The first season of "American Vandal" was so exquisite and so complete, I was disappointed to learn there would be a second.
The eight episodes were just right.
It is difficult to describe what makes this show so rich, but the essential point, whatever you think it is as you begin watching it and as you continue to watch it, it is not; it is more; it is less; it is something else.
At first, it looks and feels like a very canny satire of that new genre of documentaries which seek to investigate the official investigation of a crime: "The Making of a Murderer" or the "Serial" in which the obvious suspect is apparently railroaded into conviction, although it is not certain he was in fact NOT the actual perpetrator.
There are details of technique which mark the show as this genre--portraits of an empty room after the main actors have left, hand held cameras and most of all the faces and bodies of the people on screen look so ordinary, not at all Hollywood hair or skin or teeth.
But as the story develops, you are drawn into an American high school, which makes the school in "Rita" look benign. Shades of that old series, "OC" emerge. These high school kids live in some coast community which is clearly affluent, and soaring palm trees dot the background, along with occasional far off vistas of mountain ranges. And yet, they are impoverished emotionally and intellectually.
The party scenes look like they are drawn from a Terry Rodgers tableau: wealthy, hollow people making a show of enjoying themselves in a circle of Hell.
Then there is the offhand sexuality of these teenagers. One of the girls, hearing that the popular phys ed teacher had had an affair with the mother of one of her classmates, casually remarks, "Oh, I'd do him." Amidst the tabloid headlines which explode every time an adult teacher is revealed to have engaged in sex with some innocent student, you realize these kids are not so innocent. The girls, who are typically more developed and more sophisticated than the boys their own age, are having sex with twenty and thirty year old men whenever they fancy it.
The two students pursuing the truth are revealed to have their own reasons for their tenacity, and they have to face their own ethical lapses as they gain celebrity from their project and they have to ask themselves who they would be willing to hurt to pursue the truth: Who painted phallic images on the cars in the teachers' parking lot?
Of course, this goes to the very issue Joan Didion raised 50 years ago, "As a writer, you are always selling someone out." The moral superiority of the "investigative reporter" is, of course, a lie. The reporter is getting rewarded for the story. As Jimmy McNulty remarks when a Baltimore Sun reporters says he wonders what effect the news of a serial murderer praying on homeless people in the city has had on the homeless who live, defenseless, on the street. "How bad must they feel? I feel bad for them," the reporter says. "Oh, I don't know," McNulty says, "It's worked out pretty well for you."
The reporter is offended, but the editor smiles, knowing McNulty has seen the real truth. "If it bleeds, it leads."
All of this is playing against a background of the #MeToo movement which is, at its heart, a movement centered on the power of accusation. Of course, for #MeToo, accusation is a good thing; it has the salutary effect of exposing predators who would otherwise escape control by the normal mechanism of social control--the law, corporate rules. In "American Vandal" we are confronted with the profound destructive power of accusation. Because of his past behavior, the accused is assumed to have committed the crime. It is "fast thinking" rather than "slow thinking" and it should stop all of us in our tracks and make us ask how important is truth?
And then there is the character of the central protagonist, a neer-do-well, who other students describe as the most stupid kid they have ever met, the dumbest kid in the school, who has hopes of being admitted to the University of Colorado at Boulder engineering program. He entertains himself by drawing penises and testicles on the white boards when the teachers have their backs turned. He is every bit as much a bottom dweller as the Wisconsin junk yard man who was accused in "The Making of a Murderer."
But as each episode unfolds, he becomes more sympathetic, more human, more multi dimensional, and the pursuit of the truth unravels his world as much as it unravels the worlds of his teachers, sundry parents, and many of his classmates.
The truth will cost him the one person he really relies upon and trusts, as he finds she has in fact, been unfaithful to him. It is revelatory and unexpected how much this hurts him. This is the devil-may-care, everything-is-a joke kid who discovers it matters to him his girlfriend is unfaithful.
Along the way we meet teenagers who have already dropped out, who no longer hope or try for achievement, success, but simply hang out in someone's basement and smoke weed and play cruel jokes on some neighbor.
By the time exculpation occurs, in the last episode, the accused has lost so much it almost doesn't matter. He swallows the contempt with which he is held by his classmates as a sort of social poison, which in fact poisons his own self respect.
Thoreau said, "It is a man's opinion of himself which determines his own fate," and that coming crashing home in "American Vandal."
The eight episodes were just right.
It is difficult to describe what makes this show so rich, but the essential point, whatever you think it is as you begin watching it and as you continue to watch it, it is not; it is more; it is less; it is something else.
At first, it looks and feels like a very canny satire of that new genre of documentaries which seek to investigate the official investigation of a crime: "The Making of a Murderer" or the "Serial" in which the obvious suspect is apparently railroaded into conviction, although it is not certain he was in fact NOT the actual perpetrator.
There are details of technique which mark the show as this genre--portraits of an empty room after the main actors have left, hand held cameras and most of all the faces and bodies of the people on screen look so ordinary, not at all Hollywood hair or skin or teeth.
But as the story develops, you are drawn into an American high school, which makes the school in "Rita" look benign. Shades of that old series, "OC" emerge. These high school kids live in some coast community which is clearly affluent, and soaring palm trees dot the background, along with occasional far off vistas of mountain ranges. And yet, they are impoverished emotionally and intellectually.
The party scenes look like they are drawn from a Terry Rodgers tableau: wealthy, hollow people making a show of enjoying themselves in a circle of Hell.
Then there is the offhand sexuality of these teenagers. One of the girls, hearing that the popular phys ed teacher had had an affair with the mother of one of her classmates, casually remarks, "Oh, I'd do him." Amidst the tabloid headlines which explode every time an adult teacher is revealed to have engaged in sex with some innocent student, you realize these kids are not so innocent. The girls, who are typically more developed and more sophisticated than the boys their own age, are having sex with twenty and thirty year old men whenever they fancy it.
The two students pursuing the truth are revealed to have their own reasons for their tenacity, and they have to face their own ethical lapses as they gain celebrity from their project and they have to ask themselves who they would be willing to hurt to pursue the truth: Who painted phallic images on the cars in the teachers' parking lot?
Of course, this goes to the very issue Joan Didion raised 50 years ago, "As a writer, you are always selling someone out." The moral superiority of the "investigative reporter" is, of course, a lie. The reporter is getting rewarded for the story. As Jimmy McNulty remarks when a Baltimore Sun reporters says he wonders what effect the news of a serial murderer praying on homeless people in the city has had on the homeless who live, defenseless, on the street. "How bad must they feel? I feel bad for them," the reporter says. "Oh, I don't know," McNulty says, "It's worked out pretty well for you."
The reporter is offended, but the editor smiles, knowing McNulty has seen the real truth. "If it bleeds, it leads."
All of this is playing against a background of the #MeToo movement which is, at its heart, a movement centered on the power of accusation. Of course, for #MeToo, accusation is a good thing; it has the salutary effect of exposing predators who would otherwise escape control by the normal mechanism of social control--the law, corporate rules. In "American Vandal" we are confronted with the profound destructive power of accusation. Because of his past behavior, the accused is assumed to have committed the crime. It is "fast thinking" rather than "slow thinking" and it should stop all of us in our tracks and make us ask how important is truth?
And then there is the character of the central protagonist, a neer-do-well, who other students describe as the most stupid kid they have ever met, the dumbest kid in the school, who has hopes of being admitted to the University of Colorado at Boulder engineering program. He entertains himself by drawing penises and testicles on the white boards when the teachers have their backs turned. He is every bit as much a bottom dweller as the Wisconsin junk yard man who was accused in "The Making of a Murderer."
But as each episode unfolds, he becomes more sympathetic, more human, more multi dimensional, and the pursuit of the truth unravels his world as much as it unravels the worlds of his teachers, sundry parents, and many of his classmates.
The truth will cost him the one person he really relies upon and trusts, as he finds she has in fact, been unfaithful to him. It is revelatory and unexpected how much this hurts him. This is the devil-may-care, everything-is-a joke kid who discovers it matters to him his girlfriend is unfaithful.
Along the way we meet teenagers who have already dropped out, who no longer hope or try for achievement, success, but simply hang out in someone's basement and smoke weed and play cruel jokes on some neighbor.
By the time exculpation occurs, in the last episode, the accused has lost so much it almost doesn't matter. He swallows the contempt with which he is held by his classmates as a sort of social poison, which in fact poisons his own self respect.
Thoreau said, "It is a man's opinion of himself which determines his own fate," and that coming crashing home in "American Vandal."
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