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The Act
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Grotesque TV
Where Gregg Araki’s TV opus Now Apocalypse flaunts its open-endedness, The Act is a real-life-crime re-creation that, true to the form, begins near its end,
with the signs of a mystery – the home of Dee Dee and her daughter Gypsy Rose
Blanchard, seemingly vacated. Stretching out even this initial bit of
exposition, it takes quite a while to discover the gruesome sight of Dee Dee’s
corpse, murdered in her bed.
During the police investigation and the various
neighbourhood speculations (Chloë Sevigny plays a hard-bitten
role here) that follow on this day in 2015, we begin to flash back to where it
all began: the utterly dependent relation, virtually from the moment of birth,
of a seemingly very ill Gypsy (Joey King) to her intensely caring mother
(Patricia Arquette).
These appearances turn out to be extremely deceptive.
The situation is what one is tempted to call a textbook case of Munchausen
syndrome by proxy, in which Dee Dee convinces everyone around her – as well as,
for a long time, Gypsy herself – that her daughter suffers from an endlessly
compounding set of ailments.
Dee Dee has a set of murky motives for establishing
this set-up, including (as another series of flashbacks shows) her terrible
rapport with her own mother. The “act” part – and the elaborate fraud it
entails – comes at the moment in Gypsy’s development when, although becoming
aware of the truth, she reluctantly agrees to stay in her wheelchair and play
the part of victim.
I evoke the image of a textbook because The Act often gives the impression of
ticking off, one by one, every item in a list of diagnostic symptoms of the
psychopathology it dramatises. The series is based on a BuzzFeed article by Canadian journalist Michelle Dean, who serves
here as co-showrunner with Nick Antosca, and co-writer on 3 of the 8 episodes.
One can easily imagine her initial, engrossing reportage expanded into a book
or a feature film (the Lifetime movie Love
You to Death starring Marcia Gay Harden appeared in January 2019) – but 8
hours of television? Anywhere that the makers can stretch this material, they
stretch it.
Stylistically, it’s a series that goes in for a thick
overlay of stylistic affectation – in its overall look, in the design of
written titles, in colour scheme, in the jagged block-construction of
autonomous sequences. Several of the directors used are also well-known actors:
Adam Arkin for one episode, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre (The Mustang, 2019) for three.
The Act is grimly compelling stuff – so
determinedly sensational (gruesome bodily details – such as the feeding-hole in
Gypsy’s stomach – abound) that, for some viewers, it invites the accusation of
being thoroughly exploitative; while for others (me included), it offers the
guilty pleasure of perversely complicit enjoyment.
But why guilty? (I don’t normally take my pleasures
with guilt.) Because the series plugs into a long tradition of American film
and literature in which lower class “ordinary folk” are projected as the
repository of all things ugly and creepy. Dean and Antosca spare us nothing on
this level – all the way to an excruciating scene of mother and daughter
harshly spotlit on a stage, tunelessly warbling The Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be
There”. And when the character of Nick Godejohn (Calum Worthy), appears – a nerdy
teenager who fills, via Skype, Gypsy’s burgeoning sexual imagination with sadomasochistic
ritual and further dissociative splitting of identity – the achievement of
grand grotesquery is complete.
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