There is, thankfully, a lot of healthy skepticism going around about the root causes, or even existence, of many of these apparent structural problems. Reviewing the evidence in a recent essay, the New York Times parenting columnist Jessica Grose concluded that “we are identifying the root of boys’ problems based on vibes rather than real evidence.” The correlation between female teachers and boys’ underperformance is sketchy at best, for instance. And the Title IX narrative falters when you realize that girls have been outperforming boys in school since 1914. But still, the vibes persist.
Tony Soprano bemoaned the loss of strong silent types like Gary Cooper; Don Draper dealt with the problem of being Gary Cooper.
HBO’s new hit drama Task, which came to its end this past weekend, is about dads too. They’re also morally complicated, betwixt and between the law and the family. But Task feels unmistakably different from those shows. There was, in those antihero series, an allure to the toxic masculinity of the leads, a magnetism to their misdeeds. Their home lives were corroding as the cost of doing business, but their lives outside the home were thrilling enough for us to forget the home front. Task is, if anything, the inverse of this kind of show. Rather than understand fatherhood as a medium through which to frame these characters’ grim pursuits outside the home, Task shows us men whose criminal obsessions are a medium through which to understand their domestic entanglements.
From the start, Task was more clearly a crime saga than a mystery of any real sort. Robbie (Tom Pelphrey) and his pals robbed the stash houses of a biker gang called the Dark Hearts as payback for their murder of Robbie’s brother. Robbie lives in his brother’s old house with his grown niece, Maeve (Emilia Jones), who steps in to take care of both of Robbie’s kids. In the first episode, Robbie’s score goes awry, a bunch of people are dead, and Robbie kind of gently abducts a young boy named Sam who was, unwittingly, a witness to his parents’ own murder. On the case is Tom (Mark Ruffalo), a traumatized FBI agent dealing with the recent murder of his wife at the hands of his adopted son. Tom’s cajoled back into active duty to shut down the stash house robberies, and, despite the apparent mole(s) in his unit, he largely succeeds over the course of the series. And while much of our weekly viewing is punctuated by spring-loaded twists, the show is not really about whodunit or why, which put the finale in a strange place.
Even if that were the case, the status of that coda was up in the air. Was this a show about faith? Ex-priest Tom gets to deliver Robbie a kind of last rites in the style of that one scene from Heat. Then we get to see him in his garden like St. Francis of Assisi, at peace with the sacrifices he’s made and must continue to make. Was it a show about justice? All the Dark Hearts get what’s coming to them for being such gruesomely violent and vain psychopaths, while, at the same time, both Maeve—who turns in Sam despite likely jail time as an accessory—and Tom’s son are shown mercy. Was it a show about trauma? Robbie and Tom and Maeve and even the Dark Hearts brain trust are all acting out of complicated, usually pretty ill-advised, responses to trauma in their lives. Maybe the resolution of the series was about what happens to all that trauma when its container finally bursts.
Indeed, in addition to all the women who are killed in the show, Maeve’s life is constricted by the choices of first her father and then Robbie; Tom’s youngest daughter’s life has been battered and bruised by the choices of her adopted father and biological brother; Tom’s eldest daughter only appears on our screen because she’s been betrayed by her father, her brother, and her philandering husband; and then there are all those women at the mercy of the Dark Hearts, keeping house while they go on their little bike rides. Task, in the end, had a lot to say about this kind of masculinity that you can’t be around unless you want to get hurt. And it said a lot of those things through the prism of fatherhood.
“Sorry,” Robbie squeaks out. There’s a long pause, and he finally breaks the ice: “It’s just, you know, he raised his hands at me in my house …” Maeve incredulously interrupts, “Your house?” Robbie does a very familiar thing here. His eyebrows rise, and he corrects himself, responding knowingly to what he perceives to be a bit of a hysterical overreaction from Maeve. “Uh. OK. My brother’s house,” he corrects himself. But he hasn’t quite hit it. “No,” Maeve replies, “my house. It passed down to me when my dad died, which I allowed you to move into when you lost yours.” Still in his condescending, conciliatory tone, Robbie says, “OK, let’s talk about this tomorrow.”
Later in the argument, after Maeve lambastes him for his absentee parenting, for the disproportionate load of domestic and emotional labor he’s foisted on her, and for his life of petty crime, Robbie tries on the role of the breadwinner. “I’m doing it for this family so we can stay in this house,” he says, “You know what? You wanna go so bad? Fine. We’ll be fine without you. We’ll certainly fucking eat better.” Maeve throws a drink in his face. “It’s not your house, asshole,” she replies. And Robbie returns, immediately, with, “It’s not yours either. It’s my brother’s. My brother’s. I can handle things here on my own.” Again, here’s this man, soft underbelly intact, full of the righteousness of noble vengeance, espousing an essentially fantastical view of his own living situation, his own relationship with the only vestige of his brother that remains. Robbie is not living in the same reality as Maeve, which is one way of describing his trauma response, or a way of describing his romantic ideal of manhood.
If the mythical crisis of boys and men is a vibes-based one, as Grose suggests, then Task is an anatomy of those vibes. It is filled everywhere with men, fathers and surrogate fathers mostly, whose sense of personal grievance and imagined manly virtue is matched only by their childishness. Tom is so overwhelmed by grief over his wife that he drinks himself stupid every night from a commemorative Phillies cup until his daughter has to put him to bed. Grasso, the rat from Tom’s task force, won’t sleep with his divorcee crush in her “marriage bed” because he has the stunted Catholic morality of a boy at his first communion. But he also justifies his betrayal of the task force with the same heroic breadwinner dream as Robbie.
The men of Task believe themselves to be bringing justice to an unjust world, but, often, they themselves are the sources of that injustice.The men of Task are all fools. They use fatherhood as a shield for their selfishness. They believe themselves to be bringing justice to an unjust world, but, often, they themselves are the sources of that injustice. And the people who suffer alongside that holy quest are, each and every one of them, women who know better.
Fatherhood, Tom seems to understand, is not the solution to his problems. He can’t just keep dadding his way to salvation. In the next and final scene, we see Maeve packing up Robbie’s orphaned children and driving off into the distance, presumably to some country where she’ll no longer find herself responsible for all these crises of men.
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