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Spoilers ahead for all of season two of\u00a0DTF St. Louis,\u00a0including the finale \u201cNo One\u2019s Normal. It Just Looks That Way from Across the Street.\u201d<\/p>\n
In DTF St. Louis<\/a>, frustrated suburbanites Clark (Jason Bateman) and Carol (Linda Cardellini) are having all kinds of sex. In the motel room where they meet regularly, they describe their encounters as \u201cfantasies\u201d or \u201cdreams.\u201d They\u2019re scenarios the two don\u2019t feel comfortable engaging in with their spouses, Clark\u2019s wife Eimy (Wynn Everett, barely present onscreen) or Carol\u2019s husband and Clark\u2019s best friend, Floyd (David Harbour). Clark asks Carol to give him a rimjob, treat him like her sex robot, and sit on his face until he nearly passes out; every time they\u2019re together, there\u2019s some new convoluted role-playing or found-online position to try. But as much as DTF St. Louis shows Clark and Carol having sex, the series ultimately uses the physical act as a bait and switch, employing it as a lure for a story that\u2019s primarily about loneliness. The sex in DTF St. Louis, like the investigative framing it uses to explain Floyd\u2019s mysterious death, is central, and it\u2019s also irrelevant. Everyone\u2019s orgasming and no one\u2019s complete, especially \u2014 to the series\u2019 greatest detriment \u2014 Carol.<\/p>\n Despite DTF St. Louis\u2019s fascination with how people present themselves in their online dating profiles, navigate bedroom taboos, or choose to engage in voyeurism, the series never finds the right rhythm in deploying sex as a storytelling device that shades out its characters or its stakes. The finale reveals that Floyd died by suicide after his stepson Richard (Arlan Ruf) sees Floyd and Clark dancing together in their underwear, leading Floyd to react out of panic and depression. The episode\u2019s title, \u201cNo One\u2019s Normal. It Just Looks That Way from Across the Street,\u201d is named after a repeated line in the series, a sentiment first shared by queer DTF St. Louis user \u201cModern Love\u201d (Peter Sarsgaard). Modern Love, whose profile image is David Bowie in a feminine robe, explains<\/a> that all of suburbia\u2019s pleasant-seeming people are actually hiding kinks and desires in the cookie-cutter homes where they live with their nuclear families, and that line gets passed around like some kind of ultrarevealing wisdom, a \u201cthe grass is always greener\u201d for the hookup-app age. But that lack of normalcy then becomes normal, which feels a bit like the larger trick DTF St. Louis pulls. This isn\u2019t really a story about how sex propels and inspires people. It\u2019s about a solitude that apparently only men can feel, and all the sex scenes do is flatten Carol into a body to be coveted. If only she were as fully fleshed out as she is presented fully in the flesh.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t a diatribe against sex scenes, which are often necessary to understand a physical and emotional bond between two (or more) people, and which serve essential character- and plot-building purposes. DTF St. Louis, with its whodunit structure, is about three characters \u2014 Clark, Carol, and Floyd \u2014 but it\u2019s not interested in them equally. Because she\u2019s presented for so long as the primary suspect in her husband\u2019s death, Carol continually loses out in both the sex scenes and overall storytelling. Her bedroom behavior is always presented as nefarious (a way to get Clark on her side against Floyd), and her domestic decision-making is presented as superficial or petty (apparent evidence for how much she wanted Floyd gone).<\/p>\n While Carol is slotted as a broad villain whose agreeance to anything in the bedroom is supposed to signal a Machiavellian level of manipulation, her actions never seem quite believable, and her true feelings about either her marriage or her affair are obfuscated; because she\u2019s the person lusted after by both Clark and Floyd, their opinions about her body and attractiveness are given primacy above her opinions about theirs. During sex scenes, DTF St. Louis aligns us with Clark\u2019s view of Carol, either on top or in front of him; during their arguments about money, DTF St. Louis aligns us with Floyd\u2019s hurt feelings when Carol wonders, often sneeringly, how the family is going to get ahead when Floyd is so unambitious. Carol\u2019s identity is linked nearly always to her reactions to either man, and their inner lives are given a level of specificity and attention that Carol\u2019s isn\u2019t. Even when Carol gets to supposedly reveal her innermost wants to Clark during those motel trysts, all she does is complain about Floyd, which in turn just makes Clark more sympathetic toward his best friend. Her character ties the men further together rather than existing as an individual with the same depths of feelings as they have.<\/p>\n DTF St. Louis makes Floyd and Clark literally and figuratively a team against Carol, even as they trade off having sex with her. When the men ride their recumbent bikes together, Carol is left at home. When Floyd asks Clark if he can watch Clark and Carol having sex, and the two men present the idea of tag-teaming their peeping to Carol, they\u2019re chummily seated next to each other on one side of a table while Carol is opposite them, alone. And when Floyd passes his physical to qualify for a life-insurance policy and excitedly shares how happy Clark will be for him, his doctor asks if Clark is his husband; Carol is again erased. All of this is to amp up our sympathy for these men and our certainty that Carol killed Floyd, until the season finale finally sketches her out, albeit thinly. \u201cNo One\u2019s Normal. It Just Looks That Way from Across the Street\u201d reveals that she deeply cared about her husband and was touched by his sensitivity (when Richard says Floyd\u2019s final ASL sign to him was \u201crock on,\u201d she corrects him and says it was \u201cI love you\u201d), and because of her connection to her son Richard, she was a hardworking umpire who cared for young athletes and was compassionate toward them (a fact recounted by Carol\u2019s colleague to the cops). But even these moments aren\u2019t Carol speaking for herself, as Clark and Floyd so often do. She\u2019s getting third-person, rather than first-person, treatment, and that narrative unevenness denies us a sense of what she wanted out of her marriage and affair.<\/p>\n During one of their motel-room hookups, where Clark is watching Floyd and Carol through the closet shutters, Carol finally admits her disinterest in sex with Floyd. She follows it up by looking at herself in a mirror, slicking lip gloss on, fluffing her hair, and sashaying out in her minidress and heels. Is Carol most sexually attracted to herself, or is she turned on by other people\u2019s attraction to her? That would have been an interesting idea if DTF St. Louis had leaned into it by pairing Carol\u2019s obsession with self-help audiotapes that encourage her to steer conversations with more of a voiced desire to dominate in the bedroom. Is she into Clark because she\u2019s getting self-aggrandizement from bossing him around? Is she not into Floyd because he expects her to be demure and submissive, a dynamic she\u2019s no longer into? We know that Clark turned to these sexual escapades because he was so bored of his own monotony, tired of brushing his daughters\u2019 hair, and fed up with his everyday life that he broke into<\/a> a karate routine live on-air while presenting the weather. We know that Floyd turns to the DTF St. Louis app because he wants to get a \u201cfull-on\u201d erection with his injured dick, a phrase that Floyd and Clark keep bouncing back and forth in one of the series\u2019 many irritating conversational quirks. The desperation of these men is palpable. Meanwhile, what drives Carol? A quickly mentioned childhood spent in poverty is meant to explain her frantic concern with the family\u2019s finances. Yet she\u2019s presented so nefariously for so long that no other defining characteristics emerge.<\/p>\n Floyd and Clark\u2019s bond is the series\u2019 central interest as it analyzes suburban isolation and wonders how to combat it. Also clear is the series\u2019 implication that sex isn\u2019t really the answer; companionship is. Creator Steven Conrad makes this explicit when Floyd tells Clark that what he has with Carol \u2014 and what Floyd wants too \u2014 is \u201cjust time alone from the world.\u201d Maybe that\u2019s why the series\u2019 sex scenes are so sterile and disinterested in feeling sensual, sweaty, or passionate for all parties involved. But how DTF St. Louis constrains itself is disappointing. It\u2019s willing to show off Carol and Clark\u2019s trysts (as desaturated as they are) and write Floyd as tolerant of being kissed<\/a> by Modern Love so he doesn\u2019t hurt his feelings, and accepting of being cucked, and interested in meeting up with a man for validation of his attractiveness. But the series isn\u2019t bold enough to imagine Carol\u2019s interiority or question what would happen if, say, Clark and Floyd had kissed.<\/p>\n DTF St. Louis undermines sex as the answer to melancholy, but it also uses sex right up until the point when it would actually become more revealing to do so \u2014 when the increasingly homoerotic tension between Clark and Floyd could have been acted upon as an additional layer to their bond, or when a failed kiss between them would have cemented how they loved one another but were not in love. When does physical touch fulfill us, and when is it unnecessary? Floyd and Clark literally dance around each other while listening to Barry White\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby\u201d in the finale, and DTF St. Louis dances around the issue of their relationship, too, rather than push their bond to a potential endpoint. How the series integrates sex scenes into its broader picture often feels like Conrad worried that DTF St. Louis\u2019s larger questions about aimlessness in middle age wouldn\u2019t be interesting to people without, say, Cardellini\u2019s widespread legs inviting Clark forward, or her undulating back in reverse cowgirl. Too bad that DTF St. Louis diminished Carol\u2019s function in the narrative in the very same way Clark and Floyd did.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Vulture Daily<\/p>\n An entertainment newsletter for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n