OFMD Spiral Parallels 46: Izzy Being Wrong Part 4--Izzy's redemption (in which he learns to be right)
Intro: What I love most about how season 2 builds on season 1 of OFMD is the spiral narrative structure. Ground is repeatedly and explicitly re-trod from season 1 to season 2, but in season 2 everything goes deeper than season 1. Meanings are shuffled, emotions are stronger and truer, and transformation is showcased above everything. The first season plucks certain notes, then the second season plucks the same ones--but louder, and then it weaves them together to create a symphony.
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This totally spirals round! I was starting to feel bad that this wouldn't really do the spiral thing and the title shouldn't apply, but it totally worked out!
Episode 10
In this episode, Izzy's wrongness reaches its peak. Izzy's operating on basic toxic masculinity lies: emotion is vulnerability, vulnerability is weakness, weakness is bad. And he's also having to face something he didn't really understand all season, which is that Ed's changes aren't actually all because of Stede. They go deeper.
Izzy's belief in his own lies are so deep that he can look at this
and say this
Izzy does his best to impose his lies on reality here, a dark reflection of Stede willing a better world into existence. Izzy walks away from this interaction with Ed feeling triumphant. And when Fang asks what happened to Izzy's foot, his response is this
But you can tell from Izzy's face that he doesn't quite believe this is "correct," even though he made this happen.
Izzy didn't understand anything that was happening to Ed in this episode, and he reacted to that lack of understanding in the worst possible way. He's finally realized that he was wrong when he believed just removing Stede would turn Ed back into Blackbeard. But he's only starting to realize that Ed being Blackbeard again isn't actually a good thing, for anyone.
Season 2
Izzy keeps being wrong at the beginning in the second season. He's wrong in thinking talking honestly to Ed will have any good effects, that he can now invite Ed to be vulnerable when he's the one who pushed Ed to be someone who reacts to vulnerability with destruction.
And Izzy's wrong again when he tells Ed that the atmosphere is fucked because of Stede.
Ed doesn't react with violence, real or threatened, when he's thinking of Stede in other contexts. His response to seeing the little figurine at the wedding (which he later directly addresses as if he's talking Stede) isn't to join in the violence.
Ed only reacts with violence to reminders of Stede when Izzy's the medium of those reminders. Because Izzy was the one who imposed the logic on Ed that experiencing any real vulnerability was something that deserved destruction.
And so Izzy remade Ed's world so that Ed would react to invocations of vulnerability like this:
Ed doesn't shoot Izzy because Izzy said "Stede Bonnet." He shoots Izzy because Izzy said "Stede Bonnet."
Izzy thought he was making Ed into "my captain," the strong Blackbeard of the illustrations. But he was just making Ed into a scared, lost man so terrified of living with himself, he couldn't imagine anything but running.
Ed doesn't try to kill himself over Stede. Stede leaving him just triggered deeper insecurities in Ed.
And Izzy made it so that Ed would have no way to deal with those insecurities except violence, turned on others or on himself
Izzy pays for all this, for all his actions in the first season. By episode 4 of season 2, he's a broken shell of a man, drinking hard liquor like it's water to try to cope with reality, screaming at a wooden figurehead that doesn't even actually have a head.
Izzy's wrong a lot in this episode. but while he had to learn he was wrong before through violence and pain, this time he learns it through kindness.
Izzy's wrong when he tells Stede decides that Ed's "a rotten leg" that has to be removed from the ship. But Ed isn't rotten. He's just messy. Not unlike Izzy just now
Later in the episode, Izzy tells the crew that he himself is "already gone."
He's pretty clearly working himself up to a suicide attempt. He shot himself last time because he thought having only one working leg (and being cast out by Ed) made him unworthy of life.
Izzy thinks he's got no place in the world anymore. The conceptions he built his internal world on were wrong, and there's nothing to replace them.
And Izzy's wrong.
He rotten leg came off because other people knew this, because the crew knew that he deserved a better ending than this, no matter how badly he'd acted in the past
And they're able to pass that on to Izzy.
Because Izzy isn't going to die alone. And he isn't gone yet.
By the end of the second season, Izzy's come to understand his wrongness better than anyone. He's come to understand that what he was driving Ed to do was about his own desires, and that those were both incorrect and morally wrong--because there's a better way to live, and to treat the people you care about.
And then Izzy's monologue spirals on through this moment from season 1
And presents it again
The first time we see this image, we listen to a monologue where Izzy expresses his fears over Ed being absorbed into this world. Izzy himself is in the back shadows of this shot, looking only at Ed, at the proof that so many things he believed to be correct (Ed was the mad devil Blackbeard, Izzy's position in Ed's life was secure, the world had a permanent hierarchy of strength and weakness) were wrong.
The second time we see this image, there's also a monologue of Izzy playing over it. But his perspective on the image has completely shifted. It's not a narrowly focused moment that endangers Izzy's sense of self. It's an inclusive image, that defines Izzy's sense of self.
Izzy knows better than anyone what's wrong, and what's right. And so he's able to move a step deeper than right/wrong, to understand something important about what it means to be good, or evil.
Izzy was wrong for most of this series. But he figured it out in time to make amends. To understand himself, the world he lived in, and the people he cared about better than he ever had before.
And to determine for himself what his life, and his death would mean: not hopelessness, but a gift of hope; not an enforcement of wrongness, of evil, but an embrace of uncertain rightness, of goodness.
Sometimes, being wrong--and having time to figure that out--amounts to an act of grace.
Previous posts:
Izzy Being Wrong 3 (S1E6-9)
Izzy Being Wrong 2 (S1E5)
Izzy Being Wrong 1 (S1E3-4)
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