Middle-Class Crime

 “Ozark,”Seasons 1-3 on Netflix

The father in a family of suburbanites from Naperville, Illinois starts working for the Navarro Mexican drug cartel.  Dad is an unemotional whiz at numbers and finance and excels at money-laundering.  His wife is a stay-at-home mom frustrated about no longer working in the political arena.  His younger son is near autistic but smart; his daughter is the typical tiresome and rebellious teenager of so-many movies fame.  If this sounds like another Breaking Bad, where normal middle-class white people go rouge, it is.    What’s up with that?  Does it make crime more legit?  Or middle-class people more cool?  Another fantasy of fake rebellion for people trapped in suburbia…  Or are they objects of humor?

Wholesome Crime Family

 Number one lesson here is don’t work for a drug cartel unless you want to be threatened with death or water-boarding day in and day out.  The Byrde family has to immediately move to Osage Beach, Lake of the Ozarks in Arkansas to save their lives, as they promise the cartel they will launder huge Chicago drug cash through businesses in the Ozarks.   And they do, buying up a distressed lake lodge, a strip club, a funeral home, almost funding a church and ultimately a river boat casino.  They are nothing if not resourceful and clever. In the process they run into a group of low-end trailer criminals, the Langmores, and high-end ‘red-neck’ heroin poppy growers, the Snells.   But don’t call them ‘red necks’ or you life is on the line.

In episode after episode the level of fuck-ups and deadly tension from problems is almost farcical.  Bodies drop like fall flies in this rural ‘paradise’ crammed with upscale lake homes and enormous boats.  It’s like Naperville on the water, as the family also gets a big house and high-powered boat.  The constant jeopardy the family contends with, not just from the cartel, is like ‘fear crack.’   It’s a cinematic ride on a roller-coaster for viewing dullards who don’t have enough stress.  The Mexicans in this one are all evil.   The Byrde’s also get involved with the Kansas City mob through the Teamsters Union (right…); crooked state politicians; a crazed Protestant preacher; an obsessive and illegal FBI spook; amateur thieves and killers; a useless and duplicitous local cop; killers from another rival cartel; a bi-polar brother; a deadly cartel lawyer and the aforementioned cold-blooded Ozark hicks living in a grand home on the hill.

I imagine each character has a writer assigned to them to get them into more trouble each episode.

Eventually mom, daughter and son get clued in on the family business.  The suburbanites forge alliances with everyone, including the local crooks.  They become prominent members of the community, starting a charitable foundation to launder their consciences.  The son hilariously starts hiding money in a tax haven himself.  Mom orders a hit, even though the family’s main pride was never engaging in violence.  The daughter eventually gets with the program.  In a way it shows how to be a successful American family, a modern Deadwood of primitive accumulation. 

The series is well-acted and has some emotional depth and reality, which is how it survives.  It includes some interesting characters, not just Marty and Wendy Byrde, but especially Ruth Langmore as a young woman tired of living life in a family of petty southern criminals.  But again, after the characters, what have you got but clever math whizzes profiting off of the illegal drug business.   They are the perfect Randian example of creative, How I Built This, job-providing, ‘makers.’

At one point Marty’s non-emotional patience and calmness goes.   It is so dangerous that the Byrde’s plan an escape to some obscure rural town in Australia.   They scotch this plan because of some kind of ‘feminist’ decision by Wendy, who is enjoying her close contact with the head of the weakening Navarro drug cartel.  Sane people would have bailed, taken the money, fake identities, plane tickets and run.  But that would have ended the series, and there is nothing streaming services like better than running stories into the ground, long past their consume-by date.  Stay tuned!

Prior blog reviews of political streaming series, use blog search box upper left: “Deadwood,” “Game of Thrones,” “Rebellion,” “Stateless,” “Hannah,” “The Peaky Blinders,” “Black Sails,” “Tremè,” “Vikings,” “Fargo,” “Damnation,” “Handmaid’s Tale,”  “Comrade Detective,” “The Wire,” “Rebellion.”

The Kulture Kommissar

September 18, 2020