Now that Patrick Ball has had Langdon’s accent slip enough times to confirm that Langdon is Appalachian, can we engage with that for a second?
Is he the first person in his family to go to college? Did his parents or one of his parents go but not finish? Even if he has college educated parents, did he have grandparents who acted like all that book learning made them uppity? Or was he told his whole life that he is Smart and Has To Go To College with the unspoken caveat of “but we can’t pay for it” hanging over his head? Has he been a scholarship kid who literally cannot afford to fail?
Exactly how many people’s faces come to mind when he thinks of the word addict? How many of them are on his family tree? How many people from his graduating class are dead?
On ER, Carter has a hard time admitting that he’s an addict because he can’t admit to himself that he’s just like his cousin Chase.
So imagine that, but it’s half your little league team. It’s the pharmacist whose daughter you went to preschool with before he lost his license. It’s your old babysitter’s husband who hurt his back at the steel mill and never was quite right again. It’s the girl who sat beside you in AP Chem whose family disowned her when she came out, so she took a job in a restaurant kitchen, and it all went wrong from there.
And this is without considering alcoholism at all. This is without considering the fallout of decades of heavy military recruitment in Appalachia and how many vets turn to chemical solutions for their physical, psychiatric, and moral injuries. All of that exists on top of poverty and manual labor jobs that cause constant injuries and people using drugs to cope with the fact that this town is dying, and the only people left are the ones that cannot afford to leave.
I cannot stand people talking about how well Langdon is performing recovery like he’s a zoo animal.
He is a flawed man who said and did Many things I did not like in the first season. He lost me with that “Namaste” crack, and it only got worse when he ridiculed Santos, showed himself to be That Kind of husband, and lacked compassion for patients with uninteresting conditions.
I did not like him at all until his addiction came to light. Then, I felt empathy because he is *sick.* I think that both fandom and some of the characters fail to grasp that. Addiction is an illness.
Now, he fucked up. Repeatedly. In many ways. This is not “he didn’t do anything wrong.” He did all that shit. He has a lot to make up for.
However. Part of the reason he is Like That is because of his background, and I am becoming increasingly annoyed by people treating Langdon…well. The way the world treats Appalachian people with substance use issues. I’ve seen it before, and I’ll see it again. I just think it would be more interesting to explore his background along a class axis than to say “fuck this white guy, this addict shit is boring.”
In before lack of reading comprehension: if you are mad at Langdon for something, I guarantee that I am mad at him for that thing too! This is not about excuses. This is about explanations, which are not the same thing. I am very tired of both “Frank Langdon has never done anything wrong in his life” and “Langdon is a lowlife addict who should be in prison.”
He’s not even my guy! I just cannot keep seeing these takes.
There are real, living, breathing Appalachian people with addiction struggles and people who love those people or who having fucking tried to love those people, and they can read your disdain. Patrick Ball himself is one of those people!
Kill the abstinence-only carceral state inside your head.
