In Which There Is No Such Thing As Cocktails

Fictatorship

by DICK CHENEY

Tyrant
creator Gideon Raff 

Tyrant, the new series on FX from Homeland creator Gideon Raff, concerns yet another man with a white wife: Barry Al Fayeed. He could be almost anyone. Barry (Adam Rayner) is also a white man playing an Arab. Some of his relatives in the fictional land of Abbudin are also played by non-Arabs, certainly most of them are non-Muslims. He has returned from a cushy Californian life as an M.D. to his native land for his nephew's wedding.

It seems very daring to make a show about the Muslim world without ever mentioning Islam. It seems very daring to make a film set in any Muslim country when the sets and locations are so obviously Tel Aviv. It is this weird discomfiting feeling that Tyrant feeds off of, like crashing a wedding it turns out you were invited to all along. In fact, you are the guest of honor.

No one has ever regretted their choice of eyeshadow this much.

Any scene in Tyrant can be vaguely construed as offensive to someone. In one, Barry's teenage OTP eats some eggs for breakfast while staring at a photo of some children being killed. The metaphorical aspects were breathtaking. Other scenes push the boundaries even further, simulating the immense thrill we would get from watching Tom Cruise in an adaptation of Alex Haley's masterpiece The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

I'll take Pasadena, but to each his own. Some people even like Braavos.

It is good that we get this jaunty, impersonated thrill from the concept of Tyrant, because we do not get it from any of the show's white characters, Barry's wife and goofy children. Despite being the grandchildren of an impressively autocratic and disgusting dictator and sporting the lovely last name of Al Fayeed, Barry's kids know less than nothing about the Arab world. Having visited the area more a few times and read The Trouble With Islam (well, actually Lynne read it to me while I furiously thrashed myself), here is some of what I have learned about the area: 

1) They call a sandwich a cocktail, and there are no cocktails.

2) The only things they love about the United States are Dairy Queen and The Wolf Of Wall Street.

3) Women in the Arab world prefer showercourse, because of the lack of cleanup. It's too hot to extract come from sheets using a magnifying glass and the sun's rays.

They leave a lot to the imagination in this part of the world. Miley Cyrus is dead there.

4) If the country you are in has a q in its name, or a vowel at the end of it, you are most probably in deep shit.

5) Wear a hat, or failing that, a burqa.

6) Do not, I repeat, do not, marry a white woman.

7) Jerry Seinfeld was a god-fearing Muslim until Kramer came into the picture, forcing him to go to synagogue and make that dreadful webseries.

Wait, Dad was a horrific dictator? I'm totally surprised. OK, let's go jetskiing past that mass grave.

Each episode of Tyrant consists of someone being a real blockheaded poopsicle, usually Barry's brother Jamal (Ashraf Barhom), who takes over for his Castro-esque father to lead Abbudin into the 21st century. Barry remonstrates Jamal with typical brotherly insults and jibes, like, "You're such a penis head!" and "You murdered over 50 people, Jamal, gosh!" 

"Make her eyebrows look more Semitic! Claire Danes had no problem doing this."

It's hard to imagine anyone giving up a thriving pediatric practice in Pasadena for this madness. Barry's mother is still alive, and she is still wearing the dress that she bought in 1971:

Like a really poorly dressed West Wing

She tells him that he shouldn't be so hard on his father, and then she has no idea why he ran off to America. After he responds, "All the murdering," she nods and grooms her armpit hair with a lovely diamond-encrusted camel-hair brush.

Eventually Barry's wife starts to get a bit antsy. She throws a variety of bon mots his way, e.g. "You'll never find a bottle blonde woman in this country," and "The different colors in your brother's beard make me absolutely nauseous." She did not sign up to be the wife of an Arab scion; she thought she was just marrying a pseudo-ethnic man with a mysterious past that would never be brought up again. How do you think I got Lynne to marry me?

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He has a lot invested in the nation of Jordan, so don't set any TV series there, Mr. Gideon Raff.

the more of an asshole you are, the better dots look on your fabrics.

"Spirited Away (acoustic)" - Lily & Madeleine (mp3)

"Goodbye to Anyone (acoustic)" - Lily & Madeleine (mp3)

In Which We Speak In The Parlance Of The Times

Children of the Damned

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Homeland
creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa

As the premiere of the third season of Homeland approached, Showtime released a trailer that left me fretting over not only the ratio of Nick Brody to Carrie Mathison airtime but also how much more fun than her he looked to be having (jungle shootouts beat being handcuffed to a hospital bed every time). Thankfully Abu Nazir’s Sherif Meshad’s shadowy network stepped in and leaked the first episode, because piracy funds terrorism, and it’s Brody-free! Here are some minor spoilers.

As the season begins, it’s approximately two months following the bombing at Langley and there’s no place like home — where Carrie’s assembling more wall-sized collages, Dana Brody is returning from an inpatient treatment program, and Saul Berenson, now the acting head of the CIA, is overseeing the planning of an Oz-codenamed mission that has Peter Quinn in Caracas building bombs for the season’s opening scene.

Our first look at Carrie is as she is beginning her testimony before a Senate committee investigating the attack that wants to know why Congressman Brody had been given immunity (and what from) by the CIA in exchange for information and to account for her whereabouts the 14 hours after the bombing that she was missing. Because of Carrie’s track record for respecting authority, we know this is going to go pleasantly. Also the committee’s chairman, a Senator Andrew Lockhart, is like Arlen Specter hell-bent on character assassination, but more smug about it. Carrie, who no longer fears the skepticism of her superiors after last season’s validation, really gives the committee something to tut-tut over when she tells them that she thinks Brody is innocent.

Between her testimony and erratic notes (which look exactly like the ones I take for writing these recaps), the agency lawyer decides Carrie should plead the Fifth. Her dad is worried too; she’s off her lithium and boozing hard. The station chief appointment Carrie was given at the end of last season apparently never materialized, and her current role at the CIA is ambiguous. Unfortunately it’s looking like the role might be that of scapegoat, as leaks from inside the agency threaten to out her as the disgraced congressman’s mentally unstable lover and hold her culpable in the attack.

Is it worth pointing out that Carrie’s constant “I missed something” self-flagellation is seen as a sign of her mental instability while at the same time everyone in the government is champing at the bit to blame her for not preventing the bombing? She’s crazy to hold herself accountable for the actions of terrorists, but it’s not crazy for those in charge to do the same.

Meanwhile, the only other person who believes in Brody’s innocence, his daughter Dana, is completing her last day of therapy after attempting suicide. And even though the Brody family is still hounded by the press and receiving death threats, she seems like any other moody and horny teen who experiments with sexting, instead of one whose father is America’s most wanted and who was an accomplice to vehicular manslaughter.

As the season progresses we’ll see whether or not tensions at home will derail Dana’s recovery. With the family’s military paycheck and benefits revoked, Jessica considers dusting off the accounting degree to provide financially for the family and get time away from her mother, who has moved in (apparently devoted “uncle” Mike Faber is no longer so devoted). 

With Carrie running around D.C. in a frenetic search for Brody, last year’s black ops supervisor Dar Adal has cozied up to Saul, advising him on how to repair the CIA’s reputation. Catering to Capitol Hill politics has never been his forte (but it is why he’s so likable!) and the pressure of it has paralyzed Saul’s decision-making abilities as it comes time for him to move forward on an operation that, if successful, would wipe out the six individuals (minus Brody) responsible for planning and executing the Langley attacks for professional terrorist Majid Javadi, or the Magician, as he’s known in espionage parlance.

At home, bringing the same gravitas to drinking whiskey as he does to eating peanut butter, Saul gets drunk and mulls over the decision while his estranged wife Mira, returned from Mumbai, puts him to bed. For the second time in the episode we hear a character talk about “taking it one day at a time” in the wake of the bombing. Here it’s Saul and Mira’s strategy for reconciling their marriage; earlier it was Dana in group therapy discussing how to cope once she returns home. 

The next day, Saul authorizes the mission (which neither Carrie nor agent Danny Galvez, who we’re assuming died at Vice President Walden’s funeral with director Estes last season, are involved in) and for 20 minutes the fate of America’s clandestine service depends on whether or not Peter Quinn can assassinate his target, codenamed Tin Man. During the operation, Quinn accidentally shoots the Tin Man’s son, a boy who looks like Brody’s surrogate one, Issa. I hope this is a passing coincidence and not the show setting us up for some message about civilian deaths in drone versus on-the-ground strikes. Also, terrorists, stop having kids! Things wrap up with Saul’s turn in the Senate committee hotseat.

The episode made good use of the show’s talented cast by focusing on how the characters grappled with the consequences of the Langley attack and the void left by Brody’s disappearance. It has me especially anticipating how the dynamic of Carrie and Saul’s relationship, which has always been more interesting than the relationship between her and Brody, shifts.

While my investment in the Brody family is modest, Dana’s maturing sense of self and intimacy could make for an engaging comparison to the adult relationships in the show. In my idealized version of Homeland, this season provokes thoughtful discussion of the idea that one “hysterical” woman’s sexuality could endanger an entire nation. But I’ll settle for suspenseful, plausible cloak-and-dagger drama.

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the opal ring.

"Man Down" - Kalax (mp3)

"Midnight Rage" - Kalax (mp3)

The new ep from Kalax is entitled Journey and you can find his soundcloud here.

In Which There Are No Secrets Now

The Sixteenth Floor

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Homeland
creator Gideon Rath

It’s impossible to know for sure given the CIA’s classified records, but James Forrestal was perhaps the first person involved in its operation to go mad. As the first secretary of defense, Forrestal was instrumental in the creation of covert operations at the CIA when the department was established in 1947. By all accounts he was an obsessive workaholic and as such didn’t take it well when he was fired by President Truman in 1949. Two months later, Forrestal was dead, having jumped from the his 16th-story room at the psychiatric hospital he had been admitted to right after his dismissal. According to Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA (reported to be required reading for Homeland writers), Forrestal was in the midst of copying Sophocles’s poem ”The Chorus from Ajax” when he stopped in the middle of the word “nightingale” and lept to his death. “Nightingale” had been the codename for a CIA operation that Forrestal had been involved in to parachute Ukrainian resistors (including Nazi collaborators) into the USSR.

The Greek tragedy Forrestal had been copying before he killed himself is about the suicide of Ajax, a Trojan warrior. He has discovered that he has been tricked by the goddess Athena and was certain that the other warriors were laughing at his foolishness. Unable to face his shame, he impales himself on his sword.

Having garnered a dedicated fanbase during its first season and sweeping the drama categories at the Emmys about a week before the second season’s premiere, Homeland had to live up to some fierce expectations. And, of course, it didn’t, or at least not completely.

The actors’ performances continued to be top notch. We’ve been watching Claire Danes’s face crumple and quiver since 1994, and in 2012, her crying — a messy expression of hurt and anger — is no less compelling. Morgan Saylor got a sizable chunk of screen time in her oxford shirt and combat boots uniform after her keen performance in the first season. As a rule, teenagers are the worst and so was her Dana. I didn’t particularly enjoy the subplot that had her and Finn committing vehicular homicide, but it served as a turning point in her relationship with her father and illustrated the perils of honesty and how morality can turn grey when bad things happen to good people.

On the espionage side of things, the fast-paced second half of the season kept me guessing, which I love. Some critics may say it kept viewers guessing because the events were too preposterous to ever be logically considered. Maybe not, but as I’ve said before (and with apologies to the Sauls of the agency), when has the CIA ever acted logically? The agency has helped corrupt and unsparingly cruel dictators come to power, assured President Kennedy the Bay of Pigs invasion would be a success and produced a national intelligence estimate titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction” — all of which makes it seem petty to scoff a fictional show’s implausibilities. And if you think it’s unlikely that the agency would invite a bipolar analyst back to work for them, know that Frank Wisner, former head of CIA clandestine services and before that head of OSS (the agency’s World War II predecessor) operations, was diagnosed with “psychotic mania” and received electroshock treatments. Afterward he went back to work for the CIA at its London station.

It has been Carrie Mathison and the reaction to her illness that I’ve found most riveting this season. The initial question we asked week after week (for the first three-quarters of the season one anyway) on Homeland was, How deep is Brody’s allegiance to Abu Nazir? In one episode he was a traumatized marine reconciling his POW coping mechanisms with his suburban family-man duties and war-hero praises, in the next, a vengeful terrorist disillusioned by America’s hypocritical foreign policy. The tension between these two parts of a man was compelling but irrelevant once the CIA found out about the suicide vest and took charge of his relationship to Nazir. In the second season, this dynamic inner conflict was handed over to Carrie. We now found ourselves asking at least once during every episode, Is she still psych-ward crazy?

The best description of Carrie’s dance with madness I’ve read was in an interview with Kate Zambreno, who wasn’t talking about Homeland, but the online community she found herself in while writing Heroines, a memoir slash critical examination of the so-called hysterical women of modernist literature. In the interview, she describes Tumblr’s feminist confessions as a “circling around self-immolation.” It’s an act that sounds exactly like Carrie each time she runs into a Beirut apartment building looking for intelligence heedless of Saul’s protestations or makes out with Brody in a forest clearing.

In her pursuit of Nazir and her relationship with Brody, Carrie was reckless and impetuous, never more so than in the episode “I’ll Fly Away.” My pleas at her through the TV to stop running after Brody were no more effective than sidekick Virgil’s. And after Brody she went. The pair ended up hiding out at the Chaptico Bay Hotel. After eating dinner, as Carrie cleans up their styrofoam takeout containers, the mood turns romantic. She tells Brody that she had hoped catching Nazir would have made way for them to have a future —  together.

“You know how crazy everyone says you are?” says Brody. “You’re even crazier than that.” They then begin fucking. Loudly. And, because Carrie has taken them to a safe harbor site where Saul was able to locate them and bug the room, everyone back at the operation’s headquarters gets to listen in. It’s painful to watch the reactions of all the agents who consider this woman a lost cause. Saul hopes that Carrie’s seduction is her way of restoring Brody’s shattered psyche so that he can continue as CIA informant. He argues with Quinn over whether or not to send in a team to arrest the paramours. Quinn turns up the climatic moaning on the agency speaker and asks Saul, “Is that someone turning it around or a stage-five delusional getting laid?”

The scene is thoroughly discomforting. It is a brazen act of self-immolation and the reaction to it bears a resemblance to the reaction to the story “Adrien Brody” by Marie Calloway (a writer whose Tumblr could be a candidate for the ones Zambreno was referencing). And while Calloway may not have the bipolar diagnosis of Carrie, there is a similar disgust and rubbernecking of Estes, Quinn and their goons at the CIA and online commenters of Calloway. And like Calloway’s concerned readers, Saul wonders if Carrie has considered the consequences and really knows what she’s doing. At times it has seemed that Carrie’s appetite for Abu Nazir is matched only by her willingness to humiliate herself.

In the Observer article that brought Calloway’s piece to a larger audience, Emily Gould is quoted: “Why do women who aren’t afraid to humiliate themselves appall us so much, and why do we rush to find superficial reasons to dismiss them (‘she’s crazy’ ‘she’s a narcissist’ ‘she’s young’ ‘she’s a famewhore’)? I think in part because they pose a threat to the social order, which relies on women’s embarrassment to keep them either silent or writing in socially accepted modes.”

Humiliation is a powerful emotion. The American government has used it (including sexual humiliation) on POWs in the “war against terror.” Carrie has been through the gauntlet of shame after being forced out of the CIA, arrested on the Brody family’s front lawn and committed to a hospital at the end of the first season. In the second season, Estes and others continue to try to use her unrestrained emotions to embarrass her into submission. She undermines their attempts by adopting humiliation as a tactic of her own — hyperperforming it, subverting it and being a better agent because of it — instead of succumbing to shame as Ajax did.

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. You can find an archive of her Homeland reviews here.

"Weightless" - Natasha Bedingfield (mp3)

"Run-Run-Run" - Natasha Bedingfield (mp3)