Re: The Righteous Gemstones (HBO)
Posted: Thu March 03, 2022 2:12 am
I could watch hours of those
- Spoiler: show
- SEVEN LESSONS FROM THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES' SECOND SEASON
Neon is badass. Don’t fight it. Every vehicle looks better with neon piping. This is a preference transcending lines of class, race, religion, gender, and creed. Neon makes every car look like a glowing Hokkaido mountain god. It can't even be undercut by Jesse referring to a group of assassins with coordinated clothes and fighting moves as “ninjas,” even though ninjas work alone, are silent, and do not use submachine guns. It’s emotionally accurate, and that’s what counts most, both in drama and in life.
Everyone at all times is fighting deep and often crippling insecurity. If there is one thing the Gemstones creatives get absolutely and viscerally right, it is a deep fundamental insecurity on display in every primary character, and how it motivates everything they do. Judy Gemstone kicks doors open in bathrooms like the villain in a high school movie and dresses in sparkly boots not because she is acting like a teenager. She is one, albeit one capable of driving to abduct her non-boyfriend boyfriend’s son from school one day.
Kelvin, the runt of the Gemstones litter, struggles to take up a space larger than his own, literally ending up as the biggest dude in the room only after switching out his collection of giant muscle men in favor of a gang of literal children. Jesse wears flashy shirts and says the dumbest shit imaginable as loudly as possible because he has zero confidence in his ability to lead but even less awareness of just how insecure he is about that. He can’t sit in his dad’s seat at lunch for ten seconds before it feels wrong, much less lead the church.
(See: When he picks up the shovel to help out Gideon in Haiti in the first season finale, Jesse’s confidently holding the shovel the wrong way. It’s sweet, because Jesse’s clearly going miles out of his comfort zone by doing manual labor to bond with his son. It’s also telling because it’s pretty clear Jesse’s never had a job where he had to learn how to hold a shovel, much less use it.)
Even Eli — by far the most outwardly serene character on the show, and one whose self-possession is the envy of his entire family — knows he’s not enough to hold that family together in the wake of his wife’s death, and lives in fear of his past coming to light.
Heaven, like the Devil, is in the details. Okay, two perfect things. Staging the entire production in South Carolina has amped up the accuracy of the accents by at least five thousand percent. Adam Devine’s “nuh-UHs,” in particular, are pitch-perfect in both deployment and pronunciation. A notable exception here is Eric Andre, who is funny just standing still, and who gets away with having a terrible Texas accent, mostly because a part of the brain hearing Eric Andre do a terrible accent thinks “Eric Andre doing this terrible accent is a bit.”
Still, his contributions didn’t peak until the finale, where he finally got to do what Eric Andre does best: Eat a mouthful of sand, get his in the head with a rock, moan incoherently, come back from the dead from under a pile of beach chairs and palm fronds, parade around with a knot on his head growing progressively larger with ever shot transition, and then spill wine on himself before freezing to death and getting eaten by wolves. It’s a tribute to the Righteous Gemstones that they knew and could call upon the perfect man to do all of these things in one episode credibly. It’s a tribute to the Eric Andre Show that he had probably already done all of them on television already.
The tragedy of the well-dressed sketchy uncle is universal. I had an uncle like Baby Billy Freeman. Dodgy, briefly married on multiple occasions, including one relationship measured in a matter of days, not weeks. Claimed membership in MENSA, used dead family members’ credit cards for years after their departures. I could not tell you what his job was, or whether he ever did it. Lived, naturally and appropriately, in Memphis for most of his life.
That uncle dressed just so: Pressed slacks, cartoonish Weejun loafers, sweaters over collared shirts. That’s the thing I remember most about him. I have other uncles, uncles I’m pretty sure were racist, or at least so misanthropic racism had to be a natural subset of their general hatred of every other living person; uncles of the "gleeful fireworks and custom car horns" variety, who squandered every cent they ever owned and suffered real tree-climbing injuries as adults; respectable uncles with professional degrees, the ones who gave you books both because they were kind and maybe also because they were scared of you sliding a couple of class rungs down should you not test well.
This uncle, though, always came clean, even when he himself wasn’t. It was always wild to hear what I heard about him, and then see the person in front of me, because nothing lined up until he started talking, and even a poorly tuned child’s radar for scammers started picking up a whole screen of obvious shennanigannery. If you’ve had this uncle, then you might have shuddered a little when Baby said he was going out for Funyuns, because you knew his ass wasn’t coming back, with or without a bag of snacks.
And maybe it’s because I had this uncle, or maybe it’s just because Walton Goggins is so good in his role (maybe also had himself an Uncle Baby Billy or two). But The Righteous Gemstones, in addition to being the funniest show on television and a genius-level work of depraved human profanity, understands most what a show people put on simply by the act of getting dressed and opening their mouths. Baby Billy comes to his abandoned adult son’s house dressed like he’s ready to lead Bible study, and drives a turn of the millennium BMW Z3 because he so badly needs to be considered respectable, both for the future con of it all, but also for his own psychological structural integrity.
All Baby Billy has is looking good, which is why giving up his tanned and unbroken nose to Harmon for a punch decades in the making actually matters, a little. It’s not only all he cares about most of the time. Most of the time, it’s all that keeps him in one piece.
Flex judiciously. The show occasionally just decides to spring a badass action sequence on the audience, simply because it wants to, and because it can. There’s a dirt bike chase scene at the end of episode eight that is legitimately thrilling in both execution and in actual stakes for the characters involved. It also involves a cattle prod, more accent neon, and submachine guns. Edit: This show is also occasionally hijacked by very smart film school kids with the souls of fifteen year olds who’ve watched exactly the correct amount of trash-brilliant action movies. (Never has a "directed by Jody Hill" been more superfluous than at the close of the second-season finale.) It’s a dangerous balance to maintain, but when you need someone who can determine the exact correct amount of “tasing someone in the ass” in a television show, this is precisely the crew you want running things.
Church Lunch tells you almost everything you need to know about a person. I am overjoyed at the entire concept of Jason’s Steakhouse, the postgame meeting at the Sunday buffet the Gemstones inevitably attend at least three or four times a season. It’s 99% accurate, and only misses out on a perfect hundred percent due to not showing the Gemstones’ undoubtedly miserly tip on the bill. (Fifteen percent at absolute max, only if they kept the rolls and butter coming, and not a single penny over, and y'all know there's no way the manager has the guts or gumption to impose a flat gratuity even on a twelve-top of grown adults who frequently throw their food.)
The private room upstairs is honestly the biggest lifestyle flex of all. I need to eat brunch at Jason’s Steakhouse, or at least I want to, until I remember it’s undoubtedly an overpriced brunch hellscape with a 90-minute wait thanks to the post-church crowd. (And the Gemstones taking up an entire goddamn room with a table for twelve.)
I’m just glad that Keefe and BJ both get to sit at the big table now. Nothing is more representative of either becoming hearthstone members of the family than getting their spot at Jason’s. Now they will get a chance to do what everyone else in the family does there: Engage in barely concealed emotional combat over stuffed French toast.
P.S. Don’t try to go to Jason’s Steakhouse. It’s a former Liberty Taproom now functioning as an event space. Ironically enough, this now means people can rent it out for things like church services.
Compassion is fundamental. Somehow, after all that tazing in the ass and dialogue including the words “played-out mother pussy,” The Righteous Gemstones is a show with a deep love and sympathy for its boundlessly fucked-up characters.
Mind you, that compassion does not make any of them smarter people. With the exceptions of Martin, Eli, and Amber, they’re all still fools, albeit with at least some potential to grow and learn, or at least to change into someone new and capable of making exciting new types of huge, life-altering mistakes. Jesse, the loudest moron from a proud tribe of same, finally gets his family a win in the form of their own beachfront resort. (After almost getting them all killed, sure, but let’s focus on the all-inclusive results here.) Judy, the wildest fool, actually develops a tiny bit of outraged affection when she takes in her Aunt Tiffany. Keefe and Kelvin end the season by making what will obviously be another huge, but this time markedly different mistake. It’s not all learning.
But: If season one ended on a note of forgiveness towards one's enemies, the ultimate forgiveness the Gemstones had for each other specifically kept them alive and together this time around. That’s not cuddly or woo-woo forgiveness: That is talking about forgiveness as an evolutionary adaptation, something holding identities and people together so they can thrive in tough times.
The Lissons execute the funniest Young Guns tribute ever filmed before their bloody end because, in the end, they pushed away their elders and held grudges against their peers and parents. (John Amos, here popping up like Macaulay Culkin simply because they could do it, has a short but spectacularly ornery nursing home cameo as Daddy Lisson.)
The Gemstones survive because the pack stays together, and the finale even pays tribute to those they might forgive, but not forget. The montage here is spectacular in its own right, opening with Danny McBride cutting the greatest single imitation Conway Twitty silhouette I have ever seen, and closing with the sound of wolf snarls. It is surreal, violent, and tender.
It’s not my favorite moment in the finale, though. My favorite moment is back in Memphis, with Junior (a delightfully scuzzy Eric Roberts, Memphis as HELL) and Eli admiring the new bleachers at Junior’s expanded wrestling arena, and taking in the prominent portrait of Junior’s daddy hanging up in the facility. Eli wonders why he has it up there, and Junior talks about how he helped build the place, didn’t he? Might as well pay some respects to him. Eli smiles, and looks for a moment at a picture of himself as a young man, and that’s it.
Except, thinking about it later, it isn’t. Eli is so many things in that moment, something John Goodman carries off with stunning grace. He’s a man finally at peace with his past and his present. He’s someone who yet again ultimately made a friend out of a potential enemy, and even helped him profit in the end. (That tends to happen, you'll notice, to people who manage to stick it out with Eli.)
Eli in that scene is someone who has met the devil in himself, and not only acknowledged him, but used him to do some of his holiest work: protecting his family. Near the close of the hour, Eli says he's letting God decide what to do with the Lissons. God happens to get a phone call from Martin, who in turn lets the orphan ranch biker ninjas and a pack of handy Alaskan wolves decide what to do with the family that couldn’t stick together.
