What's To Stop You Or Me Or Them From Just Blowing Somebody Away?: Weeds, Season Two
"Death Row".
That exchange should have told DEA agent Peter Scottson (Martin Donovan) everything he needed to know about Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker); it's too late already, by the fourth episode of the season, but he should have known here.
This is actually a huge reach in terms of overanalyzing a single moment, but indulge me.
Now, the question she asks isn't actually that odd, considering that when she asks they're on a date at a shooting range. There are in fact a lot of people who have guns in the near vicinity. I've never been to a range, but I've wondered this myself - the actual obvious answer is probably something like "if you want to kill a bunch of people with a gun, it's easier to do it somewhere without a lot of other people carrying loaded guns." Peter's answer, "Death Row," is a lawman's answer, the sort of thing he needs to believe is true if he's going to do his job. We have laws and punishments and the punishments scare would-be criminals into not committing crimes and the system justifies itself. It's bullshit, of course, at least where crimes like mass murder are concerned. People might choose not to commit misdemeanors because they don't want to deal with the more minor annoyances of the criminal justice system, and maybe this has forestalled a few very personal murders (e.g., I'd kill my ex-spouse but I'd get caught), but by and large I believe that murder of any kind, and especially random mass killing, is the sort of activity that you're either going to do or you're not. If you tell yourself the reason you didn't take out the local 7-11 is because of death row, you're kidding yourself; you never really had it in you in the first place. (And, you know, that's a good thing.) Why do we tell ourselves that death row is a deterrent to others or ourselves? I'm not sure.
But in the context of the scene - where Nancy receives the answer flatly and appears to consider it seriously for a moment as though thinking, "Huh, that never occurred to me," it's telling. Nancy is all reaction - as Conrad (Romany Malco) tells her in a later episode, after she says that she's all out of moves, "You never had any." She's just been responding instinctively, and what we've learned is that in the right moment Nancy is capable of pretty much anything. She's like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, careless with other people's lives. She's a sociopath (I'm not spending the Wikipedia time to select between dissociative or antisocial personality disorders). She's a snake, and she's a monster.
This is the weird greatness of Weeds' second season. I watched the first too long ago to write substantively about it, but what primarily recommended itself to me was that I thought it was really funny and as compared to other shows and movies it didn't step too hard on the "Suburbia isn't perfect! It's actually teeming with damaged people living odd little lives with serious secrets!" pedal. That was and remains a weakness of the show - younger Botwin son Shane's lower school graduation speech is endearing but also a giant hammer used to drive home the failure of suburbia's adults to keep their children safe (i.e., he shouts "YOU HAVE FAILED! WE ARE NOT SAFE!") - but it's largely subsumed by the rest of what's going on. The difference between Seasons One and Two is that One was about how this suburban housewife/widow was also a pot dealer, and Two is about how Nancy Botwin is a pot dealer. I almost wonder if the show (and Parker's amazing performance) has created this characterization in spite of itself, and I'm almost disinclined to watch Season Three, the plot synopses of which are incredibly ridiculous (although the season concludes in an apocalyptic event which suggests that maybe the show won't retreat from examining the consequences of Nancy's behavior). (It's sort of like how the first season of 24 is, basically, "Jack Bauer tries to protect a US Presidential candidate from the men trying to kill him while also trying find his kidnapped wife and daughter," whereas now Season N of 24 is summarized as "Jack kills a guy with his teeth to escape from custody and help stop a terrorist who's trying to poison the water in Los Angeles but this turns out to be a diversionary strike when the real target is to release chemical weapons during a Dodgers game but as Jack races against the clock to unravel the scheme he realizes that it's inextricably tied to the former POTUS' brother-in-law's aunt, a shadow power figure who has unknown connections to Jack's dogsitter and has schemes of her own.")
[Since originally writing this post, I read some Television Without Pity recaps of the first few episodes of Season Three, which leave me still uncertain that I want to watch, but also gave me another angle. One of the recappers drops his own take on the changes between seasons and posits that in Season One, Nancy's business life (which will eventually get its own alias, Lacy LaPlante ("Why not just Mary Jane Dealer?"]) keeps eating chunks out of her personal home life and relationships. This sets up Season Two, where Nancy retreats into Lacy as a protective reaction against the pain of Nancy being slowly torn up. The end of Season Two moving into Season Three is about how the people in Nancy's life react to her withdrawal, by trying to sabotage Lacy's business world as a way to get Nancy back, but in doing so inadvertently put Nancy and themselves into greater danger. If Nancy doesn't meet her obligations she's a bad mother, but if Lacy falls down on the job she could get shot. I think this is a pretty spot-on take on the character's evolution, and probably indicates why I think so highly of Season Two as a particular moment in the arc - since I have a very negative attitude towards Nancy, and have since the beginning of the show, her retreat into the Lacy alias exposes most honestly the things I find distasteful about her and by my prejudices cut most deeply to what I think the core of the show is. Creator Jenji Kohan might disagree.]
"Selfish! Selfish!" Elizabeth Perkins' character (during a selfish moment of her own) screams at Nancy, and it's true. Actually, Nancy is surrounded by bad adults, horrible people incapable of keeping their children safe, but they're not monsters like she is. Perkins' Celia is a nightmare of a mother to her (awesome) pre-adolescent daughter, but she very honestly means well and has moments of self-recognition. Her daughter hates her, and she kind of hates her daughter, but she's trying to love her the only way she knows how, despite being completely inadequate for the job. Celia's daughter says that her mother is Voldemort, but she's just a selfish and self-hating drunk. Nancy's brother-in-law is also selfish and completely irresponsible, and the moments when he's the most capable adult available are kind of frightening, but he also honestly means well, and he also kind of knows what he is and is trying to change despite being ill-equipped for the task. The only character on the show who might be as irredeemable as Nancy is her older son Silas, who proves that he's more than a magnificent and selfish brat by using a safety pin to puncture his condom before having sex with his girlfriend in an attempt to get her pregnant and keep her from going to college without him. (It works [she gets pregnant] but fails [her parents make her get an abortion and shut him out of her life]. I don't want to condemn a teenager to the verdict of being irredeemable, but Silas is also just too stupid and angry to be scary. If he were the son of a Baltimore stevedore instead of a Californian pot dealer he'd be Ziggy Sobotka from The Wire, whose vibrating anger at the world for thrusting itself upon him leads him to ruin his family as well as himself, obnoxious and ineffectual to the last.)
Nancy, though...Nancy does not know what she is. Tony Soprano was also a psychopath, and he struggled (and failed) to know Why he was, but he never had any illusions about What he was. In Season Two of The Sopranos, after using a gambling debt as leverage to take over and ultimately ruin a friend's life, Tony sadly explains that he'd told his friend not to sit at the mob's poker game, but was ultimately unable to stop him. And when his friend was deeply, deeply in debt, Tony was powerless to do anything but destroy him - take all his money, his things, take over his business, use it as a front, run it into the ground - because that's what the mob does, and Tony is a mob boss. He knows his own nature, and it is to prey on the weak. Nancy Botwin doesn't prey on the weak, but she destroys, by letting other people do the destroying for her. By the end of Season Two she's brought her family closer and closer to danger - she HAS utterly failed to protect her sons, physically or emotionally - is in severe physical danger herself (along with her only true friend) and has a man's blood on her hands (though she never asked for him to be killed). She's a ball bearing willing herself through a Rube Goldberg machine of crime and violence and never stops being astonished at the amazing things going on around her, never stops to see that she's making them happen.
It all works because of Parker and her performance. Not everyone buys Parker as an actress - she's full of odd choices that can seem mannered and distracting to the unsympathetic viewer, but I buy them completely. Similarly, not everyone buys Parker as a beauty, but I'm pretty well smitten. And that's what makes it work: she's beautiful, but it's not enough for her to be beautiful. Charlize Theron couldn't sell this role, and I think she's a very good actress. Parker is disarming, her appearance and her acting working in sync; she's physically insusbtantial, almost fragile, but surprisingly tough and fierce. There's an endearing loopiness to the set of her mouth or the way she stands or holds her arms in a scene, and it draws you in, undoes your defenses, and in the moment you think nothing of going on a ride with this weird vulnerable edgy wonderful rollercoaster of a woman. (Parker's not just a loopy actress, though; in addition to nailing moments of extreme emotional intensity - her fear and attempted bravado and inability to truly process what's happening when her life is in danger is captivating - she can handle breathtaking subleties. In Season One she watched a tape of herself and her late husband making love, and it's heartbreaking in its small truth; in Season Two a scene opens with her at her computer, when suddenly she closes her eyes and breathes her husband's name before turning around as in a dream to find her young son has slathered himself in some of dad's old cologne, hidden away in a cabinet.)
And they go: the circle of men around her helping her get this pot business off the ground, not least of whom is Conrad, who intellectualy knows better and has been told to know better, but lets himself fall into the trap anyway; her sons, fighting at first to hold onto their place in her life but eventually acting out not for her attention but for her protection (young Shane becomes an anti-anti-drug demagogue at school while high schooler Silas steals video cameras that might compromise his mother's trade); Peter Scottson, who should be far too smart to let himself get dragged into Nancy's little cyclone of havoc, but does and turns villain before losing everything as a result. A weakness of the season is that Peter's journey into moral grayness takes a sudden left turn into outright villainy (for chrissakes, he calls Conrad a "nigger," in a completely jarring moment for the character) because the audience can't feel too bad about his demise. Boo to that: he was a DEA agent who knowingly dated (and briefly aided) a drug dealer, and if he didn't deserve what came to him he wasn't an angel to begin with. (Silas, in a moment of rare perception, freaking out after learning that his mom is dating law enforcement, is laudably unappeased when his mom tells him that he knows she's a dealer: "Oh, so he's a crooked cop?!") And the real point here is that Nancy created (but doesn't see that she created) a situation where Peter's end was necessary to her own survival as well as the survival of the people she cares about. People beat each other up, make arrests, steal, and commit arson all for her, and she always says never to do it again while expressing her undying gratitude. Peter's fate is the only crime not comitted explicitly for Nancy's sake (her mentor Heylia orchestrates it to save her own skin, backed into a corner), but her blithe tunnelvision created the opportunity and the necessity. If Peter didn't know Nancy was trouble at the gun range, he should have known when she tricked him and Conrad into meeting, as she insists that things will go better if they get to know each other. They don't, of course, and they never could: she spurs Peter's (unfounded) sexual jealousy and Conrad's (founded) fear of persecution and doesn't think twice about the danger she's put either man in despite ostensibly caring deeply for them both. Her choices are motivated only by what is convenient to her in the moment and if there are boundaries to her moral trespasses her lack of self-knowledge shields her from them, ensuring that other people will have to cross the lines for her.
She repeatedly says that she's trying to protect her sons, but Silas and her brother-in-law tell both her that she's full of shit and putting them in ever greater danger. She used to justify her dealing as a necessity; after her husband's death she had no other way to support the family, but this is also bullshit. She's a smart woman who almost certainly went to college and could get a job SOMEwhere doing SOMEthing. What she couldn't do is support her family to the degree of luxury she wanted to maintain, and for all its dangers dealing weed was and is the "easy" option. She chooses it out of convenience and doesn't get out when she has the chance because she likes it. By the end of the second season her justifications have, tellingly changed - now she talks up how pot is a victimless drug (but she doesn't want her sons doing it) and she's just providing a service that someone else would fulfill. Nancy resermbles Carmela Soprano almost more than she does Tony, willfully enabling her own criminal lifestyle because she likes the perks and she gets off on the rush. She likes being a criminal and she protects herself (and only herself) from the cost of her behavior, letting everyone else take the hit.
If Nancy Botwin were the sort of person who didn't think to ask why the patrons at a gun range wouldn't just kill each other, Season Two of Weeds would have been much less interesting.
That exchange should have told DEA agent Peter Scottson (Martin Donovan) everything he needed to know about Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker); it's too late already, by the fourth episode of the season, but he should have known here.
This is actually a huge reach in terms of overanalyzing a single moment, but indulge me.
Now, the question she asks isn't actually that odd, considering that when she asks they're on a date at a shooting range. There are in fact a lot of people who have guns in the near vicinity. I've never been to a range, but I've wondered this myself - the actual obvious answer is probably something like "if you want to kill a bunch of people with a gun, it's easier to do it somewhere without a lot of other people carrying loaded guns." Peter's answer, "Death Row," is a lawman's answer, the sort of thing he needs to believe is true if he's going to do his job. We have laws and punishments and the punishments scare would-be criminals into not committing crimes and the system justifies itself. It's bullshit, of course, at least where crimes like mass murder are concerned. People might choose not to commit misdemeanors because they don't want to deal with the more minor annoyances of the criminal justice system, and maybe this has forestalled a few very personal murders (e.g., I'd kill my ex-spouse but I'd get caught), but by and large I believe that murder of any kind, and especially random mass killing, is the sort of activity that you're either going to do or you're not. If you tell yourself the reason you didn't take out the local 7-11 is because of death row, you're kidding yourself; you never really had it in you in the first place. (And, you know, that's a good thing.) Why do we tell ourselves that death row is a deterrent to others or ourselves? I'm not sure.
But in the context of the scene - where Nancy receives the answer flatly and appears to consider it seriously for a moment as though thinking, "Huh, that never occurred to me," it's telling. Nancy is all reaction - as Conrad (Romany Malco) tells her in a later episode, after she says that she's all out of moves, "You never had any." She's just been responding instinctively, and what we've learned is that in the right moment Nancy is capable of pretty much anything. She's like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, careless with other people's lives. She's a sociopath (I'm not spending the Wikipedia time to select between dissociative or antisocial personality disorders). She's a snake, and she's a monster.
This is the weird greatness of Weeds' second season. I watched the first too long ago to write substantively about it, but what primarily recommended itself to me was that I thought it was really funny and as compared to other shows and movies it didn't step too hard on the "Suburbia isn't perfect! It's actually teeming with damaged people living odd little lives with serious secrets!" pedal. That was and remains a weakness of the show - younger Botwin son Shane's lower school graduation speech is endearing but also a giant hammer used to drive home the failure of suburbia's adults to keep their children safe (i.e., he shouts "YOU HAVE FAILED! WE ARE NOT SAFE!") - but it's largely subsumed by the rest of what's going on. The difference between Seasons One and Two is that One was about how this suburban housewife/widow was also a pot dealer, and Two is about how Nancy Botwin is a pot dealer. I almost wonder if the show (and Parker's amazing performance) has created this characterization in spite of itself, and I'm almost disinclined to watch Season Three, the plot synopses of which are incredibly ridiculous (although the season concludes in an apocalyptic event which suggests that maybe the show won't retreat from examining the consequences of Nancy's behavior). (It's sort of like how the first season of 24 is, basically, "Jack Bauer tries to protect a US Presidential candidate from the men trying to kill him while also trying find his kidnapped wife and daughter," whereas now Season N of 24 is summarized as "Jack kills a guy with his teeth to escape from custody and help stop a terrorist who's trying to poison the water in Los Angeles but this turns out to be a diversionary strike when the real target is to release chemical weapons during a Dodgers game but as Jack races against the clock to unravel the scheme he realizes that it's inextricably tied to the former POTUS' brother-in-law's aunt, a shadow power figure who has unknown connections to Jack's dogsitter and has schemes of her own.")
[Since originally writing this post, I read some Television Without Pity recaps of the first few episodes of Season Three, which leave me still uncertain that I want to watch, but also gave me another angle. One of the recappers drops his own take on the changes between seasons and posits that in Season One, Nancy's business life (which will eventually get its own alias, Lacy LaPlante ("Why not just Mary Jane Dealer?"]) keeps eating chunks out of her personal home life and relationships. This sets up Season Two, where Nancy retreats into Lacy as a protective reaction against the pain of Nancy being slowly torn up. The end of Season Two moving into Season Three is about how the people in Nancy's life react to her withdrawal, by trying to sabotage Lacy's business world as a way to get Nancy back, but in doing so inadvertently put Nancy and themselves into greater danger. If Nancy doesn't meet her obligations she's a bad mother, but if Lacy falls down on the job she could get shot. I think this is a pretty spot-on take on the character's evolution, and probably indicates why I think so highly of Season Two as a particular moment in the arc - since I have a very negative attitude towards Nancy, and have since the beginning of the show, her retreat into the Lacy alias exposes most honestly the things I find distasteful about her and by my prejudices cut most deeply to what I think the core of the show is. Creator Jenji Kohan might disagree.]
"Selfish! Selfish!" Elizabeth Perkins' character (during a selfish moment of her own) screams at Nancy, and it's true. Actually, Nancy is surrounded by bad adults, horrible people incapable of keeping their children safe, but they're not monsters like she is. Perkins' Celia is a nightmare of a mother to her (awesome) pre-adolescent daughter, but she very honestly means well and has moments of self-recognition. Her daughter hates her, and she kind of hates her daughter, but she's trying to love her the only way she knows how, despite being completely inadequate for the job. Celia's daughter says that her mother is Voldemort, but she's just a selfish and self-hating drunk. Nancy's brother-in-law is also selfish and completely irresponsible, and the moments when he's the most capable adult available are kind of frightening, but he also honestly means well, and he also kind of knows what he is and is trying to change despite being ill-equipped for the task. The only character on the show who might be as irredeemable as Nancy is her older son Silas, who proves that he's more than a magnificent and selfish brat by using a safety pin to puncture his condom before having sex with his girlfriend in an attempt to get her pregnant and keep her from going to college without him. (It works [she gets pregnant] but fails [her parents make her get an abortion and shut him out of her life]. I don't want to condemn a teenager to the verdict of being irredeemable, but Silas is also just too stupid and angry to be scary. If he were the son of a Baltimore stevedore instead of a Californian pot dealer he'd be Ziggy Sobotka from The Wire, whose vibrating anger at the world for thrusting itself upon him leads him to ruin his family as well as himself, obnoxious and ineffectual to the last.)
Nancy, though...Nancy does not know what she is. Tony Soprano was also a psychopath, and he struggled (and failed) to know Why he was, but he never had any illusions about What he was. In Season Two of The Sopranos, after using a gambling debt as leverage to take over and ultimately ruin a friend's life, Tony sadly explains that he'd told his friend not to sit at the mob's poker game, but was ultimately unable to stop him. And when his friend was deeply, deeply in debt, Tony was powerless to do anything but destroy him - take all his money, his things, take over his business, use it as a front, run it into the ground - because that's what the mob does, and Tony is a mob boss. He knows his own nature, and it is to prey on the weak. Nancy Botwin doesn't prey on the weak, but she destroys, by letting other people do the destroying for her. By the end of Season Two she's brought her family closer and closer to danger - she HAS utterly failed to protect her sons, physically or emotionally - is in severe physical danger herself (along with her only true friend) and has a man's blood on her hands (though she never asked for him to be killed). She's a ball bearing willing herself through a Rube Goldberg machine of crime and violence and never stops being astonished at the amazing things going on around her, never stops to see that she's making them happen.
It all works because of Parker and her performance. Not everyone buys Parker as an actress - she's full of odd choices that can seem mannered and distracting to the unsympathetic viewer, but I buy them completely. Similarly, not everyone buys Parker as a beauty, but I'm pretty well smitten. And that's what makes it work: she's beautiful, but it's not enough for her to be beautiful. Charlize Theron couldn't sell this role, and I think she's a very good actress. Parker is disarming, her appearance and her acting working in sync; she's physically insusbtantial, almost fragile, but surprisingly tough and fierce. There's an endearing loopiness to the set of her mouth or the way she stands or holds her arms in a scene, and it draws you in, undoes your defenses, and in the moment you think nothing of going on a ride with this weird vulnerable edgy wonderful rollercoaster of a woman. (Parker's not just a loopy actress, though; in addition to nailing moments of extreme emotional intensity - her fear and attempted bravado and inability to truly process what's happening when her life is in danger is captivating - she can handle breathtaking subleties. In Season One she watched a tape of herself and her late husband making love, and it's heartbreaking in its small truth; in Season Two a scene opens with her at her computer, when suddenly she closes her eyes and breathes her husband's name before turning around as in a dream to find her young son has slathered himself in some of dad's old cologne, hidden away in a cabinet.)
And they go: the circle of men around her helping her get this pot business off the ground, not least of whom is Conrad, who intellectualy knows better and has been told to know better, but lets himself fall into the trap anyway; her sons, fighting at first to hold onto their place in her life but eventually acting out not for her attention but for her protection (young Shane becomes an anti-anti-drug demagogue at school while high schooler Silas steals video cameras that might compromise his mother's trade); Peter Scottson, who should be far too smart to let himself get dragged into Nancy's little cyclone of havoc, but does and turns villain before losing everything as a result. A weakness of the season is that Peter's journey into moral grayness takes a sudden left turn into outright villainy (for chrissakes, he calls Conrad a "nigger," in a completely jarring moment for the character) because the audience can't feel too bad about his demise. Boo to that: he was a DEA agent who knowingly dated (and briefly aided) a drug dealer, and if he didn't deserve what came to him he wasn't an angel to begin with. (Silas, in a moment of rare perception, freaking out after learning that his mom is dating law enforcement, is laudably unappeased when his mom tells him that he knows she's a dealer: "Oh, so he's a crooked cop?!") And the real point here is that Nancy created (but doesn't see that she created) a situation where Peter's end was necessary to her own survival as well as the survival of the people she cares about. People beat each other up, make arrests, steal, and commit arson all for her, and she always says never to do it again while expressing her undying gratitude. Peter's fate is the only crime not comitted explicitly for Nancy's sake (her mentor Heylia orchestrates it to save her own skin, backed into a corner), but her blithe tunnelvision created the opportunity and the necessity. If Peter didn't know Nancy was trouble at the gun range, he should have known when she tricked him and Conrad into meeting, as she insists that things will go better if they get to know each other. They don't, of course, and they never could: she spurs Peter's (unfounded) sexual jealousy and Conrad's (founded) fear of persecution and doesn't think twice about the danger she's put either man in despite ostensibly caring deeply for them both. Her choices are motivated only by what is convenient to her in the moment and if there are boundaries to her moral trespasses her lack of self-knowledge shields her from them, ensuring that other people will have to cross the lines for her.
She repeatedly says that she's trying to protect her sons, but Silas and her brother-in-law tell both her that she's full of shit and putting them in ever greater danger. She used to justify her dealing as a necessity; after her husband's death she had no other way to support the family, but this is also bullshit. She's a smart woman who almost certainly went to college and could get a job SOMEwhere doing SOMEthing. What she couldn't do is support her family to the degree of luxury she wanted to maintain, and for all its dangers dealing weed was and is the "easy" option. She chooses it out of convenience and doesn't get out when she has the chance because she likes it. By the end of the second season her justifications have, tellingly changed - now she talks up how pot is a victimless drug (but she doesn't want her sons doing it) and she's just providing a service that someone else would fulfill. Nancy resermbles Carmela Soprano almost more than she does Tony, willfully enabling her own criminal lifestyle because she likes the perks and she gets off on the rush. She likes being a criminal and she protects herself (and only herself) from the cost of her behavior, letting everyone else take the hit.
If Nancy Botwin were the sort of person who didn't think to ask why the patrons at a gun range wouldn't just kill each other, Season Two of Weeds would have been much less interesting.
Labels: TV
posted by medrawt at
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