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Is Everyone Acting: Roleplay Feelings For Your Music

It’s accepted that the stories told in Taylor Swift’s latest albums (Folklore and Evermore) are fictional. For example, in Folklore, she tells the story of a teenage love triangle. It’s assumed this was a fictional love triangle because she is known to have been in a stable relationship since 2016. And it just doesn’t feel right that she’d still be cut up about her breakup with Joe Jonas in 2008.  

So she made up a story to have something to sing about. What’s interesting about that? Well, music is typically an autobiographical form of art compared to, say, movies, short stories, paintings of flowers - particularly for singer-songwriters like Swift. We don’t assume that Coppola has a particular connection to Italian American crime families beyond their shared love of red sauce. Coppola made The Godfather because he likes to tell stories and make movies. But when a musician sings in the first person about love, a breakup, or a time they got super fucked up at a party, we assume that this is based on their personal experience. We expect singer-songwriters to sing us their memoirs. Didn’t Hall & Oates know some stuck up rich bitch? Didn’t Childish Gambino go to a summer camp and act kinda cringey the whole time? Didn’t Neil Young know some old guy? Didn’t LMFAO like partying? Didn’t Thom Yorke feel like a creep? Surely there was a time that Lil Wayne got his dick sucked by a groupie and really enjoyed it so he was all like “mmmm yeah I like that”? 

Taylor Swift is famous for her autobiographical music. Every song from her early albums can be tied back to a former love interest, one of a string of famous guys she dated from 2008 - 2016. This became a game for her fans to decode hidden meanings in her music so as to infer which celebrity she’s singing about. For example:

The song “Mr Perfectly Fine” from her Fearless era (2008 - but only released in 2021) is about Joe Jonas who she dated in 2008

The song “Dear John” from Speak Now (2010) is speculated to be about John Mayer who she dated from 2009 - 2010

The song “We Are Never Getting Back Together” from Red (2012) is rumoured to be about Jake Gyllenhaal who she dated from 2010 - 2011

The song “Style” from 1989 (2014) is apparently about Harry Styles who she dated from 2012 - 2013

In fact, it’s likely this game and relationship with her fans that has burnt Taylor out on autobiographical songwriting. Previously, her relationships didn’t survive more than one album cycle so her latest album could always be about the most recent breakup. But her current relationship with Joe Alwyn has survived through four albums - and she already made the album about how great things are and about how much she loves her bf... so what more is there to say? Given that she is happy, she can’t plumb her failed previous relationships for material anymore because it would suggest that she actually isn’t happy. And if she airs any greivances in her new music about relationship struggles then... we’ll know it’s about her and Joe and given that they’re still a couple, that doesn’t give them much privacy. So while she’s still singing in the first person, it’s easier to make up stories and roleplay feelings in her music. Taylor has actually claimed that she and Joe co-wrote some of the songs for Folklore and Evermore (he is credited under the pseudonym William Bowery). Sort of a shared creative writing exercise during lockdown, I guess. (If you feel like going down a rabbit hole: in a recent twist, Gawker has shared a conspiracy theory that Joe didn’t actually write these songs.)

Hip hop artists have more in common with singer songwriters than you may think: conventions for both genres dictate that the artist should be the author of the lyrics. And authenticity is prized in both genres. Anyone who’s into hip hop knows that authenticity is crucial in how artists tell their stories and self-mythologise. If you aren’t familiar: look up the drama around Rick Ross’ persona. He positioned himself as a drug dealing crime boss but had actually worked as a prison guard - which is seen as being on the wrong side of the cops and robbers game. You can also look up the persistent accusations that Drake has a ghostwriter. It can be a major knock to a rapper’s credibility when people question their realness. 

Despite the importance of authenticity in hip hop, there’s ongoing debate about the use of hip hop lyrics in criminal trials as evidence of a criminal lifestyle. A recent example is Young Thug’s arrest on RICO charges - prosecutors have used lyrics from his music and the music of his YSL label peers to support allegations that they are members of an organised crime syndicate. 

Earlier this year, a number of major artists (most notably Jay Z) expressed support for a change to US legislation to (generally) exclude rap lyrics from evidence in criminal trials. Jamal Bailey, one of the senators who authored the legislation, said: 

The right to free speech is enshrined in our federal and state constitutions. The admission of art as criminal evidence only serves to erode this fundamental right, and the use of rap and hip-hop lyrics in particular is emblematic of the systemic racism that permeates our criminal justice system.

Should artists be able to use hyperbole (and baseles posturing) and expect that people won’t take them at their word? Like maybe Ice Cube just can’t think of anything to rhyme with “day” except “AK”... and he wants us to believe that he’s cool and tough and dangerous, but equally expects that he won’t be taken literally. We know that Ice Cube is not routinely using an AK-47. It’s like when a drag queen says that her pussy is on fire. Many musicians are just feeling the fantasy, living that hip hop drag queen persona. 

But sometimes the parallels between lyrics and real life are just too on the nose and it must be irresistible for a prosecutor: like YNW Melly’s track “Murder On My Mind”, which he wrote two years before he (allegedly) murdered a couple of guys in his crew. And it would be one thing if “Murder On My Mind” were a conscious rap condemnation of murder and street violence... but it is not that. Quoth Melly: 

I wake up in the morning, I got murder on my mind AK-47's, MAC-11, Glocks, and nines And all these pussy niggas hating, tryna knock me off my grind But I can't let 'em do it, I got murder on my mind

Come on! That is for sure going to be brought up in court. Even before Melly was charged with the double murder, lyrics from “Murder On My Mind” were used in court as evidence that he had violated his probation (for other gun violence crimes). 

If you’re a rapper who wants to talk a lot of shit and not be held accountable for it, there are things you can do to protect yourself. One popular approach is actually straight out of Shakespeare: create a crazy alter ego!

Was't Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away, And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not. Hamlet denies it. Who does it, then? His madness.

Twas Slim Shady who fantisised about killing his ex-wife, never Marshall Mathers.  

Slim Shady is the fall guy for all the fucked up stuff Eminem wants to say, but also wants to be able to distance himself from. As a point of difference: check out “We Cry Together” from Kendrick’s latest album:

Is this a recreation of an argument Kendrick has had with his wife or is this a piece of creative writing about an anonymous couple somewhere in America? I don’t know. I believe most other songs on Mr Morale & The Big Steppers are from Kendrick’s perspective, are describing his experience. Kendrick’s music has historically been very autobiographical. That’s his family on the album cover. But the song is presented without context or commentary. We can’t know. 

“Kim” and “We Cry Together” are slightly unusual songs in that they are a true roleplay of dialogue. In “We Cry Together”, Kendrick has an acting partner - for “Kim”, Eminem plays both parts. Most other songs (in the whole canon of music) are like poems or essays - just a long passage of someone talking into the void. A soliloquy. As part of a song, a musician talks or sings, typically using the first person, and they tell us something. Oftentimes they are emotional as they speak: sad, excited, triumphant, horny, regretful. How are you ever to know if this thing you’re hearing is autobiographical or fiction? Maybe it doesn’t matter - but it’s precisely the kind of thing I want to know! I want to know what’s real and what’s pretend in music. Are you acting or is this really how you feel? Is this story true? It doesn’t mean that I’ll like a song less if it’s contents is fabricated but I’m a nosy gossip and I want to know. 

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A24 & Annapurna: Can A Patron Of The Arts Get Paid?

Two film studios, both alike in dignity, but with wildly different trajectories. Annapurna Pictures and A24 are studios with prestigious filmographies, famous for working with auteurs - but is it profitable to be a patron of the arts?

Contents of this blog:

Annapurna? I hardly know 'er! We look at Annapurna Pictures, the Ellison family, and how Annapurna landed itself in financial strife after being the most hyped production company of the early 2010s

How do film companies make money? This is something that I've always assumed that I understand but when I actually put my mind to it, I have no idea about how a production company actually makes money. How much of the box office cash does a production company get? Or does that just go to the distributor? Let's find out!

Will A24 face a similar financial fate to Annapurna? Let's do some quick math on the ROI of A24 films and compare their business model against Annapurna

Annapurna? I hardly know 'er!

Annapurna Pictures is a film production company founded and led by Megan Ellison. Ellison is the daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison, founder and exec of tech company Oracle.

The younger Ellison got started in the film industry by using her dad's money to finance movies. In her early 20s she worked on some flops that didn't really lead anywhere financially or critically. Then, according to Vanity Fair, "in 2011, on her 25th birthday, she received from her father what a source says was $200 million... The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman has reported a figure that is more often whispered about in town: a lump sum of $2 billion." Cashed up, Ellison founded Annapurna Pictures and began to work with the talent agency Creative Artists Agency to fund films from established prestige directors.

In a 2013 profile, a female writer at Vanity Fair described Ellison as "pretty but a bit overweight" (I'm not kidding!) and "the most talked-about independent financier in Hollywood". What's interesting about Annapurna (beyond the rich daddy backstory) is the crazy run of films they've released and the number of auteurs Ellison has worked with, especially so early in her career:

Kathryn Bigelow (Detroit and Zero Dark Thirty)

Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master and Phantom Thread)

The Coen brothers (True Grit, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs)

Spike Jonze (Her)

David O Russell (American Hustle, Joy)

Barry Jenkins (If Beale Street Could Talk)

Richard Linklater (Everybody Wants Some!! and Where'd You Go, Bernadette)

Curiously, Megan's brother David Ellison also has a production company - Skydance Pictures, founded in 2006. So Larry Ellison has funded two production companies for his kids?! Skydance is less discussed than Annapurna because it tends to produce idiotbrained movies like Geostorm and The Tomorrow War so David doesn't get the same glossy write-ups in Vanity Fair.

I told my software dev bf (Matt) that Larry Ellison had personally funnelled like a billion dollars into the American film industry to make his kids happy and Matt responded 'well I'm glad he's making somebody happy because everyone hates Oracle'. Matt also provided this apparently iconic quote on the evils of Larry Ellison and Oracle.

^^^ Larry, Megan and David

The Annapurna hype was undeniable in the early 2010s because they dropped so many Oscar players from 2011 - 2014. Banger after banger. A24 is similarly hyped today but what sets A24 apart is that they tend to take chances on lesser known talent - for e.g. A24 has produced or distributed early feature films of Robert Eggers, Ari Aster, Greta Gerwig, Alex Garland, Bo Burnham, Barry Jenkins (first $1 million+ budget), Dennis Villeneuve (first English language film), and Yorgos Lanthimos (first English language film).

All of the above might sound like Ellison is an old school patron of the arts, giving away her trust fund so the Coen brothers can make more movies. But Annapurna is actually a for-profit business. The Vanity Fair profile on Ellison from 2013 discusses the balancing act Annapurna faces in funding films from Ellison's fave directors and touches on the naivety of mixing art and commerce. Quoth one source: "Megan is arrogant and thinks she can re-invent the wheel... She suffers from a chronic case of rich-itis.”

So in the early 2010s Annapurna quickly generated a lot of hype by releasing films from indie darlings and garnered substantial awards attention along the way - these were films that were typically smaller budget and turned a small profit (if any) but were critically well received and often got awards play. The problem was, in the mid-2010s, Annapurna had a run of duds: Detroit tanked. Vice tanked (reportedly losing Annapurna $15 million). Phantom Thread didn't make any money. Missing Link lost tens of millions. Of the 14 films Annapurna released between 2014 - 2018, they had one decent hit: Sausage Party, which made $140 million on a $20 million budget. Stories emerged in 2018 that Annapurna was in financial trouble. Quoth a source at the time: "I don’t care how much money daddy gives you—you have to make something turn a profit." By August 2019 Annapurna was facing bankruptcy with $200 million in debt. The company was later bailed out by Larry Ellison and is still kicking around but has been relatively quiet since then (which may also be attributable to the pandemic). For Annapurna, producing arthouse movies for critics, film school kids, and the awards crowd has not been profitable - they have required the support of a billionaire backer to kickstart the company and keep it afloat.

As I mentioned above, Annapurna seems to have a similar approach to A24. They fund indie passion projects - they're in it for the art. But Annapurna got themselves $200 million in debt by only producing art they believed in, so how does the future look for A24? Can a company like A24 can be profitable while acting as a patron of the arts - or does it require billionaire backers to keep a business afloat?

But first: let's learn a bit more about how producers get paid.

How do film companies make money?

Accounting in the entertainment industry is infamously arcane, so I'll try to keep this high level.

Who are the main players?

Producer - The organisation that bankrolls, coordinates, and is responsible for actually making the movie. These are sometimes also known as 'studios'.

Distributor - The organisation that markets the film and arranges for the film to be made available to the public via screenings in theatres, production of DVDs, etc.

In some cases, the producer and the distributor are the same company or are closely related - for example, Avengers: Endgame was produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures which are both subsidiaries of The Walt Disney Company.

Where can money be made?

Movies can make money via theatre box office, streaming syndication, BluRay steel box sales, merchandise, etc. But the primary avenue and quickest return is box office - this is the metric that is typically used to determine whether a film has been a success or not.

How do distributors and producers work together?

This is all subject to individual agreements and may change from film to film, but in general there are two forms of agreement that a distributor might make with a production studio:

Profit sharing: the distributor and the production company split the downstream profits of the film. For example, the distributor may have a gross points arrangement with the producer.

Leasing: the distributor pays a fee to acquire the rights to distribute the film - profits made will largely be kept by the distributor (although there may also be a gross points arrangement). When Netflix has exclusive distribution rights for a film, we could safely assume that they are using some form of leasing agreement with the production studio because (1) films released on Netflix tend not to make much at the box office and (2) it's difficult to extrapolate profitability from Netflix's viewership and subscription numbers (although I'm sure they have methods of roughly approximating this).

It's something of a gamble for producers in terms of which arrangement is likely to be of the greatest benefit to them. You may be able to lease a film to a distributor for a modest profit and call it a day or you can gamble on seeking a cut of downstream profits, but audiences are fickle and these profits may never materialise.

As an example...

For any given film, it's difficult for an outsider to know what form of distribution arrangement the film had and therefore how to calculate whether the film would have made or lost money for the producer and distributor. In the end, for a film to be profitable, a film needs to make more in sales than it cost to produce and market. There are some rule of thumb calculations we can use to roughly calculate overall profitability and to determine whether the film was a win or a loss for the studio and distributor.

Let's look at an example to determine roughly whether it was profitable or not. Note: box office and budget info on Wikipedia can be inaccurate but let's just go with it. All of the following figures are in US dollars. Wikipedia puts Dunkirk's production budget at $100 - $150 million. Let's split the diff and say $125 million. According to Forbes, the marketing budget was $135 million. So $260 million in up front costs. Dunkirk made $527 million at the box office. As a rough rule of thumb, 50% of box office profits are kept by the theatre - this may vary based on deals, distributor, and even country but let's just go with 50%. So assuming the theatres took 50% of that $527 million, about $263 million might make it back to the studio and distributor. Subtracting the $260 million for production and marketing, this would give them only $3 million in clear profit. The film then would go on to make more through digital sales and rentals, streaming, etc.

So after production and marketing costs, a film needs to more than double its budget in box office takings to begin to see a profit. To keep making movies, studios need to do more than cover their expenses - they need to make a profit to be able to pay dividends to investors and fund future projects.

What's to stop A24 facing a similar financial fate to Annapurna?

As I've mentioned, A24 and Annapurna play in the same sandpit: they primarily work on movies that the studio considers art, there are no cynical cash grabs in their filmographies. I'm curious if A24 is in a similar financial position to Annapurna - and if not, why not?

So let's do some high level accounting with A24's filmography to see if their films generally make or lose money. I'm making the following assumptions:

Only looking at box office takings (because I just know I'm never gonna find details on the DVD sales of films like First Reformed)

Movie theatres keep 50% of box office takings

Marketing budget is 10% of production budget. It's difficult to say how much is actually spent on marketing for these kind of indie films (and it's not information that is available online) so I'm being conservative - for basically any of these films that you've actually heard of, I'd assume the marketing budget was significantly more than 10%

I'm only looking at films released up to the end of 2021 so they've had a decent stretch in theatres.

In this Google sheet, I've charted the budget, guesstimated marketing costs, box office, and a rough profit/loss based on those figures. For lots of movies, the budget wasn't available so I've excluded these from the final total - these were typically movies I've never heard of so I'd assume they weren't big money makers. Of the 60 films where I was able to calculate profit/loss, 26 were profitable at the box office. Of the 50-ish other films where I couldn't calculate profitability (because I couldn't find enough data) only a few look like they might have been profitable - e.g. The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lamb, The Children Act. Overall it looks like A24 is running a significant loss on their films based on box office takings. I've arrived at A24 taking a $32 million loss but this is really just indicative based on my assumptions above and very rough calculations. Still, I think this is finger-in-the-air accurate and the finger points to A24 movies not recouping their costs at the box office. There is then streaming, DVD sales, etc. but the box office is generally a good indicator of public interest: a box office bomb is unlikely to perform much better via digital rentals.

As a disclaimer, obviously the pandemic has fucked up two years of releases so I'm sure every studio has had a rough run since Feb 2020. Before the pandemic, A24 had some big hits (Lady Bird, Hereditary, Midsommar, The Farewell) that probably worked well to cover their loses on other films. But since 2019, A24 has only had one film that turned a profit at the box office: Minari, which looks like it would have made at least $5 million profit. A24 didn't produce Minari so it's hard to say what portion of those profits they would actually have received.

From my digging, it looks like A24 has worked under both profit sharing and leasing agreements. This court case reveals a bit about the distribution deal for A24's second ever release, Spring Breakers - which was actually a film produced by Annapurna. Annapurna engaged A24 as the distribution partner for Spring Breakers, and the suit tells us that:

This was a profit sharing arrangement with A24 receiving 20% of profits

While A24 arranged the marketing, the marketing costs were actually covered by another party (Annapurna?)

The esteemed Mr. Harvey Weinstein (and the Weinstein Company) had offered to purchase the rights to the film (under a leasing agreement) for $2.25 million

Then this oral history describes A24 going on a 'spending spree' in their second year of operation (2014) and refers to them purchasing movie rights, so I'm assuming A24 had leasing arrangements - presumably funded off the back of their Spring Breakers success. This means A24 would largely bear the brunt of financial losses on these films as they paid out of pocket to acquire the film and then paid for the marketing. Of course, A24 also has TV deals (e.g. Euphoria with HBO) and, thanks to their popularity, also sell merch, but on paper they don't appear to be slam dunk profitable.

It's interesting to note that A24 initially started out exclusively as distributors and have moved increasingly into the production game. This is the opposite path taken by Annapurna which worked solely in production for years and then launched a distribution division in early 2017. When Annapurna faced bankruptcy in 2019, Indiewire noted: "The company’s financial woes began in full after it decided to start its own distribution arm to release its productions, beginning with Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit.” Since then, nearly every Annapurna release has been a box office bomb for the studio. Variety reported in March [2019] that only one movie has turned a profit for Annapurna since it launched a distribution arm: Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You.”

Another point of difference with Annapurna is that the three founders of A24 all had experience in film production and financing before they founded the company. In fact, 'twas founder Daniel Katz' former employer Guggenheim Partners that provided "a few million in seed money" to start A24. This Hollywood Reporter article from 2014 actually says that A24 is owned by Guggenheim Partners. As of 2018, Guggenheim had sold their stake to MRC which is owned by Eldridge Industries, a holding company with a net worth in the billions. Cute arthouse film company you've got there... sure would be a shame if it was owned by a billion dollar investment firm, sure would be a shame if your sweet little indie cinema business was sold around town, passed from one LLC to the next like any other asset. Indie really doesn't exist.

So A24 actually has a billionaire backer too - apparently MRC/Eldridge only has a 'minority stake' in A24 but whatever ("I own 49% of this company!"). A24 also appears to rely on bank loans to operate, so at some point it has to turn a profit. Larry Ellison will keep pumping money into Annapurna because he loves his daughter - but cold hearted industry guys in Hollywood board rooms wouldn't bail out A24 unless there was something in it for them.

Remember what those snarky industry sources said about Megan Ellison: "I don’t care how much money daddy gives you—you have to make something turn a profit." No one seems to talk this way about A24 but on paper they don't seem to be doing that much better financially. But despite how it looks, A24 must be doing okay: the explored acquisition in 2021 with a reported price of $2.5 - $3 billion - supposedly Apple was interested. And then in early March 2022, A24 announced a $225 million equity deal - this amount apparently bought the investors less than a 10% stake in the company so A24's valuation is still sitting at $2.5 billion (ish).

So why is A24 valued in the billions while Annapurna nearly went bankrupt? Without actually seeing their accounts, it's difficult to say - spitballing some ideas:

Sources indicated that Megan Ellison and Annapurna were perhaps not prudent in how they spent money on film production. Blowing out the production budget makes it harder to recoup costs

A24 may be particularly canny in how they strike deals and run their operation meaning the business covers its costs or turns a profit even if the film they're releasing isn't profitable

A24 was founded by industry veterans using investor money whereas Annapurna was founded by a wealthy outsider using her own (father's) money. Having skin in the game (i.e. no trust fund) and pushy investors may be a more powerful motivation to turn a profit

Annapurna launched Annapurna Interactive in 2016 as a video game publisher. Annapurna Pictures never attracted the kind of rabid fandom that A24 did, but Annapurna Interactive is very popular with gamers so this venture appears to have been a success... but maybe video game publishing has actually been a drain on business funds which contributed to the bankruptcy?

A24 and Annapurna appear to be working on similar types of films, but Annapurna films typically have a much higher budget. Annapurna budgets appear to typically be $30-40 million. A24 budgets are generally smaller - more like $10 million. Losing money on a $2 million movie like First Cow is a lot less damaging than losing money on a $30 million movie like Detroit

The movies where A24 has dipped their toe into production as well as distribution typically seem to turn a decent profit (Uncut Gems, Midsommar, Mid90s) which may keep things rolling and increase interest in A24 as a production joint

I think this is the most likely explanation: the A24 brand is very valuable - maybe not worth billions but certainly worth something even if the business itself is not wildly profitable. People get excited about a movie because A24 is distributing it - A24 has such good taste that their decision to work on a film is a marketing point. Such is the hype around A24 that they could probably create their own streaming platform and compete with the Criterion Channel and maybe even HBO? This kind of reputation would certainly play a part in a valuation when a company like Apple begins sniffing around - A24 will confer a lot of credibility to any entertainment business that acquires them. As to why Annapurna has missed out on this juice? It may just be a marketing issue

Further reading: a likely bogus copy of A24's 2019 annual report is available online. I haven't included this in any of my calculations above because I don't trust the financials in this report - the income column in the theatrical releases table (numbered page 8/PDF page 12) includes dummy figures. The report is hosted on a graphic designer's website and I suspect is available only as an example of her work with the actual financial figures redacted. This would explain why the figures in the report don't make sense (why would net income be higher than gross?) but that may also just be my reading of it. It's still an interesting read if only to see a template A24 may have used for this kind of reporting

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Be My Bodyguard: Child Sex Abuse at Home

Here are three edgy tweets on child sexual abuse and parents. Some of these are red pilled and hostile - but let's not allow the phrasing to throw us off what might be an interesting idea.

Tweet one:

(This account has been suspended so I can't link to the original tweet.)

Tweet two:

Some more on this: the claim is straight-up wrong. We know that sexual abuse is not restricted to just dads and stepdads, any person in a child's life might abuse them - teachers, coaches, priests, babysitters, other relatives, strangers at the bus stop, etc. Suggesting that there is a direct line between a woman leaving the biological father of her child and a complete stranger abusing that child seems dumb. (But is it dumb? In Journey Into Darkness, John E. Douglas mentions that some predators traget children from single-parent homes because they're more likely to be vulnerable. But that's not the point Covfefe Anon is trying to argue so no points for that. I'll loop back around to this later when we discuss fatherlessness.)

Looking specifically at the dad/stepdad sub-set of abusers, it may be true that stepdads are more apt to be abuse children in their care. In the thread on Twitter, Covfefe Anon acknowledges that the data above is actually for physical abuse rather than sexual abuse (which is presumably categorised separately). So Covfefe Anon backs up their point with the a screenshot from this PDF (see the last paragraph on page 9).

The relevant stats from the PDF are (paraphrasing):

In a survey of 930 San Francisco women, of those with a stepfather as a primary father figure before the age of 14, 17% had been abused by their stepfather(s). Only 2% of women who had been raised by their biological father reported being sexually abused by their father. Here's the full article (I haven't read it)

9,000 Finnish 15 year olds were asked to complete a questionnaire. Of those who completed the survey, 3.7% of girls who lived with a stepfather (or equivalent) reported that he had sexually abused them compared to 0.2% of girls living with their biological father. Here's the full article (I haven't read it)

Tweet three:

What links these tweets is a commentary about the decay of the traditional family unit and how this endagers children, through exposing children to strange men in the home and through raising children without a father. I'm also detecting a thread of women being blamed for child sex abuse in the home - even when they aren't the perpetrator. So, I want to look at:

Part 1: Sins of the father: Is it true that biological fathers are less likely to sexually abuse their children than stepfathers? Are stepparents really the most dangerous people in a child's life compared to strangers, creepy uncles, etc.?

Part 2: Is it dangerous to not live with dad? Why is living in a single parent household a risk factor for child sex abuse?

And to conclude: Are there risks you can control?

Disclaimers:

I grew up with loving, generous, supportive stepparents who have been a super positive influence in my life. People I know with stepparents (e.g. my partner) have always reported similar relationships

For succinctness, I use the term stepparent/stepdad as a catch-all but know that this also includes parents' partners like boyfriends and girlfriends, etc. These distinctions seem blurry and variable in most of the articles I've looked at - for example, it's not clear if Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) stats referring to stepfathers also include boyfriends and unmarried partners

As I've worked on this, I'm realising there's some haziness around adopted kids. They likely aren't living with their biological father but also aren't necessarily living with a stepparent. I can't be bothered investigating this and seeing if the stats differ but wanted to acknowledge this gap in the post

I'm focusing on the stepdad scenario for child sexual abuse because it is the most common (because the majority of child sexual abuse is committed by men)

A caveat with everything I'm discussing: child sexual abuse is likely to be underreported. Most of the data in Part 1 is self-reported abuse from victims completing surveys, but the data may still be skewed or incomplete

I recently had a baby out of wedlock so I have skin in the game

Part 1: Sins of the father

I've spent around an hour surfing Google Scholar for articles with concrete numbers comparing rates of biological and step father child sexual abuse and have not been able to find much.

In terms of Australian data, the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) has some detailed data on who abuses children in Australia (this article was published in 2014 and seems to rely on data from roughly 2005 - 2009). The AIFS cites the following:

"[T]he majority of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by males"

"[R]esearch suggests that a far greater number of child sexual abuse offences are perpetrated by adults who are not in a caregiver role"

"Findings from the ABS Personal Safety Survey (2005) indicated that for participants who had experienced sexual abuse before the age of 15, only 13.5% identified that the abuse came from their father/stepfather, 30.2% was perpetrated by other male relative, 16.9% by family friend, 15.6% by acquaintance/neighbour, and 15.3% by other known person (ABS, 2005)"

The ABS puts the total number of Australians who have experienced child sexual abuse at 1,294,000. This is from 2005 when the population was 20.39 million - so the ABS is saying roughly 6% of the population. This seems low compared to a lot of other stats online. For example, this meta-analysis puts the numbers at 7.9% of men and 19.7% of women suffering some form of sexual abuse prior to the age of eighteen. Even if the ABS numbers are low, I hope the characteristics are roughly correct.

Here's the data from the ABS Personal Safety Survey (2005) cited by the AIFS (see page 42 if my screenshot is hard to read):

The relevant row is the Father/Step Father row under the Relationship to perpetrator heading. An issue with most data I've found on this subject is that boyfriends and partners often aren't clearly categorised in the data - for example, would the Father/step father row also include boyfriends and partners?

Annoyingly, the ABS has grouped biological fathers and stepfathers in a single category. Based on the two studies brought to us by Covfefe Anon above, we might expect stepfathers to make up the dominant part of those numbers. Still, I'd like to deduce what proportion of the 13.5% figure for fathers (from the table above) is attributable to stepdads so I'm going to do some horribly hacky extrapolation based on this study (the Finnish one we looked at earlier in relation to Covfefe Anon's tweet and which has very conservative numbers) and the numbers in the table above. I'll include my calculations and assumptions in case I get anything wrong:

Looking at the data for fathers in the table above, the ABS is estimating that 175,100 Australians have experienced child sexual abuse at the hands of a father fugure - either their biological father or a stepfather

This is from 2005 when the population was 20.39 million - so the ABS is saying rougly 0.8% of Australians had been sexually abused by a father figure - either their biological father or a stepfather

I'm going to use this study based on the Finnish schoolgirl survey to segment out abuse by father vs stepfather. The study found 0.5% of girls had reported any sexual contact with a father or stepfather. That's slighty lower than the ABS number of 0.8% but some of that difference would be explained by the inclusion of boys in the ABS figure

Based on the Finnish study, 0.2% of girls who lived with their father reported that he had sexually abused them. Let's bump that to 0.3% to account for abuse of boys by biological fathers

So maybe 0.3% of the 20.39 million Australians in 2005 had been sexually abused by their biological father figure? That would land us at around 61,170 people. So 61,170 out of the 175,100 total

We could then infer that the remaining 113,930 cases from 175,100 total were perpetrated by a stepfather

So I think our indicative percentages are as follows:

(As with the ABS data, the percentages do not sum perfectly to 100 as more than one perpetrator may have been involved in the abuse.)

Australian census data from 2011 indicates that "71% of children lived with both natural parents, 4% were in step-families, and 5% were in blended families." (If you want ths ABS' definitions for these family types, refer to page 3 in this doc.) So roughly 29% of children live in some form of blended, step, or single parent household meaning they may have non-biological father figures around. Given that only 29% of Australian children live in a home where they may be exposed to stepparents, that would suggest that stepfathers are a lot more likely to sexually abuse children in their care than biological fathers. They make up, at most, one third of dads but commit twice as much sexual abuse.

That said, the following people still committed more child sexual abuse than biological fathers or stepfathers:

Other male relatives (uncle, sibling, grandfather, etc.) - in 30.2% of cases

Family friends - in 16.3% of cases

Acquaintences/neighbours - in 15.6% of cases

Other known persons - in 15.3% of cases

As I mentioned earlier, it's not clear to me where unmarried partners and boyfriends would be classified by the ABS - possibly under Other Known Persons? As a point of comparison, I've found some US data on child sex abuse in the The 2010 US Fourth National Incidence Study of Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4) that segments biological parents from non-biological parents. The NIS-4 found (see page 195):

Only small percentages of children were maltreated by an out-of-home biological parent (3.3%), by out-of-home nonbiological parent (0.1%), or by their parent’s boyfriend or girlfriend (2.4%).

The percentages above are for all forms of neglect and abuse (physical, emotional, etc.). This table (from page 197) provides more specific detail on sexual abuse:

The percentages and proportions here differ pretty significantly from the ABS data. Biological parents have now overtaken stepparents as abusers. The percentage of abuse committed by nonbiological parents and partners has also increased - this may be higher than the ABS numbers if the ABS categorised boyfriends/partners under Other Known Persons or Acquaintances, etc.

(Just to note, the total of maltreated children figure in the NIS-4 may look low compared to the ABS numbers. This is because the NIS-4 is looking at instances of abuse within the survey period of 2005 - 2006 whereas the ABS collected data on any historical abuse experienced in a person's lifetime.)

I don't know what to make of these differences - is one set of statistics way off? Are dads in America just more sexually abusive for some reason? Out of curiosity, I looked up child sex abuse stats for some other countries.

In England and Wales, 7% of surveyed victims reported being subject to sexual assault by rape or penetration by their father vs 8% by a stepfather

In New Zealand (see page 5), 9% of surveyed victims reported being sexually abused by their father vs 6% by a stepparent

In these studies the rates of father vs stepfather abuse are similar but remember that there are roughly three times as many biological dads as there are stepparents (assuming roughly one third of households have stepparents in the mix) so stepdads to appear to be more dangerous to a child than its biological father. Both of these studies had the same old issue of figures related to boyfriends/partners not being clearly labelled, so these numbers might move a bit depending on where boyfriends are categorised.

There is no agreement on the real prevalence of child sexual abuse. Some studies have very high estimates - e.g. that 70% of US women were sexually abused as kids, whereas others place this number at closer to 10%. Given the level of uncertainty around what proportion of people have been abused, it's not surprising that the data on perpetrators is sketchy. Based on my research above, it does seem that stepdads are more likely to sexually abuse children in their care than biological fathers. But stepdads still appear to abuse kids at a lesser rate than opportunistic strangers or other men in their lives - even other relatives.

Part 2: Is it dangerous to not live with dad?

Everything I've read indicates that living in a single parent household is a risk factor for child sexual abuse (sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). As I mentioned earlier, Covfefe Anon's tweet at the top was not specifically about this, but they may have been inadvertently correct that a mother leaving her partner to live alone does put a child at increased risk of abuse. But why is that?

Looking through those sources above (this one is especially relevant to my point), you'll notice other risk factors related to the family home include poverty, parents doing drugs or struggling with mental illness, low education levels, and domestic violence. It seems that in general anything that might make a family home suboptimal is a risk factor - a broken home or non-nuclear family is just one way in which a family home could be shitty. It's not the only risk factor and it's not necessarily the most significant. Although, when you look at the other risk factors, it is certainly the most socially accceptable.

The out of wedlock birth rate is on the rise in Australia, increasing from roughly 10% in 1970 to 35% in 2017.

(Noting that despite the hysteria, a child born out of wedlock won't necessarily be raised without a father figure.)

The divorce rate in Australia has actually dropped slightly since 2000 but this might just be a consequence of the declining marriage rate. In any case, the structure of Australian families is changing. So if single family or blended family homes were meaningfully increasing the risk of child sex abuse, would we expect to see an increase in child sex abuse since the 1970s (when the out of wedlock birth rate began to jump)? Or is this abuse that would have occurred regardless now just happening in a different setting?

Trying to determine if child sex abuse has increased is confounded by a couple of things:

There isn't good data dating back to the 1970s (or at least, nothing I could find)

Child sex abuse is reported a lot more than it used to be, but it's difficult to say whether this is attributable to an increase in reporting abuse as compared to an actual increase in the prevalence of abuse. For example, this Victorian sentencing data for 2010 - 2019 (see PDF page 4) doesn't appear to show an increase in child sex offences over that period.

People who amplify the broken home sex abuse risk factor tend to be conservative commentators bemoaning the dissolution of the nuclear family. (For example, this line of argument seems to have been of particular interest to Bettina Arndt who wrote about it for The Sydney Morning Herald and was involved with this 'issue analysis' from the think tank Centre for Independent Studies.) This forms part of a larger discourse about the tearing of the social fabric related to fatherlessness. Interestingly, there does seem to be a clustering of child sex abuse risk factors and risks associated with fatherlessness. According to Fathers dot com, "children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems." So poverty, mental health, substance abuse, and non-traditional family structure are all correlated - and these all also happen to be risk factors for child sex abuse.

The ultimate risk factor for child sexual abuse seems to be weak family or community structures to protect children from predation. Fatherlessness is a symptom of this, along with parental drug use, domestic violence, and mental health issues. So the commentators advocating for a return to good old fashioned family values may have a point about how to protect children in your home. But! Reducing risk factors doesn't address the root problem of rapist pedophiles in society. If you create a safe, traditional home for your kids and thwart a pedophile who might otherwise have abused your children in your home, I believe that pedophile will just find a different kid or different setting to exploit. I don't believe that fixing the issue of fatherlessness reduces the base rate of pedophiles.

And to conclude: Are there risks you can control?

Even if you do everything right, your kid might still be abused. There may also be risk factors as a parent that you can't control - for example, being poor. But based on the research I've done for this post, here's some some practical steps that should be within your control:

Take the risk of child sex abuse seriously. It is more common than you may realise so don't be complacent. The data is fuzzy but likely somewhere between 10 - 25% of kids are sexually abused. (This number seems high and it is scary - but maybe also comforting in a way. If child sex abuse is this common, it does suggest that abused children are generally able to recover and live relatively normal lives depending on the nature of the abuse, etc.)

The vast majority of child sex abuse is carried out by men - so be cautious of leaving your child alone with men or male adolescents. For example, hire female nannies and carers; if you're leaving your kid with friends or family, ensure a woman will be present the entire time

Girls are two to three times more likely to be abused than boys so be extra careful with female children

The majority of abuse (more than 90%) occurs in children aged 5 years and older (see page 42 in PDF). Nearly 50% occurred in children aged 9 - 14 years. From a young age, children have enough autonomy to speak and express preferences. Empower your child so they know what is and isn't okay in terms of contact and affection. Teach them to trust you so they tell you when something doesn't seem right and to yell for help when they need to

John Douglas (Mr. Mindhunter) included advice in his book Journey Into Darkness on child safety and how to prevent and detect abuse - I've roughly copied some of this advice below:

What you can do to prevent child abuse

Know where your children are at all times. Be familiar with their friends and daily activities.

Be sensitive to changes in your children's behaviour

Be alert to a teenager or adult who is paying an unusual amount of attention to your children

Teach your children to trust their own feelings and assure them that they ave the right to say NO to what they sense is wrong

Listen carefully to your children's fears, and be supportive in all your discussions with them

Teach your children that no one should approach them or touch tem in a way that makes them feel uncomforable. If someone does, they should tell your immediately

Basic rules of safety for children

As soon as your children can articulate a sentence, they can begin the process of learning how to protect themselves against exploitation. Children should be taught:

If your are in a public place and get separated from your parents, go to a checkout counter or the security office and quickly tell the person in charge that you have lost your parents and need help finding them

You should not get in a car or go anywhere with someone unless your parents have told you that it is okay

Grown-ups and other older people who need help should not be asking children for help; they should be asking older people. No one should be asking you for directions

If someone tries to take you somewhere, quickly get away from them and yell "This person is not my parent! They are trying to take me away!"

If someone follows you on foot or in a car, stay away from them.

If someone speaks to you from a car, you don't need to go near the car to talk to the people inside

You should try to use the buddy system and never go places alone

[pinelife3]

So I don't forget what it was like to give birth

In The Bell Jar, our protagonist visits a hospital with her med student boyfriend, Buddy, and witnesses a woman in labour:

Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she'd had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn't know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep. I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

I gave birth around two weeks ago. Much to my disappointment, I didn't get any of these good drugs from the hospital - but already I've started to forget what childbirth felt like. Holding a beautiful baby is probably also a drug that makes you forget.

When I was in labour at home, curled up on the couch scream-groaning in animalistic pain, I swore to myself I'd never do it again - but the plan is to have another baby in a year or two so I will need to do it again. Apparently it is easier (or at least quicker) the second time around. I'm writing this to document some of the specifics of my labour and how I felt so I don't forget more than I already have.

Here's me at 38 weeks:

Labour

What's crazy is that the contractions were pain that my body created for itself, generated internally for my exclusive benefit. As part of the natural course of giving birth, billions of women have felt this same pain - at the time though, it felt uniquely terrible. I felt like I was dying.

I started having contractions around 1pm on Thursday 6th of January - initially, they were irregular cramps that were uncomfortable but I was still walking around and feeling okay. I cleaned the kitchen that afternoon because I knew I was going into labour and wanted to have a tidy kitchen when we came home. Matt went to the shops to get snacks for our hospital stay.

We went to the Royal Women's Hospital around 8pm - by that time, I was having increasingly painful contractions roughly every five minutes. I waited in the emergency room for more than two hours before seeing the admissions/assessment midwife. Because of Covid restrictions, Matt had to anxiously wait in the car park. Bleakly, we messaged each other every so often to check-in and smiled through the window. While I was waiting in the emergency room, I overheard the triage nurse ask a woman how bad her pain was on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst pain imaginable. I thought about this in terms of my own contractions and put myself at around a six or seven.

Around 11pm, the admissions midwife sent us home because my contractions weren't close enough together - apparently I wasn't in active labour yet. The midwife gave us a number to call when I was having contractions that lasted for a minute and came every two - three minutes.

Overnight, I didn't sleep because my contractions were too painful. Matt probably didn't get much sleep either because of my restless wailing. Strangely, I've forgotten how the contractions felt. I know how to describe them: "worse than the worst period cramps you've ever had, and coming in like waves, always getting worse, and when you get a moment of relief between waves you can't rest because you know more pain is on the way." But I've forgotten specifically what a contraction felt like as a sensation in my body. The moaning during the contractions was involuntary - I'd seen videos of other women in labour and couldn't imagine making those kind of noises but it happened naturally.

By the following morning my contractions were a lot more painful and lasting for a minute or more, but still only coming every five minutes. Thinking about the one - ten pain scale again, I reassessed: maybe these contractions were a six or seven and last night had just been a four or five? The contractions felt much worse now, but I didn't know where the suffering ceiling was - is there a point where the pain gets so bad that you can't tell when it's getting worse? Lying on the couch, groaning and crying, I was scared because I wanted the contractions to stop, but I knew the only way was through and that they would be many more of them before the birth was over.

We'd been in touch with the midwives overnight and through the morning. As my contractions were still five minutes apart, they weren't too keen on us coming back to the hospital and warned that they'd send us home again if they judged I still wasn't in labour. By 1pm on the 7th I'd been having contractions for 24 hours and the pain was unbearable so we decided to go in anyway. I was scared to go back because I thought we might end up waiting in the emergency room for 2+ hours again which I didn't think I could survive. In the end, I think my agonised wails of pain helped to expedite things and they saw us much more quickly the second time. When the midwife did a vaginal exam, she declared that I was 9cm dilated and already starting to push - she had her hand in me during a contraction. I received much praise from the midwives for having managed so well at home on my own.

Matt took this picture just after I got admitted - I was so relieved they didn't send us home again and now I was allowed the sweet, sweet nitrous oxide:

I was admitted around 2:30pm and given that I was already so dilated, the midwives assured us that it would be pretty quick and easy from here - no need for an epidural, they expected the baby to arrive before dinnertime. Sasha wasn't actually born until just after 8pm. The intervening hours are kind of a blur - I didn't start pushing until around 5:30pm. By then I was so tired I really didn't think I'd be able to push - I hadn't eaten all day and hadn't slept and was exhausted from being in pain for so long.

Delivery

For the actual pushing I was naked, my feet up in stirrups. Totally undignified. The lights in the room were dimmed so the midwives had a huge torch they used to see what was going on. With the pushing, I had no sense of progress - I couldn't feel where the baby was and didn't know if the pushing was working or not.

Apparently, there's a rule where after an hour of pushing, the midwives have to call in doctors to check on the baby. Two doctors came in to do the checks. The doctors seemed to hang around after that point so I had four strangers plus Matt coaching me on pushing. I kept saying desperate, hopeless things like 'I can't, I'm so tired' and they'd all be like 'no, no you can do it - another big push. You're going to push this baby out!'

At some point, my contractions began to become more infrequent, so the midwives manually broke my waters to try to get things moving. You're only supposed to push during a contraction, so having frequent contractions is important. Later, a doctor gave me an oxytocin drip to try to increase the frequency of the contractions. I don't recall whether this actually worked.

Eventually the midwives reported that the baby's head was right at the entrance to my vagina. I reached down to feel, expecting a round, firm skull but it was like a wrinkled, fleshy protrusion coming out of me - I recoiled in horror and said something like 'oh god what the fuck'.

After a bit longer, one of the doctors began to worry about the baby's heartrate as her head (the baby's) had been crushed in the birth canal for so long. Someone said that they might need to do an episiotomy - this had been my nightmare scenario, but there wasn't any other option so I agreed. A bit later, I saw the midwives wiping some blood off me and asked if they'd already done it. They said the blood was from something else (I can't remember what). After a few more waves of contractions, the decided they would need to do the episiotomy.

Someone began injecting local anaesthetic. I couldn't see what they were doing. Matt told me that one of the doctors had a dish of betadine that they just poured over me. One of the midwives did the episiotomy - I remember saying something stupid like 'oh no I can feel the cutting.' It didn't hurt but I could feel the pressure and sensation of being cut open.

The baby was born quickly after that.

In the end, I lost nearly a litre of blood and needed a few medical interventions. I'm not sure if Sasha would have arrived safely if I tried to give birth at home - let alone in a poorly-lit hut on a windswept Irish hillside, surrounded by farm animals like my ancestors would have done. It seems like terrible evolutionary design that the childbirth process for humans is both agonising and perilous.

Here's the beautiful baby. I love when she's swaddled up - she looks like a caterpillar:

Postpartum

I had probably six days of crushing postpartum anxiety - peaking on day five where I couldn't stop crying and got into a panic spiral about whether our baby would develop colic and cry non-stop for no reason for the first year of her life. It felt like there was a weight on my chest and I had pumping adrenaline like I was in danger. I think my anxiety was worsened by feverishly Googling every element of baby care and colic for the first few days. Eventually I also had anxiety about whether I had postpartum anxiety and how long I'd feel this way, etc. Fortunately, the anxiety seemed to resolve itself when my hormones settled down - about a week after the birth

Matt was an amazing at supporting me through the labour and taking care of us when we got home. He was so chill with the stitches and blood clots and postpartum body horror I was dealing with and also very supportive through my emotional turmoil in the week after we got home. Despite the anxiety, I had this crazy rush of love for Matt where I felt so bonded with him

The whole birth and postpartum recovery process was so undignified that I feel like I've lost some of the shame I used to have about my body and its functions. The midwives grabbed my naked breast and shoved it into the baby's mouth. They manually expressed colostrum from my breast to feed the baby. They asked me to collect my pee in a tray and to keep it for them to check. They pulled my pads out of the bin to check my bleeding. They asked me to roll over and pull my undies to the side so they could check my stitches. They had zero disgust or judgement about my healing body. All of these things that I would have felt ashamed showing someone (even Matt), they made so normal which was very comforting. This has helped me to feel much more confident about doing natural mum things like breastfeeding in public, etc.

The day we came home from the hospital is maybe the most tired I've ever been. It was like psychedelic exhaustion - when I lay down in bed, the whole room spun around me

For the first few days after the birth, I felt kind of scared or awkward around the baby. As part of the anxiety, I was genuinely worried that Matt or I would end up maiming or killing the baby through our poor parenting skills

I kind of like how my skin looks when I'm anemic - it's like the blood loss takes all of the redness out of the spots and areas of hyperpigmentation on my face so I just have a nice, even complexion for once

I don't have any profound takes on motherhood yet. I've typed all of this one handed because the baby is asleep in the crook of my left arm.

[pinelife3]

What’s this Pizzagate in the heart of nature?

The big tech story in Australia last month was Facebook’s decision to restrict people and organisations in Australia from sharing or viewing news content on Facebook. This was in response to the Morrison government’s proposed Media Bargaining legislation which is basically a Murdoch-serving law to try to get tech companies to pay media organisations for news content hosted/linked/displayed on their sites and, most galling of all, share details of their algorithms with Australian media orgs. The idea that Facebook would have to notify NewsCorp every time they want to tweak their algorithm is patently insane. So I admire Facebook’s petty, dramatic manoeuvre: “if the way we share news on the site is such a problem then fine, no more news for you”. After all the fuss, the Australian government agreed to amend the Media Bargaining legislation - evidently with terms more agreeable to Facebook, meaning news has been restored to Facebook down under. 

One of the key responses I saw expressed in relation to Facebook’s initial news eradication was concern that disinformation would be able to spread more easily on the site - and that people wouldn’t be able to rebut disinformation with factual news articles.

So far as I can tell, the proliferation of disinformation online wouldn’t matter if people didn’t believe it. And most especially, if people didn’t want to believe it. After all, the web is full of persuasive writing and people who want to convince you of things - for whatever reason, conspiracy theories just seem to be very alluring. So rather than trying to protect people from their own stupidity by hiding disinformation... maybe we could look at why people are so credulous in the first place. Deep state? Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams? CIA Contra cocaine trafficking? The great replacement? Pizzagate? 

I’m going to class conspiracy theorists into three categories of my own making:

I believe: well meaning, uninformed people who have been fooled or duped. The fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield which started the vaccines cause autism conspiracy was actually written to support a class action lawsuit. Wakefield knew the results in his paper were not true: in addition to his conflicts of interest, he had falsified data. The paper was eventually debunked and retracted but the conspiracy had its roots and has continued to grow. I think a lot of the people who believe that vaccines are dangerous are parents who are just worried about their kids - and also want to protect other kids from a threat they believe to be real. Why is one debunked article more persuasive to people than a million proving the efficacy of vaccines? It is literally beyond reason.

It suits me to believe: people motivated by self-interest who adopt a conspiracy theory to support their larger world view. Their self-interest could be anything from their own ego to gun rights. The conspiracies around the Sandy Hook Primary School shooting are interesting because you can see a clear motivation for people to subscribe to that theory rather than the truth. If you’re a keen gun-owner, arguining that the shooting was a hoax to generate anti-gun sentiment and thereby allow the Democrats to pass harsher gun restrictions is neat and comforting. No one could argue that the events of Sandy Hook weren’t inhumanly terrible  - so the only option is to argue that they didn’t happen at all. Plus, in this worldview, no kids are getting hurt so you can sleep easy knowing you have seven semi-automatic weapons in the house.

I need to believe: the world is disorganised, scary, unknowable. Ocean deep, sky vast, dark impenetrable - and meanwhile our skin is so thin and delicate. So. Wouldn’t it be comforting to think that there’s a race of reptilian overlords that control the planet by whipping their tails against a complicated system of levers and pullies? That would explain a lot of the chaos in our world. Or maybe the problem is an elite coterie of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles? If only we could defeat those accursed pedophiles then life would be peaceful. Luckily, Q and a septuagenarian reality TV host are here to save us. 

Across these categories, there are two unifying features: 

Rejection of widely accepted truth 

Investment in the conspiracy

As a comparison with the conspiracists above, here’s my take on a conspiracy: I think it’s quite probable that Epstein didn’t kill himself. I think that some powerful, shadowy entity took him out to protect itself. But I’m not obsessed by this idea. It would not surprise or upset me if this was officially confirmed - similarly crazy shit happens all the time. I haven’t devoted my life to revealing this truth. I guess I fit into the “I Believe” category: all official information says that Epstein took his own life but my scepticism of the unusual circumstances around his death and Epstein’s powerful connections leads me to doubt the official information. The difference is I don’t do anything about it. I don’t really care if I’m right or not - I’m not that invested in the conspiracy.

And that’s why it seems ludicrous to me that Facebook should be tasked with combatting the conspiracy theories spiralling across our culture. Simply being exposed to bad information does not radicalise you, does not conjure an investment in the conspiracy. If a normal person reads something creatively wrong or misleading they discard it from their mind. If it hits a chord with them, they may adopt that opinion themselves - see: astrology, Armie Hammer as cannibal, tarot cards, essential oils as serious medical treatment, etc. But the evolution from agreeing with a thought to militaristically insisting that the rest of society also agree with it is an abnormal progression. That strange impulse runs deeper in people than their Facebook timeline.

Most people have fears for the planet or believe there are major issues plaguing humanity - and we never do anything about it because it would be mildly inconvenient or because it’s too hard to care about every issue under late capitalism: 

"But sorting my recycling is boring”

“Yeah yeah fast fashion is problematic but H&M is just so affordable" 

"Of course I hate R.Kelly! But ‘Ignition (Remix)’ is my jam” 

“At least they have suicide nets in the Foxconn factories now”

“I only buy free range chicken thighs because I care about animal welfare”

“I retweeted that thing about anti-Black racism. Yay racism solved!”

There are probably lots of people who believe in conspiracy theories but are ultimately apathetic about doing anything: they can’t be bothered talking about vaccines and politics all the time, can’t be bothered going to a protest, can’t summon the interest to care much. So what’s interesting then is that across the three categories of conspiracy theory belief (I believe > It suits me to believe > I need to believe), what a person believes in, and perhaps even the reason for the belief, doesn’t create any impetus to enact real world change. On both the left and the right, the impulse to do something about an issue is rare. Do you think conspiracy theorists, like the left, have a problem with performative activism? 

Imagine that you agree that Sandy Hook was a false flag, that ‘they’ hired crisis actors to publicly grieve as if their pretend children had been murdered... do you then get in your car and drive overnight to Sandy Hook and start harassing those crisis actors at the pretend funerals? What do you call someone like that? The hero of their own story.

Just wait!

In their worldview, QAnon are unironically trying to save us from pedophile cannibals. Given what conspiracists believe to be true, they are acting in good faith and doing the right thing. If you believed this shit, you’d be upset too. The fact that they’re doing something about it is kind of admirable: they don’t want our babies to get autism from the measles vaccine, they don’t want a deep state to manipulate our democratic governments. It’s existential for all of us - we just don’t agree on the threat. 

Can you imagine how electric the riot at the Capitol Building must have felt for the people who led it. Brave, romantic, a grand gesture: it was like their Storming of Tuileries. Remember this day forever! 

Modern conspiracists are actually similar to the sans-culottes in terms of being avid consumers of propaganda and inflammatory reporting. Disinformation and stirring rhetoric are not new - but shouldn’t people today be less clueless than 18th century peasants?

Why are there are so many people who believe things which are untrue? They exist on this planet with us but interpret it so differently. These questions really are existential: an ancient, echoing maw pointing to the heart of human nature. The struggle for a more perfect world, whispers about where the danger comes from at night, arguments about how to protect ourselves. 

Has there ever been a society where people didn’t have differing views on how best to shape the world? It’s the central conflict of human existence: epic, older than language - and now we want Facebook to fix it?

[pinelife3]

An investigation: if supermodels are so dumb and vapid, how do they pull artistic geniuses?

This is a picture of Nick Cave and his wife leaving the inquest into their son’s death. Their 15 year old boy fell from a cliff after taking acid and becoming disoriented. 

I cannot even conceive of how terrible it must be to lose a child. The drugs and the cliff make it an episode of Skins (or Euphoria for the zoomers) but that’s your little boy. It was a stupid accident and now you never get to see him again. A teenaged tragedy. Unendingly unfair. 

Ghosteen, the 2019 album from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, is a complex, existential album in conversation with the death of Nick’s son and his feelings of loss and grief. Nick Cave is an artist - his life’s work is to share how he feels and what he thinks. What he’s expressing with Ghosteen is sorrow and longing - and some larger angst about the purpose of existence.

Through all this tragedy, I’m sure you couldn’t help but notice... who’s the babe with the shiny hair and the fabulous gazongas? That’s Nick’s wife, man! Susie Bick - or sometimes Susie Cave. She was a major model in the 80s and 90s. A model and an artist - it’s actually fitting. 

And what’s more, Susie is the founder of The Vampire’s Wife - a label which has become super popular in the last couple of years. (Fashion people eyeroll The Vampire’s Wife because every dress has the same silhouette, but that’s out of the scope of this blog.)

There is a perception that models are are vapid and unserious. Their job is to look good, keep their mouth shut, and move merchandise. They cannot offer anything profound because their value is surface level. Men and women both push this way of thinking. 

For example, when Brad Pitt was recently revealed to be dating 27 year old model Nicole Poturalski, people were disappointed. Brad Pitt has been a cultural fixture for decades - after all this time, people still find him fascinating. And they expect him to date someone who is equally compelling. Clooney married a human rights lawyer - why is Brad dating someone who makes posts like this on Instagram...

This was Lainey Gossip’s take on the new girlfriend: 

A model, younger, it’s so predictable it’s almost boring.

Nice! I guess we’re all feminists until the woman in question is young and hot. 

It's easy to assume the worst of a person who is unknown to us, but is beautiful and hooking up with someone famous. A million mean thoughts spring to mind. “A model, younger”. That’s scorn. You know exactly what she’s saying: hot but dumb. An uninteresting person. We know what Brad really wants her for... 

If Brad Pitt is compelling to you, how compelling must Nicole Poturalski be to have won and held his attention? Brad Pitt has not been celibate in the four years since he separated from Angelina Jolie, but not until Nicole did we have confirmation of someone who he was definitely seeing. He allowed himself to be photographed with her en route to his French chateau. And what ensued was a weird story - she’s in an open relationship with some old German restaurateur and she has a son? She’s a sugar baby? Why would Brad fucking Pitt get publicly involved with someone who has a messy personal life: why hook up with a married 27 year old and weather months of stories about her open marriage if he didn’t actually like her? Why even be seen with her? The relationship is a little weird - but the reporting on it has been nasty. The new sugar baby angle which has emerged in the last week (late October 2020) is basically calling her a whore. This is the level of suspicion and derision directed at a model dating a public fixture like Brad Pitt. The notion that Brad Pitt would pay for female company or sex is patently absurd. 

If our assumptions about models are correct, why do so many models end up with artistic geniuses? I don’t care about the Victoria’s Secret models who hooked up with the bassist from Kings of Leon. I’m talking about beautiful women who made it with icons, the premier humans of the past century:

MUSICIANS

Nick Cave and Susie Bick

David Bowie and Iman

Kanye West and Amber Rose

Bob Dylan and Sara Lownds

Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall

Mick Jagger and Carla Bruni

Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin

Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd

George Harrison and Pattie Boyd

Madonna and Jesus Luz

MISC. POWERFUL PEOPLE

Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi

Donald Trump and Melania (lol)

Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni

Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr 

Hitler and Eva Braun (What?! She had a brief career an artist’s model...)

Michael Jordan and Yvette Prieto

Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall 

ACTORS (perhaps not artistic icons... but still creative and interesting)

Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves

Johnny Depp and Kate Moss

Bradley Cooper and Irina Shayk

Bradley Cooper and Suki Waterhouse

Robert Pattinson and Suki Waterhouse

Vincent Cassel and Tina Kunakey

Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubrey

Leonardo DiCaprio and half the VS roster

Huge congrats to all the models with more than one entry on the list. You’ll note that there is a dearth of female icon/male model pairings - this is kind of interesting but not something I feel like getting into.

To some extent, the prevalence of the artist and model pairing makes sense. Men like good looking women. Rich, powerful men are high status and have access to good looking women. Plus, an artist needs a muse.

Many of the models in the list above are actually iconic in their own right. Like, when someone is having a great day on RuPaul’s Drag Race and looking sleek and skinny and flawless RuPaul might compare them to Iman. People pay $10,000 USD for handbags named after Jane Birkin. 

Conversely, in the case of Amber Rose, she became the most desired woman in the hip hop industry c. 2010 because she was with Kanye. And most especially because she broke Kanye’s heart. Everyone wanted the girl from “Hell of a Life”. People point to that song as being about Kim - it was prophetic, yes, but not written about her.

Anyway. Could an icon, a legend, a genius, make it work with someone who had nothing to offer but a fast metabolism and a beautiful face? Do poreless skin and puffy lips make up for never finishing high school? 

Wouldn’t being with someone superficial or unserious mean the artist was fundamentally boring in some way too? This is increasingly the assumption about Leonardo DiCaprio - seen above photographing his 23 year old model gf for her Instagram. Even Reddit mocks him for his age gap relationships with models.

And here’s where I try to make my point: 

Kate Moss’ daughter, Lila, recently had her modelling debut during Paris Fashion Week. It was big news because she’s celebrity spawn - and of course her mother is one of the most iconic models ever. She was eviscerated. 

On The Daily Mail, the comparisons to her mother flowed. What’s interesting is that Daily Mail readers do not like Kate Moss but they will defend her 90s modelling career with their life. They laud her bone structure, her waifish figure. An irresistible, undeniable face. 

It seems silly to praise someone for the shape of their head and the way their skin fits over it... it’s not a talent, is it? Maybe it is! There is no shortage of hot girls in the world - but there may be a shortage of girls with preternatural charismatic beauty. Lila Moss (left above) is attractive - she even looks quite a bit like her mum. Perhaps in the pic above she even looks hotter than her mum (right above). But Kate Moss is more interesting: less perfect - half her eyebrow is missing, she’s less manicured. She exudes some kind of darkness, newness. Lottie Moss, Kate’s younger half-sister, is a similar story. Obviously attractive, obviously interested in modelling - but she’s lacking something. 

Bella Hadid came from a similar-ish background to Lila Moss (Bravoleb parents, frequent appearances on Real Housewives of Beverley Hills in her teen years, groomed by her ex-model mother) but Bella Hadid has it. She may have risen through the ranks due to nepotism and cosmetic surgery but she is someone people want to look at. She is sought after - not foisted upon us. Again, it’s not because she’s the hottest woman on the planet. She is gorgeous, but on top of that, there’s something beguiling about the angles of her face.

What’s this thing that clicks in your head telling you that Kate Moss’s face is more interesting than her daughter��s? It’s an intrusive thought: her skull shape is pleasing, let your eyes linger. A command: you will not forget that face. 

Iman has it. Look at her. On meeting Iman, Bowie said: "I was naming the children the night we met... it was absolutely immediate." How many beautiful women had Bowie met in his life? How many had this effect?

Can you imagine trying to keep David Bowie or Bob Dylan interested in what you’re saying? Or Madonna? Or Michael Jordan? Most of us do not have a single thought in our head which would be of interest to these people. The models I listed earlier transfixed them. Mick Jagger could have romanced every woman on the planet - but he only wanted Jerry Hall (pls disregard affairs so I can make my point). 

When a model hooks up with an artistic genius, it’s illogical to assume she’s vapid or that the icon is with her for shallow reasons. What we should assume is that she is the most interesting woman that icon has crossed paths with in a long time - which would make her very interesting indeed.

[pinelife3]

Whatever happened to Lainey Gossip?

Lainey Gossip was the smartest celebrity gossip site on the internet. I was an avid reader for most of my adult life. You may recall my April 2016 blog post about gossip and, in particular, blind items. Well, it’s been nearly a year since Lainey posted a blind item. In the site’s heyday (pre-2017), she posted a blind roughly once a month.

Beyond the drop-off in blind items, the site has decayed in a number of ways. It’s become smug and self-aggrandising. They rolled lifestyle content onto the main blog feed, so now I have to scroll past posts about, I kid you not, baby names. (Caring about baby names is so inherently stupid to me, I feel genuinely irritated just being exposed to that content. Just name your kid something out of the primary religious text for your culture/region/family. Adam can never go out of style.)

The main thing which has turned me off Lainey Gossip is the writers’ misapprehension that the site is some kind of arbiter on social justice issues. Every other day there is a post with some insufferable moralising about feminism, equality, systemic racism, Rowling’s transphobia etc. It’s not that these are bad takes - I actually agree with what they’re saying. But I don’t want to hear it on this site. I don’t refer to gossip writers for guidance on this. Lainey is not a political activist. The writers on the site are just regurgitating ideas and lessons they’ve learnt elsewhere. This post from June was the final straw for me. The relevant part of the post is Alia Shawkat’s apology for saying the n-word during an interview in 2016. The clip of her actually saying the n-word seems to have disappeared from the internet, but basically she was describing a time when she and some of her friends arrived in a very nice hotel and how she thought of the lyric: “Nigga, we made it" from the Drake song “We Made It”. 

Here’s Lainey’s analysis:

As people have pointed out on Twitter, 2016 isn’t that long ago. And Alia was in her 20s. Whether or not you decide to cancel her, as many are doing, is up to you. 

I can’t fully account for it, but the phrase ‘Whether or not you decide to cancel her is up to you’ rubbed me the wrong way. Whether you decide to cast her into the fire for not correctly censoring herself when quoting a Drake song. Whether she is destroyed as a person forever. A worthless husk. Irredeemable. Whether her soul should be torn out and her body fed to crows. That’s up to you. The new god? It’s you, the reader of this gossip blog!

This was during the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests and discussion this year. So, in the second half of the article Lainey gets high on her own farts, like so:

While I have never used the n-word casually, and many of you may say the same, we do all engage with Black art, we do all borrow from it, consciously or unconsciously, in the ways we express ourselves, in the way I have expressed myself here, from fashion to language to GIFs. Think of how much cultural colloquial vocabulary comes from the Black community – recent examples include “lit”, “snatched”, “shady”, “flex”, “tea”, and phrasing that’s become commonplace and permanent in our language like “chill”, “dope”, “extra” – all of this comes from the creativity of Black minds. And they’re almost never credited for it.

So yes, of course, call out people like Alia for their irresponsible use of the most egregious words, but at the same time, let’s all consider how much we owe to the Black community for what they’ve given to us and for little we’ve given back in respect, appreciation, and credit. Because while the immediate urgency of Black Lives Matter is to prevent more senseless killings of Black people, the broader focus of BLM is Black dignity in all forms, and all of this is related. We can’t say that we honour Black humanity if we are erasing their contributions in all aspects of our lives.

Thanks Lainey. To be clear, I wouldn’t mind if this was the only time she’d shared an opinion like this - but this type of argument is repeated ad nauseaum across the site. She’s a therapist. She’s a civil rights activist. She knows what’s good for you. She speaks with great authority on how to solve racism. 

Fast forward a couple of weeks and Lainey is apologising for the hideous shit she used to write on her blog in the early 2000s where her takes were often racist, homophobic, and/or misogynistic. In her apology post, she wrote:

Many people object to cancel culture. My personal opinion on it is that while cancel culture is not always judiciously applied, it does have value. Sometimes people should be cancelled. And if you visit this website often, you might be thinking about whether or not to cancel me. That’s fair.

...I have been conditioned in white supremacy, and I have enabled white privilege, even as a person of colour myself, because we too, given that white supremacy is so dominant, can have bias... When I started this site back in 2003/2004, I wrote misogynist things and slut shaming things, and racist things. And as the site grew in popularity, it served as confirmation bias, that there was an appetite out there for this kind of content, and I wanted to keep delivering it. Over time, I learned and grew, along with many of you who have learned and grown. And through it all, I have talked about my progress, calling out my past mistakes and leaving much of that content on the site instead of deleting it. There are some things, though, that have been deleted because I was embarrassed and I didn’t want to be part of it and obviously didn’t want to perpetuate those thoughts. But in the process of doing that, I realised that that would be erasing history – and for marginalised people, their pain and trauma is constantly being erased and invalidated. My leaving it there to be eventually called out is nothing compared to their experience.

Many gossip blogs were like this in the nascent stage of online journalism. They called it snark - and it was very popular. I think in some ways this was to differentiate blogs from the content and coverage in traditional gossip mags. Most gossip magazines are toothless - because they want celebrity interviews and exclusives. But, in 2006, a website was never going to get an interview with anyone worth interviewing so why bother to be nice - especially because being cynical and mean was more entertaining for the average reader. A lot of the gossip coverage that occurred back then would never fly now: ridiculing Britney for shaving her head, fat shaming, cruel coverage of celebrity eating disorders, slut shaming. The edgelord humour of the early blogs was crushed beneath the wheels of progress.

I don’t care about what Lainey wrote in 2006 - I don’t think it’s nice, I don’t think it’s interesting or funny, I wouldn’t have chosen to read it. But it doesn’t change my view of the site as a whole. What it does do though, is highlight how hollow all the talk of respecting women, honouring Black culture, working to be better, being good allies, etc. is on this site. Because it’s not really about doing that shit - it’s about telling other people off for not doing it. Lainey has weaponised wokeness as her new snark. 

After the fall out around Lainey’s embarrassing old articles, a banner was added to all of the articles on the site which were published before 2013: 

She’s effectively disavowed half of the blog’s history. Lainey Gossip launched in 2004. Is it really fair to say that articles published in 2012 were posted during an early period of the site?

What is Lainey doing when she toys with Alia Shawkat’s fate like Anton Chigurh tossing a coin? She knows in her heart of hearts that she has also said things she regrets, also said unsavory things in public that she didn’t really mean. It’s so weird: can’t you see the parallels between yourself and her? Lainey is pretty clear in her apology that she’s acknowledging the problematic history of the blog because people were exposing her on social media. Were it not for this, she likely would have continued writing about problematic shit other people did 10 years ago without acknowledging that she is no better. 

Again, I want to be really clear: my issue isn’t with the articles she wrote in the early days of the site. It’s the weirdness around publicly criticising people when your own behaviour is comparably bad. What could you gain from doing that beyond reveling in the snark? Destroying someone else before the mob you helped create comes for you?

Let me remind you: THIS USED TO BE A GOSSIP BLOG with analysis of celebrity culture, movie deals, blind items, industry insider stories. Now it’s just been sucked into the culture war vortex. Ruined by the discourse. 

Gossip used to be talking about other people’s business: Speculating about which Victoria’s Secret model DiCaprio would pick up next. Investigating rumours that Jennifer Lawrence faked her tumble on the stairs at the Oscars. Analysing why a celebrity filed their divorce papers in California rather than Texas. Waiting to see which celebrity would be the first to wear Marchesa on a red carpet after the fall of Weinstein.

Gossip is a way of learning what is acceptable in society, a way of observing how others perceive and react to the decisions people make - and how behaviour which violates societal norms attracts backlash. It’s even more interesting when the subject of that gossip is rich and famous. Lainey Gossip is no longer turning out this kind of content - so where can we go for these insights?

The best barometer for conservative public opinion on celebrity movements and the related enforcement of societal norms is the The Daily Mail comments section. The Daily Mail itself seems like something of a journalistic agent of chaos: I would have assumed that they swung right, but they post pro-Trump articles and anti-Trump articles. They do not seem to have a dog in the fight: the world turns, empires rise and fall and The Daily Mail persists. 

In the ‘entertainment news’ articles on the site, no impassioned arguments are made, no particular analysis is shared: the journalists position themselves as impartial observers just reporting the facts. Occasionally a piece is clearly designed to bait the readers - for example, any time they mention the price of someone’s home in the headline... “Celebrity in $13 million mansion reminds fans to appreciate the small things” or that kind of crap. But the article itself is just a list of facts. No analysis, no reflection - just positioning. 

Also interesting to observe is that The Daily Mail comments section is typically quite harmonious. Readers generally have similar take-aways from articles and it’s very rare to see an argument break out in the comments section. It’s as if Daily Mail readers think with one mind:

Stay with wife many years? Very good. Society like this. Daily Mail readers approve.

Stay with wife many years and maybe wife is slightly overweight? Oh yes - this guy is the best. International hero. Daily Mail readers all agree: we love.

Stay with wife many years and then divorce her? Hmm let’s see how this situation develops before we judge...

Stay with wife many years and then divorce her to be with younger woman? You die now.

The Daily Mail comments section is a glance into the void. A pit of human misery where people say exactly what they think. No subtext. No analysis required. 

They like Pierce Brosnan because he is a straight-forward nice male celebrity and he has been with his wife for a long time - his wife is a little overweight so it makes readers feel good to imagine that he might not be repulsed by the average woman.

They do not like Emma Roberts because in 2013 she was arrested for beating her boyfriend in a hotel room. This was a long time ago and not many people think about it now. She has a successful career and is well liked on social media. But that’s because those youngsters forget. 

The Daily Mail comments section does not forget. Their memory is long and their pity is scarce. They are society’s hive mind. The majority. A snapshot of what 95% of the planet’s population would think on any given subject - which actually makes for very interesting reading.

Forget about Lainey Gossip, trawl The Daily Mail comments section with me.

[pinelife3]

babyfuture

A literary myth persists that it was J.R.R. Tolkien who put forward ‘cellar door’ as the most beautiful phrase in the English language. Even Donnie Darko hears this from his lit teacher:

This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, that cellar door is the most beautiful.

It does have a nice lilting quality. A rich pairing: thick dust and heavy barrels. Unsealed floors. Solid stoppers. Waiting. 

Heritage.  

I find it really interesting when celebrities with clean-but-sexy images date bad boys. For example, the Kardashian-Jenners are sexy and dress provactively but otherwise present themselves as having pretty vanilla lives. They look good and have nice things but are apparently family oriented and just hang out in their mansions and try on expensive clothes. I’d say aside from the suggested nudity on Instagram (and the leaked sex tape), they are essentially PG public figures. They have no edge, no opinion, no take - beyond being sexy. But then! They date men who have drug overdoses in brothels. Men who drink and drive. Men who cheat on them. What is happening behind closed walls in these mansions?

An example of this phenomenon is Jennifer Lopez. Yes, she is a sex symbol but she has a vanilla public identity. She goes on Ellen and simpers for the audience. She played at the Super Bowl this year. You don’t perform at the Super Bowl unless mainstream America is comfortable seeing you on their TV, unless advertisers are prepared to be associated with you. In 1999 Jennifer Lopez was arrested in relation to a shooting outside a nightclub! Yes, she was cleared. But her boyfriend, Diddy, was charged (he was eventually found not guilty). JLo is mainstream now - but she used to date a guy who brought guns with him when they had a night on the town. And, moreover, he used the guns. Nice date. What is there inside her that made her want to date this guy? Does that part still exist now she’s on the cover of Vanity Fair?

Similar deal with Ariana Grande. She was in a serious relationship with a man who was a heavy, heavy opiate user. What must their home life have been like? This is not part of her public identity at all. Her public identity is high-maintenance, empowered sex brat. Short skirts and high heels - but never substance abuse. It’s honestly quite boring:

Yeah, breakfast at Tiffany's and bottles of bubbles Girls with tattoos who like getting in trouble Lashes and diamonds, ATM machines Buy myself all of my favorite things

She publicly grieved when Mac Miller died but she has never said a word about life with an addict. She plays for teenagers - but has grown-ups problems.

Want some frisson? Try these photos of Ariana Grande reuniting with Mac after the Manchester bombing:

Anyway. 

I also put Ciara in this category of women with a clean persona. She’s an RnB star so she pushes the sex angle, but otherwise presents herself as a nice girl. She told E! she wanted "a big house [and] a big family—not too big, but big enough." At the time she gave this interview, she was engaged to Future: a man who already had three children by two different women. A man who has long presented himself as a heavy drug user. And not party drugs - he uses percocet, promethazine. Something in this fairy tale doesn’t sound right...I wonder what’s going to happen?

After Ciara and Future broke up, he reflected on what went wrong in the relationship as follows:

I was like, 'I'll marry you today. You want to get married, let's get married.' But I'm not getting married with all these different people in my wedding. My family have to be there. I'm from the hood, hood people going to be there. It might be people that you don't like that's going to be there. But I know they love me, they got my best interest...I don't want nobody from the industry there, I don't want the media there. 

He also said:

I can't have… all these different big media outlets covering my wedding and I'm not comfortable... I'm not comfortable with the people who are in here. I'm not comfortable about where I'm at in my career. I'm not comfortable about compromising and about being the person that I am and being the man that I am. I feel like my better judgment is to go back to record and make music. Make the music I know the people want. I know they want the ratchet shit from me, I know they want me to say the most disrespectful shit it is. I came in like that. I gotta say some off-the-wall shit to get people's attention.

There were also rumours of cheating. But that doesn’t factor into his narrative. So whatever: his story is that he doesn’t want media attention at his wedding. He wants his family and friends from the hood there. And she doesn’t like that - she wants industry people at the wedding. They are incompatible. No one is surprised.

His career has gone way up since this. He is a beloved character in the hip hop scene. I don’t even like trap, but I like Future. He’s emotional and proud. He thrashes around in his cage and makes things worse for himself. 

babyfuture. Who is this babyfuture he speaks of? It’s his son with Ciara. Future Junior. His fourth child by this point. babyfuture.

The online mythology around babyfuture is that Future didn’t really care about the baby - after all, he had a few already which he was somewhat indifferent to. But he wanted to get at Ciara. And performatively caring about the baby (I jus want babyfuture that’s all) was a way to interfere with her new life. Her new life where she was a born again virgin with an NFL quarterback:

Ciara ended up suing Future for defamation based on the tweets above. Her argument being that they suggest she’s a bad mother which damages her career, etc. Future counter-sued, claiming she is washed-up and her career was so dead that his remarks couldn’t damage it. So it goes.

Some men say that their worst fear is being cucked: raising another man’s child. Russell Wilson, Ciara’s new partner, did it happily. That was nice of him! By all accounts he is a wonderful father to babyfuture. There were photos of him pushing babyfuture in a pram which really triggered Future. I’m not comfortable with any man but me perambulating with babyfuture. Maybe there’s not a word for it yet, but Future was reverse cucked: another man did a really great job of raising his child. 

My favourite thing Future has ever rapped is:

I’m trying to fuck the DA lady in her mouth though

This is in the hook! Why? Why does this work? It’s so ridiculous. That he’s trying to face fuck the lady who is prosecuting him. It’s just a pleasing notion somehow. If that line were a 90s movie, they’d have cast Pierce Brosnan.

Anyway.

babyfuture as a phrase is my cellar door. It conjures things for me. It’s a remarkable combination of words. It’s very modern that there’s no space between them. I love it. The word babyfuture has echoed in my mind ever since I heard it.

A rich pairing: glowing screens in the dark and flannelette sheets with parading animals. New baby smell. Regret. A more expensive engagement ring.

[pinelife3]

Sleepless in Seattle

I rewatched Sleepless in Seattle recently on a plane, and now I’ve crawled out of my cave to declare: this movie is not romantic!

Directed by Nora Ephron, Sleepless in Seattle, is regarded as part of the canon of great rom-coms. Ephron and Rob Reiner (who actually appears in Sleepless in Seattle with a great bit about tiramisu) are kind of the big-dogs of rom-coms in that people still talk about the films they made 20+ years ago (some together, some separately):

The Princess Bride

When Harry Met Sally

Sleepless in Seattle

You’ve Got Mail

Rom-coms are tricky to define - for example, is Shakespeare in Love a rom-com? There is romance and comedy, but the lovers are separated at the end. What about Top Gun? There are iconic romantic scenes and the lovers do end up together, but the love is really a conciliatory prize (the real prize is being the best at flying) and the romance is more of a B or C plot in the film, so Top Gun probably doesn’t qualify. People talk about rom-coms as having to posses certain tropes - for example:

A neurotic, highly mannered protagonist (ideally played by Meg Ryan or Hugh Grant)

An argument featuring dramatic irony, where the audience knows more than the characters and sees their misunderstanding unfold

A grand final gesture to win a lover back after a stupid misunderstanding: a last-minute dash to the airport, a last minute dash to a new year’s eve party, a last minute dash to the Empire State Building

But for our purposes, let’s say a rom-com is anything that:

Places the romantic plot at the core of its film AND

Has a happy ending (i.e. the lovers are together at the end) AND

Features genuine attempts at humour along the way. 

LOTR features a romance plot, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on (something about a ring?!), therefore it’s not a rom-com. Same deal with Bridesmaids. I would classify Superbad as a kind of rom-com because most actions taken by the protagonists are to secure love (or at least sex) from the girls they like. The English Patient? Romantic and HILARIOUS but the lovers aren’t together in the end.

So does Sleepless in Seattle qualify as a rom-com?

Yes, the whole point of the movie is to get Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks together. This plot dominates the film - but is it romantic? More on this to follow.

Yes, in the world of the film, a happy ending is secured because Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are together

Yes, there are some laughs along the way. Mostly at the expense of poor Bill Pullman who is playing a man with severe allergies. There is also some precocious-child related humour

Back to point one: I contend that the ‘romantic plot’ in Sleepless in Seattle is actually anti-romantic. In fact, there are two romance plot lines (both of which fail to be romantic) because this bitch is engaged to another man throughout the ‘romance’ with Tom Hanks.

Before we get into that though I have another major gripe: at the start of the film, Meg Ryan and her fiancé (Bill Pullman) leave home together to drive to a family Christmas lunch. They leave the same location at the same time and are heading to the same location - no stops along the way. But for some reason they take separate cars. The film provides no reasoning for the separate cars. It is patently odd and really bothers me.

Let’s take a look at the script:

________________________________________________

EXT. BALTIMORE SUN BUILDING - LATE AFTERNOON - CHRISTMAS EVE

As Annie [Meg Ryan] comes out of the newspaper building with WALTER JACKSON [Bill Pullman], a tall, handsome man who wears a hat. They're carrying an armful of Christmas presents. They're walking toward the parking lot.

WALTER

The short one with black hair  is your cousin Irene --

ANNIE

-- who's married to --

WALTER

Harold, who ran away with his secretary but came back --

ANNIE

-- because Irene threatened to put the dog to sleep if he didn't --

WALTER

And your brother Tom is a psychology professor and is married to...Betsy --

ANNIE

-- who is the most competitive woman in the world --

They put the presents in the backs of their two cars and pull out together.

EXT. A HOUSE IN BALTIMORE SUBURBS - NIGHT

Christmas lights twinkling as the two cars pull up in front of a comfortable upper middle-class house and park their cars. They get out assembling presents.

________________________________________________

This whole thing with the two cars was scripted - and even in the script it’s unexplained. My suspicion is that this just a device to get her in the car alone later so she can hear Tom Hanks on the radio - and thereby fall in love with him. This is LAZY writing. Why not just write that she had a premonition and saw a wonderful widow in Seattle and knew that they should be together. That would make about as much sense as the separate cars.

People criticise rom-coms for having unrealistic premises. For example: Last Christmas, in which a woman hangs out with the ghost of a man who gave her his heart - via transplant - the previous year. A ridiculous premise made unbearably kitsch because of the connection to the WHAM song. But honestly that makes about as much sense as an engaged couple taking separate cars for no reason.

Allow that gaping goatse of a plot hole to set the scene for the other major problem with this film: our romantic heroine is already engaged. Engaged to a man she finds boring. She remains engaged to this poor guy throughout her infatuation and pursuit of Tom Hanks. She lives with this guy, sleeps with him, plans her wedding with him: all while she is falling in love with Tom Hanks. She remains engaged until the final 10 minutes of the film when she finally dumps him. She keeps telling this poor guy she loves him. It’s evil. Can you imagine what /r/relationships would say about someone who behaved this way? This is an emotional affair.

As much as rom-coms celebrate the pursuit of love and marriage, they also caution against bad or inadequate love: it is not romantic to settle. A classic example of this is Charlotte Lucas in Pride & Prejudice: she marries the ridiculous Mr Collins to secure her future and avoid spinsterhood - but she doesn’t love him and won’t ever love him because she doesn’t respect him. Readers in Austen’s time may have been more sympathetic to Charlotte’s decision since the nature of marriage was quite different back then and spinsterhood was a seriously undesirable outcome, but contemporary audiences commonly interpret Charlotte settling for Mr Collins as a weakness of character. That decision and her life with Mr Collins only serve to reflect further radiance on Elizabeth Bennet: wistful, bitey, beautiful, beloved for centuries. That’s why no one writes fan fiction about Charlotte Lucas. 

So, in Sleepless in Seattle, the audience sees that Meg Ryan is settling for the wrong guy. This is communicated to us primarily through the visual gags around Bill Pullman’s allergies: he uses a huge number of tissues, he’s allergic to everything from strawberries to bees, he has a special respirator machine to help him sleep. This guy can’t get the girl! He can’t even breath properly. It’s clearly isn’t meant to work out between them. No, no this won’t do at all. 

What is the function of the unsuitable fiancé as a plot device? Why couldn’t this be a romance between two single people? Is it to make her cross-country pursuit seem more whimsical and fun? If it to demonstrate that she can get a guy? I actually think it’s meant to create stakes: it’s so she has something to hold her back from ‘following her heart’. This is a way of adding tension so she’s risking something (normalcy, comfort) by making the last minute dash to the Empire State Building to meet Hanks (who represents the possibility of windswept romance). Never mind that they’ve never actually spoken to each other. He’s a single parent? Um sexy! He’s a widow? Swoon. Seattle is rainy? I’m already wet.

If it’s important to the plot that she is already in a couple when she falls for Hanks, and that she casts aside an unsatisfying relationship for the mere possibility of passionate excitement, then we have had it wrong all along: the grand romantic gesture of Sleepless in Seattle is Meg Ryan dumping her fiancé. Forget the Empire State Building. It’s her telling him that she’s had an emotional affair. It’s her taking off her engagement ring. It’s her blaming him for being boring rather than working on their relationship. It’s her leaving him sat in that restaurant alone so she can go and pursue a stranger.  

This movie is not romantic. 

[pinelife3]

Paris

We did not intend to come to Paris. We had planned ot head to Venice, but the coronavirus outbreak in northern Italy was kicking off and it seemed stupid to charge into the middle of it. Instead, we re-routed to Paris with no real plans for what we were going to do for the next month.

We took the Eurostar high speed train from London to Paris: there was wifi, cushy chairs, and some catered snacks we purchased from Marks & Spencers. The dining in London was meh, but their store-bought snacks blow Australia out of the water. Down with the Coles / Woolworths duopoly!

We arrived into Paris around 9pm and walked from the train station to our hotel. This may displease some of the parents reading this missive, but Matt and I did not check Smart Traveller before booking to go to Paris. It turns out that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade considers France quite dangerous! The whole country has been slapped with an “Exercise a high degree of caution” warning, and this isn’t because of the coronavirus, this is down to the amount of violent crime tourists are likely to encounter (armed robberies on trains, car theft, etc.) and the riots. Oh and the likelihood of terrorist attacks. We certainly noticed in France that the cops were heavily armed: we saw a police officer cradling a machine gun during a friendly exchange with a citizen to give directions.

On our Sunday night walk from the train station to our hotel, the streets were mostly empty. We passed a number of sex shops, massage parlours with red lights, groups of men standing around apparently doing nothing, sex workers, and suspicious men selling cigarettes on street corners. We were on high alert for pick-pockets and the violent crimes which Smart Traveller had warned us about: with our enormous backpacks we were effectively wearing neon signs saying ‘We are tourists! Please rob us!’. Despite our fears we made it to the hotel safely. The hotel was a last-minute booking as part of our rescheduling to avoid Italy so we didn’t have many options when booking online: I think it would be safe to say that our hotel was one of the worst in Paris. We were given tokens to access the shared shower down the hallway from our room: for our three night stay we were given four tokens, effectively rationing our showers for the stay. (Again, parents reading this may be troubled to learn that we only ended up using three of the four tokens – the person who only showered once has a name beginning with ‘M’ and ending with ‘atthew’.)    

Another charming feature of the hotel was the low ceilings, roughly only two meters in height:

For our first day in Paris, it rained all day. 

To stay out of the rain, we picked a couple of indoor activities: a visit to the Musee de Cluny (famous for its Lady and Unicorn tapestries and various other medieval art) and a visit to the Pantheon. After paying to get in, we realised that the Lady and Unicorn tapestries section of the museum was closed. Disappointingly, a promising section of the museum called ‘Treasures’ was also closed – I must confess, Matt and I did inadvertently go into the Treasures section and stole a fleeting glance at a magnificent tapestry before a strict Frenchman told us (in French so this may not be an exact translation) “Can’t you see this section of the museum is closed? No treasures for you! Get the hell out!”. Utimately we only got to see some old rocks and a bath. Overall rating for Musee de Cluny is 1/5. Matt observed that it should really be called the “Musee de Close-y”.  

Next we trudged uphill through heavy rain to the Pantheon. Matt had expressed his indifference towards visiting churches, but I thought Foucault’s pendulum (housed in the church) might be of interest to him. Turns out, the Pantheon has many great qualities: it’s an amazing sandstone church built in the 1700s. During the Enlightenment, the church became a sort of secular shrine to the great figures of France including writers, politicians, scientists, etc. In addition to looking through the church (which included a huge dome, Foucault’s pendulum and some cool paintings of Joan of Arc) we got to explore the crypt which was much more pleasant and well-lit than you might expect a crypt to be.

Contrary to popular opinion, we did not find the waiters of Paris to be particularly snooty (maybe this is because we are residents of Fitzroy, which is home to many snooty waiters – mostly with fluoro hair and ripped jeans) but we did notice that they would greet us assuming we were French with a ‘Bonjour!’ or ‘Bonsoir!’ and when we would respond in attempted French they lose a little of their joie de vivre and would immediately switch to English. This was obviously intended as a kindness and did make things easier for ordering and finding a table, but meant we were robbed of the chance to practice our French. This also suggests that our pronunciation of ‘Bonjour’ is so poor that we cannot even pass for particularly uncultured or stupid Frenchmen.

To get around we tried renting electric scooters and bikes via Uber, with mixed results: there was terror, joy, and some frustration with Uber’s capricious parking rules.

For the super-interested, here are some other things we got up to in Paris:

Montmarte: We rode our electric bikes to Montmatre, an area famous for Sacre Coeur, an old church with a fantastic view, and the Moulin Rouge. The ride was mostly uphill, but on the electric bicycle was quite easy.

Wine tasting: We also did a wine tasting via Airbnb. Key takeaway: Chardonnay in France is not aged in oak barrels, meaning it doesn’t have that strong oaky taste (which I often find to be kind of cloying). Matt and I never really liked the taste of Australian chardonnay, so this was probably because of the barrel flavour. We also learned about tannins (broken down grape skins which appear in red wines) and about how rose is made (red grapes, but the skin is taken out sooner!)

Catacombs: There are old mines under Paris, which were the source of the sandstone used to build many of the city’s great buildings. These were later filled with bones after the central cemeteries were filled. We both regretted visiting the catacombs as it was very somber and confronting: millions of bones, hundreds of years old, piled on top of each other in a network of disused mines. Who enjoys this stuff?? We both felt sad and flat after the Catacombs, but then stopped for a hot chocolate and apple pastry which improved the mood. Afterwards we agreed to not visit any more mass graves.

Champs Elysées: We walked past the Louvre and gardens, Champs Elysées, Arc de Triomphe – a lovely area. We stopped for crepes and paid 1.5 euro (~$2.50 in Australian dollars) to use a public bathroom.

We also spent some time watching street hustlers. In the photo below, just below the Eiffel Tower you’ll see a ring of people in black. 

We watched them for half an hour or so. They stand together all day pretending to play a three-shell game, betting 100 euro a pop. The idea with the game is that the dealer hides a ball under one cup, then quickly shuffles all three cups to ‘hide’ the ball - the person who paid to play can then pick the cup which they think holds the ball. If they are right, they get 200 euro; if they are wrong they lose the lot. We inferred the people dressed in black are working with the dealer, spending all day pretending to play. They win some, they lose some, they clap and say “bravo!”. The idea is to make it look like riotous good fun for people passing by so that they might be tempted to play. They’re essentially just shuffing money around within their group. A key part of the scam is that after each shuffle one of the group picks a cup which, if you’ve been paying attention to the shuffle, clearly does not hold the ball - the incorrect guess is jeered at by the group and then someone else guesses correctly to much cheering. This makes the game look easy, and probably fools observers into thinking they’re especially good at the shell game because they can find the ball every time. I can only assume that when someone is playing the game for real, the shuffle is much faster and tricker to follow.

After watching for a while, we saw a middle-aged tourist approach the group, watch from the side for a while, and then scurry away to pull cash out of his money belt. His friend tried to talk him out of it. He played anyway. We watched him lose. His friend walked off in disgust. He lost again. He walked off to find his friend. The shell game people packed up after that. I assume they also pick your pockets when they can.

There were a few more tourist-scams going around, but we didn’t have any trouble. We don’t know why these three golden retreivers were standing sentinel outside the subway…

… but we can only assume it was a part of some kind of elaborate hoax.

Matt and I are now in Chamonix, a ski town in the French alps. He is practicing the ukulele and I am writing this. We’re staying in an Airbnb - our hosts are have at least three cats (two of whom have deigned to let me pat them) and we were warned that if we hear a noise like someone tapping on the window during the night it is just the local deer inadvertently banging their horns on the window while they try to eat whatever bits of grass near the house aren’t under snow.

[pinelife3]

Music I Can’t Understand

Getting into hip hop in my late teens was like learning a new language: slang, cars, food, drugs, brands, gangs, locations. For example:

What does it mean to be sitting on 44s?

44 inch rims on your car - highly coveted, a desirable rim size.

What about coming from the 504?

The area code of Hollygrove, New Orleans: the neighbourhood Lil Wayne grew up in.

Please double cup me?

Kindly serve me lean in two double stacked Styrofoam cups.

Ice cream paint job?

Cars again - clean exterior with creamy white leather interior.

Finna hit a lick?

Fixing (intending) to rob a liquor store.

Wavy Brazilian?

Human hair grown from the scalps of the fine people of Brazil, harvested, treated and then sold to be used in wigs and weaves. The hair has a natural wavy texture and is typically long and dark.

Cop dome? 

Receive a blow job. Confusingly, I’ve also heard ‘domed’ to mean shooting someone in the head. 

Chopper?

You might be thinking of a helicopter or a motorcycle, but in hip hop a chopper is almost always a fully automatic weapon - I guess because it cuts people down?

A bird?

A kilo of drugs, typically cocaine.

Beyond the slang, I also found some of the accents difficult to understand. Lil Wayne speaks in a hoarse, treacly voice, he’s usually fucked up, his word association is crazy, he loves puns, and he rapidly jumps from topic to topic. So, initially, listening to Wayne was like trying to speed read Shakespeare. It took me a while to be able to properly tune in and listen to the lyrics - but when I did, I found hip hop so rewarding and fun. This is all from one song:

‘Cause I’ll serve anyone like a blind waiter

I work out in my office, guess I’m fit for business

Your flow never wet, like grandma pussy/ I’m always good, like grandma cookies

You niggas best not slip, Ice Road Truckers

I also appreciate the trite but appealing throwaways:

felt like rockstar, might die later idk

(Music critics under the misapprehension that rappers didn’t glorify hard drugs and depresso partying before Future need to go back to school.)

I have memories of rapturous repeat listens of Good Kid, Maad City, trying to decode the story. Falling in love with the mythology of Kanye. Digging through forums. Listening to famous classics and thinking I was the first to uncover an unknown treasure, like an oblivious archaeologist. The golden age of Big Ghost’s blog. MF DOOM super fandom. Discovering old artists online and stuffing my ears with their back catalogs. Visiting country towns and thinking ‘I bet no one here has even heard of Aesop Rock’ like a smug fuck. Pouring over lyrics on genius.com. Sweating profusely at gigs. Hoarding mixtapes from DatPiff. Weirdly, I associate a lot of my fondest hip hop memories with being by myself on my laptop. 

The interface hasn’t changed one bit:

Over time, though, I’ve gotten bored with hip hop. I feel like I haven’t really fallen in love with anything released since ~2014. Piñata might be the last hip hop album that really worked on me (exception: the Hamburger Helper album Watch the Stove from 2016). Even To Pimp A Butterfly has serious issues: listen to “Mortal Man” and tell me it’s not the corniest shit ever. The extended butterfly/chrysalis/caterpillar metaphor throughout the album is like bad high school poetry. For a while, I thought my cynical outlook on modern hip hop was just a product of getting older and being wistful for the music I liked when I was younger. But now I’ve decided that this is a problem solely between me and hip hop, because I still find music that I get obsessed with. But that music is exclusively Celtic.

I would timebox my Celtic music obsession to the past year or so, but Spotify went to great pains to inform me that Enya was my artist of the decade, so this must have been latent within me for some time. 

When initially dipping my toe in the Celtic genre, I started with instrumentals and songs sung in English, but I’m waist deep now and have started listening to Gaelic music. It’s like birdsong: I don’t know what they’re saying, but I like the way it sounds. Throaty, clear. Choking, sweet. Windswept, warm. Profound, unknowable. Ancient, important. Echoing, intimate. They could be singing about stale muesli bars and stubbed toes for all I know. 

(If you don’t listen to these songs - especially the one below - I don’t think this blog post will work on you. See please listen.)

Take the song “Thig An Smeòrach As t-Earrach” (above). Obviously ‘Thig An Smeòrach As t-Earrach’ sounds like something Gollum would hiss under his breath, but I find the song itself practically spiritual. Gaelic is so foreign - the words bear no similarity to words I’ve ever heard before - but I feel like I still understand what’s being said. It’s like a fiery angel has appeared at the foot of your bed and is telling you something important: but the angel is so beautiful and bright, your eyes are watering. You can hardly look. And you certainly can’t listen. But the message is burned in your brain. You didn’t understand a word, and wouldn’t know how to repeat what the angel said - but you understand their meaning perfectly.

Do you think the past or the future is more important? And not in terms of your own life (e.g. will your retirement be better than your time in high school) - that’s chickenshit, that’s two turns in early game Civ V, that’s low stakes table. No, I mean in terms of the whole timeline of the planet: neolithic magic in stone circles, valleys where no human has ever walked, unturned stones beneath deep water, dead languages. Should we protect the physical remnants of history or privilege the possibilities of the future? Would we crush Grecian pottery if it unlocked clean, sustainable power which allowed us to create AirPod batteries which never lose their charge? Without even asking, I will tell you that anyone making Celtic music thinks the past is more important than the future. And while you listen to Celtic music, you will agree. 

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Celtic music is humanist, but ancient humanist. It is not interested in what Elon Musk is doing, it doesn’t care what shirt you’re wearing, or whether you’re an Episcopalian vegan, or if you can finish The New Yorker crossword puzzle, or really any modern concerns - at least, I don’t think it cares. In a way, I don’t care what they’re saying, because I like the way it makes me feel: peaceful and romantic and connected to something eternal and profound. Like when a huge rock is warm to the touch. These are underrated feelings.

[pinelife3]

What Women Think Men Think

In the 2000 film What Women Want, Mel Gibson accidentally electrocutes himself with a hairdryer in the bathtub which for some reason gives him the ability to hear women’s thoughts. This comes at a great time for him personally and professionally as it allows him to perform well in his job as an advertising exec, woo the lovely Helen Hunt, and bond with his estranged daughter.

Sadly, the genius of What Women Want was not recognised by critics in its time and the film received poor reviews - however, it did perform well commercially, making it a great candidate for a gender-flip remake. Our prayers were answered earlier this year with What Men Want, in which Taraji P. Henson plays a sports agent who misses out on a promotion because she doesn’t get men. Surprising no one, What Men Want received worse reviews than the original, but managed to one-up it by also being a commercial disappointment.  I haven’t seen it (I hear it is genuinely unwatchable) but from Wikipedia I gather that she drinks some magic tea and then can hear men’s thoughts which... makes her good in bed but doesn’t lead to as much professional success as you might expect. While What Women Want, directed by the great Nancy Meyers, is about a chauvinist learning to respect women, What Men Want is about a woman learning that most men suck and that they don’t deserve respect so it’s better not to work for them. What Men Want was directed by a man which, if you ask me, seems kind of pandering: why would a man make a film about how cartoonishly awful men are?

The rough premise of both What X Want films is that when the protagonist has access to the inner thoughts of the opposite sex, what they hear is revelatory: the opposite sex is apparently unknowable, inscrutable, vastly foreign. It requires magic (or bathtub electrocution) to know what others really think. Ha! Well, I have that magic. A portal to another world. A world where men, unobserved, unfettered by social barriers, freely say whatever they really think of any idea, image or product you present to them: Reddit.

I’ve often complained to Matt that practically any post on Reddit which features a young and/or attractive female woman girl will draw comments from men saying that they’re going to jerk off to the picture. Why do you think we care that you’re going to mash your genitals while watching this gif of a girl in a bikini using a homemade water slide? Why did my eyes and mind have to be subjected to this information about your plans for the afternoon? Did that first improbable spark of life, apes descending from trees, straightened spines, the birth of technology, everything our forebears strived for across eternity, really lead up to this moment where you wrote that on the internet? Why are we pack animals?

So the shtick of this blog post is: I sneak about on Reddit to find out want men want, what they care about, and think about. But! We ladies don’t care what they think about beer and barbecues (we already know that all men are practically BBQsexual, am I right?) so let’s identify a few things where we do care about what they think. 

For our purposes, I think women only care about men’s opinions on women - and possibly also sexual politics. For sports, most political issues, food, music, etc. I think we all agree that if you ask a man what he thinks, he’ll probably give you a pretty straight answer. The fantasy of knowing what men really want is that it’s information you would not normally have access to, because you’re too shy to ask, or you’re concerned his answer would be evasive or dishonest. Most people aren’t dishonest because they’re mean liars. They’re dishonest because they doesn’t want to hurt your feelings - or perhaps because they can’t be bothered to argue. So some of the impulse to eavesdrop on someone’s thinking is an insecurity, it’s suspecting they’ve withheld or softened an opinion - and wanting to know the full truth even if it’s hurtful. 

In particular (and mostly because I want to talk to someone about these books), I’m going to pick ideas from Sally Rooney’s novels to compare romantic men as written by a woman with the actuality of men on Reddit. Rooney writes love stories (or at least love-adjacent stories) which are widely read by women and have been enormously popular: this to me suggests that her idea of romantic men has resonated with many women and therefore it may be interesting to see if the interiority of the men she’s written could exist in the real world (or, at least on Reddit).

My methodology for trawling Reddit for relevant information is simple:

1. Is the attribute mentioned in Reddit’s NSFW directory? I don’t want to solely rely on the Reddit NSFW directory as a barometer for men’s interest in things, but I believe when trying to assess what men find attractive, this is a decent tool. I would venture to say that every (legal) niche interest is addressed by a NSFW subreddit: gamer girls, women in sundresses, redheads, anime princesses, cute girls, sexy girls, skinny girls, mums, teens, big boobs (attached to women with rich interiorities, I’m sure), mascara stained tears, and so on forever. Related to this: just because a subreddit exists to address a particular niche (e.g. braces), this doesn’t mean all men find that age group, attribute, body type, piece of clothing, etc. attractive - but it at least illustrates that someone found it attractive enough to create a community dedicated to it.

2. Is the attribute mentioned in any of Ask Reddit’s 'Men, what’s one unusual thing you find really attractive about women’ type threads? Men seem to sense that these threads are always started by women, so the responses are more romantic than sexual. Dudes tend to say the ‘unusual things’ they find attractive are freckles, when women can’t reach things on high shelves, messy up-dos, etc.

Question 1: Do men like the pale, non-sexy parts of women?

In Rooney’s second book Normal People, the male protagonist spends a lot of time looking at the female protagonist and admiring her pale delicacy.

You look really well, he says.

I know. It’s classic me. I came to college and got pretty.

He starts laughing. He doesn’t even want to laugh but something about the weird dynamic between them is making him do it. ‘Classic me’ is a very Marianne thing to say, a little self-mocking, and at the same time gesturing to some mutual understanding between them, an understanding that she is special. Her dress is cut low at the front, showing her pale collarbones like two white hyphens.

Later, he admires her pale lips and wrists: 

He hasn’t seen her in person since July, when she came home for her father’s Mass. Her lips look pale now and slightly chapped, and she has dark circles under her eyes. Although he takes pleasure in seeing her look good, he feels a special sympathy with her when she looks ill or her skin is bad, like when someone who’s usually very good at sports has a poor game. It makes her seem nicer somehow. She’s wearing a very elegant black blouse, her wrists look slender and white, and her hair is twisted back loosely at her neck. 

Women hope men think of them in this way: that men closely observe us and like what they see, that they can thrill romantically at non-sexy parts of our bodies like our under eye bags or bony elbows, that they’re so devoted they like us even when we’re sickly. Lolita has this to thank for its enduring popularity. Sure, Humbert Humbert is a broken man and a pedophile but he’s so lyrical:

I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.

Men want to be him, women want to be adoringly described by him. 

Anyway. Let’s check Reddit to see what men really think of pale wrists and collarbones - or if they think of them at all.

There are no communities in Reddit’s NSFW directory focused on wrists or collarbones or any bony protrusion through pale skin. There is a subreddit dedicated to NSFW content featuring pale girls with ~420,000 subscribers but the focus of this content is sexy areas of the body (enormous pale breasts, perfect pale butts, etc.) and there is not much coverage of pale wrists and/or collarbones.  

I also couldn’t find any references to pale non-sexy parts of women in any AskReddit threads related to things men find attractive about women. 

Conclusion: I do not believe that men as a cohort are particularly into dark under eye bags, bony chests, etc. These are just things women wish men liked about them.  

Question 2: Do men like damaged women?

In Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, the protagonist has the following conversation with her ~lover~ in bed:

I want you to hit me. I don’t think I want to do that, he said. I knew that he was sitting up now, looking down at me, though I kept my eyes closed. Some people like it, I said. You mean during sex? I didn’t realise you were interested in that kind of thing. I opened my eyes then. He was frowning.  Wait, are you okay? he said. Why are you crying? I’m not crying. Incidentally it turned out that I was crying. It was just something my eyes were doing while we were talking. He touched the side of my face where it was wet. I’m not crying, I said. Do you think I want to hurt you? ...  I don’t know, I said. I’m just telling you that you can.

In Normal People, the protagonists have a similar exchange during sex:

Will you hit me? she says. For a few seconds she hears nothing, not even his breath. No, he says. I don’t think I want that. Sorry. She says nothing. Is that okay? he asks. She still says nothing. Do you want to stop? he says. She nods her head. She feel his weigh lift off her. She feels empty again and suddenly chill. He sits on the bed and pulls the quilt over himself. She lies there face down, not moving, unable to think of any acceptable movement. Are you okay? he says. I’m sorry I didn’t want to do that, I just think it would be weird. I mean, not weird, but... I don’t know. I don’t think it would be a good idea.

in the context of these novels, this behaviour is a form of self-harm from women who hate themselves: even those I’m closest to want to take advantage of me, will do what they want with me, will hurt me if I let them. The perfect men, confused and innocent to this self-destructive behaviour, are concerned and decline the offer. The women interpret this as a form of sexual rejection but the reader knows this rejection is actually romantic. Could we really thrill over a man who agreed to beat her? No one talks about 50 Shades of Grey anymore but Mr Darcy lingers in the minds of mothers and BBC-watching daughters the world over. Rooney’s romantic leads are very nice men for not hitting the protagonist during sex. 

Importantly, while the offer of subservience and sexual violence is not an immediate aphrodisiac, it adds to the overall appeal of our lady protagonists as women who are soft, damaged, not easily available, but also deeply vulnerable. Bob Dylan muses, basically (she’s delicate and seem’s like veneer. Sidebar on that line: I heard it when I was 17 and was jealous because it’s so good. Turns out this line is hotly contested in places where people contest Dylan lyrics. One tribe thinks it’s: she’s delicate and seems like veneer. Another tribe thinks it’s: she’s delicate and seems like the mirror. The tribe which is 100% wrong thinks it’s: she’s delicate and seems like Vermeer.). 

These books both have this thread of college-aged women who hate themselves and want to be mistreated by their lovers, and lovers who are perfect and sensitive enough to like the control they have in the relationship, but not abuse it. My read on this is that women like to think that men like to save damaged women. Damaged meaning women who are clearly dealing with one or more of the following: 

Untreated mental health problems

Self-medication dependencies 

Daddy issues

Memories of growing up with violence/abuse/Teletubbies/war crimes/poverty

Heavy baggage from previous relationships

You know what I mean. So, let’s check Reddit to see what men think of damaged women. In the NSFW directory there are a number of BDSM subs, most of which are focused on women being dominated by men: women trussed up in elaborate rigs of ropes and straps, women being used in various ways, beaten, dominated. Most of these subs have between 100,000 - 200,000+ subscribers. This would indicate that there are a decent number of Reddit users who are interested in hurting their sexual partner. 

(DISCLAIMER: I don’t mean to kinkshame. ContraPoints (I think in this video) argued that while it’s fine to be into BDSM and enjoy being hurt or hurting someone else, it does suggest some things about you. BDSM isn’t just fun. No one wants to be tied up and beaten/pissed on for no reason. You want those things because it means something to you to be treated badly or to treat others badly. Liking BDSM doesn’t mean you’re damaged, but it might mean something adjacent to that.)

Furthermore, re: Reddit’s attitude to ‘damaged’ women, any time a guy on Reddit tells a ‘crazy ex’ story, someone from the 3 brain cells club will flop out an old cliché: don’t stick your dick in crazy. Men like to warn each other about damaged women. That cliché often attracts a popular counterpoint:  

Crazy chicks are good in bed! What a treat: there are perks to dating a damaged woman. More than anything, men on Reddit love acting like they know a lot about women and wild sex. A damaged, compliant woman is great for clocking up these experiences.

I think we can say that some men do indeed like damaged women. The impression you get from Reddit is that a lot of these men would take advantage of the vulnerable Rooney protagonists, but that’s the point even within the novels: the man could have said yes, could have hit her - which the reader wouldn’t find romantic because we know that on some subcutaneous level she didn’t really want to be treated that way. A lot of romance only reads as romantic because we’re aware of the unromantic alternative: what if Richard Gere had treated Julia Roberts the way most men treat prostitutes? What if Bob Dylan compared a beautiful, mysterious woman to the 17th century Dutch painter Vermeer? 

In the final act of What Women Want, Gibson loses the ability to hear women’s thoughts. The point the film makes is that he’s been so reformed by hearing women’s perspectives and relating to them as actual human beings, that he doesn’t need magic anymore to behave like a nice person. This is also because it would not be romantic to be in a relationship with a man who was eavesdropping on your inner monologue. If the relationship is real and working, then you don’t need psychic powers to anticipate how the other person is going to feel and respond to things. You can always just ask - and you’ll have to trust that the answer is honest. 

Bonus: more of that lovable scamp Mel Gibson:

[pinelife3]

Sadness

The treatment of the breaking of the fourth wall in Fleabag is the most compelling thing I’ve seen all year. Throughout the first season, our protagonist Fleabag (played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge who also writes the show) would look at the camera to make witty asides. Usually a sarcastic remark or eye roll to hammer home that she’s sardonic, insincere, perhaps a little underhanded. 

You’ve probably noticed how if you’re in a one-on-one conversation, it’s hard to rag on someone but that in a group it works (because you can pretend it’s good natured humour rather than a scathing attack on their very existence). In Fleabag, the breaking of the fourth wall is a way for Fleabag to safely ridicule whoever she’s speaking to. It’s also a succinct way of delivering backstory, revealing her intentions, and getting us on side. These interactions with the fourth wall are pretty standard, see: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Amélie, House of Cards, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Shakespearean asides, American Psycho. It’s an accepted device. But then in season two, when Fleabag speaks to us, someone takes notice, someone spots her dipping out of their diegetic reality as she speaks to us in ours. 

I thrilled at this. 

Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen everything - but I’d never seen this before. This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen on a TV show (forget the Red Wedding). This is a masterful trick, and great storytelling all at once - it demolishes a literary device. But most of the coverage of Fleabag has focused on how sad the show is:

People seem to like that: they like being crushed, enjoy being devastated. Why is that?

I’ve recently cried over two cowboy related things: Brokeback Mountain and Red Dead Redemption 2. 

I cried when I finished Red Dead Redemption 2 because I love Arthur Morgan so much: he was just the sweetest guy, and I was sad the story was over because we can’t go fishing anymore, or crash his horse into trees and fall, or fight gators in the swamps, or brush his horse while we cruise around the old west. I just felt so wistful for his life and the idea of bad guys working hard to be good in a changing world. 

And then I cried at the end of Brokeback Mountain because it is objectively very sad. The shirts tucked inside each other which Jack kept all those years. The possibility that Jack didn’t know how much Ennis loved him. The life they could have had together, and how much they loved each other - but the families and relationships they destroyed along the way as well, because no one ever said what they felt. 

I really liked both Brokeback and Red Dead, because they have great stories and characters. In Red Dead, I have so many fond memories - and for that reason it made me feel strong emotions. But I don’t like Red Dead because it made me feel strong emotions. I don’t like Brokeback because it was ‘crushing’ and/or ‘devastating’ - it was enjoyable because it was a beautiful story with tragic, poignant elements. I like the story - not that it made me cry. Most Fleabag reviews seem to focus on the sadness it made the audience feel as a way to recommend it to people. 

Watch Fleabag - it will make you feel something. 

Prepare to emote because Fleabag is preternaturally sad.

The discourse around the show on Reddit is similar:

Pffft want to feel really sad? Check out this scene from Synecdoche, New York:

It’s very moving, kind of irresistibly so. And I think that’s because it’s calling out to that scared, bitter, self-pitying part of you which is always cringing in the shadows, waiting for someone to invite it out of the garage into the living room. This speech is designed to frighten you: you’ll make misssssstakesss and ruin your life. You won’t even know you’re doing it until it’ssssss toooooo late. You might think your life is nice - but that’sssssssssssss only because you haven’t ssssssssssseen how bad it will get. It’s giving you permission to feel bad without providing any reason to feel bad, and then it’s allowing you to wallow in that bad feeling. It’s poison. 

I promise you, for 99% of people who watched Synecdoche, New York , life is not that bad. People in horrible, war torn places where they aren’t able to watch Charlie Kaufman films because no one dubs indie movies in Kurdish have it bad - and not just because they’re missing out on great films, but because they essentially live in a sandier version of Hell. Haven’t you ever sat in the sun with a dog and seen it look back at you and felt a perfect connection? Haven’t you ever fallen asleep, perfectly comfortable, tucked in beside someone you love? Haven’t you ever eaten pancakes with ice cream, or seen a huge mountain, or been really cold and then gotten into a warm bath? Haven’t you ever seen a baby fake-crying on the tram and then its mum tickles it under the chin and it laughs, and you see everyone around you smile because babies are so pure? Come on! You’re not Othello. Your life is pretty nice. Even Othello’s life was pretty nice right up until the end. 

Pretty nice.

But boring. Right? 

Pancakes? Cuddles?

How am I to thrill at sunsets and smiling babies? 

Good. Now I’m sad again. 

And if the realisation that you don’t have anything to be sad about (except for the ordinariness of the pleasures in your life) didn’t make you sad, check out this compilation of the 10 most depressing moments in Bojack Horseman (ranked in order from least depressing to most depressing!).

A major inconvenience of modern life is that most of us have supremely comfortable, happy, safe lives. And when something goes wrong, you can’t go on a tragic rampage and tear out your own eyes, beat your breast, or wail on the moor in a thunderstorm - even though that may be what you feel like doing. 

Work sucks, no one respects me, and I messed up that section of the Excel spreadsheet so maybe they are right to not respect me: take me to a moor where my tears can blend with rain and my howls will be swallowed by the wind! 

Ordinary people don’t get to live in a tragedy - and besides, there aren’t as many moors around as literature might have you believe. The most you can do usually is make a scene at a family dinner or isolate yourself at a party and then get drunk and walk home crying. Who would write a sweeping, romantic story about an embarrassing fuck up walking home drunk, feeling sorry for themselves.

Oh.

Wait:

And Now For That 2000 Year Old Mystery

Aristotle’s Poetics is the source of the word catharsis (in italics because it’s Greek which is the way I was taught to do it in high school - if only there were Greecian-alics, am I right?), which in common parlance today basically means any kind of dramatic release of emotions. Kickboxing is cathartic. Getting your eyebrows waxed is cathartic. Crying during an emotional episode of a TV show is cathartic. 

Because the word appeared in Poetics, it's original usage related to the theatre, in particular the experience of an audience watching a tragedy: the release of emotions they feel in watching things go seriously wrong for the hero. For this reason, catharsis is often tied to anagnorisis - the moment of tragic realisation. 

Oh god I killed my father and married my mother. 

Oh god, that’s my son’s head on the pike, not the head of a mountain lion.

Oh god, remember when I messed up that bit of the spreadsheet and everyone knew it was me. Existence truly is pain.

You get the idea. It’s not enough that the protagonist is a fuck up: that matter needs to be brought to their attention and they need to reflect on it.

(A more proper (read: academic) definition of catharsis is: “an imitation of an action ‘with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.’” The emotions the audience feel echo what the people on stage are feeling. The jump scare in a horror movie scares the character on screen and the audience watching at home.)

Aristotle never clearly defined catharsis. So for all this time (2000+ years) people have been trying to infer what he meant from a couple of references to a pretty slippery concept. Even though the general public has their understanding of the word, academics still cannot agree on a definition. But we know what it means, roughly, because we’ve all experienced it. 

Over the weekend I watched Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s other other TV show (not Killing Eve) which had an exchange between an artist and a drunk girl on sadness and how it factors into art:

Character 1: He’s my muse!

Character 2: Your muse?

...

Character 2: Like an artist's muse?!

Character 1: Yes, he is! You think meeting someone like Colin happens to artists all the time?! He gives so much.

Character 2: Yeah, sure, and you just lap it up and just slap it on a canvas.

Character 1: Pardon?

Character 2: "His pain is so beautiful." You're using him to indulge yourself.

Character 1: I am indulging? And what is this? 

Character 2: This is a $4 bottle of wine.

...

Character 2: Sorry if I upset you, Melody.

Character 1: You don't upset me. You bore me. All you seem to want to do is drink and wank and drink and wank.

Character 2: Well, at least I don't have to wank other people's pain onto a canvas, and then shove it in people's faces and call it "my art."

Character 2 in this scene is played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I can’t be bothered to explain why it’s relevant. 

For the eternity of human brains, or at least for as long as preserved creativity, the most comfortable, secure people in the world have tried to experience the things tragic victims feel - perhaps so they can briefly know what it feels like to be a romantic figure struggling in an unjust world. A passport to feelings and drama we aren’t permitted in every day life. Catharsis is the word to express the reaction, but what do we call an audience who seeks out that sensation? Catharsis chasers?

It’s not insightful to say that people like to watch Fast & Furious movies because they’re exciting and perhaps audiences enjoy that excitement because their own lives are un-exciting. But commending a thing because it will make you sad seems aberrant in some way. A fast and dangerous car that will make you miserable. A roller coaster that will make you depressed. An incredible shootout in the streets of LA that will make you sob in the bathroom cubicle at work every time you think about it. I can’t explain the drive, but like Aristotle I will invent a new word, so that academics can never know what I meant but will still write at great length about it, so that it will slip into common parlance and be horribly misused until eventually, 2000 years from now, a girl can waffle on about it on her blog. And the word will be: scartharsio. Or maybe scorpithoniacs? Or sarcastiharsics? 

Sadness is entertainment for a scartharsio.  

ALL TIME HALL OF FAME: WAILING WOMEN AND MOORS

Nobody knows what it’s like to be me, a sad woman who weeps on moors! 

I’m not being overly dramatic!

[pinelife3]

Getting Short Stories

I read the short story “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” by Haruki Marukami last weekend. I really enjoyed it - until it finished. Because then it was obvious the story wasn’t going to give me any more help to understand it. Of course, I thought about if after I finished it, still trying to get whatever Murakami was on about. And I’m still thinking about it now. I don’t get it.

(Disclaimer: I cannot give you a clear definition of what it means to get it. It’s the same as when a poem works. It’s something clicking into place. Something you couldn’t learn on Wikipedia. Sweeping clear new pathways in how you think about something. I’d argue that you can get something from a piece of media without explicitly getting the media itself (for example, I love “Burnt Norton” but it is pretty inscrutable to me). Equally, you can get something without really caring about it (see: the more recent seasons of Black Mirror) - but that’s not all that interesting to talk about.)

“The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders is an example of a short story I like and get: the character’s actions and motivations are sometimes surprising but still make sense, the world is vivid and interesting, the writing is highlightable, and I think I understand what Saunders is trying to say. Or - if I’ve misunderstood what he’s saying, I’ve been able to wring something satisfying out of it on my own. It means something to me, and I feel moved by the story and its ideas in some inarticulable way. I think I read it in a food court.

“The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” was published in The New Yorker in 1990 and then made its way into Murakami’s 1993 book of short stories The Elephant Vanishes (published in English in ‘93 - it wasn’t published in Japanese until 2005). Probably like many people who have bought the book in the past year, I was inspired to read it after seeing the Korean film Burning (which is based on a story in the collection called “Barn Burning”). Also, I haven’t read any Murakami (that’s a lie: I tried to read Norwegian Wood when I was 21 but didn’t have much patience for it and gave up after ~100 pages) and thought this might be a low-effort way of remedying that.

In terms of the action of the story, The New Yorker summarises it well: 

The narrator, a resident of Tokyo, has quit his job in a law office, and is living as a house husband. One Tuesday morning he receives a phone call from an unknown woman, who says she will help him "come to an understanding," if he'll give her ten minutes. Busy cooking spaghetti for brunch, he hangs up. Later, his wife calls to tell him of a job prospect, as poet and poetry editor of a magazine for young girls. She also asks him to look for their missing cat; it's named Noboru Watanabe, after the wife's brother. She thinks it's in the yard of an abandoned house on their street. In his own yard, the narrator hears a bird screeching; he doesn't know what species of bird it is, but he and his wife think of it as the windup bird: it's there each morning, as if to wind up their world. That afternoon the mysterious woman calls back, and tries to have an erotic dialogue with the narrator. After he hangs up, the phone rings again; he doesn't answer. At the abandoned house, a young girl coaxes him to sunbathe with her. She tells him a fantasy about ripping up a corpse to get at "the lump of death itself." That night, his wife angrily accuses him of killing the cat. He writes a poem: Noboru Watanabe Where have you gone? Did the windup bird Stop winding your spring? The telephone begins ringing once again, but neither the narrator nor his wife will answer it.

This is basically the extent of the story but there are some weird details that add flavour. For example, the protagonist seems to have an auditory fixation. A lot of the story is about him listening to female voices (side note: Murakami is known for having a thing for ears - or formerly having a thing for ears). When a woman calls him on the phone, he makes much of his ability to place voices but has difficulty placing hers. Eventually, their conversation devolves into what is essentially phone sex. He hangs up and avoids answering the phone for the rest of the day, although it keeps ringing. The narrator describes a secret garden path/passage with no entrance or exit. It runs behind all of the houses in his block, so when he walks down it, he has a view into everyone’s backyards: he can see their washing, smell their cooking, etc. He is surprised and suspicious that his wife is familiar with this corridor. (If this were high school English I would be hammering home that the blocked in tunnel is a metaphor for the protagonist’s directionless existence, etc.) The ‘young girl’/teenager mentioned in the summary above, is described as crippled/limping and she mentions that she’s taking the year off school while her leg heals after a bike accident. He falls asleep in a deckchair in her garden while she talks to him. When he wakes up she’s gone. This never goes anywhere. The phone sex never goes anywhere. The corridor never goes anywhere. 

The passages about the wind-up bird are brief and seem trivial while you’re reading them: just lazy, dreamy thoughts from our unemployed protagonist as he drifts off to sleep on a warm Tuesday afternoon:

A regular wind-up toy this world is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grown old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

Okay... sure. Clearly, the bird has some significance, but the protagonist spends an equal amount of time thinking about spaghetti. What I also find difficult is that people’s emotions, reactions and motivations in the story don’t make sense. When his wife yells at him at the end of the story, accusing him of killing their cat, I wondered if maybe she was trying to pick a fight, if she’s sick of the marriage and wants out. I also thought she might be more distressed because the cat is named after her brother - how do you tell your brother that the cat you named after him is lost, probably dead. What would that symbolise? Still, to me she seems like an unreasonable person because the way her emotions escalate (apparently without any real trigger) is seriously out of step with normal human behaviour:

I emerge from an after-dinner bath to find my wife sitting all alone the darkened living room. I throw on a gray shirt and fumble through the dark to reach where she’s been dumped like a piece of luggage. She looks so utterly forsaken. If only they’d left her in another spot, she might have seemed happier.

...I take a seat on the sofa opposite her. “What’s the matter?” I ask. “The cat’s dead, I just know it,” my wife says. “Oh c’mon,” I protest. “He’s just off exploring. Soon enough he’ll get hungry and head on back. The same thing happened once before, remember? That time when we were still living in Koenji -” “This time it’s different. I can feel it. The cat’s dead and rotting away in the weeds. Did you search the grass in the vacant house?” “Hey no, stop it. It may be a vacant house, but it’s somebody’s house. I’m not about to go trespassing.” “You killed it!” my wife accuses.

I heave a sigh and give my head another once-over with the towel.

“You killed it with that look of yours!” she repeats from the darkness. “How does that follow?” I say. “The cat disappeared of its own doing. It’s not my fault. That much you’ve got to see.” “You! You never liked that cat, anyway!” “Okay, maybe so,” I admit. “At least I wasn’t as crazy about the cat as you were. Still, I never mistreated it. I fed it every day. Just because I wasn’t enthralled with the little bugger doesn’t mean I killed it. Start saying things like that and I end up having killed half the people on earth.” “Well, that’s you all over,” my wife delivers her verdict. “That’s just so you. Always, always that way. You kill everything without ever playing a hand.”

I am about to counter when she bursts into tears. I can the speech and toss the towel in the bathroom basket, go to the kitchen, take a beer out of the refrigerator, and chug. What an impossible day it’s been!

Am I dumb? Do I not understand adult relationships? Because this seems like a very weird exchange to me. Does the way he reacts to her accusations, with exasperation rather than anger or surprise, suggest that he’s seen her behave like this before? A pop culture analogue: remember the video of Solange beating up Jay-Z in an elevator after the 2014 Met Gala?

Jay-Z is in the white suit. Solange is the one hitting him. There’s a bodyguard trying to keep them apart. And Beyoncé is standing there calmly - not getting involved, just trying to protect her outfit. Here they are directly after the incident.

What a fucking pro. Thousand yard smile. 

At the time, speculation was rife about what Jay-Z did to trigger such a beating (in italics because it’s still surprising that everyone was so okay with the domestic violence). What really thrilled people was the crack in the facade of perfection. A glimpse into their lives that hadn’t been perfectly curated, something we were never meant to see. The common read was that Jay-Z must have done something because otherwise Beyoncé would have stepped in to protect him. The consensus now is that Solange had found out that he’d cheated on her sister. Maybe even that he’d done something at the Gala. This is all now part of the Carter canon because they’ve referenced it in their music to great commercial and critical success.

Another interesting interpretation was that perhaps Beyoncé had seen Solange raging and uncontrollable many times before and knew how to weather the storm. Maybe Solange has a temper when she drinks? Maybe she’ll have an outburst, and all you can do is stay out of the way and ignore it until the mood passes and she sobers up. Perhaps her family is used to this behaviour. There’s no point engaging or trying to reason with her, you just have to let her get it out and then smile for the press at the elevator doors. 

As with Beyoncé, maybe our protagonist is accustomed to bad behaviour: recriminations, tears, tantrums. You kill everything. Most people would want to dig in if their partner said something like that. But perhaps it doesn’t trigger such a strong reaction in him anymore. Another odd behavioural detail, perhaps again showing the protagonist’s muted response to the world, is that he is pretty indifferent to the mysterious phone call. He resolves not to answer the phone, but is otherwise not at all curious about who’s calling him. If I received a call like that from a shadowy stranger, I would sacrifice a great deal to find out who was behind it. I know I’m not alone here - because, as every scammer knows, the most efficient way to get someone to open an email which it is in their best interest to not open (full of malware, spyware, etc.), is to include a declaration of love or romantic interest in the subject line.

Searching for some connection between the events of the story, I wondered if maybe the wife hired the woman on the phone to seduce her husband so that she’d have a concrete reason to divorce him. But this doesn’t really track because just earlier in the day she was encouraging him to stay a house husband - why would she do that if she wanted to leave him? 

There are lots of weird details in the story, none of which signify much to me. Our protagonist is unemployed, he doesn’t have much to do and isn’t looking for much to do, his voice as narrator is anxious, circular, repetitive. The key themes seem to be curiosity, restlessness, loneliness, directionlessness, nessness, etc. But unless the point is that everything that happened in the story was pointless, and that’s supposed to echo the protagonist’s torpor, I don’t get it. Basically every major plot element is still a question mark - are we supposed to dismiss those as magical realism or wishful thinking on the part of the protagonist and move on with our lives, never being curious about who the lady on the telephone is, or why the girl has a messed up leg and won’t go to school? I can’t do it. I want to know! I want to get it.   

Fortunately for us, Murakami wrote a novel called The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which spins off the short story into the first chapter of the novel and runs from there. Do you think it answers any of my questions above?

Remember the cat named after the wife’s brother? In the novel, the brother is an incestuous rapist. Maybe that is why the narrator doesn’t care for the cat much. Maybe that’s why the wife is accusing her husband of killing it? Some kind of wishful thinking? Still, we don’t get any background on the relationship with her brother until The Wind-up Bird Chronicle so you’re kind of grasping at air in the short story. 

In a chapter of the novel apparently not published in English versions (according to Wikipedia, Vintage, the English publisher, was concerned the book was too long so they had the translator cut about 61 pages from the original 1,379 pages), it is revealed that the phone sex lady was actually his wife. Twist! In the short story he said of the woman’s voice:

I have absolutely no recollection of ever heading this woman’s voice before. And I pride myself on a near-perfect ear for voices, so I’m sure there’s no mistake. This is the voice of a woman I don’t know. A soft, low nondescript voice.

I presume his skill for placing voices isn’t in the novel. Because that seems like a pretty lame trick to pull on your reader. It’s one thing to have an unreliable narrator. But an incompetent, overconfident one is just setting you up for a shitty experience. That’s a book I don’t want to read. I also don’t want to read it because it’s 1,318 pages, so that’s that.

Perhaps it’s wrong to judge Murakami based on one short story. But he put this one at the start of the book! And actually (even though I’ve read hardly any of his stuff) I would argue this story is probably representative of his work. Check out this Murakami bingo card:

Appearing in “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”:

Mysterious woman

Ear fetish? Perhaps not - but, like I said, an auditory fixation for sure

Unexpected phone call

Cats

Urban ennui

Secret passageway

Precocious teenager

Cooking

Vanishing cats

This story is in his usual stylistic neighborhood. He’s got to be comfy here. 

What do people like about Murakami? Does his writing make me feel like the universe is singing a song? Certainly, this story has stuck with me. By which I mean, it plagues my every waking thought. It torments me. It twists my toes backwards, blocks the drain of my shower with hair, corrupts my Excel files. It is a blight I shall bear for the rest of my life: who was on the phone? Not only do I not get Murakami, but I don’t get what others might like about him. Like I said at the top, I did enjoy reading this story because there were tantalising threads. I could tolerate the dull inner monologue about the narrator’s erstwhile legal career and how he felt as he drifted off for an afternoon nap if there were a resolution to at least one of the story’s mysteries. But this story does not pay off. Not even a little bit. The idea that you need to read 1,300 more pages for a resolution is frustrating. In 2014, The Guardian covered an event where Murakami spoke about The Wind-up Bird Chronicle:

The author of 13 novels and many short stories admitted to having completely forgotten what he has written – or indeed why – when asked about specific plot points, without seeming bothered at all. “Really?” and “I don’t remember that” were two of his most frequent answers, and he had the audience laughing at his frankness every time. “It was published 20 years ago and I haven’t read it since then!” he said of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, around which the event centred...

“I don’t have any idea at all, when I start writing, of what is to come. For instance, for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the first thing I had was the call of the bird, because I heard a bird in my back yard (it was the first time I heard that kind of sound and I never have since then. I felt like it was predicting something. So I wanted to write about it). The next thing was cooking spaghetti – these are things that happen to me! I was cooking spaghetti, and somebody call. So I had just these two things at the start. Two years I kept on writing. It’s fun! I don’t know what’s going to happen next, every day. I get up, go to the desk, switch on the computer, etc. and say to myself: “so what’s going to happen today?” It’s fun!” 

Fun for you, maybe.

I don’t think a feature of good fiction is wacky shit inexplicably occurring with no explanation or follow up - otherwise, it’s not a narrative.

I don’t need every plot line neatly resolved, and I don’t need to be told explicitly what everything means (I’m happy to do some legwork on my own) but none of the plot points are resolved at all in "The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”. In fiction, as in life, I want things to be connected, to have a cause and effect relationship. I want things to make sense: to have a trigger, make an impact, be remembered. Even if the trigger is hidden, I want people to react to the things happening around them in a plausible way. Ideally, I want to think the things in the story mattered. 

“Up in Michigan” by Hemingway is a short story I like. It’s an interesting depiction of sexual politics, innocent female affection, etc. As I’ve gotten older, the reasons I like it have changed. When I read it when I was 20, I felt some kind of feminine kinship across time with the protagonist because she falls for the wrong guy, and her romanticism is crushed by the weight of the drunk guy she likes falling asleep on her after some bad sex, and she loses a little bit of herself that night - yes, her virginity but also some trust and whatever. And now I find it kind of amusing because you know Hemingway killed with the ladies and probably played the heart breaker (or the drunk dude falling asleep on some poor girl) a hundred times over so it’s funny to imagine Hemingway in his early 20s, having just got done stomping some girl’s romantic aspirations, then sitting down to write this story, all soulful and sensitive, as if he gave a fuck about girls crying over boys who will never like them. Still, Hemingway’s short stories fucking kill. Killing fuck. They’re good. In “Up in Michingan” as in many of Hemingway’s stories, things are implied rather than uttered (as per the law in Hemingwayland), so sometimes you don’t know the background to a conversation and have to deduce what two characters are talking about, but the dynamic between them is revealed through dialog and their actions. You may not understand why something happened, and often there’s no narrator to help you out, but you infer how people feel about it and what it means to them. Not everything needs to happen for a reason: sometimes babies are born with cancer, sometimes the guy you like doesn’t like you back, sometimes guys get into fights outside bars, sometimes you meet a weird teenager in a secret garden path. But the things that happen should matter to you, to your reader, and to your protagonist, at least a little bit. Otherwise what’s the point?

[pinelife3]

Mindhunter: No Magic

I’ve been reading the book Mindhunter. You might have seen the Netflix/David Fincher TV show (or read the book?) - it’s based on the life of FBI agent John Douglas, the guy who pioneered criminal profiling, especially of serial killers, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. An interesting element of Mindhunter is how many cases Douglas worked on where the police consulted a medium. I kid you not! In tough, high-profile cases where the local police needed a breakthrough, they would sometimes call a psychic to ask for confirmation on their leads, hoping that the medium could magically intuit something about the case that the cops had missed (where does the killer live, what does he look like, what’s his line of work, etc.). It doesn’t sound like Douglas himself ever called a medium, or put much faith in their psychic intuition, but he does mention that they were around and contributing to cases he worked on. It seems like in the early days of profiling, people had a similar opinion of Douglas’ work: that it was superstitious, unscientific, unreliable - this even extended to his testimony and analysis as an FBI expert sometimes being inadmissible in court:

Though I’d already been qualified as a crime-scene analysis expert in several states, the defense referred to me as a “voodoo man” for the way I came up with my interpretations, and the judge ultimately ruled that I wouldn’t testify.

In “Killing Types”, a post on this blog from January 2016, I compared two accounts of how the criminal psychological profile of the Butcher Baker was developed. One account was from Wikipedia, and the other was Douglas, who personally developed the profile:

The serial killer in question was Robert Hansen AKA the Butcher Baker (everything I’m gonna write about him is via Wikipedia. You should just read their article if you want a more detailed account as I’m just summarising here). He was a very shy, skinny young boy with acne and a stutter. He was horribly bullied and the cute girls in school didn’t like him. Wikipedia doesn’t have a citation for this, but apparently: because he was “shunned by the attractive girls in school, he grew up hating them and nursing fantasies of cruel revenge.” As he grew up, Hansen became an adept hunter. Like many serial killers, Hansen was also a thief and an arsonist. From 1971 to 1983 he murdered at least 17 women ranging in ages from 16 to 41.

Hansen’s typical move was to abduct women (usually sex workers) and take them to his cabin near Anchorage, Alaska. There he would rape them and then set them loose so he could hunt them in the woods. Of his confessed murders, many of the bodies have not been found.

By 1982, three bodies had been found in shallow graves in the woods and the Alaska state troopers called in the FBI to assist in putting together a criminal profile. According to Wikipedia, FBI agents put together a profile for a person with the following characteristics:

Experienced hunter

Low self-esteem

History of being rejected by women

Would keep ‘souvenirs’ from his murders

A stutter

...[Douglas] devotes a chapter to Hansen, and the way he describes what happened is actually kind of different from Wikipedia’s version of events. Wikipedia makes it sound like the FBI turned up and pulled the profile out of thin air just based on looking at the crimes, whereas Douglas says that when he and his boys rolled into Anchorage, Hansen was already a suspect. So what they were doing was comparing what they knew about Hansen to what they knew about the crimes and seeing how things matched up and if he was a likely suspect. So the profile they put together did include the bullet points above and, yes, some of that would have been speculation (such as the self-esteem problems, the history of rejection, and the souvenir keeping), but the rest (such as saying he had a stutter) were based on the fact that they knew Hansen and it was completely fucking obvious he had a stutter and acne scarring. Anyway, Douglas describes his profile and process as follows:

“[Hansen] was short and slight, heavily pockmarked, and spoke with a severe stutter. I surmised he had had severe skin problems as a teenager and, between that and the speech impediment, was probably teased or shunned by his peers, particularly girls. So his self-esteem would have been low… And, psychologically speaking, abusing prostitutes is a pretty standard way of getting back at women in general.

“I also made much of the fact that Hansen was known as a proficient hunter… I don’t mean to imply that most hunters are inadequate types, but in my experience, if you have an inadequate type to being with, one of the ways he might try to compensate is by hunting or playing around with guns or knives… I was betting that Hansen’s speech problem disappeared when he felt most dominant and in control.”

So I think we can call that another case closed: it is not possible for an FBI profiler, no matter how gifted, to look at a crime scene or a string of murders and miraculously determine that the killer has a speech impediment.

As you saw above, my read of the passage from Mindhunter was that Hansen was a top suspect, that Douglas made some additional speculations about Hansen, but essentially just endorsed the guy the local cops already suspected. So specific details in the profile that seem like magical inferences weren’t as magical as Wikipedia made them seem. In January 2016 I hadn’t read Mindhunter, but I looked up what I thought was the relevant section on Google Books and that was the basis for the above section of my blog post. (If you’ve never tried to read things online for free, you may not be aware of this, but Google Books provides previews of lots of books, but you have to buy the book to read the whole thing - so back in 2016, I just looked at the pages of Mindhunter that Google had made available for free.)

Now I’m finally reading Mindhunter in full, my take on the process of profiling has changed: I do believe that Douglas and co. could have inferred that the killer had a stutter or bad skin without knowing Hansen (a man with a stutter and bad skin) was the top suspect. Indeed, Douglas tells a number of stories where he and his team correctly made similar inferences - for example, in the profile they wrote up on the Trailside Killer (not covered by Wikipedia but chronicled elsewhere). On the process of developing the profile of Hansen, Douglas writes:

We didn’t profile Hansen or devise a strategy to identify and catch him according to our usual procedure. In September 1983, by the time my unit was called in, Alaska state troopers had already identified Hansen as a murder suspect. But they weren’t sure of the extent of his crimes, or whether such an unlikely individual, a family man and pillar of the community, was capable of the terrible things of which he was being accused...

Even though the police had a suspect before I heard about him, I wanted to make sure my judgement wouldn’t be clouded by the investigative work already done. So before I let them give me the specifics of their man during our first phone conference, I said, “First tell me about the crimes and let me tell you about the guy.” 

They described the unsolved murders and the details of the young woman’s story. I described a scenario and an individual that they said sounded very much like their suspect, down to the stuttering...

In a sense, this was the opposite of what we normally do in that we were working from a known subject, trying to determine whether his background, personality and behaviour fit a set of crimes.

Is he a wizard? How’d he do that? How could Douglas know from the description of the crimes that Robert Hansen had a stutter? 

The truth is common, ordinary, sensible: he had seen, heard about and worked on cases like this many times and had developed an impression of the kind of person who is capable of hunting women like animals in the woods. He’d spoken to serial killers in prison about their crimes, observed them up close, understood their motivations (control, domination, power, punishment, lust, rage). He’s a walking database of crimes and correlations, which allows him to mentally compile the information he’s received, query it against similar cases and then make what seem like totally uncanny inferences. In terms of demystifying something that seemed arcane and inexplicable, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book as satisfying and steady as Mindhunter. This guy isn’t magical - he’s just fucking sick at his job. He knows his shit. He’s a towering obelisk of professional competence. 

That’s not to say they got everything right. For example, Douglas and his unit saw a big difference in lust killers who raped their victims vs. killers who masturbated at the scene. If a killer doesn’t rape his victim but masturbates over her, Douglas and co. would infer that the killer lacks confidence, that he’s inexperienced with women, he’s single, anti-social, probably has a shitty job or no job at all, and because of that he likely lives at home or with a relative, he feels he lacks control, etc. This type of analysis was often correct, but did sometimes lead them down the wrong path (which Douglas acknowledges in the updated foreword for the 2017 reprint of Mindhunter). Since the publication of Mindhunter in the 90s, a number of prominent non-rape lust killers have been caught and it turns out they were married with kids, they were upstanding members of their community, they were homeowners who worked decent jobs, and they seemed normal around women in social settings (see: the BTK Strangler). They simply weren’t the conspicuous, twitching deviants Douglas and his unit imagined.

Mindhunter feels like a book from a different time. Douglas is vociferously pro-death penalty. He’s more sympathetic and vengeful when the victim was a cute lil blondie than a street worn whore. He is interested in the psychology of killers, but is unmoved by their troubled backgrounds: Douglas acknowledges that practically every serial killer he studied had abusive parents, never felt loved or safe, were victims themselves in many ways - but he’s pretty indifferent towards that angle. This perspective would probably get more play in a book on criminals written today - modern writers might be interested in a holistic view of criminality and suffering as cyclical. Douglas does say the number one thing we could do to prevent the development of serial killers and psychos is love our children more and have more resources available to intervene when kids seemed to be headed down the path of darkness... but, look at Douglas’ description of a guy they were looking for in Illinois:

Like so many of these guys, this one is a real loser with a poor self-image. He may come across as confident, but deep-down, he is extremely inadequate.

The UNSUB is a real loser! 

One of the key sources of information for Douglas is the killer’s signature. A signature differs from a modus operandi (MO) in that the MO is how the crime is carried out (e.g. killer surveils house for weeks in advance, cuts phone line during the night, breaks in via a window, uses the victim’s tights as a ligature, etc.) while the signature is what the killer does to get off: posing the body, keeping trophies, torturing the victim, taking photographs. Douglas says a killer’s MO may change over time based on failed crimes, stressors, changes to police work, etc. but a signature will remain steady. For example, when Bundy was at his most desperate after escaping from prison (for the second time!), he went on a poorly planned spree. By now, Bundy knew it was all over. The police knew who he was, what he’d done, and were searching for him - it was a matter of time until he was recaptured. The electric chair was waiting. Bundy’s MO had developed with experience and he was typically an organised killer who used a kit, props, and had the skill to lure his victims, but when he knew the net was closing in, he became disorganised - his MO changed. Instead of approaching a pretty girl on the street, luring her to his car and then taking his time to torture/kill her, he broke into a sorority house in the middle of the night and attacked the residents in their own rooms in vicious, quick attacks. Interestingly, this methodology was similar to his original technique when he was younger and less experienced. When he was under pressure, he regressed. Via Wikipedia: 

Bundy's modus operandi evolved in organization and sophistication over time, as is typical of serial murderers, according to FBI experts. Early on, it consisted of forcible late-night entry followed by a violent attack with a blunt weapon on a sleeping victim. Some victims were sexually assaulted with inert objects; all except Healy were left as they lay, unconscious or dead. As his methodology evolved Bundy became progressively more organized in his choice of victims and crime scenes. He would employ various ruses designed to lure his victim to the vicinity of his vehicle where he had pre-positioned a weapon, usually a crowbar. In many cases he wore a plaster cast on one leg or a sling on one arm, and sometimes hobbled on crutches, then requested assistance in carrying something to his vehicle. Bundy was regarded as handsome and charismatic by many of his victims, traits he exploited to win their confidence.

For Douglas, an MO is not a reliable way of tying crimes together - because an MO can change. But a signature (which is often at the crux of why the crime was committed) will remain relatively static and is a good clue that two crimes carried out in different ways may be related. The MO may tell you some practical details about the killer (he owns or has access to a car, he’s a local who’s familiar with the back roads, he was known the victim because he was able to gain access to the home without a struggle, etc.) but the signature is driven by behaviour - and that’s what reveals the pits inside a person. 

What’s been revelatory for me in Mindhunter is how there is a real, meaningful link between private behaviour and the surface-level details a person. We like to think that our interiority is private and inscrutable to others, that we’re boxed canyon mysteries with rich inner lives and motivations that are inconceivable to the people around us, that our true selves transcend superficial things like how we look or where we work - but Douglas can tell whether a guy will get a haircut after he’s killed someone. He knows if the killer was drunk at the time of the crime. He can tell if they were in the military or not - and if they were, whether they had a dishonourable discharge. How old the killer is. His race. Whether he’ll want to talk to people about the crime. The chances of him owning a German Shepherd. Whether he finished high school. If he keeps a journal. Whether he’s ever been married - and if it was a happy marriage. Most of these are visible details of ourselves that we display to the world, and feel safe displaying because they don’t give too much away: you don’t think people can accurately read anything serious or private about you based on something like how old your car is or whether you watch the nightly news. But all these insignificant details do reveal something. Maybe it is kind of magical.

[pinelife3]

Hunting Hinoki: A Frugal Jerk’s Perfume

This year Matt and I are being frugal jerks.

My salary is $85,000/year - after taxes, etc. this works out to ~$4,500 in my bank account every month. Of this, every month I funnel $1,000 into my holiday savings account and $1,000 into my regular savings account for investing or as a back-up if something goes wrong. Right now, I have more money (spread between my bank accounts and some ETFs) than I have ever had! It feels really good. I’m not even spending it on anything (more on that below) but it just feels good knowing it’s there because, to me, having money in your bank account symbolises things like security and responsibility.

The major change Matt and I have made as frugal jerks is not buying lunch everyday. Previously I was spending ~$13.50 every week day on salads. The salads were good (they’d put crushed up corn chips in them) but my habit was shameful. One day they accidentally double charged me so I paid $27 for a salad. The other thing we’re doing is not eating out so much - dinner out even at the pub typically costs $60 between us (for two meals and two drinks) so eating at home has helped. 

My share of the rent is something like $1,300 so that leaves around $700 for everything else (food, hot water, transport, pinot grigio, Spotify, face cream, etc.). Frugal jerk has been more of a fun thing for us so far, where we joke about how clever we are for saving money (e.g. by buying the slightly cheaper haloumi at the supermarket). For me, the philosophy of frugal jerkism is centred around saving money through cunning and self-sacrifice rather than because you need to. It’s more about the joy of beating the system: the thriftiness has become its own obsession. This post on /r/frugal_jerk the other day really cracked me up - the premise was that some desperate jerk happened upon a jumbo tin of beans (enough calories for weeks!) but was so weakened by his self-immolating frugality that he was unable to carry the beans.

ANYWAY

I haven’t worn perfume in a few years because it started giving me this really cankerous rash on my eyelids - look on the horror show of my eye and despair:

Lately, though I’ve been thinking of risking it all (or at least my eyelids) to smell good again. I’m interested in perfume by Diptyque (their labels are cool) or Aesop (smells herbal and lush and maybe would be hypoallergenic?).

Most major fashion houses (e.g. Dior, Prada, Chanel, etc.) have their own perfume lines. A lot of retail stores (e.g. Target, Kmart, Zara, H&M, etc.) also have in-house perfume lines. Perfume strategy is actually pretty interesting. Perfume as a luxury good is likely the only designer product most women in the world will ever own. Every Myer and David Jones store in the country carries perfumes and makeup from Chanel and similar brands, but won’t carry any other product from these brands - no shoes, bags, jackets, or dresses. Because Myer and David Jones customers can't afford the jackets. You can buy a small bottle of Chanel perfume for ~$125 at Myer. The cheapest Chanel bag I could find is a hideous $4,420 bum bag, meaning the perfume is ~2% of the cost of their cheapest bag. At Kmart, you can buy a bottle of perfume for $5. An average bag at Kmart goes for ~$15, making the perfume ~33% of the cost of the bag. Isn’t that an interesting difference? Imagine if Chanel tried to sell perfume for $1,458 a bottle (~33% the cost of one of their bags). It would still sell (because China) - but obviously not so much of it. It’s like all of the most prestigious fashion houses agreed that the one product they would sell very cheaply (relative to the rest of their catalogue) would be perfume. 

Combining my twin goals of frugality and not getting a hideous eye rash, I’ve decided to recreate Aesop’s Hwyl perfume at home. 

With zero research, my planned steps are as follows:

Identify what scents/essences/whatever are in the perfume

Look up tips on how to make perfume

Acquire required ingredients and bottle

Mix it up

Test it out 

Does it smell good?

Does it give me an eyelid rash?

Aesop may be savvy to the ways of DIY perfumers because they’re pretty evasive about what scents actually go into Hwyl. Here’s how they describe it:

An intriguing fragrance with a hint of eccentricity. Reminiscent of a Hinoki forest, smoky notes descend into subtle spice and dark green, earthy accords. Eau de Parfum for men and women. 

Aroma

Smoky, woody, rich

Key ingredients

Cypress, Frankincense, Vetiver

The full ingredient list is as follows:

Alcohol Denat. Water (Aqua), Fragrance (Parfum), d-Limonene, Eugenol, Geraniol, Citronellol, Isoeugenol, Farnesol, Linalool.  This ingredient list is subject to change, customers should refer to the product packaging for the most up-to-date ingredient list.

Fragrance? Very sneaky. According to Wikipedia, parfum is just the French word for perfume.

What are these other things?

According to Truth In Aging dot com, alcohol denat, or denatured alcohol is ethyl alcohol which has had denaturant added to make it taste bad. I’d imagine the denaturant is added to prevent people abusing the product as a form of surrogate alcohol (click here for something interesting and kinda related). Truth In Aging goes on to say that alcohol denat has “a variety of purposes in cosmetics. It acts as an anti-foaming agent, astringent, antimicrobial agent, and a solvent. It also helps deliver the active ingredients of a product. Almost every type of skincare product lists it as an ingredient.”

Okay fair enough. I’ve also seen advice online (as in the video below) that you can buy perfumers alcohol. I bought perfumers alcohol online for ~$15 (100ml including shipping).

Next ingredient in the list: Water. Sounds straight forward. After that comes fragrance, which we’ve already discussed. Then: d-Limonene. d-Limonene is apparently “a biodegradable solvent occurring in nature as the main component of citrus peel oil. It has a pleasant citrus aroma and has a FDA-GRAS rating (is generally recognized as safe). Replacement for toxic solvents.” 

Maybe this is weird personal hang up of mine, but I don’t think of solvents as being a thing that should go on skin. Or, at least not the skin of things that are still alive (what happens between a corpse and its mortician is none of my business). But according to Wikipedia, a solvent “is a substance that dissolves a solute (a chemically distinct liquid, solid or gas), resulting in a solution.” That sounds pretty reasonable - I guess not all solvents are paint strippers. WebMD mentions that “Limonene may block cancer-forming chemicals and kill cancer cells in the laboratory. But more research is needed to know if this occurs in humans.” The margin of error on WebMD’s article should be assumed to be high but let’s hope d-Limonene is not actively carcinogenic. In any case, I might just get some orange and/or lemon essential oil as a substitute.

Next is Eugenol, described by Wikipedia as a "colorless to pale yellow, aromatic oily liquid extracted from certain essential oils especially from clove oil, nutmeg, cinnamon, basil and bay leaf.” So in addition to the lemon/orange, we’re also in the market for some clove/nutmeg/cinnamon. That gives us a tangy, fresh fruit scent with some warmer spice. Sounds reasonable.

Geraniol is next, it’s apparently “the primary component of rose oil, palmarosa oil, and citronella oil.” As you may know, citronella comes from lemongrass (and palmarosa is similar to citronella). I don’t think of lemongrass as being similar to rose, but I’d prepared to add it to the mix.

Scent list so far:

Lemon grass and/or rose (or palmarosa if I can find it)

Orange/lemon

Clove/nutmeg/cinnamon

Next in the list is Citronella so we definitely will need lemongrass. And then maybe rose as well? (Stupidly I didn’t expect there to be so much chemistry involved in this process.) Wikipedia notes that “Citronellol is found in the oils of rose (18–55%) and Pelargonium geraniums.” I’m not even going to get into Pelargonium geraniums - apparently there are different types of plants which are both called geranium but belong to different genera (Wikipedia does concede that it’s confusing). 

This has been tedious but we’re nearing the end of the list. Isoeugenol is next - sounds like something from Mordor but Wikipedia says it’s a thing (specifically a ‘phenylpropanoid’, if you’re curious) which occurs in essential oils such as ylang-ylang. Sounds easy enough to procure.

This next one sounds a little more esoteric: according to Wikipedia, Farnesol is “a natural 15-carbon organic compound which is an acyclic sesquiterpene alcohol.” Hmm okay (15-carbon!?!?!?!). Never mind about all of that, the article goes on to say “Farnesol is present in many essential oils such as citronella, neroli, cyclamen, lemon grass, tuberose, rose, musk, balsam and tolu. It is used in perfumery to emphasize the odors of sweet floral perfumes. Its method of action for enhancing perfume scent is as a co-solvent that regulates the volatility of the odorants. It is especially used in lilac perfumes.”

Uh-huh so this reaffirms some of what we already know - lemon grass, rose, etc. 

On to our final ingredient: Linalool. So the bad news is that there are more than 200 types of plants which produce linalool. This makes it hard to zero in on one particular ingredient. However Wikipedia does note that the plants producing linalool are “mainly from the families Lamiaceae (mint and other herbs), Lauraceae (laurels, cinnamon, rosewood), and Rutaceae (citrus fruits), but also birch trees and other plants, from tropical to boreal climate zones, including fungi.”

So again, we’re smelling some familiar things in here. Part of what’s tricky is that I don’t know whether linalool is listed because there’s something crucial linalool adds to the mix which I need to include it for, or if they’re just declaring linalool because it happened to be in one of the other ingredients. Do I need to procure linalool, or will I inadvertently include it because it’s in citrus-y essential oils? Lush mentions it on their website saying, linalool “occurs naturally in many essential oils, such as ho wood oil, tangerine, spearmint, rose, neroli, mandarin, lemon, lime, lavender, cypress, grapefruit, cinnamon, chamomile, palmarossa and ylang ylang.” Lush indicates that linalool occurs in essential oils which makes it sound like it just happens to be there. Let’s assume they don’t have a huge tub of linalool they use to season everything.

Referring to what Aesop cited as the ‘key ingredients’ of the perfume Hwyl they mentioned cypress, frankincense, and vetiver - none of these have come up in my list so far which may be an issue so let’s dump those in too. 

This article in the Australian Financial Review, which reads like a poorly disguised ad, covered the launch of Hwyl:  

Hwyl is the first Aesop fragrance – and one of the first widely distributed fragrances in the world – to prominently feature the Japanese cypress tree, of which there are three native varieties. Yet anyone who has visited Japan will be familiar with the woody, evergreen aroma of Japanese cypress, particularly the scent of the most-grown tree, hinoki: it is used as a building material for temples and shrines, as an incense, in bath salts and to make rotenburo, the big, open-air tubs at Japanese hot springs.

The article also refers to a Comme Des Garçons perfume launched in 2008 called Monocle: Hinoki which also includes the hinoki scent. It’s described as  “inspired by "a perfectly still, slightly chilly spring morning spent soaking in an indoor/outdoor tub at the Tawaraya in Kyoto." The fresh notes of frankincense, moss and vetiver are cut through by sharp cedar, thyme and pine, reminiscent of the boxy hinoki soaking tub.”

Checking against that list, Hwyl does sound/smell similar. The perfumer who worked on Monocle: Hinoki says of the perfume: "My formula contains cypress, pine and resinous notes. It's actually very simple."

My final scent list: 

Smells I’m confident I need:

Cypress (or pine/balsam as a backup)

Frankincense

Vetiver (apparently smells like lemongrass)

Lemon grass (logically, should smell a bit like vetiver)

Rose (you know what it is)

Ylang-ylang

Something citrus (lemon, mandarin, or orange)

Something spicy (cloves, nutmeg, or cinnamon)

Smells in the maybe pile:

Pine

Cedar

Thyme

Moss (???)

Geranium

Mint

Neroli

Lavender

Over the weekend, I went to Auroma, a local shop that sells a huge range of essential oils and other thing you might need to make your own soaps, lotions, candles, etc. They sell essential oils from various brands with the cheapest oil available in store being ~$15 for a 15ml bottle. Some brands also sell blends - where basically they mix several oils into a pleasing scent and call it something like ‘Moroccan Spa’ or ‘Romance’. You may already see where I’m going with this, but if we multiply the number of perfumes above in my ‘confident I need’ list (8) by the lowest possible price for essential oils in this store ($15 - although in actuality most were around $25 - $35) then we have a base cost of $120 just to buy all the scents I need - some of these would only require a drop or two. It would be against the philosophy of a frugal jerk to spend so much on essential oils.

So I bought two bottles: 

3% rose absolut in jojoba oil - this is nice but very strong. The nose boggles at what a 100% rose absolut might entail

A blend called ‘Moonlight’ which is made up of various amounts of sweet orange, cedarwood atlas, juniperberry, lavender Bulgaria, patchouli, and cinnamon bark

I ended up with cedarwood instead of cypress. In store, this didn’t seem like a major concession, but as I write this I am realising that cedarwood and cypress trees are quite different. I also missed out on frankincense, ylang-ylang, and vetiver (although I do have lemongrass which is supposedly similar). What’s tricky is that when you’re sniffing all the different sample oils, nothing smells that great. They did have vetiver and frankincense in the store, but I didn’t much like the smell. Plus, buying those would have added around $50 to my bill. 

These are the different components of my perfume. I also bought a brown glass roller ball thing (pics of that upcoming) to store the perfume in.

For those wondering about the perfumers alcohol and whether the denaturant is  effective at deterring would-be drinkers, I’d compare the smell to something like vodka or nail polish remover without the fake-nice smells they add. So probably no worse than any hard alcohol (for reference, I think whiskies and similar drinks smell pretty bad). I daren’t taste it (poison! death!) but I do note the bottle doesn’t say not to drink it. The label indicates that <0.25% of the 100ml is tertiary butanol (AKA tert-Butyl) and that this is the denaturant in the alcohol. According to this Q&A doc produced by the European Commission, denaturing alcohol typically involves:

“A smelling agent 

A foul tasting agent 

An analytical marker, which remains present (even in trace quantities) despite fraudulent attempts to remove all 3 elements above”

The doc goes on to say:

Member States backed (by simple majority) the Recommendation to use either isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and/or tert-Butyl alcohol (TBA) as a minimum denaturant to be added to alcohol used in the manufacture of certain products in cosmetic and perfume production. The denaturants should be used in products with an alcohol level above 20%, or 5% for mouthwash. These chemical agents are proven effective analytical chemical markers, which allow authorities to prove that the illicit alcohol is actually one which has been denatured and has qualified for the exemption. This is an important addition to the use of the smelling and tasting agents, which can easily be removed with charcoal and/or distillation techniques and the residual taste and smell can easily be masked. For example, some mouthwashes which contain 40% alcohol volume only use a menthol essence to "denature" them, which leaves the product still drinkable as an alcoholic "spirit". The Recommendation for the use of IPA and TBA was made on the basis of scientific advice from Member States' customs laboratories and input from other national and Commission experts, through the Fiscalis Project Group. Extensive consultations were also held with industry. The two denaturants in question are already widely used in the cosmetic sector, as well in other industrial sectors.

So it sounds like tert-Butyl is used to prove that an alcohol has been denatured but may not be foul smelling or tasting itself. I mean, if the purpose of denaturant is to deter human consumption, this smell isn’t doing that much to deter me (although it isn’t particularly alluring either). But that may make sense given that perfumers alcohol is intended to be used in something which makes you smell good. So perhaps this has only been denatured with a foul tasting agent? I am curious to try holding a small bit in my mouth and then spitting it out... but I will resist. I’m not so desperate for blog content that I need to start conducting perverse science experiments on myself.

Once my perfumers alcohol arrived, I got to mixing. I haven’t been overly scientific about this - there is plenty of literature online about different ratios to create eau de parfum vs eau de toilette (the latter has more water and less fragrance) but the little roller tube is pretty small and measuring things proved tricky because I was dealing with pretty small quantities anyway. My rough process was:

Add ~5 drops of the rose absolut oil

Add ~20 drops of the Moonlight blend oil

Add water so the roller is half-full 

Top it up with alcohol until the container is full

Shake vigorously (after replacing cap!)

This method may not have been ideal since the perfume promptly became milky and unappealing (those denaturant makers could take a hint from my work):

The good news is, my frugal jerk perfume has not inflamed any kind of rash on my eye. Because I’m not wearing it. In terms of the scent, I do like it - but I smell like a mum who just left a day spa, like I got a massage and all of the essential oils the masseuse used have soaked into my skin. Driving home from the spa I find that I am struggling to grip the wheel. The sweat of increasing stress mingles with the oil residue on my hands and the car fills with the rich scent of ‘Signature Serenity Spa’ blend. I try to pull off the road but my hands slide uselessly around the wheel and I think of my grandfather's sheepskin wheel cover. The road curves before me and I take a final breath of the perfumed air as the roadside barrier disembowels the car... So, I mean, it’s nice, but not the ‘intriguing fragrance with a hint of eccentricity... reminiscent of a Hinoki forest, smoky notes descend into subtle spice and dark green, earthy accords’ that Hwyl promised to be. I think the brighter smells (citrus, lemongrass) are more prominent than the smoky Japanese forest scents (cypress, frankincense) - which makes sense given that my perfume doesn’t actually have any cypress or frankincense in it. 

Reader, this is the anagnorisis of this blog post. I see now that I should not have settled for cedarwood in place of cypress, should not have disregarded my own ingredient list, and perhaps should never have tried to make perfume in the kitchen sink. I also don’t think the bit about the day spa mum worked. Aristotle’s words on the nature of tragic realisation hold true to this day - to quote his Poetics: “Oh well, what are you gonna do?” 

The cost of this perfume/experiment was ~$45 which included two bottles of essential oils (mostly still full), a bottle of perfumers alcohol (also mostly still full) and the roll-on perfume bottle. Even though the oils are expensive, I have a lot left and can continue to make perfumes and build towards the scent I want (in theory anyway - this experiment will end here. My interest has seriously waned. I’m just going to end up using these oils in my diffuser). 

Am I going to crack and buy a bottle of Hwyl? I’m not sure - I am always very intimidated by the people who work in Aesop because they are understated and elegant and the store has a weird, ritualistic element to it (free sacrament with every purchase!) which does not awaken the capitalist beast in me. 

This might also be a good time to say I’ve never actually smelt Aesop’s Hwyl before. But I’m sure it’s spectacular.

[pinelife3]

Defending Green Book

Green Book, winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, has had some run-ins with the press:

I want to look at some of these reviews and think pieces, talk about the arguments being made and try to defend Green Book. I’m not planning on talking about the plot or actors or any of the various scandals involving writer Nick Vallelonga. I could write a review saying that it’s funny, the music is beautiful, that it’s hammy at times but generally pretty nice and try to defend it that way, but I didn’t love Green Book - it didn’t suck, but there are other films from 2018 that had burly, surprisingly supple stories, brawny imagery, shredded performances, super jacked action, rippling jokes, rugged special effects, muscle bound implications (i.e. they were very sexy) which I would commend way more highly: Loveless, Widows, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Can You Ever Forgive Me, Burning, etc. Loveless in particular is a film I’ve thought about at least once a week since I saw it (around a year ago). Probably any of these films is more deserving of Best Picture - but I think the level of negative coverage Green Book has received is unfair and I want to try to rebut some of that.

ONE ARGUMENT: Green Book flopped because it’s not the kind of movie people want any more

While sniffing around for content, I noticed the URL for Vulture’s write up on Green Book’s box office performance refers to the film as a flop - a word which doesn’t appear anywhere in the article itself:

I checked the history of the article using the Wayback Machine and found that when the article was initially published in November 2018 it had this title:

How interesting. 

By December 15 the title of the article had been edited:

The actual content of the article hasn’t changed since it was published so this is likely not the writer’s doing and is just some sneaky shit from Vulture. (The writer is Mark Harris - who, just quietly, is a pretty big deal and generally seems like a nice guy. I know it’s wrong to define people based on who they’re married to... but dude is married to Tony Kushner!!) 

I imagine when the film ceased to be a flop, Vulture didn’t want to look like they were wrong. I’m not a journalist so I don’t know what standard operating procedure is in these cases, but from my time reading articles online I’ve observed that when a correction or change is made to a published article, some small text down the bottom of the page says something like “This article was originally published under the title...” or “This article originally misstated the number of fries served with...” or whatever. 

Anyway - here’s what Harris had to say:

Two weeks ago, the movie arrived. The crowds did not. Following a disappointing opening on 25 screens, Green Book expanded to 1,000 for Thanksgiving weekend and finished a somewhat wan ninth. According to IndieWire box-office analyst Tom Brueggemann, its cumulative gross of under $8 million makes it “a work in progress, with a struggle ahead.” That struggle may offer a lesson that after 50 years, a particular kind of movie about black and white America has, at long last, run its course.

This is the top 9 in American cinemas for the weekend of Green Book’s wide release:

Was Green Book expected to compete with Ralph Breaks The Internet or Fantastic Beasts? Considering Green Book’s budget, I don’t think is such a bad showing. Especially considering this is the type of film which typically relies on word of mouth to generate interest - it’s a gentle human interest story. Parents will recommend it to their kids. Kids will recommend it to their grandparents. Families will watch it at home on their sectional sofas with their golden retrievers and one of those 70s wooden bowls full of kettle cooked chips. The awards and nominations may not have been expected (Farrelly’s last film was Dumb and Dumber To), but they helped generate interest as they nudged the film into prestige territory.

Besides, you can see that Green Book’s per theatre average is $5,000 which is better than Widows, Robin Hood, Instant Family and Bohemian Rhapsody. If we’re talking about flops on this weekend, Robin Hood is the obvious candidate - it opened at #7 and grossed ~$14 million internationally against a $100 million budget! Based on Harris’ logic, this is the type of film that audiences are really saying they don’t want anymore: modern takes on heroes from the Late Middle Ages (sounds kind of obvious when you put it like that).

No one should have expected Green Book to be a box office juggernaut, it’s an indie racial politics road trip movie produced by (amongst others) Participant Media - a film studio which produces work intended as ‘social impact entertainment’. That is, films creating a conversation and maybe even spurring reflection and change around current social issues. Other recent films produced by Participant Media include Roma, Spotlight, Deepwater Horizon, RBG, Beasts of No Nation, He Named Me Malala, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and The Cove. A wide range of movies - I’m guessing the social impact element of Deepwater Horizon is that you can have too much of a good thing (when that good thing is millions of barrels of oil tumbling into the ocean, suffocating and poisoning everything it touches). Plus Deepwater is interested in OHS (Did you know BP pleaded guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter?) 

Participant Media occasionally delivers surprise hits (like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) but produces a lot of smaller budget movies (<$30 million) which barely make their money back. Haha even Deepwater Horizon failed to break even (budget including marketing, etc. was $156 million, box office was ~$120 million). When a Participant film gets awards recognition (see: Spotlight) their investment in the film multiplies well. Looking at their 2018 films (including Roma and Green Book) this may well be their strategy moving forward. The point I’m trying to make is that not even the people who made Green Book were expecting it to be a box office hit. 

In the Vulture article, Harris’ general argument is that Green Book’s ‘disappointing’ box office showing on its opening weekend indicates that America is over this type of movie. Harris states that there are two types of audience member: white and nonwhite (I’m sure there are lots of people who would take umbrage with being defined as nonwhite but Harris has a point to make about how progressive and non-racist he is so get out of his way), and that of those groups:

The portion of the white moviegoing audience that needs to be handled with this much care and flattery is getting smaller every year, and the nonwhite audience, at this point, seems justifiably wary of buying a version of someone else’s fantasy that it has been sold many, many times before...  

As one person commented on the article on Vulture:

More from Harris:

There were loud critical complaints that in Three Billboards, the black characters were plot devices, abstractions designed to facilitate the growth curve of the white protagonists. That didn’t matter to Academy voters, nor will it matter to some of them that Green Book is a movie that could have been made 30 years ago. But Academy voters themselves, almost 30 percent of whom have joined only in the last four years, are changing, too, so who knows? It used to be a certainty that you’d never go broke selling white people stories of their own redemption — and that may still be true. But in 2018, it suddenly seems possible that you’ll never get rich that way either.

Should Harris disclose here that he is a white person? And isn’t a white person like Harris rejecting a trite tale of white redemption itself a tale of white redemption? Indeed, Harris’ prescient savviness to not be fooled by ‘a film which could have been made 30 years ago’ is a stirring tale of white redemption to rival Green Book itself.

(I got all raged up about the coverage of Three Billboards last year as well - you can check that out here.)

ANOTHER ARGUMENT: gReN bOOk iS JusT aN iNVerSioN oF dRivInG miSS dAiSy (and that makes it bad - obviously)

From The New Yorker:

From The Telegraph:

From sore loser Spike Lee:

Green Book, like Driving Miss Daisy before it, tells the story of a black character and a white character who forge a friendship in the face of racial hostility while behind the wheel. (In Driving Miss Daisy, the driver is black, and the rider is white; in Green Book, it’s the other way around.) “I’m snakebit,” Lee continued in the press room. “Every time somebody’s driving somebody I lose.” He paused dramatically. “But they changed the seating arrangement this time.”

(Side note: one criticism of Green Book that’s pretty solid is that the story in the film may not be as truthful as Nick Vallelonga and Farrelly insist it is. These arguments could also be made about BlacKkKlansman, so. Provided I’m not watching a documentary, I don’t care how accurate a ‘based on a true story’ film is. See also: The Favourite.)

From The New York Times:

In the above, Wesley Morris (one of the only black writers I’ve seen cover this in a major publication) makes a really strong argument for the issues with Green Book and other films from the interracial friendship genre:

Not knowing what these movies were “about” didn’t mean it wasn’t clear what they were about. They symbolize a style of American storytelling in which the wheels of interracial friendship are greased by employment, in which prolonged exposure to the black half of the duo enhances the humanity of his white, frequently racist counterpart. All the optimism of racial progress — from desegregation to integration to equality to something like true companionship — is stipulated by terms of service. Thirty years separate “Driving Miss Daisy” from these two new films, but how much time has passed, really? The bond in all three is conditionally transactional, possible only if it’s mediated by money.

(FYI, the third film he’s talking about above is The Upside.) Morris actually seems to like Driving Miss Daisy - but he is openly disgusted by Green Book:

The movie’s tagline is “based on a true friendship.” But the transactional nature of it makes the friendship seem less true than sponsored. So what does the money do, exactly? The white characters — the biological ones and somebody supposedly not black enough, like fictional Don — are lonely people in these pay-a-pal movies. The money is ostensibly for legitimate assistance, but it also seems to paper over all that’s potentially fraught about race. The relationship is entirely conscripted as service and bound by capitalism and the fantastically presumptive leap is, The money doesn’t matter because I like working for you. And if you’re the racist in the relationship: I can’t be horrible because we’re friends now.

As a plot device, I think the point of the money or the job is that IRL people from different worlds and communities just tend not to meet. That’s true now - in what other context aside from work, dating apps or maybe sports would you meet people even from a different suburb? Logistically, how do you get them in a room together? There are still real class divides in the world - I went to a very fancy private school with an indoor pool, an equestrian centre, a ‘wellbeing centre’, etc. which is based in Corio, one of the most disadvantaged suburbs in the state. Very few (no?) families in Corio could afford to send their kids to our school. I have no friends from Corio. Probably no friends from ‘working class’ families at all. I work a white collar office job so I don’t meet working class or long-term jobless people at work. I live in a gentrified inner-city suburb. What would be the set-up to get me in a room with a person from a disadvantaged background? Would I be doing volunteer work with elderly people? Serving lunch to the homeless? A school teacher at an inner city school attended by refugee children? Would I be a psychiatrist working with a bright, but angry and confused young man? (Hey, Will Hunting!)

In Green Book, our protagonist Tony Lip (Mortensen) is initially v racist, as are most of the people around him - we hear them use slurs, and we see Tony throw out glasses because black men drank from them. As Tony works for Dr. Shirley, they chat in the car - this is really the only black man he’s every had a one-on-one conversation with. Tony also observes the more extreme racism of the South. All of this undoes his prejudices. And Tony and Dr. Shirley learn from each other along the way: Tony to be a more considerate husband, more restrained in dealing with conflict, and more warm and open-minded with people who are different from those he knows - and Dr. Shirley learns to open up, have some fun rather than protecting his pride, etc. Morris is right, initially “[t]he relationship is entirely conscripted as service and bound by capitalism.” Tony took a job. Which is not a bad or unusual thing to do. Morris makes it sound sinister - ‘conscripted’, ‘bound by capitalism’. But working for someone is pretty normal - Morris himself works for The New York Times, bound by capitalism to be a critic for a great publication! It’s not so bad. 

The common criticism is that Tony only changes through exposure to an exceptional black man, a piano virtuoso with a psychology degree, who is, in the film’s portrayal of him, not ‘typically’ black because he doesn’t like fried chicken or popular music. Critics argue that this microcosm doesn’t prove that Tony won’t be racist towards other black people, it doesn’t deal with larger issues of race throughout America - and worst of all, it depicts Dr. Shirley as so lost, lonely, and broken as a person that he chooses to settle for Tony, a recently and possibly only partly reformed racist, as his new best friend.

Sure! Okay! I think when people are from different races, communities, socio-economic backgrounds, etc. are put together, it’s easy for someone who studied post-colonial literature at uni to get into battle mode. But there has to be a non-offensive way to tell a story about people from different backgrounds being in a situation and getting along. Because those situations happen all the time and it’s a good thing they do. That’s why people talk about the value of diversity. And it’s not bullshit. When people who are different get together, it can work and they can learn important lessons from each other.

Morris also talks about Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing:

Closure is impossible because the blood is too bad, too historically American. Lee had conjured a social environment that’s the opposite of what “The Upside,” “Green Book,” and “Driving Miss Daisy” believe. In one of the very last scenes, after Sal’s place is destroyed, Mookie still demands to be paid. To this day, Sal’s tossing balled-up bills at Mookie, one by one, shocks me. He’s mortally offended. Mookie’s unmoved. They’re at a harsh, anti-romantic impasse. We’d all been reared on racial-reconciliation fantasies. Why can’t Mookie and Sal be friends? The answer’s too long and too raw. Sal can pay Mookie to deliver pizzas ‘til kingdom come. But he could never pay him enough to be his friend.

Maybe there’s something innately American about race relations and black history that I’ll never understand, but - is Morris arguing that black and white people in America can’t get on? Closure is impossible?

In this interview with the Associated Press, Mahershala Ali, as the only black person involved in Green Book, clearly felt pressure to defend it:

Ali grants “Green Book” is a portrait of race in America unlike one by Jenkins or Amma Asante or Ava DuVernay. But he believes the film’s uplifting approach has value.

“It’s approached in a way that’s perhaps more palatable than some of those other projects. But I think it’s a legitimate offering. Don Shirley is really complex considering it’s 1962. He’s the one in power in that car. He doesn’t have to go on that trip. I think embodied in him is somebody that we haven’t seen. That alone makes the story worthy of being told,” says Ali. “Anytime, whether it’s white writers or black writers, I can play a character with dimensionality, that’s attractive to me.”

...

“A couple of times I’ve seen ‘white savior’ comments and I don’t think that’s true. Or the ‘reverse “Driving Miss Daisy’” thing, I don’t agree with,” he says. “If you were to call this film a ‘reverse “Driving Miss Daisy,’” then you would have to reverse the history of slavery and colonialism. It would have to be all black presidents and all white slaves.”

Yet the debates over “Green Book” have put Ali in a plainly awkward position, particularly when Mortensen used the n-word at a Q&A for the film while discussing the slur’s prevalence in 1962. Mortensen quickly apologized , saying he had no right, in any context to use the word. Ali issued a statement, too, in support of Mortensen while firmly noting the word’s wrongness.

I don’t want to wade into that whole mess - but it does feel like a kind of ouroboros trap where you want to condemn a word and the people who used it but can’t say the word, so your condemnation and discussion of the word is really neutered. Like when people talk about ‘You-Know-Who’ in Harry Potter. The word still flashes through your mind.

Gah so Ali had to go on The View covering for Mortensen and explaining why we should forgive him for his just-shy-of-unforgiveable mistake so we could all still go see the film without feeling weird. What a horrible position to be in.

A lot of the coverage of Greek Book is from critics who are saying the film is regressive and offensive, that it uses black people as props, that America should be better able to handle its history by now - they don’t even hate it, they feel ick about it. And it’s so unfortunate that Ali has had to hear all of this. In various interviews, Ali has spoken about how long it took him to break out in Hollywood:

“I was exhausted by . . . I don’t want to say the lack of opportunity, but the type of opportunity,” Ali says. “I’d get offers to do two or three scenes, with a nice note from the director. But I felt like I had more to say.”

From a different article:

“Dr. Shirley was the best opportunity that had ever come my way at that point,” Ali said. “You gotta think, a year-and-a-half ago, coming off of Moonlight, which was an amazing experience, but I'm present in that movie for the first third of it. And that had sort of been my largest and most profound experience in my 25 years of working.”

“So to be presented Green Book and have Dr. Shirley, a multidimensional character who had agency, who chose...no one else was doing that in this time,” he continued. “He didn't have to hire a white driver, he chose to hire a white driver in 1962 to be in the south and have a white man opening your door and carrying your bags and for him to be in that relationship, to be the person in power, for him to be as talented and as intelligent as he was, the dignity in which he carried himself with, his own personal struggle to keep his life and things about his life private because for those things to be public, it would not have been embraced.”

Does it sound to you like Ali is trying to convince himself that it was okay to do this job? 

Conscripted as service and bound by capitalism.

About a month after Morris’ article Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies? was published, Green Book won the Oscar and he reflected on the film again, sounding more resigned and sad:

First, for all the changing that’s been reported about the academy’s membership — it’s getting less white and less male every year — it’s not yet entirely reflective of all that change: white and male and, at this point, capable of feeling better about a movie like “Green Book” more than, say, a movie like “Vice,” a fever dream about Dick Cheney... Peter Farrelly makes comedies and this movie, if you’re inclined to find laughs at the friendship at the film’s center, is funny. And the last line is so good and right and pleasing that I actually went for a third helping just to make sure I wasn’t wrong about it all. Only once I start thinking about what and who I’m laughing at do I get depressed...

For reference:

That is toasty warm.

As I said at the top, I don’t think Green Book is a fantastic movie - I just think it’s better than the criticism it attracted. The bulk of the criticism seemed to be mean spirited, referring obliquely to the fried chicken scene, and focussed on Peter Farrelly having a career in broad comedies and therefore not being a worthy match-up for Spike Lee, Alfonso Cuarón, etc. - plus also the obvious laughs to be had from Farrelly being forced to apologise for flopping his dick out ‘as a joke’ on the set of There’s Something About Mary (because haha his penis is so small and gross haha that’s the real joke). Hatred of Green Book has become a fun meme for Twitter. 

I don’t believe Morris is writing this stuff for his own amusement, or to be contrary, or as some kind of performative wokeness. He seems very genuine - he went to see Green Book again just to check he really disliked it. He seems hurt and troubled by the movie. The best I can get to is that maybe I’m wrong for feeling optimistic and liking the kind of movie where everyone can be friends. I am very open to accepting that there is something I won’t ever really understand about racial politics in America - and if that’s the case I may not be equipped to properly defend Green Book. 

(This is someone’s cue to make a movie about an Australian blogger who doesn’t think she’ll ever get American racial politics and then - on a yoga retreat in Texas, in the midst of a bird flu/zombie apocalypse, has to team up with a wheelchair-bound black politician (who was at the retreat to treat herself after a very stressful primary election). And then I the blogger becomes her driver, fleeing the flesh-hungry birds across the Texan plains, heading who knows where, but always squinting into the sun. We’ll They’ll saw the top off a Land Rover and restore a Civil War-era gattling gun to make it a death Jeep and the hair in our their armpits will grow long. It ends with us them howling like wolves and eating raw zombie birds. It will win many awards and annoy much of film twitter because the movie should have been about the black woman’s election and the blogger should have been eaten by the reanimated birds.)