Friday, May 1, 2015

Bates 1-5 Back to the strip club to pick up the next weeping stranger, one supposes.

Bates Motel s1e5        www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/bates-motel/ocean-view-1x5/

Whip-Smart
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 5 | Aired on 04.15.2013

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How does Norma react to being put in jail for killing her rapist, while her husband-son is off losing her virginity? Oh, pretty well. Just kidding, she goes mental on everybody and screams at her adorable [young 30s nice woman] lawyer and screams at her adorable sons and generally wrecks shop all over the place... Until Deputy Shelby manages to "misplace" that crucial carpet evidence for love of her, and the whole case falls apart. That's so great, because Norma and Shelby could be really happy together. Just kidding, he keeps Chinese sex-slaves in his basement.
Or -- as of Norman's sloppy B&E (on A&E) -- in dead Keith Summers's old boat, as it turns out. As Emma explains, you have to think like a sex-slave-haver: You want multiple places to keep your sex-slaves, in case an Ambien zombie teen burglar finds her. Local color note: the sex boat is also [like the motel was] named The Seafairer .. where, yes, they do find Jiao .. growling and clawing at them and occasionally passing out..  It's a fun situation, a real "cool scene," and definitely something that children should try to handle all on their own.  My favorite part was when she bit the shit out of Norman's hand and you're just like, "Welcome to every disease."
Norma sees red when she notices Emma's car outside one of the motel rooms because she assumes they are doing it, just to hurt her feelings. And then she assumes that they're doing it with some cracked-out Chinese chick, which I'm sure she'd find a way to blame on Dylan. And then finally the girl confirms Norman's story with a literal photograph of Deputy Shelby himself.
But what about Dylan? I know, right. I love that kid. So his whole thing is that when the second Norman told him the sordid story about the rape that became a murder, his wheels started turning about how he could kidnap /rescue/ his baby brother and go live somewhere on the titular beach [episode title 'ocean view'] off of his drug-mob money, and they'd never have to worry about Norma's increasingly unhinged ass again. Like, you would not believe how quickly he springs into action on this plan once Norma gets arrested.
And then when Norma kicks Norman out of the car in the middle of nowhere -- which I'm not even mad about, she's just bein' Norma -- Dylan comes and saves him out of nowhere and they go on this brotherly motorcycle ride in their little helmets and their little outfits and they are loving it and it goes on for just long enough that you're done letting it make you cry when it's finished.
Love those boys. You know who else really cares about those boys?
Continuing his trend of being way too into Dylan's family dynamic, merc /mercenary/ partner Ethan -- crier-at-stripclubs, sayer-of-the-word-Bro-like-a-million-awkward-times -- hands Dylan five grand to start his new life as a single father-brother, because there is honor among drug mobsters. The next thing that happens is a random junkie who owes Dylan's boss money walks up to their truck and blows Ethan's sweet little head off. Dylan is down a good / his only friend, which is sad, but on the other hand he's up five Gs and a sick-ass truck, so... Back to the strip club to pick up the next weeping stranger, one supposes.  /this recaplet is ~ on fire  w energy.
But I had to wonder: What would be the ombudsman situation here? Does Dylan even know how to get in touch with their employer? We'll have to wait for next week for the answers to these pressing human resource /right/ issues, because the next thing Dylan decides to do does is track the junkie kid through the streets -- suspenseful and harrowing! -- and eventually run him down.  So the whole "eye for an eye" thing is alive and well in Dylan... Dylan... Um. Dylan, if I'm going to love you this much I'm gonna need a full name. My vote is Texas. /ohh only got that on second reading. FNL! town in friday night lights is dillon, tx./ 
That was a joke. But what is not a joke is: I will miss you, Ethan! I especially liked how you were always crying at strip clubs, and randomly handing strange boys huge sums of money.
Next Week: Norma's dilemma... And probably Dylan will make some very valid points and hand out stellar advice, and everybody will still treat him like he's goddamn Theon Greyjoy /:) / because that's just his lot in life. "I guess I just have one of those faces where only mob heavies and drug dealers could see what a trustworthy guy I am." Which, to be fair.    /he does? I don't know but class ending in twopj style   whew, great style all through blitz of a recaplet.  like, angry.



Want more? The full recap starts right below!


https://web.archive.org/web/20140409024436/http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/bates-motel/ocean-view-1x5/4/
p4
Emma: "But how come?" [we can't go rescue Jiao now]   Norman: "You are not allowed to ask questions. There is no further clarification available at this time. Stop hyperventilating, you have cystic fibrosis."  (What he says is, "You're freaking out all over Italy!" /yes! wondered about that.// but the Google on that just is people wondering why the hell he said that, not what the reference actually is. When in doubt, I usually just say it's a line from The Big Lebowski because odds on it is /ha ha :)/, but given Norman's cineaste tendencies, I'd say that is too recent..)
Emma: "Hey, did your mom actually kill Keith Summers? That guy was the worst! I would actually be really impressed if..." 

Norman: "She most certainly did not. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a date with a bail bondsman."
One thing that has been interesting to track has been Norma's habit -- and increasingly Norman's -- of just outright rejecting consensus reality and substituting her own. In one way it's a crazy person thing to do, but it's also how shit gets done. /y! "What I am saying is." //

when you think about revolutions, about the suffragettes and bloodier ones, the thing that keeps showing up is that in order to change anything, you have to be super weird. You have to exist outside the context to understand the context, but then you also take a giant step toward crazy when you decide to affect that context. I can't think of a person -- or at least an act -- that's been really pivotal in America's social history that wasn't absolutely balls-out crazy: Rosa Parks wasn't having it, Shulamith Firestone wasn't having it. That's the beauty of the breakdown and we have to catch those people /they deserve us catching them/ once they're all burnt up and fall back to earth.

p5
And what's more, people who successfully mediated both worlds -- the internal and the external /hm/ -- seem uniformly left behind even when they contribute greatly: Gloria Steinem, who saved the world and created the one we live in, is barely a footnote to the new bunch. Which is gross, but supports the point:
To create change, you have to be willing to be sacrificed to that change and that's super sad, but it's a closed sum. Martyrs are lunatics, because you would have to beYou never have a place in the Utopia you are creating.  //this is prob smart. but I d n already know this, wh saying, so want-need it more to be actually said.




-

Bates Motel premiere episode twopj / what *is* the oldest story



www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/bates-motel/first-you-dream-then-you-die-1
The Cord of Communion
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 03.18.2013

So the pilot's title [First You Dream, Then You Die] refers to /is the title of a bio of/  Cornell Woolrich, a writer whose life mirrored Norman Bates's in some oddly key ways and whose biographer  has said, "He did in prose what Hitchcock did in film." He was gay, alcoholic, lived on and off with his mother, did well in the movie-option department ..
  By adolescence he was living with his mother in a love-hate relationship that would dominate the rest of his life and provide the emotional wellspring for his claustrophobic tales of paranoia and fear. He sold more than 100 stories and novelettes to the pulps during the 1930s and developed the themes that would forever be associated with his name. Claustrophobia. Entrapment. Paranoia. Menace. Doom. With titles that aptly reflected those themes: Speak to Me of Death, Men Must Die, If I Should Die Before I Wake and You'll Never See Me Again. - See more at: http://sphozy.com/writings/nightmare-world-cornell-woolrich-first-you-dream-then-you-die#sthash.tDT3BvY6.dpuf
.. a man whose work influenced Hitchcock and yet who seemed to himself be a Hitchcock character. In fact Rear Window was based on a story of his which -- layer-violating -- was a remake //Woolrich's story was? ie a retelling?//  of an H.G. Wells short story
I think it's more than a wink at the extensive and multivalent connections between Cornell, Norman, Alfred H (and Anthony P).
This is the world we are looking at, a world that pulls equally from ... all and sundry refilmed-remade-rebooted-retellings. The ultimate postmodern (in the actual sense of the term) spin-out and remix of a story that has proven widely and wildly remixable. Over the past week, I've learned that any review of this show that opens with bitching about iPhones is not going to be worth reading, because it has no idea what it's looking at.  This is not even the first Norman Bates story with iPods, for chrissake. //I guess GVanSant's near shot for shot remake was set in current time?// A thing I can't remember anybody bringing up all week long. But while Gus van Sant was practicing creative restraint //shot for shot// and this is a show is about externalizing the duality of self /wait wh is the contrast there? this is a *story* about that externalizing, right? not just this show. the movie and the GVanS remake as well. ok I guess means while GVanS was restrained, he is still one of many instances of a remaking of this story ~ and I guess the 'and' is that this story is about externalizing the duality of self wh is compelling but still leaves one wondering why so compelling?  bit sloppy loose here syntactically?//, one must wonder:
why is this the story, why are we continually returning to this particular thing to work out our zeitgeisty-artsy obsessions?
When in ten years they develop, I don't know, Smell-O-Vision or four-dimensional timespace dramas or liquid downloadable drinkable movies, there will be a Norman Bates story within the first six months.// :) //  I guarantee it. Do I really need to tell you why?
It's the soup of culture surrounding the oldest story in [human] history and the oldest fear at the heart of humans.
//hmm isn't the oldest story more genesis
not only the bible story ~ creation, naming, man, needs companion woman, innocence > body, shame   fall from paradise /y this is old story, growing up  'for a long time I used to go to bed early' we were children  we could not stay so okay related mother-son  but still first there are the two people the companions not the parent child  but ok dyad  but still takes two before have a (humanly born) child; 
but also in (earlier older) myths Ka ~ mother earth /so okay?/ a snake a beginning /ok born of woman? and eee ouroborus eats itself? / ~ but, Athena from Zeus's head, or Aphrodite fr the ocean, these seem clean, bearable / but maybe what happened in the earlier generation, genesis, the gods who were (always already, for us?) dead when we began telling the myths:   Cronos   who ate whom?
WHAT IS THE OLDEST STORY?  just now in mind oldest profession prostitution, ok so maybe woman as mother has to have had sex, how can male child deal with that? //

Does the mother overtake the son? Does the son overtake the mother?   //hmm no is seeming to me like it is not about who dominates  it is about how to stand it (tolerate, be okay with, not go crazy from) ~  ambivalence.    //change ~ how to leave.  attachment separation loss.//   and I suppose sex in there, less understandable to me (I d n feel v fully into to a ~ three person stage?) - taboo on incest (thinking of parents as sexual) while also you were born of sex.
and yes this seems most apparent troublesome in mother-son {Oedipus} //why?  bcs father-daughter is actually less bizarre ?? ~ it is a man violating ~  as men do ? I don't know.  it's a story we are more used to ?  it's ugly (frightening, hurtful) but not as icky? (mother is too much.)  I don't know: Nicole in Tender is the Night.  without mother-wife (died?), "it just happened, we became lovers" ~ that is a case of father not ~overtly terribly violent.  seems actually ~sorry.  is it less icky?  yes. seems so.  why. easier to get out. ? away from.  ~ you didn't come from out of inside father's body.  < I don't know if that matters. works as a metaphor? for how father does not surround you like mother does./   


Male privilege will tell you that the world is about son overtaking father, becoming father, displacing father -- until he's old enough to become one.
But that's a story with a beginning and middle and end //easier to get out. ?//:
This [mother-son] is a story that surrounds you so much you can't even talk about it.  //right. icky. too much. what is that, being too much?//
You can talk about "legitimate rape" /hm? politician anti-abortion I suppose got flack about this phrase, saying that leg rape rarely results in pregnancy, body shuts down.  wh I can see offensive but how is this related?  bcs wh I am saying? man violence on women is sth horrific that we *can* talk about??//  and birth control rights and bake sexism right into the cake, but //?// you can't talk about it.
Unless you do it like this //as a story, with complicated not un-sympathetic, crazy, hurt, more or less well-meaning people ~ who care about each other?// : Horribly, horrifically, sadly and deliriously.
//delirious - acutely disturbed, restless, w illusions incoherence.








https://web.archive.org/web/20140330223421/http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/bates-motel/first-you-dream-then-you-die-1/15

p15
I wasn't being facetious when I mentioned Gilmore Girls and Grey Gardens and Mildred Pierce //dominating mothers//. You already know the difference between those stories and this one: Everybody's got a mother, but there's a difference between daughters and sons. Put a boy into one of those scenarios //oh. those are all daughters reacting against or trapped and dominated by their mothers//, one of those worlds where femininity reigns and you'll end up -- we're told, over and over -- with a Cornell Woolrich or several Tennessee Williams characters, or a monster like Norman Bates. (Go back far enough and you can see generations of American fathers terrified into violence that this'll turn his kid gay, for instance.)     But it's really just the same old tale:
A mother who couldn't be alone //y//    and   a boy who wasn't ready to learn the difference between being a husband and being a son, when it was time //when is that? when she finds someone else to be not alone with?//. That's not how monsters get made, just wimps.
Mom-rapes * and brutal murders and these horrible people in the town, and apparently pervy manga, are how monsters get made. That and whatever is already going on with Norman that we don't know about yet..
*right. Norman goes to a party, against his mother's wishes: and she gets raped. 
another night he goes over to a girl's and has sex; his mother gets arrested. 
/this was noted in a comment I read, maybe prvslytv recent ep.. 



https://web.archive.org/web/20140330223408/http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/bates-motel/first-you-dream-then-you-die-1/11/

Norma: "Who's gonna book a room in the rape-slash-murder motel? We came here to start over, I'm fucking starting over."
And what about this? Where the hell was Norman?
You know, we came here to start over.  We came here to start over.  I am starting over!
And where the hell were you, Norman? I- I was upstairs.
No, you were not! You were not upstairs.   If you were upstairs, you would have come down, and you would have helped me.  So where were you? I snuck out of my room and went to a party. Mom, I thought I was gonna study with them, but they took me to a party.  I didn't know.   
And then, seeing she's still pissed -- that the rape and the murder, he just witnessed are about to go on his permanent blame record -- he pulls the most manipulative move of the night /int I guess maybe this is manipulative? I don't know. not intentional, but y a rxn to being blamed, guilty, to instead be upset/: He flips out.
"I didn't know -- it hardly matters right now, there's a dead man on the floor, there's a lake of blood, what are we supposed to do, clean this up with paper towels and spray cleaner? I don't think so!"
Holy hell, mother, we're totally screwed! What are we doing? We don't know what we're doing! - Norman? Norman.    - We just don't know - what we're doing! - Okay.  Calm down.  It's gonna be okay.  It's gonna be okay.  It's okay.  Look, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be okay.
Here's what we're gonna do, okay, we're gonna take all the bed linens from every motel room, and we're gonna use it to soak this all up.   We're gonna wrap the body in one of the comforters, and we'll put it in a- in one of the tubs in one of the motel rooms just- just until I can figure out what to do with it tomorrow. Okay.Yeah?    Norman, I'm sorry.  I'm sorry that this dirtbag raped me, okay? /!/  But here you are, and here I am, and he's not gonna win this one.  Go wash up a little. Put your bloody clothes in the trash bag.   
Mother, are you sure we shouldn't call for help?
No one's ever gonna help us, Norman.  No one's ever helped us.  
I'll tell you this -- and it goes for both of them -- the majority of shit that is wrong with you started out as a solution to something. /y v good and of course./ The human mind is expertly functional and extremely efficient when it *needs* to be:
Most non-chemical crazy is just solutions that stayed too long -- scaffold for a building that's since been built, that's now made weaker by it -- which is by the way why it's dumb to be ashamed of them /y. well, is that why? it is a reason. before it was sth wrong w you, it was sth you (your psyche) *accomplished*.  sth you needed, and you made.// 
In this case, that little histrionic breakdown /manipulated? y - a situation into a tolerable one, ok/ did exactly what it was programmed to do:
Force her to compensate, to assume the shape he needs her to assume, so she won't flip this energy and attack him.






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