Dexter blew me away by killing one of it's principal characters, an act I completely didn't expect. This show has managed to come back once again from the precipice of banality, and no the irony of banality is not lost on me when the show is about the struggles of daily life when one is a serial killer, to impress me with it' insight into human character and the lengths we will go to in order to get what we think we need.
Last night I watched Hank Moody implode once again on Californication. Yet, this time there was a tone to it that I didn't expect. The show suddenly moved it's characters from an odd and slightly quirky life into a darkness usually reserved for network drama's about ethnic groups. It was nice to see someone acknowledge that white people do this stupid shit too.
In retrospect it's obvious that Hank has been heading in a dark and tragic direction all season, yet it just seemed to me to be a stupid progression of events created by a man left to his own self-destructive devices. I never suspected he'd take it over the edge, or, in fact that he already had and that it was about to come back and bite him in the ass.
The Hank/Karen relationship is continually in some adolescent upheaval. It's perpetually arrested at a time in life when one member does everything in their power to destroy all the good they have ever possessed or accumulated. Hank, though a sarcastic and somewhat bitter straight guy always seems to have one foot in a grounded reality where he knows who he is and what he's capable of. Yet last night even he seemed surprised by what he'd wrought.
Becca, insipid, insightful little character she's always been has never seemed to me so whole as a person, nor as raw on the inside as her exposure to her parents relationship has made her. Inspiring was never an adjective I expected to assign to her character. But then came her confession to her father that she'd willingly given her virginity to a stranger the previous week. How could a child feel that close to a parent that they could confidently tell such a secret and know they'd be accepted for also being a flawed human being like the rest of us?
Hank/Karen have mangled everything they've touched, yet they've managed somehow to impart to their child that it has nothing/everything to do with her, and that she is loved beyond any dysfunction they can conceive. Her thoughtless dash toward her bleeding, broken father being loaded into the police car in the middle of the street demonstrated her understanding of their kinship.
None of this should be any surprise to those of us who've managed to hang on while Hank does the neutron dance right in front of us. But it always is, I think that's the point. It's always the person right in front of you who's rending themselves into oblivion that you never suspect will actually take it all the way. But straight men in this culture frequently have to at least touch the bottom of the pond in order to accept their place in the order of things.
Hank says "writing is hard" and it is, you have to pull out of yourself the things you'd never admit exist and then willingly assign them to another character and act as though they're not a part of you, that you'd never do "that." It's courageous writing the staff of Californication have done, and it's courageous producing Showtime has done in not interfering in it's presentation.
I can't wait to see if Hank acknowledges he's nothing more than pond scum like the rest of us, or if he continues to deny his humanity and what it costs him.
And so it goes:
Love
