Looking For Truth: Out of the City

Manuel here to offer this week's Looking recap filtered through a decidedly ranty diatribe on LGBT representation.

I was looking for glimpses of the city that had formed me. I didn’t hold out hope that a Hollywood product would show me anything I recognized beyond a consumer gay culture satisfied with glossy representations as a sign of progress. - Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

I couldn't let this week's recap go by without addressing that New Inquiry piece published last week about Looking which opens with a Rent anecdote and that quote above.

Sycamore's framing tells us everything about what I've elsewhere called "the burden of representation"; notice that every sentence starts with an authoritative "I" that is supposed to function as both a composite of those "I"s that Looking and the homonormative gay industrial complex displaces but which nevertheless points us to an individuality that would (and does) refuse an acknowledgement from such a representational vantage point. There is no hope that mainstream representations would present anything Sycamore would recognize; this is both the foundational claim and foregone conclusion of the piece. [More...]

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Freakshow, Anthology Escape Clauses, and Forgotten Endings

a belated goodbye

Here's how you know a show has lost you: when you forget that you didn't finish watching it. I was faithfully tuning into American Horror Story this past season, and just like every season, I lost interest without realizing I'd lost interest before the finale. It's rather like a tire slowly deflating rather than blowing flat with that horrible disorienting noise.

In the case of Freakshow my attentions were interrupted by Oscar nominations and then awards shows and then Sundance. When I got done with all of that it took me a full two weeks to remember that Freakshow was still sitting there on the DVR waiting. In many ways Freakshow was the best looking season of AHS with the most promising first chapters. But it suffers as Vulture correctly observed from a horrifically ill advised finale, particularly its entire final sequence on Elsa's post-Freakshow career. That was the worst kind of television writing, really: nonsensical, unearned, aggravatingly ignorant of what came before it and beholden to an agenda (Jessica Lange Worship) that the text can't support or in this case actively fought against for an entire season.

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Netflix Sneak: "Bloodline" with Kyle Chandler & Sissy Spacek

Last week here in Manhattan The Film Experience was invited to attend a very exclusive special screening and dinner for Netflix's new series Bloodline. How did they know we had a thing for Kyle Chandler and Sissy Spacek? Even more mysterious: How did they know about our deep abiding love for Norbert Leo Butz and Katie Finneran, two Tony-winning Broadway musical comedy sensations who are surprising but great choices to play husband & wife in a swampy thriller / family drama / murder mystery fusion. 

The storyline concerns the Raeburn family, a rich Southern Florida clan who own and run a very lucrative beachfront hotel. In the premiere episode the parents (Sam Shephard and Sissy Spacek) are celebrating an anniversary and home come there four adult children played by Kyle Chandler, Linda Cardellini, Norbert Leo Butz, and their eldest and most troubled prodigal son Ben Mendelsohn. (Mendelsohn's management team might want to look into a curveball next time he takes a role because seeing his face is now already shorthand for TROUBLE!)

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Looking Down the Road: So This Is Goodbye

Manuel here, braving a sick day bringing you a short and sweet recap from this week's SanFran shenanigans. Even if this week’s episode of Looking hadn’t ended with one of my favorite college-throwback songs I overplayed during many a heartbreak (that entire EP is to die for!), “Looking Down the Road” would have easily become my favorite season 2 episode so far. I wish I weren't so indisposed otherwise I rattle off an endless valentine to this episode which saw itself resetting (or re-directing) our three main leads lives with Dom and Lynn's relationship seemingly at an end, Kevin and Patrick's affair finally buckling under its own platonic weight and Agustin landing a job alongside Eddie at the trans center.

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Looking for the Promised Land: A Midsummer Night's Queers

If the comments on last week's recap of Season 1 of Looking are any indication, what fascinates yours truly, Manuel, about the show is also the very thing that makes it so divisive. Disclaimer: what follows should in no way be taken as an apology for the show nor a glowing endorsement of it as "the best!" As I pointed out last week, there's room for improvement and Patrick & co. have great heights to scale before being able to sit alongside Don Draper, Selina Meyer, Valerie Cherish, Piper Chapman & Jane Rodriguez (my Top 5 shows for 2014). 

The burden of representation. That's how I diagnosed what has fallen on Looking for the mere reason that it's one of the few shows openly about gay people men. As some of you pointed out in your comments, issues of entertainment value and overall quality depend on the fact that the show (whether intentionally or not) announces itself as a mirror. [More...]

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