Television! "Industry," "My Brilliant Friend"

[mallorys_camera]

Third season of Industry is remarkable.

The milieu—the London world of high finance—is more or less incomprehensible to me. I still don’t comprehend what a “short” is despite having had it explained to me more than a hundred times; I feel about shorts exactly what I used to feel about the rules of football, which, similarly, I had explained to me endlessly when I used to attend Ichabod’s high school football games.

In the end, I realized my lack of comprehension did not signify I was stupid: I just did not give a fuck. The information felt—feels—irrelevant to anything that’s important to me. There’s no room for it in my brain.

“Short” is just jargon. But I think that’s the point. The characters are dehumanized by what they do. But the jargon could be anything.

The storytelling, that fusion of plot, characterization, status detail, & dialog, is so tight, so seamless, so immersive. How brilliant is this line? The story of our lives becomes the story of the detours our desires take us on.

I can’t recommend the show to anyone, though.

The characters are so brutal.

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Money, finance, capital, these abstractions around which we design our lives, are a completely imaginary—if consensually agreed upon—concept. Money is not real. Money is the ultimate glamor—in the original sense of the word, meaning the sickly glow that certain groundworms emit that used to lure unwitting peasants off the path into the darkness where they would be devoured by wolves.

Money is a human construct with no equivalent in the physical world.

I wonder whether that’s why it’s so compelling?

In a weird way, the human obsession with money is the ultimate signal of human dominance over the physical world.



My Brilliant Friend is another show about money, or more specifically, the lack of money—especially that first season, which focuses on post-WWII southern Italy’s extreme poverty & privation.

I would recommend My Brilliant Friend unreservedly.

It has the same seamless, completely organic storytelling as Industry, but while the characters are just as flawed, they are immensely more sympathetic—possibly because the viewer tracks them from earliest childhood. To see someone in the context of childhood is to understand everything, and, if not to forgive it all, to forgive a lot of it.

One of the areas where My Brilliant Friend excels, in fact, is that it recreates the texture of memory in a truly remarkable fashion. I can’t think of any other film or TV show I’ve seen that pulls this off quite as well.

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Since I, too, am completely subjugated by the imaginary construct of money, it is now time for me to get off my ass, stop free-associating, & start Remunerating!!!!