In Which We Risk The Middle Class

Self-Erosion

by ELEANOR MORROW

Chance
creators Alexandra Cunningham and Kem Nunn
Hulu

Kem Nunn is the kind of person who just looks wrong in clothing. As therapist Dr. Elden Chance, Hugh Laurie attempts to replicate that basic mien. Hunched over in front of a patient, he resembles a man constrained by a Pullmanesque daemon, being tugged at by all sorts of sources larger than himself. The main inertia acting on him is his massive bald spot, which the second season of Chance draws considerable attention to at every juncture. The point is that while Dr. Chance is steadily, progressively losing his hair, his precisely violent friend 'D' (Ethan Suplee) is completely bald, but full of hair in a variety of other places.

Nunn does not exactly admire therapists. On some level you have to wonder why he has made a show about one. Dr. Chance is completely helpless to affect his patients’ lives, and this second season of Chance hammers this home whenever possible. Dr. Chance is a neuropsychiatrist, one of those terms that in the future will be described retrospectively the way we currently reference shock treatment. Dr. Chance is deeply afraid of the men who torment his patients, and so once he convicts them in his own mind, he allows Darius to threaten or disable their flaccid bodies.

It does not take very long to realize why this is not much of an idea, and having taken this project on with an open mind, it is only the matter of a few afternoons before Dr. Chance realizes it is not the ideal solution. Nor is rehabilitating these monsters at all realistic. His evil deeds begin to consciously and subconsciously rub off on the daughter (Stefania Owen) he shares with his ex–wife. In Chance’s stillborn first season, we watched the good doctor risk everything in his life for Gretchen Mol. This was implausible until she began acting actively freaky, at which point his attraction to her (1) made logical sense and (2) revealed his complete lack of personal integrity.

The novel Chance has this fantastic ending where the possessory nature of the universe took over. Man, or woman, could not be held responsible for their acts when the world was so awry. The general environment of San Francisco informs on this quite broadly. No one can live in this place, Nunn seems to be arguing, without the various economic inequalities of the locale driving you insane or worse. A civilization without a middle class is therefore doomed.

Dressed in sweaters or a jacket and jeans, Nunn has never wanted to be anything like an elite. His modest but brilliant collection of novels, including his magnificent debut Tapping the Source, mines the momentary but exciting genre of surf detective fiction, that which was first gainfully developed by John D. MacDonald. Like MacDonald’s lackadaisical but purposeful protagonist Travis McGee, Dr. Chance runs moral circles around his basic compassion for women who have been abused by men.

San Francisco, then, is the playpen for all morality. Whatever happens there will affect how we deal with the issue of the effect of random chance on every citizen. Other places in the world and in our country reward a certain psychological aspect, but San Francisco can no longer be said to endorse this view. In this abandoned metropolis, a savage immorality is the only healthy way of all-around living.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan.

In Which Kem Nunn Did Not Get Along With His Shrink

Four People

by ELEANOR MORROW

Chance
creators Kem Nunn and Alexandra Cunningham
Hulu

"God is an American," it must have occurred to Hugh Laurie at some point. He has spent much of the second half of his career with the best American accent he can muster. There were American men who talked the way that Hugh Laurie does to his wife and she to him; in the 18th century, they lived in mansions in Virginia and were at home in the country. While he filmed House he spent most of the year away from his wife and kids, and of course on the show, where he portrayed a perpetually cranky doctor, he did not have either.

Laurie is deeply acquainted with the subject of depression as well. Despite the fact that he is a semi-capable neuropsychiatrist, whatever that is, Dr. Eldon Chance is suffering from this familiar phenomenon. It began shortly before the divorce with his wife, Carla, initiated when she began fucking her personal trainer. Carla (the hard-to-look-at Diane Farr) has one main complaint about her soon-to-be ex-husband. He is not decisive enough – he doesn't make things happen, he simply receives them when they do.

Chance seems to take this characterization as a personal challenge. Novelist Kem Nunn (Tapping the Source) used Chance to fold a book-length indictment of the institution of psychiatry into a noirish murder mystery. Nunn never says so directly, but he hates shrinks. He finds them lacking from every conceivable angle, and the man he loathes the most in the genre is Dr. Freud. The only thing he believes Freud is any good at is writing – identifying psychiatric treatment with what he does, bullshit, is the most backhanded compliment Nunn can pay to this troubled profession.

Dr. Chance does not really treat patients often. His position in the medical firmament is that of a diagnostician, and the reason he seeks this role is because he is frequently alarmed by the intensity of the empathy he feels for others. This experience scares him again and again, giving him insight into himself. We thus see therapy as an act that exists mainly for the person perpetrating the dialogue. In addition, it is key for the economic sustenance of therapist, and thus this arrangement can never be wholly positive no matter how genuine the concern on the part of the practitioner. There is always poison in the drink.

Chance refers Jaclyn Blackstone (Gretchen Mol) to a psychiatrist better equipped to deal with her multiple-personality disorder, Dr. Suzanne Silver (LisaGay Hamilton). The two discuss their patient in extensive scenes which allow Nunn to display how self-involved and ill-equipped they are to treat this woman. Therapy, Nunn argues, is like groping around in the dark for another person and finding only a mirror when you flick the light on. Dr. Silver is most upset about how long she had to wait for her lunch.

Once he begins fucking his patient, Dr. Chance is still referring to the literature, caught up in his shifting view of a person about whom he never really cares enough to get to know. "Freud had famously said that he had come to regard any sexual act as one involving at least four people," Nunn has Dr. Chance think in the novel. "Chance had no idea how many of them were there in the room, coming and going at all hours of day and night, but between the two of them it was how it had been with the madman among the tombs, that their number was legion." The analysis itself is the only guide a lost soul has available to him.

Despite its San Francisco setting, the environments that surround Dr. Chance never really play a huge part in the novel. Nunn's collaborator Alexandra Cunningham and director Lenny Abrahamson (Room) have made a point of indicting San Francisco as well. The separation between the haves and have not could not be more apparent. Chance uses a homosexual black man (Clarke Peters) to sell his furniture, and befriends the man's in-house carpenter, Darius (the brilliant Ethan Suplee). Like any tourist who stays too long, he does not know anything about such types, and endeavors to learn.

In the character of Darius, Nunn manifests his most appealing creation – a self-proclaimed veteran capable of inflicting violence on everyone but Chance himself. Laurie makes a point of not appearing too physically frail, in contrast to his most famous role, but he struggles to compete with Darius and the litany of more present people that fill the rest of the narrative: his troubled patient (a harried-looking Mol), her mysterious husband (Paul Adelstein), and his troubled daughter (Stefania Owen).

Like much of Nunn's work, Chance seems to operate with its own set of moral strictures and bears little resemblance to the contemporary world or current events. This gives the series a certain timeless feeling, and many times it channels the never-ending atmosphere of another noir, Vertigo, with which it shares a city and many themes. If we really believe what we are seeing, we risk incriminating ourselves. Thus it is only possible to watch Chance in a detached way, to hope that we are not as these people are.

There is no cinematic mood more difficult to sustain than menace. At times Chance seems to thrive on this not-knowing, fearful state, but it is much more achievable in the short running time of a feature. Stretching out this sensation into multiple seasons is just that: a stretch. We cannot possibly identify with a group of people who only see themselves as victims or perpetrators, and the uneasy feeling never coalesces into an understanding that could make either side any kind of a victor.

By the end of Chance we have not found anyone we really like. As Nunn puts it, there are feeders and receivers, and the world is full of the latter, perhaps completely full. This meaningless binary is even sadder if it might, in some respects, be true.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which The Frosted Tips Of Tom Hiddleston Electrify And Outrage All Concerned

Foreign Bodies

by ELEANOR MORROW

The Night Manager
creator Susanne Bier

Tom Hiddleston's frosted tips have taken on a life of their own. As a brunette, Hiddleston was a swerving force of flowing locks, always looking down on you through his nightmarish blue eyes, with an expression that seemed to say, "I know you are surprised that I am also a person as you are." Yet there was always something alien about the man, and frosting those tips has brought that inimical quality into the light.

Hiddleston's character in The Night Manager is a former military man who works at a hotel in Cairo for some reason. He starts to take an interest in the mistress of a powerful Arab man and decides to save her from her wicked life, using his frosted tips alone. She is all beaten up from her boyfriend, and looks like she has just been in a car crash, but he feels like this is the optimal time to start a romantic relationship with her.

The next time he sees her, her little poodle is covered in her blood. If you think this is a somewhat heavy-handed allegory for western imperialism, you have not read very much John le Carré. This is actually him being subtle.

I recently watched David Gordon Green's very funny, somewhat racist version of a true story, Our Brand Is Crisis. The movie was never attempts to be particularly complex in the style of The Night Manager, and it ends when Sandra Bullock's heartless political consultant suddenly grows a conscience because she was furious the man she was working for was trying to do the best for his country.

Our Brand Is Crisis is a rollicking and funny portrait of what might ostensibly be a very dull election for the president of Bolivia. Bullock's interactions with poor young men are a novelty, turning the plot into an actual referendum on the goodness of people and what it means. Our Brand Is Crisis takes something completely simple and problematizes it into something deeper. The Night Manager does the exact opposite.

The same sort of rigorous moral certainty pretends to pulsate through The Night Manager, but we can sense the bullshit. It is naivete, pure and simple; the idea that international relations, and the managing of various dictatorial regimes would be pathetically facile if only the people on the ground would go after the real bad guys. In The Night Manager, that bad guy is a British arms dealer who also runs a multinational corporation, Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie).

This cartoonish Bond villain had the temerity to sell weapons to someone! Tom Hiddleston's frosted tips did not really seem to understand that governments manage this monstrous feat almost every single day. When he finds a written list of weapons Roper plans to sell, he immediately calls British intelligence to complain. Four years after he gets a woman of color killed, he is night managing a resort in the mountains when Roper shows up with an entourage.

The Cairo parts of The Night Manager are transparently not filmed anywhere near the city, but up in the mountains we get a fantastic sense of place. In the evening, with the cold restraining the flagging movement of those blondish tips, Mr. Hiddleston starts to grow active in his den, like a nocturnal rodent. He is not very handsome in this guise, or very strong, or very smart. But he is busy.

Laurie is a great performer, but The Night Manager accentuates too many of his weaknesses. He is not naturally intimidating, fearsome or menacing. His friendliness seems to complete explode his cruelty. Sure, he is capable of awful things but combined with a braying smile, we sense he must be a far more complicated man than Tom's tips give him credit for.

Director Susanne Bier has Laurie give elaborate speeches about the virtues of capitalism which come across completely ridiculous. The rest of the time is spent making his subordinates dance with his girlfriend (Elizabeth Debicki, looking quite sussed). Intelligence professionals back in Mother Britain meet for hours to think of how they are going to shut down this maniac. I don't know, maybe they could just arrest him? Christ.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Steel & Stone" - Caleb Caudle (mp3)