I am fascinated with TV series that deal with the seedier side of life. I loved The Sopranos. And Peaky Blinders. Also, Boardwalk Empire, Gypsy, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and Nurse Jackie.
These shows and others like them portray people caught in their human frailties. They are deeply flawed people, wounded, sometimes by their own poor choices in life and sometimes by people who betrayed or used or mistreated them in some profoundly cruel way.
I am currently making my way through Showtime’s series, “Ray Donovan.” Soon to begin its 6th season, the series centers around the Donovan family, a father and three sons mired in old hurts, deception, corruption, and crime.
Ray (Liev Schreiber) is the middle son, a “fixer” for L.A.’s elite crowd of Hollywood stars, producers, financiers, and old money people who inevitably cross the line into affairs gone wrong, crooked payoffs, illegal deals, and so forth.
Mickey Donovan (Jon Voight) is the father, an old-school mob guy, crude, addled, a notorious flirt and chauvinist. When he gets out of prison after serving 20 years, he returns to L.A. to try and insert himself into Ray’s life, bringing with him his loud personality and annoying ways.
Each episode explores the breach of trust between these two men, both of them desperate for their love. A pedophile priest raped Ray and his brother Bunchy (Dash Mihok) when they were boys. The damage to them was irreparable and ruining. Bunchy turned into a sexually frightened and confused man incapable of any meaningful female relationship. While Ray sublimated his trauma, married and fathered two children.
In spite of wealth, power, and the respect of anyone attempting to mess with him, Ray is a tormented man, driven by a seething rage against his father who was never there for him, and against the priest who sexually violated him and contaminated his life with shame and loathing.
In the midst of this brutal series of mangled lives are fleeting moments of tenderness, sometimes awkward attempts to be human and caring in the face of so much emotional shallowness and damage.
What is it that draws us to these people? Why are their turbulent lives of interest to anyone? I think it’s because we know that underneath all of our pretenses, behind the masked smiles we often wear, is our own emotional anguish, the scars we bear from perhaps poor parenting, broken relationships, sexual abuse, secret sins only we know about, and a multitude of other weaknesses or vulnerabilities that often resurface and taunt us.
There is an exhaustion that comes with trying to always be faultless. Assaulting the misdeeds of others, attempting to be the intrepid good scout standing above the fray, working tirelessly to maintain a radiant reputation, can be draining, empty, and fruitless.
Sometimes we just need to drop any judgments of others and join the human race.
Poet Naomi Shihab Nye has a poignant line, “Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.”
There is a consistent theme running through all of these TV series. It’s not that evil reigns, or that corruption pays, or the abuse of others is unavoidable. No, nothing like that at all. The theme is, our humanity comes with choices to enhance our lives and the lives of others no matter what has happened to us, or, to live in unresolved pain and inflict it on others in the hope someone will hear our calls for help.
Writer David Whyte asks, “I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing.”
It is that longing that defines all of us. And it is there we make our ultimate choices in how we live.
© 2018 Timothy Moody
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