American Crime Makes Us Confront How We Judge Other People

[BlueMTexpat]

http://www.vulture.com/2016/03/american-crime-makes-us-confront-how-we-judge-other-people.html

The second season showed how an athletic scandal at a private school tore apart its immediate community and inflicted collateral damage on a nearby public school. It wrapped up with a long, almost silent scene of a tormented and self-destructive gay basketball player standing on a road contemplating whether to advance toward a vehicle he’d just flagged down. It ended without definitively establishing who leaked the medical records of Taylor’s mother Anne. Taylor is asked to stand up in court and say how he pleads, but the show cuts away before we can hear his answer. And we all had to decide to be all right with this not-knowing, and decide not to resent the show as it gradually worked its way through ten densely plotted episodes, taking every opportunity to pull the sympathy rug out from under us.

TV has evolved a lot in the last 20 years, but it’s still rare to see a commercial network show as rigorously conceived and executed as this one. There’s a temptation to read TV series through an auteurist lens just because a showrunner has a big personality, even when the program is nothing to crow about in terms of picture, sound, and overall aesthetic. That’s not the case here. Ridley, whose screenwriting credits include U-Turn and 12 Years a Slave, has thought about how every cinematic choice expresses and fortifies what he’s trying to explore.
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The filmmaking fits perfectly with the show’s belief that the only absolute truth is whatever we happen to feel in the moment—and that we construct our own version of “objective reality” depending on our upbringing, our agenda, and our pathologies, and rarely allow anyone else to truly penetrate or challenge our perceptions. There is a sense in which both seasons of American Crime are about how tribes perpetuate their existences: by defending certain members and disciplining or expelling others. (A lot of characters got offered monetary settlements or severance packages in exchange for not making waves anymore.) But after a certain point even that interpretation breaks down, because the definition of “tribe” is so flexible. The private school and the public school are tribes, and so is the basketball team, and so is every family on the show. And there are times when characters express allegiance based not on bloodline, geographical proximity or professional affiliation, but on principle—like Sebastian, the vigilante hacker who decides to help Anne and Taylor by releasing unflattering emails from administrators and board members at Taylor’s school.

This was a thoroughly engrossing season, with societal insights and outstanding performances all round.

[BlueMTexpat]

1. Just realized that I posted this by

mistake in the HRC Group.

My fingers took on a life of their own. I meant to post it in GD. Anyway, sorry about the inadvertent mispost. If you want me to delete it, I will.