Being quarantined feels like solitary confinement with a TV—you’re stuck here by yourself because the authorities have a warrant, but you get to watch all kinds of crap, all day and night if you want. There’s no time to waste because that’s all you got, is time. So I’ve been watching “Ted Lasso,” yeah him, “Ozark,” and now “Reacher,” meanwhile arguing with the girlfriend about them. She likes “Reacher,” I don’t. Here’s why.
Invulnerability does not an interesting character make. Even Superman has his Achilles' heel. So when you cast Sherlock as a bodybuilder, Arnold without an accent, who's also (a) a martial artist--in the American, pugilist style, without the grace and humor, or humility, of, say, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li-- and (b) a bona fide psychoanalyst--he's read your file, don't bother to hide anything--you get complacence from the viewer, because he knows this man will prevail, no matter what.**
Reacher embodies the equation of strength and power. It’s a ludicrous notion, as Hannah Arendt explained, except in the fervid imagination that produces the dime novel, the western movie, and the action hero of the comics transposed to franchise Marvel/Disney films. But Lee Child, the English Bob of our time, lives by it as he recreates America’s wild west. Like the hero who spoke mainly to his horse, Reacher is the strong, silent type. He speaks hard-boiled in those short, declarative sentences that disarm his associates--never his friends--and warn his enemies, but Dashiel Hammet, Raymond Chandler, et al. (I'd include P.K. Dick in this company), knew their narrators couldn't be omniscient, whatever their placement in the plot. Practically speaking, Reacher is. After 20 minutes with the chief detective, he knows the poor guy is a recently divorced Harvard Law grad who’s trying to quit smoking and adjust to rural idiocy in Georgia.
The narrative damage done by an irresistible force like Reacher, a guy who doesn't have to reach for anything because nothing’s beyond his grasp, is measurable--the only way to keep the story moving is to up the episodic ante of violent incidents and unspeakable cruelty. So, victims aren't just killed or executed, they're castrated and crucified in front of their wives; the implacable, immovable obstacle of evil, here as elsewhere in TV dramas a drug-running, human trafficking cabal, becomes omnipresent, gouging its way through every available Mayberry. Reacher, ever the stranger, always lands in such desolate, godforsaken places. But still we know he’ll prevail.
"Ozark" maps the opposite narrative topography. It's anxiety-inducing because no one, not even Navarro the drug lord, is invulnerable. The power to thwart evil in this recreational wasteland is contingent, even fragile, and it has nothing to do with any individual's strength--it's a social construction. The exception to the rule is Navarro’s nephew, who outdoes even Darlene in killing off everyone in his way, but he’s clearly bound for an ignominious end at the hands of the FBI or his uncle’s assassins. In this sense, and as against “Reacher,” violence is not the only or the principal source of narrative propulsion in “Ozark.” It moves instead by letting us feel the oddly compelling complexity of every character (save the nephew).
Marty and Wendy, Jonah and Charlotte, Wyatt, Ruth, and Darlene, they make me watch and squirm and wonder. Reacher lets me concentrate on cracking open another pistachio.
**Let me add a brief note about on-screen male masochism, which, as I argue in The World Turned Inside Out (2009), chap. 4, is the solvent of masculinity and the setting for experimentation with what Freud calls the “feminine position.” [See “Rambo,” “Lethal Weapon,” “Fight Club,” etc.] Reacher gets in a lot of fights, but he’s never beaten to a pulp, not even close. He’s impervious, impenetrable, immune even to temptation, sexual or otherwise. So his masculinity is never in question.