A man's gotta have a code, but there's a limit

A few thoughts about Bad Monkey

Hi, situation normies! Michael here. Like Walt Whitman, Situation Normal contains multitudes. To wit: sometimes I write about rad books & movies, especially crime stories, as I’m a crime novelist of the slacker noir variety. Enjoy!

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IMDb

If the internet is to be believed — always a dubious proposition — Omar Little from The Wire coined the phrase, “A man’s gotta have a code.” Omar definitely said that line, but it feels like John Wayne said it too. Or, maybe it was Henry Fonda. Or, Gary Cooper. Or, Lee Marvin. Or, some other badass gunslinger. Point is, the line feels like something out of a Western. Actually, the line feels like it explains the Western genre, or pretty much any story where good guys chase bad guys, or bad guys chase worse guys. Sure, the hero always has a personal motivation — money, love, revenge, etc. — but it’s their code that tells them what to care about, what to fight for, and if necessary, what to die for.

The code is the hero’s moral compass in an immoral world. It’s why Johnny Utah lets Bodhi ride a once-in-a-lifetime wave to his death at the end of Point Break.

The code is why Robert De Niro chooses to settle a score at the end of Heat (and ultimately dies for his trouble), instead of making his getaway when he has the chance.

The code is why Philip Marlowe murders his best friend, Terry Lennox, at the end of Robert Altman’s version of The Long Goodbye, even though Marlowe spent the entire movie trying to save Lennox.

These decisions are ethically complicated and legally dubious, but they are moral, as far as the hero’s code goes. Which brings me to Bad Monkey, an Apple TV+ adaption of Carl Hiaasen’s novel of the same name. Like most Carl Hiaasen novels, Bad Monkey feels like the Florida Man internet meme got a book deal. But where the meme serves up one-dimensional helpings of schadenfreude, Hiaasen’s books offer vivid, humanizing portraits of Florida’s kooks, schemers, philanderers, reprobates, dipshits, fools, heroes, and villains. Few of Hiaasen’s characters get what they want, but in the end, most get what they deserve.

Here’s a quick word about the premise of the show to bring you up to speed (or you can watch the trailer below):

Bad Monkey tells the story of Andrew Yancy (played by Vince Vaughn), a one-time detective demoted to restaurant inspector in Southern Florida. A severed arm found by a tourist out fishing pulls Yancy into the world of greed and corruption that decimates the land and environment in both Florida and the Bahamas. And yes, there’s a monkey.

There’s a lot to love about Bad Monkey. The source material is gold, as anyone who has ever picked up a Carl Hiaasen novel knows. (If you haven’t read his crime comedies, you should start). Bill Lawrence, who created Scrubs and co-created Spin City, Clone High, and Ted Lasso strikes the perfect balance between LOL and WTF — an essential skill for landing a crime comedy. And then there’s Vince Vaughn, who could read a phone book to a corpse and make me laugh. Also, the monkey is great.

But I don’t want to dive too deep into the plot, because I don’t want to spoil anything. Instead I want to tell you that what I love most about Bad Monkey is what it says about the limits of the hero’s code.

Vince Vaughn’s character, Andrew Yancy, lives by his code, and in a way, that’s his problem. It’s why he was demoted from detective on the Key West police force to food inspector (just go with it, as there’s always a certain amount of absurdity in a Hiaasen story). Yancy’s code is why he’s waging a one-man war against the asshole who built a McMansion next to his Key West cottage. And his code is why his love life is a mess.

Except, it’s not really the code’s fault, it’s Yancy’s fault. We love Yancy for the same reason we love all our hero’s — he’s determined to set things right, no matter the cost. But we also come to worry about Yancy for the same reason. As his father tells him, “if you don’t let anything go, you can’t hang on to the thing that matters.” Basically, what he’s saying is, pick our battles, son. Because if you don’t pick your battles, you’ll find yourself locked in an eternal fight with nothing to fight for, except a lifeless code that can’t love you back.

Which brings me to, well … everything. Every day of your life, you pick your battles (and let countless more go). Hopefully, we become pickier about the hills we won’t die on as we grow older. Personally, I’ve learned to decline countless battles and written off entire battlefields. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I care about something else more. The world provides an infinite buffet of challenges to my code, and so I could apply my code anywhere; but I am finite, and so I must choose with care where to enforce my code.

Everything else, as The Dude would say, we must abide. Otherwise, we are Walter, tilting at every windmill: rug pissers; pederast bowlers; censorious waitresses, despite the Supreme Court roundly rejecting prior restraint; nepo babies who are flunking social studies; rich fucks we suspect of faking their war wounds; trophy wives who owe money all over town, including to known pornographers; nihilist kidnappers who do not understand the rules of ransom, or apparently, nihilism; Vietnam. Everything for Walter, as the The Dude says, “is a fucking travesty.” Walter is right about those travesties, of course, but they aren’t hills worth dying on.

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Read Not Safe for Work, Laugh Your Butt Off

If you enjoyed this post, pick up a copy of Not Safe for Work, a slacker noir that fits somewhere on the shelf between Carl Hiaasen’s books and the Fletch novels. Find Not Safe for Work on Amazon, or all the other book places.

Stick Around and Chat

1. What’s your code?

2. Are you a Carl Hiaasen fan, or do you need to drop everything and pick up his books?

3. Besides Severance, what else should I watch on Apple TV+?

4. What battles did you skip?

5. What hill do you intend to die on?