Dirty John 1.5: John's Family

Other than a trenchant scene in which Ronnie (again) tells Debra off about John - which (of course) leads her to get even closer to John - episode 1.5 focuses on John's upbringing, by way of his father, who is as much a sociopath and swindler as John.

First of all, you couldn't ask for a better actor to play John's father than Shea Whigham.  Tina and I just saw him in Homecoming, where he was equally effective.  And of course he was unforgettable as Nucky's brother Eli in Boardwalk Empire.  The thing is, he plays radically different characters in each of these series, and brings home his character with searing, understated style in each of them.

In Dirty John, he's interested in earning money - by doing such things, for example, as getting his son John to eat a little glass in a restaurant, so he can extort some money from the owner.   John learns the hard way how he can play on people's vulnerabilities to not just to make money, but improve his position in this world.

Given what his father has done to him - not in terms of his school of hard knocks education, but in terms of the hardness of the knocks - it's not completely surprising that John puts his father out of his misery when he's already in bad shape in the hospital.  But this also shows that John has gone beyond his father in depravity - as far as we have seen, his father wasn't a killer.   And John has taken his father's advice to go after the families of people who oppose him to the level of threatening his own sister.

Debra doesn't (yet) know about John's murderous propensities, but how on Earth can she start taking him back, in view of what she indeed does already know about him? We got part of the story last week - she inherited her mother's insanely deep well of forgiveness - but there's something else that's deeply not quite right about Debra.

Again, I have no idea how this story turned out in reality, but I'm keenly interested in seeing how it turns out in this bizarre and compelling little series.

See also: Dirty John 1.1: Hunter and Hunted ... Dirty John 1.2: Motives and Plans ... Dirty John 1.4: The Forgiveness Gene

 

Homecoming: Memory Spliced, in Ten Short Parts

A powerful, unusual, vexing yet ultimately satisfying short series on Amazon Prime - ten 30-minute episodes - created and directed by Mr. Robot's Sam Esmail (with Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz), starring Julia Roberts, with great supporting acting by Boardwalk Empire's Bobby Cannavale & Shea Whigham, and Stephan James, whom I've seen here for the first time.

The plot concerns a government contractor with a plan for PTSD soldiers - treat them with a drug that will make them forget the memories that are unraveling them, with the result that they will be whole and happy again.  Julia Roberts plays social worker Heidi, with a heart and a brain.  Cannavale is her boss Colin, in charge of the project.  Whigham is government investigator Thomas looking into this.  And James is Heidi's patient Walter, beginning to fall in love with her, as patients in therapy often do.

But that's the best of what's happening.  The worst, we soon discover, is that four years later, in 2022 (the present are the Spring months of 2018), Heidi has lost all of her memories of working in Homecoming, and Walter is nowhere to be found.  We're now not only in Mr. Robot territory - one of differentiating truth from lies, what's real from what's implanted - but in Chris Nolan's pathbreaking world of Memento. 

And Homeland delivers, with one of the most memorable performances ever delivered anywhere by Julia Roberts, a storyline that surprises and yet all fits into place, and even an ending that's good for your heart.  Cannavale is suitably megalomaniacal yet vulnerable,  Whigham is aptly dogged and a little clumsy, and James has a winning quality, making it not surprising that Roberts' Heidi has reciprocal feelings for him.   Hats off to all concerned, including whoever came up with the square and letterbox screens, as a way of showing limited and full memories.   I predict that by 2022,  Homeland will become as much a classic as is Memento.

 

Radio Free Albemuth: Philip Dick Nixon

Just saw Radio Free Albemuth on Netflix, the 2010 movie released more widely in 2014, based on the Philip K. Dick novel written in 1976 and published posthumously in 1985, or a year after 1984.   The movie is thus an adaptation of late Dick, very late Dick, and contains a smorgasbord of gonzo Dickian conceits, often brilliant, always enjoyable, served upon a constellation of brazen political critique and at times lurid and ingenious science fictional speculation.

The story occurs in an alternate historical America, which diverged from our own some short time after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.   Someone named Fremont is President (played by The Walking Dead's Scott Wilson), reelected umpteen times, and more Nixonian than Nixon.  In this 1984-like dystopia, all agents of the government, not just the plumbers, do the President's illicit bidding, which in this world is not illicit.

Rock music plays a crucial role as a conduit of subversive messages, a realization of the paranoia that gripped the real Nixon administration, whose FCC sought to punish radio stations that played songs glorifying drug usage (this resulted in the banning of Phil Ochs' "Small Circle of Friends" and the Temptations' "Cloud Nine" by some radio stations - two songs that actually were condemning drug usage).  In Radio Free Albemuth, the government shuts down Progressive Records, and executes the man who sought to release a record with a subliminal subversive message - Nick Brady, played by Jonathan Scarfe, who made a memorable contribution to Hell on Wheels last year.

Aliens and extra-dimensions also make an appearance, in what is probably the weakest part of the story, distracting from the realpolitik attack on Nixon Agonistes' America.   But this part is true to Philip K. Dick, who also plays a major role in this story, as a science fiction author named Phil, who has written among other familiar tales an alternate history in which the Nazis won the war (see my recent review of The Man in the High Castle television pilot).   Dick is well played by Shea Whigham, who also put in a great performance as Eli Thompson in the late, lamented Boardwalk Empire.  And good to see Jon Tenney (The Closer) and Rich Sommer (Mad Men) in cameos as evilly madcap Federal agents.

While I'm mentioning names, I should also say I was happy to see my erstwhile science fiction editor at Tor, David G. Hartwell, thanked in the credits.  And the science fiction shown darkly brightly in all kinds of quick bits in this movie, including an alternate reality within this alternate history, of a Portuguese States of America, created in an alternate history in which there was no Protestant Reformation, hence Portugal and Spain, not England and Spain, split up the New World.

An unsurprisingly muddled  review at The New York Times missed all of these touches and more this past June, and Radio Free Albemuth hasn't exactly wowed those who pass solemn judgement on movies from their officious perches.   But that wouldn't have surprised Philip K. Dick, who considered literary theorists KGB agents bent on disabling American science fiction.   As for the movie, I have no doubt that it will amply survive, and go on to become a cult classic in many ways more true to Dick's vision than the high-octane enjoyable big films also derived from his work but which soared off in their own directions.



time travel and alternate history

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