Trauma In A Car Park: Dalliances With Crap TV

There are those rare days when summoning the energy for the latest special delivery film on MUBI - typically a 2 hour plus piece set in a sanatorium where people speak the language backwards, make statues and Marienbad topiary look athletic, have a fixation with the deep symbolism of a dripping tap and stare silently and endlessly at the middle distance - is just a bit too much.

For those occasions there is genre television: crime dramas, comedy dramas and the like. 

Rather than the resonant, perfectly formed madeleine of the best TV, honed and balanced, these programmes are like a particularly decadent slice of cake. They lure you with the promise of their confection but you rapidly find that the cream was whipped UHT, the ingredients came out of a packet and the fruit is tasteless.

This appreciation has been tested during recent experience of watching the British crime dramas Fearless and In The Dark and the US dramadies Casual (on Amazon Prime) and Flaked (on Netflix). 

The British programmes are at some pains to suggest that their cake is sourced wholly from organic ingredients and will provide roughage. So we have top quality lead actors; intriguing personal back stories; local rootedness and a deliberate sense of grit.

Ultimately, however, they always seem to suffer chronically from: 

- trauma in a car park. Deep personal crises are revealed, often at some volume because they have been bottled up for so long but particularly because they have been bottled up on a car journey, in a public place so that it is then possible for someone to look suitably windswept and desolate to emphasise that this has been a personal crisis. This is frequently associated with .... 

- having to be somewhere else. Personal trauma has an amazing ability to unlock flashes of penetrating insight and to alert all colleagues that they urgently need to phone or text the person undergoing the major crisis. The inexorable consequence is that the crisis ridden individual then has to run, ride, hitch, harness or otherwise transport themselves at high speed towards ... 

- the place that they should have known was important from a much earlier point in proceedings. These seem to come in two main types. One is typically damp. There is something about water and dripping pipes, plentiful moss and ubiquitous dilapidation that has set designers going absolutely gaga. The other is posh, polished and pristine and can be guaranteed to sport a magnificent and huge kitchen full of implements that one never knew could look so threatening. In one or other of these places ...

- the top quality lead actor will do something clever having previously arranged a load of stuff which there wasn't really time to explain to anyone else let alone the viewer. That car with the bomb under it. Don't stress we've sorted that. The chap you've just worked out is the killer, immediately decides to run off in a high profile way because he has a telepathic understanding of your moment of insight all those miles away in the car park (see above). Of course he runs directly to the damp place or the pristine place (see above) but sufficiently slowly that the top quality lead actor is able to follow him. After the clever thing has happened there has to be a few moments for ...

- the universe, having been out of kilter for the previous five episodes, to resolve the world order so that everything is back on it's axis and a thousand previously impossible things happen in moments. Shady types who were almost omnipotent in their malign elusiveness are suddenly dropping to their knees when merely approached by your common or garden Dixon of Dock Green bobby; previously wildly over acting Masters of Oxbridge colleges are found slumped with the equivalent of the pearl handled revolver or the glass of whisky having decided that suddenly it is all too much. After which we may have ...

- deep personal trauma in a car park redux because whilst professional clever things have to happen there has to be another scene in a public place (who knew car parks could be so full of drama) in which wind-sweptness can return albeit with a touch more sun this time because the talking cure has worked a degree of magic and the trauma is not quite as bad as it had been. 

The lesson that we might draw from this is that given the crap weather in the UK the emotional state of the main protagonist can be deduced with considerable confidence just from the amount of natural light in any given car park and the length of the preceding car journey. 

Whilst these are useful insights to fully appreciating not very good British crime dramas when it comes to US dramadies life is more straightforward:

- this is California so the weather is never less than magnificent which means that inner emotional states cannot be signposted by the weather and being hipster types people ride bikes in scenic locations so that they don't have the chance to engage in emotional dramas in car parks. But ...

- none of this matters because the only things that happen are some some very, very tired tropes about good looking flawed guys having an endless supply of attractive women with whom to have mixed up relationships; quirky friends who are just mixed up enough to provide a plausible foil but who are by most standards very good looking; all against the backdrop of magnificent houses or Venice Beach; and that ...

- since everyone is in therapy or recovery they can talk in detail about their deep personal crises without needing to do it in the car park.

There are worse things than cows on the line

A new explanation for the delay to my train this afternoon: cows on the line. This did, however, provide some time to reflect on other rather more serious characteristics of modern life than the inconvenience occasioned by the peregrinations of the odd Friesan. 

So here are six which seem to me to be particularly pernicious aspects of our current situation. 

1. Libertarianism: otherwise known as letting me do whatever I want and a plague on everyone else. Such a convenient doctrine for the already powerful and utterly malign as a philosophy for the common good with a resolution to remove everything that might be a constraint or require a contribution to the commonweal. This is wholly distinct from liberalism and indeed individualism which are both important and positive. The basic issues that libertarianism always avoid are that a free for all never serves those without agency. The deep structural imbalances in society that fuel inequality have to be collectively addressed. Atlas didn't shrug at the effort involved in doing that.

2. Anti-intellectualism. Often now seen in the derision poured on experts. Again a characteristic of the charlatan, the demagogue and the populist to avoid scrutiny from people who might actually know what they're taking about. Without expertise we end up simply with opinion which rapidly shades over into prejudice. Having freed ourselves largely from the shackles of religion and recognised that logic and evidence and indeed facts are a rather better basis for making decisions we move away valuing intellectual and expert contributions at our enormous peril. Just look at the con man sitting in the Oval Office. A vulgar buffoon with the attention span of a newt and an ego the size of a (small) planet.

3. Anti-Enlightenment(arianism). The critical values of the Enlightenment are scepticism, rationality, tolerance and the recognition of the value of the individual. They established the public square for debate and discussion. All are inimical to populist, authoritarian, regressive and nativist prejudice. These are the core values of civilisation. They need all our support and rigorous defence including unbending intolerance of the intolerant. 

4. Self-improvement. A malign obsession linked to the dreaded 'positive thinking'; one of the most ridiculous and pernicious of doctrines, the stuff of snake oil salesmen the world over. Imagine it and you can be it! Maximum happiness guaranteed. So much the better if we would instead focus on self-reflection - a genuinely helpful approach to understanding our place in the world and our relationships with others. All the better again if this is accompanied by the willingness to embrace failure, pessimism and uncertainty all of which are the natural state of we flawed creatures. We'd all be a great deal happier as a result.

5. Transformation. A much abused term but reflecting a desire to makeover, to fundamentally change ourselves and particularly to look for magic cures for unhappiness, illness or obesity. The truth is that small, moderate, balanced improvements are almost always the right course to follow and have much the better chance of being effective and sustainable. Magical thinking is always just that: the stuff of fairies at the bottom of the garden. Leave it there with the compost.

6. Majoritarianism. Obscenities such as referendums are consistent with democracy only when seen solely as majoritarianism and an unhealthy desire to divide and direct fire at on out group in order to justify all kinds of malign activity such as dismantling the rule of law. In effect a form of popular dictatorship. That's why they are the plaything of the demagogue and the populist. A liberal democracy starts from the perspective that the main characteristics of any system are to be plural, to embrace nuance and to recognise that the world is a mess: its manifold not binary and anyone who tells you the contrary is doubtless up to no good.  

Ditch 'em all!