I just finished watching Lodge 49. It’s wonderful. No one I’ve asked has heard of it.
It’s difficult to describe, beyond the setup: a down-and-out surfer finds a signet ring from a local fraternal order on the beach and returns it to the lodge. When he sees the dying lodge and meets the struggling people within, he falls in love with it and asks if he can join.
The lodge’s history is steeped in alchemy and ritual, so the show itself has mysteries, of course. But they almost seem beside the point, despite their intrigue. Todd VanDerWerff wrote about this halfway through the season:
It’s not clear what the larger point of the series is, or where all of its mystical portents and hints about some larger purpose for these characters are going. There’s a strong subplot about Dud’s twin sister, Liz (Sonya Cassidy), who’s working at a Hooters-ish sports bar named Shamroxx, because she’s so burdened down with debt passed down to her by her and Dud’s deceased father. There’s a dead body in a secret, hidden room in the lodge. There’s a loose seal wandering across the road.
All of this, I think, has led to people trying to guess what Lodge 49 means. It has some of the outward trappings of a mystery show like Lost or Twin Peaks, so it must play by the same rules as those shows, right? But the series’ fourth episode, “Sunday,” is as good an argument as anything that the series is less about trying to make sense of its many loose ends and more about realizing that you find life amid the loose ends.
Lodge 49 is the anti-Lost. It’s a deliberate inversion of the (very successful) mystery-meat show format. In this case, the mystery isn’t the main course; its function is mostly to agitate the characters into opening themselves up to one another. It gives them reasons to build and sustain a community. So the show will reveal the occasional mummified corpse or Bruce Campbell, but it’s mostly content to wander and explore and build connections. It’s been called “deceptively aimless”. And that makes it a breath of fresh air.
Todd wrote this more recently about the overdue decline of the white male anti-hero and the punishment of women for entertainment. It hits the issue from pretty much all sides, and the whole thing’s worth a read, but this bit leapt out at me:
But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’ve capped an era full of white male antihero protagonists with a president who feels like he might as well be the main character of an antihero drama in some other universe, where viewers thrill at how he always dances one step ahead of the forces that would bring him down, cheered on by toadies and sycophants who eagerly abandon principle in the face of finally grasping power.
This is also a delicate dynamic to talk about because the surest path toward boring, bland art is to insist that it be morally, ethically, socially, and politically palatable. We need shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad to help us ponder the darkness within humanity, and within ourselves as individuals. To insist that art conform to some code of righteousness is a shortcut to making art that’s not worth thinking about....
What I am suggesting is that advocating for representation on TV and in films is not merely about painting an accurate, inclusive picture of the world we live in. Yes, we need more women antiheroes, more antiheroes of color, and so on — but we also need to think about how the stories we tell create long grooves in our culture, grooves that eventually crystallize into reflexive beliefs about who gets to be the protagonist and how they go about being that protagonist.
Read that last sentence again. The stories we tell create long grooves in our culture. It took me a while to understand that there is such a thing as a cultural illness, and that too many Travis Bickles and Jesse Jameses and Eric Cartmans often lie at the root of it. If you don’t believe that, sit down and listen to how Johnny Cash sang “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Then go into any bar where it’s playing and listen to how the drinkers sing that line.
Vonnegut wrote “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” But he decided that wasn’t clear enough, so he wrote this too: “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
I used to think that people who were troubled by phenomena like South Park were being uptight and humorless. Now I wonder whether South Park’s omnipresent “screw you for caring about stuff” theme carved some of the grooves that helped pave the way for our current predicament.
My hope is that we’re waking up to it. The current president* may not be a coincidence, but neither is the appearance of two movies about Mister Rogers or the slow rise of shows like Lodge 49 or The Good Place. I don’t think stories will save us. But maybe we’re starting to realize that stories have shaped us more than we suspected.