Ah, shit. Yet again I thought I'd already made a post about something that ended over a month ago. Yet again, I had not!
Chapo Trap House (Matt Christman in particular) has an interesting take on the Danny McBride trilogy of HBO shows from the 2010s (Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals, and now The Righteous Gemstones) which is that together they examine in surprising depth the psyche of contemporary American Protestantism. Matt's take isn't fully formed and my attempt to reconstruct it will be even less complete, but it boils down to the idea that Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism polluted the very code of ethics and morals that existed in the European strains of Christianity that came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and now you have red states full of people whose personal codes of conduct boil down to, "if I am successful, it is because God has made me successful, and if God has made me successful, it is because I am living my life in accordance with his wishes." Or, essentially, "the deck is stacked in my favor because God has willed it to be that way, and if the deck is stacked against you it must be because you've pissed God off."
Such a theme is at its most overt here in a show about televangelists, but the undercurrents were there in both of the previous shows as well, albeit in a less explicitly religious sense. Danny McBride is amazing at building and portraying these characters who are reprehensible in their actions, but who clearly earnestly believe they are upstanding people. It's a gift!
I don't have much else to add, but Edi Patterson was the MVP of this cast, bar none, for her brazen performance as such a specific type of bratty, stupid, frustrated grown woman in Judy Gemstone.
And thanks to this show we will always have "Misbehavin'."
No comments:
Post a Comment