41. Lost origins, desperate starts

Every story is a contract with the audience

A royalty double from me this week. For UnHerd, I wrote about why the mystery of Kate’s photoshop is driving everyone into a red string fever. To understand the paranoid stance of the palace, you need to go back to the unkindness and intrusion of the noughties, when Kate was nicknamed “Waity Katie” by the press. Today, she’s caught between the physical imperative of being a royal body, and the celebrity condition of being an internet cypher: if Diana was the people’s princess, Kate is the copypasta princess (I said crowdsourced in the article, but copypasta is better), and that’s a much weirder position to be pushed into.

I’ve also got a feature in this month’s Harper’s Bazar about upcoming Netflix film Scoop!, which is a very fun retelling of how Newsnight scored the nuclear Prince Andrew interview. All my interviewees — including Sam McAllister (the Newsnight booker who landed the white whale), Keeley Hawes and Gillian Anderson — were delightful, but extra credit must go to Rufus Sewell, who was extremely gracious when I decided to break the ice by telling him how “formative” his performance in the 1994 Middlemarch had been. It’s print only so far, so grab yourself a copy at your nearest newsstand.

Listened

Fred again.., Skrillex, Four Tet, “Baby again..”

At some point last summer, my son, who is 21 and seriously into clubbing, said something about Four Tet. And I said, “FOUR TET?” — probably in that really annoying way an older person uses to imply that the younger person they are talking to has made a mistake. Because I knew an act called Four Tet, actually a DJ and producer who made a series of beguiling folktronica records in the early noughties (the one I listened to most was Pause which, God this makes me feel old, was burned onto a CD for me by a friend) but who I hadn’t really thought about for nearly 20 years. Well, while I was doing… whatever it is I’ve been doing, Four Tet has gone MASSIVE. Like, headlining Coachella massive. Collaborating with Skrillex massive. I love this twitchy, needling, indefinably menacing track from a couple of years ago. And I love even more the idea that by just carrying on doing what you’re good at, you end up being a midlife superstar. New album Three is out now.

Watched

Desperate Housewives season 1/Lost season 1

Two 2004 ABC shows that would go to seed over the course of their very long runs, but which I loved at the start and are definitely worth revisiting for anyone interested in learning how you set a drama running. Both have not just exemplary first episodes, but exemplary openings. In Desperate Housewives, you watch Mary Alice go through a normal day — “polishing the routine of my life until it gleamed with perfection” — before, with immaculate poise, she takes a revolver and shoots herself in the head. It’s a brilliant scene of John Waters-esque black comedy, capped off with a delicious punchline: the nosy neighbour who calls in the gunshot smiles complacently as she peels the name label off Mary Alice’s blender and pops it in her own cupboard.

Lost starts in very different mode, with an action sequence. A man in a suit jolts awake on a jungle floor — instant mystery! This is Jack, but we don’t know his name till later. We follow him through the wreckage of a plane crash: all around him is chaos and panic, but he is purposeful and sure, taking charge and saving lives. At one point, he gives a dumb lifeguard the job of finding a pen, supposedly to perform an emergency tracheotomy but really to stop the lifeguard from doing any more bad CPR. When the immediate peril has died down, the lifeguard reappears with a fistful of ballpoints. “I didn’t know which one was best,” he says. “They’re all good,” says our hero — so we know he’s authoritative but also kind. The vodka miniature in his pocket says he’s got a backstory beyond medicine too.

Within a very short span of time, both establish the world of their stories: suburbia with a heart of darkness, survivors in a hostile environment. Both throw out a question, with the promise of an answer if we just keep watching: why did Mary Alice kill herself, and why did the plane go down? And both deftly introduce the wider cast, so even if we don’t know all the names, we have a rough idea of some faces and what they want (Lost is especially good on that). They also both have an incredibly strong sense of space, which I think is helped by their use of tracking shots: this is Wisteria Lane, this is the beach. In other words, inside a few minutes, we’ve got the who, the where and the huh?

Over the last twenty years, I’ve occasionally thought with some annoyance about the amount of time I invested in both these shows, and it’s undeniable that the network serial drama is probably cursed to be disappointing. The first season of Desperate Housewives has 23 episodes lasting 43 minutes each, the first season of Lost 25 episodes. That’s so much story, and then they go on for, respectively, another seven and another five seasons. It’s near-impossible to avoid spinning your wheels at some points and resorting to melodrama at others. (An instructive comparison: Damon Lindelof, one of the Lost showrunners, also made the tight, dazzling 2019 nine-episode adaptation of Watchmen for streaming.)¹

But if they ultimately failed, well — at least they failed more slowly than a lot of shows. Twin Peaks, for example, which was on the same network 14 years before these two, and which is a kind of parent to both. From it, Desperate Housewives took the seething malice inside middle America, while Lost snatched up the Jungian weirdness. Both tried to solve the great problem of Twin Peaks: how to navigate between the audience’s desire for resolution of the mystery, and the audience’s need for the mystery to be sustained so they can keep watching.

Peaks becomes abruptly very bad after episode 9 of season 2, which is when we learn who killed Laura Palmer. Consequently, Desperate Housewives and Lost don’t give their secrets up so easily, which is why they eventually get so annoying, in different ways. Going back to the first episodes explains why I stuck with them. A drama (well, any kind of storytelling) is about the contract you strike with the audience, and both these shows establish their contract exceptionally well.

Read

Lucy Sante, I Heard Her Call My Name (Penguin)/Jan Morris, Conundrum (Folio Society)

I ended up reading (in one case rereading) two trans memoirs in the last couple of weeks — a new one by the critic Lucy (formerly Luc) Sante, and a beautiful reprint of Jan Morris’s Conundrum from the Folio society. (I wrote about the Sante for UnHerd and the Morris for the Times.) I’ve read an awful lot of books about the trans experience by this point, and I will level with you that a lot of them are bad.

The first problem, common to all memoir writers, is that nothing about having an interesting experience guarantees that you will be able to write. Then there’s the question of whether transitioning even counts as an “interesting experience”. I mean, it’s unusual. But it’s been pretty well covered by this point. And those who cover it rarely have anything original to say about it, because the topic has become so thoroughly enameled in political slogans.

In C. N. Lester’s book Trans Like Me, the whole attempt at an explanation in acceptable terms collapses into vagueness: “the knowledge of how my mind knows my body to be is so… I don’t even know how to put it. How do you describe the mind and body describing the mind and body?” ponders Lester. Which provokes a huge urge in me to scribble “I DON’T KNOW YOU’RE THE ONE WHO’S SUPPOSED TO BE TELLING ME” in the margin.

Lester has written the intro to the new edition of Conundrum, and you can pretty much hear the sound of air being disapprovingly sucked through teeth as you read it. “In uplifting, almost sanctifying her experience as a transsexual woman, she denigrates and diminishes the experiences of other trans people.” Yes, yes, I get it — Morris is problematic. But Morris really is problematic: an old school imperial adventurer, a Flashman in petticoats. Which is why the book is fun. The dogmas had not set in when Morris was writing, and even if they had, I suspect that Morris was always more interested in Morris than in toeing the line.

The Sante, similarly, is full of things the modern trans memoirist is not supposed to say — like “I trembled… to my crotch” (describing the experience of seeing a selfie that had been filtered to look female), or recounting with mild curiosity the distress caused to his partner when he decided to do his big coming out at her birthday party. “Somehow, though, in my delirium I had overlooked something critical,” writes Sante. You don’t say? Neither book leaves you feeling that the author is exactly likable, and both are all the more entertaining (and, presumably, the more honest) for it.

Gimme, gimme more…

• STOP THE PRESSES, Kardashian survivors Caitlyn Jenner and Lamar Odom are making a podcast! It’s about sports so there’s every reason to get Kris Humphries of the 72-day marriage involved, and while there probably isn’t a good reason to get Kanye involved, I’m sure his analysis of the ((((((forces)))))) controlling the Super Bowl would be enlightening for all of us.

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• Hadley being coruscating about antisemitism at the Oscars, and more generally among the liberal arts classes. That pin badge, eesh.

• If we have to listen to celebrity thoughts on the Middle East, let’s have more Billy Porter: “I am in support of my Jewish friends and my Palestinian friends… All I know is that the extremists came in and did something that was horrific, and then they retaliated. Now, the retaliation is a little overkill, now, doll. But why are we at war at all? That’s not just about them, that’s everywhere. We’re always at war. It breaks my heart. I don’t know what to say, and I don’t know what to do, other than hug you and say I’m sorry, and what can we do to fix it? I’m in support of peace! Fucking peace!” Yes the details are a little vague, but it’s better on the outlines than 90 percent of the takes I’ve seen.

• Kensington Palace still isn’t talking, but Rose Hanbury has had enough.

• Bold of this piece to decry a “chillingly basic strain of feminism” while offering no positive suggestions of its own whatsoever. “To progress, we need both nuance and radical change.” Sounds amazing! Got a single example of either there? Oh…

• Colin Furze was in the year above me at school so his megafame as a YouTube stunt engineer is extremely disconcerting.

• I was on the FiLiA podcast to talk about Toxic, and I popped up on the first hour of Hugo Rifkind’s Times Radio show to talk about (among other things) being a snake pervert.

• Do you like heroically detailed fiskings of terrible journalism as much as I do? If so, you will love this David Aaronovitch megapost about the “recovered memory” fraud and the “Satanic Panic”. Parts one and two of the radio documentary he made with Hannah Barnes — yes, that Hannah Barnes — are available on BBC Sounds. (Imagine my horror while listening to discover that there is a legit snake pervert moment in here, which if it was true would be too unpleasant to countenance.)

• I’ve seen Diva twice and consider it a gorgeous load of sexist bollocks, but Wilhelmenia Fernandez is great in it; I didn’t realise till I read her obituary, though, what an impressive life she had.

1. When Helen reads this, I know she’s going to say: “Dazzled by Dr. Manhattan’s giant blue peen?” So here we are: yes, Helen, dazzled by the giant blue peen.