DTF St. Louis is a seven program mini-series premiered on HBO in late February and early March. Despite some raucous aspects, the show is a surprisingly tender account of a friendship between two men and their loneliness. Justin Bateman plays Clark Forrest, a St, Louis TV weatherman; he's a successful man whose smiling face is emblazoned on billboards around the city. David Harbour has the role of Floyd Smirnitch, a heavy-set teddy-bear who supports his family (only marginally) by gigs in which he translates the spoken, or sung, word into American Sign Language (ASL). Smirnitch's wife, Carol Love-Smirnitch brings a child into the family from a previous marriage and is employed as some sort of technician at Purina. Carol, played by Linda Cardinelli, is attractive, knows it, and isn't ashamed to display her charms at backyard parties and get-togethers -- she was raised in dire poverty and is dissatisfied with her husband's meager income and the lower middle-class constraints on her life. Floyd is hired to translate storm warnings into ASL at the TV station and the two men bond during a frightening tornado and flood. The weatherman is obviously more well-to-do than his hapless friend and Clark Forrest assumes the role of benefactor to Floyd. In the course of their friendship, Clark initiates a love affair with Carol, Floyd's unhappy wife. At an apparent assignation or trysting location (it's a municipal swimming pool with a bathhouse attached), Smirnitch is found dead. Suspicion falls on Clark Forrest with a big city police detective and the local suburban cop arresting the weatherman for murder. The motive for the killing is said to be Forrest's involvement with Smirnitch's wife -- and the evidence shows that Carol recently acquired a sizeable insurance policy on the life of her husband. Video imagery shows Clark Forrest (apparently) cruising around the bathhouse at five a.m. on a recumbent bike, an odd-looking piece of gear that is an identifying feature throughout the show. Everything points to Clark colluding with Carol to murder Floyd. This is all established in the first episode, with six to follow. The rest of the episodes slowly, but irrevocably establish that the truth about the homicide is far stranger with much kinkier and perverse elements at work. Everyone in the program is dissembling, not out of iniquity, but because they are ashamed of their deviant qualities, their failure to live up to the norms of the St. Louis suburbs. As one character, a sad gay man says: "From across the street everyone is normal." But, as the show establishes, this normality is merely a facade, concealing all sorts of unsavory secrets. "DTF" stands for "Down to Fuck" and it's a sex-dating app, apparently like Tinder or Grindr. The show functions simultaneously as a gripping detective story and, also, as a probing portrait of middle-aged men suffering from loneliness and alienation -- a mid-life crisis, as it is sometimes, described.
At a backyard party, Forrest encourages Floyd to venture into the netherworld of internet dating by accessing DTF St. Louis on his cell-phone. Floyd was previously handsome enough to be featured as a centerfold in Playgirl magazine but he's gained a lot of weight and is self-conscious about his appearance. His personal ad on DTF garners a response only from a lonely gay man who runs a roller-rink. At a breakfast meeting, the date asks Floyd to kiss him. Floyd isn't naturally homosexual but he indulges the man out of sympathy -- he doesn't want to appear to be rejecting him. Meanwhile, Clark Forrest is entertaining himself with a torrid affair with Floyd's wife, encounters conducted at a local motel. He and Carol exchange fantasies and act them out in the motel in some cringe-worthy scenes. Floyd gets nowhere with his on-line dating and feels even more rejected and unhappy. Without much difficulty, he figures out that Clark is sleeping with his wife -- this is not something that upsets him. In fact, Floyd is so generous and kind that he wishes his wife well with Clark knowing that she is sexually unfulfilled. Floyd is impotent because his penis was injured in some mysterious event and now bent with Peyronie's disease. Although Clark and Carol are sexually engaged, Clark really loves Floyd although his affection is not exactly homosexual -- instead, he admires Floyd's generosity and kindness and wants to help him; he tells the cops that he would not have killed Floyd because his friend is "wonderful." This leads to Clark making loans to Floyd and, even, buying him life insurance at Carol's behest, a transaction that suggests that Carol and Clark are conspiring to murder Floyd and make his death look like a heart attack. All of this narrative and many other plot points as well are conveyed in a complex but fluent structure consisting of flashbacks generated by the criminal investigation that is underway after Floyd's death. A staid and conservative big city detective is partnered with a very intelligent and feisty Black woman police officer employed by the small suburb where Floyd's body is found. The Black woman is "porn positive" and says that she and her husband use the stuff to enhance their marriage. Of course, pornography and the underworld of gay swingers and wife-swappers is literally unthinkable to the White middle-aged detective, but with the Black cop playing tour guide (Virgil to his Dante), the two ultimately solve the mystery.
The show is brilliantly acted and genuinely moving. It's very elegantly packaged -- the narrative seems hyper-realistic but, in fact, the show is highly stylized. For instance, the scenes involving Clark's confinement in jail are always shot in an ultra-brutalist concrete enclosure. Clark sits shrinking, shoved up against raw concrete walls as he is interrogated. When the investigating cops meet to discuss the case, they always confer in an old downtown barroom with an ominous black metal ceiling that the camera angle shows in every establishing shot. It seems to be twilight always, a crepuscular suburban landscape with the waning sun shining through autumnal trees. The series ends in a satisfactory way that I won't disclose in this note. It suffices to say that the love between the two men, which begins in cameraderie ends by spiraling out-of-control, a development suggested by Clark's ever more desperate attempts to overcome Floyd's sexual dysfunction, an endeavor that has led to Floyd watching the sexual encounters between his wife and her lover from a closet inside the motel room and tactics that are even more perverse. The material sounds exploitative and, I suppose, it is -- but human desire is unpredictable and perverse and, in fact, the impulse to help and, even, rescue is even more complex and perversely unpredictable. There are uncomfortable truths in this series about unhappiness and unfulfillment concealed by DTF St. Louis' rather conventional murder mystery premise.
No comments:
Post a Comment