The heat hit Felice like a punch in the face, a wall of seething fury. She started sweating as soon as she stepped onto the smooth panels of her balcony, felt it prickling across her brow, and a few moments later trickling down her ribs. The city lay shrouded in early morning darkness, the night sky humming with the faint susurrations of a city still sleeping, its industrious millions almost entirely unaware of the vast disaster that was falling on them from the uncaring heavens.
As she pulled the doors open she could not decide if she wanted it to be unusually hot, enough to justify this lunatic trip, or a typical Houston summer morning, confirming her foolishness and offering her one last chance to acknowledge her own stupidity and back out of this whole thing. When she woke, dragged out of uneasy slumber almost as soon as she had gone to sleep, she had thought of calling the whole thing off, her stupid escape plan from a creeping disaster that almost no one in that wide, sleeping sprawl even knew was coming. Her boyfriend’s final text had not helped to assuage her self-doubt, four separate messages delivered after midnight in response to her final uncertain pleas, short and sudden rejoinders like stabs:
This is crazy girl
I can’t believe you’re gonna break date night for this shit
I ain’t gonna go with you on this dumb-assed trip
Those crazy hippies have got to you. We’re talking about this when you get back
Not really the best thing to have read as soon as she woke up, so to bolster her waning confidence Felice took out her phone and flicked down to the last texts from Raven:
It’s a good plan Felice. Please don’t back out this morning. You know what’s coming.
And then:
We don’t do addresses. But if you want to check in, head north up the 83 after Junction till you see this
Followed by a picture of a tumbledown shack, half-hidden in tangled shrubs, connected to the highway in the background by a short, uneven dirt path.
So, neither her boyfriend nor the source of the warnings Felice had received about the coming disaster trusted her. But Raven’s caution made sense given how Felice – well, Felice’s colleagues, mostly – had treated them. Jared’s viciousness was a little surprising, but at least her mad fancies about this trip had brought that to the fore.
She stared out across the eastern expanse of the city that had been her home since she started college, frustrating and complicated and unsuited to her in so many ways but still the place she had lived these last eight years, the place where she had learned the law, learned love and loss, and gained this tiny glimpse at a terrible future. What would it be like by tomorrow? She wondered if anyone else in the city was standing outside now, contemplating the same flight as her.
Probably only she could be this impressionable. She again thought of calling the whole thing off, retreating to her bed and forgetting the whole crazed fancy. But as she stared out at the city, gripped by the self-doubt of the loner, the isolation of Cassandra, the heat sank into her bones, and she began to feel it: not the mere discomfort of sweat and stickiness but a vague animal fear, a current of visceral, physical uncertainty flowing in the opposite direction to all her civilized doubts. It should not be this hot at 4am. In her instinctual self she expected sun, the rippling hazy air and scintillating brightness of midday, not the darkness and silence of deep night. Run, her instinct warned her, someone has stolen the sun. How could it be this hot before the sun had even risen?
Shaking her head, she retreated from the heat into the relative cool of her living room, her regrets tempered by animal wisdom and the sure knowledge of the shame she would face if she canceled now. She had a room booked and friends to collect, precious paid leave already taken. She had set herself this stupid quest, crying wolf for a week, and now she had to go through with it. With a sigh she collected her coffee and began checking the things she needed for her trip: clothes and make up for a couple of days in a small sports bag, and in her backpack her driver’s license, national ID card with proof of citizenship (just in case), state ID with proof of gender (just in case), her bar certification, spare charger for her phone, sanitary products and painkillers, print out of her hotel booking with clearly visible Texas address (just in case), and a few snacks. She was ready to go.
Ten minutes later she was in the basement car park, slinging her sports bag into the trunk of her car, placing an icebox on the floor of the rear passenger seat, backpack next to the driver’s seat. The underground car park was already uncomfortably warm, and she was sweating by the time she started the engine and immediately turned on the aircon. She wondered if the aircon of her cute little urban runabout would cope with the heat aboveground without a head start in the relatively cooler carpark. Her car was a gasoline vehicle, of course – electric cars now were just expensive, inconvenient oddities for collectors – and running it in the underground parking space would stink out the elevator and draw complaints if anyone noticed. Still, it was very early, and better safe than sorry … she decided to run the aircon and take the risk of complaints.
While she waited, she turned on the radio, already tuned to Raven’s channel and broadcasting the first of the day’s emergency warnings:
EMERGENCY! PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS EMERGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT! A HEAT DOME IS COMING. TEMPERATURES ACROSS THE ENTIRE TEXAS BASIN WILL BE FATAL. RESIDENTS OF SOUTHERN TEXAS, YOUR POWER GRID WILL FAIL BY MIDDAY AND YOU WILL BE TRAPPED UNDER A FATAL HEAT DOME. GET UNDERGROUND OR GET OUT BY MIDDAY.
This repeated a few times, a strong, urgent woman’s voice building to a peak of alarm at the end of the last sentence, reassuring Felice that this crazy evacuation was the right decision. Raven had warned her about the heat dome a week back, with more urgent messages a few days ago. Their first communication in months, leading to this unexpected and uncharacteristic evacuation. Felice was a lawyer, not a panic-merchant. But here she was, sitting in her car with the aircon running full blast, listening to alerts from a barely legal underground radio station, possibly ending her relationship, on the advice of an activist she barely knew.
She sighed, pushed the car into drive, and headed towards the exit. Some kind of road trip, this.
#
4:30 AM. WBGT: 91
Felice sat in her parked car, tapping the wheel impatiently and waiting for a message or a sign of life. Sunrise was still two hours away, and the cloudless sky was a dark, empty vault, the only light coming from a small number of haphazardly spaced street lights. Across the road her friend Mini’s house was dark and still, no lights visible in the upper floor of the duplex, no signs of movement behind drawn curtains. Mini lived in a quiet neighborhood of low-rise buildings, duplexes and expensive family homes, arrayed neatly along a two-lane street. Many of the houses had small front yards, in most of which the national flag hung limp from slanted white flagpoles. Since loyalty to the Party was synonymous with loyalty to the country, many of the houses had a second flagpole hanging the President’s Flag, its black and red squares a stark contrast to the brighter colors and shapes of the national flag. Mini’s house had no flagpole, but someone had stuck two small plastic flags on the postbox. Across the road from the house, a short distance in front of Felice’s windshield, the smiling face of a man in uniform beamed down at her from an official-looking plastic placard fastened to a telegraph pole, his name and service dates embossed above and below the picture in silver writing. She could not tell in the morning darkness whether it was a memorial or an honor plaque.
Felice was just about to pick up her phone to call her friend when the second floor door opened and Mini emerged, walking lightly down the stairs followed by her man. At the bottom she looked around, peering into the darkness until she saw the car, waved and crossed the street. Felice opened her door and stepped out of the car into the fierce heat, feeling its muggy embrace instantly on her skin. She waved back to Mini and came forward to meet her, embracing her as she stepped off the road onto the grassy verge by the car.
“Mini,” she greeted her, speaking barely louder than a whisper. Mini’s parents had named her after a female character in a famous children’s book about a wizard’s school but she hated the name, and insisted on being called by her diminutive, even at work. The nickname suited her, though – she was a short, bouncy, slightly rounded young woman with cheerful blue eyes and blonde hair falling in confused tumbles and waves around pale shoulders that almost shone in the dim street light. Felice was also short, and they could look each other in the eye as they gripped each other in greeting. “Thank you for coming. I was worried you had forgotten.”
“Of course not, ‘Lise,” Mini replied in the same quiet voice. “This is going to be an adventure. And you’re right, it’s so hot!” She brushed her hand across her forehead, drawing away a sheen of sweat. “It’ll be nice to get away if it’s going to be this hot until the weekend.”
“We should get into the car,” Felice said, turning to greet Mini’s man. “It’s cool inside. Aaron,” She called to the man quietly as he staggered up behind Mini. While Mini had dressed nicely for a road trip in summer dress and pumps, Aaron was wearing sandals, sloppy shorts and a plain light-colored t-shirt, his clothing lazy as always. He was a handsome, slender man with very white skin, messy short dark hair and a vague, unfocused expression. “You can put them in the trunk,” she told him, gesturing to the three bags he was struggling with and dangling her keys, but he shook his head.
“Just in the back is fine,” he replied. “Y’all can sit in the front and gossip, there’ll be room in the back for our stuff.” Felice did not know Aaron well, but he was always attentive to her friendship with Mini, comfortable letting them socialize together while he lazed around in the background. He pulled open the back door of the car and began slinging in bags, first two duffel bags and then a longer, slim black bag that he fed in between the front and back seats, resting it on the icebox. “I’ll jump in before the heat gets in,” he said and hustled around the car, brow already slick with sweat.
Felice turned back to Mini. “Do you need to hide anything?” She asked, voice dropping lower and conspiratorial. “I have a small space behind the wheel in the trunk.”
Mini waved her hand dismissively. “No ‘Lise, it’s fine. I have an injectable, I get it from my mom when I go back to Maryland. No need to hide anything. Do you have anything in there?”
“Not really,” Felice replied adding in a slightly crestfallen tone, “Jared refused to come. Did you bring everything else you need? I booked three nights.”
Mini nodded. “We’re good. Let’s get in the car, it’s stinking out here.”
You can read the remaining six chapters over at Royal Road . I hope you like them!
Out of a lack of good sense I started watching the new Netflix show The Diplomat, which is basically about a woman called Katherine Wylder who gets appointed US ambassador to London just as an enormous shitshow of international relations swamps the post. She gets entangled in this quite complex international conspiracy while trying to negotiate her failing marriage with a man called Hal who is a former ambassador now relegated to house-husband duties, and struggling with her own feelings of inferiority in the role.
I think it’s quite poorly acted and at times poorly written, but the plot is fun and most of the British characters (not the Americans, sadly) are quite fun. The British PM is obviously intended as a slightly less on-the-nose version of Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary (Denison) is a beautiful man with a great voice and a nice delivery, and the depiction of UK parliamentary politics and the seediness of the Tory party is quite fun. Unfortunately it suffers from several flaws: all the main characters are absolutely awful, the acting and dialogue is overblown, and it suffers from that kind of weird nationalist/liberal self-aggrandisement that characterized shows like The West Wing and that godawful series about political journalists, and that has infected every hypocritical late night TV comedian and democratic operative. In this case the lack of self-awareness, the hyping of American goodness, and the ignorance of America’s past or responsibilities, is so extreme that I can’t think of anything else to say about it except that it’s fascist.
I hate to be one of those people who says all modern media is fascist, but by god when I watch shows like this I can’t help but fall into that melancholy trap. Before I explain / rant about that aspect of the show, however, some thoughts about the awfulness of the main characters.
How awful does a character have to be?
It’s interesting how far the show goes to absolutely debase the two main characters. Kate Wyler is an atrocious human being, a bully to her junior staff and a histrionic fool around her husband. She is also weirdly disgusting, or at least the show sets out to make her behavior repulsive – the way she eats, the way she makes her husband sniff her armpits and pisses in front of him, the weird way she flirts, it’s all awful. It’s particularly weird because she’s flirting with the foreign minister, Denison, who is a beautiful, splendid figure of a man who could have any woman he wants, but we’re meant to believe he somehow finds her attractive after all the grossness we’ve seen from her. It doesn’t make sense.
Beyond her physical grossness, Kate Wyler is an awful person. She loses her temper instantly with people beneath her, but knows full well to suck up to the people above her, she blows hot and cold with her peers and yells at them for perfectly reasonable mistakes or misapprehensions. She constantly changes her tone with her husband, who we’re supposed to believe she’s divorcing while she’s constantly getting him to do stuff and regularly begging to go back to him. She tells everyone she doesn’t trust him but believes every one of his lies, tries to be a strong and independent woman but is hamstrung by constantly comparing herself to him, blames him for getting people killed in Afghanistan but admires his bravery and initiative … Every episode is a constant rollercoaster ride on her irrational rages and intemperate assumptions and judgments. I think this is made worse by the actor, who seems unable to achieve any acting register between flat and screaming rage. In every scene Kate is on the verge of exploding, or is overwhelmed with sentimentalism.
Meanwhile her husband is a shifty, lying, feckless, deceitful man who respects no one, and lies to everyone to achieve what he thinks is right. He never communicates clearly, doesn’t listen, and is pursuing his ambitions individually and through his wife, who he is manipulating towards a position of higher power. Nobody with any self-respect would stay married to this shiftless little shit. Except Kate Wyler, of course, who is meant to be a picture of independent womanhood while she has allowed herself to be abused and misused by this cockhead for 12 years.
Also, Kate Wylder has a weird attitude towards femininity, a classic American woman’s double standard. She hates wearing dresses and seems to not know how to wear them or high heels comfortably – an impossibility for a female ambassador from her social background – and hates the very idea of being seen in a dress, which is demeaning to her. Until she needs to flirt with Denison, the night she’s planning to fuck him, when suddenly she can comfortably wear a sexy red gown. A classic madonna/whore complex. Thanks, Netflix, for presenting me with such a novel approach to modern femininity! Furthermore, every couple of episodes we get presented with some weird problem with her clothing – a stain on a grey suit, or needing to use a paper clip to fasten her pants even though she’s staying in a noble house with a staff of fifty, none of whom seem to have access to a sewing kit. This is awkward, makes her seem uniquely unfeminine and also entirely unsuited to the role of ambassador, and after a couple of incidents begins to seem strangely perverted on the part of the writers[1]. Why do we have to be subjected to this? It may be part of the broader sweep of establishing Kate as a highly-strung, somewhat messy person – we also see her using her knees as a writing table when she’s sitting at a table, forgetting her reading glasses before an important meeting, and constantly forgetting to carry the script of her speeches – but I think it works better to make the viewer feel gross, and to establish a strangely voyeuristic perspective on the main character.
Finally, the other big problem with Kate Wyler is that she is a bully. She sucks up to people above her, like the British PM and Foreign Secretary and the US Vice President, and punches down at her staff and other weaker people. She yells and bristles and snaps at her underlings, doesn’t let them finish sentences, and overrides their suggestions to her own detriment. In the presence of her underlings she always believes she knows better, but in the presence of the VP, for example, she instantly accepts every correction no matter how stupid, and she is deferential to the PM and Foreign Secretary, who she also stupidly decides is “a very good man”. She has a similar deference to her husband, who through most of their relationship has been her superior and who she believes is the “most intelligent man” she has ever met (spoiler: He’s a fucking idiot, but a good liar), and who she consistently trusts and makes schemes with despite her clear knowledge that he’s a liar and a selfish prick. It takes her five minutes of vicious and unnecessary scolding by the VP to decide that this stupid, evil woman is a truly amazing and superior person, only to discover five minutes later that the VP is neck deep in the evil scheme that nearly killed her husband and colleagues. In contrast, and as an absolutely perfect representation of what a dickhead she is, early in season 3 – after she has been attacked for her bad hair by the VP – she is assigned a decoy, a woman who looks vaguely like her and walks around everywhere with her. She very quickly starts insulting this woman’s hair, offering to buy her a hairbrush as some kind of cheap joke. This woman’s sole purpose, her entire job, is to die in Kate’s place, but because she’s lower on the pecking order Kate thinks it’s alright to insult her appearance. She’s a classic bully, easily cowed by people with power and quick to attack people over whom she has power. And like all bullies, she deserves everything that’s coming to her. Someone should tell her what happened to Indira Gandhi after she insulted her bodyguards.
This is the couple that are meant to carry us through this show! It’s yet another example of the modern trend among so many TV shows and movies of presenting us with main characters with whom we either have nothing in common (see e.g. Succession) or who are genuinely awful, despicable people (see e.g. The Punisher).
Fortunately this show has a cool mystery plot running through it, a large part of which is driven by the misjudgements and chaotic decision-making of the main two characters, so I can put up with them (for now) in order to see where the plot takes me. But on top of that, this show is steeped in the fascism of modern American empire, and so it is appropriate, given how impossible it is to avoid the fascist gloss, that the two main characters defending the interests of empire are despicable people. They should be! But let’s talk about that fascism.
The liberal gloss on horror
The plot at the center of this show concerns a secret scheme within two governments to provoke some kind of confrontation between the UK and Iran, by way of Russian proxies, which goes horribly wrong and requires Kate and Hal to work very hard to prevent a major war. This plot and the histories of these two characters means that the last thirty years of American misdeeds loom large in the background of the story, and the involvement of the UK means that the entire thing happens in the context of the “special relationship” between the UK and the USA. This means that the story writers have to grapple with the legacy of US violence back as far as the second Iraq war. They do this by presenting the USA as a force for good that occasionally made some genuine mistakes, and the “special relationship” as largely one between peer nations. What this essentially requires them to do is throw a gloss of liberalism over three decades of some of the most violent, destructive behavior since world war 2.
An early conversation between the UK and US representatives about a decision to bomb some Russian mercenaries in Libya is instructive. In this conversation we learn that the Russian mercenaries have been invited to Libya by the Libyans to help them fight bandits and jihadists. With no effort made to discuss why “the Libyan Government” needs help with jihadists, the conversation proceeds to mention that “the Libyan Government” has repeatedly asked the US to help them with these jihadists, but the US has refused. From there our heroes decide that therefore it’s a good thing that the UK is going to bomb the Russian mercenaries, since it will help “the Libyans” with their “Russian problem.”
What’s weird about this? I put “the Libyan government” in quotes because there are currently two Libyan governments, one supported by the UN and one not, because the country was bombed to rubble by the USA, UK and France in 2011, for no reason, and in the chaos that followed the country has been reduced to ruin. This is the origin of the jihadist problem! Which the US, in this show, repeatedly refused to help the Libyan government solve. So now they’re going to “help” the Libyans with their “Russian problem” by bombing the mercs that are helping the Libyans deal with the jihadists the US created.
All of this is presented to us, the viewers, as if it were simply the natural law of the earth that Libya should have a jihadist problem and the US should decline to help. No context or backdrop at all, just a set of facts of nature. Similalry, we are regularly reminded that the Iranians are “crazy” and hate America, but nobody at any point ever tries to reason out why or to explore this craziness at all, even after the Iranian ambassador mentions that US sanctions are ruining the Iranian economy. Similarly, the Russians are “crazy” – they might nuke you or they might do nothing, says Hal. It’s simply impossible to conceive of any country except the UK or the USA having reasons for what they do, or motives of their own, or objectives other than getting in the main characters’ way.
It is very difficult for me now to watch these shows, after decades of my adult life have passed watching the USA do one awful thing after another, and to see the terrible things that have been done suffused into the backdrop in just such a way as to make all the consequences of those terrible actions seem like natural laws or facts of nature. In shows like this the main characters are the key agents of this grasping, violent, consistently criminal power, this clique of gangsters at the heart of the international order. They’re soldiers or special forces or diplomats or politicians constantly negotiating a dangerous world where the actions and motives of enemy states don’t make sense and the threats and risks that they have to negotiate come out of nowhere, are just flat and empty historical facts without rhyme or reason. This is necessary for narrative reasons – no one wants to spend two episodes explaining why everyone hates the main characters! – but it’s also very convenient for the American Exceptionalists who write this trash. They can foreground the importance of America as “leader of the free world” (they actually use this phrase, can you even?) and the challenges it faces in maintaining the “rules-based order” (which they long since turned into might makes right), and absorb all the underpinnings of this shitshow that their nation created into just a wallpaper of carnage and ruin. And we, as the viewers, get inured to this increasingly violent world, forced to accept the main characters’ dangerous opponents and the compromises they have to make to deal with this “adversity” the same way we accept predators and bad weather in a wildlife documentary. Look at the brave cheetah facing off with the hyenas in the rain! Nothing we can do about the laws of nature, is there?
It is also made very obvious to the discerning viewer at a certain point that this whitewashing of America’s misdeeds, the careful elision of all its historical crimes, and the representation of the “special relationship” as a union of approximate equals, is deliberate. The purposive nature of this process is made clear to us in the episode of (I think) Season 2 where the Americans and British are going to do some sly negotiations on the sidelines of a major dinner to celebrate “The Dreadnought Deal”, which one American laughs is still referred to as “the stab in the back” by the French. Why are the French angry about this deal, and why is it a bit tricky to hold meetings at this dinner? Because “The Dreadnought Deal” was an arrangement where the Australian government had agreed to buy French submarines but then suddenly of its own volition inexplicably changed its mind and “decided” to buy British submarines. This is a thinly veiled reference to the AUKUS deal, in which Australia’s most pathetic PM in a long run of pathetic PMs backed out of a practical, reliable agreement with the French to buy actual submarines, and allowed our country to be bullied into signing a ludicrously overpriced deal with the Americans to buy submarines that the USA has no capacity to make and will never deliver, and that we couldn’t operate anyway even if we got them. It was a stab in the back for not just the French, but for the Aussie taxpayer too! But in this story, it is carefully reimagined so that the USA is an innocent, independent observer of a slightly inexplicable sovereign decision by those reckless Aussies.
Fuck off!
And as America sinks into fascism, so all the symbolism and rhetoric of their degenerating political order gets recast as neutral backdrop against which the show’s main characters have to do dark deeds and cut sinister deals and make bad compromises. The security theatre, in which Kate is hustled from room to room and building to building by nameless men in suits, where she is assigned a low-level decoy girl whose sole job is to die on command, where snipers and heavily armed police merge quietly into the backdrop of the regal buildings she inhabits – this increasingly violent and militarized performance becomes as natural to the viewer as the sandstone of the diplomatic residence. The particular jargon of American militarism – of “assets” and “operators” and being “read-in” and “clearances” – becomes normalized along with the constant suspicion of the security state, its background checks and threats of violence. When one character, Stuart, begins to doubt his role as an agent of the imperial power, his former girlfriend Park, a CIA agent, warns him about all the terrible things that will happen to him if he resigns in protest, of how his life will be ruined, as if they were events as natural and as inevitable as December frost, even though she, as a senior representative of that power, would be responsible for doing them to him. And then she immediately asks him to come back to her, having just threatened to wreck his life as easily as you or I would talk about squashing a bug. This cruel, violent, paranoid calculus becomes the ordinary substrate of the story, a world of imperialistic fascism that suffuses the show and impels us, the viewers, to accept and ignore it.
It’s disgusting. And it’s weird that as the US slides down its blood-slicked slope into fascism, dragging the entire “rules-based order” with it, these otherwise-intelligent, well-educated writers and dramatists insist on continuing to tell us these stories, from these perspectives. There is another story that could be told here, of an ordinary partner of one of the sailors who dies in episode 1, trying to uncover the truth of the events that led up to his death and slowly untangling an international conspiracy of the worst kind, maybe finding allies on both sides of the Atlantic who are willing to use his or her quest for justice as a tool in their own political games. This story could unfold over several seasons with the same shenanigans, and the same plots, even some of the same characters, being exposed from outside. The same fascist backdrop would be there but now it would obviously, clearly be wrong, a twisted world order that is alien and unfamiliar to the ordinary soldier’s spouse trying to uncover the truth. None of this fascism would be taken for granted in that story.
Which is why that story wasn’t written, and we got dragged into this one instead.
The self-defeating feminism of angry spies
I guess, though, if you were watching your country slide into fascism, it might make you angry and kind of desperate, which is the primary attitude of Kate Wyler during much of this show. She is constantly angry and flying off on weird rages, jumping to conclusions and demanding action on her assumptions – which repeatedly are revealed to be wrong, including in the absolute banger reveal at the end of season 3 – and getting people killed as a result. It’s not just her, though – almost every woman in the show is mean, cynical and impossible to deal with. Consider:
Grace Penn, the VP, makes a clear point of being directly, unpleasantly rude to Kate Wyler the first time she meets her, and almost never tries to politely ask people to do things. Plus, of course, she’s up to her neck in a terrible, murderous conspiracy
Eedra Park, the CIA station chief in London, is incredibly cold towards her “boyfriend”, Stuart, uncompromising on every decision she makes, completely unwilling to discuss her feelings in or out of work, largely lacking in respect for other people’s privacy, and incredibly mean to her ex (the honeytrap thing is devastatingly nasty, not to mention cheerfully telling him how his life will be wrecked by people like her if he shows a shred of conscience)
Billie Appiah, the Whitehouse Chief of Staff, lies to everyone including people very close to her, is a manipulative and cold-hearted fiend, and never shows any kindness to anyone
In contrast, men like Stuart, Foreign Secretary Denison, and the weird pointless MI6 spy who turns up out of nowhere in season 3 are, broadly, soft-spoken, well-mannered, polite, kind and engaged. They pay attention to others’ feelings, try not to be mean when asking people to do things they don’t want to do, express their feelings towards the women around them in heartfelt, meaningful language, and generally behave like good colleagues.
This show was written by a woman, about a group of powerful women, but the behavior of those women is more like Selling Sunset than Downton Abbey, that’s for sure. Is it the screenwriters’ and directors’ view of working women, that they’re the perfect stereotype of shrill harridans? Do they think screaming and yelling and making unhinged demands that get people killed, threatening and entrapping your ex partners, and being cold and mean to everyone, is model behavior for women at work? Why don’t they expect the same reckless and psychopathic behavior of men? Is there no other model for how powerful women should behave? Because after three seasons of this, it certainly seems to me like Debora Cahn (the writer) hates women, and admires and loves men.
Television should do better than this
I really, really wish that script writers and directors would try a little harder than this. They’re paid a lot of money to do this stuff, they work in complex teams with lots of feedback from multiple colleagues and the actors themselves. How do they manage to give birth to these awful characters? How do they sustain them through the process of all the writing and directing and acing, and still think to themselves that what they’re producing is a worthy meditation on the human condition, on women at work, on marital relations, or on global politics? Do they see it at some point but think oh well, there’s too much invested in this now, let’s just keep spitting out this corrosive poisonous trash?
Or do they agree with it all? Does Debora Cahn actually really think that Kate Wyler is a model of the only way for powerful women to behave? Is she impressed by US security theatre, all those men in dark suits hustling stern-faced officials from room to room while they whisper into their comm links and the female officials body-shame the women who’re paid to die in their stead? Does she really think that these conversations in these blood-soaked halls of power are enlightening and inspiring, that the US has done nothing wrong and it really does make sense for these people to do these things? And is that the viewing appetite of the US public now?
I would hope not, but this possibility is why, when I watch shows like this, I think of the blithe dismissal of modern media as “all fascist now”, and I think, you know what. Yes, it’s all fascist now.
fn1: And if you think I’m exaggerating the possibility that the writers are just gross, wait until the moment late in season 3 where you are subjected to a completely irrelevant, absolutely repulsive, and entirely gratuitous ten second vision of Prime Minister Trowbridge, fully clothed, viscerally fucking his fully-clothed wife while she stares expressionlessly at the ceiling and says “More vigorously”. My god, I may never recover from that. Finally, someone to rival David Lynch for pointless grotesquerie.
This week I watched the new War of The Worlds so you don’t have to. The sacrifices I make for my reader(s)! I watched it because a) I was interested in whether it actually deserved the 0% rating it has received on Rotten Tomatoes and b) I am interested in all the variants of this famous story that are produced, from the weird time traveling robot dog one to the Tom Cruise one to the original.
This version does some interesting new things with the basic concept, which are worthy additions. In particular the aliens are attacking earth for our data, not for our physical resources, and have weird little ant robots that can crawl into any space to suck data from hard drives and usb sticks. This leads to some poignant scenes in which the main character Will’s dead wife’s Facebook memorial page is progressively deleted, and the last message she sent him (a five second “put the dog out” reminder) corrupts and disappears as he plays it. The movie is also almost entirely shown from the perspective of Will’s computer: we see him making phone calls, using various apps to access remote cameras, and surfing the web and youtube to look for information. The only time we break this view is to see him in action through the perspective of a delivery drone. This is a difficult perspective to do well, and I think this movie actually pulls it off. So, it adds something to the genre.
Did this movie deserve 0%?
When I watched the movie it had a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which has now risen to 4%, and I don’t think, frankly, it deserves this. It has a coherent plot, an interesting visual perspective, it quickly and effectively develops the main characters who are, in general, sympathetic, and it does not insult the viewer’s intelligence or their morality. The acting isn’t great and it has some timing problems, and some of the story developments are preposterous and not really sustainable, but it isn’t terrible. It certainly does not treat the viewer with the complete contempt shown by the new Star Wars movies, it doesn’t have the weird Vaudeville turn of some other recent movies, and it doesn’t fundamentally let down either its genre, the canon from which it is drawn, or the basic internal premises it establishes for itself. In fact the final process to defeat the aliens, in which the family members have to pool their separate skills to develop a combined computer/physical virus to simultaneously attack the aliens’s cybernetic physical and data forms, is consistent with the original story being updated to the information age, and nicely foreshadowed by a text message in which Will’s daughters Lancet paper is shown. If this movie deserves 4% then the new Star Wars movies should be somewhere down around -50%.
I wonder to what extent the bad reviews are simply a racist response to the fact that this movie has a mixed-race cast in which the three most important characters are black. But my primary interest here is not to review the movie, but to explore some of the implications of the main character’s job as an NSA spook, and the fact that he is played by Ice Cube.
Will Radford and the Actually Evil NSA
The main character in this story is Will Radford, played by Ice Cube from NWA. Will is a low-level agent in the NSA, whose job involves sitting in an office accessing various apps to spy on members of the population to check for “threats”, as well as ghosting agents in actual raids. The tools at his disposal are a genuinely excellent depiction of an electronic surveillance organization in a cyberpunk dystopia: he can basically block select a section of a map in his app and reveal all the accessible cameras in the area. He can then right-click on any one of those cameras, vehicles or NSA “assets”[1] to bring up a context menu of tools available to him, which includes being able to instantly access the camera and view the street through it. Furthermore, once he has streetview he gets little floating pop-ups over every person in the view giving their name, major information and threat assessment, and if he clicks on them he can monitor their spending habits. He does this in the beginning of the movie to track his daughter on her way to work, determines that she bought a muffin, and then calls her to body shame her for eating the muffin. Top parenting, Ice Cube!
This isn’t the limit of his powers though! He can access reaper drones to use their weapons, and can also hack cars, so that at one point he hacks a Tesla, drives it to his injured daughter, and programs it to drive her to an emergency center (as well as turning on the aircon). He can also generate all-purpose security keys for any device or program, which he uses to hack his daughter’s laptop so he can monitor her conversation with her (white) boyfriend and to break into a Zoom call. It’s actually a really good depiction of the security state at work, the one we conspiracize about, and better still it’s essential to the framework of the story – the aliens are attacking earth for its data, and a large part of the reason they have recognized the abundance of data is the amount that is being used by the security services.
You see, the kicker here is that the NSA is running a top secret extra layer of surveillance called Goliath that collects orders of magnitude more data than Will has access to, and that will ultimately enable computers and AI to be used to predict terrorism and crime (and possibly bad thoughts). This system is so secret that Will didn’t know about it, and is shocked when he learns about it. His kids make jokes about him spying on everyone – which he literally, physically is! – and complain about how his job is a bit dodgy, and he’s aware that he’s spying on everyone, but halfway through the movie we learn that there is a further layer of NSA tech that is beyond the pale. We learn this when Will is busy using his technological and surveillance powers to try and save the earth from an attack by super-powered aliens, so the message is very clear: the surveillance Will was doing is good and right, but the new program, Goliath, is going too far, it’s evil, and it has had extra-galactic consequences.
Essentially the movie sets up a clear moral boundary between having a guy like Will sitting in his office spying on literally everyone on earth to the extent that he is able to see when and where they bought their breakfast, how they paid and what they bought, which is directly shown as good and right; and some nebulous additional level of surveillance that would be immoral, bad, and dangerous. And we are shown all this through the perspective of the hero of the story, the guy who was doing the government surveillance that is good, and who is played by Ice Cube, a famous anti-government rapper.
Where have the black cultural resistance ended up?
That’s right, the man whose first solo album was entitled Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, and who sung about institutional racism in the police force, played the NSA spy whose digital intrusions into the lives of ordinary Americans were clearly portrayed as good and necessary. This seems like a far cry from the original political purpose that he was singing for in the late 1980s and early 1990s, doesn’t it? But surely he’s alone in this fall from grace?
Ice T, infamous for the (excellent!) song Cop Killer on the (excellent!) Body Count debut album, has played a policeman in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit for about two decades. Snoop Dogg was one of the Olympic ambassadors for the 2024 US Olympic team (and apparently very good at it), while 50 Cent attempted to become an investor (even investigating a metals business in South Africa, the most colonial of colonial adventures) before declaring bankruptcy. Tupac is dead, with rumours connecting his shooting to P Diddy, who is being investigated for what appears to be a decades-long rape and sexual assault factory he was running.
It certainly looks, on the surface, as if one of the biggest movements of black cultural resistance in the USA in the 1990s, the entire rap/Gangsta Rap world, has collapsed into a cultural movement dedicated to churning out propaganda in support of the central planks of American imperialism, and profiting from it where possible.
It’s worth noting that not everyone accepted these rappers as a form of cultural resistance. Black feminists criticized the language they used to describe women, which was quite new, and other rappers were concerned about the nihilism and destructiveness of the movement. Gil Scott Heron identified this most clearly with his 1994 song Message to the Messengers, which questioned the value of their songs about crime and misogyny, with lines like this:
You can’t talk respect of every other song or just every other day What I’m speakin’ on now is the raps about the women folks On one song she’s your African Queen on the next one she’s a joke And you ain’t said no words that I haven’t heard, but that ain’t no compliment It only insults eight people out of ten and questions your intelligence
Gil Scott Heron wrote that song carefully, to question the content of the lyrics of Gangsta Rap without questioning the motives of the singers themselves, and included this chorus to make this point:
And if they look at you like they think you insane Or they call you scarecrow thinkin’ you ain’t got no brain Or start tellin’ folks that you suddenly gone lame Or that white folks have finally co-opted your game Or you really don’t know…They said that about me a long time ago
It’s nice of him to be so considerate of the motivations of this political movement, given where they ended up. After all, Gil Scott Heron wrote the famous song Whitey on the Moon, but he never cos-played an astronaut for TV. What does it say about the next generation of rappers that they ended up cos-playing their class enemies on TV?
Settlers and the co-option of resistance in America
I am currently reading Settlers, the 1983 radical history of America that argues the US working class are a labour aristocracy, with whom it is impossible for the global proletariat to find common cause. The book’s argument could probably be boiled down simply to “My argument is not with the government of America, but with its people.” It describes the economic development of America (which it writes always with a k, as in Amerika) from its “discovery” to the civil rights era, with the fundamental conceptual framework being that at every step of its development the “Euro-Amerikan settlers” destroyed non-white cultural and economic systems, stole their land and the fruits of their labour, and either killed them or drove them out. For example, consider this description of activities in the south-west of the USA after world war 2:
Sound like a program that’s being fired up again?
At every step in this process the author, Sakai, argues that the goal of the “Euro-Amerikan settlers” was to expropriate non-white wealth and labour and steal their land. However, the book describes specific periods of time when the settler state realizes that the black proletariat, in particular, is too numerous and too powerful to destroy, and in those periods it employs various strategies to co-opt the leadership of the black proletariat, offering them incentives and inducements in exchange for their efforts to defang resistance to the settler state. The canonical example of this provided in the book is the co-option of black labour activists in the immediate lead-up to and during the second world war, when black workers were deemed essential to industrial growth during the war and too numerous to destroy, but at the same time the black proletariat had built their own system of unions and radical organizations, and were simultaneously embracing black nationalism and communism. Sakai gives the example of Garvey-ism, a black nationalist movement embodied in the form of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which was radical and later said to have inspired people such as Kwame Nkrumah and Ho Chi Minh. Malcolm X’s father was assassinated by the KKK because he worked for this organization, and the US government cracked down on it mercilessly. At the same time, however, they built up an alternative activist, A. Philip Randolph, who worked alongside other bourgeois organizations to oppose the UNIA and try to lead the black working class to an accommodationist, integrationist compromise with the settler state. In exchange for steering the black community away from nationalism and communism he and other leaders from these organizations managed to secure some concessions from the settler state, became leaders within their community, and the New Deal was partially extended to black communities. By the end of world war 2 black men were integrated into the army and the industrial base of the military-industrial complex and had become junior, unequal partners in the post-war imperial program of the USA.
After the war, however, when everything returned to normal, the settler state began pushing non-white people out of industry, which was again returned to the Euro-Amerikan settlers, and a new wave of terror was unleashed on black people in the south. This led in turn to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and after that the rise of black cultural resistance in the form of activists, rappers and writers like Angela Davis, Gil Scott Heron and James Baldwin[2]. The settlement brokered by those co-opted labour leaders before and during the war had been partial and incomplete, and the post-war, post-New Deal settler state retrenched much of it, leading to the disruption and violence in the inner cities of the 1980s.
Sakai wrote Settlers in 1983, before the rise of gangsta rap, but I think we can see some parallels in the growth of that movement, what it advocated for, and how it ended up. The focus on nihilistic criminality and money, the individualism and competitiveness, represented a distinct break from the community-focused discipline of earlier activists, a solution to the problems of the inner city based on personal salvation rather than group solidarity. It’s no surprise that one of the major producers of the movement, P Diddy, was eventually revealed to have been running a record studio where sexual assault and playing favours was a key part of the business model. It’s also no surprise that drugs, sex and money replaced politics and love as the main themes of the music. Cop Killer replaces anger against the system with individualistic rage and violence, a loner driving around the city killing single police officers rather than an uprising against the police force as a whole; it is more lascivious, more inviting, but also ultimately futile and self-destructive. As a political program, this kind of stuff led nowhere.
So it makes me wonder, now that we see where that movement ended up, whether the post-Rodney King cultural resistance among black Americans was actually effectively a co-option of struggle[3], a promise of lucrative rewards to a small number of gangsta rappers in exchange for leading a movement of desperate young men down a blind alley. And once that anger has fizzled out, lost its direction, the deportations and political violence start up again – as we have seen, in the wake of BLM – while the people who led the movement astray get their sinecures on TV, doing copaganda and nationalist propaganda for the settler state.
This new War of the Worlds movie showcases this perfectly, with one of the main characters from Boyz in the Hood, the man Straight Outta Compton, working for the government to spy on his own people, and saving everyone from an alien threat on TV at the same time as the real-world government his character works for gears up a new program of state violence, concentration camps and deportations the like of which we haven’t seen in almost 100 years. I think it’s pretty likely that this new wave of state violence won’t spare the young black men of modern America, and right now real versions of Ice Cube’s character – who almost certainly aren’t black – are firing up their apps to start spying on the very people Ice Cube once claimed to represent.
fn1: I really hate this term
fn2: It’s worth comparing the intellectual, gender, and sexual diversity of that movement with the uniformly hetero and cis nature of gangsta rap. Baldwin was gay, and the movement was much more internationalist, inclusive and politically aware than gangsta rap. This may reflect the reactionary politics of the 1980s in which gangsta rap forrmed, but it is also indicative of an organic mass movement embedded in an enlightened proletariat, rather than a curated movement drawn from a suitable pool of nihilistic and destructive talent
fn3: I don’t want to get too conspiratorial here; co-option doesn’t necessarily mean that someone in the government identified this strategy directly and reached out individually to these people to groom them. Cultural movements arise from the political circumstances of their time, and the ruling class selects from many bubbling movements those which are useful to it. But at the same time we know that the CIA directly funded authors associated with anti-government movements, and the state worked alongside supposed radicals like Orwell. We’ve all seen the suspicions surrounding people like Epstein, and the awful behavior of the spycops in the UK. It’s possible that a nihilistic and destructive resistance movement emerged organically from the reactionary economic and political climate of the 1980s; it’s also possible that a few gold weights were placed on the scales, to ensure certain movements rose out of balance. Who knows, maybe the CIA are paying me to write this!
I have written a fanfic short story set in the world of 28 Years Later, which you can read at Fanfic.net. It incorporates the lore of the three movies (28 days, 28 weeks, 28 years), and all the main elements of the most recent movie, along with my criticisms of that movie, to build a story that I hope is more coherent and politically relevant than the weird thing that 28 Years Later ended up becoming.
I may have taken slight liberties with the full powers available to Carriers, and I hope I haven’t dwelled too much on survival practicalities. One of the most interesting things to me about the zombie genre is the how? How would I survive? What would I do? It’s easy to get bogged down in that, which is why in years gone past on this blog I wrote a series of posts about Zombie Survival Spots in Tokyo (e.g. Ikaho), so I hope I didn’t bog the story down with those details.
Anyway, go over there and check it out! Leave a review if you have the passion!
I just finished reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which is an excellent book about one of UK history’s more influential non-regal people, Thomas Cromwell. Wolf Hall tells the story of his early rise to becoming Henry the 8th’s chief advisor, with lots of reflection on his childhood, his past in Europe and his religious beliefs. In this version of the story Cromwell can speak many languages, worked as a mercenary for years and knows how to fight and kill, has memorized the entire New Testament, and is also a capable lawyer and accountant. He’s also funny, compassionate, loyal and caring, and in some ways too exceptional to be a real person, but he is an incredibly likable and engaging character to put at the heart of a complex story. I think I won’t be reading the next two books in the series, primarily because we all know how it ends (spoiler: he dies), and I don’t want to read hundreds of pages about a great character being undone by jealousy and treachery. It was bad enough in The Tudors! Which wasn’t even directly about Cromwell!
This post isn’t intended as a review of the book, which is great, but to discuss a phenomenon in modern literature and TV that I find simultaneously engaging and frustrating: the tendency of writers to put a character with modern liberal views into their medieval/fantasy fiction, in a way that unfortunately breaks the coherence of the setting. I don’t know if this is a bad thing, perhaps it’s an essential narrative tool when you’re trying to write a story for modern readers about a world they can’t relate to, but sometimes I find it really jars with the setting, and occasionally drags me out of it. Let’s start with Cromwell as an example, and then look at some other cases, contrast them with a narrative about a conflict of cultural movements, and discuss how jarring it can be.
Cromwell as liberal stand-in
Historically Thomas Cromwell played an important part in the broad sweep of Henry 8th’s religious and social policy reforms, including the dissolution of the monasteries, the introduction of new accounting and management structures for the Crown, and the implementation of the principle of royal supremacy (essentially the idea that the King should control the church). In Wolf Hall Cromwell is shown introducing the principle of royal supremacy based on his reading of certain Italian political philosophers, and he is also seen as generally being heavily influenced by more advanced thinkers on the continent. His role, along with Anne Boleyn’s, is played up a little more in the TV show The Tudors, and in Wolf Hall a lot of people are involved in the introduction of radical ideas to England. Nonetheless, Cromwell plays a central role in building the new intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of what will become the English enlightenment.
More personally, the Cromwell of Wolf Hall is a model of enlightened modern masculinity compared to the people around him. He is open-minded, compassionate, forgiving of others’ sins, and possessed very much of a live-and-let-live philosophy. He treats his children well, recognizes and values consent as it applies to women’s bodies, and for himself and his family he values love in relationships above expediency. Having come from a common background himself he values equality and sees humans as all essentially the same in god’s order, wants to see the Bible translated into English, and has many critical views of church teachings that are consistent with modern liberal ideas about freedom of religion and conscience. He respects others’ privacy and treats women as equals, even noting to himself that he would be more successful if he listened to women more carefully. He does not under-estimate women like Anne Boleyn and wishes that his own daughter could grow up to be the Mayor of London. The Jews have been expelled from Britain and are generally reviled, but he spends time talking to old Jewish women and trying to understand their perspective. He also has a strong sense of having been wronged by noblefolk, and wanting revenge on them. He opposes bullies, and is satisfied to see Thomas More executed partly because of his memory of being mistreated by him when he was a poor child. In these regards he stands out from the people around him, who discount women’s agency, enjoy bullying and reward bullies, and do not consider even the possibility of a world where all people are equal and free to believe what they want or express ideas how they want.
There aren’t really any points in the story where Cromwell doubts his right to be ascend to the levels he has reached, where he wonders whether his many actions against the natural order might be wrong, or doubts his rights and powers. He is a confident, committed representative of modern liberal values in a world where these values do not exist and will not exist for another 250 – 300 years. On many occasions it is difficult to recognize him as coming from the same world as, having the same superstitions and beliefs, or sharing any of the prejudices of his peers or the community he lives in. Mantel navigates these differences well by stressing his outsider status, his many years in Europe where he experienced many things, and his education and intelligence, but in the end he still retains this sense of being a man out of time, a person from the modern age who somehow got incarnated in 16th century Britain. Much of the pleasure of the story arises from the friction between his beliefs – which you, the reader, largely agree with and which seem very familiar to you – and the beliefs of the society he actually lives and grew up in. It’s fun, but it kind of doesn’t make sense.
The liberal stand-in as observer and agent in medieval fiction
This character, who I think of the as the liberal stand-in, is a super common character in stories about medieval or pre-medieval times. There are many examples in fiction and cinema, and they are often the most-loved characters in the story. Let’s consider some examples:
Tyrion Lannister in the (TV version of) Game of Thrones, a man who respects the weak and the bullied, who “drinks wine and knows things”, who always has the most rational and intelligent solution to a problem and often approaches problems in ways that go against the superstitions and prejudices of the people around him.
Peter Grant, the detective in the Rivers of London series, who attempts to scientifically understand the magic he uses, and is a liberal and left-leaning, open-minded man in one of the most close-minded, racist and backward elements of British society (the police), who attempts to apply modern scientific reasoning and western liberal values to the society of fey and magical creatures that are older than most of human history
Robin Hood in the original Errol Flynn movie, who educates Maid Marian in the reality of life among the poor and degenerate of England, and attempts to introduce more liberal values of equality and peace
Merlin in the Mists of Avalon series, who has many views about religious freedom, compassion, equal treatment of others and rational inquiry that are completely at odds with the people around him
Drizzt Do’Urden, the dark elf of legend, who is a rebel against the racial evil of his own people and wants to build a better life for himself in a world of magic and superstition[1]
Often the liberal stand-in is not the main character, though sometimes their liberal conflict with the world around them is the central theme of the story (e.g. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). For example, the main character of The Mists of Avalon is Morgana le Fay, who is a vicious, spiteful, incompetent little monster, and Merlin offers us precious respite from her stupidity.
The liberal stand-in should be distinguished from characters who reject the moral codes of the world they live in but do so out of selfishness, laziness, or because they are the actual evil person within the framework of the world’s ideology. For example, Cersei Lannister does not maintain her incestuous relationship with her brother because she thinks people should be free to love whomever they choose: she knows it’s evil and wrong and she just doesn’t care, because she’s evil, and we repeatedly see evidence of her viciousness and evil to confirm that her motives are selfish, not ideological. Similarly, most stories about Henry 8th present his changes to the religious structures of England as being motivated by a selfish reaction to the constraints placed on his power by Rome, not by any real ideological commitment to building a freer and more equal religion. He is usually portrayed as a selfish man with the power to ignore his society’s rules, not a man who has an ideological objection to those rules. I think these characters often exist to remind us of the fundamental backwardness of the society we are reading about, or to explain the rules of that society to us from the perspective of the people who fully accept them. The liberal stand-in, in contrast, is there to help us feel comfortable navigating those worlds, to help us enjoy them without feeling dirty for being part of them.
The liberal stand-in plays a dual role in many of these stories, simultaneously driving the narrative forward by solving problems in ways others can’t and listening to people the other characters won’t, while also interpreting the world for the reader/viewer. They offer an entry into the world that is sympathetic to the basic principles of the modern reader/viewer, while also understanding (but rising above) the narrow-minded superstitions and prejudices of the people around them. Sometimes this sympathetic role is essential for the reader/viewer to remain engaged with the setting, which can be so horrible, grinding or cruel that without the hook of this character we might give up hope on the society and walk away from the story. Tyrion, in particular, plays this role, offering us respite from the misogynist violence, the bullying and the hatred that permeates his fallen world.
I think I notice the liberal stand-in very quickly now when they appear. They often annoy me, because they stand out like dogs balls from the rest of the characters and make me think “oh, here is the guy who’s going to explain how everything works to me, in language I understand!” Sometimes I wonder if they’ve been put there by the author to remind us that the author doesn’t believe any of this shit, and sometimes I wonder if the writer needed them more than we do. In big movies I wonder if they’re partially put there to ensure that the setting is palatable to the producers, who are likely to be very conservative. Sometimes the liberal stand-in makes sense (e.g. Tyrion!) and sometimes it makes no sense at all – Merlin should be the most alien thinker of all the characters in The Mists of Avalon, not the most modern!
The persistence and ubiquity of this character in literature going back 50 years makes me think that they’re an important part of fantasy writing, a role that is difficult for writers to avoid and that may be necessary to help readers to engage with the setting. Maybe they play a role as a kind of circuit-breaker or pressure release, to help readers navigate settings morally and personally as well as to guide readers through them. But sometimes they can be a very frustrating, reality-suspending impediment to enjoying the story!
Liberal stand-in or culture clash?
I once read a theory that Hamlet’s madness should not be interpreted as a moral flaw or as a tragedy brought about by his personal desires. Instead it should be seen as the consequence of the conflict between the enlightenment and medieval thinking. In this interpretation of the play, Hamlet represents modern British sensibilities of Shakespeare’s time, which was heading towards the enlightenment, and in the play he is a reaction against the medieval worldviews of his contemporaries, and the backward role he is expected to take on as a prince, which conflicts with the enlightenment principles he learnt at University. The play can then be seen as an allegory or a morality play about the changing religious and cultural perspectives of England at that time. The play is generally believed to have been written in around 1600, when Britain was definitely heading into the enlightenment and when principles of medieval rulership were being rejected, under the reign of Britain’s first formally-recognized female queen[2]. Many aspects of traditional medieval culture had been rejected, and Hamlet was a personification of that conflict between old and new. In this interpretation of the play, Hamlet could be seen as playing the role of liberal stand-in for 17th century British readers of a story about 14th century Europe.
However, there is another type of story that he could represent, which does not necessarily require a liberal stand-in: a story about a clash of cultures, in which an old ideology is being superseded or crushed by a new way of thinking. In this story we don’t necessarily need a liberal stand-in character, because the clash of cultures themselves enables us to understand and sympathise with one or both cultures. The model of this to me is the role Uhtred plays in The Last Kingdom. The narrative of this story is Uhtred’s efforts to restore his lands, but the broader context is the clash between christian and pagan culture in England. The pagan culture is represented by the non-christian Danes, not just Uhtred but also Brida, Haesten, those insane Welsh dudes, etc. On the other side is Christian culture represented by Alfred the Great, Aelswith and various priests and advisors who all hate Uhtred. The clash of cultures is personified in the fractious relationship between Uhtred and Alfred, where they consistently fail to understand each others’ perspectives and beliefs[3]. The Danes in this story have many beliefs that we modern viewers might hold, such as their willingness to allow women in battle, their sexual licentiousness, lack of genuine concern about homosexuality, etc. but they’re also wildly different from us. They have a might-makes-right kind of viewpoint, maybe a bit of human sacrifice, pretty hazy about concepts of consent and conscience, and are deeply superstitious. Neither of the cultures depicted in the story are cultures we modern liberal viewers can be comfortable with, but in the tension of their conflict we can learn about them and enjoy the frustrations and challenges the characters face, without necessarily requiring a specific character to guide us through it. If there is a liberal stand-in in the Last Kingdom I don’t think it’s Uhtred so much as Father Beocca, who advises Uhtred on how to negotiate his conflicts with christendom, regularly counsels restraint to angry Alfred, and helps us the viewer to comprehend what’s going on. I’m not sure he fully counts as a liberal stand-in, but he’s the closest we’ll get.
Is the liberal stand-in necessary?
It’s strange to me that so many fantasy stories are unable to imagine a world with more modern or liberal politics than the actual politics of the middle ages. There’s no special reason that a society with no christianity, without even a monotheistic spiritual background, and often with magic to replace technology, should be so socially and politically backward as the societies we so often read about in many fantasy stories. I wonder if this is because the typical modern western writer can’t envisage real conflict occurring in the societies they grew up in, and so they imagine that if their fantasy world had more modern or less hierarchical politics it would not have the stirring conflicts between good and evil that often form the basis of the stories in fantasy worlds. As a result we get presented either with settings drawn directly from archaic social structures, or with classical medieval settings built around monarchist, patriarchal and violent societies. Maybe it’s a failing of our own understanding of our own history? I’ve written before about the stunted imagination underlying some of the settings we are used to reading, about the misogyny of Game of Thrones, which is well beyond any real world equivalents from our history, and about how the economics and demographics of these settings have to be twisted to support the depth of misogyny and hatred that are imagined for some of them. Things are better now than they were 10-15 years ago when I wrote those essays, but the choice of settings and the conservative politics of those settings remains a problem. I think the liberal stand-in is necessary in these settings in order to give the reader a little breathing space to get away from the politics that the writers seem to assume is essential to the setting. But is it really necessary to construct these settings in this way? Can we just imagine societies with medieval tech, magic, monsters, and polytheistic beliefs in which the politics is fundamentally liberal, or at least different? Why do we need wizards to be accompanied by kings? Why do knights have to always ride through landscapes where women can only be goodwives or whores? Is it possible to construct a bigger vision of different pasts than just the crabby, narrow-minded, monarchic shitshow that Thomas Cromwell got beheaded for trying to improve slightly?
If we did imagine fantasy settings with more diverse social structures, maybe we wouldn’t need the liberal stand-in. Maybe we could enjoy them without needing an interpreter or a guide to tell us it’s okay to be part of them. Maybe we could have more sense of fellow-feeling with the ordinary people of those worlds, and enjoy their superstitions and limitations without feeling like we are secretly soiling or demeaning ourselves. Things are better than they were when I started this blog, but it would be nice if fantasy could abandon the politics of kings and knights and inquisitions and whores, and build worlds we did not feel so morally and emotionally alien in. Then we might not need the strange, slightly out of place liberal interpreter to guide us into and out of those worlds, wouldn’t experience the jarring sensation of suddenly reading about a guy just like us who feels as out of place in the world as we do. Instead of liberal guides, in 2025 let’s try and build worlds that are less anachronistic!
fn1: I confess it’s been a very very long time since I read these books!
fn2: It’s worth noting that a lot of the changes that happened during Henry 8th’s reign, some of which directly benefited Elizabeth or made her job easier, were enacted precisely to stop Elizabeth’s reign from coming to pass. Henry wanted a boy, who would grow up to be a king, so that neither Elizabeth or his formerly-legitimate daughter Mary would succeed him, because the idea of a woman inheriting power in England terrified everyone, including him. It was only his dismal failure to produce a male heir (which was apparently entirely the fault of his six wives…) that led to the kind of reforms that enabled Elizabeth to be so successful, and those cultural changes I think to a certain extent must have helped to lay the groundwork for the English enlightenment that Elizabeth’s reign ushered in.
fn3: To me the final conversation between Alfred and Uhtred as Alfred is dying is absolutely splendid theatre, and Alfred is one of the greatest supporting characters of the genre. What a legend that actor was[4]
fn4: Helped by the fact that he looks so much like Brett Anderson from Suede
When I lived in Sydney my kickboxing teacher was Mick Spinx, a master of Karate, Jin Wu Koon Kung Fu and kickboxing. Mick worked as a builders labourer, and spent the 1980s fighting in no-rules martial arts contests around Asia, before he retired, set up a part-time gym and established a builder’s business. He eventually retired from his main line of work, sometime in the 1990s, to devote himself full-time to teaching martial arts. He owns a beautiful house in a beautiful part of Southern Sydney, and fighters from the gym he founded have a storied reputation in kick-boxing, MMA and Muay Thai.
At the same time as Mick was setting up his kickboxing gym Wal Missingham brought Wu Shu and Jeet Kune Do[1] to Australia, somehow managing to collect a fleet of Volvo cars and a big house in the suburbs of Western Sydney while running a gym and spending some time in prison. In the 1970s Tino Ceberano (whose daughter is *that* Kate) introduced Karate to Australia and popularized it. At the same time, stoners and losers across Australia and the USA were dropping out and heading to the beach, turning surfing into a hobby and a sport that everyone now knows about. In the UK, punk, heavy metal and folk metal bands were creating some of the most powerful forces known to modern culture, while living in dodgy share houses and working in minimum-wage service jobs. I myself, for 3-4 years in the 1990s, worked part time in Sydney while I did full time political activism, even regularly donating part of my part-time wage to my collective. In Britain, people doing this built the vegan and animal rights movement in the 1970s, brought yoga to their society in the 1980s, and protested nuclear war and hunting.
Extreme and alternative sports like BMX, break dancing, surfing, base-jumping, MMA, and free-diving were developed in the 1970s – 1990s by young people in the Anglosphere and western Europe who had time, inclination, and no serious impediments to spending their lives devoted to their hobby. Popular music as we know it in the Anglosphere was developed in the same way. Influential bands you know like Crowded House, Guns ‘N Roses, and AC/DC, and influential bands you probably haven’t heard of like Crass, Sisters of Mercy and Dead Can Dance[2] managed to build their entire cultural output while working part time, hanging around in squats and share houses, and doing pretty much nothing useful with their lives for years.
I saw a comedy routine recently in which a man talked about the “rags to riches” story of tech founders like Zuckerberg. He asked how he was meant to be inspired by the fact that these guys built their tech business in their garage. “A garage?” he asked. “I’m meant to see a rags-to-riches story in that? I could never hope to have a garage! I aspire to be able to save the down payment on a 1 bedroom apartment an hour’s drive from the city. As far as I’m concerned those people are loaded. And not just a garage – if they were building their business in there it was a *spare* garage. Nobody today can imagine having access to two garages in their 20s!”
I had a garage when I lived in a share house in Sydney in 1995, when I was working part time and doing political activism full time. I would spar there, with a friend of mine who trained with me at Wal Missingham’s JKD school near Parramatta. He was a heroin addict in remission, but he still had a home and a car, and he would drive me out there. We had a lemon tree in my backyard, between my house and the garage. We lived in inner city Sydney, with cats and a guinea pig.
Who has that now?
People often talk about how it is a unique property of liberal democracies that they build huge cultural power because their liberal political culture makes it possible. Putting aside the fact that an enormous amount of the cultural output of the UK and USA in the 1960s and 1970s was financed by the CIA, and the fact that some of our most famous liberal icons were treacherous arseholes like Orwell, I don’t think this is the reason for our huge output.
I think liberal democracies produced huge cultural output in the 1970s and 1980s because they were the richest societies on the planet, and the cost of living was so low that young people could commit years of their life to a hobby for no more reason than they wanted to. Work culture was also different, so people could take time off, disappear for a while, fuck around, and still come back to a rewarding career. If somebody asked you about the gap in your resume you could just say you were FAFO-ing, and they’d be like, okay, sure[3]. That’s exactly what happened to me: after 4 years of part time work somebody just asked me to apply for a full-time job at the Kirketon Road Centre, and I did, and I got it, and my whole career proceeded from that. There were like five other applicants for that job, max, and they all got scared off by the transgender sex worker in the waiting room who was walking in cocaine-boosted circles telling the staff about how she lost her tongue piercing up her lover’s arsehole the night before.
Now I read stories on reddit about people who submitted 1000 job applications for two years and got two interviews.
The modern economy doesn’t allow lifestyle sloppiness, gap years, time off to find yourself in Asia. It’s a cut-throat world based not only on having experience before you finish high school, perfect scores and elite university degrees, but on the image of being the perfect corporate dog. You have to *explain* the gap in your resume, your hobbies have to be hobbies you would willingly write down on a CV, your travels have to be designed to factor into your statement of purpose for that master’s admission. In place of grainy photos of your back on the trail to Macchu Pichu you need clear photos of yourself surrounded by poor African kids. If you developed a new sport you need to be able to show that you monetized it, not that you enjoyed it. You spent a year in your mother’s basement developing a self-published role-playing game? Loser! You could have been monetizing your writing skills for some dodgy start-up!
The effect of this on our cultural output has been and will be profound. Every aspect of our cultural life is being stitched up by rich people, and the economic environment of the modern Anglosphere prohibits young people from taking time out to explore their cultural and sporting interests unless they’re already rich. This is going to directly result in a collapse in new cultural generation in western societies, because the incredibly thin (and shrinking!) slice of western society that is rich enough to take time off to explore new ideas is simply not large enough to generate anything meaningful. This will prevent the generation of, for example, new musical movements from the UK, which historically has been the number one source of popular musical innovation in the world. Similarly, Australia and New Zealand were sporting powerhouses and a source of a huge amount of the raw talent that fed into the music industry and Hollywood, but the diversion of entire generations of young people from those countries into consultancy businesses and crypto is going to be devastating for the global arts industry. There will be no more Germaine Greers, Mel Gibsons, or Kylie Minogues from a society whose kids have to spend more to rent a single room in a share house in Sydney than I spend on my entire mortgage for a house in Tokyo[4]. They’re too busy working to do it!
If we want to live in societies that are cultural innovators, that produce new sports and art forms and music, we don’t need to have special innovative policies or philanthropy or patronage or whatever stupid idea rich people and their apparatchiks have come up with this week to try and develop a top-down cultural of artistic innovation. We need societies that are cheap to live in, where people can afford to spend years doing nothing economically productive, living on welfare and playing around with ideas. We need a work culture that doesn’t care about gaps in resumes or “unproductive” part time work or “unprofessional” activities and interests. We need a society that rewards people for being people.
That society is gone, and if we don’t get it back, our culture is going down the gurgler with it.
fn1: Nino Pila, who I trained with in Adelaide, would beg to disagree about who brought JKD to Australia, but since everyone involved was a terrific arsehole, let’s not fuss too much.
fn2: I think this band is the single most influential cultural phenomenon of the last 100 years, and one day I will write a blog post on the fact that people all around the world, from every culture and background, who have never been to and know nothing about New Zealand, can instantly recognize Lisa Gerrard’s music
fn3: With the minor caveat, of course, that this freedom was primarily afforded to white men.
fn4: A friend of mine from Sydney visited recently and introduced me to this astounding calculation. WTF! This friend had spent 10 years – 10 years! – in the 1990s working in occasional part time jobs and squatting throughout Europe, doing political activism in the Netherlands, London, and some of the former Yugoslavia on basically no money. Try doing that now!
The now-mandatory Vaudeville switch at the end of every horror movie
I took time out of my busy weekend bludging schedule to go and see 28 Years Later, the third in the series of rage-zombie movies that started with 28 Days Later. I’m a big fan of the concept and previous releases, and I think the first in the series is a standout issue in the zombie genre. The origin of the virus, the scenes of post-apocalypse Britain, the shocking violence necessary to survive, and the final showdown that turns the movie into a tale about the evil that men do – it’s perfection in almost every way. The second movie, 28 Weeks Later, is a healthy follow-up that mixes a not-overblown meditation on trauma and betrayal with a solid story about the failure of state institutions, and introduces only a single additional detail, the concept of latent carriers of the virus[1].
This one, however, not so much: 28 Years Later is a mediocre movie, with a moderately gripping first third, a boring middle with trite philosophy, and an absolutely, stunningly shit ending. Having just emerged traumatized from the Vaudeville switch at the end of The Substance, you can imagine my disgust at being subjected to the exact same tawdry trick at the end of this movie. Is it the rule in Big Cinema this year that horror movies must end with some shitty transition to a completely different cinematic style, aesthetic and pace? WTF.
Overall, I don’t recommend wasting your time on this movie. It isn’t that exciting in its good parts, it adds material to the setting that is unnecessary and distracting, it has a very boring and frankly stupid middle part that attempts to philosophize in a way that is completely at odds with the basic principles of post-apocalyptic zombie survival, and the ending is a disaster. Apparently the ending presages a second movie in the same series, which – unless it’s set 28 hours after the ending of this one – is going to completely betray the basic structure of the entire series. What a fucking disaster! If, however, you’re like me and you need to see every movie in a series just to find out what they’re doing to it (as I regret doing with Star Wars), then sure, go and see it, but don’t expect anything good. And don’t read the rest of this review, because it’s going to be full of spoilers.
Britain 28 years later
The movie opens in a small community on an island off Scotland, separated from the mainland by a causeway that is flooded and protected by a strong current at all times except during low tide. They have built walls around their island and established systems of defense and survival, so it’s all going relatively well. The island is quarantined, and at night you can see the quarantine ships patrolling beyond the coast, making sure nobody escapes. The main characters, Spike and his dad (who is a dickhead) are introduced along with Spike’s sick mother Isla, and then Spike and his dad travel to the mainland, which seems to be a rite of passage for the boys of the island.
At this point the soundtrack becomes the “Boots, boots, boots” poem, which is played over the trailer you would have seen, and which was awesome in the trailer but strangely out of place in the actual movie. I wondered if they were going to pull it off, and I think they failed. This is interspersed with strange visions of war from old movies, and scenes of zombies filmed with darkvision that seem to suggest that Spike (a 12 year old boy who is the main character of this movie) has some connection with the zombies (this is the first of many misdirections). We see Britain 28 years after the virus outbreak, learn that there are not many zombies left and they seem to be easier to avoid. Some have become these kind of slug-like humans that crawl along the ground eating worms and carrion, easily killed. We see abandoned villages and learn that nobody, basically, is left alive on the mainland, it’s a dangerous place and very few people have survived 28 years of wandering rage zombies. The zombies are now a kind of wild phenomenon, like an animal, that lives on the huge herds of deer and other animals that have returned to a re-wilded Britain. This vision of post-apocalyptic Britain is cool!
Then we run into the first big problem with this movie: The Alpha.
The many distractions and modifications
Obviously every new addition to the series is going to introduce some new ideas and modifications to the rage virus, but this movie introduces two that are absolutely disastrous: the Alpha and his breeding harem. Spike and his stupid dad stumble on such an Alpha near the beginning of the movie and have to flee back to the island, barely escaping with their lives. The Alpha is a new type of zombie, bigger and faster and tougher than the others and also smarter: Spike’s dad realizes that they’re dealing with an Alpha when Spike notices a dear’s head high up on a tree like a trophy or a warning, and they immediately flee. Nobody understands how Alphas happen, but they exist and they’re rare.
Later on we meet a second Alpha, called Samson (not by itself) and here the distractions really start to multiply because it seems pretty obvious that Samson has a harem of female zombies around itself, one of which is pregnant and gives birth to a healthy baby while Spike and his mother watch. In this one scene we introduce three insane additions to the series:
Zombies can breed (which kind of makes sense, since they’re not dead), and their babies are uninfected because of “the miracle of the placenta”[2], which is kind of hard to believe because if you get one drop of blood in your eye this virus infects you and seconds later you’re eating your own children, but somehow you can be born open-eyed and not get infected by a drop of your mother’s various fluids! It would make much more sense if you were born a carrier, like the adult woman in the second movie. Also, apparently this baby needs milk, so none of these infants would ever survive, right? Now we can imagine a story where the Alpha keeps some human communities alive and hands over the babies to the communities to raise, then takes them back as adults – like a kind of horror version of the fey. That would lead to some really cool horror, where communities in mainland Britain survive through horrible compacts with the creatures in the forest. But no, our writers are too stupid to draw such a long bow.
Alphas maintain harems, and defend them and support them. They’ve kind of evolved in a couple of generations to be kind of like apes, with a single superior leader-figure that maintains bands of the other infected, which it kind of organizes. Alphas are still not very smart, and their primary defining trait is that they’re huge and violent, but they have begun to establish a rudimentary community structure in the zombies. This would make for interesting stories! But our writers are too stupid and useless to bother with this
Isla (Spike’s mother) can commune with these creatures. They stumble on one of the Alpha’s harem having her baby in an abandoned train[3], and Isla is able to calm it down and kind of form a bond with it, helping it to have the baby and not getting harmed immediately afterwards. This is a huge hint that Isla is a carrier of the rage virus (like the woman in the second movie). It doesn’t make any sense otherwise, does it? But then the moment passes and the zombie mother attacks her.
This last point, where Isla seems like she might be an infected carrier, is hinted at earlier too, when Spike leaves his sick mother some bacon and when he comes back there is a camera angle that suggests she ate it violently. This concept of a carrier was introduced in movie 2, and it would also explain why Spike has some vague visions of Zombies – maybe he, like Isla, can somehow commune or empathize with Zombies but since he was born to a woman who is a carrier his communing power is weaker or something. But instead, we just find out she has brain cancer and the entire thing is fucked off down the river and introduces us to the boring middle of the movie.
Subsequently other distractions we learn about are that a mixture of Iodine and something else, smeared on the skin, repels zombies; and that a mixture of two commonly-available drugs can be used to put them to sleep. But at the end, when Spike is traveling by himself, he doesn’t have any of these strategies on hand. Why not? Because this movie is interested in bamboozling you with stuff, but not exploring any of it.
These distractions really annoy me. I don’t mind having new concepts added to the rage virus, and I like it when people try to explore the implications, but in this movie they throw all these things in without purpose, and in some cases undermine them immediately after introducing them. Is it meant to keep us guessing, so we aren’t sure how it’s going to end? Is it all setups for future movies? Or is it just that the writers threw everything they could at the wall, and hoped to see what would stick? I think the latter. So that just complicates the movie unnecessarily.
The philosophy of death
We learn more about Alphas and their babies in the middle of the movie, when Spike runs away from his community with his sick mother Isla to find a guy called Dr. Kelson, who he has heard about from his grandfather/uncle/random old dude, and decides might be able to cure her even though he’s been warned Kelson is a freak. Kelson is played by Ralph Fiennes, who seemed to be phoning it in to me but who some reviewers said offered a stellar performance (never trust reviewers!). Kelson is building a huge garden of bones, a memento mori, which he hopes will survive the epidemic and stand witness to all the people who died. He introduces Spike to this garden of bones, his tools to protect himself from zombies and Alphas (the iodine sunscreen and the drug respectively), and then does a basic diagnosis of Isla: she has brain cancer, which either metastized to her breasts or came from them, and is going to die soon. This leads to the central theme of the middle part of the movie: Spike has to learn to reconcile himself to death, through the euthanasia of his mother and then Kelson rendering her down to her skull, that Spike can add to Kelson’s garden of bones.
You read that right, folks: This zombie movie wants you to meditate on the inevitability of death, and learn to accept it. Every other moment of every other zombie movie in history is filled with the desperate struggle of the few survivors against death, the certain knowledge that death is not the end because the dead come back to eat you, and the spiritual dread of knowing that you don’t go to heaven or hell, but if you die in the wrong way you will spend eternity shuffling around feasting on raw brains. The few people left do everything they can to stave off death, and take enormous risks to save a single life, because every life is rare and precious.
But in the middle of all that, this movie wants you to think about how you need to accept death.
Fuck off.
The awful ending
That stuff was all mostly forgivable in the circumstances, until the last five minutes where Spike is traveling to find himself (yeah kids do that on the zombie-infested mainland now!) when he is attacked by some zombies and runs away, gets caught against a barrier, and thinks he is going to die until a bunch of weird, healthy-looking young people appear, all wearing perfectly clean velour sports suits, and offer to clean up his zombie problem for him. They then fight the zombies using various fancy weapons in a highly-stylized way, with weird music, that is something like a homage to A Clockwork Orange combined with the over-the-top slapstick combat style and gory bloodfest of Kingsman. It is absolutely, completely out of place. The aesthetic is different because up until now everything has been grimy browns and greens, the kind of clothes survivors would wear after 28 years of grim clinging-on, but these guys are all in shiny primary colour velour sportsuits. The filming style itself is different, much more like splatter-gore than the rapid shifting first-person panic style we are used to in this series. And the theme is different, the breathless desperate survivor-horror replaced with a kind of Vaudevillian over-the-top, highly colorized extravagant action movie fun. It’s like if Jackie Chan walked into Day of the Dead wearing WWE spandex and started beating up zombies with a rainbow-coloured golf club. It just doesn’t work.
Worse still, I learn from the internet that the main character leading this team, Jimmy, has styled them all on Jimmy Saville, Britain’s most prolific child sex abuser, who was still a national hero in the time that the rage virus originally broke out (his crimes were uncovered about 10 years after the release of the first movie). I didn’t realize this at the time, but I think it’s in extremely poor taste. It makes sense! The people in this alternative history Britain don’t know that Jimmy Savile was a pedo and a necrophile. But it wasn’t necessary! Especially since introducing his luscious style completely changes the aesthetic of the movie!
This really ruined the ending of the movie for me. It just didn’t work. It’s one of those moments when the writers are basically just saying to their audience: Fuck you, we know you’ll pay us anyway and we don’t have to even try, and we certainly aren’t going to respect your fucking genres or the history of these movies you love or you as consumers of culture. Fuck you, they are saying, you are stupid and worthless pigs who consume our slop whether you like it or not and if we want to squeeze three movies into one because making three separate movies on three different topics is too much effort for us we will and you will like it or you will fuck off, because the reviewers won’t warn you that we’ve fucked something you love, will they, because they’re on our side, and what else are you going to do? We control this industry and we make these movies to show how cool and special we are, not because we owe any artistic or cultural duty to you, you fucking filthy plebeians.
Every time they do this to one of these series, that’s what they’re telling you. This movie was written by Alex Garland and produced and directed by Danny Boyle, the guys who made the original. They have chosen to undermine and trash their own cultural work for no more reason than that they’re lazy, sloppy wankers who don’t respect their own cultural contributions. It’s shit, and I hate it when they do this.
So fuck them.
A side note on race and sex in this movie
There are only three women who have more than a bare second of screen time in this movie:
Isla, Spike’s mother, who is weak and sick and confused and so useless that she needs to be protected by her 12 year old son (except for one moment when she kills a zombie and then forgets she did it), and whose primary purpose in this movie is to die and teach Spike something (though it’s not clear what)
Rosie, a friend of Spike’s parents, whose sole contribution to the movie is to fuck Spike’s dad (Isla’s husband) while Isla is sick in bed
A zombie woman, who despite being infected with a rage virus is able to commune with Isla through the holy bond of motherhood, which helps her to give birth to a baby, before she gets brutally gunned down by a Swedish man[4]
So, sluts, madonnas and breeding vessels, and all the breeding vessels die.
Every actor in this movie is white, except Chi Lewis-Parry, a mixed-race man who plays Samson, the zombie Alpha that is superhumanly strong with a huge cock and a harem of white zombie women, some of whom are pregnant.
It’s perfectly possible that Spike could have been cast as a girl, so that the journey to the doctor was a mother-daughter bonding story. It’s possible Spike’s dad could have been the sick one, his mother the untrustworthy gatherer who fucks around with other men from the community, so that the journey to the doctor becomes a father-son bonding story. It’s possible that the community could have been much more mixed race, accepting any survivors no matter what because of the desperation of clinging to life in the islands. It’s possible that the zombie Alpha could have been the same race as the majority of the British community that was originally infected with the virus in the original movie. It’s possible that Spike’s dad didn’t have to cheat on his wife, or that the only other woman with more than five seconds of screen time wasn’t there just to be sexy in a summer dress.
All of these decisions could have been made, in 2025, in the modern world. But by some incredible coincidence they weren’t, and by amazing happenstance we are subjected to another movie where the black character is a terrifying embodiment of primeval masculinity with a huge cock, and the women are all sluts, madonnas or breeding vessels. Who could imagine such ill fortune would plague an experienced movie writing, directing and producing team in 2025?
I should have taken the hint from this guy
Conclusion
Don’t waste your time on this movie, and if you do decide to stick it out to see what’s happening in this series, don’t expect anything good from this or the next one. Don’t expect a coherent progression in the basic laws of the world, or any adherence to the principles and frameworks of the previous installments. Don’t expect any deviation from the sexism and racism of the 1980s where the director and producer were raised. Perhaps you can hope for some shitty philosophy that is inconsistent with the setting. Maybe the next installment will be a musical! We can but hope! If we’re really, impossibly lucky, maybe the team who made this one will figure out what they’re trying to do, and instead of subjecting us to three completely incompatible movies in one they’ll decide on a thematic principle and stick to it. But they certainly haven’t done that yet!
I traveled to Roppongi to watch this movie, on a 32C day in pre-summer Tokyo[5], when I could have stayed home and snoozed or played computer games or watched some shitty anime on a streaming service. When I got to the cinema a crow was standing on the bench area outside the cinema entry, tearing the guts out of a pigeon it had just killed. It nonchalantly ignored thousands of passing Tokyo-ites who all stopped to stare in disgust at it, and eventually a second crow joined to wait for its portion of the delicacy. It was kind of funny that this crow was doing this just before I went in to watch a zombie movie (even funnier when I discovered that the Alpha kills people in a very similar manner to the way the crow was eating its pigeon). I probably should have taken it as an omen and just turned around and gone home. Instead I went inside, and sat in a quite warm and very packed theatre, endured some very tedious advertising, and parted with ¥2000 (twice my monthly Apple music subscription!) to watch this ordinary and vaguely insulting contribution to modern culture. I don’t think that the people who made this movie did so with much concern for any of these decisions that I and millions of other people around the world made. I don’t think they respect us at all, in fact. I’m sure they’re bemoaning the decline of cinema and blaming it on streaming, computer games or TikTok or something, but the simple reality is that if they want me to leave my house and shlepp across town in the heat, past the cannibal crow, and pay a chunk of money to sit in a crowded theatre with a bunch of strangers, they need to try a little harder. We all know what they’re capable of, because we saw it when they made the original movie and Trainspotting. Is it possible Boyle has lost his touch in his old age? Yes, I guess it is. But more likely is that he’s lost his respect for us his viewers, and thinks that we should thank him for whatever shit he decides to squeeze out for us, and complains that we’re easily distracted if we decide not. Easily distracted, from this shit? You bet!
He’s not alone in this. The people who made The Substance did the same thing to us, as did the people who made every woeful installment of the Star Wars sequels, and who insult us with year after year of degraded schlock from various useless superhero franchises. They just don’t respect us, they don’t respect cinema as a medium of artistic expression (no matter how much they bleat about its decline) and they definitely don’t respect any of the genres they work in. So we should stop respecting them, and we should show it by not paying them.
So, don’t waste your time and money on this movie.
fn1: I’m going on memory here so don’t quote me.
fn2: Which is weird because lots of viruses cross the placenta – here’s a list. How convenient that this one doesn’t!
fn3: The abandoned train was great, a very nice piece of urban ruin
fn4: This Swedish soldier is funny because he is marooned on the island and trying to explain 2030 European life to Spike, an 11 year old boy who grew up on zombie-wasteland Britain. This Swede doesn’t last long, despite his advanced gear, which is also great
fn5: People from “hotter” places may not understand what those words mean. People who live here do!
I recently finished reading Manchukuo 1987, by a person known by the pseudonym Yoshimi Red on Twitter who blogs at lateral thinking. It’s in the Sci-Fi section in Amazon, and presented as an alternative history military sci-fi detective novel by Yoshimi themself, which I think is a good description. I think it’s self-published (sorry Yoshimi Red if I’m wrong!), which means it’s quite cheap, and I recommend it strongly. This is my review, the first half of which will be spoiler-free and the second half of which will have some very mild spoilers.
The Setting
The novel is set in an alternative history where world war 2 kind of staggered to a stalemate, leaving Japan in possession of some of its colonies, un-nuked and essentially undefeated, with the Soviets and Nazis similarly surviving the war with some kind of territorial integrity. It’s 1987, the fag-end of the Showa era, and the Japanese empire is crumbling, Korea and Taiwan already independent and Japan’s final colony, Manchukuo, about to achieve independence in a negotiated agreement that will see the nation become independent from both the rest of mainland China (ruled by the KMT – there is no communist China in this alternative history) and Japan, under its frail and ageing emperor Puyi[1]. The Japanese empire doesn’t want to give up its territories but has been forced to by age, circumstance and general failure, but in the process of hanging onto its final territory it committed various terrible crimes, especially in past military campaigns against communist insurgents outside the cities. There is a general air of fascism everywhere in this setting, with much talk of racial purity laws, government slogans and propaganda and police everywhere, and a clear dual class system with the Manchurian people on the bottom, Japanese settlers in the middle, and Japanese from the original Island at the top. It’s a disastrous society waiting to explode. The story is set in Ryujin, a small city on the Manchurian coast.
The story
The main character, Munekata, is an aging member of the Kempeitai, Japan’s military police, with nothing to do while he waits for the end of the empire. He does a side hustle in private investigations and he has a bad history as a soldier in an infamous unit known for war crimes, and he spends his days burdened under the sense of his own decline, the collapse of the empire he gave his life to, and the growing decadence and seediness of the society he is in. He has a dodgy relationship with a woman called Hana, has a string of bad past relationships and bad decisions, and is generally not in a good frame of mind.
Munekata gets tasked with investigating a crime that was committed against a young Japanese settler girl called Sachiko, and with nothing else to do he decides to take the quest for justice for Sachiko seriously. He is helped by Hana, and in the process gets entangled with various elements of the Chinese society of Ryujin – a rich author who collaborates with Japanese occupiers, a criminal gang, an extremely racist Japanese settler schoolgirl, and various representatives of the military. Of course he slowly uncovers a terrible secret behind the crime, and as colonial society begins to unravel under the pressure of the looming independence agreement he, too, begins to fall apart, driven to violent extremes in his quest to solve the crime and find justice for Sachiko.
The Verdict
This is a really good book. It is well-written, with an excellent pace and a simple, believable but engaging plot line that keeps you involved in the story without confusion, stupid twists, or sudden loss of coherence. As I read it I got a strong sense of hints of Mishima[2], which to me is good (I like all the Mishima I’ve read), along with hints of Richard Morgan and William Gibson. It’s difficult to pin down exactly the genre and style because it blends so many elements of alternative history, detective fiction, film noir, science fiction and political thriller, but I think it merges them really well.
The setting is a brilliant attempt at describing life in the Asian Co-prosperity Sphere as it falls apart, which blends elements of Japanese and Chinese culture really well, lays out a convincing and believable alternative history, and describes the politics of colonial power really well. This is why I describe it as post-colonial detective noir, because Yoshimi balances the differing forces at play in an imperial colony in a way that makes them both believable and powerful parts of the story. The tension between collaborators and criminals, the compromises ordinary Chinese have to make, the confused racism of the settlers and the spiteful nature of their dependent relationship with the locals, are all very well laid out so that the many terrible and complicated decisions people have to make – and the social pressures that drive those decisions – make perfect sense. In truth except for The Man in the High Castle I haven’t read any attempts at alternative history of the Japanese empire, so I guess I can’t compare, but this is a great description that works really well.
The characters are also very well developed and believable, and I did not at any point finding myself giving up in frustration because their flaws were too great, nor did I ever find myself finding their decisions or actions unbelievable or stupid or inconceivable. In the circumstances, they really made sense and their actions were coherent and consistent. The author’s voice focuses primarily on Munekata and his inner life, but regularly switches to give insights into the feelings and thoughts of the other characters, especially Hana and the racist schoolgirl Mizuki. There are a lot of secrets and dirty motivations in these three people’s hidden lives, and seeing them try to figure themselves out and deal with their pasts, their prejudices and their beliefs is a lot of fun.
Also the ending is great. Read this book!
Don’t read this book if …
Every book has stylistic elements that some people won’t like, no matter how good it is, and this book is no exception. I think it will help to read this book if you know a little about Japanese and Chinese culture, since there is occasionally slang and reference to specific elements of e.g. Buddhism and Chinese history, and there are some elements of the setting that will make more sense if you have some familiarity with these cultures. If you aren’t into Asian culture at all, then don’t bother with this book!
A particular issue some readers might have with this book is the rather unpleasant nature of the main characters. Munekata is basically a reformed killer, a war criminal, listless and aimless and very cynical, and although I enjoyed reading about his struggles I can understand that some people might find him too unsympathetic. His relationship with Hana is quite awful, and she’s very mean to him. Hana herself is a very compromised and confused character, as is Mizuki, and and these kinds of characters don’t appeal to everyone. Their personalities are at times quite bleak, and I understand that doesn’t appeal to everyone. But as a counterpoint, I’m actually the kind of reader who usually gives up on a story if there aren’t any redeeming or sympathetic characters, and I really enjoyed reading about these guys, so it’s probably worth challenging yourself even if you don’t normally like these types of characters.
Finally, I guess I should say that (to me at least) this book seems quite explicitly post-colonial, in that it is describing a colonial society with an obviously critical voice – I don’t think anyone could make the mistake of thinking that Japan’s 1987 Manchurian colony is meant to be a positive place or a force for good on the Chinese mainland. If you’re not into post-colonial literature, you might want to give this a pass – but in that case you’d be missing out, and I recommend you reform your reading habits.
Finally there are a few editing errors that occasionally jar, but for a self-published book who cares? Yoshimi, don’t waste your money on an editor!
About the setting
[Possible mild spoilers ahead]
The setting is very well described. In addition to the sense of a crumbling empire, lethargic under its own weight and obviously being abandoned by the imperial core, there is also a very vividly described sense of late-Showa indecision and staleness. Everyone I speak to in Japan has this criticism of the late Show period, that nobody was making decisions and everyone was just fumbling along, not sure what to do or how to get along. In real history at this time Japan was hurtling towards a bubble, with the young people of the era living hedonistic lives of great wealth and consumption while the nation’s leaders – largely born in early Showa, who Japanese people sometimes refer to with disdain as Showa shoki danshi – fiddled and refused to take the actions they needed to turn the economy away from its disastrous path. In this alternative history there is no mention of the bubble economy in the main islands, but it is very clear that the colony of Manchuria is falling apart and no one in the leadership has any ideas about what to do. Stubborn, narrow-minded, inflexible and incurious, the leadership are classic Showa leaders and the sense of everything crumbling while they fiddle around and faff is great.
The story also features another classic of Japanese literature, especially manga: the secret machinations and conflicts between branches of government. Munekata is in the military police, but formerly he was in a special army of super-powered combat-suit wearing mass murderers called the Survey Unit, who spent their time raiding villages and burning them and killing everyone to save them from themselves. Then they were just kind of disbanded in disgrace and Munekata was moved to the military police, where he is kind of not on good terms with other elements of his own police force and the broader military. Everyone is spying on everyone, and of course the plot Munekata uncovers involves different branches of the military and civil society playing off against each other for their own stupid ends that they all pretend are for the good of the emperor. This is a super common element of Japanese fiction, representing in my opinion unresolved social trauma and political memories from the war (which was famously undermined by the conflict between the Navy and the Army), and it’s good to see it reproduced in brutal form here.
As part of the setting we regularly have memories of Munekata’s period in the Survey Unit, which was a nasty organization that really helps us to understand that this imperial venture in Manchukuo was evil. During those flashbacks we learn slowly about “the vast plains”, the areas outside the cities that are essentially breeding grounds for a communist insurgency[3]. They play a role similar to “the bush” in an Australian novel, or the hinterlands in a typical post-apocalyptic story, and lurk on the edge of the story like a threat. Meanwhile in the city there is a criminal underground and a teeming underclass of desperate Chinese, held in subjection by the Japanese colonial overlords and constantly ready to erupt in violence. Nobody in settler society is willing to confront the reality of this underclass and what they’re going to do when imperial oversight ends. It’s great, the lurking threat of communists on “the vast plains” and rage-filled colonial subjects in the city, all slowly heating to boiling point …
Finally, there is a lot of effort in this story to imagine how society would have developed in this imperial setting, where two historically very closely linked societies are trapped in an unequal struggle based on violence and possession. The characters describe two new forms of Japanese: Kyowa-go, which is a mixture of Chinese and Japanese used to communicate with the many colonial subjects who work alongside the Japanese settlers (like civil police, servants and so on); and Armee Japanisch, a German loan-word, which describes a kind of authoritarian and bullying version of Japanese used to threaten and cower colonial subjects. Although this is mostly used by Munekata, other characters occasionally use it mockingly or in defense. Alongside this we see other aspects of the merging of colonial and settler classes on the fringe of the society, and we also hear rumours about colonial families that have come undone through sexual interaction with colonial society, or through crime and entanglements. In some ways like Burmese Days, we see this primarily through the viewpoints and antagonisms of the settler Japanese (Munekata and Mizuki), which also means we don’t fully understand their nuance or their depth. This is a really engrossing and engaging construction of an alternative history society.
Finally, there is a constant overlay of fascism on all of this. Settler characters refer constantly to the racial purity laws (when they were in place, when they were removed, how they need to be navigated), Munekata is familiar with and occasionally references the extensive secret police files on everyone in the city, and the settlers themselves live in a walled-off, separate area of the city that is heavily guarded. At the same time there are attempts to build a long-term functioning society from this unequal division of racial rights, so we regularly see references to pictures and slogans that depict Manchurians and Japanese working side by side to build the nation or to fight of communists. I imagine that living in Rhodesia near the end would have been quite similar to many of the social systems in place in Manchukuo in 1987, and they are brought vividly to life by the excellent writing.
Final notes
This is a great book, really well written and set in a carefully crafted and very complete alternative history, an imagined past where Japan got to implement its vision of the racial order of the Asia-Pacific. Its political and social themes are nuanced and carefully described, its characters are deep and engaging, the physical setting is very well described and feels vividly real, and the story is gripping and engaging. I strongly recommend this book!
fn1: Yes, the Puyi from the Last Emperor, still hanging onto life and established as a “co-equal” emperor (in name if not formally) with the Japanese emperor.
fn2: I know Mishima is a weirdo gay fascist, so sorry Yoshimi if that comparison annoys you, but I think he was a great writer, a kind of Japanese DH Lawrence.
fn3: Mao is dead, executed by the army, but the insurgency lives on, trying to take over both Manchukuo and Kuomintang China, opposed by the Japanese in the former and the “liberal” Chinese government in the latter.
The other day I aimlessly chose a movie to watch at the local cinema, and settled on The Substance, which I somehow mistakenly thought was a psychological thriller with a fantastic or horror element. I don’t know where I got that idea from, but the poster certainly did not give away that it is a body horror. I also had a vague impression that this movie is a reflection on the politics of female aesthetics in Hollywood, possibly even that it was a feminist critique of Hollywood’s double standards, so I imagined it would have some kind of feminist ending possibly working a revenge/thriller angle into the feminist critique. Since I’m a sucker for that sort of thing, I thought I’d give it a go.
Unfortunately, it’s a body horror, which is a terrible kind of movie to watch without proper preparation, it’s not feminist at all – quite the opposite! – and it has a really, really bad ending that is both thematically and aesthetically ridiculous, and an insult to both the artistic and intellectual capacity of its audience. The Substance is, in essence, one of those increasingly common movies that insults its audience’s intelligence, carrying a deeply misogynist message while missing all the best possibilities of the genre, and being gross besides.
I do not recommend you watch this movie for any reason, and I’m going to explain why now. Warning: extensive spoilers ahead, but you’ll thank me for it when you get to the end and realize what an awful shitshow you avoided by reading this.
The premise
The basic premise is actually cool. Elizabeth Sparkle is a famous showbiz star (even has her own star! on that godawful street in LA that isn’t worth visiting) who gets sacked from the show she headlines on her 50th birthday because she’s no longer young and sexy. By coincidence she is offered a chance to trial a new “experience”, which will make a new and better version of herself. She stupidly agrees to do this, and goes through an obviously shady and extremely dodgy process of acquiring a package of medical tools that will change her.
The basic process is: she injects a substance that makes a new, young, sexy version of herself crawl out of her own body. Her body remains alive but comatose, and the new version of herself (called Sue) needs to use a horrible need to drain spinal fluid from comatose Elizabeth, and inject it into herself every day as a stabilizer. Then, after 7 days they switch: Sue plugs a two-way catheter into Elizabeth, they exchange fluids and then Elizabeth wakes up and Sue sleeps. During each seven day period either Elizabeth or Sue (whoever is sleeping) receives IV nutrition, and the rules are strict: they must switch every 7 days *without exception*, and they must remember that the two bodies are actually one.
The important point here is that Sue is young and beautiful and sexy and luscious, while Elizabeth is old and gross and fading. I like the process, it’s very body horror and gross and it leaves this kind of Dorian Gray-like body in the apartment while the other woman lives her life. It seems that each woman doesn’t know what the other one did, so when Elizabeth wakes up she doesn’t know that Sue has taken her old job, or who Sue is fucking, or what plans she is making. Everything each woman needs to know about the other woman’s life is learnt from clues left around their (awful) apartment.
The story
From here of course it all goes wrong in the expected ways. Sue, young and sexy and reckless, starts extending the time to the Switch, taking extra spinal fluid from Elizabeth and having fun until things go wrong, and every time Elizabeth wakes up a part of her has been ruined by Sue’s excesses. For example, the first time Sue goes over, one of Elizabeth’s fingers is a mess. Elizabeth has no way of knowing what Sue is doing and both of them are too stupid and self-absorbed to write each other notes, so they just kind of try to figure it out.
Elizabeth starts to resent Sue, and Sue becomes very successful very quickly, with many reasons to put the Switch on hold. Finally, Sue is offered the chance to host the New Year show (which doesn’t make any sense, for reasons we’ll explore below), delays the Switch for weeks, and finally has to Switch when Elizabeth runs out of spinal fluid. But this happens the evening of the New Year show, of course, so Sue makes a reckless gamble. She digs up the unused portion of the original injection material and injects it into herself, thinking she can birth a prettier version of herself to do the show. Unfortunately the self that is born is a hideous monster, composed of horrible parts of Sue and Elizabeth, which goes to the theatre, intrudes on the show, and at the highlight of the show starts exploding with blood all over the audience. This last 30 minutes goes from Body Horror to David Lynch style stupidity, with the horrible Sue/Elizabeth creature spurting blood like a fountain across the stage and the crowd, stupid music playing, overdone and overdramatic scenes from the crowd as they panic and run, etc. It’s like a terrible, blood-soaked, juvenile version of the mall scene in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, if that scene was awful in every way.
Why it sucked
There are multiple reasons it sucked: the background of the star and the reasons she was replaced, the nature of her replacement, the complete failure to explore the sinister organization providing “the Experience”, the deeply misogynist message, and the absolutely trashy, shitty ending. Let’s go through them.
Nobody cares about your aerobics
The problems start with the source of Elizabeth Sparkle’s “fame” and why she lost her job. Although the movie hints that Elizabeth was once a famous movie star, when it opens Elizabeth is the star of a morning aerobics show for middle-aged women, in which Elizabeth and all her co-stars are mature women who are leading their audience (the viewers at home) through a high-energy aerobics set. This is cool and everything, but it is absolutely the stony end of fame, and anyone who has sunk to fronting an aerobics show knows their star has long since flamed out. Not only should they have long ago come to terms with their fading glory, but they also would be well aware that their job is entirely dependent on their fitness and looks. Being sacked because you’re too old and ugly is the most ordinary thing about such a show!
Also, it’s completely normal, realistic and to be expected that a 50 year old woman is too old for an aerobics show. It’s high energy! They have to speak while they bounce! They have to look young and energetic! These shows are never fronted by women over 50. If I was turning 50 as the host of an aerobics show I’d probably resign! That’s hard work.
Of course it didn’t have to be this way: the show could have started off with Elizabeth working in a role she does not need to be attractive for. She could have been a newscaster, a daytime interview host like Oprah, a weather presenter, the host of a kids’ show. In these cases, sacking her because she’s too old and ugly and replacing her with some floozy is an insult to her and to women everywhere, and it provides a really good starting point for her rage. Why did you sack me from a talking job because my tits are sagging? I’m going to fix this by making a new me!
That works! But the aerobics show thing just doesn’t. No one who does that is actually successful, and nobody who does that expects to last in the role past 50.
But there’s another problem here: the actor playing this woman is Demi Moore, famous sex symbol from the 1990s. We see her naked early on and she’s still got it! No 50 year old woman, looking in the mirror and seeing Demi Moore’s body looking back at her, is going to be especially exercised about making a younger, hotter version of themselves. It just doesn’t work!
The failure of the replacement
So, to fix this Elizabeth goes through this insane and horrible transformation, where her back splits open and a new version of herself crawls out of the wound, then for the rest of her life she has to be stabbed with a needle once a day by her alter-ego Sue, be asleep for 7 days in every 14, etc. It’s an enormous price to pay! And what does she get for this enormous price? A mediocre-looking Sue, who simply restarts working in the same job. Doesn’t become a movie star or bed the richest man on the planet or anything like that – just goes to the casting for the role Elizabeth just lost, gets it, and starts working as the next aerobics show host. Birthed from Elizabeth’s spine, she crawls bloody and mediocre straight to the equivalent of showbiz failure. Why?
Sue is not especially beautiful or sexy, within the rules of Hollywood. There is one scene where she is walking towards the camera in her leotard and her thighs are rubbing together – this “super hot” aerobics instructor doesn’t even have a thigh-gap. Do you think a modern Hollywood production studio would cast a woman without a thigh gap in an aerobics show? I don’t think so. Of course, by the standards of us mortals she’s hot and pretty, but she’s inferior in every way to her backing dancers, and she’s not that pretty by the standards of the industry she’s in. This is what Elizabeth sacrificed half her waking life for?
If you go to the casting list for the show you’ll see why Sue is not especially attractive, though. It’s not because she’s meant to look this way. It’s because the actor is Andie McDowell’s daughter, and all the major roles in modern cinema have been reserved for the children of famous actors. Whenever Sue has to look hot, a team of body doubles do her job for her.
They could of course have made a play out of this in the movie: Elizabeth could have told the studio her daughter was going to apply for the job, and then Sue turns up for the audition. Cue scenes of all the hopeful nobodies being disappointed because the actor’s daughter got the part. Fun, right?
Wrong. No fun is allowed in this movie.
About the Experience
It’s really unclear who is behind the treatment Elizabeth receives. She never meets anyone who dispenses it, speaks to them only on the phone, picks up her supplies from a dodgy postbox, has no company name, nothing. Who are they? Is she paying? Is she an experiment? What is the purpose? Where is this tech from? We don’t learn anything, even though they’re obviously dodgy. If the whole movie were not completely tied up in the personal drama between Elizabeth and Sue, they could have perhaps joined forces to take on this organization and reveal the truth, maybe find some serum that frees both of them to live their lives. And this is the most interesting thing about this movie! Why would anyone come up with this weird treatment, why do they call it the Experience, why are they giving it away?
We find out nothing, and instead everything remains locked in this personal drama between two women, which is instigated and fueled by an organization that seems to be staffed entirely by men …
The misogynist message
The first half of the movie is interesting, as Elizabeth begins to become jealous of Sue and Sue’s selfish activities begin to affect Elizabeth. Elizabeth calls the organization and complains about Sue but they remind her of the fundamental principle that the two bodies are one, implying that anything Sue is doing is somehow under the control of Elizabeth. But Sue is a reckless, shallow party animal, and her selfishness is slowly draining Elizabeth’s life blood. Elizabeth becomes increasingly angry with Sue, expressing her anger in the most ridiculous ways (none of which are a note to Sue!) This conflict finally ends with the two confronting each other (due to Sue’s recklessness) and Sue killing Elizabeth, which incidentally is ridiculous since Sue cannot live without Elizabeth.
So basically the entire plot revolves around a conflict between two women, somewhat akin to a mother-daughter conflict, in which the mother is jealous of the daughter’s beauty and the daughter refuses to respect her progenitor or to treat her own body with the respect it needs, and this brooding resentment grows until they have a conflict where one woman kills the other. All of which was brought about by the elder woman’s shallow desire to stay pretty, and the younger woman’s inability to respect an older, uglier woman. And the quintessential cause of all this was a series of injections provided to the older woman by a man.
It’s all a bit shit, isn’t it? It’s just the same old misogynist story, repackaged with body horror. This misogyny is reinforced by the constant stream of tits, arse and cunt throughout the movie. Sue’s reimagined aerobics show is a twerkfest, and every time we see her on the show we get the typical crotch-shot, the classic semi-pornographic promise that the leotard/bikini is going to slide enough for you to get a glimpse. We routinely get full-body shots in the shower of both women, and in the ridiculous climax all the backup dancers are bare-chested, tits out for all to see. When the hideous Sue/Elizabeth monster has its on-stage meltdown a breast even slowly bulges out of one eye, and falls to the stage like one of those weird gross flying sperms in Eraserhead[1]. It’s a grotesque manipulation of the female body, intended to humiliate and disgrace women as a gender. Sure, there are gross men depicted grossly, who pray on these women and are in charge, but we never ever see them naked or in compromising, humiliating positions related to their bodies. Only the women in this show are embodied, and their bodies are grotesque, sexual or treacherous but never valued.
It’s classic misogyny!
The trashy ending
The ending makes no sense and is no fun, just 30 minutes of cringe. You sit there hiding your eyes as this badly-done monstrosity pumps impossible amounts of blood in spurts onto an over-acting, cartoon-like crowd to the backing of bad music. It’s really obvious that after establishing the complex psychology and body horror of the relationship between Elizabeth and Sue the writers are completely out of ideas. They don’t know how to end the story, so they just plunge it into bloody farce.
This ending also betrays the body horror of the first half of the movie, which while gross is also carefully done with a specific tacky /trashy theme. The way the male producer eats, the way he pisses, the grotesque birthing of Sue from Elizabeth, the specific aesthetic of the medical implements used, the sounds of Sue sewing up Elizabeth’s back, the colours of the spinal fluid as it degrades to snot, the horrible puncture wound in Elizabeth’s spine, everything is carefully designed to disgust, disturb and horrify in a particular way. Then in the last 30 minutes it’s just fountains of blood and squealing women, all the nuance and care and attention to detail replaced with this dumb-arsed fountain of blood. It’s one of the lamest, most inconsistent thematic turns I’ve ever seen in cinema, as well as the stupidest non-ending you can imagine. It really smells like the writers had a different ending in mind but the producers shit-canned it – probably because it was feminist – and forced the director to retcon this broadway shitshow onto the end.
I really wish I had walked out at the point where the final scene obviously turned dumb, but the cinema was dark and it was too much effort and I wanted to know just how stupid the directors were, so I had to sit through the worst 30 minutes of lame-arsed bloodspurts you’ve ever seen. It was gross, dumb, boring and cringey.
If you do watch this movie, walk out 30 minutes before the end. In fact, walk out when Sue kills Elizabeth. Everything after that is a waste of your time.
Why do they do this to us?
The first half of this movie was hard going but interesting. Demi Moore and Denis Quaid did well, and the plot was intriguing at this point, buoyed up by the weirdness of the Experience. Also, the music was okay. But as soon as they had to come to a resolution of the tension between Elizabeth and Sue they failed, and turned the show into a misogynist shitshow that was an insult to its audience. Why?
There were alternative stories they could have told. Elizabeth could have been a news announcer rather than an aerobics presenter, with no reason to be fired and an abiding rage. Sue could have got her job through sexual favours, knowing from Elizabeth’s experience that this is how it is done, and carrying an abiding rage. They could have written notes to each other, or left videos on their phone, and slowly built a rapport, then in their separate 7 day periods of activity prepared a terrible revenge. The movie manoeuvres so that they wake up together – they could have done this but then united as a team, rather than fighting out of jealousy, raided the location of the lab that produced the material and sought answers. They could have done a Thelma and Louise style flameout, taking down everyone who ever wronged Elizabeth when they realized that the Experience could only end badly. There were so many opportunities to make an interesting ending, but instead they just had this tortured Elizabeth/Sue body, this weird progeny of both of them, explode in blood onstage and then die.
The ending – the entire second half of the movie – was obviously shit. It was transparently bad. Why is it that movie producers routinely do this to us? It’s an insult to us as consumers, as adults, as rational people, as consumers of art. Do these producers even think of what they do as art, or just see it as a very roundabout way of delivering investment profits? Do they care about their audience at all? Or is Hollywood now so inbred, inward-looking and cloistered that they look at a plot like this and think it’s smart, incisive, politically insightful? Did they think this misogynist trash was a feminist movie? Or do they think that if they tell a story about two women we’re all so stupid we’ll immediately interpret it as feminist? Do they think we think at all?
I’m so sick of the movie industry doing this to us. It happened with Star Wars, which was an absolutely epic six episodes of treating us like shit, and of course they do it with so many of their action movies with their daddy issues and their completely superficial attempts to engage with social issues. They did it in spades with Game of Thrones, which was a slap in the face to everyone who had watched it for so many years. And they somehow here found a way to do the same insulting failure with body horror, which you would think would be immune to stupidity and condescension. It’s so common, so disappointing, and such an indictment of the modern movie industry.
So, don’t be like me: Don’t give these fuckwits your money to watch this trashy, patronizing, misogynist crap!
We carry in our hearts the true country And that cannot be stolen We follow in the steps of our ancestry And that cannot be broken
We Orcs do not have “names”, because every one of us is a verse in the ongoing Saga of our Clan. Were you to simplify the verses of my story so far into a phrase suitable for your frail, Embodied[1] language, then you may call me Skulltide, Blade of Memory.
I grew up among the Clan known as the Wardens of Memory, in the Valley of the Pylons. You have surely heard of it? The wide, silent valley where no bird sings and strange towers of obsidian rise at inscrutable angles from thick, wild forests. Those towers, formed of alien magic of impossible age, draw to them the lost and wandering essence of the restless dead from great distance. They drift down the valley’s central river, The Lacrima, visible in the quiet darkness as werelights and eerie will-o-wisps, fickle and deadly to those who have not learned the Songs of my Clan. Each of those balls of baleful essence-memory eventually drifts away from the river into the enclosing forest, to be drawn to one of the Pylons, where its essence and memories are drawn into the arcane stone. We, the Wardens of Memory, tend to the valley and bear witness to the torments and longings of the lost essence. All of us serve some purpose in the Clan’s function – but the Clan is dying, being slowly consumed by the Pylons it serves. Many of us simply disappear, wandering into the Forest of Memory and succumbing to the eerie spiritual call of the Pylons. Their souls leave their bodies, which they abandon to the scavengers among the trees, and are drawn into the Pylons themselves, lost to us and to time.
There is much debate in our clan as to why this is. Some say our Clan was bound here as punishment for an ancient sin, to be slowly consumed in service to the Pylons. Many speculate as to our ancient sin – did our ancestors build the Pylons? Did they harvest essence from the Embodied for some evil goal, that now we must all pay for until our Clan disappears? Were we trapped in the Valley by a curse? Did the Pylons curse us? Some argue the Pylons need souls as fuel, that they were built long ago by some evil empire to store the memories of all its people, and from the outset were designed to sustain their sinister magic through the harvesting of the souls of the True People[4]. Because the Saga of our clan is so old and so long, and the language of our people has changed so much in the aeons that the saga was written, we cannot easily interpret those early stanzas – indeed, few of us even know them – and so we cannot know the truth of our circumstances, except that which we know in this the present moment of our Saga: that our task consumes us, and within a few generations our Clan will disappear, our Saga be lost to time, if we cannot learn the truth of this affliction.
I, being one of the Subtle, was selected from an early age to study the divine, and to fulfill a role among the lost essences. But as our Clan’s numbers dwindled and our situation became more desperate, a faction among us decided that it was time to seek outside for knowledge. I was trained as a Warden of Memory, drawing my divine power from the knowledge and essence of the Pylons, but one day I was sent away from the Valley. Our people learned of the existence of a great and learned Necromancer on an island far from our land, and discovered that refugees from one of your pitiful internecine conflicts were fleeing there. I was sent down the Lacrima on a raft, to join one of those ships and travel to the Island, there to find my way to the Necromancer to learn more about the secrets of the Pylons. If the Necromancer has no knowledge well, we Subtle live long and vigorous lives – I will simply continue traveling until I learn the truth of the Pylons, and save my Clan.
I will cut the ties of Memory that bind us to the Pylons, that we may forever live in the Valley and fulfill the role our Clan is destined for. And until I do, you may call me Skulltide, Blade of Memory.
fn1: Orcs do not believe that non-Orcs have souls. Rather, they see non-Orc humanoids as a heightened form of animal, which over its lifetime imprints its memories and impressions onto the essence that flows through it. When some of those non-Orcs die, their essence lingers as a ghost[2], though most of this essence flows back into the mortal realm and returns to the power spots from whence these heightened form of animals drew it with the power of their will. Thus, non-Orcs are referred to as “Embodied” in the (higher) language of Orcs.
fn2: Have you ever seen an Orcish ghost or revenant? No, because souls require exceptional circumstances to be tricked into remaining in the mortal realm after their death. Such depravity is primarily the consequence of the unknowing, spiritually uninformed characteristics of essence
fn3: Orcs have three genders, though to the outsider they may appear to only resemble the two genders that characterise the limited spiritual and physical condition of the Embodied. Those we call the Primal are the largest among our kind, lean-bodied and muscular, giants compared to most of the Embodied. They are most likely to physically resemble those you call “men”, and so when we (lower ourselves to) speak with your kind, we refer to them as such. Those we call the Inchoate are usually the smallest of our kind, slightly shorter-lived and more likely in their passionate nature to take on the form you Embodied call “women”, and so we assign them that gender in our dealings with you Embodied. The remainder, those we call the Subtle, are between these two kinds in size and strength, equally likely to take either physical appearance as they grow – and sometimes both – and do not easily fit into your restrictive and arbitrary categories. Of course usually, given the lack of subtlety in the minds of the Embodied, you will confuse our form with one of your two genders, and who are we to correct you? But strictly speaking, I am a third.
Compromise and Conceit 