Trigger Warning: The following article touches on sensitive subjects such as violence to children and violence towards & reductive treatment of LGBTQ individuals.
I am not an expert on any of these subjects. If anything written here is offensive or harmful, please bring it to my attention.
When I first got a recommendation to watch The Alienist, a new drama on TNT, it was only four episodes in. Given how I had enough time to watch all four episodes and catch up for the next week, I took the opportunity. However, I only managed to get two episodes in before I felt I was going to vomit at just how offensive the show was.
The first two episodes open with text on a black screen saying that, in the show’s 1896 setting, people who are considered mentally ill are considered to be separated from their true nature, and those who would try to study their thought patterns are called alienists. Five seconds in, and my confidence in this show is already shaky. The commercials I had seen for The Alienist made the show out to be a lurid crime drama that could get away with more graphic storytelling, due to being on cable. Now the show comes out and says, “We’re also going to be talking about the mentally ill”?
Sure enough, the first case of the series revolves around the New York police of 1896 discovering the body of a boy escort, Giorgio Santorelli, with his genitals removed. The person the police arrest for the crime is Henry Wolf, a gay man with syphilis, who starts hitting on Luke Evans’ character, John Moore, setting off more red flags. With the acting, directing, and cinematography choices made, Henry’s designed to disgust the audience, his syphilis and effeminate nature come across solely as signifiers that he’s a “bad man.”
As if that wasn’t enough, it turns out that this case hits home for our main character, Dr. Lazlo Kreizler, played by Daniel Bruhl. A few years ago, he had a similar case with the Zweig twins, a girl and her brother who liked to wear her dresses. Both wound up murdered, with the brother’s genitals also mutilated. Lazlo’s attempts to connect the two cases together incur the wrath of the children’s mother, who visits him and says she never should have gone to him to help her son’s “condition.”
“My son is dead. Both my children are dead, because of you,” she tells him.
(Notice that her daughter is only mentioned by association of her son, making it seem like only her son is important enough to be treated as an individual.)
Granted, this was not enough for me to give up the show yet. I know as well as anyone that good shows can have problematic elements (look no further than Batman, another IP with varying degrees in how it treats the mentally ill), and I was willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt. After all, the implication of making an alienist, a.k.a. a psychiatrist, the main character of a show lends itself to the idea that there could be a sense of nuance and understanding to the proceedings that most people would miss.
The first time he’s seen in both episodes of the show, Lazlo is seems perfectly capable of empathizing with a young boy who started a fire (saying it was more an act of loneliness than malice) and an adolescent girl who touches herself (her mother and priest wanted her to take cold baths and put leeches on her body). The show also has Dakota Fanning as Sara Howard, a typist for the local police department who has to deal with sexist, corrupt cops while trying to figure out the case, which is an important, timely topic, as Fanning herself has discussed. Lazlo also calls on the assistance of Marcus and Lucius Isaacson, two Jewish detective sergeants who use forensic science that the rest of the police department doesn’t approve of. Marcus even gets a chance to show a pessimistic yet interesting approach to government: “In capitalism, man exploits man. In socialism, it’s the other way around.”
Unfortunately, The Alienist has two major problems. First, it’s not a well structured show. Given how the episodes I saw play out as though they’re just dispensing information regarding the season-long story arc rather than having each episode build up to its own mini-climax, the show seems to be designed for binge-watching. Long-form storytelling can work (look at the success of Breaking Bad and the longevity of The CW’s Arrowverse), but it’s terrible when TV episodes feel like they’re telling only part of a story that won’t go anywhere until the finale, rather than being treated like individual stories in their own right. The argument can be made that it’s more acceptable with Netflix originals, but when network television only releases 1/16th of a story at a time, rather than an episode that stands on its own, it can be aggravating for viewers if the story is just spinning wheels and not going anywhere, especially if problematic elements are introduced without being addressed.
The second problem is that, while Lazlo seems to be more accepting of neuro-divergent behaviors, having Moore and Sara do the grunt work, while he just draws conclusions based on what they bring him, really makes Lazlo feel like a background character in his own show. Lazlo says he’s sympathetic to the children who have been murdered for their sexuality/genderqueer status, but the audience never gets to see him doing so, which leaves the one time we do get to experience genderqueer life in greater detail to Moore, and it sours the entire show.
Near the end of episode 2, Moore investigates Paresis Hall, a real life “boy brothel” owned by actual gangsters/antagonists Biff Ellison and Paul Kelly, who appear in the show. The look of the scenes makes the environment as disturbing as possible, and not in a good way. In filmmaking, the Dutch angle is a technique where the angle of the camera is tilted to the side, instead of being properly horizontally level with its surroundings, making the audience feel that something is wrong. In the brothel’s intro scene, not only is the camera mostly on its side, but it pans up, down, and all around the scene in a single take, making the environment feel tense, lurid, and skeevy. Children selling their bodies for money is awful enough; the over-the-top camerawork is completely unnecessary. It gets worse when one of the gangsters drugs Moore and slyly hits on him, making the audience more uncomfortable. The drug kicks in while Moore questions Santorelli’s friend and fellow escort Sally, making the atmosphere even more disturbing, having the environment blur out until the escort he was questioning steals his wallet, and the owners proceed to let some of their older escorts molest him.
The sex workers in this scene are disappointingly not portrayed as sympathetic characters with depth, but shallow tropes meant to be feared. It’s not even clear whether they’re supposed to be gay boys or genderqueer. All the sex workers answer to female names (Giorgio was known as Gloria), and their lack of apprehension in assaulting Moore portrays them as fine with how the gangsters run their brothel. This plus the Zweig “boy” preferring ladies’ clothing hints at genderqueer identity but never tackles those undertones head on in a positive way, instead painting a regressive view of non-straight, possibly non-cis people.
Based on these episodes, The Alienist is one of the most offensively exploitive shows I’ve ever seen. While the series includes real people and places, Lazlo Kreizler and his cases are works of fiction. The filmmakers had the choice to frame these escorts as being forced to do these actions under duress, but they opted to go the tired, lazy method of using male homosexuality for shock value. I don’t care whether Moore’s reaction was meant to be reductive or whether Lazlo would go on to visit the brothel and react in a more level-headed, down-to-earth manner. If the show was at all interested in representation beyond harmful genderqueer tropes, then that’s what these first two episodes should have set out to do.
Just to be clear, I’m not so naive enough as to think queer people can’t be as awful as straight people; people are capable of good and bad. But positive representation for queer people, gender or otherwise, still feels few and far between, and again, these harmful genderqueer tropes are still alive in 2018. I’m also not saying anyone involved in the making of this series is a bad person, because no one sets out to make a bad product. As Roger Ebert said, “It’s not what it’s about, it’s how it’s about it.” It’s just the way they went about it presents the show as homophobic, transphobic, hypocritical garbage that doesn’t leave me compelled to keep watching in the hope that they’ll eventually do better.
(image: TNT)
Nic Woolfe is an aspiring writer who loves talking about nerdy stuff, storytelling, and being a good ally. If you’d like to see more nerdy think-pieces, the best place to follow Nic is on Tumblr. If you’d like to see Nic’s first impressions of movies and TV shows, follow on Twitter or Facebook.
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