"The Boys" Can Still Smash and Grab Your Attention
“Satire,” Philip Roth once said, "is moral outrage transformed into comic art."
I’m here to talk about “The Boys,” airing the fourth episode of season 4 tomorrow on Amazon Prime, but consider for a moment the ethos Roth addressed in 1971 America. It has a daunting similarity to the national mood right now.
Roth addressed his satire to a divided nation, having been spurred by some insipidly cruel remarks about abortion by the nation’s chief executive. His short, darkly humorous satirical novel “Our Gang,” focused on then-President “Trick E. Dixon”.
Dashed off on impulse though it was, the book was a minor triumph, catalyzing public alienation by rendering that chaotically populist presidency through what Roth himself described as a prism of writerly “bad taste.” The New York Times review by Dwight MacDonald called it “a political satire that I found far-fetched, unfair, tasteless, disturbing, logical, coarse and very funny…in short a masterpiece.”
I’ll hold off for now from burdening showrunner Eric Kripke’s four-season run with the tag of masterpiece, but going by this season’s first three shared episodes, it certainly qualifies as “very funny”--and more. The funny comes frenetically mingled with its other attributes—scene after scene is smart, tough, wickedly coprophiliac and sexualized (sometimes simultaneously), gory (for sure and repeatedly), and, to my main point here, defiantly political.
The Hollywood Reporter headline for their recent chat with Kripke did not overstate it: “For Eric Kripke, `The Boys’ Was Always About Trumpism”.
To Amazon’s credit they have not tried to crimp Kripke’s political edge. Sprawling and similarly compromised they may be, they don’t acknowledge any heat they feel as the show’s engiulf-and-devour mega-corporation Vought manipulates and buffaloes an angry MAGA-leaning public. (This even as AMZ overlord Jeff Bezos has damagingly handed the reins of the--once-proud, as it’s now tagged– Washington Post to British-spawned tabloid varlets seemingly enlisted to dumb the paper down to Murdochian levels that would shame even the also Vought-like Fox Corporation.)
Although Kripke has no fecks to give as to offending the network or any insurrectionists standing by, he has asserted to THR that he and his writing crew began creating the earliest episodes the show in 2016, when Trump was a mere dark horse. Perhaps what pushed the narrative towards deeply parodying the `Strong Man” autocracy of the ensuing four years was discovering an actor who’s still under-recognized, but offers a glorious to-watch mélange of smugness and narcissistic buried rage.
Antony Starr, in portraying the central Trumpian figure Homelander, does a precise job of painting just outside the lines of an impersonation, Yet he captures the man– the fatuous smirks and false smiles, the grasping for any low-hanging power surge, the false bravado, and the ultimate inner terror of being found out as a fraud and to end up ultimately insignificant, except as an object lesson in democracy’s vulnerability.
“Suddenly,”Kripke told THR, “We were telling a story about the intersection of celebrity and authoritarianism and how social media and entertainment are used to sell fascism. We’re right in the eye of the storm.”
The comic streak that quickly won this viewer’s loyalty, and perhaps is best enjoyed by those who scrutinize the exec-suite schemes of giant media corporations, is the inside baseball of branding, marketing and manipulating grievance into entertainment--right down to the cornball musical cues (e.g. “Up Where We Belong”) that accompany some of the most scabrous scenarios playing out onscreen.
Oh yes, Homelander, like Trump, is determinedly aligned with Jesus, though not as wholly conflated with the savior as the real-life mountebank increasingly is.
There’s much more to like, for the eight current episodes and no doubt in the next and final fifth season. So thanks, Marjorie Taylor Greene, for feeding at the same trough as Lauren Boebert, Dog Assassin K. Noem, Kari Lake, and in her day, Sarah Palin. One of Season 4’s gifts from the just slightly insane “Boys” writers’ room is the new character Firecracker, who tellingly embodies the real-life witches’ priggish moralizing, as we see it mixed with sexualized enticement and the most feral ambition.
It fell to another new and utterly watchable character, Sister Sage (her super power is, no crap, being “The smartest person in the world”), to induct Firecracker into Homelander’s (chronically shy a quorum) cabal The Seven. Sage asks the recruit (whose “dumb cracker” tendencies she’ll freely exploit), just “what is it you’re selling [the suckers]?
What she answers could either serve as the lasting epitaph for MAGA, or if things take a wrong turn in November, be refashioned as the words carved into the pedestals of the Confederate general statues Trump will order restored next January:
“I sell purpose. These people got nothing. Maybe they lost a job or a house or a kid to Oxy. Politicians don’t give a shit, mainstream media tells them to be ashamed of their skin color. So, I bring `em together, give `em a story, give `em a purpose.
"Which would you rather believe? That you belong to a community of warriors battling a secret evil? Or that you’re a lonely, inconsequential nobody that no one will ever remember?”
Mic drop for Firecracker! You can see in Sage’s multi-layered expression that she has found the perfect foil–call her Nikki Haley with a piehole full of grits--to carry the upside-down flag into skirmishes with the libtards.
One senses she is on a collision course with Erin Moriarty’s character, whom we met as The Seven beauty queen Starlight, but now is reluctantly in the public radar as activist reformer Annie January. Add in Annie’s oft-befuddled b.f. Hughie (Jack Quaid), the brawling but half-ruined Billy Butcher (actor Karl Urban’s mix of tender and brash keeps him a welcome pivot point for we viewers) and add in a row of entertaining performances by the ensemble of performers taking all sorts of psychic and physical damage. What you get is piquant entertainment—or, as Roth might call it, “comic art”.