Videovista has my review of series one of Kurt Sutter’s Sons of Anarchy.

Though nominally a ‘review’, the piece is really more of an essay about the creation of genre expectations through aesthetic framing. In particular, I argue that Mad Men apes the art house aesthetic and narrative styles in order to create an impression of intelligence whereas Sons of Anarchy looks as dumb as a bag of hammers despite being actually quite a clever and involved piece of writing. Dig:

Sons Of Anarchy is about the attempt to recreate a state of nature in the modern world. It examines families, tribes, organisations and states and looks at how distrust, individualism and selfishness have not only rotted out all of these institutions but also made it almost impossible for us to return to a state in which we do work together and trust each other as equal, free individuals. Sons Of Anarchy speaks to the very heart of human politics and it does so not by using long-takes and awkward silences to hint at the deep inner lives of middle-class professionals, it does so by having a load of hairy tattooed men shoot machine-guns at each other.