38. These tragic denatured freaks

Country house music, vintage trolling, non-pets

This week I achieved the pinnacle of my journalistic career by writing about how RoboCop is the greatest sci-fi film ever (OK, seventh greatest according to the Times’s panel, but in my chart it was number one). It’s a fun list and there are only two things on it that I have serious beef with.

Firstly, Soderbergh’s Solaris is just… fine. It’s not even Soderbergh’s best film, and I’m not sure even his best film belongs on a best-of list for any genre. It seems quite mad to have this and not any Russian sci-fi (but then I didn’t put any of the Russian greats on my list because I haven’t seen them: it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me). For a thinky mid-budget Hollywood sci-fi, it’s Sunshine all day.

Secondly: GROUNDHOG DAY IS NOT A SCI-FI FILM. Yes it is, says my friend Gia: its plot hinges on the manipulation of the laws of time. Absolutely not, says me: by that reasoning, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a sci-fi movie. Freaky Friday is a sci-fi movie. Chaos is breaking out. We need some rules here, people. For a film to be classed as sci-fi, it must do more than bend or break the laws of physics.

To be sci-fi, the “science” part must be an emphatic part of the fiction. The film must be interested in the how of its reality-breaking device, and the how should be integral to the theme of the film. Alien, formally, qualifies as a horror movie. It’s science fiction because the alien is a thought-out product of evolution rather than simply a very unpleasant monster, and because that evolutionary imperative is integral to the existential dread of being adrift in an inhumane and godless universe. And if a film can’t offer that, if should at least have some lasers.

A double-strength podcast outing for Toxic this week, as I appeared on People of Teen People in an epic two-parter. This is such a great idea for a podcast: host Anna Soper goes through back issues of the magazine Teen People (mission statement: making real teens into celebrities and celebrities into real people), catching up with some of the “real teens” who were featured and deep-diving into the media culture of the early century. It was a very fun, very probing conversation and I hope you’ll have a listen.

Listened

Beyoncé, “Texas Hold ’Em”

Finally, the answer to the question: why has Beyoncé been wearing a bloody enormous cowboy hat to every event she shows up at? I like this, though it hasn’t so far made it onto the playlist of Things I Can’t Stop Listening To — there’s a pleasing elegance to the way it blends from bluegrass in the intro to house at the end.

Renaissance didn’t really stick for me. I think I found it a bit too much like a historical reenactment of the New York ball scene soundtrack, a little too on-the-nose “yass kween”. There’s something more risky and exciting — to me, anyway — about Beyoncé doing country, and what that implies about a black artist rifling through the politics of the US south (and there’s a nice inversion here of Taylor Swift’s post-Red move out of country and into the pop terrain Beyoncé made her own).

That said, the discourse has slightly overegged Bey’s underdog credentials: there was a short flurry of “why isn’t country radio playing this song?” followed, a week later, by “Texas Hold ’Em” hitting number one on Billboard’s airplay-based country chart. Lads, she’s Beyoncé: the stations probably need her more than she needs them.

Watched

Wicked Little Letters (general release)

This is a kind of film I haven’t seen for ages: the extremely three-star British drama. You know the drill: efficient script, low stakes, high-powered BritThesp cast. This could have been made twenty years ago, just with Julie Walters in the Olivia Colman role, and I suspect will receive an unfairly cool reception purely thanks to coming out in a year of genuinely remarkable films.

For what it’s worth, I was grateful to it as a palate cleanser between films that want to bleed my heart dry (I’m still bracing myself for All of Us Strangers). It’s a fun movie about a real poison pen scandal in post-WWI Sussex, although it achieves its comic tone by stripping out a lot of the more interesting complexities in the historical version. (This LRB review of the book the film is based on is worth reading, not least for the line: “soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a warning ‘that a noun is coming.’”)

A couple of observations you may prefer to avoid if you’re planning on watching. One, the film invents a genuinely multicultural British 1920s where Lolly Adefope and Anjana Vasan live in a south-east village without experiencing any racism or even being of any particular note.

I like this as a choice, partly because it means two of my favourite actors get to play historical roles; but it’s a mildly jarring contrast to the fact that sexism is extremely real in the world of the film, which makes frequent reference to the women’s suffrage movement (in fact constant reference through Vasan’s costumes). Maybe this is just an example of the Tiffany problem: an all-white UK would seem too odd for audiences to take now.

Two (spoiler incoming), there’s an obvious echo of modernity in the way poison pen letters presage modern trolling — and in the twist, which is that Colman’s character is sending the letters to herself. She enjoys her victim status, but this is also a form of self-harm. Just over ten years ago, I came across this phenomenon for the first time, in the case of a teenager who killed herself after receiving abuse through ask.fm. Subsequent investigation showed that almost all the abuse came from her own IP address.

Read

Rebecca Giggs, “The Snake with the Emoji Patterned Skin” (New Yorker)

Absolutely dystopian report on the world of designer snake breeding, hinging on the question: “Could a python raised in a tray, fed, kept warm and watered, and bred be said to live a full life?” Obviously not!

Snakes are not pets! Pets are animals that have a symbiotic relationship with humans and have evolved in parallel with us (cats and dogs and horses probably chose us as much as we chose them), not ones that have simply had the misfortune to be captured and mutilated through selective breeding! (Just wait till you get to the “small eyes” bit, argh, and I don’t even want to think about the fate of the “desert morph”.) Snakes just want to be left alone!

As a known snake pervert (and with apologies to CCP for this content),¹ I say: let my scaly associates free, and also the ones who’ve been — brrr — bred to be scaleless. (Incidentally, how do you think snakes do without scales? Not great. Not great at all!) And by “let them free”, I mean: have these tragic denatured freaks humanely euthanised before the situation gets any more horrifying.

Gimme, gimme more…

• Remember me enthusing about my friend Tracy King’s memoir earlier this year? Publication date is just over a week away now. The Guardian ran a fantastic extract, and there was a very nice review in the Sunday Times.

• Hear me out, what if Emerald Fennell is engaged in a long-term art project to discover exactly how little dignity Barry Keoghan has?

  

• I’ve found the tributes to Steve Wright — including this lovely Twitter thread as well as the testimonials from fellow DJs — really touching. Just a nice man who loved making radio, which is quite something given the Yewtree monsters he overlapped with.

• I’m going through a phase of being obsessed with Robert Maxwell and desperately wanted to watch some of his Spitting Image appearances. There aren’t many of those online, but googling did take me to the VHiStory Project: one man’s heroic effort to catalogue his thousands of VHS tapes. It’s completely absorbing. Here’s the entry for a terrible-sounding live “event” broadcast about the paranormal which I have a very vague memory of watching at the time.

• This essay on SSRIs and assexuality has been saturation-recommended already, but it’s really very good so I’m recommending it again.

• Great craic from Lindsay, cannot wait to watch this nonsense:

1. I’m not actually a pervert for snakes, I just like them a lot in the wild, which according to SOME PEOPLE is a perversion all by itself. I absolutely freaked my husband out once by confidently putting my face in the personal space of a sunbathing kingsnake in Washington State Park and announcing, “It’s not venomous!” Although it would still have been perfectly justified in biting me under the circumstances. Family lore says that the first time I saw a real live snake, it was an adder my dad had spotted disappearing into a drystone wall and caught by the tail for a better look, while my little sister (apparently not a snake pervert) screamed in horror.