My husband and I were talking about the show last night, and I brought up Sirk and Ray as touchstones for the approach of the show (as well as the obvious antecedents of PTA and Scorsese)—all filmmakers who have combined a generous, humane, and deeply realistic approach to character while operating in a heightened, artificial, sometimes frenetic visual style. I think Levinson’s approach is to make everything overwhelming, “too much.” The cinematography, the camera movement, the verbosity of the characters, the editing, the emotionally charged and expensive pop music cues so close in succession that they’re almost overlapping, the tense situations, the collision of genres, the wall-to-wall dicks and tiddies, the drugs and drinking. The point of excess for most creators is Levinson’s starting point.
Rue’s narration, I think, is meant to appear impartial and omniscient, but it’s also the unreliable, exaggerated, partly true, partly fabricated ramblings of a drug addict and habitual liar, as aware of itself as a controlled, artificial construct and convention that is also embarrassingly revealing as [S2E3 spoiler]
Lexi’s play/show-within-a-show (complete with its own aftershow interviews with the “cast”) in S2E3.
I think its “truth” is contextual, situational, and subject to infinite revision. One of the main themes of the show is the lies we tell ourselves and others in order to live, and so everything in the show may or may not be a lie.
[I think I may have inadvertently repeated things TWBB said just above, but in my defense I was mostly repeating things I said at home last night!]