A Spouse of Dynamite in "The Diplomat"

The American people “want some pomp and circumstance,”  says one wised-up character in Season 3, Episode 3 of “The Diplomat,”  the current Netlfix hit most popular among the streaming  culturati. The rest of that thought reverberates more relevantly than perhaps any utterance  in the entire enterprise. It's a warning that if you fail to show the  nation what it means to be “a proud American  family,” that's when “some neofascist crawls out of the woodwork and takes the empty throne.”

Well geez, a devoted viewer might think, this show’s offer of sophisticated escapism (with consequential political realities underneath) isn’t usually so...on the nose. As show runner Debora Cahn has pointed out, the time lag dictated by the several months  needed for  shooting and airing the program typically means that up-to-the-minute relevance is unattainable. The plot, for all its savviness about our current disruptions, can at most be predictive rather than reactive.

That said, any of us agonizing through the ongoing misappropriation of the presidency  could readily read  into the statement several IRL items: Joe Biden’s sorry run for a second term as the empty throne, Project 2025 as the woodwork, the neofascist as—well, to finish that thought is somehow vulgar.

There is an increasingly well-documented trend among that deep-thinking national minority not to say the name I just contorted myself, yes, not to say. Also in the current ethos is a the widely adopted attempt to  avoid watching the skeins of grim news programming in the burgeoning hellscape that is American governance. So—sorry/not sorry? One parlor game that threatens to become a drinking game is, which neo-fascist do you abhor most? Again, no fair naming the central figure. 

Is it little Stevie Miller? Almost too obvious. We made him--he is the spawn of bullying, unpopularity, incelhood. Mr. Santa Monica Goebbels, not unlike lying and enabling legislative functionary Mike Johnson, has the ready excuse for the perversity—each was probably the most cordially loathed dweeb in their school. (I’ll bet neither still had their lunch money on them by the end of second period in junior high. Though they may have sat at the end of the bench, spraying disinfectant on the basketballs and whispering in the assistant coach’s ear that Crazy Pete was playing warfighter cosplay grab-ass in the locker room again, perhaps covertly slugging down some rye whiskey with his milk.)

(Speaking of lunch--as the shutdown the Republicans have deployed to protect the Epstein files winds on, in just days tens of millions of American kids may go underfed despite available contingency funding that could fuel SNAP’s about-to-be -blocked nutritional benefits. Points to lickspittle Mike on that.)

(Did we forget Witkoff ? His wizardry has, as an example, helped the Trump tariff abominations put 100,000 --the BBC estimate--carpet weavers out of work in India. The shrimp harvesters are underfed as well, watching their catch rot thanks to the same tariffs.) 

Back to the Big (Bad) Dogs. 

 Could it be hulking Tommy Homan, with his sneer somewhere in the south half of a head that looks like a rugby ball that  popped its laces?  How about Dog Executioner Kristi Noem, the runner-up to (rigged, to be sure) homecoming queen Melania? Nah—though she did strangle Karoline’s pet lizard from a biology project. Pam Bondi was going to bring her before the student court for a show trial,  but Pam is out  by the demolition music, clapping erasers in time  after telling the whole bowling team about the Big Guy sneaking performatively male gazes into the girl’s locker room with his little tittering buddy, Jeffrey. 

Yep, it really comes all the way back down to Russ Vought, who stole the exams years ago and balled up the constitutional and jurisprudential protocols  right under our noses. Only a few people knew the unseen appendix held an agenda for destroying diversity, roughing up brown folks and running some extra-judicial rub-outs. 

The  discouraging takeaway from all this is to take on board the fear that almost any pushback attempt by Hollywood, including even the smartest works of cinema and the streamers,  seems  powerless to move the mass-cult needle.  I’d like to be designated an alarmist, but is it already too late for alarm? There’s a disconnect just coughing out sparks;  I’m just a guy trying to care about the World Series and such circus tents even as we’ve severed the aid programs to the many parts of the World Serious the Big Man has declared to be shitholes.

So let’s care about, just for kicks, that smartest and most virouous of shows, the above-mnetioned “The Diplomat”.  Not unfeasibly, show creator Cahn compared the actual administration to a Marvel movie. This amused one time "West Wing" staffer Allison Janney, playing  fictional Vice- President- on-the-rise Grace Penn, and also spurred Bradley Whitford as fictional Second Husband Brad to compare the real-world administration to a scenario in which the Kardashians and “Squid Game” had a baby Tony Soprano.

To venture into updating the plot points is to risk spoilers, but suffice it to say that that British aircraft carrier that got blown up with significant loss of life in earlier innings is not done as the MacGuffin of global affairs Kate Wyler and her irrepressibly envelope-shredding (not to say explosive) husband must quarrelsomely attend to. It seems almost a symptom of the groaning despair out nation faces that only (er, un-obliterated) nuclear-level  threats can now penetrate  our shattered attention spans. (Season 3 adds a second seaborne engine of both real and character wars, a nuke-capable downed Chinese submarine. There are plans for that even Hegseth might be afraid to tell journos about.)

Oh--you’re wondering if something similarly apocalyptic is trying to  happens in Kathrine Bigelow’s now streaming as “The Diplomat’s Netflix neighbor drama (its title exproriated loosely above), “A House of Dynamite”? 

Well, I could tell you right here.

And I could tell you again from a different POV in the next paragraph.

And how about a migraine-inducing third run-through of the same information? 

Well, what you really want to know is, what are the consequences? 

The spoiler here is that I don’t have a spoiler to share. But the film runs like an expensive Bigelow-level Swiss watch …er, until it doesn’t. So enough about that.

At least half the point of the “The Diplomat’”s  dramas—and continuing kudos to Cahn for keeping it all in balance—is who’s zooming who? Which returns us to the quote at the top of this post, as spoken by Roslaine Elbay’s character Nora. Egyptian by birth, and a real-world  graduate of Oxford in Political Science  who’s probably even sharper than her role demands, she is emblematic of this show’s smart casting.

The regulars do their delectably argumentative things—notably Sewell’s Hal, teetering between dangerous impulsivity and making grand master chess moves while the room is learning checkers. At one stage deep in this season he does something so masterful that it awakens the elegantly controlled but unmistakable horn dog within Kate’s complicated psyche. But plot twists and flips in this series are always coming in to unhorse happiness. Veterans of all three seasons might, like me, ask if Kate’s sexuality has been fetishized just a bit too demonstratively, but not only is she fully believable as a lust object (costumers for this show,  take a bow for your daily work but especially fore that glittery sheath dress), but continuously credible the sharpest tart (one can imagine salty PM Trowbridge saying) of them all. Perhaps it's not improper to note that Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah ) has her own smolder going, and as the drama moves in Season 4 to deeper still West Wing intrigue…

(Hold on! Yes, People’s House architecture buffs, Sir destroyed the East Wing to build an idiot’s ballroom with the full assent and funding of `me', and , of course, the hideous plutocratic pecker-tracked tech bros. Yes, he did.) 

…Billie will have her say. (Notwithstanding Hal’s level-voiced warning with extortionate info bulging in his back pocket: “You don’t want to play chicken with me, Billie.”)

In due course, with further attention to the film that is still emerging as hope for we politically downtrodden, “One Battle After Another”—

https://www.dogtown.press/one-battle-after-another-guns-for-glory/ 

--we will consider here how feeble or not is the creative community’s response to what is happening all-around us. For now, we can only hope in the sprit of “The West Wing” (where Cahn trained up with mentor Aaron Sorkin) is that Kate Wyler is ready to do is what we all need to happen for we simple humans: “People huddle in dark corners to keep the world in one piece.”