Eff You You Effing Effs

Tuesday 22 June 2010 - Filed under tv

All due respect to PFork pfriend Sean Fennessey, but his assessment of HBO’s Treme (on GQ.com) couldn’t be more wrong about the show’s supposed failures if it were trying to prove that 2+2=5.  And while I could go on a point-by-point rebuttal of his claims (including the “musicians aren’t actors” claim, which both The Wire and Generation Kill put to bed by having non-actors in the “industries” covered by these shows play not-small roles, for better or worse), it’s the bits about John Goodman’s work as Creighton Burnette that really stick in my craw.

So Creighton — the bellicose, big-and-tall writer / academic / husband / father, first introduced giving a skeptical British documentary crew a piece of his mind and their own camera — funnels his creative and spiritual impotence into Katrina-centric YouTube rants, which catches the eyes and ears of both some like-minded baristas and his erstwhile literary patrons:

Creighton’s publisher, stirred by his newfound Internet fame (which sort of matters, maybe, for book sales?), asks him to revise his forthcoming historical novel about the Flood of 1915 to reflect Katrina’s devastation. Creighton quickly descends into a booze-drenched fit of writer’s block, lies to his family about his progress and then, seemingly almost out of nowhere, takes one last tour of his beloved city before jumping off a ferry to his death. Why? Perhaps the writer’s block was that terrifying, or the meaningless of it all overcame him, or something else. The writers never deliver the answer—maybe that’s for season two—but it felt like an unfair grounding of a character that never took flight.

While the Treme writers don’t actually come out and have a character helpfully point at the smoking gun (or, in this case, cigarette), there are plenty of clues — subtle and otherwise — that lead down this particular path.  Creighton’s hyper-passionate proletyzing for the idealized New Orleans, the mythic gilded palace that exists for brief moments when the sun hits the water just so, spoke volumes about a hole he was desperate to fill with something worth a damn, a hole that he sadly couldn’t fill with his family.  All his ranting and raving — being done as a non-native NOLA resident, as his wife reveals (a shrewd detail dropped by the writers) — was meant to mask his anger at his own supposed professional failings. Just as he wanted his New Orleans back, he wanted back his “writing,” his own voice.  And just as Katrina took away Antoine Baptiste’s home, and Janette Desautel’s professional hopes, and Bourbon Street’s pride, it took away Creighton’s voice.

More specifically, it perverted his voice, leaving it water-stained, mildewed, something (to him) that’s inhospitable.  Of course, folks big-upping his cuss-strewn anti-FEMA invective don’t know, or care, about that, but Creighton sure does.  If anything, the writers perhaps put too fine a point on this when he gets praise for his profane YouTubery from Roy Blount Jr. Blount praises Creighton’s passionate embrace of the power of “fuck,” which Creighton seems to treat as one part flattering to two parts unsettling — just as NOLA doesn’t get any notice or nevermind until after the floods have done their worst, so it goes with Creighton’s voice.  It speaks well to the writer’s understanding of the ego of the Artiste that Creighton overreacts to this supposed oncoming train of unwanted popularity — if he wasn’t already floundering thanks to a crippling case of Writer’s Block, the fact that he’s getting notice for what seemingly amounted to an onanistic verbal splurge sends him reeling.  That it could potentially save his career – and “potential” is the key word there; as Sean notes in his write-up, his publisher THINKS they might be able to get some blood from this profane millstone of theirs — is beside the point; if it’s not happening the way Creighton wants it to happen, it’s not going to happen.

That’s what makes Creighton’s decision all the more devastating — suicide’s always a selfish act (especially when a wife and child are being left behind), but it’s this resigned petulance that makes it that much more deplorable.  Don’t mind me for getting a little too TMI in all this, but I can identify all too well with Creighton’s seemingly hair-trigger mood switch in the middle of Mardi Gras, that sudden tumble back into despair amidst all this revelry and jubilation.  I can also empathize with his obstinate need to muddle through the morass — writers-block wise, and emotionally — by himself.  Even that euphoric junkie-high he achieved through YouTubing, a last resort he turns to after failing to write anything he considers worthy, doesn’t cut it anymore — those final video messages, done in a somber and beaten pallor, are miles more moving than the blustery missives that made his online name.  They’re also more eloquent and honest a farewell to this world than that insufferably brief and calligraphically florid note he leaves behind in his wallet.

I’ll admit it — I was hoping that the time spent with Creighton during the season’s penultimate episode was to be with him when he found something in New Orleans that spoke to his heart’s idea of New Orleans and held off the seemingly unavoidable end he planned for himself.  After those slightly-off farewells to his family, and those despondent sessions in class where his unslaked love of literature is waylaid by concerns about what’s going to be on the midterm, I was really hoping Creighton could find something in the wreckage of New Orleans, and himself, that would get him over his sorrow.  And the minute he left that twenty-dollar bill in Annie’s instrument case, I knew it was too late.  Where the other characters that Treme followed came to terms with what happened to them and their city and moved on, Creighton simply wasn’t going to “stoop” that low.  As The AV Club’s Keith Phipps astutely noted in his write-up of that episode, “[Creighton's suicide] seems like the act of a man who’s forgotten he’s not the protagonist of a novel.”  To accept his life as it stood post-Katrina was to compromise to a degree that, as pigheadedly stupid as it sounds, he just wasn’t willing to accept.  It’s not an answer that’s emotionally satisfying in any way, but I’m of a mind that such a question can’t ever be answered properly.

(For what it’s worth, that over-generous gesture to Annie echoes a similar gesture made by a integral character in the finale of The Shield, a cop show that, while a little more tawdry and pulpy than The Wire every was, is worth the time of anyone that gives a fig about quality television.  For the few reading this, I’ll pretend you don’t want anything spoiled.)

2010-06-22  »  David Raposa