I haven’t read Laura Lippman Lady in the Lakeand I think I will do justice to Alma Har’el Lady in the Lake go there. I prefer to go to cold adaptation, I really do; Evaluate the quality of a television show based on its fidelity to the story told in different, different media art form, it’s a mug game for me. But I did a little research, and discovered that in the novel, the name of the boy Tessie killed and the family shrouded in mystery was not Durst, but Fine.
Why make that change, I wonder? Perhaps the creator / showrunner / writer / director Har’el thought “Fine’s family” is a bit too cutesy, a bit too on the nose – put Fine’s point on it, like. (Sorry.) But if that’s the case, why change Tessie’s last name, her grieving mother (a devastating Hallie Samuels), Allan’s absent father, famous surrealist grandmother Louise (Rebecca Spence), and her . conspicuously friendly grandfather Hal (Mark Feurstein) – whom young Maddie discovers has painted her nude, floating in a lake – for Durst, everything? As of the first season of The Jinx, is the last name of one of the most notorious mass murderers of Jews in American history. You may have been called Lanskys or Siegels or Berkowtizes.
And not like that Lady in the Lake above is a little wink-wink with its nomenclature. In one of the episode’s most powerful sequences, Maddie is completely exhausted and stoned. Schwartz had sex with the policeman Ferdie Platt, a black man. Even a glancing acquaintance with German or Yiddish can help get this goofy pun. I am agnostic as to whether there is much to be mined from direct nominative parallels.
me not agnostic whether it’s hot to watch Natalie Portman roast come, and I mean come on grieve for, young people he barely knows, from the right of any racial number, religion, class, and Career divide. The formation of desire, from the first primordial stirrings to the moment when the chemistry between mind, heart and body bursts into sensual life, is one of the core features of cinema. Har’el caught that spark of desire, when the idea of sex went from “huh! interesting!” for”I made this happen,” beautiful here.
On the complete opposite side of the ledger, so good, a terrible day was experienced at the same time by Cleo Johnson. Cleo learns that her political idol, Myrtle Summer, was once taken from her gangster boss, Shell Gordon. He knew that Summer wouldn’t hire him because he was working now with Mr. Gordon – his job wouldn’t have to stay if he worked for Summer. It’s a Catch-22. In response, Cleo distraught and can day-drunk deliberately torpedoes a local TV spot about Summer’s candidacy, discussing in blunt and powerful terms how she can have either glory or money to support children, but not both.
To make some extra money, Cleo takes up Shell’s repeated advice to bring her husband Slappy, from whom she is now separated, back to the club for a gig. Ignoring all of Cleo’s warnings, Slappy proceeds to perform a rude routine of brutal and vicious Southern racism that nearly destroys the glasses in the hands of the patrons. But those same customers are enjoying every minute of this dripping raw material, and thanks to the sharp delivery of actor-comedian Byron Bowers, it’s easy to understand.
But Cleo’s love for Slappy was far from the end of the story that evening. For one thing, it’s a signal to Ferdie that he’s probably still off the market – leading directly to the uniform-on, hands-up-the-dress hook-up with Maddie at the end of the episode. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you want to make a hot sex scene, one character appears to touch the waste of another character. Hot fast, baby. Bending over the side of the bed, contrast. splendid.)
For another, it was cut by Reggie. The young Macher in Gordon’s organization is the reason for the sexy Cleo, friend of the talented singer Dora Carter, him inamorata, is performing at boss man’s night club. (Reggie calls Shell “Mr. Gordon” the best part is that he’s Shell’s only son, like Addam and Alyn with the Sea Serpents. Dragon House.)
But Reggie has been warned by Ferdie’s twisted partner Officer Davis (David Johnson III) that the police ‘before the gun-blazing standoff with the fish shop man – who, really, crazier than rats shithouse, and spend most of the episode wearing. gas mask for no reason – just technical the end of Tessie Durst’s investigation. The abuser’s mother (Masha Mashkova) insists that “a Black man with a black eye” is the real perpetrator. Best to lay down until the shiner clears up, Davis told Reggie.
So Reggie, with an act of stupidity to rival anything you’ll see on TV this year, dispatches bartender, bookkeeper, department store mannequin, and mother of two Cleo Johnson. on a mission to pay someone to kill a politician he volunteers. True: The simple envelope Reggie is tasked with is paying off a hitman named Duke (Kenneth Nance Jr.) and various Lynchian hangers-on and ne’er-do-wells, like the drunken Russ (Michael Dillahunt Jr.) and the cowardly Sponge (Gavin Peppers), to kill Myrtle Summer.
This is what he did, or at least appeared to do, quickly and brutally. But they didn’t count on Mr. Summer and his shotgun – or on the escape attempt by Cleo, who forced them to come with them because they didn’t know if they could trust this strange woman. The episode ends in a dramatic freeze-frame on Cleo, fleeing through the streets.
But how far can you run from a system that fights against dignity, as Cleo did? While attending Tessie’s funeral, held soon after her death according to Jewish custom, Maddie and her mother Tattie (Mindy Goldberg) come across horrific anti-Semitic graffiti on several gravestones. Tattie said she was happy her mother, a Holocaust victim, was no longer alive if she could play in America again. Talk about it, Tattie.
Meanwhile, for every Officer Platt in the Baltimore PD, there is a twisted Officer Davis, or a racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist Officer Bosko (Ronnie Gene Blevins), who harasses Maddie and Ferdie in every way available to him. The fierce racism Slappy jokes about – before smooths out with some good-natured dirty jokes about Harriet Tubman (you kind of have to be there) – very real. The news media, represented by sleazeball Star reporter Bob Bauer (Pruitt Taylor Vince), is eager to create salacious stories about menacing queers. (Bosco and Bauer both think that Maddie and her teenage sidekick Judith are lesbian child molesters.)
And the patriarchy has such a lock on things that Maddie can’t sell her own car without her shady husband Milton’s permission, which she certainly won’t give. She is forced to commit insurance fraud by staging a break-in and hiding her wedding ring to get money to cover the rent. (Ferdie describes all of this in 60 seconds when he’s called on the case; his willingness to play ball with her about it is, in fact, foreplay, and it’s as sexy as anything these two do this episode.)
The point is, what connects Maddie and Cleo, despite the condescension towards Maddie seen in Cleo’s narrative – and who can blame her, considering how her fate was worse than Schwartz’s? – is that he wants to live in a world where people like him want to live in it. It’s a world worth dreaming about. This is a world to fight for.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for The stone is rolling, Vulture, The New York Timesand anywhere that would have him, indeed. He and his family live on Long Island.
