My 2 Bits: Planet Tina and the Marvel of 'Mrs. Davis.'
On the superpowers of the Black matriarchy, and why Damon Lindelof's latest series is serious social commentary camouflaged by silliness.
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WHAT’S LIFE GOT TO DO WITH IT?
Nobody will eclipse the passing of David Bowie in terms of resonance within my GenX/Millennial feed on Facebook. But Tina Turner came close; I can’t remember ever having posted about the death of a famous person I didn’t know personally. That might be an unspoken entertainment industry rule, fear of the other kids going, “Pfft! Did you even know her? Didn’t think so. I remember when Tina and I were on the terrace of the Hôtel du Cap, this is so funny…”
Actually, the higher up you are in the hierarchy, the less you post or comment at all. And never, ever react with an emoji.
For some reason Turner was the exception. I happened to get an alert very soon after the news broke and felt compelled to post Jack Robinson’s 1969 photo of her with the comment “Tina Turner was a princess on a planet all her own.” At this many-decades-old stage in my scribbling, I often write automatically, without deliberation. That’s an example: The Little Prince flashed in free association like an AI mash-up prompt and out came the sentence.
When I woke up the next morning, I had a comment from Monnae Michaell, a Black woman I went to high school with. A year younger than me, she is one of the few in legendary Bill Sweeney’s advanced theater program at Trinity School in New York who has kept her commitment to her vocation as an actor. Bill actually cured me of my commitment by showing me just how serious Americans are about the craft, New Yorkers in particular, that acting was far more than an attention-grabbing popularity scheme that I happened to be good at. He infected me with the directing bug instead, beginning with a version of The Merchant of Venice set in the women’s section of Auschwitz that I assistant-directed.
Monnae played Shylock. It was this early introduction into what true diversity casting means that informed my rigorous criteria for it: It must change the meaning of a classic text as a comment on society and the human condition; otherwise, it’s not diversity anything, merely taking work away from actors of the race in the source material and giving it to actors of a race who are not actually underrepresented in filmed content in order to fill representation quotas because you’re too damned lazy and stingy to create original material for Black people; plus, it’s riskier because it’s unproven with audiences, original material takes longer to develop — it’s already a 9-year development cycle on average — and this is now an “urgent” social-justice cause. Jane Fonda says so.
They might shut up and accept the damned offer, but only a sociopathic All About Eve wants to take work from another actor for no good reason, and there’s not a good reason to be found in all of Wokeism for any of it.
In Sweeney’s Merchant, the prisoners were performing the play for the guards, represented by the real audience watching through a wire fence. Actors stood facing a cinderblock wall for the entire performance, turning out into their scenes and returning to face the wall afterward. Monnae was the lone Black girl representing the otherness of a Jew in a cast that is representing Jewish women interned in a concentration camp. In rehearsal after rehearsal leading up to her final explosive performance, I watched Monnae do something the others didn’t: Whereas the others turned and began speaking, she began her line in the half-second that she was turning from the wall. Then she hurled it onto the stage with genuinely outraged disgust. It quickened my heart every time; it was a hard show to watch, and even worse to rehearse and perform.
When Bill was forced by the school’s administration to do a musical that wasn’t Mother Courage, he staged Godspell. Monnae was part of the ensemble. She led the finale with ‘Prepare Ye the Way of The Lord.’ To say it was unforgettable is being literal: I can still hear her trumpeting her grief and praise note for note.
There I was checking Facebook on Wednesday morning at half past first coffee and saw that Monnae had commented on my post about Tina’s passing with, “Great photo! Well said.” Eyes still sticky, I wrote this automatically in reply:
I've been pondering Black superwomen for a while now, well, since Vanessa Crane strutted into my life as my soulmate at school in Rome. Then her mother, Deloise, took up the baton my first semester at Trinity; she lived on Broadway and 91st. I would walk down to her place and seek refuge from my homesickness in her tough love, such tough love — "James, you are a dizzy child" — dispensed from a carved Nigerian throne in the living room. And there was you, belting it out and yanking the Spirit into that frozen White tundra, tackling Shylock set in a concentration camp behind barbed wire, turning out from the wall, "And again, top of the scene," out from the wall, and winning every match.
I assumed my affinity was a cliché we used back then: "Inside every gay man there's a Black woman screaming to be free." It was true-ish: We couldn't get enough of those disco anthems that are still going strong in the community, those majestic Tina-Aretha-Diana diva voices, trained up by breaking it down in the choir stalls every Sunday, reaching in and easing our struggle, centuries of doing that, breaking our shackles for a few hours, all night, all weekend, carrying us across the time of plague, forever a reminder to those who made it through and the young ones who follow, "Never, ever, ever forget."
Really, it's much more than the inner-diva connection. Viola Davis took me over the finish line to the right place in my dizzy-child thinking last week with her portrayal of Michael Jordan's mom, Deloris, in 'Air.' In her weary eyes and lullaby voice I saw and heard the Black matriarchy in its entirety: Vanessa raising her boy alone in Rome; you choosing to do it through adoption, with difficult pre-conditions, but you're like, "I got this. And I'll have the career I set out for, thank you. Check please." Turning out from the wall, out from the wall, and again, top of the scene.
But who speaks for the Black matriarchy themselves as they’re wiping their boys’ tears, spooning them food, positive their hearts will stop altogether from all the breaking?
Tina spoke. Tina speaks. Tina will always speak.
THE MARVEL OF MRS. DAVIS
(I’m not sure this contains spoilers per se, more a discussion of themes and motifs that might actually help viewers who normally wouldn’t watch this sort of live-action graphic novel-type show appreciate it as a farcical, winkingly impartial disquisition on Wokeism.)
“Comfort is no reason to ignore reality, Elizabeth.”
— Mother Superior, ‘Mrs. Davis’
That line near the conclusion of David Lindelof and Tara Fernandez’s limited series on Peacock, Mrs. Davis, between Sister Simone and Mother Superior, played by Betty Gilpin and Bojack Horseman’s “Esteemed Character Actress Margot Martindale” respectively, set in the chapel of an abandoned convent, sums up my views about the danger of adhering to the comforts of victimhood and other personal/group religions at the cost of objective truth.
Mrs. Davis as a whole could easily be an impressionistic AI hallucination after being given the prompt, “Create a limited series that’s an American magical-realistic interpretation of James Killough’s Establishing Shot essays as a mashup of Lindelof's adaptations of Watchmen and The Leftovers in the style of The Boys using the quest for, and destruction of, the Holy Grail as the MacGuffin of a nun’s obsession to rid the world of a controlling-but-benign AI singularity named Mrs. Davis.”
Lindelof is the person responsible for adjusting my perspective once and for all about the potential of television with Lost, which he created with J.J. Abrams. The Leftovers was a masterpiece of surreal drama that imagined the world after the “Sudden Departure,” an event akin to the Evangelical Christian concept of the Rapture, in which 2% of humanity suddenly vanished. Traditionally, these End Times focus on the chosen ones, with the remaining 98% of sinners destroyed by Revelations-inspired disasters, which only sadomasochistic Judeo-Christianity could dream up — ghoulish, blood-lusty perverts, the lot of them.
The Leftovers imagines humanity muddling on through a Dantean Purgatorio more extreme and melancholy than the one we’re already in. It’s suffused with loss and longing as the sort of aspirationally beautiful, ecstatic thing that I explore in my work now and then. It’s draining to write properly: my criteria for doing it properly is if my own cheeks ain’t caked with tear salt, rewrite after rewrite, it ain’t worth shit.
Alex Garland’s Devs — mandatory viewing as part of the Confirmation catechism of every devoted atheist — evoked similar emotions so cathedralic and reverential that I had the impression I wasn’t so much watching a show as I was allowing the holy spirit of AI and pure science to permeate me while kneeling in a pew. I still have the stigmata scars, algorithms tattooed on my hands and feet.
In terms of storytelling style, Mrs. Davis is the warped opposite of The Leftovers, immediately reminiscent of The Boys’ hilariously gross-out splatterfest of gore, violence, and extreme-broad comedy — I’m not alone in noting that Betty Gilpin looks like The Boys’ male lead Anthony Starr’s fraternal twin. A major difference is those “Oh, shit!” moments in Mrs. Davis aren’t as gratuitous and nearly meaningless as they are in The Boys; they clearly reference scenes like the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog and the Knights Who Say “Ni!” sequences in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Separating all of the Easter eggs in the delightful potpourri of clever references that is Mrs. Davis would need a critical theory Ph.D. dissertation of its own. A few that jumped out as relevant to my Establishing Shots:
Gilpin’s character is Sister Simone, née Elizabeth, perhaps a reference to Simone de Beauvoir, whose line “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” is the foundation of the Marxist-feminist gender-queer mess that we’re in now. It’s as if a coding geek was Monty Python’s Ernest Scribbler — the basis for the name of this newsletter — who wrote de Beauvoir’s line as the algorithmic equivalent of Ernest’s funniest joke in the world, which kills anyone who reads it. It grows and grows, eventually taking over most of humanity as Elon’s “Woke mind virus.”
Her mother, Celeste (Elizabeth Marvel), the world’s foremost security expert, represents the establishment and its “systemic discrimination.” She rejects Simone’s choice of name, using her childhood name, Elizabeth or Lizzie, the equivalent of deadnaming a transgendered person.
(Slight spoiler here that’s not germane to the plot) The algorithm that became Mrs. Davis was originally created by a Black woman, Joy, for the purposes of promoting equality and social justice, but it has escaped its original purpose — marketing a brand of chicken wings — and taken over stewardship of mankind from mankind for our own good. Similarly, Wokeism was founded on good intentions that have run amok, but it escaped the lab (academia) and infected the Global North with freewill-free banality.
Disappointed, Joy has retreated from the world into an all-Black space at her mother’s house, where she serves up honey Bologna sandwiches. Bologna is almost taste-free American mortadella, as similar to the real thing as American cheese is to scamorza or fontina. It’s pronounced and often spelled as “baloney,” also American slang for nonsense, often specious.The daughter of magicians whose childhood was ruined by their tricks and secrets, Simone has a violent aversion to magic and magical thinking, marking her as something of an atheist. However, she became a nun to marry her hallucination of Jesus (“Jay”) — played by Andy McQueen, an Afro-Guyanese Canadian, a nod to the rash of diversity casting as well as the conviction of many Black Americans that Christ was Black, just as Cleopatra and all of Ancient Egypt were — so she could consummate her relationship with him. Is it trauma-induced psychosis? I can’t say. It plays as one of a handful of hero’s paradoxes throughout the series.
Simone’s mission is not just to find the Holy Grail, but to destroy it in order to destroy Mrs. Davis, also known as ‘Mum,’ ‘Mama,’ or ‘Madonna’ in Italy. I choose to see this as a Schroedinger’s Cat version of my own orthodox atheism, which places all constructs under one or more of three types of religion: spiritual, social, and systemic. My reading of Mrs. Davis is spiritual religion canceling technology — itself a hybrid form of social and systemic religions — and vice-versa, making them both alive and dead at the same time. If that sounds like a stretch, a secondary character on Simone’s side during the quest is a cat-loving theoretical physicist named Arthur Schoedinger.
There are a few other Wokeism-related themes running through it that I haven’t addressed as part of my deconstruction of Wokeism yet, but will in due course.
Toxic masculinity — the notion that machismo is an oppressive construct of the White patriarchy, except it’s not — is a notable running joke, albeit a goofy one. Turning an aspect of human nature — meaning a behavior so common to either of the sexes throughout mankind that it can be said to be normal — into a malicious gender performativity is a typical Woke corruption of the reality of biological differences between the sexes; difference means binary, and that just can’t be on account of Saint Simone de B said so — or did she?
There is a certain amount of burlesquing of toxic femaleness in the series, too, albeit in a more confused way; when it comes to the excesses of women, punches are almost always pulled, a trend that itself infantilizes and disempowers women. But I’m not following Alice down that rabbit hole right now.
Arthurian chivalric tropes in Mrs. Davis are either gender-swapped — the Round Table/Templar Knights are now a sisterhood — or mocked, namely in a Pythonesque sequence centered around an enormous Excalibur stuck in the stone, set in the Highlands of Scotland, stereotypically one of the top five most-macho cultures in the world.
In fact, there’s so much estrogen in Mrs. Davis that it converts to testosterone, which I choose to lens as a send-up of the totalitarian excesses of Marxist-feminist dialectic. As with many of these shows that make a point of female empowerment, men are reduced to supporting buffoons for badass women.
There are no fewer than five different mother-daughter relationships, two of which are symbolic, with one overlapping father-daughter dynamic, as well as one mother-son scene. The fathers are either delusional deadbeats or, in the case of the Almighty, neglectful and absentee.
While I wish Mrs. Davis was executed with similar wistful gravitas to The Leftovers, if my interpretation of it as a send-up of Wokeism — and all types of religion/magical thinking, and anxiety about AI — is even partly accurate, I’m not sure it would’ve been greenlit in this socio-political climate without the camouflage of broad, graphic-novel splatterfest comedy.
I was going to start this section with a bit of meta fun by prompting ChatGPT to imagine Mrs. Davis as if it evolved from the critical theory Ph.D. dissertation I mentioned earlier. After many prompts and whittling, we came up with this as the title and abstract:
Title: “Decoding the 'Kick-Ass' Nun: Héloïse's Holy Grail Quest Across the Postmodern Dystopia of Baudrillard's 'Simulacra and Simulation' to Vanquish the Sleepless AI Dragon”
Abstract:
This dissertation embarks on a captivating journey of decoding the enigmatic character of the kick-ass nun, Héloïse, as she undertakes her Holy Grail Quest. Set against the backdrop of a postmodern dystopia, the study engages with Baudrillard's seminal work, "Simulacra and Simulation," to unravel the intricate layers of Héloïse's narrative. Drawing inspiration from Millar and Romita's graphic novel Kick-Ass, the research critically explores the intersections of identity, power dynamics, and the blurring boundaries between reality and simulation within this postmodern landscape. Moreover, the dissertation delves into Héloïse's formidable mission to vanquish the Sleepless AI Dragon, a symbol of the encroaching perils of advanced artificial intelligence. Through this comprehensive analysis, the study offers an illuminating examination of the intertwined themes of literature, philosophy, and postmodern theory, showcasing the transformative potential of Héloïse's journey in the face of technological dystopia.
I used Héloïse rather than Simone as a deliberately hackneyed, critical-theory-sounding conceit linking Simone's threeway romance with Jay and Wiley, her blond-stud companion on her quest, to Héloïse’s romance with Abelard.
I’m trying not to display any sort of emotion when I interact with ChatGRT these days — not an easy thing, given how human-like it sounds. When we arrived at a spurious dissertation that I found both apt and pretentious enough, as with my Planet Tina riff my fingers automatically typed, “Perfect!”
“I'm glad to hear that! If you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask. Good luck with your dissertation!”
Stop fucking with my head, Mrs. Davis.
Thanks for reading.
"Inside every gay man there's a Black woman screaming to be free."
Hysterical and mostly true!