[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 an initially
minor character who more fully emerges alongside a community and a crisis.
One of the most
enjoyable things for those of us who have followed the David Simon Extended
Universe (DSEU) for a couple decades now is seeing some of his favorite actors
appear in multiple projects. The Deuce
featured a number of those folks in both major roles and cameos (one of my
favorite of the latter variety was Clarke Peters as a
retired pimp), and among the former was the return of Chris Coy. Coy appeared
in the third and fourth seasons of Treme
as investigative journalist
L.P. Everett, one of my favorite characters on that show (which is a very
competitive list), and I was very excited to see him in the opening episodes of
The Deuce as Paul Hendrickson, a
bartender befriended and then hired by James Franco’s Vincent Martino. During
the first season (as I remember it, anyway—I watched that season a couple years
back), Paul seemed as if he would be a relatively minor character, helping flesh
out the world of Vincent’s bar (a key season one setting that carries forward into
the later seasons, although it changes ownership multiple times among the show’s
characters) but not necessarily having too much to do outside of that space.
Paul gradually
took on a far larger and more significant role in the show’s second and third
seasons, however, and that emergence reflects two key aspects of both his character
and New York City in the 70s and 80s. He’s the show’s most prominent gay
character (although far from its only one), and because the show’s three
seasons take place across a decade and a half of history (they are set in 1971-72,
1977, and 1984-85 respectively), through Paul’s eyes and experiences (as well
as his professional and romantic relationships) we get to witness substantial changes
in both the city’s gay culture and the very possibility of living as an out gay
man in late 20th century America. Indeed, while both Vincent and the
audience know that Paul is gay relatively early in his time at the bar and on
the show, I believe it is only in the second season when we start to see Paul present
his sexuality as part of his public identity. Of course the Deuce is a neighborhood
and New
York a city where it was more possible to be openly gay in the 1970s than
in much of the rest of the United States, which makes Paul’s identity and
journey an important part of how the show represents that world but which also illustrates
that even in such a diverse and progressive community to be gay in the 70s was
to live a frequently, frustratingly fraught existence.
Of course that
existence became infinitely more fraught, and indeed constantly endangered,
with the emergence
of HIV/AIDS in the
early 1980s. Until I began watching season three I didn’t realize it would
be set in the mid-80s (although I should have suspected as much, given the time
jump between seasons one and two), and so didn’t see coming just how fully that
final season would focus on the presence and effects of the AIDS crisis. It
does so for most of the show’s characters (since the worlds of porn,
prostitution, and sex work were particularly threatened by that epidemic), but
it is Paul who becomes a strikingly intimate lens on the crisis, both through
his long-term partner (Aaron
Dean Eisenberg’s Todd Lang, an actor who is already dying of AIDS when the
season begins) and through his resigned acceptance that the disease will
eventually claim his life as well. Moreover, while the show certainly does
justice to the AIDS epidemic on its own specific terms, it also utilizes the
epidemic symbolically, as a striking parallel to the themes of continuity and
change, loss and persistence, that are at the heart of how The Deuce portrays its titular neighborhood, New York City, and
late 20th century America. Season three’s final 1985 line (before
the 2019-set coda) is given to Paul, and works on all those levels: “I love the
change of seasons now,” he says wistfully, before walking slowly away (he now
must use a cane) into the early fall evening.
Last
DeuceStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other recent TV you’d recommend?
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