Poker Face

Pop culture and the meaning of life. Mini-essays written and illustrated by grimy, human hands.

Some spoilers for the first four episodes of Poker Face. Some. As in: not many.

My father investigated homicides. I once asked him why people kill people.

“Alcohol,” he said, and ordered another round.

I didn’t like that answer, and patiently son-splained our darker drives, drawing from my infinite pile of half-read books.

“That’s the movies,” he sighed (sighing being his preferred form of punctuation). “In real life, people are dumb, they drink, and then they kill each other. In fact, the only people dumber than the criminals are the police.”

I suspect that this was an indirect dig at a member of our extended family, who was on the anti-terrorist squad at Scotland Yard, had served in the more famous recent wars, and therefore out-scored my dad on that all-important metric, The Real Man-O Meter. 

Threatened masculinity aside, it’s a point I think on often as the years pass and my dad gets deader, one side effect of which is that I treat him and his ideas more kindly. I thought of it again while watching Poker Face, a show in which the incomparable Natasha Lyonne plays an amateur sleuth driven to defend the innocent.

It’s a joyful throwback to those Sunday afternoon shows in which a detective stumbled across a needlessly complex murder, usually in a small town with no distinguishing features (aside from its astronomical homicide rate and, presumably, attractive location fees).

The cops were always complacent. The investigator was both perpetually underestimated and preternaturally competent, their preferred mode a languid take on Socratic irony. Their sword of justice? A lollypop, or a fabulous moustache.

And so it is with Poker Face, minus the facial hair.

There’s a lot to pontificate about. Example: the difficulty of truth-telling in a land dominated by liars. Yes, you may draw the obvious connection to present-day America. In fact, you’re invited to do so, via flyover state locales and references to fascism, sometimes in the form of fascist dogs. As in actual dogs with tails.

More possible pontification: if we’re reliant on a rogue detective to bring the guilty to heel, week after week, then what are these shows, really, but an endorsement of vigilantism in comfy slippers? Poker Face included.

Anyway, none of this has anything to do with my dad’s understandably dim view of murderous humans. What does is that not a single murder in Poker Face makes any sense. For instance, does a big-but-not-life-changing scratch card win justify killing? Is the only solution to a pitmaster turning vegan his immediate execution? Should the drummer in your band die because he’s got talent?

Again: not a single murder in Poker Face makes any sense–unless you are really, really dumb.

More evidence for my case, albeit circumstantial (as my dad also liked to grumble at random moments). Poker Face’s creator is Rian Johnson. Rian Johnson’s last film was Glass Onion. Glass Onion was also a film about the dumbness of murder, this time the dumbness of killer billionaires.

Hanlon’s Razor famously said: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

My dead dad not-famously said: “You get me now?” And: “Would anyone like a glass of red wine?”