“American Nightmare,” the newest water cooler, true-crime series from Netflix, pivots on a terrifying premise. On March 23, 2015, 30-year-old Aaron Quinn called the police in Vallejo, California from his nearby home on Mare Island to report the kidnapping of his 29-year-old girlfriend, Denise Huskins. The particulars that Aaron describes are strange enough for David Lynch: Aaron and Denise were drugged with NyQuil and Diazepam by men who were clad in wetsuits. The men blinded the victims with lasers, tied them up with zip ties, and slipped blacked-out swimmer’s goggles over their eyes. Denise was taken, while Aaron was left with a camera installed in his house to ensure that he didn’t call for help. Aaron’s explanation for waiting to call the police until over 12 hours after the kidnapping strikes them as awfully convenient.
Aaron’s reticence may seem convenient to you as well, and “American Nightmare” continues to abound in wtf behavior. Like most thrillers, fictional and non-fictional alike, this three-part docuseries is about how easily someone’s implicit contract with society is severed, when the weirdness of human behavior is subjected to a detached bureaucratic standard. Writer-directors Felicity Morris and Bernadette Higgins are shrewd and a little ghoulish, initially manipulating you to see things as the Vallejo detectives do. The first episode is titled “The Boyfriend” and Aaron is presented as being a potential villain with an overwrought explanation for what happened to Denise. There didn’t appear to be enough signs of struggle in the residence. Aaron and Denise were having trouble, especially given his inability to let go of an ex, Andrea. Mat Mustard, a rumpled Vallejo detective destined to be played by the actor Bill Camp one day, seems to be arising as a hero of “American Nightmare.” Conditioned by years of routine thrillers, we wait for him to clean up the mess.
Then Denise is dropped off at her parents’ house 400 miles away, unceremoniously and anti-climactically. Her story matches Aaron’s before turning much darker. Men dropped her in the trunk of what she took to be a Mustang, drove her out to a remote cabin, and kept her bound in a room for two days. The head kidnapper insisted that he must rape Denise so that he has something over her head to keep her from going the police. That, of course, makes no sense, but it makes no sense in the way of a psychopath. The cops, once eager to demonize Aaron, descend on Denise as well, calling her a fraud in collaboration with Aaron, slandering her in the press without evidence to support the theory that she’s lying about the kidnapping. Footage of the police’s behavior is available on archive footage and security cameras, and it’s shockingly callous. Even if Aaron and Denise were pulling a scam, the Vallejo police’s arrogance was appalling.
“American Nightmare” is a #MeToo-era crime story, and it’s persuasive. One would have to be drinking reactionary Kool-Aid not to find Aaron and Denise’s treatment here disgusting, especially as a testament to the tendency of men to believe any possibility but the one that leads to evidence of men’s exploitation of women. Mustard and the other police would rather believe that they’ve stumbled upon a real-life “Gone Girl” — a popular Gillian Flynn novel and David Fincher film about a woman who fakes her own kidnapping to screw over her husband — than read the facts of the case. Institutional sexism meets the way that media casually informs, and warps, our perceptions of life.
Morris and Higgins are willing to play dirty, too. “The Boyfriend” ends with a cliffhanger: the introduction of Denise as she is today, before Morris and Higgins’ camera, ready to tell her side of the story. “The Boyfriend” misdirects the audience into seeing her as the villain, rhyming her blond, “All-American” good looks with those of Rosamund Pike’s sleek viper from the Fincher movie. This structure works in terms of thriller fiction, setting us for the first in a series of twists, but it’s morally shaky. What if people only watch one episode? They leave potentially with Mustard’s view of the case. This sneakiness gives “American Nightmare” a disreputable pulse. It’s an affirmation of #MeToo that understands our lizard-brain addiction to cynical, violent surprises.
That was the kick of “Gone Girl” too, particularly Flynn’s version: Like the Adrien Lyne thriller “Fatal Attraction” many years before it, the novel puts modern feminist talking points into the mouth of a psychopath, undermining empowering sentiments and thusly serving men’s most powerful resentments of women back to them. These thrillers understand that the genre thrives on worst-case scenarios, and on running wild with your crummiest assumptions about human life, justifying your fears and bitterness and allowing you to get off on them. This is why politically correct thrillers, which are in vogue now, feel so profoundly neutered. A thriller that appeals to your rational self is less than pointless. True-life crime docs are playing with similar fire that’s rendered hotter by their non-fictional pretense: They are cereal loaded with lurid and dehumanizing sugar, but with a patina of nutrition so you can kid yourself if you need to. Or it’s based on a true story so it must be good for you!
Morris and Higgins’ toggling between found footage and recreations is propulsive, and the interviews are powerful. But what might Denise think, after being ostracized by her community for a crime committed against her, of watching a documentary that spends its first third pretending to legitimize her tormentors for the sake of misdirection? On the other hand, this misdirection proves instructive in other episodes, revealing how we can be led by reporters and filmmakers and really anyone else towards conclusions about stories of which we know nothing. It’s intoxicatingly easy to believe that Aaron is the criminal, then Denise, then the police, the latter of which enable one of the most chilling monsters in recent true-crime reporting to flourish until a female detective pieces together the true evidence. We are eager little children, lapping up our reductive, lurid cereal crumbs, and when Morris and Higgins reveal the truth of Denise’s kidnapping, we should feel indicted. For better and worse, Morris and Higgins have showed us how lazy, stereotypical, resentful, and media-saturated thinking can lead to another person’s destruction.
The recently completed fifth season of “Fargo” is also a riff on #MeToo. Set in 2019, pointedly during Trump’s presidency, it concerns a Bible-thumping sheriff, Roy Tillman, Jr. (Jon Hamm), who has a history of beating his wives and funneling county resources into a right-wing militia. The plot kicks off with Tillman attempting to kidnap an ex who escaped many years before, who now lives as Dot (Juno Temple), a small-town Minnesota housewife with a poignantly dweeby beta husband and a daughter. Dot is also invincible: capable of escaping any jam and conquering any man, even the brutal Tillman and his assortment of incompetent goons. At a certain point, one expects creator Noah Hawley to make a joke of Dot’s super-humanity, but he serves it up straight, along with the implication that all men are either evil alphas or defenseless betas in perpetual need of mommy.
There’s nothing wrong with sport being made of men—many of us have earned it. But I get impatient with the ceaseless run of TV shows and movies that prioritize civics lessons above the acknowledgement that human behavior is contradictory and impossible to fit into a slogan. “Fargo” season five is very watchable, but the schematic is so obvious that it never feels dangerous. Since the women here can never be wrong—even the billionaire debt queen played by Jennifer Jason Leigh learns life lessons—the meaning of every scene becomes redundant.
This “Fargo” runs afoul of a problem that dogged “Barbie” last summer: Faultlessness is not only condescending but boring. Since the women here must be shining beacons of inspiration, rather than human beings, they grow tedious, while the men, allowed to be flawed, steal the show that’s meant to indict them. I left this “Fargo” admiring Temple’s technical skill, but missing the volatility that she has brought to films. Meanwhile, Hamm has finally found a memorable role after “Mad Men.” Hamm’s weightiness here — literal and figurative — suggests a second life as a haunted character actor.
The Coen brothers are routinely criticized for their cruelty. Not untrue, but one of the fascinations of their “Fargo” is in watching how they oscillate between mocking and empathizing with their characters. The empathy doesn’t feel like insurance being taken out to safeguard them against condemnations of their nasty jokes, but rather a facing up to the fact that we can both admire people and look at them with withering contempt. The empathy shows the Coens seeing their characters as people, while the jokes find them running with the mean streak of their imagination for the sheer pleasure of it. They admit that sometimes we look at people and think impure, judgmental, nasty thoughts. Who doesn’t? The first season of Hawley’s “Fargo,” with its invincible Billy Bob Thornton character who was smug and evil and acted out on the sort of petty revenges that drive many a regular person’s fantasies, had a touch of that Coen steel. But that season was released in 2014. In 2024, you gotta chase a humanitarian award.
“American Nightmare” is streamlining on Netflix, while all five seasons of “Fargo” can be streamed on Hulu.
