Television
American Gigolo: Tainted Destiny
Howdy Y’all. Today hasn’t been the best, not gonna lie to ya. I spent the day shivering my ass off in a sardine can, but I’m a trooper and I’m managing to pull through. Amid the Hyperthermia though I mustered up the willpower and energy to complete the first, and only, season of American Gigolo.
Being mildly entertained by the original 1980s film starring Richard Gere I came in expecting a fresh new twist on the concept, but did the TV show give that? The short answer would be no, regrettably, but lemme regale you with a tale of Why.
Jail Bird Blues ⛓️⚖️🥀
The TV series begins as a follow-up to the original film I suppose. We see Julien Kaye being questioned at the police station for the murder of one of his clients. He’s being interrogated by a homicide detective, Joan Sunday. This time we get to see Julien display a rich belt of emotions that was, at least to me, noticeably absent from the original film.
In the first few minutes of American Gigolo, Jon Bernthal’s Julien Kaye can be read as a broken and traumatized individual rather than the eternally cool, calm, and stoic Julien Kaye portrayed by Richard Gere.
One domino topples another and Julien Kaye confesses to the brutal slaughter of his young client and lands himself in prison for a stretch of fifteen-odd years. Julien maintains his physique and health in prison, while living a repetitive life void of color, luxury, meaning, thrill, or purpose.
Calico King 👑😈
One unremarkable day out of the great wide blue, Detective Sunday visits Julien and reveals that he’s to be released due to the deathbed confession of an old man who claims to have murdered Julien’s client. With this revelation, Julien wins back his freedom and is cast back out into the world.
Longing for some semblance of familiarity and stability, Julien returns home to the desolate dead-end desert town where he grew up. This part of the show and the flashbacks that accompanied other scenes, like Julien’s post-prison homecoming, were the ones I gravitated toward most. I enjoyed the flashbacks because they painted a vivid portrait of Julien’s life and gave us the origin story which was left out of the 1980s film.
However, when Julien returns home, everything down to the last little detail is the same as the day he left it. That dead-end town was like a time capsule, nearly immune to the ravages of time and kept in inglorious pristine condition. As I watched, I realized that the town itself wasn’t the only thing that got preserved. All of the sorrow, depression, pain, and trauma were preserved as well.
Julien’s mother is going through the motions alive but dead in her heart and mind. She appears to be a hoarder on the cusp of getting her own Buried Alive episode on TLC.
The landlord who repeatedly sexually assaulted Julien as a boy still lives in the trailer next door and has grown old, looking very much like a wretched witch straight out of a Brothers Grimm story. I’m not sure if that’s what the director and makeup teams were going for, but it absolutely worked and was a beautiful way to physically display the woman’s internal wickedness in a subtle and grounded way.
Closet Cleaning
Julien stays with his mother for a short time and manages to ask her a few important questions. He gets his answers but not the love, comfort, understanding, or mental coherence of his mother, who is as close to being a vegetable as one could get without the curtain coming down.
Julien must’ve realized the same deep down. After tidying up his mom’s spot and making himself look a little more presentable, he leaves for California with the knowledge that people don’t always evolve beyond their circumstances and that some things are just never meant to change.
Themes
American Gigolo explores many complex themes throughout its eight-episode run. Among them are starting over, moving on from a painful past, learning to let go of the things that no longer serve you, living with your mistakes but not letting them define you, what it means to be a father, and learning to dream new dreams. These are all solid themes to cover, and no matter what stage in life you find yourself these themes will resonate one way or another.
Music
American Gigolo’s great soundtrack aligns perfectly with Julien’s age, which looks to be in the range of mid 40s to early 50s. Because of this, the music is very mature, paying homage to the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s and injecting the show with this Old Cowboy energy. It reminds me a lot of Red Dead Redemption’s John Marsten.
Favorite Characters
American Gigolo had many colorful characters with wonderfully complex backstories but almost none of them had that pop of personality that truly makes an audience care.
However, there was one character in particular that I grew to love due to her snarky humor and spitfire demeanor. This character was none other than Detective Joan Sunday. Joan was extremely likable and easily relatable. She was astoundingly normal and what I’d categorize as an everyman.
Joan isn’t some high-class California prostitute or sheisty multi-millionaire. Joan is simply trying to navigate a very shady world and uncover the dark secrets of Julien’s peculiar case one clue at a time. The world Julien previously occupied and continues to orbit is alien to around 99% of the audience. Detective Sunday acts as our guide through the sleazy jungle that is Julien’s life.
Going Back to Cali
Julien returns to California in search of his former pimp Olga Desdain, once California’s queen of prostitution, but finds her as an old woman dying of dementia. Her niece Isabelle, who has always had an obsessed infatuation with Julien, is the new Westside madam, having inherited that role from Olga.
Julien leaves Olga with far more questions than answers. Not long after, Olga is shot in the head and dies alone in her sick bed with her murderer being a question mark.
As Julien works to rebuild his life, Detective Sunday works to unravel the mystery of why Julien’s case has so many missing pieces. This all leads us to the extraordinarily wealthy Stratton family. The Stratton family consists of Richard Stratton, Michelle Stratton (who is revealed to be Julien’s old flame and I suppose lifelong lover), Colin Stratton (the kid who turns out to be Michelle and Julien’s son), and Panish (Richard Stratton’s henchman with a nefarious reputation). The Strattons appear to be that typical All-American family that seems perfect and all put together from the outside looking in.
In actuality, Michelle and Richard have a parasitic relationship. Richard is shacked up with Michelle for her looks and Michelle is with Richard because of his vast fortune. Both individuals are using one another. What little love there is just so happens to be one-sided on Richard’s end, while Michelle seems to forever lust after and yearn for Julien.
When we first meet Colin Stratton, he’s agonizing over the removal of his teacher who he’s having X-rated relations with. The teacher eventually gets iced by Panish at the Costello hotel. Stumbling upon the teacher’s corpse causes Colin to run away due to the sudden shock and panic.
From that point on, the series becomes centered on two quests. The first quest belongs to Detective Sunday, who works to fully close Julien’s case after 15 years. The second belongs to Julien, who works to find his feet, and, towards the end of the season, his priorities shift drastically from reconstructing his own life to finding Colin, the son he’s never met.
End of Season 1
During the final episodes of season one Julien finally meets his son. By that point, Julien has managed to get back on his feet for the most part and he’s even rekindled his relationship with Michelle to a certain extent. Moreover, he’s arrived at a stage where he’s ready to get on with his life and attend to his future amputated from the messy business of high-class whoredom.
Julien tells Detective Sunday that moving on isn’t so bad and urges her to let sleeping dogs lay and to finally close his case. While Detective Sunday doesn’t feel all the dots are connected, she’s exhausted and wants desperately to repair the broken relationships she’s created throughout a long career.
Julien then tries to restart his relationship with Michelle, but she abruptly rejects him despite how well he lays the pipe. This was a little surprising because of how madly in love Michelle seemed throughout the show. But then I remembered a particular flashback with her and Julien just before he got locked up.
Michelle is the stereotypical bored housewife who’s woefully unsatisfied and no longer feels alive or excited by much of anything. Michelle’s world is dull and her marriage lacks love, support, bedroom spice, or any other meaningful qualities. But why does she continue to stay if she’s in fact that unhappy with the state of things? Julien, during this key past argument, states that they are more or less both whores. He’s paid in cash for the personas he takes on and the services he provides his clients, and Michelle is a Golddigger who’s paid in horses and handbags.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Michelle’s rejection came due to a cold acknowledgment that while she and Julien’s relationship had a surplus of passion and flame, it would never be as stable or financially sound as the life she’d become accustomed to with Richard no matter how cold and dull it might have been. And I can’t say that I didn’t understand Michelle’s side of things. She and Julien are by this point both in the thick of middle age. While Julien’s best and only option to secure his future is to return to gigolo life and gradually rebuild from there, Michelle — so long as she’s tied to Richard (who is a bit of a simp) — will remain a lady of leisure until the day she dies.
No person in this modern age, be they man or woman, would run the risk of losing such a lavish lifestyle, especially if the requirements involved in maintaining it were freakishly low. Michelle is willing to live with a comfortable level of discomfort so long as her worries and daily stressors remain trivial. As a result of Michelle’s rejection, Julien is left heartbroken and without a purpose and returns to the only way of life he’s ever known.
American Gigolo was meh but I enjoyed the in-depth exploration of Julien Kaye, the person beyond the glitz and glamours of his Gigolo occupation. For that and that alone I rate American Gigolo Season 6/10 diamonds 💎💎💎💎💎💎, slightly better than the original with room for improvement. It could’ve been better with an alternative premise.
