The baffling failure of Rutherford Falls

Once upon a time, Greg Daniels and his writer Mike Schur set out to adapt a show around a stubborn protagonist who lived in his own reality. That was Michael Scott and within six episodes, he was retooled into a more self-aware character. The show instantly became better when the character at its center was more empathic and relatable.

 

So why do they keep repeating the same mistake. Leslie Knope was nauseating in the first season of Parks and Recreation before they righted the shop and General Mark Naird suffers from much the same problem in the inaugural season of Space Force. Apparently, they haven’t learned their lesson with the character of Nathan Rutherford.  Played be Ed Helms, he’s a proprietor of a historical museum, a mayor (the kind that has no actual power), and descendant of a town’s first settler who is obsessed with his place in history. 

He’s seen as a harmless rube until a proposal comes up to move a statue of Rutherford’s namesake and town founder from a traffic circle where it is causing traffic accidents. When Nathan attempts to defend his position, he puts his foot in his mouth and shows an entitlement and privilege large enough to get him cancelled on an epic scale. Before one thing leads to another, Rutherford invokes the wrath of the local Native American tribe and gets his family embroiled in a law suit that tears through the town.

 

In an age where the country is sharply divided over the issue of whether any statues of white people should stand at all barring a demanding purity test, this seems like extremely risky territory to wade in to. It helps that the wide spectrum of attitudes of a statue (“I think they should make a statue about my grandmother instead”, “statues are boring”, “it’s a traffic hazard” etc.) beyond the typical “statues as symbols of hatred” are on display. But it’s an odd next project for as progressive a show runner as Michael Schur (who does enlist a Native American show-runner to be fair). I haven’t read any critics’ reviews but I watched the first episode thinking of all the ways that self-righteous bunch would be waiting to anoint this show with the Scarlett P (for “problematic”), even if the philosophy of the show hews more towards their values.

 
The show initially seems determined to make a strawman out of Rutherford—he’s exceedingly stubborn and so utterly resistant to change – that he’s basically what you’d get if Andy Bernard got educated by the Daughters of the Confederacy instead of Cornell. At the same time, the show is concurrently woke in almost every aspect outside of Nathan’s blindspot for protecting his heritage.  Nathan’s best friend is a Native American history obsessive and the two bond over shared history and he displays the appropriate sensitivity to microaggressions and intersectionality. When the two want to disqualify a white history fair candidate because he’s caught on tape using a patois, it’s the kind of societal overcorrection I wouldn’t be behind in real life but it might hit the social justice sweet spot for these viewers.

Similarly, Nathan’s intern/assistant/lackey is a Southeast Asian gay teen who he has a relationship based on mutual respect to the degree that doing drudge work for school credit isn’t considered exploitation for a high schooler of any race.

The problem again, is just the sheer oblivious of Nathan and the lack of character development until, perhaps, the last two episodes of the season.

This series dramatizes several issues like the value and profitability of nostalgia, how different oppressed peoples work together in the present, whether casinos are helpful or hurtful to Native tribes, if grievance is enough currency alone to accomplish objectives and more. These issues can spur thought-provoking conversations only if they involve characters that can be taken seriously.

The show has the potential to be better in the second season as things stand, but why take so long to set such elementary things into motion?

 

La Bamba (1987): Can a Rock God be Sweet?

Can a rock god be a sweet angelic boy — someone wants nothing more than to buy his mother a house and do right by his high school sweetheart and extended family?

My experience with rock and roll biopics (Ray, Walk the Line, Dreamgirls, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Doors, Almost Famous) has taught me otherwise. If the movies (and the occasional Rolling Stone article) has taught me anything, it’s that rock is a corrupting influence. It’s only a matter of time before your head gets big, you abandon your friends and business partners, you succumb to groupies (or in the case of Bohemian Rhapsody, a strangely evil form of gaydom) and drugs get the better of you.

In Bohemian Rhapsody, for instance, Freddie Mercury was far more a uniting force than a dividing force and there’s little evidence of him taking his band mates for granted. Contrary to what the movie states, they all started solo careers around the same time.

I’m not enough of an expert to comment on whether reality serves the story in these cases or the other way around, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some exaggeration was necessary.

Then again, a well-behaved rock and roller is not only a boring story, it seems antithetical to the spirit of rock and roll or any of its variants. Whether the country stylings of Johnny Cash or the sounds of Motown, it seems like music in the last 70 years wouldn’t be what it is if its creators weren’t driven by a rebellious streak.

This isn’t so in the case of Richie Valens. Or at least the version played by Lou Diamond Phillips in the 1987 film La Bamba was pure and angelic. Born Ricky Venezuela to a single Chicano mother, Venezuela was true to his high school sweetheart, forgiving of his abusive brother, and he never had a desire to do anything but earn enough money to buy his mother a house. Valens’ life came to an end in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and J.P. Richardson in an event that served as a humongous blow to the burgeoning rock and roll movement. It was most famously catalogued in Don McLean’s hit “American Pie” where the term “The Day the Music Died” was coined.

You might say that Richie Valens was a paragon of virtue is giving him an awful lot of the benefit of the doubt considering he died at the age of 17. It’s possible that in an alternative reality, Valens would have knocked up seven girls and killed a cat had he survived to 18. In fact, one of the smarter things the film does is hint at that rock-and-roll-infused destruction and what might have been with Valens’ doppelganger in the form of his wreckless brother Bob who occupies a large role in the film. But 17-year-old Ritchie is rock solid. The film is pretty convincing that this is a man who would have stayed true to himself no matter what happened.

But just like my knowledge of what Johnny Cash or Ray Charles is limited, I don’t really know what the future of Ritchie Vallens held, and in a way it doesn’t matter. Rock stars have always been and always will be legends. In any given point in American history, there have been thousands of people who play the guitar and write songs but through some combination of marketing, luck, and talent, a few become symbols that are part of something larger than themselves.

Valens was immortalized by Don McLean who wanted to use his passing as a metaphor for lost innocence. American culture tended to get pretty metaphorical in that way as it came out the other end of Vietnam. The film chooses to symbolize Valens that way. I’ll take it.