John Boutte, in a club scene last night, performs Treme's theme song as well. / HBO
Warning: spoilers for last night’s Treme follow.
This was the first episode of Treme that I didn’t see in advance, and once I caught up with it, other deadlines got in the way. In the interest of putting it out there for your discussion, I’ll skip the big overview—the episode, it was pretty plain, focused on themes of homecoming and displacement in recovering New Orleans—and skip straight to the hail of bullets. Or maybe, for this show, we’ll call it the run of notes:
* This was the second week in a row where I thought that an absolutely transcendent musical moment was undercut by a related scene or line that told when it should have told. (Last week, the memorial to the fallen chief followed by the Katrina tour bus—and I know some of you disagree.) This week, Antoine’s opening, impromptu riff on “St. James’ Infirmary,” with lyrics about waiting too long in a New Orleans emergency room, was pure bliss (especially the fellow patient using an ashcan for percussion). But its sweet conclusion—”I have roamed this whole wide world over / But New Orleans is still my home”—was unnecessarily mirrored in the show’s closing line, in which, asked if he’s returning to New Orleans for business or pleasure, he says that New Orleans is always a pleasure. It wasn’t heavy handed in the was of the tour-bus scene and might have worked without the opening sequence, but coming after that scene and the setup line, it was predictable in a way I don’t expect this show’s dialogue to be.
* On the other hand, a setup-response couplet that did work: “How you get to sleep at night, man?” “I drink.”
* Still not sure I care that much about Sonny, but for some reason developing his backstory as a New Orleans outsider who wants badly—maybe too badly—to belong makes him more understandable. (It also set up the “Hamsterdam” reference, another callback to The Wire besides the appearance of Prez.)
* Still not sure I love Davis either—and am kind of dreading his run for office—yet I kinda loved his futilely punching out the inflatable Santa. Whatever problem I have with the character, I think Steve Zahn is playing him just as he’s supposed to.
* I’m curious how Creighton’s YouTube rant played to those of you who did not know that it was based on, and in some stretches copied verbatim from, post-Katrina activist Ashley Morris’ “Fuck You You Fucking Fucks” blog post, which became something of a rallying cry. Did it seem organic, or too much like John Goodman as mouthpiece?
* As long as we’re talking about real-life sources and further reading: if anyone was intrigued by the description of guards throwing sandwiches over the fence in those post-Katrina prison open pens, I highly recommend Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, a brilliant nonfiction account I read while working on my Treme piece.
* And to bring it back to Antoine: his Baton Rouge visit did an excellent job of showing his love for, and yet his distance from, his kids, for reasons we can see have partly to do with circumstance and partly to do with him. And the fact that the kids, from New Orleans, now prefer Olive Garden and TGI Friday’s was a kind of perfect yet light detail showing how removed his now is from them. If I were their father, that would make my heart hurt. And not just because of the food.
* “Nice folks. But you know they clap on the 1 and 3?” I may never be able to think of Portland the same way again.