The measuring stick of savagery for modern couples is Netflix binge watching. How much entertainment can you cram in a single day? A week? A year? It's my pleasure to announce that Josie and I have passed a new milestone of savagery last week-end: we watched an entire show - Netflix's latest prodution Narcos - over the span of a single day, from 9 AM to 7 PM inclusively. It was rather easy since the show only counts ten episodes and that it was compulsively watchable, but I'm proud of my excess as usual.
Here are my impressions.
- Narcos is slickly told, but morally objectionable given its documentary nature. It's a heavily romanticized retelling of something that actually happened. Turning Pablo Escobar into a contemporary Tony Montana is fucked up because he killed real people and therefore cannot be a catharsis. It would be like turning Ted Bundy's life story into a contemporary Hannibal because they're both smart and charismatic. Pablo Escobar blew up planes and assassinated presidents, for Christ's sake. It might sound cool in fiction, but it would terrorize you if it happened on your watch.
- That said, the use of documentary footage in Narcos is pretty clever and enjoyable. Not only it gave the series credibility, but it also thought me a few things about the horrors perpetrated by the Medellin Cartel. For example, I had no idea Pablo Escobar might have financed an attack on the palace of Justice in Bogota. I didn't even know the thing happened in the first place. Narcos bugged me because of its angle on the life of Pablo Escobar, but I'd watch, let's say a Kennedy family series that uses similar storytelling technique. Drug-addled womanizers bug me a lot less than murderous drug lords.
- I'm not done bitching about the portrayal Narcos made of Pablo Escobar. Part of the responsibility for that is on us, the audience. Everybody gets a kick out of rooting for the psychopathic character until they're put in a psychopathic situation. Would you beat someone to death in front of their best friend in order to convince the friend not to steal from you anymore? Would you kill a hundred people just to get rid of one? Of course you wouldn't. Pablo Escobar did that shit for years. That man was not like you. I'm not against psychopathic characters at all, but shit, you gotta beware about how you're actually portraying history. People like you and me died a horrible and lonely death so that he could keep making money exploiting other people's addiction.
- What made Narcos so goddamn watchable I believe is the use of first person narration. Whichever showrunner had this idea had a stroke of genius, because it doesn't keep the show from alternating point of views, it's just that whenever it falls back to Agent Steve Murphy (admirably well played by Boyd Holbrook) it reverted back to first person narration, streamlined whatever information we just been exposed to and reaffirmed the purpose of the entire series: how can you stop someone as powerful as Pablo Escobar from destroying a country? The writing was short, to the point and didn't sacrifice its personality. Whenever Narcos became derivative, it reined the viewer back in.
- I was a bit disappointed the series almost obfuscated the existence of Mexican drug cartels, like these two entities didn't have anything to do with one another. It would've been a great way to make Narcos more pertinent and to give it a contemporary edge, but the series is absolutely blinded by its ambition to portray the life of Pablo Escobar that it tunes out almost everything else. I guess it's a narrative choice, but I thought it confined the series to its worst aspect and denied the audience of insight on the mechanics of drug cartels. I guess after reading Don Winslow's masterful THE POWER OF THE DOG, everything less ambitious is a little bit pale in comparison.
- Not a fan of the ending, I thought it cheaped its way into a second season.
And you, how did you like Narcos? What worked for you? What didn't work?