You learn a lot about a noir character by their coffee: sugar? cream? more whiskey than caffeine?
I’m cataloging every noir scene where coffee plays a role — rote and ritual, soul-dark or cream and sugar, served from dingy diners to shiny penthouses.
Despite his moniker being often paired with coffee, Sugar doesn’t drink it often.
Coffee only appears once in Sugar’s first five episodes, at a meeting between Bernie (left, Dennis Boutsikaris) and Sugar (right, Colin Farrell).
While the contrasting orders could play as Dennis is a pansy but Sugar is a hard-boiled detective, I read it as Dennis being a stereotypical Los Angeles yuppie-producer-asshole, while Sugar is not of that world.
It’s in keeping with other noir trappings which cast Sugar as an outsider.
SPOILERS ABOUND AFTER THIS POINT
for the whole series
turn back now if you don’t want those.
Speaking of outsiders not of this world: let’s talk about That Twist.
When I mentioned I’d started Sugar, a friend messaged “Very curious to get your eventual reaction to [thing redacted but you'll know it when it happens]”
By episode 6 I thought she’d given me too much credit and I’d missed an obvious mystery twist . . . then Sugar got shot at, moved his hand to deflect the bullet, my jaw dropped, and it clicked.
Noir worked as cover for a sci-fi in a similar way to how PI worked as cover for Sugar’s alien-ness.
The way Sugar’s weirdness, fancy car, obsession with movies, is excused by his doctor and others he runs into as affectations which go along with his strange vocation; viewers may excuse a secret society, the ability to speak a dozen languages from a few ‘intensive months of study,’ etc. as story machinations, the sort of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ many stories ask for, particularly ‘hard genre’ stories such as noir and sci-fi.
His superhuman metabolism, a secret society, the hand tremors, the spelling of ‘Djen,’ some of the more cryptic exchanges between Sugar and Ruby, a doctor pointing out Sugar’s fresh needle tracks — rather than jump to ‘alien’ conclusion, because we’re in noir we have plenty of reason to excuse those tropes.
For example, when Sugar told Melanie he wasn’t as drunk as her because of his absurd metabolism, I thought he could be
lying (paid the bartender to give him apple juice, or poured his drinks into a pot plant)
simply doing a functioning-alcoholic-good job at covering his inebriation
exaggerating his truly better-than-usual metabolism
Whatever the explanation, noir-heightened-ness lets things like that slide.
Instead his metabolism — like Ruby’s clandestine meetings with a handler, like the self-administered injections I thought would tie into Melanie’s sobriety journey — was a secret, fourth thing, hiding in plain sight.
One genre hiding inside another.
Speaking of, Sugar directly references The Night of the Hunter, a fantasy, fairy tale, parable, surrealist, stark-referencing-with-knuckles-tattood-LOVE-and-HATE noir, which also tips its hand in terms of genre bending.
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I’m well on record for liking films and TV which fuck around blurring genre lines; in the end for my money Sugar should have paid more attention to the episodic-story drivers, making its mystery / plot / clues work for its primary genre as much as it pushed the tone and style.
I also think while the twist is quite-foreshadowed, it kept that card in its pocket far too long, especially for a show who gives the protagonist voiceover stylisation — Sugar knows who and what he is, so obfuscating the majority of his identity for six episodes IS a cheat, as opposed to someone like Veronica Mars who tells us who she is in her opening address to us.
But the hard left from hardboiled noir to hard-sci-fi?
Pour it into my cup, inject it into my veins.