Mrs. Davis (Spoilers Under the Cut!)
May. 29th, 2023 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
js_thrillI liked the show Mrs. Davis and I want to talk about it with people. The premise of the show Mrs. Davis, at least, the part that seems fair game to talk about is that Betty Gilpin (who you might know from GLOW on netflix) plays Simone, a magician-debunking nun who is also particularly set against a popular/powerful algorithm/"AI" (the eponymous Mrs. Davis), and Mrs. Davis seems keenly interested in securing Simone's services.
Before the cut, I am going to put some stuff that I think can help you decide whether it is a show that is for you:
So, this is where the spoiler are. Stop reading now if you don't want to know about the actual plot revelations of the show.
In the first episode we get some establishing details, we get some mystery laid out. Simone busts magicians who are conning people on the side of the road. She gets targets from a mysterious boss behind a closed door in a restaurant, with the cook as some sort of handler. She seems like an unusual nun. Margot Martindale is the Mother Superior of her abbey, and they have great rapport. The AI Mrs. Davis seems to want to talk to Simone but Simone doesn't want to talk to it. It seems capable of extorting/coercing its users to great lengths, so it manages to arrange things so that the convent is being shut down and dispersed. Well, already we can see why Simone is right to be wary of this very powerful AI. But Simone also doesn't seem like a "typical" nun, so we wonder what her deal is. The thing that took me from "maybe this show is all right" to "okay, what the fuck is going on?" was the episode two reveal. Early in episode two or maybe at the end of episode one, she mentions that the cook at the restaurant, Jay, is her husband. And since we know she is not a traditional nun, we think, oh, maybe she had a bad reaction to the rise of the AI, and ran off from her marriage to find escape from the rule of the AI, or maybe they just have a complicated past or something. But at the end of episode two. Well.
I once saw my friend Christina Van Dyke present a paper (several years ago), about mysticism and medieval nuns. She talked about how the writings of these nuns weren't always viewed as philosophy because they weren't engaging in the detached/abstract mode that was more customary for theoretical work, but that this isn't always clearly necessary (Augustine's Confessions, for example, isn't abstract or theoretical, in the same way as Aquinas's treatises, but is taken to be a philosophical text), and it was a fascinating talk but there were some memorable examples from the ecstatic visions that some of these nuns had, which she shared in the talk. For example, one had written of a vivd dream of knitting a blanket for baby Jesus out of her veins. Others had more libidinal visions of connection to Jesus. When I wrote above about episode two being a major revelation point, this is because it is revealed near the end of episode two that Jay (played by Andy McQueen) is Jesus (or possibly a hallucination of Jesus, or a vision of Jesus, or what have you), because as a Nun, that is who Simone's husband is. She does have a complicated past as the next 6 episodes are going to show us, but as with any good magic trick, there was some misdirection in the set up, and the scene cuts and traditional expectations of tv narrative got used to conceal that this restaurant exists primarily (exclusively?) in Simone's ecstatic visions.
Is this cheating on the part of the show's creators? Unless you do everything in single-shot real-time with no cuts, audiences have to be able to trust various cinematic conventions? So you might expect these reveals to feel cheap/unearned. But I think the show pulls them off without it feeling cheap and unearned in the same way that a good magic trick often does. First, there has to be narrative sense to it. Jay turns out to be Jesus, which adds up because Nuns are "married to God", and so even though the show had us thinking he was her pre-Mrs. Davis terrestrial husband who things had soured with or gotten complicated with and she had gone off to join the convent, the resolution makes narrative sense. Secondly, very early on, the show establishes that it will be doing this sort of thing to us. The first scene where we meet Simone involves a faked car crash with a fake decapitation, and a pair of fake cops trying to extort him for money, where Simone enters on a horse, revealing the con. Now, as viewers, we have no way to know that the people wearing cop outfits aren't going to be real cops unless someone in the show tells us that they are fake. The blood effect from the neck of the fake corpse: it isn't realistic, but that's pretty common on television. So, we can't tell whether that is because of how they've chosen to do the VFX on the show or because it is a clue that this is a con job, until Simone enters and tells us. (As I went back to watch this scene, I have begun to wonder whether some of the later scenes in which characters' heads explode are intentionally referencing this opening scene). So, we are told early in the show that we cannot trust our impressions of things, because scenes will be drastically recontextualized by later information. And that is true of no scene more than the very opening scene (apparently set in Paris 1307) which is re-contextualized in the fourth episode, where we learn that it was not a flashback to Paris 1307, but footage from a sneaker commercial set in Paris 1307 (the version we see in the opening ends just before the branding reveal).
The thing about this show is that it really is trying to do these magic trick reveals in lots of ways throughout the show. It is using the stage magicians toolkit of misdirection, flashy spectacle, humor, dramatic reveals, and so on. But it is (it seems to me) doing all this in order to raise questions about belief and skepticism, about desire and meaning in life, and about faith and one's relationship to a power greater than oneself. Or at least, that's what it really seems to me that the show is doing. But I can't *really* tell how much all of those things are actually doing work, versus how much they are also just window dressing or theming, because I am not myself a person of faith. I can't tell if this all would just ring super hollow for someone who does have a more intense relationship to faith and god, and to christianity in particular. But I want to talk about it with someone, because I think there is a lot going on here, and I found it fascinating, and I think probably the AI stuff is a bit of a red herring, almost.
Anyway, I may have more thoughts about this later, but if you want to talk about Mrs. Davis let me know.
Before the cut, I am going to put some stuff that I think can help you decide whether it is a show that is for you:
My take on how to decide if you should check out the show (the bulleted list is not spoiler-y, but the paragraph after has some things that might very loosely be considered spoilers, so you may want to stop reading before then, if you are super-spoiler averse). All other spoiler-y discussion is behind the cut:
- if you like Betty Gilpin! (GLOW)
- if you have interest in fiction that deals with AI safety/“alignment”
- if you have interest in themes about faith, belief, and skepticism
- if you like plots with mystery box style intrigue
- if the humor/tone of the show appeals to you or at least doesn’t turn you off
So, this is where the spoiler are. Stop reading now if you don't want to know about the actual plot revelations of the show.
In the first episode we get some establishing details, we get some mystery laid out. Simone busts magicians who are conning people on the side of the road. She gets targets from a mysterious boss behind a closed door in a restaurant, with the cook as some sort of handler. She seems like an unusual nun. Margot Martindale is the Mother Superior of her abbey, and they have great rapport. The AI Mrs. Davis seems to want to talk to Simone but Simone doesn't want to talk to it. It seems capable of extorting/coercing its users to great lengths, so it manages to arrange things so that the convent is being shut down and dispersed. Well, already we can see why Simone is right to be wary of this very powerful AI. But Simone also doesn't seem like a "typical" nun, so we wonder what her deal is. The thing that took me from "maybe this show is all right" to "okay, what the fuck is going on?" was the episode two reveal. Early in episode two or maybe at the end of episode one, she mentions that the cook at the restaurant, Jay, is her husband. And since we know she is not a traditional nun, we think, oh, maybe she had a bad reaction to the rise of the AI, and ran off from her marriage to find escape from the rule of the AI, or maybe they just have a complicated past or something. But at the end of episode two. Well.
I once saw my friend Christina Van Dyke present a paper (several years ago), about mysticism and medieval nuns. She talked about how the writings of these nuns weren't always viewed as philosophy because they weren't engaging in the detached/abstract mode that was more customary for theoretical work, but that this isn't always clearly necessary (Augustine's Confessions, for example, isn't abstract or theoretical, in the same way as Aquinas's treatises, but is taken to be a philosophical text), and it was a fascinating talk but there were some memorable examples from the ecstatic visions that some of these nuns had, which she shared in the talk. For example, one had written of a vivd dream of knitting a blanket for baby Jesus out of her veins. Others had more libidinal visions of connection to Jesus. When I wrote above about episode two being a major revelation point, this is because it is revealed near the end of episode two that Jay (played by Andy McQueen) is Jesus (or possibly a hallucination of Jesus, or a vision of Jesus, or what have you), because as a Nun, that is who Simone's husband is. She does have a complicated past as the next 6 episodes are going to show us, but as with any good magic trick, there was some misdirection in the set up, and the scene cuts and traditional expectations of tv narrative got used to conceal that this restaurant exists primarily (exclusively?) in Simone's ecstatic visions.
Is this cheating on the part of the show's creators? Unless you do everything in single-shot real-time with no cuts, audiences have to be able to trust various cinematic conventions? So you might expect these reveals to feel cheap/unearned. But I think the show pulls them off without it feeling cheap and unearned in the same way that a good magic trick often does. First, there has to be narrative sense to it. Jay turns out to be Jesus, which adds up because Nuns are "married to God", and so even though the show had us thinking he was her pre-Mrs. Davis terrestrial husband who things had soured with or gotten complicated with and she had gone off to join the convent, the resolution makes narrative sense. Secondly, very early on, the show establishes that it will be doing this sort of thing to us. The first scene where we meet Simone involves a faked car crash with a fake decapitation, and a pair of fake cops trying to extort him for money, where Simone enters on a horse, revealing the con. Now, as viewers, we have no way to know that the people wearing cop outfits aren't going to be real cops unless someone in the show tells us that they are fake. The blood effect from the neck of the fake corpse: it isn't realistic, but that's pretty common on television. So, we can't tell whether that is because of how they've chosen to do the VFX on the show or because it is a clue that this is a con job, until Simone enters and tells us. (As I went back to watch this scene, I have begun to wonder whether some of the later scenes in which characters' heads explode are intentionally referencing this opening scene). So, we are told early in the show that we cannot trust our impressions of things, because scenes will be drastically recontextualized by later information. And that is true of no scene more than the very opening scene (apparently set in Paris 1307) which is re-contextualized in the fourth episode, where we learn that it was not a flashback to Paris 1307, but footage from a sneaker commercial set in Paris 1307 (the version we see in the opening ends just before the branding reveal).
The thing about this show is that it really is trying to do these magic trick reveals in lots of ways throughout the show. It is using the stage magicians toolkit of misdirection, flashy spectacle, humor, dramatic reveals, and so on. But it is (it seems to me) doing all this in order to raise questions about belief and skepticism, about desire and meaning in life, and about faith and one's relationship to a power greater than oneself. Or at least, that's what it really seems to me that the show is doing. But I can't *really* tell how much all of those things are actually doing work, versus how much they are also just window dressing or theming, because I am not myself a person of faith. I can't tell if this all would just ring super hollow for someone who does have a more intense relationship to faith and god, and to christianity in particular. But I want to talk about it with someone, because I think there is a lot going on here, and I found it fascinating, and I think probably the AI stuff is a bit of a red herring, almost.
Anyway, I may have more thoughts about this later, but if you want to talk about Mrs. Davis let me know.
