Tox Report 47. Behold! The bend in the river

Being Bowie, Civil War and maternity horror (plus some news)

If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, you’ve probably already seen this announcement, but don’t think that can stop me from announcing it again. As reported in Variety last week, the TV rights to Toxic have been acquired by Paris Hilton’s production company 11:11 Media, with plans to create a docuseries based on the book. This is some way upstream of anything actually coming to the screen, but it’s still, as you can probably imagine, pretty exciting — especially because it means Paris has actually read the book.

My girl just loves reading

Immediately after the Variety story went up, I experienced the familiar queasiness of incipient cancellation: surely someone was going to spot that I’m pRoBlEmAtIc and run up some viral content to ruin my life. But no: Jezebel barely exists anymore, Vice is no longer publishing and the wokescolds have relocated from Twitter to occupy the terra incognita of the various clones, where they can get as mad as they like and only God can hear them. There is no one left to cancel me and no audience to feast on my cancellation.

It’s disconcerting to realise how fully the media environment of the noughties has reverted: what appeared to be a time of creative destruction has ended up being mostly just destruction, as the sites that rose up to eat legacy media’s lunch have largely disappeared, leaving little but depletion in their wake. (Obviously there are whole new media platforms — YouTube, the podcaster ecosystem — that have sustained, but I’m thinking about written journalism here.) The great web 2.0 revolution reduced to two vast and trunkless legs of stone. Or as one of my friends said: “Behold! The bend in the river.”

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Listened

David Bowie, “Hallo Spaceboy”

An update on TTPD, which I have been listening to in the car in an effort to get past my bad first impression. I do think there’s a better album that could be edited out of the sprawling one we have: “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” have all grown on me, although none are within touching distance of my existing Taylor faves. My overriding feeling — which is that we’ve passed the time of Taylor Swift being Taylor Swift’s own best subject — prevails.

Tox Report 46. Life vs art

Niall Boyce emailed with this thought:

A little more harsh on TTPD than I would have been (I think I have a higher threshold for ambient noodling). Though you have got me worried. In terms of timelines, TTPD is just about coincident with the point in Bowie’s career when he released Tonight followed by Never Let Me Down. Is this the end of the imperial phase? Beginning of 80s Bowie Taylor?¹

The more I think about it, the more I like Niall’s comparison. When he made Never Let Me Down, Bowie was approximately two decades into a career that had started fairly normie but progressed into an expansive, inventive exploration of identity. You can see where this is going. By the mid-eighties, I think he was feeling pretty exhausted. His “off” era can be thought of as a hiatus from the all-consuming project of “being David Bowie”.

But worrying as the possibility of Taylor’s Tin Machine indeed is, it’s worth remembering that there were only eight years between Never Let Me Down and 1995’s Outside (Bowie’s diversion into industrial-influenced sounds), followed by his drum and bass album Earthling two years later. In other words, we might be less than a decade away from Taylor’s “Hallo Spaceboy”, or something equivalently weird, which is definitely something to be excited for.²

Outside was treated as disappointment by reviewers who wanted “classic rock Bowie” back. But Bowie had no interest in being a heritage act, and he understood the coming future even if his fans were trying to claw him back from it (there’s a reason he supplies one of the epigraphs to Toxic).³ “Hallo Spaceboy” returns to his Major Tom mythos of cosmic melancholy (the Pet Shop Boys’ remix even interpolates portions of “Space Oddity”). It’s the sound of an artist revisiting a persona that had become stifling, with his artistic powers renewed and ready to attack.

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Watched

Civil War (in theatres)

I think Civil War is very likely to be the best film of 2024. It impresses first as spectacle: a freeway clogged with abandoned cars, American cities burning like torches, a sniper with candy pink and baby blue nail polish. From start to finish, there is all intensity, no slack. Beyond the visuals, much is tantalisingly undisclosed. How did the civil war in this near-future USA begin? Unknown. Why did the President (a riveting Nick Offerman, whose performance nods to Trump without falling into Trumpian caricature) order air strikes on his own people? Unknown. Who are the Western Alliance and what do they want? Unknown also. Whatever went before, everything by now has reduced to (as one soldier explains to our journalist protagonists) killing the person shooting at you before they can kill you. There are no good guys: atrocities belong to every side.

Obviously this has annoyed the kind of people who experience ambiguity as a personal attack. From the left: Time magazine found it too unpleasant (“Our current reality is dismal enough. Do we really need a movie to invent, and rub our noses in, the possibility of a bleaker future?”). From the right: Richard Hanania found it not unpleasant enough (according to Hanania, the film’s failure to include a Sam Peckinpah-style graphic rape shows the film has been captured by “political correctness”, as does the decision to feature two female war photographers, because there’s no such thing as a female war photographer except for — oops! — the female war photographer Lee Miller, who is explicitly referenced in Kristin Dunst’s character). All this criticism can be summed up in one complaint: why isn’t Civil War propaganda for my side? I suspect defensiveness on the part of these critics, because it’s very obvious to me that if Civil War has a “side”, that side is “against polarisation”.

Writer/director Alex Garland doesn’t seem to have talked about this in interviews, but I’m pretty sure that Civil War is structured as an allusion to The Wizard of Oz. There’s a road (smouldering tarmac rather than yellow brick); a destination (the White House, not the Emerald City); a Dorothy-like ingenue (Jessie, played by Cailee Spaeny); three older and slightly broken figures who help her (Dunst’s Lee, Wagner Moura’s Joel and Stephen McKinley Henderson’s Sammy, who could map very roughly to the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion); and an authority figure (the Wizard/the President) who turns out to be pathetically human. In which case, the whole film feels like a cruel joke on Dorothy’s magic words: “There’s no place like home.” Because in Civil War, there is no home you could ever go back to.

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Read

Hannah Barnes, “My Nightmare Giving Birth — and Britain’s Maternity Scandal” (the Times)

I’ve mentioned Hannah’s work often in this newsletter — her investigation into the Tavistock Clinic’s gender services for children, and her previous work looking at the “satanic panic” social contagion — but as significant as those stories are, neither affected me as much as this article about the failings in maternity services, and her own direct encounter with them. The cliche of the NHS is that it’s bad at chronic conditions but good in a crisis. So what explains it being so bad at childbirth, which is in many ways the ultimate acute health event? Much of this article was painfully recognisable:

Two hours later there was still no baby and I was in agony. A doctor arrived, took a brief look and said cheerily, “You’re going to be fine. You’re going to get that baby out.” And then he left. My maternity notes state, “PLAN: continue pushing.” I have no idea what this refers to — like so many of my notes. There was no plan. If there was, it wasn’t one I had agreed to. Finally, after another hour the decision was made that the doctor would use a ventouse — a suction cup that sits on your baby’s head — to help deliver my baby. Apparently I consented to this, but I have no recollection of doing so. And I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know what was being asked of me. My doctor didn’t use the word ventouse. He used “Kiwi”, which is a type of ventouse. At the time, I didn’t know what either were.

Like Hannah, I was sent home from hospital after my waters broke. Like Hannah, I suffered in terrible pain — labouring back-to-back with no amniotic fluid to cushion my baby’s skull against my spine for nearly 24 hours — without being offered more than gas and air until the very end. Like Hannah, I believed that I was going to die at one point. The bleak explanation for such failures is probably that women are often treated as an afterthought on maternity wards, in an NHS that (as multiple scandals have revealed) all too routinely assumes that patients (especially female patients) are making a fuss and somehow obstructing the medics from doing their job.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• I expanded my Baby Reindeer thoughts for UnHerd — and ended up unexpectedly revisiting my own encounter with a stalker, having not thought about it for years.

• For the Sunday Times: I interviewed Katy O’Brian, the “big girl” who’s about to be an absolutely enormous star, about the fantastic Love Lies Bleeding (more on that film next week).

• Loved this conversation with Caroline Criado Perez on the Cluster F Theory, which is — entirely unsurprisingly, but totally fascinatingly — largely about pockets:

  12. Invisible Women - Caroline Criado Perez

• The vibe, it has shifted. Billy Bragg gets taken to task in this Observer interview over his weirdly combative pro-trans/anti-feminist position, and comes out looking like an intellectually feeble tribalist: “My problem with people like Rowling, like Julie Bindel, is really who they are lined up with… they are on the wrong side of the table.”

• Sister in Law: Fighting for Justice in a System Designed by Men by Harriet Wistrich is out this week. I’ve been reading a proof and it’s a phenomenal story of campaigning by one of the most effective feminists in the country (also one of the greatest movers you’ll ever see tear up a dancefloor, but that’s by the by).

• What if Michael Hobbes’ terrible output is Jesse Singal’s truest muse?

• Alex Massie on the fall of Humza Yousaf: “Last weekend, Yousaf led and spoke at a ‘Believe in Scotland’ — yeah, ok, whatever — rally in Glasgow. We were led to believe this would be a statement-making kind of event of real significance. And so, indeed, it was. For at a generous estimate it was attended by no more than 2,000 people. This game is up, for the time being; this game is a bogey. Dumping the Greens does not materially alter that reality; in a perverse way it reinforces it.”

• I’ve finished the moderately disappointing Three Body Problem (Netflix) and moved on to series two of the excellent Blue Lights (iPlayer). I loved the first series, and it’s holding strong on its return.

1. It was Niall, btw, who commissioned me to write this when he was working at Lancet Psychiatry. I loved writing it, plus it’s been my biggest banker in ALCS payments since I enrolled, making it the most remunerative per-word piece of work I’ve ever done.

2. There’s a fun aside here, because “Hallo Spaceboy” is a collab with the Pet Shop Boys, who made headlines last week after Neil Tennant issued the following diss on Taylor: “She sort of fascinates me as a phenomenon because she is so popular. But then I listen to the records and I think, Where are the famous songs? What is Taylor Swift’s ‘Billie Jean’?’ ‘Shake It Off’? I listened to that the other day and it is not ‘Billie Jean’, is it?” Obviously I disagree (‘Shake It Off’ is great), but I can only applaud the willingness to ruck with Swifties.

3. It’s taken from his 1999 Newsnight interview, in which he told Paxman: “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying… It’s an alien life form.” Paxman’s incredulous scowl at this is probably the most perfect representation of “man about to be ambushed by reality” that you’ll ever see.