[Severance] The After Hours, Turturro thematics
I keep thinking about Illuminata (when do I ever stop, tbh) and John Turturro’s decision to adapt and direct a whole movie about the earnest and harrowing realities of the performance as labor. Putting himself in the role of Tuccio, who is too out there in his work to ever get what he wants and can’t help but compromise, even when it makes him miserable and makes him frustrated at his work. It’s also a movie where the whole cast were his friends in the business, including Christopher Walken. He played Umberto, a critic whose opinion matters enough to be a risk Tuccio takes, whose (explicitly homosexual) relationship with a member of the company ends with the latter’s edits once more unraveling Tuccio’s script. Tuccio’s work is entirely driven by love of performance, by the shared human subjectivity that joins both role and actor: there’s no superfluous fanfare in the play, and it’s agonizing that it results in no glory. To quote an unrelated lyric, “Being yourself while being other people is harder than it looks,” so the overlap between role-in-fiction and role-in-life is inevitable. I find myself thinking about how both the play in the movie and the actual movie faded into obscurity (like all the actors who don’t reach stardom, like the whores, like the faggots, like the badge-coves of performance art.) I feel there’s a continuation of this pattern in Turturro’s roles in Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink in particular: The “clockable queer (never explicitly on camera, thematically relevant, alluded to in derision and/or metaphor) entrenched in a web of historical violence that continues into their present” is kind of a typecast for him at this point (not unwelcome for me personally, but nevertheless there).
Christopher Walken is openly bisexual, and he was John Turturro’s choice to play Burt because he believed completely that the love he feels for Walken would come through his performance of Irving so clearly. All the anecdotes from the set I’ve caught are about commitment to the story, to the characters, but most of all to each other as people who’ve been friends for decades, who love each other dearly, who are getting older and are perfectly aware of it, and what it means for their life and for their career.
A lot of queer men’s experience of their gender and sexuality is inseparable from repression and violence directed at themselves or others. I have a lot of friends over 60 in the scene that built both their sense of masculinity and its queering around (and within) the oppressive power structures they existed in (Franco’s fascist dictatorship for my friends, the US imperial military complex for Irving, and the Lutheran church and Lumon’s hitman jobs for Burt). There’s also a lot to be said about the dehumanization of anyone over 50 in both the acting industry and gay culture through either defanging any desire or painting it as predatory. In this plotline about two older gay men in the context of bodily autonomy, the nuclear family as an extension of capitalism, and the struggle to subvert inherited power relations, I’m 100% on board with the point where we’re leaving Burt and Irving in The After Hours. But I don’t think that a sacrifice, an admission of desire, and a melancholy look out of a train window are all there will be to them. Life is never free of pain or grief or frustration, but that’s not proof of inevitable tragedy; I dare say that it’s kind of the point of Severance. That love takes work, that justice takes work, that you’re born with an expectation of the life you’re going to have, and sometimes you’ll fall into that and be miserable, but it’s never too late to change course; there’s no predestination. Good news about hell, yes, but also about heaven: Whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.
What I’m trying to get at is I can’t imagine John Turturro would want anything more than to make room through his role in Severance for all these things he and Christopher Walken have been denied by the industry they work in for personal and artistic integrity reasons. I don’t believe Severance’s writing would shy away from it, given the historical evidence of them listening to the cast and giving the less marketable realities of the characters that they share with their actors the weight they deserve.
Budget and time constraints aside, I trust Dan Erickson and the writing team to do a good job with Irving’s plotline if there’s a third season. But most of all, I trust John Turturro to give Irving (and Burt, and by extension Christopher Walken and himself) a story most of us would give a piece of ourselves woven into our fictions.