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Inside the Episode
With Steve Hawk
None Is Too Fallen
When the JFC writing team first decided to make Shaun's mom a porn star, some of us were concerned that it might come across as gratuitously salacious. But David Milch, the show's head writer and executive producer, put it this way: "The idea is not to scandalize with naughtiness; it's to show that no one is too far gone."
The notion that none of us is beyond redemption weaves into another of Milch's favorite themes – that the future is constantly in the process of reinterpreting the meaning of the past. Tina's arrival engages both of these ideas.
Although Tina puts up a tough front as she pushes to get back in Shaun's life ("Tell her [Cissy] I'm gonna see him," she says to Butchie), at the core she considers herself unworthy. She has, after all, chosen a career of ongoing public degradation. Worse, she knows she'll never be forgiven, or forgive herself, for leaving her baby boy on someone's doorstep when he was only two hours old.
Toward the end of the episode, when Tina and Butchie sit in her car trying to work up the nerve to knock on Cissy's door, Butchie gives a speech about his mother that reveals the kindness at the core of his spirit:
Butchie: "You saved her life Tina, giving her Shaunie. Things were so f**ked up back then. Dad was hurt. They weren't that long back from the Islands. A lot of shit went down over there I think – maybe stepping out on each other .... A lot of acid.... It was coming apart at the seams for my mom, 'what I'm trying to say.... It wasn't a burden you put on her. Getting Shaunie to hold was a gift, and she held on real tight, a long f**king time."
That's the future reinterpreting – and perhaps even redeeming – the meaning of Tina's loathsome past.
Forget The Words, Watch the Action
This week's installment of "watch what people do, not what they say" takes place in Butchie's hotel room, when Tina arrives to seek his help in her attempt to visit Shaun. Their initial hostility crescendos with this verbal smack from Butchie about why she's come back now: "He's in all the papers and you remember you're his mother." With that, Tina loses the fight to hold back tears:
TINA: "I never forgot I was his mother."
When Butchie realizes she's crying, he says, "Turn off the f**king faucet, Tina, give me a f**king break."
During rehearsal for that scene, Milch told Brian Van Holt, who plays Butchie, to demonstrate the disconnect between his words and his feelings by opening the door to Tina as he says that last line. Even as he mocks her for crying, Butchie ushers Tina into his pathetic hotel room, essentially inviting her to examine the evidence of his own ruined life. As she looks around at Butchie's mess with her back him, Tina's silent reaction, which actress Chandra West nails, shifts from appalled to sympathetic to determined. She's disgusted by what she sees, quickly comprehends the generosity of his act, then decides to respond in kind by reminding him that she's just as far, if not farther, fallen:
TINA: So ... you know what I do.
And with that they fall back into mutual reprobation, which is a more familiar and, in its own twisted way, more comfortable form of communication. Butchie takes the bait:
BUTCHIE: Everybody, at the same time. While every dipshit on the Internet whips his skippy watching.
TINA: And you're president of the I.B. Morality Brigade.
Found Moments
In the scene in the VFW bar, in which Vietnam Joe wrongly accuses the bartender of playing a sick joke by telling John to pretend he's been fatally stabbed, their delicate conversation gets interrupted by a customer who walks in with a talking hand. The hand has a spring-loaded middle finger that extends on command, and it utters things like, "Go f**k yourself," and "Ass-licker," and "F**king idiot."
Someone brought the device to the set the day before that scene was going to be shot. The thing's funny for about 10 seconds, then you want to hit it with a hammer. Milch certainly wanted to after it disrupted his train of thought when he was trying to talk his way through a creative logjam at lunch. Rather than throw a fit, Milch inserted it into the bar scene, where it served the same disruptive purpose.
Alternate Titles
Three alternate titles to the official one ("His Visit: Day Four"):
a. "The I.B. Morality Brigade"
b. "Plane Going Who-Knows-Where"
c. "The Whore Comes for Shaun"
Steve Hawk is a writer and lifelong surfer from Southern California. He acts as a writer and surf consultant for John From Cincinnati. Bio
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"His Visit: Day Four"
