mind - I feel sorry for myself, that I cannot be as they are. Even more astonishing is that I am allowed to behave this way by the people in my life.

Beel, drain this woman while I watch the uneven bars

There might be another reason that this cliche keeps reoccuring in our popular fictions. Vampire leader Salome Agrippa (Valentina Cervi) has quickly become the worst character on True Blood. Her scenes are completely boring; she speaks with a vague monotone that is supposed to come off as threatening but in reality just lulls the viewer to sleep. Her idea of acting consists of brushing back her bangs. If I have to view her bare chest one more time, I'm going to start missing the acting "skills" of the guy who played Lafayette's top.

But besides the fact that Salome can't act and looks completely unappealing without clothes, the various travails of Salome don't interest me or my wife because she is truly satisfied with herself. Salome is incapable of change. Eventually this will be her downfall as she tries to take over the world for her vampire God, but until then I guess I have to keep watching Bill (Stephen Moyer) penetrating her with his ass raised high in the air, like he's about to hammer a nail.

you killed off Christopher Meloni FOR THIS?

True Blood and Breaking Bad, as they ascended to their first heights, made a point of portraying strong and powerful women. Now that these dramas near their conclusion, these women are actually revealed only as exceptions to the general rule of female archetypes - power and vulnerability can no longer exist within one human person. There may be sexism behind this, and I'm sure there is, but I can suggest another cause as well.

sexism, yoWhen a man changes his mind, or becomes something different than what he is, it is not a betrayal. This is expected of him: it happens when he begins a household, settles down with his partner, has children. These are all changes for him, and the responsiblities are said to improve who he is.

When these things happen to a woman, it is thought to be no more than a natural extension of herself. Lies. This vicious canard is completely subsumed in how men think of the opposite sex. But the reality is not that women aren't changed by the contours of family and marriage. It is that, on a conscious or even subconscious level, women are better at understanding what change implies than men will ever be.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the former vice president of the United States. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about the beginning of Breaking Bad's season.

"We Are Not Good People" - Bloc Party (mp3)

"Octopus" - Bloc Party (mp3)

The new album from Bloc Party is entitled Four, and it will be released on August 20th.

In Which We Charm Absolutely No One

Notes on Margaret

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

Margaret
dir. Kenneth Lonergan
150 minutes

Kenneth Lonergan’s hold on the countless ways we fail to communicate is Margaret’s most bewitching coup. Rather than gaining mileage from what is unsaid, his teenage protagonist, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) clashes with each person in her ever-growing sphere as she tries to reconcile with a fatal bus accident in which she feels partly responsible.

Discovery, as Lonergan lays bare, is often achieved with fight. Shushing, shouting, crying, dismissive arm-waving, passively listening, correcting someone’s grammar, mimicking, misunderstandings, storming out and slamming doors, all inch Lisa further from resolve but closer to breaking through her childhood safeties and habitat, the Upper West Side — a character unto itself in Margaret.

Anna Paquin is terrific as a teenage girl. She struts to her desk. She pouts. She still has baby fat. Her skirt is too short and her henley shirts, too tight, but with stretched sleeves to pull over her hands in more contemplative, panicked moments. Her hair is greasy at the roots. Her eyeliner, reapplied regularly. Her eyebrows are over plucked and her stare is restless no matter the emotion — eagerness turned frustration, grief turned anger. Her attitude thaws with adults who outdo her wit or minutes before she loses her virginity.

On screen, teenage rebellion is charming. But not Lisa Cohen’s. Hers is not easy to look at — it overcompensates, it’s at times ugly and a bit ridiculous. It’s authentic. For years on screen, Kirsten Dunst sought to be Lisa Cohen.

In one scene she wanders drunkenly around a party, stumbling from a boy named Paul to another boy named Darren. She is bold and willing with Paul in the bathroom but it’s the way her body flops down on the floor in the hallway to make-out with Darren, only to struggle as she gets up, that is exact.

Lisa Cohen is both the heroine in a 19^th century novel and a character from a post 9/11 graphic novel.

Margaret is cut somewhat messily; some jumps are more abrasive than others. In this way, everyone’s story is told alongside Lisa’s. Everyone is defenceless, including the audience.

She dismisses a boy’s phone call and we are immediately dropped in his bedroom where he sits on the edge of his bed, crying beside his Pavement poster.

A conference call with lawyers and loved ones, and Lisa, contrasts with three New York buildings — Lisa’s urgency calmed momentarily, not by a parent or a friend, but by her city.

“What’s Indiana like?” Lisa inches in to ask her teacher. They are sitting on the couch in his sublet. Seconds later the camera cuts away, and in the next scene, she stands at his front door as he apologizes for what just happened.   

Like Maurice Pialat in A Nos Amours, who too directs and plays the father of a teenage daughter, Lonergan is Karl, Lisa’s dad who lives in California, remarried. Shots of Karl pacing outside his beachside house as he speaks somewhat idly to his daughter, contrast with her relentlessly shifting world. His sky is blue and empty while wide shots of Lisa walking home after school are peopled and hectic — a huddle of boys part as she digs her hands in her skirt pockets and passes them, bothered by the unwanted attention.

Margaret slows in parts to truly appraise emotions. Instead of dialogue as a tool used to forward plot, it rationalizes a character’s feelings. Lisa’s mother, Joan (J. Smith-Cameron) is dating a man named Ramon played by Jean Reno. One night she asks Lisa’s opinion about a date outfit. Their exchange is immediately cruel and spirals as if on each side, the breaks have jammed. But neither is in fact mad. Both are hurting and experiencing the kind of homelessness only possible in one’s own home, at the end of a week that crawled with failed attempts. A mother readying herself for a date is no match for a daughter afflicted with misunderstood angst.

Lonergan’s long takes ripen as Lisa’s emotions, no matter how sincere, heighten. It’s as if something on screen thickens, like batter, when the camera sticks with a conversation that at first appears to have no direction. It’s exhilarating. 

At an outside terrace, Paquin, Jeannie Berlin, who plays a dear friend of the deceased, and a lawyer meet for lunch. They discuss legal options. Lisa interrupts a number of times. Salads are served. It brought to mind a scene in Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours where three adult children, mourning the loss of their mother, discuss her will and the family’s summer home. They speak diagnostically much like in Margaret where emotions turn to equation. In both films, unglamorous details are entirely involving. 

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She last wrote in these pages about the city of Los Angeles. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Carolina" - The Gertrudes (mp3)

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In Which We Made Love Like Only Two Vampires Can

People Love Giving Redheads Tips

by MOLLY LAMBERT

True Blood barely conceals its softcore intentions these days. When they introduced yet another hot love interest for Sookie I realized they had given up the ghost of pretending this show was anything else besides a showcase for super hot men with muscular body types of all races. You know, like the X-Men or World Cup soccer.

If you think watching a main character with no real personality go through a bunch of different fantasy fulfillment scenarios mostly based around encountering sexual variety is just for chicks may I direct you to the ultimate male Mary Sue: Agent James Bond. Yeah yeah, he's the best spy in the world and he likes martinis or whatever but unless Sean Connery is playing him Bond's charisma is mostly implied. 

There is nothing people want more to than to get to know a group of fictional characters and then see them paired up in different romantic combinations. Audiences want sex scenes with backstories. They want to invest in characters and then see them fuck each other. This is why movie and television sex scenes are titillating in a way pornography can never be. As fantasies go, they are way more like real life.

It accounts for the enduring popularity of love triangles (keeping Archie comics in business since 1942) and explains why John Mayer said he wants to write fan fic for porn he watches. What is missing in pornography that is present in other kinds of fiction is an interior aspect to the characters. Television uses long form seriality to go deeper into characters and their connections, approximating actual relationships.  

When social boundaries are transgressed, they are often boundaries that have been carefully established and built up over time. That's why Rachel and Joey was such a big deal on Friends, because they'd managed not to fuck for eight seasons despite being the two hottest people on the show. Rachel should probably have picked Joey. She would have saved us a failed spinoff and spared Ross another failed marriage.

We don't even necessarily like to see romantic buildup paid off in fiction, because perversely enough often wanting is more pleasurable than having. Mulder and Scully sustained The X-Files through seven seasons by not fucking each other, and their sexual chemistry murks Bill and Sookie's, who we've actually seen have sex. 

In serialized television you are sometimes logging literally hundreds of hours with characters over the course of seasons. It's like getting to know people in real life, seeing their lives build and progress over time. The parasocial relationships people have with fictionalized characters are stronger than many real life relationships.

Even though the Twilight Saga is four books long and six hours of film deep, its characters are filled in with the most basic of details. Eclipse tries to remedy this by providing several backstories for its vamps and werewolves, but ultimately the dots connecting the characters from their pasts (Civil War) to the present (revenge) seem like Stephanie Meyer's rushed attempts to fill in blanks and pad out her romantic fantasy masturbation tale after exhausting ways to say that Edward is cold and sparkly.

What is with the Civil War obsession, vampire nerds? Brother against brother? Twilight fetishizes the Pacific Northwest but Stephanie Meyer also has a boner for the Confederacy. It is also probable that Stephanie Meyer was influenced by another Hollywood romantic blockbuster based off a "women's novel," Gone With The Wind. Either way, vampires and the antebellum South go together well because they are both steeped in decædance and romanticized heavily by a certain kind of nerdy girl.

Southern Gothic predates Anne Rice's vampire novels but Rice literalized the "gothic" part in her 1976 supernatural thriller Interview With The Vampire. Flannery O'Connor's depiction of the South as a place where freakishness and grotesquerie run rampant paved the pathway to Rice's supernatural New Orleans that currently leads True Blood's endless stream of magical vagrants just passing through Bon Temps.

Part of True Blood's fetishization of the South seems to have to do with a fantasy about simplicity. Jason Stackhouse is most often given this role of the idiot as truthsayer, but True Blood is prone to letting all its characters bear this out. In many ways it is exactly like Li'l Abner, a comic I was obsessed with as a kid.

In True Blood's version of the South, the racists always look like grimy rednecks, and small towns are pan-sexual rural oases. How fucking bummed is Sam Merlotte going to be when Sookie is like "it's not that I don't like shapeshifters, it's just you."

Alan Ball may be from Georgia, but True Blood is Hollywood all the way. Bon Temps is just a super-horny Mayberry. Sookie Stackhouse has to choose between her brunette vampire fiance who is literally sort of corpse-like, a way hotter blond vampire with possible repressed Nazi tendencies, and now also a jacked as fuck hot beardo werewolf dude. Including the fan service dream sequence sex, chick gets laid as much as Don Draper. Maybe it's the alliterative names?

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is on tumblr and twitter. 

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