This post discusses plot points from the November 20 and 27 episodes of Sons of Anarchy.

“You reach an age where you realize that being a man isn’t about respect or strength. It’s about being aware of all the things you touch,” Jax writes to his son in his journal in last night’s episode of Sons of Anarchy. It’s a fantastic mission statement for masculinity. And I think the test for Sons of Anarchy going forward is whether the show thinks Jax is living up to it, or if it’s aware that Jax has reached a point where he’s entirely self-deluding, where even his declaration that “You can’t sit in this chair without being a savage,” is a way of evading the person that he’s truly become. I’m at a point with Sons of Anarchy where I literally could not care less about any of the plot mechanisms, the Irish, the cartels, the CIA, etc., but I think the show’s doing some of the best work it’s ever put on screen with its characters’ emotions, and with the impact of their choices.

First, and most important, I think Sons of Anarchy‘s made important steps this season to make Tara a consistent character, and that means forcing her to reckon with the totality of her life with Jax. “I know why you couldn’t walk away a few months ago. The club’s been your whole life, you couldn’t let it die. i think I fell in love with you even more because of that. You’re a beautiful, loyal man Jax,” she told him in last week’s episode. “You’ve done everything you wanted to do, baby. It’s your turn now. we can move on. And after yesterday, I can’t help but feel like this is some kind of last chance for us.” His deflection is heartbreaking, because what it really means is that he wants Tara to turn the job down, that he may say that he’d be willing to consider a life where his wife is the primary breadwinner away from Charming, but that when that option is genuinely present, he’s not up to the task. But Charming isn’t really enough for Tara, even if it takes Unser to help her realize it. “I love Jax and my boys. I love being his wife…I’m okay with the life,” she tells the old man when she meets him at chemo, stepping back from the triumphant embrace of her role as queen that marked her last season. “Seems like you left yourself off that list,” Unser reminds her. “I used to love being a surgeon,” Tara admits.

When she accepts the job, telling the head of the practice, “It’s a perfect fit. I just want to keep it under wraps. Let Jax sit with it for a minute,” she’s acting in her own interests. But she isn’t ready, either, to face up to the fact that what’s a perfect fit for her and what’s a perfect fit for Jax may be fundamentally incompatible. Jax may promise Tara that “I’m going to give you a beautiful life.” But the two of them, at least in our viewing, have never been able to have an honest conversation about what beautiful means to either of them, to agree on a shared vision of their life. They’re good at impulse, at sex in that hotel room, at the shotgun wedding. But marriage means planning, means understanding how your touch affects things years down the road.

It’s Wendy who speaks that truth to Tara and Jax once she finds out about Abel’s accident, and his kidnapping. “You knock her up, spit out another kid, and throw your entire family against the chaos. And you, how can you live like this? What is wrong with you?” she tells them. And when they object, she doubles down, telling them “Bullshit, you know I’m right.” How Jax punishes her for telling the truth, that as a recovering addict with a partner who is out of the life, Wendy is actually better-equipped to raise Abel than Jax and Tara are, is, to me, one of the most repulsive things that’s happened in this show. Tara may have revitalized prospects of a career, and Jax may be a man. But Wendy loves her son enough not to put him in danger, not to use him as a pawn in manipulating her family. And Jax absolutely cannot handle that truth.

Instead, he decides he’s justified in attacking Wendy as a threat to her family, tells her she’ll use her genuine and legitimate fears for her child to make her seem insane rather than accepting responsibility for his own failures, and attacks her through her sobriety. Wendy is not a perfect person, of course. Her drug use endangered Abel and made his life more difficult. But as an addict, her drug use has a different moral quality than Jax’s sober bad acts. And just as Gemma took advantage of Wendy’s addiction to try to push her into suicide in the pilot, Jax has become someone who will threaten Wendy’s hard-won sobriety to avoid a reconciliation for the threat he himself poses to Abel’s safety. It’s a repulsive thing to do. And I don’t know how Jax can recover from the places he’s gone to. If he’s Hamlet, Jax’s fate may be to suffer a kind of living death, casting a cancerous shade across the people he believes he loves. Whether she knows it or not, Gemma may have seen her son’s future in Nero’s ravaged face.

Clay’s expulsion may offer some instruction. “I’m aware that we don’t just pick it up where we left off. But maybe this is a chance for us to do it different, Gem. No lies, no secrets,” he tells her. Their reconciliation may be false on Gemma’s end, and Clay may not have fully reckoned with his past willingness to commit violence against people he loved in the name of controlling them. But there seems to be some genuine shame and regret in his reactions to her return, to his expulsion from the club. “I’ll sleep at mine tonight. The ink’ll ruin your sheets,” Clay tells her as he heads off to have his tattoos covered up. He’s accepted his punishment from the club, and he’s aware of what he’s touching, even to the level of Gemma’s linens.

This post is a discussion of the first three episodes of the third season of The Wire. Next week, we’ll discuss episodes four through six.

The moment from the beginning of the first season of The Wire that’s lodged most in political and historical memory is Bunny Colvin’s speech about the paper bag. It’s true that his insight that there’s never been a paper bag for drugs and the genesis of Hamsterdam drive the core action of this season. But while the bureaucracy’s inability to tolerate Colvin’s innovation is the major theme of the season, it’s also valuable to examine how bureaucratic actors can enable each other in doing harm. We may spend a lot of time watching street-level partnerships evolve, bend, and sometimes break in The Wire, but the partnership between Burrell and Rawls, and the work they do in the CompStat room this season, is just as important.

Unlike the street partnerships, there’s a clear power imbalance between the pair. Burrell has the power to promote, to play politics, but it also makes him vulnerable. “What makes you think they’ll promote the wrong man?” he asks Daniels, to whom he’s promised much and is late on delivery. “We do it all the time,” Daniels tells him coolly. Carcetti offers Burrell opportunities, telling him “We’re losing 10, 12,000 residents a year to the county…The Mayor’s acting like a ten percent bump in the murder rate is business as usual…If you were smart, you’d come to me when the Mayor shorts you.” But much of the first three episodes of the season involve Burrell trying to figure out whether to accept his offer, and when he does, how to play it effectively.

Rawls and Burrell work so well together because the former makes space for the latter. Rawls gets to be profane and aggressive, opening up wounds Burrell can slip into and deliver death blows. “I don’t care how you do it. Just fucking do it,” he declares in explaining CompStat’s plan to put a hard limit on the number of murders Baltimore will report for the year. When Bunny asks them “How do you make a body disappear?,” Burrell gets to be comparatively elegant, telling him: “If you want to continue wearing those oak clusters, you will shut up and step up. Any of you who can’t bring in the numbers we need will be replaced by someone we can.” When Marvin Taylor reports that even though “I deployed my resources per your instructions…They move, sir. Every day. They’re going to sell their drugs somewhere,” it’s Rawls who informs him “They all tell me you lack a fucking clue,” and Burrell who smoothly relieves him of his command. It’s Rawl’s who throws a crude temper tantrum at Colvin, telling him, “What I got instead is some half-assed ‘I wish we were doing better’ platitude that’s meant to fool maybe a six-year-old girl into thinking you’re doing your job. But she’s left the room. She’s asking the stripper if she can have your job because she sure as shit doesn’t want yours.” And it’s Burrell who transforms that crudeness into something more elevated. “If the felony rate doesn’t fall, you most certainly will,” he tells Colvin. “The Gods are fucking you, you find a way to fuck them back. It’s Baltimore, gentlemen. The Gods will not save you.”

Watching the two men is a fascinating reminder that bureaucracy doesn’t only produce complication, duplication, and incompetence. It can be a tool of cruelty, both within the ranks, and to the people the bureaucracy works on. Rawls’ cruelty can be effective, as we saw in his management of Jimmy McNulty’s reaction to the shooting of Kima Greggs in the first season of The Wire. But here, it’s being used to browbeat, to obfuscate, and to cement a culture of lying. The glimmers of hope from the bureaucracy in these episodes are small: the possibility that someone else’s loss in a Parks Department layoffs could mean an opportunity for Cutty, the reminder in death that a police “was called. He served. He is counted.” CompStat itself is a scandal. But the means by which it’s enforced are spirit-crushing on their own.

This post contains spoilers for Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a novel about a woman in a troubled marriage who goes missing, in a single sitting on Monday, and while I raced compulsively through the book, I was left with a rather empty feeling at the end. I hunger for stories about difficult women, sometimes even dangerous ones, and so I felt I should have loved Gone Girl‘s central twist, that Amy was not, in fact, a victim, but a psychopath who framed her husband for her disappearance. But instead, I was annoyed by the expectation that the twist itself was enough for me, that we’re still at a point where suggesting that a woman is a psychopath, or a killer, or even a bad wife or mother was supposed to be surprising and daring. Just as the anti-heroes of the last decade of great television tell us something about suburban denial, the difficulty of being a self-made man in the drug trade, or the costs of toxic masculinity, I wanted Gone Girl to tell me something else about marriage, or the Midwest, or being a woman than I felt like it actually did.

In Gone Girl, the revelation that Amy is not the Cool Girl she pretended to be, but rather, dangerously amoral and manipulative, is what brings Amy and Nick back together. “I couldn’t return to an average life,” Nick concedes to himself. “I’d known it before she’d said a word. I’d already pictured myself with a regular woman— a sweet, normal girl next door— and I’d already pictured telling this regular woman the story of Amy, the lengths she had gone to— to punish me and to return to me. I already pictured this sweet and mediocre girl saying something uninteresting like Oh, nooooo, oh my God, and I already knew part of me would be looking at her and thinking: You’ve never murdered for me. You’ve never framed me.” For Amy, it’s realizing that Nick is her perfect victim, someone who has truly wronged her, but also, who is too afraid of becoming his father to be much of a person at all. “I am a little too much, and he is a little too little,” she thinks. “I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.”

Her psychopathy is the point. It doesn’t reveal anything else. The novel doesn’t really explore whether Rand and Marybeth, her parents, actually raised or exploited Amy in a way that contributed to her mental state. It’s not an expression of contempt for the world, as is Kevin’s boredom and suspicion of anyone who shows passion for an idea or activity in We Need to Talk about Kevin. And it’s not really an attempt to elicit a reaction from someone, the reason way Jo Gage (an incredibly scary Martha Plimpton), the daughter of a criminal profiler, becomes a serial killer in Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Whether you find the uses of psychopathy—to compel the attention of an absent father, or to provide a situation so extreme that a mother who failed to bond with her son finally experiences maternal instincts—in either of those works compelling, the revelation of psychopathy isn’t where either story ends.

“Blind Spot,” the Criminal Intent episode that features Jo Gage, functions in much the same way as Gone Girl. In both the novel and the television episode, the assumption through much of each is that the person who kidnapped Amy or who is torturing and murdering women must be a man. In Gone Girl, the question is whether Nick kidnapped or murdered his wife, and if he didn’t, whether an ex-boyfriend Amy accused of rape, a high school ex who was obsessed with her, or an impulsive girl who Amy accused of stalking her is guilty. And in “Blind Spot,” for much of the episode, Robert Goren assumes that the person torturing and murdering women is either an old serial killer who has resurfaced, or a male copycat killer, despite the fact that the new victims have been sexually violated but don’t have semen on their bodies, like the old victims did. And in both cases, the dynamic of the narrative radically changes when it becomes clear that the narrative of Amy’s that we’ve been reading is a fabrication, that Jo, initially treated as if she’s a victim (she was the roommate of one of the women killed), is, in fact, the killer the police have been seeking all along.
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By Alan Pyke

“He doesn’t catch the bird, okay?” Emile Hirsch’s character screams at his sister in the last relatively calm moment before Killer Joe descends all the way into the filth it’s been building toward for an hour. He’s frustrated because she is staring at a Roadrunner cartoon over his shoulder instead of listening to him. Chris is the closest to a sympathetic male character in the movie, but he is still enforcing the story’s only real rule: Listen to the men and do as they say, or they’ll find a way to make you fall in line. Over the course of the film, the enforcement of that code builds to an astonishing, grotesque climax.

That mounting pressure is captivating even as it horrifies, thanks to Matthew McConaughey’s shapeshifting Robert Mitchum-like charisma, an excellent counterpoint performance from Juno Temple, and gorgeous cinematography full of rusting Texas dilapidation.

Those are about the only things I can say with certainty about Killer Joe, the new William Friedkin movie opening Friday. Beyond that, it’s a dark, often hilarious, and thoroughly subversive mess. Friedkin’s adaptation of Tracy Letts’ violent, manipulating play builds a rhythm of pitch-black humor in its first hour, then dares you to keep watching as the titular murderer shifts from seductive to sadistic. The MPAA’s ratings may feel arbitrary, but flicks like this are why “NC-17” exists.

The particulars: Chris (Hirsch) has an idea that is, by the standards of doomed crime-scheme movies, fairly straightforward. He wants to hire a local detective who moonlights as a contract killer to get rid of his loathed mother. He needs the money from her insurance policy to wipe out his debt to a local drug distributor after she pinched the coke fronted to him by the distributor. His father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) doesn’t have any money to lend him to pay Joe’s (Matthew McConaughey) advance fee, though, so when the detective-cum-hitman suggests Chris’s young sister Dottie (Juno Temple) could function as a “retainer,” Chris assents. The offscreen machinations of Chris’s stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) threaten to hijack the whole messy business.

Killer Joe revolves around men who treat the women in their lives as levers to power — “chess pieces” would imply intelligence, which Chris and Ansel lack. Joe, whose savvy and witness-stand formality of speech suggest he’s a pretty skilled detective when he’s not killing people, is no better. He suggests that Dottie’s virginity (and indefinite use of her body) will tide him over until payday, but are Chris and Ansel any less disgusting for quickly agreeing even if they don’t abuse her themselves? If anything, the film makes them out a little worse: neither man can bring himself to explain the arrangement to Dottie, even though she knows and approves of the murder they’re buying with her body. When Joe shows up as Chris and Ansel hurry out the trailer door, it’s been left to him to explain (indirectly), and to calm a crying Dottie (which he does with alarming ease). The ensuing dinner and sex scene are the first real hint you get of just how much this movie enjoys daring you to keep watching. It’s a deeply creepy and coercive thing happening, but as Dottie succumbs to Joe’s dominating charisma she seems, at least somewhat, to enjoy herself. The film doesn’t do anything to help you decide how to feel about that. It’s a calculated, exploitative experiment in audience manipulation, and together with the preceding talk of Dottie as a form of capital, it helps finally establish that there might be somebody to root for in all this mess.
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