#i will always defend this show and its depiction of Victorian people

[arbor-tristis]

Sorry but it IS poor media literacy. In shadows are falling, Murdoch is in extreme grief. His thoughts are not rational and he blames Julia which he would never have done. Just because he is the lead doesn't mean he is always right. That's actually a consistent theme in the show, from the start.

The whole point of his character is that he is a contradiction, a catholic but also a modern man of science. His catholic beliefs have made a lot of things difficult to swallow but because murdoch is at his core a man that values honesty, logic and justice, those beliefs often make him lean towards the more progressive side. This is true with Julia, with all the gay people he has ever come across in this show, and everything else.

When Julia reveals to him that she has had an abortion, he finds it difficult to forgive. He believes that it is wrong. But the show does a great job, because as the audience we KNOW it's Julia who's right. She explains it very well- she would never be where she was if she didn't have the abortion. It's a challenge to Murdoch's character to unlearn his Catholics beliefs and understand that abortion is often the only good choice women have. He learns this slowly, but regresses in his moment of grief during the miscarriage. This DOES NOT mean that at any point in this whole thing we are supposed to agree with him. We are supposed to feel bad for him, to have some sympathy. That's it.

Also with homosexuality- in like the very first (or second?) season, it comes up in a case. The resolution of the case is such that actually the gay people were not the murderers and that if people had just let people be, nobody would have died. He even lets a gay priest get away with being gay. He could have charged him. But even that early, Murdoch could feel that that would be wrong. He is not a bad person. He is just learning. Julia is once again a part of it, by opening his eyes to more progressive views.

Also I've said it once and got flamed but I'll say it again- the conversion therapy arc was actually very well done. Watts wanting conversion therapy actually makes a lot of sense given the trauma of internal and external homophobia. To all of you it might seem unimaginable but TRUST that even today, gay people try it, because they don't want to live with the trauma of being gay in this world. It's not always parents dragging people kicking and screaming - it's grown gay adults who just want to be "normal". Who are tired of hiding, of lying, of having limited options. It's very sad but it's entirely understandable. Now think of that, but in the literal Victorian/Edwardian times. Contextualise Watts' wishes in what he has just been through. What kind of future he believes he has. Be honest, would you not have considered conversion therapy? This is the EXACT argument Murdoch makes. He feels bad for Watts. He understands Watts' choice because he knows how helpless he feels. He doesn't think all gay people should do it or that gay people are bad, but he recognises that the world is not kind to them and there's very little he or anyone can do as an individual. It's a very sad reality but he's not really homophobic to think that and it's definitely not him being "pro conversion therapy". If you pay attention, even Julia seems to be sympathetic to Watts but because she is a doctor she tries to tell him that it doesn't actually work. But she STILL understands. Thats what a person with any empathy for someones suffering would do. The episode doesn't have a nice little happy ending and Llewellyn just accepts that he has to be gay because conversion therapy doesn't actually work. But why should it have an ending where everyone turns to the camera and says "conversion therapy is bad y'all" for you to take away the right message???? They didn't solve homophobia, they were just people doing the best they could.

I think you should ask yourself why you need it to be so black and white. Why does Murdoch have to be a good guy or "right" just because he is the lead, and just because he is right about some things, mostly detective work. Murdoch is a person. A talented, rare person- but he exists in history. Like it's not hard. This show actually does a great job of humanising Victorian people. They may have lived at a very different time, but so many of them, not just our main characters, act in progressive ways, out of love, out of a sense of justice. Even Brax does. They were people and they cared about other people. Like us. They would do anything to help them and love them the best way they could. They may not have gotten it 100% but that's fine, nobody does.

You are not the only one in this fandom that has expressed these beliefs, so it's not personal - but watching period dramas with so little sense of nuance is what is wrong. Even today people are complex. Please gain some sense of complexity in characters. It might improve your viewing experience.

If this is incredibly poor media literacy, shout at me and take away my media and English a levels but I'm rewatching shadows are falling and I genuinely cannot tell if the message is pro-choice or pro-life.

Cause on one hand you have murdoch. They've played his Catholic morality as being in the wrong before (I.e what lies buried and then in the future when he says watts should be allowed conversion) and as a whole the show doesn't shy away from the fact that victorians had different moral standards. And of course, if a character does something that does not mean that the author agrees with it or that the viewer should agree with it. But at the same time, he's the lead. Like we've been positioned to agree with him the whole episode for obvious reasons.

And then there's Julia who we are also supposed to sympathise with, arguably more. Her and Rebecca are arguing that abortion is alright and they're both 'good guys.'

I'd argue that in season 2, at least in my reading, we are supposed to view julia having an abortion as a fair reason for murdoch to break up with her. Idk this whole episode feels very murky. It's a great episode and I go back to it all the time, but murky none the less.

[bnrobertson1]

THOUGHTS ON “THE IRISHMAN” (BRNR #26)

My introduction to the peerless works of Martin Scorsese began as a quest for something somewhat different: softcore pornography. I was 12ish and while my dad never ponied up for the Cinemax/ HBO package, for some reason we kind of got Cinemax, or at least its static-filled approximation, on our living room TV. For an internet-less pre-teen disastrously crashing into puberty, this Cable company mix-up taught me the importance of enjoying life’s happy accidents.

Here’s how it worked: with my parents asleep and me left to my groaningly embarrassing druthers, I would pray to whatever deity sent me the scrambled Cinemax signal to also hook a bruh up with some tastefully shot augmented bosoms-focused programming. Mind you, this was before a Channel Guide let you know what you were watching, so sometimes you just had to approach watching like fishing, hoping that whatever this fuzz was would shape into someone getting freaky-deaky, and soon.

It was on one of these prideful nights that I encountered something I at first hoped was a Red Shoe Diaries episode starring the guy from No Escape*. He was with one of the crooks of Home Alone, someone who looked familiar but whose name escaped me, and some less-than-handsome guy who appeared to be wearing a really bad toupee. They were walking to a car and saying “fuck.” A lot. Then, after entering the car, the Home Alone actor nonchalantly shoved an icepick into the Toupee Guy’s head, afterwards commenting something along the lines of “Maybe that’ll shut him the fuck up.”

*A Ray Liotta-starring vehicle I TREASURED growing up, mostly due to its innovative violence.

I didn’t know I was watching Goodfellas, but I knew I was mesmerized. It was violent, it was funny, it moved quickly, it did pushed buttons in my nervous system I didn’t know existed. It somehow made the sting of not watching Shannon Tweed dry-hump a decorated general evaporate. Goodfellas simply crackled with life, even when almost indecipherable due to the static-filled presentation. There was a brute, beautiful honesty to it that the things I was getting exposed to simply lacked. My perception of what art was obliterated and resurrected in the course of about 45 minutes.

Flash forward roughly 24 years. The Irishman, Scorsese’s newest highly anticipated mob drama, hits theaters in a culture far from the one that greeted Casino or The Departed. Instead of the automatic praise that usually greeted Scorsese, a new environment questioned his cinematic contributions mostly due to the lack of representation of (a) minorities and (b) women. While some of these criticisms are fair if a little silly*, the simmering became a raging fire after Scorsese commented on his inability to connect to the movies of the Marvel Universe**.  

*It’s a bit like saying Te-Nehisi Coates hasn’t developed a full voice because he hasn’t written a Jane Austen-esque romp through Victorian England. Or that Lou Reed’s status as legend is flawed because he never released a yodeling album. Artists are allowed to have focus. It’s OK.  

**My only thought about the Scorsese vs. Marvel debate, as someone who quite likes a lot of the Marvel movies: They’re algorithms (albeit very fun ones), and Scorsese is 100% right. I also hope the people who are breathlessly defending Disney against America’s best filmmaker will one day have enough clarity to see that siding with an imagination-torching corporation against an independent artist just sucks.    

The most concise review* I can give of The Irishman is this: it’s the Scorsese mafia movie that pretends the Rolling Stones never existed. In fact, he seems to go out of his way to not mention them in one scene where De Niro’s narrator comments on Jimmy Hoffa’s popularity rivaling that of Elvis and the Beatles. While Casino and Goodfellas never approves of the mafiaso lifestyle**, it does show its appeal with slick music, dialogue, costumes, cinematography, actors, etc. Those films, especially Casino, have operatic narratives, clearly connecting them to millennia-old Roman myths.    

*I already failed. I realize this.

**This part seems lost on a lot of Scorsese haters. Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro is beaten to death after watching his brother suffer the same fate, and his Tommy DeVito is shot in the back in the head- does that really seem like a glorification of a lifestyle?

The Irishman is less indebted to Rock n’ Roll and epics as the Catholic church, or more specifically, Catholic guilt. This guilt weighs heavy on every frame. And this dive into Christitan scruples goes than the top-line perspective of “that’s bad and should be punished and that’s good and should be praised” of some of his other mob epics. There is no shooting of guns in handbags after truck hijacking. Or close-ups of hands in general. There is a hand-stomping scene, but it’s depicted in such a matter-of-fact way it is obviously not a heralded act*. The soon-to-be-curriculum cab demolition scene is scored by an ominous, brooding soundtrack, not the coked-up WHEES of Mick Jagger (or Harry Nilsson for that matter**). Instead, Scorsese’s focus is on bigger, more abstract themes, such as impermanence and the point of existence itself - questions that are frankly terrifying because the answers do not exist, much less reassure/ satisfy.

*Speaking of the hand stomp, many point to this and some of the stranger looking faces as flaws of the film. I’d argue that one of the film’s biggest themes is the fallibility of memory. It’s a striking juxtaposition to put your current self in the past, yet we all do it naturally. I also realize I’m a huge nut when it comes to Scorsese and maybe twisting myself crooked to defend all of his techniques.

**Maybe the best scene in all of film? 

The Irishman often feels like a mea culpa- a heart-felt apology for any damage Scorsese’s more flamboyant films may have done to the culture at large. The amazing thing about the film is how well Scorsese seemed to predict criticism without merely sycophantically answering it. You say my films don’t feature women enough? Well how about a film where the main actress has about 7 words*? That’s not to say the film is a preachy drag because it’s anything but. It’s still funny (sometime riotously so) and moves insanely quickly for a film 30 minutes longer than Casino. The acting is superb, as is the strikingly methodical editing. The first 2/3 of the movie feels like a Goodfellas or Departed- the last third, especially after the climax, feels paced like his Catholic meditation, Silence. “It is What is It is,” the film’s quasi-mantra, nicely sums up its feelings on impermanence, something that will probably affect us all, even Marty.

*It’s almost like Anna Paquin knows that the number of lines and contribution to a film are not always directly related.

But trying to paraphrase- or comment on- what The Irishman is trying to say is really missing the point. It’s a uniquely cinematic work that speaks a cinematic language. Written words are not suitable to mine its deeper meanings, only experiencing it, and meditating on it, does.

I could go on and on about the voluminous excellence of this film. Simply put, I love it. It does feel like ol’ Marty won’t be making anymore, but what a fucking fantastic way to bow out of the genre he revolutionized. He’s made five better than anybody else (Francis Ford Coppola excluded- kind of). And he ended it with such a reflective, brilliant exclamation point, he might have just proved himself the exception to the whole “impermanence” thing.

But while I’ll defend the intellectual merits of his works ‘til the day I can’t, I’ll always associate Scorsese with pornography. A little forbidden, a little dangerous, but capable of reveal orgasmic- and embarrassing- truths to those willing to forgo the comfort of societal norms and allow themselves to be illuminated by the flame of unflinching honesty. Grade: A++