Everything is too busy these days. This may seem strange to say coming out of a pandemic that largely slowed everyone and everything down to a halt, but our current rush to regain normalcy in an ostensibly post-pandemic world has only brought back the stresses many of us didn’t realize were weighing on us pre-pandemic. In other words, our current hyper-capitalist reality is a real bummer. It’s in this state of mind that I caught up with and finished the little seen (and now cancelled) AMC drama Lodge 49, which proved to be a balm for my own sense of uneasiness as well as a sneaky proposal for a way of living that elides all of that misery.
Lodge 49 follows Sean “Dud” Dudley (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s Wyatt Russell) a year after his father’s disappearance at sea. Adrift and afflicted with the lingering pain of a seemingly never healing snake bite, he stumbles onto Lodge 49, a masonic brotherhood located in his very own South Beach and owned by a group known as The Order of the Lynx. He joins the Lynx in the hopes of recovering a sense of purpose in his life and soon becomes enmeshed in the lives of the members.
From there we follow the comedic and philosophical journeys that Dud and the members of the Order of the Lynx — including Ernie (Brent Jennings), Connie (Linda Emond), and Dud’s sister Liz (Sonya Cassidy) — embark on, along with the strange, metaphysical rabbit holes they find themselves tumbling down. The synopsis alone makes Lodge 49 seem like nothing else on television currently or when it aired two years ago, and that’s even before you dive deep into the thematic throughlines the series explores.
Lodge 49 is a show that implores the importance of leisure and openly flouts the idea of having goals, and that in and of itself makes it remarkable in our current televisual landscape. In the Trump era, popular television relied on depictions of totalitarian hardship (The Handmaid’s Tale) or hyper-competent liberal protagonists who overcome all odds (Watchmen). It’s no wonder Lodge 49 never caught on: it just wants to have a beer and lay around, man. The inherent cultural assumption is that leisure itself isn’t important when, in this hyper-capitalist world only made worse by a global health crisis, leisure is more important than ever.
A defining characteristic of the show’s main characters is their ennui. They’re also largely miserable. Dud and Connie are functionally unemployed and Ernie and Liz are at dead-end jobs. They come alive within the lodge, a liminal space where their sense of purpose in the world is a bit clearer and almost feels tangible. It’s also a space where they can drink beers, goof off, and hold meetings about the precarious future of the financially troubled lodge.
Dud, Ernie, and Connie use their leisure time at the lodge to explore themselves and get to the core of their unhappiness. Ernie and Connie’s self-evaluation takes a more orthodox form, rehashing old loves and regrets, while Dud’s takes the form of a self-defined quest to uncover the many mysteries of Lodge 49. Dud’s own quest humorously turns Ernie and Connie’s storylines more surreal as the series progresses. There’s deep lore behind the lodge that is inspired by real life masonic lodges, but unlike other “mystery box” shows, the secrets of Lodge 49 function more as a shiny abstraction, clues that a viewer can explore if they want but that serve mostly as thematic decoration. The longer Dud investigates the strange alchemy-related history of the lodge, the more he accidentally recognizes ways to live his current life and how to be a functioning member of this community.
Liz is a keystone character despite not being part of the lodge. Similarly affected by the disappearance of her and Dud’s father, Liz works at a Hooters-type restaurant that functions as purgatory. The psychic weight of a large financial debt takes its toll on her as well. Despite all of this, she connects with coworkers and even manages to flirt with climbing the corporate ladder, her lack of ambition ironically propelling her forward even though her attitude towards her job causes her to backslide (an action she is aware of and completely embraces). It’s in this push and pull that Lodge 49 lives, teasing out deft characterization and anti-capitalist themes in funny and surprising ways.
A life of leisure isn’t always portrayed as idyllic. Lodge bartender/alchemy enthusiast Blaise (David Pasquesi) jumps at the opportunity to explore the Lodge with Dud, only to become obsessive and “burn the map of reality,” in his own words. What was a fun distraction becomes a high-intensity job, leading to Blaise’s nervous breakdown: a synecdoche of the show’s views towards mainstream society’s ideas of success and happiness. It also seems to be a sharp dig at the obsessive theory-minded viewer: don’t take all of this too seriously, the show tells them…have fun with it and enjoy the ride.
It’s easy to portray characters that are happy doing “nothing” when they have the financial means to do so, and that’s once more where Lodge 49 remains an outlier. The South Beach that the series depicts is largely in decay, with once thriving aircraft manufacturer Orbis completely shuttered, abandoned oil fields adorning several scenes, “successful” business people that are largely frauds, and characters consistently losing jobs or (in Dud’s case with his employment at a temp agency) changing them frequently. Few shows depict characters at the lower end of the class system, and only Lodge 49 depicts their economic struggles with a realistic sense of melancholic decency. Sure, they’ve been abandoned by both their local and federal economy, but at least they have their own self-made happiness with each other.
Lodge 49, both the series and the titular lodge, serves as the nexus point where harsh socioeconomic realities smash headway into mystical truths about the world and ourselves. It’s in this transcendental collision that these characters can find deeper meaning. What’s remarkable is that both Lodge 49 and Lodge 49 can essentially function the same way, illuminating both the characters and viewers to a new sense of being and to the idea that there’s so much more than our current hardships. Lodge 49 can lift you up closer to a higher sense of purpose, but it’s the dreamlike serenity of the eventual backslide that ultimately has you coming back for more.
