From my FB page. Today's musing minute

 Today’s musing minute

*SPOILER ALERT*, IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE TV SERIES “YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS” OR ARE CURRENTLY WATCHING IT, WATCH THE WHOLE OF IT BEFORE READING THIS IF YOU WANT TO AVOID THE SPOILER.

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Clearly, art is often a vehicle for social philosophy, even propaganda. The extent to which a work appeals to its viewers depends very much on the conscious and unconscious values that they hold dear, that they relate to, that motivate and energize them in their imagination of a better world.

I found the series interesting, engaging, sometimes amusing and frustrating. Interesting because it is full of beautiful talented actors doing their thing against a backdrop of a beautiful affluent neighborhood. Engaging, because the situations are sometimes cleverly ironic, also sometimes sad, in an exaggerated but familiar way. But, also, very frustrating, because of the constant, but unmissable, sub-text of social criticism and perverse moral judgement resonant with the “social justice” credo pervasive within the chattering class of our current society.

The story is rather simple. Andrew Cooper (Coop), [John Hamm], is a regular hard-working ambitious American guy who makes good, better than he could have imagined, and gets to live the “good life” in a fabulously affluent suburb, with his glamorous wife and two slightly troubled kids. Except that the “good life” turns out to be not so good, full of stress and spite and trivialities, which Coop only comes to realize after suddenly losing his job as a superstar hedge fund manager, having earlier lost his marriage and become estranged from his kids. The series is about how he tries to cope with the new calamitous world in which he finds himself. Now, suddenly in his life, everything is dark.

I will leave those details to the show. A driving theme, emphasized by Coop’s recurring eloquent third-person narrative to the viewing audience, is the revelatory value of what has happened to him. As a consequence of these unnecessary losses (a result of misallocating his time and energy by pursuing misguided ambition for material and status-achieving goals) his eyes are opened by degrees to the hitherto hidden reality of his pathetic existence as a “rich person”.

In his new reality staring poverty and deprivation in the face, he begins to realize the offensive nature of his friends’ lives, particularly their penchant for acquiring useless mega-expensive stuff, which they never use, and sometimes don’t even remember they have. Zero-sum thinking is seductively present throughout this. I could almost here the script writer thinking: “they have all this stuff while so many good folk are struggling and starving. Its unjust, isn’t it?” One could almost hear the “social justice warriors” cheering.

So, as if motivated by this, Coop decides, since they don’t need all this useless treasure (watches, paintings, jewelry, … ) he might as well steal them, and fence them for a fraction of their market value, in order to bridge the financial gap in his fractured life until he can figure out something else. Coop the narrator suggests he should have known better, but not because it was after all, theft, and clearly and blatantly immoral, but because the system is rigged atainst him.

He gets greedy and finds his circumstances getting more and more entangled, ultimately facing a charge for a murder he did not commit. In a scene near the end of the final season’s episode, he confronts the person who has framed him for the murder, and asks her why she was prepared to sacrifice his life for her purposes. To which she illuminatingly replies, “because you don’t deserve that life!” in contrast to herself who worked up from the bottom and sacrificed more than he did to get it. And, strange to tell, Coop admits he basically agrees with her – his illuminated conscience speaking aloud.

I saw many aspects of an upside down morality. One of particular interest was the common misconception of the nature of “value” – what it means, what it is. So, when Coop makes contact with a tough, no nonsense inner city woman (who somehow seems to be Jewish) who is an expert fence for stolen goods, she lectures him about not understanding the value of real concrete physical things as against the (imaginary?) value of the pieces of paper he is used to pushing around in his hedge fund job. She is saying to him, you have left the imaginary world of parasites on Wall Street and now find yourself in the scary real world of objective merchandise.

So, when suddenly, things turn back around, and Coop is offered his old job back plus more, and is in a position to return to the $100K membership country club, and all the other good things, he strings things along before dramatically deciding to turn his back on this cesspool of richness and return to the honest, decent, socially just job of burglarizing his neighbors. Are the viewers supposed to applaud his clarity, his courage? Am I being cynical and uncharitable? You can decide.

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