I said before that Julian isn’t meant to be an actual businessman. Last time, I was talking about what Sunnyvale as a creature* does to what we’d typically think of as a business like a bar. This week, Julian’s turned the entire trailer park into a business, and in the television episode “All the Fuckin’ Dope You Can Smoke!” we get to see what that does to Sunnyvale and to him.
* I guess I should say that I’m still not sure what Sunnyvale actually is. It’s a community, and it’s definitely a culture, and it’s obviously a trailer park. But it’s also a weird kind of entity in itself. Sunnyvale creates some weird space-that’s-not-a-space where the normal rules of how to run a business and how to run your life don’t really apply. Where trailers can fall on top of people and they can walk away and dust themselves off. Where the value and power of money itself just fucking breaks down. Sunnyvale isn’t a normal place. It’s more than a place. What it is, I guess we’ll find out through the next two years or so of writing about it. Maybe.
So what’s the situation? What are we actually dealing with here? Barb is coming after Sunnyvale. She’s out for revenge. She’s the spectre of death looming over the whole community. Well, she’s the spectre of mass eviction, which basically is death for a community. Death for Sunnyvale.
The last and only line of defence is Julian. Sunnyvale’s greatest schemer, planner, fixer, and con-man. He can hold off Barb’s attack with the help of his crooked lawyer Steinberg. By rezoning the park as private property for business, he’s built another legal barrier to Barb’s takeover. And if Sunnyvale is going to be a private business, he’s going to make sure it uses its full potential. A casino resort – for an entry fee, customers can gamble their money away and drink for free. Julian gets to make more money to keep Steinberg working to get Barb off his back, and Sunnyvale protects itself by doing what it does best – getting people drunk as fuck.
Everything should be running totally smoothly. And if you watch the episode, it looks as though Ricky is the one to fuck things up as usual. He improvises a line in the youtube ad Bubbles records for Sunnyvale Resorts about "All the Fucking Dope You Can Smoke!” And it gives the impression that free weed is part of the all-inclusive package, instead of the extra that it was in Julian’s original plan.
So Ricky and Julian get into a fight. Now, ordinarily, this isn’t really a big deal. We’ve seen Ricky and Julian get into fights. We see it all the time. One of the pleasures of watching Trailer Park Boys is in seeing Ricky and Julian get into ridiculous arguments over some fuckup and then watching them work it out. But this argument escalates absurdly fast. Within minutes, they’re pointing guns at each other. These two don’t lose their tempers this quickly. Even when they lose their tempers, they don’t point their guns at each other.
Gun standoffs aren’t normal in Sunnyvale – they only happen when a situation gets so intense and dangerous that ordinary trailer park diplomacy collapses. And it’s usually an outsider to Sunnyvale who starts the gunfight. Like Leslie Dancer, Cyrus, or Sam Losco (before he decided to stop being an asshole). When a gunfight happens, one of the participants has to leave. Usually, it’s the one who started it. Sunnyvale is a place where people have guns, but gunfights and standoffs are normally pretty foreign. When guns come out, it’s not as a way to settle fights – it’s a sign that a fight’s gotten incurable. Ricky and Julian are best friends, and to see them point their guns at each other is incredibly messed up.
How did Julian get into this state? Look at how stressed he is all through this episode as he tries to keep Sunnyvale running smoothly as a resort. Julian’s getting petty, sharp, mean-spirited. He’s turning into the asshole that he normally hates to see in Sunnyvale ruining everyone’s good times and happiness. And he’s doing it in the name of making money. He even rebranded the place as Moneyvale, for fuck’s sake.
But Julian never originally rezoned Sunnyvale as a private property to make money with it – his Freedom 45 plan that he’d never have to hustle small-time jobs for a living again. The prospect of making money was a happy side-effect of his plan to save the residents of the park from Barb evicting them – his plan to save Sunnyvale. But to save Sunnyvale, he brought it into contact with the outside world – the normal human world that runs on money, prices, and profit. Having to enter commerce with that world started turning Julian into an asshole.
He’s even lost the sense of strategy, scheming, and planning that led him to think of rezoning as a defence against Barb’s attack. He turns a hippie away from Ricky's Drugs Store and Bubbles' pet-sitting business just because they didn't buy all-inclusive bracelets. He's become so focussed on his own narrow plan to make money that he even ignores all the ways that Sunnyvale can prosper just by encouraging people to join in the community – come get high while we watch your kitties for you!
Just look at how he acts with Jim when he and Randy return to Sunnyvale. We’ve seen how Barb, Donna, and Candy are intimidating Jim into helping her take back Sunnyvale. And we’ve seen how Jim doesn’t want to have anything to do with anything in Sunnyvale anymore except Randy. But Barb won’t stop the violence, won’t stop using violence to keep Jim at her heel.
Because let’s be entirely honest about what Barb, Donna, and Candy do to Randy when they kidnap him and take him back to that camper. They are sexually assaulting him. It’s played for laughs,** but it’s clearly rape. Randy is distraught and traumatized afterward, and Jim drives him back to Sunnyvale, comforting him all the time. Jim is capable of incredible tenderness to Randy, and in those few minutes in that car, Jim does all he can to help Randy heal from a terrible act of sexual violence.
** Which is disturbing enough, and extremely unsettling to watch.
This moment should be the start of Jim’s victory over Barb. He returns to Sunnyvale, the community he’s denounced, because Barb’s violence toward Randy was too much for him to put up with. Jim can deal with being abused by Barb – he put up with being married to her for years anyway. But this kind of brutal violence done to Randy is too much. Jim is clearly, obviously desperate. He’s set on betraying Barb, no matter the cost to himself. He wants her defeated. He can’t let her win after she’s done this terrifying thing to his Randy.
And Julian can’t see that. He yells at Randy for being away from his post, and doesn’t listen when Randy tries to explain that he was kidnapped and assaulted. Jim is presenting Julian with his best opportunity to stop Barb – a spy on the inside of her gang who’ll report on her plans. Randy’s been hurt so badly that Jim is offering to cooperate with Julian, a man he still regards with seething resentment over ejecting him from Sunnyvale. This could be the moment when the joy and love of natural Sunnyvale life wins its greatest victory – throwing together two mortal enemies as a team, in the name of Jim’s own desire to love and protect Randy.
But Julian just throws him out. He can’t see Jim’s desperation. The stress of running a real business has made him blind. It’s wrecked his own ability to scheme. It’s ruined his ability to think. All Julian can do is yell and scream at his problems, flail around like an animal.
Jim will only get more desperate after this. He has nowhere left to go for help. This could have been the team-up that changes everything, that finally brings complete happiness to Sunnyvale. But Julian’s been too blinded to see it. The moment is gone. And it can never come back.
So we have a chance for a redemptive friendship, the fundamental conflict of the entire last 15 years of Trailer Park Boys healing in the name of solidarity against violence and cruelty. And Julian blew it. There will never be that kind of opportunity again. And the friendship that defined the bonds of brotherly love and solidarity at the heart of the show is crumbling. Julian’s blown that too. It seems in these few moments that nothing can save Sunnyvale.
Then Jimmy Kimmel shows up and his audience laughs so hard at Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles’ zany antics that everything is fine. What the fuck?
• • •
Recommend more posts and more explorations in the weird world of Sunnyvale by sponsoring them. Sign on to my Patreon to get on the ground floor of discussions about how Sunnyvale Psychochronography will develop, commission me for special posts and projects, take part as a producer in this exploration of a Canadian paradise.
New visitor? Check out the archive here, at my introduction to the Sunnyvale Psychchronography project.
No comments:
Post a Comment