The Trouble with Cliff Booth
Why I won’t be watching his further “mis-adventures” on Netflix
First of all, isn’t misadventures one word? It shouldn’t be hyphenated, but I guess David Fincher or Quentin Tarantino or some executive producer at Netflix thought it quirky, kind of like Inglorious Basterds. What’s with all these un-necessary hyphenations and mis-spellings? Is this some kind of new Olde-Englishe thing?
Anyway, that’s not the reason I won’t be watching this joint Tarantino-Fincher production. I’m really pissed Netflix spent 200 million USD on this totally worthless romp, 40 million USD on Brad Pitt alone. Wasn’t Once Upon a Time in Hollywood enough?
This after shutting down David Fincher’s Mindhunter, citing massive production costs. You can imagine the reaction on Reddit. FTR, it only cost 10 million USD per episode. This just flat out sucked because Mindhunter was twenty times better than Cliff Booth. Netflix could have made two more seasons at that price.
Mindhunter presented the best pair of detectives since the first season of HBO’s True Detective. Holden Ford and Ben Tench, played by Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany, were the perfect odd couple. Not only that but Fincher included a top-notch psychoanalyst in Dr. Wendy Carr, impeccably played by Anna Torv, whose scientific rigor matched that of Dana Scully, MD. This was television at its finest with a revolving cast of serial killers, which should have attracted a big audience. Apparently the ratings didn’t meet Netflix expectations, especially in the wake of their runaway success story, Stranger Things. So, Mindhunter was given the boot after two stellar seasons.
Fans appeared out of the cyberwork (a new word I coined) on Reddit and other social media platforms lamenting this terrible decision, but there was no swaying Netflix, which decided to move on, giving us more seasons of Stranger Things long after this show had lost its charm.
It’s the age median the Netflix executives were after. Stranger Things tied into the demographic of teens and pre-teens that subscription streaming services crave. Plus, it had international appeal, even here in Lithuania, where they filmed the Russian prison scenes in Season 4. The only reason I watched this season was because they kept the shooting closed to any visitors. Didn’t want to ruin the suspense, which as it turned out there was none.
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Not so with Mindhunter. This was a masterfully wrought series with loads of suspense, especially in the second season where our intrepid trio tracked down a notorious Atlanta serial killer. Like all the serial killers depicted in the series, Wayne Williams is real. This was a particularly difficult subject to tackle as Williams has maintained his innocence and his guilt remains questionable. I thought Fincher did a great job of leaving room for doubt.
I can understand how this series wouldn’t appeal to the 12–18 year old demographic, but the median age of Netflix users remains 35–44 years old. Surely, this would appeal to this age group. I know, don’t call me Shirley.
Is Cliff Booth any better? It’s been seven long years since his previous mis-adventures. Does anyone even remember him? I know Brad is a GILF but there’s nothing particularly attractive about this character. He’s a typical QT creation. In fact, he’s a lot like Lt. Aldo Reine from Inglorious Basterds, although not quite as stupid. Cliff doesn’t pretend to speak French. Like Aldo, he acted as a one-man wrecking crew, busting up the Manson cult, thanks to their inability to properly read residential addresses, thereby accidentally saving the luscious Sharon Tate from a horrific fate. Another revisionist hero.
I wonder what new deaths Tarantino and Fincher will rewrite. Maybe Cliff will save Natalie Wood in this latest caper, taking out Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken, and sailing off to Catalina Island aboard the Splendour, apparently named after her seminal film, Splendor in the Grass.
If there is any subject that scores well on Netflix it is serial killers. There is no end to docs and dramatizations on this subscription network, the latest being Lizzie Borden in the ongoing Monster series. It doesn’t have a very high approval rating, Popcorn meter 32 percent, but the series as a whole has scored well, propelling Lizzie to the top of the Netflix monthly chart. I believe Lizzie is the fourth re-incarnation in the series.
Like Wayne Williams, her guilt was questionable. She was acquitted in the court of law. Apparently the evidence at the crime scene had been severely compromised. Sound familiar. No problem for Netflix, like every previous movie and series the creators assumed her guilt, even going so far as to project a lesbian relationship with the maid, with whom she was apparently in cahoots. Maybe Maggie Sullivan gave the extra whack?
This could be Fincher’s problem with Mindhunter? He stuck to the facts like Sgt. Friday in Dragnet. Fincher didn’t let his mind take all sorts of salacious turns. Instead, he probed the minds of his semi-fictional detectives and psychoanalyst, gauging their reactions to these serial killers, which is what I found so compelling. There actually is a Behavioral Science Unit that was created at Quantico in the late 1970s, which formed the basis for the series. Fincher had explored Ford in Season 1, Tench in Season 2. Now, it was Carr’s turn. I was really looking forward to Season 3, as there had been so many tantalizing reveals in Wendy’s character in the first two seasons. Just like that, the switch was turned off.
Now we have Cliff Booth. Fuck-you, Netflix!
