Streaming
Run-Down
Covid has
kept many people at home more than they might want. One solution to dealing with cabin fever is streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or Disney+ if you have access. These are political
or semi-political series that might pass muster. Two are good, one a maybe, and two
are fails of typical escapism. There are spoilers here.
 |
| Afghan Family Fleeing Anti-Female Regimes |
STATELESS
(Netflix)
Good. This short
Australian series takes place in and around an immigrant detention camp in southern
Australia
in 2004-2005. It is based on a true
story involving a disturbed Australian woman who hides in the camp attempting
to get to Germany
with a stolen passport. She is trying to
avoid some psychological cultists who have threatened her life. The camp
mistakenly treats her as an immigrant.
She is white, sexy and crazy and finds herself surrounded by Afghans,
Pakistanis, Iraqis, east Asians, Tamils, Syrians – no one like her except the Australian
guards, who are also not like her. The
camp is full of desperate immigrants – men, women and children - who have survived
the dangerous ocean journey trying to avoid various cruel circumstances in
their ‘home’ countries. Some have family
members who have died on the way or from whom they have become separated. The series focuses on an Afghan man who is
trying to leave the camp with his daughter. The camp, under a careerist female
officer, is not giving anyone permission to settle in Australia, so
it’s a mostly hopeless holding pen except for one small exception. In 2012 Australia shipped immigrants away
from the mainland to off-shore islands to be warehoused after the mainland camps
became unmanageable. That is the situation today, with the Australian Navy and
Coast Guard now turning back boats.
The camp guards
are also affected by dealing with this terrible situation. One especially, a formerly happy but broke man,
witnesses a beating and tries to expose it.
He then turns and blows a whistle on an camp escape organized by his
sister, only to finally quit his job as a guard because of the misery he
encounters. The short series brings you into the camp yourself and that is its
strength. It is a picture of a difficult capitalist world melting down.
 |
| Not Hannah Montana. Hannah and Erik in the woods. |
HANNAH,
Season 1 & 2 (Amazon Prime)
Good. This series
is based on the original 2011 Hannah revenge film about a young female
trained in northern Finland
to become an assassin. In that film
Hannah grows up in the woods, learning from her ex-CIA father how to shoot,
fight and think on the run. This is somewhat
similar to how this series starts, but with a twist.
Besides the
original Hannah film, the series borrows a premise from the Jason
Bourne series and a bit of the Hunger Games. It is focused on a group of young teenagers stolen
at birth by the money-bloated and seemingly omnipotent CIA. They want to breed and train them to become robotic
assassins for a ‘wing’ of the Agency.
If you hate the CIA, you will enjoy how it is depicted in the most
horrible terms. And you will enjoy it
when Hannah and her adoptive father crush various agents, much like Katniss
Everdeen handles the Careers. Like Jason
Bourne, it involves a female CIA officer who gradually grows protective
towards the outcast assassin, in this case Hannah. And like Bourne it involves a rouge CIA
group that carries out these policies, in this case far-right American
nationalists embedded in the organization.
This is to give the series ‘deniability’ towards the rest of the 'regular' CIA,
which has used assassination for years. Taking
place in cities across Europe, it is exciting
and satisfying to see a young teenage girl and her allies ream these murderous
and monied ‘defenders of the American
Way.’
International
Streaming:
BORDERTOWN
(Netflix), THE 12 (Netflix) and THE CLIFF (Amazon Prime)
Fail. Bordertown is a traditional Finnish police
procedural with the standard dysfunctional and brilliant detective solving
crimes in a real border town in Finland,
Lapeenranta. The series, like so many
others, pretends that many detectives are geniuses in some way or another,
which of course is not true. Its purpose
is to humanize them so the police come off as brilliant heroes. It includes other tropes - detectives who are
rarely at home and have to ignore their families. Phone calls in the middle of the night are
standard. There are an astounding number
of murders in a country that has very few murders at all. Shady government or police powers run the
town but never get caught. Nasty Russians,
the enemy de jure, are behind many of the crimes in one way or another, as
Lapeenranta is on the Russian border close to St. Petersburg. Bodies washing up on shore, found in the
woods, in shallow graves or out, chopped up or maimed, dead in a house with plenty of splatter or
blood pools – the same obsessive stuff we see all the time.
Ending with
the tricky search for the killer involving psychology, science, organization, motive
and emotional intelligence. This is
probably what draws so many people to detective series – a creepy form of
problem solving, even though the clues are completely arbitrary.
The most
disturbing part of series like this is the murder, injuries or fear directed at
women, female teenagers and young girls – including the cops’ own kids. I found this bloody trope common to a number
of Scandinavian detective series and it extends to nearly the whole genre. It usually ends with a male, though sometimes
female cop, solving the crime. In some of these series the ‘clueless teenage
girl’ is a stock character. Why are
‘dead women’ at the center of so many detective stories? I think it is a way to instill fear in females
and to normalize violent male chauvinism against women and girls. It is not
just to show ‘reality.’ Unlike the Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, Girl
With the Dragon Tattoo, etc., this focus on dead women has no
politics behind it.
Stephen
King likes it but this series is not worth watching unless you like to see young
women constantly a target.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maybe. The
12 is about a Belgian jury that
in no way resembles the classic U.S.
film 12 Angry Men. It involves 12
jurors and 2 alternates who barely discuss the two subject murders until the
very last scene in the jury room. It’s a
sad bunch. They are mostly concerned with their own private traumas or
relations. One has seen her parents
murdered. Another is a construction boss
hiding the death of an undocumented worker.
There is an alcoholic who gives information to a journalist. One juror is a depressed keeper of
monkeys. Another is an autistic father
with problems with his daughter. A key
juror is brutalized by her husband. At
the end the accused is convicted on one murder charge and one murder charge is
dropped, all based on circumstantial evidence. Both killings involve dead females
– one teenager, one a child – so it fits with the ‘dead woman’ pattern. You are led by the defendant’s clever defense
counsel to believe that the flaky accused is probably innocent, but at the last
moment we are shown less murky clues that the jury is only half right.
At any rate,
‘a jury of your peers’ at work, showing how each brings their personal experience
into their votes. Not something that
should be too surprising. In a way, it
makes a joke of the jury system and a joke of the humans in it. Compared to the 1957 film 12 Angry Men it reflects a decline in the competence and focus of individual human beings.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fail. The
Cliff (Hamarinn)
is an Icelandic
police procedural about a construction project that is attempting to build an
electrical transmission tower on an historical and ‘magical’ cliff in the
countryside. Local environmentalists are
protesting the project and eventually the viewer finds out how 2 deaths actually
happened. In this case, only one women is harmed in the making of this series. The divorced male detective helping
investigate the crimes has trouble relating to his daughter, while the other
female detective is becoming estranged from her husband. Since dysfunctional home life is part of the cop
trope, perhaps cops should never get married or have children.
Dull, even
with the Nordic ‘magic’ touches. Make environmentalists look like lunatics. Works
best as Icelandic tourism.
Other prior
blog reviews on movie or TV series, use search box, upper left (you can click
on the next page for more hits): “Hunger
Games” “The Peaky Blinders,” “Comrade Detective,” “Handmaid’s Tale,” “Game of
Thrones,” “Line of Separation,” “Damnation,” “The Golden Age of U.S.
Television,” “Black Sails,” “Fargo,” “Deadwood,” “The Wire” “Treme,” “Mayans
M.C.,” “Rebellion.”
The
Cultural Marxist
August 10,
2020
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