Too Old to Die Young: Nicolas Winding Refn’s timely desecration of prestige TV

The boundaries between film and television are blurring. Hollywood franchises mimic the serialised structure of big-budget TV shows, while recent TV hits have embraced the superficial signifiers of genres traditionally associated with cinema. Through You (2018–), Westworld (2016–), American Horror Story (2011–) and The Walking Dead (2010–) the 90s psycho thriller, the western, the haunted-house horror and the zombie film have all been plundered.

Yet, with a few notable exceptions, TV auteurs remain rare. Instead, the writer or show-runner is television royalty. Matthew Weiner (Mad Men), David Simon (The Wire) and Ryan Murphy (Glee) have become household names, while for filmmakers, directing for television is still perceived as a training ground.

Step into the fray, Nicolas Winding Refn. His latest project, Too Old to Die Young, is a 10-episode, 13-hour crime thriller now streaming on Amazon Prime. It draws on cinematic references — both ‘low’ genre and ‘high’ arthouse — almost exclusively. But in prioritising sensory overload over narrative momentum, Refn takes a new approach to adapting cinematic genre to the small screen.

In Refn’s work, cinematic set-pieces that would traditionally drive a narrative forward are dwelt upon with austere, fetishistic glee. Refn’s camera can become lost in the beauty of plays of light, the allure of an actor’s face, body and skin, or bursts of stylised colour, bringing a perverse stillness even as he dramatises movement, violence, sex or a heated dialogue exchange. His 2013 film Only God Forgives is a kind of slow cinema pastiche of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone films of the 80s, and one seemingly designed to annoy audiences who connected with the straightforward genre larks of his breakout film, Drive (2011). By playing with expectation to a sometimes absurd degree, Refn draws out new meanings and often erotic possibilities from a brutal Viking skirmish, a prison brawl, an urban shootout, a meeting between gangsters, a date.

His most recent, most experimental film, The Neon Demon (2016), is a garish, seedy and fabulously mean-spirited erotic thriller about bored models in LA. Its narrative is rudimentary and vague, its atmosphere an overwhelming sense of dread achieved through presenting striking imagery and sound design over overt storytelling. The horror of the film’s final segment has more to do with Refn taking pleasure in creating perverse tableaux than narrative logic or symbolic meaning.

The fourth and fifth episodes of Too Old to Die Young, which continue this trend, were pointedly debuted as a single ‘film’ at this year’s Cannes film festival. But Refn has gone on record to, rather impishly, describe both episodic television and feature filmmaking as ‘dead’, and streaming as something different to be reckoned with. The statement, antagonising both advocates of a new media order and hardcore cinema lovers, was dismissed by many as flippant, but it rings true when we look at the direction his filmmaking has been going in, and certainly when we watch Too Old to Die Young. It is a show fully committed to its own generic slipperiness, at odds with the narrative and character development demanded by prestige TV. Indeed, breathtaking visuals, a striking colour palette of red, blue and violet neons, elaborate sound design and sweeping score are the real priorities here, over the classical narrative drive and character work of long-form television.

The show is set in a Californian hellscape populated by a plethora of criminal underworlds, loosely connected by a bent cop called Martin, played with languorous restraint by Miles Teller. With a script by comic book writer Ed Brubaker, the dialogue is functional and pulpy, with occasional bursts of mad, visionary psychosis, typically reserved for John Hawkes’ fascistic killer Viggo, Jena Malone’s elusive psychiatrist Diana and a bizarre recurring cameo from Hart Bochner as comically overblown cop caricature ‘Lieutenant’. These speeches, absurd even in context, feel at times almost like satirical jabs at the art of the well-written TV show, with its inherent need to condense the hang-ups of characters through neat speechifying and easy summations of an episode’s theme.

Dialogue is mostly beside the point, as is character development. We may develop a deeper understanding of the morose gangster Jesus (Augusto Aguilera) across the episodes, but the cod oedipal psychology is laid on too thick, his kinky sex scenes too protracted, his body too fetishised for this to feel like the goal. Likewise, the disturbing age gap between Martin and his school-age girlfriend Janey (Nell Tiger Free), and the bizarre sexual tension he shares with her father – a gleefully odious William Baldwin – both function as character development. But these are facets more entwined with the show’s obsession with creating nightmarish imagery, erotic tension and unease than with an overarching story arc.

There is something of Frank Miller’s Sin City (2005) in the stylised mosaic of crime worlds: the brutal Mexican cartel, the LA cops, the low-level drug dealers, seedy porn producers and overprivileged Hollywood kids partying in gargantuan luxury homes. These worlds are familiar from Grand Theft Auto, and the gliding camerawork and bursts of violence often ape a gaming aesthetic. However, the reference points remain primarily cinematic. There is the charged tension of Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) in the Mexico-set desert scenes, as well as bursts of exquisitely staged slow-mo violence and gore. There are hints of Sergio Leone’s obsession with weighted looks exchanged between hard-boiled characters. The flashy neons and jittery, cokey edge recall William Friedkin, particularly his Cruising (1980) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), as well as Walter Hill’s nervy crime thrillers. But there are also visual references to gay porn and S&M, while the lethargic pacing, deliberate framing and languorous visual style echo everything from the work of Aki Kaurismäki and Claire Denis to the high priests of slow cinema: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Bela Tarr and Lav Diaz. For a television show to begin from these starting points is refreshing and invigorating. For the prioritisation of style itself to be the main purpose feels radical. Too Old to Die Young shows Refn preoccupied with sensation. Style itself is the purpose.