To The Lost
All those cute things we said Boardwalk Empire was about—father-son surrogacy, central place theory, Paz de la Huerta—were very cute but incidental. There were times in the first season when I thought Boardwalk Empire was the revviest show on, when its decade of choice actually looked all swellegant and roaring. In season two it’s like they tried to tear down the twenties retroactively. No youth, no liberation, no fun at all.
We forgot Boardwalk Empire is a gangster program. All it does is kill and eat. Jimmy Darmody knew it, why the fuck didn’t we? There are no clean getaways. Oh wait, that was the shitty tagline from Drive. But seriously.
HBO has always been really good at patting down the patriarchy and at least detaining it. If you’re a male authority figure you can expect to do more than just take off your belt and shoes now and then. Boardwalk Empire basically did a double-elimination tournament with fathers and sons and their administrations past each other. Nucky effectively went on vacation during his father’s funeral. Jimmy killed his. Nucky killed Jimmy who kind of turned out to be not so much of a son, after all. Nucky doesn’t want kids, not really, because he could never afford to be challenged.
Religion diffused throughout the season like soft blue light. In the finale Manny Horwitz lurked under a synagogue like a semi-demolished demigod, taking requests. For her audience with Esther Rudolph, Margaret brought her priest along—he immediately got all entitled with Esther, who shut him down like a boss. I love her. All manners of faith, and not a single reasonable decision by any of these brain surgeons. I wonder if there’s a connection?
Nucky, channeling Adriana La Cerva’s future intestinal tract, decides he can cross Margaret off the list of witnesses against him by marrying her. Amazingly he doesn’t try to obscure the fact that he’s a master manipulator who wants only to save his own skin, and it’s still not the douchiest proposal I ever saw. At least he didn’t submerge a ring in a tumbler of illegal hooch. Margaret, after the mandatory three-day waiting period, accepts and somewhere Paz de la Huerta sits bolt upright in the bed where she just fucked a homeless transsexual mime and goes “NUCCKKKKYYY”.
On the wedding are interposed, Godfather-like, scenes of Jimmy and Richard going buck on the new treasurer. I really really wish people would stop doing this kind of homage. Oh right, we forgot this is a gangster show.
Jimmy going willing to his own killing party reminded me visually and conceptually of the L.A. Confidential denouement, when Russell Crowe arrives at the Victory Motel fully aware it’s a setup. “This is as good a place as any for it to end”, he tells Guy Pearce. The rainswept War Memorial didn’t just look like the statue level of Goldeneye, it was every bit as gutty and theatrical as a Michael Mann ending. Sometimes this show is as good-looking as JFK at Hyannisport. By sometimes I mean all the time. You could spend all your time looking at what’s in the background or foreground of a shot and not notice all the tropes lying around like tripwires. Just remember to step over them like the kids stepping over the cables in the Jurassic Park kitchen scene.
I am supposed to have an opinion on Jimmy’s death. Michael Pitt himself seems on the fence about it. Terrence Winter is pretending not to know what blackout drunk means. I don’t know? It’s like on Six Feet Under when the writers would spend every hiatus figuring out what to do with David and Keith—break them up again? Bust David back down to the chat rooms? At a certain point a fictional relationship, just like an IRL one, has been taken as far as it can go and that’s as much as I care to oversimplify it.
Angela’s death was worse because you could at least argue it was gratuitous, and in any case it was way more important as a signifier. When you look at Jimmy’s murder from Nucky’s point of view, it was inevitable, necessary, and no big deal. And if you’re not able to look at something from the main character’s point of view, you’re probably just trolling yourself.
The process of Jimmy getting his house in order came off brittle and rushy, but this is second-wave HBO. Darkly emotive is no longer the house brand. All the shows still glisten at a glance, but substances aren’t what they’re making anymore. Boardwalk Empire, for its part, won’t ever stop being gesturalist. Why should it? Terrence Winter’s place on television, like Matthew Weiner’s, is legacy manifest. It’s more patriarchy but at least they know it.
