Tox Report 57. Right as well as crashingly insincere
On the nearly assassination, plus return of the Witch Trials and Griffin Dunne
You know what I could do without ever hearing ever again? Trump spokespeople (and I am specifically thinking of future vice president J.D. Vance here) talking about “taking the heat” out of politics. Are they aware that their guy is the “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” guy? The “stop the steal” guy? The guy who has marshaled the birthers and the Qanons and the lamping Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer people to his cause? This is, of course, raw opportunism: the intent is to make the (correct) naming of Trump’s anti-democratic impulses implicated in an act of violence committed by someone who appears to be, at a minimum, ideologically ambivalent.
Trump’s would-be killer was a registered Republican, who had also made a small donation to the Democrats, and was wearing the merch of a firearms YouTube channel. I know America, for whatever reason, cannot accept gun control, but maybe a compromise would be to only allow people with clear political attachments to own military-standard weaponry. At least then you could plausibly say why they killed the people they killed. (And it’s been close to forgotten in the drama about Trump’s near-miss assassination, but one rally attendee was killed and two others seriously injured. This wasn’t just a failed execution, it was also a mass shooting.)
Nor am I interested remotely in sonorous op-eds about how this is a “warning sign” for liberal democracy. If you’re reading in the UK, the warning sign has been lit up so long you’ve probably stopped seeing it: two of our MPs have been murdered in the last eight years by extremists of different stripes. Radicalisation and violence are in the system now, and though I experienced the killing of Jo Cox as a devastating upset of my norms and values, maybe my mistake was to think things had ever been different: in my lifetime, there was a significant terror attack that came very close to killing the Prime Minister and did kill five other people. Democracy is always embattled. The greatest danger is complacency.
Which takes me back to the US. Team Trump is guilty of cynicism, but in its way, team Biden has been too. It’s not wrong to say that this presidential election is an existential choice for America, but it would have been helpful if the Democrats had ever acted like they believed that. Biden should not be the candidate. His age could be overlooked for the first term — mid-70s is old, but he didn’t seem elderly at that point, and had the benefit of continuity with the Obama era. At 81, though, he is old old. You can be old and competent (I interviewed Siân Phillips last year and, at 90, she was wholly unblunted), but that is irrelevant to whether Biden is personally competent: he isn’t, and if his party truly believed this election was as crucial as they say, they wouldn’t be running with him. The tragedy is that, just as with the Republicans doing “take the heat out” lines, they were right as well as crashingly insincere.
Listened
Reflector, “You Can’t Say That”
If you listened to The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling last year, this is an update from the team that made that series. The first episode, in which Helen Lewis gives a guided tour of the last 12 months in the gender wars, is a satisfying listen. The second episode, which involves hosts Megan and Andy offering point-by-point rebuttals to the critiques of Witch Trials guest Natalie Wynn (the YouTuber Contrapoints), is less so. Wynn came on the show and then decried it, and though I appreciate Megan and Andy’s commitment to good faith argumentation, Wynn deserves to be taken far less seriously than this: anyone who claims to have only taken part in a work of journalism because they expected the hosts to be “on their side” is not a significant thinker. In fact, given that the original series was made under the aegis of Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast and Weiss is not exactly coy about her heterodox affiliations, I’m tempted to say that Wynn isn’t even a significant googler.
Watched
After Hours
After I reviewed Griffin Dunne’s memoir (see below), is was always going to be either this or An American Werewolf in London, and it was this. Wikipedia calls it a “dark comedy” but I’m not sure that conveys just how dark: Dunne’s character Paul is a data entry worker who embarks on a quest across bohemian New York to get laid, and ends up dealing with a corpse while a vigilante mob hunts him down led by Catherine O’Hara in an ice cream van. Bits of it have aged very oddly, particularly the casual (and uncomfortably sexy) way that Rosanna Arquette’s character describes being raped, and the unfeeling way in which her death is absorbed by the story. I don’t think anyone in the story does anything harder than a joint, and the film was actually made after Scorsese hit his own rock bottom, but the vibe of the film — frenetic, emotionally numb — is stereotypically coke. But the structure is satisfying and the punishment of Paul so relentless that it eventually becomes very funny; while the moral, which is that any amount of tedious dayjobbery is preferable to people who do things, is evergreen.
Read
Griffin Dunne, The Friday Afternoon Club (Grove Press)
Dunne is fantastic in After Hours (and he needs to be, since he’s on screen almost all the time). He feels like a big deal who’s just about to break out, but the breakout never quite happened — as good as his CV is (and a lot of actors would kill for his career, or at least join the Church of Scientology), it’s nothing to make Tom Hanks feel threatened. Consistently, he made decisions that kept him from becoming a capital-S star. In his memoir The Friday Afternoon Club, Dunne offers this explanation for his persistent underwhelm:
“The truth was that I knew the attention that came with stardom would stir a self-awareness I was ill-equipped to handle, so committing to the next level of success paralyzed me with fear. My personal character was still undercooked, and my ego wasn’t strong enough to handle the scrutiny of fame, yet I was just wise enough to know that if I rushed headlong toward it, I’d soon burst into flames and end up a has-been in rehab.”
This is one of the great Hollywood memoirs, from its dreamy invocation of an LA childhood in the sixties to the devastating veer into true crime when his sister Dominique is murdered. It stands comparison not just with books like Eve’s Hollywood, but also with his Auntie Joan’s The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion was Dunne’s father’s sister-in-law). And it’s fantastically smart about the seductions, dangers and rewards of celebrity. My full review is in the Times.
Gimme, gimme more…
That depressing bit at the top didn’t even mention how sad the football was! We go again and all that, but it would have been nice to go this time.
You can hear me chat to Emma Burnell about Toxic on the House of Comments podcast. One correction: I say Toxic is already out in paperback, but it’s not actually on sale until 25 July. Get your orders in!
New Shalom Auslander! I came to Auslander late, with Mother for Dinner, and cannot wait to read this memoir, reviewed here by Hadley Freeman.
New dawn update: the health minister has made an evidence-based decision and explained it in clear and empathetic terms. I’m simply not equipped for this level of governmental competence.
Ursula Doyle is one of the people who made Toxic happen, and it’s gutting to realise that she was going through such an appalling time while I was working with her.
Thanks to the Girl Who Was Death on Twitter for bringing my attention to this from Great British Getty Images: “A doctored edition of Paris Hilton’s album ‘Paris’ is displayed in London. Several HMV stores have found copies of the heiress’ debut album replaced with sleeves and music by an artist giving the name DM. The ‘guerilla artist’ Banksy has claimed credit. (2006)” (And yes, the clever joke here is that he edited the sleeve to show a revenge porn victim topless. The noughties, everyone!)
The Paris Hilton album parody would have been funny if Banksy had just stuck to the song titles, and found some other visual joke. Sexual humiliation of women by righteous men is as old as time. I wonder if he would regret it now?
I’m going to maintain a politic silence about what I believe Wynn googles significantly