Ponytail Picks #30 - Crime
Your long-haired outlaws at Ponytail Press have smuggled in another barrel of picks for ya. You can tell your friends, but only if they’re cool and won’t rat us out.
WATCH
Trailer Park Boys
Very excited to talk here about my current “continue watching” show on Netflix—the infamous Trailer Park Boys, which I’m watching for the first time ever. Yes, I’m very late to the party. I have vague memories of a bunch of my friends in high school talking and laughing about it at lunch hour back in the day, but being the shy Christian kid that I was, the show was clearly off the table for me, what with its expletive-loaded dialogue and frequent drug-related content and alcohol use.
Unsurprisingly, it feels a lot more tame watching it now then what I was led to believe it was like as a teenager. Well, maybe tame isn’t the best word. It’s still full of ganja-growing and dope-dealing, guns and f-bombs, drunkenness and petty crimes. But it’s far from a gritty Scorcese crime flick. At its heart—and it has a heart, which is key—it’s just a very silly show, with a comedic tone that’s only interrupted by the occasional surprising moment of cockles-warming character drama, usually in the form of one of Ricky’s charming, expletive-laden, jumbled-words confessionals about his lack of smarts or his attempts to be a good dad to his daughter:
The silliness is carried out in a plethora of repeating gags and plot formulas. The boys commit petty crimes. Mr. Lahey and Randy try to catch them. Trevor and Cory get blamed. Julian carries around a rum and coke. Randy’s shirtless. The show—both its actors and its writers (at least through season 3, which I’m currently on)—knows its characters, so much so that with the documentary style format it feels like these characters are real people. And I think it’s that sense of familiarity that it exudes that makes it such a good show, episode after episode.
And it doesn’t hurt that the various crime escapades and misadventures it comes up with are hilarious: Marijuana growing in an old Airstream trailer; siphoning gas for a trailer park gas station; robbing a grocery store to get hot dogs for a wedding; using kids in an extra-curricular school club to steal barbeques… the list goes on. Crime doesn’t pay, usually, for Julian, Ricky, Bubbles and co., but it sure is hilarious.
-JB
READ/WATCH
2 crime-centred docuseries on Netflix (+ book pairings)
I’m ironically breaking our format rules this week for two reasons:
For better or for worse, I couldn’t think of much literature I’ve read that centres around crime.
In the last two weeks I watched two series on the topic that felt like must-watch stuff to me.
To do my diligence in keeping with the Picks format, I chose a book that connects to each documentary thematically. Whether via page or screen, these works will have you thinking differently about crime, law, and how we define these things through media.
I Just Killed My Dad
When is it OK to kill someone? I’m the kind of person that would rather not answer that question. I Just Killed My Dad doesn’t exactly answer it either, but its meat comes from looking past the initial question and instead focuses on the ways our society encourages violence and betrays its victims, especially when it comes to “domestic affairs.”
The series’ themes of patriarchy and toxic masculinity came to light much more clearly thanks to the book by bell hooks that I mentioned in our last installment of Ponytail Picks, The Will to Change. From the teenager at the centre of the story and his visibly suppressed emotions to the failings of the judicial system to protect him and his mother, I Just Killed My Dad presents the complexity of a tragedy that leaves very few hands clean.
Trial By Media
After studying media and communications, engaging with media about media is an odd experience. You can’t help but apply the critiques presented in the program to the program itself.
Watching Trial by Media is no different, but as in I Just Killed My Dad, the series does what any good documentary should—tell the story while, as much as possible, suspending judgment. From the first episode, Trial by Media doesn’t take sides in the cases it presents, something the press at the time failed to do at an epic scale.
That last statement sounded judgmental, but the series leaves even that question unanswered. Does attention from the media help or hinder justice? It all depends on the context and the eye of the beholder, the program seems to say.
It wasn’t easy to pair a reading for this one, but the first thing that came to mind was a particular plotline in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom. The media games used by one character for the pretext of justice (in this case, for the environment) are in part what sinks the ship of his cause. But like the two documentaries mentioned above, Franzen pushes through the cultural commentary to point the finger instead at the flawed, broken people pulling the strings in front of and behind the camera.
-AK
LISTEN
CBS Radio Mystery Theater
I can’t remember exactly when I discovered CBS Radio Mystery Theater—a 1970s revival of the “radio play” form of entertainment that was popular in the 1940s and 50s—but it got me through many a long shift at the frozen-fruit processing and packing plant that I worked at for a few summers in between semesters over ten years ago.
After downloading the whole slate of 1399 45-minute episodes—archived and available for free online, for those old-school millennials like me who still use mp3s—I quickly fell in love with the old-timey-like recordings in all of their spooky-cheesy charm, from the melodramatic voice actors and made-for-radio scripts (“Wait, what are you doing with that gun?”) to the charismatic host E.G. Marshall who would offer his own philosophical ruminations related to the story in between each of the acts before signing off with an unsettling “pleasant… dreams?”
The stories covered a wide variety of mystery-adjacent genres, but many of my favourites were/are the crime dramas. Take a look at (and then a listen to!) some of these tantalizing episodes:
[A woman’s] husband disappears after their return from the honeymoon and the young wife’s sister insists that the nuptial was a mere fantasy. She attempts to persuade a cop that her husband was indeed killed.
An unemployed actor plans a bizarre drama of enacting his own death and consequently impersonating his wife to claim the insurance money.
To increase the worth of their works a trio of artists plan the perfect con—the catch is, someone has to die.
Desperately in need of cash, Gay Armstrong tries to sell her late mother’s pearl necklace and is disturbed to find out that the pearls are a fake. In a sign of goodwill that raises her suspicions, her stepfather offers her $15,000 for the piece of jewelry. Now Gay will stop at nothing until she uncovers the truth.
“The Look”
In order to further himself as a potential president-elect, a senator uses a sub-committee on organized crime to further things along. Things take a turn for the worse when the investigation moves too close to home.
If you end up listening to these or any of the other episodes, let me know what you think! Any other radio drama fans out there?
-JB
Our lawless days are done. Join us in our straight and narrow journey towards our next Ponytail Picks on the topic of
My favorite episode of CBSRMT was titled “Return of the Moresbys” (I think). Patrick O’Neal delivers a line that I’ve loved since I first heard it in 1974: “I went home. I tried being one with the universe. When that didn’t work, I tried being one with a bottle of Scotch.”