Seeing the Diamond Beneath the Paste

Latest viewing experience: D.E.B.S.



The trailer is a bit of a bait and switch; what we really have here is a cheerful lesbian coming-of-age story. The superspy stuff is an overlay. The two lovers are, respectively, a superspy and a supercriminal who are supposed to be thwarting one another, not sneaking around and dating, and the tale of treachery and betrayal serves as an objective correlative for the socially imposed tensions of the love that still dare not speak its name in many quarters. It's a nifty idea, this stitching together of different misbehaviors to illuminate the unnecessary dangers of same-sex love, but what makes sense in theory fails in practice because the superspy genre elements mostly just lie there. Lots of candy colors and outsized props strive for cartoonish low camp but just look stagy, and the writer-director doesn't generate any thrilling thriller tension. Cat-and-mouse sequences are carpeted with techno music that's clearly meant to drive the energy, but someone chose chill house music instead of edgy tracks, so the chases are way too relaxing. In one scene there's an extensive establishing shot of a fancy restaurant that mimics the upward tracking shot of the opera house in Citizen Kane, showing us just how immense and fancy this restaurant is, but then the scene that plays out is a conventional restaurant scene that makes no use of all that fanciness. Then there's a long sequence in which the protagonists navigate a road-to-the-batcave route to a secret exclusive dangerous nightclub... that just seems like any old nightclub. People dancing, hanging, having fun. Lots of mohawks and spikes, but it still seems as safe as an after-church reception. 

 So why am I hammering on this mediocre movie? I watched it because the writer-director, one Angela Robinson, wrote (several years after making D.E.B.S.) some of the best episodes of True Blood. Her scripts blended and interconnected comedy, action, drama and suspense with acrobatic alacrity. She earned her money and how. Her scripts were jim dandy. Alan Ball (The auteur of True Blood) and company saw and nurtured something in Robinson that, on the basis of D.E.B.S., most of us would never have guessed was there. How does one spot the potential lurking behind a failure? Clearly the producers of a campy vampire soap opera know something about talent spotting that eludes most of us.

Hands on Shoulders

As I approach my 40th birthday and my fourth anniversary, I recall something a friend told me on graduation day in 1996.  At 22, I was utterly out of ideas about how to make my way in the world, and I told her so.

"We'll have it figured out by the time we're 35," she said.

Over the years I clung to that like a talisman.  And at the age of 35, I began dating the woman who is now my wife.  Good stuff.

***

New topic: we saw a couple episodes of True Blood recently.  It's a soap about extravagant, camp vampires.  In the first of the episodes in question (Season 5, episode 3) we learn in flashback how two vampires, Eric and Pam, met; how Pam persuaded Eric to make her a vampire; why she wanted to be a vampire at all; and how they became a couple.  It's no spoiler to say that it involves some outlandish behavior, grandiloquent gestures, ultimatums, and lots of blood.

In the next episode we see how Eric and Pam formally sever their relationship.  It involves hands on shoulders; sensitive, quiet conversation; and a little tearing up.  Talk about a dropoff.

I'm an Eric Rohmer fan, so it's not like I'm averse to restrained, dialogue-driven relationship stories, but I can get hands on shoulders and restrained tears from a hundred lesser shows.  The writer or someone misunderstood what we come to this show for.

I suppose you could spin it as a demonstration of how the characters have matured over the years, but anyone who's watched the show this far know the characters have done anything but mature.  They're vicious, deadly hotheads.  That's why they're fun.

True Blood is produced by the creator of Six Feet Under, a more realistic soap that is special to me, and it had its fair share of hands on shoulders moments, but the show was calibrated that way.  For a while I was frustrated that True Blood wasn't Bride of Six Feet Under, but now I've learned to appreciate the depths that can be plumbed within the Pop Kabuki format of this show.