Welcome to 'Stray Thoughts', where the Eureka Street editorial team muses on ethical and social challenges we've noted throughout the week.
Earlier this week I finished watching the Netflix series Ozark. The series has captured and held my imagination over its five-year run. At times I have toyed with the idea of abandoning it because the content is so dark. It is, at heart, an unflinching look at evil. I’ve always known I’d come back to each new release of episodes in part because the darkness is made watchable by the likeable faces of Jason Bateman and Laura Linney. They play the couple at the centre of a family amidst sinister violence and corruption. Indeed, the juxtaposition between the content and those faces is a key part of what makes the show so intriguing.
Bateman especially, playing Marty a Chicago financial planner who gets mixed up with drug cartels when he decides to do a spot of money laundering, plays his character as an affable, practical every man, even as he disposes of bodies and plots for and against his Mexican drug cartel bosses. The greed of a business partner means the Byrds are ordered to the Ozarks, the lake district in Missouri, to set up a money laundering empire.
Their interaction with the cartel becomes more direct, and they slowly become central to its operations. Linney’s character, Wendy, is unnervingly capable of speaking to people as though she were at a US high school bake sale, even as she is bartering for her and her children’s lives.
The couple’s children, late adolescent Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and the younger Jonah (Skylas Gaertner) are in some sense the canvas upon which the parents’ misdeeds are manifested. From an early stage the children are aware of and involved in the new family business. Part of the justification for remaining involved in the drug business is to keep the children safe from not-so-subtle death threats. This ignores the moral harm done to them, the distortion of the good experienced by them, the darkening of their souls.
Whilst they long to be an intact family, there’s a moment in the penultimate series where I realised Marty and Wendy would not die for anything, certainly not to shield their children from evil. I found that deeply unsettling. The final scene completes this narrative arch in the most dramatic and yet understated way. Which is what evil mostly is, dramatic yet understated.
A series like