What If This Were Enough? Page 10
Imagine, instead, a day of quiet wandering. Imagine tuning in to what’s around you, instead of getting distracted by events and sounds and messages that have nothing to do with where you are. Imagine taking some time to notice the wind in the leaves, the sunshine on the grass, the smallest seedpod drifting through the air, the oddly shaped stone resting at the edge of the creek. Indye’s hobby wasn’t just gluing junk together. Her hobby was the search itself. Every day’s walk held new promise.
I didn’t see Indye after I left home for college, and I always thought that she died a few years later. But the other day I looked up her obituary online, and it turns out she lived to be 105 years, eight months, and fifteen days old. I wonder if she kept looking for new treasures for years after I knew her. I wonder if she kept whispering her secret into new ears for another two decades.
The future turned out to be just as incredible as I imagined it would be when I was little. But these days, I just want to slow down. I want to pull the shutters closed and block out the world. I want to spend hours gluing things together. I want to fill my house with tiny bits of collected junk. The more I have, the more I realize that all that matters is the small discoveries, the little interactions, the improvised, messy, glued-together moments that lie at the center of our happiness. Everything else is just a distraction.
the land of heroic villains
The premise of The Sopranos was simple: A mob boss begins therapy. Tony Soprano was a bad guy who did bad things, but he was conflicted about it. Why did he do bad things? Well, he couldn’t afford the mortgage to his big house in New Jersey if he stopped doing bad things. He’d have to make all new friends. He’d also have to avoid getting shot in the head by his former associates, then pushed off a boat with a bag of rocks tied to his feet.
When the show premiered on HBO in 1999, it was unusual to cast a criminal as your leading man. But as strange as it was to root for a bad guy, we did it. Something about Tony’s regular life in the suburbs made it possible. We even felt a little sorry for him. Pop psychology had yet to overrun our world, transforming celebrity interviews and song lyrics and Prius jingles alike into a mélange of dime-store psychoanalysis and interrogate-your-deepest-self psychobabble. But even if probing the psychic depths of complete strangers wasn’t yet common practice, we recognized that Tony’s mother was mean to him, that Tony’s wife, Carmela, acted holier than thou, even though she didn’t really want Tony to leave the mob, because that would mean she’d lose the mansion and the Porsche Cayenne and the designer handbags.
We also saw that Tony truly cared about his wife and his kids, in his own awkward, sexist, clumsy-bear-paws-hugging-you-too-hard kind of way. From some angles, Tony was a big softy: He was sentimental about the ducks that came to swim in his pool. He felt depressed about getting old. He worried about dying—that he’d drop dead of a heart attack one day and nothing he’d done would matter. When Tony went to therapy and told Dr. Melfi his darkest fears, we didn’t identify, but we empathized.
Nonetheless, Sopranos creator David Chase never wanted us to forget that his protagonist was a thug, plain and simple. Tony and his cohorts Silvio and Big Pussy and Christopher were the worst sorts of people: ignorant, reckless, amoral. It wasn’t just that they were insatiable and easily bored and lacked any kind of a moral compass. These people were capable of careless acts of unspeakable cruelty. They could put down their sandwiches to kill someone, and then finish their sandwiches afterward. They could interrupt an argument to kill someone, then continue arguing. They killed their close friend Big Pussy; then Silvio calmly removed Big Pussy’s watch and jewelry and kept it before they threw his body overboard.
In other words, audiences may have come to empathize with Tony Soprano over the years, but David Chase never did. Tony rarely learned anything worthwhile in therapy. He never made progress. Everything he wanted, he wanted for himself alone. He often grew enraged at his therapist, Dr. Melfi, just for seeing him so clearly. He resented her intelligence. He resented her power over him. He tried to experience things like gratitude and generosity, but his selfishness, his rage, his greed, and his laziness always got in the way.
The true irony of The Sopranos—the show that gave rise to our so-called golden age of television, that inspired countless TV heroes who were, by any honest estimation, reprehensible villains—was that, though Chase aimed to subvert the black and white morality of most TV dramas, his creation wound up as a morality play. As intrigued as we were by these men who committed evil acts, we weren’t supposed to unabashedly embrace them.
But we did anyway. Viewers forgave Tony. They embraced Tony and Carmela and Christopher as if they were members of their own family. In forums and comments sections in 2010, the year the show wrapped, fans worried loudly about the fate of these beloved characters: They not only wanted Tony to evade prison and survive, but they wanted him to live happily ever after. They posted romantic videos of Tony and Carm’s best moments—as if he’d never hit her, as if she never called him a cheating bastard, as if they were the sweet married couple who lived next door.
Chase knew that if he killed Tony, he’d make a martyr of the character. Prison was also too good for Tony. The show’s finale, in its abruptness and lack of conclusion, suggested that Chase wanted Tony to suffer for all eternity instead, stuffing his face with onion rings while scanning the entrances and exits for a would-be assassin. He wanted Tony to be seared into our memories exactly the way he’d lived: indulging but insatiable, wallowing in nostalgia, trying to show his kids love but finding fault with them instead, trying to enjoy the moment but being too distracted, too jittery, too afraid, too anxious to be present. There would be no peaceful rest for Tony, no sentimental denouement. Tony would disappear without redemption and without fanfare, as deeply corrupt and irreparably broken as America itself.
The series finale almost felt like a rebuke to the show’s Tony-loving fans. Its conclusion suggested that even when your evil acts aren’t punished, living such a deeply selfish life brings no joy, no lasting satisfaction, no happy ending. In an episode that was widely resented for its abrupt cut to a black screen at the end, Chase may have gone one step further, implicating not just Tony but also those who loved and embraced him. In that final scene, Chase seemed to be telling us that if all we want to do is shuffle along in a haze of nostalgia, seeking an endless stream of indulgences and distractions, we weren’t much better than Tony himself. Tony (who murdered people in cold blood) was not much worse than Carmela (who benefited from Tony’s corruption), who was about as bad as most of us (who benefit from our country’s corruption, living lives of privilege as the poor continue to suffer). A life without values, in other words, is a life without meaning. Or as Tony’s mother, Livia Soprano, once put it, “It’s all a big nothing.”
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If The Sopranos represents an early-aughts litmus test of American moral relativism (a slope that arguably began slipping the moment Pilgrims set foot on American soil), Showtime’s Billions represents the unquestioned peak of our willingness to indulge patriarchal corruption. The show, which premiered in 2016, centers on Bobby Axelrod, a hedge fund titan with a penchant for striding down glass-walled corridors while spitting out one-liners abrasive enough to make Gordon Gekko blush. Axelrod (played by Damien Lewis) is the very definition of bravado unbounded by any moral compass. “When I pull a deal off the table, I leave Nagasaki behind!” he growls at one point, demonstrating his habit of conflating senseless brutality with power. In promotions for the show, HBO repeated the same clip over and over of Axelrod’s face in close-up, saying with a sneer, “What’s the use of Fuck You Money if you never say ‘fuck you’?” The clip embodied the macho premise of the show itself: Why get rich if you can’t screw someone over and then rub their face in it? Isn’t that the whole point of being wealthy?
Up until Billions, the villainous leading men of premium cable tended to land in thei
r morally questionable circumstances under duress. Walter White was broke and dying of cancer when he turned to making and selling meth on Breaking Bad. Vic Mackey of The Shield was a dirty cop not because he was evil, but because the bureaucracy of lawful policing left too many bad guys on the streets, plus his kid had autism that required therapy beyond the reach of a cop’s salary. Breaking the rules in this context—messing up people’s lives, hurting innocent bystanders—was collateral damage in the battle for survival. In contrast, on Billions, unethical moves aren’t some unfortunate side effect, they’re the characters’ entire raison d’être. Axelrod, along with his associates and his nemesis, Attorney General Chuck Rhoades (played by Paul Giamatti), aren’t attempting to right wrongs or bend rules because they have no choice. They simply want to win at any cost. They’re proud of any behavior, moral or not, that leads to victory.
Victory is not enough, of course. These guys want to win while everyone else loses; otherwise it’s not as fun. What’s the joy in flying first class if there aren’t any poor slobs in the rows behind you? Every bit of dialogue, every monologue, every passing remark emphasizes riding high at the expense of someone else’s misery. In every scene, these men plan new ways to take each other down.
In keeping with the trope of the premium drama, Bobby Axelrod sees a therapist, as Tony Soprano did. But he doesn’t talk about his feelings in order to know himself better or to feel his feelings more deeply. His therapist—or “performance coach,” as they call it at his firm—is there to help him win more effectively. Axelrod and his employees only explore their emotions in order to gain control over them. Feelings, like competitors or financial regulators or moral codes, are merely obstacles to success.
Remorse sometimes rears its head in Billions: Axelrod realizes that he ruined the lives of a few non-enemies along the way, a fact he’s not proud of. Rhoades messes up his marriage by being a ruthless dick. But these moments don’t come back to haunt them. There are no recurring nightmares, like the ones that plagued Tony. Axelrod and Rhoades don’t care enough about other people’s feelings to be unnerved by them.
The underlying premise of Billions has nothing to do with regret—and it has, somewhat ironically, little to do with money. Axelrod’s life looks pretty joyless. Absent, too, is the melancholy or dissatisfaction of Tony Soprano. Where Soprano often gave the impression of craving more—more love, more power, more sex, more pasta—Axelrod only wants to roam the glistening halls of his hedge fund offices, master of his domain, restless but in command.
Billions is a voyeuristic exercise in which we imagine the accumulation of money, power, influence, and vengeance in fast motion. Who will be humiliated? Who will reign supreme? We aren’t supposed to consider the long-term side effects of such a life. We are to delight in the brutal clash of wills. To ask whether it’s ethical or base, healthy or destructive, worthwhile or worthless, is to miss the point entirely.
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The operating system that guides Billions reflects the culmination of years of cultural programming that either savors the gray area of any moral puzzle or else sidesteps the issue of morality altogether. But TV comedies are in many ways even more depraved than dramas. Where Woody Allen may have taken us down the path of the lazy and entitled, he tended to treat his characters’ indiscretions as the outgrowth of any sophisticated adult male’s natural desires, thereby sidestepping moral dilemmas the second they arose. (“Of course we’d all like to sleep with teenagers instead of our wives,” he suggested with a wink, as if this admission made him adorably raffish and not a criminal.) Seinfeld’s morality went deeper, acknowledging that being an intelligent, entitled New Yorker doesn’t exempt you from being judged as repugnant. The show demonstrated over and over again that selfish, lazy people can do actual, concrete harm, even if they don’t necessarily lose sleep over the consequences of their actions. (Remember when George’s fiancé died from licking the cheap envelopes he bought for their wedding invitations?)
Most of our “golden age” comedies, from Curb Your Enthusiasm to Veep to the works of Judd Apatow, follow in this Seinfeldian tradition. The characters are self-serving and pathetic and unscrupulous; that’s what makes them funny. In dramedies like Weeds, Transparent, Fleabag, and Big Little Lies, selfish, myopic, pathetic behaviors are treated as the most entertaining aspects of privileged people. Indeed television has been marinating in blatant, unpunished selfishness for long enough now, in our scripted programming but also in our nightly news, that it’s as though we’re slipping back into Woody Allen territory. The shores of our morality recede, but the tide of forgiveness rises to meet it. In such a world, of course you’d sleep with your best friend’s ex-boyfriend. Stealing from your family, selling drugs, cheating on your husband—these things “just happen,” requiring little explanation or apology. We all make mistakes.
American exceptionalism, which always included some talk of bravery and honor but also privileged winners over losers and haves over have-nots, may have finally curdled into this craven survivalist brutality. TV reflects our culture’s fundamentalist roots leavened by an almost surreal disentanglement from our long-held standards of behavior. It’s not just a void of ethics that we’re witnessing, though; it’s the celebration of that void. Many of our most popular narratives sidestep unwieldy talk of values, a seemingly outmoded term, in favor of a recurring struggle to dominate, or else to avoid domination. Brutality, mercilessness, lack of concern for principles—these are painted as prerequisites. In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, British documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux remarked on the U.S. president, “Trump saw through so much. For all his awfulness, I can’t but help admire his shamelessness, in an odd way. Or maybe not admire, but be fascinated by it and maybe envy it. In a shame culture he seems to have figured out that if you refuse to be shamed, it gives you enormous power.”
In other words, power is admirable no matter the source. If being terrible makes it possible to win, then it makes perfect sense to be terrible. Terribleness itself becomes admirable.
More than just our triumphant, pioneering spirit, or the heroes we made of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, perhaps it’s America’s long embrace of rebellion that should answer for our current moment. Because no culture has conflated knee-jerk defiance with heroic independence and tenacity quite like America has, from John Wayne to Marlon Brando to James Dean to Elvis to Fonzie. We’ve metabolized decades of stories in which the day must always be saved by a renegade who exists above the law. The heroes of our dramas, movies, reality TV—and now our celebrities and political leaders—share a lack of respect for traditional limits guiding their behavior. Rules are there merely to be broken.
But there’s also something oddly outdated in this thinking, as authoritarian corruption becomes commonplace. When Bobby Axelrod pulls off his oxford shirt and replaces it with a black Megadeth T-shirt before a meeting with Chuck Rhoades, we’re supposed to think, admiringly, “This guy truly gives zero fucks.” The show’s creators may have misjudged the moment. Because instead of looking cool, Axelrod just looks like a prematurely old man, one whose worldview is expiring before his eyes.
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It’s not hard to chart America’s moral decline in retrospect, just by examining our cultural artifacts. But many of us didn’t realize until 2017 that the self-serving villains and sociopaths on our screens also populated our real-life offices and schools and neighborhoods. And if producer Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual harassment had been exposed in 1997 instead of 2017, it might’ve felt like the fulfillment of a cliché. The studio head who demands head in exchange for a plum role was such an accepted part of the entertainment industry narrative (and its sickness) for so long that it was a running joke. That’s certainly how his onetime lawyer Lisa Bloom tried to frame it, referring to Weinstein as “an old dinosaur trying to learn new ways.”
But in 2017, it f
elt as if an increasingly grotesque subspecies of infantile beast had escaped the screen and invaded our real lives. Suddenly, we found ourselves wondering: Does the world even feel real to powerful men? How else do two world leaders with nuclear weapons capable of murdering millions trade juvenile insults on Twitter like kids battling over a video game? What else makes it seem tempting to break a window in a hotel tower and point one of forty-three assault weapons at a crowd below, as Stephen Paddock did in Las Vegas in October 2017, killing fifty-eight people before turning the gun on himself? And unbelievably enough, no one seemed prepared to take action to prevent more harm. Were we really going to hold our collective breaths and watch these angry men determine our fates? How was this reality?
Lisa Bloom had misjudged the moment the same way the writers of Billions had. Even before the full extent of his crimes emerged, we couldn’t see Weinstein as a friendly dinosaur, or take the faux-humble words of his apology seriously. “Though I’m trying to do better,” he wrote, “I know I have a long way to go.” It seemed absurd that we were meant to picture a sad, endangered brute brought low and forced to reflect on his sins closely for the first time, and not, say, a guy who had been paying women to stay quiet for over three decades.
The whole picture was so perplexing. Why did Weinstein so often insist that employees and actresses meet him in his hotel room, opening his robe to reveal his naked body to them like some kind of a sick surprise? Did their repulsion remind him of his power? Did it feel useless to have so much power if he couldn’t lord it over a woman, and make her feel small and powerless by comparison?
When you really slow down the tape on Weinstein—or Donald Trump, or Bill Cosby, or Bill O’Reilly, or Roger Ailes—what you see more than anything else is a profound lack of connection to other human beings. It’s not just that women, or strangers, or people of color, or children of immigrants, or Muslims (or a combination thereof), don’t rate in their world. It’s that these people are utterly irrelevant. A person is either useful and part of the club, or else that person is cast out like trash. The second someone ceases to be useful, they are forgotten. No big deal, time to finish your sandwich.