Death by Lightning

38

I must admit that I went into this one reluctantly. I’m generally not a huge fan of biographical or historical dramas. Especially American ones. As I find American writers get stuck in the whole conundrum where they want things to feel authentic, but also feel like they need the anachronistic language or needle drops to keep people engaged. Too many “thous” and “arts” and lute music and I think execs feel they’ll lose their audience. So, they tend to either split the baby or just go full Tarrantino and make their 1800s characters say motherfucker every other word. Plus, the whole cradle-to-grave versus chunk-of-time approach is always at odds. How do you tell the story of an important historical character without talking about their background, upbringing, parents, schooling and everything else in detail without it being too much? Death by Lightning does take the 2020s bait a bit, mixing in modern music and doing a kind of altered oldy-timey speak that trends more modern than I’m sure the people at the time spoke. But, tactics aside, what we ultimately need is a true-to-life story that is compelling beyond merely its historical context.

Well, it turns out the best way to do this is to tell the story of a person you’d think you maybe knew something about, President James Garfield, and backdoor in the actual story of his assassin, Charles Guiteau, who you definitely knew nothing about. Then you hire a bunch of known actors to fill out the 1880s tale of a reluctant presidency and the delusional man who thought he somehow had a hand in his ascension. I think that unless you’re a giant liar, or just happen to be a presidential historian, that most of this story will be a new one to viewers. Sure, Garfield was our 20th president, and probably 50% of viewers knew beforehand that he was assassinated, but to see how our government functioned back then and how a dude with absolutely no presidential aspirations could basically become president by accident was somewhat of a shock certainly to me. It’s almost comical how things functioned back then. A bunch of white dudes with beards grumbling and fumbling their way through the election process. Most of them clownishly misjudging their own power over both the people and their own comrades. These are not our best and brightest, it seems.

And this is how they keep things compelling. They gloss over a bunch of the minutia and just focus on the core stuff. It’s only four episodes, after all, so they have to just kind of keep things moving. It’s mostly welcomed, but there are some areas where it felt like the swiftness was to its detriment. At times it felt like we were in the field of 64 in March Madness and then all of a sudden we were in the semis and then the winner had confetti falling on them to “One Shining Moment.” Because that step-by-step history isn’t really what the series is about. They show us just enough of the process and the absurdity of the maneuvering and cluelessness to give us a taste and then zoom in on Garfield (Michal Shannon) and Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) in order to give us the two sides of the coin: earnestness and narcissistic insanity. Played incredibly well by our two lead actors, whose paths cross several times during the course of the series and ultimately end in avoidable tragedy.

I’m not going to get political here. That content can all be found on my other website, mrpollster.com. That’s a joke. But there is something here that feels eerily modern, despite this situation being singular and happening 150 years ago. Garfield is portrayed as a well-meaning, moderate civil servant. Dedicated to improving the U.S. and clearly uncomfortable with the power of the presidency. The slimy backbenchers who seem to be constantly plotting against him and his complete dufus of a VP, Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman), sit on the other side of the equation. While Guiteau moves in the background, convinced that he is somehow owed something because he tweeted about — I mean supported — Garfield’s presidency and thinks he somehow made it happen. Each faction could easily be tied to something in our modern politics. And I’m sure the creators of the series are very aware of this fact. Though they are pretty subtle about the parallels. Suffice it to say not much has changed over the years, save the technology and communications. There will always be altruism. There will always be schemers only out for power and/or money. And there will always be self-involved crazy people who have an obsessive and overly-inflated view of their own importance. Before they, I don’t know, shoot up a school or kill a CEO or whatever.

What I mostly learned is that I’m glad I live in this century and not the 1800s. I forget that it wasn’t really until the late 1800s that universal germ theory was widely adopted. Nah, surgeons would like lick their instruments to get them lubricated before starting to probe around in your body. Washing hands was for suckers, and when they saw puss they were thrilled that the body was expelling the “bad stuff.” So, no, Garfield didn’t need to die from the assassin’s bullet. He could have gone on to enact his agenda and perhaps the ripples of his considered approach might have been felt a century and a half later. And somehow Guiteau (who couldn’t even kill a guy right) would have been even less known than he is now. Sliding doors and all that. Nope, the doc working on Garfield couldn’t even put his own ego aside to listen to the, gasp, black doctor who merely asked, “Hey, are you gonna maybe sterilize that?” Ultimately, this thing is worth a watch to see some fun actors cook — especially Macfadyen who plays delusional incredibly well — and learn about a little-known vector of American history that feels eerily similar to today’s shitshow that we call a society.