Racing through Season Three of Weeds to get ready for Season Four which premieres on Showtime June 16, I stayed up late the other night watching episode after episode and wound up scared, depressed, lonely, and miserably contemplating my own mortality in the increasingly haggard faces of Nancy Botwin and her psychopathic friends, family, and drug-dealing business associates.
So far, this season has added to the show’s overall body cart by two, but the murder that ended Season Two’s cliffhanger is still very much an important part of the story arc and the dead body is literally on the scene, and in all three deaths I couldn’t help seeing foreshadowings of my own, although it’s unlikely I’m going to be assassinated by drug dealers, smothered by a resentful henchman getting his own back after years of swallowing my insults and abuse, or take a runaway Army spy drone in the chest.
Maybe I was in a morbid mood or maybe it was the shock of seeing a formerly main character’s rotting corpse popping up out of a muddy stream, but it seems to me that in Season Three the show has taken a turn away from the ironic contemplation of Nancy’s spiritual corruption towards a more cynical amusement at all forms of physical corruption, illness, injury, old age, and especially death. Bodies are jokes nature has played on our souls, and appetites are jokes played on our bodies. In the first two seasons, most of the main characters had stopped bothering to exercise any sort of self-control—the exceptions being the career criminals like U Turn, the dealer Nancy started Season Three in debt to and who has spent a lot of his time trying to teach Nancy a work ethic. But now none of them seems to have any trace of self-control left to exercise. It’s not that their appetites—for sex, money, pot, iced lattes—are out of their control. It’s that those appetites are now in control. The adult and teenaged residents of Agrestic, who have barely managed the maturity levels of their own children and grade-school aged brothers and sisters, are verging on devolving into animals of the allegorical sort.
It's easy to imagine Kevin Nealon's character, the cheerfully corrupt, constantly stoned, and lecherous Councilman Doug, replaced by a cartoon wolf. Elizabeth Perkins' haughty and self-righteously contemptuous Celia Hodes, the living exemplifier of the definition of hypocrisy as the compliment vice pays to virtue, could be drawn as an imperious showdog, an Afghan, say, wearing her last blue ribbon proudly as she turns up her nose at the mutt who has dared to make a pass at her and turns away, seemingly to show him her back, really to lift up her tail for him. And Justin Kirk's Andy, Nancy's lascivious, scheming, hedonistic brother-in-law, is Fritz the Cat.
The characters behave with the randomness of cartoons, going where they shouldn't, doing what they would know better not to do if they gave the matter a second's thought, essentially always lighting matches in sheds stocked with dynamite and running down blind alleys where packs of snarling rotweillers wait to greet them, always in pursuit of the next high, from pot, from sex, from scoring a big wad of cash, from indulging whatever vice or vanity is driving them at the moment.
They are bodies in directionless motion, mindless but not thoughtless, it's just that their stomachs or their cocks or their clits are doing the thinking for them. To put it in Freudian therms, they are all Id. To put it in theatrical terms, Weeds has turned into a farce.
In Season One, the humor was whimsically ironic, playing off the pretense that Weeds was just another sitcom about life in the suburbs and Mary-Louise Parker's Nancy Botwin our era's Mary Richards, a slightly ditzy but spunky type determined to make it on her own but who's made a bad career choice. By the end of the season, the writers stopped winking at us and started to let the truth show: Nancy was a dangerous narcissist whose moral carelessness made her as socially destructive as the most vicious professional criminals she dealt with. This carried over into Season Two, and the comedy became darker, the irony heavier, and the show began following its own premise towards its logical conclusion, with Nancy bringing death and misery to all around her. But with Season Three, it's as if the writers have pulled themselves up short, realizing that they were getting ahead of themselves, and decided that the only way to get out of the tragic ending they were bringing about too soon---too soon that is if they wanted the show to last beyond its the halfway point of that season---was to push past the tragedy as fast and hard as they could into absurdity.
The humor has become broader, blacker, bleaker, more leeringly sexual and more scatological. There've been fart jokes, burp jokes, piss jokes, shit jokes galore. Blood jokes, sperm jokes, wet vagina jokes. Every kind of bodily fluid and secretion has been good for a laugh, as has been every kind of bodily harm. In the last episode I watched, Celia's estranged husband Dean, indulging himself in a midlife crisis, a goofy grin of narcissistic self-satisfaction on his jowly middle-aged face peeking like a gopher from its hole out from under his oversized motorcycle helmet, racks up his bike and lies immobilized in a ditch, every bone in his body broken, while a dog comes along to lift its leg over his head. Later, mummified in his hospital bed, he has to lie there and watch, unable to complain or resist, as his two best friends, Andy and Doug, unplug his morphine drip in order to score themselves a quick high.
This emphasis on people as bodies and bodies as ridiculous is in fact an emphasis on our mortality. If we aren't just bodies, we are trapped inside them, and bodies are unreliable things, fragile, capricious, insistent, and finally out of our control---no matter how much self-discipline we have, no matter how much self-control, the body will have its say at last, simply by taking itself out of here and us along with it. It will die.
We will die.
Nancy's business is biblically symbolic.
All flesh is grass.
Of all the bodies in motion here, only one---not counting Conrad, Nancy's partner in the grow house and erstwhile lover, who is the most human of all the characters in that he is motivated by more than appetite and desire, he's motivated by pride (not vanity) and love (for Nancy), and her younger son Shane, who is the soul in distress in the series, the only truly good person around which makes us constantly on the look out for his eventual fall and corruption---Nancy's is the only body that still seems to contain a working brain. Living under the constant threat of death and jail keeps her on her toes. Nancy is the drug-dealing Indiana Jones. She's always making it up as she goes. But a plan that evolves on the spot is still a plan. She has to think or she's sunk. This is what keeps what is essentially a despicable character sympathetic. We admire her grit and her spunk and her wit. Plus she happens to look as adorable as Mary-Louise Parker, although that adorableness is fast becoming nothing more than a mask. Nancy is often at her most grotesque when she is at her cutest. Nancy's ability to think fast and improvise saves her life again and again, but her first reaction to every new problem and threat is to sink into lethargic despair, that is, to become an exhausted and enervated body at rest, and those moments of lassitude are growing longer.
And her reaction to her moments of triumph and success has not been to withdraw for some quiet self-reflection and try to think her way clear of the mess she has made of her life. As soon as a problem is solved or a threat eliminated, she rewards herself with some act of self-indulgence. She gives in to being a body. Which means that it's when she's celebrating an escape from danger that we most see her as headed towards that which all flesh is heir to. Maybe it's just me and my mood, as I said, but while watching a scene in which Mary-Louise Parker comes in out of the rain, her skimpy wet dress plastered to her, strips down to her underwear, slides her panties down her long, long, long legs, props herself on her boss's desk, and hooks those long, long, long legs over his shoulders, I should probably not be thinking, Ask not for who the bell tolls, Nancy...
The only body treated with any respect or dignity or sympathy in its distress belongs to Celia.
Celia has spent the better part of three seasons pretending she doesn't have any uncontrollable or uncontrolled appetites and that she is the only responsible, grown-up human being in Agrestic. It's a pretense of virtue that's allowed her to feel entitled to a reward for her good behavior and she's rewarded herself by being as self-indulgent as any of the other main characters, including Andy and Councilman Doug, although what she usually indulges is her anger and spite. This season she's wanted to indulge her sexual desire. Nancy's boss, Sullivan Groff (played with a mix of smarm and charm by Matthew Modine), has been putting the moves on her and she would very much like to respond. But she's been afraid to let him see her cancer-ravaged body. Celia had a double mastectomy in Season One. She's had plastic surgery but her new rebuilt breasts are still vividly scarred from the surgery. She's convinced that Sullivan will find her repulsive.
That's because she's repulsed by herself. But his persistence and her own longing make her brave. There's a scene in which Celia forces herself to stand naked in front of a full-length mirror and try to see what Sullivan will see if she lets him. At first what she sees simply saddens her and seems to confirm her decision to keep pushing Sullivan away. But then she takes a second, harder look and while her eyes don't exactly light up, her expression becomes curious. What if I'm being too judgmental, she seems to think, what if I'm not as ugly as I thought. What if I am in fact a little bit...attractive? And her hands slowly slide up to her breasts and she begins to caress them, not in a masturbatory way, in a testing way. She's testing to see how they might feel to Sullivan and surprises herself with the discovery that they feel like...her.
When next we see her she's in bed with Sullivan.
It's a sweet moment, as much as any sweetness can be said to attach itself to Celia, and the most sympathetically human moment of Season Three, at least through Episode 9.
But it's a moment that has been brought about by Celia's cancer, which makes it a moment about the fragility of bodies and the way they will ultimately betray us.
In another mood, or if I was watching another show, I might have interpreted it as a moment of triumph over death, a scene that shows that life and love and sex win out.
But in the third season of Weeds, it's the scene in which Death drops the mask of Comedy it's been wearing and grins out at us most cruelly.
The first three seasons of Weeds are available on DVD through my aStore or you can download individual episodes using Amazon's Unbox.
Very interesting and thought-provoking analysis, and it almost makes me interested enough to pick up Weeds again. Jody and I stopped watching after season 2, which just seemed to be spiralling into melodrama (and the cliffhanger finale clinched the deal); I enjoyed it more as a comedy of manners. Maybe it's worth another shot.
Posted by: Tom Hilton | Wednesday, June 04, 2008 at 07:11 PM
Tom, Hold off until I finish Season Three, because I'm not sure I'm actually enjoying it!
Posted by: Lance | Thursday, June 05, 2008 at 07:05 PM