[COLUMN] Sugar is a Study of California Alienation | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains some discussion of the plot of the first two episodes of the second season of Sugar, now streaming on Apple TV, but that’s not the real spoiler here. This piece spoils the big twist in the first season of Sugar. And it’s a doozy. So, if you haven’t watched the first season of Sugar but want to, consider yourself warned. If you’re looking for a quick review, I largely enjoy Sugar for the vibes. The plotting is decidedly wacky, and its mysteries aren’t hugely compelling, but it does hit its themes very well and it looks gorgeous. So, you still here? Sweet. 

For most of the first season of Sugar, it is clear that private detective John Sugar (Colin Farrell) is carrying around a secret. The fact that there was a twist was so heavily signposted that it became a fun guessing game for audiences who knew that there was a twist, even if they didn’t know what the twist was. Was John Sugar a vampire? Was he an android? Was this all an elaborate dying dream? Was he trapped inside a computer simulation? Was he the star of his own Truman Show?

At the end of the sixth of the eight episodes in the season, Sugar finally comes clean with viewers. The movie-loving hopelessly naïve private detective is actually a blue-skinned alien who is part of a delegation who has been sent to Earth to observe and study humanity. The twist was divisive to say the least. According to Colin Farrell, it was originally supposed to be revealed at the end of the premiere, but was pushed later into the season, with Farrell admitting it “split the audience.”

The twist is Sugar in a nutshell. It is a frankly insane plot development that arrives in the middle of a show that, to put it simply, does not need it. There is a sense that “Colin Farrell as Los Angeles private detective” is a slam-dunk premise, and that “Colin Farrell as Los Angeles private detective who is also an alien” is gilding the lily. It is an insane concept to layer on top of the show. Still, that insanity is oddly appealing, lending the show an otherworldly vibe. There’s nothing like it on Earth.

Sugar is perhaps best enjoyed as a vibes-forward show, in which Colin Farrell drives around a beautifully shot Los Angeles in a beautifully-maintained car, dabbling in the tropes of classic film noir as the star monologues on the human condition in voiceover, sporadically intercutting montages and images from classic Hollywood movies. Leaving aside the opening few minutes of the second season premiere and the second half of the season finale, those expecting lore will be largely disappointed.

The second season is ruthlessly disinterested in the idea of world-building or mythology. The first season teased the mystery of Sugar searching for his long-lost sister Djen and ended with Sugar remaining on Earth to track down a rogue member of his species operating under the name Henry Thorpe (Jason Butler Harner). Despite that cliffhanger, the opening scene of the second season neatly cuts those threads. Sugar finds Thorpe, who is dying and who confesses Djen is long dead.

This choice is indicative of how Sugar likes to tell its stories. It’s not that Sugar ever really lets go of Sugar’s pursuit of his sister. Djen haunts the narrative. The second season ends up being largely built around a simple case for Sugar in which the private detective tries to reunite two lost and estranged Korean siblings: Ji-Seok Moon (Raymond Lee) and Danny Moon (Jin Ha). It is very cute – perhaps too cute – right down to giving the brothers the surname “Moon.”

It is something alchemical, something transformative. Sugar’s sense of loss and grief is transformed into purpose. Sugar could not save his own lost sibling, but he can maybe save Danny Moon. After all, he has a lot in common with the Moon brothers. “Danny’s an immigrant,” Sugar muses. “Like me. Like most people from this neighbourhood in Los Angeles.” There is a sense that this is the magic of Los Angeles, this power of transformation and transmutation.

Sugar is very firmly about California in general and Los Angeles in particular. It looks gorgeous, letting the city play itself as the character navigates iconic locations. The series is riffing on the long tradition of Californian film noir, from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The texture of the show was largely defined by director Fernando Meirelles, cinematographer César Charlone and editor Fernando Stutz, who gave the series a distinctive visual language.

It also captures the spirit of the city. While Sugar’s status as an alien is (mostly) irrelevant to the episode-to-episode mechanics of the show, it works as a metaphor for his isolation and disconnect. “I was so clear that staying behind was the right thing to do,” Sugar narrates. “I was so certain that I would uncover the answers to my loss. But all I’ve done is lose more. My mission. My friends. My home. And so… now I’m alone. Here. I can never go back home. But there’s always California.”

Anomie is a phenomenon common in any large city and there is a broader loneliness epidemic in the larger world, but Los Angeles has always felt different due to a number of factors. “The vast interstate system of Los Angeles,” argues J. Harry Wray, Professor of Political Science at DePaul University in Chicago, “is disconnected from its environs.” The city is a vast urban sprawl, with very bad public transportation, creating a city disconnected from itself.

The second season of Sugar is preoccupied with the idea of loneliness and anomie. Sugar is living out of a hotel. Using a device in his bedroom, he still sends signals out into the void, in the hope of communicating with his people. “I’m still here if anyone else is,” he broadcasts. “It’d be… it’d be nice to talk to someone.” He confesses, “It’s not easy being on your own sometimes. Before, there were thousands of us. I could always come home and find someone to talk to.”

Part of the charm of Sugar is the way in which it ties this very literal expression of alienation into the broader themes of the pop culture that the show emulates and into the human condition. This season, Sugar occasionally gets help from Tom Flyberg (Shea Whigham). “I helped him a few years ago when his wife went missing in Ojai,” Sugar explains via voiceover. “Turned out, she’d only gone missing from Tom.” This is the fear underpinning film noir. Human beings are all alien to each other.

However, Sugar connects with California and Los Angeles in a broader way. Sugar is, as he repeatedly points out in the first couple of episodes, another immigrant in a city full of immigrants. “LA’s an immigrant city,” he muses. “This is where they come. A writer once said, ‘Los Angeles gives a feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future too.’ But I don’t know about that. I’m an immigrant too. I think LA’s got a lot of good to it.”

Los Angeles is an immigrant city in large part because it is the literal end of America. It is the point at which the frontier surrenders to the unyielding Pacific, where Manifest Destiny crashes against the very edge of the continent. It is no wonder that California has attracted large communities of Chinese, Scottish and Irish, and Spanish immigrants. It makes sense that Sugar would find himself perfectly at home at the end of the world.

There is something appealing in the way that Sugar taps into the sense of California as a liminal space. The state has a long history of alien-related lore, with reports of sightings of strange objects in the sky over the Bay Area in 1896, and conspiracy theories about extraterrestrial visitors over the city during the “Battle of Los Angeles” in 1942. Astronaut Gordon Cooper claimed to have seen a UFO at Edwards Air Force Base in 1957. Area 51 is just across the state line in Nevada.

Despite Sugar being a literal alien, there is a decidedly spiritual component to the show. Sugar largely avoids getting too bogged down in science-fiction mechanics. Sugar can seem almost angelic at times, a hopelessly naïve figure descended from the heavens who helps human beings navigate their messy lives. In this sense, Sugar is in conversation with California’s longstanding history of new age spirituality, which occasionally overlapped with that fascination with alien life.

California has been home to various spiritual and new age movements over the decades, from the hippies to surfer culture. New religions and cults have emerged, from the Manson Family to the Peoples Temple. Many of these belief systems embrace the idea of extraterrestrial life, from Scientology to Heaven’s Gate, whose members took their own lives because they believed that through that they would be transported to an alien craft travelling in the wake of Hale-Bopp comet.

There is perhaps something about California that allows these sorts of belief systems to take root. In 1919, Michael Williams wrote that Southern California was a “vertiginous confusion of modern idolatry and sorcery and superstition,” finding philosophical justification as a “new paganism, made up of Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Christian Mysticism, Hermeticism, and New Thought.” Even by 1946, just in the wake of the Second World War, observers had noted the trend.

This makes a certain amount of sense. It has been observed that California has always been a wealthy area, and that wealth attracts charlatans. However, there may be more to it. America presented itself to the settlers as a vast and endless expanse, a promised land of infinite opportunity. It is only logical that those who arrive at the very edge of that promised land should find themselves looking to expand even further. If such expansion cannot be literal, maybe it can be spiritual.

Appropriately enough, the second season finds Sugar coming to the end of himself. All alone in California, Sugar finds himself getting lost. “Suicide is unheard of on our planet,” he explains at the start of the season. “But when we go on-mission, when we stay too long on worlds not our own, we can forget where we come from, who we are. It’s rare, but I’ve seen it before.” Sugar is clearly lonely, and has nobody to connect to except the humans around him.

This perhaps explains the character’s other big tether to California. Sugar loves cinema. He has clearly modelled himself on the heroes of old film noir. The first season found the private detective hired by film producer Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell) to track down his missing granddaughter Olivia (Sydney Chandler). His life is built around cinema. “I tend to keep to myself when I’m not on the clock,” he tells the audience. “Order in, watch a movie.”

In some ways, as much as California represented the end of the frontier, it also manufactured new abstracted frontiers for American culture. Silicon Valley helped push the digital frontier into the mainstream. As the hub of American cinema, Hollywood served as “the Dream Factory”, manufacturing the myth of the American frontier through the production of westerns. When America ran out of West, America just manufactured more of it.

Sugar does not always work on a nuts-and-bolts storytelling level. It is very loosely plotted and its mysteries are always remarkably linear. However, the show does succeed as something of a mood piece. It is a snapshot of the texture and the feeling of Los Angeles and California, with all these layers of the state’s identity collapsing into the frame. It is a collision of many of the underlying tensions of California crashing into one another.

It is a city of immigrants and of aliens, where one can very easily wind up alienated from one’s self.