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tadashi posted:I mean, Congress almost got to pick the president. It wasn't that far off. I'd argue they predicted and captured the chaos of the 2016 election perfectly even though, plot-wise, it wasn't any sort of mirror of the election itself. Comedy is just tragedy that happens to someone who for whatever reason really deserves the awful poo poo happening to them according to an external observer (the audience). The idea of it is to be clever enough with the catharsis that its light and silly and leaves open the possibility of recovery. This lightness and wit is what distinguishes season 5 of Veep from say season 5 of Breaking Bad, as the protagonists of both shows reap the consequences of some seriously longass plot arcs. And at the end of the Washington Monument scene in Veep they shift from one tone to the other through no method more complex than just waiting a minute and letting it hang after everyone walks away from her. Selena Meyer is hopeless after politics, she isn't connected enough to do "consulting" or erudite enough for law or rich/cunning enough for business. She's been clowned out of the Oval Office by Laura Montez--who, since Montez has been denied "first female POTUS", is instead "first hispanic POTUS" despite the fact that aside from skin tone and godawful emphasis on her spoken name she's about as latin as she is sikh--as a catspaw for the absolute worst of the crusty-rear end white dudes, all done through a parliamentary trick that was no more or less legitimate or derived from popular mandate than Selena's own ascension to the executive. The entire object of the season was to get someone as awful as Selena in the same ways as Selena into the white house through utterly undemocratic procedural bullshit. If Tom won, for instance, that'd be a good thing! That'd be a really good note for the show to end on, actually! That's not the objective. The objective is to make you squirm. Selena is an awful faker, but Laura is by virtually every metric worse, and not even possessed of the dignity to act of her own ambition, she's just being used for some guy's benefit in a Congressional beef and glad of it. It shouldn't end like this goddammit, this is wrong! This whole thing is wrong! Th... there's no coming back from this one, is there  And as her staff leaves her one by one, physically representing within the scene the awful catty beltway bullshit lifting away from her, she stops being Selena Meyer and just becomes a person with no prospects and the jokes are still the same jokes, but the ultimate subject of them gets just a little bit sympathetic, because when you take away the entourage and the title and the helicopter you just have a really sad lonely and increasingly-old lady sitting alone in an empty park dedicated to a monument for the first president's penis. (and then in the very very very very final 5 seconds right as you're getting up to piss as the HBO logo comes on.... SAVED!!! Veep: confirmed goodshow) Willie Tomg has issued a correction as of 04:47 on Apr 17, 2017 |
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Apr 17, 2017 04:24
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 13:13 |
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