By Todd VanDerWerff
Rescue Me, which ended its third season last night, is a series at war with its own worst impulses. In every episode -- indeed, in every scene -- the audience holds its breath, waiting to see if the writers will find a note of grace or banality.
Even the finale, a mostly quiet and occasionally meditative hour about the sacrifices the men of the firehouse have made, was marred by a ludicrous cliffhanger in which Sheila (Callie Thorne, doing strong work in an underwritten role), in a fit of rage prompted by the admission of her on-again, off-again boyfriend Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary, stunning even in the show's weaker episodes) that he's not going to retire and move with her to the beach, drugged Tommy, then accidentally started a fire, which she somehow couldn't put out (and she's supposed to be a fireman's widow?) and collapsed beside him as the flames roared around them. Sheila, a once interesting character, had sunk to the level of a crazy shrew -- an unfortunately common outcome for the show's female characters.
The cliffhanger was already objectionable for its lack of real suspense (does anyone really think Tommy won't get out alive?). But it was doubly unfortunate that it came at the end of a short arc (mostly dealing with the death of Tommy's brother Johnny, played by Dean Winters) that eschewed the show's usual on-the-nose approach to plot twists for something subtler. In large part, the season's last three installments had blended humor and pathos in a way that only Rescue Me can manage. It seemed possible that the show third year would end a high note -- a major victory, considering that this season was problematic even at its best. Co-created and overseen by Leary and coproducer Peter Tolan, Rescue Me tends to mistake collections of bad events for high drama, it has trouble drawing believable female characters, and it often doesn't trust itself to go for an understated moment when an over-the-top moment is readily available.
So what makes Rescue Me worth watching at all? For one thing, it's a show with a singular voice. Both its best and worst inclinations stem naturally from Leary and Tolan's view of the world as a bleak place where only a mordant sense of humor will get you through the day. A lot of dramatic TV either sands off its rough edges or sharpens them to a fine point in order to compensate for a weak product (Rescue Me's FX stablemate Nip/Tuck is guilty of the latter). Whatever other complaints one can muster, it's hard to say that Rescue Me doesn't come from a genuinely artistic place. What Rescue Me offers, what keeps its fans coming back week after week are smaller moments that counteract the dramatic bombast. Susan Sarandon, for example, was mostly wasted in a guest arc early in season three, but she had a lovely monologue where she justified the kidnapping of Franco's (Daniel Sunjata) daughter, Keela (who, legally, wasn't Franco's to begin with), by pointing out to Tommy that his male chauvinist boys' club would destroy the spirit and ambition of an obviously bright girl like Keela. For a show with as many poorly developed female characters as this one, the monologue seemed to endorse the theory of many viewers that the women of Rescue Me do have interesting lives, even if we rarely get to see them. (Of course, this idea was never developed beyond that one monologue, but it stood out in a series of episodes that seemed unusually female unfriendly; more on this in a minute.)
Throughout the season, Rescue Me played to its greatest strength, comedy. Even an underwhelming episode might boast an extended, massively entertaining bit like fireman Sean Garrity (Steven Pasquale) sleepwalking with dried chip dip on his face, destroying a supermarket and somehow winning his girlfriend's love in the process. Leary and co-creator Peter Tolan (who directs and co-writes many of the episodes with Leary) have an ear for the way guys talk when they're not around women, and the firehouse scenes routinely rank among TV's best. It's worth watching Rescue Me week to week just to see what these crude men will say and do -- and the actors are up to the challenge. But the sense of male camaraderie transcends ball-busting. Leary and Tolan understand that men can be reserved emotionally (a stereotypical portrayal) but will open themselves up in small groups. 
In every episode, there's a scene where handful of firemen discuss their lives with each other; these scenes rarely hit false notes. Often, the exchanges are prompted by Tommy, who's more gregarious than the others; when he talks with, say, Franco about his missing daughter, or defends the Probie (Mike Lombardi) when his colleagues express revulsion at his homosexual relationship with his roommate, it feels real. Occasionally, the show will string enough of these emotionally real moments together and sidestep enough of its unfortunate tendencies to nail down a wonderful scene or episode. Think of the third season scene where Tommy used a visit to his eldest daughter's school counselor to learn about his own emotional damage, or the scene where he visited a bar and held forth on the FDNY's September 11 losses, reminding the viewer of how many times he's used 9/11 trauma to excuse inexcusable behavior. Special mention should also be made of the fire scenes themselves, which are always expertly choreographed and shot -- Dante's Inferno by way of an especially bleak stand-up routine.
In particular, the season's penultimate episode, which centered on Johnny's death, felt like one of the series' finest hours yet. For a show that's largely dialogue-driven, significant portions of the story were told visually. From Tommy's dad (the wonderful and under-used Charles Durning) struggling with a doorknob after learning the news to the ghosts of Tommy's lost friends and relatives standing vigil at Johnny's funeral, the episode was quietly powerful, marred only by cutaways to storylines that felt unnecessary, like Uncle Teddy (Lenny Clarke) in jail, a subplot played for increasingly rare laughs.
Many of the show's fans are critical of this episode for segueing (a bit awkwardly) into a wedding celebration for Sean Garrity (Steven Pasquale), who is marrying Tommy's sister. But that's the essential Rescue Me spirit: there are good and bad things in life, and your crutches (alcohol, sex) get you through. The most important of these is family; the wedding and the after-party (featuring the whole, sprawling Gavin clan -- good luck keeping track of them without a flowchart) espoused this idea more strongly than any in the show's history. Rescue Me sincerely believes that sorrow can become joy in a matter of moments if you're surrounded by the right people.
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But Rescue Me's faults are too serious to deserve a pass. All too often, when given the choice between doing something realistic and insightful and doing something cheaply melodramatic, the show opts for the latter. The sense of cheap melodrama can be felt most keenly in its account of its hero's life. Tommy lost a beloved cousin (and fellow fireman) on Sept. 11, then sank into depression and the bottle, losing his wife, Janet (Andrea Roth), then taking up with his cousin's widow, Sheila. Since then, Tommy has lost a son, Connor, and a brother, split from his wife and various girlfriends, dealt with survivor's guilt and tried to conquer his alcoholism. He's had to put up with a cantankerous father and watched his uncle go to jail for killing the man who killed Tommy's son.
Gavin's run of bad luck is equalled by few TV characters; one of them is NYPD Blue's Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz), who lost partners, children and lovers, enduring so much heartbreak that his level of misfortune grew to seem ridiculous. But it's worth remembering that Sipowicz endured these tragedies over 12 seasons, each one consisting of 22 episodes apieces. Tommy's tragedies were packed into three 13-episode seasons, and his friends in the firehouse have suffered on a similarly grand scale. The Chief (Jack McGee) has lost his wife to Alzheimer's and suffered a heart attack. Lou (John Scurti) saw his money swindled by a call girl and contemplated suicide. The Probie has had to deal with a sexual fetish (for overweight women), his desire to stalk his ex with a gun (one of the series' worst subplots) and his sexual orientation (he had an affair with his male roommate). The series rose to new levels of excess near the end of Season Two, when bad things happened to every character in the last five episodes, cresting in a finale which took place immediately after the death of Tommy's son.
On an unabashed soap opera like All My Children or Dallas, the audience expects the characters to suffer during every waking moment. Melodrama works in a self-contained feature film because, like a soap opera, the audience accepts the genre as a heightened interpretation of reality. The narrative represents a greatly compressed series of events; one quick cut and you're on to the next thing. The ostensibly realistic TV drama doesn't do melodrama well, because it doesn't have such luxuries. The story is spread over many years, and between episodes (or seasons), the viewer has time to think about what happened and poke holes in the show's credibility. On a soap, this is all right; contrivance is part of the fun. But a show like Rescue Me can't afford to seem contrived; it's already leaning too much on broadly theatrical devices (like Tommy's ghosts). If too many characters endure too many tragedies in too short a timespan, the bubble of realism pops. Rescue Me pops its own bubble routinely. Whenever it wants to shake up the characters' status quo, it reaches for misery (like the death of Tommy's son) and threatens to become a soap opera for macho guys.
In Season Three, Rescue Me seemed to balance its lighter, better elements and its melodrama. Deeply serious subplots (like Lou contemplating suicide) were balanced with light-hearted ones. Even in the season's tragic final episodes, the writers retained celebratory elements (Garrity's long-awaited wedding; the scene where Lou was revealed to be dating a soon-to-be ex-nun). This season also indicated that the show's creators were capable of restraint. Where Tommy's son's death was conveyed in an over-the-top music video where Tommy rushed his boy to the hospital, the death of Tommy's brother was cause for a mostly understated montage that showed people descending into grief as a less-oppressive song played on the soundtrack. The first incident tried to ratchet up already-plentiful emotion. The second allowed us to fill in the blanks and see the emotional aftershocks for ourselves -- we already knew from the "previously on" that Johnny Gavin was dead; now, we got to see those who loved him react. (This is not to say that the series completely abandoned bombast. In the same episode as this montage, Tommy received an answering machine message from his brother forgiving him, letting him off the hook for a season-long fight over Tommy's ex-wife. While this ties into the the show's theme of family overcoming all obstacles, it felt cheap and dramatically convenient.)
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But in season three, the show's other worst impulse came to the fore. The women of Rescue Me tend to be emasculating harpies whenever they're not lusting after one of the firefighters (usually Tommy, though Franco is a target as well). In the first two seasons, this flaw was easier to overlook. The show is told from the point-of-view of the guys. We saw so little of the women that we could presume their lives were more complex than the men knew.
Then, in season three, Tommy raped his ex-wife, and the show seemed to approve of it. The scene began with Tommy and Janet discussing how to split up their affairs. He grew angry with her, then slapped her around, forcing her onto the couch and holding her down. Then he removed her clothes and his pants and pushed himself inside of her (all of this conveyed through sound effects). Her rage gave way to something approaching pleasure; the job done, Tommy pulled out. The whole encounter was filmed from a low angle that made Tommy look like a monstrous aggressor.
True, the scene had its ambiguities: Janet never said "No" or cried out, and eventually she seemed to enjoy it. In addition, their relationship was always volatile; it wasn't inconceivable that we were watching hate sex. Even if it was rape, the show would have been on dramatically solid ground if the scene had ended there. But it didn't. After the encounter, Tommy exchanged pleasantries with Janet, who got dressed again. Then he left the apartment as indie rock rose on the soundtrack and a charismatic smile crossed his face in tight closeup. Pulling on his sunglasses, he got in his truck and pulled away from Janet's building. Moments later, Johnny went to the same building to visit Janet (his lover at the time) and found her sitting on the couch, flipping through a magazine, acting as though what just happened was the most normal thing in the world. Indie rock played triumphantly throughout.
The scene's defenders would have viewers believe that the soundtrack reflected Tommy's mental state, and the unstable attraction that still existed between him and Janet. But the images told another story. Because Leary is so charismatic, because the whole thing was presented with such a joyous juxtaposition, the show, intentionally or not, sided with Tommy. There's no way to watch that scene and say that Rescue Me thought its hero's actions weren't justified. The overwhelming sense is that Tommy put that bitch in her place.
Rescue Me certainly doesn't have a moral imperative to sit down with the viewers and explain that rape, even between lovers, is a crime. But it does have the imperative to view acts like this through a lens of neutrality. When a Sopranos gangster cuts down a gangland foe, even if the killer takes pleasure in the moment, the series rarely does. Violence is shown from an emotional or physical distance -- with a sense of detachment, even coldness (think, for example, of Tony's fight with Ralphie in Season Four -- shot clinically, to convey the weight of the violence). Rescue Me undercut itself by making what the writers claim wasn't a rape seem like one, then appearing to side with the rapist. (This was par for the course. Rescue Me has almost never sided against Tommy; while he may be a jerk, we're always reminded that he's a a cool guy and a good friend.)
If the event wasn't indicative of a larger trend, it could be viewed with some impunity. But the season also saw Tommy take a co-ed home and duct tape her mouth shut when she wouldn't stop talking, Susan Sarandon kidnap Franco's daughter, Janet come to have an affair with Tommy post-encounter, Sheila drug Tommy (twice) and rape him (once) and numerous women lust after Tommy and call him repeatedly (at one point causing him to proclaim a day "crazy chick calling day"). And that's not even touching on the finale, where Sheila put Tommy in mortal danger. None of the women of Rescue Me did anything redeemable in Season Three, and the producers' promises that Tommy would feel the repercussions of his actions in Season Four smacked of backpedaling, as if Leary and Tolan were responding to a critical outcry they didn't see coming. (And let's remember that Season Four is a year away; some viewers may feel they need to see the repercussions now.)
All of this may make Rescue Me sound like an abominable show that's not worth watching. But it is worth watching; it has moments of truth and insight, humor and affection. Its missteps are so maddening because it is so often very good, making its flaws all the more readily apparent. Perhaps Leary and Tolan can fight their way past their worst tendencies, and find the great show that lurks inside of their very good but very frustrating one.
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Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Trauma and drama on Rescue Me
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22 comments:
Alan Sepinwall on the finale: "Look, you drug Franco or Garrity or even, God help us, Lou, and trap them in a burning beach house, and I can picture the possibility that they could die, or get scarred or crippled or whatever. But Tommy's going to emerge physically unscathed -- how is he going to maintain his supernatural ability to bag hot women otherwise? -- and even if Sheila dies, I won't exactly mourn the loss of the poster girl for how horribly this show usually writes women."
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Jonathan Toomey at TV Squad: "I mean, don't get me wrong, this was a great episode. Every Rescue Me episode is. But it just lacked something."
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Yeah, you pretty much nailed it, Todd.
It's funny how this year I've caught myself tuning in every week just to be annoyed. (Hmm, let's see what creepy Denis Leary sex fantasy we're in store for tonight!)
And while Leary is indeed a very good actor, his preening clothes-horese tendancies distract me to no end. Everyone else on the program wears T-shirts and regulation gear - but Leary's always in some sort of expensive turtleneck or designer dress shirt (often pink!)... even his FDNY jumpsuit is always fashionably unbuttoned with the collar arranged in a way the QUUER EYE guys would applaud. Maybe the right look for Sonny Crockett, but kind of a weird choice for a Tommy Gavin, no?
That, and I also can't stand his penchant for acting every dramatic scene while wearing $500 sunglasses, indoors. I actually applauded when Sheila told him to take them off last night!
(What else to say about Sheilia? If she dies in that fire it will be a mercy-killing. Sigh.)
It was Lou that kept me watching this year. I thought John Scurti really came into his own, bringing such understated, matter-of-fact pathos (which felt especially welcome considering how hard everyone else was straining to be dramatic) and, by far, the snappiest comic timing on the show.
My secret hope last night was that Lou would find his sea legs, and next season would take place entirely on the boat, with John Scurti and Artie Lange vying for the affections of the nun.
Sean: I concur. I keep wanting to love this show, but I just can't. I can't think of another recent series that trashes its own potential for greatness so routinely. It wants to be The Last Detail and Peyton Place at the same time. Dramatically and aesthetically, it's as big a fuckup as its hero. And for all Leary and Tolan's bluster in interviews, it doesn't have the balls to admit what it actually is: a soap opera for Maxim subscribers. I checked out after the rape episode -- which I watched long after the controversy -- and never came back. It wasn't the rape, it was, as Todd says, the smugly triumphant attitude toward it that irritated me. As Alan has said, there's a difference between depicting sexism and embodying it, and Rescue Me too often goes with option 2.
I thought Scurti came in to his own as well this season, but Steven Pasquale really showed a knack for physical comedy that I wouldn't have guessed he had. He's good at playing the dumb guy, but the sequences when he sleepwalked and when he got high off the marijuana fire were just precisely timed and played.
In some ways, Rescue Me feels like a drama that really wants to be comedy. I wonder if the hour length makes the writers feel they have to throw in a tragic even now and then?
Scurti for the past two seasons has been the show's MVP. It's interesting that you brought up "Dallas" because that was the first thing I thought of with the ludicrous cliffhanger ending, though I don't recall any "Dallas" character drugging another one to have sex with them. I still like the show more than I don't, but when it makes a wrong move, boy does it make a wrong move. In some ways, I think they'd have been better off ending on last week's episode. With the opening that turned out to be a flashback, it started to be interesting and I thought the whole episode might go that way but, alas, no.
Excellent analysis. Like Sean, I often wonder if I'm tuning into this show just to be annoyed.
I'm not sure how I felt about the rape. Janet has become such an intolerant monster, like Tommy, so addicted to misery and chaos, that it made sense to me, but the music... uh. Um. It's getting to the point that Tommy and Janet are so hateful around each other that I wonder why the ever got together to begin with. Johnny's phone message made no sense to me. They still love each other? Really? are you kidding me? And Johnny was supposed to be one of the more well adjusted characters.
The show reminds me of the issues I had with Oz- the show does such an automatic job of creating the worst possible scenario for its characters that every move the show makes becomes predictable. Dramatically intersting or no, the more that happens, the futher I tune out.
"[Sheila] accidentally started a fire, which she somehow couldn't put out (and she's supposed to be a fireman's widow?)...."
Well, she was plastered at the time.
The first (and I think we can all agree, superior) season of "Rescue Me" was so effective because it foregrounded the day to day, almost sitcom-like hassles of being a hard-living guy (ex-wife antagonizing you, drinking too much, co-workers are idiots) against the still recent specter of the worst thing anyone could possibly imagine happening. Tommy and company's baboonish and chauvinistic behavior was accepted condoned because a) look what they've been through and still continue to do, you'd be on edge too and b) it may have been destructive behavior but it was primarily self-destructive behavior. These guys could save lives, but it was themselves that was in danger of slipping away.
But in season 2 & 3, living in the wake of 9/11 wasn't enough so the show became, as Matt put it, "a soap opera for Maxim subscribers" (incidentally I've found this true of all of FX's dramas as captivating, edgy first seasons of "The Shield" and "Nip/Tuck" gave way to more and more outlandish plotlines and gimmicks, as if to justify/build upon all their initial buzz). Now the day to day grind of running into burning buildings and busting balls becomes secondary to loopy plotlines about secret half-brothers/child molester priests and dead children/vigilante justice, Johnny gunned down with no provocation and everyone is sleeping with everyone.
To that last point, as Sean pointed, out season 3 has been one prolonged sex fantasy for star/creator Leary with him being on both sides of a rape fantasy, seduced by his nephew's teacher, nailing his brother's ex wife and, in a scene arguably more disturbing than the Janet "rape" because it's played for laughs, duct-taping shut the mouth of a chatty sexual conquest. These guys were always assholes and privately resented women, but it now seems as the show itself hates women. Janet may have always been a shrew and Sheila always needy, but one could almost forgive these transgressions as the byproduct of dealing w/ Leary's glorious shmuck all the time. Now they seem to exist only to make the lives of the men around them miserable.
On "Rescue Me" women are either vacant-eyed fuck puppets or clingy, manipulative harpies. With the exception of Tuesday's finale, there's a direct corollary between the episodes of season 3 that capture the "all that matters is the guy next to me" spirit of season 1 and the episodes where Tommy keeps his dick in his pants, something to consider for season 4.
As to whether I'll be back for season 4, I'm in the same boat as everyone else. You suffer through the scenes that doesn't work to watch the stuff that does. And in capturing the rapport of working class guys blowing off steam and expressing hetro-love for their brothers the show is without peer. Man, I wish this show was easier to write off.
jon: Is it that hard to run a fire extinguisher though? Really? (He said as someone who's never had occasion to do so.)
Andrew: Spot on. While I do say the show has gotten better from season to season, I think that's in the ways in which it blends its comedy (which I do think has improved on season one) with its drama -- this season came the closest to actually working in that regard.
But the attitude toward women gives it a one-step-forward, five-steps-back kind of feel.
And while I think Nip/Tuck has become an even more ridiculous show, worshiping at the altar of "edgy," I like quite a bit about The Shield, which I am catching up with on DVD. Does it get really awful at some point? I'm halfway through season two.
I've always had mixed feelings about "The Shield" which since the beginning has struck me as TRAINING DAY: The TV Show. I find it lazy and reductive, with almost any problem able to be solved through brute force and intimidation, with no real consequences for Mackie and company's horrible behavior. Its first season is probably "its best" (although to be fair, I haven't seen the most recent season yet) in my opinion but once the whole bit with the Money Train comes into play and the fall-out of which lingers over the following seasons (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here) I thought it got sort of cartoonish. That and I don't think there's a single likable character on the show, which would be admirable if it wasn't such a chore to sit through.
Interesting. I remember watching the debut episode of Glenn Close and being impressed at her decision to underplay on a show full of over-players, but I couldn't follow most of the storylines and thus tuned out.
Some of the storylines I've heard of SOUND ridiculous, but friends and critics I respect hold the show in such esteem that I wanted to see it for myself.
I think the difference between The Shield (and even Nip/Tuck) and Rescue Me is that the first two ostensibly play in their OWN universes -- they're both self-consciously heightened realities. The Shield is in the Dirty Harry prototype, with Nip/Tuck playing in the Dynasty prototype (I guess). Rescue Me, by including 9/11 as central to its premise, AUTOMATICALLY attempts to be more "realistic," so the melodramatic stuff sticks out like a sore thumb more.
Mackey killing hundreds to keep himself looking clean? I can buy that in the show's reality. But I have trouble buying Uncle Teddy not being broken up about his nephew's death as he tries to get his wife in bed.
Todd: I've used a fire extinguisher while drunk (ah, college) with no problems. For whatever shameful insight that's worth.
THANK YOU for someone else noticing Leary's wearing of sunglasses in indoor-set dramatic scenes(I, too, cheered when Jant had him take them off).
It's distracting as hell.
Matt (and/or Alan), has Leary ever addressed his sunglasses technique in one of your calls with him?
Anon: I am not aware that the question has been asked yet, though Alan's interviewed Leary more often than I have, so maybe he has some, er, insight.
I think it's just Leary being Leary -- the wiseass supporting guy finally getting a sexy lead role and indulging his rock star fantasies.
Thanks, Matt.
I had a brief panic that fire extinguishers actually ARE ridiculously complicated and hard to use, but that would seem sort of antithetical to their purpose.
Todd--
Terrific, terrific piece--you really nailed the show's strengths and weaknesses (and why it remains worth watching in spite of itself) to perfection. The defense of Sean and Maggie's insta-wedding is very much appreciated, too.
A couple of points: No critique of the just-concluded season is complete without penalizing Leary and Tolan for the (IMHO) racist depiction of the nurse that Jerry hooked up with, a character who compounded the series' typical mysogyny issues. Eeeew. Similarly, no article on the finale is complete without praise for the flashback to the pre-9/11 firehouse that was seamlessly integrated into the episode. And in your comments on the litany of woes the characters endured, I don't recall Mike the Probie was ever depicted as having a fetish for big gals--he just went out with one, who he got hooked on 'cause of how cool she was and how great she was in the sack. His neurosis about what the guys at the firehouse would think may have created an aura that suggested a bona fide fetish, but I don't think that was the case (I would also argue that there's a very strong case to be made for Theresa, Mike's plus-sized honey, as being the least sexist and most well-rounded female character to ever appear on the show).
Relative to your swipes at Nip/Tuck, I agree that the show has gone too far over the top recently (all that Carver BS, the idiotic subplot with Julia's spa, etc.) but I absolutely have to defend the show for its fearless and incisive insights into male sexuality via various subplots involving Christian and (to a lesser extent) Matt. Last season's stories about Matt exploring the possibility that he might have a tranny fetish and Christian coming to terms with his sadistic streak via sex with the chunky patient were daring and edgy in all the right ways. Like Rescue Me, N/T delves into a lot of male stuff that men dont' usually show women, albeit from a very different angle, and when the show gets it right it's both disturbing and breathtaking. And for what it's worth, I've seen the first three episodes of the new season and it seems Ryan Murphy has learned from negative fan response to the Carver storyline and taken pains to steer the show back in a more realistic direction (in addition to delving into Christian's psyche with more subtlety than before). The new season ain't perfect--the story arc with Sanaa Lathan is a misstep, IMHO--but the good stuff bolsters my belief that the show deserves more credit than it gets for the genuinely deep elements that are often obscured by its slick surface.
This season was my first introduction to Rescue Me. I came to the show fresh. I think it is one of the best shows on network TV. The sudden tonal shifts from pain to humor to pathos are jarring but somehow plausible. I think Tolan and Leary have a profound understanding for how working-class people cope with tragedy. They know that people learn to compartmentalize traumatic events in their lives in order to function on a day-to-day basis. The funeral/wedding scene was brilliant because showed how tragedy and celebration are interconnected.
The rape scene bothered so many people because it wasn’t drawn in black-and-white terms. The show knows violent sex between two people who have a history together is charged with conflicting emotions. (The scene is in many ways a better version of the staircase sex scene in Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.) Has anyone ever wondered if Janet wanted it to happen?
Rescue Me has some of the best female characters on TV. Shelia is one of the most complex female characters since Carmela Soprano. Like The Sopranos, Rescue Me understands the way woman must create a life with the men from the neighborhood. The show knows that to make it to the city—Manhattan—is not always possible.
That’s why the Marisa Tomei character was so fascinating. She had made it out of the neighborhood. Somehow, she still found herself drawn back to where she came from because she was most comfortable there. It took her doomed affair with Tommy to remind her why she left.
The Tomei character’s opposite is Shelia, a woman who was raised to always know her identity. Growing up, she knew she was somebody’s daughter or mother or fireman’s wife. Now, having lost her husband on 9/11, she is forced to be an independent woman. It’s driving her a little mad. (Being a fireman’s widow is not very appealing to her.) Shelia’s date rape of Tommy was one of funniest, kinkiest and, yes, saddest scenes I’ve seen all year. The humor and kink come from her desperation in trying to pull it off. (The scene was given a major shot of energy from the use of the Lyres’ “Help Her Ann.” A great song!) The sadness comes from the realization that she’s wanting some kind of physical and/or emotional connection with her dead husband, even it means sleeping with Tommy.
Tommy is an asshole. The show does not approve of his behavior. It doesn’t disapprove either. It doesn’t have to. It trusts the audience to see that Tommy is a bad man who is also genuinely heroic. He puts the people he loves in danger, but he puts himself in danger to rescue total strangers. The show asks: Is a man’s good intentions good enough to overlook his cruelty? The jury is still out. Tommy deserves to be haunted by ghosts. (I fully expect to see his cousin, his son, and now his brother to be riding with him in his truck next season.) He deserves all his misery. He also doesn’t deserve it. There, but for the grace of God, go I.
Aaron --
Don't have the time to adequately respond to all of your points (though I will try to later tonight), but what struck me about the staircase scene in Violence (as I recall it) was that it was a fight between the two that escalated. Cronenberg also spent a lot of time in close-ups of both participants (the eyes saying back and forth, "do you want this?") before it turned into sex.
In Rescue Me, it's ALL Tommy. He's aggressive, pushing her around, then holding her down on the couch. While I'm willing to entertain "it wasn't a rape!" theories, I think that it's sort of unfair to say that the scenes critics are trying to see it in too black and white of terms. The scene (indeed, the series as a whole, which has depicted a violent Gavin relationship, but never THIS violent) seems drawn to provoke, in many ways, to bait the audience. By clearly positioning Tommy as the aggressor who doesn't care for Janet's wishes, even if it's not showing rape, Rescue Me is getting as close as possible to the rape line without crossing over it. It's daring people to take offense at it, but there's nothing more to the scene than shock. What new does it express? Tommy and Janet have a rough relationship? We knew that already.
Anyway, a reader writes to say that the song at the end of the episode is NOT actually indie rock (having originated from a major label). I'm happy to revise to just "rock" in that case.
Aaron: I agree more with Todd on this one. I think you make an excellent point when you say that the show is on a deliberate mission to provoke. However, I don't think it often provokes in the name of real challenge or insight, it just wants to make you say, "Holy shit, I can't believe they did that."
Also -- to follow on one of Andrew's points, as well as points raised in Todd's article -- I do think there's been a perceptible change in world view over three seasons. During the first season, the writers simultaneously validated and challenged their male heroes' simplistic assumptions about women, manhood and the world in general. More often than not, seasons two and three feel more like validations.
The sheer amount of horrendous shit that befalls every major character -- coupled with the constant nagging, manipulation, basket case theatrics and insatiable sexual hunger of the female species -- combines to produce the personal equivalent of 9/11, a bunch of small scale catastrophes that make it easier to the guys to justify their selfishness, ignorance and shortsighted behavior. The message often seems to boil down to, "Hey, don't criticize me -- you see the shit I have to put up with?" The show never loses sight of the fact that its male heroes are bullheaded adolescents at heart, but it makes the world around them so awful that in the end, you can't really blame them too much for behaving that way. There's no reward in being decent. No matter what you do, life still beats the shit out of you, so you might as well live moment-to-moment.
The best plotline last year involved Lou getting swindled by the call girl. I assumed that's where the plot was headed because I figured there was no possible way Rescue Me would ever show a hot young woman actually falling in love with a guy like Lou; she'd have to be either crazy or duplicitous to do so, in the show's view. But it wasn't the story that intrigued me, it was the fact that Lou was ensnared and humiliated by one of the oldest male fantasies in human history: saving a "bad" girl from awful circumstances and turning her into a "good" girl -- the True Romance plot.
Besides being superbly acted by Scurti, this subplot seemed almost like a critique of the macho fantasies that are validated elsewhere on the show (if not by the writers themselves, then by Leary's movie star affectations, and the show's insistence on glamorizing him).
What made Scurti's performance so brilliant were the hints that at certain points, Lou knew the trap he was falling into, knew he was in the grip of a male fantasy; yet he put that realization aside and tried to make the fantasy come true anyway. Something in Scurti's eyes said, "This scenario doesn't end happily for most guys, but goddamnit, it's going to end happily for me, because I'm different." No such luck.
"And while Leary is indeed a very good actor, his preening clothes-horese tendancies distract me to no end."
Also, I read somewhere that his hair's too long for the FDNY. They're supposed to keep it short so it doesn't interfere with their breathing gear. But then Leary wouldn't look at pretty.
"My secret hope last night was that Lou would find his sea legs, and next season would take place entirely on the boat, with John Scurti and Artie Lange vying for the affections of the nun."
I agree with everything you just said except for "Artie Lange."
Steven Pasquale deserves an Emmy for that Ambien-walking scene alone, not to mention for keeping me from changing the channel every time I see Tatum O'Neal.
Reading this review, and my forwarding it to two friends who think Rescue Me is the best show on TV, sparked off a heated debate between all of us (with me taking the anti-Rescue Me side for the most part, although I think the comedy writing in the show is often brilliant).
But to inject some background to what impulses might drive Leary as a writer, go back to his No Cure for Cancer book and video from the early 1990s -- which was great, one of my favorite comedy books. Leary went much deeper than comedy when he discussed his father and his passing, recounting the story of his father nearly sawing off his thumb while doing work around the house. What floored the child Dennis was that even though his father had nearly cut his thumb off, all he did was walk in the kitchen, where Denis and his friends were having a birthday party, calmly and coolly, wrap black duct tape around his thumb, then drive himself one-handed to the emergency room. Not once weeping, or flinching, or showing any sign that he had just grievously harmed himself. Similarly, when he later died in a pub in Ireland from a massive heart attack, he simply keeled over on a barroom floor, and that was that.
Leary also recounts the story of his brother shooting him in the head with a bow and arrow while they were playing William Tell, trying in vain to figure out how to explain this to his parents, but for the most part, him being so afraid of his father kicking his ass, that he was too scared to cry or break down in any sense -- in effect, he had handled the situation just like his father would. His father treated the situation as it was -- a freak childhood accident, and he drove Denis to the hospital, luckily to find no serious damage had been done. His father later laid an epic ass kicking on his brother that Leary compared to the Jerry Quarry/Muhammed Ali fight.
Both these episodes are described in painfully hilarious detail -- I found myself laughing out loud as I re-read them again last night. And that version of Leary is recognizable in flashes in the over-the-top writer's point of view he's pushed on this main character in Rescue Me. I get the vibe in his mind, all this weird shit he's putting his character through is some type of macho bluster (that which cannot kill him will make him stronger) -- the bad TV equivalent of communicating that sense of macho-ness he did effortlessly with a scared kid trying to explain to his dad what an arrow was doing sticking in his head.
Leary probably see a lot of his father -- a tough old Worcester, MA Irish guy -- in NYC firemen. I suspect when he sits down to plot out these shows, that image of his father is never far away from him. On one hand, I think he wants to honor him -- and the other, I think he wants to tear that image down. And I think that split is what I sense going on beneath all this bad TV bluster.
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