BLOODLINE -- THE NETFLIX SERIES

Do NOT loan your boat to either of these men!

“Bloodline” is one of those long strings of story, thirteen fifty-minute episodes in this case, that Netflix is using as “fishing line.”  It has already been noted that this series (which hints that if it “sells” there might be a second year) was written by men, directed by men -- I’m not so sure it was edited by men.  They note that the Mcguffin is a girl who died, but it is because of the inadequacy and defiance of a boy trying to be a man.  The “sub-McGuffin” is a little seahorse necklace.  Of course, a seahorse is notable because it is the male that shepherds the children.

The series pivots on the Alpha male father who is played by Sam Shepard.  Sam is the Hollywood icon for troubled but powerful males who get locked into generational combat because of what might be that “warrior gene” people talk about -- a tendency to go to violence under pressure.  He should never have gotten his teeth fixed -- maybe he was in pain, but their snaggles and mismatches were potent indicators of childhood poverty and violence.  At least his hair still stands on end.  In this series he dies early as a necessary plot turn, but his presence lingers on, which is why they cast Sam.  

Sam Shepard with nice teeth.

His obverse is Sissy Spacek and it seems clear that the actors are old friends, comfortable with each other.  By now Sissy has aged enough that her slightly weird aspect can either lean to ladylike delicacy or back the other way to near-stroke-victim twisted mouth.  Still, the moment after the father is found dead and the mother is alone on the beach with him, stricken, is a powerful one.

So the four children have assigned roles.  These screenwriters read all kinds of psych stuff, which is circularly drawn from movie scripts, so we are not surprised that one is solid, a helper; one is slippery and volatile, the plot driver; one is a perpetual child; and the girl is a helper lawyer with VERY short skirts.  Wind it up, set it ticking, and the actual plot is predictable, so it is plot twists and character empathy that draw us along.  Of course, it’s great that the scenery is wonderfully tropical with those long pink dawns and impossibly tall cumulus clouds rising off the flat horizon.  I hope the cormorants got union scale.

The male reviewers feel that nothing happens until halfway through when the explosions, drugs, guns and fistfights mostly start.  There are burned and dismembered bodies early on, but they’re just a footnote.  Female.  Illegal immigrants, anyway, and significant only because their menfolks grieve.

Good Bro (cop), Bad Bro (hustler)

The central conviction, natural for screenwriters, is that families all lie to protect themselves.  Just as an individual has a “self story” that explains and justifies him or her self, a family has a larger story that idealizes what has happened and casts the family members in their roles.  For Americans the story is likely to be about “building something from nothing.”  A biggie here on the Montana prairie family stories of a century or so completely overshadow the millennia of nomadic indigenous culture.  There is NO hint of the original occupants of the Florida Keys.

So mostly the story is about picking apart the lies around the death of the sister and effect those lies have had on the siblings.  The most blameless person is supposed to be the mother (as usual) but she turns out to be the worst liar.  (We are not really surprised.)  Winding in and out are elements of law enforcement, but they are pretty sketchy and dubious.  This is not “Mr. Watson,” as Matthiessen explored.  Nature doesn't count.  Even though the oldest son is a deputy sheriff and the DEA, the FBI, and other patriarchal figures sort of drift through, there are no inquests, no arrests, no coroner’s reports.  Everyone drinks like a fish, but no one is alcoholic except one peripheral loser-mom trailer trash character.  Just another red herring, though her daughter seems to suss what’s going on.

The F-word gets big play as an indicator of pressure.  Otherwise, much of the dialogue is “What’s going on?” and just “What?”   These people have a big problem figuring things out or assimilating information when it’s given to them.  But then that’s a real life family problem a good share of the time.

Mama, liar and control freak.

Family secrets that are conscious and planned are not so toxic as the unacknowledged ones that are often due to unconscious omissions, suppression not so much as not wanting to think about it and therefore never talking about whatever it is.  Lost babies, crazy aunts, failures and addictions of one sort or another.  They’re like big boulders in the flow of life, making patterns and eddies that are never really resolved or understood.  Then they sink boats.  (The ones in this movie are set on fire.)  Speaking from experience, if you point out these forces, the reaction is likely to be attack and ostracism.  No one wants to talk about it except your shrink.

The great irony of real life is that as impersonal information has been accumulating through analysis of the flood of information and records that computers and the internet make accessible, we have turned out to have much more to hide than anyone dared to guess.  The statistics say that sexual abuse of children, rape both male and female, insanity, failure to maintain necessary medical regimes, forms of addiction -- all those things people have been hiding -- amount to one-in-six, thirty per cent, twenty per cent -- never quite hitting the halfway mark and never becoming majority numbers but just about defining the amount of dysfunction and damage a population can sustain without collapsing.  Even if one only accepts that two per cent of the population are sociopaths, that means that in this village of three or four hundred there are probably half-a-dozen of them.

Communities have their stories, too, and they enforce them through organizations and appearance.  Pretty houses, nice lawns, a few parks with amenities, and everyone can insist that the town is perfectly normal, safe, and admirable.  It’s too bad to have learned to recognize pathology and very ill-advised to bring it up in public.  The flying finger of fate will soon be pointed at the end of your nose.  (“Yer mamma wore combat boots!”)

Prosperity rules.  If wearing combat boots will make you rich, let’s head down to Army/Navy.  Forget church, make sure you force the teacher to give your kids good grades, and eat what you like.  Forget all that nagging.  The markers become more important than the actuality.  The green pieces of paper that only stand for value, become the value.

I’ve wandered off from my original plan for writing about “Bloodline.”  Why -- in a world so full of grief and betrayal -- are we able to coolly identify the problems in a television series, easily able to see where the characters go wrong, but when it comes to our own lives we can only ask “What’s going on?”  or just “WHAAAT??”