OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: Daniel 3:14?

Assume that nothing is accidental.

That’s one of the things I tell people who sign up for the discussions on movies and TV shows that I lead for LifeQuest of Arkansas. I tell them that everything on the screen is—or should be—intentional, and that the best creators transmit information through even the smallest details. Their eyes, if they are doing it right, are on the sparrow.

So it matters what kind of watch a character is wearing, what color shirt they have on, whether the day is bright or gray. The best artists are always looking for ways to move you toward their invented truth, to receive their world as they intended.

That’s not always the way it goes, especially in a collaborative project like a movie or a television series. People make mistakes and compromise is inevitable. Happy accidents occur, and so do unhappy ones. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and it’s in the frame because whoever was in charge of continuity was distracted by a cryptic text from a passive aggressive significant other. But all things being equal, assume the time displayed on the clock radio is significant.

I didn’t pay any attention to it.

But someone in the class caught it.

Our text for the day was Ray McKinnon’s Rectify, Season 1, Episode 5, “Drip, Drip,” which first aired on the Sundance Channel in 2013.

We’re discussing Rectify this year because three years ago I decided it might be more fun to take a long slow look at a TV series than to talk about the current cinema every week. I’d always wanted to revisit Krzysztof Kielowski’s Dekalog, a 1989 Polish TV series set in a grindingly gray contemporary Warsaw apartment building that consists of 10 one-hour films, each inspired by one of the Ten Commandments. When that class proved popular (I think the LifeQuest board might have as been as dubious about its prospects as I was), we decided to repeat the experiment with the first season of David Milch’s HBO series Deadwood.

And so a year ago I was showing the most profanity-packed television show in history—one that featured full-frontal nudity from a pre- Parks and Recreation Nick Offerman—in a west Little Rock church.

One of the most important characters in that first season of Deadwood is Rev. Smith, based on real-life street preacher Henry Weston Smith. Smith was played by McKinnon, who used to live in Little Rock and who, on a couple of occasions, spoke to my LifeQuest class. Some of my people remembered him, and some remembered him from around town. Our fond memories of Ray led us to undertake Rectify this year.

But it wasn’t just the local connection. Rectify is one of the finest TV series ever made, and the most empathetic and non-condescending portrait of small town Southern life I know.

And it’s all about being reborn. It’s about Daniel, who is released from Georgia’s death row after 19 years because newly discovered DNA evidence has muddied up the case. Now in his late 30s, without ever having had an adult life, Daniel is released back into society, into the little town he came from, into a now blended family that includes people who are strangers to him.

Daniel was convicted of the rape and murder of his high school girlfriend, and throughout the first season we never arrive at an objective understanding of his guilt or innocence; we only know that things were not so straightforward as the prosecutors who put Daniel away led the jury to believe. There were things that didn’t come out at trial because they might have been embarrassing and/or caused undue pain to the victim’s family. Daniel’s attorney saw his job as trying to save the boy’s life, and he might have had his client not been so strange and introverted; had his client not confessed.

But the show is not the police procedural it could have been, it is a solemnly paced examination of what it means to truly live as a human being, with the certain knowledge that life is finite. In prison Daniel had achieved a kind of equilibrium, a mastery of himself. He read deeply, he had some meaningful conversations. He lived in a cell with blindingly white walls not unlike the way the movies sometimes depict heaven.

Now he tends to confine himself to a room of similar dimensions. He’s confused by all the color, noise and choice. Every episode in the first season covers approximately a day, so it’s early on the morning of the sixth day, at 3:14 a.m. according to the clock radio, that he slips out of his mother’s house and lights out for anywhere but the suffocating smallness of Paulie, Ga.

I didn’t notice the time on the clock. But someone brought it up in our post-viewing discussion. Could it have been an allusion to the Bible verse Daniel 3:14, where the King Nebuchadnezzar confronts Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who have not been falling down and worshipping his golden idol whenever they heard “the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music.”

Nebuchadnezzar warns them to get their minds right, that if they do not fall in line they will “immediately be cast into a burning fiery furnace.” But being believers in the true God, the God of Daniel, they defied the king. And though the furnace was heated seven times hotter than usual, so hot it destroyed the mighty men who bound them and threw them into it, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walked out unscathed. And Nebuchadnezzar was convinced.

He issued a decree that anyone who spoke bad about the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—the God of Daniel —”shall be torn limb from limb, and their houses laid in ruins.”

Idon’t know that McKinnon intended the time on the clock radio to be an allusion to this verse; my guess would be that he didn’t, that 3:14 a.m. is just one of those times when we can feel desolate and talk ourselves into running away. But McKinnon’s Daniel has agreed, probably for the wrong reasons, to be baptized later that day. He is doing it for Tawney, who is married to his step-brother and who is the best Christian ever portrayed on television. Daniel has a not quite grown-up crush on her. Maybe he sees being baptized as a way of falling down before a false idol?

He runs away, but returns, after having literally wrestled with what may have been the devil or a dark part of himself (played by W. Earl Brown, the same actor who played Dan Doherty in Deadwood).

I didn’t catch it; but I’ve always said a good critic makes critics of his audience. So I feel a little proud. Nothing is accidental.

Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

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