800 Words: Homeland - THE New Show, Part II - The Misfiring Intelligence of Carrie Mathison

Other contemporary shows derive their power from daring to be more extreme: more violent, more disgusting, more sexy, more detailed in production value. It is so easy to realize any vision on contemporary television that its makers are limited by their imaginations. The subtlety we saw in great shows that ended only five years ago is largely missing from the new fare. Once Mad Men ends, will American TV join our movies as an artform in which the best shows derive their power from blunt force?

Among the new batch of hit TV shows, Homeland is a particularly intense, sometimes unpleasant one  – it has almost none of the humor one finds in Mad Men or The Sopranos, yet all of The Sopranos’ oppressive dread. But Homeland is unique among new hits in that the show derives its power from its subtlety. In so many ways, it’s more intense than shows that are much more graphic. It dares to let loose a fully 3-dimensional female character on the screen to an intensity not yet seen on television.

Carrie Mattheson is perhaps the most complex woman the small screen has ever seen. In a performance from Claire Danes as great as any in screen history, we watch as Carrie Mathison bullies, cajoles, deceives, pleads, pesters, seduces, browbeats, blackmails, baits, and bribes her way through the maze that is Washington bureaucracy – yet we know fully well that only a deeply unhealthy compulsion could drives her so hard to succeed in a town where the appearance of complete mental health is always demanded. The tension, the constant danger of watching an Alpha Female negotiate her way through Washington, the ultimate man’s city, is far more intense - and far hotter - than all the sex and violence in Game of Thrones. Next to watching a plausible female character risk constant humiliation, all that extreme graphicness feels positively tame.

As I watched Carrie Mathison single-handedly raise up the CIA (or bring it down, depending on your point of view), I was immediately put in mind of Hedda Gabbler; Henrik Ibsen’s (in)famous anti-heroine,  daughter to a Norwegian general and married off to a mediocre academic; given no other outlet for her inner life than to ruin those of the friends and lovers around her– was she born to be destructive, or did her circumstances create her? Had Hedda Gabler lived 125 years later, I’d imagine her being almost exactly like Carrie Mathison. Lots of feminists would have us believe that Hedda is a victim of her society, an intelligent woman trapped in her surroundings and lashing out merely because revenges against the world are the only options available to intelligent bourgeois housewives. Other critics, older critics, would have us think of Hedda as a psychopath concealed in Jane Austen garb – plotting the ruination of others merely because she can. Neither interpretation is true, though perhaps both are. The whole tension of Ibsen’s play comes from the fact that we have no idea why Hedda acts as she does, only that she commits terribly destructive acts. Perhaps (I think Harold Bloom said this), if Hedda were a man, she’d be another Napoleon, but maybe she’d be a regular person – with all her (his) will to destruction satiated by getting a fair chance at achievement in life. All we can be certain of  is that somewhere in Hedda’s psyche lurks an instinct towards reckless destruction.  Maybe it’s because she’s a woman, or maybe she’s just nuts.

It’s probably a simple matter of time before many feminists would coopt Carrie Mathison is a feminist heroine/victim, just as they have with Hedda Gabler. Carrie Mathison is many wonderful things, but she is no heroine, and how boring she would be if she were. Don’t misunderstand,  the fact that a character like her exists on television is a huge triumph for feminism (and the men who support it), but to if she were simply a hero who rises above the glass ceiling to be a hero to her country would place her in a ghetto every bit as confining as the glass ceiling itself. The irony of Carrie Mathison is that here, finally, is a woman placed in the highest echelons of government policy-making. But the only reason she is accepted by men is because she is so unstable, and that makes her more unscrupulous, more reckless, more ‘masculine’ than any man in the CIA. If war is nothing more than a game of chicken, then Carrie Mathison would win every battle. She is a limited person of limitless willpower who would sooner sabotage everything for which she fights than to fight by other people’s rules. Like all sorts of alleged political heroes from Winston Churchill on down, she’s a dangerously insane figure that has the great luck of her delusions being correct. People like Carrie are much more likely to be wrong than right, and a large part of the show’s power comes from the fact that it’s probable she‘s exactly as insane as she seems. But insane situations call for insane people.

No Aaron Sorkin script, no Gore Vidal novel, no Oliver Stone movie, comes even close to understanding how Washington works nearly so well as Homeland (only The Daily Show comes close). Washington is run, truly run, by people like Carrie Mathison. The façade of Washington power is based on bland, petty flakes like her boss, the Deputy CIA director David Estes, who has no interest in doing his job well or in anything else except jockeying for a chance to be CIA Director. Whether Carrie is right or wrong, whether people like her make America a more or less dangerous place, at least she cares about the quality of her work. The David Estes of DC desperately need the Carrie Mathisons, because somebody has to take the responsibilities they’re not willing to take. If Washington were left to people like David Estes, it would be guaranteed to incinerate in a day, and people like him know that. Carrie Mattheson might incinerate Washington too (and quicker), but at least she’d try to save it.

A whole third post could be done about the show’s amazing political fairness. There is neither the ersatz liberal idealism of The West Wing, nor the authoritarian justifications of 24. It does not have Boss’s cynicism about the evil acts it takes to get things done, nor does it have The Wire’s axe to grind. The government of Homeland is a government we can recognize; in which deeply flawed public servants have deeply flawed motives, but every one of them has their reasons for acting as they do. Homeland makes no equivocation about the fact that there are people throughout the world who would visit as much evil on Americans as they possibly can, nor does it ever excuse the Americans who would do evil in their battle to save American lives.

Like all these new shows, Homeland's daring comes at a price. It's flaws are enormous. As yet, Saul Berensen has little purpose on the show but to act as a father figure for Carrie. Clearly, he’s meant for something more, and the odds are 10 to 9 he’s Abu Nazir’s government mole. The ultimate explanation for Sgt. Brody’s behavior is far too neat, and was revealed far too soon. Writers should never give a character that many reasons for acting irrationally only to finally give him a rational reason to act as he does. But no TV show in the 21^st century speaks as clearly to our world's fears. And no new TV show has a character nearly as alive, as plausible, as fascinating, as the misfiring intelligence of Carrie Mathison.

800 Words: Homeland, THE New Show - Part 1

A bit more than a year before he died, Christopher Hitchens wrote a long article for the City Journal lamenting that there has never been a single novel that truly does justice to complexities of his adopted hometown, Washington DC. Hitch would regularly declare that he was able to read so much because his house had no TV, but last fall while Hitch lay on his deathbed, the first book of a new novel was unearthed that might precisely be what he was looking for. Unfortunately, the novel was on TV, so Hitch probably never had a chance to watch.

Literary fiction no longer holds a place in American life’s mainstream. With the death of J.D. Salinger, we lost the last literary author read by ‘everyone,’ and his books were all a half-century in the past. It’s still within living memory that American authors like Hemingway, Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, Fitzgerald, Booth Tarkington, Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, and Faulkner were writing complex works for a general, middlebrow public. In 1945, if you had cultural aspirations, you dare not go without reading these authors. You dare not even go without reading the American fiction writers of the previous generation or two either: like Mark Twain, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, O Henry, Jack London, Ring Lardner, Edith Wharton, and Sherwood Anderson. And those who truly loved literature could trust that there would be a whole new generation of authors with entirely different voices who could sustain their interest just as well when the giants stopped writing books – the only problem was that so many writers were inspired to write great fiction that no two readers seemed to agree on which were great. It’s a list that contained every special interests - from Jewish authors like Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud and Joseph Heller, to black authors like Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright and James Baldwin, to science fiction authors like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, to southern authors like Robert Penn Warren and Walker Percy, to southern women authors like Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, to Jewish women authors like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick, to politically committed women authors like Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, to journalistic authors like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer (no matter how differently they viewed themselves), historical fiction authors like Gore Vidal and William Styron and E.L. Doctorow, regional northeastern authors like John Updike and William Kennedy, and this list does not include the non-fiction, the poetry, the foreign authors. By the late 60’s, no two Americans could agree on who the great authors were, and reading became -in every sense- a truly solitary activity. American literature had  balkanized into a cornucopia of niches – something for anyone, very little for everyone. And since no two intellectuals could agree on what authors should be read, the general public retreated to paperback fiction and genre pot boilers.  The end result was all too foreseeable, the literary American novel itself has long since become a niche commodity, even the most feted and successful contemporary authors like David Foster Wallace and Phillip Roth are only read by small subsections of America’s intellectually curious public. And in place of the novel grew other things about which everyone could agree what was great.

If our grandparents grew up in the golden age of American fiction (and their parents in the golden age of American poetry), then our parents grew up in the golden age of American movies. In 1975, if you had cultural aspirations, you dare not absent yourself from a movie theater for more than a week at a time: hundreds of movie theaters existed every city of note, and they catered to every special interest. Special movie theaters existed for new movies, classic movies, foreign movies, B-movies, exploitation movies, and pornographic movies. But what amazes is that intellectually curious people were expected to see it all: not just exciting new American directors like Kubrick, Lumet, Peckinpah, Cassavetes, Bogdanovich, Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Altman, but the classic movies of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks and John Ford, Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor and Vicente Minnelli, Billy Wilder and Nicholas Ray; self consciously “bad” movies by Roger Corman and Russ Meyer, Ossie Davis and Melvin van Peebles, George Romero and John Carpenter, Larry Cohen and John Waters; and not to forget – foreign stuff by Bergman and Fellini,  Antonioni and Bertolucci, Godard and Truffaut, Kurosawa and De Sica, Bunuel and Ophuls, Herzog and Fassbinder. But then came the 80’s, with its multiplexes and VCR’s and pursuits of bottom line profits, and suddenly, movie theaters were no longer exciting places to be. No longer were the movies fundamentally a place where people went to watch other people, the movies became a place where we went to watch machines. Whether it was the special effects extravaganzas of George Lucas, or the spiritually charged machines of Stephen Spielberg, or the artful background tapestries of Ridley Scott, or the superimposed historical backdrops of Robert Zemeckis, or the gigantic new worlds created by James Cameron, or the human, anti human machines of half a dozen horror auteurs, the world of American movies had Balkanized – its Golden Age definitively and clearly over. By 1990, American movies inspired a hollow shell of the passion in Americans which they used to. Where did that passion go? Well, if you’re not reading this article, you’re probably watching television.

And if cinema was the language of our parents, then TV is our language. No longer can TV be condescended to as an inferior artform, there’s simply too much contrary evidence. There was plenty of evidence of TV’s emerging quality in the 80’s and 90’s. But just imagine how different the last twelve years of our lives would be if we’d never seen The Sopranos, The Wire, Arrested Development, South Park, Chappelle Show, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Lost, Fringe, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Office, 30 Rock, Community, Parks and Recreation, Malcolm in the Middle, Undeclared, Freaks and Geeks, Futurama, Family Guy, Friday Night Lights, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, How I Met Your Mother, Everybody Loves Raymond, Big Love, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Conchords, Entourage, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, True Blood, Oz, Dexter, Weeds, The West Wing, House, Glee, Nip/Tuck, The Shield, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Powerpuff Girls, Spongebob Squarepants, and yes, 24. More than any book or movie, to know what these above titles signify is to understand what it means be an American in our time. You may not have seen all of them, but you have an opinion on most. And in the back of your mind, there lurks a part of you that wants to plunk down on the couch and see every f-cking episode of them all.

And now, as the era of television draws closer and closer to its end, we have a new show that could well be as earth shattering as any of them. In all probability, television already hit its all-time high point, probably around 2005 when The Sopranos, The Wire, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, South Park, and The Daily Show were all operating at their absolute peak. We’re beginning to see American television balkanize just as American literature and movies did before them. There are more networks than ever before, and all of them want to create their own original programming. But in such an environment, even networks as daring as HBO, Comedy Central, or Fox (and they are extremely daring) can’t necessarily hold their own. Today’s best TV shows have to be ballsy as never before. To distinguish themselves, they have to take on entire worlds of ideas and characters and leave any reservations at the door. Next to the Grand Guignol fest of Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos makes mafia violence look like a tasteful phenomenon. Next to the earth-scorching indictments of local politics made in Boss, The Wire was positively even-handed. Next to Louis CK’s lacerating self-humiliations in his eponymous show, Curb Your Enthusiasm seems like a shrine of self-love. In contrast to the formal perfection of the best from ten years ago, the excess of ambition seen in today’s best new shows makes them seem comparatively sloppy. To equal the daring of these older shows, the ambitions have to be still bigger. And one can feel the showrunners struggling against their limitations: Casting directors are not accustomed to hiring so many many actors as it has to for Game of Thrones, or auditioning actors to sing, dance, and act for the camera as they must for Glee. Network public relations are not accustomed to to explaining the necessity of animal death so that they can make a show like Luck,  nor can they find a plausible explanation about why Outsourced, the first fictional American TV show about the contemporary Asian experience, resembles nothing so much as a Minstrel Show.

We’ve reached TV’s Golden Age, and there’s simply nowhere to go from here but down. It’s been a nice ride, but in ten years we’ll all disagree about what TV shows are worth watching – and reality TV’s triumph over quality programming will be complete. Quality on TV will once again be the exception rather than the rule, but with the added tragedy that we’ll remember a time when it was not so. We’ll probably either view video games or internet videos with the seriousness we currently give to television. Neither prospect fills me with much excitement, but then again, we probably haven’t yet seen the most exciting things yet which either can do.