All the animals come out at night ...
In it’s first season last year, David Simon and George Pelecanos’s show The Deuce showed off The Wire creators’ talents for telling both big-picture, socially critical stories and small, carefully created real tales of everyday people caught in the webs of forces beyond their control. Taking place against the backdrop of the seedy world of New York’s Times Square sex industry in the early 1970s, The Deuce, like all Simon’s work, gave us memorable characters, multiple intertwining narratives and a gritty visual evocation of place and time.
In its second season, the show’s creators have stepped things up a gear and given a suitably complex twist to their sprawling but carefully controlled narrative of the world of the first season and its characters five years on in 1977.
The pimps, the prostitutes, the pornographic filmmakers, peep-show booths, club-owners, vice cops and the mob are still hustling their way through New York’s darkest, sleaziest streets, but changes are coming. They’re coming for Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal, below), a former prostitute who has moved into the world of adult films and has her heart set on directing. They’re coming for C.C. (Gary Carr), a coldly manipulative pimp who is increasingly frustrated by the film success of his once topearning prostitute Lori (Emily Meade). They’re coming for Vincent and his twin brother, Frankie (James Franco), whose comfortable and profitable business relations with the Mafia are causing tensions in their personal lives. They’re coming for the porn industry as a whole, which is experiencing a tipping point between the mainstream acceptance of adult content and the introduction of new home-video technology that will change it forever. Finally, change may be coming for Times Square itself as property developers begin to realise the potential value in cleaning up their prime midtown real estate.
If the first season was a darkly comic but sometimes heartbreaking introduction to the cutthroat world inhabited by its varied characters then the second season is a more focused and darker examination of a world on the cusp of change. It is also a season that manages mostly to keep its focus on its female characters and their attempts to empower themselves in a male-dominated world where women are the actual money-makers and value adders.
That’s a struggle probably best reflected in the season’s strongest story and through its strongest performance in which, with often not much more than a glance, a shrug or a softly delivered zinger of a line, Gyllenhaal portrays Candy’s struggle to be an artist in an industry that vehemently resists art and is controlled by men for whom she will always be a sex object. That’s a message that carries with it not only the truth of the time in which the story is set but also a deflating reflection of our own and a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same. ●
The Deuce season 2 is available on Showmax