Tox Report 71. Just splendidly yourself

Brats, camera, moral disintegration

Hello! Yes it has been a while, hasn’t it? I got busy and then I got ill and then I got busy again and now here we are in December, staring down the end of the year. A few weekends ago I was in Aldeburgh for the documentary festival, where I was part of a panel about a brilliant film called The Contestant. It was a full-on three days surrounded by the most interesting people while eating the best food in a beautiful town with a remarkable cinema, and I plan to be back next year whether they need me or not. More on that in the watched section below. From there, I headed up to Manchester to see Charli XCX (which I’ve written about in listened), and all the time on trains meant I was also able to polish off a twentieth century classic I wish I’d got round to decades ago (read).

I’ve done a lot of writing since I last posted, and it would be quite annoying to include everything here, so I’ll just point you towards three pieces I think are particularly worth reading:

• A feature about the Boybands Forever documentary (now on iPlayer), which involved me talking to four of the boys (now men) interviewed in the programme, and making the brilliant discovery that Duncan from Blue loves Kenny Everett. (There’s an issue of Tox Report about Liam Payne that I started and then didn’t have time to finish, so you may get that in the next few weeks.)

• A column on the problems with the assisted dying bill (written before it passed first reading, but still relevant).

• And an essay for UnHerd about the sad evolution of the American late-night hosts like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who went from scourges of over-emotive misinformation from the right to intellectually dishonest practitioners of the same for the left.

See you next week, assuming I don’t get either busy and/or ill again before then! And if you can’t wait that long for more of me, you can listen to me on Andrew Hankinson’s Logroll podcast. There is a lot in this about my knitting mag hinterland, which may or may not be interesting depending on how you feel about knitting and/or epic grifters.

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Listened

Charli XCX (Manchester Co-op Live)

Credit: Henry Redcliffe (Instagram)

What a party. It has undeniably been Charli’s year, and this was her celebration: just her and 23,500 of her closest fans bawling out every single word with her. I’ve never seen one person dominate an arena so completely. That’s because Charli is a fiercely charismatic performer, but it’s also down to a presentation that was both stripped back and incredibly smart. Big arena shows demand big screens and — usually — big spectacle. Think the Eras tour and its massive cast of dancers, multiple costume changes and last-days-of-Rome maximalist sets (including, and I still find this astonishing even though I saw it with my own eyes, a full on-stage log cabin in a forest idyll for Folklore/Evermore).

Tox Report 55. In my Eras era

Charli’s genius for the Brat tour is to treat the screens as the spectacle. The two massive vertical screens either side of the stage weren’t a supplement for people in the cheap seats: they were the show, and this is the first time I’ve seen a performer use an arena this way. Charli’s camera operator was onstage with her, not trying to stay out of view but fully visible as her co-creator of the event. For at least half the show, she was singing to the lens rather than “directly” to the audience — which meant she was singing directly to us as we saw her on the screens. Pop’s greatest camgirl gets it. The real you is the image.

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Watched

The Contestant (limited release)

In 1998, the Japanese magazine show Denpa Shōnen — already famous for its absurdistly sadistic stunts — launched its greatest creation slash abomination: “A Life in Prizes”. For 15 months, the show forced a contestant named Nasubi to live alone and naked in a bare studio apartment with nothing but a pile of magazines, some postcards and a video camera. His challenge was to live entirely on winnings from competitions.

This had been a huge international story at the time, and I remembered it vaguely as one of those “oh Japan, so bizarre” things, filed away in my head with playing Bishi Bashi Special and watching Takashi Miike films.¹ What I hadn’t remembered — or rather had never known — was the extremity of the cruelty involved in the production. Nasubi (it’s a nickname that translates as “aubergine”, and harks back to a childhood of being bullied for his long face) was never told the terms of the challenge before he entered. He was systematically deprived of human contact for the duration.

After he “won” the competition in Japan by passing 1 million yen in prize value, the producer — reluctant to lose such a ratings success — blindfolding him and moved him to South Korea to do it all again. When he passed the original milestone set for him there (the price of an economy ticket home), the show upped the ante without telling him (to the price of a first-class ticket home). When he reached that, he was transferred to the studio in Japan and placed in a mock version of his apartment. He assumed another stage of his ordeal was beginning. In a way it was: the walls fell away revealing him (naked of course) to the live audience.

Being exposed on a stage to a cheering crowd was the first time he had been among people for over a year; he had had no idea his experiences were being broadcast all along (there was also a live webcast, such was the demand to see Nasubi). The funny thing is that the audience loved him. He had been treated so cruelly for their entertainment, and they adored him for taking it all. In the footage of the final reveal, you can practically see his soul break as he blinks in the studio lights.

The producer who orchestrated all this describes himself in the documentary as “the devil” and it is hard to disagree. Everything for him revolved around an obsession with capturing the ultimate TV moment. There’s a bit of this impulse in all producers. Not always so sociopathically: but the job of a producer is to want what audience wants, sometimes in a way the audience can’t understand or won’t admit to itself yet.

“A Life in Prizes” seemed distinctly Japanese — the product of a high compliance culture with a baffling delight in suffering. But it was the future of entertainment. Worldwide, the next decade of TV and beyond would be dominated by reality, and if nothing on Western TV matched Denpa Shōnen for open cruelty and manipulation, it’s worth reading Emily Nussbaum on Love is Blind: shows have simply got more skilled at keeping their manipulations off the screen.

Do you enjoy intense close readings of pop culture? Then you will love my book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties, which tells the stories of nine women who navigated celebrity in the 2000s: Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Aaliyah, Janet, Amy, Kim, Chyna, Jen.

Read

John Updike, Rabbit, Run

I’m not sure when exactly I realised that Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, hero of this novel, isn’t actually a hero. A former high school basketball star, Harry is 26 years old when the novel begins, oppressed at home by his drunk (and pregnant) wife and oppressed at work by his job in a department store, demonstrating consumer goods to housewives. So Harry does what the title says: he runs, leaving behind his wife (and the son they already share) and embarking on a two-month affair with a prostitute.

At which point I thought: is John Updike really asking me to like this guy? And of course, you’re not — or at least, you can like him, but you aren’t being invited to approve of him. Written in 1959 and published in 1960, Rabbit, Run is a “what if?” novel: what if a man took seriously what the Beat writers were saying at that time, refused his responsibilities and dropped out of society? Even so, Updike’s extraordinary sense of space and movement make Rabbit’s flight thrilling, however terrible his actions are.

The results, though, are catastrophic. Updike (a small-C conservative after my own heart) is unsparing about the trail of wreckage Rabbit leaves behind him. But Updike (a consensus-questioning liberal also after my own heart) is equally conscious of how suffocating the post-war world around Rabbit is. If Charli dancing to her camera is the absolute in consumer-culture individualism, and Nasubi in his flat performing to his camera is the invention of that type, Rabbit is its beginning: the man who just wants to be splendidly himself.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• Jesse Singal (no byline because it’s the Economist, but it’s Jesse) on a lawsuit against one of the US’s leading exponents of transition for minors: blockers at 12, testosterone at 12, double mastectomy at 14, all on the basis of what was, generously, a cursory assessment.

• “You think, ‘Would a guy in there have raped Gisèle? Or men in the boulangerie or those on the street?’ Women are looking at men differently: they’re asking, ‘Could you or you or you?’” Janice Turner reports from the Pelicot rape trial (the Times).

• “Speculation is not the function of journalism. It is what an anxious brain does, worrying about all the ways things could go wrong, sending the worrier into a panicked and angry state—the same state of mind, I would add, that consumes Fox News viewers.” Noah Hawley is a storytelling genius (see his work on Fargo), so I’m minded to listen when he points out that making things up in liberal American journalism is out of control (the Atlantic). Too late for his country, but maybe we can learn something as the prospect of reporting on Farage and Reform gets urgent here.

• “The Innies and our Digital selves have no ownership over their real counterparts’ bodies. They have no say. They are entirely at the mercy of their Outie or Real Self.” I’m very excited about the return of Severance so this week, I’ve been rewatching season one in preparation, and reading this brilliant essay by Gia about the similarity between “severed selves” and online existence.

  Apple TV+'s Severance as an analogy for 21st Century Digital Identities

• “And in publicly airing his views on that demographic, perhaps Gregg Wallace has done us a favour. He’s pointed the way to a (re)definition of ‘a woman of a certain age’ which is not about her sexlessness or, conversely, sexiness, but rather her lack of respect for the rules men have historically expected women to play by.” Deb Cameron at Language: A Feminist Guide on the Masterpest. Bonus content: Hugo Rifkind does Wallace in his “My Week” column, and it’s very, very funny.

1. I got my dad to tape Visitor Q off TV for me in 2003 (I think) while I went to the pub. When I got back, I remember him furrowing his brow and saying something like: “I’m not sure about that film of yours darling.” Then I watched it and I felt very bad about involving my dad in all that. Read the Wikipedia if you have to because I’m definitely not explaining it here.