#it really makes me think of that one line which I can not cite freely but it was something along those lines too

[starpros-sunshine]

also I love this that is the face of someone who is very much not happy with anything at that moment you really can tell how much he does not like seeing the object of his affections treated like that

[along-came-atsushi]

Akutagawa – Dazai – Atsushi: An analysis about their relationship

And why Dazai treats them so differently.

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The symbolism of Atsushi and Akutagawa:

From their outward appearance and their design alone, Atsushi and Akutagawa are meant as opposites, but they’re also a duality:

Both wear black and white clothes, but whereas Atsushi is mostly white with a streak of black, Akutagawa wears mostly black with a streak of white. It’s even represented in their hair colours.

Besides this, there are many other things that mark their oppositeness and their duality to each other:

Atsushi is a member of the ADA, while Akutagawa is a member of the PM. Atsushi’s ability colour is blue, Akutagawa’s ability colour is red. Being a member of the ADA makes Atsushi someone who works for the “light and day”, Akutagawa is someone who works for the “darkness and night.” Atsushi loves cats, Akutagawa hates dogs. Atsushi’s ability takes the form of a tiger, Akutagawa’s ability represents a dragon, both creatures are important elements in Asian mythology. Ultimately, Atsushi symbolizes life or is associated with life, while Akutagawa symbolizes death or is associated with death.

Considering this, the title Shin Soukoku (Double Black) isn’t even a fitting name for them, since they both aren’t simply a double, as both Mori and Fukuzawa or Dazai and Chuuya were.

[Beware: Spoilers starting from chapter 83]

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Dazai’s mindset and his relationship with Akutagawa:

1.) One of the reasons why Dazai’s treatment towards Akutagawa as a mentor was so cruel and brutal, firstly lies in his overall negative mental state during his PM time. He was visibly unhappy, constantly surrounded by death and violence, and more than now struggled with his suicidal thoughts.

Is it an explanation for his treatment of Akutagawa? −Yes, it is.

Is it an excuse for his treatment of Akutagawa? −No, it isn’t.

2.) Another reason is that this is just how things are done in the Mafia. There is no sense in handling someone with kid gloves in the PM, a place where you get killed for disobeying orders, where you shouldn’t see your peers as friends or get to intimate with anyone:

“It’s an unwritten rule in the Mafia to not stick your nose where it doesn’t belong. One must never open the door to another’s heart and try to judge them for the darkness tucked within.” – Odasaku

If it wouldn’t have been Dazai who taught Akutagawa in such a cruel way, with high probability, it would’ve been someone else. Or as Dazai explained, a sign of weakness will get you killed in the PM:

And Dazai had the absolute chance to kill Akutagawa after he disobeyed orders and killed a person captured for interrogation. His ability can nullify all other abilities by mere touch. He could’ve simply touched Akutagawa, so that he wouldn’t have been able to use his ability to protect himself, and then shot him on the spot. But he didn’t do that, because:

“Akutagawa – he’s like a sword without a sheath.” Dazai grinned from ear to ear. “He’ll surely become the Mafia’s strongest skill user in the not-so-distant future. But for now he needs someone who can teach him how to put that sword away.”  [...]

“When I first saw him over in the slums, I was horrified. His talents are extraordinary, and his skill is extremely destructive. Plus, he’s stubborn. If I’d left him to his own devices, he would’ve ended up a slave to his own powers until he destroyed himself.” – Dazai to Odasaku

He already valued Akutagawa’s skill and saw the huge potential in him:

I was surprised. I had never heard Dazai openly speak so highly of one of his men like that before. [...]

Dazai didn’t freely make people work under him, period; much less a boy on the verge of starvation in the slums. But Dazai seemed to have his own reasons for doing it. – Odasaku about Dazai

.

Something which is also later confirmed by Atsushi:

“I believe Dazai-san has acknowledged you long ago.”

Why is it then that Dazai still treats Akutagawa so badly and doesn’t tell his approval right to his face? Something that becomes Akutagawa’s main purpose for a long time, even after Dazai left PM.

.

Dazai’s relationship with Odasaku and Ango:

Dazai’s behaviour and actions when he’s with Ango and Odasaku clearly shows that he can be different and doesn’t treat everyone with cruelty and coldness, if he wants to.

But what’s the difference between the two people he considers his friends and the people who are his subordinates?

-> Ango and Odasaku value and respect life.

.

The reason Dazai becomes and is attached to Odasaku and Ango is their viewpoint about death and life:

“I would become a novelist and write a story about why the man stopped killing. But to become a novelist, I needed to sincerely know what it meant to live. – Odasaku

.

“You’re quite the interesting fellow, Ango. Doing that isn’t going to make the boss happy. […]” “You’re making records of the lives of the deceased. Am I right?” […] “The line between human losses and those of money and equipment begin to blur. There is no individual, no soul, and no dignity to death. But you’re fighting back against that.” – Dazai to Ango

This is the reason why he values them so much that he considers them his friends. He’s not friends with them because he gains something from it, or because they have interesting abilities, or because they are on the same intellectual level as him (which they aren’t). Something that gets emphasized by Odasaku’s rank. He descended from an assassin (a high reputation in the PM) to a maid-of-all-work and an errand boy (a low reputation in the PM).

Dazai is attracted to and fascinated by people who value life – something you don’t find in the PM, and something he himself struggles to understand. Probably because there never was a person who taught him this. Like a curious child, he turns to people who he knows have a better understanding in this than him.

He even becomes very irritated when one of his subordinates questions his friendship with Odasaku:

“Dazai, sir, I don’t mean to be rude, but… I saw him [Odasaku] sweeping behind the office the other day. A man of his status isn’t qualified to be your friend, let alone with an enemy like this.” Dazai stared, flabbergasted, at his underling.

“Are you joking? Odasaku’s not qualified?” Dazai asked, thoroughly surprised. […] “You fools!” Dazai’s lips curled into a sneer in genuine disgust.

This respect doesn’t solely concern Odasaku and Ango. Hirotsu is also one of the very few people he respects for this reason. Even though Hirotsu may not value life in the same terms as Odasaku and Ango do, but he also doesn’t lightly throw away his subordinates lives either:

“…Ha-ha! Just kidding!” Dazai abruptly added in a cheery tone. Hirotsu stared back at him, confused. “The reason you have so many people following you is that you don’t turn your back on them. I’ll leave things in your hands. I won’t tell the boss.”

It’s only when Odasaku dies in Dazai’s arms and tells him to go protect the living, that he starts to change his behaviour and viewpoint.

.

Dazai and his many failed suicide attempts:

Why is it that Dazai − a genius, a manipulator, someone who exactly knows how the human psyche works, someone who’s predictions always come true and who has plans within plans – then always fails when he tries to kill himself?

Dazai has read the book “The Complete Suicide” so often that he can cite it in his sleep. He has engaged in torture and killed many people. He knew exactly how to involve Ango and himself in a car crash without them dying.

If he really wanted to, he could’ve already killed himself many times ago. He claims that “he doesn’t like pain and suffering”, which according to him is the reason why his suicide attempts fail. But there are ways how he could kill himself without just that. It’s just that he doesn’t WANT to die.

„I thought if all went well, I could die a heroic death on the battlefield. But the dozen or so armed guys who showed up were a real scrappy bunch. […] Thus, I unfortunately avoided death once again.”

He always tells that something inconvenient happened that kept him from dying. But sometimes people around him notice that there’s something wrong in his attempts:

“I was walking and reading a book called ‘How To Not Get Hurt Out Of The Blue’ and fell into a drainage ditch.” A surprisingly absurd reason. – Odasaku and Dazai

.

“I glance at his desk and see the blasphemous book he bought the other day, ‘The Complete Suicide’, opened to a page titled ‘Death by Poisoning Mushrooms.’ Next to the book lies a plate with a half-eaten mushroom on it. However, upon further inspection, it appears to be a slightly different color from the one in the book. – Kunikida about Dazai

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“I thought you [Gide] were similar to Dazai at first, rushing into battle and wishing for death without even considering the value of your own life. But he’s different. […] And he’s just a child−a sobbing child abandoned in the darkness of a world far emptier than the one we’re seeing.” – Odasaku to Gide about Dazai.

Dazai is a person who actively seeks life and wants to be freed from his own philosophy. He’s struggling between seeking death, which he thinks is the only way to free him from his loneliness and suffering, and seeking life for the simple reason that he doesn’t want to die.

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Dazai’s relationship with Atsushi:

Atsushi saved Dazai from drowning despite the fact that he himself was on the brink of starvation. The first thing Dazai got attached to Atsushi is his view on life. Despite the abuse he suffered, Atsushi seeks life and wants to live, makes it even his reason to fight and his life motto.

“The lives of those who can’t save anyone have no value”. In that moment an idea suddenly popped into my mind. […] If by any chance I can let the passengers return home save and sound does that prove that it’s okay for me to live?”

Throughout the story, Atsushi transfers his viewpoint and determination to characters who have a connection to death, darkness and/or suffering (e.g. Kyouka, Lucy).

The reason Atsushi values life, being the symbolical personification of it, is the reason why Dazai is able to treat him much better than Akutagawa.

.

Forming Shin Soukoku:

Dazai says that Akutagawa is a highly skilled student, but he needs someone to sharpen him. He instantly decides and plans to team him up with Atsushi, the moment he meets him. He knows that Atsushi, due to his view on life, is the only one who can teach Akutagawa to value life himself and to change as a person. In other words “the one who can teach him how to put that sword away”.

This is something Dazai in the past couldn’t and still can’t teach Akutagawa (or anyone at all for that matter). Because he himself needs and wants to be taught that, so he seeks people who are able to give him a different understanding in this (see Ango and Odasaku). Vice versa Akutagawa isn’t able to teach Dazai how to value life, because he himself represents death and has a strong connection to it. It’s one of the very first things he says when he gets introduced in the story:

“Fear death. Fear slaughter. Those who desire death have an equal desire to die.”

Even though Atsushi’s words may seem very harsh, but it IS one of the reasons why Dazai so abruptly abandoned Akutagawa. Is it an explanation? −Yes, it is. Is it an excuse? −No, it isn’t.

Another reason is that Dazai tries to flee from his responsibilities, his past and the terrible things he has done (including Akutagawa’s abuse), because he is not able to face them. Not now that is. He is still in need of guidance and of change, in order to be able to do this.

[Side note: Dazai and guilt is something that can be analysed in its very own meta. I’m not expanding on it further here].

Akutagawa’s connection to death gets emphasized by him even disobeying orders to not kill, for the sole reason that in his mind, killing is much simpler and more effective. He lashes out and tries to kill the people who are respected by Dazai and/or considered friends, even though he should know that an action like this will definitely not get him the approval he so wants.

He was willing to kill Atsushi, even though his mission was to capture him alive, ignoring the possible consequences this would have had for him.

But throughout the story Akutagawa changes his viewpoint. He thinks that the reason why Dazai acknowledges Atsushi and puts him above him, is because he is a better (better in the sense of physical and ability strength) subordinate than him. But he realizes that this can’t be the case and questions it more than once:

His former pure jealousy and grudge towards Atsushi (something which he also felt for Odasaku) slowly turns into questioning, trying to understand what differs them from each other. Dazai knows very well that Akutagawa is still obsessed with him and his approval. Therefore if necessary, he uses this to manipulate him, if it’s to either protect/help Atsushi or to get them both to work together:

Akutagawa starts to constantly challenge Atsushi, questioning him, and demanding him for an answer. It’s only when Akutagawa saves Yokohoma from the Moby Dick crash, that Dazai openly tells him “you did well”.

The reason why Dazai does this so hesitantly, shows that he is still in his own metamorphosis. He’s slowly changing as is Akutagawa. He is still afraid to face his responsibilities, but doesn’t treat his former subordinate cruel anymore.

This change in Akutagawa goes so far that Atsushi is able to ask him to not to kill anyone until they meet again. When told about, Dazai is visibly happy, as it is something that he as a mentor wasn’t able to do. He is reminded of Odasaku, comparing Akutagawa now to him:

Due to this, Dazai now has this much faith in Akutagawa that he puts the task to keep an eye on Atsushi and to protect him in his hands:

Mind the difference of his expressions when he talks with Akutagawa then and now:

Dazai doesn’t team Atsushi and Akutagawa up only for strength and fighting reasons. Or because their abilities are compatible in battle. But because Dazai knows that Akutagawa won’t unnecessarily kill anymore, because he is seeking answers through Atsushi and is changing through their interactions:

He keeps his promise, much to Atsushi’s surprise, but it’s out of the question that he is happy about this:

Akutagawa promising not to kill anyone, keeping his promise in the end and even going so far as to protect someone, in other words valuing life, is something which Dazai could’ve never taught him. And again, he still can’t. Dazai is not solely the teacher, but the student himself. And although Atsushi may be a teacher for both of them in his philosophy, he is a student of Akutagawa and Dazai in other things.

Because what Atsushi lacks is self-confidence and his own worth, faith in his own abilities and the mental strength to overcome his past abuse and trauma. Those are things he learns through Dazai and especially, through Akutagawa.

[tanadrin]

Is it weird that I think that anti-Catholicism is making a moderate comeback? I actually saw an obscure twitter leftist claim that the “dual loyalty” canard actually was mostly true citing one Ross Douthat essay or something. There have also been college campuses rolling back accommodations they once gave to Catholics and Jews, ostensibly as a gesture of anti-racism.

Anti-Catholicism has never really gone away. Evangelical Protestants, especially in the US, will make common cause with prominent Catholic conservatives only until it's expedient to throw them under the bus; when you get to the far-right conspiratorial fringe, some refuse even to accept that Catholics are Christian (because they worship the pope or are secretly a Babylonian cult or something).

Like any religion, criticizing an institutional church is different from fucking over individual adherents, and people who do the latter under the guise of the former are assholes. I don't think the Catholic church should be an established religion anywhere on Earth (because no religion should be), nor should it ever be accorded special political privileges; and I think taxing churches and expropriating their property can, under many circumstances, be totally acceptable. But freedom of conscience is a pretty hard line for me. If someone wants to freely donate to a politically dubious organization like the Catholic church, or join a fucked-up abusive nightmare like the Jehovah's Witnesses, or become a Scientologist, society has almost no right to interfere with their free expression of religion. I think this principle even extends to many--but not all--of the decisions that the pious often make for their children. Obviously no one ought to have carte blanche to abuse their kids, but I do worry that, for instance, anti-circumcision legislation that targets Jews and Muslims does far more harm, and serves primarily anti-minoritarian urges to a much greater extent, than it does good or serves the interests of liberalism.

All of which is to say that I think kneejerk discrimination against the average American Catholic in the 21st century--who in any case are pretty evenly split politically and seem to have a wide range of views--is pretty stupid. But that doesn't mean there aren't Catholics who harbor the ambition of establishing an American theocracy or something pretty close to it, and who talk about religious pluralism only insofar as it serves their own interests; but would happily use their religion as an excuse to impose their values universally, if they were able. And there is absolutely a contingent of conservative Catholics who will use political opposition to the Church's actual policies and actual stances to claim the Church as a whole, or individual Catholics, are being persecuted simply for being Catholic.

My own mother was sort of trained by the nuns who educated her to interpret any ambiguous or critical portrayal of Catholicism in a kneejerk fashion as some modern-day expression of Know-Nothing bigotry (thankfully she eventually grew out of that). And looking around these days it's hard to detect any systematic anti-Catholic prejudice in American life, though the idea that some fundie evangelical institutions harbor a deep and irrational loathing of the Whore of Babylon is pretty uncontroversial to me.

And if by "anti-Catholic sentiment" people are referring to those churches in Canada that got burned down--well, that's 100% endorsed. They should have started burning them down decades ago. They should do St. Peter's next.

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

[robininthelabyrinth]

Spilled Pearls

- Chapter 14 - ao3 -

If Lan Qiren hadn’t had any idea on what to do with Cangse Sanren to begin with, he had even less of an idea of what to do when he received a letter from his sworn brother which, after some deciphering of the small talk and insincerely meant pleasantries that could just as easily be read as implicit threats, seemed to boil down to so I hear you have a lover now? and also come to the Nightless City at once.

I do not have a lover, Lan Qiren wrote back crossly. You should send whatever spies you have packing because they are clearly completely useless to you. Also, I have classes that I have no intention of missing. If you want company, recall that you have a wife.

That won him a few weeks of blissful silence, possibly due to Wen Ruohan’s shock but more likely due to Lan Qiren having spitefully chosen to send his reply by usual post rather than by special post, which was more expensive and also generally reserved for important sect matters and not for obvious fishing attempts for gossip about the personal lives of juniors.

Which Wen Ruohan should be above, anyway. What did it matter to him?

The response, not long after that, went something along the lines of so what you’re saying is that you haven’t won the immortal mountain’s disciple yet? if you come to Qishan, I can advise you and that irritated Lan Qiren most of all, because right up until that point he hadn’t known that Cangse Sanren was a disciple of the famous Baoshan Sanren, the best-known immortal still in contact with the mortal world.

Mostly because Cangse Sanren hadn’t ever bothered to introduce herself.

It bothered him, a little. More than a little. She knew how much he valued people acting according to the rules; even if she didn’t care for them, shouldn’t she respect his inclination?

(It turned out that she didn’t introduce herself because she didn’t have a proper name, just the title that everyone used for her. Baoshan Sanren let everyone keep the name they came to the mountain with, but Cangse Sanren had come too young for any name at all, and so she’d never gotten one in all the suspiciously unspecified years she had spent on the timeless mountain. It was a pretty good reason not to introduce yourself, as such things went, and it also belatedly explained why she took offense to people calling anyone old.)

I am not trying to win anyone, he wrote back to Wen Ruohan. And even if I was, which I am not, I would still have classes and am not currently at liberty to travel. Has there been some sort of terrible tragedy such that your Wen sect is so desperate for additional people in the Nightless City?

You are not just any person but my sworn brother, Wen Ruohan responded. Am I not entitled to see you? Maybe I want to see this beard you’re reputedly growing.

Lan Qiren rolled his eyes and threw the letter into the box he was keeping all the others. He was trying to grow a beard, as it happened, though being a newly-turned eighteen it was a slow and frustrating process. He wasn’t entirely sure he liked the itchy feeling of it growing, either, but stroking his chin as if in thought was nearly as cathartic as waving his hands, only more socially acceptable; he liked that part very much.

He’d always had a tendency towards strange motions – moving his hands or arms, tapping on things, or rocking back and forth when he was especially distressed – but his brother had always hated it especially, always quoting Do not move arbitrarily at him even though he knew that that wasn’t the fundamental meaning of that rule. That wouldn’t have been so much of an issue, except most other people seemed to agree with him, citing the importance of acting in a dignified and restrained manner, limiting unnecessary movement and remaining still and calm as a placid pool of water no matter what the circumstance.

The beard was an acceptable compromise. Given how common beards were in the sect, it would be hard to criticize Lan Qiren without accidentally insulting an elder – and it felt so good to be able to move freely, the action serving as an aid for emotional regulation that he desperately needed.

Of course, Cangse Sanren thought it was ugly.

Lan Qiren didn’t agree, but he also didn’t think it was any of her business what he did with his face. Even if it was ugly, so what? He wasn’t particularly egotistical.

Accordingly, he thanked her stiffly for her opinion and then proceeded to ignore it.

Apparently, that didn’t sit well with her, a fact Lan Qiren only discovered when he woke up one day, groggy and unclear as to what had happened the night before, to find himself shaven clean and Cangse Sanren beaming at him from within his own room, to which he had never invited her.

He did not react well.

Stories of your shouting have reached even Qishan, Wen Ruohan’s next letter said. Was what your little lover did really so bad? I hadn’t known you were so sensitive. It’s not as if it won’t grow back.

This is your fault, Lan Qiren wrote back, irrational and upset, his calligraphy rough from the way his hand shook – though whether in rage or something else he couldn’t quite tell. I don’t want to hear from you.

Truly his reaction had been out of proportion with Cangse Sanren’s offense. Shaving a beard, especially a half-grown thing like that, was little more than a childish prank, even if it had taken him several months to get as far as he had; in the end, it was really only a blow to his vanity, and perhaps the loss of a convenient emotional crutch.

And yet, when he’d woken up and seen her there where she wasn’t welcome – when he’d realized that he couldn’t remember the evening before, just the way he couldn’t remember what had happened in the Nightless City that day, waking up to Wen Ruohan smiling at him and an oath he didn’t know nor want – when he’d tasted the sour taste of day-old liquor on his tongue –

He’d panicked.

She’d realized it, he thought in retrospect; the ever-present smile had slowly dripped off her mouth as he stared at her blankly for the first few moments, frozen, and had morphed into an expression of shock when he had broken through his paralysis to start screaming at her to go, get out, leave – he’d even picked up some of his own things to throw at her, just to make her leave faster.

He continued smashing his things after she’d gone, unthinking in his frenzy and unsure why he was so upset, and in the end when clarity had returned and he realized what he’d done he’d been so ashamed that he’d grabbed his guqin and slunk away, retreating to the rooms where the Lan sect entered into seclusion. He couldn’t go into real seclusion with so little preparation, of course, but he was practiced enough at inedia that he could skip meals for a few days and not need to see the world for at least a week.

Part of the feeling of shame was that he didn’t know why he had reacted so badly. Wasn’t it normal for peers his age to play that sort of trick on each other? It hadn’t been meant as a real insult.

He had no right to feel so betrayed.

And yet, he did.

Cangse Sanren had visited later that day, her hand tapping lightly on the door bound by wards and her normally brash voice murmuring explanations and not-quite apologies – saying that she hadn’t realized what it had meant to him, that she wouldn’t have done it if she’d known, asking if he wouldn’t come out to talk to her about it and let her apologize properly.

He ignored her.

He ignored her the next day and the day after, too. His hands were unsteady when he tried to play calming songs for himself, his music tangled and knotted up like the feelings in his chest.

On the fourth day, she came and sat by his door in the evening, late and near to curfew.

“I didn’t know, you know,” she finally said after sitting there for nearly a shichen. “About what happened to you in the Nightless City.”

His hands froze over the guqin.

“Drinking liquor comes as easily to me as breathing,” she continued. “No one’s ever been able to play a trick on me because I got drunk – it’s everyone else who falls over in the end, not me. Maybe what why, when someone told me how badly your family handles its liquor, I thought only of how funny it would be…and not how it would feel, waking up and realizing that you didn’t know what happened. What someone could have done to you.” She was silent for a moment. “What I did do.”

Lan Qiren shut his eyes tightly.

Yes, he thought to himself. She was right. That was why he was so upset.

It wasn’t about the beard at all.

“An oath made when you didn’t know it doesn’t count, you know.”

He laughed harshly, the sound catching in his throat like thick mud. “It does,” he said, and his voice was hoarse from the lack of speech. “Of course it counts. It’s my honor, in the end…anyway, there’s no reason for me to lose my head over it. Sect Leader Wen’s powerful and influential; there are those who would cut off their right hands for a connection with him, much less an oath of brotherhood.”

He wasn’t even all that angry at Wen Ruohan for doing it, either, not really. There wasn’t much point – his few experiences with the other man so far showed that that was just what he was like, always taking instead of asking, and scheming was as innate to inter-sect politics as fighting. Might as well be angry at his grandfather for the ancestral weakness to liquor in the Lan lineage.

It had only been the shock of Cangse Sanren’s unexpected actions that had made it feel like a knife stabbed into his back, a scabbed-over wound suddenly ripped open again.

“You didn’t trust him,” Cangse Sanren pointed out. “You trusted me. And I scared you.”

Perhaps that was true.

“You’re still you, you know. Even while drunk.” She chuckled. “You talk more, care less what people think of you; you’re a little more willing to stand up for yourself, a little more bitter, a little less consciously kind. You told me all about music, something that went over my head, then went to sleep in just the right and proper way, albeit right on the floor. I had to wait until you were asleep to shave you.”

That was a relief to hear. Lan Qiren hated the idea of being so vulnerable.

Although – perhaps he wasn’t. According to Lao Nie, he’d apparently kneed Wen Ruohan in the balls that night for bothering him with nonsense or possibly for trying to leave before he finished explaining something, sometime either before or after their oath.

(After, he assumed. If it had been before, it seemed more likely that he would’ve ended up dead.)

“Anyway, I wouldn’t have done anything serious,” she added. “You wouldn’t have woken up married or anything.”

“It’s not you,” he assured her hastily, alarmed by the thought. “I didn’t mean to imply anything about your character, which I know is good; I know you wouldn’t have done anything like that. It’s only – you don’t always know what people think is enough, coming from the immortal mountain as you do. If someone really wanted to push the issue, or if you didn’t have the background you did, just you being in my room unattended might’ve served as an excuse. And then where would we be?”

She was silent for a while.

“You really don’t want to be married to me,” she finally said. “You’re not playing games or anything; you really don’t.”

Lan Qiren felt something lurch in his chest.

“No,” he said, painfully honest. “Did – did you?”

“Maybe a little,” she said, and Lan Qiren winced. The possibility hadn’t even occurred to him, not even when others had suggested it.

“I didn’t mean…”

“I know,” she said, and her voice was warm. “Don’t worry about me, Qiren; I’ll get over it soon enough. There’s no pain I won’t forget a day later, never learning anything, it’s just the way I am.”

He gnawed on his lower lip. “…can I ask why?”

“Why you, you mean?” He could hear her shrugging through the door, the fabric of her clothing rustling against the wall she was leaning against. “You care about things, deeply and truly. Rules, honor, the right path…I like the way you think, the way you care. You have a good heart and a good brain. Why not you?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and felt rather a wretch over the whole thing. “I didn’t mean to…to…”

She laughed. “You didn’t lead me on, Qiren! You only ever treated me as a friend, and I was, I think. Maybe still am?”

“You are,” he said, and looked down as his guqin, then sighed, picking it up and going to the door. There was no point in pretending to be in seclusion now that the knot in his heart had loosened, and he was starting to get hungry. “Come on, let’s go. I feel a need to graze on the kitchen’s leftover vegetables, as if I were a wild rabbit.”

She beamed up at him, round face shining like the moon.

The next day, after he finished doing penance for missing classes without advance notice – two dozen strikes, but no more – Lan Qiren went down the mountain and purchased some tea said to have especially strong stimulant properties, and gave it to Cangse Sanren.

She blinked at it, then looked at him.

“If you brew this in the morning, you won’t be so tired all the time,” he told her, and shrugged. “Since we’re friends and all.”

He didn’t have that many friends – so few as to not even have recognized her as being one. He was determined to cherish them.

She smiled.

The next day after that, there was surprising news in the Cloud Recesses, the gossip reaching the classroom faster than the messenger sent there specifically for that purpose.

Wen Ruohan had come to pay a visit.

[tl-notes]

Kobayashi’s Maid Dragon S2 Episode 5 Notes

Better late than never! Hopefully I’ll catch up with these before next week’s episode hits.

私は、種族全体の目的よりも自分がやりたいことをやっているエルマに、興味がありました。

当時の私、そんな感じでしたし。

What Tohru is saying in these shots is a little different in the Japanese:

“I had an interest in Elma, who was doing what she wanted to do instead of advancing the goals of the species [her faction]. Since that’s how I was at the time, too.”

That is, for the first sentence, Tohru is saying Elma wasn’t interested in the broader dragon goals, not Tohru herself.

Then in the second sentence, instead of a wishy washy “I think that’s how it was?” Tohru says that she was like that too, hence her interest.

So it goes from like:

 “I was interested more in Elma than in faction goals, because she was acting freely. I think, anyway.” 

to more of a:

“I was interested in Elma because she was acting freely, not bound by faction goals. That’s what I was like too, after all.”

Not sure if it really counts as a translation note, but since I had some questions about it, here’s a few words on the Tohru/Elma disagreement scene.

Tohru thought Elma was like herself: acting not according to what dragon (or human) society asked of them, but according to their own personal set of values. Elma, by allowing herself to be placed in the position of “god” by the humans, had changed that; she locked herself into permanently being a (large, important) cog in the human society. From Tohru’s perspective, she’d lost the one person she felt kindred with, her fellow “free actor.” She doesn’t particularly care what happens to the humans, hence the 私が言いたいことはそういう話ではない (“That’s not what I’m trying to talk about”) when Elma says she’ll just stop the wars from happening: that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t solve Tohru’s issue.

Hence Kobayashi’s response: both grand (involved the fate of nations), and petty (Elma got “trapped” by food, and Tohru’s initiation of the fight was for personal reasons).

喧嘩するほど仲がいい kenka suru hodo, naka ga ii

This is one of those sayings that is often a giant pain in the butt to translate, because it’s not an odd concept in English, but for whatever reason* there is no common pithy saying for it like there is in Japanese, so it’ll almost come off less smoothly. 

The idea is that, in order to “have a fight” with someone, you have to already have an established relationship that’s at a certain level of closeness.

Two strangers? Why would you even have a reason to fight, who cares. Two acquaintances? Why deal with it, just smile and nod and go on with your day. Two close friends though? You probably care enough to want to convince them of whatever it is, and/or you don’t want to have to hide your real thoughts/feelings around them like you might around, say, just random coworkers or something—meaning more chances for friction.

*My theory on this is that it comes from the same place as the “wow Japanese people are so polite” stereotype and stuff like honne/tatemae as discussed in a previous episode’s notes: in a situation where two strangers/acquaintances might get into a shouting match in the US, in Japan there’s a comparatively higher chance they just tatemae it up to prevent direct conflict and end the situation early—hence less likely to “have a fight” per se. As always this stuff is just on a continuum though.

What do you call these “clouds” left by planes as they fly? In Japanese, they’re called 飛行機雲 hikoukigumo, lit. “airplane clouds.” And they’re not a season word! 

Officially, anyway. 

However, they are heavily associated with summer, to the point where you if you google around to find out if they are a haiku season word, there are a whole bunch of sites to tell you no, they’re not, stop asking. That doesn’t mean they’re not a great way to tell the audience it’s summer anyway, though! 

If you’re curious as to why the summer association: how long vapor trails like this remain visible depends heavily on how humid the air is. More humidity, longer trails. And Japan has very humid summers (and very dry winters!).

If you’ve heard the song Tori no Uta, the OP to Air (also animated by Kyoani), hikoukigumo is the very second word in the lyrics—no coincidence given the heavy summer theming! If you haven’t heard it, I suggest giving it a try.

“Candy shop” here is 駄菓子屋 dagashi-ya, which is a kind of store that specializes in very cheap varieties of “candy” (maybe more accurately snack foods?): dagashi. If you’re seen/read any of the series Dagashi Kashi, you’re familiar with this variety of snack. 

Dagashi is so called because, back in the Edo period, quality white sugar was super expensive and not something commoners could typically eat. Cheaper brown sugar was, though, so you ended up with different terms for stuff made from each: the expensive 上菓子 jougashi and the cheap 駄菓子 dagashi. 

Later, in the Showa period after WW2 when the average person was able to afford a bit more, the term stuck around but more generalized, referring to a wide variety of cheap snacks. These snacks are not necessarily always sugary, and they often have some sort of gimmick so it wasn’t “just” a piece of candy—toys attached, or games/puzzles, or requiring some interesting way to eat/drink them. If you grew up with Dunkaroos: that kinda thing.

Similar to “penny candy,” dagashi was/is cheap enough for children to afford several different varieties of with just a bit of change from their parents, and small stores specializing in them—dagashi-ya—sprung up all over the country, quickly becoming a popular spot for kids… and, not too long after, a symbol of childhood nostalgia. 

They’ve been on a big downtrend in the last few decades however. The spread of convenience stores as a competitor for snack buying is often cited as one reason, while a greater variety of ways for kids to spend their playtime now (video games etc.) is another.

You’re probably aware, but of the many reasons to bow in Japan, to show humility when making a request is a big one. 

Of note here is that Tohru doesn’t push Ilulu’s head down, which other characters in other shows might have done here, but just lightly reminds her: yeah okay you’re a dragon talking to a human, but you’re the one asking—act like it. She does, and her sincerity is rewarded.

The word here is ぱねぇ panee, which is a heavily abbreviated form of 半端(では/じゃ)ない hanpa nai, ~lit. “not halfway/half-done/half-assed.” 

hanpa ja nai→hanpa nai→hanpa nee→panee

It’s used probably how you’d expect: describing something intense af.

(I’m mostly just bringing it up because I love super-shortened slang like this!)

The phrase for “like” here is 気に入った ki ni itta, which is basically to have an interest in something/someone, to take a liking to, to say something is a favorite, etc. When said of another person, there’s typically an air of the speaker considering themselves in a higher position. It generally isn’t “like” in a romantic sense.

Take’s “hey that’s my line,” comes from the fact he’s (in his mind) in the position of power and was judging her on whether he’d try to kick her out of the job. You can tell he was thinking of it as “I like the cut of your jib. I guess you can stay.” kind of thing.

Normally a new employee would not say this about their new boss/job, even if they did like it, though a boss/senpai could of a new employee, hence the “what?”

Notably, Ilulu used “like” earlier in the episode to refer to Tohru as well. In that case it was 好き suki, which is a more literal “like,” with the various implications that may or may not have. Personally, it strikes me as a little odd to translate them both as “like” in the same episode.

And that’s it for episode five! I’m

[cto10121]

The bad Shakespeare takes keep coming, I see. This one had the cleverness to couch itself as a personal narrative (makes it much more interesting, tbh). But as bad Shakespeare takes are my bread and butter, my boon and bane, mamma mia here we go again, with Merchant of Venice.

“But those who thought the play was irredeemably antisemitic were, the consensus went, vulgar and whiny—​and, completely coincidentally, they were also Jewish, which somehow magically invalidated their opinions on this subject.”

I’m glad (is that even the right word?) this author found scholars that don’t think this play is anti-Semitic, but my experience with scholarship has been way more mixed than that. Suffice to say, this is literally all the play is known for these days, and views of the play as anti-Semitic are everywhere (Rosenbaum even had a hot take that since the Nazis liked it, it must be anti-Semitic). Didn’t know Harold Bloom thinks this play is anti-Semitic, though. That in itself is a bit of a red flag, as Bloom is a notoriously poor reader of Shakespeare.

“[I]n Merchant, Portia unhappily fulfills her father’s requirements of her suitors, while in Il Pecorone, the lady enjoys drugging her suitors and robbing them blind. By removing this detail, Shakespeare removed the suggestion that malicious schemers come from all walks of life.”

Or, by removing this detail, Shakespeare removed the clear and abhorrent sexism of his original source that turned a woman robbed of her autonomy by her father’s will into a criminal. It’s almost as if you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

“Dr. Lopez, one of the most respected physicians of the 16th century, had indiscreetly revealed that he once treated the Earl of Essex for venereal disease. The earl took revenge by framing Dr. Lopez for treason and arranging for his torture; while on the rack, Dr. Lopez “confessed”—​though “like a Jew,” as the court record states, he denied all charges at trial, while the attorney for the Crown referred to him matter-​of-​factly as “a perjuring murdering traitor and Jewish doctor.”

This is a very twisted account of the Lopez affair and Essex’s motives in going against him, at least to my understanding. For context, Lopez was accused of receiving loads of money from the King of Spain to poison Queen Elizabeth.

According to Stephen Greenblatt, in Will of the World: “Essex had tried some years before to recruit Lopez as a secret agent. Lopez’s refusal—he chose instead directly to inform the queen—may have been prudent, but it created in the powerful earl a very dangerous enemy. After his arrest, he was initially imprisoned at Essex House and interrogated by the earl himself. But Lopez had powerful allies in the rival faction of the queen’s senior adviser William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his son, Robert Cecil, who also participated in the interrogation and reported to the queen that the charges against her physician were baseless.” Lopez apparently had been taken bribes from various sources, and confessed (freely? under torture?) “that he had indeed entered into a treasonous-sounding negotiation with the king of Spain, but he insisted that he had done so only in order to cozen the king out of his money.” Weird.

Greenblatt isn’t a historian, though, and Essex was indeed an asshole to Lopez, (and for what is worth, I feel Lopez was innocent; I just get those vibes) but so far I can find no other source that Essex actively framed Lopez. Most likely he did some sleuthing, dug up some questionable, compromising stuff, and tried to blow a hearth flame into a firestorm.

“After all, the historical record gives Queen Elizabeth a cookie for dawdling on signing Dr. Lopez’s death warrant; her doubts about his guilt even led her to mercifully allow his family to keep his property, not unlike the equally merciful Duke of Venice in Shakespeare’s play.”

Again, Lopez had powerful allies (doesn’t get much higher than Burghley), and again, re: Greenblatt: “According to court observers, Elizabeth gave Essex a tongue-lashing, ‘calling him rash and temerarious youth, to enter into a matter against the poor man, which he could not prove, and whose innocence she knew well enough.’” A cupcake, then?

“And it is of course entirely unclear whether this trial and public humiliation of an allegedly greed-​driven Jew attempting to murder an upstanding Christian, rapturously reported in the press with myriad antisemitic embellishments, had anything at all to do with Shakespeare’s play about the trial and public humiliation of a greed-​driven Jew attempting to murder an upstanding Christian—​which Shakespeare composed shortly after Dr. Lopez decomposed. Most likely these things were completely unrelated.”

Nearly all the major Shakespeare biographies and articles I’ve read literally and explicitly talks about the possible influence of Lopez’s execution on Merchant of Venice and names it as an inspiration: Greenblatt, (he even headcanons that Shakespeare watched the execution!) Bate, Ackroyd. That’s how Horn managed to ping my BS radar something awful—because I had read about it, many times, even if it was mentioned in passing. It’s solid, legit Shakespearean academic fanon. The sarcasm is really unwarranted, and childish besides.

“It was damned hard to hear the nuance while parsing lines like “Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnal,” or “My master’s a very Jew; give him a present, give him a halter,” or explaining what Shylock meant when he planned to “go in hate, to feed upon / The prodigal Christian.”

The first two are the fool’s, Lancelot’s, lines, I think. As for Shylock’s hatred toward Christians, while ugly, it’s entirely understandable given the Christian characters’ treatment of him pre-play and during it (Antonio spitting on Shylock’s gaberdine and then asking him to borrow money from him is called out by Shylock himself for its sheer hypocrisy). It also fits Shylock’s character as an unassimilated Jew, resenting Christian hypocrisy and racism.

“The actor began the brief soliloquy that every English-​speaking Jew is apparently meant to take as a compliment: ‘I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? . . . ​If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’

“Wait, that’s the part where he’s more human?”

[…]“Sure,” I told my son, game-​facing him back in the rearview. “He’s reminding us how he’s like everyone else. He’s a normal person with normal feelings.”

My son laughed. “You seriously fell for that?”

[…] “What do you mean?”

“Shylock’s just saying he wants revenge! Like, ‘Oh, yeah? If I’m a regular human, then I get to be eee-​vil like a regular human!’ This is the evil monologue thing that every supervillain does! ‘I’ve had a rough life, and if you were me you would do the same thing, so that’s why I’m going to KILL BATMAN, mu-​hahaha!’ He’s just manipulating the other guy even more!”

And then the crowd applauded, Harold Bloom cried, and the mayor gave the author’s six-year-old son a gold medal for his Brave Hot Take. Honestly, this was the most unbelievable part of the essay I’ve read. Unless this kid has been reading academic essays on MoV that posit this exact same interpretation (“Shylock was just using humanistic rhetoric to justify his ~bloodthirsty revenge!”), this one’s for a fake Internet stories anthology. Shylock may be a dour, miserable pain in the ass, but he is no Barabas, an actual anti-Semitic caricature—he has a character, and a recognizably human one, and the play bears it out that he is right in his anger.

“I reviewed the other moments scholars cite to prove Shylock’s “humanity.” There were two lines of Shylock treasuring his dead wife’s ring, unlike the play’s Christian men who give their wives’ rings away. But unlike the other men, Shylock never gets his ring back—​because his daughter steals it, and becomes a Christian, and inherits what remains of his estate at the play’s triumphant end.”

Er, this is a non sequitur—that last has nothing to do with the first. The point is, Shylock doesn’t give away his ring; the fact that his daughter stole it means nothing to his treasuring it. It may be proof of the play’s marginalization of Shylock (which accurately if sadly reflects real-life systematic marginalization), but not his humanity. Shakespeare just doesn’t do backstories, even for major characters, so it is significant that he gave Shylock a wife/beloved in the first place.

“Finally, scholars point to the many times Shylock explains why he is so revolting: Christians treat him poorly, so he returns the favor. But for this to satisfy, one must accept that Jews are revolting to begin with, and that their repulsiveness simply needs to be explained.”

This makes absolutely no sense at all. If one accepts Jews are inherently revolting, then no explanation need be given for when a Jewish character acts revolting! The racist accepts the revolting Jewish characterization without qualm. The fact that the play insists on his grievance is significant.

“We listened together as Shylock went to court to extract his pound of flesh; as the heroine, chirping about the quality of mercy, forbade him to spill the Christian’s blood as he so desperately desired; as the court confiscated his property, along with his soul through forced conversion; as the play’s most cherished characters used his own words to taunt and demean him, relishing their vanquishing of the bloodthirsty Jew.”

YMMV, but to me there are no cherished characters in this play. That’s the whole point! Everyone is so mired in this dreary capitalist materialism that denigrates genuine human connection into mere transaction. Everything to these characters is money, money, money (and class), or at least tainted by it. Shylock is simply the most overt (and honest) of the lot. Love relationships, religion are impoverished; Portia and Bassanio are scarcely more suited than Portia and her other suitors. Shylock and Antonio are Jews and Christians in-name-only: They are capitalists first and foremost. Portia is a smarter, more likable Karen. Lancelot isn’t funny. Jessica is okay, but her leaving her father is framed as a asshole moment at least in one instance. Portia is probably the most lovable, but she has her asshole moments too. There are no truly awful characters, but you don’t need to demonize and dehumanize your whole cast into two-dimensional racists just to make a point.

Merchant of Venice is not the best of plays. It is one of Shakespeare’s experiments, a proto-problem play before his Jacobean era, using dark comedy and a slight bent of farce to explore and elucidate social issues, racism and discrimination, chiefly. At least it tries, anyway. Taming of the Shrew is the first proto-problem play done completely farcical, which at least makes it compelling in a slapstick-satire way; Merchant is much more sociologically astute, but also more dull and coolly distant even from its own concerns. I don’t blame anyone, much less Jewish people, for not liking the play or thinking it a masterpiece. I myself don’t, though for reasons that have nothing to do with the usual ones. I like what Shakespeare was trying to do and I think he did some things very well. It has ambition and thought. But I feel like for most of it Shakespeare was on writing autopilot while mentally looking around for something a bit meatier to adapt and develop. It’s a jogging-in-one-place play; he has a couple of those.

In sum: Author argues for complicated play’s anti-Semitism, ends up just saying the racist slurs by the flawed/asshole Christian characters made her and her son uncomfortable (feat. A distorted and even misleading account of the Lopez affair). Plus some internalized anti-Semitism to sort through, methinks.

[synthmusic91]

thoughts? kjfhlkjdfh asking bc i rb'd the original post from u a bit ago because i agreed w/ original poster but i just saw this rb of it and wanted to know what u thought. ciaran(.)tumblr(.)com /post/652413157345820673/there-is-a-genre-of-posts-thats-obsessed-with-the

well first of all i hope this isn't a bait ask. this reply really doesn't deserve the time and effort i put into refuting it, but there was a point in time when i was emotionally confused by these..."arguments", so whoever u are, anon, i hope this is helpful. i also recommend some distance - literally, "go outside and touch grass", which is a lot more difficult than it sounds, but it needs to be done. anyway, here's my "analysis":

for context, here's what the post in question said:

and the tags:

at a high level, we can see that what ciaran is saying doesn't really respond to what OP was talking about. for this reason, i'm not going to bring in much of what OP said, because it's uncontested in this context, and look at ciaran's reply. i'll try to break this up...

EDIT: i had a long-ass response here, but then i realized it was dumb because the source material is dumb. i cut out most of it, but here are the highlights.

"there is a genre of posts that’s obsessed with the notion that fandom is something much larger, more prevalent, and more able to affect the way media is processed and consumed, than it actually is in reality."

so, as we can all see on tiktok and, indeed, on the electronic lore olympus billboard that takes up a side of a literal skyscraper, fandom is no longer the niche thing that "fandom olds" make it out to be. also, we can't ignore how many (white) fandom players go on and work in the industry (cassandra clare, whoever wrote 50 shades, man idk much of anything so there's probably many more). so this comment is sort of myopic. and since this is what characterizes the rest of the reply, well...it's not great.

also don't look up lore olympus; it's basically a dd/////lg fanfic that happens to be one of the most popular series on the line webtoon app, which is rated for teens...and for $1 to the creator's patreon, you can view not sfw p*dophilic art, so. also obviously i didnt do that; there was a video essay about this. i can't find it though

"ironically but understandably, these posts are made by people who are so terminally fandom-poisoned that they ascribe phenomenal power to it, and think of it as some great evil that must be defeated (by making posts on tumblr, which is obviously a very influential thing to do)"

"fandom-poisoned" is such a nebulous term, especially since it appears to mean "has had some really significant, (in this context) bad experiences with fandom." this is, first of all, a huge assumption to make about a stranger, and second, not the own they think it is. i'm just going to link this post, and hopefully you can see how it relates.

anyway, the "making posts on tumblr is meaningless" is um...interesting, seeing as off the top of my head i can think of two very influential tumblr blogs that talk about really important issues, Gradient Lair and Red Light Politics. I don't know as much about Red Light Politics, but Gradient Lair is frequently cited by academics (not getting into academia nonsense now but... -_-). also, they sound more pissed that the original post did gain traction, but whatever. this paragraph doesn't really make sense, but nothing here does, because i wasn't given much to work with.

"...and then because these people have basically no imagination and unfailingly pick on others for their own faults, they project their own experiences on everyone they perceive as being more ‘in fandom’ than them,"

jesus christ. i'm going not say anything about the tone of this because i put too much effort into this for some rando to call me a cyberbully.

i think what they're thinking about is how there appear to be some "fandom critical" people who try to, holistically, "ruin everyone's good time" by "stirring up drama" about popular fandom artists/writers/whoever else idk. oftentimes these people will also make jokes about fandom whatever, seemingly picking on random people's interests.

however, if you look at the long history of fandom racism, fandom's normalization of p*dophilia, and even general fandom harassment, and then you look at fandom's visceral, unwarranted reaction to criticism regarding these things, you can quickly see that disillusionment towards fandom is entirely reasonable. as for the joking, well...this an oversimplification but not everyone needs to like what you like. it sounds like they just need to get over themself.

and go “You, a 27 year old queer blogger who is into [tv show/anime/movie] an embarrassing amount, are now going to be the face of Capitalism” with no self-reflection or critical thought given to how fucking cringe it is-"

so, i'm regretting putting so much effort into this because this is so fucking long and i have to analyze this nonsense...it feels like i'm back in my feminist thought class. nightmarish. but anyway, this seems to deal with- [CUT FOR LENGTH. nothing important was missed].

EDIT 2: actually here's a summary of what I had. it deserves better than to be a response to this nonsense, but first it detailed how this took 1. the op's post and 2. a comment that we don't even know if op agreed with and misinterpreted that, and threw quite a fit about this- and i hate to say this because this term is misused so often by redditors, but- strawman.

I then went on to discuss how, for example, PoC can uphold systems of white supremacy. while obviously no person of color is going to be the "face" of white supremacy, the discussion still needs to be had, especially within that group. similarly, while fandom constituents may not be the face of capitalism, there needs to be a discussion, within fandom, on how they support and are defined by capitalist (and other) systems.

it was really too good of a point to be making for this trash reply. I could go say more, but I'm still trying to stay on topic, unlike ciaran.

"to act like random people on the internet, end users with no influence over corporate decisions, are the ones personally responsible for the fact that late-stage capitalism has destroyed popular art and culture in an increasingly sordid attempt to make money."

we've been over the "no influence" bit - because in fact fans do have influence, especially since media creators are literally fans, etc etc. i'm tired of people acting like they have no power and using that as an excuse to support and perpetuate harmful, easily avoidable behavior.

also, to act like the nebulous system of late-stage capitalism is the only cause of bad media is ludicrous. first of all, someone has to make these so-called "corporate decisions", and the people making artistic decisions are, again, overwhelmingly members of "fandom." this comment is really trying to keep marvel trash and lore olympus-esque nonsense in the same atomic, indivisible category lest someone catches a whiff of nuance.

"the above post is a great example of this phenomenon because op admits freely that they only think fandom is destroying media because they have been spending more time in fandom and thus have an over-inflated sense of its importance in greater culture. posting your own Ls indeed."

i'm so tired. this person literally has 120 works on ao3 like...who is spending more time in fandom.

and the tags:

#i assure you that fandom has no bearing on my actual real life #and if it does on yours. then that is your problem #it's also a very funny problem to

now this is just egregiously tone deaf. you do not need to do more than a cursory google search to find a bottomless well of examples of fandom harassment, threats, doxxing, and violence, much of which is racially motivated. you can see why it would be bad to make fun of this. 

also the way that “fandom has no bearing on their actual real life“...120 fanfics on ao3. 120.

conclusion:

the reply clearly misinterprets of op's point, and as such, does not refute it. they responded to another issue altogether, which is that of the sanctity of their ~coping mechanism~ or whatever it is. their argument in this respect was, in my opinion, delusional and pathetic, especially given that they wrote it on someone else's unrelated post.

FINAL NOTE: i cut out lots of this because the reply went in so many different directions, so some stuff might not make sense. let me know if you have any questions.

[pilferingapples]

Brick Club, 1.4 entire (retro)

Cosette's story often has such a fairy-tale feel, and it starts with this  section (what should I be calling these chunks of text? the X.X sections as a whole, not the X.X.X ones? Volumes?) .

And yet I'm not at all sure why I get that feeling quite so strongly, in terms of narrative technique.  The initial namelessness of the cast, with Two Mothers echoing the way people in fairy tales are Mothers and Millers and Eldest Daughters?  But if Fantine is presented as if she was s stranger to us again, it's not different than what happens with JVJ, and his story never feels this way.  The  Three Sisters made by Cosette, Eponine , and Azelma maybe? That's a very fairy-tale motif indeed.   Something about the way the inn itself is described..?

Augh, I absolutely cannot put my finger on it.   Still,  something about this passage feels as ominous and certain and doomed  as if the inn was a gingerbread cottage and Fantine was vowing to keep silent for seven years while making shirts out of nettles.

Notes on Various Things under the cut:

-  love that the inn sign is really badly made. I've seen several attempts at it in various adaptations and they're always a disaster and it's excellent, I want a collection.

-  the cart is covered with "the same ugly yellow mud sometimes used to decorate cathedrals".  The cart that is A Metaphor for outdated social institutions.  I see you, Hugo. 

- I will FIGHT Hugo about peasant/working class women's clothing in this era, this outfit would be super charming!  But it's definitely more about utility and practical wear than Fantine's old outfits.   There are roughly a billion dissertations to be written about the way that things working class people do and use are , through history, treated as inherently ugly/undesirable, regardless of how much art and beauty might actually have gone into it; I feel like the classism kinda speaks for itself on that.  And then,since Hugo's already drawn a huge Romantic Aesthetic defining line between the Useful and the Beautiful  in this book, I think  I can fairly just quote Gautier's explanation of the issue -- "Nothing is really beautiful but that which cannot be made use of; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and the needs of man are vile and disgusting, like his poor, weak nature" -- and leave this for now.  I suspect it will come up again. 

- Fantine has been "marked by irony" --that is, scarred by her time with Tholomyes.  I do like the way  this new line on her face sounds almost like a dueling scar. Fantine's a fighter in her own way!

- ...Tholomyes is gonna make it to at least 1828, meaning he'll outlive everyone we love in this story except Cosette and Marius.    And he'll do it while being  "always a man of pleasure"--I feel like there's an implicit suggestion that Cosette has a lot of half-siblings in the world, all of them with a story as important as hers, if only people would take them seriously. 

- ...as a Somewhat Taller Than Average woman myself, I am rather delighted by Hugo's obvious terror of women who are Not Tiny.   ( And I realize I'm probably Reaching to think that Mme T might have been much happier and more well-adjusted if she weren't trying to cram her giant self into a tiny box of Ideal Femininity?  Maybe she'd have been much more ok if she'd  been able to go into showbiz and get famous as  a weightlifter or something. )

But I do think there's a real sort of sadness to her introductory chapters.  She had an ideal dream for her own life , and it wasn't even a particularly ambitious one--just a love story, really-- and it's fallen through as much as anyone else's hoped-for Ideal in the novel. She's still trying to hang onto it at this point, but we're already given a glimpse of the future  when she'll not only have given up on that ideal, but come to despise herself for it.  This is no way absolves her of her cruelty towards others, but I think she's a more complex villain (and she is  a villain) than she's sometimes treated as. 

- Fantine does try to lie about having been married, here! ...but she also comes right out and tells people she's making a financial Deal with exactly how much money she has, and how much she's able to give over, before it's all settled.  It's  painful how ill-prepared she is to deal with this kind of economic manipulation (and I think "prepared" is really relevant; she's had no one more naturally skilled or experienced to teach her how to handle these things, and business negotiations, which this is, are incredibly complicated) . 

Seeing how much money Mme T gets for Cosette's fine clothes makes me strongly suspect that Fantine was severely underpaid for pawning her own fancy things--unless, and I guess this is possible, her "putting all her finery" on Cosette  is meant to be literal, and Cosette's current clothes are directly made of Fantine's old fancy outfits. 

- Fantine tries to lie about having been married , and the neighbors *see* her crying as she leaves Cosette, and Cosette must have been well dressed and all for that first months or so...but still, everyone believes the Thenardiers when they start telling the town that Cosette is an abandoned, illegitimate child.  They believe it because Cosette looks the part, and Cosette looks the part because the Thenardiers force her into it.  In so many ways, Fantine is never in control of  the narrative about her child, and What People Say about them does indeed matter more than anything she does--no amount of effort, no show of love, can save her and Cosette when everyone else  has decided they're socially damned. 

...but on the less thematic and more practical side,how on earth are the Thenardiers learning about her marital status? Seriously, was this freely avaialable info?  This  issue is something that comes up several times in the novel and I really have no idea what access to people's family records was like? 

- we get our first negative association with a cat , hm 

- ...workers have "generous impulses", huh?  (also I am not at all sure if the corresponding Bourgeois Respectability is meant to be entirely a good thing, but I'm not sure it's NOT , like I would be with Some Writers? Agh) 

- The Thenardiers' animal souls are : 

French: écrevisses 

Hapgood: crab-like FMA: crabs Rose: crayfish  Donougher: lobsters

Google Translate agrees with Rose, but I wonder if this isn't one of those words that was colloquially used to mean a general category of creatures in its day --Things Like a Crayfish/lobster/crab-- and has come to mean something very specific now?

-  ..y'know, what really kills me about Cosette in this every time is how everyone , *everyone*  in this town really either believes she deserves her abuse, or thinks it's BETTER than she deserves.  This is not happening in secret, behind closed doors, in a private house; it's at the public inn and very blatant. Everyone knows she's out in the cold , first up every morning, starving and beaten, in a home where the other kids somehow have more than enough (because their parents steal it from Cosette, directly).  And not one person in this discount Omelas even thinks it's bad , much less intervenes. It's a point in the Thenardiers'  favor, socially.   This isn't just the gamins of Paris being brushed aside,this is a whole town actively citing horrible child abuse as the Moral and Good Option that elevates the people doing it.  

And in this, I suppose, Cosette shares a history with Valjean-- they're  both put through absolutely horrific abuse , which is not just societally ignored, or accepted with jaded apathy ,  but openly lauded as morally correct.   I hate Montfermeil so much-- but Montfermeil is not really different from Arras, or Digne, or any other place where people think that abuse of the "deserving" is a Good Thing. 

[wanna-b-poet31]

An (I should really retitle this series) 4-part Good Omens Meta Part 5: An Angel in Recovery

~~~Hey, look at me back at it again talking about abuse in Good Omens~~~

So like real talk, I could write a whole damn book on just trauma studies with Aziraphale and Crowley. Like no joke, I’m drafting my dissertation on disability and trauma. Expect at least 2 more parts of this multi-layered Meta because I have all the thoughts.  #sorrynotsorry for how long this one is. 

An Overview of Recovery

One of the things I just can’t get over is the ways in which Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship enable each other down the path of recovery from their respective abuse

I’ve been throwing around the word “recovery” pretty freely in my other installments. So, before dissecting their relationship, we need to know: what exactly DOES a recovery from an abusive environment actually look like? 

Generally speaking (and I mean like really, really generally), trauma recovery has 3 goals: 

establishment of safety, 

remembrance or mourning of abuse, 

the reinstitution of self/ sense of individual normalcy    

It’s important to note that most recovery paths are non-linear and deeply personal. Meaning, no two paths are the same not even if they’ve undergone similar trauma or trauma from the same source/event. Some practitioners will cite as many as 10 steps, while others still say recovery is reached when the survivor shift from a place of unpredictable abuse/trauma to a place of safety   >SOURCE <.  

Aziraphale’s Recovery Needs

Throughout the series, Aziraphale is constantly threatened, subject to unsafe work/family dynamics, and forced to endure emotional abuse.  Heaven’s stakes are unconscionably high, unfairly looming over the angel’s head. He constantly has to deal with the threat of falling, coupled with the constant belittling, and dismissive nature of the other Angels. His environment makes it hard for Aziraphale to recognize that Heaven is abusive. It doesn’t help that his primary coping skill is denial and repression. As long as he can’t recognize the problem, he simply can’t address the underlining issues causing his problems.  

Consequently, he doesn’t acknowledge that Heaven isn’t the perfect, righteous power he thinks it is. Heaven isn’t safe. It’s violent, unforgiving, and more than willing to drop him like a rock. There is no security if something as small as asking questions, or loving Humanity (his job) is grounds for falling or permanent death. Yet, this is the place he idolizes, above even his lover best friend. 

He can’t even consult other Angels to form his own sense of security in Heaven. None of the relationships we see (excepting Crowley) offer him solace, comfort or anything but abuse. If we include his human alliance with Shadwell, there’s another layer of homophobic abuse piling on his emotional abuse and physical intimidation.   

To heal, Aziraphale’s recovery journey has five distinct stages: self-identification of his abuse, securing a safe space, confronting his abusers, cultivating a healthy relationship (with Crowley), and embracing his sense of self.  

Abuse By Any Other Name

Aziraphale needs to come to terms with the trauma inflicted upon him by Heaven. And this isn’t to say he doesn’t notice that Gabriel is cruel to him, or that Sandalphon is about .25 seconds away from smiting everything and that’s dangerous, but he denies that these behaviors are inherent problems.  Their behaviors, particularly toward him, his interests, and his loves are not respected, but he still treats them like unquestionable authorities.  Admitting that there is a problem in the power dynamic, or at the very least the terms and conditions of Heaven are unjust, is the first thing Aziraphale needs to do to begin recovering from his toxic environment and toxic relationships.

Now, we do see Aziraphale push against his system of abuse, he lies to God for one thing, and maintains a relationship/agreement with Crowley for another. But his rebellions still regards Heaven above all other relationships. It is still where he claims his loyalties lay. Until he can admit that Heaven does not have his best interest at heart, he can’t undo their damage. 

I argue that the first step in Aziraphale’s recovery is when he admits that he has a problem with the end of the world. It’s not a full admission of Heaven’s fault, but it is an admission that when he does not feel comfortable with Heaven’s actions he should and CAN intervene. Before, with Noah and Jesus, he watched, even though he objected and was horrified by the actions against innocence. We see this again when he seems visibly upset with “all the smiting” that Sandalphon does at Sodom and Gamorah. Despite his misgivings, he doesn’t intervene (at least not on-screen). Look at the below gif. He’s clearly pained by God’s decision, but he bites his tongue. It’s not that he doesn’t want to question, it’s that he can not question. He must soldier on. 

We can see that when Gabriel brings up the possibility of “something big is coming”, he is visibly perturbed. Then, once Crowley tells him about the coming of the Anti-Christ. He recognizes that his love for humanity and his life on Earth is a tipping point that he’s unwilling to give up.  But, he still does it by operating within the framework of Heaven. 

The next crack happens when Aziraphale realizes Heaven is unsupportive of his efforts to save Heaven. His face visibly falls when Michael says they’ll forgive him for is an inevitable failure. He’s also upset by Gabriel who does give him encouragement, but in a tone that is clear, he thinks Aziraphale’s efforts are fruitless.  Heaven makes it clear that war is more important than love for God’s creatures.

Then Aziraphale goes to Heaven, wielding information about the Anti-Christ. He knows where Adam is, he knows the beast is released, and he knows that Armageddon is days, if not hours, away.  Yet, he falters. He’s all anxiety and nerves when he’s forced to talk to his so-called “side”, in a way he’s never like with Crowley. But this scene’s pièce de résistance is his choice to lie about the location of Adam. After first mentioning Crowley and all his wiles, he suddenly becomes uneasy. Gabriel asks “where” and Aziraphale recognizes that no one in the room cares about protecting humanity. Now, instead of the end of the world being his biggest problem, Angels (not yet Heaven) are.�� This is further supported by their intimidation of him after the break-up on the bandstand. 

While this scene is certainly progress towards naming his problem, he’s not all the way there yet. He meets with Crowley, and Crowley scares him because he’s not ready to admit Heaven is intrinsically abusive the same way Crowley is. He still believes that Heaven, and the angels, are on his side, that they’re doing right. He’s mortified about the very realy possibility that if he chooses Crowley, he’ll lose his divinity. His later scene summoning Metatron shows that he believes so badly that if he can only get ahold of God, everything will be sorted. But, it isn’t.  

It is only when he recognizes “hello god, it’s me Aziraphale” won’t get him shit, that HEAVEN is his problem. Not Crowley, not angels, not Hell, but Heaven is his abusive parent and he needs to pick which side he wants to be on.  

So he chooses Crowley. 

Sanctum Sanctorum

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 100 times. Heaven is an empty, cold, and unloving place. There is no joy in its walls. There is no love for the Angels who dare enter. It’s a place where the Archangel Fucking Gabriel is willing to burn his “traitor” in a fire without a trial. In short, it’s unsafe. Aziraphale is, at the very least, unsafe their. Unsafe from judgmental eyes, unsafe from intimidation, and physically separated from the rest of the angels during every meeting. 

Soho, in contrast, is very different. It’s very clear that Aziraphale’s shop is warm and alive with love. It’s where Aziraphale eats, prays, loves, and lives. He knows, even before he can name his problem, that Heaven isn’t home. So he creates one, a little oasis where he can invite Crowley for drinks, he can maintain his ever-growing book collection, and center himself. 

He is safe here, on Earth, because it’s of his own choice. Agency (or the ability to make choices) is crucial for coping with trauma. It empowers survivors to maintain their recovery and help give them back control over their lives. In Heaven, Aziraphale has no agency. There is no food for him to taste, no lover best friend to go on dinner dates with, no books to quench his thirst for knowledge.  In his bookshop though? He has all the freedom to be as hard or soft as he pleases, read whatever he pleases, eat or drink whatever he pleases, and love whomever he pleases, without fear of discipline.

It’s VERY important to note that 1 solitary character respects his sanctuary -- Crowley. Gabriel and Sandalphon barge in unannounced frequently, belittle his work and expect him to drop everything at a moment’s notice. Shadwell breaks and enters, calls him homophobic slurs and “kills” him. Sure Crowley miracles the locks open unannounced, but it’s only when the shop’s on fire and damn it Crowley has an Angel to save.  

Every other character, except Crowley, belittles Aziraphale’s love of books and food, and warmth. Where other characters barge into his home uninvited, Crowley always asks express permission (minus when he’s being an action hero) to enter Aziraphale’s inter-most place of safety. Unlike everyone else, Crowley respects and loves Aziraphale enough to help him maintain a place of safety from the abuses of Trust they both find in Heaven. 

The One Where Gabriel’s a Dick And Aziraphale Says FUCK YOU to Hell

Aziraphale realizes that the line between Heaven and Hell’s abuse is a fucking thin one. They team up to actively destroy the two things he loves and has been gaslighting, attacking, or traumatizing him to do it. As a way to start coping with the tremendous loss and trauma inherent in Armageddon't he comes to terms with his abusers. 

There are three distinct moments where he does this. First is to Shadwell. The idiot of a man is constantly berating him, a presumed ally, with homophobic slurs. While ultimately a small moment, it’s one that Aziraphale desperately needs to confront if he has any hope of confronting his other abusers. When Aziraphale faces Shadwell, he does it with so much style. Not just does he reclaim the homophobic slur, but he also puts Shadwell in his place for using it in the first place. Honestly, Michael Sheen and Miranda Richardson deserve Awards for their performance here. 

The second biggie is when he stands up to (the bastard archangel) Gabriel.  Although I don’t doubt Aziraphale could cut someone with his flaming sword, his most powerful weapon is his words. He defends Adam’s choice to not destroy the world and confronts Gabriel’s use of the “great plan” vs. the ineffable one. Aziraphale knows that poking at Heaven’s excuse for destroying humanity won’t hold up. There is no rationale for waging war except “to see whose gang’s the best”. Speaking up like that, against a director of war, is ballsy, but Aziraphale does not care. He needs to confront the horrendous way Gabriel/Heaven has treated him, humanity, and Crowley. 

And who supports him through this cathartic moment? Crowley. With a single glance, Crowley interjects and comes through, supporting Aziraphale’s (actually really clever) plan to protect Adam and the world. Crowley realizes Heaven and Hell don’t actually know what they’re doing, and that Aziraphale has them dead to right. Stepping closer to Aziraphale, protectively behind Adam, he pushes until Heaven and Hell are forced to admit defeat. 

It’s a beautiful confrontation. A perfect Fuckkkkk you to 2 abusive entities. 

The third distinct moment is the switch. While Hell specifically hasn’t actually targetted Aziraphale, they have done something worse. Attacked his support system. So, Aziraphale returns in kind, confronting his partner’s abusers head on. And look at the absolute GLEE he takes in showing off how indestructible to Holy Water his partner is. He’s making a performance of daring all of Hell to come after them, terrorizing them like they terrorized Crowley and him.

It’s also him coming to terms with the fact that yes, it’s him and Crowley against the (divine) World. The switch is so significant for so many reasons, but the primary one is that it allows Aziraphale the ability to face his biggest fear -- Hell -- and not flinch. The Threat of falling (like from Uriel/Michael/Sandalphon) and going to Hell terrifies our loveable bastard angel. He knew that he was disposable to Heaven, but he’s indisposable to Crowley. This confrontation allows him to come to terms with the unhealthy power dynamic of Heaven and begin the rest of his life with Crowley as equals. He’s not fully recovered (recovery is a process, not a finish line) but he’s faced all of his abusers.   

Our Own side

His relationship with Crowley is the only damn thing that Aziraphale can always rely on. Heaven’s love is conditional. Humans live short lives compared to Azi’s immortality. And Hell wants him dead simply because he’s an Angel.

But Crowley? Dammit. Crowley will run into a burning building to save him. He’ll run into a church to save him, and then save his books because Crowley knows Aziraphale would forget. He’ll race to France DURING A REVOLUTION, to a PRISON to rescue Aziraphale. He’s Aziraphale’s constant companion, and really the only support he can always trust. 

Crowley is the one to pull Aziraphale out of his abusive environment, enable him to act in the face of injustice, and support him as he faces down his abusers.  He also respects the angel’s boundaries consistently, and while he’s been accused of going too fast, he’s patient, never pressuring Aziraphale to do something he’s truly uncomfortable doing. Normally, it’s already something Aziraphale wants to do, but can’t rationalize a reason to do it that would allow him to disobey Heaven. All the way up until shit hits the fan does Crowley refrain from making Aziraphale uncomfortable, and even at the breakup scene, Crowley forces it because he knows Aziraphale has to make a choice. Him or Heaven. 

But, it’s Aziraphale choice and Crowley REFUSES to make it for him.  

Heaven never consults Aziraphale on policy decisions, never initiates open communicates with Aziraphale, and certainly never treats Aziraphale as an equal. Crowley does. Crowley could easily have forced Aziraphale into his car and flew to Alpha Centurai. He could have forced Aziraphale to go with him in the bandstand. He could have forced Aziraphale to do any number of things without his consent, but he chooses not to. He chooses to be the honest entity Aziraphale needs in his life. He chooses Aziraphale, just as Aziraphale chooses him.

Even when they’re arguing, they share strong conflict resolution skills. Either they choose to talk it out unit they reach an understanding or, Crowley gets some fresh air, before consulting Aziraphale again. There is one moment when Crowley calls him stupid with any real bite to it, and it’s because Aziraphale, who is so close to admitting he has a problem, and that problem is Heaven, can’t make the last leap. Crowley, for the only time in the series, really insults Aziraphale because he needs one last ditch effort to take off the blinders, preventing Aziraphale from recognizing his trauma.  

And after that? When Crowley is heartbroken and rejected for the second time? He still goes looking for Aziraphale. Unwilling to let anything damage the integrity of their relationship.  

Crowley’s acts of kindness and love allow Aziraphale to finally recognize his past was unhealthy. But more than that, Crowley fulfills all the criteria needed for a healthy relationship according to The National Domestic Abuse Hotline. 

And A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square

So What does this all mean? Where are we left at the end of the series? In a pretty good place actually.  I said the final step was establishing a sense of self. Where was he before the abuse started? Or, if that’s impossible to know (given our data) What does he want his new normal to be? 

A life with Crowley.

It’s clear that when Crowley invites him to stay at his place (if Aziraphale likes) the night of Armageddon’t, Aziraphale does because they both deserve. There’s a slight smile when Crowley offers, and like in 1941, the romantic music swells. Only half-heartedly does Aziraphale say his side wouldn’t like it, but both of them know they’re on each other’s side. Not Heaven. Not Hell. Just them.  

Quite simply, he’s already told us what he wants moving forward. He wants to be with Crowley, perhaps one day the could go for a picnic, or dine at the Ritz, but always together.  So, he does. 

Recovery is not a destination, it’s a process. Thanks to Aziraphale’s healthy support system that is Crowley, he is able to start his recovery journey and end the series in a much healthier place than it started.  Aziraphale is not “cured” by the end of the novel, but he is coping, and he is recovering. So long as Crowley’s by his side, he’s well on his way to healthy coping mechanisms, and living in a safe, loving environment with a partner who loves and respects him. 

TLDR:  Aziraphale is recovering from 6000 years of abuse and trauma. Crowley loves, supports, and helps heal him on his journey. 

For More on this Series:

In Part 1 I wrote about how Heaven is hella abusive towards Aziraphale, but Crowley’s love facilitates his recovery

In Part 2 I wrote about how traumatized Crowley is, but thanks to Aziraphale’s love which facilitates Crowley’s recovery

Part 3 is the one where Aziraphale Has some Dubious Coping Skills

Part 4 looks at Anthony J. Crowley’s Poor Coping Skills+ the One Surprisingly Healthy One

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk

[unstoppableforcce]

what we do now that it’s over ( 2 )

alt title: imma make it my own kind of canon. cowards.

finnpoe ! soft and angsty ! this episode ft. a Fight ! and some Kes and Rey as Rebellion super fans.

also, TROS spoilers, obvi - r.e.

Everything had always been so easy with Poe.

Since the day they met, on the star destroyer, pulling him from his cell and ripping his helmet off, since the first second they met eye to eye, it had been so easy. He knew he could trust him; he knew from that second and he had never thought twice about it.

And he hoped he could be the same for him, until now, he honestly believed he was. But something was wrong, and Poe had gone silent, and all Finn could do was watch from the sidelines as he quietly filled with pain from within.

After a short half hour of small talk with his dad, all of them standing around the counter, letting the conversation flow freely, Kes chastised his knee and requested they move to the table to continue. Poe used that as his escape, citing the Metwe or whatever the fruit was his father had mentioned earlier and disappearing out the door just as the sun hid behind the horizon.

Rey and Kes easily dipped into old war stories, citing the similarities between young Luke, Han, and Leia and the older versions they were more familiar with. But Finn couldn’t get into it, not when Poe was acting so off.

When Kes got up to check the stew, Rey finally turned back to him, laying a hand gently on his shoulder and snapping him back from his more distant thoughts.

“You okay?” She smiled softly, everything about her disposition so soft.

All he could do was nod, his throat a bit dry, a cough needed to clear it. And he thought that would be the end of it, but she didn’t concede so easily. She just waited, patiently, watching him try to avoid her stare the entire time.

All he could do was shrug, what was he head to say?

“You should go check on him.”

She could see right through him, she had always been able to. The only lie he ever managed was telling her was when the first met, that he worked for the resistance, but she only believed him because she wanted to. He couldn’t fool her anymore.

“Yeah.” He sighed, giving her a nod and getting to his feet, thankful to be able to quietly slip out passed Kes with his back turned. Not that he would mind, he was just as interested in hearing about the Jedi from Rey as she was from him.

Moonlight did little to light the land away from the lights along the porch, once passed the beast enclosures, it took Finn several blinks to be able to make out any moving shapes, a couple more to be able to make out Poe by the towering tree.

He tried to minimize his presence as soon as he spotted him. He had expected him to be burdened by the work but if anything, he looked more at peace than he had since they got into the house to begin with. Finn couldn’t help but notice that his disposition had changed as soon as he saw his father, and he was slightly back to normal now that he was away from him.

Whatever was going on, Rey was right, he could in no way understand it yet.

“You just going to stand there and watch?” Poe smirked out over his shoulder, hopping down from the branch, landing heavy on his feet and kneeling down with arms out to keep balance, a sling of fruit around his chest.

“You didn’t look like you needed any help.” The words shot out of his mouth comfortably, banter had always come naturally for whatever reason between the two of them.

“Yeah well.” He kept his smirk as he made it back to standing straight up. One hand filed through the pouch, grabbing out a small blue fruit, just the size of his palm, and tossed it Finn.

But it was dark, he could barely make it out as it flew his way, catching it in the last second, eliciting a hearty chuckle from Poe.

“You eat these fruits?” Finn asked, walking closer as Poe picked up all his equipment, still laughing.

“I could eat like six a day as a kid.” He smiled, motioning them back towards the house. “Nowadays, I think I prefer it fermented, it's a good drink.”

Finn brought it to his face, took a sniff and laughed at the idea of it.

“It’s not going to hurt you-”

“It smells like dirt.”

“It’s a farm, everything smells like dirt.” Poe countered, stopping halfway there and using his vague gravitational field around Finn to keep him close. “Give it to me.”

Finn didn’t so much relinquish it as Poe just took it from him, taking it straight to his lips and biting a hole into it, some of the juices trailing in the stubble lightly coating his face. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it, trying to excuse the watering in his mouth as hunger, explaining it had been a long journey in the argument he was having with himself.

“See. Safe.” He pushed it back to Finn and he accepted, taking a smaller bite out of the same bit mark and continuing behind Poe as he walked.

It was good. Nothing to climb a towering tree for in his opinion but it was good.

“You come out here for a reason?” Poe spared him a look, discarding his tools by the smaller barn.

Did he? To check on him, but that wasn’t much of an answer, certainly not one he could admit to straight out.

“You were just taking a long time, wanted to see if the wild Yavin beasts had gotten you.”

Poe stifled a chuckle, working the sling off his body to tie into a sack.

“I’m safe, don’t worry.”

But Finn caught his arm, keeping them outside, just far enough from the porch for a minute longer.

“I am a little worried though, you know.” He spoke directly to his feet, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

Poe nodded, wiping his face and giving a silent shrug. “I’m fine, really.”

“You can talk to me, Poe…”

He knew that, he nodded because he knew that. And just like Finn, he had never doubted it. But something kept his throat welded shut, kept everything he had repressed for so many years down where he thought it belonged, inside and quiet.

There was so much he wanted to say, he just couldn’t find the voice to say it.

“I think my dad’s got dinner, so you know…” He gestured back to the house; Finn had no choice but to follow.

Rey and Kes were standing around the counter when the entered, pouring stew by the ladle-full into the bowls laid out there. Kes sighed when he caught sight of his filthy son, smacking him on the back affectionately and laughing. “I didn’t mean tonight but thank you.”

“I figure you had a laundry list for me tomorrow.” He sighed, laying the bag on the counter and waiting around with everyone else for Kes to finish rationing the delicious smelling stew.

“I offered to take Rey out to the Force tree but I haven’t been able to make the hike in a while, maybe it’s better if you do.” He added and they all nodded in agreement. “Let’s eat, I want to hear more stories.”

And stories he heard.

Whatever had changed between them, everything flowed easier. There was no tension like there had been before between Poe and Kes, everything had settled down.

It was only when Poe stood up to take the bowls and Finn followed to help, leaving Kes and Rey at the table, did it begin to fall off the wagon.

Neither of them caught what Rey had asked, but Finn couldn’t imagine she would have done it purposefully if she knew what would happen.

“Shara was a magnificent woman-”

Poe’s hand slipped on the bowl he scrubbed, dropping it with a clatter to the bottom of the sink. Finn was right by his side, drying the dishes, but even he almost dropped the spoon in his hand when he saw Poe’s shoulders tense up, the likes of which he had never seen to this extent.

Kes didn’t notice the intricacies of his son’s reaction the way Finn had, or even the way Rey had, the bowl clattering having caught her attention briefly before Kes continued on.

“I fought on the ground with Han Solo, I knew good pilots, but there was nothing like her. The heart, the tenacity-”

Poe had to shut the water off, reaching to the side to snatch the towel from Finn’s hands before he could even protest, wiping his hands down and pulling back from the sink. Kes continued on.

“Everything about her-”

He pulled back entirely, wiping his brow with the towel before tossing it aside and tearing off past Finn. If he noticed him standing there, he didn’t make it seem like he did, he barely missed shoulder checking him as he squeezed out of the kitchen, back out onto the porch, and judging by his heavy steps on the stairs, back out into the garden.

Kes didn’t even notice, even as both Rey and Finn shared a look of concern with each other, disconnected from his story, he continued to ramble on.

Finn set the last bowl down and muttered a quick, “excuse me” before taking off after him, back out to where he found him before, not wasting any time allowing his eyes to adjust before he searched the darkness for him.

“Poe?” He called out. No response.

He tried again, more desperate this time as he made it past the beasts and looked around. “Poe?”

He nearly tripped over him, catching sight of him sat on the ground, just at the end of the barn, on a bale of some sort of food for the beasts nearby, head in his hands.

“Poe…”

“I’m fine.”

“You keep saying that-”

It wasn’t a chuckle this time, it was a scoff that fell from Poe’s lips, strained but still there. “And yet you keep asking-”

“I’m just trying to help-”

“Well don’t.” He finally looked up at him, tears of hot desperation in his eyes, breaking from his lash line to drip down his cheeks. He used to sleeve to wipe them away as quickly as they formed, but Finn spotted them immediately. “I’m fine.”

“We came back here to slow down and you haven’t caught your breath once since we’ve been here-”

“I can breathe just fine-”

“You just stormed out of the kitchen-”

“I’m fine, Finn, really I’m-”

“You don’t have to be fine anymore, Poe.” He finally sighed out, kneeling down in front of where he sat, still avoiding his eye contact, and laid his hand as gently as he could on his knee. Poe didn’t pull away, so he left it there, massaging a gentle circle with his thumb. “The war is over, and you can slow down…”

Poe held his breath, unable to focus on anything else besides the light pressure he could feel over the knee of his pants, Finn’s finger dragging around, circle after circle. Even the humid weather and the probable plethora of bug bites he was sustaining fell to the wayside as Finn held his position right in front of him.

He couldn’t really hear him once he started, he figured whatever he said, he was making a point, but even his brain wasn’t working well enough to process it. Everything was flowing through his brain at a mile a minute, emotions he hadn’t allowed out in years and ones he had only come to realize recently.

His breath finally caught up to him, he sucked it in and let his chest fill with it.

He couldn’t let it out. Not now, not yet. He wasn’t ready for that.

“I’m fine, Finn, go back inside.” He huffed, slowly dragging both hands over his legs to meet Finn’s grip and softly push it away. “I’m fine.”

Finn wasn’t sure if he was saying it to himself or to him, the way the whisper fell out of his breath and Finn’s relatively close proximity, it could go either way. Whichever it was, he pulled back and nodded. He didn’t agree, but Poe wasn’t looking for an agreement.

“Just…” Poe sighed, standing and pacing around him, further from the house. Finn stood to meet him, but he still took two steps away and raised his hands to keep them at distance from one another. “Just, go back inside. I’m fine.”

He wasn’t. He was so far from fine that he couldn’t even see how hard he was fronting, and how painfully it was failing.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone, I don’t think-”

“It’s my farm Finn, I’ve got it.”

That wasn’t what he meant. It wasn’t the wild beasts, the foreign fauna or flora that he was worried about. It was his own head. He knew what it was like to put on a helmet and hide it all away, what that ever-present stress could do to the body for extended periods of time. He knew better than anyone.

But there was no argument to be made, Poe turned around and headed off deeper into the darkness, the last clear shadow of him Finn could make out was him hitting himself on the side of the head.

They couldn’t stay here, not if it was going to destroy him like this. He needed to tell him that. But he waited, he walked back to the porch and sat on the small chair at the bottom of the stairs and he waited to tell him just that when he got back.

He waited for most of the night. Eventually the subtle hum to the jungle and the warm air lulled him off to sleep, he had been so exhausted, he should’ve known he would have never been able to stay up much later than that.

It was the worst sleep he had ever gotten, he felt sick the entire time and he knew it wasn’t the stew, but Poe.

[probablydaydreamingg]

11 questions asked and answered (SKAM edition)

Thank’s for tagging me @ciaoragno and for coming up with this idea ;) I’ll try to ask good questions but it’s not my forte haha.

1. Always repost the rules!

2. Answer the questions given to you by the one who tagged you!

3. Give 11 questions!

4. Tag 11 people!

Questions answered:

1. You’re trying to convince a friend to watch skam, what’s your opening line?

“It’s the most realistic and enjoyable tv show about teens for teens, but not only. It touches upon important topics like sexuality, mental illness, sexual assault, religion... The way they integrate those topics without making it a pretext for drama, as well as the innovative format of the series make it near revolutionnary.” 

2. Follow up: your friend is still unimpressed, which scene do you show them?

Ahhh... I have to say one from OG as it’s the start of everything so, probably the first scene of episode 5 season 3 as it’s the one that got me into Skam :) It remains one my fave scenes ever in the Skam universe (the tenderness uwu).

3. For those who don’t have remakes in their country, what “opening speech/essay” theme would you wanna hear if you were to have one? / for those who do, did you relate at all to the theme they chose to talk about?

Well ahah, Skam France... I can’t even remember what the opening speech was about honestly ! Probably very similar to OG as season 1 (and 2) is basically a copy paste of OG writting wise. So.. not memorable to say the least. 

4. Which character would you wanna be stuck in an island with?

Interesting question ! Hmmm... I want to say Nico !! I just love him sm, and I feel like he would have a lot of insightful / philosophical thoughts about being stuck in an island (probably citing one of his favorite poems from time to time, and drawing with whatever he can find), and also I feel like he’s resourceful which is a must for surviving in the wild lol. I'd gladly listen to him babbling about the things he enjoys for hours (98% of it being Marti). I'm afraid he wouldn't like the idea so much though, reminding him of the last men on earth and all.

5. Set you wanna visit?

I would have said OG but I’ve kinda already visited some of the shooting locations since I lived in Oslo for 6 months (before I knew of Skam though). I didn’t see the school, but it doesn’t interesting me that much. So I’ll say Skam Italia !! as it’s my fave remake and I can’t stop thinking of visiting Rome asap! Skamit has some of the best shots ever and is very intelligent with the way they incorporate landmarks. There’s a viewpoint over Rome that they used in season 2 episode 3, first clip (I believe), which I’d love to go to, the streetview on San Pietro but that’s a given, the empty pool from season 1, Martino’s neighborhood / the tags shown in season 1, the spot where incantava have their argument in s3, and obviously.... Bracciano !!!!! ... and Milan !!! (all the spots from Tu Non Sei di Milano).. urghh so many I’m sorry lol. 

6. You’re hosting an exclusive dinner party, which 15 characters from across all remakes and og will you invite?

Ooofff that’s a tough one !! i'll try to include at least one character per show (apart from wtfock because I never watched it). So: Isak, Even, OG Sana, Eskild, Martino, Niccolò, Italian Eva, Gio, David, Mia, Isa, Janna (NL), Imane (fr), Joana, Shay.

Damn that was hard ! My original list had at least 5 more people. I'm sorry you didn't make the official list, we'll let you in through the back door ;)

7. What/who was the scene/line/character that made you actually want to watch the whole series?

I already mentioned it, but it was the first clip of episode 5 season 3 of the OG (like many people). I saw gifs here on tumblr and binge watched the series in a couple of days ! As for remakes well, I thought I'd give it a chance and became obsessed (story of my life).

8. Which two remakes would you wanna see do a crossover?

Hmm all of them ?? I'd say Skamnl and Druck because I feel like the characters would get along well. Or Skamit and Skamnl but I feel like it would clash a bit haha.

9. One character you wanna hug?

All of them really, well except for Willhells and pChris who I don't like. If I have to choose ONE, Niccolò once again hihi. I LOVE him you don't understand. And I feel like he gives really warm, soft hugs, because he's so soft himself 😪💕.

10. Most iconic line?

isak's speech from the end of S3 (life is now), and it's rendition in Skamit (sono io). Also special mention to the speech at the end of OG season 4 (i'm emotional just thinking about it), and the family speech from Eleonora / Edoardo in Skamit season 3. Also the davenzi reunion scene has some major iconic lines that made me cry like "stop acting like you're a vampire" (I don't remember exactly). Damnit i'm so bad at this game sorry.

11. What’s one advice you wanna give your favorite character?

Again if I have to choose only one, Niccolò ! I'd give him an advice inspired by Rocco's latest IG caption (his captions are out of this world wtf) about frailty / vulnerability, to say that being sensitive, vulnerable, is not a curse but a gift, it can sometimes be your biggest strength. Because, if on some days it makes you feel weak and incapable of acting, it's also what drives you to step up and "fight" for the things you care the most about. So my advice is for him to not be too harsh on himself, and cherish his vulnerability because it's a quality.

My questions:

If we could have a season set in university, which remake would you want to do it?

If you could steal one object / piece of clothing from og and remakes, what would it be?

Name two characters across the Skam universe that you feel would get along well.

Favorite musical moment in OG and remakes (one scene that features music)

Among OG and remakes, which show made you fall in love with the country / city it's set in the most ? Alternatively, which one made you discover the most about a country and its culture ?

One character you'd want to be best friends with.

Do you think you'll show og and remakes to your children 😅, if so in what order?

Do you consider Skam to be your "little secret", a world you're able to freely be yourself in without real world interference, or you do openly talk / watch it with family and friends ?

If you could watch only one episode from og and remakes for the rest of your life, which one would it be?

Is there a character you didn't like in og and ended up liking in one or several remakes ?

If you could write your own Skam season, on which character would it be centered and on what topic ?

I'm tagging @ciaoragno @free-as-abird @happystrawberry1998 @lovely-things3 @pvnkiwi @isakvaltrsen @that-damn-french-kid @matteoluigiflorenzi @nochoicebuttostan @soon--soon @nerdiepandas and anyone else who wants to do it! ✨

[chiseler]

The Briefly and Occasionally Great Del Tenney

He wasn’t as culturally attuned as Roger Corman. He wasn’t as obsessively prolific as Jess Franco. He wasn’t as personally flamboyant as Ed Wood. Still, writer/producer/director Del Tenney is a legend in the annals of low budget horror. That he’s a legend is in itself legendary, given that he’s remembered for only four films, all of which were made during a two year stretch in the early 1960s.  I’m hard-pressed to think of another director with a filmography that brief who earned a legacy like Tenney’s. They weren’t great films, some weren’t even particularly good, but they had a spark to them, and they were undeniably memorable, sometimes for reasons that had nothing to do with the films themselves.

“My friends used to come up to me and ask, ‘How could you do all those terrible films?’’’ Tenney was fond of saying. “And I tell them, ‘I cry all the way to the bank,’”

He was born in Mason City, Iowa, but in the early ‘40s his family moved to Los Angeles. Tenney began studying theater in school, and by age 15 he was already working, both on stage and later as an extra in the likes of The Wild One and Stalag 17. His focus was on theater, though, so in the late ‘50s he moved to New York and found work in summer stock. A number of the young actors he worked with then, like Roy Scheider, Dick Van Patten, and Sylvia Miles, would later appear in Tenney’s films, many making their screen debuts with him.

By the early ‘60s Tenney and his wife, actress Margot Hartman Tenney, had also started directing productions of their own. After a conversation with a friend who was involved in (as it was described in polite company) “the exploitation film business,” Tenney took a job as assistant director on a couple of pictures, including the merely sleazy Satan in High Heels (a nasty little cheapie involving carnival strippers, junkies, robbery, sex, and murder) and nudie cuties like Orgy at Lil’s Place, (which concerned two girls who decide to get into the nude modeling racket). In later years, while Tenney spoke freely about the former, he rarely mentioned the latter. Still, his experience there inspired him to start making films of his own.

While in the theater he preferred to stick with Shakespeare and the classics, when he moved into film it was all about the bottom line. His goal was not to make great art, but to make a few quick bucks, and to do that he knew what audience he had to aim for. He was determined to give them exactly what they wanted.

Seeing potential in a story his wife had told him about a girl she knew in college who was found murdered, in 1962 Tenney sat down and began working on a script he initially called Black Autumn. Later it would be called Violent Midnight. Then shortly before its release the distributor changed the title to Psychomania, thinking it would cash in on Psycho and  pull in the kids.

Financed by his father-in-law and filmed (as all his pictures would be) in Stamford, CT,  Psychomania focused on a string of brutal sex murders in a small college town. The obvious suspect is that eccentric painter with a family history of mental problems who lives all alone out in the boonies and paints nude models who often end up getting stabbed (Lee Philips). The above-mentioned Dick Van Patten and James Farentino co-star as a couple of suspicious detectives, and Sylvia Miles appears, well, doing that great Sylvia Miles thing.

It’s a sharp and surprisingly stylish little b/w suspense thriller clearly influenced not only by Hitchcock in the camera work, but also by film noir and horror films of the ‘30s and ‘40s in its use of deep shadows. The shadowy murder scenes are especially shocking here. But none of that really mattered. The picture guaranteed its drive-in popularity by including plenty of nudity along the way. In fact prior to its release the same distributor who changed the title also insisted on more boobs, so without any tantrums about “integrity” or “artistic vision,”Tenney went back and shot another ten minutes of skin and mild sex and cut it in.

Although  Richard Hilliard receives the on screen credit as director and Tenney’s only credit is as producer, he would later say that  Hilliard  was a friend of his and a theater person who knew nothing about making films or dealing with actors, so he had to step in himself and take over, making this the first picture he wrote, produced, and directed.

The film made a lot of money (given its budget, anyway) but today is the least recognized of his films. That always confused me a little, given that in technical terms alone it’s the best thing he ever did. But I guess that’s not what people are always looking for in low-budget films.

There’s something else going on in Psychomania, though, that I’ve been touting for years even if no one seems to care.  In terms of genre film history, those self-satisfied types who concern themselves with such things comfortably and endlessly cite Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace as the first giallo, the film that launched a thousand copycats made by everyone from Fulci to Argento. The Bava film is the immovable cornerstone. Without taking anything at all away from what is undeniably a great picture, I’d still argue that Tenney beat him to the punch. Psychomania (released on DVD as Violent Midnight) contains everything that would later be cited as fundamental to any giallo picture: a string of sex crimes, an obvious suspect, several other obvious suspects, lots of boobs, savage violence, and a twist ending. But Psychomania was released in early ‘64, roughly  14 months before Bava’s picture. Okay, so maybe it’s not Italian, and maybe it wasn’t based on those tawdry little yellow paperbacks that were so popular at the time, but dammit it’s still a giallo, and it was the first.

I’ll shut up about that now.

After making a film with style, intelligence, and even a little class compared to the usual drive-in fodder, a film whose influence would be felt for the next twenty years (even if no one will admit it), and a film that made him a little money, Tenney took a hard left.

Filmed over two weeks in 1962, Curse of the Living Corpse was a  costume melodrama set in 1892 that’s  reminiscent of those AIP prestige numbers or early Hammer films. When a wealthy, possibly crazy, and just plain mean old man dies, his will stipulates that if the surviving members of his family don’t shape up and fly right, he’s going to rise from the grave and kill them off one by one. Well, they don’t and he does. Or at least it looks like that’s what’s happening.

It’s still a film with style, intelligence, and class, but of a different kind. While Psychomania was intense, sexy, and at times brutal, Curse of the Living Corpse was a very stagebound, theatrical piece, a bit slower, a bit more deliberate. A sitting room murder mystery heavy on the dialogue, punctuated here and there by a thematic murder. Plus most of the  characters are wearing too many layers for things to get terribly sexy.

Curse features Roy Scheider (in his film debut) as one of the profligate heirs in question,  Carnival of Souls’ Candace Hilligoss, and Tenny’s wife Margot Hartman. It’s one of the things that has always made Tenney’s films, cheap, fast, and DIY as they were, stand out. By pulling in friends from the theater, good, professional actors willing to work on a goofy movie for no money, he ended up with performances several cuts above what you’d normally find in something like this.  When none of the actors in a costume drama are, say, chewing gum, it just adds a layer of credibility to the story, no matter how ridiculous that story might be.

The other thing that made Tenney’s first two films stand out was the sharp b/w cinematography. The shadows are so deep here, the contrast so sharp and detailed, the film at times reminds me of those early Bava pictures (to go back there again). Even when the story lags a bit, the atmosphere carries it along. It’s something that can’t often be said about the low-budget pictures of the era.

Well, even as he was still working on Curse of the Living Corpse, pre-production was underway on his next film, The Horror of Party Beach. Shooting began about three days after Curse wrapped. If Tenney took a hard left from Psychomania into Curse, this time he had to jump all the way to the other end of the spectrum.

He admitted he wasn’t sure the genre-mashing satire, the horror musical beach movie, would work, but he charged ahead anyway. What made it work was sticking so tightly to the conventions of both the bug-eyed monster film and the beach blanket movie, while at the same time pointing up the ridiculousness of those conventions. Plus there’s a great fucking soundtrack provided by the Jersey-based surf band The Del-Aires.

In the film’s first five minutes he lays everything out. We meet an assortment of young attractive couples and character types on the beach, each with issues of their own. We meet the potential (human) villains in the form of a local motorcycle gang. And out in Long Island Sound, nuclear waste is being dumped into the water where it settles down on a shipwreck and transforms (with the aid of some neat in-camera trickery) the skeletal remains of lost sailors into an army of fishmen in search of human blood.

After that, well, there you go. The monsters are intentionally silly takeoffs on the usual “man in a rubber suit” creatures (note particularly the eyes and the teeth). But if the monsters are silly, so are the people, and in between  the two Tenney crams in as many drive-in standbys as he can fit: motorcycle chases, baffled scientists, malt shops, some of those crazy teenage dances, doomed drunks, convertibles, incredulous cops,  superstitious black maids who accidentally save the world. And he holds it all together with some editing that’s a bit more clever than you’d expect. The first victim, for instance, dies during a series of cuts between the attacking fishman and The Del-Aires performing the unbelievably catchy “Do the Zombie Stomp” to a bunch of dancing teenagers on the beach. For something this goofy it’s surprisingly disturbing.

(Jokes and surf bands aside, Humanoids From the Deep owes a serious debt of gratitude to Horror of Party Beach).

This and Curse of the Living Corpse were released as a double bill by 20th Century Fox later in ‘64, complete with a gimmick. Would-be audience members were required to sign a release before entering the theater absolving the theater owners of any blame should the viewer die of fright during the screening. It’s unclear if there were any casualties.

The double bill was the last thing to play at the legendary 3,000-seat Paramount Theater in Times Square, and Horror of Party Beach went on to become Tenney’s most successful film.  After that things started to slip.

His next picture, which he completed in ‘64,  was Voodoo Bloodbath, a horror comedy that can trace its roots directly back to Val Lewton’s classic I Walk With a Zombie, but with more bad jokes. William Joyce stars as a bestselling, wisecracking, playboy author of adventure novels. Given that he hasn’t turned anything in to his editor for months, his editor drags him onto a plane and flies him to, yes, Voodoo Island in search of inspiration. See, not only is a famed scientist conducting cancer research there, but the place is supposedly overrun with zombies, too.. It’s a million-selling novel in the waiting. When they arrive they discover three things:

1. The Caribbean island is actually populated by Mexicans for some reason.

2. The scientist has a beautiful blonde virgin daughter.

3. The local natives are preparing for a human sacrifice that night.

None of it bodes well for anyone, though no one realizes this yet.

The humor arises mostly from the editor’s shrill and boorish wife, and the author’s overbearing attempts to pick up any woman he sees (particularly the scientist’s daughter). Neither are terribly funny. The rest of the film is straight-faced and boilerplate, reminiscent of a dozen voodoo pictures from the ‘40s. It’s not very good, either.  Compared with his first two films in particular the production values and direction had gone straight to hell. It’s a clumsy, sloppy picture with very little charm. There’s not even much of a bloodbath. Drumming’s good, though. Up to this point he had worked near miracles with standard storylines and no budgets by bringing in good actors and skilled editors and cameramen. Here he didn’t seem to be trying all that hard. Of all four films, this one really did look and feel like everything else out there.

I wasn’t the only one who thought it could’ve been better. The picture sat on the shelf for nearly seven years until 1971, when low-budget distributor Jerry Gross came nosing around in search of a film to drop in the bottom half of a double bill he had in mind. After a quick and simple title change, the Tenney film was just the ticket he was looking for. As great and fun as those first three films had been, it was Gross who, if accidentally, helped make Tenney a legend.

Today Voodoo Bloodbath is all but completely forgotten. Even under its new title, I Eat Your Skin is less remembered for what it is as a movie than for being half (together with the utterly unrelated I Drink Your Blood)  of one of the most notorious double bills ever released. After seeing them we may not remember anything that happened in either, but we sure do remember those newspaper ads, and sometimes that’s worth a hell of a lot more.

Tenney didn’t talk much about the experience or the film after the fact, but while Voodoo Bloodbath was still sitting on the shelf he  all but completely stepped away from the film business, though he admits he kept the monster suit from Horror of Party Beach and wore it at parties. He and his wife had never strayed from Connecticut, never became part of the hobnobbing Hollywood crowd, so they simply settled down where they were all along, and returned to their first love. They founded what would become a very well respected theater company, putting on three or four productions a year.. Years later when they moved to Florida they opened another. In between Tenney got involved in real estate up and down the East Coast.

Then in the late ‘90s, over thirty years after retiring from motion pictures, he and his wife, together with producer/director Kermit Christman (Wicked Games) , founded DelMar Productions and Tenney began writing, producing and directing again. Between ‘99 and 2003, he made three pictures: Clean and Narrow, about an ex-con trying to go straight in a small town; an I Know What You Did Last Summer knockoff called Wanna Know a Secret?; and a supernatural thriller called Descendant,  in which a would be writer is haunted by the spirit of an ancestor who happens to be Edgar Allan Poe. The last was particularly dear to Tenney, because he’d always loved Poe and wanted to do some kind of movie about him.

Ah, but the movie business was a very different animal by then. It wasn’t merely a matter of borrowing a few bucks from your father-in-law to make a silly monster picture, then hooking up with an independent distributor. Now even making the smallest film meant raising a few million dollars. Worse, the lawyers had gotten involved. And forget about any kind of distribution if you aren’t connected to a major studio. The fun had been sucked out of the game, and this was evident in the films themselves. Sure those films he made in the ‘60s were blatantly, even cynically commercial, but commercial in a ragtag, adventurous, slapdash way.  The new films were commercial, but much more carefully so. They were  slick and serious. If they weren’t slick, audiences wouldn’t look at them, and you had to be serious about the whole process, because there were millions of dollars at stake. Hell, there was even a desperation evident on the screen. While before Tenney had been working with a bunch of young actors on their way up, now he was working with a bunch on their way down (William Katt, Sondra Locke, Wings Hauser), and you can almost hear their nails scratching as they scramble to hold onto anything at all before they vanish completely.

No, it wasn’t much fun,  But those aren’t the films Tenney will be remembered for, and they won’t take anything away from his status among fans. He’ll be remembered for those four pictures from back in ‘64 (even if one wasn’t released until ‘71). They weren’t as good as some, but a lot better than most.  In all four pictures he never once repeated himself. They were all radically different in mood and style and story, and there was a seductive, sloppy magic about them that’s inescapable. No matter how many times I go back to Psychomania/Violent Midnight (and I go back to it a lot) the ending still catches me off guard. After all these years “The Zombie Stomp” still gets stuck in my head.   I even find myself returning to I Eat Your Skin every couple years, not to laugh at it, but just to wonder. I guess that’s why Tenney, on the basis of only those four pictures, can now take his rightful spot among the pantheon of cult directors.

by Jim Knipfel

[rallamajoop]

On the history of the airline stewardess (and why she deserves so much more credit than you probably realise)

So, to recap: in the name of producing one short fanfic, I have now spent far too many months researching the history of the airline stewardess. It's safe to say I came to the subject primed to get sucked in hard (in brief: I hail from an RAF family on my dad's side, and there is a definite vein of aviation nerdery running throuth us all to this day). But as not more than a fraction of that material was ever going to make it into the fic, it seemed the least I could do to give a quick summary of some of the cool things I got to read while getting horribly sidetracked er, writing this thing, and why others might find them interesting too.

If it wasn't obvious from all those quotes in the opening paragraphs (most only-slightly-paraphrased from real news items), I have borrowed heavily from my sources in writing this fic. The bit about Heather's former roommate who kept her uniform pressed every day for months after her marriage, for example, comes direct from the life of stewardess Connie Bosza, whereas most of the rest of the anecdotes about Heather's housemates and homelife actually happened to Sherry Waterman. Usually I'd have worked harder to remix and reinvent, but here I found myself getting so attached to the subject that not sharing as much of these real women's stories as possible felt like the greater betrayal. But I'll skip citing every article I saved in the process (ask if you're really that curious) and skip to the meatier sources.

My own gateway to the subject came from Victoria Vantoch's book The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon, where, in an introductory spiel about the life of her own mother, she lays out the profession as a mass of contradictions. Not only does she cover the subject from the very first stewardess of the 1930's to the equal rights challenges of the 1970's which transformed the industry, the work serves as a fascinating insight (and sometimes horrifically so) into the realities of Cold War gender politics. Vantoch deliberately underlines the case that, just because this is a story about a lot of pretty women doesn't mean it doesn't deserve to be treated as serious history. Though there are places I wish she'd gone into more depth, it's an excellent introduction to the topic (and available as an ebook if you want a copy).

For real inspiration, however, I got far more out of From Another Island: Adventures and Misadventures of an Airline Stewardess—the personal account of Sherry Waterman, one of few real stewardesses ever to get around to publishing a memoir (Flying Mary O'Connor is another, but it's out of print, not available at my mainstay of BookDepository.com, and cost somewhat more than I felt justified in spending on ebay). Beginning around 1950, she worked for American Airlines for 6 years, and when she had exhausted the possibilities of domestic air travel, she transferred to Transocean Air Lines and spent another 3 years flying the Pacific. The result is remarkably readable and captures the scope, the joy and the absurdities of the profession with gusto. (Waterman really did, for example, recognise a surprised-but-flattered Dr. Edward Teller on one of her flights, and has stories to share about passengers getting stuck in aircraft toilets—though in reality, the size of the passenger was apparently the primary issue).

By contrast, though equally well-written, Sex objects in the sky: A personal account of the stewardess rebellion, by Paula Kane, was a much harder read. Like Waterman, Kane spent 5 years with American Airlines, beginning in the late 60's, but she describes an experience of growing disillusionment punctuated by incidents of sexual harassment so unpleasant that my rec for this book probably warrants a content warning. The rebellion Kane chronicles would not have been possible without the prior civil rights victories of the 60's, but the sexual revolution and changing nature of the industry had plainly produced an attitude of entitlement to women's bodies that would become infinitely worse before it got better (and this is one of few subjects I only wish The Jet Sex had covered in more detail). In the process, she captures a moment in her profession's battle not only for their own rights, but to make air travel safer for everyone on board.

I owe a particular debt to Kane's book for underlining something which had gone understated in my last two sources—namely the vital importance flight attendants may play in managing an evacuation from the plane in the event of a crash. And thus it is, of course, that my story obtained its set piece. (For the record, Sex objects in the sky is available to borrow from OpenLibraries online, and thus one of the most accessible sources on this list.)

For more on key role flight attendants can genuinely play in saving lives, I'd also recommend the Angels of the Sky series as the Confessions of a Trolley Dolly website, and the Air Crash Investigations episode Getting Out Alive. For one last great online source I discovered in the middle of writing the story, we have Winged Women: Stewardesses, Sexism, and American Society—a Master's thesis by Michele Martin, which is freely available online, and built around interviews with several retired stewardesses. Don't let the fact it's a thesis put you off this one—it's written in very accessible fashion, and works as a much-abbreviated version of The Jet Sex for a good overview of the history of the subject. It even includes an account of a plane crash where two quick-thinking stewardesses really were instrumental in getting every last person of the plane in the nick of time (most other real-life examples I'd managed to uncover to this point, the heroism of the stewardess was underlined by the fact that a great many people did not make it out).

I would love to say more on the subject, but I don't think I could better explain how this subject grabbed me the way it did than to quote from the sources themselves. So if, by some miracle, you still want to hear more, below you will find quotes from the introduction of each of those three key sources. I'd like to thienk they all, in their different ways, really speak for themselves.

Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon Victoria Vantoch

In 1956, when my mother was in eighth grade, she dreamed of becoming the first female astronaut. She went on to become the salutatorian of her high-school class and won first prize in a model UN speech contest that awarded her a month-long, all-expense-paid trip to historical sites around the country. She subsequently earned a B.A. in Slavic languages from UCLA. The Library of Congress Aerospace Technology Division recruited her for her Russian language skills and she moved to Washington, D.C., where she translated Russian aerospace articles on everything from Alexey Leonov, the first person to walk in space, to metallurgy—all of which bored her to the core. She considered graduate school for international studies but did not have much savings and could not stomach the prospect of living on peanut-butter sandwiches for four years, so, in 1968, she brushed up on her Russian and interviewed for a stewardess position with Pan Am, which had just started flying to Moscow. She was devastated when the airline rejected her, but she managed to win a position with Eastern Airlines and her hometown newspaper chronicled her success. As a stewardess, she moved into a boarding house with Alice Paul, one of the twentieth century’s most famous women’s rights activists. While living with Paul, her life was a collage of contradictions. She lobbied on Capitol Hill for the Equal Rights Amendment at the same time that she went to work as a stewardess wearing pale blue hot pants. In 1969, she gave a speech to Congress in honor of the early women’s rights activist Lucretia Mott. The topic: gender equality in the workforce. That same year she also competed in two beauty pageants. She got married, had my sister and me, continued to fly, and spent much of her adult life feeling guilty about being an absent parent. Flying was never really about the money for my mother. It meant freedom from suburban life and office monotony, and participation in a public realm that was usually reserved for men. I rode on flights with her and felt proud—my mother was the stewardess. And since airlines allowed employees to bring their families on flights for free, by the time I was twelve I had traveled to twenty-five countries. Some of my mother’s early stewardess friends went on to get doctorates in chemistry, to work at the Department of Defense, to manage large households of their own, and to become successful attorneys. My mother, however, continued to fly until Eastern went out of business. Without a job at the age of forty-eight, she desperately campaigned for a stewardess position with other airlines. She created a colorful posterboard presentation that read, “I will die if I don’t fly” (along with—I’m serious—a song she wrote about her love of flying) and sent it to the American Airlines personnel department, which, after a series of interviews, hired her.

But this was the early 1990s and, by now, being a stewardess had lost its cachet. Around that time, in my early teens, I was interviewing for admission to exclusive New England boarding schools. During one interview that wasn’t going particularly well, the pompous interviewer in a tweed jacket suggested that I become a stewardess like my mother—“ because of my smile.” I knew then I would be rejected. My face burned. I stopped mentioning my mother’s profession. It was no longer something to be proud of. It had become an insult. My fascination with airline stewardesses began with my mother. It began with curiosity about how a talented public speaker who was nearly fluent in Russian and committed to women’s rights chose a career that ultimately allowed her to be written off as a vapid sex object and, ultimately, as a low-status service worker.

From Another Island Sherry Waterman

I was aware even then of so many little things commonplace to us, and yet so significant. These things were most evident in San Francisco, one of the crossroads of the airline world. A lei of wilted pikake blossoms tossed across a copy of the New York Times – both had been fresh that morning; two roommates had returned from Honolulu and New York. A pair of Alaskan mukluks and an aloha shirt crammed together in a suitcase; another roommate was leaving for Tokyo and returning via the Aleutians. Two stewardesses, chattering on the phone about their forthcoming vacations; each was going around the world in a different direction, and one was saying, impatiently, "Well, okay then. I’ll meet you in Egypt." Six roommates gathered around the table for a spaghetti dinner, pleased by the rarity of their all being at home together, and no one bothering to comment that at dinner the night before, all had been thousands of miles away, in different directions.

This was our way of life and it was natural to us. It was the way most of our friends lived and we often lost sight of the fact that it was not the way everybody lived. We were impatient with people who expected us to make dentist appointments three weeks in advance— who could know where she would be three weeks hence?—and we regarded a six months' lease on an apartment as signing up for eternity. We lived from city to city and felt at home in all of them, but we also lived from day to day, and never felt truly at home anywhere. During the first week in June, Dallas was our home and we loved it. Our roommates were among the best we'd ever had. Then the Texas summer hit with fierce intensity, and we raced to the airport with transfer requests clutched in our perspiring hands. Two weeks later we were settled by the sea in Los Angeles, and we spent the summer on the beaches. But the summer waned and the chilly fogs became more frequent, and it was time to move back to Dallas. So the transfer requests were filled out again. It was October, and one of us was playing Autumn in New York on the record player, and another one of us said, "Did you notice that tree on the corner has some leaves that are turning brown —just like the leaves back East?" So we changed the course of our lives with the eraser on a pencil.

We could follow the sun or the seasons with less planning than most girls give to a two-week vacation. We packed ice skates and swim suits in the same suitcase and used them both within 48 hours.

All of this was in the days before jets, but we still got around pretty fast, and we always measured distance in terms of time rather than miles. "How far is it to Dallas from here?" "Oh, four hours in a DC-7. Or were you speaking about a Six?" Short distances were figured that way too. A girl who lived in the beach area of Los Angeles would have her hair done and her shoes repaired in Washington, D.C., because it was "closer" —a ten-minute walk from her layover hotel. We were familiar with so many cities that sometimes we got them confused. I dropped a token in the fare box of a San Francisco bus and the driver stopped me as I started toward the back. "What's the matter," I inquired, "isn't that token for this bus line?' "Lady," he said, squinting at it, "that token isn't even for this country."

Sex Objects in the Sky Paula Kane

Almost lost in all the sexual innuendo of the Madison Avenue imagery is the primary reason why stewardesses are on board a plane, which is to enforce safety regulations and supervise the immediate evacuation of the plane in the event of a crash. And in crash after crash, the efficiency and courage of the stewardesses have meant the difference between passengers' lives and deaths.

Forty passengers and three crew members were killed in the December 8, 1972, crash of a United Airlines jet at Chicago's Midway Airport. But fifteen passengers survived, many of them because of the heroic efforts of the two stewardesses, Kathleen S. Duret and D. Jeanne Griffin.

The plane crashed into a block of houses one and a half miles southeast of the runway while attempting an instrument landing in scattered fog. Almost the entire front end of the plane was demolished on impact. The two stewardesses, who had been seated in jump seats at the back of the plane, rushed to open an emergency exit, but were driven back by raging flames. They worked their way along the right side of the burning cabin, clearing away the debris of galley equipment blocking the aisle. Then, one by one, they assisted nine surviving passengers to the exit and out of the plane, pausing each time to take gasps of fresh air before returning to the dark, burning, smoke-filled cabin. Six passengers found their own way out through breaks in the plane's fuselage.

The National Transportation Safety Board found in its investigation of the accident that most of the passengers in the cabin section died after impact as a result of inhaling carbon monoxide and other poisonous fumes from the fire. Those nine passengers lived because of the experience, the expertise, and the courage of Ms. Griffin, a stewardess for ten years prior to the accident, and Ms. Duret, a stewardess for seven years.

Yet their actions earned just one sentence in the sixty-one-page NTSB report: '"Nine passengers who exited through the rear service door were assisted by the two flight attendants; these attendants were the last to leave the aircraft."

Their exceptional bravery in carrying out their legal role on the plane, as stated in Federal Aviation Regulation 121391, "to provide the most effective egress of passengers in the event of an emergency evacuation," earned them no citations or awards from the airline.

Stewardesses who please customers, who receive complimentary letters, and provide exceptional "service," receive awards of merit from the airline. But apparently not stewardesses who save human lives. You have entered the weird, upside down, Alice-in-Wonderland world of the airlines. Presumably the companies are very concerned about safety, since the public's concern for safety on planes has been a major problem in attracting more customers. Yet in several areas the airlines display an incredible disregard for elemental safety. Hazardous materials are illegally shipped in cargo bins below the passengers' seats. Cabins are constructed with materials that in accidents emit a deadly, cyanide-filled smoke.

The stewardesses, in charge of safety in the cabin, are dolled up in miniskirts and coonskin caps, "hot pants," and other bizarre costumes. They are seated in unsafe jump seats, in unsafe corners of the plane, are always called "girls," and are treated like children by the company. And when they "grow up," they are encouraged to leave, even forced out after flying a few years, because they are no longer considered girlish enough. The tightly written script they are ordered to act out in the air, including the constant smiles, the constant engaging of each customer's eyes, the constant subserviance, makes it difficult and sometimes impossible for them to enforce even rudimentary discipline during the flight.

The sexual stewardess fantasy has a direct effect on the safety of flying. It also takes its toll on the psyches of the women who play the role. Stewardesses tend to have serious identity problems as a result of being treated like pieces of fluffy assembline line equipment by the airlines. We tend to move in regular stages from romantic idealism to disillusionment to frustration and anger and self-doubt.

[...] But in the past few years stewardesses have finally started to fight back. They have won a series of rulings by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that have stopped the airlines from forcing women to retire from flying at an early age and from banning married flight attendants.

[5questions]

Richard Wehrenberg

Richard Wehrenberg was born in Akron, Ohio and is the author of Abracadabrachrysanthemum (2018), Hands (2015), and River (2014), co-written with Ross Gay. Their work has been published in The Academy of American Poets, Peach Mag, Bad Nudes, Monster House Press, & elsewhere. They are a poet, writer, artist, & designer living in Bloomington, Indiana.

I want to start with the cover. I admire its minimalism but also the way that minimalism allows the title to speak for itself, carrying the reader along as they go to the next page. What are some of your favorite book designs? How has your own design aesthetics changed since you first started designing chapbooks and websites over ten years ago? Do you have any sort of codified process for your design work?

I perceive Text as Image and Image as Text, in a kind of infinite stirring/reworking. My aesthetic/process for design feels necessarily influenced by how my specific body-form perceives/reads the world, via its various miracles and supposed ‘deficiencies’—ie. having one barely-able-to-see (left) eye and one incredibly-over-achieving (right) eye, as well as having benign hand tremors (ie. my hands shake, inexplicably). I understand designing as the praxis of ‘de-signing' (ie. removing the signs from) this Earth/traditions/meanings/images. To quote one of my fav poets, Mahmoud Darwish—“I love your love / freed from itself and its signs,” which to me means: I love you ‘best’ when we shed the layers/masks/images that bury us in stories, when we dwell in our original and base-form—which of course has to be, for me—Love—the desire to see the world as un-riven, as One, despite everything working against the infinite forms love embodies. I feel my design aesthetic as ‘spiritual,’ or at least to me it feels like it springs enigmatically from a spiritual impulse/condition/base. All to say—my style/praxis is mysterious, even to myself, and my design depends on this kind of unknowability/improvisation. For Abracadabrachrysanthemum (and Three Crises by Bella Bravo, which share almost identical design elements), I viewed the circle on the covers to be a kind of gravitational wormhole into the book’s work, like you implied. A simple entranceway that has, like a planet or black hole, its own gravity to pull/cull others in, to merge and connect worlds. As far as design influences—I love love love Quemadura’s work (who you probably know as Wave Books’ designer.) I remember seeing their stark, simple, text-based covers as a younger poet/designer and being moved by space they allow for the text (exterior and interior) to become its own image/meaning apart from other visual suggestions. Also, Mary Austin Speaker’s work—who does design for Milkweed Editions—is always so precise, gorgeous, and enchanting. Outside of the poem-world, I am constantly inspired by fellow Bloomington designers/friends Aaron Denton and Sharnayla. The beauty they channel is astounding. Since I began designing, I feel that I’ve just become better and faster at designing, and my core aesthetic has mostly stayed the same. Being self-taught, you kind of just pick up little preferences, skills, and potentialities randomly along the path of work. I’m in a constant state of knowledge-acquisition re design and thus my process is really just experimentation. One codified process I do have is to meditate on a book’s content, to summon its image by intentionally dwelling on it within an unconscious states of meditation, dream, trance, etc. Usually I can call up a color palette, or image/font/et al that each individual book/design is calling for via these means. I believe in this kind of prayer/listening in my work, and I cite the unconscious as my main source of artistic capacity and production. I’ve also dreamed book covers before. That’s the best.

Many of the poems in this collection have geographic allusion, descriptive precision, and a general sense of place becoming character. This reminds me in many ways of your book RIVER, co-authored with Ross Gay. While that was prose and this is poetry, this is something I have noticed in your writing. How would you describe your aesthetic connection to geography? nature? environment? This book seems to expand beyond America in ways previous writing of yours doesn’t...

I can’t not attempt to constantly locate my Self in this World—can’t not see/feel/attempt to understand where/how/who/why I am in relation to ‘others’—to the land, rivers, oceans, to other animals, to the incredible manifold instantiations of plants, to the water with which without we would vanish, to all the ostensibly separate “I’s” on this shared Earth/consciousness/World surviving, dwelling, praying, creating—Being. I am an empath and embed/imbibe my surroundings almost automatically/unconsciously into myself. I become wherever I am. And thus its violences and gorgeousnesses alike become my own. And thus I speak for them, to them, of them, with them, in service and toward the healing of them/us/I/we. I unbecome my self to reset my churning and lumbering around this planet, to geographize ‘my’ position within this unpositioned House we find our selves. I am also quite of the mind that we are indeed both Here and Not Here. This Not Here is completely devoid of the drama of the body/ego, which we so often encounter and identify with today (and have since arriving on Earth.) My body, it’s specific forms and desires, languages and impulses, with yours, in conflict with theirs, with the scarcity, the low amount, the abundance, the never-ending forsaken nothing-everything, all of it, all the time, ever, ever, never-enough or always-too-much, the never-quite-right. You compared to me, thine in yours with mine of we. In spirit realm, there is no time and ID like we think here. Both Here and Not Here are real/valid places—the corporeal realm and the spirit realm—and I know, at least for now, I live in both places. I realized recently one of my main hopes for my writing is for it to re-embed the divine into the every day, re-pair it with the quotidian—to reunite these worlds-torn. What I mean is: I identify heavily with wherever I am in this 3D reality called life, and also identify heavily with the spirit realm as an (un)geographic place where I also reside. Over-identification with either realm leads to misery/suffering or disassociation/location, to paraphrase A Course In Miracles.

There is a sense of unity between the voice of these poems and everything else in the world, seen best, in my opinion, in “Signifying Brown Bear” wherein a stuffed animal becomes a virtual tunnel into all sorts of real human and existential experiences. Do you think something fundamental has changed in contemporary consumer society from ancient or medieval or even early modern societies, in which we have too many outlets for our emotions and experiences? Maybe too many is good (whatever "good" means)? In this poem, the stuffed bear almost represents your own yearning to connect as fully as you already are with universe around you. It has many of the conceits of a love poem and, at times, a tongue-in-cheek tone. In the end, the poem is what makes us think. You have turned a mirror on the reader. Was this your intention? How do you decide when to write in second-person versus first person etc.? Is any of this interpretation at all on point?  In “Signifying Brown Bear,” I am referring to an actual brown bear (ie. Ursus arctos) and the poem is just kind of about how people/entities who I become close with can begin to feel like sweet-tender-almost-cryptozoological-creatures to me and I want to also just be a sweet-tender-almost-cryptozoological-creature—or hell, I’ll settle for even a plant or a rock—back to them. Anything but this warbling, incomplete, stammering-maunderer of a human being! (Exaggeration.) I do not want my humanity at times—my human-being-ing—which has been categorized, documented, and shrink-wrapped for societal use and relation, who is part of the decimation of Earth via capital. I want the freedom (and I’m sure we could say unfreedom) of the brown bear who is in relation to the Sycamore by the river, and the salmon floating above the stones, the water gliding over, ever-thinning rock into sand granules—slowly—and back again—and back. I don’t want to be (and can’t be, is perhaps my thesis) relegated to the realm of signifiers and signs imposed via any of the manifold categorization machines we navigate on the daily to obfuscate these kind of otherworldly, ancient connections I feel as Real. To decimate that last paragraph—I also believe in becoming fully-embodied/present in the form we are in in this life, too. So, it’s confusing, this ever-always-transforming-ing perceptioning. The confusion about what energy/thing I am and what you are is a little about what that poem is about, too. I was reading Agamben’s The Use of Bodies and came across this ancient Greek word, poiesis, which appears in the poem and means, “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.” I love that idea, and think it is what we are here to do, in part. So often for me the unprecedented-something we are trying to bring into existence is ourselves and the art/energy we carry in us must be made into song. I want to always make the reader aware of their presence in my writing—to me writing is a collective act and readers are always existent, even if they never ‘read’ your work. The imagined, the dead, the unborn, the spiritually uncanonized, the already-gone-never-was reader, writer, seeker, be-er. I switch between tense often and freely, because in poetry, at least for me, we feel/fall into each word/line we write and there’s less of a need to be ‘coherent’ in the sense of the popular notion of storytelling/fiction, which (I might have another thesis here) feels like a symptom of capitalism, too. Of course it feels really nice to have a coherent story. I love television and pop culture. I want to write for television. I want to be perceived as coherent. But I want to say too: the ‘incoherence’ of poetry is a kind of coherence, a prayer toward a ‘new’ form, if you will, despite being so old itself. Poetry coheres to a perhaps more experimental way of telling a story, a precedentless next-ing, and this variation is vital—these unforeseen forms, stories, ways of being. We are a species that evolves, and because the mouth/mind is the site of evolution now, I am playing accordingly.

What ended up happening with MHP?  Why did you decide to stop active involvement in it? What are you doing now in terms of day-to-day life? Monster House Press has evolved through many forms. In 2010, it began, semi-naively, as a collective publisher of zines and chapbooks in the eponymous punk house. It then expanded and evolved into a project I was maintaining, mostly on my own, from 2012-2016 in Bloomington, Indiana. In the summer of 2016, MHP rose again as a officially collective project—an amorphous mass, as we liked to call it—primarily because the workload had become unsustainable for me to do on my own, and we were doing more and more, gaining recognition, et cetera. We decided to lay MHP to rest at the end of the 2018, as many of us involved in keeping it going are moving onto graduate school and/or starting new projects/lives. It felt apt to end this specific instantiation in my career-form of publishing, as I have moved away from the punk/DIY scene from which it was born, and the name itself has too become divorced from its origin and who I/we was/were then. I’m sure I’ll always be editing, publishing, reading, designing and helping steward others’ work in this world, as that impulse is something part and parcel of my being, this collaboration; however, the terms and boundaries within this specific modality as MHP have expired to me. In my day-to-day life, I am a freelance graphic designer, artist, editor, and writer. I usually sit at my house with my dog, working on whatever project I have in my docket at the time, or go out to a coffee or tea house to do work. I also just finished auditing a graduate poetry workshop called Joy & Collaboration with Ross Gay, which was, in a word, divine—and I currently spend my days/time helping out with the growing at a communal greenhouse as well as generally just reading/writing/watching/listening to the Earth/Universe, hoping to be of service, use, and care.

What future projects are you working on? Do you still play music with organized groups? Have you thought of writing long-form fiction?

I’m hoping to start my MFA in Poetry next year. As far as writing projects—I’m writing a collection of sonnets about my alcoholism/being an alcoholic in the United States. (I’ve been sober for 5 years now.) The sonnets are these kind of little, tender love-songs to my alcoholic/former self (who I can never fully extinguish) which—I hope—also reckon with and help shed light on addiction, malevolent masculinity/whiteness, and which also seek to forgive and release—to heal. I also have this big, kind of far off ditty of a dream to open a Poetry Center one day, in the Midwest ideally, kind of a little like Poets House in NYC, where events, workshops, reading, writing, and magic can happen. A hub for poetics/healing/joy/collaboration. There will probably be an herbal/plant element too, somehow, as I love working with/growing plants. And music! I haven’t played music in an organized group in a while, but enjoy being able to play piano and saxophone here and there, when I can, however that happens. I helped transpose, sing, and record a score for a little art movie project, along with Ross Gay and Lauren Harrison, which was super delightful. Music is the literal heart of the world, imo. I listened to 36 days of music this year, ie. for 1/10 of the year I was listening to music, which was kind of staggering and incredible for me to realize. I love writing long and short form fiction, but have found it removes me from the world too intensely, which, I feel I am supposed to stay more rooted/involved in the World in a proactive sense, so I tend to write poetry and other forms over fiction. I am interested in the hybrid essay form—with poetry hidden inside—and creating/seeking new hybridized forms. There’s so much potential for greatness—and so much to come.

[flannelshirtandjeans]

TFW your D&D character makes a choice and you discover hidden (but kinda sense-making!) depths

I’ve been thinking a lot about Inquiry and what happened last time in D&D (good things!) and I’m gonna blabber about them here because I think it’s cool how the choice not to sign the Prince’s contract came organically in play but actually makes a fair bit of sense now that I’m thinking about WHY exactly she’d feel so strongly about it - I knew she DID, just couldn’t put it into words so - 

So for brief context, our party’s been kinda accidentally got tangled in something we weren’t supposed to be tangled - a fey lord is rising again and we kinda got involved by accident because one of his minions hired us on a quest, and now we’ve kinda figured out what’s happening on our own, and now the Prince of one of the party members’ home city kingdom wants to hire us to act as her agents our in the realms where she doesn’t really have legal authority etc - but because we’re dealing with a big enemy, she wants us to sign a contract and be put under Geas so that people can’t torture information out of us, for example, or we just won’t blabber to the wrong person -- and Inquiry was immediately like Nope. I - and she - had trouble articulating why in the situation (’I see that Ida has a very difficult face going on :D”). How the Geas would work is that if they tried to talk about their quest nothing would come out, and they couldn’t write it either, just random lines would come out. If they chose to not sign, they wouldn’t be shared all the information with.

But like, I’ve been thinking about it, and there’s many reasons for this, and I’m gonna put those under cut because I can’t say anything short ever, and this went deeper than I EVER expected going into this game lmao --

She’s been just told by the very same Prince that they can’t trust anyone - and the party has learned this the hard way anyway when they trusted the person who hired them in the first place. Being asked to sign a contract like this when she doesn’t know this Prince and isn’t a citizen of her kingdom feels just... like going against what she’s saying for one, but also she just??? doesn’t have a reason to trust or even LIKE the Prince, and doesn’t see the kinda ‘why should I trust this person to put me under a spell’ thing.

the Prince trying to offer her something else she might like when she said that she doesn’t care about the money rattled her even more, because it felt like she was being bought into what she already said she doesn’t want to do, which she’s pretty averse to (makes her think of like demons and their deals - don’t know if she knows about the Fey and the deals they make but the other connection already doesn’t feel good (even if she’s reasonably sure the Prince isn’t a demon). Trust -1.

Secondly, the terms of the contract are terrifying to her - the name she chose for herself is Inquiry, which doesn’t mean just that she asks a lot of questions (though she does), but that she values knowledge and information, and sharing it. She recognizes that not all information is or can be free and shared freely, but the idea that if she needed to share anything about their quest that could help people, or be used to gain an ally at a crucial time, etc... she couldn’t, and it’s because of a spell put on her, and not because she chose to withhold that information herself. Like??? if she really wanted to say something and it could help convice someone to their side, or it could save someone, she couldn’t do anything because she’s under a spell??? That’s so scary for her, not being in charge of what she shares and what she doesn’t.

Anyway, how scary is it to hear your contractor say essentially ‘I would rather have you tortured fruitlessly than let this information slip’??? SHE’S A BABY. A BABY ADULT WHO DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR THIS.

And that’s like the MOST important reasons - I have thoughts about how her name by her father is Lupercia after a demon lord of Sloth and she thinks about a lot of things in terms of sloth vs. not sloth and to her putting a spell on someone so you can ‘trust’ them is on the sloth side of things. There’s less logical thinking behind that feel and she wouldn’t cite that in an argument. xD

As a player I’m uh. reasonably sure that the Prince is fine, just has kinda questionable means, but Inquiry Does Not Like It, and did refuse. xD “The Prince gives Inquiry a kind of a curious look” (paraphrased) had me going THIS IS FINE. xD