DTF St Louis Is An Utterly Original Drama of Male Loneliness |
DTF St Louis Is An Utterly Original Drama of Male Loneliness
Steven Conrad’s miniseries on HBO begins like a murder mystery, but turns into something weirder and more beautiful.
There is something absurd about hearing a character in a movie utter the title of the movie they’re in out loud. It’s a moment that can be played for laughs, but it’s just as hard not to smirk when a film that takes itself seriously calls itself by its own name. Many filmmakers will go out of their way to avoid this moment of clunky announcement. You never hear, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis snarl, “Welp, there will be blood,” or Leonardo DiCaprio mutter, “You know, man, it’s always just one battle after another.”
HBO’s new limited series DTF St. Louis observes no such prohibition. In the world of the show, “DTF St. Louis” is a hook-up app for married people looking for discrete adulterous encounters. It’s the catalyst for the entire sweet and sordid affair that takes up this show’s seven episodes. We hear Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman) and Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour) discussing it, and their joint interest in exploring it, in one of the show’s numerous timelines. Both men, suburban husbands and fathers, are unfulfilled in their sexual lives. So they make a pact to revitalize their lives together through online love. And we hear police investigators explaining and interrogating it after Floyd’s mysterious death in another of those timelines. The app’s logs are a key archive of evidence for Detective Homer (Richard Jenkins) and Detective Plumb (Joy Sunday) as they try to figure out what exactly happened to Floyd.
DTF? DTF. They met on DTF. I got a hit on DTF.
The mantra-like repetition of this title is, thus, perfectly explicable in plot terms, but it also leads the viewer to notice how many other different notable terms or phrases characters repeat over and over again to each other onscreen. Cornhole. Outback Steakhouse. Quality Garden Suites. Nicer plates and bowls for the household. Finish First. B out the B. Watermelon Breeze. No way, José. Jamba Juice. DTF St. Louis. There is a touch of smugness in the portrayal of these Midwestern suburbanites who pay such linguistic reverence to the names of the strip mall chains that litter their commercial thoroughfares, but there’s also something more. Characters repeat these loaded phrases—each tied to a meaningful event in the story of love, friendship, and infidelity that we watch unfold—until they are more sound than word. It’s the stylistic signature of DTF St. Louis—language that becomes gesture that becomes feeling.
A prose poem? I hesitate to use too literary an analogy, as there are aspects of DTF St. Louis that are pretty willfully goofy, and I’m not entirely sure every tonal movement it makes is either effective or well chosen, but there’s really no other experience on TV quite like it right now. Words and phrases repeat, but so do images, sometimes achingly gorgeous ones, stitched through the series like embroidery.
The show begins, and it seems like a murder mystery or a suburban infidelity melodrama or a male friendship cringe comedy. It is indeed all of those things, and several more besides that reveal themselves over time. But the rhythm and pace of the show does not belong to or emerge from any of those genres. Its repetitions, its quick vignettes, its........