40. Holding steady in Happy Valley

Menfeels at work

This week, I reviewed the new Judith Butler book for the Sunday Times and it was cathartic. Well, reading the book was dismal — Butler is a horrible writer. But settling my score with her work after seething on it for nearly 25 years was gratifying, even if wordcount constraints meant I had a lot more to say than there was space for. I might run the uncut version as a bonus newsletter at some point if I decide it’s interesting enough.¹

In the meantime, if you want to read someone really banging on about Butler, try this interminable Andrea Long Chu essay in New York Magazine, which makes the bold argument that medical transition should be accessible to anyone of any age (yes that includes children) just because they say they want it. Is it convincing? It is not, but it is interesting to see just how awkward Butler’s ideological position has become, even while she continues to be feted. Gender performativity theory made Butler a kind of John the Baptist for gender identity theory, but for people like Chu, Butler is clearly reaching the end of her usefulness.

I also had a spot in this feature on “The book my mother gave me”: my book is Moominland Midwinter. Midwinter is an eerie book to read as a child, because it’s a book about the child characters (Moomin and Little My) being cut adrift from their carers, who are hibernating through the cold months. It has the feeling of secret knowledge being imparted — and part of that secret knowledge is the fact that death occurs, and life goes on, even if you don’t get to make a “sweet muff” (Little My style, and please no muff jokes) out of the departed’s tail.

Rip the squirrel with the marvelous tail, an idiot

My other news is that I passed my driving test last week on the first attempt! (Albeit at the grand age of 42.) Nothing to add, just fishing for congratulations.

Listened

The Hold Steady, “Your Little Hoodrat Friend”

I don’t think I’d registered the existence of the Hold Steady until a few years ago, when the relentless advocacy of Michael Hann (now lead music critic on the Spectator, though he’s been beating this drum hard since his Guardian years) finally got through to me. And then, slowly, I started to notice that a lot of the 35-and-up men of my acquaintance were also really, really into the Hold Steady. I mean Swiftie levels of devotion.

For example, every year the Hold Steady does a three-night run in London: two dates at the Electric Ballroom, one at the Omeara — a 300-capacity sweat-dripping-off-the-ceiling type place. And every year, about 300 men will build their whole weekend around this moment: an act of pilgrimage and collective worship. (I’m exaggerating the sex ration of the audience a bit for dramatic effect: there are plenty of women who like the Hold Steady. But there’s also something specifically masculine about their appeal.)

Next year, I’ll do the Omeara if I can. This year, I did Friday at the Electric Ballroom, and I loved it. The devotion to the Hold Steady only fully makes sense when you’ve seen them live. On record, they’re a good, grizzled rock ’n’ roll band with lyrics that are really short stories of grimy blue collar America, sliding elegantly between bathos and tragedy: betting, boozing, tangling with messy girls. Springsteen but after some therapy-heavy rehab for stimulants.

Live, they’re all that, but with — as frontman Craig Finn shout-sings on one song — “SO MUCH JOY”. Finn stands at the front of the stage, arms wide open to the crowd, looking like an English teacher getting a bit too into it, carrying his audience with him into an emotional universe where “I love you/ I feel you/ I know that you’re hurting” is a perfectly non-ridiculous thing for men to say to each other. (For the record, it is of course a non-ridiculous thing for men to say to each other, but as Finn sings in the song, “it’s different for boys”.)

My husband (who of the many dragged-along spouses at the Electric Ballroom was probably the only male one) said: “It feels like I’m in one of the support groups at the start of Fight Club.” And it does! The vibe is very much men feeling their feelings, without the prospect of getting into Semtex. I made the decision to squirm up to the front and stay till they’d played “Hoodrat”, which is belting song about a man denying he has a thing for a sketchy groupie-type girl while very clearly having a thing for her. When the guitars squall off at the end of the bridge, the crowd throws confetti — a ritual built up over years of performance, just like the Swifties’ friendship bracelets — and it’s beautiful.

Watched

Happy Valley series 2 (iPlayer)

I’ve been reading Sally Wainwright’s scripts, so it was inevitable that I’d go back and rewatch some of her shows. Series two of Happy Valley is, I think, a perfect drama, and the more time you spend with it, the more you see its perfection. From the opening scene — a near-monologue delivered by Sgt. Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) to her sister, describing a weird series of events she’s had to police that day — almost all the pieces of the mystery to come are in place. We won’t know how they fit together until nearly the end, but the dead body Catherine finds at the end of her story is intimately related to the blackly comic business with the stolen sheep that leads into it.

Watching it this time, I was really struck by how much this is a series about parenthood (and here come spoilers, so don’t read further if you’ve not watched it yet). For Catherine, that means principally parenting Ryan, the child her daughter Becky bore as a result of rape before she killed herself. But it also means parenting her adult son Daniel, who has flaked out of fatherhood, having an affair while his wife was pregnant. It means being the mother to a dead daughter.

It means Tommy Lee Royce’s drive to “parent” Ryan, his biological son — a mission that gains urgency after Tommy’s mother Lynn is murdered by a serial killer, orphaning Tommy. It means Alison Garrs parenting her son Darryl, another child of rape (by her own father) and (we will learn) the serial killer haunting the series, which leads to the one of the series’ great scenes: Alison, now aware that her son is the monster she always feared, spinning him a line about escaping to Disneyland while lining up a shotgun at the back of his head to execute him.

It means Alison’s narrative counterpart: the parent whose act of love is to kill himself rather than his child. D.S. John Wadsworth, a detective who commits a terrible impulsive murder when his affair partner blackmails him, then tries to cover it up in the most gruesome way, by staging it as the unknown serial killer’s work. His last words to Catherine before he tumbles backwards off a bridge at the series’ very end, cornered and disgraced, are: “I love my kids.”

(But how impulsive was the murder? Happy Valley is so very good on the mix of circumstance and planning that leads into people doing bad things: at one point, Neil — Catherine’s sister’s boyfriend and an alcoholic — informs Catherine that he always books three days off work when he feels a bender coming on. What’s the balance of control and compulsion there? Born or made, willed or fated, these are the questions the whole series circles back to.)

Even a relatively minor character has a backstory about parenting: D.I. Jodie Shackleton, we learn, is the daughter of the chief constable. “So guess how she shinned her way up the greasy pole,” says Catherine. I love this detail because it doesn’t “need” to be there: Jodie would work as a lowkey antagonist to Catherine without it. But including it gives Jodie depth (later in the series, she’ll casually say that being assumed to benefit from nepotism is actually a disadvantage she’s had to overcome), it gives substance to working-class Catherine’s resentment of Jodie, and it ties Jodie to the theme of parental responsibility: where, exactly, is the line between overstepping and neglect when it comes to your child?

Read

Sally Wainwright, Happy Valley series 2

What’s really remarkable, reading the scripts, is that nothing is wasted. Every gesture, every digression feeds the story. This is real nose-to-tail storytelling — not the grim “swallow the gristle” kind where you’re forced to muscle down unpalatable exposition, but the delicious “marrow in the risotto and you didn’t even realise” kind. (This is a very carnivorous metaphor, apologies to vegetarians.) And it builds to a climax that is both deeply shocking (actually two climaxes, both equally shocking) and completely right in terms of what’s gone before. You don’t know it’s coming, but when it happens, you know that nothing else was ever possible.

That’s a result, I think, of Wainwright’s consistency in building her world. Her stories make sense because her characters make sense, and her characters make sense because their actions are all congruent with the story. What’s interesting to me, as a person who’s just learning about screenwriting, is how much of this is on the page. For example, this is our introduction to John Wadsworth, who we meet in his home:

The WADSWORTH family are all in from school and work: a noisy, busy household. Mum (AMANDA, 46) is cooking, Dad (JOHN, 48) has set the table and now he’s sitting at the far end of the kitchen playing Scrabble on his Ipad. JACK (15) and BEN (13) are having a heated debate, and AMBER (8) is struggling to get the screw-top off a juice carton. (The debate shouldn’t sound as angry as it might read, it’s just the hurly-burly of teenagers and tired parents)...

That note — “shouldn’t sound as angry as it might read” — is so good, and Wainwright’s scripts are full of those details. It tells you that the Wadsworth marriage is, like thousands of other marriages, disharmonious but not dysfunctional. You wouldn’t say they love each other based on this scene, but they don’t seem to hate each other either. By episode three, though, things have become absolutely poisonous:

JOHN’s ironing his own shirt. He looks bad tempered and sullen. He looks like he drank too much last night as well and is struggling with a hangover. AMANDA’s clattering about noisily with plates in the dishwasher. She looks bad-tempered and sullen too. We glimpse the children each individually looking sullen with whatever it is they’re doing as they get ready for school in this joyless house, which looks much less tidy than we’ve seen it before.

These at-home-with-the-Wadsworths scenes aren’t just background. They track the descent of John as a character, his feeling of being victimised even having committed a dreadful crime, his loss of control even as he deludes himself that he’s regaining it. When he says “I love my kids” at the end, these scenes are the evidence we have to test his statement against, and to me it seems like his suicide might be the only “loving” thing we see him do as a father: he drags his kids into his fights with his wife (she’s not much better), he treats them as a possession to be haggled over. But he spares them the shame of living with a murderer as a dad, and perhaps that almost counts as loving from someone as status-anxious as him.

After three viewings of the series and reading the screenplay, I still don’t know exactly where my sympathy for John ends. It certainly doesn’t extend very far — he’s a bad person pushed into a corner where he becomes the worst version of himself. (Again, there’s the Wainwright depth-through-detail: Neil was blackmailed by the same woman, and didn’t murder her, though he did have a breakdown. This coincidence helps nudge the story to its end, but it also shows that John’s response to a terrible provocation was not inevitable.) But he’s still a person: hopeful, scared, desperate, scarred by the violence he committed. At the end, I want him not to jump, even though I’m relieved when he does. That’s great drama.

Gimme, gimme more…

• I’m back and forth on whether Big Menopause has done good consciousness raising, or turned a normal physical process into a commercially exploitable pathology. Both, probably. Anyway, it was interesting to read this critique of celebrity campaigns…

• … and this response by Kate Muir. Can it really be true that “most women” have a calamitously bad menopause? I do worry that, when I see whole forums of middle aged women self-deprecating about their “peri-meno brain”, I’m seeing women who’ve memed themselves into decrepitude.

• The WPATH leak of documents about paediatric transition hasn’t made much of a splash (probably because there’s no clear news line in there, and we already knew a lot of the bad stuff), but Hannah Barnes has a good explainer on it.

• What the heck is going on with the Royals? Maybe a crisis doesn’t feel much like a crisis in the first phase. Maybe it just feels like things are really, really out of kilter.

• I have zero beef with any of the Oscar winners (in fact I now find myself in the weird position of being an Oppenheimer apologist as the “well actually it wasn’t that great” machine grinds into gear), with one exception: HOW COULD THEY DO KEN DIRTY LIKE THAT? The Billie Eilish song that won is lovely, but “I’m Just Ken” is everything. No matter: Ryan Gosling stormed the show with his performance (full version here, enjoy), for decades to come people will be mildly amazed that he didn’t get the Oscar, and honestly — it’s a song about finding peace with being a cuck, even though you look like a chad. It’s thematically correct for Ken to be the underdog.

1. One weird thing that happened around this: in the comments on the Times article, I mentioned Richard J. Evans’s book In Defence of History. And then someone using the name Diane Purkiss popped up and demanded to know what my academic discipline was. This is intriguing, because Purkiss’s book The Witch In History was one of the works Evans criticised in his book; Purkiss wrote a long and chippy response to Evans’s critique, and then Evans (who is, and I say this with all respect, probably the man least likely to let anything go ever, which is why he writes the most entertaining obituaries) wrote an equally long response to the response as part of the afterword to the paperback of In Defence of History. So there’s academic bad blood there, and there seem to be three potential explanations for the comment. One, there’s another Diane Purkiss abroad with a keen interest in debates about the influence of poststructuralism. Two, the author of The Witch in History spends a lot of time in newspaper comment threads. Three, Purkiss has a Google alert for mentions of In Defence of History because she’s still sore about the teardown Evans gave her. If it’s three, maybe she’ll comment here and confirm! Btw Diane, I did English literature.