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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Of corsets and cocksuckers
As any card-carrying Taoist and historian knows, if you don't trust the people, they will become untrustworthy. Maybe that's why the town of Deadwood seems to be awash in chaos and violence lately. Swearengen and Bullock are each natural leaders in their own right, but Lord, they have less trust than a troop of Girl Scouts peddling Thin Mints at a kleptomaniac fat farm.
God, but it's good to have those scrubby cocksuckers back in our loving arms again, isn't it? The first three episodes have been pretty outstanding, what with Swearengen and Bullock finally having it out, even though it sort of seemed like they had achieved an uneasy peace last season.
And speaking of uneasy pieces, how about that bed-thumping affair between Mrs. Garret and Bullock? Yow! I love it when corsets and niceties give way to sweaty lust. Why would anyone slog through hundreds of pages of "The Age of Innocence" otherwise? Wait -- did anyone actually get down in that book, or was it all just heavy breathing and the slipping off of lace gloves for clandestine hand-fondling? I can't remember. But no matter, the hand-fondling was just as good as any bed-thumping affair could've been, if not better.
In fact, there was something a little melancholy about the bed-thumping, wasn't there? It was as if Mrs. Garret and Bullock were admitting that this was the end game. No more need for polite talk and longing looks. It would all be downhill from here. Much as I like Mrs. Garret, there's something a little bit nasty and passive about her. She reminds me a little of Lisa, Nate's passive-aggressive hippie wife on "Six Feet Under," one of those honey-sweetened, wheat-free earth mothers who one suspects is huffing paint thinner and drowning kittens and trampling on alfalfa sprouts when no one is looking. Nice as it was to see love in bloom in such a godforsaken place, it was tough not to hope that Mrs. Garret and Bullock would both get their comeuppance for being so prideful or lustful... or something.
And Swearengen would've stabbed Bullock in the back, too -- at least he claimed as much -- if it weren't for the stagecoach carrying Bullock's wife and son, inherited from his dead brother, that rolled into town at that moment. "It was the cow-eyed boy that unmanned me!" Swearengen spat in typical Swearengen-speak.
The cow-eyed boy unmanned me, too! But my favorite turn of phrase from the season premiere had to be Cy Tolliver's. He told the whores fresh from the stagecoach that while Bullock's wife was riding to town with them, Bullock was "pickling his prick in the cunt brine of another!"
Pickling his prick in the cunt brine of another! Sweet Jesus! How much do you want to bet that the writer who dreamt up that line stood up in the middle of the writers' room and screamed, "I rule! I friggin' rule!" and then did a touchdown dance the likes of which those pointy-nosed wordsmiths had never seen?
OK, maybe not. But it's nice to imagine it that way, isn't it?
Paper pushers and copycats
But then, it's probably better that it didn't happen that way, since all bona fide Taoists know that when people see things as good, evil is created. Look no further than NBC's "The Office" (Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. EST) for more proof of this phenomenon. Yes, "The Office," an Americanized version of the BBC show we all watched and loved and couldn't imagine being changed in any way, since every single aspect of it was pure genius. Why, we wondered, would the idiots at NBC even try to mess with such a good thing? Why not just replay the original, insanely brilliant series on prime-time network television?
Oh, maybe because Americans can't understand those funny accents and don't get jokes that British people make about British stuff because it's all weird and foreign and who wants to learn new things about faraway places anyway? Not us!
Still, I was willing to give "The Office" a shot. The contrarian in me had heard all the angry fuss about the remake, most of it coming from me, and eventually I got sick of hearing me whining about it and started to think, "Oh yeah? Well, who knows? Maybe the NBC version will kick ass!" Not only that, but I love Steve Carell and knew that he'd be about as good at the job as anyone short of, say, Harry Shearer, who, now that I think about it, would've been way better.
OK, here's the thing. It's basically impossible to tell that Steve Carell is pretty funny in the first episode, because all you can think is, "He's no Ricky Gervais!" And annoyingly enough, the first episode is almost exactly the same as the BBC version, with the stapler in the "jelly" and David making Dawn cry and Tim shooting the shit with Dawn, only there are these strange Americans where our favorite office drones should be. I mean, how can you swap out Gareth (Mackenzie Crook) and replace him with someone new?
Here's the good news -- or the evil news, depending on your perspective: After watching two more episodes, I was beginning to almost enjoy the NBC version on its own merits. The new Gareth has his own special charms, actually, and Carell is pretty fantastic. It's still not clear that the awkwardness, a staple of the original, really works on American TV, but when compared to the shrill, chirpy pace of most sitcoms, well... why not at least hope that this show finds its own little place in the universe? It's better than another "My Wife and Kids" or "According to Jim," isn't it?
So let's just try to suspend our disbelief and block the comparison to the superior original from our minds as long as we can. Because, as we all know, the sage needs no comparisons, and all things change in time.
