Netflix Watch
There is nothing wrong with your screen. Do not attempt to adjust the vertical or the horizontal. If you’re as old as I am, and an American, you maybe remember that that was how each episode of “The Outer Limits” started: the spooky weekly sci-fi show of six decades ago. You’re not in the Twilight Zone, either. (Imagine Rod Serling’s deep, rich voice telling you that you were.) Nowadays one fires up the computer of an evening to watch Netflix. Rod Serling (a fellow Yid, by the way) had no ideological hidden agenda to push. But Netflix does. So, just like universities now need Campus Watch to call them out on anti-Semitism and the media need CAMERA, it’s not enough to watch Netflix. We need Netflix Watch, and Hineni, “Here I am!” your obedient servant, a.k.a. the Lone Ranger (okay, I’ll try to stop hamming it up with allusions to the Golden Age of entertainment), the vigilant Netflix Watcher. I’m going to show you this evening how one of Netflix’s latest dramas is alluring at first but you don’t have to go below the surface to discover that it’s not art or entertainment at all, but a great big evil lie in the service of a racist fantasy.
A few words of introduction, at the risk of triggering homophobes and other bottom feeders out there. I’m a New York Jew, now living in retirement at the other end of the great continent. My folks were born in Brooklyn; my kid brother and I were born and raised in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. I was an academic my whole working life. I’m gay. My lifetime partner and I met and fell in love on Shabbat Shuvah, which in September 1980 was one of those glorious Indian Summer days when The City is pure magic. Gay marriage was not legal then, but Dennis and I were a dedicated, devoted, monogamous couple. We married informally soon after we met, and exchanged rings, but we were officially married only on our 25th anniversary, and in Toronto at that: NY, where he lived, and Massachusetts, where I worked, didn’t recognize out-of-state gay couples.
Through the ’80s we were more or less closeted, depending on our surroundings: nearly all Dennis’ old friends died of AIDS in that decade, while much of American society celebrated the disease the way Germany appreciated the insecticide Zyklon B that was repurposed for the gas chambers of Treblinka and Auschwitz. “AIDS kills fags dead,” read a tee shirt sported by Sebastian Bach, an Aryan-looking pretty boy rock star back then. Bach’s monosyllabic observation (which was probably pushing the limit of his lexical ability) was a play on an advertising jingle for roach poison. Thus, one doesn’t let one’s nostalgia for the New York of yesteryear overwhelm one. The past of one’s youth was not monochromatically rosy.
Dennis died this January. In his last illness, and since his death, neither his relatives nor mine raised a little finger to be helpful or supportive in any way. (His old friends Margot and Palden traveled long distances to be there with us and help us. We were not alone. It’s just our families that suck.) His sister in Texas wrote a little memoir about his childhood attendance at a Mormon church or something that neatly airbrushed away his 44-year-long marriage to me and our lives together in New York. The little memorial I held for him, which was attended mostly by friends from my Chabad shul, was dedicated to restoring the deletions in the vita.
You can therefore imagine the eager anticipation with which one greeted Netflix’s serialized drama, “Eric” (2024). It’s about a fetching, talented ten-year-old kid named Edgar who goes missing one day on the way to school in Greenwich Village. Edger’s father Vincent, the creative genius behind a TV puppet show called “Good Day Sunshine”, is a sarcastic, abusive alcoholic and drug addict. He’s a straight white male, the son of a rapacious real estate developer and a prim society mother whose emotional frigidity would be the envy of an iceberg in Antarctica. Vincent’s mean, arrogant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant parents are served in their palatial East Side apartment by a long-suffering, hard-working Hispanic lady named Tia. Edgar’s mom is a darkish, anxious-looking lady with dark hair and black eyes named Cassandra. I figure she’s a Greek-American. The important thing is that she’s a she: Edgar loves her but is terrified by his testosterone-poisoned, white-male-privileged father.
When Edgar goes missing, his parents figured he’s been kidnapped by pedophiles running a racket in a gay club down the street. Spoiler alert: Edgar has in fact run away for fear of his choleric dad and has taken refuge with a kindly Black African dude sporting natty dreads who lives in the subway tunnel and whose tags Edgar’s taken a liking to. It turns out two white ethnic heterosexual men in the vice squad of the NYPD, one Irish, one Italian, are on the take with the pedophile ring. They have murdered an underage black kid, a sweet boy named Marlon, who was fellating a prominent NYC politician who looks and talks a whole lot like Donald Trump. A white heterosexual male Italian mobster and corrupt, cartoonishly violent white heterosexual male Romanian garbagemen dispose of Marlon’s body.
Enter the hero. Mikey, a handsome, dignified, meticulously honest and law-abiding, closeted Black gay man, is a NYPD detective in charge of Missing Persons at the 27th Precinct. He’s doing what he can to find Edgar, and trying to comfort Marlon’s grieving, angry mother, who figures the NYPD isn’t looking for her son (we don’t yet know he’s dead) because he’s Black so who cares. When he can spare an hour from work, Mikey’s nursing his older, white lover, who’s dying of AIDS. When the man dies, his mean white relatives take charge of the couple’s apartment and throw Mikey out. It’s actually worse than racist neglect back at the precinct: Mikey’s captain, who is, guess what, a white heterosexual male, is covering up the shenanigans of the vice squad.
With what you know about me, you can understand how I liked and identified with Mikey and disliked his deceased partner’s family. I know Mikey’s cold, bottled-up fury. I remember the friends who died of AIDS. They were the ones who made NYC’s arts and letters and music not just notable, but fabulous. Dennis and I lost both Black and white friends, rich and poor, Jew and Greek, and they are all one to God, “who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion.”
Towards the end, a tearful and repentant Vincent confesses to a crowd of the homeless who are protesting in City Hall park. He says he’ll do better. Imagine here enemies of the people, bourgeois types, admitting to their misdeeds (taste, literacy, culture, learning) before an angry mob of Red guards during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The corrupt cops are arrested, Mikey and Marlon’s mother go looking for her son’s corpse, and Edgar comes home safe and sound to his mom. Not his dad: Vincent’s handed in the house keys to Cassandra and a divorce is on the way.
In other words, “Eric” has very little to do with NYC as it actually was in 1985. Reality’s been dispatched down an Orwellian memory hole, or maybe one of the drama’s Hogarthian storm drains. It’s really a very thinly veiled, no, not veiled at all, ideological rant about identity politics and critical race theory, where Black is all good and white is all bad, and the worst of all is being a white heterosexual male, from the real estate moguls’ top of the food chain to the trash collectors at the bottom. It’s pure critical race theory propaganda, and anything at all in “Eric” that’s true to the time– period typefaces in the titles, the landline phones and VHS tapes, some of the music– is put in the service of the big lie. It’s not my hometown, it’s my hometown as falsified by the brownshirt left. It’s not 1985, it’s this nightmare year of 2024 distorting 1985.
But that’s not all. Wait, there’s more!
Guess what. In the city of the bagel and smear, of the knish, of Isaac Bashevis Singer, of Ben Katchor and Jerry Seinfeld and a million more of us, we’re missing. That’s right, the city that homegrown Nazis used to deride as Jew York is, in Netflix’s “Eric”, what those Silver Shirters and German-American Bund types hoped and prayed for. It’s Judenrein. Jew-cleansed. Dejudaized. There are no Jews. Well, almost none. I counted one, a money-grubbing (of course) TV executive, a villain named Avi. Avi: could be an Israeli name too. That’s how Netflix economizes: kill two Jews with one stone. Ever wondered what the Big Apple would be like without Gershwin and Rhapsody in Blue, without Aaron Copeland, without Woody Allen, without me and YOU? Why strain your imagination? Relax, tap enter, and let Netflix do the thinking for you.
Before World War II, one out of every ten citizens of Poland, and one out of every three residents of the capital, Warsaw, was a Jew. There were three million of us. When the Gomulka government decided to expel the postwar Jewish population, in 1968, there were about 30,000. Now there are a few thousand, and a nice museum. We’re an exotic curiosity of the past without whom the Poles can get along just fine, thank you very much. And what? You think America’s different? That we’re somehow indispensable? That they like us? That they even care? That it can’t happen here? That they’ll miss us when we’re all gone? You really believe all that, mister? Okay. Hey, see that? Look over there. Way up over the East River. It’s called the Brooklyn Bridge. I own it. I need to sell it in a hurry to raise some dough. How much cash you got on you?