Dissected Plateaus and Bloodline (Possible Spoilers)

Back in the Hudson Valley. Brain dead the way that only a lo-o-o-ong car ride and a subsequent ten hours of sleep can make you feel after you’ve spent three nights tossing and turning on an unfamiliar mattress. Coffee can’t touch it.

Past Whitney Point, State Route 79, the old Catskill Turnpike, gets terrifically weird. Skirting the banks of the Tioughnioga River, it runs through a bleak upland that was once a lake. When the lake dried up, however many thousands of years ago, it left vast amounts of gravel, hence the preponderance of cement factories – now all shuttered and abandoned – hulking over the weird little towns in the mostly dead counties of Cortland, Chenango, and Broome.

The recession may have ended in New York City, but it’s still alive and kicking upstate.

I like weird. I like half dead little towns. So it was a fun drive.

And I like Ben, so all in all, I had a terrifically good time.

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I’d forgotten what a genius writer Ben is. He read aloud to me – the first 1,200 words or so of the current opus, which he describes as his homage to Brideshead Revisited. Even takes place in a mythical town he’s dubbed Redemption Falls. It was really, really good, the cadences, the simplicity of the word choices. Reminded me a bit of Pat Conroy or Irwin Shaw. I was very impressed, and it takes a great deal to impress me as a writer.

We rendezvoused in Syracuse. Took the young ‘un out to brunch. The young ‘un is also Writing a Novel although being a young ‘un, he doesn’t give a shit about redemption and is writing about a mythic quest into Bardo to rescue a girl who’s OD’d on heroin. (Wait. Could that be classified as redemption?) His novel’s pretty good, too, considering the author is only 20 years old. It has immediacy – bam! you're right in the story – which many authors who may make better language choices can’t pull off.

All of Syracuse sits under a black cloud right now on account of SU’s basketball team having been booted out of March Madness, and the young ‘un is no exception. Plus he hadn’t slept in 36 hours – something about studying for a midterm. So I can’t say he was the sprightliest company in the world, but he was polite and reasonably affectionate. So that’s progress of a sort.

Then B and I drove back to Trumansburg and launched a three-day talkfest interspersed with visits to various restaurants and brisk walks. It was snowing hard in Trumansburg. Lake effect snow on the third day of spring to the tune of four – count ‘em – inches.

I took him out to brunch at Coltivare, the new culinary center that was set up to showcase TC3’s farm-to-bistro initiative. EXCELLENT food at a very affordable price. This was to celebrate B’s receiving the word that his Hep C is officially cured. Immense relief – a year ago, I was completely convinced that he’d be dead in another two years, and I was not at all looking forward to living in a world without B.

We also hit the diner:



Mostly, though, we stayed in his apartment and binge-watched Bloodline, the latest Netflix-produced TV series, which is awfully good.

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Bloodline is interesting on two levels.

Even given the truth of the Tolstoy axiom – Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way – there are certain taxonomies of unhappiness within unhappy families. One I’ve had a lot of opportunities to study up close is the unhappy model in which the firstborn is an absolute fuckup, so it’s the second-born child who ends up caretaking, being responsible, working too hard. And feeling the guilt that goes along with the usurpation of the natural order of things.

Cain and Abel, in other words.

Bloodline is the story of the Rayburn family who live in the Florida Keys. Papa Rayburn (Sam Shepard) drifted there from Texas after a stint in the Navy and with the compliance of his wife Sally (Sissy Spacek) starts a wildly successful hotel.

They have five children. Four of them survive into adulthood; the fifth is a ghost and an enigmatic plot point.

Danny (Ben Mendelsohn), the eldest, is the fuckup. Brilliant, doomed, and possessed with an absolute genius for knowing exactly what button to push to detonate the self-destructive impulses in everyone around him. Imagine if the TV character House hadn’t gone to medical school and had ended up in south Florida.

John (Kyle Chandler) is the responsible second-born. Also the local sheriff. Hen-pecked by his acquiescence to dreary family expectations into the most tedious character imaginable but sarcastic, even merry, when he interrogates suspects. Or when he’s tied on a few. And this is an unhappy family that likes to drink!

There’s also the lawyer daughter Meg (Linda Cardinali) who’s probably the smartest one in the family, and the youngest son, Kevin, (an actor with the unfortunate name Norbert Leo Butz) who looks and acts like a drunken hobbit.

The storyline involves Danny’s untimely death.

Which takes twelve hours of screen time to unfold. Even though you absolutely know – and if you’re too dim-witted to read the plot’s entrails, you’re informed via flash-forwards – that it’s gonna happen.

It’s a very slow-moving TV series, in other words.

For the first three episodes, Bloodline’s slow pace is absolutely unbearable. You’re thinking, Wait! Isn’t there a new episode of “The Shahs of Sunset" I could watch instead?

And then presto! You’re hooked.

The show is a series of brush strokes, in other words. Each very small. Each expertly applied.

The last three episodes – including the one after Danny dies – are some of the most gripping, mesmerizing filmed entertainment I’ve ever seen.

But they absolutely would not work in TV's traditional weekly episode format.

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Bloodline the first entertainment I’ve seen that was clearly designed for binge-watching. Where the assumption of binge-watching made its way into the narrative skeleton.

The storytelling is immersive without being particularly dramatic. That means you could never air it in hourly chunks separated by an entire week – the presumptive audience would just completely lose interest.

The economic implications of this distribution choice are pretty fascinating.

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