Luck

Luck – Luck is an HBO series consisting of ten episodes aired between December 2011 and March 2012. The show’s creator is Davild Milch and it was produced by Michael Mann, who also directed the first (pilot) episode. Luck probably represents the limit of opacity that popular entertainment – in this case a TV show – can exhibit. Although I watched all episodes, I must admit that I never understood what was going on. My few insights into the elaborate, and convoluted melodrama, were always retrospective – in other words, I figured out things that I had seen two or three weeks before from clues in later episodes. The series presents the viewer with the experience of working for the first day at a brand new job: all around there are “old hands,” experienced employees, who know everything about the job and their co-workers, but the tasks posed to the neophyte are obscure, of occult motivation, and everyone speaks in impenetrable jargon. The show takes place at, or around the Santa Anita horse racing track, in Southern California. Ace Bernstein, played by the shuffling, elderly-looking Dustin Hoffman, is some kind of good gangster. Bad gangsters led by Michael Gambon, chiefly villainous for his hammy acting, are scheming to thwart Ace. Ace is apparently trying to purchase the race-track and he owns a horse, although because he is a felon, the horse is registered to Ace’s henchman, a Greek thug played by Dennis Farina. There are a host of other characters associated with the race-track including a lovely lady veterinarian who is the lover of the surly Puerto Rican horse-trainer, Escalante, Nick Nolte playing an old man who owns another horse important to the plot, a fetching Irish girl-jockey, various alcoholic and injured jockeys always struggling to ‘make weight’, and Richard Kind, playing a hapless agent for the jockeys. Four degenerate gamblers live in an adjacent motel and spend their days at the track – on-line plot summaries call them “railbirds” and they provide a low comic commentary, something like a Greek chorus speaking in demotic vulgarisms, to the principal action. It’s the old Shakespearian device of establishing multiple parallel plot lines – some of them tragic and noble, others vulgar and rudely comical, but all related thematically. Since “it’s not just TV but HBO”, the show features some spectacular sex scenes with gorgeous and talented actresses – but the sex is purely picturesque and gratuitous, it has nothing to do with the main plot which involves intricate gambling machinations and complex business disputes. The difficulty that the series poses arises from the Elizabethan-flavored dialogue – people speak in gnomic fragments that are enormously compressed and highly poetic. You can almost never figure out what anyone actually means – everyone speaks in a complicated argot of allusion and reference, mostly to things that we can’t possibly know. For instance, just before a deadly battle in a rest room, Dennis Farina’s thug says to Dustin Hoffman, “we have a situation, just like in Chicago…” But we have never heard any previous reference to anything in Chicago and, certainly, no scenes take place there. At the end of the series, Nick Nolte whose horse has won some race of great, but completely obscure, significance, growls: “A goat from in front, a horse from behind, a man from all sides.” This is clearly very pungent and memorable and, no doubt, means something but I have no idea what is intended by this strange aphorism. It doesn’t help matters that Nolte’s voice is recorded at very low levels and that the actor speaks in a gruff bass that is like the almost inaudible rumbling of an earthquake. Another example must suffice for many: the railbirds get into a quarrel about whether to name a horse Niagara Falls – this induces one actor to say that the name reminds him of “Slowly I turned – step by step – inch by inch…” I knew this meant something but couldn’t remember the reference. Wikipedia tells me that the character is referring to an old vaudeville sketch memorialized in film by the Three Stooges and, in another case, Budd Abbott and Lou Costello – I know a lot about old movies, but this reference had me stymied until I looked it up. (I looked it up because I have always known those words – “Slowly I turned, etc.” – but didn’t know their source; it must have been a movie I saw when I was eight or nine). Who is the intended audience for arcana of this kind? I thought the show was excellent and looked forward to it every week because of the extraordinary details relating to horse racing and because of the excellence of the acting – the series reminded me of the obsessive detailing that Erich von Stroheim used in films like Blind Husbands and Greed. And the appeal of the film, like one of Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries, is to see vivid characters going about their daily lives in a fascinating institutional setting, in this case the oddly bucolic stables with race-horses (and roosters, dogs, and a companion goat) in the middle of the big city. Also the horse races, although the stakes involved were completely unclear to me, were spectacularly exciting and filmed for maximum impact – there is nothing more inherently beautiful than big horses running at full speed. Unfortunately, the races were also dangerous and three horses died during filming. The last accident caused sufficient indignation that the show has been canceled – I think three episodes were shot and will be aired but the rest of the series has been suspended. As is often the case in Hollywood, this decision had nothing to do with the death of the unfortunate horses. HBO ordered ten new episodes on the strength of the pilot and the audience response to the pilot. But market share decreased with each episode as the show’s mysteries never really were clarified – to critics, this meant the show became better and more intriguing each night (this was my view), but the general audience was puzzled and ceased watching. Thus, the network seized on the misery of the horses to cancel a show that would, otherwise, (if it had been suitably profitable) survived the brief scandal involving the death of the animals. The final shot in the series as shown in March 2012 is, therefore, doubly haunting and prescient: a gorgeous horse extends her neck toward the camera in a serpentine motion – the horse looks just like the dying beast in Picasso’s Guernica. (Again, the Internet tells me that Nolte is citing an Assyrian proverb: Fear the goat from the front, the horse from behind, the man from all sides. But who could possibly know this?)