Tox Report 77. Horror stories
Red carpet coercion, Nosferatu, hotties for Trump
Hello Tox Nation, and thank you so much to everyone who left a comment or sent a message after last week’s newsletter. It meant a lot, and it’s been comforting to read about other people’s beloved pets while I’ve been missing Jessie so much.
I’ve got a busy week so it’s a short one today…
Listened
Charli XCX, “Von Dutch” (live at the Grammys)
As I think I’ve mentioned once or twice, I really like Brat, so it was good to see this song win at the Grammys, and made up for the extreme tediousness of Beyoncé winning album of the year for the forgettable at best Cowboy Carter (or, more realistically, winning album of the year as a belated apology from the Recording Academy for not awarding it to Lemonade). But the big story of the Grammys isn’t Charli or Bey. It’s this, or rather what happened shortly after this:
Kanye West arrived on the red carpet with his wife Bianca Censori. Then, in front of the cameras and apparently at his command, she peeled off the fur coat to reveal that she was wearing nothing but a torso-size American tan body stocking, meaning she was effectively bare. This is about part one million in the saga of “Kanye publicly displaying his naked wife”, and in this case it ended with them both being booted out of the show.
But it won’t be the last time Censori is used this way by West, who clearly sees his wife as an object to be shaped and controlled — exactly as he saw Kim Kardashian when they were together. (Censori is more amenable material for him because, unlike Kim, she has no status, no accomplishments and no capital of her own.) In lieu of mind reading or a confession, it’s impossible to know whether his primary satisfaction in this is the attention it wins him, or the power such humilation gives him over the woman in question.
It also doesn’t really matter which it is. The thing I’m more eaten up about is where the audience fits into this perversity: an exhibitionist needs an audience, and every open-mouthed social media post or news story is giving him exactly that — often with barely concealed salivating over Censori’s body and the authority Kanye wields over it. Yet not paying attention means effectively leaving Censori to what appears to be plain coercive control. It is a grisly, impossible situation where witness becomes complicity.
Watched
Nosferatu (general release)
Robert Eggers’ debut feature The Witch is a stone-cold classic in my opinion, and follow-up The Lighthouse is even better. The Northman I was a bit less in love with — for whatever reason, it felt as though it lost its conviction in its own world before the end. And an Eggers’ movie is, above all, about bringing the audience fully into the cracked reality of the characters.
To that end, Nosferatu is a triumph of mythology layered on mythology (it’s neither a remake of the original Nosferatu or an adaptation of Dracula, but something in between), set in a university where good and evil are not vague abstractions but elemental forces. When Sam Taylor-Wood’s normie middle class capitalist protests that all this demonic stuff is beyond him by saying “I’m a ship man!”, you know that he’s doomed: there is no hope here for those who refuse to countenance the invisible world, and not much for anyone else either.
It’s a horror film, so inevitably it’s only up for technical Oscars. It deserves to win them all, and then some. In particular, it’s a travesty that Lily-Rose Depp didn’t get a nomination — and look, I as much as anyone would have loved to damn her as a nepo baby but she delivers a ferociously physical performance that is up there with The Exorcist is terms of “actresses scaring the shit out of you”.
Read
Brock Colyer, “The Cruel Kids’ Table”, New York Magazine
The vibe shift? It looks like this. Brock Colyar spent inauguration night with the beautiful people who turned out for Trump. They’re hot, they’re online and they really don’t like being chided:
“This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity. […] ‘Conservatives used to be uptight, but the left has become the funless, sexless party. Not that the right is the party of sex, necessarily. We have fun,’ says a 31-year-old influencer, Arynne Wexler. ‘What does a conservative even look like anymore?’”
“Even up until the election, many liberals who still thought of themselves as the owners of mainstream culture dismissed this scene as fringe,” adds Colyar, who might well intend this remark as a self-reproach: Colyar has previously written profiles of such very online left figures as Bud Light ruiner Dylan Mulvaney and AOC’s “hot brother”, while not noticably getting to grips with right wingers who might have crossed the beat of New York Magazine’s influencer correspondent. (Colyar has also written a pretty good personal essay about the gratingness of pronoun politics, which suggests some awareness of what’s drawing the cruel kids.1)
But however much the libs deserved to be owned, the politics now in the ascendancy are in many regards exactly as disturbing as Colyar says they are. There is a real Gatsby-era feeling of gilded doom to this feature (or Weimar-era, if you like). The ambitious and attractive are always going to be drawn towards power; perhaps they’re also always going to be fundamentally incapable of understanding that glitz and irony offer little defence against destruction.
Gimme, gimme more…
“I broke the Neil Gaiman story, but I never wanted him cancelled like this,” writes Rachel Johnson in (the Standard, free to read). You have to ask what kind of future career Johnson could envision for someone who is not only a reputation danger to his own intellectual property, but apparently an HR danger on set.
Caution advised on this bizarre puff piece about a man who tortured, murdered and raped a woman and her two daughters but is apparently “happy to be alive” having embraced a transgender identity (Newsweek, free to read). “Had Lee accepted herself earlier, Hawke-Petit and her daughters may still be alive, she said,” writes the journalist, paraphrasing the murderer and endorsing the killer’s self-exculpatory (not to mention insane and offensive) belief that violence against women is a surefire symptom of a female gender identity. For bonus points, you can compare the archived version of the piece and see how many incriminating details the original report left out before some frantic editor reinstated them in response to criticism.
Despite that article, Colyar uses they/them pronouns, but I don’t so I’m not going to.
I feel like 'validating' every theyem by always asking 'where's the rest of you because you used a plural?'