Death by Lightning

 Cable and streaming services have an insatiable demand for "content".  This demand leads to the production of shows with eccentric subject matter.  Every nook and cranny of storytelling will ultimately be explored and embodied in programs for broadcast.  What would you think if someone told you that Netflix had produced, and was prepared to host, a four-part mini-series on the political adventures of James Garfield?  I presume you would express astonishment.  But, in fact, the Netflix four part show Death by Lightning, indeed, dramatizes James Garfield's ascent to the presidency, the first three-months of his administration, and, then, his death at the hands of the assassin Charles Guitreau.  Even more astonishing, I think, is that this unlikely subject matter has been adapted into an excellent and, even, inspiring program.  This is big budget, lavishly produced, period piece, featuring many well-known actors, the men most disguised by great tufts and blankets of facial hair -- Guitreau, in particular, sports a pointed spade of a beard that seems dense enough to dig a hole.  Michael Shannon plays the noble and courageous James Garfield.  Matthew Macfadyen has the part of the psychotic Charles Guitreau, and Nick Offerman, cursing majestically, plays Chester Anderson.  (If you research these Gilded Age politicians, you will observe that the show portrays their features with, more or less, accuracy -- Betty Gilpin who has the important part of "Crete" short for Lucretia Garfield also displays an uncanny resemblance to the woman she is impersonating.)  The show is probably a "hard-sell" for most viewers, but it's remarkably good, cogently scripted and impressively mounted, and I recommend it.

Charles Guitreau is a con-man, thief, and ne-er-do-well.  In one funny sequence, he joins the Oneida Commune, a community that espoused free love.  Everyone else in the commune is enjoying plenty of robust sex -- but not Guitreau; at a meeting for self-criticism of commune members, some of the women in the group admit that they are not attracted to Guitreau and that they have nicknamed him "Charles Get-out".  Thrown out of the Oneida community, Guitreau flees to Chicago where he lives with his sister, Florence.  There is some intimation that Guitreau was badly abused by his father and that this mistreatment has left permanent scars on the man's psyche.  But this doesn't excuse Guitreau's misdeeds -- he steals money from his sister's household and, ultimately, ends up in Washington D. C., hustling there and pestering people with utopian schemes and grandiose self-aggrandizing plots.  It is in Washington that Guitreau's path collides with that of the new President, James Garfield.

Garfield is an Ohio Senator.  He's not ambitious, portrayed in the film as more of a "home-body" (the real Garfield was a philanderer and much more obviously ambitious than his fictional counterpart). At the 1880 Republican Convention, Garfield makes a nominating speech for Blaine, a reform candidate for President and a dark horse.  The speech is received with immense enthusiasm -- Garfield is an excellent orator.  When the Convention deadlocks between the Reform candidates and the corrupt New York party entrenched in the Manhattan Custom house -- this is where Chester Arthur serves a thuggish boss named Conkling -- the delegates look to Garfield and, over the course, of 34 ballots, he's becomes the Republican candidate for the Presidency.  As a compromise measure, Chester Arthur is elected candidate for the VP position.  Garfield doesn't want the nomination and can hardly be persuaded to campaign. He runs his campaign from the front porch of his house back in Ohio. If anything Arthur is even worse -- he does nothing but carry on extra-marital affairs and drink.  Nonetheless, Garfield is narrowly elected president and has to return to Washington with his wife, daughter and two sons.  In the course of the election, Guitreau, who fancies himself an imposing political operative.  He demands the opportunity to speak at various rallies and, after a couple very brief meetings with Garfield and his wife, Crete, comes to believe that he is their good friend. 

Garfield, who is believer in civil rights for the freed slaves, has trouble appointing his cabinet.  He is being subverted by Chester Arthur's boss, Roscoe Conkling of the custom's house.  There's some political intrigue and, with the encouragement of Crete, who is a staunch  ally, Conkling is expelled from the Custom's House and loses his power base.  Chester Arthur invites Garfield to fire him because he has been part of Conkling's schemes to thwart the President's appointments.  But Garfield intuits that the cheerfully corrupt Arthur harbors a more decent and upright spirit than appears on first blush and keeps him as VP.  Guitreau seeks an appointment in the Garfield administration as an ambassador to France  (on account of his French Huguenot name).  Guitreau meets Garfield who is remote and preoccupied and, although civil, has no office for Guitreau. Other members of the administration are less civil and they forcefully eject Guitreau from the White House.  Guitreau seeks to exploit the tension between the Conkling and Garfield wings of the Republican party and he comes to imagine that he is an ally of Chester Arthur and that killing Garfield will elevate Arthur to the presidency.  At a train station, Guitreau shoots Garfield twice, a 45 caliber bullet lodging in his abdomen.  The doctors of the era know nothing about germ theory and they dig around in Garfield's entrails with dirty fingernails and bloody bare hands.  In the harrowing last episode, Garfield succumbs to sepsis brought on by this treatment.  Crete visits Guitreau in jail and denounces him -- she says that his book called Truth has been intercepted by him and will not be published.  (As it happens, the book was a plagiarized collection of sermons and speeches by Noyes, the leader of the Oneida cult.)  She tells Guitreau that he will be forgotten.  In the same breath, she admits that James Garfield's abbreviated three month term of office will pretty much insure that he's wholly forgotten too.  Guitreau, still megalomaniacal, is hanged, chanting some sort of little ditty that he has written.  Two autopsies end the show:  Garfield is autopsied and, it seems, evident that he has died of medical malpractice -- the bullet, "tucked behind his pancreas" didn't damage any organs.  Guitreau's brain is extracted from his skull and put in bottle.  (I saw the bottle and brain at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia where there is a rather brutal exhibit about Garfield's assassination and the medical misadventures attendant upon it -- for instance Alexander Graham Bell deployed an early version of a metal detector to try to find the bullet that had perforated Garfield; the iron springs in his bed confounded the instrument.)  The show begins with Citizen Kane-like moment in the vast archives of the Smithsonian Institution in which a worker in 1968 finds the jar containing Guitreaus's brain (or part of it) while rock-and-roll blares on the soundtrack.  The show is decidedly funky -- everyone, including Crete, uses the word "fuck" continuously and the program has a lurid little title sequence showing mechanical men executing one another -- someone bawls out a sort of folk song scored to electric guitar; it sounds like Jack White.  The irony of Crete's last speech to Guitreau is that, based on Stephen Sondheim's musical about assassins, most people remember Guitreau better than they do Garfield.  A title at the outset of the show tells us that the program is about two forgotten men, one of whom killed the other. Garfield is portrayed as noble, lacking in vulgar ambition, and kindly.  His death has a tragic cast and the program is generous enough to spend a little sympathy on the assassin.  The term "Death by Lighting" that titles the show derives from Garfield's remark that you can't guard against political assassination any more than you can prevent "death by lightning".  The show is brilliantly written by Mike Makowsky and adapts a bestselling history, Destiny of the Republic, about Guitreau and Garfield byCandice Millard.