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Clickbait (2021)

Available on Netflix

Created by Tony Ayres & Christian WhiteStarring Zoe Kazan, Betty Gabriel, and Adrian Grenier

There are so many good things – even great things –  to watch on screen these days. But we all have a limited amount of time. With my schedule, I have about an hour or two a day to devote to TV and movies. So, I have to be selective about what I give that time to. Why not get the highest return for my investment?

That’s the theory. In practice, I am not infrequently seduced by what my mother used to call candy bar entertainment: Delicious. Addictive. Bad for your (mental) health.

You can’t always know from reviews or trailers whether the movie or series you decide to watch will be of the candy-bar kind. But what you can do is make it a rule to push the off button the moment you realize it is.

Last night, for example, based on something K had read, we decided to watch Macho, the new Clint Eastwood movie. It was awful right from the start. So it was easy to walk away from it after 15 minutes.

About a week ago, though, I decided to try Clickbait, a Netflix miniseries recommended by a friend. Unlike Macho, Clickbait was, from the beginning, engaging and entertaining. Binge-worthy. So I watched all eight episodes in three sittings, staying up two hours past my bedtime twice.

Was it worth it?

Plot:  “Clickbait” is internet content that grabs you with an alluring promise but then fails to deliver. By naming this series Clickbait, Netflix was quite possibly promising the opposite.

The series follows the mysterious Nick Brewer (Adrian Grenier) as he struggles with his multiple roles as father, brother, son, and husband after appearing in an alarming video holding a sign indicating that once his taped confession of abuse gets 5 million views, he will die. Of course, the clip goes viral. Unsure where Nick is, his family must figure out how a man they only knew as caring found himself confessing to a secret life.

 

What I liked: 

* Clickbait was, for sure, highly entertaining – in the sense of having a fast-moving and interesting plot that kept me wanting more.

* It was a whodunit. Sort of. But it was also an exploration of many elements of social media that are changing our culture.

* I liked the acting of two of the principals: Betty Gabriel (as Nick’s wife) and Andrea Elizabeth (who played Nick’s mother). I had mixed feelings about what Zoe Kazan brought to her role, but I thought many of the secondary roles, including those of Nick’s two boys (Cameron Engels and Jaylin Fletcher) were played well.

* I liked that it depicts an interracial family without making too much of it.

 

What I didn’t like: 

* I found much of the plot to be annoyingly improbable. Everything from the romance between two of the lead characters, Pia (Zoe Kazan) and Roshan Amir (Phoenix Raei), to the scene where the villain is standing with his gun pointed at the cops and they aren’t shooting him.

* The tension and the surprises were done not through clever plotting but with fakes and feints.  The plot itself was clickbait.

* Adrian Grenier, who was perfect in Entourage,  didn’t bring enough to this role.

Roxana Hadadi, writing on the Roger Ebert website, said all of this better than I just did:

Clickbait is a reminder of why Netflix series became such hits in the first place. A cast of recognizable, serviceable actors dive with melodrama and zeal into a narrative that defies logical sense but moves at a breakneck pace, ends on cliffhangers like clockwork, and incorporates just enough zigs and zags to keep viewers guessing. The miniseries’ title is accurate enough: Clickbait grabs you, whizzes you along, and leaves you feeling satisfied before you forget everything you just watched. It’s not sophisticated, but it is highly bingeable, and its eight episodes are consistently outlandish enough to keep you watching.

 

Critical Reception:

* “Clickbait asks big questions and keeps you hooked…” (Karl Quinn, Sydney Morning Herald)

* “Alas, I finished Clickbait feeling had, as though – to use the title – I’d clicked on something that promised a bit of substance but delivered a whole lot of nothing.” (Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe)

* “Obviously Clickbait has things to say about internet technology, misinformation, and the alarming, potentially dangerous speed of modern media. But mostly it’s just an elaborate whodunit.” (Tom Long, Detroit News)

You can watch the trailer here.

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Blood Meridian – or The Evening Redness in the West

By Cormac McCarthy

337 pages

Published in April 1985 by Random House

I’m writing this review two hours before we meet to discuss the book. At this point, I’ve read about half of it. Normally, I’d feel uncertain about commenting on a novel I’d only half read, but not in this case. I’m quite certain that what’s ahead for me is more of what I’ve already experienced.

There isn’t much of a plot to Blood Meridian. It’s more like a travelogue – taking the reader through the seven circles of Cormac McCarthy’s vision of hell. There are four or five principal characters, but none can be described as a protagonist – not even “the kid.”

There is no character development to speak of. No anagnorisis. No peripetia. No denouement. But there is the kid’s tragic journey through a bleak and brutal landscape, described in language that is verbally lush, syntactically challenging – and always poetic. In fact, I have come to think of this book more as a prose poem than a novel.

Blood Meridian follows the kid, a teenage orphan with a penchant for violence, as he gets hooked up with a series of even more violent people while seeking his fortune in the US/Mexico borderland in the middle of the 19th century.

Some of the plot and at least two of the characters are based on historical accounts. One of them is John Glanton, the leader of a gang of thieves and murderers that, among other atrocities, randomly massacred indigenous Americans and Mexicans in 1949 and 1950. Another is Judge Holden, a character one could reasonably suppose to be a hybrid of Ahab, Kurtz, and Mephistopheles, but who was, in fact, a real person.

If Blood Meridian is verbally a prose poem, it is visually an orgy of charred and bludgeoned human bodies, broken skulls, bloody scalps, raped women, and hung and dismembered babies. Instead of a plot, the reader is delivered a litany of human cruelty, betrayal, and evil. These actions continue, almost unbroken, for 337 pages. You can open the book to any page, put your finger on any sentence, and you will be within 20 words of something that is ugly and/or violent and/or terrifying.

But the prose… It is the reason you want to keep on reading.

Blood Meridian is a literary achievement. It is Heart of Darkness played out on the Western Frontier, spare in sentimentality and brimming with Peckinpah-level carnage.

I’m eager to discover what my fellow Mules will say about it. I know at least one of them put the book down without finishing it. But Harold Bloom himself put it down twice before reading it through a third time and declaring it a masterpiece.

As I said, I am about halfway through the book. And so far, I’m not sure I’d rate Blood Meridian as highly as Bloom did. (Not that he would have needed my confirmation.) But I am certain that I will finish it – because even if it fails as a novel in some ways, it succeeds magnificently in so many others.

 

Critical Reception  

* “Blood Meridian comes at the reader like a slap in the face, an affront that asks us to endure a vision of [hell]…. But while Cormac McCarthy’s fifth novel is hard to get through, it is harder to ignore. Any page of his work reveals his originality, a passionate voice given equally to ugliness and lyricism.”  (Caryn James, New York Times, April 28, 1985)

* “McCarthy’s style is a pastiche of bad Faulkner, and his vocabulary is apparently drawn from Jacobean tragedies and translations of Beowulf…. The narrative is littered with portentous phrases like ‘Gods years’ and ‘lies by God lies.’ These… pronouncements, after a while, become irksomely hollow and pretentious…. Blood Meridian is certainly bold and disturbing – but does that make it a masterpiece?”  (Allen Boyer, Detroit Free Press, March 24, 1985)

* “[Cormac McCarthy] is the writer all American writers have to measure themselves against.” (David Vann, The Guardian, Nov. 13, 2009)

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