“Disco deserved a better name, a beautiful name, because it was a beautiful art form. It made the consumer beautiful. The consumer was the star.”
Reading these words changed my life. I was a sophomore in college and very much arrayed against any kind of mainstream music when I happened to pick up the loose liner notes for a Barry White best-of compilation one of my roommates had lying around. All my life disco had represented everything cheesy and plastic about popular music — until I read what Barry said.
Suddenly it all clicked for me. What used to come across as phony about disco now felt to me like the utmost sincerity. Love really is that powerful. Dancing really is that wonderful. The night really is that magical. Disco is designed to make you feel good things in as big a way as possible. It makes you beautiful.
This revelation opened up a mind that had been closed to vast swathes of artistic expression. It also made me just about lose my mind when DTF St. Louis writer/director/creator Steven Conrad selected my favorite Barry White song, “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Baby,” to soundtrack the climactic underwear-only dance party between Clark Forrest and Floyd Smernitch. I’m serious, I threw my hands up in the air so fast I spilled a beverage. I love this music. As it turns out, I think I love these men, too.
Barry’s baritone isn’t just on the soundtrack for us home viewers, either. It’s literally what Clark and Floyd are listening to in the pool house on the early morning that Floyd dies. After the disaster with “Tiger Tiger” — which Floyd, being Floyd, is incredibly understanding and forgiving toward Clark about — Clark is determined to give Floyd the validation of arousal that he yearns for. He’s so determined, in fact, that he decides to try to give it to himself.
Barry White is the sound of that scene, the sound of two men — two admittedly goofy, awkward men — trying to find intimacy and arousal together. I understand, of course, that not every DTF St. Louis viewer can say “Barry White changed my life” the way I can, so you may not be sold on the power of the song. But you don’t need to be. You understand Floyd, and you understand Clark, and you understand what they mean to each other, and what Clark’s would-be gift to Floyd will mean to him. Of course it looks silly — it’s two basically heterosexual middle-aged white nerds dancing in their tighty whities — but it’s so, so serious, so sincere, so beautiful. The Maestro, as Barry was called, would have been proud.
The whole episode is beautiful. Painfully so, shockingly so, almost like an endurance test. Time and again characters and storylines pay off in a way that hits like a blow right to the solar plexus, bowling you over with intense feelings of empathy or grief or…I don’t know, just that feeling you get when you wrestle with the beauty and the sadness of the world.
We pay another visit to Modern Love, for example, fully in his element as he glides around his roller rink. He corroborates Clark’s story, confirming that he met the fake “Tiger Tiger” for a date at the rink. All they did was hold hands, which at this point is shocking to Detective Homer — doesn’t everyone Indiana Jones dicks or cuckoldry from a closet these days?
No, Modern Love explains. Holding hands makes you feel safe, like you did when your dad walked you across the street. It’s part of those thrilling first stages of love; “years can go by without that now,” Modern Love laments. Homer is taken aback when the roller skater asks him when was the last time he held hands; his answer, “My wife, I guess, years ago,” is like little bridge over a river of sadness flowing right through this guy, one we never knew about before.
“You don’t really end anymore where you used to,” Modern Love says of holding hands. “You just keep going.” I think that was the first time in the episode I just sort of reeled back in my seat. The language here is so beautiful: You can feel the man searching for the right words, laying them down one in front of the other until he feels he’s made his point.
This is echoed in another amazing scene elsewhere in the episode. After the “nix” from “Tiger Tiger,” Clark and Floyd decide to blow off steam with paintball but end up just sitting on the forest floor, talking about their feelings. And man, those feelings just pour out. Floyd tells Clark, who feels like a superfluous person with a stupid job, that there is sunshine in his face. Clark tells Floyd, who feels like an unlovable failure, that there is gold in his heart. They say all this through sign language, one gesture at a time.
When was the last time you talked to your best friend like this? Don’t you wish it had been recently? Yesterday? Today? Maybe you should pick up your phone and text them real quick before you finish this review.
Anyway, Homer and Plumb believe Clark’s story and clear him of the murder, even though he was present at the pool house. They discover a second recumbent bike was driving around the area that night and realize Richard, Floyd’s son, was present too.
It’s the culmination of a tremendous arc for Richard and his mother, Carol. Richard decides to pedal to his new school on his recumbent bike, thinking everyone will find it cool. Carol, who believes the opposite, feels she can do nothing but watch her son ride off to his own humiliation. In the meantime, though, she cheerfully (and rather profanely) sings as she spends her umpire money on new furniture and bedding for Richard’s room, to make it look more grown up. (The umpire gig winds up being her alibi: Queece, her 15-year-old boss, happened to see her asleep in her living room when he came by early that morning on his “paperperson” route to drop off her Umpire of the Year award by hand.)
Finally, Richard comes pedaling down the street…beaming! Waving! Giving the thumbs up! He was right, they did think he was cool! And then on top of that, he is thrilled almost beyond words by his new bedroom decor. What a great day for a kid who could really use one, right?
Until suddenly, out of the blue, he melts down, shattering a window and screaming uncontrollably. We’ve seen this behavior before, or at least heard about it: At long last, Floyd tells Clark that Richard mangled his penis the day of that disastrous job interview, just a little boy angry at a man he saw make his mom cry. But this time he’s screaming “Don’t tell Floyd! Don’t tell Floyd!” about his episode. Carol finally gets him medical help to calm down, but she doesn’t know the cause.
Eventually, in the same skate park he and Floyd use to come to together, Richard tells his mom, Homer, and Plumb the truth. He confirms their theory that he got onto Floyd’s computer and found the DTF St. Louis account, following Floyd to his date to confront him about his infidelity. This winds up happening wordlessly, with neither he nor Floyd (whom he catches in his underwear after Clark leaves) speaking — except by ASL, which Floyd uses to say “I love you” before drinking a lethal dose of Amphezyne-spiked Bloody Mary. It’s finally all too much for the man the man with the golden heart.
Clark couldn’t feel those feelings, you see, much as he wanted to. But he doesn’t know what he wants. He’s lonely, desperately lonely. He’s confused by his complex feelings regarding Floyd, regarding men in general. He’s afraid he fucked up everything with this summertime affair — obviously he means his marriage, his relationships with Floyd and Carol, but I think he also fears he’s damaged himself, unlocking desires he simply lacks the capacity to understand but now can’t stop feeling.
After season of precision-calibrated reserve, Plumb winds up laughing after it’s all said and done. She and Homer sit on her porch, talking about sexual fetishes — Homer thought “BBC” was a British television network — and trying to determine if Homer even has any. The best he can come up with is “I like a nice bra,” which sets Plumb to giggling. It’s nearly as unexpected as if she’d stood on her head, and it’s hugely endearing.
You get the sense that maybe the off-the-clock Plumb is a very different person than the steely investigator we’ve spent our time with. (Watching her shut down Carol’s obnoxious “Can you please speak up?” conversational technique felt really good.) With Homer, what you see is apparently what you get. It’s a marvelous contrast, as it has been all season. Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday are as crucial to this show’s success as Jason Bateman, Linda Cardellini, and David Harbour are.
But we don’t end on their happiness. We end on footage of Floyd’s suicide, some of it shot on overexposed film stock, cross-cut with Clark Forrest’s return to his totally empty home — no wife, no kids, no job, no stuff, no mistress, no best friend. “I don’t know what I’m doin’,” he repeated to Floyd during their final conversation, and that’s when he still had those things in his life. Now he’s sitting on the backyard swing, dangling there. All those lives ruined because he felt lonely, and because he loved his friend.
DTF St. Louis is the year’s sneakiest show, using a dirty-joke title and great comedic actors to cloak a profound and despairing examination of how the difficulty of human connection in a society that devalues it. The taciturn delivery of its repetitive dialogue creates the same kind of meditative feel you get from David Lynch and Mark Frost’s dialogue in Twin Peaks, or from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
In all those pregnant pauses, with all those familiar phrases, we ask questions. Does it have to be this way? Why must we construct intricate rituals which allow us to touch the skin of other men? How is it that being married to the sweetest man you’ve ever met can make you more miserable than you’ve ever been? Why do we seal ourselves away in lives that kill us before we die? When we place so much stock in the love of others, where does that leave us when that love goes away? Is it justice or mere, cruel chance when despite your best intentions, your attempts to escape your prison and find love again destroy you?
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
