Posted Saturday morning, November 17, 2018. Revised Saturday afternoon after editorial consultation with Oliver Mannion.
At the foot of the cross: Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil, contemplates his sins in a scene from the Netflix series “Daredevil”.
Too much Matt Murdock. Not enough Kingpin.
Not enough Daredevil. Too much Wilson Fisk.
Too much psychology. Not enough action-adventure.
Too much growling. Too much snarling. Too much talking too low and too slow.
Too much gazing sullenly inward.
It’s not that there’s too much Catholicism. It’s that there’s too much theology and not enough mythology. Which works out as too much exposition and not enough symbolism. Symbolic action, that is. Not calling for more iconography. So...too much telling, not enough showing.
Fisk is boring. Matt is boring. Sister Maggie is boring. Karen is boring and annoying. Give us more Foggy now!
Those are my quick notes on the first six episodes of Daredevil Season 3.
Fisk has been doing Kingpin-like plotting and scheming all along. Matt has been Daredeviling like, um, hell. In fact, the story arc depends on Fisk being able to manipulate pretty much all of New York City and everybody in it from behind bars and then right under the noses of the FBI agents guarding him when he’s schemed his way out of prison and into “protective custody”---actually, literally, right in front of their eyes!. But the show hasn’t found much fun or humor in either plot thread. The same lack of fun and humor pervades Matt’s adventures as Daredevil.
The fights are necessarily brutal. Matt is still recovering from the near-fatal injuries he suffered at the end of "The Defenders" when a whole building blew up and collapsed on top of him. And he’s reinjured in each new fight, so he isn't capable of the gymnastics and swashbuckling derring-do that characterized the fights in seasons one and two and connected “Daredevil” with the comic books of my kidhood when Daredevil was my third-favorite Marvel superhero. Those fights also connected the show in my imagination with the great pirate movies of yesteryear and Charlie Cox with their stars Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks, Tyrone Power, and Burt Lancaster. That connection is somewhat tenuous and more by default than by intention. The thematic differences don’t allow Cox to play Matt with their devil-may-care---No, I’m not sorry---attitude or exhibit the joy they took in their own physicality.
BTW, now showing in one of the cineplexes in heaven is the Batman movie Warner Brothers and DC wished Zack Snyder had made starring Power or Flynn (You get to pick. It’s heaven, after all.) with Lancaster making a cameo as Superman and Fairbanks as Green Arrow. (Or Flynn. Again, it’s heaven.)
Also, by the way, although I’d rather see Flynn as Batman and Bruce Wayne, I think Power’s the more apt casting choice.
Give it a minute.
But there can’t be a lot of fun to be had while the emphasis is on Daredevil as a wounded ninja too exhausted and too distracted by pain to use his wits in place of his fists. Where the writers and directors have been missing out is in the scenes of Matt as a detective, which, grim and gritty as they’ve been, have provided some of my favorite moments so far.
The series so far has been about the main characters---Matt, Fisk, Karen, FBI Agent Nadeem, Bullseye, and, to a lesser extent, Foggy---wrestling with their guilty consciences. The showrunners have tried hard---too hard, I think---to make the tone of the scheming and the action scenes consistent with the angst-ridden scenes of the main characters coming to grips with their sins. I’m not calling that a mistake but it decreases the opportunities to relax and simply enjoy watching, if only for a few minutes here and there.
The most interesting character to me and the most compelling plot dynamic is Bullseye and the mirroring of his past with Matt Murdock’s.
Matt and Bullseye were orphaned at about the same time and age. But Matt landed in a Catholic orphanage where among the adults who helped each other raise him was a wise, tough-minded, soft-but not too-soft-hearted nun who knew when to give advice and when to step back and let Matt to figure it out for himself. Bullseye wound up in some sort of state run facility where the only adult who cared for him was a well-meaning but emotionally-wounded herself staff psychologist who, because she knew she didn’t have any help herself and he had no one else to turn to, took too much upon herself.
The critical compare and contrast isn’t between religion and psychology (or between Jesus and Freud) but between the nun, Sister Maggie (Joanne Whalley), and Dr Mercer, the psychologist (Heidi Armbruster). Dr Mercer tries to make Bullseye see himself as having worth in his own eyes. Sister Maggie helps Matt feel himself as being part of a community and finding self-worth in that.
Sister Maggie is guided by her experience, her faith, the lessons she learned from her own teachers and mentors and by being part of a community, and by her own conscience. Dr Mercer relies too much on her professional education and training. With understandable reason, she cuts herself---and Bullseye---off from the community she was part of, which was institutional and bureaucratic and while “caring” in its mission without a true beating heart and so not much to be missed. But she doesn’t join a new community. She effectively goes to live alone in the desert. When Bullseye comes to visit her, their relationship stays more professional than familial, despite their own wishes and efforts.,and they occupy their own little world where Bullseye has no comfort or support except what Dr Mercer can manage. He becomes dependent on her for everything including having a soul and he’s left at a complete loss when she develops cancer and dies.
And she has nothing to leave him but shadows of herself that he can only use to repeat what she’s already taught him. (Makes you think how it was a good thing Kal-El landed in Kansas in front of the Kents’ car and not in the arctic to raise himself with only Jor-El’s crystals for company and guidance.)
Sister Maggie helps raise Matt to be a hero to his community. Bullseye is raised to be nothing except the Dr Mercer’s moral puppet. She’s his Geppetto but there’s no Jiminey Cricket to help him grow up a real live boy.
Thanks to Sister Maggie and his other teachers, when Matt is ready to leave the orphanage he’s ready to leave the orphanage and take his place in the adult world. He knows what he wants to be---a help to others---and he becomes a lawyer to do that. He becomes Daredevil our of a sense of responsibility. But the fact is that his identity is defined by helping others and not by the job that lets him do that. He doesn’t have to be a lawyer or to be Daredevil to be Matt Murdoch.
Bullseye, on the other hand, needs a particular sort of job to give him meaning and purpose.
Guess what happens when he loses his job.
Or, rather, guess who happens to him.
Kingpin---played brilliantly once again by Vincent D’Onforio, although with a touch too much deliberation and repressed passion, rage, and madness this time out for my taste---is of course a great tempter. He is the devil in a white suit. Ken and Oliver Mannion see him as a version of Billy Bob Thornton’s devil in “Fargo” although without Malvo’s sense of malicious fun. Bullseye resists, but he really doesn’t stand a chance.
Kingpin is still tempting Matt and the temptation is still for Matt to betray himself by killing Kingpin. But their connection this season is more in their doubling. Matt is more tempted by his own growing sense of despair.
Both Fisk and Matt Murdoch see the world as gone to hell. (It’s not just so he can call himself Daredevil and wear a red costume that he lives and works in Hell’s Kitchen.) Matt is tempted to give up trying to help and let the world burn. Fisk wants to be the one who sets and controls the fires.
Now I come to the least interesting and compelling character and her story arc---Matt and Foggy’s pain in their necks former secretary and now pain in her editor’s neck investigative reporter, Karen Page.
My main complaint isn’t with the character as written, although I’ve got a few complaints about that, which I’ll get to. It’s with Deborah Ann Woll who plays her. I don’t think Woll is a particularly strong actress. Her voice is too high and without music or range. She has about three expressions---facially as well as vocally. She doesn’t move well. Every time she enters I expect her to just stand there and whine, and she rarely disappoints on that score. But she isn’t given much more to do. Karen is whiny, and in most of her dialog she either hectors and scolds or feels sorry for herself.
(It’s not Woll’s fault but it doesn’t help that I don’t see her when she’s on screen---her as her or as her character. I keep seeing someone who looks to me like, if she’d been alive and in Italy five hundred and fifty years ago or so, would have been one of Botticelli’s favorite models.)
As a character type, she’s a little girl lost and the writers seem to expect us to feel sorry for her and forgive her her annoyingness because of that. Little girls lost are more sympathetic and compelling when they’re actual little girls and they take an active part in their own rescues from the woods.
(See Dafne Keen in “Logan”. See “Logan", period.)
But something clicked while we were watching the seventh episode last night that made me appreciate Karen and her place in the story a bit more. It dawned on me that she’s an archetype as well as a type---a sinful mortal who’s been driven from the Garden and is trying to earn her way back by making up for her original sin.
The Garden that was Karen’s home lies somewhere the woods and farms of New Hampshire and her sin was against her family. At first I tried to think of her as Eve after the Fall, but that’s just my gender bias at work. She’s more like Cain after he kills Able, wandering the earth, trying to make things right again between himself and God but unintentionally causing himself and others he meets more trouble and harm. Traditionally, Cain inadvertently fills the world with demons, monsters, and mischief-making minor devils and fairies. Karen makes mischief and causes trouble on her own. The demons, monsters, and devils are in her own head but they’re let loose whenever she tries to do what she thinks is right and good.
That makes her more interesting to me than the annoying screw-up I’ve taken her for since she first showed up for work at Nelson & Murdock in Season 1.
At any rate, to sum up:
Ok, ‘nuff said.
And RIP Stan Lee.
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Maybe I'm being too harsh. As is often the case, Ken and Oliver Mannion think I’m all-wet. Mrs M is on the fence and waiting for us to finish (No binging here in Mannionville.) before rendering her final judgment. But Ken and Oliver are enjoying this season and are much much more into it than I am. Oliver says the reason I’m not is that I’m spending too much time checking my cell phone so I’m missing key scenes and bits of dialog. I think he’s got cause and effect mixed up.
Burt Lancaster as Superman? Hmmm...maybe the late Lancaster of "Seven Days in May". But just as I'm picturing Power and Flynn at the height of their active youth I'm picturing Lancaster of "The Crimson Pirate", and he's a little too brash, carries a little too much self-impressed (not that it's unwarranted - as the saying goes, it's not boasting if you can do it...) with his own awesomeness.
Although...hmmm, again. Maybe that'd be an intriguing reading for Superman. Playing against the sober Man of Steel who knows how deeply invested humanity is in his powers, it'd be a self-referential sort of post-Golden Age Superman...
I'd actually like to see that.
Posted by: FDChief | Tuesday, November 20, 2018 at 03:31 PM