Latinos – Bitch Flicks

‘Fear the Walking Dead’: I’m From the Government, and I’m Here to Help

As with the writers on ‘The Walking Dead,’ these writers haven’t yet proven they have any idea how to write strong roles for women. But if they ever figure it out, they’ve got the right actor for the job.

Well, this was unexpected. Despite its occasional heavy-handedness and several key moments where characters did things that no one in their situation would ever actually do, the fourth episode of AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead was actually the best yet. And they didn’t even need a zombie attack! Or for Alicia (Alycia Debnam Carey) to do anything worth mentioning!

They haven’t added any Black characters since the purge of the first two episodes, but the Latino characters on the show are a relatively rich and varied lot, with Ruben Blades’ Salvadoran barber Daniel being given some of the show’s best dialogue. Toward the end of the episode, as he was preparing to go to a military field hospital with his wife Griselda (Patricia Reyes Spindola, who mostly just gets to groan in pain and suffer nobly), he talks to Madison (Kim Dickens), whom he clearly recognizes as the household’s most astute and proactive observer of the encroaching zombie apocalypse, about the Salvadoran government’s massacre of some people from his village, and about how his father said the perpetrators were not evil, but committed evil acts out of fear. I got a chill when he told Madison that his father was a fool “to think there was a difference.” Daniel is a strong enough character to make the show’s over-the-top anti-government paranoia seem downright rational.

The engaging performances of Blades, Dickens, and — I have to admit he’s growing on me — wild-eyed Frank Dillane as Madison’s heroin-addicted ninja son Nick go a long way toward selling the silliness of the plotting. There was also a pretty strong opening with Madison’s beau Travis (Cliff Curtis) jogging around the now militarized, fenced-in, and seemingly safe neighborhood to the strains of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” and then Travis’ son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie), from his perch on Madison’s roof, sees a flash of light from a building outside the fenced in area, from the area that was supposedly cleared of all residents by the military. It looks like someone’s using a mirror to signal the folks within the perimeter, perhaps for help. Or perhaps it’s a warning.

In any case, Chris shows Travis his video of the mysterious flash, and Travis, who firmly believes that their problems will soon be over now that the government/military has stepped in, shrugs it off. Travis has ingratiated himself to the local military commander, Moyers (Jamie McShane), by helping out when a frightened neighbor locks himself in the bathroom. He eventually tells Moyers about what Chris saw, but Moyers is using the neighborhood’s streets as his personal driving range (this is what I meant by heavy handed) and blithely assures Travis that the area’s been cleared.

Meanwhile, Ofelia (Mercedes Mason), Daniel and Griselda’s daughter, has struck up a romance with a guardsman played by Shawn Hatosy. There’s the suggestion that she’s using him in an effort to get medicine for her mother, which would not be wise in this scenario, as these military types clearly have too much power over the locals’ lives.

Chris eventually shows Madison the video, and she clearly takes it more seriously, because she responds by sneaking up to the fence, cutting a hole in it and slipping through, presumably so she can go find whoever is signalling and clear up what that’s about. I might have tried a pair of binoculars first, but anyway, using her training as a high school guidance counselor, she eludes the soldiers with relative ease.

On the other side, she finds a bunch of people shot dead in the street, and they don’t appear to have been “sick” (i.e. zombies) so her suspicion about the military’s methods grows.

Meanwhile, Nick was supposed to be kicking heroin, but he has another idea. He sneaks into the house next door, where Travis’ ex-wife Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez) has been using her nursing training to administer morphine to an elderly man with a heart condition. Even though Madison complains at one point about how much time she has to spend watching Nick, and even though the elderly guy’s wife lives with him and presumably keeps a pretty close eye on him, Nick somehow gets into their house undetected, and manages to unhook the guy’s IV and use it himself, while resting comfortably under his bed. It’s a shame he’s not using his superpowers for good.

When Madison gets back from her adventures beyond the fence, she catches Nick looking for the old man’s drugs, and slaps him around. Under these circumstances, who can blame her?

Liza is helping folks with their medical needs all throughout the neighborhood, and draws the attention of Dr. Exner (Sandrine Holt of House of Cards), the pretty face of the government/military carting away your loved ones in the dead of night. Liza tells Exner about Nick’s drug problem, and later regrets it when the guardsmen come to pick up Griselda that night, and instead of letting Daniel go with her, as Exner told him they would, they take Nick against his will.

Early on in the episode, Madison makes an odd complaint to Travis about all the cooking and cleaning and, ahem, watching Nick she has to do, and wonders not why Travis isn’t helping — he has importantly manly town duties — but why Liza isn’t. Well, clearly it’s because she’s going around the neighborhood helping those with medical needs, but maybe she’s keeping that a secret for some reason. At the end of the episode, when Nick is taken away, Liza takes the mendacious Dr. Exner up on her offer to go to the medical facility and help out, in part, it seems, to look out for Nick, but Madison still tells Travis as Griselda, Nick, and Liza are carted away, “This is Liza’s fault.” It’s not that there aren’t people who would see the zombie apocalypse as a conflict between them and their significant others’ ex, but Madison seems too smart, brave (foolhardy, even) and clear-headed for that. This kind of trumped-up domestic drama seems a bit silly in this context, and Madison is not a silly character. As with the writers on The Walking Dead, these writers haven’t yet proven they have any idea how to write strong roles for women. But if they ever figure it out, they’ve got the right actor for the job.

The show ends with another effective, chilling moment, as that night Travis sits on the roof in Chris’ old perch, and watches as several flashes erupt in the house where Chris saw the mirror signal earlier. This time, the lights appear to be muzzle flashes, and the look on Travis’ face suggests that he recognizes his own culpability in what’s transpiring, as he told Moyers about the house. Hopefully, this means Trav will be pulling his head out of his ass soon. It would make for a better show.

Recommended Reading

“Fear the Walking Dead Pilot: Can It Be More?”

“Fear the Walking Dead: The Black Guys Die First”

“Fear the Walking Dead: Liberals Try to Stop Zombies with Words!”

‘Looking’: When a Straight Woman is the “Gay Best Friend”

The HBO series ‘Looking,’ which focuses on the lives of gay men (co-created by the gay writer-director Andrew Haigh who made the art-house film ‘Weekend’; two of the main cast members, including the lead, are also out gay men) occupies a ground somewhere in between, in which women do exist, though only in supporting roles–but those roles are cast and, written with an acuity that transcends their brief time onscreen.

Warning: This review contains spoilers for the first seven episodes of the first season of HBO’s Looking.

No matter how much is written about the series Girls, “wives and girlfriends” could be the de facto description of most speaking roles for women on television and in film. Because women are the plus-ones in the script we’re not surprised that their parts, when compared with the male characters have fewer lines, less complexity and less variability–in age, race, body type and conventional attractiveness. The uncomfortable truth is: the only reason women are in these many of these shows and films (besides for decoration, to act as a kind of talking furniture) is to communicate that even though the male characters seem to spend most of their time and emotional energy interacting with each other– and the audience can’t help noticing the homoerotic tension between them–they’re not queer.

So what happens to women’s roles when the main male characters are queer? In some cases, like the excellent recent release Stranger By The Lake, women aren’t in the picture at all–not surprising, since the film takes place in a cruising ground. But the absence of women also reflects the strata of gay men whose social circle is made up almost entirely of other gay men, even outside of sexual situations. In the case of the execrable American version of Queer As Folk the token woman couple were written alternately as villains or annoyances: their erratic behavior providing the flimsiest of excuses to propel the storylines of the male characters.

The HBO series Looking, which focuses on the lives of gay men (co-created by the gay writer-director Andrew Haigh who made the art-house film Weekend; two of the main cast members, including the lead, are also out gay men) occupies a ground somewhere in between, in which women do exist, though only in supporting roles–but those roles are cast and written with an acuity that transcends their brief time onscreen.

The most prominent example is Doris (Lauren Weedman) who is the best friend, roommate and long ago ex-lover of one of the series main characters, Dom (out gay actor Murray Bartlett). Unlike other fictional f*g hags, Doris isn’t secretly still in love with Dom (as the Meryl Streep character was with the Ed Harris character in The Hours) nor is she a woman so desperately unhappy with her own life that she can’t stop meddling in and monopolizing Dom’s. She has a challenging career as a pediatric nurse, and although she is much less glamorous than most of the other women on television, we see her making out with Dom’s male coworker during Dom’s birthday party (though just once on TV or in a movie I’d like to see the relatively common occurence of a f*g hag going with her friends to the gay bar, picking up a woman there and going on to forge a queer identity of her own). Instead Doris plays the role usually given to “The Gay Best Friend” in a romantic comedy. She has all the best lines and an acid delivery but is also a loyal friend and the voice of reason.

When Dom wants to contact an abusive ex-boyfriend (who was, at one time, also a meth addict but has since become a successful realtor) Doris warns him off doing so, but when Dom sees the guy anyway, tells him she understands why.

Doris asks, “Did you at least ask him for your money back?”

“No,” Dom answers.

Doris then asks “Why not,” and her tone has no anger in it, just a sad compassion that seems to illustrate a long history between the two friends.

In the most recent episode (Episode 7, the penultimate of this season, but the series has just been renewed for a second season, with Weedman becoming a cast regular) we finally got to meet the mother of the main character Patrick Murray (Jonathan Groff). His mother has been something of a bogeyman since the first episode when Dom advised Patrick to stop dating only the men he thought his mother would approve of. Patrick, who designs video games, then pursued and eventually became boyfriends with Richie (Raúl Castillo) a Mexican American barber. With Richie and Patrick’s relationship, Looking is able to touch on some class and race schisms that exist in the gay men’s community–but also beyond–that other series and movies rarely show.

Richie and Patrick spend an idyllic day together

Patrick isn’t a racist exactly (his best friend is Latino–and also a main character–wanna-be artist, Agustín, played by Frankie J. Alvarez), but, except for most of one idyllic all-day date that takes up the whole of Episode 5 (directed by Haigh, it echoes the structure, if not quite the emotional sweep of Weekend) he can’t seem to stop himself from saying racially and culturally insensitive things to Richie, which nearly prevented he and Richie from getting together in the first place. Patrick’s awkwardness with Richie is a result of his moving in mostly white, affluent (or at least artist-class) circles and shows a reality rarely seen on TV or in movies: that white people, even the ones who say they aren’t racist, often have no idea how to be in interracial relationships–and aren’t very good at learning from their mistakes. The show also captures tensions within the Latino community, when college educated, Miami-raised Cuban American Agustín accuses Patrick of “slumming” with working class, Mexican American Richie.

In Episode 7, Richie was supposed to finally meet Patrick’s mother (Julia Duffy from Newhart) at his sister’s wedding, but after a morning full of disasters: spilled coffee on a dress shirt, a parking ticket, Patrick’s mother’s misplaced phone (which the hotel won’t give to Richie because, he says, “I guess I don’t look like a ‘Murray'”) Richie and Patrick argue, and Richie says he thinks it’s too soon to meet Patrick’s family. So Patrick goes to the wedding alone.

patrick-richie-psychic-looking — Patrick and Richie

Making the excuses familiar to those of us who have fought with our partners right before or during major social events (“food poisoning” Patrick says), Patrick meets up with his mother, a persnickety and perpetually dissatisfied woman (she complains about the state of the grass on the grounds of the wedding site) who calls Richie “Richard” and “friend” instead of “boyfriend.”

At the end of the festivities (scenes of cake pops, bad dancing to the B-52s and the groom removing the bride’s garter will elicit groans of recognition among any queer who has felt alienated at a straight wedding) Patrick tells his mother, “You’re the real reason Richie isn’t here,” blaming the argument he had with Richie (ostensibly because Richie suggested Patrick smoke a joint in the car to relax before the wedding) on his mother’s lofty expectations.

But Patrick’s mother herself is munching on a pot-laced Rice Krispie treat (Patrick’s family is from Colorado, where marijuana is legal) and tells Patrick, “I don’t think you can blame me for Richie. If he’s not here, that’s on you, sweetie.” She also tells him that marijuana has helped her since she went off Lexapro, which Patrick had no idea she was taking.”If you asked me how I was doing every now and then,” she counters, “you’d know.” And with just a few lines (and an expert reading from Duffy) Looking turns an “evil” and “unreasonable” mother character into a sympathetic person with wants and needs of her own. And echoes the experience of so many of us as we strive to become people different from who our mothers see us as. Our mothers change too and become different people from the ones we wanted so badly to distance ourselves from.

With Blue Is The Warmest Color, Concussion, and Stranger By The Lake, this past year has been a great one for queer characters’ stories on the big screen–and Looking has now brought that same depth and quality to the small screen. I can’t wait for Season 2.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G5Ud5A0NHg&list=UUVTQuK2CaWaTgSsoNkn5AiQ&feature=c4-overview”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.