“DTF St. Louis” Peers Into the Suburban Male Psyche
During a recent episode of “SmartLess,” the podcast that the actor Jason Bateman shares with his industry buddies Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, Bateman chatted amiably with the show’s guest, the business mogul and reality-star supermom Kris Jenner. Jenner told the trio the story of her first encounter with Robert Kardashian, her first husband, who would later come to fame by serving on the defense team for his golf buddy O. J. Simpson. (Bateman: “Is it a meet-cute?”) It was at a horse track. (“I’ve never been to the Kentucky Derby, no, but I met a mint julep once.”)
Bateman had been ambling through the interview with a nervous professionalism, pecking away at Jenner with the kinds of questions your best-adjusted friend—or that friend’s dad—might ask. But then, perhaps inspired by the mention of the genteel betting environment of the Derby, he piped up with an intriguing piece of personal history. “I used to have a bit of a fun time with gambling,” he said. “I no longer do.”
Bateman’s curt baritone was the same as it always is: no sorrow or self-recrimination or even rote regret marred his tone. In fact, he sounded sort of peppy, even though he was relaying what might have been a dark glimmer of a sordid arc—too much “fun” followed by a fall. His euphemistic locution was extra funny because it was directed at Jenner, whose public profile carries no hint of ever having had “a bit of a fun time” that didn’t yield a nice paycheck, or at least a helpful hit of press. All efficiency, that Jenner. She didn’t really respond to Bateman’s biographical toss-off.
For years now, Bateman has been one of my favorite actors, precisely because he tends to play characters who might nonchalantly mention a degenerate past, with no evident rancor, then never bring it up again. His characters enjoy casual conversation but don’t brook wanton confession. They’re probably just as happy to talk about the weather, or the business pages, or the latest intrigue at the office, as anything else—happier, even. Bateman plays Everymen: repressed, likable, sometimes spiky, often prosperous guys whose secrets leak out through subtleties of wording and tone, and by way of blank, unworried statements instead of long epiphanic speeches or outpourings of the soul.
In “Arrested Development,” the cult-classic mockumentary sitcom that aired from 2003 to 2006, Bateman played Michael Bluth, the middle son of a wealthy family fallen on hard times. He’s a widower and the father of a meek kid played by Michael Cera. Surrounded by vain, selfish airheads, he’s something like a surrogate for the audience, often selling a joke just by making a baffled face. Michael Bluth is exceptional because of the wealth his family used to enjoy, but also because of his seeming—and, to be fair, intermittently absent—levelheadedness despite the bubble in which the rest of his family still stubbornly, tenuously lives.
Starting in 2017, Bateman played Marty Byrde, an accountant turned cash launderer for a ruthless Mexican cartel, in “Ozark,” arguably his signature role. The show is lit in wan grays and murky browns—this has, over the years, become an irritating Netflix cliché, but, in the case of “Ozark,” the coloristic choice really works. Marty becomes the proprietor of a funeral home and a riverboat casino, both fronts that can’t hold for long, placing him in the middle of a conflict between the Mexicans and the local criminals near the Lake of the Ozarks, in Missouri, a whole social panorama away from his family’s former home in Chicago. “Ozark” is about how putatively regular people can get caught up in currents much stronger than they know, how Batemanian sangfroid can cloak a quotidian sociopathy that only grows as bloody trouble grows, too. It also, in an insightful way, recasts the relationship between white-collar work and underworld crime. Sometimes what the cartel needs most is a guy who’s a whiz with a spreadsheet.
“DTF St. Louis,” a new comic whodunnit on HBO, is a strange, surreal, surpassingly dark addition to Bateman’s œuvre. He’s cast well in the show—I can’t imagine it working without his presence, reeking of ennui and buried impulses. He plays Clark Forrest (that’s Michael, Marty, and Clark, for those keeping track; so many swatches of khaki-colored, all-American nomenclature), a TV weatherman living in a St. Louis suburb. He rides a dorky recumbent bike to work; he bought one for his wife, but she won’t use it. The marriage is beige, just like the town, and just like Clark’s life.
At work, while reporting near a looming tornado, Clark meets Floyd (played with a touching, funny pathos by David Harbour), a sign-language interpreter. Floyd lives on a lower rung of the town’s hierarchy than Clark. He doesn’t have as much money, his formerly buff body (he used to pose for Playgirl) has gone bulky and soft, he’s got the taxman on his ass, and his rock-throwing stepson gives him only grudging respect. Still, Clark and Floyd get along. They’re both uncomfortable in their lives and looking, somewhat desperately, to spice things up.
Soon, Clark finds a dating app emphasizing discretion, called DTF St. Louis, which he shares with Floyd. (It’s reminiscent of the app Ashley Madison, that infamous watering hole for lonely married folks, whose names were exposed in a 2015 leak.) But before we learn too much about how their dates might go, or whether they’re even able to snag some, we discover that Clark has been carrying on an affair with Floyd’s wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini), and Floyd turns up dead, surrounded by his own pinups and a can of laced Bloody Mary.
“DTF” is even odder than you may think. Its characters speak in repetitive, often childish phrases that sound as though they belong to much younger people, possibly elementary-school children playacting at bored adulthood. “I fuckin’ love it and stuff,” one lover says to another, confirming her enthusiasm for their tryst. People make big deals about their favorite Jamba Juice concoctions, and take many beats too long to arrive at the understanding that “DTF” does in fact stand for “down to fuck.” Certain passages in the fiction of Jane Bowles read like this. You might conclude that the show is an experimentalist exercise in rummaging through the brain matter of the median suburban American, connecting each of that specimen’s furtive actions and veiled desires to the immutable psyche of a permanent child.
In a chapter of Susan Cheever’s latest book, “When All the Men Wore Hats”—which cunningly explicates the writing of Cheever’s father, John—the stories “The Five-Forty-Eight” and “The Country Husband” get grouped together as suburban horror shows running on sexual energies. “Both these stories carefully paint the pastel watercolors of the suburbs,” Susan Cheever writes. “Both stories run on the energy of illicit sex and unwanted desires, and both end up in shame for the men who feel these desires.”
In this way, Clark Forrest, a local celebrity owing to his job, is like an updated, puzzlingly childlike Cheeverian confection. He asks Carol to dominate him—he calls their odd lovemaking method “powerhousing,” and requests that she yell and purr and querulously cry the word “powerhouse” as she thrusts while he lies on the motel bed with his feet in the air. (He admits that this was first done to him by a red-haired guy with a mustache; like John Cheever, he may have even deeper proclivities to hide.)
To observe Bateman, here and elsewhere, with his sharp features and clear voice all working to accomplish a deceptively high irony—Bateman’s hallmark is that he’s never saying exactly what he means—is to ask after the health of the “average” American male. Let’s concede for a moment, just by dint of statistics, that this guy has to be white and live in a suburb of a secondary or tertiary metropolis. Let’s say that he’s trying very hard to be “good,” by whatever definition hit him at the right time to absorb that kind of lesson. And let’s say that the invisible power of his position—never laboring under any sort of automatic racial or gender suspicion—is a freighted vehicle pulling him toward a corruption whose contours he lacks the sophistication to perceive, much less resist. We don’t even need to ask how he votes. Shouldn’t we get him some help? ♦