Tox Report 53. Making yourself up
Eminem, Westworld and Sofie Hagen
A short, sharp Tox Report today because I was travelling all weekend. Enjoy!
Listened
Eminem, “Houdini”
I am not sure there’s ever going to come a day when I can listen to “My Name Is”, or “The Real Slim Shady”, or “Without Me” without completely corpsing. At any rate, I tested them as close as possible to destruction over the last couple of weeks and didn’t get anywhere close to exhausting the shock and hilarity in them. When he’s at his best, Eminem is pretty much untouchable — moving at high velocity from offence to offence without ever getting pinned to a position. There’s always a perfectly executed get-out, which is that the ultimate joke is against himself in character as Slim Shady, and he delivers the punchline irresistibly.
New single “Houdini” riffs hard on Eminem’s double life as Slim. It’s the lead track for what seems to be a concept album about killing off his alter-ego, and if the sample is a bit obvious and the goading about cancellation a bit tired (it’s over, let go, nobody listens to Jezebel), you can’t fault the energy. A few weeks ago I threatened an essay about “Stan”, which is probably the greatest moment in pop history of a star confronting their own stardom: thanks to “Houdini”, I wrote it for UnHerd.
Watched
Westworld season 1 (Sky/Prime)
I spent the first three episodes of this (which I’ve been watching because the husband and wife showrunner team who made it, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, also made the great, great Fallout) wondering how it was going to hold its conceit together. One of the benefits of a movie is that you can keep things shifting along fast enough to avoid awkward questions. Why would you make lifelike robots capable of killing and not include a master failsafe? Why doesn’t anybody audit this ridiculous theme park? No time to stop and think about that, because here come Yul Brynner to murder you.
The TV show, on the other hand, luxuriates in this kind of conceptual stuff. And once the first season locks its rules in, it’s suddenly away, pulling off incredibly audacious storytelling across multiple timelines — there are two particular twists that made me fully gasp, both delivered with beautiful understatement. I started the second season and suspect that I won’t see it through: this is a show that played its cards perfectly in the first hand, and I don’t know if I want any more from it than it’s already given.
The first series was broadcast in 2016, and contemporary criticism is very Trump-inflected: reception at the time was very much focused on this as a portrayal of the subaltern, the effects of trauma, the depersonalising consequences of depersonning the other. And so on. That’s in there, for sure, but with more distance it’s not what I would read as the dominant theme. Westworld is explicitly a story about storytelling — a longstanding obsession for Nolan, as you’ll know if you’ve seen Memento, which is based on his short story and written and directed by his brother Christopher.
In Westworld, every decision the screenwriters make is filtered through a decision made by the in-game narrative designers: you literally see characters’ motivation being devised and installed, their inciting incidents fabricated before your eyes. It becomes eerie because it still works: you care about the lost daughter, even though you know it’s a put-up job. Which is fundamentally how fiction works. As the audience, you agree to have your emotions scammed.
Read
Sofie Hagen, Will I Ever Have Sex Again? (Bonnier)
I guess narrativising and self-mythology is the theme of this newsletter: certainly, there’s plenty of both in this book. I am — as may have long become apparent — a sceptic about the literature of self-revelation, in which people seem less to show themselves than to shape themselves to suit the constraints of the story they need to tell. In 2019, Sofie Hagen published a book called Happy Fat in which she promised readers they could be fat and sexy, healthy and happy. Five years later, we learn that she was not after all sexy, healthy and happy, but instead in the midst of a sexless long-term affair with an older comedian that is both heartbreakingly grim and far from the grimmest episode recounted in Will I Ever Have Sex Again? (Also, she’s no longer a she but a they.)
A generous read is that she’s acquired self-knowledge in the interval. A less generous, but possibly fairer, read is that the first book was glib and so is this one. They were never about reckoning with the truth of her situation: they were always about self-commodification. What galls most is that these books are sold as benefit-led — if you read them, you will supposedly learn something applicable to your own situation. Not exactly self-help, but something adjacent. But if you thought you were getting something from the first book, you were being conned because Hagen was not giving an honest account of herself. A writer like Hagen has to be a revisionist: otherwise you run out of things to write. All very depressing. Full review in the Times.
Gimme, gimme more…
I also reviewed a bracing collection of essays about the feminist fightback against gender identitarianism in Scotland. It’s good to be reminded that the women’s movement has always been a DIY operation: yes, that means it can be diffuse and prone to personality-based flameouts, but it’s also a sign of incredible resourcefulness and tenacity.
Speaking of revising your past: this sounds interesting. At 17, Jill Clement became the lover of her 47-year-old art teacher — and later his husband. She wrote a memoir about their love story in 1996. Now she’s written another memoir, with a very different version of what their relationship was.
I had no idea how deeply Michael Mosley had shaped science broadcasting as a producer before he went in front of the camera; less surprising is how fondly regarded and widely respected he was.
The European elections and the prospect of Farage MP have combined to make me feel very depressed. Here’s hoping I haven’t spent the last days of liberal democracy close reading Eminem!
I watched Inside Llewyn Davis this week, and was not prepared for a scene of three men I fancy performing an excruciating novelty folk song! (Also: is this the Coens’ saddest movie? Counter-arguments will be considered, but this sets a high bar.)
The first series of Westworld is brilliant. The second still fun but not quite so interesting. The third disappeared entirely up its own fundament and was unwatchably bad.
An excellent review of Women who wouldn’t wheesht! Whilst I’ve yet to read the book, I followed some of the main protagonists at the time on twitter, so am well acquainted with the struggle. On my list to buy! And, re Michael Moseley; I always admired his broadcasting style, so was delighted to bump into him briefly, when he travelled to Glasgow a couple of years ago, to film our little boot camp class, for his tv series. He said all the right things about being impressed with our group, and he returned last year to film again, though unfortunately I couldn’t make that one!