Bloody Sandwiches: MobLand & Generational Warfare

Getting cut out of the family photos

This post containers SPOILERS about the TV show MobLand.

Guy Ritchie is not a drawcard for me. He’s a compelling visual stylist whose work screams his background in commercials and music videos in every frame. He also evinces a posh boy’s love of East End gangsters so his films end up being commercials for organized crime. So when a new TV show was linked to Ritchie, I knew I had to avoid it like a Kray Twin adversary avoiding The Blind Beggar. What I didn’t know is this show had been created by Ronan Bennett.

Bennett has had quite the life. As a teenager, he faced the courts for violence associated with the IRA and anarchist movements. Then he got a doctorate in History at UCL. Most recently, he created the shows Top Boy and The Day of the Jackal. His shows are about more than people committing cinematically exciting violence. Top Boy explores London in the same way that The Wire explores Baltimore. The Jackal is as much about transnational corporations and the lifestyles of the professionals who service them as it is about a man shooting people with ever more elaborate and unconvincing guns (“Why, yes, this foldaway Brompton bicycle does turn into a sniper rifle”).

On its surface, MobLand is about a crime family and their primary fixer/lieutenant - played by professional hard man Tom Hardy. It should be difficult to relate to a character who spends much of his time blackmailing and killing people. But the show is about something that is supremely relatable to me. The protagonist and his best friend are middle-aged Gen X men trying to balance grueling work commitments with kids on the one hand and increasingly erratic parents on the other. MobLand is all about Sandwiches.

The Boomer couple who head the Harrigan clan used to be at the top of their game. But as the series progresses, it becomes clear that this is no longer the case. Conrad Harrigan is played with an increasingly unhinged menace by Piers Brosnan who seems hell-bent on making you forget he was so boring as James Bond. Meanwhile Helen Mirren plays his wife Lady Macbeth But More Evil Maeve. Their schemes start off violent but comprehensible before escalating to mad then ending full nuttah. Nevertheless they still think they are geniuses, even as their enemies murder their own children with chainsaws, the police arrest them, their closest allies betray them, and their non-dead children curse their names. It’s not us, it’s them. We’re fine.

Letting go is hard to do. Passing on the crown is not the same as losing it.

Meanwhile their biological and adopted offspring move from reasoning with them and repairing their damage to getting the job done without them. Some people have spent so long listening to their own voices that they are unable to listen to those of others.

Most of the Boomers of my acquaintance are not mass murders. Some of them have taken sensible decisions regarding their declining capabilities - e.g. putting their names down for retirement homes; and sorting out powers of attorney and wills and so forth. Others have stubbornly refused to accept the unforgiving trudge of Time, frogmarching us all to the grave like Tom Hardy with an errant henchman.

What this has done is made me determined to not make the same mistakes (although doubtless I will find new and unsettling mistakes to make). I am not Peter Thiel immortal. My body and mind will corrode and decay. I would say that I don’t want to be a burden but I have found the people who say that to be the most burdensome. Rather I want to maintain control of my own destiny. And that will mean giving up certain delusions of competence when the time comes. Hold me to that.

Pierce Brosnan, HR role model