**blanket
alert: pretty much ALL of Arrested Development will be spoiled in the following
article**
Few TV shows
have proven to be as enduringly meme-able as the glory that is Arrested
Development. Created by Michael Hurwitz
in the early 2000’s, the show originally aired on Fox until low viewership led
the studio to pull the plug. Things
stayed that way for a while, with the show accumulating a larger and larger cult
status, until Netflix got hold of the rights and produced a fourth season,
which debuted back in 2013. Starring
Jason Bateman, it was a tale of the hilariously sad antics of a perpetually
dysfunctional rich family forced to confront their demons after their father is
arrested and the company (along with their fortune) threatens to fall all to
pieces before anyone can say, “Banana.”
From
episode one onward, the show is a masterclass on how to build a story for the
long-haul. The lengths the show’s
creators went to set up jokes and plot twists episodes, and sometimes seasons,
in advance, and the myriad references to hilariously obscure movies or past
roles of the actors in the show are rightfully legendary, and may prove Hurwitz
and his team to be the greatest (or most terrible?) masterminds in television
history. And even beyond the writing, the
show constantly used shifting cameras, perfectly-timed sound effects, and
spot-on editing to throw just about every possible audio-visual gag at the
audience it could.
And
that could have been enough. It could
have been a show driven solely by its own pessimistic nihilism ala Family Guy
or South Park, and make bank on how fiendishly layered its fourth-wall breaking
plot contrivances were. But it didn’t. Instead, its creators went the extra mile and
ended up creating a damn-near perfect time capsule of America in the
early-to-mid-2000’s. There are probably
no two events as seminal to the fall of American public trust as the twin
hammer blows of the Iraq War and the Great Recession, so it is eminently
fitting to examine how they both became focal points of Arrested Development’s
ever-winking cynicism.
It
starts gradually at first, but as the second and third season go on more and
more of the story centers around the unique cultural myopia around the start of
the Iraq War and the fallout a year into the conflict, when people started to
wake up to just how extensively the Bush administration had lied and manipulated
to pull us into a war humanity is still paying for in spades today. Depending on how you swing it, in fact, the Iraq
War might be the most important external event in the show that affects the
plot and characters.
Some
(by no means exhaustive) examples; George Senior, we learn, is arrested and put
on trial in part for building palaces for Saddam Hussein in the 90’s (one of
which turns out to be hiding a veritable army of Hussein doubles). A side character Gob marries was a torturer in
Abu Ghraib. One episode revolves around supposed
proof the Bluth company was building WMD bunkers in Iraq…..except by the end
the “evidence” ends up being a hacked picture of Tobias’ testicles. Buster enlists in the army and is only taken
because of how direly low recruitment has gotten….because of the Iraq War. It’s his emotional struggle with the risk of
enlisting that eventually leads him to take his fateful swim in loose-seal-infested
waters. The show was one of the first to
parody the use (read: overuse) of “because 9/11” to justify the shitty, shitty
policies of the Bush years. Rob Cordry
has a brief side role as an NRA-fanatic who literally forces people at gunpoint
to accept his extreme interpretation of the Second Amendment. The use of a black hand puppet to skewer racism and police violence YEARS before Ferguson. And on and on and on.
The
show is the debacle of Iraq. It is
crass, 21st-century capitalistic commercialism at its nihilistic
peak. It is the devil-may-care economics
of the wealthy that directly caused the Great Recession. It is one dig after another at the demise of
reality TV and all it touched, and of the descent of local news organizations
into Nightcrawler-style pits of ethical
darkness.
With
the original show being such a perfect product of its time, it was perhaps
inevitable that the long-awaited fourth season could not possible match it,
being too far disconnected from the era and culture that spawned.…..
…..oh my God, there’s a subplot about
Lucille proposing a wall on the Mexican border to keep minorities out, and her
and George Senior searching for a politician dumb enough to latch onto the idea. And this aired in 2013. TWO YEARS before Trump opened his
Presidential campaign.
Guys. Arrested Development warned. They
fucking warned us.
And
once again, while this coincidence would be scary enough, the deeper I got into
Season Four the darker the rabbit hole became.
Much as the war on Terror became central to the story of the original
three seasons, the Great Recession becomes a recurring theme tied to season
4. Family members constantly gripe over
who gets a cut from “the Stimmy.” Tobias
and Lindsay are directly roped into the housing bubble scam right before the
market goes belly-up. The season also
managed to slip in predictive digs at the sheer absurdity of the “bubbled
elites control the world, dude”
conspiracy theories currently in vogue amongst the left AND the right, a
phenomenon that proves stupidity is the only true equal-opportunity employer in
this world. In a passing remark, Ron
Howard suggests that he and other Hollywood producers knew about the housing
and market crash before it happened, implying an alternative world where
tinfoil-hat claims that a cabal of snooty leftist elites control the world are
real- and then never addresses these implications again, almost directly giving
the finger to people who buy into such crap.
Nothing
there? Overinterpretation on my
part? Maybe, but then this show has always
been so meticulously constructed that even thinking such a possibility feels
like a form of heresy.
The
fourth season, by the end, almost feels too harsh, too cold, too terrifying. People get really, genuinely hurt; Lucille 2
ends up dead, Maeby is going to prison as a sex offender, a desperate drug
addict is literally left to die in a trash heap, and the relationship between
Michael and George Michael- once treated as the show’s lone emotional center- is
left so broken and twisted in the season’s brilliant final scene that it’s hard
to imagine it ever healing again.
Sad? Harsh?
Too much? Perhaps. But it’s a fitting conclusion for the Bluths,
because there ultimately is no happy end for people like this. Such constant lying, selfishness,
close-mindedness CAN’T end any other way.
And it’s here the parallels between the Bluths and the Trumps, the GOP,
and American conservatism and evangelism writ large get downright uncanny. It’s not a perfect 1-1, obviously, but the
shallow ignorance, the vain superficiality, the obsession with toxic masculine “strength”
and the shows of wealth and might to hide the existential emptiness within- all
present and accounted for.
One
example in particular won’t stop haunting me.
Every time an uncomfortable truth about his life rears its ugly head, or
he’s called out for his lies, cruelty, and hypocrisy, what does Gob do? Grab whoever confronts him by the neck and
shove a roofie down their throat so they forget by the next morning. If there is a functional difference between
that and the unceasing efforts of Trump and the GOP to cover up their lies and
corruption with even more of the same, we haven’t yet invented a microscope
strong enough to spot it.
And
what better summation is there of the mental state of any sane, moral, thinking
person in America over the past two years than the deep spiritual horror
signified when characters are faced with a terrible truth, stare into the
middle distance, and “Sound of Silence” begins to play in the background? If there is one, I haven’t found it yet.
There
is, of course, a very key difference between fiction and non-fiction to
consider in all this. The Bluths are
monsters, but they mostly just hurt themselves.
The desolation of Trump and the GOP, however, could all-too-easily encompass
the world if we don’t fight back enough.
Guys,
Arrested Development tried to warn us. We
chose not to listen. And now we’re
paying the price.
-Noah Franc
Previously on Films for the Trump Years:
Part 1- Selma
Part 2- Good Night, and Good Luck
Part 3- 13th
Part 4- Get Out
Part 5- Chasing Ice/Chasing Coral
Part 6- The Big Short
Part 7- Human Flow
Part 8- Winter’s Bone/Moonlight
Part 9- Black Panther
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