The Treachery of Nice
A Comparison of "Cure" and "Ted Lasso"
This is my first “short” newsletter. Essentially, my plan is to release an official entry one week, and a briefer and less structured newsletter the next. In the indeterminate future, and with enough luck and popular support, the short entries will be replaced by multi-part newsletters connected to a paid tier.
One aspect these shorter and extended pieces will share is an opener that provides quick updates about what I’m watching and/or something you should watch. Now through October, I’ll open up with a themed four-part film lineup you can use for Halloween. Why four films? It’s a solid start, but you’ll (hopefully) have an addition or two that you want to mention. Do it! But please do it in the attached comments section, as the more I exploit the bells and whistles of this platform, the more likely I am to get some traction on it.
Your Halloween Film Theme Is:
Some Assembly Required
Stories about assembled monsters, as opposed to the kind that arrive more-or-less intact.
1. Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale)
Not the first, but an early and influential adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. Released in the same year as Tod Browning’s Dracula, this film helped set the blueprint for Universal Pictures’ monster movies. Based on anecdotal evidence alone, it seems as though its sequel has overtaken it in terms of public support, but the strong sense of atmosphere and visual ingenuity makes it ripe for modern appreciation. The reveal of the monster in particular contains shots today’s filmmakers should be obligated to purloin.
2. Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale)
With only a brief screen appearance and no dialogue beyond hisses, growls, and shrieks, The Bride of Bride of Frankenstein still managed to leave an indelible mark on the history of horror movies. Whale’s return to the story of Dr. Frankenstein’s reanimated wretch is a more subversive and sharply funny tale than its predecessor. Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius sets a standard for the mad scientist few have managed to touch.
3. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989, dir. Shinya Tsukamoto)
The provocatively abstract tale of men who become metal monsters not by the deliberate hands of a scientist but as a consequence of our communal dependence on dehumanizing modern (for the time) technology. Silly, fitfully sexual, and often abrasive, it’s an unforgettable watch. It’ll be especially hard for your more staid friends to shake if you screen it for others, but that’s really more their problem than yours.
4. May (2002, dir. Lucky McKee)
A dark and tragic character study that dissolves into an outright slasher. The titular May, played by Angela Bettis, is wracked by anxieties and painfully undersocialized, and her attempts to open herself up to human connection end in a kind of disaster that’s painful to watch and seemingly unavoidable. Her fixation on “perfect” features is externalized in a grisly project that finds a new sort of tragedy to the amalgamated human monster.
The Treachery of Nice: Ted Lasso and Cure
As conversations about Ted Lasso’s current season, and its seeming commitment to niceness over conflict and effective comedy, have grown heated, something occurred to me: The show is a natural antithesis to one of my favorite films, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, a story about a mysterious figure who causes seemingly normal people to commit shocking acts of violence.
The natural antithesis of a work moves backward from the original’s core conceit in ways that both confound and reinforce it. I’m not saying that every piece of art has one, but they’re fun to discover, and they can be illuminating. In this case, Cure’s relentless darkness, along with its critically vaunted status, helps articulate a theory as to why there’s been such stiff opposition to the current run of Ted Lasso.
In the Apple+ series, protagonist Ted Lasso is a newcomer to an English town and soccer team, one whose singular personality and dogged niceness tease out the innate goodness of those around him. Even if their straightforward goals remain unfulfilled, many come away from meeting him with some intrinsic positive growth. Mamiya, the antagonist of Cure, also explores a new environment and makes connections with those he encounters. However, where Lasso is gregarious and genuine, Mamiya is diffident and elusive. Where Lasso has a unique and unmissable personality, a sense of self that’s practically carved from granite, Mamiya is a cipher, unknowable to the point of essentially having no self at all—tell him his own name, and he’ll forget it again within seconds.
Oh, and where Lasso’s charm and earnestness help people find their best selves, Mamiya compels them to commit gruesome murders.
It would be nigh-impossible to mistake one of these works for the other. For one, they’re in different languages. Also, Cure shows a murder victim getting his face peeled off, while Ted Lasso seems indifferent at best to gore. Still, both can be tidily summarized with the following: A unique outsider helps people find something within themselves they didn’t know was there.
Beyond having fun with premises, and being an excuse to encourage more people to seek out Cure, defining this connection helps us think about the influence of niceness on a narrative, and how it can arguably sour a show more easily than nastiness. Is the following going to be conjecture? Sure, but my newsletter, my conjecture.
Narrative is synthetic. No matter what happens in fiction, nothing happens. That certainly applies to stories that evoke “negative” feelings, though the inherent artifice can fail to lessen their intensity for viewers who prefer to avoid them. For those who don’t flee, the rough stuff can become cozy through exposure or an ingrained aesthetic and/or narrative affinity, or they can be pleasing in the way the rush of heat from a spicy meal can be pleasing on the tongue. Cure has a slow pace, depicts gory death with an unsettling frankness, and steeps its audience in a kind of pervasive dread that feels both confining and dreamlike. Not “nice,” in other words, but the volume of unease is intoxicating, whereas an abundance of niceness can just feel toxic.
Synthetically nice content (and again, all fiction is synthetic) can be pleasant, but at some point, the tang of artificiality is like tasting household cleaner. For many (though certainly not all), the niceness starts to feel like the smile on a con artist’s face, a way to trick or lull rather than engage on fair terms. Even when dark or mean-spirited content feels like a cynical ploy for attention or a shortcut to provocation, it doesn’t hit you with the insulting falseness of overly ingratiating positivity.
I suspect the harder pushback against the second season of Ted Lasso is driven by a concern that works possessing its demeanor aren’t just bad but actually manipulative, and that it lures audiences into easy viewing at the expense of better storytelling. In other words, it’s not just that the lack of conflict or edge affects its quality, it’s that the show sets a dangerous precedent in its excessive prioritization of niceness. If hostility in the face of too-easily-digestible content seems inappropriate, consider how reality television was able to suck up so much of the atmosphere of entertainment in a relatively short time.
Ted Lasso may continue to cause bile to rise ever higher in a growing number of throats, but it’s still retained much of its popular support. The detractors may not concern studios seeking sincere imitators they can rush into production, but it is reassuring to know that people still want more from what they watch. Even if it won’t change larger trends, advocating for art to be more than just gentle, artificial warmth can encourage creators to keep trying with riskier and richer stories. We may never find a true antidote for pablum in our lifetimes, but we can produce another Cure if we keep trying.