33. A Toxic day in the USA

Oh tempora! Oh mores! Oh TJ Hughes and Debenhams!

Happy Tuesday to you, and happy US launch day to Toxic! The Air Mail newsletter ran an excerpt from the Jennifer Aniston chapter this weekend, and if you haven’t read the book, I think this is a great taster: it’s about the fall of network TV, the (apparently endless) crisis of masculinity, the baby bust, and how all those things led to the gossip industry’s wholesale invention of the eternal Sad Jen/Brangelina love triangle.

When I first started thinking about the book, I drew up this literally-scrawled-on-a-paper-bag list in a cafe. (I was, as you can see from my excited underlining, always extremely wedded to doing a chapter about Chyna and WWE, but where is Kim and why is Lindsay demoted to a subheading of Paris? Ridiculous.) I knew, even at this stage, that Jen was key to the book, because as soon as I began talking about the project that became Toxic, my friends insisted it had to include her. I had a slightly atypical noughties experience for my age, because I had my first child in 2002 when I was 20, and so when to have a baby ceased to be a decision I had to make; but for many millennial and gen X women, the “sad Jen” mythology left a huge mark. The coverage of Jen was experienced as a warning and a threat.

There’s a quote from the film critic Molly Haskell that I use in the introduction to Toxic: she calls the female screen stars of Hollywood’s golden age “two-way mirrors linking the immediate past with the immediate future”. To me, that’s the best summary of the role celebrities play in our collective consciousness. They’re dolls on which we can practice all our anxieties, all our hopes about how we’re supposed to live — and no one experienced that more explicitly than Jen.

I loved hearing from the Powell and Pressburger fans among you after last week — in fact, I just love knowing that there’s a solid constituency out there of people who love The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. What a film. This week: a song I can’t stop listening to, a film I can’t stop thinking about, and some TV I can't watch because it isn't going to get made.

Listened

Binki, “Landline”

I have always had this slightly embarrassing thing where I can get properly, properly stuck on a single song — or if not always, then as long as digital media has made it possible. I think, based on my extremely limited understanding of music (grade 5 flute, baby) that this tends to happen with songs that flinch from including the tonic chord of the key they’re in: they never feel resolved, so my impulse is to go back and listen again, and again, and again in a desperate hunt for satisfaction.

Is that true here? I cannot possibly say (grade 5 flute was 30 years ago, baby), but I can say I’ve listened to this song at least 100 times since I overheard my son playing it, including several solid blocks of thirty minutes on repeat, like some kind of sociopath. It’s just so urgent, a thrum of suspended desire built around the pleasingly archaic image of waiting by the phone. Plus it’s from 2021 but sounds not totally unlike something I could have heard on Popworld, and I’m here for anything that lets me trick myself that grade 5 flute was less than 30 years ago.

Watched

Under the Skin (limited release)

It’s a cultural exchange week: my children bring me new music, I take them to see an old film at the cinema. Fair to say that they did not embrace Under the Skin the way I did Binki. My daughter emerged saying, “That was weird. I didn’t like it.” (Though she did then spend the day reading about Under the Skin and reporting to me on her findings.) My son said, “Yeah I guess it was OK when you understood the metaphor.” But this time of watching (my second), I didn’t think of Under the Skin as particularly a metaphor at all though. It just experienced it at (ha) surface level.

It’s a story (and this is a spoiler) about an alien, played by Scarlett Johansson, whose function is to entrap human males, in disguise as a human female; she attempts to live as wholly human; she fails, and is murdered. What makes it riveting is that this is all told from the alien’s point of view. Everything becomes strange and fascinating: sun through branches, spray rolling back from the shore of a loch, Tommy Cooper on TV, Glasgow city centre. (The film is from 2013, which means the high street scenes in particular feel like a time capsule. Oh tempora! Oh mores! Oh TJ Hughes and Debenhams!)¹

She (but why “she” when she isn’t human? The habit of gendering is hard to break) looks at us the way we look at her: incompletely comprehending, unable to grasp the motivations within. And yet it’s the fact that she isn’t really a she that makes this so compellingly a film about sex, in the non-sexy sense — the susceptibility of her victims to the simulacra of an attractive woman, the importance of penetrability to humanness and specifically femaleness (the scene of her trying and failing to eat chocolate cake is even more memorably unpleasant to me than the haunting surrealist sequences of her “absorbing” the men), her vulnerability to the worst form of male violence at the end.

The moving image is, not pejoratively, a skin-deep medium

It’s also a really interesting study in what to take and what to leave when adapting a book for the screen. The novel, by Michel Faber, is equally brilliant and very different — most obviously, in being more explicit about the aliens’ intentions and methods. (If the film lends itself to a radical feminist reading, the novel is practically begging you to give it a radical vegan interpretation. Which is maybe why I, as a committed omnivore, have decided to bar all subtext from my Under the Skin experience.)

A novel can give you convincing interior access to a character. The moving image cannot — it is, not pejoratively, a skin-deep medium. The underneath must be implied, not narrated. (My review of Platform 7 from a few weeks ago is really about how badly drama can fail when a literary conceit is dumped straight onto the screen.) Under the Skin feels a little like director Jonathan Glazer thinking through some of the problems of filmmaking: like a film that is committed entirely to being a film. The first thing we see is her mechanical eye coming into focus. A camera, looking back at a camera.

Under the Skin was not a commercial success. Like, really, really not a success: reading the box office breakdown makes me feel nauseous. I don’t know whether this contributed to the fact that it was Glazer’s last movie until The Zone of Interest, which is just about to be released. I saw Under the Skin as part of a Glazer mini-season at the Little Theatre in Bath, leading into Zone’s UK launch, and that screening was sold out, suggesting the movie might have found its people. (Sexy Beast, also phenomenal, was the weekend before.) I think it’s extraordinary: sublimely horrible, sublimely graceful, and not like anything else in the world — except, maybe, Zone of Interest. More on that next week

Read

Jonathan Dean, “David Chase: It’s 25 years since I created The Sopranos — but TV’s golden age is over” (The Times)

Sopranos creator David Chase gives good quote. For example, on the networks that turned down The Sopranos: “I made them regret all their decades of stupidity and greed. Back then the networks were in an artistic pit. A shithole. The process was repulsive. In meetings these people would always ask to take out the one thing that made an episode worth doing. I should have quit.” (And yet, reading that, does a tiny bit of you not feel a twinge of sympathy with the execs who chose not to work with him?)

Anyway, 25 years after The Sopranos, the golden age of TV which it initiated is — as Chase notes here — over. Actually, I think there have probably been two overlapping “golden ages” this quarter century: a cable-driven one which ended with Breaking Bad in 2013, and a streaming-driven one that was widely declared dead with the finale of Succession. Now ad spend has collapsed, and streaming has turned out to be a venture capital bubble, so it’s time to say thank you and goodnight.

Not that there’ll never be good TV again (I’m excited for the return of Severance, and there’d better be a season two of Such Brave Girls), but we’ve probably hit the end of the era when big beast showrunners made so much expensive, clever drama that you couldn’t keep up. I’m sad about that, and also not — I’m interested in what TV can do when it’s cheaper and tighter, deploying ingenuity against practical limitations. I mean, Succession is great, but imagine how good it would be if it was set in a Croydon flat share.

Gimme, gimme more…

• Lana Del Rey x Skims is it? Simply take all my money, Kim Kardashian.

• I saw Priscilla and my only reaction was that I might get into big eyeliner and backcombing. It's a strictly aesthetic experience (the same aesthetic as Lana del Rey x Skims, so you could just stay home and watch the promo for that), although Jacob Elordi makes an admirable fist of reclaiming Elvis from iconography — it is, in an odd way, a very similar role to Felix in Saltburn: a gilded prisoner turning his helplessness into cruelty.

• On the basis of this post, I’m looking forward to Henry Oliver’s book about late bloomers and how to be one.

• You probably don’t need me to tell you to listen to the new series of Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart. It’s all very good, but I want to give special mention to episode three, which is like a horror film (surely someone’s buying rights) — and which coincidentally features two people who pop up in Toxic: Matthew Randazzo V (author of the book about wrestling, Ring of Hell, although he’s not talking about wrestling here), and Jonah Goldberg (conservative commentator, here being a conservative commentator).

• RIPfork.

• I have Thoughts about the Kate Middleton Mystery Abdominal Surgery News Cycle, but all of them probably better expressed a decade ago by Hilary Mantel.

• This is, as they say, a real vibe. (Read Mother for Dinner!)

• Felt kind of grimy watching the BBC documentary about Eleanor Williams, the young woman from Lancashire who made elaborate false allegations of being sex trafficked by an Asian gang and kicked off a race war in her town — even though the film was sensitively made and offered genuine insights into the investigation of sexual offences (and, inadvertently, the pervasiveness of CCTV and other monitoring technologies). The problem, I suppose, is that the obsessive sexual fantasising and hyperpromiscuity (she shagged a strange man in an alleyway! In daylight!) suggest that Williams herself has been irretrievably broken by something beyond the remit of the film to disclose — notwithstanding the fact that she doesn’t meet the legal definition of insane. There was something vaguely indecent about being shown the footage of her vamping as a victim with self-inflicted wounds. As ever, interested in what other people made of it.

• Just linking to the J-Lo trailer as a placeholder while I get my head around how extremely deranged it is. But don’t you worry, there will be further discussion of this.

• I’ve loved the Shangri-Las since my dad used to play “Walking in the Sand” in the car — a band founded on the principle that the one thing Phil Spector’s girl groups had too much of was restraint. So I was sorry to hear that lead singer Mary Weiss died, and happy to learn from this excellent obituary that she had a solid second act. Put on your best Queens accent and sing it through your nose with me: “Oh no! Oh no! Oh no, no, no, no no…”

1. I had a job in the Sheffield branch of TJ Hughes, where the manager eyeballed me at my interview and said: “Cookshop.” There was a big expectation while I was there that staff should upsell customers on credit deals — a thing I was very reluctant to do, but did often enough that I can still remember a chunk of the phonetic alphabet from making calls to the finance centre. Anyway imagine my surprise that that business model took a hit in the credit crunch.