Rutting Season: Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones

The new DVD sets of Boardwalk Empire provide a chance for the HBO-less to finally see if Steve Buscemi can really pull off being a mob kingpin mayor. He can't. Didn't anyone try and direct him? He looks and acts like a hermit crab bewildered at the loss of his shell, anxious to disappear. There's only one or two actors in the series who seem genuinely menacing. Naturally they're the unknown up and comers with real mobsters to use as inspiration: Stephen Graham makes a terrifying but adorable Al Capone, Vincent Piazza is a poison breeze as Lucky Luciano and Michael Stuhlbarg grows large with every inhale as Arnold Rothstein ("ever since Rothstein 'cough' fixed the world series...")

But the 'main' protagonists are a bore. Somewhere one of the show's creators felt there needed to be some moral lip service, so Nucky helps poor widows and attends temperance meetings; rat Michael Pitt occasionally goes home to make idle promises to his wife and kids; Michael Shannon's fed face is ever locked in an insectoid bug-eyed mask. And there's Kelly Macdonald as the Irish widow temperance member saint Margaret Schroeder, who flinches at every loud noise (she could use a freaking drink - her thin-skinnedness is a clear sign of low affect tolerance and predisposition to alcoholism and I should know).The saint of the show, Margaret sleeps angelically with her two children in such a way as we're forced to wonder what seedy motive is behind it all: is it the male jealousy over the perfect bond between infant and mother or is it the woman intentionally sanctifying herself in religious poses to put the husband off his night's rutting? And then, on the other side, the premature baby Buscemi, underloved, his incubator the closest companion. Anyway you slice it, or wherever you set it, it's just the hungry ghosts in action. Goodfellas was about brotherhood, Godfather about becoming a true dark lord, Boardwalk Empire is about gettin' boozed up in the whorehouse, without the wife or the temperance league or the feds knowing.

Ah Margaret and of course her husband beats her, for all saintly mothers are beaten by their drunk Irish laborer husbands in these things, and a whore gets cut up because Michael Pitt is sleeping with her as always, and we're forced to behold Nucky wheezing his way through sex with La Huerta. There are endless elaborate adult themed strip shows in old theaters and talk of whores when whores are not present.

This is the kind of show HBO specializes in, delivering seedy animal sex and domestic violence in attractive period settings, all but daring us not to wince in embarrassment as women are all either naked floppy breasted whores or floppy hat wearing saints. Sure maybe that's how it was, but these people's lives have lots of incidents they can pick from--why not go the Mad Men season one route and really get into the nuts and bolts of the biz?--but no, and when you unwind the fancy ribbons the non-sex incidents it seems they have no purpose other than to build up to brutal demeaning violence or animal rutting.  And of course, Marty directs the first episode like he's still trying to capture that old Goodfella's momentum but getting bogged down instead in Age of Innocence period detail and not one but TWO suspense deadening multiple violent scene crosscut climaxes. Even if Scorsese scores it to a vaudeville comedy routine replete with drum rolls or a tacky 20s novelty song instead of 60s rock, it was old and done as far back as Coppola's wretched The Cotton Club.
 

Now, I only watched five episodes so far, but how much is enough?  I stopped because I hated freaking Margaret Schroder's smug decision to rat out the St. Patrick's green beer keg stash to the feds in E5. I subscribe to the Over the Edge credo that a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid, and so she should have been the one who should have got cut up, not that sweet-ass ho. And then there's the Buscemi aspect. He can be mildly impressive, but when he has to deliver lines like "I could have you killed!" he sounds like even he doesn't believe it, like he just learned of this ability that morning over O.J., like it was a news story.

In other HBO News, confirming my dark fears, Game of Thrones which like Boardwalk Empire and Rome before it, seem to exist in the murky realm where all the violent sexual ravishings that have occurred off camera in every costume period movie made prior to 1970 finally explode from under their shaggy peat moss burial and into their close-up. The go to position in all these series (and Spartacus too, probably, I've not seen any of it) is doggy style, for maximum rutting; the strong survive and the strong don't woo. God knows how these women ever managed to become lubricated. And as Leonard Maltin notes of Watchmen: "deliberately extreme violence and sexuality seems pointless in this stylized but overly long comic book saga." The stories are always set before the introduction of the missonairy position, and foreplay, and feminism made the world a better but less darkly, violently, pre-erotic place.

Yes, the missionary position is not friendly to the voyeur as the sexual displays occur sandwiched between two wall-like backs but the doggy style is very public and bawdy: the man triumphantly ruts away from a kneeling position, both hands free so he can wave to the cheering throngs; the woman, facing forward, all but paraded in chains down the streets of Rome.

Plus, the HBO modus operandi for delivering these sex scenes is the genuinely ingenious use of 'uncanny Oedipal shock'. Instead of the long, tedious build-up to softcore action, set to smooth, slow soulful muzak like we get in late night Cinemax, these HBO sex scenes start in the middle, from far away angles or in the background, so it takes a second or two for our objectifying voyeur defenses to activate. The effect is sudden, brutal, and jarring, like accidentally walking in on your parents, or looking for the bathroom at a party and suddenly you open up the door on a massive orgy in all it's ugly practicality and hairy geometrics, or being suddenly sexually groped on a bus stop, where it takes a minute to realize even what just happened and for the shame and fury to come roaring up. We're still thinking about whether or not we should have joined in for months if not years afterward. 

I don't mean to sound too militant feminist, but this raunchy HBO sudden shock sex stuff poses a problem for me because it is so well acted, so artfully and so skillfully rendered.  What on the page is a lewd fantasy imagined in a bored in study hall teenage mind becomes a traumatizing 'adult' reality. It's not 'real' in a novel. The Thrones, like the violations in Girl with a Dragon Tattoo probably come off much less traumatic and degrading in the privacy of the printed page. The French know these things and as Severine Benzimra writes:

Sexual scenes aren't supposed to, on this side of the ocean, attract the audience. They represent a part of the life of the character that it is necessary to represent. They aren't meant to excite. Sexual excitation is linked to imagination to be provided by all-audience movies (meaning not the audience of pornographic/erotic movies) if it can be provided by a movie, an idea on which French people wildly discuss and disagree. Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic littérature.

I feel these kind of things should always be poorly acted, or narrated in an affectless tone by one woman to another in the privacy of a Fårö boudoir. Writ in vivid blu-ray they are simultaneously indulgent and a reprisal against indulgence. They are where the consumerism's frenzied promise of bling and commodified sex and indentured bitches sippin' cristal go to not die but see the ugly traumatic exterior of their macho fantasy.

This is why a good moral center is so essential for sports teams. We only have to look at the whole Paterno situation to see how the command hierarchy of a team can obliterate the feeling of responsibility to the larger society, that's why I'm glad Eli Manning is such a good boy!

 Some things are better as dreams, this we know, we decadent shaggy artists. We know because we tried it all, and even when it led us nowhere but depression and despair we persevered at it, and then finally crashed the wheel out from under us and we realized art was the only thing that didn't hurt someone else and leave you feeling skeevy at the end of the day. Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire will either help the frat guys crash into realizations too, or else just shift their lusts from the present to the past.  Until then one gets the impresison from HBO that the red-blooded American male demographic is looking in the past to find that old sexist power, sighing like a moon-faced teenager that he can no longer act like the world is his own private frat house.

Now if a girl likes these sex/rape scenes that's fine, let them be turned on. They're allowed to. But I scoff at the argument that it's not sexist since later the girl gets even or rapes back or learns to control her lusty mate. And we who haven't read the books or seen more than one episode have a right to our response despite the opposition. I liked this response from Carla DiOrio James on Think Progress:

Rather, holding the subject in a deeply personal space, I worry what good these images can do in the collective subconscious of American males. Since the spike in sexually violent images of our Hollywood culture in the 1980's, date rape has spiked accordingly. This spike has not been proven as dramatically in any other country as it has in the US, where male sexuality has become increasingly linked to hyper-violent images.

On the printed page or in some crappy Jess Franco movie rape and sadistic torture can be titillating, fake-looking, haunting, and disturbing because the trauma isn't 'real', it hinges on audience participation. As the great Joseph A. Ziemba of Bleeding Skull wrote in his review of The Possessed:  

The adult themes filter through a PG-13 sensibility, washing the whole thing with frivolity. Blood and mean-spirited torment become instantly hilarious when the torturer can’t keep his wig on.

But etched so vivid by the expert and well-funded HBO craftsman, the rough trade rutting and demeaning sexual servitude of Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones is just a sad sign that white elephant prestige picture craftsmanship has finally exhausted the stash of sleazy taboos it looted from its now destitute grindhouse neighbor, and it still / hasn't found / what it's looking for. God knows what it will overdo next. What else is even left, outside of being real, real gentle?