Family and Community in Jeopardy: ‘The Family Man’ S02 & ‘Mare of Easttown’
Could two web-series from two different cultures and two different genres and completely different storylines be companion pieces to each other?
First, the protagonists of Mare of Easttown and The Family Man. A middle-aged, emotionally exhausted female police officer grappling with work and family. And an almost middle-aged male secret agent struggling to keep his family happy and united, while pining to get back to his job. Both, middle-class characters. Both, agents of the state. Both, somewhat conservative but trying to acclamatise themselves to changing times and ethos and keeping themselves and their worlds from crumbling. One, a white, cis-het, small-town woman, another, a north-Indian, upper-caste, cis-het, small-town man (originally). The trajectories of both have a similar double-track that run parallel to each other throughout: for Mare, the town community and the family, and for Srikant, the nation and the family. This is also related to the way both shows negotiate their respective genres — this makes the former barely a crime thriller and the second, much more than a political thriller.
Ultimately, at stake in both shows are the integrity of the family and the community (whether town or nation). But what exactly are the forces that are endangering these social arrangements?
In Mare of Easttown, an unsolved case of a missing girl returns to prick the conscience of the community and its legal protector, the police, when another girl turns up dead. But more than individual perpetrators and victims, the series is more invested in deeper social maladies that form noteworthy patterns in the plot: depression, drugs, sex work, theft, adultery, abduction, rape, murder. Crucially, most of these concern the behaviour of minors. In fact, the community is in threat because its young are falling into ‘sin’ and thus, making themselves vulnerable. The story is thus more interested in delving into the secret, inner lives of its victims than establishing the psychological depth of the perpetrators — something that marks its departure from others in the same genre and even takes away a lot of the edge off the ‘whodunnit’. For the story is not as much about a crime/crimes, as it is about the vulnerability of the young, whether in terms of female sexuality or male violence, victim or murderer. It is this which lies at the heart of the community’s (and by extension, Mare’s) conscience and marks their/her guilt. This is what gives urgency to the solving of the crime/s and the search for justice and more importantly, healing.
But initially, Mare’s response to the crisis is marked by an emotional unavailability. She buries memories of her dead son and doesn’t allow herself to grieve, she is resentful that her ex-husband has moved on and refuses to reach out to him, she has time for sexual but not romantic relationships, she pours herself into her work to the point of burnout, she is dismissive of the year-old unsolved case because the victim is known to be involved in sex work, she doesn’t hesitate to frame a woman to gain custody of her grandchild. In other words, it is a brash, emotionally deficient, masculinist response that we are unused to associating with the representation of women in cultural texts. And so everything goes haywire and the crises deepen. For her to eventually emerge from all this mess, she has to look deeper into each of these issues, and rather than looking outwards and away, has to look closer around her, where she will be able to resolve both sets of crises. (This is why the first set of crimes — abduction, confinement, rape — is not the real crime, and is abruptly dealt with.) Her search for the ‘real’ killer will lead her to her friend’s husband and then son — this is the real crime not because of the gravity of the crime, but because of the identity of the killer, the child, who is the metonym for the future of the community. Closer home, Mare will learn to confront and resolve each of her personal issues, with some help from destiny.
For all of this to happen, she has to open up her emotional reserves in addition to using her sharp professional acumen — she has to learn to make peace for what is best for her grandson, encourage her daughter to follow her dreams, dance happily at her ex-husband’s marriage, seek therapy for her unresolved grief, be prepared to go into the attic where her son hanged himself, and be there as emotional support for her devastated friend. At the end of the series, balance is restored and everything falls just into place: the young are all rescued and rehabilitated and Mare’s own family remains untouched by any of the repercussions of the current spate of violence — it is not her ex-husband who is the adulterer/killer (even though he has been a suspect in the past) but her friend’s husband/son, it is not she who dies in the line of duty, but her partner, and it is she who gets to keep her grandson, not her daughter-in-law. All of this happens as she takes up her role as caregiver in her personal relationships and to an extent, her approach to her profession. In other words, she learns to re-feminise herself and live up to her duty as the moral protector of her family and community.
In The Family Man, Srikant’s crises are more layered and interesting. As an individual, he is constantly (and comically) bewildered at the changing times, something that is most visible in his inept communication with his wife and children and also in his brief but frustrating 9–5 corporate job under an irritatingly uppity young boss. He has to look up English words in the dictionary, he doesn’t get his kids’ lingo, he doesn’t understand the intrusion of privacy that is marriage counselling, he doesn’t understand new-fangled concepts like ‘taking a break’, he can barely tolerate his boss, and he can’t understand why his family fails to appreciate his presence when he makes the effort to be more available and help out in household chores, trying his best to keep up with all of them. For him to come truly into his element and emerge out of his personal crises, he will have to re-masculinise himself. He has to slap his boss silly, rejoin his old job, distance himself from his wife, plunge himself into the company of his (mostly) male colleagues, put his life in danger for the nation, and basically expand his life much beyond his home, not shrink his existence into it. (This is a reverse trajectory from that of Mare.) To fulfil both personal and mission, the North-Indian upper-caste man family man must step out of his comfort zone and collaborate with others unlike him — whether his Tamilian wife or other Tamilian agents, informers, and officers.
This personal expansion of the protagonist finds its parallel in a similar expansion at the level of the nation-state. Like Srikant (the benevolent, upper-caste, middle-class, North Indian patriarch who finds his authority over the family diminishing), the (largely benevolent) state too is struggling with the realisation of the existence of the nation beyond its mainland and must confront the violence simmering in its margins and threatening its integrity — in this narrative universe, this threat is represented by Kashmir in the north, Sri Lanka in the south, and (in anticipation) Nagaland in the north-east. Both individual and state must protect the integrity of the entities they are assigned to protect and each will depend on the other for this. Moreover, both levels of struggle have to do with internal and external threats to the masculinist authority and centrality of the respective entities, man and state.
Why do I say masculinist?
Because this season has to do quite a bit with the threat of female dominance and to an extent, female sexuality. What is common between his wife who has a will of her own and exerts it to distance herself from him, a daughter who has an undesirable boyfriend who is seducing her as leverage, a stubborn, strong-willed Prime Minister whose whims and power-play he has to serve by, and his powerful antagonist in this season? They are all women, occupying positions of power historically denied to their gender. The wife strays and fails to protect their daughter whose burgeoning sexuality leads her into a trap, the PM puts foreign relations in jeopardy and endangers her own life. But it is the rebel soldier Raji, in whom his true nemesis lies. In her, he finds his own heroism truly threatened, for the sheer similarities and differences between them. Both are not cut out for regular living, both are trained in combat and manipulation, both serve causes bigger than themselves. But there differences are starker. If he has the security of gender and family, Raji has lost all her family and is emphatically alone — not a family woman; moreover, her sexuality makes her vulnerable and hers is by no means a comfortable, middle-class existence. They may both be beholden to their duty, but while he is in it for the salary and the medal (like a mercenary), hers is a cause that consumes her in a far more compelling way, for it absorbs her completely — instead of distracting her or making her vulnerable, her dead family inspires her mission (unlike Moosa, in the previous season). (Milind’s inability to manipulate his antagonist in this season is displaced onto his daughter, who does so with a slightly uneasy conscience that is soon cleared. Importantly, she is rescued unharmed and sexually unviolated — unlike Raji.) Both also recognise each other for who they are. She can tell when he’s fibbing. He can tell that she is unpersuadable. His attitude to her is marked by (possibly) chivalry or genuine respect. He thus shields her in custody from a female police officer and even when he does kill her, it is not face-to-face, on the ground, with little dignity in death, but up in the sky, mid-air, in a cloud of flame and smoke — the death of a martyr, not a cornered terrorist. Contrast this with the male Ealam soldiers, who unhesitatingly send Raji off to a suicide mission and let her sexuality be exploited for a favour.
But what of the cause she represents? The show has an intriguingly uneven attitude towards the antagonists it portrays. At one level, it is certainly stereotypical of the show to present national interest and state authority in opposition to the Muslim, the Kashmiri, the Tamilian. At another level, it makes a distinction ostensibly between Kashmiri ‘terrorists’ and Tamilian ‘rebels’. At yet another level, both of them are shown in surprising collaborations, implying that they are not all that different in their vision. Further, even the rebels have a good ‘political’ faction and a bad ‘soldierly’ faction, with the first content with diplomacy and negotiation for recognition as a bonafide government, and the second determined upon an act of terror as revenge. Besides, in case the two sides seem disproportionately empowered/disempowered, the Ealam rebels are shown enjoying the support of the local villagers, who take up arms against the combined police-and-TASC force, turning the latter into the hunted and cornered and outnumbered.
It must be conceded that TFM does raise uncomfortable questions surrounding political violence by distinguishing between nation and state, making space for conversations about multiple nations, acknowledging disproportionate and ruthless state violence, and investing time and even sympathy into the representation of the Ealam soldiers. They are not presented as caricatures, but with a clear vision motivated by personal histories of violence, such that their violence against the nation-state and fight for their freedom appears to be justified to an extent. Importantly, there are even several instances of internal conversations amongst the TASC force that questions their own mission, and these merit closer attention.
In episode 6, there is a potentially nuanced discussion sequence, where the agents are discussing the difference between terrorists and freedom fighters and Muthu, the Tamilian officer explains to the naïve Northener Milind the local context of the Ealam struggle and how ‘he can see the villagers’ pov and their support for the rebels’. When Milind asks him why, in that case, is he acting against his own conviction, Srikant slips in his own opinion — it doesn’t matter what/who is right/wrong, ours not to question why, ours but to do or die, and that only following orders will get them medals and giving opinions is going to earn them ‘paap’. A weird choice of word and concept, until we realise that for all his apparent flexibility, unquestioning obedience of a central authority is the real, old-fashioned value system that he abides by. The one who poses these uncomfortable questions and who still lives with the traumatic memory of the climactic encounter in the previous season — Milind — will soon die in combat and his partner-in-crime-prevention, Zoya will remain virtually absent from the season, physically healing but psychologically scarred. In episode 7, when JK declares in frustration that he can die for country not petty politics, Srikant conveniently conflates state and nation and reminds him that it is national security they are protecting and that the ideology of the people in power are irrelevant in the matter. JK too is grievously injured by the end of the series.
Each of these conversations is aimed at acknowledging guilt in the line of duty and doubts about the righteousness of their cause and who the ‘good guys’ are — thus, addressing directly the uneasy conscience of the nation-state and its agent/s and anticipating their critique. But all such soul searching is repeatedly neatly and decisively resolved, leaving little or no room for any moral dilemma or moral transformation as such by the end of the season. Only, now Srikant and his team can go ahead and follow higher command with a lighter conscience, having talked out their guilt. And they will indeed receive those medals for national service.
For this to happen, the terrorists from the north will have to be killed violently. The rebels from the south will be split into opposing camps and the dangerous faction will be wiped out so that the good, cooperative rebels remain. At a personal level, Srikant, in a reprisal of the role of the responsible patriarch, rescues his daughter and brings her back, virtually unharmed. He is restored to his family and gains a new respect from them, but is still uncomfortable with his wife. For the moment, he has averted all conspiracy against (and within) both family and nation, but the show ends on a note of a disruption of both, all over again. Suchi is about to confess tearfully before him and even the global threat of the coronavirus is overshadowed by the nation being plunged in more insidious political danger.
Ultimately, both Mare of Easttown and The Family Man are about middle-class state agents who are emphatically grounded in their respective communities and must learn to perform their duties as morally upright guardians of community and family, in roles that are intimately bound up with each other. Both are middle-class protagonists trying to perform their duty amid emotional frustrations and external pressures; both learn to re/solve these issues and find their inner and outer integrity restored to them. The crimes they have to solve/prevent are different in nature and appropriately gendered : a crime of passion and an instance of national security threat , but both are about transgressing/challenging rightful authority and upsetting social imbalance — each protagonist must recognise how to respond best to their respective crises, in keeping with their gender. Mare has to live up to the promise of being ‘Mare of Easttown’, holding both family and community emotionally together, and Srikant has to become ‘The Family Man’, protector of nation and family, and nation as family.
