In the third episode of the recent HBO show DTF: St Louis, a side-character makes a remark that becomes one of the show’s defining lines: “No one’s normal. It just looks that way from across the street.” This is an oddly sweet line for a show that positions itself as an erotic thriller. But DTF: ST Louis is neither particularly erotic nor thrilling. Its sex scenes range from cringe-inducing to unwatchable, and its thrills lead to surprisingly sober revelations.
Told in a retrospective style, the show follows two cops as they attempt to uncover how David Harbour’s genial Floyd died. Their immediate impulse is to zero in on his weary wife Carol, played by Linda Cardellini, and Floyd’s best friend Clark, played by Jason Bateman. In the very first episode, viewers are shown a flashback of Carol flirting with Clark: a flirtation that quickly turns into a full-blown affair. Given this set-up, one can easily imagine the dominoes falling. Love, sex, betrayal, hatred, murder…a typical detective story. It is to the show’s credit that it tells an entirely different tale, one that never really requires the police at all.
DTF: St Louis’s understanding of both sexual abnormality and the television genre to which the show belongs are best captured by an excruciating scene at the beginning of the sixth episode. Floyd is making love to his wife Carol. Floyd’s friend Clark is watching with their consent from the bedroom closet. Suddenly, a repulsed Carol tells Floyd to climb off her: “I just feel like I wanna, like, squirm out.”
Floyd is rejected by his wife because he is overweight, because he is aging; fundamentally, he is rejected because she does not desire him. That banal but tragic reality is what powers the show’s mystery and leads to its devastating conclusion. For Floyd, a man with a stepson he adores, a wife he loves, and a best friend who regularly conveys affection, all the philia in the world cannot make up for a lack of eros. The lives of every other character in the show are shattered by what turns out—after a protracted investigation—to be his suicide.
In this sense, DTF: St Louis turns out to be not an erotic thriller but an erotic tragedy. In presenting a man who throws away a lifetime of platonic love for desire, DTF: St Louis becomes a paean for the worth of the former.
Bateman’s Clark is a handsome, wealthy weatherman with two young daughters and a loving wife. The absence of Clark’s family from the show is indicative of how little he thinks of them. Despite his worldly success, Clark has few friends aside from Floyd and finds his job meaningless. When Carol approaches him at a cornhole party, their affair becomes a potential remedy for his malaise.
Carol, Floyd’s wife, could easily be an unsympathetic character. In the deft hands of the show’s writers and producers, she becomes complex. She’s a harried mother of a middle school–aged son who has a serious mental-health condition. She’s a hard worker, putting time in as a local umpire, and a careful saver, due to a childhood of financial insecurity. It is implied that her interest in Clark may have as much to do with money worries, which she associates with Floyd, as it does with Clark’s erotic appeal.
A former Playgirl model, Floyd is now overweight and impotent due to an accident that the show gradually unveils in both its funniest and most heartwrenching gag. He now works as a deaf signer, a less-than-lucrative job. He missed an interview for a job in finance because he was rescuing a mentally ill teenager from being hit by a car. In the early episodes of the show, Floyd is preoccupied with his wife’s unappealing umpire outfit. He seems oblivious to the fact that she is taking on the umpire job to repay their debts.
Despite his fecklessness, Floyd adores his stepson, works tirelessly at his current job, and is an exceptionally loyal friend. Floyd might be rejected sexually, but he is far from unloved. Toward the end of the third episode, Clark sincerely proclaims his love for Floyd to the police officers investigating him. He says he loves Floyd “like the sun when you’re cold. Like water when you really need water.” One baffled officer asks if Clark loved Floyd like sex. Clark says no and that his feelings for Carol were not comparable. In the second episode, while watching Floyd proudly dance and sign at a concert, Carol tells Clark, “I love him so much. I just want to be old with him…he is the sweetest thing.” Shortly after that, she breaks off the affair with Clark.
Nor do Carol and Clark proclaim their love for Floyd only in his absence. Clark repeatedly tells Floyd he loves him. He goes to lunatic lengths to find someone who might be attracted to Floyd. Meanwhile, Floyd’s stepson comes to hero-worship Floyd over the course of the show, to the point of even adopting his dorky four-wheeled bike (a gift, notably, from Clark). Floyd might be struggling financially and sexually, but the people closest to him admire him deeply. His blindness to that is puzzling.
Clark, for his part, has his own share of anxieties, which lead to a bizarre breakdown at work. To his credit, he notices Floyd’s depression; his concern is the driving force behind his crazed quest in the last two episodes to find someone who will sleep with Floyd. The second of those attempts leads to a humiliating episode that Floyd’s stepson inadvertently witnesses. Confused and disgusted, the boy shouts at Floyd that he’s a fat asshole, a liar, and that no one loves him. Floyd commits suicide just after this.
In another kind of show, the two men’s sorrows could be chalked up to a midlife crisis. Indeed, both Clark and Floyd are middle-aged and are reevaluating their lives. Yet the label “midlife crisis” could suggest that the crisis in question is not serious enough to cut a life short. What Floyd, at least, suffers from is far worse than the ordinary frustrations of aging. In this way, the show is very much an artifact of its time, pointing toward a sobering reality: that men now make up a staggering majority of completed suicides. Middle-aged men are particularly at risk. These facts are not commonly discussed in the media. They are depressing and suit neither political party’s platform. Yet male deaths of despair have been gradually rising in the United States. DTF: St Louis makes a compelling case that the stigma attached to physical decline has something to do with the loneliness driving this trend.
If one of the show’s motifs is sexual inadequacy, another is sunshine. The theme song is “Let the Sunshine In.” In the second-to-last episode, when Floyd’s stepson bikes back after a wonderful first day at his new school, “You are My Sunshine” plays. The show’s retrospective scenes, from before Floyd’s suicide, are shot in bright, summery tones; the show’s current-day moments are given a grim, gray palate. There is a careful suggestion embedded here, a plea even. But it is one the characters do not heed until too late.
In the last scene of the last episode, we see Clark sitting alone on a swing set. Earlier in the show, Floyd sat on the swing next to his. Acquitted of Floyd’s murder, Clark has nevertheless lost his job and, it appears, his family. He is now imagining his friend’s final moments. The sky is cloudy. The day has dwindled into evening. The sun has gone.
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