The Deuce 3.5: Lori and Candy

The Deuce 3.5 showed us just about everyone going down in one way or another.  Among the highlights (or low lights):

• Frankie's definitely dead.  
• Vince ignores various advice and kill's Frankie's killer.  Since said killer's father is a made man, this means Frankie's own life is now in mortal danger
• AIDS is taking its toll, in heart-rending ways
• Lori is so besieged, so desperate to protect herself and body from real intrusions, that she's now imagining them.

Let's look a little more carefully at the last.  Lori should be doing better, much better.  She escaped prostitution in New York to become a porn star in Hollywood.  But she found the impositions on her body in the acting annoying and unacceptable.  So she tried singing.  She sounded alright to me, but apparently not to the audience on her side of the screen.  So, she left that and is working as a stripper.  The audience loves her in that.  But she finds that love threatening, and hallucinates an assailant.  What does that say about Lori?  That she can't handle success?  Well, at least not in the kind of work she's doing,

Candy, after a rough couple of weeks, is the only one in striking distance of a happy ending.  She finally rekindles a professional alliance with Harvey.  In many ways, their relationship has always been the best in this series - the best in that both benefit professionally, and neither one is really damaged when discord arises, as it always does in all walks of life.

And, since The Deuce is about porn and its evolution, this befits the series.  See you next week.

See also The Deuce 3.1: 1985 ... The Deuce 3.2: The First Amendment! ... The Deuce 3.3: Love and Money, Pimps and Agents ... The Deuce 3.4: Major Changes

And see also The Deuce Is Back - Still Without Cellphones, and that's a Good Thing ... The Deuce 2.2: Fairytales Can Come True ... The Deuce 2.3: The Price ... The Deuce 2.4: The Ad-Lib ... The Deuce 2.6: "Bad Bad Larry Brown" ... The Deuce 2.9: Armand, Southern Accents, and an Ending ... The Deuce Season 2 Finale: The Video Revolution

And see also The Deuce: NYC 1971 By Way of The Wire and "Working with Marshall McLuhan" ... Marilyn Monroe on the Deuce 1.7 ... The Deuce Season 1 Finale: Hitchcock and Truffaut 

  
It all starts in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn walks off the set
of The Misfits and begins to hear a haunting song in her head,
"Goodbye Norma Jean" ...

The Deuce 3.4: Major Changes

I mean, it's the final season (even thought it's only the third) of The Deuce, right?  So we had to expect major changes.   More than Lori failing at everything other than sheer porn that she tried (though, if you ask me, I thought her singing was pretty good).  More than Candy being read the anti-porn riot act by Andrea Dworkin (a real person, by the way, who died in 2005).

So, it wasn't that surprising to see what happens to Frankie.  On his birthday, no less. It's been building up to this all season, and there even were intimations of that in last year's second season.  He doesn't pay his due respect to people with guns, including and especially the mob.

And so, he gets shot at the end of the episode.  And it looks like he's dead, or dying, in his twin brother's arms.   But then the coming attractions show him alive in bad shape in a hospital, or at least someone with a mustache who looks like him.  It's probably Frankie - as far as we know we've been following the story of twins in The Deuce, not triplets (in which case, maybe the whole series would've been called The Trio).

But you know what?  It doesn't really matter if Frankie is dead, or very badly hurt, in which case, he could die before the series ends, anyway.   But even if Frankie survives, that's still going to amount to a very major change in the series.  He won't be the same.  Which means that his brother Vincent, who has been much more of the main character in this narrative, won't be the same, either.

I'm also sorry to say that I expect some other deaths before the series is over, anyway.  Life is hard and dangerous, especially when you're in the kind of business that the twins and everyone around them are in.

See also The Deuce 3.1: 1985 ... The Deuce 3.2: The First Amendment! ... The Deuce 3.3: Love and Money, Pimps and Agents

And see also The Deuce Is Back - Still Without Cellphones, and that's a Good Thing ... The Deuce 2.2: Fairytales Can Come True ... The Deuce 2.3: The Price ... The Deuce 2.4: The Ad-Lib ... The Deuce 2.6: "Bad Bad Larry Brown" ... The Deuce 2.9: Armand, Southern Accents, and an Ending ... The Deuce Season 2 Finale: The Video Revolution

And see also The Deuce: NYC 1971 By Way of The Wire and "Working with Marshall McLuhan" ... Marilyn Monroe on the Deuce 1.7 ... The Deuce Season 1 Finale: Hitchcock and Truffaut 

  
It all starts in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn walks off the set
of The Misfits and begins to hear a haunting song in her head,
"Goodbye Norma Jean" ...

The Deuce 2.2: Fairytales Can Come True

The evolution of porn continues to take center stage in The Deuce 2.2, with Candy realizing that a good way to go forward, get more sophisticated, in her movies is to base at least one on a fairytale - or maybe it's a nursery rhyme - Little Red Riding Hood.   Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs' "Little Red Riding Hood" plays in the background - also a raunchy version of that nursery rhyme and always good to hear.

In other movie-related developments on The Deuce, Larry Brown - played by Gbenga Akinnagbe from The Wire and lots of other memorable performances - asks Candy why there are not any "brothers" in her movies.  He aptly points out that acting is the essence of being a pimp, and he would be up to cast in her movies, and you can see the wheels in her head beginning to turn.

And ... at very least, Lori will be heading out to Hollywood, because you can't have a story about the movie business without some significant kind of Hollywood involvement.  What these movies are of course doing is lifting our characters way beyond New York to the world at large.

Indeed, the local non-movie threads in this episode are just two brief scenes.   One concerns the windowless peepholes and their complications.  The other concerns an alternate mob move on Vincent's bar, and will likely lead to some sort of bloodshed before the season is over.

As a media theorist, I'm enjoying the emphasis on porn over in-person pimping and prostitution, meaning, so far, I'm liking this season more than season 1.

See also The Deuce Is Back - Still Without Cellphones, and that's a Good Thing 

And see also The Deuce: NYC 1971 By Way of The Wire and "Working with Marshall McLuhan" ... Marilyn Monroe on the Deuce 1.7 ... The Deuce Season 1 Finale: Hitchcock and Truffaut 

  
It all starts in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn walks off the set
of The Misfits and begins to hear a haunting song in her head,
"Goodbye Norma Jean" ..