In the Flesh: Too Old to Die Young

It’s a miracle this show exists. That it’s one of the greatest seasons of television ever made is self-evident by the time its premiere wraps on a fight between vacant, dead-eyed cop Martin (Miles Teller) and a naked gangster in a mechanic’s garage. If you aren’t sold by then, perhaps James Urbaniak’s jaw-dropping turn as sexual predator and porn producer Stevie Crockett, a sort of business-forward Black Lodge entity, will cement its status. Or the staggering monologue by the dying narco baron Don Ricardo (Emiliano Díez), in which he recounts a dream about his dead sister visiting him in the form of a cat shedding tears containing the lives her son would never lead, only to be met by that same son’s inability to understand the poetic beauty of his uncle’s words. Maybe you’ll hold out until the enigmatic Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo) is fucking her beautiful boyfriend with the handle of the whip he used to turn Martin’s back into a cross-hatched filet of raw meat, its tongue wrapped tight around his neck, her spit dripping from between his ass cheeks. Maybe it’ll be the satire that gets you, like a room full of cops with the affect of secondary characters on The Office doing a cheer routine to spell out “fascism”.

Or maybe it will be the colors. Flushed, hot pinks. Deep, vibrant blues. Amber and gold and sickly green. Even its washed-out colors are crisp and distinct. Against the backdrop of today’s apricot-and-teal plague, Too Old to Die Young looks like it reinvented color single-handedly. And not only is every shot composed and lit with painterly precision, but more often than not we get to linger on it, to absorb its beauty slowly and with purpose. There are shots of Jesus (Augusto Aguilera) standing cigarette in hand in the negative space of a barn door, flanked by expanses of wind-battered siding, that look like Georgia O’Keefe paintings brought to life. There are interiors and landscapes so reminiscent of David Hockney’s work it feels easier to believe he created them than that a location scout ferreted them out and lighting and cinematography teams worked tirelessly to capture them. A shot of Martin standing in a condemned warehouse looks like a lost still from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with a slanted beam of bluish light cutting the darkness between the concrete pillars and suffusing the background with a soft blue glow. 

Surely you’ll be on board by the time Jesus, attired in gay little Chelsea boots and a black Greek Fret speedo like some kind of Robert Mapplethorpe fever nightmare, hacks Martin’s head off with a machete and then sets about butchering his body. By that time you’ll have had more than long enough to marinate in Refn’s slow, hypnotic glides through neon-lit rooms full of brutal criminals watching kitsch performances, or to stare into Martin’s empty gaze as he embarks on a crusade against rapists and sexual predators under the guidance of Diana DeYoung (Jena Malone), a holistic therapist and victim advocate who has her clients’ abusers whacked on a regular basis. You’ll have started to put the interlocking themes together, the senseless savagery, the resurgence of brainless, incoherent fascism squirming like newly hatched caterpillars out of radios and police stations, its connection to the longstanding American traditions of sexual violence behind closed doors. You’ll see what Refn means with his sudden flashes of expressionless, silver-eyed entities granting visions of apocalypse and of rebirth to their devotees.

All of this alternating symbolist and impressionistic filmmaking leaves you wide open to his eventual full-frontal assault on the symbolism and technique of crime cinema. Cue Viggo’s (John Hawkes) one-man assault against a trailer park infested with sexual predaors, which begins with a Lost Highway-esque exploding trailer captured in the liquid flame of slow motion, and ends in an ecstatic rush of isolated archetypal scenes and people executed by Viggo, who stands in the same black void, unmoving but omnipresent, connected to his victims solely by the language of onscreen violence. Buildings come apart in sparkling clouds of glass. Fire churns slow and red, feasting on oxygen. A Nazi flag ripples amid tumbling large-denomination bills, all as Solti’s ‘Tannhauser’, performed by the Vienna Philharmonic, soars triumphantly. Cue Martin’s goofy boss and coworkers putting on a passion play set to Handel’s ‘Sarabande’ and conflating their own inconveniencing with the torture and execution of Christ. The form is the function. The mannequins are people. The symbol is the thing itself. Viggo is pressing his rifle’s barrel up against an idea and pulling the trigger.

Or perhaps none of that will work for you. The unrelenting onslaught of violence both personal and structural, the pulsing synth, the soundtrack of revitalized back-shelf needle drops like Barry Manilow’s ‘Mandy’ during one of the finest car chases ever put to film, the stink of sex in the air — maybe that isn’t your thing, and this will feel like a spiritual assault launched against you by some coven of wizened old warlocks babbling in the dark recesses of an abandoned set from a David Lynch film. But if you make it to the end, if you endure everything Too Old to Die Young throws at you, no matter how much it makes you want to go nonverbal and hide under your childhood bed, the show might still get you. In its final episode it drops what is perhaps the mother of all monologues, a titanic prophetic vision not just of American fascism at the time of its release, but in our present moment, a naked glimpse of the potent spiritual poison in which we’re fighting not to drown. I’ll leave you with that vision, which I cannot hope to improve upon in summary or explanation. It’s worth the trip all on its own.

“Soon, violence will become erotic, torture euphoric, as the masses hail public executions, propelled by the wrath of fascism. Concentration camps will be rebuilt. Ignorance will be exalted, and there will be race wars, for hate will be rewarded and seen as truthful and beautiful. Faith will be reduced to venomous platitudes, the morphine-infested enslavement of thought. Perversity will be dignified. Incest, molestation, and pedophilia will all be praised. Rape will be rewarded. The few will have everything. The most will have nothing, for not all men are created equal. Narcissism will no longer be suppressed, but worshipped as a virtue. Indulging one’s impulses will become instinctual. Our identities will be defined by the pain we cause. Pure unadulterated nihilism will be the only solution in the face of glorious death. In time we will have our own religion, our own dynasty, and with it we will wake the true fury of the world, and as man implodes in a wash of blood and silence a new mutation will emerge. And on that day, I will declare the dawn of innocence.”