You can only disconnect from repressive signifiers by recognising the dialectical interplay between input flows and output flows; Tony is both murderous uncle and murdered nephew; Oedipal ghosts die in the Nevada desert. All representational difference is merely an obstruction of universal processes. By reintroducing himself into the social world, his epiphany is nullified and those ghosts return. The obligations of the socius wash away immanence. Brief moments of immanence are what we live for - early morning phone calls with your wife, sitting in quiet solitude among animals, spinning your baby niece around in your arms - before our desire is redirected into representational forms.
Barely even scratched the surface of what's going on here. The greatest hour of television.
A perfectly adequate political chamber drama, but its adherence to the BBC model of bone-dry theatre impersonation makes you wonder why it needed to exist. All the more tragic then that one of the supreme masters of cinema, Josef von Sternberg, never finished his planned film adaptation of Graves' novels. Sternberg's understanding of psychologies of power would have been a far better match for the source material than the dull, anti-art sensibilities of crusty BBC writers and directors.
Now us Brits are infecting American television - can we please keep our smarmy, pretentious attempts at 'satire' away from people with genuine talent? The only parts which are worth anything were aped from the family dynamics of The Sopranos
Clever plotting is not an adequate replacement for actual substance
