[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 the somewhat
underutilized characters who nonetheless reflect some of the show’s key themes
and debates.
David Simon’s TV
shows have been pretty wide-ranging in setting and content, but all of them
(with the likely exception of 2008’s Generation
Kill, the seven-episode Iraq War miniseries that I haven’t yet had a chance
to watch) have included one iteration or another of threads focused on the police
and politicians. The Deuce is no
different: one of the characters present from the first episode to the last is
Chris Alston, a police officer played by another of those David Simon Extended
Universe actors I was very happy to see back (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.,
likely still best known as
D’Angelo Barksdale from The Wire);
and beginning in season two Alston is more or less consistently partnered with
Luke Kirby’s Gene Goldman, a political figure loosely affiliated with the
police who is working to clean up Times Square/midtown Manhattan ahead of
investment and gentrification in the area. A show with as many characters and
threads as The Deuce is never going
to be able to spend as much time with every one of them as would be ideal, and
while for both of these characters we do glimpse interesting additional layers
through their personal lives (for Alston in his romantic relationships with
women who have very different takes on the city than he does as a cop, and for
Goldman because he is a closeted gay man pursuing risky sexual liaisons while
married with children), we don’t quite see enough of those elements for them to
be developed successfully.
What that does
mean, however, is that the characters of Alston and Goldman can remain more
clearly and centrally focused throughout seasons two and three on the questions
of whether and how to “clean up” midtown, and the related questions of the
costs and benefits of such changes. The dynamic between the two men is somewhat
similar to the contrasting one between Ashley and Abby that I highlighted in
Wednesday’s post: Alston is an insider, having spent years in the Deuce and
become friendly with many of its denizens (his first scene in episode one is an
extended, light-hearted conversation with a group of pimps at a shoeshine
booth); while Goldman is an outsider, bringing those outside forces of politics
and money to bear on the neighborhood (while, again, he is also, hypocritically
partaking in its hidden pleasures through his private life). Yet for most of
their time working together, the two have pretty similar agendas, and indeed
Alston’s primary role for much of seasons two and three is to utilize his more
personal connection to the Deuce to find ways to further Goldman’s goals and help
push the neighborhood toward change and gentrification. Of course midtown
and the city did significantly change in the years immediately
following the show’s 1985 conclusion, and so these two characters perhaps
reflect Simon’s sense that those changes were, if not inevitable, at least
unchallenged (if not entirely supported) by the various levels of authority and
power that these two figures represent.
Yet it’s not
quite accurate to say that gentrification goes unchallenged within the political
world of The Deuce. Of course some of
the other characters I’ve highlighted this week vocally oppose those changes,
with both Abby and Paul in particular articulating strong arguments against
gentrification in the show’s final season. But by the closing episodes Alston
has come to share more of their perspective than he (or we) might have
expected, and he attempts to share that vision with Goldman in their final
scene together: Alston drives Goldman to the Bronx to show him one of the new
neighborhoods where prostitution, drugs, and other elements of the Deuce’s
seedier side have relocated; when Goldman asks him whether Manhattan is
nonetheless better off than it was before their efforts, Alston’s response is simply
a final, “I don’t know.” I think it’s fair to say that The Deuce as a whole has a similarly conflicted perspective on
these central themes and questions: as I argued Monday, through characters like
Lori the show has depicted the hugely destructive effects of the worlds of
prostitution and porn that were at the heart of the Deuce in the 70s and 80s;
but the final 2019-set coda depicts Times Square as it exists in our current
moment, a mecca of capitalist excess and superficiality, and it’s hard not to
think about what has been lost and forgotten through that evolution. A
multi-layered, contradictory, very American lens on those issues, as this
wonderful show was on so many themes.
March Recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other recent TV you’d recommend?
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