Tox Report 50. A different animal

Back to the (horrible) future

I’m recovering from the whooping cough but it’s been a rough week, so this is a very watching-TV-heavy edition of Tox Report. Next week, hopefully some thoughts on the new Billie Eilish (I like it!), and maybe even a couple of things that involve leaving the house. But today, it’s Fallout appreciation and the lure of retrofuturism.

FYI: Toxic is currently a bargain £2.99 on Kindle, and £12.88 for the hardback at Amazon — so if you’ve been waiting for your moment to buy it, now seems like a very good one. If you’ve ever wanted to have the madness of the internet age explained through the medium of celebrity sex tapes, this book is for you. And if you’ve already bought it (and ideally liked it), it would help hugely if you could leave a review. Reply to this newsletter or send a message using the button in this post with your address, and I’ll post you a signed bookplate as a thank you for you service.

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Listened

RJD2, “A Beautiful Mine”

While I was ill, I decided to rewatch Mad Men. Can I tell you something about Mad Men? It’s… fine. Yes, I know, “golden age of TV” and all that. But Mad Men is, when you get down to it, smug good taste bait. It’s inviting you to luxuriate in the vibe of the early 1960s. The waistlines! The plastics! The cocktails! The (not always well-judged) typefaces!¹

33. A Toxic day in the USA

And the characters feel like museum pieces too — diorama models constructed to demonstrate the forces of the sixties, with about the depth and conviction of the animatronics at the Jorvik Centre.² Honestly, Betty could be played by a copy of The Feminine Mystique on a piece of string, and Don could just be a question mark, given the number of times other characters pause meaningfully and say “but who IS Don Draper?” Take away Mad Men’s production design, and I’m not sure there’s much left.

OK, you’d still have two incredibly aspirational and attractive leads in the form of Hamm and Hendricks — but we’re talking about a show that succeeded fundamentally on aesthetics. The ratings, the awards, the critical adoration really all stem from an audience desire to be in that era of history. Still, it’s nice to have on when your concentration is shot, and it’s got a good trip-hoppy theme song.

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Watched

Fallout (Prime)

And I get the appeal of the period. There is something incredibly poignant about that mid-century consumer boom look. It seems so wholesome and robust — a heaven of suburban plenty and technological advancement. In David Lynch and Rocky Horror and John Waters and Pleasantville and Sylvanian Families and tradwife discourse, it’s the platonic ideal of western (specifically American) civilisation. But it hardly lasted a generation.

One of the many, many things I love about Fallout³ — the actually good TV show I watched this week — is that it uses the visual language of the fifties to imagine a what-if world in which culture stopped evolving just before the point where Mad Men begins. The western never stopped being the dominant mode of cinema. Technology carries on developing, but the social upheaval of the sixties never happens. It’s a world where the innocence of the post-war period never fell, and the twist is, it was never really innocent.

And isn’t that the point of this look, in Lynch and Rocky Horror and Waters? (Although probably not Sylvanian Families.)⁴ It’s always the cover for some corruption: part of its appeal, besides the aw-shucks charm, is the suspicion that it all needs to be torn down. Which happens in Fallout in the most spectacular, nuclear way. It’s a show that plays a brilliant game with good and evil in its characters — and with the viewer’s idea of good and evil.

There’s an electric moment in episode two when the scientist, Wilzig, meets Lucy, the naive Vault-dweller who’s come to the apocalyptic surface to find her father. Wilzig warns her that nothing she’s learned so far will work for her up here, and then he tells her: “The question is, will you still want the same things, when you’ve become a different animal altogether?” That’s the question for the Ghoul/Cooper, aspiring knight Maximus — and Lucy’s father, played (but of course!) by America’s greatest ever seedy boy scout, Kyle MacLachlan.

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Read

Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting

Speaking of retrofuturism: my 1994 edition of this book (one of the how-to-screenwrite classics, first published 1979) includes a chapter on “writing with computers”. Strangely, it’s aged back into relevance. Archaic as it is to read a writer arguing the toss between Microsoft Word and WordPerfect, the sections where Field discusses the creative potential of story generation software is weirdly pertinent to the AI debates.

But the backbone of Field’s book is his analysis of the elements of storytelling. I feel a little foolish that I’ve never read it until now, because it’s not just a guide to assembling a script — it’s pertinent to any narrative form, which obviously includes journalism. And once you’ve read it, you see it validated everywhere: the setup-confrontation-resolution cycle, the primacy of need to character. That’s true even with something like Fallout, which works giddily intricate relations between not only interlocking storylines but interlocking timelines. When you watch it, listen to the characters: they all, at some point, tell you what they want, and it feels totally natural.

Fallout seems to me like a sign of the maturity of videogames as art. Its narrative fully integrates the principles of the open-world game it comes from — to the point of the Ghoul joking about side quests. Interestingly, exec producer Jonathan Nolan’s previous big series was Westworld, which took the theme park premise of the original film and developed it into what is, essentially, a drama about videogame narrative design.⁵ Westworld doesn’t satisfy me as much as Fallout — Fallout is funny, where Westworld is sombre in a way that makes some of the sillier plot points (but why keep putting malfunctioning robots back to work?) hard to take. But I like it as story, and it as story about story. I like it as a moment of one medium taking on the full possibilities of another.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• I read the full judgement from Roz Adams’ employment tribunal against Edinburgh Rape Crisis, and it’s a bleak catalogue of bullying — and of treating service users as mere props for the service providers. Karen Ingala Smith offers a good summary of the moral failure involved.

• Even worse, but similarly in the line of institutions putting themselves above the people they supposedly exist to help: the Infected Blood Inquiry found “systemic, collective and individual failures to deal ethically, appropriately, and quickly, with the risk of infections being transmitted in blood, with the infections when the risk materialised, and with the consequences for thousands of families.”

• The Diddy video really is horrendous: consider yourself warned before clicking.

• Is the noughties’ greatest comeback but a fever dream?

• I find the “well we would boycott the genocide festival but alas we are horny handed sons of toil” flex very funny.

1. I have spent a lot more of my life than I should have done thinking about the decision to set the credits of Mad Men in Arial. On the one hand, it is entirely insignificant and doesn’t matter. On the other, it is an act of gross trolling and an assault on the authenticity of a fictional world that only exists to be authentic. I hate it, is what I’m saying. I hate it a lot.

2. I love the Jorvik Centre so please don't be too offended if you’re really into Mad Men.

3. Specifically the TV series, though the design comments apply to the games too — which I haven’t played, but which I subbed many, many features on in my twenties when I worked in games journalism.

4. Although that is why this Instagram feed (props to Hadley) works so well:

reformation

A post shared by @reformation

5. I’ve watched four episodes of Westworld this week, as well as all of Fallout, half a season of Mad Men, a few Law and Order: SVUs and the first episode of Wolf Hall (offered to my daughter as A level history revision). It’s been, as mentioned, a rough week.