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Anyone that saw Sunday night’s episode of HBO’s The Comeback is likely a little shaken
up.
In it, very-contemporary male showrunner Paulie G.
(Lance Barber) managed to mentally and emotionally abuse his star Valerie
Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) – operating within the bounds of “artistic license” – by
writing her into a scene in which her character Mallory (closely based on
Valerie herself) is to give a Paulie G. stand-in (played by Seth Rogen; more on
that in a minute) a blowjob. It’s not the act itself that is so awful; it’s
that Paulie himself tells Valerie that the scene’s purpose is to humiliate the “character,”
that Valerie’s role essentially amounts to “shut up and take it,” and that no
matter how clearly she demonstrates that she is incredibly troubled and
uncomfortable, Valerie is expected to do her occupational duty and humiliate
herself in the process.
And just prior to this, she is instructed to – in a “fantasy
sequence” scene – stand between two completely-nude, curvaceous women. Director
Michael Patrick King holds the camera on Valerie and the two others for a full
minute, without a cut, without a shift of the camera – there is no
reprieve here, nor when Valerie is asked to further denigrate herself.
It’s an unflinching, unwavering and frankly brave exposé
of the relationship between male showrunners and female talent – which
is common for HBO. More impressively, The
Comeback makes its point – a point many would like to shrug off, or ignore,
or dub hyperbolic – with startling clarity. It’s flat-out impossible not
to see the abusiveness here, to see how Valerie is being absolutely violated as
both an artist and a person; and yet, it works perfectly within the show.
Valerie remains absolutely clueless. She won’t admit to herself even that this
is completely over-the-line (“It’s HBO,” she keeps telling herself), so she
filters her discomfort and anger through a repeated reminder that “This didn’t
really happen” – because, after all, Paulie G's series “Seeing Red” is semi-autobiographical
– and a jarring rape joke. She can’t acknowledge her own feelings, but her
strange behavior makes it clear to everyone from Mr. Rogen to the audience that
what’s going on is just wrong. For that, The Comeback deserves all the credit in the world: the situation
here is disturbingly truthful and intentionally overt. Again, anyone watching must
have been shaken by this elongated episode-ending sequence, regardless of their
feelings toward Valerie as a person. It was too horrifying, too obvious, too real.
Unfortunately, “anyone watching” sadly includes an unfortunately
small group of people. As far as gender politics in television go – and this
year, from Transparent to Orange Is the New Black to Masters of Sex, has been somewhat groundbreaking – I sincerely cannot recall a more effective subversion of the new forms of misogyny
and inequalities so prevalent here and now. It’s confrontational even as it’s
fully within The Comeback’s brand of
ruthless cringe comedy. But, again, almost no one is watching.
There is great irony in the fact that the two series
that immediately come to mind after watching this Comeback episode are not just male-led HBO dramas, but also their
highest-rated original programs. This year, both True Detective and Game of
Thrones have been chastised for their gender politics – for very different
reasons, with Thrones’ issues
certainly more relevant to the issue at hand here – even as they broke ratings
records and earned substantial acclaim in the aggregate. The season premiere of
The Comeback nabbed 300,000 viewers
in its initial airing; the most recently-aired episode of Game of Thrones nabbed
7.1 million – that 300,000 makes up for less than 5% of that GoT audience. Granted, Game of Thrones is among television’s
biggest shows, but I don’t see The Comeback
breaking
HBOGo anytime soon, either.
Sonia Saraiya’s highly-cited
“Rape of Thrones” article from earlier
this year zeroed in on what became a hugely-controversial element of Game of Thrones’ most recent season: a
rape that wasn’t treated as a rape, and that the creators did not view as a
rape. I won’t waste time here repeating that piece’s arguments, but the
parallel is clear. I’ve written in the past about the fact that Thrones’ fourth season is an anomaly
among prestige dramas, in the sense that its writers’ room consisted
exclusively of men (they are all white, and it should be noted, Thrones’ handling of race has also come
under attack recently). The scene’s director Alex Graves essentially
described the rape as a half-rape – which doesn’t exist – and creators David
Benioff & D.B. Weiss similarly said it “becomes consensual by the end.”
Watch
the scene: it was rape, and few in the television-watching community would
dispute that. Subsequent episodes, specifically their handling of victim Cersei
and attacker (and, well, brother) Jaime, were disastrous in this regard: Cersei’s
treatment from writers alternated between nasty and pitiful, as she was
generally stripped of agency and respect. For a show with a deep cast of strong
female characters, it was simply unacceptable – and it’s the type of problem fans
of the show have encountered on multiple occasions. According
to Salon’s Lili Loofbourow, “Game of Thrones, with rare exceptions,
all but ignores the gaze of viewers who appreciate the male form … I’m used to seeing breast after breast after buttock
after breast while understanding that they're not there for me.”
To watch Valerie stand lifelessly between
the two young, nude women – injected into the “fantasy” because Paulie G. can’t
get off on old, clothed Valerie alone – is to reflect on Game of Thrones and others like it. It’s an image so normalized in
premium cable television that The
Comeback, by completely stripping
its eroticism and supposed “artistry,” puts a monstrous face on a trope
too-easily accepted. It’s an HBO head writer, King and Kudrow so pointedly
explain, that is putting this image on camera (on HBO no less). And that Paulie
G. casts Rogen, who eventually comes to Valerie’s defense, is just a perfect
demonstration of the combined idolization and degradation that a person like
Paulie G. performs. That the show is so eerily recognizable has made some critics
uncomfortable, but here rests its power and essentiality. To watch this and say
“Eh, I don’t buy it” is, at best, straining.
The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum notably took down True Detective late in its run after
the series had attained universal acclaim, aforementioned record-breaking
ratings and a firm place in the zeitgeist. A driving reason: “To state the obvious: while the male detectives of True Detective are avenging women and
children, and bro-bonding over “crazy pussy,” every live woman they meet is
paper-thin. Wives and sluts and daughters—none with any interior life.”
It’s a harsh criticism – outside of the series’ two leads, I’d argue that every
peripheral character is thinly-drawn which, depending on your opinion, is
either intended or a weakness – but not an unwarranted one. That critique is
embedded in this Comeback season’s
construct; Valerie is not permitted to improvise (unlike Rogen), and her
character is thinly-villainous whereas the casting of Rogen indicates that the
Paulie G. character boasts the actor’s charming dimensionality. I’m a big fan
of True Detective for the many things
it did so right, but at the same time, it’s hard to argue that Nussbaum is
wrong. Moreover, the “intentionality” claimed by creator Nic Pizzolatto and the
series’ strident defenders loses legitimacy when its only female-centric
episode was, quite drastically, its
weakest effort.
HBO half-hours
consistently earn lower ratings than their 60-minute counterparts, and the
mega-success of both GoT and True Detective is additionally explained
by an epic, big-budget fantasy setting (in the former’s case) and old-fashioned
movie-star appeal (Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in the latter’s).
The disappointment here is that what’s at work, in terms of gender and sexual
politics, is problematic and yet brushed aside. Critics can write thinkpieces
on both of these series, but realistically, their impact on these audiences is minimal.
For a majority of viewers, there’s not a clear-enough understanding that one, this
problem really does exist; two, that this problem can be fixed; and three, that
to hold writers accountable for underwriting or undermining female characters
is necessary and vital. The Comeback
provoked that conversation. It underlined those three points with great precision,
rendering any defense of the issue at hand completely moot.
If only more people were
paying attention.