The Blacklist Declassified

Both Alan Shore and Red Reddington are outsiders. Alan had left his last two jobs under unhappy circumstances, accused of embezzlement at the first, fired from the most recent (after which he took the firm to court and won). At Crane, Schmidt and Poole, he is ever walking a fine line ethically, though often in the name of some larger moral purpose (or personal prerogative). His chances of ever becoming partner are remote and it is not something he even pursues. At once point, he reacts to a younger lawyer trying to pull rank on him, by saying sarcastically, “And I’m such a slut for authority.” He is at the firm largely because Denny Crane likes him, in fact loves him, in every way other than sexual.

Red Reddington is, of course, the archetypal exile, a man without a country – the ultimate outsider. We do not know, yet, if he is a actually a traitor, or if he too was compelled by a larger moral compulsion or by a vendetta. Jon Bokenkamp has made clear that Red is not to be thought of as an immoral man.

“We have a lot of conversations, John [Eisendrath] and I and then with James [Spader] as well, about where would Red draw the line? What is his view about good and evil, right and wrong? And I think he’s very determined that the character is not a psychopath. He’s not someone who has no sense of right and wrong. I think in viewing him with a sense of right and wrong really protects his character from just becoming evil. And I think he’s very aware of that and that is another thing I think that perspective is something I think he has helped to bring.” http://bit.ly/1wRn9pX

‘The Exile’ has been a driving intellectual force in the West, especially in America, whose universities were inseminated after World War II by émigrés from Europe. They are, in fact, largely responsible for the creation of postmodernism. Edward Said, who developed the notion of post-colonialism, here quotes Hugh of St Victor, a 12th Century monk from Saxony:

The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a practiced beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the whole world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; but the perfect man has extinguished his. http://bit.ly/1wPRmWw

The Pope has said we are may be on the cusp of World War III http://bit.ly/1x93mSQ. ISIS has rekindled talk of a clash of civilizations, that notion, coined by and popularized by Samuel Huntington in the early 1990s http://fam.ag/1HNrxYt and revived by in early years post-9/11 http://bit.ly/1462unc. Both the President http://1.usa.gov/1HOBIMv and the Vatican http://bit.ly/1zHOJIl quickly disavowed this language, but we cannot know what is said behind closed doors. Likely, coming conflicts are to be waged economically on the one hand, and by terror and mass surveillance on the other. But whatever-this-is, this conflict, will last a generation, if not a century, we have been told http://bit.ly/1H5SmIQ.

You can find discussions of such matters in back pages of The Economist and Foreign Affairs, though they are muted or ignored by the New York Times and the Washington Post, for fear, perhaps, of alarming the populace, or of creating a backlash? For a bevy of mostly well-intentioned reasons, the public is sheltered from the realities of a rising China, a populist Russia with legitimate beefs with the West, or the potential for a unified pan-Sunni insurgency, perhaps for fear that such awarenesses will sully the innocence of our postmodern openness to other cultures. Yet thinking begins with clarity and proceeds through dialectic. And action (and reaction) are impossible without an understanding of who we are, whoever “we” may be.

In the years of the Bush Administration, Boston Legal highlighted issues that were often under the radar, clarified them morally and exerted pressure on the national consciousness. Can we ever know the impact that this show had on public attitudes toward homosexuality, euthanasia, the pharmaceutical industry, the death penalty? Certainly it was substantial.

Alan Shore and Red Reddington explaining.

Similarly a bevy of issues is simmering now, mainly international, that The Blacklist is positioned to address. For the most part (save the climate issue), these are not issues the Americans people disagree about: democracy vs theocracy, money in politics, free-market capitalism vs state-run capitalism and currency manipulation, a free press and Internet vs government-run, trade agreements, or basic human rights vs female circumcision, sex trafficking, denying education to girls etc. And The Blacklist has addressed several of them, for example, human sex trafficking in The Freelancer (1:2) and animal poaching in The Mombasa Cartel (2:6). Further, it is steeped in Cold War mythology. Red went missing, after all, just as the Soviet Union was coming apart.

Like the national issues highlighted by Boston Legal, these international issues are muddled and vague in the public consciousness, just waiting for elucidation. Are these themes are too abstract for tv? Concretize them. I love the notion of the “Alliance” running a dark-horse candidate for President in 2016, to take office in the fateful year of 2017. Think of the possibilities!

I admit I want Red to be heroic, even if he is a reluctant or flawed hero. Tragedy I can tolerate. Dystopia, I cannot.

We do not need to understand Red, we do not need to admire him, but we do need to trust him, as he frequently asks Liz to do. The audience, like Liz, needs a guide and mentor to navigate these treacherous times. Some Millennials take the view that shows like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad (both of which I gave up on) are ‘how it is’ precisely because they offer no unflawed perspective or admirable characters. “That’s how it is.” Good Lord, is this what postmodernism has brought us to?

James Spader has said that the idea of Red being on a path of redemption would be “disappointing” http://bit.ly/1vVlaSN. Was Alan Shore on a path of redemption? Of course not: the society he lived in was not morally in a position to judge him. Plus, he was having way too much fun. Is this similar to how Spader views Reddington? He has said that “in a way, I was looking for him” http://huff.to/1xS3zpH. Red frequently ridicules the ineffectiveness of the FBI’s methods, the inability of Asst Dir Harold Cooper (played by Harry Lennix) to see outside the box, to play “the long game” – to see all the moving pieces.

Red is the very picture of Edward Said’s “exile,” the individual who sees the world ‘contrapuntally’ – from more than one perspective simultaneously:

Hugo [of St Victor] twice makes it clear that the ‘strong’ or ‘perfect’ man achieves independence or detachment by working through attachments; not by rejecting them…. Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost; but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.

Regard experiences as if they are about to disappear. What is it that anchors them in reality? What would you save of them? Only someone who has achieved independence and detachment, someone whose homeland is ‘sweet’ but whose circumstances make it impossible to recapture this sweetness can answer these questions. (Such a person would also find it impossible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma.)

The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar places, can also become prisons… Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience…

There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be.” http://bit.ly/1wPRmWw

Compared to Alan Shore, Red Reddington is the ‘outsider’s outsider’ the true exile who is more at home in the world at large than in the country of his birth. As such, he can be the perfect guide to help us perceive the pitfalls and treachery of political, economic and ideological realities on a global scale. Like Alan Shore, Red Reddington operates outside the conventions of local morality and action. But Red’s sandbox is much larger: it encompasses the world.

The Blacklist can always opt for the ‘bad guy/badder guy’ formula, sticking with the bread-and-circus scenario of a “Batman a week” http://bit.ly/1vVlaSN. I hope Jon Bokenkamp was referring only to the action and pacing of the recent Batman movies when he turned this phrase. It’s a fine line to walk between the unusual but plausible and the fantastic impossible.

If the creative staff chooses, The Blacklist can do for international issues what Boston Legal did for national ones: pierce through the manipulation, secrecy and denial, and articulate and clarify the challenges, choices and yes even Truths that our governments, corporations and media can find every reason to obfuscate.