#45: Am I dumb or is Severance dumb?
Death By Consumption
3/11/25 - 3/17/25
I don't think we should be allowed to have such beautiful weather when such horrible shit is happening all the time. It's real "Springtime for Hitler" vibes right now. Walking around the city, feeling the sun on your skin for the first time in forever, wearing a light jacket, smiling at dogs, and then you check your phone and it's like: all cancer drugs are banned and we just killed 500 more Palestinian babies and we're filling up our shiny new Salvadoran concentration camp with whoever the goons can grab off the street. It's all so, so, so bad, and it makes me irrationally mad that the evil people get to enjoy this weather too (but do they even enjoy things like "sunlight" and "warmth"? Or does it annoy them in an opposite way from me, the thought that poor people might be out there enjoying sunshine as well?). Anyway, let's hurry things up and ship all these freaks up to Mars or wherever they want to go, so the rest of us can start making life pleasant again here.
This week, I have thoughts about the Big Shows on right now, I watched our beloved Gene Hackman spiral into 70s paranoia, I read two books about miserly alcoholics and one book about New England (a place that is full of miserly alcoholics), and I entrusted my scalp to Beyoncé.
Severance, season 2 episode 9 — on Apple TV+
I’m going to hold your hand when I say this: I think Severance might not be that good anymore. There are still moments of brilliance, particularly the stunning visuals, but it’s all starting to feel a bit… to what end? Perhaps this is just a symptom of the way I like to watch my TV shows; I have never been a big fan of investigating the mysteries. What is Cold Harbor, what happened to Mark’s wife, what do the numbers mean? To be honest, I don’t care! Never have! I do not have Reddit brain!
For me, the first season was brilliant because all those mysteries, like the room with baby goats or whatever, felt like texture, silly background noise to the true purpose of the show, which was to take a brilliantly simple concept (what if you didn’t have to be conscious during your shitty keyboard job?), and use that to explore the internal lives of these specific characters, and their halved personalities, as a way to interrogate our own modern ways of living.
In the age of information overload, there’s always been an aspect of forced cognitive dissonance in order to simply do your job — to be a good worker in the 21st century means constantly toggling between unspeakable horrors and maximizing profits for the shareholders (and as a bonus if you’re an American, many of those unspeakable horrors are paid for by the very paychecks you’re earning!). So I watched the first season feeling a lot of: yes! This is it! This is how I feel! This was very fertile ground, I thought, and I was excited to see what grew. And then I turned on the second season and found out, actually, it’s just a show about: what if a corporation did weird secret evil shit?
I don’t think we’ve fallen off the cliff in the same way that basically every Showtime show in history completely collapses in season 2, but I fear we’re getting there. I guarantee many others are having entirely different experiences (God knows there are millions of aging millennials who have been chasing the high of LOST for 20 years, and I hope they’re having fun!). Maybe you’re one of them! And maybe I’m the naive one for thinking a TV show would be able to properly explore what I thought it was going to explore — especially a show created by one of those corporations most responsible for The Way We All Live And Work Now. And, honestly, it’s kind of unfair to judge a show against what I thought it would be, rather than simply taking it at face value. But: sorry, I like to complain, so here we are.
There have been glimpses, in this second season, of the show I imagined we were getting — most notably the scene where one character tries to find a normal job, which in this universe is at a door factory, where the interview requires you to prove your lifelong passion for doors. But that scene, a perfect mixture of the show’s off-kilter tone mixed with capitalist critique, was practically a one-off this season. Instead, we had an entire episode in which we, essentially, watched Patricia Arquette dig through her childhood home in real time. It was, actually, a perfect metaphor for what the show has become: a gorgeously shot, darkly moody series of events in which a woman digs for meaning and finds, instead, more questions.
The White Lotus, season 3 episode 5 — on MAX
On the other hand, I could not be having more fun with The White Lotus. On the surface, you could say it’s significantly slower than this season of Severance. After all, for the first four episodes not much happened: Parker Posey said “Lorazepam,” Jason Isaacs made phone calls, Carrie Coon and the gals gossiped about each other. But beneath the slow surface, things are happening to these characters. We’re seeing resentments grow, sexual tension rise (between family members?), pressure build. At least once an episode, Parker Posey has pronounced a word in a way that made me laugh so hard I lost the rest of her sentence. I’m consistently gasping in shock (quite often, it’s due to nudity, too — last week: Jason Isaac’s prosthetic dick; this week: Carrie Coon’s boobs). Who cares about moving the plot when I'm having so much fun?
And throughout, we get sheer moments of brilliance. Like (spoilers for episode 5 ahead!) this week's monologue delivered by Sam Rockwell, one of the most breathtaking and memorable things I’ve seen on TV in a while. To contrast it with Severance, which is all plot machinations all the time, The White Lotus takes these divergences simply for the sake of character — there’s almost no chance that Sam Rockwell having sex with white guys while pretending he’s an Asian girl is going to factor into the ultimate plot (though I would love to see how such a thing would even happen). It’s just Mike White adding texture to the show by introducing us to yet another confused rich white man in Thailand, giving us another flavor of the kinds of visitors who see the locals as mere props in their fantasies.
In fact, The White Lotus might be the anti-Severance. Where Severance is cold and stark, The White Lotus is warm and lush. Where Severance’s characters are servants to the plot, The White Lotus’s characters are the plot. Where Severance wants you to screenshot every frame and search for answers to the mystery, The White Lotus often has contempt for anyone who even cares about the mystery (the season started with a mystery person committing a mass shooting, and Mike White has mocked internet sleuths — while giving them what they want at the same time! He's so clever! — by introducing a whole arsenal of Chekhov’s guns, practically a new gun every episode). Severance is homework, and The White Lotus is skipping class to chug Everclear and dry hump. I know which one I prefer!
The Wheel of Time, season 3 episodes 1-3 — on Amazon Prime
Did you know, in addition to Mike White, there’s actually a second show currently on-air whose showrunner was a queer Survivor player who also should have won his season? You probably didn’t, because opening the Amazon Prime app feels like digital dumpster-diving. I honestly feel embarrassed to even be typing this right now, as if you’ll think less of me if you know I watch anything on Amazon Prime. I can think of many shameful acts I’d rather admit to than even having a single conversation in public about an Amazon Prime show. The app feels like the in-flight entertainment system you’d get in a spaceship designed to transport prisoners from one space penal colony to another. The vibes are, simply, horrendous.
But, since I am one of the insane people who once read all 15(!) Wheel of Time books, I am watching the adaptation, and mostly enjoying it? They’ve done a genuinely incredible job adapting a meandering, overly complicated 15-book series into a TV show you can actually follow, but I have no idea what it’s like for a non book-reader. They do drop a lot of exposition, and I often have to pause to explain it all to Justin. So if you haven't read the over 4 million words in the series as background, I'm not sure you'd enjoy it! The teenaged actors are fairly terrible, but if I look past their high school theater skills, the show does scratch that Game of Thrones itch for me — that desire that lives deep in every gay man, the urge to see British character actresses of a certain age in elaborate costumes, drinking wine and plotting. If nothing else, Rosamund Pike is the star of the show, as the schemingest witch to ever scheme, and she wears a very surprising hat this season.
The Conversation (1974) — on Criterion
After dear old Gene Hackman's horrific death the other week, I felt compelled to watch The Conversation, a movie I had never seen but had obviously heard great things about. This is one of those films, like Dog Day Afternoon and Klute, where I'm shocked people aren't still talking about them every day, even 50 years later. I think this Francis Ford Coppola guy might have a career after this! The sound design, of course, is incredible and brilliant, but what got me was the way the story wraps tighter and tighter around this one conversation, slowly revealing new pieces that may or may not be red herrings. (This is how you do a mystery, Severance. Which, speaking of: did you know the music in Severance is literally just the music from The Conversation?! Listen for yourself!)
Also, it must be said: Harrison Ford was so beautiful. They really do not make many things like they did in the 70s (men, films, furniture).
The Conversation was a surprisingly tense, beautiful thriller, one that feels even more appropriate for today's world of 24/7 surveillance, though this tweet also captures a similar vibe nicely:
Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar (2024) — paperback
Goddamn, this was good. Written by an Iranian-American poet, Martyr! follows Cyrus Shams, a struggling writer/recovering alcoholic whose parents have both died in differently tragic ways. As a result, he's obsessed with death, so, when he hears of an Iranian-American artist living out her dying days in a Brooklyn museum, he travels to meet her, which, essentially, causes his entire world to fall apart. Because Akbar's a poet, the book is gorgeous and heartfelt, but never overly saccharine. It also contains, every once in a while, a brutally scathing look at America today:
Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone's pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. "The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves," said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they'd wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.
The book is short but expansive, as the point of view skips from character to character, spanning decades in just a few pages, all of it refracting the central theme which is: what makes life worth living? That is, of course, too big a question to answer in this slim a book, but it's also, basically, the question all art is ever asking. “An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything," Martyr! says, and isn't that such a simple, beautiful, painful truth? It's the kind of book that makes you want to go out and do something, to make something that will last — but on the other hand, the book says, if you make nothing in your life other than a real connection with someone else, then that's just as well.
Pushkin Hills, by Sergei Dovlatov, translated by Katherine Dovlatov (2013) — library ebook
I didn't mean to read two books this week about recovering, disillusioned alcoholics, but I do love accidentally symmetrical readings. This was an even slimmer book than Martyr!, and much more difficult to get into. It's been described as "hilarious," but, if I can be unkind, the humor is very New Yorker, very A Real Pain, more of a light chuckle than a real laugh. (A sample joke: “There are dozens of books written about the harmful effects of alcohol. And not even a single brochure on the benefits. Which seems a mistake…”) It's certainly clever and engaging, but it's one of those Russian novels in which a Russian man mostly opines about how fucked the world is now. I sometimes struggle with a book like that, maybe because it's a bit too similar to my own internal monologue. Who knows! That's for me and my therapist to figure out.
Something I loved in this book, though, was the frequency with which sentences ended in ellipses. It felt like a little thrill, getting to the end of the sentence and having it just trail off, and it makes me want to do more of that in my own writing... Why not leave a little mystery.............
The History of Sound, by Ben Shattuck (2024) — library ebook
This book, a collection of interlocking stories all set in New England, was a quiet, moody read, which I found extremely enjoyable. Sometimes it's nice to just read a peaceful, beautiful series of words before bed! This book isn't huge, nor will it make a big impact, but I don't think it's trying for that. This book is the anti-Twitter, a way to momentarily still your internal screaming. I can't say many of the characters or stories as a whole will stick with me, but there are certain images that I know will last.
Actually, I just saw that the titular story — a historical gay romance lol — is being turned into a movie starring Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal? So maybe this will make a big impact...
Restoring Hair & Edge Drops — by Cécred
Ever since my friend Katie casually pointed out in 2011 that my hair had thinned (an offhand comment that both ruined and saved my life, thank you Katie!), I have been in the trenches. My hair has, somehow, clung to life through the modern magical science of finasteride and minoxidil — I've experimented with others, but I've found they're mostly snake oil (I am RFK Jr. when it comes to biotin, sorry!). Until Beyoncé, of all people, cured baldness?
When I saw the now-viral tweet in which some gay showed his before-and-after photos, I did what any balding gay man did and RUSHED to Cécred's website to buy a bottle of her hair restoring drops. It quickly sold out (white gay men taking something meant for Black women? What else is new! I am sorry to be part of the problem but when it comes to hair loss I am Billy Zane on the Titanic, get the fuck OUT of my way), so now I am left with my one, precious bottle. I'm only three days in, so I haven't seen any growth progress yet (I'll keep you updated! We love a reverse balding journey), but even after the first application, I noticed my hair at least felt thicker, smoother, and healthier. I literally do not know what this woman put in here (the label lists a hell of a lot of peptides, plus honey? Is my head going to attract bears????), but if Beyoncé did manage to cure hair loss, I will be surprised, but not shocked, and her $600 concert ticket prices will be partly forgiven.