Anotaciones: Penny Dreadful: City of Angels Episode 9: Sing, Sing, Sing
The title of the episode refers to the popular swing music hit written by Louis Prima, but popularized by Benny Goodman with the dynamic style of drummer Gene Krupa driving the song with a lead drum solo. The full title is “Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)”. The song is an iconic song that most anyone would think of if asked about swing music and plays prominently twice during the dance sequences and has a certain darkly ironic touch.
The episode begins with Lewis and Tiago discussing the attempt to assassinate them that took out Lewis’ car. There are many possible suspects, but Lewis is convinced that the source of the danger is the Nazis and I can’t say that I disagree with him.
Charlton is complaining to Alex/Magda about how he is finished and how no one loves him and his career is over. Alex/Magda comforts Townsend with the idea that he can still win if he has the moxie to fight for what he wants. It is one of Charlton’s fatal flaws. His inability to believe in himself and stand up against adversity. Alex/Magda tells him that the only thing he can do is ask his father for help. Since Charlton doesn’t have any other ideas himself, he agrees. She reminds him that Kurt loves him and that she, after a visible attempt to swallow her disdain, does too.
Peter and Elsa/Magda discuss their situation. Peter feels guilty and says that he was too quick to move Elsa/Magda and “Frank” in the house and wasn’t thinking about his children, which is true. Elsa/Magda, like Alex, does her best to comfort Peter and try to convince him that he did nothing wrong. She suggests that they should do what happy families do and that they should go to the movies. She opens the paper and points out The Adventures of Robin Hood since it is Tom’s favorite. Craft agrees that it’s his and Tom’s favorite book and is mollified by Elsa/Magda’s peacemaking. The series has a real touch for period detail and calls back to the previous references. They’re not just placeholders for historical points, but important to the story as the series progresses. As it happens, the composer of the, again, iconic film score of Robin Hood is Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Korngold was a child prodigy and born to a Jewish family from Vienna, Austria. He was called to Los Angeles before the Anschluss to write the score to Robin Hood which saved his life.
When Peter leaves the room, Elsa/Magda once again begins to use microaggressions against Maria. Maria has overheard the whole conversation while washing the dishes and Elsa/Magda intentionally drops her juice on the floor and mockingly requires Maria to clean it up. She is baiting Maria, much like Officer Murphy did with the song La Cucaracha aimed at Tiago. They have a moment where Elsa/Magda taunts Maria with her real identity and Maria does not confront her. But Maria does respond to Elsa/Magda patronizing suggestion that she hoped they could be friends by saying, “You might as well howl at the moon.”. So perhaps Maria might know more than she is strictly letting on.
You see a group of white men golfing right before you see Lewis insisting that he be allowed to enter the private club where Richard Goss is having lunch with two businessmen. While there were a number of private clubs, like The Jonathan Club and The California Club with restricted memberships meant to keep out Black, Latino, and Jewish people out, the one club that has a golf course is the Wilshire Country Club and that is almost certainly where this lunch is taking place. An important thing to note is that public clubs where only the rich and powerful are allowed to enter are meant to enshrine the status quo and keep the power distributed only among the powerful. As they used to say in Los Angeles.
According to LA Confidential, there’s an old adage that goes, “The people who run Los Angeles belong to The Jonathan Club; the people who own Los Angeles belong to The California Club.”
Golf is the sport of rich autocrats as we’ve come to see in recent years.
Lewis immediately starts in on Goss, telling the men having lunch with him that he works for Adolph and to go “pick up a copy of Mein Kampf in the gift shop.”. Like Maria and Elsa/Magda’s tête-à-tête, they exchange thinly veiled threats. Lewis references cockroaches and their indestructibility. He likens himself to a roach and it’s another callback to Officer Murphy’s mockery of Tiago and Diego in Episode 6, How It Is With Brothers, but upends it to make it a positive quality. Lewis knows how Goss perceives him and his people, so he would rather call himself a roach and reclaim the insult before it can be applied to him. It’s the old standard of the grim brawler in the culture wars: you can’t hurt me, because I am willing to hurt myself first. Lewis offers Goss his gun and tells him if he has a problem with him, he should kill him right then, in public. But Goss knows that Lewis has no fear of death and that the best way to hurt him is to threaten the people he loves. He offers Lewis a accounting of his surviving family members as well as telling Michener that he is fully aware that Brian Koenig is under Lewis’ protection. They are at a standoff. Like Maria and Elsa/Magda, both sides know of the enmity between them. It is the calm before the war begins in earnest.
Charlton Townsend drives up the manicured driveway to his father’s house while the song Why Was I Born plays on the soundtrack. The song was written by Jerome Kern with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II for the musical Sweet Adeline. While it is a love song, in this context, it is a particularly plaintive cry from the son of a great man who has never felt loved by his father.
Why was I born
Why am I living
What do I get
What am I givingWhy do I want a thing
I daren’t hope for
What can I hope for
I wish I knewWhy do I try
To draw you near me
Why do I do I cry
You never hear meI’m a poor fool
But what can I do
Why was I born
To love you
The character of Charlton Townsend is a complex villain. He’s someone that is reprehensible, but you can see how he got that way while watching the scene between Michael Gladis and the late, great Brian Dennehy. You can sympathize with him in a way that you cannot with Magda or Richard Goss. He is a child who grew up without love or understanding who was turned into a racist and a bigot by a cold home and a parent who just decided that he didn’t like his own son because he didn’t consider that son good enough. Townshend mentions two of the robber barons who made Los Angeles into what it is today: William Mulholland, the Irish civil engineer and superintendent of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who realized that the city would need more water to grow and stole that water from the farmers of the Owens Valley. Edward Doheny was the oil tycoon that Upton Sinclair’s satirical and pro-labor novel Oil! was based on and then Paul Thomas Anderson’s film There Will Be Blood was inspired by Sinclair’s novel. Doheny has a street and a state beach named after him and discovered oil in Los Angeles. If it tells you anything about what Doheny was like, he was implicated in The Teapot Dome Scandal as well, the character of Daniel Plainview is based on Doheny and another oil baron Harry Sinclair as adapted by screenwriter Eric Schlosser. Schlosser made a number of research trips to visit the oil baron museums in what city? None other than Bakersfield. Moo.
The third robber baron of LA is his own father, Jerome Townsend who is based on Henry Huntington.
When his father sets at naught Charlton’s insistence that motorways are the future and details his plans about airports, Jerome Townsend already owns most of the land in Inglewood around what becomes Los Angeles International Airport, Charlton piteously appeals to his father for help and Jerome Townshend cuts him down by responding that he already knows that Charlton is gay and enumerates his physical deficiencies. Jerome’s coup de grâce is that that’s not why he won’t help him. His own father won’t help because he won’t help someone who considers weak and a loser. The camera does a single shot of Charlton’s defeated face and it’s a shot that is filled with pain. Michael Gladis does a stellar job of showing the wordless despair of an adult who has been completely destroyed by rejection from the parent that they desire love and approval from more than anything. It’s a sad situation that has repeated itself more than once, and most recently with Donald Trump Jr. Trump Junior’s obvious attempts to live up to his father’s expectations and his father’s contempt for him is plain to see. Trump has even said it himself, using the same devastating word: loser.
Lewis Michener’s next stop is in another rich neighborhood. He goes to Beverly Hills to visit Benny Berman, the Jewish gangster from episode 4, Josefina and the Holy Spirit. Berman crows about his fine new house and asks Lewis if it makes him look nouveau riche, which he clearly glories in. Once again, Lewis asks for Berman’s help and Berman repeats what he requires of Michener for that favor. This time Lewis agrees. He is now indebted to Berman for good. Another very good quality about this series is that it gives some underrated actors a chance to cut loose and show sides of their talent that haven’t been seen before. Brad Garrett is again delightful as a sly and deceptively gentle criminal who is as smooth as silk. It’s a real treat to watch these terrific moments of acting excellence. Watching Nathan Lane’s face when he agrees is another treat. Josh Logan loves actors and their expressive faces and eyes.
Lewis’ final stop is the Hollenbeck Police station to transfer Diego to the San Quentin guards. He speaks with Captain Vanderhoff who informs him that the Northern California authorities are “insufferable Bay Area pricks, so be warned.” Another peculiarity of homegrown hatred among Californians is the “rivalry” between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I always wondered what the problem was and I finally found an answer. Apparently, Bay Area people really hate the Dodgers. Cool? Like many perceived beefs and rivalries that non-Angelenos have with Los Angeles, as I suspected, it’s one sided.
In all seriousness, I do think the general opinion that San Francisco Hates LA is, at its heart, just a baseball rivalry. But for some people it’s since extended into a general dislike of Los Angeles, with the irony being that while some of San Francisco may spend a lot of time hating Los Angeles, I don’t think LA spends much time thinking about us at all.
After bringing Diego out of the cell, Diego greets Lewis with “fuck you puto.” and then is taken out through a crowd of hostile uniformed officers. As they break out the front doors, you start to hear the first drumbeats of Sing, Sing, Sing (With That Swing). Once again, the bleak irony is starting to rise in a jolly drum beat.
In small groups, the members of the Vega family begin to converge on The Crimson Cat. Dottie Minter plays Mahjong with Brian Koenig, who casually admits that he’s already solved the rocket problem and is on to a bigger invention. Outside the home, Kurt is lurking and bringing up his gun when suddenly an approaching car makes him draw back. It’s Benny Berman and his men there to pick up Dottie and Koenig. Another delight in this show is Lin Shaye as Dottie. Her curt dismissal of Benny’s flattery and Berman’s sudden frown is an amusing bouche over the tension of the scene.
The Vega reunion comes to head with the arrival of Sister Molly and Tiago and the reveal that Tiago and Molly are together to them all. Every secret has been revealed and tempers flare. Tiago finally stands up to them all by telling them that he will not tolerate hatred of Molly and that he is tired of not being enough of anything for any of his loved ones. This is the crux of the otherness of Chicanos. Any assertion of individuality outside of the family and rebellion against the family’s feelings about how you should live your life results in feelings of resentment. You are not brown enough for your people, you only are if you obey the status quo and live the life society dictates. John Logan wrote this episode and he really does understand the Mexican family dynamic and the family drive to make the family members submit to the family’s traditional wishes. They really get that mad and can just as easily let it go once confronted. It’s true.
The next section needs a trigger warning for violence, which the show did issue, and I will too. The ending of the show contains a scene that is extremely disturbing and a current issue. It involves lynching or hanging. If that is something that will deeply upset you, and honestly, I can’t see why it wouldn’t, please stop reading now.
Of course, this show was filmed over the past year, starting in late summer. There have been many parallels on the show to the current day issues, but there is no way that anyone connected to the show could have known that we would be exactly where we are now: in a pandemic, during a period of public protest, fighting an encroaching wave of fascism and authoritarianism within our own borders, and with a series of hangings of Black men that were quickly ruled suicides without much investigation. As stated in the LA Times editorial, it is very important, especially in such a time as this with an uprising of the people against the police and deeply rooted suspicion of their authority, that these deaths are actually investigated and the truth shown unequivocally to the public as soon as the investigation is concluded. The cops are not going to be able to ignore things like this after the last month. Anything less is not acceptable.
That being said, I think the original intention of this scene was to illustrate the probably mostly forgotten fact that there were a lot of lynchings in California. California, particularly Los Angeles and Southern California, are thought of as liberal spaces and it is assumed that this is not a place where racism thrived. I think that the series and my columns about the shows have gone very far in proving that that is actually not the case. The Klu Klux Klan and Nazis both had organizations in Southern California. The Nazis of World War II actually chose Los Angeles as a potential base because there was so much racism here that it gave them an opening and made them feel welcome. It’s estimated that there were 300 or so lynchings in between the 1800’s and the 1950’s.
The Chinese Massacre of 1871, which destroyed the original Chinatown and where between 17 to 20 Chinese people were robbed, shot, and hanged. It is considered by some to be the largest mass lynching in history. It was perpetrated by white and mestizo people who formed a mob after the reported killings of a policeman and a rancher. There’s also a number of trees and sites where lynchings took place or were rumored to have taken place. Most of the people who were lynched were Mexicano or Chinese. Andres Pico, brother of the last governor of Alta California — Pio Pico, lynched two Mexican members of the Franco gang where Orange County is today; Francisco Ardillero and Juan Catabo in 1857. Juan Flores was himself hung in Downtown Los Angeles in front of thousands of Angelenos. Even real estate agents bragged about a “hangman’s tree” in Hollywood as a sales incentive telling prospective buyers this:
In 1930 the developers of an upscale Hollywood neighborhood used a sycamore on the property where more than 30 people were hanged as a marketing tool to lure home buyers.
“The dedication of Hollywood’s hangman tree is being held in conjunction with the exhibit of the five Mediterranean model homes,” a story in The Times read. “The tree is located only a short distance from one of the homes.”
In the scene, the dancing at The Crimson Cat is inter-cut with the surprise stop of the paddy wagon carrying Lewis and Diego and the cop escort to Union Station. Lewis is cuffed to a bar in the wagon and Diego is dragged out. The joyful movements of the dance are similar to the struggles of Diego while the cops drag him to his fate. The music is another version of Sing, Sing, Sing and it cannot be denied that the song is a theme for this extrajudicial murder. The happy music and the joy of the dance actually make the scene harder to deal with emotionally. Everyone would expect a somber and sad scene, but the point is made differently. They went to the opposite and in doing so, made it more shocking while making the point that such murders and brutality weren’t and aren’t anomalies. That the vindictiveness of these crimes is not something out of the ordinary. It is actually the norm. What is becoming profoundly obvious even to the most privileged Americans, this is the norm.
In short, while we dance, someone dies.
This episode was directed by Daniel Attias, who won the DGA award for best drama directing in 2009 for the Transitions episode of The Wire.