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Thomas Jane on ‘Hung,’ Symbol of the Recession
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Though it feels like a cultural violation to talk about any television shown in contest with “Mad Men,” our national homage to past depravities, it is merely one of two series about a good-looking divorced white man in conflict with his virility that is offered on Sunday nights at 10. The other series is “Hung,” a comedy that, although it has not given birth to a single trend, expression or style of tie, has distinguished itself as the most topical fictional programming on television. As it’s moved into its second season on HBO, “Hung” has become an even more finely drawn satire of the Great Recession.
Notionally a sex farce, “Hung” is substantively a continuing commentary on the humiliations of middle-class life during a downturn in which the spending of the still well-to-do strikes many as a kind of aggravated assault.
“Hung” is predicated on a conceptual gag — Ray Drecker, a 40-ish high-school teacher, coach and father of two, supplements his burdened cash flow by providing sexual companionship to women who are bored, lonely, crazy or recovering from frigidity. But the most evocative recurring joke is visual, the shot of Ray’s lakeside bungalow, a casualty of fire, overwhelmed by the towering McMansion next door that is occupied by a saucy woman to whom Ray is providing his gifts gratis.
The setting is the world in and around Detroit, that graveyard to the high days of American manufacturing. Ray (played appealingly by Thomas Jane) is the embodiment of the service economy that followed, but never quite provided an analogous glamour. Although he possesses the physical attributes that should make him a winner in his chosen vocation, Ray lacks the drive to bring in the big money. He ambles along — at one point literally, as we watch him run out of gas and push his battered Jeep Cherokee down the road toward his day job where, symbolically, he is emasculated even further, tending to the young.
To have situated Ray in middle management, even at an ailing Ford or General Motors, would have suggested a kind of ambition that has never compelled him. He speaks with the monotone intonations of someone lacking expectations, and “Hung” commits itself to the idea that high school isn’t the kind of place for a real adult man who might have any.
Mike, Ray’s friend and colleague, played by Gregg Henry, gives voice to the status anxieties that a balding, middle-aged man in a feminized profession might reasonably suffer. Riffling through his student evaluations Mike finds that his overall rating is 1.3 on a 1-to-10 scale. “I hate Mr. Hunt,” one of Mike’s students writes, “with a passion that burns like 1,000 suns.”
Collective aspiration and the kind of mercenary will that might move things along belong, in the universe of “Hung,” to the women in Ray’s immediate orbit. As a fantasy of male sexual objectification, “Hung” is a de facto dreamscape of female social authority. Ray is handled by two rivalrous managers: Tanya (Jane Adams), a disheveled poet, and Lenore (Rebecca Creskoff), a brassy showboat who believes she can turn him into a superbrand among the presumably dwindling number of executive wives in the affluent suburbs.
Ray’s professional listlessness is an continuing source of disappointment to both women, as it had been to his ex-wife, Jessica. Played with the ambivalent gold-digger’s sense of erotic confusion by Anne Heche, Jessica left Ray in the show’s prehistory when it became clear that his teaching career was never going to allow her to have the kind of sprawling kitchen that has become the upper-middle-class matron’s entitlement. Jessica gets the cooking space that seems to burn with 1,000 splendid risottos when she marries a weaselly dermatologist who is hardly immune to the recession’s severities. Like Ray’s bank account, his fortunes are beholden to female spending power, and bleak times mean that there is less money pumping through the economy for Botox.
When it made its debut, “Hung” was inevitably compared to “Weeds,” another series examining domestic life financed by a dubious income stream. But “Hung” feels less manic and infinitely more skeptical of wealth’s thrall. The moneyed women with whom Ray does business don’t want his kindness as much as they want to indenture him to their desires. When he offers a pregnant client with a family inheritance some heartfelt marital advice, she screams at him to stop the counseling she doesn’t find sexy.
Other comedies have used the recession as backdrop or cheap gimmick — “Cougar Town,” “The Middle” and the short-lived Kelsey Grammer vehicle “Hank” come to mind. But none have been as good or come nearly as close to capturing the ugly personal indignities experienced in an increasingly bifurcated class system.
“Hung” is resigned to the virtual impossibility of someone like Ray ever landing in the kind of expensively light and airy houses of his clients. That Ray’s work keeps him horizontal is as much a metaphor for his financially flattened position as it is for anything. Wherever Ray is going, it isn’t skyward. A star athlete during his teenage years, he has ticked all his thriving days off on his calendar. Ray is the biographic alternative to Don Draper, who has spent three seasons and counting on “Mad Men” scrubbing away at his ugly history while ascending.
“Hung” reminds us that the great big elevator of American prosperity that carried Don no longer works.
http://tv.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/art....html?ref=arts
Notionally a sex farce, “Hung” is substantively a continuing commentary on the humiliations of middle-class life during a downturn in which the spending of the still well-to-do strikes many as a kind of aggravated assault.
“Hung” is predicated on a conceptual gag — Ray Drecker, a 40-ish high-school teacher, coach and father of two, supplements his burdened cash flow by providing sexual companionship to women who are bored, lonely, crazy or recovering from frigidity. But the most evocative recurring joke is visual, the shot of Ray’s lakeside bungalow, a casualty of fire, overwhelmed by the towering McMansion next door that is occupied by a saucy woman to whom Ray is providing his gifts gratis.
The setting is the world in and around Detroit, that graveyard to the high days of American manufacturing. Ray (played appealingly by Thomas Jane) is the embodiment of the service economy that followed, but never quite provided an analogous glamour. Although he possesses the physical attributes that should make him a winner in his chosen vocation, Ray lacks the drive to bring in the big money. He ambles along — at one point literally, as we watch him run out of gas and push his battered Jeep Cherokee down the road toward his day job where, symbolically, he is emasculated even further, tending to the young.
To have situated Ray in middle management, even at an ailing Ford or General Motors, would have suggested a kind of ambition that has never compelled him. He speaks with the monotone intonations of someone lacking expectations, and “Hung” commits itself to the idea that high school isn’t the kind of place for a real adult man who might have any.
Mike, Ray’s friend and colleague, played by Gregg Henry, gives voice to the status anxieties that a balding, middle-aged man in a feminized profession might reasonably suffer. Riffling through his student evaluations Mike finds that his overall rating is 1.3 on a 1-to-10 scale. “I hate Mr. Hunt,” one of Mike’s students writes, “with a passion that burns like 1,000 suns.”
Collective aspiration and the kind of mercenary will that might move things along belong, in the universe of “Hung,” to the women in Ray’s immediate orbit. As a fantasy of male sexual objectification, “Hung” is a de facto dreamscape of female social authority. Ray is handled by two rivalrous managers: Tanya (Jane Adams), a disheveled poet, and Lenore (Rebecca Creskoff), a brassy showboat who believes she can turn him into a superbrand among the presumably dwindling number of executive wives in the affluent suburbs.
Ray’s professional listlessness is an continuing source of disappointment to both women, as it had been to his ex-wife, Jessica. Played with the ambivalent gold-digger’s sense of erotic confusion by Anne Heche, Jessica left Ray in the show’s prehistory when it became clear that his teaching career was never going to allow her to have the kind of sprawling kitchen that has become the upper-middle-class matron’s entitlement. Jessica gets the cooking space that seems to burn with 1,000 splendid risottos when she marries a weaselly dermatologist who is hardly immune to the recession’s severities. Like Ray’s bank account, his fortunes are beholden to female spending power, and bleak times mean that there is less money pumping through the economy for Botox.
When it made its debut, “Hung” was inevitably compared to “Weeds,” another series examining domestic life financed by a dubious income stream. But “Hung” feels less manic and infinitely more skeptical of wealth’s thrall. The moneyed women with whom Ray does business don’t want his kindness as much as they want to indenture him to their desires. When he offers a pregnant client with a family inheritance some heartfelt marital advice, she screams at him to stop the counseling she doesn’t find sexy.
Other comedies have used the recession as backdrop or cheap gimmick — “Cougar Town,” “The Middle” and the short-lived Kelsey Grammer vehicle “Hank” come to mind. But none have been as good or come nearly as close to capturing the ugly personal indignities experienced in an increasingly bifurcated class system.
“Hung” is resigned to the virtual impossibility of someone like Ray ever landing in the kind of expensively light and airy houses of his clients. That Ray’s work keeps him horizontal is as much a metaphor for his financially flattened position as it is for anything. Wherever Ray is going, it isn’t skyward. A star athlete during his teenage years, he has ticked all his thriving days off on his calendar. Ray is the biographic alternative to Don Draper, who has spent three seasons and counting on “Mad Men” scrubbing away at his ugly history while ascending.
“Hung” reminds us that the great big elevator of American prosperity that carried Don no longer works.
http://tv.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/art....html?ref=arts
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