Tox Report 51. A fragile thing that soars

Billie, Stanley and what happens next

Good news: the whooping cough has faded to an occasional hack, and only once or twice a day do I make the telltale gasp of a dying balloon. I cannot stress enough that pertussis is a no-fun bacterium, and if you are ever offered it, I strongly recommend passing. Anyway, respiratory woes aside, this week I’ve been listening to Billie Eilish, watching Eyes Wide Shut and reading about American liberals losing their mind — plus stepping in at the Times to write about Eddie Izzard’s ego and how constituency parties are the thin blue (and red) line separating democracy from chaos. General election is go!

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Listened

Billie Eilish, Hit Me Hard and Soft

Here is the story of me and Billie Eilish: new Billie Eilish music arrives, I give it one listen and dismiss it as boring, then three days later realise I’m waking up in the morning with the chorus lodged in my brain, urgently needing the satisfaction of the whole thing. Anyway, it’s happened again with Hit Me Hard and Soft.

When the Spotify push notification came, with its injunction that “Billie and Finneas would like you to listen to the whole album” (I’m paraphrasing slightly because I forgot to screengrab this), I was kind of annoyed — like who are these people to tell me I must dedicate an uninterrupted 43 minutes and 49 seconds to experiencing their work?

But the album really insists on being a whole: songs split and morph unexpectedly into their successor, hooks revive from song to song, and the whole thing tells a sweet, prickly story of longing and desire. Lead track “Lunch” is a slinky celebration of a girl-on-girl crush — “I could eat that girl for lunch.” That sexual becoming is one of the album’s big themes, and you can hear the confidence in her voice, which increasingly shifts away from tentative whisper-singing and into a swooping mode that reminds me of Harriet from the Sundays’ sparrow-flight vocals — a fragile thing that soars.

The other theme is Billie’s ongoing uncomfortable relationship with fame. As you will know from this newletter’s endless griping about TTPS, I’m kinda over stars moaning about stardom. But HMHAS does something interesting with it: “Diner”, for example, is sung from the perspective of her actual stalker, but listen carelessly, and you’ll hear a love song. “Don’t be afraid of me/ I’m what you need” is a line that says a lot about the terrifying bargain fame imposes: Eminem’s “Stan” updated for Instagram.¹

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Watched

Eyes Wide Shut (limited release)

I’ve never seen Eyes Wide Shut at the cinema and I love Kubrick, so I was willing to stow my misgivings based on my original DVD viewing 25 years ago and give it another try. I regret to inform you that it remains not very good, although there are things I appreciated more this time out than I did before, mainly the structure: first the film follows Tom Cruise’s character on an odyssey of frustrated libertinism ending in the sinister events of the masked orgy, and then the next day he retraces those steps, revisiting the locations and finding everything is either more ugly or more banal than his first impression.

And once you’re free of the idea that this is a film about “Cruise and Kidman” and have accepted that it’s a Tom Cruise movie with glimpses of Nicole’s bum, it becomes much less frustrating. That also says a lot about the film’s fundamental weakness, though. It’s a movie driven by female sexuality — specifically, by a man’s shock that his wife’s sexuality is not the tame, domesticated thing he believed — with a vacuum where any sense of female interiority might be.

Fine, fine, it’s Kubrick’s movie, he’s a man who obviously liked big tits on skinny women, and if he wanted to bank a lifetime of genius to make a movie full of big tits on skinny women, I guess that’s his artistic choice. But it makes the film ludicrous: for example, the couple’s final reconciliation rests on Nicole Kidman’s character using “fuck” as a verb in the middle of a toy shop, and it’s so awful I sat braced through the whole scene willing her to somehow not do it.

TBH, her performance is fairly absurd all round. Her attempt at “acting drunk” in the initial ball section is about as convincing as a pissed person’s attempt to act sober and makes me assume she’s a lifelong teetoller. Perhaps it’s telling, given Cruise and Kidman divorced two years after the film,² that their chemistry is most convincing at the beginning when they’re supposed to be estranged.

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Read

Nellie Bowles, Morning After the Revolution (Swift)

I reviewed this for the Times, and ended that review like this:

“For several years, standing up to stifling liberal orthodoxies has given writers such as Bowles (and me) a living, as well as a cause. Pointing out ideological excess is an entertaining and necessary project, but also a limited one. This book is part of what is now a thriving market in woke-critical literature, which strongly suggests the New Progressives have lost their hold. If this is the morning after the revolution, maybe it’s time to ask what’s coming next.”

While I was writing that, I was also helping my daughter with her A-level history revision about the Tudors. In 1540 (per one of the flash cards), the conservative faction of Henry VIII’s court was in the ascendancy. They had secured Catherine Howard as queen, passed the six articles (which reverted the church to Catholic doctrine on several key points), and most importantly they had got Thomas Cromwell executed. Two years later, Howard herself was dead and the conservatives were mostly dead or in disgrace. Their win was short-lived.

Revolutions that seem total can be remarkably flimsy once time is applied, and if you can kill Thomas Cromwell and not get your doctrine to stick, maybe there was never any hope for the New Progressives (Bowles’ name for this political sect, and a useful one)/Woke (ick)/Successor Ideologues (does anyone remember this one)/whatever you want to call them. I risk sounding complacent if I declare the end of the whole mad experiment that peaked between 2020 and 2022 — this peculiar belief system is still deeply embedded in certain channels of health, education and politics. But it is no longer taboo to question it, and in fact the absurdity of it all is extremely well established.

I suspect that NP/W/SI/whatever is going to survive much longer among its enemies than it will with its adherents: well after people have given up posting memes about how actually slime moulds have 500 genders so human penises don’t mean anything and ritually self-flagelating for their whitecishet privilege, there are going to be standups lazily soaking up clapter by saying “woah, the woke mob won’t like that will they.” But these will be the equivalent of the Japanese soldiers who didn’t know the Allies had won.³ The big fight has moved somewhere else. Where though? I’m still thinking about this.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• I wish I could have fitted this detail about Emma Dent Coad into my Times column on the madness of the 2017 Labour intake: “She has also raised eyebrows on more trivial matters, drawing criticism following her 2017 assertion that Prince Harry could not actually fly helicopters and instead ‘just sits there going vroom vroom’.”

• The Cluster F Theory continues to be extraordinary. This episode with Richard Bacon about a near-death experience has stuck with me since I listened to it:

  16. Mortality - Richard Bacon

• This article is way long and has an almost impressive lack of original reporting given the number of words involved, but there is something about its description of fast-fashion retailer Shein that has lodged in my head like as itch: a company that makes pictures of products to sell a physical simulacra of said product to women who wear these items in pictures and then throw them away. All Shein needs to do now is rationalise away the actual garments and send you, idk, an NFT of a sideboob baring top.

1. This newsletter is overdue a bonus edition about “Stan”.

2. Which gave the world this incredible meme:

3. This is not a great metaphor because the lost soldiers I really want would need to be on the winning side, but it will have to do.