You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
CALIFORNICATION
It’s a showtime series that has come and gone, but thanks to our good friends at Netflix, I have been reintroduced to this salacious vehicle.
David Duchovny plays the role of Hank Moody. He’s a struggling novelist who bangs more women than keyboards. He is a synaptic impulse of unmitigated ID.
His day consists of womanizing and boozing and periodically trying to raise his daughter and marry her mom.
The show went off the air in 2014 after 7 seasons.
I am 4 episodes in and I must admit, I am hooked.
Hank is a toaster-human thrown into a bathtub filled with nuclear flavored gin.
He is untethered emotion, a raw impulse, a snot bubble blown into a cloudless sky.
If blood rushes to Hank’s groin, he acts on this impulse touching himself or getting someone else to do it for him.
Hank goes to a bar, tosses back a shot, eats some peanuts and then…
CUT
Some hard body is on top of him telling him that she is turned on by oral verbosity and mental prolixity.
How you like that Hemingway?
According to a Rolling Stone interview, Duchovny was coming out of the X Files and he wanted to do comedy.
I guess getting slimed on by aliens and spanked by the smoking man was too serious.
“The T&A on the show seemed to be the thing people hung their hat on, but I went to work trying to do really good comedy,” Duchovny says, looking back. “It’s too bad [the nudity distracted viewers], because I think that people may have missed a really good show underneath all that mountain of T&A.”
There is a lot of T & A. I’ve seen more boobies in 4 shows than you’ll see in 25 years of gunsmoke.
I don’t even know what that means but it makes me laugh.
and speaking of laughs, there are also a lot of laughs inspired by human insanity and mental masturbation.
Some moments are so awkward they make you push yourself back into the couch and cover your eyes and say “Oh No,” more times than a nun having sex for the 1st time.
When other characters would fight, Hank uses his words to eloquently paralyze his prey, hypnotizing them with hyperbole, before dropping a one liner on them like a walk off home run at Chavez Ravine.
Hank is spit and vinegar and unbridled emotion that has no filter.
He is raw and adrenalized.
He is your your mouth hooked up to a mr. Coffee Pot inhaling the juice from the unground bean.
He will say anything that break dances across his cerebral cortex.
He will challenge authority even when it means he is going to go to jail or going to get his ass kicked by a gay biker gang.
Hank is a fascinating character that is set to high octane and then never relaxes.
He is 2 viagras and call me in the morning.
If he is the straw that stirs the drink, the rest of the cast is a colonic ensemble of diuretic action.
Old girlfriends with round house punches end a scene for good measure.
16 year olds who have the sexual promiscuity of an Easter rabbit on estrogen dance across the script.
A literary agent who likes to spank his secretary while she wears leather and lace is a common theme.
Wow.
Calfifornication is really story telling fornication.
It’s palm tree lined boulevards and beach breezes and parties in the Hollywood Hills.
It’s vomit and dog crap and egregious violations of misconduct so ridiculous you simply must laugh.
I missed Californication the 1st time around.
Thanks to NetFlix I look forward to the digital depravity, the desensitized debauchery and demented tom-foolery.
I’m 6.5 years away from the end of the Californication-a-thon, but I did read that Duchovny wanted to Hank to die in the end. I don’t know how it ends, but apparently Hank doesn’t die.
I think I understand his rationale.
“I always wanted Hank to die. That would have been my way of ending it. Everything had to catch up with him. You can’t drink and smoke like that and get away with it for too long.”
Well said. But you can sure try.
Life’s Crazy™