Top Of The Lake

 

There I was, the other day, struck by the thought that I hadn’t had Elisabeth Moss’s face in front of me on a big screen in a long time.  Mad Men was ages ago, and we are a while off another season of Handmaid’s Tale, though the memory of the excellence of series three is still a tingling sensation.  With recent government curbs on demonstration and their response to violence against women, we are another step closer to Gilead anyway, so we’ll all be blessing the fruit in no time.  Under his eye, indeed.  This brought me to click on Top Of The Lake on Netflix, a Moss-fronted drama that aired on the BBC back in 2013.  It looked rainy and gritty, promising some crimes perpetrated against a backdrop of luscious scenery and I felt safe in the knowledge I would have a strong performance from such a gifted actor in the lead role.

The first series is set in New Zealand, which is something I had somehow missed.  This isn’t Yorkshire (I was imagining Happy Valley vibes) but Lake Wakatipu at the bottom of South Island.  You can imagine my surprise, then, when Moss whips out a Kiwi accent.  It sounds decent to me, but from my perspective on the other side of the world, I realise I have no credibility to judge.  Moss plays Robin Griffin, returning to her home community from Sydney (which nicely covers an irregular vowel sounds anyway).  She’s in the police, sort of coming and going in a role to do with sexual assaults.  It’s hard to be sure if she’s on a working trip or not.  Her mum is unwell, but she almost ignores her to re-tread the paths of her own traumatic youth there, making it clear that she left for a very firm reason.  In a bit of a busman’s holiday, a local girl goes missing, and there are many suspicions of foul play, so Moss is in her element as the strong female and only capable police officer, dealing with an avalanche of male incompetence and insouciance as she tries to right the wrongs in her own community.

Before long, every character is a suspect, and this is because everyone is awful.  Unlikeable characters loom as large throughout as the spectacular scenery, but we are drawn in as Moss dashes in the drizzle from riddle to riddle.  There’s even a strange women’s commune set up beside the lake in shipping containers, riling some of the local populace but mostly sitting about drinking tea.  The climax gripped me with not only its gruesomeness, but its plausibility among a group of lakeside settlements who treat the most vulnerable in their society as expendable commodities.

Come 2017, the standalone conclusion is overturned as a second season appears.  The action has moved to Sydney, so our only point of continuity is Robin Griffin herself.  Still carrying the (additional) trauma of her previous lake-based experience, she now has new vulnerable girls to protect.  There are the South East Asian young women working in the licensed sex industry, branching out into further ways of selling their bodies.  There’s also the now-teenage daughter that Robin had given up for adoption.  She’s mixed up in these brothels, it turns out, rebelling against her adoptive parents (including a Nicole Kidman with little to do but have distracting hair) by pursuing a relationship with a vile German man who specialises in looking after stray cats better than he treats his sex workers.

Being strange throughout, Game Of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie is our cop partner, clashing with Robin in various ways, while we sort of wobble through a sequence of events to our climax.  The unlikability of everyone far exceeds series one’s motley crew of characters, and this made it a bit of a slog to get through.  Everything was gross, but not quite grotesque enough to be a reason to be compelled.  I stuck with it for the sake of dear Elisabeth, covering for patchier performances.  On many an evening, clicking next episode felt like more of a duty than a treat, especially in a world of so much else to watch (bonjour, Lupin).

While this might not sound like the strongest recommendation, Top Of The Lake is still important viewing.  As a slagger-off of TV despite never having produced any, I should confess I am deep in the Introduction To Screenwriting term of a part-time Creative Writing MA I am doing.  I think we can all agree the quality of my prose needs professional help.  I also have a new-found respect for anyone who writes anything on telly.  A fellow course-member (on Teams of course – I have never met these people) pointed out to us that Top Of The Lake is a great example of a female story structure.  I think this is part of feminist literary theory, but our hero’s treatment within the show follows a different arc to what we see in the hegemonic male stories of our culture.  This is all a bit academic so let’s focus on the easy bits.  This is a strong female character, leading storylines that make us question how women are viewed and treated by our societies.  It’s not pretty, but it’s more relevant than ever.

Motherland

I’ve been doing some parenting recently.  Well, I held a friend’s baby for about half an hour while she had a crème brûlée (the mum, not the three-month-old).  Despite not having procreated, I was fairly confident I could keep the young lad content with my impressive jiggling skills, honed over a decade ago when I was a quaternary caregiver to my niece.  A couple of times however, I could sense his bottom lip quiver, his copious cheeky cheeks redden and his little face screw up in unhappiness, prompting me to adopt a new position to distract him from any number of distress sources: hunger, overheating, a soiled gusset, boredom with the view.  When the moment came, I was fairly satisfied to be handing him back over, even if the girls had commented that his 6.5kg of weight had leant my biceps an alluring bulge.  If I factor up the duration of that brief stint of (quite literally) baby sitting to a week, I have to multiply its difficulty by 336, and if we go all the way to the eighteenth birthday at which point I assume you turf your progeny out into the street and cut them off from the family fortune, that’s a total of 314,496 units of parenting.  In short: child-rearing is hard.  And as the owner of a phallus, I’ve got the easy end of the stick, as it were.  Motherhood is hardest of all.  Here, then, is the hilarious truth that forms the comedic backbone to BBC sitcom, Motherland, whose achievements we will be celebrating today.

Too millennial ever to be aware of what’s scheduled on the actual TV, I was only vaguely conscious of Motherland’s two series when they first went out, catching glimpses whenever the real telly came when switching from Netflix to Amazon Prime.  I knew one of its creators was Sharon Horgan, who had co-created Catastrophe, and again, following my nose in working out why people on podcasts like a thing, I finally plumped to dive in after spotting Motherland’s first series appear on Netflix, before eventually tracking down the second on iPlayer.  I was craving the wit and cynicism of British humour after having so many glossy American boxsets in recent rotation: Power, Watchmen and, er, Love Island USA.  The situation is suburban London and the comedy is balancing childcare, a career, a relationship, and, worst of all, other mums, so let’s meet the mothers of this land:

Julia

The master of the fake smile, Julia covers up each episode’s mounting shower of disasters with a suitably correlating uptick in false cheerfulness, effectively using effusive exclamations to paper over cracks in her best-laid plans until she ultimately breaks down in ranting and raving.  We cross our fingers and toes that she will catch a break, but she’s ever thwarted by each element of what should be her support structure: her husband would help but he has to play golf with the lads, her mother would help but she’s entitled to enjoy her retirement, the other mums would help but they’re busy forming a sort of mummy Mean Girls (mean mums?) at the local café, consigning Julia to the table by the toilets.  A career in PR only makes matters worse, as it does most things, but it’s the people Julia meets at that lavatory-adjacent table who finally offer help.

Liz

The queen of laid-back parenting, Liz has had to develop more extreme coping strategies as a single mum.  Her seemingly thick skin places her well to encourage Julia to be less anxious, though Liz does herself later struggle with pushchair extraction when her youngest finally abandons her for nursery.  Life’s too short not to cut corners, and that time saved is better spent having a cheeky drink anyway.

Kevin

Yes, it’s a man, but Kevin is perhaps the mumsiest of all.  Contrasting with Liz’s workaround and make-do methods, Kevin is not happy unless he is out-parenting left, right and centre.  Desperate for the approval of the other mums, he volunteers for every PTA gig going, yet fails to find the acceptance he yearns for.  Mostly seen in a cagoule, his highlights are his throwaway lines about never-seen wife Gill as it’s clear to everyone but him that his approach to parenting makes her skin crawl.  Yes, Kevin is cloying, but his heart’s in the right place, and his very inclusion provides a spirited commentary on gender roles for those that are looking to find one.  Otherwise he’s a silly sausage in a bicycle helmet.

Amanda (not Mandy)

With her expensively coiffured blonde hair and yoga-taught frame, Amanda is the alpha-mummy whose every utterance either allows her to show off (less of the humble, more of the brag) or serves as a backhander to put down the other mums around her.  For some reason, I love her.

Anne

My favourite mum.  She begins as one of many flunkies to Amanda’s act as chief mum, but soon accumulates enough scene-stealing lines to guarantee belly laughs so loud that you can only hope you’re giving your neighbours a taste of their own medicine for all those lockdown reggaeton parties you’ve endured.  She’s a cautious parent, convinced all adults are out to molest or poison her offspring, which makes trick or treating challenging.  Her wardrobe malfunction at a swimming pool party and her poor management of her own IBS during a weekend away in half term both endear her further to me.

The second series also sees the introduction of Meg, a hard-partying, hard-working mum who hasn’t got time for any of your nonsense, unless it involves being abusive on night buses.  I can’t work out what they’ve been trying to do with her beyond address a lack of diversity but it’s great to have her along.  Let’s say she is wonderfully complex.

On the other hand, the kids rarely merit any significant characterisation and this is, again, because they don’t really matter.  The humour is brittle and acidic when it comes to deploring the role of modern working mums, running households, keeping everyone happy, sacrificing their interests and yet still being expected to knock up a harvest festival costume at a moment’s notice.  They’ve been told they can have it all, but yet somehow it feels like having nothing.  The swimming pool party episode illustrates this perfectly when Julia, hair done and posh outfit selected for a career-important work do, is strong-armed into in-pool supervision that leaves her showing up later at her function as drowned as a rat.  We laugh because it’s true, but as I recovered from each chortle, I had to check my childless male privilege lest I feel hopeless about a status quo whose imbalance looms large in daily lives.  Motherland’s comedy comes from its universal truth, but I’m sure we could find something else to laugh about if gender inequality no longer existed.

Game Of Thrones (Season Two)

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Still reeling from the execution of beloved Ned Stark, nothing delayed me in adding the second sequence of Game Of Thrones to my old Lovefilm list.  As one of the show’s only fans in those distant days, I had little competition for the DVD discs which soon appeared in the post for immediate viewing.  That said, the picture quality of DVDs is now tantamount to watching content through a butter-smeared cataract, so I’m surprised I was able to make out anything.  Now no longer shameful of its fantasy origins, with no apologies necessary for things like zombies and dragons, the second series offers an emboldened portrayal of Westeros, enriched by all the layers of storytelling its previous instalments had laid down.  I would quantify the action as aplenty, yet the dialogue scenes still sparkle with political tussling, knowing wit and rich imagery.  Some battles are only alluded to, due to their production cost (such as a Robb Stark ambush on the Lannisters) but this clearly allowed them to save enough budget to enact a naval battle in the series’ penultimate instalment, Blackwater.  So it’s swings and roundabouts, slash, creative editing and wildfire.

But I’m not cussing the production for being efficient, not least because all our scenes north of the Wall seem to be filmed in real snow.  No film or TV show ever has nailed realistic-looking fake snow, so the Night’s Watch in their almost entirety are shipped off to some godforsaken winter wonderland, not for a skiing break but to traipse through snowdrifts in their big black cloaks whilst in pursuit of Mance Rayder.  It’s a visual joy worth every penny and for which I am happy to sacrifice any other battles in this series.  And like all our theatres of action in this season, things get dark.  While those who have taken the black come face to face with the awful Craster and an army of the undead (and nobody can decide which one is worse) grim and ghoulish characters dominate scenes throughout each storyline.  From the blue-stained mouth of Pyat Pree in Qarth to basically anyone in the Iron Islands (though Yara Greyjoy turns out to be a babe), the baddies outnumber the goodies.  Even solid Lannister-alternative Stannis is joyless and potentially a bit evil, while darling Joffrey plumbs new depths of depravity yet still channels American daytime soap-operatic expressions to great effect.  Hating him more than anything unites us on the side of Sansa in the coming battles.

And indeed, that is the main thrust of this second series – the worsening of the war.  The Tyrells switch sides, Dorne is brought to heal, massacres run in the Riverlands and wildlings prepare for invasion.  As a result, the violence multiplies and grows more extreme, and it’s made clear it’s the smallfolk who suffer at the hands of the powerful in their petty squabbles.  Nowhere is this easier to see than at the doomed holdfast of Harrenhal.  I remember finding the tension here unbearable on my first viewing.  When the daily selection of torture victims threatens to end Gendry’s journey through a hot rat to the stomach (really) I almost lost my mind.  Furthermore, Tywin Lannister’s selection of Arya Stark as his cupbearer leads to an oblivious truce so paper-thin that you’re screaming at the TV each time the youngest daughter of Ned nearly opens up Tywin’s neck with her mutton knife.

Nevertheless, there is also greater confidence with LOLs, as humour creeps through even against the bleakest backdrops.  Ygritte’s goading of Jon Snow (for knowing nothing) draws a wry smile in the Arctic tundra, while some of Samwell Tarly’s comedic potential is slowly revealed.  There’s even space for dark humour, with the slightly slapstick approach to Jaqen H’ghar’s assassinations on behalf of new bestie, Arya.  Indeed, offsetting this lighter touch is a heck tonne of foreshadowing as well.  Reviewing these earlier series with the benefit of having seen everything, certain lines make more sense, certain expressions are more significant and certain background observations feel strangely pivotal.  But the expansion of the Game Of Thrones universe satiates our yearning for more of what we love.  Everything is spiralling out of control and starting to go very wrong (especially for the Starks) so the only response is a desperate need to return for more series to find out what happens next and to answer the ever more unanswerable question about how this can ever be resolved.

Best newcomer

Podrick Payne is who I’m going to single out of the many new faces to grace Westeros.  While he at first simply makes up the numbers in his initial scenes, he later becomes a source of great humour.  But it is his prowess in the Battle of Blackwater that marks him a true hero, most particularly as he saves Tyrion Lannister from his sister’s sketchy third-party attempt on his life, ensuring one of our most beloved characters makes it through to the end.  We also learn in season three about his massive willy, so it’s important that this too is acknowledged.

Most valuable character

I would like to make a big fuss here of Osha, as her achievements are wrongfully unsung.  While she enters the fray as a sinister Wildling, her loyalty to House Stark soon grows strong.  Determined to save Bran and Rickon from Iron Islander clutches, she takes one for the team by seducing Theon Greyjoy and offing a number of his guards.  With Bran’s survival pivotal to so many of the subsequent series (with many a great character meeting a grisly end while he just daydreams sitting down) it’s thanks to Osha that he survives this moment and lives on to warg another day.

Best death

Picking up where the first season left off, this sophomore series doesn’t hold back with the dispatching, so there was a wealth of offing to choose from.  I’ve gone with the dual ends of Xaro Xhoan Daxos and Doreah in Daxos’s own vault deep in Qarth.  Sealed in while still alive by Daenerys as punishment for betraying her and stealing her dragons, this first glimpse into her vengeful spirit is not only terrifying in and of itself, but being locked in a dark room until you die feels like a dreadful way to go, and the whimpers of Doreah as her fate is sealed (geddit?) still haunt me to this day.

Jaw-dropper moment

Meeting Melisandre is traumatic for all of us, not least because she talks only in the mantras of her Lord of Light religion, constantly gets her boobs out and pulls some wonderfully patronising facial expressions.  She likes setting fire to things (and people).  But, as she ascends in the camp of Stannis Baratheon’s claim to the Iron Throne, she makes sure to do away with any doubters by using the dark magic for which we love her.  While I could mention the smoke baby that ends Renly’s campaign after emerging from twixt her legs, it’s the poison goblet switcharoo she does with Maester Cressen which is both believable and terrifying enough to make it clear that this is a woman who can’t be trifled with (and is dark and full of terrors).