Thugged Out Gangster Shit: And Everything Comes Crashing Down, Sunnyvale, 11/06/2016

Thugged Out Gangster Shit convinced me that the tenth season of Trailer Park Boys is the most intricately plotted set of episodes the show has ever produced. It's doing a lot more than just telling a story, though it definitely doesn’t stop telling its story. Except when it does, or at least when it seems to.

This isn’t making a lot of sense right now. Maybe I need to hit a bottle of Ricky’s cannabis syrup. Man, that’s some good shit.

Anyway, I was in the process of figuring out what the hell is going on in this season of Trailer Park Boys after going through plot and character and thematic developments for the last eight episodes. You’d think I would have narrowed down on that by now, but it turns out that I haven’t.

And that’s actually pretty typical of how this season is put together. There is, at least at first, a very clear story that unfolds over this season. Julian takes the lead defending Sunnyvale from Barb as she tries to invalidate his ownership of the park, because she intends to evict all the residents and sell out to the suburban real estate developers creeping closer to its territory.

You'd think at first that this would be a pretty simple storyline. There’d be plenty to do as Julian keeps trying to make money to keep his greasy lawyer Steinberg on the case, keep the town in business, and outmaneuver Barb’s own schemes. But a lot of the actual story that we see on the screen, episode by episode, isn’t really about that. When I first watched these episodes, I thought that the writers were just losing the plot introducing all these other wacky ideas into the story.

What was the point of seeing J-Roc put on a Cholo persona other than feeling like Jonathan Torrens and the show’s writers have strayed into uncomfortably sorta-racist territory? Or Julian’s interval running Sunnyvale like a casino resort? Or the sudden arrival of Snoop Dogg and an entourage of celebrities partying at the Legion Hall? These things all seemed like distractions from the main plot – Julian fighting Barb in an elaborate chess game for control of Sunnyvale. Then I realized that this was the point.

This isn’t one of those stupid arguments that you should think of all the mistakes in the narrative as genius only because the writers put the mistakes there on purpose. That’s just making excuses for a writing team having made a bunch of mistakes. You’ve got to watch Julian through this series, and think of how his actions – episode by episode, even scene by scene – add up to building a scheme of his own to stop Barb. And when you see the arc of all these nine episodes, right up to the moment of the most horrible surprise plot event, the answer to that question becomes clear.

They don’t.

Julian isn’t developing a scheme. He isn’t developing any real contingency plans. He might think he is, but really, he’s just distracted. Now we’re starting to see why this season was constructed in what seemed like such a scattershot way. Those spectacles – Moneyvale Resort and Casino, Entertaining the Snoop – draw Julian’s attention away from the main problem that he’s facing. How he’s going to stop Barb.

He always seems to have it on his mind. Just look at him in one of those last scenes with Snoop as they sign the documents making him a partner in Sunnyvale as real estate and as an enterprise. He’s the same wheeling and dealing Julian. But he’s reactive. He couldn’t have planned being able to add the immense fortune of Calvin Broadus, Esq. to the financial backing of his company. That live feed to the Jimmy Kimmel show came out of nowhere. 

Julian’s plan actually fell apart much too easily. You can tell when you watch him in court that even he’s surprised at how little effort it took to ruin all his plans. We were much more entertained watching Tom Arnold chase after Lucy, Doug Benson fuck J-Roc’s wife, and Snoop Dogg get stupidly high. Julian was dragged along by these ridiculous events too. He was drawn in too many directions to focus on what was in front of him all along – that Steinberg was an unprofessional, greasy idiot and a dick who was taking him for a ride the entire time.

Remember the failed heist of the truck a few episodes back? That was supposed to be an easy job. I feel as though I’ve seen Julian pull off that kind of job very successfully in the past. But it was an uncoordinated mess as the driver was replaced at the last minute by a guy who got no briefing on what he was actually supposed to do during the hijacking, and Jacob ended up getting shot. It’s at this point that you can tell that he’s starting to doubt Steinberg and what he has to say. 

Then comes the idea for Moneyvale Casino Resorts, and Julian forgets all about Steinberg’s idiocy. Then comes Snoop and the entourage to party in the park for a few days, and Julian thinks he can actually rely on Steinberg. But the guy can’t even bribe a judge properly, and in getting caught he ruins Julian’s case for him.

So the story itself is dragging Julian away from being able to put up any real defence for Sunnyvale against Barb’s scheming. And it’s dragging us away from noticing it. All the different threads of the season have gotten away from us, and they’re coming together disastrously. 

The whole season has a structure that takes us – along with Julian – along the ride of these distractions. And we see just enough of what’s happening on the sidelines – Ricky and Lucy’s marital problems over the baby and his life of petty crime, Jim’s increasing desperation as he’s hemmed in on all sides by hostility and rejection, just the barest hint of Steinberg’s grease – that we can see what can all come crashing down. Or in this case, crashing into a casino trailer on fire and shooting a gun around at everybody.

But then something totally ridiculous happens, and we all start laughing. Until we’re in the hospital with a brain-dead Ricky and the whole extended family collapses in tears. And just like Lucy, Julian, Trinity, Jacob, and Bubbles, you wonder how it all could have happened this way. But you also know exactly how.

• • •

You can support Sunnyvale Psychochronography at my Patreon, and read through the index of my first pass at season ten at the introduction to the whole project. I might be starting a Kickstarter soon to support a small ebook of the season ten essays and a little extra material. For example, an expanded essay on the Jian Ghomeshi trial, or thinking through international stereotypes of Canadians as Trailer Park Boys can show us. Or anything you might want to recommend as a backer of either project.

The Super Bling Cowboy: What’s Right and What Should Be, Sunnyvale, 28/05/2016

This is a transitional episode. Watching it, there’s an odd feeling hanging over the whole affair that something very strange is going to happen. But not yet. Until then, it’s mostly just an entertaining mess. Snoop is enjoying himself in a relaxing, weed-fuelled rural getaway. Doug is wonderfully high, but badly needs some kind of food that doesn’t have weed baked into it. Tom is enjoying his immersive Sunnyvale experience with his idols Ricky and Bubbles. Bubbles is getting ready for his show at the Legion Hall as the Super Bling Cowboy, which seems to be a better country-rap persona than Buck 65 could ever figure out.

Barb herself is absent. All we see of this plot is a brief meeting with Steinberg where we, as viewers of this episode of Trailer Park Boys can totally tell that he’s hosing Julian for all the money he can squeeze out of those pecs. All Steinberg does is preface every answer to Julian’s request that he actually do something with a demand for more and more money. He runs his law office out of his run-down house. His sign has letters missing. He uses a cell phone that looks to be vintage 1998. Why does Julian think he can trust this man to do what he says he will? Is an alleged law degree all it takes to pull the wool over his eyes?

This is a transitional episode, but it’s filled with little moments of ethical and moral insight. Not all of this is about what’s right. Doug’s quest for food leads him to put some moves on J-Roc’s wife Marcia, who’ll betray him by season’s end to join the life of rich and famous stoner comedians. The most egregious is Tom’s Indecent Proposal moment to have sex with Lucy for $10,000.

Now, this is also probably the funniest sequence of the whole episode. I know the “All we wanna do is smoke and fuck some hoes” song is the climactic centrepiece of probably the whole season, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But if I can speak as an individual watching this show and not as a philosophical commentator – the sequence of seeing Lucy’s fee shrink by commission again and again made me laugh out loud more than anything else in the episode.

“And now I gotta take a cut!”

Well, that’s not quite true. I actually laughed louder in the fight scene when everyone finds out about everybody else’s cuts. 

Ricky: “$4000 to fuck my wife!”

Tom: “Actually, it was $10,000!”

Sarah: “What the fuck, Julian! You told me $5000!”

Snoop’s right, Julian. You a motherfucking pimp.

The whole sequence is this greasy blur of friendship and moneymaking. I mean, Julian’s cut is unreasonable by pretty much any measure. It’s a sign that, despite his ethical redemption at the end of “Up In Smoke,” he’s still too focussed on making money to foresee all the effects of what he’s done. He can’t see that Steinberg is milking him. He takes such a huge cut of what should be Lucy’s fee that it’s ridiculous. And when it all comes out, he and Sarah both end up getting nothing. Julian is still unmoored. 

Actually, let’s look for a moment at Sarah in this episode. Because we haven’t really had much to see of her all through this season. “Super Bling Cowboy” is the first episode where Sarah’s played any really substantial role. And her role is as pimp. A much better pimp than Julian knows how to be. All Julian can do with Tom’s request to bang Lucy is deal with him, then farm out the job of actually convincing Lucy to do it. Sarah’s the one who’s actually effective, making Lucy actually consider the idea. Mind you, she also knows that it’ll make Ricky explode.

And in that crazy huge fight over Tom’s Indecent Proposal, Sarah plays a very devious role. She’s the catalyst. She adds enough extra spark to set Ricky boiling over from upset to pissed to royally raging. Just a few extra words to emphasize that, yes, Julian was pimping out his life partner. Never said anything about how she was the one to do all the work of pimping out Lucy. No, it’s all Julian’s fault. 

It’s an elegant moment for Sarah, which I’m sad we never really see again this season. And it comes pretty late in the season anyway. There really could have been so much more.

What we get more of in this episode is the catastrophic collapse of Jim Lahey, played for the zaniest over-the-top laughs you can imagine. Jim gets comatose drunk with Leslie as the ex-Private adds a few extra mystery pharmaceuticals to their whiskey cocktail. Leslie’s dedication is single-minded – about what, it isn’t really all that clear. But we know from the ending of the last episode that there are guns involved. And Barb’s ultimatum hangs over them.

Jim came to Leslie for help because he was desperate, because there seemed no other way to escape Barb’s menace. Barb herself isn’t in this episode, but her presence hangs like a shadow flickering around the edges of the story. It’s why Julian sees Steinberg, to hold off Barb’s lawsuit, why he remains desperate for more money, to the detriment of his own intelligence. It’s why Jim and Leslie are trying to figure out a way back into Sunnyvale.

Well, Jim isn’t really trying to figure it out. “The liquor will figure it out!” That’s a bizarre, but inspiring faith in providence. Jim will drink and his drinking will lead him to a solution to his problem of how to get back to the trailer park. Providence answers – Snoop and Tom want to see Jim dance with the liquor, so Julian goes to get him. It’s not in Jim’s control, but the liquor brings him back to the park. Granted, they end up in a freaky replay of The Deer Hunter’s Russian roulette scene with disabling quantities of liquor. But they’re still back in the park, simply from trusting the liquor. 

Maybe Julian could learn something from Jim about trusting faith, since every time he’s tried to take purposeful control of a situation this season, it’s blown up in his face. Julian’s need to control has ruined his ability to actually control his life and his plans. But Jim’s faith in providence has taken him exactly where he wants to be. 

Ricky has a similar faith in providence. You can see it when he won’t promise Bubbles that he’ll make the show. He can say he’ll try, but that real life is complicated and he can’t guarantee that he’ll actually, with 100% certainty, make it to the Legion Hall show. But even though Ricky steps back from control over his messy, increasingly weird life, he actually does make the show, along with Snoop Dogg, Tom, Doug, Julian, J-Roc, MC Flurry, and the whole rest of the Sunnyvale crew. Going to see Bubbles play is what breaks up their fight. 

That Sunnyvale fam jam – “All we wanna do is smoke and fuck some hoes!” – is the moment of joy where all the heated arguments over Julian’s barely competent (and Sarah-sabotaged) pimping job melt away. Instead, Snoop helps Bubbles win the open mike contest, humiliates the boys who bullied him back at the start of the season, and provides once again the ethical voice of Sunnyvale. These are Sunnyvale’s values – you support your friends and family, and love them. That’s the path of joy, the foundation and cement of real community.
• • •
Sunnyvale Psychochronography will work episode by episode (movies included) through the entire Trailer Park Boys in search of the utopian vision that lies underneath it all. Check out the full index of episodes so far and an introduction to the project here. You can also support Sunnyvale through my Patreon, which will let you join the search itself through commissioning special essays and other content.

Up In Smoke: And They Stole the Show, Sunnyvale, 21/05/2016

Trailer Park Boys isn’t just some weird little piece of television loved in Canada. We aren’t dealing with any King of Kensington small-time shit here. I remember when the most visible Canadian comedy show that wasn’t a CBC political sketch show was Dog House. You know the one? With the St Bernard dog who got his mind switched with a cop? Starring the kid gunfighter from Unforgiven? Doesn’t describing that show make you want to go watch Unforgiven instead? I know I do.

But Snoop Dogg just showed up in Sunnyvale with Doug Benson and Roseanne’s ex-husband. Let's be accurate here. Julian invented Moneyvale last episode as a casino, and he marketed it to folks just like the people in his own community and in the surrounding Dartmouth municipality.* These are clients far beyond what he’s prepared to deal with, and you can tell when you watch him try to sweet-talk Snoop and Doug. The biggest money.

* We all know people from Halifax proper are too stuck-up to party in Sunnyvale.

More here is going on than just a visit from the richest and most famous partiers Sunnyvale’s ever seen. This is the entire plane of Sunnyvale’s existence turning itself inside out. Snoop, Doug, and especially fucking Tom – they’re Trailer Park Boys fans. They aren’t there for Moneyvale. They’re there to hang out with Julian, Ricky, Bubbles, and the rest of the gang. 

No matter how many times Ricky might lose his temper at “these fucking idiots with their cameras!” showing up at the park again, it’s easy when you watch Trailer Park Boys to think that this is only a television show for you. You’d easily be forgiven for making that mistake. Back when Trailer Park Boys started its run, it was one of the only television comedies shot with handheld cinematography, in the style of an anthropological documentary. It was basically just them and Ricky Gervais’ Office, which was still a pretty cult property at the time. It would be another three years before the American office became a huge hit and everyone was ripping off Michael Schur.

I mean Trailer Park Boys. Everyone was ripping off Trailer Park Boys. 

But think about the idea hidden at the heart of the faux-documentary format. Trailer Park Boys, the show we all watch, is a fictional television series that was first made by Canada’s Showcase cable channel, and is now made by Netflix. Its cinematography is in the style of handheld vérité, a style that implies that it’s filmed on-site, with real people acting as they naturally do. Our own interaction with Trailer Park Boys as an audience – the camera – implies that Sunnyvale is a real community outside Dartmouth. The show’s own camera, our eye on Sunnyvale, tells us that the camera is really in a community called Sunnyvale, and that we’re watching the edited adventures of its residents. 

Snoop Dogg, Doug Benson, and the sidekick from True Lies are real people who work in the entertainment industry. They all love watching Trailer Park Boys. If they got word that the community was open as a casino and entertainment park for people to visit, they’d get a crew together and go. It’s the Sunnyvale Reality Tour,** the Sunnyvale Experience. And now we’re watching the documentary crew that brings us our weeks and months in the life of Sunnyvale record Snoop visit the town with his buddies Doug Benson and his Soul Plane co-star.

** Oh, wait. Wrong show.

But Trailer Park Boys is a fictional television show. Ricky, Julian, Bubbles, and the rest of them are all actors. I’ve met John Paul Tremblay when he and I were in St John’s Newfoundland at the same time last August. Julian is a character he plays, and he is a real actor and television producer from Halifax. My girlfriend and I were drinking on the outdoor deck that’s shared between Roxxy’s, Distortion, the Bull & Barrel, and whatever bar has taken over what used to be CBTG’s. The deck isn’t licensed, but everyone drinks out there anyway and no one cares. So I go to the Bull to use the bathroom – it’s the only bar that never charges cover – and there’s Julian surrounded by a sea of fans, drinking.

So we chat, I tell him how much I loved season nine, and he tells me that he’s really proud of the work they’ve done on season ten. He’s wearing a tight sweater and a baseball cap, and perfectly in character as Julian. John Paul takes a picture with me and my girlfriend, we shake hands, he moves on to the next group of fans who want to buy him beer. 

A few days later, we saw him with his wife and kids at the Regatta – a giant county fair that occupies an entire lakeshore in the east end of old St John’s, which shuts down the entire city for a day every August. He was wearing a tank top and sunglasses, looking irritated to all hell pushing around a baby carriage and hauling toddlers around. I knew, looking at that face, that he would respond to the next call of “Hey Julian!” with the angriest “FUCKOFF!!!!” I have ever heard. Or else just punch them in the face.

He was very much John Paul that afternoon.

Probably, he’d been surrounded by fans just as obnoxious (if not even more so) than that fat dork who I think I saw on an old Sons of Anarchy episode. He hounds everyone in Sunnyvale like an indulgent superfan with too much money to spend. He’s an open and enthusiastic poverty fetishist, loving every minute of hanging out with Bubbles in his shack that’s barely above a shantytown hovel. He darts from person to person in Sunnyvale like they’re a roadside attraction there to dance for passers-by in exchange for some loose change. He watches a documentary series about the lives of eastern Canadian trailer trash, real people with real lives filmed, edited, and broadcast for his amusement. And visits Sunnyvale to mock these people’s real lives, as if they were Disney mascots or actors in a theme park.

The celebrities’ presence reduces everything in Up In Smoke to a cheap joke at the expense of real people’s lives. When Barb, Donna, and Candy come to the town to stare down Julian, the confrontation between Candy and Randy becomes a joke. And it’s a deadly serious situation – this is Randy’s chance for vengeance against the women who raped him in the last episode. This is something we should be aware of when we watch this scene. Randy is squaring off against his rapist in front of the entire town of Sunnyvale.

And the celebrities make a mockery of this intensely serious moment, with Snoop taking bets on it like it was a cockfight. The attention of the local media only demeans Randy’s shot at redemption even more, taking all of the cameras away from the fight itself – which we barely see – and putting it all on Snoop Dogg charming the locals.

Yet it also redeems Randy at the same time. Because Randy loses that fight. He gets his ass kicked. But thanks to Snoop, Doug, and that other guy,*** it doesn’t turn out to be a moment of traumatizing, brutal humiliation. It’s a cartoon cockfight with a giant mega-butch lesbian. Tom’s jokes about banging fat women land harder than any of Randy’s punches. Snoop, Doug, and Tom have turned this deadly serious situation of Barb’s assault on Sunnyvale into a joke. They’ve been defanged, at least for this moment, and lost their power. 

*** Didn’t I see him in that old Coneheads movie? I loved that movie when I was 10.

And when Lucy finally explodes on Julian over the missing money for Trinity’s wedding? And the fight threatens to break up the Boys’ entire lifelong friendship? Tom steps in and fronts the cash right away. “I’ve spent literally millions of dollars on weddings! What’s a thousand?” He does it simply because of a simple truth – it’s not worth ruining a whole friendship over money. These real people from one of the most morally brutal places in the West – Hollywood – have come to Sunnyvale for the sake of exploiting it. Instead, they ended up using their mastery of the media and comparatively huge material wealth to heal friendships and defang the powerful and violent. 

Whose boom is that in the shot? Ours or the TV crew's?

Our world has smashed into Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale has become our world. Its power to turn even the most serious situation into a ridiculous, joyful laugh has become our power. Snoop, Doug, and Tom gained it just from spending a few hours in Sunnyvale, as Sunnyvale itself was starting to lose it. Villains aren’t laid low through violence, they’re mocked to death and laughed at until their weapons won’t work anymore. Joy conquers hate. If Snoop Dogg could do it after just a quick visit to Sunnyvale, why couldn’t we do it when we’ve visited Sunnyvale through our televisions for 15 years?

Of course, we all know that they’re just playing comic versions of themselves on a television show, right?
• • •
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Love Power I: Sunnyvale Spoilers, Research Time, 19/05/2016

Today's post is about some more ideas I’ve been developing in dialogue with Antonio Negri’s books. It’s also a bit of a spoiler for the Sunnyvale project. Let me explain how that works. 

The posts of Sunnyvale Psychochronography are walks through the stories of individual episodes. They focus on different characters or narrative turns that I think turn an eye on whatever aspect of Trailer Park Boys’ underlying philosophical ideas I want to focus on that week. Each post discusses these ideas in terms of the characters and their actions. Not the ideas themselves in an abstract sense.

If everybody in the world had a
flower instead of a gun, there would
be no war. There would be no hate.
There would only be love.

Negri advocates a central idea at the end of his major trilogy – that love can be the founding principle and engine of politics. Love is the fuel and motor of justice in human society. Love has the power to produce a thriving economy through the social solidarity that grows among people in a community working together. Their interpersonal relationships and organizations produce the wealth of the community.

Reading Negri, he discusses how contemporary communications technology – the globalization of personal relationships and person to person communication – lets the productive networks of love spread all over the world. Today, it’s actually possible to build a world order based on common communication, cooperation, and love.

Looking at the community of Sunnyvale and the Trailer Park Boys, the show itself is a demonstration that such a productive order is possible at all. 

You see, it’s very easy to write off poor, ignorant people whose business activity lives on the margin of legality. This is true enough for poor people in countries like Canada where we have a lot of government services and proper infrastructure to keep people living dignified lives. But it’s doubly true for the residents of shantytowns and favela sprawls. You live in a corrugated tin shack, people barely think of you as human.

Write those people off, sure. But if you do, you dismiss the value of literally billions of lives. Notice the scale and you see what you’ve done. That’s the magnitude of your mistake. 

Sunnyvale is a community that we’ve all come to know where everyone lives on the margins of mainstream society and legality. But it’s a community – in all its conflicts and farcical craziness – that’s still held together by love, and the solidarity that flows from love for each other and your community. All Julian’s actions in this latest season come ultimately from his love for his community.

Sunnyvale is a demonstration that love is the primary motivator of human relationships and community. And when you shift the discussion to Negri’s context – writing as a critical contributor to Western political philosophy – Sunnyvale itself makes a demonstration against the long-standing presumption of humanity’s violent nature.

Negri is writing as a philosopher who’s had a base in a university throughout his life. Throughout Commonwealth, he’s in a dialogue with many legendary writers in the Western philosophical tradition, Thomas Hobbes especially.

Yeah, the lesser evil right here, Thomas. Right here.

You can think of Commonwealth as an argument against Leviathan. That earlier book was an argument that humans were inescapably weak, paranoid, and prone to violence against each other. Peace and productivity needed us to cede our freedom to a central authority, who could inspire in us enough fear not to kill and steal from each other.

The repression and terror that a state government can inflict on people is, if you follow the ideas of Hobbes, which are entirely mainstream in Western philosophy, actually a lesser evil. The greater evil that government repression blocks is the anarchic, chaotic “war of all against all” that comes from people being totally free.

Even the modern libertarian idea – which is now mainstream in North American political thinking – is no real solution. It still presumes humanity to be essentially egoistic, cruel, and violent. It just says that permitting that violence is the lesser evil compared to state repression. That’s no solution, though. 

The solution is – brick by brick, person by person – to build a society from our own networked organizing that is actually based on love. Companionship and friendship spreading all over the world through our communication networks. 

This is the heart of the Sunnyvale project. How can people – with all their conflicting desires and personalities – succeed in building a society based on love? Because so much mistrust and traditions of suspicion stand in the way. . . . To be continued

All the Fuckin’ Dope You Can Smoke! Greed’s Blindness, Sunnyvale, 14/05/2016

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?

• • •

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If You Don't Believe It It's Not Real: Who’s the Asshole Here? Sunnyvale, 07/05/2016

Fucking Sam Losco, that's who he is. I don't think I can remember a bigger asshole in Sunnyvale than him. Even Cyrus or that whack job Tommy from last season isn’t as big an asshole as Sam. Sam Losco is so big an asshole that you don’t feel bad robbing from him. Even Bubbles doesn’t really feel bad stealing from Sam. He’s such an asshole that his real first name should be Fucking, Sam should be his middle name, and his birth certificate should read Fucking Sam Losco.

But that’s not the Sam we see in “If You Don’t Believe It It’s Not Real.” This Sam is smiling, pleasant, and kind. It's more than just the All Smiles image he puts on his denture business. The contrast is incredible. 

Because the show goes out of its way to make the contrast obvious and clear. I remember the first episode of Trailer Park Boys that I ever saw was “Mrs Peterson’s Dog Gets Fucked Up.” And I remember a major plot point was that Ricky accidentally got shot in the ass and they had to go to Sam Losco’s veterinary practice to have the bullet removed. And he treats the boys terribly the entire time. 

This episode creates a parallel situation. As part of an elaborate scheme cooked up with Julian’s greasy lawyer Steinberg, the boys are planning a fake heist. The plan is clear. To cut off Barb’s lawsuit to take back ownership of Sunnyvale Trailer Park, Julian is having the park rezoned as private property. Part of that will involve branding the park as a business, so they arrange to steal a truck full of liquor, e-cigarettes, and slot machines. Steinberg has arranged for the truck’s driver to play along with the supposed theft. So far, so greasy, so good.

But the truck driver fires shots at them. The result is a classic moment of angry screaming among the boys. Danny, the guy who was supposed to drive the truck, got busted that very morning for drinking and driving. The driver is frightened beyond belief, thinking that he’s actually being set upon by genuinely dangerous killers and criminals. Not just a bunch of anarchists from Sunnyvale. Julian bribes him and he runs away screaming. We never hear from him again. 

If I can say there’s any underlying character arc this season that’s starting to become clear now that we’re halfway through, it’s that Julian is trusting the wrong people. Despite growing evidence to the contrary, he keeps believing that Steinberg can deliver on his promises. This is probably that lawyer’s biggest fuckup yet. Relying on a driver so sloppy that he can’t even avoid getting caught for drinking on the job, they end up turning a fake heist into a real one and scaring a driver into potentially becoming a witness to the police. 

Police which we know from the last few episodes are (however slowly) becoming more competent now that actually wealthy people are moving into the area around Sunnyvale. 

Even Julian’s own crew aren’t really competent enough to pull off this heist. Danny the truck driver we never actually see was too stupid not to show up for an intense job without getting so fucked up he’d get caught. Now look at Cory and Jacob, more fucked up than Mrs Peterson’s dog was back in that first season episode after Ricky makes them each swallow his liquified weed paste. So fucked up that they’re playing around the side of the road with flowers in each other’s hair instead of preparing for a heist. And way too fucked up to drive the truck back to Sunnyvale.

So Bubbles ends up being the smartest guy in the group going back to Sam Losco’s denture business to get Jacob sewn up. And they meet Sam Losco, who isn’t angry, isn’t a jerk, who’s just being nice to them. Smiling, genuinely happy to help them out. His mother, “God rest her sexy soul,” said to him on her deathbed, “Sam, you’ve got to stop being such an asshole!”

“I started being nice to people, and they started being nice to me. Now I’ve got money in the bank. I’m getting fucked! I’m getting sucked! Life is great!”

Wise words, Sam. Wise words. It’s a shame that Bubbles nearly kills the guy with a giant toothbrush after he freaks out over the boys having stolen his dead mother’s teeth. And we end up with a properly slapstick sequence that’s just as absurd as the best zany shit the boys from Sunnyvale can come up with. Rolling the unresponsive Sam up in a carpet with duct tape. Accidentally backing over him with Lucy’s car. Tying him so poorly to the top of Lucy’s car that he rolls off into the woods. Leaving him to crawl back to Sunnyvale, just looking for his mom’s teeth.

Sam should be unbelievably pissed about that. I don’t really know who wouldn’t be a least a little. And he is angry. But he remembers the promise he made to his mom. It’s a promise more important than just being a dick to Bubbles, Ricky, and Julian. “You’ve got to stop being such an asshole.”

“Can you just call me a cab, please?” So Randy calls him a taxi, and he goes back home. And we never see Sam Losco again either. 

Think about that for a second. Sam Losco has been a major villain on Trailer Park Boys in multiple seasons over the years. All because he was mad at the boys and the people of Sunnyvale and wanted to take revenge. He was a part of Sunnyvale’s world, and even though he was a destructive part, we all loved him didn’t we? We looked forward to seeing what kind of crazy shit Sam would get up to as he went after the boys and the people of Sunnyvale. 

But now that he’s not an asshole anymore, he’s not part of the story anymore. Which leaves me with an important question for what Sunnyvale is really all about. Do you have to be an asshole to stay part of Sunnyvale?

Sunnyvale is a paradise – a place that doesn’t even run on real money, where all you really need is liquor and dope and a spirit of having a good time, where happiness is just getting drunk and stoned with your family. That’s paradise. But it’s a paradise that also runs on conflict. Jim and Randy coming after the boys. Sam, Barb, or some other malignant outsider coming to Sunnyvale to take it over. Sunnyvale is a paradise, but you can’t have a television show without the conflicts that tear paradise apart. Nothing would happen in ten episodes if everyone was just getting drunk and stoned. 

Look at how Barb came back to Sunnyvale, how she plans to rule Sunnyvale again. She literally plans to take ownership of the trailer park back through court orders and force everyone out of the community. She does so with two goons whose only tactics are intimidation with threats of violence and actual violence. She humiliates and blackmails Jim to ensnare him in her plan to take over and destroy Sunnyvale. The condition of her coming back is that she’s become a bigger asshole than she ever was.

Sarah has come back too. And she was never a part of Barb’s plan this season at all, even though she went to jail with Barb, and was part of Barb’s crew in prison. Yet none of that has been mentioned this season. Sarah is on the sidelines, barely saying a word. Not even really contributing to the storyline at all yet this season. She hasn’t even said anything about Barb yet. Even her colour commentary on the boys’ ridiculousness is banal, uninteresting. Unnecessary. She’s not an asshole, but she’s also not really part of the story.

The biggest villains in Sunnyvale are the assholes. But is being an asshole a condition for entry?

• • •

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