Tag Archives: Weeds

Why I Quit Watching Weeds

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I binge-watched several seasons of Weeds back there a while ago. The show got worse and worse and more and more improbable as it went along. Soccer-mom-turned-weed-dealer Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise-Parker) becomes stupider, more repulsive, and less believable as the plot spins along pointlessly yet eventfully, as serial plots will do. Eventually Nancy ends up moving out to Texas and the Mexican border, where she owns a little boutique as a front for hard drug dealers (hard drugs are bad, in case you didn’t know) who use the store as one end of a smuggling tunnel.

The problem is that running the store makes Nancy bored, despite the fact that she’s now wealthy and has enough money to take care of her family and could presumably take up a hobby like golf or sleeping with various guys (which the show presents as her main interest) or whatever.

But again, plot must keep plotting, so Nancy goes exploring where she shouldn’t (shades of Bluebeard) and ends up seeing, coming through the tunnel, not hard drugs, but…a woman.

Again, I watched this a while ago, and I’m not watching it again, but as I remember the image of the (Latina) woman is shot in semi-slow motion, like a dream image. Nancy is transfixed with something (horror, presumably, though desire is a buried possibility) — and then the woman is gone, taken away, we know not where. Later, Nancy has a kind of moral epiphany related to the woman; she realizes that her work with the drug cartel is horrible and wrong, and that she (Nancy) is a bad person and needs to change. End of moral — and of the series, for me. That was the last episode I watched.

I wasn’t at the time entirely sure why Nancy’s slow-mo longing for the woman in the tunnel was so repulsive. But I’ve done more reading about sex-trafficking since, and that’s clarified the problem. In sex-trafficking narratives (of which this is one) women who cross borders are seen as helpless, debased victims, in the thrall of villains who ruthlessly exploit them. It’s a sensational story — and, as Laura Agostín and others have argued, it’s not necessarily especially anchored in reality. Instead, sex trafficking often serves as an exploitation narrative, providing exciting thrills for folks at home while giving useful cover for government anti-immigration raids.

In this context, it seems important to point out that Nancy never talks to the distant marginal woman. She doesn’t ask her if she’s in distress, or if she needs help. How exactly does she know that the woman doesn’t want to come into the United States? There are, after all, many folks who do want to immigrate from Mexico to the U.S.; it seems like a pretty big leap to assume that someone crossing the border is a kidnapping victim rather than an immigrant under her own power. Unless, of course, you assume all non-white women are automatically debased victims.

That does seem to be how Weeds sees this unnamed and unspeaking icon, whose function is to remain silent so that she can fit neatly into Nancy’s psychodrama. She is a mute object lesson; we don’t care about who she is, but only about how Nancy feels about who she is. The dispossessed, victimized other is valuable as an exercise in empathetic response for the middle-class white woman — to show how privileged and awful she is, and teach her to do better.

Kohan went on to make Orange Is the New Black, of course, a show in which non-white women do, mercifully, get to talk. Still, Kohan hasn’t changed that much. I’ve written a bunch about why I don’t like OITNB, but I think this incident from Weeds sums up the trouble economically. That trouble is carelessness — both in the sense that Kohan has not taken the time to learn about the Very Important Issues she addresses, and in the sense that she doesn’t seem to actually care about them, except as they fit into her sit-com engine of alternating cutesiness and moral epiphanies. Her glibness is so overwhelming it is virtually indistinguishable from cynicism, and her empathy so conveniently self-serving it might as well be solipsism. She is a master of empathysploitation, a longstanding genre whose popularity, it seems, never fades.
 

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Something Has to Happen

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Breaking Bad seems to be trying obnoxiously hard. By that I don’t mean that it strives for relevance or for aesthetic bona fides, though there’s certainly a big dollop of that of that in its we’re-serious-because-we’ve-got-cancer-and-also-meth plotting. But what’s most striking about the writing isn’t the angst or the realism. It’s the events. Our hero, high school science teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) has barely been diagnosed with cancer before he decides to become a meth cook, and he’s barely cooked his first batch before his life is threatened by thugs, and then, hey! he’s killed his first man. This is all within two episodes — as far in the series as I’ve gotten.

None of which is especially improbable for television. But that’s just saying that it’s really extraordinarily improbable. The drug industry is very violent, but if everyone who ever got involved in the industry killed someone in their first day on the job, you wouldn’t have a drug industry, because everyone in the industry and probably in the country would be dead I’m certain meth addicts and providers off each other, but surely they usually take a week or so, at least, between violent murders.

Which is to say that while Breaking Bad makes some gestures at gritty realism, it remains a genre television series. As such, it’s driven by the demands of drama; something has to happen. Guns, car chases, sex, dead bodies, lots of messy blood — you get them all and get them often, because that’s what the audience wants. There wouldn’t be much point in watching a show where a high school scientist just quietly started selling meth out of a trailer, made a lot of money, and then socked it away for his kid’s college fund, right?

There’s a very similar dynamic on the very similarly-themed show Weeds. Like Breaking Bad, Weeds is a story about an everyday middle-class parent (in this case Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) who experiences a personal tragedy (in this case the death of her husband) and so turns to selling drugs (in this case marijuana.) Weeds is played more as comedy than tragedy…but it, too, is tied to the remorseless genre requirements of having something happen. Nancy is constantly being robbed and shot at when she isn’t having sex with a series of more or less unlikely partners, her travails ever-escalating until the end of the third season when she actually burns down her entire town in a fiery apocalypse.

In the fourth season, Nancy’s family heads to the Mexican border, where she hooks up (in various senses) with drug runners. Said drug runners use Nancy as a front; she is given ownership of a store selling maternity clothes. The store has a tunnel going under the border, allowing the Mexican gangs to transport drugs into the U.S. In theory, this should be a dream come true for Nancy; she is being paid a ton of money, isn’t endangering her life, and can actually spend time with her family. She works nine to five, and then can go home to her kids.

Instead of being pleased, though, Nancy is bored — which doesn’t make a ton of sense for the character as we’ve come to know her, but does make a lot of sense in terms of genre conventions. It’s not Nancy who can’t stand the day to day tedium of not getting shot at; it’s the viewers. If the story is to go on, Nancy needs to do something other than sell maternity clothes…and so, sure enough, she (for our benefit) starts poking her nose where it doesn’t belong. Thus she is confronted with a Moral Dilemma. In the last episode I was able to make myself watch, Nancy sees a young woman come through the tunnel, and figures out that the maternity store is being used as a front not just for drugs but for (gasp!) trafficking.

Sex trafficking is here deployed in a wearisomely cynical fashion. Neither the show, nor Nancy, nor the viewers actually care about the woman who we see supposedly being trafficked. She’s just there there to be young and pretty and victimized; a totem of how far Nancy has sunk. There’s never a question of whether or not she wants to be crossing the border, for example — of where she’s coming from, or where she’s going to. Nobody asks her, nobody gives a shit. She’s not a person — just an excuse for moral panic that can move the narrative along.

This dovetails in depressing ways with how sex trafficking is actaully used in political discourse. As Laura Agustin, who researches migration and sex work, argues, sex trafficking as it is usually portrayed in the media barely exists. Most women (or men) who cross a border and are paid for sex aren’t victims of kidnapping, and while they would certainly benefit from more sympathetic immigration policies and a whole host of services, they don’t necessarily need or want “rescuing”. At the very least, they need people to listen to their stories of themselves, rather than jamming them into somebody else’s simplistic genre narrative of villainy, moral commitment, and heroic salvation.

It’s hard to get away from simplistic genre narrative though. As Breaking Bad and Weeds both know, no one wants to sit down for an evening and watch paint dry. Entertainment is supposed to be entertaining; narratives are supposed to be filled with event. We don’t love violence qua violence, necessarily, but we seem to have a hardwired ineradicable bias in favor of having something — anything! — happen. I think that rage for sequence has a lot to do with (as one example) our inability to turn the drug war off. Kill the bad guys, save the babies, experience moral ambiguity, tune in next week. Nancy and Walt and the viewer turn off their own lives and take a walk on the wild side where, we all like to imagine, stuff happens. Narrative is its own addiction. Who wouldn’t, like Walter and Nancy, give themselves over to its rush?

Of Wires and Weeds

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I’ve been obsessed recently with the Showtime series Weeds, about soccer-mom-turned-pot-dealer Nancy Botwin. I’ve compulsively watched the first three and a half seasons in the last couple of weeks. Thanks a lot, Netflix instant.

Anyway, I had Weeds on the brain when I read this post by Alyssa Rosenberg about how the dealers on the Wire don’t get to have any romance.

But with the exception of D’Angelo Barksdale (who ends up as more of a neutral character), the main members of the drug crews either don’t have long-term relationships or those relationships aren’t a major way of exploring who they are as people (there are exceptions for minor characters, like Bernard, whose girlfriend Squeak leads him into trouble). Avon Barksdale has an ex-girlfriend who Wee-Bay kills, but we don’t see him in any sort of relationship with a woman — probably the most important woman in his life is his mother. Wee-Bay is explicitly non-monogamous, and what relationship he has with his son Namond’s mother mostly concerns Namond’s well-being. Chris Partlow and Michael Lee are both victims of sexual abuse, which motivates murders they commit, but isn’t something we see them work out in intimate relationships. There are interesting possibilities in Snoop’s gender expression, but the show only really explores her as a soldier. I don’t even want to think how Marlo Stanfield would treat a woman he actually dated, much less had sex with and then executed after she turned out to be a spy.

I’m not sure what this disparity means. Does running a drug crew mean folks have less time or inclination to pursue steady relationships? Is it commentary on the crews, suggesting that as they’re peddling one means of social dissolution, they’re engaging in others? Whatever Simon’s intentions, weighting relationship questions and subplots to the police means we get a smaller part of the human spectrum when we look at the crews.

I think Alyssa’s point is correct — the drug dealers are not granted romantic sub-plots. I think the reason is because, for Simon, drug-dealing is an intensely male world. There are some women involved, like Brianna and Snoop, but they’re obviously exceptions, and both have something of an asterix beside them (Brianna is involved because she’s Avon’s sister; Snoop is deviant in multiple ways, not least in her gender presentation.)

The maleness of the drug world means that romantic male-female relationships play a secondary role; the most intense focus of interest for the men is homosocial. For instance, we never see Bodie with a girlfriend — but we do see that he has a big old crush on Stringer Bell. The crush is tied up in Bodie’s ambition and in his desire to be a man; it’s composed of part admiration, part envy, part lust (for power, for money), and it’s the lever that impels Bodie to kill his friend Wallace. I don’t think it’s an accident either that Poot, who is defined in part by his interest in women, eventually gets out of the game.

The main focus of homosocial tension in the Wire, though, is between Avon and Stringer Bell. For both, their partnership is the defining relationship of their lives, and at several points that relationship is explored not just through business, but through sex. The clearest instance of this is when Avon gets out of jail. He’s interested in making time with an attractive woman at his coming home party, but Stringer keeps cornering him with business talk. Finally, Stringer drops a frustrated Avon in a luxury apartment. Avon stands and fumes for a couple of seconds…and then Stringer reappears, the attractive woman and a bonus attractive woman in tow. The whole sequence is a sexual tease, and the teaser is Stringer. He uses the women he’s bought for Avon to seal their partnership and friendship with sex.

The homosocial possibilities of Avon/Stringer slash are contrasted in the Wire with Omar’s much-more-than-possible homosexual relationships. Alyssa doesn’t mention Omar — but he’s a striking exception to her discussion of drug dealers and romance. Which is to say, Omar is very much defined by his serially monogamous romantic relationships. These relationships are all with men — and the suspicion is that they are possible because they are with men. Romance with women is not possible in this world; but men are a different story.

The parallels between Omar’s relationships and the other drug dealers’ relationships calls into question the heterosexuality of the entire milieu, a fact of which the other drug dealers seem nervously aware. Both Avon and Stringer initially want to kill Omar because he robbed them — but what really pisses them off is that he’s gay. Avon ups the bounty on Omar when he learns that he’s a “cock sucker”. And as for Stringer, while it’s never made explicit, it seems clear that part of the reason he uncharacteristically participates in the torture of Brandon, Omar’s lover, is because Brandon is gay. The killing of Brandon, and Omar’s reaction to it, ultimately ends in Stringer’s own murder. Male-male love is the only kind on offer in the world of the gangs — but it’s a love steeped in disavowal, which ultimately leads to tragedy and death.

Weeds presents a very different view of the drug trade. Where the Wire’s dealers are manly men thinking about other manly men with whom not to have sex, the world of Weeds is decidedly matriarchal and up to its orifices in intergender fornication. There are certainly a lot of men involved in dealing, from Nancy’s drop-out son Silas to the agressively psychotic thug U-turn to the more quietly psychotic DEA agent and thug Peter, to the quietly honorable grower Conrad. But they one and all — tough or weak, dumb or competent — drop to their knees if a pretty girl points at her bits. In this show, it’s the women who wear the phallus — sometimes literally, as when Nancy’s brother Andy finds himself unexpectedly sodomized with a large black dildo by one of his girlfriends.

Women make dumb choices out of lust in Weeds too — dealer Heylia James lets her iron competence slip for a few episodes when she falls for a Nation of Islam minister, for example, and Nancy’s increasingly compulsive sluttishness get her into trouble on more than one occasion (most flagrantly in the first couple of seasons when she mistakes scumbag Peter for a nice guy.) But overall, the women on the show are the ones who display a modicum of responsibility and resourcefulness, and who manage to use their sexuality rather than letting it use them. Heylia’s Nation of Islam minister helps her escape a drug bust; Nancy gets Peter to use his DEA office to protect her…and eventually it’s Peter who gets killed (set up by Heylia) not Nancy.

One of the more emblematic moments of Weeds occurs when Alejandro, a rival, violent pot dealer, demands to meet with Nancy after threatening her and her children. Nancy drives out to confront him in an alley, the two get in each other’s faces…and next moment Alejandro is (consensually) fucking Nancy on the hood of a car. Post-coitally, Nancy informs him that he was a good lay, and then sticks a B.B. gun to his dick and tells him to stay away from her or she’ll castrate him. Afterwards, Nancy is extremely upset (“What are you doing?” she asks herself)…but Alejandro turns into a puppy dog, sending her gifts and cheerfully becoming her minion in the drug business even though she tells him she’s not screwing him again.

It’s not entirely clear whether Nancy slept with Alejandro to get the upper hand or whether it was just a case of rampaging hormones. She does tell Alejandro the rutting was unexpected, but she’s certainly capable of lying, to others and to herself. In any case,the point, reiterated throughout the series is clear — men think with their dicks, and their dicks are a lot stupider than women’s cunts.

There’s a tendency to assume that because the Wire’s a gritty serial it must be more realistic than a situation comedy like Weeds. The Wire shows the drug business as a male world, so that’s the way it must be. I’m not so sure though. Weeds seems to get other things closer to right than the Wire does; for example, it’s more on target about police corruption. Moreover, in the freakonomics series where drug dealers commented on the Wire, one argued that the maleness of the show was one of its least convincing features.

“Women,” said Tony-T. “Where I come from, women run most of the things [that the show] talks about. It’s the women that have the power in the ghetto. This show totally got it wrong when they made it all about men. Women are the politicians; they can get you a gun, they got the cash, they can get you land to build something on.”

What’s perhaps more interesting than which is more true to life, though, is the fact that both the Wire and Weeds share the broad assumption that women in control is odd, unusual…or, in other words, funny. When Stringer Bell says something is “just business,” it’s chilling — a sign of his cold, calculating lack of emotion. When Nancy says that a relationship is just business (as when she declares that her relationship with Peter is just a business relationship) it’s generally at least half a joke — she’s covering her ass, or lying to herself, or otherwise shucking and jiving. Because, presumably, nothing with women is just business.

You can see this idea played through in the one woman in the Wire who tries to run a drug business: De’Londa. De’Londa is a controlling, castrating, shallow bitch, who treats her child with unfeeling ruthlessness. She’s a lot like Weeds’ Celia, in other words…and like Celia, the ruthless woman in control is played much more for laughs than are the ruthless men in control. De’Londa is wrong and ridiculed not because she’s evil (lots of people on the Wire are evil) but because she’s a woman and a mother.

In other words, Weeds is a comedy because it’s a matriarchy and a matriarchy because it’s a comedy, just as the Wire is a tragedy because it’s homosocial, and homosocial because it’s a tragedy. Man’s world is serious and scary; woman’s world is funny and sexy. Stringer Bell can no more fall in love than Nancy Botwin can be a tragic Shakespearean hero. Their genders put limits on their genres.
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Update: Alyssa points out that she did mention Omar; she attributes his romance to his neutrality, or as she says: “Characters who aren’t affiliated with the crews like Omar Little, who has multiple long-term relationships throughout the series, or Cutty Wise, who eventually begins dating a nurse, are allowed significant romantic attachments.” Sorry Alyssa!