Talking to the Killer: a review of the crime series "Blackbird"
The third season of Mindhunter we deserve.
While David Fincher and company are on indefinite leave of absence, the streaming industry has staged an unspoken battle for the title of best trilogy. While HBO's "Mair of Easttown" won in 2021, this year all bets are on a new Apple TV+ project called "Blackbird," an adaptation of James Keen's novel from "The Wire" screenwriter and "Islands of the Damned" author Dennis Leahane.
America, 1990s. Jimmy Keane (Theron Edgerton) is the son of an ex-cop who, thanks to his father's connections and innate charisma, was able to build a successful business selling guns and drugs. Alas, Jimmy is too arrogant, and the FBI never sleeps - after one more wild night he goes to jail, and the sentence promises to be long: 10 years without parole. It would seem that life is over. But everything changes when the feds offer Kean an unusual deal, guaranteeing his coveted freedom. Jimmy must turn on all his charms and gain the trust of Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser), a maniac suspected of murdering 14 girls who may go free for lack of evidence.
The opening shots of the series are striking with the sudden transformation of a very different Theron Edgerton, who in two and a half years has transformed himself from a mild-mannered British pop idol to a masculine drug dealer whose bravado and self-confidence truly know no bounds. Oddly enough, for all this superficial gloss, Jimmy Keane is a character that inevitably arouses the viewer's sympathy: in the first episode, the guy devoid of marginal cynicism is willing to give his last money for the life of the goofball friend who had previously robbed him himself. Obviously, Jimmy did not come into the criminal world from the good life: oppressed by the emotional coldness of his parents, Kean decided to become a model of the very popularized in the pop culture alpha-male in the hope of earning the universal love of women and, oddly enough, the respect of his own father.
The antagonist Larry Hall, brilliantly played by "The Richard Jewell Affair" star Paul Walter Hauser, in contrast, lacks even the slightest shred of empathy. Unlike Keane, Hall grew up under the all-consuming tutelage of his beloved twin brother Gary, and was never really hurt by the world in general. And yet, at some point something went wrong: the cozy image of a guy with lush sideburns, an intellectual and participant in historical reenactments was eaten up by an inner psychopath with a penchant for sexual perversion and violence.
Alas, the creators of "Blackbird" do not give a clear answer to the question of why a child grows up to be a maniac (in fact, there may be many reasons, including endogenous ones), but they raise another topic, much more atypical for the genre of social self-presentation - the conventional "clothes" that we wear in order to interact with people. In both Keane's and Hall's cases, primary perception decides everything: the charming Jimmy becomes the soul of any company, even if it is a society of convicts, and the harmless, quiet Larry seems to be the last person capable of murder. The problem is that all masks are in one way or another a variant of the defense mechanism of the psyche, and if Kean, like all ordinary people, uses it unconsciously, Hall, as a true psychopath, - with a very specific purpose to avert suspicion. Nevertheless, his image is far from ideal - especially when compared to Ted Bundy - and periodically cracks at the seams, exposing the gruesome truth.
At the same time, the screen interaction of Hauser and Edgerton's characters does not look like a conversation between two hardened criminals, it looks much more like a collision of a psychopath with a true humanist, who, even being in the heart of darkness - the worst prison in America - has not lost his soul. Of course, there is a high probability that the prototype of the protagonist James Keane, who acted in "Blackbird" as an executive producer, did everything possible to maximize himself in the eyes of the audience - the factor of male ego has not been canceled. The important thing is that this contrast between the characters definitely played to the show's advantage, turning a classic trudrama into a tense parable about a wolf who pretended to be a rabbit and a rabbit who wanted to seem like a wolf.
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