As season 5 of Showtime’s testosterone-fueled paean to the word man and the fucked up nature of the entertainment industry comes to an end this Sunday, I need to talk about something. Many people have come to dismiss this show as simpleminded and at times annoying, a one-trick pony who’s done the trick a few times too many to make it interesting anymore.
My wife regularly rants about how she wants to see a woman once, just once, say no to Hank Moody and, though that has happened a bit more this season – in fact he’s probably gotten less ass this season than any of the previous – she still rolls her eyes every time a woman goes from despising him to riding him like a cowgirl after a few sardonic quips and some slow-talking innuendo. This season has done a good job at finally giving Hank a good deal of comeuppance and the whole idea of contrasting the classic literary word man against the nouveau-riche hip hop and movie world while he gets fired, dumped, and threatened with murder over and over again is just fucking great.
But as I watched this season, paying attention to the words, the actions, the type of writer he is, the thing that I finally realized about Hank Moody and even more the lesson from this show harkens back to one of the literary greats of the 20th century, Henry Miller.
I mentioned good old Henry Miller’s seminal work TROPIC OF CANCER in my rundown of books every man should read and most lit professors, writers, and postmodern readers would agree on its importance as well as on its unrivaled prose and its daring “new” take on story and sexuality (even now, coming up on a century after Miller first published it the book would be considered risqué, probably be protested by not a few conservative caucuses, and a new campaign to ban it might even appear). But central to it is Henry, a man who walks around with the assurance and pride of one much greater than he. Henry constantly talks about people meeting him and somehow discerning he’s a writer, even if at the time he’d written hardly more than a few pages on recycled parchment. Women find themselves drawn to him even though he has a lousy job that hardly keeps his first wife and kid in clothes and food, much less his second and when he moves to Paris, as detailed in TROPIC OF CANCER, he lives on floors, feeds on scraps, and still as a homeless beggar gets tail. Often the woman is the aggressor and often he feels guilty afterwards, lamenting the lost love he had, not only because he left her behind for these increasingly empty sexual conquests – his language makes sex into a physical thing, often ugly, at times sublime but mostly pathetic and petty – but also because there had been a time when she had been just as idealistic and adventurous as he and now that woman she’d been when they first met is gone.
Now CALIFORNICATION. Hank is short for Henry so his real name is Henry Moody – of course the initials are a pretty obvious giveaway. So too is the description of his books as sexually explicit, raw, but interspersed with amazing, “pretentious” says the rapper Samurai Apocalypse in season 5, prose. So too is his seeming inability to keep women off him and, at the same time, once they’re on him his seeming inability to control himself in spite of the pain and suffering these meaningless trysts play on himself and his family. Hank is diagnosed as having a sex addiction, his agent the schlubby Runkle as having a much less fulfilled one, but the sex that people decry as shameless and gimmicky, simply to keep people watching, is shown as the affliction of the sex addict. When people watch a man party so hard he loses his family they never go “God, why can’t he just put down the bottle” because they know the point of the story is that he’s an alcoholic. Yet they can’t feel this for Hank because sex is so damn natural and fun. It looks much nicer than a man passed out in a puddle of his vomit in doorway on Las Palmas. But the simple fact is that Hank’s sex addiction has ruined his marriage, ruined his ability to be a good father, and even to a certain extent ruined his writing. They would’ve called Henry Miller a sex addict if that word even existed back then.
So CALIFORNICATION is the reincarnation of Henry Miller as a playboy living just down the coast from where he settled in Big Sur and as such takes Miller’s conquests, and laments, and his addiction, and introduces them to a new generation without the wherewithal to read or the knowledge of the existence of Henry Miller’s great books TROPIC OF CANCER, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN, the ROSY CRUCIFIXION TRILOGY, and so on. In that way is it historic.
But from another direction, it’s historical in literature because it’s a premium cable TV show about a novelist. And not some murder mystery writer (MURDER SHE WROTE) or detective/cop novelist (CASTLE) but a swaggering literary writer, the last of the real poets, displaced in a city where the novel is something that only has value if it can be adapted to screenplay, which most literary novels cannot. He isn’t a detective dressed up as a word man but a word man dressed up – well, as a word man. He doesn’t have any special powers of intuition. He’s just very flawed and tragic and he lives a life which appears to be every man’s dream on the surface but, upon deeper penetration, you see how truly miserable and self-loathing he is. A literary lothario who would sacrifice everything for the word but in the end really sacrifices it for the demon inside a free and liberated artist.
Henry Miller, meet Hank Moody. Like looking in a goddamn mirror.
So tune in this Sunday, 4/1 @ 9 on Showtime. Watch season 5's finale and think, Jesus, would this happen to the postmodern world's great founding father of surrealist free association and sexual liberation had he been born 60 years later? I think so and, doing you one more, think that would've been one helluva book.
- Ryan
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