A Frankly Bad Netflix Show I Watched that was Good
A Neoliberal Interpretation of a Surprisingly Novel Tv Show
Stop Being Panicked, Learn to Love this Hellscape
I don’t know how much light amusement you’re able to derive from the social fracture endemic to these deeply polarized, hyper partisan times. If you’re a subscriber to this blog, you’re probably not apt to find it a laughing matter, the reality crisis mercilessly afflicting the body politic. That’s why you’re subscribed. Your nerves are shot. You’re tired of entertainment. You want rationality.
But if on the chance that your anxiety and thirst for seriousness hasn’t removed your appetite for apocalyptic social satire, then you might enjoy, “The Watcher” on Netflix.
I for one, even while holding my gradualist’s trust in incremental progress, as opposed to the corrosive cynicism of the absurdist, could still delight in this darkly uproarious portrait of the collective hysteria it seems we’ve induced, through our mutual subjection to the mass surveillance and perpetual blame of our infinitely aggrieved, remarkably thin-skinned fellow citizens. “The Watcher” is a highly clever, viciously ironic, distorted reflection of our current moment.
657 Boulevard, House as Allegory
As in a lot of American cinema, and probably most horror movies, the story is foregrounded by a house, “657 Boulevard,” which functions simultaneously to pastiche classic American horror, while offering a motif for our civil discord. Moreover I think a haunted house in a horror movie invokes a tragedy peculiar to the American psyche: you can call it our private individual quest for a bourgeois ideal of happiness and financial security, incongruous with the turbulent volatility of day-to-day social life, where every other American is trying desperately to achieve more or less the same end, like sinister cannibalistic demons, thwarting your quest to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, at every turn. Part of the unintended cost of living in a free country is that not just yourself, but everyone else, wants as much as they can possibly get for themselves right away, as fast and conveniently as one can humanly attain it—or by right, if necessary, defend it.
Drawing on that uniquely American psychological recipe for disappointment, hysteria, and recrimination, the ironic plot the house drives is: the stereotypically modern family from the city attempts to adjust to the mundane suburbs of Westfield New Jersey, without losing their minds.
Pretty Ensemble Cast
Dad is played by the ingeniously talented Bobby Cannavale, (whom I first encountered in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” where he unforgettably plays the boisterous Sicilian gangster Gyp Rosetti in the third season). Mom, Nora Brannock is played by Naomi Watts. She’s not Cannavale, but she’s brilliant as Nora. The Brannocks have two kids, whose names I forget, who don’t nearly have as much screen time as the parents, especially the young son. All that happens with him is that his ferret dies. I will say it here, because I think I should say it somewhere, and I don’t want to forget to say it—Cannavale is the core of the entertainment for me. And since he’s so undeniably magnificent, and I also certainly don’t think the show is a masterpiece, I am very unsure whether I would have liked it as much if someone else played Dean.
Playing the real estate agent who sells the Brannock’s the house is also the inimitable Jennifer Coolidge. Perhaps best known for the Xanned-out Botox-ridden character she pioneered as Tonya, in “White Lotus,” (another show whose provocative nature impresses me, also “Succession”) she seems slightly type-cast in “The Watcher,” although as a realtor she’s a fast talker, and less benign and more cunning than the plastic immensity of her appearance would suggest.
I think everyone in “The Watcher” is well cast though, and each sets the stage for a weird and funny, though when you reflect on it quite disturbing, histrionic, provocatively self-conscious, but artfully so, parody of classic American horror drama. But besides its half subtle and winking self-aware genre-bending high jinks, it is an almost cruel, as in actually biting, satire of the senselessly brittle, paranoid, easily triggered, easily threatened, post-pandemic US.
In the Midst of Hollywood These Days in Atrocious Decline
I’m still impressed long after having finished watching it several weeks ago, with how mean-spirited it was as a satire. I have developed a tendency to be pessimistic that mysteriously no one in art and culture seems to have it in them now to give us what we deserve for our irrationality. I’m not sure why—it seems to me, as the world just got crazier and crazier, and dumber and dumber, America’s total descent into utter madness over the last near decade has corresponded with the total nullification of a desire in the entertainment industry to hold any mirror up to nature of any kind, instead retreating into nostalgic period drama or science fiction or godfuckingawful superhero movies. And it has made me inclined to think, the stupidity is perhaps so pervasive that it manifests itself in a way such that some artists pretend out of exhaustion to be above it all, and avoid social commentary—and/or from despair they just don’t want to add to the conflagration, or, they presume to pity all of us involved too much, to engage with it. Like the morally superior people uninterested to question or defend any of their assumptions, who dismiss contention as soon as it appears, and say let’s not argue, or I don’t want to have an argument.
With my mindset on the other hand, which is neither exhausted or despairing, I was struck with refreshment and cathartic relief that someone in the arts still had the zeal to bash the entitled delusion with which American society post-Trump is riven...
Brian Murphy creator of American Horror story wrote “The Watcher,” and some other guy. AHS which I’m not crazy about. I thought the first season and the one with the mental institution were phenomenal, but then I hated just about all the other seasons I gave a good effort to try to like.
An Introduction to our Leads
So Nora Brannock is an artist of some notion. She is a sculptor or something. Whatever you consider someone who makes pale white pots out of clay is. The sort of art you might see at your average New York City boutique art show (not that I have ever been to one). Blandly symmetrical, formalistic, pleasing to the eyes of the minimalist, seeking to escape the messy flux of reality through indulging a pathological obsession with forms, experimenting in the high art of emptiness, Nora makes exquisitely bland objects you wouldn’t look twice at in daily life, except if you were beholding them at a New York City art show, only because you were supposed to. Or a museum like the MOMA, stuff which if it actually has merit, in any event is way over my head. The one time I went to the MOMA I’ll never forget the gigantic display of a white wall with a bunch of tiny squares arrayed in rows, or the big machine painting a floor brown and then cleaning up the paint and then repainting the floor brown. Of course with tourists gleefully absolutely swarming the exhibit with their phones out.
Nora is also not very successful at making minimal art, and her clay pots and vases have yet to be recognized by NYC’s art literati. Nora is a caricature of upper middle class “artsy” NYC pseudo-sophistication. Throughout the show, and the writers go out of their way to demonstrate, Nora is perpetually dressed in white, a light white trendy overcoat, billowy white pants or long skirts, and large black eyeglasses with very thick rims. She is a parody of herself, status-seeking (above all), environmentally conscious, defund-the-police progressive, vegan or vegetarian diet (whatever the difference is). Naomi Watts’s character is bland, boring, sanctimonious, tendentious and naiive, as such people are with their trendily loose fitting, white/offwhite clothes, Doc Martin boots, and canvas composted-looking tote shopping bags with aluminum water bottles poking out. And Watts plays the ethereal Nora with a deft instinct for exactly how aloof, complacent, privileged and helpless to carry herself. She also drives a Prius.
Her husband, Dean, works in marketing or something. I forget what he does. It’s unremarkable. But while avoiding self parody unlike his wife, he is clearly supposed to resemble the typical modern family man. He lacks his own, and he does not even seem to notice, his wife’s pretensions. Maybe this is because his job, his role as father and husband—and as the family breadwinner for the moment, while Nora flounders—his obligations in a sense have a way of shielding him from sham. He’s a softie in a sense as a man, but he’s an arrogant softie. Dean represents the strange confused mess men have converted themselves into now. A shallow facade of accommodation and tolerance, obscuring depths of entitlement and infantilism.
As it turns out, Dean actually doesn’t make very much money either. And his character seems emblematic of the personality driving the mortgage loan crisis in 2008. While appearing modern and trendy enough with his moussed hair, and tight fitting gray cashmere sweaters, an overoptimism about his prospects and narcissistic self-confidence protects his ego and keeps it afloat, buoyant above underlying financial insecurity and the accumulated private debt that comes with someone quietly attempting to live beyond his means.
As if in mockery of that very possibility, in the first episode, Dean is shown haggling with his bank to get a loan to buy the house. He says something like, ‘Come on. I don’t care if it costs too much. I’ll do whatever it takes. I’m an American, right? I’ll do whatever it takes to buy a house.’ He ends up buying the house in New Jersey with everything in his savings, banking on the fact that he might soon “make partner” at his firm, a joke that these days we can always contrive a reason to postpone until tomorrow practically anything. Nowadays we expect either someone will always take care of us, or things will simply figure themselves out for our benefit; people solipsistically think the universe is either tailored to the gratification of their personal needs, or it isn’t and therefore the universe is corrupt. You can summarize the prevailing mentality nowadays in the following phrase, if my life is imperfect, then it’s immoral. Probably a better word though is: narcissism.
The Plot
You forget why the Brannocks move to Westfield—well I did—and it doesn’t matter. You know what their intention is, to start a new chapter of their lives. And they could hardly have picked a zanier array of neighbors as a segue. Two of them Mitch and Mo (Margo Martindale) sit on their front lawn stonily facing the Brannock’s house, reclining in deck chairs staring at it.
But the show has no clear direction until the Brannocks start receiving anonymous letters in the mail from The Watcher, who claims to be surveilling everything they do, and calls their kids, “young blood.” The eccentric neighbors seem like the most likely suspects behind the letters. First Mitch and Mo presume to harvest their vegetables on the Brannocks property to provoke them. Then there is the historian (played by Mia Farrow) and her apparently autistic or otherwise disabled brother. One day Dean is horrified to find the historian’s brother riding the antique dumb waiter in their house. Enraged, Dean threatens him and tosses him out. Then the historian rushes to her brother’s defense to argue former homeowners had always condoned her brother’s use of the dumbwaiter, whenever he wants, while she also threatens Dean that the local “preservation society” has authorization to come in and inspect the Brannocks property whenever they feel like it—which seemed to me a hyperbolic joke referring to the stranglehold such local organizations have on property development.
Another suspect is Dakota. Once the anonymous letters start to arrive, the Brannocks hire a professional to strengthen their home security system. Since he can tell the Brannocks are so uneasy and unconfident in their security, Dakota ridiculously offers to work for the Brannocks full time, which the Brannocks gratefully oblige. Dakota virtually lives with them, surveilling or ‘watching’ the house 24/7 for an intruder. The Brannocks' bored teenage daughter also acquires a crush on the nineteen year old Dakota, and they surreptitiously start a relationship.
There’s no point in recounting the whole plot, because it’s filled with red herrings, and it sprawls in so many different directions its hard to keep track of, which is perhaps the show’s main weakness. But I will try to summarize some of the details in a way that shows how valuable and fun the sprawl still is.
Love the Sprawl
Shortly after those events I describe, the Brannocks hire a private detective whose purpose is ineffectual. I think she just adds to the confusion by making it paradoxically yet more complex with the supplement of her expertise. They also go to the police pretty early on, who baldly admit there’s nothing they can do about the letters. The realtor or Jennifer Coolidge, becomes a suspect much later, who’s hell bent in her effort to invent a plausible scenario for Nora to sell her house, making a haphazard series of grim insinuations. Having lunch with Nora at their country club, she bluntly tells her how she thinks Dean will probably get fired, or that he’s probably having an affair.
More possible suspects crop up. One is a young father who had owned the house once, who tries to tell Dean that the neighbors Mitch and Mo are part of a cult of child murderers who drink the blood of their victims after murdering every family who moves into the new house, a Qanon reference. There is John Graff who had used to own the house too. Graff shows up on the Brannocks’ property one day and terrorizes Dean with ominous monologues, alluding repeatedly to how people don’t go to church anymore, and that American society began to fall apart in proportion to declining church attendance. As I remember he also makes wildly inappropriate comments referencing the Brannock’s emergent sexually suggestive daughter. As it turns out, Graff had lost his mind when he lived in the house once. He snapped and murdered his family who had become too irreligious for him to tolerate any longer. This guy is a stand in for the Trump right, evangelical, a conspiracy theorist, socially conservative. He dresses like it’s 1950. He tells Dean there’s this thing that happens every 8 years, but now I forget what it was. It was a banal chronological coincidence he extrapolated from American history.
Something Rather Pointless I Should Still Probably Mention
I should mention the show is very loosely based on a family who really lived in Westfield, The Broadduses, and started to receive letters from an anonymous “watcher.” It is also loosely based on the seemingly unconnected multiple homicide where a father had murdered his family, to which the John Graff character is an explicit reference. But if you watch because you have interest in either of these events, you will be disappointed. The allusions to those events are tangential at best. Hence the smattering of lukewarm if not negative reviews of this show on the internet, doubtless written by people who had hoped for something more sensational and dramatic, probably in the vein of HBO’s “The Staircase,” (which I thought was alright, not great).
Back to the Plot
There is a terrific scene where Mo pleads with Dean to stop renovating the house. She disagrees with his particular choice of renovation, and takes offense to it. Dean tells her to go to hell. Then shortly thereafter, Mo shoots herself in the head. In a hilarious scene, she gets wheeled out of her house on a gurney with a blood-soaked sheet covering her face (she later survives). Then Mo’s son reproaches Dean in outrage, claiming he provoked Mo’s suicide attempt. He argues she had cancer, so she was fragile, and all because of Dean selfishly choosing to renovate his house, callously unresponsive to his mother’s protests, now Mo shot herself in the face. It was all Dean’s fault. I took this scene as a satire of progressive people who demand you to be sensitive so as not to offend anyone, and then when you’re not sensitive by their arbitrary high standards, they unreasonably reserve the right to scold, shame and condemn you.
In response to the goading by the religious John Graff, and as a consequence of his own protective tendencies— throughout the show, Dean objects to his daughter’s burgeoning sexuality, upbraiding her for wearing provocative bright red lipstick, and her shirt sleeve skimpily falling down her shoulder ( in one scene at dinner, Dean mocks Nora’s socially progressive view that a girl who would dress like this is only showing healthy confidence in her sexuality), and he becomes horrified to find out his daughter has started a thing with their full time security guard—now that for all they know, Dakota could be the stalker sending them letters. He’s also old enough in relation to the daughter, to commit statutory rape. When Dean lashes out at Dakota and accuses him of being The Watcher, his daughter makes a video of the confrontation, and she posts it on the internet, where she attempts to spin it that the reason her father reacted so extremely was because he is a racist (Dakota is black) with the result inevitably that Dean ends up losing his job.
As the show progresses, the plot becomes increasingly tangled and convoluted. New characters and subplots come into play, but it starts to get old fast as the threads get lost as soon as they appear. But for me the enjoyment of the show doesn’t consist in keeping track of it all. Besides the witty social comedy, the story for me—Nora and Dean—are better than the plot, especially Dean. You almost pity him as he starts to unravel, and his self-involved family turns on him.
Dean’s demise is tragic in nature. Because this entire time he is sincerely only trying to protect his family, but Nora invariably has cause to suspect him of having an affair; his daughter resents him for his patriarchal animosity towards Dakota; and the letters begin to obsess him so much that his maniacal efforts to locate their source increasingly serve to drive a wedge between him and the very family he’s trying to protect. Nora with the help of her realtor, also begins to suspect Dean of writing the letters to fabricate a pretext for them to sell the house, because he can’t afford it—when Nora eventually finds out he risked all their savings on it.
What Does all This Nonsense Mean?
I took Dean’s collapse into a paranoid state as a dark metaphor for the state of modern man and his inability to please the rival factions in the metonymic form of his neighbors in a country so divided and political as it is right now. It’s almost in fact, as if it were because we got off on being so oppositional and defiant towards each other (well it gets you status on the internet). Disappointing other people who demand your conformity to their agenda, whatever it is, is the price of being a member of contemporary society, even for someone as innocent as Dean. His downfall could also be a symbol of what social fragmentation means for fatherhood. However a father chooses to play his role as father, this deeply, acutely self-interested society makes it extremely difficult to command any responsibility as patriarch in the traditional understanding. When they eventually sell the house, and move back to the city, Nora reads in the paper that their neighbors in Westfield all got anonymous threatening letters, and she accuses and castigates Dean for writing them, which he abruptly confesses indeed to doing, now that Dean suspects all of their neighbors were in conspiracy together to torment them all along, causing him to seek revenge. Hilariously.
Back to the Plot
You find out their private detective even owned the house once. She also admits to Dean on her deathbed to writing them threatening letters to make them want to sell it; as, though she was infatuated with the house, she had to sell it to pay for her cancer treatment. But then her rich husband died and left her a ton of money, so then she became able to buy it back. This latter subplot with the detective is the best proof of the convoluted nature of the narrative, which the show does sag under.
What Does this All Mean Again?
We never learn who the watcher is specifically. The fact—or the joke rather—is he or she, or them, or it could be anyone. The central takeaway for me, if there is any message here (even though I hate the idea that a book or a movie or anything should have one single unifying, comforting message) is that while we’re all terrified rightfully of being judged by other people, we’re also more keen than ever to judge and condemn other people in return. Or even as a preemptive strike. Everyone is the watcher. All of us. In 21st century America everyone is in conspiracy against everyone. This is the price of political freedom, including social media. In Thomas Hobbes’s phrase, it’s a war of all against all. “The Watcher” is a wonderful send up of our profoundly irrational milieu. You should watch it.
—Jay