The Cleaner


Michael Stuart Kelly

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The Cleaner

There is a magnificent TV series out on A&E called The Cleaner (Wikipedia), (Imdb The Cleaner).

William Banks, played by Benjamin Bratt, is a drug addict. During the birth of his daughter, Lula, he made a deal with God, saying that if he is given a second chance he will end his drug abuse and help others to end their addictions to sex, drugs, and gambling. Banks and a small team of recovering addicts then worked to help others in recovering from their addictions.

I am normally suspicious of entertainment ventures that deal with addiction because they usually get so much wrong. There is a political game that is played an awful lot in public where people who support the disease model bash the people who support the behavior model, and vice-versa, when in truth, the issue is complicated. It is a mix and there is no one size fits all. But the bickering rages. It is often present in the themes of art and entertainment works, many of which are no more than biased propaganda for one view or the other.

When you look at the underbelly of the controversy, all you really see is a bunch of government and charity grants. A true addict who has been clean for a good amount of time (at least myself and some others I have known) cannot see this without feeling deeply repulsed by the hypocrisy. It is insulting and very irritating to undergo such an intense trial in life as addiction and then be treated as a pawn in a game of "let's see who gets the most money." We recovered addicts are people with a very serious problem who sought a way out so we can go on living, not fodder for people looking for a cash handout to pay for the promotion of their pet theories.

The episodes of The Cleaner I have seen so far are not propaganda nor sensationalism. They have been spot on with my own experience. I admit, I heard once in the series that addiction is a disease, but it is treated throughout in the plot as something where the volitional element is critical for the addict to get better. It does a great job of showing the interaction of the major components of addiction.

Even the ugliness is shown without the caricature stereotypes. And it's all there: the visuals of needles and ghettos, etc., the lies the addict tells himself and others, the inner weaknesses addicts must fight in order not to relapse, the sudden outbursts of violence, unresolved conflicts in real life being accepted as a blessing to be faced (as opposed to running away), and so on.

The truths presented in this series are so strong and emotionally powerful that I have selfishly hoarded this thing for myself. I hardly talk about it with anyone and I had decided (until now) not to write about it.

Then I saw one episode called Five Little Words. (The following is a spoiler so do not read further if you are against having plot surprises spoiled.)

It started with William Banks, the interventionist crusader, talking to himself in voice over. He mentioned that there are five little words that each addict tells himself and they represent his only true hope of getting out of addiction. (I paraphrase since I cannot find the exact quote.) They come from a place of inner strength and sadness. They do not admit despair and defeat. They are a hair-thin line between addiction and recovery and they can snap at any time, but so long as the addict holds on to them, he has hope.

Then one of the characters said, "I wish I were dead." There were cuts to several other scenes where others said, "I wish I were dead."

When I saw that, I thought, "Aha! Finally here is something sensationalist in this show that does not ring true. It's a good thing I did not write about it." But these Cleaner guys are good. Damn good. They unfold the main narrative and the different subplots with inordinate skill, so I just let myself be carried along like I always do with this show.

The climax came when Banks finally received forgiveness and acceptance from his wife. He had been trying to preserve her in his life and re-win her respect. She invited him back into her bed after months of sleeping in different rooms. As he slowly walked from his bedroom to hers (now theirs), he went into voice over and stated the opening lines about the five little words being the hair-thin lifeline of the addict. As the bedroom door closed, he said,

"I wish I were alive."

When that happened, the tears started streaming down my face. It hit me with the force of a sledge-hammer and I knew at that moment that I had to write about this.

The people who are involved with this show KNOW. They know... And they peal away the truths about addiction and put it all in fictional drama in a form I have not seen in other movies and TV shows.

One of the most powerful dramatic devices used is Banks's one-way conversations with God.

We all experience existence through our inner voice. We all talk to ourselves and this self-talk is constant throughout the day. It is even going on in our subconscious like background music in a store. All we need to do is open our awareness and we hear it clearly in our minds.

What's interesting is that sometimes we talk to ourselves in the first person, other times we imagine we are talking to someone else, and even other times we run a narrative about ourselves and things outside ourselves like a description in a book. We even talk to ourselves in second person as if we were someone else. First person, second person, third person. Past, present, future. Flash back and flash forwards. Juxtaposition. Mishmash. We do it all as we talk to ourselves.

I believe that making a second-person narrative to "out there" holds the seeds to the psychological power of prayer. This allows a person to address existence on his own level of one conscious to another (even if imagined) instead of being all alone in his mind. This perspective makes life easier to understand. For as much as we try to accept it, no one likes being locked up inside his own head. That's loneliness on a metaphysical level.

I know I had a running dialog with existence all during my own addiction. I used to walk the streets at night saying, "If you exist, God, talk to me." But there was never any answer in words. There never is.

This process is the way Banks does it in The Cleaner. He made a pact with God, and he talks out loud in his head to God, but there is never any answer. Banks acknowledges this during his one-way conversations. He even tells others (who accuse him of being a nut-case with a "calling") that it is a one-way dialog. He says it is not praying. It is talking. He talks and God hopefully listens.

In another episode, as he moves out of his home at his wife's request (ironically after her acceptance and forgiveness, which shows that the issue of the pain addiction causes is complicated and difficult to heal), he says in voice over (and I paraphrase), "If you ever had anything you wanted to say to me God, now is the time. I'm ready to listen."

Of course there is silence.

This second-person self-talk to "out there" serves both the believer and atheist alike. We all try to make sense of our lives and this is one of the most satisfying angles from which we can look at existence.

The people in the production of The Cleaner who latched on to the idea of using this device in voice over had an insight of pure genius. I know it resonates deeply with myself.

There is a reason they got the psychological details of addiction right. This series is loosely based on the life of Warren Boyd - The Real Cleaner. He is one of the advisers of the show. Here is small piece where Boyd actually speaks: Cleaning TV with Benjamin Bratt, Jon Prince, Warren Boyd. The producers went out and got the real deal and were wise enough to use it.

It's uncanny how much Bratt looks like Boyd, too. Here are the photos (sorry about the pixelization in the first—photos of Boyd are not easy to find and it was cropped from another):

Cleaner2.jpg

Waren Boyd

Original full picture: A&Es Recovery Project

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Benjamin Bratt

Original picture: Benjamin Bratt at "An Evening Of Love" Benefitting The Bare Foot Foundation

Cleaner-BoydandBratt.jpg

Boyd and Bratt (and Amy Price-Francis)

Original photo at Jamd

As I said, this series is magnificent. You have truth for addicts, drama for the public and, for those who seek heroes to admire, a strong hero who acts on his own moral choices without being a comic book character. Watch it if you want to see some of the best there is on TV ever. But if you don't get to see it (or don't like it for some inconceivable reason), that's OK. I'm perfectly happy to hoard this treasure all for myself.

Michael

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I'm genuinely surprised to find out that this is about addiction. I thought that this was a noir about those operatives who "clean up" after the Mob's (or the State spooks', see "Point of No Return") inevitable mistakes. A&E has, methinks, done a piss-poor publicity job.

Benjamin Bratt is pretty much irrevocably typecast, for me, from his playing an uptight cop in 2037 in the action/satire "Demolition Man" ... but I might see if I can get past that.

[...] a strong hero who acts on his own moral choices without being a comic book character.

Are you admitting that many comic-book-inspired films have, indeed, had strong heroes who act on their own moral choices? If so, you're way ahead of many here who casually dismissed that potent source of Romanticism (in Rand's sense) last year.

Or are you decrying comic-book scenarios for not being worthy, or capable, of portraying such heroes in a satisfying manner? I can't tell.

If it's the latter, just try, say, the film of "Watchmen" when it comes out next year, and see if you can make such a statement of dismissal. Or rent "V for Vendetta" or this last Summer's "Iron Man." (With a heroic innovator making amends for his mistakes.) Or many of us could suggest other vivid portrayals, on and off the page.

Edited by Greybird
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Steve,

Most comic book heroes I know of act on their own moral choices. The nature of the medium, however, leads to clear simplified choices and conflicts, even when a hero is conflicted internally. There just isn't the space to expand too much in this direction without holding up the action.

Also, an overly moralistic approach to addiction leads to stereotypes that are useless to someone who has been there (and to the public if it is truly interested in the real deal), unless he belongs to a church or cult that has taken precedence in his thinking.

Michael

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I watch The Cleaner. Thanks for your review.

Michael: Is the depiction of Bank's family relationships accurate?

I liked Benjamin Bratt from his Law & Order days.

Thanks again for the review.

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