The Beautiful American Loneliness of Poker Face
Rian Johnson's eye for the old and weird
In the introduction interview for Written In the West, a collection of photographs taken while researching locations for Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders tells Alain Bergala that melancholy is “an integral part of the American West.” That western melancholy is also what makes Poker Face so hard to stop watching. That’s not to say the new streaming show on Peacock by Rian Johnson starring Natasha Lyonne as a woman drifting through the region while on the run from some real bad guys, solving crimes using her perfect bullshit detector, is a sad affair. The opposite, in fact. Poker Face has been compared to Columbo and other mystery of the week series from the past, like Murder, She Wrote or Perry Mason. Those shows used to be a staple on network TV when watching television wasn’t such a serious affair and not everybody could be a critic by jumping on Twitter or Reddit, and Lyonne playing a character that could easily be described as “Peter Falk’s dirtbag granddaughter” is delightful.
Poker Face is a throwback. Each episode features Lyonne’s Charlie Cale going from one place to another as she tries to outrun a very dangerous person that’s on her tail. But the person chasing Charlie is secondary to the main plot of each episode. Charlie has a built-in bullshit detector, but she also has this uncanny ability to keep running into murders that she feels the need to help solve, and that’s what each episode revolves around. Charlie’s story is secondary. Sorry to be so vague, but I’m not doing spoilers on this one.
Visually speaking, Poker Face tracks across some lonely terrain. The American west is vast with a lot of empty or abandoned space, but it also has specific sounds and feels. The grit of the sand blowing in your face or insects and birds chirping that might sound unfamiliar to the ears of an outsider. Movies and shows are always using the region, but directors are also quick to use modern editing techniques to brush out something that they didn’t specifically want to be seen or heard in the shot. Johnson wisely lets the cicadas do their thing and there are plenty of scenes that only depend on the desert sun for lighting. It adds a layer of realness to the show that you don’t see on a lot of modern television.
The way that the camera on Poker Face often focuses on a single, solitary character or object was what got me thinking of Wenders’ photography book along with shots by William Eggleston or Stephen Shore, other photographers who captured the beautiful American mundane in ways photographers are still trying to copy today. One moment that especially stuck out to me is at the start of the fourth episode, “Rest in Metal.” It’s nothing special, and that’s the point. It’s just a jug of pink goo that has spilled onto the floor of some chain hardware retailer as “Arthur’s Theme” by Christopher Cross plays out of some shitty speakers. It reminded me of the 2018 New Yorker article by Jia Tolentino about young people that make videos featuring similar AOR songs playing over scenes of abandoned malls. “Hearing a song you love when it’s playing from elsewhere is a reassuring, isolating experience: you feel solitary and cared for at the same time,” Tolentino wrote. The way Poker Face looks also makes it both reassuring and isolating but in an oddly cozy way. Poker Face is an unexpected comfort watch.
But the truth is that cozy feel shouldn’t come as a surprise even though it’s a show about somebody solving murders since watching Andy Griffith as Ben Matlock or Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote do the same thing was the television version of a cup of hot tea and a nice blanket. That’s probably why those kinds of shows were often associated with older viewers like the grandpa and other people from the retirement home on The Simpsons.
I loved those shows growing up. I’m a massive Columbo head and watched Murder, She Wrote with my grandparents as a kid. But the mystery of the week shows always seemed to be treated like a second-class citizen on television. They were popular, but the “prestige” era bulldozed over the simple premise and we got Tony Soprano or Don Draper. I’m not complaining about that, especially since I’m a Sopranos obsessive, but the easy, lighter, lower-stakes kind of shows like Columbo or Perry Mason just sort of went away and nobody said a thing. But with Poker Face, there’s the auteur feel Johnson brings to the table as he does with his films that should give viewers enough to chew over. He knows what came before, he uses it and puts his own spin on it. Instead of a folksy old lawyer in the South or a British mystery writer who lives in New England, it’s Charlie drifting through the dying and dead towns of the American west. Not the suburbs of Breaking Bad, but the parts you have to drive an hour or two outside of Walter White’s town to get to.
It’s lonely and beautiful, the old gas stations and diners, the flickering neon lights, the roadside motels that used to service people on long trips before highways were the norm.
It’s also not just the characters on Poker Face or the way they’re captured on camera. There are so many little nods to weird, old Americana throughout the show. Lyonne’s wardrobe is filled with them. At one point, she’s dressed in black in a way that calls to mind a member of the ‘80s L.A. band Gun Club, a very haunted goth punk bluesman look. She puts on trucker hats and has great sunglasses. Sometimes aviators, at while sometimes she rocks Elvis shades like Christian Slater in True Romance or Brad Pitt in Fight Club. A throwback of a throwback, the 2023 take on a look that was cool in 1995 but was taking its influence from 1975. She’s got a silver digital Casio watch, she hangs out in diners, drives an old car and listens to the radio while she’s on the road to nowhere in particular. But even her method feels old. No Google Maps or anything. like that. Charlie says at one point, “I take a map. I pick a spot and I head there.”
It’s a big, weird country with a lot of overlooked or forgotten spots. There’s a lot of darkness out there and Poker Face uses it to the show’s advantage. But there’s also a lot of light and beauty that’s on display. It all feels very familiar, but also unlike anything else out there right now.