Monday, August 10, 2020

Covideo Nation

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.

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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.

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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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