The Affair - Episode Three

Noah
Noah is very much hitting the same beats he hit in the previous episodes.  And it does feel like about half of Noah's and Allison's interactions involve one of them pulling the other into a more secluded spot.  However, while we did not learn much more about Noah, we did see the world of the island expand as well as seeing more about Allison's personal life.

Noah seems primarily motivated by the road not take more than discontent with his own life.  While staying with his in laws for several months may not be ideal, it may be the catalyst that wakes up these feelings of wrestlessness rather than his wreslessness being the status quo.  Wondering what the other Noahs are doing in different corners of the multiverse seems to be on his mind, and it keeps being brought to the front of his mind by interactions with Allison.  Those interactions seem to be catalyzed by friction laden events between Noah and his family or in laws.

One technique we see often in Mad Men is that a character, Don or Peggy perhaps, will encounters something unsettingling or that angers them.  Another character then walks into their path, unaware that they are primed for explosion and then get the full brunt of their ire.  For example, Don is already upset when Pete walks into his office seeking counsel about trying to land American Airlines, following the death of his own father (on an American Flight).  After Pete is scolded by Don he turns then to Duck to try and land the client as Duck cuts into Don's alliances.  When Mad Men uses this technique it is some of the strongest plotting you'll see on the series. 

So Noah falls into this loop where his wrestlesness both informs his attempts to find Allison and stems from his interactions with her.

Noah reminds me of something Jimmy on You're the Worst said.  He blames his break up with Gretchen on his desire to seek misery and discontent, an inability to accept good news, which stems from him trying desperately to live the life of a writer...one of despair and agony and pain and alcoholism.   Struggling to put together a second novel, Noah seems intent on playing the role of a writer in order to inform his writing (and use writer-ly phrases like "the death of the American pastoral")

The Island
The Island World is expanding.  Local politics are front and center and there's a long standing feud between Oscar's and Cole's families, with families supporting one or the other.  It appears as business owners whose families go back generations on the island they need not introduce themselves to people, as they are known and the lines are already drawn.  Oscar tries to draw support, half jokingly, from Allison knowing if Cole's own wife sided with Oscar it'd go a long way.  It also means he must know in advance Cole's going to have a mini tantrum about a bowling alley.

The thing about Cole's tantrum is that it is disguised.  He camouflages his desire to not only have toys himself but to keep others from enjoying their own toys as merely a desire to maintain what is true and decent about their home.  He wraps himself in nostalgia and sympathy like so many politicians wrap themselves in the flag.  He blames the locals problems and the loss of their way of life on some intangible and ill defined specter represented by Oscar's bowling alley. There's a clear progress and "tradition" divide, given words by Cole's indifference to NASA in a separate rant. 

Worst of all, Cole invokes his dead son. He does this not once but twice.  The visceral appeal for sympathy works and the townspeople respond in a way the council sees the writing on the wall and delays Oscars development for "further study" which is probably a euphemism for "suck an egg, Oscar."

Cole's diatribe is probably the first and best thing to define Cole's character, especially in concert with his get-off-my-lawn screed about their neighbor's house's height.  While the rest of his appearances are layered in ambiguity and painted in gray, this, coming from Allison's POV, makes no bones about what Cole is doing.

Allison
She reprimands Cole for his dead baby and nostalgia tirade.  Using Gabriel as a means to an end is unacceptable.  We see that everything Allison does is in response to grief*.  She starts her day the happiest we've seen her but the longer it goes on the worse things get for her.  Not only does she resent the way Cole brings up Gabriel, but she probably also resents his ability to talk about Gabriel on his own terms while she is still reacting to everyone on the island constantly putting it in her face.  It's draining.

* And this is so much more expertly done than the grief porn we saw on the show that shall not be named

Allison has a bandage on her person again and I wonder if we're supposed to be thinking of the wounds she still sports from having lost her son.  This one is even bigger. 

What we know, what we don't

• The interrogator is called "detective" so we'll assume cop.  
• Allison's a nurse.  Maybe I was wrong about Gabriel dying from an accident rather than a sickness.  Or maybe she simply can't help but replace Gabriel's face with that of any helpless child she encounters.
• We don't know who died, but I think we're supposed to think it's Cole which makes me think it's 'not Cole'.  It's not Oscar either.  I hope this doesn't get dragged out.  
• There are some envelopes of money being passed around.  
• Couple this with the weird need to close the door at the taxi dispatch...there's something below the surface here and I think it involves Cole's family at a high level. The Montauk Illuminati.  Or at least like the Commodore of Atlantic City

Rashomon
In each of Noah's and Allison's accounts, the other person appears to be the driver in the affair.  The other person appears more confident and self assured.  In Allison's account, Noah is worldly and cultured and confident.  In Noah's, Allison is sultry and seductive and her skirts are like two inches shorter. 

Kurosawa

• Seems odd Allison would live on an island and not know how to swim, no?
• Noah's in laws have a trump card on the fact that he and Helen have accepted their money in the past.  Probably following a long disagreement between the two that Helen ultimately won. 
• And so Noah gets to sit there and hear his mother in law talk about him as though he's not there
• And Rawls gets to keep being a dick to McNulty, but this time McNulty doesn't have a body to dump on him via tidal charts

The Affair

Sunday Plot Driver
Homeland and Boardwalk Empire returned to their fall spots, Boardwalk for the final time.  And while still fun to watch, the shows are more plot driven than ever.  That's great, and I don't miss an episode but from my perspective, it doesn't make for terribly interesting writing.  It's why I find it fun to vomit 1,000 words on a largely wordless three minute sequence in Game of Thrones and why the often plot-less or minimally plotted Mad Men is so easy to talk and speculate about.  Getting into the characters, their motivations, their points of view, their subtleties or passive aggressive actions or digs at other characters is what is fun to me.  It's why Boardwalk's plot driven third season was its worst while the character heavy fourth season was its best.  And to talk about Homeland and Boardwalk right now is to simply recap the days events.

Showtime kept running a commercial featuring Dominic West of Jimmy McNulty fame.  As I was in the process of rewatching the whole series of The Wire (because that's how I spend my time) I figured I'd give this show I never heard of a shot.

Literary Devices
Immediately after watching "-30-", I watched the pilot from The Affair.  If nothing else, I was pretty happy to see McNulty having a tet-e-tete with none other than Bill Rawls, only this time Rawls sipped an expensive wine on his estate overlooking the beach, passive aggressively taking digs at his son-in-law rather than bearing down on him as an angry acting police commissioner.

In a sentence, the show tells the story of an affair between a novelist/public school teacher (Noah) with a wife and kids, and a married waitress (Allison) whose child passed away.   It was apparent from the ad flashbacks would play a part.  I like flashbacks.  I like non-linear storytelling in the right hands.  Let's do this.

Halfway through the show, the show takes a twist on another literary device, point of view.  The first rendezvous between Noah and Allison is chronicled from Noah's point of view...the journey he and his family takes to their summer home where he first encounters Allison waiting tables at the restaurant.  But then it rewinds and tells us Allison's point of view for the same time period.  The first two episodes have followed this format, as each part is told in past tense to an as yet unnamed man by the respective leads.

Already we have questions:

Who is the man they are speaking to?
It could be a cop.  It could be a PI.  It could be someone from an insurance company investigating a claim on as yet unspecified event that affected both Noah and Allision.  He is a man of some kind of authority, but through two episodes he's not betrayed any conclusive evidence

Who was killed?
We find out in the second episode it's related to someone's death, a male.  But we have no idea who that is yet.  

Will the show stay with this format?
They could easily introduce other POV characters, though at this point there does not seem to be a need.  They could also flip the order at some point and show Allison's story in Part 1, followed by Noah's.

Because we're seeing events as they were viewed and are being interpreted by each of the main characters, we are not necessarily seeing the unvarnished truth.  Whether to soften their own actions, whether they incorrectly perceived an event, or whether they sincerely do not accurately remember how events occurred is foggy.  Is one telling the truth?  Is the other?  Does it lie in the middle?  Are both completely off base?

The unreliable narrator looms large in this story and is quite possibly my favorite device of all.  True Detective schooled everyone on its use.  While many will remember the unbroken six minute shot, I define the show as Rust and Marty's accounts to the cops completely diverges from what we see in the flashbacks.

Compare and Contrast
It would be easy to make a list of the differences in their accounts.  But it's more interesting to look for the subtext in those differences and wonder why they are different.

For example, Noah runs into Allison at a farmer's market where she is selling jam.  It is the first time they've met since the restaurant.

In Noah's account he buys one jar for $12 for his kid.  In Allison's she sells him five jars for $8 each totaling $40.  Noah admits he bought the jam.  However, his motivation for buying it is to please his kid who wants to eat it.  He remembers the price is high, $12.  He probably does not remember the exact amount because that would be a strange thing to remember.  Instead he remembers vaguely that it was high and $12 seems like a lot.  In reality it probably ballooned a bit in his mind, focusing more on the ridiculousness of paying that much for jam at all.  Throughout the transaction, Allison is standoffish and refuses his offer to keep the change from his $20 bill.

Allison remembers herself acting friendlier and recalls her jam sales partner commenting that Noah is showing a strong interest in one of them.  She could have insert that in there to strengthen her argument that Noah is the initiator, or she could specifically remember her friend saying that.  She remembers Noah buying multiple jars of jam, as if buying more jam would buy him more goodwill with Allison.  As the vendor, she probably correctly remembers the price of each unit ($8), but we don't know if Noah sincerely is being more forward with her or if she is trying to downplay her own role or it is some third, fourth or fifth version in the multiverse where she sincerely believes her perception of the event but a third party would view it completely differently. 

What they agree on is that Noah bought some jam and Allison was not actively engaging him, at least at that point.

Other details may seem relatively minor, like Noah's wife's dress color at the party, but are perhaps wrought with symbolism or tell us something about the POV character we haven't figured out yet.

Allison's child
We don't know yet how he died.  If we've been given foreshadowing (or backshadowing?) some possibilities include

1. drowning - Allison can't swim
2. choking  - Noah's son at the restaurant.  In her version, she knows exactly what to do to dislodge the obstruction.  Perhaps she learned after her son passed because that was how it happened.
3. broken neck or asphyxiation - based on the pre-car trip events

We also know that Allison lost her son in a public way.  She's recognized by Noah's mother in law as someone from the newspaper, related to the boys death.  That seems to point toward an accident, rather than a sickness.  Not only that but Allison is constantly reminded of her son by well-intentioned but grief inducing acquaintances.  All anyone seems to want to talk to her about is her dead son.   Allison has not been able to accept her son's death in the way her husband has.  Perhaps Coles grief is more manageable because he doesn't have everyone in his face about it constantly.

The Affair
With two well acted, interesting and sympathetic characters, a realistic supporting cast, an element of mystery, told through fun and dexterously handled literary devices and obviously well thought out writing make this the show I'm looking forward to on Sundays. 

The Wire: Season Five

I recently rewatched the entire series of The Wire, so I thought it was a good time to update my thoughts on the final season.  They haven't changed.  In fact it is "now more than ever" that Season Five was arguably a success and definitely in line with the preceding four seasons.  With new or newly edited text in red, I am trying to get on paper 

1. why the season was a success, 
2. how it aligned with the show to that date and 
3. what caused the (unjust) negative reaction.
   

I remember a lot of complaints about The Wire: Season Five when it was airing.  While I think at least some of that was typical "I watched it back when it was good" feeling of longtime fans, as the show was finally starting to pick up steam in the mainstream.

Personally, I liked it and disagree that the show sunk to an unwatchable quality reserved for lesser shows.  Here's why:

Season Five started with one hand behind it's back.  While Season One and Season Four* included thirteen episodes, and Season Two and Season Three included twelve, HBO renewed The Wire for only ten episodes in Season Five.  While "-30-", the season/series finale ran over 90 minutes, this is still provided only about 80 or 87 percent of the storytelling time previous seasons had, leading to some compressed plotting particularly noticeable as McNulty's serial killer takes shape.  For the show that perfected the contemporary novelistic season plotting, this is a major blow.

On the most recent watching, I think the finale needed 90 minutes regardless, in order to tell the stories of that episode as well as tie off the season and series.  Being down three whole episodes, or 180 minutes, or however many scenes that is, had a huge effect on the plotting, but also the character development, perhaps even more so.  A reasonable complaint about the Stanfield crew is that they are one dimensional and lack the shades of gray the Barkesdale organization had.  Marlo would never provide $15,000 to a boxing gym, let alone to a boxing gym run by someone who parted his employ.  The missing pieces from these episodes mostly occur on the front end, and then have the effect of weakening the payoffs and turning early items into caricatures when they try to make due with what they have. 

McNulty jumps to 11 in the second episode when he flies off the handle and starts messing with the crime scene to create his serial killer.  Such a drastic action would normally take place later in the season (Hamsterdam) with more set up.  McNulty is not the only guy at 11.  The police force is decimated by draconian budget cuts and Carcetti is more asshole-ish than ever both to his staff and in his policies.    The near riot in Carver's briefing comes off as cartoonish, but necessary to quickly establish the dire nature that the budget cuts have caused, necessitating McNulty's drunken stupor into serial killerdom.  Even McNulty's demeanor is exaggerated for effect, drinking in public more than ever and using a snarl as his regular speaking voice.  As bad as the police department has been in the preceeding four seasons, it is at it's absolute worst now.  And Simon has no time at all to show that.  

Think of the journey it takes to get to what the season is known as.  

1. Valchek is upset at a stain glass window donation by Sobotka, which results in a petty attempt to investigate him.  This ends with solving a dozen prostitute murders and major crimes zeroing in on an international drug conspiracy.
2. Hamsterdam isn't functioning until the season's sixth episode.
3. The boys spend the summer exploding pee balloons on themselves.  School doesn't even start until episode three. By Christmas the boys are all completely separated from their original homes and lives. 

In short, the cause > effect > effect > effect > unintended consequence > detour > uintended consequence, etc is not allowed to happen organically.

A few moments allow us to see what composes a true newspaperman.  Gus lives, eats and sleeps the paper so much he wakes up in a sweat worried about transposing numbers.  It tells us about his character.  If Simon made a mistake, it was to not include more of the "show don't tell" examples like this, rather than simply have some of the reporters wax nostalgic about their love for the old days.  There's a time and place for that (Frank Sobotka) but we have to see and learn more first so we're invested in those monologues.  But again, time is a factor and it may have simply been a calculation to hurry up and get the information at us.  

Some of those monologues took place in bars and it brings to mind the fact that a lot of this season is simply conversations taking place in bars.  It is jarring even after a three season McNulty bender.  You have the newspaper folks, you have the former Major Crimes crew plus Bunk, Gus meeting Lt. Mello, Lester meeting Clay multiples times.  

I wonder if this was an intentional budget-related decision. 

Anyways, the other way to establish Gus' character was to line up validators.  Other editors and reports look to Gus and echo his concerns.  We don't get to learn much about the validators which weakens their effect unfortunately, but again this is a casualty of losing three whole episodes.  

That said, I did enjoy the copy editors who never moved from their ancient computers and sat there like Oracles, dispensing vocabulary and sentence structure lessons.  One dimensional characters can not only be entertaining but are also necessary.  If everyone on television was as fleshed out as Tony Soprano, then we'd never get anywhere, plotwise.

Not only did Season Five tell a compressed season five story, but it had the responsibility of wrapping up storylines from previous seasons.  Some were still able to be done with a single scene as with Namond's debate.  

But the serial killer storyline was completely unbelievable!

More unbelievable than a police commander effectively legalizing drugs?  I do not believe the point of the serial killer was to create a serial killer but to illustrate the state of journalism and comment on anonymous sourcing.  At least there are real life instances they can point to for that one (including reporting on a serial killer sniper in the DC area). 

For some reason, critics are able to suspend their disbelief in cases where Simon uses dramatic license, like in Season Two when the state attorney's office lets Frank Sobotka out of their sight and vulnerable to violence (because they aren't as familiar with procedures within the state's attorney's office) but scream bloody murder if the screen doesn't reflect every day of their life in journalism, exactly. 

It is a mistake to label this as the "Newspaper Season"

Focusing only on the newspaper aspect of Season Five sells it short.  In fact, the newspaper plays a smaller part in the season than any of the other seasonally added aspects of Balitmore (Port, City Hall, Public Schools).  The Sun is there almost as an extension of the police department in order to divert resources (and show the problems associated with that).  As a bonus, we see some of the dysfunction in the Sun that speaks to why we're all so ignorant of this sort of thing.  Specifically, it's shown through a "teach to the test" attitude that we saw with the public schools and a corruption that we see in City Hall and the Department.

However, the lack of volume paid to the Sun doesn't allow it to be the headliner.  It plays a part roughly equal to the part the Department played in Season Four, ancillary to several stories, but not the major story itself.  

Instead, the Marlo/Jimmy & Freamon show is the biggest story.  It throws back to Season One, but now armed with what we know from Season One it does not need to be as dense.  

Second is Carcetti's ascent to the statehouse which received due attention.

Bubble's road to recovery is the one positive thing to take away from the season, perhaps the series.  A seemingly small, but in reality huge, victory is gained when he ascends the stairs in the final montage.  I think many people believed Simon viewed himself as the Gus character, but it's my sense that he felt more in tune with Fletcher, the young reporter who spent time with Bubbles and learned his story.  Bubbles was in real life one of Simon's sources and when he passed, Simon wrote his obituary.

The story that receives the least attention but could have had miles more was the State's Attorney/Clay Davis trial.  If the Sun showed us why we don't hear about these things, the trial showed us why the bad guys don't go to jail.  The dysfunction is apparent immediately when Bond leaves the "headshot" on the field, prosecutes the case himself for the profile, and loses handily after Clay plays not just the race card but the "whole deck."  We saw a lot of the trial but could have been even more informed if we had seen Bond bungle the preparation.  Not only that but the prosecutor's office and courts have been a source of ire for McNulty-ilk, upset about how everyone wants a clean record so they can become a judge.  We only saw the state's attorney in conference rooms when a case was brought to them, or in the halls preparing to go into court, but seeing some inner turmoil from Bond's shop would have made for a good story, especially considering they already had Rhonnie established as a character. 

 "You have to listen to the notes she's not playing" **

I think Lisa Simpson sums up the season in that single sentence.  We've spent four seasons watching bureaucratic and institutional dysfunction, not to mention out and out corruption, in the police force, labor unions, political arenas and public schools.  Why is this the first we're hearing about it?  Why is this the first we are seeing the incompetence demonstrated and explained?  David Simon, the show's creator and executive producer, posits the answer by adding the newsroom storyline: the state of journalism is a mess and fails to focus on important aspects of real life because they are populated by journalists with little experience and led by those who prefer to focus on winning awards.  They go about winning awards by following a proven formula of reporting, not unlike Season Four showing the fundamental flaws of "teaching to the test" when the kids are preparing for their standardized testing.

 

The best novels and televisions shows "show and don't tell" but it's even more difficult to show the absence of a positive, which if I viewed the show correctly (and there is a correct way)*** was the goal.  While the systemic problems shown in the other storylines continue, the newspaper has other priorities than shed on a light on these, never more apparent when they decided to de-prioritize reporting Prop Joe's murder.  It is a subtle, quick moment which encapsulates the entire newsroom storyline.

The unreporting of Prop Joe and Omar are two examples of why the stories being told in The Wire are not being reported in real life.  A third example speaks about race more broadly when a story about race relations within the University of Maryland faculty starts to form.  However, the story is spiked before it's ever written based on the executive editor's relationship with the dean at UM.  Their association is obviously a conflict of interest which should result in the opposite effect (Whiting removing himself from the story) but instead shows the larger picture of how the Sun is being steered.  In mainstream media, race is discussed when Obama is elected president, or when a cop shoots another kid, but lacks any serious day to day examination of why inequality still exists at the level it does today, socially, economically and legally.  No one wants to discuss it, least of all Whiting, who is one of the gatekeepers that could change that.  

Speaking of things no one wants to talk about: heart disease is the biggest killer in America and we really don't care.  But one person gets Ebola and it's all day every channel.  A sensational story of a biting, sexual, serial killer of homeless people garners more attention and resources than anything else happening in the city.  This despite the fact that it is fake.  Meanwhile, someone is actually killing dozens of people (just by the murder, think of how many people are killed or having their lives ruined by the drugs themselves) and it registers a zero.  Heart disease is killing everyone and all we can care about is Ebola which is barely a thing.

This harkens back to something the show started with: there is no federal interest in drug crime and the city's ills because we are too busy fighting the Terror.  When McNulty visits Special Agent Fitz in Season One, he learns that Fitz has all these cool toys to fight drug dealers, but is being reassigned to the Terror as soon as he winds down his current case.  In fact, the whole Bureau is being reassigned to fight the Terror with counterTerror.  The FBI's shift in its mandate to become primarily about counterterrorism is as jarring as when J. Edgar first started introducing wire taps and such to catch the bad guys.  

* Season Four's finale "Final Grades" ran 78 minutes because they needed 18 more minutes in that season to finish stabbing us in the heart/crotch

** From "Lisa the Simpson" where Lisa comments on how to listen to jazz

*** Simon later clarified what he was saying.  It's pretty interesting no matter what you think about it.  Also his thoughts on blogging and oh my god I started a tv blog!