This episode is a showcase in stunning visuals. Hence, most of the credit for illuminating and elevating the drab subject matter of the drug-addled, hip-hop-influenced culture and lifestyles of relatively affluent late-teens in the postmodern, post-industrial American suburbs belongs to those behind the camera.
A first episode of any new television series is always difficult. The need to introduce and portray the characters, background and surroundings of the story that you are trying to tell is a difficult ask in such a short amount of time but this framing is successfully and effectively accomplished in such a short amount of time that it ensures that the episode is more significant than most other first episodes of any new series and much more than it has the right to be.
We quickly learn that the lead character was born in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. We see footage of one of the actual planes flying into one of the World Trade Center towers. At first glance, the inclusion of this footage seems gratuitous but it is not.
Firstly, the events of 9/11 have been so thoroughly replayed in the last nineteen years that whatever shock value that might have been associated with the footage once upon a time is truly gone. The numbing effects of overexposure and the passage of time ensure that. Even for those who witnessed the attack take place live on television (as I did), a complete sense of detachment pervades the subject. For many, it is the stuff of history. It is studied for its immediate and lasting impact on the world we live in. The emotive element has almost been completely extinguished. The nineteenth anniversary of 9/11, for many, passed with barely a whimper.
Instead, 9/11 footage is included to set the zeitgeist. It allows for a definitive break between the world that was and the world that is... the one that the characters being depicted were born into. That is the point. They know nothing of the world that existed before... which, for the record, was substantively different than the world that is.
This is a world in which the hope for a better tomorrow appears to be almost entirely extinguished. However naive that feeling might have been (that post-Cold War bump of sustained peace and seemingly endless economic growth), it was very real. Looking back, life then by comparison appears to have been relatively uncomplicated.
NAFTA had yet to take full effect and the embodiment of what it represented had yet to manifest in peoples daily lives. The bubble had yet to burst. Endless war, a consequence of the event (which provided Hawks and war-profiteers with everything their hearts desired), had yet to set in. An apathy that is sometimes associated with the young was not anything like as deeply-entrenched as it is now.
We live in a more honest age but not in an age of more honest people. We simply can see more of what is going on. You can see this in the contrast of the politics (and politicians) of old and it's failure to adapt to modern technology. Before, the people understood that they were highly policed... monitored... controlled. But never so thoroughly have we been monitored and never so explicitly has the fact been thrust into our faces.
The bloom is off the rose and it can be more clearly seen under. Thus, everyone is much more cynical. This cynicism has bred the kind of numbness that we might correctly associated with the hedonistic practices and lifestyles depicted here. This new, post-9/11 age is more vapid, more vacuous; though it needn't be. Drugs are what fill the void. (Insert Marx' opium quote here.)
The misdiagnosing and over prescribing of drugs to the lead character as a child is another apt sign of the (post) modern age. This is the age in which every and all signs of difference in behaviour (even in children... as if we were meant, from the earliest of our days, to sit through hours of monotonous and uninspiring classes without a hint of discomfort or protest) is dealt with via prescription drugs. Any problem adapting to a maladaptive system is a sign of a wiring problem.
We find out that Rue's addiction problems stem from her search for bliss... that carefree feeling and absence of fear that she felt when she experienced the intoxicating feeling of nothingness and tranquility (peace) when she was pumped full of liquid Valium in a hospital bed.
As if to reply to the questions that we expect to arise whenever we see an individual struggling with addiction, Rue assures us that she was not victimized in any way as a child (sexually or otherwise). She even makes it clear that her search for bliss predates the premature death of her father from cancer.
In conclusion, we can determine that (contrary to her "diagnosis") she is neither the victim of a wiring problem she was born with or one that was brought about by trauma. Instead, Rue's addiction is the by-product of her overt embrace of a wiring problem that we more closely associate with human beings in general... She wants to experience the world not as it is (which is much too traumatizing) but as the way it could be.
I could say more but this is only the first episode...
Visuals 10/10
Storytelling 8/10
Acting performances 8/10
Actual story 5/10
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