Favorite Moments from TRANSPARENT: "Elizah"--
-The season opener ends with a question. Maura's weird odyssey is paired with Raquel's speech about Passover. You escape from slavery; you're free! You step outside and listen for God's voice--but hear nothing. Or, at most: Stillness. You wander in the woods and sense a presence behind you, and you're not sure if it's help or an antagonist. You wait for a miracle--the parting of the sea. "But that's an old miracle." So, says Raquel: "What about this. What if you are the miracle? What if you have to be your own Messiah? Then what?" It's a smart closing line for a season-three debut of a show intent on raising questions, without clear answers. Maura has freed herself from slavery, but now she has wandered into the woods. "Why am I still unhappy?" she asks. Because she is obtuse, ill-prepared, childish, entitled, self-doubting. She doesn't know how to take care of herself. The episode unspools problems Maura can blame on no one but Maura Alone: the broken sandal, the awkwardness in the hair-extension emporium, the stolen Gatorade. Freedom from slavery is nice, but it isn't the giant, exuberant, technicolor musical number that Maura might have expected.
-There's so much exquisite attention to detail in these thirty minutes. "I'm not part of your transbrella," says one colleague of Maura's. "I'm intersex; you've seen me on Oprah." "Oh, right," says another colleague. "There was that book in 2014, and it had a graphic--" (This seems sly, on the part of the writers. Whatever you might have found in 2014, it's dated now. Whatever came out yesterday, it's dated now. Keep your eyes open; change comes fast.) "The order of the calls is MOBS--Maura, Omar, Baxter, Simon." "I think he just likes hearing sad phone calls." "You ain't got a soul if you don't got the soul." "Size twelve? The biggest we have is eleven." (Maura's damaged footwear is a sharp metaphor for the problem of wandering through the woods with a damaged soul. We all have damaged footwear; we're all still expected to walk.) "This paper is for signing, not for reading." "This is strike 67, but whatever." "I'm not using my teeth, but I do have this Lesbian Manicure." "You want pudding? Listen--" Everywhere: intrigue. In this way, the show reminds me of "Girls." There's such intelligence in the way it handles human fumbling--the dropped balls of communication. Maura takes a call for which she is comically ill-equipped; a voice on the other end says (unfairly), "Give me a reason I shouldn't kill myself." It's not clear if the voice is sincere or simply the possession of a hyperbolic, melodramatic teenager. What can Maura ask: "Have you been drinking? Have you had these thoughts before?" (What force has made Maura--white, wealthy, unaware of the world of foster-care, of five-hour waits for services that cannot be rendered--what force has made Maura feel entitled to take this call? In all the confusion and awkwardness, there are nice moments, too. "Actually, I'm not a he. I'm trans, like you." "Can you breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth?" Life is rarely purely good or bad.)
-The half-hour beautifully catalogs misreadings--many wrapped up in questions of privilege and "background." Maura assumes three young women are prostitutes: "Que? Que? What street? I'm a student, and these two are getting their nursing degrees." The fast-food employee, rightfully irritated by Maura's theft, then makes a mess by misconstruing obvious signals. Though Maura is clearly a woman, the employee calls her "he" and makes the assumption that she, Maura, is threatening Elizah's safety. (Even the name "Elizah" is evocative. It alludes to the Old Testament. But it also presents Maura with a spelling she has likely never seen before. The world is constantly challenging and startling this poor, well-meaning lady.) Maura herself fully tunes out the employee's rational speech about the purloined Gatorade; with a near-palpable sense of entitlement, Maura explains her plan to bring money later (with a tip!) and assumes that the words coming out of the employee's mouth are just a kind of burbling, a kind of aural distraction. The show nicely piles one climactic problem on top of another--Elizah's mysterious status, the enraged fast-food employee, the police, the fumes from the nail salon, the issue of the non-Jewish hospital. We feel Maura's panic, because of the empathy Tambor brings to his performance. (Tambor grew up with a mentally-ill, relentlessly-bullying mother who said, regularly, "You ain't shit." He escaped and remade himself; at least one of his siblings became an addict and died young. And I think another is troubled and in frequent peril? Tambor owns a bookstore; he wakes everyday to a cup of cold coffee and a long session with a novel, which, he feels, is the act in his life "closest to praying." His attitude with regard to performing for an audience: "F**k 'em." He's in his seventies, and the father of several small children. The role of Maura makes him cranky, because he is so deeply invested in Getting It Right. It's unclear to me why the Emmys aren't just all earmarked, in perpetuity, for Jeffrey Tambor.)
-This show depicts--more deftly than most others--the mess that good intentions can create. It says, with real compassion, "We're all wandering around in the woods--just inches from an embarrassing full-on collapse in a public place." Money cannot protect you. What a thrilling and eloquent addition to the world of TV.
-The season opener ends with a question. Maura's weird odyssey is paired with Raquel's speech about Passover. You escape from slavery; you're free! You step outside and listen for God's voice--but hear nothing. Or, at most: Stillness. You wander in the woods and sense a presence behind you, and you're not sure if it's help or an antagonist. You wait for a miracle--the parting of the sea. "But that's an old miracle." So, says Raquel: "What about this. What if you are the miracle? What if you have to be your own Messiah? Then what?" It's a smart closing line for a season-three debut of a show intent on raising questions, without clear answers. Maura has freed herself from slavery, but now she has wandered into the woods. "Why am I still unhappy?" she asks. Because she is obtuse, ill-prepared, childish, entitled, self-doubting. She doesn't know how to take care of herself. The episode unspools problems Maura can blame on no one but Maura Alone: the broken sandal, the awkwardness in the hair-extension emporium, the stolen Gatorade. Freedom from slavery is nice, but it isn't the giant, exuberant, technicolor musical number that Maura might have expected.
-There's so much exquisite attention to detail in these thirty minutes. "I'm not part of your transbrella," says one colleague of Maura's. "I'm intersex; you've seen me on Oprah." "Oh, right," says another colleague. "There was that book in 2014, and it had a graphic--" (This seems sly, on the part of the writers. Whatever you might have found in 2014, it's dated now. Whatever came out yesterday, it's dated now. Keep your eyes open; change comes fast.) "The order of the calls is MOBS--Maura, Omar, Baxter, Simon." "I think he just likes hearing sad phone calls." "You ain't got a soul if you don't got the soul." "Size twelve? The biggest we have is eleven." (Maura's damaged footwear is a sharp metaphor for the problem of wandering through the woods with a damaged soul. We all have damaged footwear; we're all still expected to walk.) "This paper is for signing, not for reading." "This is strike 67, but whatever." "I'm not using my teeth, but I do have this Lesbian Manicure." "You want pudding? Listen--" Everywhere: intrigue. In this way, the show reminds me of "Girls." There's such intelligence in the way it handles human fumbling--the dropped balls of communication. Maura takes a call for which she is comically ill-equipped; a voice on the other end says (unfairly), "Give me a reason I shouldn't kill myself." It's not clear if the voice is sincere or simply the possession of a hyperbolic, melodramatic teenager. What can Maura ask: "Have you been drinking? Have you had these thoughts before?" (What force has made Maura--white, wealthy, unaware of the world of foster-care, of five-hour waits for services that cannot be rendered--what force has made Maura feel entitled to take this call? In all the confusion and awkwardness, there are nice moments, too. "Actually, I'm not a he. I'm trans, like you." "Can you breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth?" Life is rarely purely good or bad.)
-The half-hour beautifully catalogs misreadings--many wrapped up in questions of privilege and "background." Maura assumes three young women are prostitutes: "Que? Que? What street? I'm a student, and these two are getting their nursing degrees." The fast-food employee, rightfully irritated by Maura's theft, then makes a mess by misconstruing obvious signals. Though Maura is clearly a woman, the employee calls her "he" and makes the assumption that she, Maura, is threatening Elizah's safety. (Even the name "Elizah" is evocative. It alludes to the Old Testament. But it also presents Maura with a spelling she has likely never seen before. The world is constantly challenging and startling this poor, well-meaning lady.) Maura herself fully tunes out the employee's rational speech about the purloined Gatorade; with a near-palpable sense of entitlement, Maura explains her plan to bring money later (with a tip!) and assumes that the words coming out of the employee's mouth are just a kind of burbling, a kind of aural distraction. The show nicely piles one climactic problem on top of another--Elizah's mysterious status, the enraged fast-food employee, the police, the fumes from the nail salon, the issue of the non-Jewish hospital. We feel Maura's panic, because of the empathy Tambor brings to his performance. (Tambor grew up with a mentally-ill, relentlessly-bullying mother who said, regularly, "You ain't shit." He escaped and remade himself; at least one of his siblings became an addict and died young. And I think another is troubled and in frequent peril? Tambor owns a bookstore; he wakes everyday to a cup of cold coffee and a long session with a novel, which, he feels, is the act in his life "closest to praying." His attitude with regard to performing for an audience: "F**k 'em." He's in his seventies, and the father of several small children. The role of Maura makes him cranky, because he is so deeply invested in Getting It Right. It's unclear to me why the Emmys aren't just all earmarked, in perpetuity, for Jeffrey Tambor.)
-This show depicts--more deftly than most others--the mess that good intentions can create. It says, with real compassion, "We're all wandering around in the woods--just inches from an embarrassing full-on collapse in a public place." Money cannot protect you. What a thrilling and eloquent addition to the world of TV.
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