Have I tired of Guy Ritchie?

The first episode of Netflix’s The Gentlemen reminds me of Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain without the leavening of self-awareness. Pain & Gain leaves us, the audience, with enough room to see the idiocy and toxic obsession involved. From the movie’s first moments we are offered a perspective that might empathize with the main characters, but doesn’t ask us to sympathize with or believe them. In that way, Pain & Gain feels like a critique of the stupidity and myopic ambition of its characters.

The Gentlemen might critique its characters’ beliefs… maybe. But The Gentlemen doesn’t offer the distance and outside perspective that Pain & Gain does. Even when it showcases the absurd, the first episode of The Gentlemen takes the main characters seriously and takes their perspectives. It believes its own hype. Instead of offering a self-aware critique of people’s unwillingness to admit that they’re stuck swimming laps in a shallow pool, this first episode puts us inside the fishbowl, trying to find a better fishman.

It’s flashy and stylish and dramatic. It also feels a bit stupid.

I can’t help but wonder: has Guy Ritchie’s work always been like this? It’s been so long since I watched something else from him (since high school, probably) that I don’t have recent context. I remember liking Snatch. I’ll use it as a point of comparison, but I’m working from old memories.

As I remember it, Snatch felt less like a glorification of its ambitious, stupid, macho criminals and more like a grim comedy of errors. There were clever people, idiotic people, violent assholes, and a whole bunch of schmucks. There was a large enough cast that, while we might follow one or two for our central narrative, nobody felt like they had that protagonist glow telling us to empathize and sympathize with them. Finally, any character’s success was due to chance and a willingness to roll with the punches, rather than any honed skill or virtue.

The first episode of The Gentlemen takes a more frustratingly conventional course. It offers the main character, Edward, as some kind of hero, someone we’re supposed to empathize or connect with. His whole character introduction is him “saving the cat” by being a capable and friendly commander, holding high status without being an ass, and doing good deeds by being firm but kind. But once he returns home, and as he slips into the criminal world, we’re treated to at least two scenes where we’re told that people (particularly men, I presume, because the show has vanishingly few women with meaningful roles) need to train their inner beast and, well, refine their aggression. His dying father uses nearly exactly those words, talking about their ancestor the first duke’s mastery of refined aggression. And in case the audience missed the message, “Refined Aggression” is the episode’s title.

In a Guy Ritchie film like Snatch, or in Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, we’d see that these words were being spoken by imperfect vessels who were revealing their own beliefs. Perhaps they’d be thriving in their own world, or maybe they’d be trapping themselves in yet another cycle of violent striving and dissatisfaction. In this TV show, with our main character imbibing these words and nodding along, the whole show seems to agree. There’s no one to offer any alternative path, no one to offer commentary on the message. It feels like someone swapped the grim-comedy-of-errors that I enjoyed with an advertisement for cultivated cruelty.

I can’t tell you whether the rest of the show changes this at all. It’s possible that this show is setting up a larger tragic arc. But I haven’t watched more. Unless someone convinces me that the show changes, I doubt that I will return to it. Maybe I’ll watch a bit out of morbid curiosity.

Why do I have such a strong reaction to this? Why do I find it so unsatisfying?

I firmly believe in the power of media to shape people’s perspectives on the world. I have spent enough time reflecting on the media that shaped me, and I spend enough time working with teens, that I have a hard time not analyzing what messages a narrative offers. I think we have enough stories that glorify toxic and abusive power, especially toxic and abusive masculinity. We don’t need more of them.

It’s absolutely possible that The Gentlemen’s Netflix series will eventually complicate its thus-far-uncritically presented worldview. But it doesn’t feel like the show is laying the groundwork for that. It’s not even offering its perspective with enough interesting alternatives to create a fun web of thematic contention (like those called for by John Truby in his chapter on moral arguments in The Anatomy of Story, or by LocalScriptMan in “A Different Way To Think About Storytelling”). Without that narrative disagreement, the show is just saying “train your inner beast, refine your aggression.” I could go read any number of tired books about manliness if I wanted that message. I’m not excited about a show that regurgitates that line without making it a dramatic point of argument.

It doesn’t help The Gentlemen that there’s another series I’d much rather watch, one that does a good job of including interesting thematic disagreements and narrative tension: The Brothers Sun. This is yet another show about criminals, and about people being freshly exposed to the criminal world that their family is in, but at least in The Brothers Sun we can see characters argue for and against each other’s beliefs with all the exciting narrative tension that creates. I’ll absolutely write another post about that show later. Suffice to say I think it’s far better that this one.

If you want Guy Ritchie, go watch Snatch again. Not even my love for Giancarlo Esposito can make me recommend The Gentlemen.

Oh, yes, there is also a movie (also from Guy Ritchie) called The Gentlemen. It shares conceptual roots with the TV show, but appears to be separate. I haven’t seen it.