I 

watch a lot of TV. This is old 
news. Sometimes, though, 
my obsession with keeping 

up with TV gets unhealthy, 
particularly when I’m unwilling 
to quit a show I don’t even like 
anymore.

It’s “The Walking 

Dead.” 
“The 

Walking Dead” is 
what 
I’m 
talking 

about.

Critic Matt Zoller 

Seitz 
calls 
“The 

Walking 
Dead” 

an example of the 
“Bad 
Relationship 

Show, 
taking 

its 
audience 
for 

granted or treating 
it like garbage for weeks, then 
doing or saying something that 
momentarily makes you think the 
series is delivering on its promise, 
only to backslide quickly and 
become ostentatiously mediocre 
again.”

I’ve stayed committed to far too 

many Bad Relationship Shows. 
I watched all eight seasons of 
“Dexter” and all six seasons of 
“Glee,” two shows that repeatedly 
sprinkled hints of potential in 
their later, bad seasons, only to 
fail at delivering on that promise. 
When Debra (Jennifer Carpenter, 
“Limitless”) 
from 
“Dexter” 

discovered her brother’s secret 
at the end of the sixth season, the 
show impressively depicted the 
fallout, giving her the agency to 
break off her relationship with 
Dexter (Michael C. Hall, “Six Feet 
Under”) — only to lionize him 
and slaughter Debra’s character 
development with an ill-advised 
quasi-incest plot.

“Glee” 
was 
the 
ultimate 

example of this pattern, waffling 
between promising and abysmal 
so rapidly it induced whiplash. 
Rachel (Lea Michele, “Scream 
Queens”) 
and 
Kurt’s 
(Chris 

Colfer, “Struck by Lightning”) 

move to New York 
briefly 
revitalized 

the show with a 
new 
setting, 
but 

the new characters 
back home were left 
in the dust when it 
came to interesting 
storytelling. 
Subsequent seasons 
featured countless 
plots 
that 
went 

nowhere, and yet 
I 
kept 
watching; 

it felt wrong to invest so much 
time in the show only to stop 
five years in. I thought, at least, 
that the show would end on a 
high note, recovering with an 
emotional 
series 
finale 
that 

made you remember the show in 
its prime; that’s what happened 
with “The Office.” Nope. It was 
bad.

“The Walking Dead” is the most 

prominent show in pop culture 
that fits this mold, still getting 
huge ratings despite its repeated 
violation of the audience’s trust. 
The fourth season was a recovery 
season of sorts, and the fifth 
season was by far the best of 
the show’s whole run. Then the 
sixth season happened, and I got 
burned worse than ever.

Enough think pieces have been 

written at this point, so I don’t 
need to explain why the latest 
“The Walking Dead” premiere 
was so bad. I’ll just say that after a 
horrifically bad season finale last 
year, a lot would have to be done 

to earn back my goodwill, and the 
premiere did not do that. It was 
more of the same, and it should’ve 
been the straw that broke the 
camel’s back. I should’ve just 
made the definitive decision to 
stop watching.

And then the second episode 

aired, and it was pretty good. The 
new character of Ezekiel (Khary 
Payton, 
“General 
Hospital”) 

instantly established himself as 
the most interesting one on the 
show — at this point, most of the 
main cast has far outstayed their 
welcome — and the episode had 
a surprisingly hopeful message, 
with a healthy dose of levity and 
a refreshing element of surreality. 
(Ezekiel leads a community called 
the Kingdom, reigning as a “king” 
with a CGI tiger at his side).

To be clear, I don’t think 

this means the show’s going to 
actually continue on its upward 
trajectory. “The Walking Dead” 
has done this countless times, 
and I have no faith that it’ll 
suddenly improve and stay good 
for more than a couple episodes 
at a time. There’ll be some decent 
episodes, then one that comes 
close to breaking me. As Zack 
Handlen from The AV Club said, 
the ideal way to watch the show 
is to “Enjoy the moments, but 
don’t necessarily expect them 
to add up to anything more than 
themselves.”

Part of me knows, though, that 

even if the show gets to a point 
where I don’t enjoy any of the 
moments — even if every episode 
is dull, pseudo-philosophical, and 
unrelentingly, mundanely grim — 
I’ll probably still keep watching. 
That’s the burden of the hopeless 
completist.

Mel Gibson returns to 
top form with ‘Hacksaw’

Subversive war film puts Andrew Garfield through hell

BEST CONCERT EVER

The burden of being a completist

The critic-coined ‘Bad Relationship Show’ continues to haunt Ben

AMC

This seems like an intimate moment.

FILM REVIEW

Mel Gibson’s films ordinarily 

treat violence as a symbol of 
passion. William Wallace leads a 
bloody revolution for the freedom 
of Scotland in “Braveheart.” 
Jaguar Paw must 
kill his captors to 
return to his wife 
in 
“Apocalypto.” 

Jesus is tortured 
and crucified to 
save his followers 
in “The Passion 
of 
the 
Christ.” 

With that in mind, 
it’s strange that 
Gibson 
would 

choose a project in which the 
main character shows his passion 
through 
staunch 
peace 
and 

nonviolence. That’s not to say that 
“Hacksaw Ridge” isn’t a violent 
movie, but Gibson utilizes the 
violence here to sharply contrast 
with Desmond Doss’s (Andrew 
Garfield, “The Amazing Spider-
Man”) vow not to take a life. He 
tells the story of a man surrounded 
by darkness who refuses to let 
it consume him, and injecting it 
into a film with a perfect cast and 
action set pieces that are nothing 
short of incredible.

As jaw-dropping as those war 

scenes can be, the opening scenes 
of the film, which paint a picture 
of Doss’s upbringing, are just as 
powerful; the audience witnesses 
the poignant evolutions of the 
relationships and ideals which 
come to define Doss through 
the war. As he does for most of 
the film, Garfield carries these 
scenes with a charm that could 
have been grating had it not come 

across as so incredibly earnest. 
There’s never a moment when 
it seems like he’s deliberately 
overplaying a certain part of the 
character for effect, whether in 
his scenes opposite Teresa Palmer 
(“Lights Out”), with whom he 
shares adorable chemistry, or 
in his scenes with his father 

(Hugo 
Weaving, 

“The 
Matrix”), 

which are nothing 
short of quietly 
devastating. 
As 

Desmond’s PTSD-
stricken 
father, 

Tom, 
Weaving 

gives one of the 
best 
supporting 

performances 
of the year as he 

portrays a man completely broken 
by war and killing who doesn’t 
want the same fate to befall his 
sons. He’s a hard man, and the 
film doesn’t excuse his behavior, 
but Weaving manages to make 
him one of the most sympathetic 
characters.

Once Doss leaves for boot 

camp, Gibson draws on well-
worn war movie tropes, but even 
in doing so, cleverly subverts 
them. Vince Vaughn (“Wedding 
Crashers”) plays Doss’s drill 
sergeant, Howell. At first, he 
acts as is expected; he hates 
Doss, considers him a coward 
and makes life hell for him as a 
result. There’s nothing here that 
hasn’t been done in just about 
every war movie ever made. It’s as 
their relationship progresses that 
Howell becomes a more complex 
character, 
and 
his 
actions 

become less straightforwardly 
antagonistic and more believably 
human.

Then comes the war. There’s 

no mincing words here: these 
scenes are brutal, as brutal as war 
movies have ever been. Instead 
of, 
say, 
Spielberg’s 
approach 

to “Saving Private Ryan,” in 
which he followed Tom Hanks’s 
Captain Miller for most of the 
Omaha Beach scene, Gibson 
frequently switches the point of 
view between the characters of 
the supporting cast, leading to 
a feeling of disorientation and 
chaos that is likely similar to 
what soldiers at Okinawa felt. 
The enemy Japanese soldiers 
are rarely seen, and the soldiers, 
along with the audience, feel 
completely blind.

Still, what is most surprising 

about “Hacksaw Ridge” is the 
deft way Gibson deals with the 
complexities of war. America is, 
of course, in the right here, but 
it is clear that not every decision 
an American soldier makes is 
the right one. Doss’s convictions 
are never called into question, 
but neither does Gibson dismiss 
those who disagreed with him 
completely out of hand. It shows 
remarkable maturity from a 
director 
who 
has 
obviously 

had issues dealing with those 
different from him in the past.

“Hacksaw 
Ridge” 
is 
a 

remarkable war film. Its cast 
is nearly perfect, and both 
Garfield and Weaving may garner 
awards consideration as the 
year continues. The characters 
are complex and, likable or not, 
achingly human, and its war 
scenes are both devastating and 
awe-inspiringly crafted. With his 
first film in ten years, Mel Gibson 
has crafted a testament to true 
bravery, exhibited in both those 
who choose to fight and those 
who don’t.

JEREMIAH VANDERHELM

Daily Arts Writer

A

“Hacksaw Ridge”

Rave & Quality 16

Summit 

Entertainment

BEN 

ROSENSTOCK

I was irrevocably taken with 

Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” when 
I heard it for the first time in 2nd 
grade. My best friend Sophie and 
I had started to move out of our 
respective “girly-girl” phases and 
into “tomboys,” stars in our eyes 
at the possibility of shedding our 
tutus for skateboards and baggy 
jeans. If our childhood were a 
Disney Channel show, you would 
have seen us sharing a split frame, 
cross-legged on our respective 
beds, each with a red Discman in 
hand and the lyric booklets at easy 
reach where we would memorize 
and analyze them like holy texts.

We marveled at Avril’s attitude, 

how she’d put her feet up on the 
table when she did interviews and 
swear and shop in the boy’s section 
for her clothes. We giggled at 
Avril’s lesser known song “Naked” 
and shamefully memorized all the 
words to “Nobody’s Fool,” where 
she raps. Although we were still in 
a phase where we refused to admit 
that we found boys anything less 
than revolting, I know that we both 
applied Avril’s angsty heartbreak 
lyrics to our first crushes.

Aside from being incredibly 

catchy and often easy for my 
almost tone deaf voice to sing along 
to, I isolated lyrics from Avril’s 
lyrics that sounded like they just 
“got” me. Exhibit A: on “In my 
World” she sings “I never spend 
less than an hour / watching my 
hair in the shower / it always takes 
five hours to make it straight” (I 
have and have always had a frizzy 
and unruly mane of hair). On 
“Nobody’s Fool,” “I’m not the milk 

and cheerios in your spoon” (hey, 
I’ve eaten those!).

The 
heart-wrenching 
stuff, 

although it hadn’t materialized 
practically in my life, was still 
down there somewhere I think. 
Avril gave big f-yous to guys who 
treated her like crap and sang 
about feeling out of place. I loved 
to rock out to hits “Complicated” 
and “My Happy Ending” although 
my deep love for Avril’s work was 
mildly pretentious. Sophie and I 
claimed a fierce loyalty beyond 
the hits — we held fast to the deep 
cuts.

Here, I want to thank my mom 

for being a cool mom. Not the 
“Mean Girls” type of cool mom; 
she was not about underage 
drinking or letting us call her 
Michele. She’s a cool mom because 
she let me skip school 12 years ago 
to see Avril perform live. It was 
November 1st and she wrote me a 
note excusing me from that day of 
fourth grade. I sat with my mother 
somewhere in the nosebleed seats 
of the FleetCenter and wore an 
overpriced Avril Lavigne shirt 
that fit me like a dress.

I felt the stadium vibrate 

beneath me and it was so loud 
that my mom gave me earplugs. I 
remember clutching her arm, with 
some certain level of fanaticism, 
saying “I can’t believe it’s really 
her.” I kept my eyes forward, 
and my mouth moving quietly to 
the lyrics, not wanting to miss a 
moment of sharing that celebrity 
space.

In “Happy Ending,” Avril sings, 

“All the things you hide from 
me / all the shit that they do.” I 
anticipated this line painfully 
and when it came I blushed at the 
thought of listening to the same 

song I’d listened to hundreds of 
times on my own with my mom by 
my side. Although I worshipped 
at the feet of a punk princess, I 
was a rigid rule-follower and as 
much as I wanted to get loud and 
provocative, I was anxious at my 
mother knowing I even existed in 
the same world as the word “shit.” 
As I said, my mom is cool mom, 
so of course she did not comment 
about the lyric and later noted 
that Avril had a beautiful voice 
and sounded a little like Sinead 
O’Connor (I did not know who 
Sinead O’Connor was).

That night, I fell asleep in a 

dreamy haze and returned home 
where I continued my religious 
listening for maybe a year or so. 
That said, Avril as we knew her 
was changing — she was adding 
pink to her hair and getting 
married and straying from the 
moody and darkly stubborn tones 
to catchier radio pop-punk that 
Sophie and I refused to listen to.

We chose to hold on to the Avril 

I saw live in 2004, the one we saw 
as our rebellious older sister who 
inspired us to buy skateboards we 
would barely learn how to ride. 
We’ve changed our red Discmans 
for Spotify premium. My spot in 
Avril’s stadium is now in a small 
venue somewhere filled with 
PBR and manbuns. That said, the 
magic is still in there somewhere 
in the form of pop-punk and room 
shaking as it did when I saw Avril 
live for the first time 12 years ago.

We’re 21 now, and if you need 

us, we’ll be in the corner defending 
the merits of Under my Skin 
and Let Go, lyrics committed to 
memory and a lifelong promise to 
never end up like that sad ballet 
girl in Sk8er Boi. 

MARIA ROBINS-SOMERVILLE

Daily Arts Writer

Coming of age alongside Avril Lavigne

In this series, Daily Arts writers reflect on their favorite concert experience

TV COLUMN

6A — Monday, November 7, 2016
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

