Tox Report 52. Traumaculture
Combat kitsch, silent violence, gentrified madness
Loaded is back! Kinda, sorta — the brand has been unrolled over a relaunched website, with much fuss about whether this was the “return of lad culture”. And I was happy to be a part of that fuss, having been both a fan of early Loaded (a genuinely great magazine that identified an untapped market and defined a cultural moment) and a participant in the death throes of the lad mag (fun fact, I was the person to tweet about Zoo magazine’s hateful “cut her face” advice column).1 You can listen to me talking about it on Woman’s Hour from last week.
Listened
Paul Hardcastle, “19”
My husband insists on playing Greatest Hits Radio in the car. I don’t know why, because he only seems to enjoy it when they play Queen, and if you like Queen that much, why not just play a Queen CD? Anyway: we were driving home and this came on as part of a 1985 chart countdown. I find this song’s existence incredibly weird — a hit song in response to a war that happened ten years earlier, by an artist from a country completely uninvolved in said war.
Not weird, maybe. Maybe just a measure of how cultural Vietnam was: by the time of “19”, Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Rambo and Taxi Driver had all been released, and that’s just a tiny portion of the Vietnam filmography. The cut-and-paste of Hardcastle’s sampling sounds appropriately jagged given the violent theme, but the soulfully-sung bridge, especially, is kitschy and sentimental. It’s a novelty song about PTSD, and I don’t really know how to feel about such a thing.2
Watched
No Country for Old Men (limited release)
There are so many Vietnam films that the Coen’s No Country doesn’t even make the Wikipedia list. It is one, though: protagonist Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a ’Nam vet, which explains both his remarkable sharpshooting and his ability to move unflinching through the carnage caused by Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh.
“You think this boy Moss has got any notion of the sorts of sons of bitches that’re huntin’ him?” asks the deputy tasked with investigating the bloodshed. “He’s seen the same things I’ve seen, and it’s certainly made an impression on me,” replies Tommy Lee Jones as the laconic sheriff. No Country’s dialogue sticks, I realised on this second watch (I first saw it in 2007 on release, and it was back in cinemas for a limited Coens season), because there’s so little of it.3 Large chunks of its run time are basically silent, which adds to the tension and loneliness of a film driven by the implacable violence of one man.
Chigurh, with his Lego hair and his inhuman “code” that makes every threat a solemn promise and his terrifying bolt gun, is one of the great villains, as disturbing for his perversion of social convention as he is for his violence. When Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) defies his offer to bet her life on a coin toss near the end, she becomes the only character to resist his exploitation of other people’s manners. Not, of course, that it saves her. I think you can probably sort Coens movies quite cleanly into the ones that offer salvation and the ones that offer none, and there is none here.
Read
Baek Sehee, I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki (Bloomsbury)
I reviewed this for the Times and came out unconvinced as ever by the mental health memoir as a thing. There’s something of the monkey’s paw about this genre: yes, you can achieve success, but the price of that success is to be forever identified with your condition. Your ongoing productivity depends on your ability to relapse in sync with the publishing cycle. That doesn’t make the authors of these books “inauthentic” or “fake”, exactly; but it does mean there’s a pressure against recover that’s liable to flair up every two years. (If you run out of things to write about, you’ll really have a reason to be depressed.)
They’re also guilty of what Freddie de Boer called “the gentrification of disabilty” — mental health, yes, but not the kind that makes you act in viciously antisocial ways. Not the kind that makes you a danger to other people. And these respectable avatars for madness displace the actually mad, degrading compassion4 for those who do truly terrible things while the balance of their mind is disturbed. Here’s one such story, unlikely to be coming to an Urban Outfitters book table any time soon.
Gimme, gimme more…
Hugo Rifkind explains the strange world of the Scottish upper classes — a ruling elite with nothing left to rule: “‘Have you any idea how fucked up this would be,’ said one female friend eventually, ‘if you weren’t posh?’” (This has made me excited for Hugo’s novel, Rabbits.)
Via
: is Love Is Blind a toxic workplace? The answer to this question depends on whether you consider the manipulation of fundamental human emotions for televisual purposes to be “toxic”, but I am pretty sure it’s a slam-dunk “yes” for non-sociopaths.I watched Tell Them You Love Me this week — the documentary about a female academic convicted of sexually abusing a non-verbal disabled man who she claimed to be conversing with via the “highly contested” (read: utterly spurious) technique of “facilitated communication”. Even without some of the details in the reporting of the case, this is an incredibly disturbing portrait of human self-delusion.
Wow Morgan Spurlock’s obits are a bleak read. Alcoholism, success built on probable dishonesty never to be replicated, a career-killing #MeToo confession, then dying of cancer. But I’d forgotten he directed the great One Direction movie This Is Us — a film that I suspect inaugurated the now-ubiquitous contemporary star trauma vehicle. I wrote about it for the New Statesman in 2013.
Yes, I was a canceller before I was a cancellee. And I don’t regret it one tiny bit.
Here’s an interesting fact I can’t find an exact source for: after playing this, DJ Kate Thornton (for Greatest Hits Radio is where media personalities of the nineties rest their weary bones) claimed that “19” gave its name to Simon Fuller’s management company — Hardcastle was one of his first signings, before he nabbed the Spice Girls, S Club 7 and Amy Winehouse.
Afterwards, I read and enjoyed this conversation between Cormac McCarthy (author of the novel) and the Coens:
C.M. But Miller’s Crossing is in that category. I don’t want to embarrass you, but that’s just a very, very fine movie.
J.C. Eh, it’s just a damn rip-off.
C.M. No, I didn’t say it wasn’t a rip-off. I understand it’s a rip-off. I’m just saying it’s good. [Everybody laughs.]
I went back and forth on “compassion” vs “sympathy” here, but I think compassion is the one.
"This article was amended on 29 May 2024. An earlier version described Spurlock’s moustache as “handlebar”. It has also been described as “horseshoe”. Spurlock himself used the term “handlebar” in a 2012 piece for the Guardian. For the avoidance of dispute the word “handlebar” has been removed."
Some people have way too much time on their hands.
TLJ in No Country gives a master class in acting, IMHO. And, re 19, I didn’t like it when it came out, but the words hit home, especially when I worked out that my own father had been 19 when he was called up in 1941. Nothing changes.