This new Netflix series has an interesting premise that speaks to countless fragmented and dysfunctional American families. But...xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

After beginning with some promise, after only 3-episodes, this series goes terribly wrong: first with a fourth episode that seems to come out of nowhere, totally disrupting the emotional tenor of the previous episodes and whose purpose seems only to extend the first season an extra episode as well as to establish some themes that might allow the show to be post-produced into something more than a single season mystery; and second, both the deficiency of the actors themselves (who barely rose to the modicum of complexity that any of their characters contained in these initial episodes) as well as the method used to direct them (and that concerns the use of flashbacks and ambiguity to promote the series's increasingly tenuous core mysteries) becomes intolerable as it rises to the surface as an unavoidable aspect of every scene that makes watching the on-screen character's attempts cringe-inducing.

Casting the Cultural Specificity of the American Family

Beyond all of the easy criticisms of the acting that occurs in this series, the interesting issue that the casting raises is the problem of portraying the ordinary sort of American family at the center of this series. They are a fairly wealthy family, one who apparently built their own fortune in the Florida Keys and who now own an entire bay containing a tourist attraction of a coral reef and an old, historic bed and breakfast on the beach. The family is, as we see, a central pillar of respectability in the community, and the dedication of a dock in the community to the Rayburn family is what the series opens with. And to some extent, we might even say that the hodgepodge casting effort does some justice to characterizing this type of family, because there is certainly something irritating about them, as they all seem to share some main characteristics and idiosyncrasies bordering on pathology. Many families in the United States, and certainly in Florida have this (Southern entitled) old-money mythology about themselves as being somehow historically significant. Each has a family member dedicated to tracing the family's heritage, building the family tree and establishing its pedigree; then there is the constant talk amongst the middle-class family of 'the family' itself as an entity and the whole host of bothersome manifestations of its affirmation both within the family and without. For instance, outside the family and among the community, there are those that work for 'the family' and who the family treats with faux-kindness but who are really just hourly paid servants; then there are the 'lower classes' among the community who pay exaggerated respect to the family and to whom 'the family' itself represents itself as something more than nothing whenever something is going wrong, or otherwise, so as to solicit empathy or subservience and to constantly reassert the integrity and existence of 'the family' as coherent political and economic unit (e.g., 'its a family issue'). All of this works towards producing 'the family' itself as a cultural, socially and economically significant actor in American life that anyone who has any experience with these people, will no doubt instantly recognize; in fact, without this kind of performance, these families probably think they would cease to exist at all, which is precisely what makes them so typically American. These narratives also align with a particularly conservative American political ideology: that of the hard-working individual who has earned their place in society through their own efforts to accumulate wealth and construct a life for themselves and their children and, less often, other close relatives (although probably not, as competing with these 'members', whose membership is always negotiated and in question, is also a central theme in these 'families' lives). So, despite that the series may also focus on constructing some kind of elaborate family mystery around these people, the fact is also that, as a whole, the portrayal of this sort of American family in this uncontested way itself becomes an unavoidable political statement that, even over the course of a single episode, becomes quite grating to the point, in the fifth episode, of being laughable, boring, and, without being overly judgmental, pathetic.

As with many American families, the individualism bred of this kind of conservative ideology produces fragmentation in the family in ways that are sometimes difficult to discern. One of the ways in which the series is particularly successful is, at least in the first three episodes, with its portrayal of American brotherhood and the network of relationships within which they are entangled, primarily turning on issues produced by the partial dissemination of information through their fragmented family network: one brother has one conversation which another has with another brother over the phone across the country in California, who then speaks with the father back in Florida about the first brother that sets into motion, about just a single event, a whole sequence of misunderstandings, arguments and problems that result from the lack of presence of the entire family in one location (physically and psychologically), and the inability to form a coherent shared history as a result of it. Bloodline gets this aspect of American family life pretty much accurate, as the brotherhood depicted here seems to many times only to exist through these kinds of problems and the awkwardness created by not deeply sharing a history but somehow still being emotionally bound together so as to be unable or unwilling to abandon one another. This manifests itself in American family-life in the tropes mentioned several times in the series: 'you never give up on family' or 'family always deserves a second chance'—the kind of superficial philosophy required to glue the family together despite itself and whose use reflects precisely the precarious situation these families find themselves in with little but objective facts of genetic relationships and knowledge of a photo album to force their repeated encounters with one another into an assemblage of dysfunction.

Beyond its value for sociological consideration, this kind of asymmetric information distribution within the family is also the source of the core mystery that propels the series along through flashbacks and the constant emergence of new information into the family milieu. While the series is not worth watching beyond the first five (really three) episodes, in these first episodes we see through flashback the dribble of information about a sister who somehow dies and that left its mark on the father and oldest brother particularly, while other younger members only vaguely recollect her or the events surrounding her death. Then there is the flashback that describes the eventual death of the oldest brother, some act of violence of the sister in the trunk of a car; the ambiguity surrounding a war veteran friend of the patriarch as well as an endless list of ambiguities that surround just about every interaction in the film. Which is the problem really: because while the initial idea and insight into American families is good, it is used to support a completely incredible number of hidden issues in the family to the point where not a single moment can occur without some overtone of dishonesty or mystery. And while its probably true that many American families, perhaps even the family of the writer, director or producer (or all) have this level of dysfunction, it strains the concept to the point of caricature, where the emergence of new mystery just becomes something to laugh at in all its naked predictability.

Orchestrating Ambiguity

Unfortunately, it doesn't stop at this caricaturization, but is, rather, even extended into the type of directorial style employed, one that produces a particular, and peculiar form of acting-ambiguity. It is almost like the theme of family fragmentation and information asymmetry was written onto a whiteboard in some conference room and everyone said to themselves: 'this is the stuff gold is made of; how do we make every element of the series reflect it, up to and including the style of direction?' This could have been a quite contemporary decision with, perhaps, a good outcome: other directors, for instance in Scandinavia, have developed a form of directing where actors are each given different versions of the script and story-lines so that the process of discovery of the whole takes place in the moment in which it is filmed. Jesper Gandsladt The Ape (Apan) is one such film. And there is also the Meisner Method where actors are taught to learn their lines through repetition to the point of such familiarity that they become casual and reflexive so that, in the moment of acting, rather than focusing on remembering ones lines and trying to reconstruct their emotional basis, the actor can rather focus exclusively on the other actor present and on their immediate relationship in the moment upon which the emotional key for the scene is constructed.

However, rather than any evaporation of artifice and emergence of a visceral realism, it becomes apparent in many many many scenes in just these first few episodes that actors are simply not in-character or we see their naked attempt to get into character in real-time, awkwardly, right on screen. In the clip below, in the fifth season, at the bar there is a discussion where little brother Kevin is finally allowing the truth about his failed relationship to become public (he had been creating an elaborate performance in which even his to-be ex-wife was participating in perpetuating the fiction of their togetherness) and the supporting actor character Marco Diaz comes with a pitcher of beer to the seemingly private conversation with the sister: he gives the sister a look; she says confusedly 'what?'; the boyfriend says questioningly 'what? Should I leave?', seriously not knowing what he should do at that moment, as he does every time he's seen on camera; to which the sister says, 'what do you mean? This is my man, he can stay here'.

And while one can certainly imagine a scenario where this dialogue reflects the characters thinking itself through well-performed acting, in this case, its abundantly clear that the dialogue is entirely a meta-dialogue that takes place between the real-life actors that is only partially and awkwardly concealed in the actual performance they engage in, which is drinking at a pub and acting silly. So, what we see in this scene, and it is not an anomaly (an entire deconstruction of this series around these moments would probably go to book length), but just people acting drunk in a bar (or actually, probably just drinking in a bar, really) trying to perform the politics and ambiguity of family secrets by openly narrating to themselves a meta-commentary on what they think a mystery should be and how the mystery should best be represented in terms of the family relationships and dynamics¹. This is a lot to calculate in a moment and so its no wonder we are left with little else than the impression of its meta-calculation.

A Contrived, Amateur, Finance-Driven?

The only other thing that can be said about this film is that it appears to be a typically contrived, amateur, finance-driven cinema. In this respect, the faux-cool of the oldest brother (Ben Mendolsohn) and the version of counter-culture he represents is one aspect of this type of film. The ambiguity and invented drama and fear surrounding the veteran friend (Frank Hoyt Taylor) of the patriarch is another, with all of the absolutely laughable dialogue directed at him (the middle brother John says: 'my dad talked about you a lot, made you out to be John Wayne or somethin'...we though you were a badass—that's what we called you, Mr. Badass...'). Together, these casting mis-alignments, while also contributing to the strange awkwardness of the family's reunion in the first episodes, quickly begins to primarily reflect what appears to be nothing rather than an overly contrived film production: pick this person to seem this way, that directing style to make it seem another way; make an intro-sequence that reflects my retirement coastline (perhaps the producers live desperate lives on the beach there) but that also incorporates elements of other successful series (like the equally terrible True Detective). This is what a certain segment of American Finance cinema seems to amount to: the emergence of contrivance funded to the big screen without much real sensitivity to the reality of the characters; or the authenticity of characters that reflect the writers, directors, producers own lack of depth and insight. This is Bloodline, and we're lucky to get anything worthwhile at all out of it. The whole thing is also intentionally, and irritatingly under-exposed.

Footnotes