***THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST TWO SEASONS OF HBO'S BOARDWALK EMPIRE****
Sorry for the lengthy absence, folks; getting married tends to result in those. Love you, Raychel. Now, on with our regularly scheduled pretentiousness.
Boardwalk Empire is an HBO show about gangsters in New Jersey starring Steve Buscemi, so naturally, comparisons to The Sopranos crop up a lot. I, on the other hand, always felt like, if you were going to pick a prior HBO series to compare it to, Deadwood would be more accurate; both series take a seemingly-played out genre and, using a loosely true-events-based framework, tell a story about how American institutions develop, and how sometimes arguably positive or necessary things are built by hard, violent people. One of the many, many things that made Deadwood a gem was how, even though it had a male-dominated cast and setting, its female characters never felt incidental, and indeed, the show was quite adept at handling gender issues through the prism of its time and place (the second season features one of the most frighteningly realistic examinations of violence against sex workers I've seen on television, period or otherwise).
In this respect, Boardwalk Empire, which recently began its third season, hasn't done nearly as well for itself. Part of this is that, unlike Deadwood, it struggles to figure out female characters' place in a show about gangsters during Prohibition. This is perhaps clearest in the show's female lead, Margaret Thompson, nee Schroeder, nee Rohan (Kelly MacDonald). For the show's first season, Margaret functioned almost like one of the Doctor's companions; she was someone from outside the world the show presents to us, along for the ride because, like us, she didn't understand it. An Irish immigrant, suffragist and temperance-movement foot soldier with two children and a drunken, abusive husband, Margaret came to Steve Buscemi's charismatic political boss/bootlegger Nucky Thompson to ask for financial help due to her husband's gambling; shortly after, her husband beat her into a miscarriage, Nucky had the bastard killed and Margaret soon became his kept woman. As the season drew to a close, Margaret left Nucky after finding out he was responsible for her husband's death, but returned to him shortly thereafter. Margaret's arc in that season was fairly straightforward, but it started to veer off-course in the second; after Nucky's former mentor the Commodore (Dabney Coleman), his protege and surrogate son (and the Commodore's actual son) Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) and Nucky's brother Eli (Shea Wigham) together hatched a plan to get Nucky imprisoned and take his throne, Margaret at first showed intriguing signs of a Lady MacBeth/consigliere relationship with Nucky, but this was completely discarded when her daughter Emily was diagnosed with polio; from this point, Margaret's entire function in the story was to fret about whether or not Emily was being punished for her mother's decision to live in sin with a criminal, which was about as interesting in the long term as it sounds; as the season ended, Margaret married Nucky to invoke spousal privilege at his trial and, in a final fit of Catholic guilt, signed over a lucrative plot of land he owned to the Church.
This character arc was, shall we say, not well-received by a lot of fans, nor was her affair with Nucky's Irish bodyguard (disturbingly, this led to portions of the fandom calling for her death, despite the fact that almost every major character on the show has been banging someone on the side at some point); fortunately, the show seems to have finally found a compelling plotline for her. Some background:a major theme of the new season is Jimmy's warning to Nucky in the series premiere that he "can't be half a gangster anymore", a point driven home in the season 2 finale when Nucky personally killed Jimmy for ordering a hit on him. In the year and a half between seasons 2 and 3, Nucky, thanks to Margaret's land donation, has become a philanthropist as a front for his criminal activity, opening a Catholic hospital on the land; Margaret, in the season premiere, witnesses a young woman stagger into the hospital and miscarry. She later learns that the woman miscarried from drinking raw milk, and becomes concerned with the quality of information on prenatal care available to women, to Nucky's annoyance. Now, it's entirely possible this plotline could go south too, but it's definitely a step in the right direction; first off, it's not out of the blue. Women's health has been shown to be a concern of Margaret's since early in the series, and moreover, Nucky being a full-time philanthropist now ties it directly into the protagonist's arc.
If Margaret's been given short shrift, the show's other female characters have gotten worse; first, there's Jimmy's wife, Angela, an ambiguously lesbian/bisexual (it's never clearly established which, and it''s probably not historically realistic for even Angela to be entirely sure herself) artist. Unfortunately, despite Aleksa Palladino's excellent, sensitive performance, the above was pretty much the extent of Angela's character; her best scene on the show was a lovely conversation with Jimmy's friend Richard Harrow (Jack Huston) a hideously disfigured, socially inept World War I veteran, and it suggested further depth to her character until, in the second season's tenth episode, a vengeful rival of her husband's killed her to send a message (randomly offing a female character AND an LGBT character? Ooh, way to buck convention, HBO).
Still, Angela was less problematic from a feminist perspective than Jimmy's mother, Gillian (Gretchen Mol); it had been established that Gillian was impregnated with Jimmy when she was raped by the Commodore at 13. After having little to do in the first season, she became a big part of the anti-Nucky conspiracy in season 2, actively encouraging Jimmy's abortive hit and filling a similar role to the one it was implied Margaret would play. To the show's credit, even though Gillian has always been a villainous character, it did make an effort to show her as deeply damaged as a result of her assault; in Mol's best scene in the series thus far, she recounts the experience to a bedridden Commodore, concluding by giving him several vicious slaps. It's perhaps Gillian's most humanizing moment; despite her attempt to be coldly calculating about everything, all she feels when it comes to this is perfectly-justified rage. Then, in the penultimate episode of the season, it was revealed that she had seduced her own son while he was a student at Princeton; it was an audaciously creepy thing for the show to do, and of course it makes sense for Gillian to be somewhat fucked up regarding sexuality; that said, it's seemed more and more like she exists to be fucked up than to be a fucked-up rape survivor. (For instance, her current plotline involves her trying to convince Jimmy and Angela's young son that she's his mother, adding "evil stepmother" to the lazy female characterizations the show is slapping onto her.)
Another good sign for the season is the addition of Billie Kent (Meg Steedle), a flapper who's Nucky's mistress; unlike her counterpart from earlier in the series, Lucy Danziger, a sort of proto-Ke$ha who was pretty much universally loathed and abruptly written off, Kent is intelligent, charming and someone it's easy to see Nucky being attracted to. As opposed to the Lucy-Margaret dichotomy, that of Billie and Margaret isn't a lazy virgin-whore thing; both women have their good points and bad ones, and Billie is independent enough to make clear to Nucky that she's uninterested in being his kept woman (sexual autonomy was, of course, a major theme of the flapper movement- hey, see how easy it is to tie history in with your plot if you actually make some effort?). Even better, HBO's advance episode summaries reveal that this season will feature the return of one of the second's best characters, Esther Randolph (Julianne Nicholson); a witheringly snarky, Katherine Hepburn-esque federal prosecutor, Randolph was based on real-life crusader Mabel Walker Willebrandt, and had some of the best lines in the show ("A lady lawyer?" a particularly dumb cop asks incredulously; "What's next, horseless carriages?" she deadpans. "They already got those," the cop obliviously replies), and was also arguably the best feminist role model yet presented.
If there's one major weakness the show may have in tying these threads together, it's that it really isn't sure how to handle its gender issues in terms of the male characters. Nucky, for instance, was a major backer of women's suffrage, is enraged enough at violence against women to have killed Margaret's husband, and is politically progressive to the point that he at one point berates a crony for making a racist joke, and yet he's shown as in the season 3 premiere not only dismissing Margaret's concerns about prenatal health, but, asked his opinion on a female pilot, snaps that she "should spread her legs and leave spreading the wings to her husband". It's possible that this is again meant to represent the whole going-full-gangster thing, but showing willingness to cap a guy's ass leading to gratuitous sexism seems like kind of a weird bit of character development). Even at its best, tying all of its threads together seamlessly has always been a weakness of this show, but the vast majority of those threads are so intriguing that I'm hopeful the show finally has something to say about women's issues, even if the next scene is the guy with half a face shooting someone.
