celebrity gossip, academic style

People love to rag on Boardwalk Empire. The generalized complaints: it’s boring, it’s all the prestigious packaging without the gravitas, its lead (Nucky Thompson, played by Steve Buschemi) isn’t interesting. But mostly: it’s boring.

Are these the same people who say that Mad Men is boring? Or, more specifically, the same people who really only like Mad Men because of Jon Hamm’s face? Because I don’t get it: just because a show is 60 minutes long and doesn’t jump between six different fantasy worlds, all peopled with women in various stages of undress (read: Game of Thrones), does not a boring show make. Is it boring because there’s intricate dialogue? Because the suits are too pretty? Because there’s more diversity, both in terms of class and race and ethnicity, than not only most shows on television, but most shows on HBO? Is it boring because there’s a character who wears a mask over half his face but still manages to be a sex symbol? IS THAT BORING?

Point is, I have very little tolerance for the ‘boring’ argument, in part because I don’t think that all television has to have the pace of Breaking Bad. I like Top of the Lake, I liked the exquisitely slow Rectify. I feel the same way about the “it’s boring” complaint as I do about the “that movie was too long” complaint — there are bloated blockbusters that really are too long, and then there are movies that take longer to tell their story. Have some patience. Calm the eff down. Be expansive and imaginative with your expectations of how a plot can unfurl.

I also want to bolster my defense of this show, which I find pretty criminally underrated — in part because people think it’s one type of show, when in reality, I think it’s another. So I’ve asked Angela Serratore of Lapham’s Quarterly to join me in unpacking this defense. (I know she was the one to do it when her early morning Facebook post read ‘HAPPY BOARDWALK EMPIRE DAY!’)

AHP: Angela, when you talk about Boardwalk Empire, how do you talk about it? Like when someone says “what’s that show about,” what do you say?

AS: All the post-David Chase shows are about America and what it means to thrive here. I think BE is, more than Mad Men or Breaking Bad or pretty much any other show on television, about America and the banal ugliness of what it meant to make it here in a time before the middle class existed, in a time before Irish, Italians, and Jews were seen as fully white, and in a time when the idea that we’re all entitled to some piece of the pie hadn’t yet coalesced.

I suspect part of the reason people find the show boring is because most of the characters fall somewhere on the sociopath spectrum, and what we’ve come to demand from ‘difficult’ characters (I’m talking to you, Don Draper) is some degree of moral anguish. People on Boardwalk Empire don’t have that luxury. Irish-Catholic Margaret, who LEAVES HER HUSBAND because she’s got qualms about his involvement in crime, gets what is probably the most matter-of-fact abortion on the history of television because, well, what else is she going to do? I think this sort of pragmatism can come across as boring, in part because most of us don’t want to believe we’re capable of it.

AHP: I’m vigorously nodding my head here. I love how tribal and prejudiced this show is (or, rather, the culture it mediates is), and not because it makes me feel like we’ve moved past it, the way that Mad Men can (oh remember the ‘60s, when kids didn’t even wear seatbelts! Look how far we’ve come!) but because it serves as an invitation to see those things in our current society. Texts about history, of course, are always as much about the present moment as they are about the past, and I think Boardwalk Empire does a great job of showing the ways in which things like blatant racism and misogyny can be taken on and off, like a piece of Nucky’s very refined wardrobe, according to the demands of the market.

AS: That is an excellent point. Racism and misogyny (or their absence) are, for these characters, essentially tools of business. Nucky doesn’t have the luxury of considering whether or not Chalky’s family deserves the same chances as anyone else’s because he needs Chalky to help him kill people. Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky (who are quickly becoming some of the show’s most interesting characters, in my opinion) don’t have the luxury of being loyal to their Italian and Jewish bosses because they want to move organized crime into the modern era (read: sell heroin).

AS: What about the violence? Is it any more or less jarring than the violence of its peers?

AHP: Gangster violence, especially in the Coppola/Scorsese mode, has always fascinated me - and I’m not a person to tolerate much violence. Gangster violence is always so religious and primal, or at least that’s the way it’s shot and edited, and there’s something about framing violence in those terms that seems more meaningful, more of an act of a repertoire, than most other violence. It’s not that I think it’s beautiful, per se — it’s just that the violence, and the way it’s enacted, is always replete with meaning. Like in S02 (spoiler) when they scalp that dude — that’s to send a very specific message, much in the same way that the horse head in the bed sent a very specific message in The Godfather.

I think that some might argue that that’s stylizing, but I don’t think so — Tarantino stylizes violence; Michael Bay stylizes violence; postmodernism in general stylizes violence….and thus evacuates it of its meaning. When someone gets beat up in Boardwalk, it doesn’t look like a cartoon. It looks like that person was pummeled, and the bruises last. I’m not necessarily arguing for BE’s realism so much as its unflinching commitment to show violence as a tool that wounds both the aggressor and the victim. The “winners” in BE are fucked; the losers are fucked. In that — and its truly complicated take on its female characters — I think it’s most like Deadwood, which I miss like crazy.

AS: To be female on Boardwalk Empire is fascinating because it isn’t a death (literal or metaphorical) sentence! It’s taken Matt Weiner (and I really do love MM, I should point out), what, six seasons to really beat everyone over the head with the fact that Peggy is Don, but I think it’s evident from Boardwalk’s first episodes that, say, Margaret is just as ruthlessly pragmatic as Nucky. Joan sleeping with the Jaguar executive is the more polite version of Gillian murdering Jimmy’s clone so she can claim ownership of the house. The women on this show know what the men capable of and THEY’RE capable of. The ‘man acts bad, woman acts bad to punish him’ scenario doesn’t have a place on this show, because everyone is a striver, and that’s incredibly refreshing.

I will say that while I think the show’s treatment of females is fascinating, I’m unsure of its attitude towards femininity and qualities associated with the feminine. It was clear from the first season that Sensitive Jimmy was not someone who could make it in this world. His wife, the Lesbian Painter with Feelings, and her female lover are brutally executed because they have no leverage to offer their executioner. Paz de la Huerta’s showgirl can’t figure out how to be anything but a sex object; she’s summarily discarded by Nucky and, after becoming pregnant, falls into a state of physical and emotional collapse. Margaret, who moves in with the man who orders her husband’s murder, knows from the beginning of her relationship with Nucky that to fall pregnant would be inadvisable; it’s when she later lets her guard down and seems to feel genuine affection for the Hot Irishman that she gets into trouble. This is misogyny but it isn’t chauvinism-it’s the very simple fact that for most of history, to be feminine means to be in danger.

AHP: You are totally correct about Femininity as Weakness, but I will say that Nucky is the least masculine yet still masculine leading man I’ve witnessed (see further discussion below). And from a feminist perspective, I’m really grateful for the way the narrative has attended to the social and cultural realities of being a woman at this time — like the fact that the female-dominated teetotalers didn’t hate alcohol because they were prudes, but because their husbands kept using all their wages to get drunk and beat them. (I realize I’m being semi-reductive here, but I feel like that history really gets passed over in favor of harpy women who wanted to take away all the booze) And Season Three’s sex ed clinics, spearheaded by Margaret, that get off to a woozy start and then get her in trouble — if this were a different type of story, we’d have a montage of Margaret basically teaching every woman how to use appropriate birth control methods culminating in lots of happy tears. Instead, we see how impossible it was for even a woman of substantial means to do something like this — and how stultifying social institutions remained, even amidst the rise of the so-called “New Woman.”

And as for Margaret going soft with Soft Irishman and both of them being punished for it….I’m going to articulate an unsophisticated yet totally true opinion that every superb narrative needs a love story. It doesn’t have to be a traditional love story — the love story of Breaking Bad, after all, is kinda between Walt and Jesse — but you need two people to root for. Some people are rooting for Margaret and Nucky, but I’ve always had a soft spot for an Irish revolutionary, and I spent the bulk of the last season and a half rooting for Owen and Margaret. Clearly they were doomed, but that was part of the pleasure, like watching Romeo and Juliet for the fifteenth time.

AS: I agree with you. I love a love story, and I really love a revolutionary Irishman, and of course I can see how Margaret would have fallen for him, though their sex scenes are curious-if I’m remembering correctly, on virtually every occasion they’re intimate she demands it from him, sometimes rather coldly.

But I think her anguish over his death is brilliantly ambiguous-is she upset because she fell in love and her lover was delivered to her husband’s house in a box? Or is she upset because she needed a way out of Nucky’s Atlantic City and now that way out is gone (and she’s pregnant, too)? On a lesser show it would clearly be the former, but on this one, where the women are allowed to be just as pragmatic as their male counterparts? I’m not so sure.

AS: It’s always a dicey proposition to include real-world characters in your fictional story. I’d argue that BE does this better than pretty much any other show I watch, but is that off-putting?

AHP: You know, the Girls in Hoodies podcast was talking about how historical accuracy limits what this show can do, both in terms of character development and general plotting, but I think that it’s like the Classic Hollywood Studio System: a healthy set of constraints actually allows you to focus on establishing depth, instead of breadth. Like we know what happens with Al Capone, and the writers have to hew somewhat closely to that narrative — but they can also do a ton of exploration with how to get him there, and how the character playing him develops….like the stuff about him and his deaf son, I just love.

AS: Also, as historians I think we’d both agree that implying that Real People of History can limit a story’s progress/development is to overlook that history is fiction is history, etc. etc.

AHP: YOU COULD NOT BE MORE CORRECT, ANGELA. Which segues nicely into BE’s depiction of race, which most texts focusing on this period just ignore entirely in favor of jazz age spectacle. In fact, the casting of Michael K. Williams as Chalky White was one of my major attractions to the show, even before it began airing [COMPLETE ASIDE: Is Richard Harrow the Omar of Boardwalk Empire? Discuss]. I was fairly unimpressed with Chalky’s screentime, or lack thereof, throughout the first two seasons, but his storyline last year was just explosive. I couldn’t look away. Part of that is Williams’ insane acting ability, and part of it is the willingness to portray a black character with the same sort of nuance as the white characters. Chalky is at once incredibly charismatic and incredibly flawed — not unlike Nucky.

AS: I’ve seen some fans of the show give Nucky too much credit for being business associates with a black man (it’s not like he’s being invited to dinner parties, you know?). But I think of all the male relationships on the show the one that’s caused me to hold my breath the most is that of Nucky and Chalky. Last season, when Nucky had nowhere else to go and Chalky took him in and agreed to throw his manpower behind him? That was a careful bet on Chalky’s part, one based on desire for future favors from Nucky, concerns about what another white person in charge might demand from Chalky’s operation, knowledge that the shrewd Nucky should never be counted out, and, maybe, a little bit of friendship or mutual respect?

In most media that deals with crime, races are allowed to unite exclusively for transactional reasons, with race itself being at the forefront of the alliance. That Chalky and Nucky are allowed to have this relationship at all is a testament to Winter’s understanding of how people climbing up the ladder deal with each other.

AHP: I’m super excited about the casting of Jeffrey Wright as Dr. Valentin Narcisse, a Marcus Garvey-ite rooted in Harlem who’ll serve as counterpoint to Chalky. Andy Greenwald recently interviewed Wright for the Hollywood Prospectus podcast, and his description of this character and what he gets to do with him over the course of the season, sounds incredible. Wright comes off as wicked smart and super learned in the politics of 1920s Harlem, including the discourses of the “New Negro” and the “Talented 10th” (and how they butted up against those of Marcus Garvey), and it sounds like the writers of the show are positioning his character to reflect and engage in that cultural moment in a highly textured way.

AS: Can we talk about where Nucky lies on the leading-man spectrum now? Anyone who knows me IRL knows about my powerful attraction to Steve Buscemi. I also think he (and Nucky, by extension), is sort of a litmus test: anyone whose initial response is to call him weird-looking or dull is immediately written off as a person with no imagination.

But I think something that separates him from the rest of the pack (and makes him more than a little frightening, quite frankly), is that he’s got very little in the way of a backstory and yet it doesn’t matter. Don Draper is all id, doing whatever he wants because he was birthed and raised by whores, and that’s something that informs virtually every decision he makes. Nucky had distant parents and a dead wife, and yet we rarely wonder about them, which I think is a further testament to the idea of the show as about what it meant to be American at a time when people were still deciding what that even meant. Nucky doesn’t waffle over notions of who he is-why bother with that when you can get on with the much more interesting business of winning?

AHP: It’s a fascinating example of attention to period psychology: in the 1950s, it makes sense that everyone around Don Draper is trying to figure out “who he is,” because the spread of pop-Freudism positioned childhood as a key to unlock identity. But Nucky is defined by his Irishness heritage (and the Catholicism that accompanies it) and the fact that he doesn’t speak with an accent (read: second-generation, and thus more wholly American). Which is part, I think, of why he has no qualms about dealing with gangsters, whether they be Jewish or Italian or Black, and also why he attends so mindfully to his clothing. He may always be Irish (and remember, we’re still 40 years away from having an Irish president, and even he had to promise the American public he had no allegiance to the Pope in Rome), but living in American capitalism, at least during this specific time period, means that he can indeed transcend his class. But bottom line, at least for me: Nucky is hot because he’s very smart.

AS: Yes, which is a nice segue into what we’re looking forward to this season, because I think the question almost always is: Nucky is smart, but do smarts last forever?

Nucky has gotten by on his wits and his ability to convince other people that he’s a sound bet-is that going to hold? He’s got incredibly fragile relationships with Chalky, Rothstein, Capone, Luciano, and Lansky. Is he going to look ahead well enough to choose the right sides, or is the rapidly approaching end of Prohibition going to throw him off his game? We saw last season that Luciano and Lansky were looking beyond booze and into hard drugs, and this represents a huge shift in a system of organized crime in which bosses at least pretended to have boundaries. Will Nucky have boundaries? Will he pretend to have them?

I’ve read in early reviews that Margaret is absent from the first few episodes, which makes sense-she and Nucky are estranged at the end of last season, and Kelly Macdonald was pregnant during the filming of much of this season. Still, I wonder about her possibe return to the fold. Will Nucky find another showgirl (and another one after that?) Or will the both of them realize what they are and what they can be together, a la Tony and Carmela?

I am also interested to see how Ron Livingston fares. Part of why this show looks so good is because everyone in it looks like they belong in the 1920s-will the introduction of someone with a modern face change the landscape?

AHP: You stole all my questions, save one: WHAT WILL BECOME OF RICHARD? He is the heart of the show for me, and the way they handle him will say a lot about how I handle the show.

With that, I hope that we’ve proven that Boardwalk Empire is anti-boring, or at least that only boring people are bored, etc., et. al. We’ll clearly be watching tonight and commenting up a storm tomorrow, and hope you’ll join us freaking out over Nucky’s newest tie choices.