A Gory Brief on Dory Sief
Search Party is over. The final season went up on HBOMax this past Friday. What began as a show somewhat satirizing Brooklyn hipster milennials (like who cares lol) evolved over time to be a closer character study of its central quartet - Dory (Alia Shawkat), Elliott (John Early), Drew (John Reynolds), and Portia (Meredith Hagner), and to an extent the woman for whom the titular search party is searching, Chantal (Clare McNulty). I wrote about the show during its second season, and I have a great deal to say about the show in general, its plots, themes, costume and set design, and central performances, but this hopefully short message is primarily about the show's main character Dory, and what's so fascinating about her.
I tried to turn a loved one onto Search Party, but there's a moment in the show's pilot that she couldn't stand to watch past: Dory is having a bad day and her boyfriend Drew is doing a terrible job of comforting her, ignoring her request to be left alone. She finally lets loose: "I don't want a hug, I don't want ice cream, I don't want to take a deep breath and think about what I'm thankful for. I just want you to shut the fuck up." He agrees to her request, and immediately starts talking to her again. She yells, "I said, 'Shut the fuck up!' I said, 'Shut the fuck up!' Why can't you do anything I ask you to do? Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!!" That's an early moment in the show where Dory pushes Drew away (it also pushed away my loved one), but Drew keeps coming back to her, again and again - so do Elliott and Portia, and so do I. To be fair, the other three are very capable of destroying their own lives without her help. In this final season's first minutes, her three friends agree to 5150 her. What is it about Dory that only a few episodes later they're all not just back in her orbit but making compromises they never thought they'd make just to please her?
What Is It About Dory is a running theme throughout the show, in no small part because of Alia Shawkat's incredible, engaging performance. The show's inciting incident has Dory convinced that she should take on the search for a missing college classmate with whom she was never really friends - that choice leads Dory into murder and coverup, becoming a media star while on trial, and then getting kidnapped and brainwashed. In this fifth season, among other things, she grows obsessed with the idea that only by recreating her own life experience can other people avoid a horrifying, bloody fate that came to her in a dream. Early in the show, her narcissism was meant as a commentary on an aimless generation looking for some kind of meaningful experience. As it went on, this grew into something darker. Elliott's a narcissist who lied to everyone about a defining childhood trauma; Portia's a narcissist in the way lots of actors can be narcissists; Drew's a narcissist who believes in the importance of his own personal career success. Dory's not run-of-the-mill. There's a huge, howling darkness inside of her, something she can't stop picking at even though the further she explores it the more it takes over her life and damages everyone in her orbit. At the end of the first season, we learn that Chantal in fact disappeared on her own volition. What Dory discovered wasn't a missing person, it was a funhouse mirror image of herself creating her own problems. And once she saw this in herself she became powerless to stop it. And those of us devoted to the show can't pull ourselves away from Dory's journey of self discovery. How low can a person sink while believing they're victims, or worse, altruistic?
There's another character on TV who reminds me a little bit of Dory right now, and I'm similarly enraptured by her storyline. It's Nina Reeves, on General Hospital. It would take way too long to get into her years-long backstory (the year I started watching, 2018, she kidnapped and tortured someone for the entire summer and it doesn't even come up anymore), but her current storyline is somewhat controversial among fans: for about nine months, a character named Sonny Corinthos was living with amnesia in a small town under the name Mike, with no memory of his past, including his wife and children. Nina Reeves, who knew Sonny, ran into him in the small town and not only didn't tell him who he was, but didn't tell his family that he was in fact alive (they all believed he'd drowned to death). Not just that - she befriended "Mike," and then their friendship became romantic. Shortly after they confessed their feelings for one another, he regained his memory and returned to his home and family, all of whom are understandably furious at Nina. But even with his regained memories, Sonny ("Mike") still has some residual feelings for Nina, and she for him. She lives in hope that he'll decide their love was real enough, and leave his wife for her.
The entire time Nina and Mike were in the small town, she knew she was making a huge mistake. For one thing, amnesia couldn't last forever - their time together was necessarily limited. And besides that, what she was doing is deeply immoral and nothing to base a functioning relationship on. Nina values honesty. She dumped Valentin for hiring a woman to pretend to be her daughter and she dumped Jax for keeping a secret from her that her daughter was in fact Nelle. Despite ALL of this, she cannot stop herself from falling in love with Mike. In one of my favorite moments, she flirts with Mike, and a moment later asks herself:
Like Dory, Nina has discovered in herself something utterly rotten, and what's worse, it cannot be controlled. And like Dory, Nina refuses to explore the possibility of self-improvement. Just digging deeper and deeper into destruction is all they can do. Narcissism is named after Narcissus, who couldn't stop staring at his beautiful reflection in a pool of water. Dory and Nina are more like a mashup of Narcissus and Dorian Gray, someone who can't stop staring at a decaying and horrifying self-portrait.
Both women quickly tire of apologizing and start to need to make everyone see where they're coming from. Nina insists that she's just trying to move past what happened, but also offers Sonny a ride home when he gets too drunk on New Year's Eve after his wife kicked him out for only admitting under oath that he still had feelings for Nina. Dory can't see any reason why she'd be the wrong person to save humanity, just because she can't stop laughing with her friends after admitting to a murder for which she'd never been caught. At the series' end, she sees the way that she's responsible for a monumental disaster, but does this self-knowledge lead her toward epiphany? In the show's final moments, the central characters appear to have changed very little, in spite of the changing world around them. If anything, Dory seems to have made one change - she is ready to stop pretending to care about other people at all.
SCREEN TIME: SOME THOUGHTS ON AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF CHILDREN'S MEDIA
Your local library may have online events where librarians sing songs and read books to children. It's been a nice way to fill the day with things that feel less passive than television viewing. If you'd like my help finding these events, feel free to reach out!
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This broadcast's theme song is from the original Colombian Yo Soy Betty, La Fea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZqIrKG9WUw Thanks Mordecai for the recommendation!
Stephanie Koenig wrote and directed A Spy Movie, starring her and Brian Jordan Alvarez, and it's for free on youtube. I highly recommend this super low-budget very silly comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YziovxOn6kE&t=2851s
I've been rewatching Better Call Saul from the beginning and I don't know who other than Vince Gilligan and the team does a better job of mixing meticulous organization with flying by the seat of their pants. Gilligan said that season two of Breaking Bad was completely plotted out in advance, and after that they played it by ear; I wouldn't say that there's any apparent difference in quality. This prequel series must correspond with the events of Breaking Bad, and it's clear some things are set up early to work a certain way, but Better Call Saul's first season dispenses with backstory as soon as possible and seems along with us for the ride, making the dawning realizations of what relationships must deteriorate all the more tragic. The best characters on Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad succeed where they do because of a dedication to putting in the hours on the most boring parts of their work. On Breaking Bad, it's Walter and Jesse spending hours carefully cooking blue meth, and Gus actually working shifts at a fast food joint, and some others. On Better Call Saul, what unites Jimmy/Saul and Kim is a willingness to put in long hours with minute details. What drives them apart is that Jimmy/Saul applies that dedication to ethical gray areas with abandon. That detail-oriented recklessness seems to be both a character detail and a metaphor for the writing of the shows. Great stuff, man.
Take care!