[Last fall I had
the chance to watch the third and final season of The
Deuce, George Pelecanos
and David Simon’s phenomenal HBO series about, well, all the things I’ll
AmericanStudy in this series and more! I’d love to hear your thoughts on The Deuce, or other TV you’d recommend,
in comments!]
[FYI: SPOILERS
for The Deuce in most of this week’s
posts, so if you haven’t seen it yet, get thee hence and then come on back!]
On two compelling
characters who embody two distinct forms and outcomes of activism.
I could write
this entire week’s series on the women of The
Deuce, which reflects a really important aspect of the show’s cast and diversity
(and, it’s worth noting, represents a bit of a departure for David Simon, whose
prior
shows have tended to focus
mostly if not at times
entirely on male characters). My final two posts will turn to male
characters and their contexts, but today I wanted to highlight and
AmericanStudy two more compelling women, a pair of characters who were linked
not only through their blossoming friendship but also through shared activist
goals and efforts: Jamie
Neumann’s Ashley/Dorothy Spina, whom we meet in season one as a veteran prostitute
but who leaves and then returns to New York in season two as part of a group of
activists and social workers seeking to help prostitutes survive and ideally leave
the life; and Margarita
Levieva’s Abby Parker, whom we meet as a brilliant and ambitious college
student and whose evolution to a bar manager and owner is paralleled by her
deepening desire to fight for the legal rights of her midtown friends and neighbors
and the city’s most disadvantaged communities.
As those brief
summaries suggest, these two strong women both focus much of their attention on
advocating for other women (as well as men in Abby’s case, but she likewise frequently
focuses on women’s rights and issues in particular). Yet they arrive at those
activist roles very differently, with Ashley/Dorothy coming out of the gritty,
working-class world on which her activism subsequently focuses, and Abby
approaching a similar world from (initially at least) an outsider’s and more
privileged position. Perhaps as a result of those different origin points
(among other, related differences between the two women), their respective
activist perspectives and goals likewise feel distinct: Dorothy (Ashley’s birth
name, which she uses when she returns to the city) takes a hands-on, pragmatic
approach, engaging prostitutes and pimps on the streets in an effort to change
both individual lives and the culture as a whole; while Abby approaches the
issues with a more legal and philosophical perspective, even choosing to back
away from a feminist anti-pornography campaign she had helped originate when
the movement begins to threaten First Amendment rights. As that latter detail illustrates,
although Dorothy and Abby’s activisms could in many ways be seen as
complementary, the distinction between pragmatism and philosophy can and does
lead them to diverge significantly as well.
Nowhere is the
divergence between Dorothy and Abby clearer than in the endpoint of their
respective arcs on the show [serious SPOILERS in this paragraph]. At the end of
season two, Dorothy’s past as Ashley catches up with her, and she is murdered
by pimps (it’s not precisely clear which ones, but they all had known her in
her prior life as a prostitute); whereas Abby not only survives, but at the end
of season three leaves the world of her bar to return to college (and, in the
finale’s 2019 coda, we see that she has gone on to become a successful lawyer,
likely fighting similar activist battles in that world). It’d be possible to
see these respective endpoints as a commentary on what forms of activism are
more or less likely to endure and succeed, and I do think that’s part of what
these characters and their arcs depict. But knowing David Simon’s consistent
critique of social structures and hierarchies, I would also argue that the
characters’ ends have a great deal to do with their beginnings: that Abby’s
outsider and privileged position make it much easier for her to leave the world
of the Deuce and enter another like the law; whereas Dorothy’s apparently
lifelong entanglement in a much more working-class, impoverished world seems to
trap her, despite her best efforts to change both her own situation and that
world as a whole.
Next
DeuceStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other recent TV you’d recommend?
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