There is something absurd about hearing a character in a movie utter the title of the movie they’re in out loud. It’s a moment that can be played for laughs, but it’s just as hard not to smirk when a film that takes itself seriously calls itself by its own name. Many filmmakers will go out of their way to avoid this moment of clunky announcement. You never hear, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis snarl, “Welp, there will be blood,” or Leonardo DiCaprio mutter, “You know, man, it’s always just one battle after another.”
HBO’s new limited series DTF St. Louis observes no such prohibition. In the world of the show, “DTF St. Louis” is a hook-up app for married people looking for discrete adulterous encounters. It’s the catalyst for the entire sweet and sordid affair that takes up this show’s seven episodes. We hear Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman) and Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour) discussing it, and their joint interest in exploring it, in one of the show’s numerous timelines. Both men, suburban husbands and fathers, are unfulfilled in their sexual lives. So they make a pact to revitalize their lives together through online love. And we hear police investigators explaining and interrogating it after Floyd’s mysterious death in another of those timelines. The app’s logs are a key archive of evidence for Detective Homer (Richard Jenkins) and Detective Plumb (Joy Sunday) as they try to figure out what exactly happened to Floyd.
DTF? DTF. They met on DTF. I got a hit on DTF.
The mantra-like repetition of this title is, thus, perfectly explicable in plot terms, but it also leads the viewer to notice how many other different notable terms or phrases characters repeat over and over again to each other onscreen. Cornhole. Outback Steakhouse. Quality Garden Suites. Nicer plates and bowls for the household. Finish First. B out the B. Watermelon Breeze. No way, José. Jamba Juice. DTF St. Louis. There is a touch of smugness in the portrayal of these Midwestern suburbanites who pay such linguistic reverence to the names of the strip mall chains that litter their commercial thoroughfares, but there’s also something more. Characters repeat these loaded phrases—each tied to a meaningful event in the story of love, friendship, and infidelity that we watch unfold—until they are more sound than word. It’s the stylistic signature of DTF St. Louis—language that becomes gesture that becomes feeling.
A prose poem? I hesitate to use too literary an analogy, as there are aspects of DTF St. Louis that are pretty willfully goofy, and I’m not entirely sure every tonal movement it makes is either effective or well chosen, but there’s really no other experience on TV quite like it right now. Words and phrases repeat, but so do images, sometimes achingly gorgeous ones, stitched through the series like embroidery.
The show begins, and it seems like a murder mystery or a suburban infidelity melodrama or a male friendship cringe comedy. It is indeed all of those things, and several more besides that reveal themselves over time. But the rhythm and pace of the show does not belong to or emerge from any of those genres. Its repetitions, its quick vignettes, its narrative haltingness and teasing, its many gemlike moments of visual beauty—the show builds out of these disparate and interconnected blocks of text, gesture, feeling.
I will admit that I was resistant to this show at first. I have an allergy to media about suburban ennui and adultery—it’s hard to come up with new things to say about a topic so well trodden over many decades. But I will also admit that DTF St. Louis hypnotized me. Does it have anything new to say about the stir-crazy horniness of middle-aged middle-class white people? Maybe. But the way DTF St. Louis says what it has to say is utterly original and irresistible. That’s enough for me.
DTF St. Louis is one in an increasingly long list of recent prestige TV series about the crisis of contemporary masculinity. In fact, it airs on a cable channel—HBO—that, over the past two years, has essentially become a one-stop-shopping narrowcast boutique of narratives of male loneliness and anxiety. The Rehearsal, The Chair Company, Rooster, Task, The Pitt, the forthcoming Richard Gadd series Half Man—these series are all variations on a theme, and DTF St. Louis, for all of its formal eccentricity, slots right in among them. Like many of these series, it’s an alternately critical and credulous examination of what exactly the hell is the matter with men these days.
DTF’s take on this discourse is, as its characters like to repeatedly say, “complex.” At its heart are Clark and Floyd. Clark is a successful local meteorologist for a news station in St. Louis. He lives in the imaginary West County suburb of Twyla, MO, with his wife and two children in a large and lovely, if sterile, new construction home. He is a measly kind of man, soft and sensitive, acquiescent to his family, but also blocked up. He greets everyone with ingratiating good cheer, but he’s also possessed by a kind of twitchy nervousness. He rarely finishes a sentence, hanging, instead, on his conversation partner to fill in the rest. Bateman does an unnerving but effective job of transmuting his characteristic smarm into something a little more fragile.
To Floyd and his wife Carol (Linda Cardellini), though, Clark is a glowing image of stability. Floyd is a bit of a lovable loser. He is an American Sign Language interpreter who works onscreen with Clark. He describes himself as overweight, out of fighting trim, and that’s only the beginning of his manifold problems. He is a doting stepfather to Richard, a sad young boy with devastating behavioral issues. He wants to regain his lost intimacy with Carol, but there are two problems that we find out about right away. The first is that Carol has taken on a job as a little league umpire to make some extra money, which they need because they are deep in debt. It’s not that Floyd objects to this as a threat to his masculine status as a breadwinner but that Carol’s umpire uniform turns him off. The second reason for their cold snap in the bedroom, though, is that Floyd, for reasons that it will take the entire season to unfold, has a debilitatingly crooked penis. I’ve already listed a number of storytelling genres—mystery, erotic thriller, buddy comedy—that DTF St. Louis incorporates. One of them, maybe the most structurally important, is the dick joke.
So, these lost boys turn to DTF St. Louis, and the promise of midlife sexual awakening it brings. It’s hard to summarize what actually happens after that, largely because “what happens” is revealed piece by piece, with events thoroughly shuffled out of chronological order. DTF St. Louis creator Steven Conrad—who is the sole writing and directing credit on every episode—borrows and blows out a contrivance that I most closely associate with Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad: Each episode, from the very first, features scenes from every other episode. That means that the convoluted, devastating final moments of the series—as well as dozens of other moments—are stealthily interspersed as elliptical cutscenes all the way through. When we first encounter those images—Clark riding his recumbent bike on the dark streets, for instance, or Clark and Floyd embracing in the nude—it’s unclear where and when they’re from. The show’s quick-cutting and lyrical editorial style makes this pattern seem perfectly natural in the pilot. But it means that, every time we see a set of images, we learn more about them. Every time we watch a scene with a little extra time at the front or back, or from a slightly different perspective, we understand something different about them. The story moves forward, but through recycled images and moments that gain meaning and feeling over time. Jamba Juice. Quality Garden Suites. No way, José.
The basic outline is that, soon, Clark and Carol embark upon an affair of their own, while Floyd begins—first accidentally and then on purpose—to explore the possibility of “intimacy play” with other men. Those paths crisscross and converge in expected and unexpected ways, forming a kind of homespun love triangle that it takes every minute of all seven episodes to fully appreciate and understand. Then, in the end—as we’re shown in the pilot—there’s Floyd’s dead body, an empty can of poisoned Bloody Mary, and a Playgirl magazine centerfold with the model’s face scratched out.
What’s never unclear on this show is that the real love story here is between Clark and Floyd. These men share everything, they support each other 24 hours a day, they are kind to each other in ways that will eventually baffle the investigating detectives. This is a portrait of radical male vulnerability, of the kind of soul-entwining friendship we are told is hard for men to strike up at this age. “I’m just fucking lonely, man,” Clark tells Floyd. “I’m lonely as shit.” DTF St. Louis is a show about the side effects of Clark and Floyd’s deceptively simple and incredibly complex cure for male loneliness.
Then there’s Carol. Since Freaks and Geeks, Linda Cardellini has become one of the greatest and most dependable TV actresses of her generation. She is, in this show, sultry and silly, cold and furious, whimsical on occasion, and righteously cutting. Her performance in her umpire gear is a massive comic achievement, her diminutive head rolling around atop the bulky chest pad, her arms slicing out to call strikes—she’s like a silent film comedian. And while Carol’s woundedness and frustration and awakening desire are as important to DTF’s narrative as anything else, so too is her ultimate marginality. She is the wife of a mixed-up, depressed man and the mother of a mixed-up, depressed son. When she and Clark meet up for sex, Clark calls the assignations “dream sessions,” because the room becomes a space for them to realize their (sexual) dreams. But Carol doesn’t really have any hot dreams of her own. The only ones she can come up with are about ways she can rescue her lost husband and lost son.
Even still, Carol’s screen time fully dwarves that of Clark’s wife and children. They barely factor in the story at all, not even into the many conversations Clark has with Floyd about his guilt. He feels guilt about cuckolding Floyd and about hurting Floyd’s feelings, but little guilt about his betrayal of his own family. Late in the series, Clark tells the investigators that his affair with Carol was, “a reaction against my own life.” He goes on to recall the gentle #GirlDad scene of braiding his daughters’ hair as they share their lives with him. Despite the sweetness of these moments, he feels removed from them, asleep. “You cannot be there with your daughters in these precious moments, thinking about yourself and your things,” he said. “Come on, you gotta be present.” And yet, Clark is not present. Or rather, he’s present elsewhere. Clark only has eyes, and a heart, for Floyd. And part of this show’s tragedy and romance is in witnessing Clark devote, and then sacrifice, his life (daughters included) for him.
A criticism many commenters brought up about Martin Scorsese’s funereal gangster epic The Irishman was that the film’s few women were radically marginalized onscreen. In particular, Scorsese cast the outstanding Anna Paquin to play the daughter of the aging hitman protagonist played by Robert DeNiro. But Paquin has only a single line in the film. Why have her there, why put her in those scenes, looming in a corner, if you’re going to ignore her? The answer—for many, an insufficient one—is that this is a film about the sustaining and suffocating embrace of male friendship. That the titular Irishman’s enmeshment in the “family” of the Italian mob gave him a sense of belonging and acknowledgment he’d never had, but that it came at the expense of any kind of relationship at all with his actual family. At the end of that film, as those men that filled his life are killed in their turn or die of old age, he is left alone, lonely, without the daughter he kept at the margins of his life. The cure for male loneliness is fatal if taken in too high a dose.
DTF St. Louis tells a similarly dire story in a form that is deceptively enlivening. Its quick disorienting cuts, its uplifting seventies pop soundtrack, the electricity of its leads—we don’t feel, here, the dread and horror of mortality that suffused every second of The Irishman. But it’s all a feint. It’s possible, it turns out, to give too much of yourself, to escape an airless co-dependency only to reproduce that same airlessness elsewhere. It’s possible to be so kind that it’s cruel. Carol keeps saying that Floyd is “the sweetest man,” but he is as dismissive of her struggle and pain as he is attentive to Clark’s. There is a heart-flaying generosity to the way Clark and Floyd melt into each other, a deep selfishness to their self-love. They find something in each other only to lose everything. You know, man, it’s always just one battle after another.
