One of the small discomforts of being a Gen Xer is that so many of our childhood TV gods turned out to be bastards or wankers. Some of these men (they are all men) were semi-evident bastards at the time: you can’t throw a stone in Waitrose these days without hitting someone who always thought Jimmy Savile was a creep. In the early 1980s my friend Debbie was at secondary school in Walton on Thames, where the hottest ticket in town was ‘the Walton Hop’, a monthly alcohol-free disco for teens hosted by TV superstar and (later) convicted paedophile Jonathan King. She says all the canny kids avoided him; and anyway, they were too busy fingering each other in the car park to hang around with old men. I was a distinctly non-canny teen, and the story still makes me shiver.

In — and I want to make this extremely clear — an entirely different bucket, we had the childhood gods who, in the glaring light of adulthood, just appear tacky and tarnished. People whose desperation for the spotlight was so glistening and unctuous that, watching them now, you want to scrub them off with Swarfega. Which brings us to Noel Edmonds.

He’s not an evil man, of course; he bears no comparison to Savile or King or Gary Glitter or Stuart Hall or Rolf Harris or Christ on a bike, what was happening in BBC Light Ent in the 1970s? But as the years have gone by, the evidence has grown that Edmonds is just kinda… Brexity. He’s the sort of man who asks for ‘a pint of your finest ale, barkeep!’; the sort of man who is jonesing for a ticket for the VIP enclosure at Cowes; the sort of man who brandishes a helicopter pilot’s licence as a way to get hot chicks. There are worse things in the world, of course. But in terms of the non-criminal survivors of Gen X’s childhood TV, there’s Derek Griffiths on the one hand, and there’s Noel Edmonds on the other. The two genders.

The mildly horrific thing about Edmonds’s roaring success in adult light entertainment during the ‘90s — the pounding, lurching, nausea-inducing nightmare of Mr Blobby, ‘Crinkley Bottom’, gurning pranks and gunge tanks — was that it revealed that so many adult Britons were gurgling twats. Just as you reached your 20s and were ready to take on the world, you were faced with the hard truth that half of your fellow citizens could be captivated for hours by the TV equivalent of a string of bright lights in a cock-and-balls arrangement. And once you know that, how the fuck are you supposed to live a meaningful life?

Perhaps Edmonds’s adult form wasn’t so upsetting for Tiswas kids; perhaps they didn’t feel so personally implicated. Because that was how it was when we were little: you were a Tiswas kid, or you were a Multicoloured Swap Shop kid. Tiswas pre-dated Swap Shop by a couple of years — it was first broadcast in 1974, while Swap Shop didn’t appear until 1976 — but at first it wasn’t available nationwide because of ITV’s regional structure. Noting its popularity and its innovative format — an hours-long Saturday morning magazine show for kids, not something that had been tried before — Auntie Beeb hurriedly stepped in with a spoiler that it had thrown together from some ordinary household items: a Radio 1 DJ (Edmonds), a sternly sexy catalogue model already known to viewers of Children’s BBC (John Craven), and an out-of-work 19-year-old Liverpudlian actor (Keith Chegwin). (Maggie Philbin was added a couple of years later, when someone in the production office remembered that women exist.)

From the toes of my wide-fitting school shoes to the roots of my frizzy long hair, I was a Swap Shop kid. During its interminable mini-documentaries focusing on stuff I absolutely didn’t care about (horses, sports, large infrastructure projects) I would flick over to Tiswas, but this served only to confirm that it was a feral landscape of bullies and scoundrels. There was so much yelling on Tiswas, so much genuine chaos, so much behaviour that would have seen my mother giving us a hard stare and an early bedtime. Children need to know that somebody is in charge, and on Tiswas, nobody was. I loathed it then and, honestly, watching the clips now, I loathe it still.

Swap Shop, in contrast, was immensely wholesome, and that was the way I liked it. It was based around the quintessentially Biddy Baxter concept of swapping unwanted possessions. The swapping was the brainchild of producer Rosemary Gill, who had (of course) previously worked on Blue Peter, and it was so BBC-coded that when you stop to think about it an orchestra appears behind you and starts playing Sailing By.

It was also a magnificent rejoinder to the commercial breaks that interrupted Tiswas. Swap Shop could never have been shown on ITV, because the advertisers wouldn’t have stood for it; the list of swaps offered up by the nation’s children functioned as a giant focus group revealing the consumer items that kids didn’t bloody want. Board games featured heavily.

The specificity of the swaps made them entirely irrelevant to most viewers (‘Mark Goodwill offers a 6ft wigwam, and wants a football game’); but for me, a child for whom stationery loomed very large, the real lure was the sight of Noel noting down swaps on an orange notepad using a chunky coloured ballpoint. I wanted that orange pad badly. Even more than that, I yearned for a job — a real-life occupation, not a game of make-believe — that required me to urgently jot things down on an orange pad while holding a trimfone to my ear. Adult life has not yet came good in this respect, but there’s still time.

I didn’t know the word ‘curation’ when I watched Swap Shop, but looking back now it is an incredibly clear example of the care and thoughtfulness with which the BBC approached children’s programming. John Craven and his news bulletins were included throughout, for additional roughage. The filmed mini-documentaries about horses and bridges, much as they bored me rigid, were full of information for kids who were that way inclined. At one point Barry Took popped up and sang ‘Sh-Boom (Life Could Be A Dream)’ very badly, accompanied by a pianist, and if you have to ask ‘Why?’ you don’t understand the BBC at all. Keith Chegwin’s ‘Swaporamas’ were BBC outside broadcasts at their finest, safely wrangling thousands of kids carrying pristine copies of Connect Four and swinging old scooters above their heads; imagine the risk assessment.

To quote the writer of a blog about growing up in this era, Swap Shop was ‘like a three-hour child safeguarding exercise’. But if we’ve learned nothing else in the intervening 50 years, we’ve learned that child safeguarding is a critical part of a civilised society. And this is where Edmonds, for all his Brexity wankerishness, came into his own, because this was a man who could be trusted to sodding well behave himself around kids. He played pranks — this is Edmonds, after all — but only ever on other adults; unlike Tiswas, Swap Shop had no studio audience of willing stooges who were desperate to please. In hundreds of phone-ins (another Swap Shop innovation) with vulnerable little humans, he was reliably good humoured and quick-thinking, and yet never patronising or dishonest. He wasn’t trying to be anyone’s friend, and he wasn’t engaging in a charisma competition with kids either; he was man enough to know that that was beneath him. If a kid said something dumb, as kids tend to do, he neither bullied them nor pretended that it hadn’t happened. He just named it, dealt with it and moved on. He was a safe, well-boundaried adult. He was exactly the person you want fronting a programme like this; an experienced presenter who could enliven scripts with tiny drops of piss-taking and subversion without ever kicking over the safety barriers.

My oddest Swap Shop memory, and the one I’ll probably remember until I’m gaga in a nursing home, involves Edmonds’s ‘pyjama patrol’. This was a regular part of Swap Shop banter: the joke was that Edmonds thought nobody should be turning on the TV in the morning until they’d bloody well got dressed. Every week he’d read out letters or take phone calls in which viewers dobbed in their mums, dads or siblings for watching Swap Shop in their pyjamas or nightdresses.

One morning my brother and I were watching along when Noel read out a letter from Mr Davies in London, who wanted Noel to know that his kids Matthew and Rowan always watched Swap Shop in their nightclothes. We ran yelling to the living room door and called for our dad, who appeared looking alarmed. ‘YOU TOLD NOEL ABOUT OUR PYJAMAS’, we screamed. My dad looked utterly baffled; he said he had done no such thing. At the time, we thought he was playing along with the joke. My dad worked at the BBC in London, and it was perfectly plausible that he had wandered over to the Swap Shop production office and ask them to read out a message on air. But I have returned to this question regularly over the decades, and he has never wavered from his basic position that he doesn’t know what the fuck I am talking about. And my dad is not a good liar; I think he’s telling the truth.

All I can think is that for my brother and I, this new form of programming induced something like a collective hallucination. For the first time we were watching something that was live, that featured our heroes having conversations with us, and that required no intervention from parents. For the first time our TVs were treating us as individuals, interacting directly with us, recognising our wants and needs not as babies and toddlers, but as autonomous individuals. In this sense, Swap Shop ‘saw’ us. Nothing like it had ever happened to us before; perhaps the experience was so powerful that it induced a dreamlike state in which fantasies felt true.

And presiding over it all, like a groovy psychopomp, was Noel Edmonds. Thank God for that: it could have been so much worse.

Subsequent generations of Radio 1 DJs were less avuncular:

Elevator Pitch

On his way home from visiting his father in hospital, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) finds an ear in an abandoned lot. Jeffrey and his neighbour Sandy (Laura Dern) investigate. They discover that the ear belongs to a man called Don Vallens. The drug dealer Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) is holding Don and his son hostage in order to have a hold over Don’s wife, nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Concerned about Vallens and menaced by Booth, Jeffrey takes everything he has found out to Sandy’s father, a police detective. In the end the police raid Booth’s hideout, Jeffrey shoots Booth, Dorothy is reunited with her son and Jeffrey and Sandy end up together.

Told this way, the plot of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet sounds like a conventional Hollywood movie: a pair of spunky young people do what the staid authorities can’t and solve a mystery, bringing the bad guys to justice and setting right the world. This may account for the polarized reception that Blue Velvet had on its initial release, because it is very much not that kind of film.

It may be seen now as one of the greatest films ever made (number 85 on the Sight and Sound list, chart fans) but at the time there were accounts of people walking out and of arguments breaking out in the audience during showings. One man apparently fainted but insisted on seeing the end of the film. This is undoubtedly because Blue Velvet is not a conventional mystery film. It is violent, horrifying and disturbing. But that does not mean that it is instead a conventional horror film. It is sexually violent, morally horrifying and emotionally disturbing. It is a psychological mystery, a social horror.

The film sets out its stall right from the start. It begins with an almost parodic vision of the American suburb: white picket fences, roses, a fire truck with a dalmatian, Bobby Vinton singing ‘Blue Velvet’. Then Jeffrey’s father has a stroke while watering freshly planted grass seeds and is left writhing in the dirt as a baby toddles unconcernedly by and a dog plays with the freely spurting hose. The camera dives into the grass beneath Mr Beaumont and uncovers a world of teeming horror, heaving knots of insects wetly scrambling over each other in the darkness.

This is the kind of thing that gets Lynch called ‘surreal’ which is both ironic and entirely accurate, since he is pursuing the surreal in its purest form: the super real, the real reality, not the one we generally experience. A lot of the time our brains are relying on what they already know to smooth our passage through the world: conceptual short cuts and symbols like white picket fences, roses and robins, schmaltzy pop songs. Lynch insists on seeing these things as they truly are, which is often upsetting.

1986 was also the year Stand By Me was released, another film in which young people discover the truth beyond their suburban world. The bullies and domineering fathers of Stand By Me are scary but ultimately conventional movie villains. Dennis Hopper’s portrayal of Frank Booth, in all its grand guignol sexual turmoil and furious, inarticulate violence, makes his true inner horror real.

Delights

All of which was catnip to a certain kind of young cinema-goer in the late ‘80s of high concept, low brow Hollywood fare like Top Gun (1986) and Highlander (1986). There were, of course, plenty of art house films of the period, like Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986) and Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), but these looked like art house films. They were black and white, unconventionally shot stories of unconventional characters acted by unconventional looking people like Tom Waits or Peter Falk. These were very much the inheritors of the New Hollywood movement of the ‘70s.

Blue Velvet was none of these things. It was shot in the saturated colour of a mid-century Douglas Sirk melodrama, featuring striking, movie star level actors in what at first glance appeared to be a thoroughly conventional story. It felt like an object of the ‘80s, bright and full of ‘60s pop music and yet, at the same time, it tore away those colourful surfaces to reveal the dark truth we all suspected lay beneath. It was not ‘morning again in America’. In the words of Frank Booth, ‘Now it’s dark’. Blue Velvet felt like an art house movie for our generation, an articulation of everything that felt wrong with the morally repressive, economically neo-liberal conservative mainstream.

Moreover, in its odd affect and stilted, parodic dialogue, it became endlessly quotable, another one of those movies that slipped into your idiolect and became a sort of password, instantly recognised lines of dialogue, the quoting of which immediately reassured you that you were probably among the like-minded. Start singing Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’, and if they grabbed a light to shine in your face, then you were probably among friends.

The author entertaining annoying fellow cast members at a wrap party at some point in the early ‘90s

Discomforts

Male friends, most likely.

One of the things that Blue Velvet has in common with some of its New Hollywood predecessors, like Taxi Driver (1976), is that, as a film considering the nature of masculinity in a misogynist patriarchy, it ends up being full of that misogyny itself.

One friend of The Metropolitan pointed out to me that when Dorothy Vallens comes back to her apartment from her singing gig and takes off her dress and wig, she nevertheless keeps her high heels on, something no woman who was trying to make herself comfortable would do. Surely it is merely a coincidence that we are then treated to a sequence of Isabella Rossellini tottering about on her heels in her underwear.

There are, theoretically, story reasons for this. One reason is that she isn’t making herself comfortable but instead preparing for a visit from Frank Booth, one that will turn out to be horrific. The other is that she is being watched by Jeffrey, who is hiding in her closet (sic). The high heels are part of the sexualisation of Jeffrey’s ‘investigation’, which becomes an inquiry into the mystery of himself, as a maturing man.

The film might be forcing us to confront Frank Booth’s misogynist, violent masculinity, but it means that we are not just watching him commit a sexual assault, but we are watching it from a male point of view. While the film does insist that the female characters are just as complex as the men, they are still largely there as symbols within a man’s story.

Can We Show The Kids?

Blue Velvet, in other words, contains ‘opinions of its time’. And also the style of its time. One of the Metropolitan kids has watched it and declared it not as good as Twin Peaks (1990), which is an entirely valid assessment, and I think I can see why. Blue Velvet feels more identifiably an ‘80s film than Twin Peaks is obviously a product of the ‘90s. It feels like it is in much closer conversation with the culture and mores of the period than Twin Peaks, which is more interested in establishing its own, distinct universe.

On the other hand, Blue Velvet is one of those rare things, a Hollywood auteur film. After Lynch directed Dune (1984) for him, producer Dino De Laurentiis gave him complete free rein to make the film the way he wanted, with the single stipulation that it be no more than two hours long.

That single limitation perhaps turned out to be the magic ingredient, as it forced Lynch to remove almost half of his first cut. As a result, the film is both highly focused and more elusive, full of references and symbolism that the audience themselves must work to understand. In other words, a work of art, which requires us to sit forward and engage emotionally, morally and intellectually, rather than a piece of ‘sit back’ entertainment.

Is It Still Worth It?

Here’s an example of that symbolism: when Jeffrey first finds the ear, covered in ants in a patch of waste ground, we zoom into it. Then, after the story is done, we zoom back out, this time from Jeffrey’s ear, as he lies in a garden listening to the robins. Which is to say that the main substance of the movie happens between two ears: inside a head. We are, as the Roy Orbison song has it ‘In Dreams’.

This accounts for its sense of heightened realism, the way innocent settings like apartment building corridors become imbued with a sense of menace, the way that nature becomes disturbed around Frank: thunder rolls, creatures roar, candles gutter. It’s there in one of the greatest edits in film history. As Frank roars his animalistic challenge to the world: “I’ll fuck anything that moves”, he entirely vanishes from the frame, leaving behind an empty room. He escapes from the film, defying the logic of the medium, pre-empting the film’s own next cut to the speeding car. It is the action of a dream in which jumps of place and meaning happen precipitately but never quite break the structure of the experience.

But whose dream is this? Jeffrey Beaumont’s perhaps? This is his adventure, after all. Indeed, his story is weirdly reminiscent of the hero’s journey of Star Wars (1977), in which the similarly naïve but righteous Luke Skywalker sets out to rescue a woman held hostage by a sadistic father figure with a breathing problem. Even more weirdly, George Lucas originally approached Lynch to direct the Star Wars sequel Return of the Jedi (1983), which would have improved the Star Wars franchise immeasurably but undoubtedly have driven Lynch insane, so we’re probably better off without it.

It is no mistake that Frank Booth enters Jeffrey’s life only after Jeffrey’s own father is removed from it, and insists that Dorothy call him ‘Daddy’. Frank Booth appears to be an ‘alpha’ male, but his insistence on terms like ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’ in his sexual assault of Dorothy Vallens reveals him for what he is, an underdeveloped baby, a thing of inchoate urges and appetites, untrammelled by rationality or morals. Blue Velvet is, in part, the story of Jeffrey wrestling with his own masculinity, ultimately rejecting Frank’s childish egotism for an adult engagement with the world.

On the other hand, if we are to take the journey between those two ears literally, then the place we are travelling through is Jeffrey’s hometown of Lumberton itself. This is the dream of a small town, an American Dream. As such, it is both a nightmare, full of greed, selfishness and violence, and also an unattainable fantasy of Norman Rockwell suburbs and happy families.

But it is also the dream of the audience. Hollywood is, after all, the dream factory; the cinema, the dark place where we see jumbled visions of the real world full of symbolism and portent. Blue Velvet is one of those disturbing dreams that stays with us into our waking life, that asks us to re-examine our reality. After all, as Jeffrey and Sandy keep pointing out, ‘it’s a strange world’. Far stranger, even, than Blue Velvet.

And if Lumberton isn’t enough, there’s always Twin Peaks:

When did we stop thinking about cultural output in terms of highbrow, lowbrow and — most delicious of all — middlebrow? In the striving ‘80s and ‘90s, when class in the UK was explicitly understood as malleable, ‘middlebrow’ was king. Between ‘lowbrow’ (Top Gun, Blind Date, Wilbur Smith thrillers) and ‘highbrow’ (Peter Greenaway, GBH, Martin Amis), there were the middlebrow giants: The Crying Game, Inspector Morse, Sebastian Faulks.

I’ve been thinking about ‘middlebrow’ recently because I have fallen into the novels of William Boyd, who towers over the British middlebrow like a genial Colossus. My introduction to Boyd was Gabriel’s Moon, a 2024 novel about an accidental spy in Swinging London. (Espionage thrillers, especially British ones, are deeply middlebrow; period settings are another tell.) The titular Gabriel Dax makes a decent living through travel writing (there’s a vanished biography for you). On a work visit to Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) he stumbles into an exclusive interview with Patrice Lumumba, the real-life first Prime Minister of the Congolese Republic and thorn in the side of the CIA. Lumumba is assassinated days later, and Gabriel suddenly finds that his interview transcript is of interest to MI6. From there, we’re off into a kinetically satisfying slide through ‘60s London bedsits, Spanish bohos and hard, drunk American men with guns.

But instead of immediately getting himself killed, Gabriel proves to be oddly adept. He is clever and funny and self-aware, generous and spontaneous and robust and independent; despite his backstory of deep childhood trauma, his personality is almost epically functional. He has extraordinarily healthy boundaries, and a genuine and open-minded interest in the people around him. There is a lot of bemused self-questioning, as you would expect from someone who is accidentally spying for MI6: ‘What in God’s name have I got myself into?’, ‘What the hell was going on?’ But none of this translates into anything approaching genuine unease. (One of the reasons that Le Carré’s later novels are highbrow rather than middlebrow is that everything about them is deeply queasy.)

If you had to sum up Gabriel’s Moon in one word, that word would be ‘congenial’. Reading a Boyd novel is like spending the day at a sprawling house filled with well-behaved children, nice dogs and comfortable sofas; the food is hearty, everyone is slightly (but not messily) drunk, the conversation never lags, and nobody is judging your shoes. Boyd was born in Accra to a doctor and a teacher; he attended prep school and then Gordonstoun; he went to university at Nice, Glasgow and Oxford (which seems like at least one university too many); he has houses in Chelsea and the Dordogne. From this restlessly cosmopolitan background of considerable privilege, he spins rollicking tales of enormous charm. His protagonists — always posh, always male, always English — surface at various points throughout the twentieth century, in various parts of the globe; they become tangled up in world events; they experience bizarre coincidences; they narrowly escape danger.

At every single point, even when they’re behaving quite badly, you’d be very happy to go for a pint with them. Their personalities are so secure, so open-handed, that their every move feels like a genuine offer of friendship or connection. (In the words of the Soviet prosecutor Ignatov in Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, another totemic middlebrow novel, charm is ‘the final aim of the leisure class’.) The story of Lorraine, Dax’s working class girlfriend, seems to illustrate this conundrum: she mistakes Gabriel’s easy, generous affection for something deeper. When she eventually dumps him, her explanation contains what must be deliberate shades of Pulp’s ‘Common People’, the anthem of the economically insecure and their difficult dealings with the posh: ‘Her hair was considerably shorter… “I needed a job”... There was a flat above the shop, she said.’ Little ‘Easter eggs’ like this, which allow the reader to feel clever for a couple of minutes, are deeply middlebrow.

The middlebrow category still exists, and is still wildly successful; we just don’t tend to call it ‘middlebrow’ any more. The term seems to have undergone a process of pejoration, in which the supposedly unvalorous qualities of the denoted items become a semantic smear on the word itself. Middlebrow is popular, middlebrow is easily accessed, middlebrow disappears after impact; who, these days, reads Captain Corelli’s Mandolin? For the striving, insecure middles, the middlebrow hits of yesteryear are a stain on the bookshelf; if you can emancipate yourself from the cringe, you will find a wonderfully easeful trove of middlebrow on the shelves of charity shops in well-to-do areas.

The cultural flinch that put paid to middlebrow is today apparent in the word ‘trashy’: like trash, having some of the qualities of trash, but somehow — through the magical application of the consumer’s awareness — not actually trash. Middlebrow is, of course, a variety of trash: it’s trash with a middle-class consciousness, trash with less vulgarity; it has a wider vocabulary, better taste in soft furnishings, and cleaner, less upsetting politics. I’m not saying this to be rude; ‘trash’ is not a synonym for ‘shit’. It takes rare qualities to hit the trash sweet spot of entertainment, ease of access, and evanescence (the quality of impermanence, not the 2010s rock band). If I were able to write a wildly popular book, I would of course be doing so right now; the truth is that I can’t. In order to be perceptibly popular, trash must be accessible; it must be the kind of thing you can watch with half an eye, or read with half a brain. Trash is never difficult or obscure; its meaning, to the extent that it has a meaning at all, is entirely obvious. You might want to read or watch it a second time, but you won’t need to. Underlying all of this is the question of the creator’s intent: trash is not created for the purpose of effecting change, either within the artform or in the wider world. It does not aspire to longlasting impact.

In middlebrow novels, the historical settings often work towards political inertia. I have a great fondness for Faulks’s novel Charlotte Gray, but it’s hardly a realistic portrait of SOE’s successes and failures in Occupied Europe. Few people outside the Congolese diaspora now have a very firm idea about who Patrice Lumumba was, and every single person who has agrees that his assassination was a shameful geopolitical crime. There is no tension in Boyd’s disinterment of the case; there is no struggle. As Boyd himself has said: ‘My vision of the world is that it’s absurd and stupid and makes no sense, and attempts to make it make sense are doomed to failure.’

But while the producers of trash don’t explicitly aim for longlasting impact, they can end up achieving it anyway. The political bones of Jilly Cooper, for example, have emerged over time. I have spent decades nursing a prejudice against Cooper’s novels; the covers (a brute combination of proprietary sexuality and horse tack) make me want to punch something, and I couldn’t expunge the awareness that Cooper was a self-confessed admirer of Margaret Thatcher. I was both sentient and politically aligned in the ‘80s, and I had quite enough real-life experience of actually existing Thatcherites in the home counties.

Then, the 2024 Disney Plus dramatisation of Rivals turned into a massive hit, and it became apparent that lots of women — women I like and/or admire, women who are absolutely on the left — really love both the books and the adaptation. It’s significant, I think, that most of these women are at least ten years younger than I am; they weren’t there, or — at least — their tear-stained mother hadn’t pinned a wilting red rose to their school blazer on the morning after the 1987 General Election, around which the second series of Rivals revolves. (This makes my mother sound hysterical. She wasn’t, but she did take the 1987 election very hard.) They didn’t see it happen the first time around, as tragedy; they can consume Cooper happily as farce, and perhaps as a highly coloured piece of dramatised history. In choosing a contemporary setting for her throwaway romps, Cooper perhaps inadvertently authored a political document, a sympathetic and absorbing explanation of the attractions of Thatcherism, one that has real explanatory power. Her villains are rotters and her heroines are gutsy, but they all exist together within the material structures of a social and economic revolution.

Boyd’s most famous novel is Any Human Heart, a cradle-to-grave narrative of the protagonist Logan Mountstuart in the form of an intimate journal. Mountstuart is admirably buoyant and open minded, but the emphasis on privacy and secrets afforded by the diary device enables us to see his selfishness and bitterness, and worse. Any Human Heart is less congenial than Gabriel’s Moon, but there is something radical in the way Boyd marries Mountstuart’s public face of easy, charming privilege to his private shards of bald nastiness. As The Guardian noted in its review, ‘The common factor [in journals is] the aspiration to be honest, to tell the truth.’ Like the radical self-acceptance practised by Boyd’s characters, trash doesn’t care about the pursed-lipped judgements of the intellectually anxious: it just wants to be. And sometimes, in capturing the attention of millions of people and bringing them to one focal point, it cannot help becoming profound.

For more on the various cultural brows, high, low and in between (including some charts, which is very middlebrow):

Your Funeral… My Trial by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: track by track

Sad Waters

You can blame Larry Adler for what you are about to read.

In September 1990 my student friends and I were entering our second year at university, and had just moved into a shared house. Until we got around to renting a TV, the only source of entertainment was the trusted companion of my adolescence, a little Panasonic audio system. Being middle class kids we mostly used this to listen to Radio 4, from ‘Farming Today’ in the morning to ‘Sailing By’ at closedown.

Then, late in September, Radio 4 broadcast, at 11:30 at night, a four part series about Larry Adler, Britain’s most famous harmonica player (go on, name another one). It was a rather too exhaustive accounting of Adler’s career, featuring a lot of mild anecdotes about blowing into a mouth organ. (To be fair he also sometimes inhaled, which produces a different sound.) Even worse was that at the top of each show in this series the listener was treated to the theme tune from Genevieve (1953), Adler’s most famous bit of musical breathing. Genevieve is a superannuated little comedy in which a superannuated little Kenneth More drives a superannuated little car. The theme is inoffensive and undistinguished and we were soon heartily sick of it, releasing an anguished cry whenever we heard the opening wheeze.

Fortunately my Panasonic machine featured, preposterously, a record deck, which slid out from the bottom like something from Thunderbirds. We didn’t have many records with us, being limited to what we could fit in our luggage on the train; but we did have Your Funeral …My Trial. And at the first warning toot of Adler, we would throw the switch and slip gratefully into the cooling embrace of ‘Sad Waters’.

The Carny

My introduction to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds was courtesy of Wim Wender’s 1987 film Wings of Desire, which features a sequence in which trapeze artist Marion sits in her circus caravan and listens to ‘The Carny’. This is incredibly on the nose, of course: a depressed performer who has just been told that the circus is closing for the season listens to a goth song about a circus losing its purpose and drifting away into the darkness.

But if you’re an adolescent who has gone to see a black and white movie about angels haunting Berlin, you’re in the market for precisely this sort of thing. This was especially true in 1987, after the early ‘80s post-punk pop explosion had been replaced by an impenetrable wall of arena-scaled flatulence, ‘60s revivals and ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. [Editor’s note: Tobias originally rendered this as ‘Never Going To Give You Up’, which gives you some insight into his mindset.]

‘The Carny’ was something else: not the conventional platitudes of a chart pop song, or the yelping inanities of a dance record. It’s a weird and twisted little story of death and circuses, half spoken and half sung, with Blixa Bargeld (Bad Seeds band member and also the lead singer of Einstürzende Neubauten) declaiming in the background with an alarming teutonic flatness.

The words are dark and lyrical (‘The whole valley reeking of wet beast/ Wet beast and rotten, sodden hay/ Freak and brute creation/ All packed up and on their way’; later on, Cave even uses the correct collective noun for crows). And musically, it was unlike anything I had ever heard before; Bad Seeds co-founder Mick Harvey had dragged the metal guts of a piano into the studio, re-tuned it, and then plucked it like a monstrous harp. It’s a malevolent broken calliope of a song, lumping along like an unhappy dancing bear, a weird and woozy waltz.

Your Funeral My Trial

Harvey has said that this album was when the band found their sound. The title song is a great example of this, because it wasn’t the first song to have this title; in 1959 Sonny Boy Williamson had released ‘Your Funeral And My Trial’, a reasonably traditional blues track: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo (harmonica again), middle eight, chorus and done.

This one is three verses with a falling tune that ends in a plaintive refrain: ‘Your funeral, my trial’. Rather than a solo there is a repetition of the arrangement, which stumbles like a drunk, teeters over a rattle of drums, plunges, and rises again to soar on the wings of a Hammond organ. It’s a strange and unpredictable shape for a song, both satisfying and challenging. If it is at all influenced by the Sonny Boy Williamson track, it’s a prime example of David Sylvian’s description of Japan’s approach: ‘trying to copy something else and failing miserably’. The Bad Seeds play their own blues and, in doing so, invented a strange new form of music.

Stranger Than Kindness

‘Stranger Than Kindness’, written by Blixa Bargeld and Anita Lane, is an excellent example of this kind of strangeness. It is hard to say what it is. It is dark and soft, the percussion faint and distant, the guitars swelling gently, Cave crooning. But those distant drums thunder, those guitars keep pulsing away, the lyrics are doomy, the whole song has a tone of threat that stops it ever being gentle. If it’s a love song, it’s about a lost one. If it’s a ballad, it’s for a wake. It is the darkness of a gathering thunderstorm, the softness of the fall of dust in empty rooms.

It was also, on my double album copy of the album, at the end of side B, the end of one record. If you started listening at the beginning of that Larry Adler programme it was about midnight by now. What ‘Stranger Than Kindness’ turned out to be was a strange new kind of lullaby, full of ominous dreams and elusive premonitions.

Jack’s Shadow

OK, not an entirely new strange music; but at least drawing on different traditions from the ‘60s rock, soul and pop that still hypnotised mainstream pop. The Bad Seeds released two albums in 1986; alongside Your Funeral… there was also Kicking Against The Pricks, an album of cover versions. What’s noticeable is what they choose to cover. There is a ‘60s rock song, but it’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ by The Velvet Underground (also covered by Japan, of course); there is a Jimi Hendrix track, but it’s ‘Hey Joe’, a ballad with a long history and contested authorship.

Most of the songs are blues and folk and, most significantly, country. Country was not a wildly popular genre in the British alternative scene of the late ‘80s, associated as it was with rednecks, backwoods and Republicans. Cave, however, had grown up in Australia, where he had watched the Johnny Cash show on TV. As he says: ‘At that stage, I had really no idea about rock ‘n’ roll. I watched him and from that point, I saw that music could be an evil thing; a beautiful, evil thing.’ You can hear Cash’s influence throughout Your Funeral …My Trial: the Western imagery in the title song, the quotation from ‘The Green, Green Grass Of Home’ in the lyrics of ‘Sad Waters’, and the dark, sardonic storytelling of ‘Jack’s Shadow’, alongside a chugging, relentless accompaniment.

One of the great pleasures of discovering new music is how it encourages you to discover new music: how you follow the train of influence back, picking up clues from liner notes and interviews and reviews. Just as Tom Waits brought me Captain Beefheart and David Sylvian brought me Can, so Nick Cave introduced me to Johnny Cash. Which is recommendation enough, frankly.

Hard On For Love

We’re being very serious, but it’s worth pointing out that Nick Cave is frequently very funny indeed. ‘Hard On For Love’ is a list of sexual metaphors that degrade from double entendres, to single entendres, to a collection of over-excited yelping noises:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
But he leadeth me like a lamb to the lips
Of the mouth, of the valley, of the shadow of death
I am his rod and his staff
Yeah, I am his scepter and shaft
And she is heaven and hell
At whose gates I ain’t been delivered
I’m gunna give them gates a shove

It is ludicrous, and undoubtedly deliberately so. But in its welter of sex, religion and death it achieves a hysteria that is both manic and amusing.

There’s often a mischievous gleam in Cave’s eye, although it can be hard to figure out how knowing it is. Much of ‘The Carny’ is concerned with the burial of a dead horse named Sorrow. At the end of the song, the rain floods the shallow grave and the body of the horse floats back into view. All of this enables a line in which the circus workers are ‘wishing they’d done a better job of burying Sorrow’. It has all the arduous, objectionable construction work needed for a despicably delightful pun.

But bizarre as the music might be, it is never quite comic. ‘Hard On For Love’ has an ominous, driving pulse to it that undercuts the overwrought lyrics, giving them a fierce vitality that acknowledges that the impish glee of the words is not so far from the wild ecstasy of the act.

At first the comedy might seem incongruous in a goth band, but it’s been there in the genre right from the start. The song that arguably founded the genre, Bauhaus’s ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, was actually — according to singer Pete Murphy — ‘dead funny’. Cave’s previous band, The Birthday Party, had had their biggest hit with ‘Release The Bats’, a parody of a goth song. Goth rockers The Cramps were capable of being simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, and Robert Smith of The Cure is a delightfully amusing man.

She Fell Away

Part of what The Bad Seeds were doing, though, was building a different kind of goth. It was partly the Southern Gothic of Flannery O’Connor and The Doors, and partly a decayed European Gothic of rotting rococo ballrooms and The Brothers Grimm. The lush, rumbling lyricism of ‘She Fell Away’ is dark and ominous, but it’s a world away from the striplit stark angles of Bauhaus and the muffled mournfulness of peak-era Cure.

The Birthday Party was formed while the members were at boarding school together in Australia, and this kind of comfortable background tends to produce a certain arch detachment, no matter how much heroin you take. It makes you think it’s jolly fun to record endless songs about men being violent towards women: your ‘pistol going crazy’, as ‘She Fell Away’ puts it. Later on Cave recorded a whole album titled Murder Ballads, and the trouble with this repetition was that it began to feel less like playing with genre conventions and more like barely sublimated misogyny. It also became a little boring: here comes skeevy old Nick the Ripper again, with his scalpel, blues records and a pocket full of Penny Dreadfuls. It’s something of a relief that he seems to have finally grown out of it.

Long Time Man

It probably says something about me that I still listen to these early Bad Seeds albums regularly. But then I too am a boarding school goth, prone to not taking things seriously enough. These were the records that helped shape who I am as an adult, so they’re hard to let go of.

Cave, meanwhile, has matured. He has endured the deaths of two of his children, and has become a genially gruff gothfather, leading gigs with the embracing fervour of a preacher and dispensing worn wisdom through his blog, the Red Hand Files. But his longevity is also surely due, in part, to the sound The Bad Seeds arrived at on this record: the grotesque C&W-influenced storytelling, the simple refrains of folk made complicated, the emotional heft of orchestral pop curdled and monstrous. Something strange and dark and wondrous.

Thank goodness for Larry Adler.

We’ve covered The Bad Seeds before, and the joy of discovering Tender Prey (the follow up to You Funeral …My Trial) through the gift of a pirate cassette from a friend.

Letterboxd Diary

What has been entering into his Letterboxd account.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025)
★★★1/2

A spin off from a Canadian TV show that was a spin off from a Web series about a pair of idiot would-be pop musicians who will do anything other than actually practise. This appears to be a shambolic and oddball shaggy dog story but, as it unravels, it reveals itself to be an intricately plotted and increasingly lunatic confection. If you find yourself annoyed or bored by the first 20 minutes, consider sticking with it.

For us Brits, there’s something intriguing about Canadian subcultures; they are little glimpses of something that is neither our own culture nor the hegemonic American culture, but a secret, third way. The Canadian comedy album The Great White North had an outsized impact on me as an adolescent; the quietly-off kilter comedy felt like a weirdly parallel and deeply appealing world. I can imagine Nirvanna having a similar effect if I were forty years younger. Especially if paired with Back to the Future (starring the Canadian Michael J. Fox, of course), on which it riffs spectacularly.

House of Mirth (2000)
★★★★1/2

Terence Davies’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, starring Gillian Anderson as a young woman in Edwardian America who is slowly trapped and destroyed by upper-class social mores. A really terrific film in which Davies’s slow, watchful camera perfectly embodies the glacial prison of custom and the slow grinding of fate.

Pickpocket (1959)
★★★★1/2

Bresson’s brilliant portrait of a young man who descends into a life of crime, all the while excusing himself with Nietzschean philosophy. The central business of pickpocketing has been interpreted as many things, including a metaphor for homosexuality, but it struck me also as a dramatisation of more general masculinity. Michel insists on his being a ‘superior man’, who should be exempt from common laws and mores, but who lives off the scraps he steals from other people, not only the things he steals, but also his philosophies, his loves, his life. He himself is empty, desperately trying to fill himself with the things he picks up. It is not until prison forces him back on his own resources that he finally finds a purpose, in someone else. Watched in an age of the ‘manosphere’, it takes on a whole new resonance.

Our Man in Havana (1959)
★★★★

A sort of Ealing comedy version of The Third Man. Alec Guinness plays James Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba, who gets recruited as a spy and starts inventing a network of fictional spies for the extra money they bring in. It’s a little uncertain in tone and lacks the beautiful clarity of purpose of The Third Man, but it’s still a Carol Reed film of a Graham Greene script starring Alec Guinness, and has a lovely, post-War cynicism to it.

Broadcast News (1987)
★★★★

1987 was the year that the FCC in the US abolished the ‘Fairness Doctrine’, which had required broadcasters to cover public interest subjects, and to give air time to opposing points of view on the news. This enabled, among other things, the growth of politically aligned talk radio, and the evolution of news as entertainment. The Doctrine had only been established in 1949, so in total it lasted for less than forty years; you could argue that that period was the anomaly, not everything that’s happened since. The awful evidence is that cruel, salacious and wildly untrue journalism is just very popular with human beings.

The muddling together of news and entertainment is what sets liberal hands a-wringing in Broadcast News, James L. Brooks’s satire of TV news journalism in the ‘80s; but the script also acknowledges that the development was probably inevitable. Even Jane, Holly Hunter’s serious and talented news producer, prefers William Hurt’s dim-but-handsome anchor man to Albert Brooks’s intelligent-but-neurotic reporter. Whatever you might think about the film’s editorialising, it does at least have something to say, and says it splendidly. It was frankly a relief to watch something with a grown up script acted by grown up people. William Hurt was great, wasn’t he?

Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
★★★1/2

Two men living on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland in the 1920s fall out, and begin to battle in increasingly lunatic ways. I tend to find Martin McDonagh’s films a little less than the sum of their parts, but when those parts are Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, you still have something to conjure with. Although I suspect my inveterate Englishness stopped me enjoying it quite as fully as I might, since I, inevitably, hadn’t even heard of the Irish Civil War, which forms the background to and core metaphor for the story.

Damsels in Distress (2011)
★★★1/2

A group of idiosyncratic but well intentioned young women try to help their fellow students at an American university. An odd little film from Whit Stillman, which has the stylised characterisation and dialogue of a Wes Anderson movie and the loopy plot of a Coen Brothers but which has a peculiarly strange flat affect, directed like a made-for-TV movie. This may well have been yet another stylised choice alongside the script and performances, but it felt oddly orthogonal to both, inaptly affectless and not really finding its feet (sic) until the daffy dance sequence at the end. Greta Gerwig is predictably great, though.

Disclosure Day (2026)
★★1/2

Or, close encounters of the fifth kind. A sort of sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in which a band of heroic truth tellers attempt to reveal to the public (through the medium of… a local TV news channel?) that the American government has been secretly experimenting on aliens for seventy years.

The core problem here is the script, which basically intersperses set-piece action scenes with people telling each other the plot. Another problem is that, for a movie about otherworldly powers directed by Steven Spielberg, it is oddly lacking in awe. Even set-ups that had visual potential - a child’s bedroom full of wild animals, a suburban house built in an empty warehouse - were peculiarly prosaic. You can usually rely on Spielberg for exemplary visual storytelling, but even this seems to desert him here. You get the impression that he is so steeped in alien conspiracy lore - and seems to believe a lot of it - that he was unable to perceive that the audience might not share his obsession.

Let’s hope this wasn’t his last film, eh?

Masters of the Universe (2026)
★★

After the evil Skeletor took over Eternia, Prince Adam was hidden away on Earth, where he works in HR in an anonymous corporation while searching for the phallic sword that will enable him to turn into He-Man. I mean, it almost sounds promising, right? An attempt to use an ‘80s toyline to do for masculinity what Barbie (2023) did for feminism. Sadly this isn’t Greta Gerwig and Margo Robbie; it’s just grown actors (and Jared Leto) dressed as plastic toys, reciting ‘amusing’ self-referential dialogue in front of green screen backgrounds.

Maybe playing it straight could have worked, but Masters of the Universe is probably too silly for that. The media franchise only ever existed to sell toys, and the toys were mostly focussed on whichever mad new manufacturing process Mattel was trying out. Thus we had not only mechanical innovations like Man-E-Faces (a figurine with multiple faces on a cog-wheel) and Modulok (customisable, clickable limbs), but also the green-flocked Moss Man and the astonishing Stinkor, whose plastic was impregnated with an unpleasant smell. Obviously, there is material here for a comedy; and a musclebound hero called He-Man definitely lends itself to an inquiry into images of masculinity. But this isn’t what we get, maybe because neither Hollywood economics nor Mattel’s marketing department were up for it.

It’s impossible to tell who this movie is for. There hasn’t been a toy line in ten years or a TV series in twenty, so it can’t be for the kids; but it’s neither intelligent nor stupid enough for the Gen X dads. Maybe people should stop trying to turn toys and games into movie franchises. Unless it’s Micronauts. They can do that one.

Playlist

: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

‘Hello’ - Girl and Girl

Spotify has been playing me a lot of excellent Australian indie rock recently and this is a cracking playlist opener.

‘Projections’ - José Junior

This is a kind of krautrock theme tune to a sixties spy thriller, which is absolutely something I would watch, tbh.

‘Lady Luck’ - Richard Swift

This, on the other hand, is very seventies soul, which is never a bad thing.

‘In Spirit’ - WHY?

I was thinking that this sounded like an acoustic cLOUDEAD and then I discovered that he was in them. Mystery solved.

‘Hasta La Vista’ - Dream Wife

This, on the other hand, has something very ‘80s post-punk about it, which is, inevitably, my favourite genre.

‘Bert & Ernie’ - Erobique & Jacques Palminger

And now something for our deutschsprachig audience. My German isn’t quite up to it, but I’m hoping this is about the Sesame Street residents or, failing that, the taxi driver and cop from It’s A Wonderful Life.

‘Sea of Moscow’ - Pioneerball

The theme tune to an American sitcom that was aired on BBC2 in the ‘70s and which you fondly but vaguely remember.

‘supermassive black hole’ - Bella Band

I can’t figure out whether this child is AI generated or just annoyingly talented but this is, at least, one of those covers that is better than the original.

‘Weather Me’ - BODEGA

This has got a lovely combination of punky verse and big, rousing grunge chorus.

‘Here’s The Thing’ - Sports Team

The Australians don’t have a monopoly on the cracking indie rock, though.

Everything is on a Spotify playlist as (mostly) usual:

For those original Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a happier Spielberg experience, there’s always our series on ‘kids on bikes’ movies:

The Legend

The second episode of the BBC’s ‘90s series Sounds of the Sixties closes with a series of performances that allows us, the jaded grandchildren of the sexual revolution, to understand something important about the impact of the Rolling Stones. It’s not so much about the song they’re performing (‘The Last Time’, 1965) as the fact that have been preceded by the parodically fey ‘You Were Made For Me’ by Freddie and The Dreamers (literally performed on an episode of Blue Peter), and ‘Ferry Cross The Mersey’ by Gerry and the Pacemakers. The milquetoast context makes it startlingly obvious that these young men have not only heard of sex, but have almost certainly had some. What’s more, they fully intend to have more.

The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ is perhaps the most mid-’60s record imaginable. Time magazine’s declaration in April ‘66 that London was ‘Swinging’ was, in itself, a sure sign that the party was drawing to a close, but it wasn’t the only portent. In October ‘65 The Beatles had recorded ‘Nowhere Man’, which echoes ‘Paint It Black’ in its story about a lost and despairing individual. Lennon’s quip in March ‘66 about being ‘more popular than Jesus’ had tarnished their fun facade, and they played their last live concert in August of that year. As ‘Paint It Black’ was released in May, the Moors Murderers were on trial; in July, 31 people were arrested at an anti-Vietnam protest outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. That August in the US, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the Texas University tower, having already murdered his mother and sister, and opened fire on the streets below, killing a further 15.

The Stones were supposed to be the gritty alternative to The Beatles; as such, they were the perfect band for this moment. By 1966 they were starting to find an identity with their first album of wholly self-penned material, the US version of which opens with ‘Paint It Black’, a fraught study of a depressed mind turning destructively inwards. ‘Nowhere Man’ is a story of empathy and possible redemption, but ‘Paint It Black’ offers no such poptimism. Indeed, it directly refutes the ‘Sky of blue / And sea of green’ of ‘Yellow Submarine’ (1966): ‘No more will my green sea / Go turn a deeper blue’. The sun will be blotted out, and the world painted black. The character in the song no longer ‘wants to be your man’; there is always an acrid streak of misogyny in the Stones’ work and here, when the narrator catches sight of some girls, he has to ‘turn my head/until my darkness goes’. Far from not fading away, the flowers and love are never coming back. There isn’t even a chorus, at least not a conventional one. There’s a whiff of patchouli in the sitar curlicues, but ‘Paint It Black’ is more psychotic than psychedelic; it throbs with the beat of a racing heart, dark and thunderous, the narrator only just holding himself back from doing something unspeakable. The decade is taking a turn.

As the situationist Paris ‘68 slogan has it, ‘Sous les pavés, la plage!’; beneath the cobblestones, the beach. A new beginning might be discovered in the ruins of the old, grey order. But the Paris students only knew that there was sand under the streets because they had torn up the cobblestones to hoick them at les flics. The old order could only be reduced to ruins if someone pulled it down. The social revolutions of the ‘60s were driven not just by hope, but by anger; not just by love, but by violence. ‘Paint It Black’ is pregnant with that fury.

The Reality

They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over and as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.

Danny the drug dealer, Withnail & I (1988)

What Danny is trying to suggest here, in his addled state, is that by 1969, nothing significant had changed. By the time Withnail & I came out in the late ‘80s all the hippies had got haircuts, swapped acid for coke, and made a serious bread in advertising and computers. But Danny is wrong (in this as in many other things). There was a social and political revolution in the ‘60s; it just didn’t involve airborne cobblestones and painting everything black. It was more concerned with expanding civil and human rights, and trying to improve people’s living standards. These things were insufficiently exciting for pop stars, of course. ‘Taxman’, the opening track of The Beatles’ album Revolver (1966), is an extended moan about wealth taxes.

It is entirely possible, though, that painting everything black wasn’t a well-worked-through policy position. Rather than anything specific, the song speaks to the inarticulate, inchoate anger and despair of a young man who doesn’t know what he’s rebelling against. (As has often been pointed out, the Black American rhythm and blues music that the Stones loved to rework reads very differently when performed by white British grammar school boys. As a fellow middle class boy with nothing to rebel against except a headteacher, this spoke to my condition.)

These days the Stones are the epitome of the ‘60s sellout. Their brand promise is chugging, swampy rock; their riffs are machine-tooled and mass produced, efficiently churned out on endless world tours, coming to a stadium near you soon. They have a logo. They are middlebrow rock for middle-aged middle managers. On the cover of Dirty Work (1986), twenty years on from ‘Paint It Black’, the band are all in pristine linen suits in vibrant ‘80s slab colours. The work may be dirty, but they are not. The only thing painted black is their hair.

Another album released in 1986 did contain some dirty work: Pussy Galore’s cover of Exile On Main Street. It sounds like it was recorded in a single session, with instruments detuning, stamina flagging and tempers fraying. It is a practically unlistenable mess of furious distortion, and it is a hundred times more grimy, unnerving and underground than the original. But then what else would you expect from angry and upset middle-class kids like Jon Spencer and Julia Cafritz?

Significantly, though, I’m willing to bet that you have never heard it; you’ve quite possibly never heard of Pussy Galore. Their version of Exile On Main Street was released on cassette only in a limited run of 550 copies. The lesson Generation X learned from the failure to paint it black was that it wasn’t worth trying at all.

You know who else was making dark music in the mid-’60s? The Velvet Underground, that’s who. And they never sold out.

This piece was originally read at the Open Book open mic night at the Fiction Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, July ‘25

An article recently made the rounds among my fellow Generation X friends suggesting that Gen Xers might actually be the cool ones. That’s the way the article phrased it—“what if gen xers are actually the cool ones?”—as if it would be a surprise. As if it’s not clear.

The article was written by a Millennial, so it managed to be a TINY bit judgy and condescending, even while complimenting us. For example, the article says of Gen Xers, “they appear frustratingly unaware of the role that privilege played into their cynicism and ability to be disengaged.” But otherwise the article really does say we’re the coolest.

The article was in Vogue, so if you think Gen Xers AREN’T the cool ones, you have to take it up with Anna Wintour, who’s the cultural leader of…the entire world.

Anyway, I’m not here to debate whether it’s TRUE that Gen Xers are the best. I mean it’s probably true, but whatever. I’m here to talk about how it came about: How did Gen X get so great? What is the source of our wonderfulness?

Was it because we were “latchkey kids,” and had to fend for ourselves after school until our dual-income parents got home from work? Because our parents left the key under the mat, and we had to look after ourselves and not wreck the house? Did that independence give us our incredible…panache? Being the most under-parented generation in history and having to make snacks for ourselves probably did contribute to us being total badasses. But I think there’s more to it.

I think the reason Gen X is the coolest, and the greatest, is the music we grew up with. I don’t mean the music was great. I mean the exact opposite. It was perfectly dreadful. 80s music, the music of my generation, was a shitstorm. But it made us great. Let me explain.

If you compare mainstream 80s music to any other decade of Earth’s history, you quickly notice that it’s tinny, boring, and gutless. It has no beauty, grandeur, or meaning. It has bland melodies, childish production values, and bad drumming. There’s been severe musical inequality between the decades, and Gen Xers got the bad end of the stick. Of course there were exceptions, but the mainstream sound of the decade was bloody awful. I’m not gonna give examples, I don’t want to single anyone out—and it’s not necessary.

What’s important is that we Gen X-ers spent our formative music-listening years, when our tastes were forming in our teeny-tiny teen brains, inundated by mediocrity. Think of the generational trauma! Teenagers wandered around aimless, dazed, empty—it was a true “teenage wasteland.” I remember at one middle school party, some crushingly god-awful song was on the turntable or boombox, and I looked around at my friends wondering, “Who are we? What are we doing? Is there nothing better for us?” We tried to smile. But true happiness was impossible!

This condition of musical precarity is terrible for the teenage mind. It causes feelings of emptiness and hopelessness, and makes teens more vulnerable to fear. An adult brain can survive many hours without good music. But a teenage brain without good music will begin to deteriorate and decay within 6 minutes!

Under these conditions, some kids were lost, fated to listen to 80s mix-tapes until the end of time. Others lashed out and became burnouts.

But, in many of us, it induced resilience, resourcefulness, and pragmatism. That’s right—our resourcefulness didn’t come from latchkeys. It came from having to go out and find good music. We learned quickly that to have a happy teen life, we needed better music. So we ventured into the cities, found divey used record stores in places like Greenwich Village, and greedily purchased the music from other decades, from other worlds, from indy labels. Networks formed to disseminate good music among our people. “Classic rock radio” emerged, not simply to preserve so-called “dad rock” from the previous generation, but rather to preserve the sanity of Gen Xers. Gen Xers became searchers and explorers. We became philosophers, as we wondered why the Universe would treat us so poorly, and how such bad music could possibly exist. We became like mythical creatures forever seeking to escape our tinny ridiculous decade.

The horrors of 80s music also toughened us. Some call us cynics, but in fact we’re realists. 80s music made us jaded and street-smart. And here we find Gen X’s greatest quality: of all the generations of the world, Gen Xers have the keenest eye for bullshit, because we heard so much of it in our youth. We actually start from the assumption that everything is bullshit, and proceed from there. Gen Xers can easily see through the bullshit of both Baby Boomers and Millennials, to say nothing of Gen Zers, because we came of age amidst a culture brimming with bullshit. We’ve had enough. That’s why you’ll frequently hear Gen Xers saying to people of other generations, “Would you cut the fucking bullshit already?”

Given this history, is it any wonder that Gen Xers are the coolest? When you see the jaded, unimpressed 10,000 yard stare of the Gen Xer—a look sometimes mistaken for cynicism, but which can come across as rather cool—know that that look was borne of 10 years of avoiding bad music.

If your hackles instinctively rose at the idea that ‘80s music might have been terrible, you may well be British and probably an avid reader of that bible of ‘80s pop, Smash Hits:

Upper-class nineteenth-century twenty-something Emma Woodhouse amuses herself by concocting matches between her neighbours in the village of Highbury, and most particularly by taking up and grooming Harriet Smith, a girl of uncertain parentage. But while Emma is an enthusiastic fantasist, she is utterly incapable of seeing the reality of the relationships around her, and her efforts are disastrous. Finally she realises that she has been wrong about many things, but most of all about herself; and also that all along, she has been in love with the perceptive and reliable Mr Knightley. Luckily, despite her failings, he has also always been in love with her. Everything ends in marriage, as it should.

The most ludicrous of all my regrettable teenage crushes was the one I had on Emma Woodhouse. For a start, she was getting on for two hundred years old at that point; more importantly, she did not exist. Worst of all, the girl is a nightmare. But, on the upside, she does have some charming qualities, as perceived by me and (more pertinently) Mr Knightley and Jane Austen:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

But this is Austen, and that ‘seemed’ is doing some heavy lifting, as is that semi-colon. The final phrase is the sting in the tail. Emma Woodhouse, Austen is intimating, is spoiled, complacent and knows little of real life. She is, as Amy Heckerling’s 1995 movie homage puts it, clueless.

The truly tragic thing about my crush was that I had entirely misread the book. And it’s not like Austen was hiding anything; she lays it all out on the first page:

The real evils, indeed, of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

She is also, in that paragraph, showing the reader how she is going to tell this story: ‘The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her’. Those last two words are key to understanding how to read the book, because Austen needs us to understand that when we read events from Emma Woodhouse’s point of view, we are reading them from the point of view of someone who has had ‘rather too much her own way’ and thinks ‘a little too well of herself’. But the narrator, obviously, isn’t going to tell us that out loud. We are required to hear Austen’s hinting tone, and perceive the arched eyebrow and barely concealed sigh of a woman in her late 30s dealing with the next generation. (Austen’s oldest niece Fanny would, incidentally, have been about Emma’s age when Austen was writing the book.)

Once we understand this we can understand Austen’s double tone throughout, her habit of arch intimation and subtle direction. Even the smallest moments start to have multiple layers. Take this moment at the Highbury ball, when Emma realises that Mr Weston has invited other guests with the same urgency with which he invited her:

Emma perceived that her taste was not the only taste on which Mr. Weston depended, and felt, that to be the favourite and intimate of a man who had so many intimates and confidantes, was not the very first distinction in the scale of vanity. She liked his open manners, but a little less of open-heartedness would have made him a higher character — General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be — She could fancy such a man.

This is not (just) an observation about Emma’s taste in men; it is also an illustration of how she is unable to be honest with herself about her piqued vanity. Austen also wants us to notice that what she is describing as the kind of man she could fancy is Mr Knightley, a man about whom she is equally unable to be honest with herself.

Concealed within all of this there is a little moment of social criticism. Emma sees the other guests as socially beneath her, and in her highly stratified society this is no small thing. This is especially true of the women for whom a ‘good’ marriage is one that will maintain their place in the social hierarchy. Miss Bates, the chatterbox spinster whom Emma humiliates on Box Hill, is a warning; she ‘has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more’.

All of this was largely beyond me as a hormonal teenager. This was ironic, because being a teenager was the reason I was reading Emma in the first place: it was a set text. And what a set text it is, an elegant piece of ivory rather than an overwhelmingly intricate clockwork diorama of a Dickens. As well as being very, very funny, Austen’s narrative irony is a delightful way to learn how to read as an adult, how to engage with a text both imaginatively and intelligently. I got over Emma Woodhouse in the end, but I’ve never gotten over Jane Austen.

Sadly, all these qualities are also why the books are very hard to adapt into other media.

Not long after I met Emma Woodhouse and Jane Austen, I met an actual living writer of whom I was also a big fan. More importantly (to me), he pronounced me ‘the second most attractive person in the office’. The office in question was a literary agency where I was spending my summer as a receptionist; the real life person was one of their clients, the delightful Andrew Davies, who was happy to stop and chat with the ungainly young man who brought him his coffee.1

At that point I knew Davies for his sitcom A Very Peculiar Practice (1986--88), which turned out to be excellent preparation for going to university on a brutalist campus. But he was to become properly famous for the ‘Moist Firth’ TV version of Pride and Prejudice (1995), which was totemic for Gen X and helped to propel a new era of Austenalia.

Davies became well known after Pride and Prejudice precisely because Austen is very hard to adapt well. It’s deceptively easy: there’s plenty of repartee, humour, farcical goings on, bonnets, boots and very, very tight britches; and there is splendid romance, with misunderstandings and pent-up emotions and glorious declarations. The difficulty, though, is two-fold.

First of all, Austen has something in common with P. G. Wodehouse beyond home counties high jinks among the lovestruck upper classes;2 the joy in their books is not only in the plots but in the prose. You can cast all the comedians you like, but you’ll never get anything on screen half as exquisite as a P. G. Wodehouse sentence, as jolly and jaunty as a sprung ballroom floor. His greatest jokes are not in his dialogue or his plots, but in the paragraphs in between, the bits that tend to become mere stage directions in adaptations.3

The second difficulty is Austen’s archness. Without the voice of the narrator you are left with only dialogue, and if these adaptations were doing Austen properly you wouldn’t be able to trust what the characters say.

Davies followed up his BBC Pride and Prejudice with Emma for ITV in 1996. It is not the finest Austen television production. Kate Beckinsale is a good bit of casting for Emma herself and Mark Strong ought to be perfect casting for Knightley; but he is cursed with a ludicrous hairstyle that robs him of any gravitas. Far too many of the other cast members are indulging in ‘classic TV adaptation’ acting, over-articulating and waggling their eyebrows like mad.

Even in a sub-par production, though, Davies is a cut above most of Austen’s adapters. He uses some very clever approaches to the problem of the authorial voice; most notably, he inserts cliched fantasy sequences that bring Emma’s romantic imaginings to life and show them to be perfectly ridiculous. There are also some very smart, ‘fair-play murder mystery’ plot shenanigans in which the audience is subtly shown, in the background of scenes, the truths that Emma has thus far failed to notice.

He also introduces some politics. Emma lives with her nervous and worrisome father, who hates change; at the end of the book he only agrees to let her marry Mr Knightley because there are turkey thieves abroad in the local area, and having a young man about the house would be advantageous. Davies adds these thieves to the beginning of the first episode (although they become rustlers of hens instead) so that the series is bookended with brief cameos of the harder world beyond the great houses of Highbury. These scenes also function as commentary on Austen’s marriage market, in which marriage is as much about financial alliances and social structures — and thus political and ethical positions — as it is about love.

Davies’s skill as an Austen adaptor is that he includes not just the action and language of the books, but also their tone and intent. After all, a good deal of the romance (and most of the comedy) comes from social commentary and psychological insight. Without those, adaptations are liable to become little more than ‘just a bunch of people going to each other’s houses’, as the famous one-star Amazon review of Pride and Prejudice puts it; or just a bunch of other people’s regrettable teenage crushes. Although if that means that someone else (like me and the ludicrous Mr Elton) becomes inappropriately enamoured of the marvellous Miss Woodhouse, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

One thing Emma Woodhouse is not is a ‘good girl’

For All Mankind (2019—), AppleTV

After watching Star City (2026) we decided to give For All Mankind — its parent show — another go. Then we got captured in its gravity well, and have spent a whole month in orbit. Or, to be slightly less astronautical about the whole thing, we have been binge-watching.

Its set-up is a counterfactual: Russia has won the race to put a man on the Moon, and quickly follows that up by putting a woman on the Moon. One of the interesting things about For All Mankind is that it takes this second premise as seriously as the first. Its thesis is that this would have forced the American space programme (and, by extension, all aspects of American society) to up its diversity game — not just from the bottom—up, but also from the top—down. Women, people of colour, immigrants and gay people are all explicitly knitted into the hierarchy, and — over time, but over less time than has been the case in our universe — they frequently reach the top. Pleasingly, this is not just a limp and lazy way for show-runners to signal that they have all the right values. Instead, the writers have had a genuinely good go at thinking about the ramifications: how having a range of perspectives at or near the top of the tree might have really changed the course of history.

Meanwhile, the Russian victory means that the space race remains a race, with the USA and the USSR both fully committed to it through the decades. They compete to build bases and reach new planets, and fight Cold War battles on the lunar surface. In turn, the impetus towards constant technological progress prolongs the existence of the USSR by keeping the Russian economy buoyant.

The seasons (there are five so far, and a sixth is in the works) are chunked by decade; the first takes place in the 1970s, the second in the 1980s, and so on. But each focuses on a limited time period within that decade, picking one resonant story: the second season is set entirely within six months in 1983. This means that each new season leaps forward with <ahem> a giant step; all the necessary background information (pop culture, non-space news, celebs) is filled in by a montage at the beginning of the opening episode. This sense of momentum somehow adds to its bingeable appeal, and the leaps forward mean that the show has quickly become generational. We are now watching the children and grandchildren of the original characters. In less talented hands this would make things overly soapy (an endless parade of teenagers screaming ‘you don’t understand me, or my spaceship!’) while making the world too small, and too populated with familiar faces. But in this case, it just means that you feel the full weight of the history.

For All Mankind has the issues that any long-running show has: the writing deteriorates over time, and the plot twists become increasingly coarse. But it’s interesting how the time jumps help mitigate a lot of the other possible problems. Repetitive storylines can be jumped over; boring stuff can be backfilled in the montage; new characters can just show up, already fully integrated, in a new season. We aren’t forced to understand those over-involved soap opera inter-relationships that look like a polycule org chart.

But the focus on the two generational families — the Baldwins and the Stevens — does present a Nepo Baby problem. No matter which season you’re watching, there is always at least one Baldwin and at least one Stevens at the centre of events. This is the problem that sunk Star Wars: ‘No, I am your father’ was a great plot twist (something similar worked for Frank Herbert in Dune too, which I suspect is where George Lucas stole it from), but it meant that instead of being a story about fighting oppression in the name of democracy, Star Wars became a dynastic squabble between generations of Skywalkers.

It also drags the show into a contentious debate: how valid is the ‘Great Man’ theory of history? Astronauts were, in the early days, mostly test pilots -- rule-breaking, risk-taking, ornery, egotistical ‘selfish pricks’, as astronaut Molly Cobb puts it. It takes a certain mentality to sit in a Superloo propped up on a tower of explosives that will hurl you into a deadly void; as Tom Wolfe put it in The Right Stuff (1979), ‘What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle and wait for someone to light the fuse?’ The space race made heroes of people — men, in our reality — who were willing to sacrifice their lives in the cause of exploration. But, of course, they could only do that because, back at Mission Control, there was a team of brilliant and rigorous engineers. The ludicrous gamble of space travel is underwritten by painstaking preparation and thorough regulations; the great men in their Superloos can only do what they do by relying on other people, people who don’t usually become famous but who have extraordinary talents and competencies.

For All Mankind, in fairness, addresses this head-on. ‘Nixon’s Women’, a group of female astronauts introduced in Season 1, are all outlasted by super-astronaut Ed Baldwin, increasingly doddery and ancient as the seasons go by. But the other longest-running (and now most doddery) character is Margo Madison, an engineering prodigy who reaches the top at NASA. (Margo was mentored by Wernher von Braun; happily, Tom Lehrer and his song also exist in the For All Mankind universe).

This marriage of pioneering bravado and painstaking systems is central to space travel. It is also, as we saw in Fargo this month, a particularly American tension: the ‘heroism’ of the Founding Fathers versus the egalitarian democracy they claimed to be creating [citation needed]. For All Mankind is very interested in this tension; the confrontation between individualistic American capitalism and state-controlled Soviet communism is one of the main plot engines. More broadly, it constantly juxtaposes daring with caring; pushing forward, and staying behind; discovering, and maintaining. Neither is shown as being necessarily more valorous; both are shown as being entirely critical.

SPOILER ALERT

Once For All Mankind settles Mars in the fictional twenty-first century, the commentary on the founding of America becomes explicit. In American science fiction the colonisation of Mars is frequently deployed as a metaphor for the early US; but this time, the literal USA is the bureaucratic, stifling hegemon from which the new colony is struggling to escape. The independence movement arises from the entrepreneurial black market in alliance with the aged Ed Baldwin, who has been told by the powers that be that he is now too old to play the space cowboy. This ‘Great Man’ is driven by little more than petulant, bruised ego; but his galvanising effect is undeniable. As Molly Cobb went on to point out, “selfish pricks change the world”. And the careful state is equally flawed; Margo Madison is chewed up and spat out by successive governments. Ultimately, what For All Mankind seems to be saying is — not unexpectedly — that it really does take all mankind to achieve anything worthwhile.

Much like making a decent TV show, in fact.

Letterboxd Diary

: All this mucking about in outer space hasn’t left much time for movie-watching, and what we have watched has been somewhat underwhelming. It has included Hitchcock’s remake of his own film, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956); and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990). Both of these are set in North Africa in roughly the same timeframe, which at least conjured the amusing idea of them happening in each other’s backgrounds.

The Sheltering Sky contained less rear projection; but on the other hand, it would have been much enlivened by some spies and shenanigans. It’s very much style over substance, with some laudable location scouting and an awful lot of ACTING. There is also an awful lot of nudity from both John Malkovich and Debra Winger. All of this somewhat detracts from what I assume was supposed to be an existentialist mediation on something or other.

We also watched a film that, paradoxically, wasn’t quite enough style over substance: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011). It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film, capitalising on a stacked cast and the considerable screen charms of Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan. But it could have done with a little more of the tarmac desert of neon nighttime Los Angeles. I kept thinking of Walter Hill’s Driver (1978), which is a very similar set up and — despite Refn’s horror-inflected violence — manages to have a much colder, harder, more nihilist vision. The two would make an excellent double bill though, maybe with Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver (2017) as a chaser. Or you could pair it with The Fall Guy (2024) for two very different personifications of Ryan Gosling as a stunt driver.

However, some of my underwhelmed response was down to the fact that the only version of the movie we could find on Amazon Prime had been re-soundtracked by… Zane Lowe? I have no idea how competent Zane Lowe is as a DJ, but on this evidence he shouldn’t so much give up the day job as be actively barred from the night job. Why you would inflict this vapid autotuned sludge on a movie with (apparently -- we didn’t bloody get to hear it) a critically acclaimed and influential original soundtrack, I have no idea. Whenever a new wedge of entirely forgettable 2010s pop landed in the middle of a scene you could almost hear the director screaming.

I also watched the fifth most successful film of all time: Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026). It is a Spider-Man film and if you like those, you’ll probably like it, as does most of the rest of the world. If you don’t you won’t, and there we are. The most interesting thing about it to me is that Marvel films are now moving beyond aping the structure of the comics world between movies — building their Cinematic Universe to match the inter-connection of Marvel’s comic books — and are now making films that consciously use the structure of monthly comics. Brand New Day is essentially a little three-issue arc, with guest appearances in different issues: The Punisher in one, Bruce Banner in another, and then the big reveal of the ‘villain’ in the third (and yes, I did do the little nerd *gasp* when their name was revealed, and I’m not ashamed. Much.) They are finally moving beyond the ‘Save The Cat’ three-act structure, and are trying different ways to tell a story. Albeit the same stories about superheroes.

Playlist

: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

‘First Of All’ - Japanther

Where else to start but with First Of All, first of all?

‘Swim’ - Madder Rose

I had completely forgotten this track, which means that when Spotify unearthed it for me again I was delivered the early ‘90s in an immediate Proustian rush.

‘Heartbeats’ - The Knife

I knew the José Gonzalez version, like anyone else who ever watched multicoloured balls bouncing down a San Francisco street, but I’m not sure I’d ever heard the original before, bizarrely.

‘Fossils’ - THAO

There’s also a new track that features a collaboration with Tune-Yards and The Linda Lindas, which is really one for the sickos, but I liked the off-kilter funk of this track.

‘More Bad Miles Of Road’ - Little Barrie

A lovely, dirty, slinky bit of road trip soundtrack

‘One Stop Shop (For A Fading Revolution)’ - Twen

A splendid piece of rousing indie rock

‘Tsitsutsa Tsigesv’ - Agalisiga

A beautiful, lonesome piece of Cherokee country folk

‘Atomized’ - Andrew Bird

I was put off Andrew Bird because the first I ever heard of him was in one of Jeffrey Brown’s infuriating biographical comics. This suggests I may have to reconsider. Still hate that comic though.

‘Pearls’ - Styrofoam Winos

Big fan of the way this song keeps breaking off to just repeat euphonious words.

‘Down On Love’ - Sam and Louise Sullivan

Summer is the time for sweet and groovy ‘70s power pop

The whole playlist is also on Spotify:

For more moon-walking:

Elevator pitch

Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) needs money desperately, so concocts a plan to extract some from his wealthy father-in-law; he arranges to have his wife kidnapped by lowlives Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), with whom he will split the ransom money. Carl and Gaear, however, are stupidly violent and violently stupid (this is a Coen Brothers film, after all). Their antics catch the attention of heavily pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), who proves to be as competent as everyone else is not.

Of course, this isn’t true. Everything in Fargo is a fiction, including the opening caption claiming that it isn’t.

In 2001 the body of Takako Konishi, a Japanese office worker, was found in the snow outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. A Brainerd police officer told the press that she had previously approached him asking about Fargo. He got the impression she had gone looking for the ransom money buried by Steve Buscemi’s character; but she had been unprepared for the brutal Minnesota winter weather. In other words, Takako Konishi died because the Coen Brothers lied.

Except she didn’t.

Because the explanation that Takako Konishi had been looking for the ransom money from Fargo was also made up. The police officer had misunderstood her, and — having seen Fargo himself — leapt to the wrong conclusion. Takako Konishi was depressed, and had a drinking problem; she had sent a suicide note to her parents. She had a very real, tragic reason for going out into the snow alone. But the fictional version took hold, because it is perfectly apt. The plot of Fargo is driven by greed, and it is full of mistakes, tragedy and bizarre deaths. It also has a complex relationship with fact and its own reality as a movie.

This is not uncommon with the Coen Brothers. They are notorious for never giving straight answers or insights into their films, remaining wry and inscrutable. Much of what they assert is fiction, even when it comes to what happens behind the camera; Fargo’s credits claim that the film was edited by Roderick Jaynes, an eccentric Englishman who prefers watching cricket to going to the Oscars. But Roderick Jaynes is Joel and Ethan Coen. Probably.

Even their films are not quite their films. Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) is the film that John L. Sullivan never makes in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941). The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) is a Frank Capra Christmas movie run through a 1950s management efficiency programme. The Big Lebowski (1998) is Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) viewed through a haze of dope. Fargo doesn’t even take place in Fargo; the Coens claim they just thought it was a good title.

Fargo is a kind of a parody of contemporary crime movies. It takes the violence and greed of similarly one-named, hard-boiled films like Heat and Seven (both 1995) and transplants them to the Minnesota-nice suburbs, all wide fields and wide vowels, brown food and brown interiors. It is a movie — like so many Coen Brothers movies — about movies. It is a movie that knows it’s a movie. But the Coens know, also, that movies aren’t just movies; the Brainerd cop’s mistaken interpretation of Takako Konishi’s actions shows that they leach into reality. Fargo is ‘told exactly as it occured’ in the script. Which is better than real life, any day.

Delights

When writing about Coen Brothers films it is customary to talk about the script (‘Sir, you have no call to get snippy with me’), the performances (William H. Macy’s stupendous unravelling as Jerry, all tight smiles and seething hysteria), and the vicious Looney Tunes physical comedy (the kidnapped Jean Lundegaard’s panicked lurching with a bag over her head). But we all know about those.

So instead let’s talk about Carter Burwell, a regular Coen Brothers collaborator. He takes the theme from a Norwegian folk song ‘Den bortkomne sauen’ (‘The Lost Sheep’, a splendidly on-the-nose reference) and walks it through some wonderful transformations: from melancholy and lonesome, to sinister and threatening, to big and dramatic. It acts as a counterpoint, imparting atmosphere to banal interiors and seriousness to slapstick shenanigans; and it carries the weight of the genuine emotion so carefully suppressed by the restrained Midwesterners. The film may often seem ludicrous or cruel, but the music insists on an emotional truth.

Discomforts

A frequent criticism of the Coen Brothers is that they are shallow movie brats: sixth-form Tarantinos who know nothing of the world beyond the foyer. They make movies that have nothing to say, and make an awful lot of fuss not saying it. Their output is just an amusing entertainment for the bohemian bourgeoisie.1

And this isn’t entirely wrong; the Coen Brothers were beneficiaries of the same ‘90s indie cinema boom that brought us Tarantino, and they have some of the same period affect. It’s partly what made them so popular with the Quotation Generation: media-literate, disaffected and cynical twenty-somethings who thought that the only thing worse than selling out was taking yourself seriously enough to sell out.

If you take their publicity appearances at face value, this appears to be the Brothers’ opinion of their own work. Their evasive responses to serious questions, their self-deprecatory jokes, their meta-fictional mucking about; it all seems to point to people who are in it purely for the LOLs. But as any ‘90s Gen Xer (or, indeed, anyone who’s been in their twenties at some point) could tell you, that’s what you would do if you wanted to hide how emotionally invested you are.

Can We Show The Kids?

The Metropolitan kids discovered the Coen Brothers for themselves, and wanted to show The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) to us, so I think it’s safe to say they’re up for it. When we showed one of them Fargo, his immediate reaction was: ‘But they’re all idiots, apart from her!’, so I think it’s safe to say they also get it. They are all idiots apart from Marge (and her husband Norm), which is absolutely the point.

Is It Still Worth It?

The actual city of Fargo was originally two cities called Fargo. ‘Fargo on the Prairie’ was built by engineers of the Northern Pacific railroad; it was a family-oriented settlement, staid and conformist. ‘Fargo in the Timber’, down towards the Red River, was a lawless place of bordellos and saloons. The two communities were frequently at odds. One splendidly Coen Brothers-esque story has a sleigh driver bringing goods to ‘Prairie’ having his load progressively lightened as he passed through ‘Timber’, so that he eventually arrived with nothing.

In the end, the Lake Superior and Puget Sound Company told the US Army that the residents of ‘Fargo in the Timber’ were selling alcohol to Indigenous Americans, and the residents of Timber were turned out of their land. In other words, the story of the city of Fargo is the myth of the American West: rugged frontiersmen tamed the landscape, and the gentrified city folks tamed the rugged frontiersmen. The city is, after all, named after William Fargo, the founder of Wells Fargo Express Company, which linked the grizzled prospectors of the California Gold Rush to the tail-coated East Coast bankers. He forged a direct connection between the American dream of self-sufficient independence and get-rich-quick endeavour, and the American ideal of the city on the hill; a bright and shining republic of honest, upright citizens, democratically decided laws and universal freedoms.

This tension runs all the way through Fargo. As the child pointed out: they’re all idiots. More specifically, they’re greedy idiots. Jerry Lundegaard is willing to have his wife kidnapped to get the money he needs to buy his own car lot. His father-in-law, Wade Gustafson, is willing to screw over his own son-in-law to get the lot for himself. Carl Showalter is willing to kill people for a brand new car.2 The drive to succeed has not just driven them all mad; it has driven all humanity from them. Jerry’s unravelling is the dramatisation of what happens when these two images of America meet; when an average man tries to be an entrepreneurial success, and discovers that himself and his aspirations are incompatible. It is the incompatibility that maddens him.

The only ones who aren’t mad are police chief Marge and her husband Norm. It is relevant that Marge works in public service, and Norm is an artist. Their ideas of success aren’t related to money; they are about social impact. They are about putting violent people behind bars, and getting Norm’s painting of ducks on a three cent stamp (‘Every time they raise the darned postage, people need the little stamps!’) As Marge says to Gaear at the end, listing his murders: ‘And for what? For a little bit of money… There’s more to life than money, you know.’

To some extent this is, of course, a mirror of the Coen Brothers’ own experience. After the artistic successes of their early films, the Hollywood producer Joel Silver gave them a massive budget. Might this be the moment that they finally broke through into the mainstream? No. The budget was spent on The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), and it bombed. They made Fargo for around a quarter of the budget of Hudsucker, prioritising their art over financial success; and it took almost ten times as much as Hudsucker at the box office, a genuine success in anyone’s evaluation.

At the end of Fargo Gaear is visually rhymed with the statue of Paul Bunyan that opens the film; both are in red plaid shirts, both are wielding an axe. Bunyan is a figure from North American folklore, a giant lumberjack of astonishing skill and appetites. As such he is a great symbol of American frontier masculinity: physical, independent and successful. But there is some debate about whether the tale of Paul Bunyan is genuine folklore, or whether it was dreamed up by the publicity department of a logging company; the latter explanation would possibly make him the most American character of all.

Fargo suggests that American frontier masculinity is less Paul Bunyan than Gaear Grimsrud: withdrawn, psychopathic, driven solely by greed. And it tells us that those stories we are assured are true — masculinity, material success, folklore, the script of Fargo, the American dream — might be worth questioning.

For more Minnesota Nice, you could always try a trip to Lake Wobegon.

Given all the near-apocalyptic news stories we’ve been treated to over the last six months, you can be forgiven if you didn’t notice the recent Ockenden Report into ‘the biggest childbirth scandal in NHS history’, in which poor care in Nottingham Universities Hospital Trust led to ‘potentially avoidable’ outcomes in 444 cases, including 260 babies who died or were harmed.

Or perhaps you scrolled past it, thinking you’d read it already; and, in a way, you had. In 2015 Dr Bill Kirkup published a review into the ‘serious and shocking’ failures at Morecambe Bay; his report is best known for skewering a determination among midwives to ‘pursue normal childbirth “at any cost”’.¹ In 2022 Donna Ockenden published a review of the failings at the Shrewsbury and Telford trust; at the time, this was ‘the largest maternity scandal in NHS history’. And in the same year, Bill Kirkup (again) found ‘deplorable and harrowing’ failures in the maternity services in the East Kent NHS Trust.

The problems in maternity services have been picked over again and again (as Ockenden herself acknowledges in the introduction to her most recent report). We know that units are dangerously understaffed; that there’s an odd (and distinctly British) cultural split between midwives and other clinical professionals; and that the NHS is appallingly bad at learning lessons. We also know that mothers are getting older and fatter, which makes their pregnancies riskier. And we know that there’s a real resistance in maternity units to listening to what women are saying.

At the heart of Ockenden’s 2026 report into the Nottingham scandal is a detailed account of the birth and death of baby Harriet Hawkins, and the experiences of her mother Sarah, who is a medical professional (as is Harriet’s father, Jack). Harriet died during an extremely long labour. Here are some extracts from the report’s account of the four days it took to admit Sarah to hospital:

[Day 1; Sarah was just over 40 weeks pregnant; antenatal appointment] Sarah had experienced contractions overnight… Sarah expressed concern that she might not be admitted [to hospital] when she felt she needed to be. Sarah recalls being told that “they normally wait until you call three times, and then they have to bring you in if you feel like you need to be admitted”.

[Day 1, 8.30pm; Sarah is seen in the maternity unit] Sarah recalls being told she was not in labour… Sarah [recalls] that during this time she had 3 painful contractions in 10 minutes… and was told it did not matter… Sarah agreed to go home.

[Day 2, 12:04pm, phone call] Sarah and Jack called to say contractions were continuing, and that Sarah had not slept; she had been contracting without a break and contractions were coming every 3 minutes. Sarah recalls being told they were not regular enough [and] to eat jelly babies… Sarah reports that when she was asked if her baby was moving normally, she said, “I’m not sure because I’m in so much pain, I can’t tell” and the midwife told her that was normal in latent labour.

[Day 3, 3.27pm; phone call] It was documented Sarah was contracting 1:10 lasting 60 seconds… Sarah disputes this record, remembering that she felt her contractions were more frequent than this… Sarah should have been invited in at this phone call.

[Day 4, 12.14am; phone call] It was recorded that there was ‘PV bleeding’ (meaning that Sarah was bleeding vaginally). Sarah does not recall this, and in the Review Team’s collective experience it has the mark of a record made in order to be able to defend a decision to invite a woman in if challenged by colleagues. Sarah was advised to attend hospital.

There is a lot more in the same vein after Sarah Hawkins was admitted to hospital, but this post can only be so long. The point is, she was in a huge amount of pain, having strong contractions for days on end, and kept begging for medical attention; and in return she was told she wasn’t in labour, that she should stay at home, and that things would be OK if she would only eat jelly beans. Sarah is herself, remember, medically qualified.

Labour units are places in which most women come to do something pretty straightforward and medically unremarkable, and some number of women — unknowable in advance — come to have a life-threatening medical emergency. Combined with hellish resource constraints, in badly run units this produces a culture in which women are not so much ignored as actively disbelieved. I suspect this is the only way the staff can cope with the dissonance of being unable to provide safe care, but every scrap of anecdotal evidence about women’s experiences in maternity services reveals that for some staff, it has become second nature. (When I was being stitched up with insufficient anaesthetic after having my second son, I told the midwife ‘You’re hurting me’ and she replied ‘No I’m not.’) A woman’s account of her own experience is much more easily dismissed than the fact you have run out of both beds and fucks. After all, birth is the most natural thing in the world, isn’t it? Thousands of women do it every day.

Maternity care requires NHS professionals to work with women who are, fundamentally, entirely well, and entirely capable of taking active decisions about their own care — until, suddenly, they’re not. In his drippingly misogynist memoir about working in obstetrics, This Is Going to Hurt (2017), Adam McKay is repeatedly enraged by women who have the unparalleled cheek to regard themselves as competent adults.

This persistent view of pregnant and labouring women — that they are, essentially, selfish, foolish and unreliable — has, unsurprisingly, provoked political resistance. Take the evolving politics of the episiotomy, a deliberate surgical cut between the vagina and the anus that makes a wider opening for a baby’s head and shoulders. In the 1950s and 1960s episiotomies were absolutely standard in British hospitals, as was a full pubic shave; women would, as a matter of course, be shaved and cut before they went into active labour, whether they turned out to need it or not.

Then, a bunch of feminist midwives and activists (most notably, in the UK, Sheila Kitzinger) and a few oddball/argumentative obstetricians pointed out universal episiotomies were indefensible on the ‘do no harm’ principle. They are, obviously, incredibly painful; imagine being given a deep scalpel cut to your bumhole, being required to shit a pristine cantaloupe melon, and then being sent home with some general advice to take paracetamol and eat prunes. They also carry some long-term risks.

Combined with developments in medical research, this activism was successful; medical advice has changed, and rates have dropped hugely. And, along the way, episiotomies accrued an explicit political valence. When I came into this picture in the 2000s, the standard feminist talking point was that episiotomies were anti-woman. And so I was scunnered when, in conversation with a thoughtful and humane (female) genito-urinary surgeon with an interest in birth trauma, I was told that the episiotomies remained one of the best ways to prevent severe anal—vaginal tears. For some women, they are absolutely the best choice. But the problem has turned through 180 degrees; now, practitioners have to fight against the impression that episiotomies are an indicator of poor and borderline misogynist practice. As with spontaneous vaginal delivery (more commonly known as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ birth), a third-hand version of feminist analysis leaked into areas where it had no business going, and women like me — articulate, interested, mardy, but entirely medically unqualified — are turning up in maternity wards with ill-informed opinions.

But this is what happens when an appreciably large proportion of medics simply refuse to recognise the fundamental competence of their patients. The whole ‘natural birth’ movement was provoked into existence by the damage being done to women’s bodies, and in Morecambe Bay it ended up sacrificing women and babies on the altar of ‘natural’, non-medicalised care. Somehow, women lost out both ways.

Almost uniquely in medical care, maternity concerns not one but (at least) two linked patients, whose needs are simultaneously separate and entangled. Usually their medical interests will align, but sometimes they will not. To take a very small example, when I had hyperemesis (uncontrollable vomiting) during both my pregnancies, my need to eat food conflicted with my babies’ needs to avoid anti-nausea medication that might harm them. (Early-gestation foetuses don’t really require the mother to eat food; they just need her to occasionally hold down a glass of water.) An unborn baby in distress just needs to get born, but their mother might be appallingly damaged by the instruments used to extract them.

A pregnant woman is like a quantum particle simultaneously occupying contradictory states: single and dual, well and unwell; both one patient and two patients, potentially routine and potentially emergent. I think medics, like everybody else, get a little fried by this; it doesn’t fit the available frameworks. In the absence of compassion and good practice, it translates into a general reluctance to view a pregnant woman as a discrete individual; someone who has the same full and absolute rights as any other patient, and someone whose account of her own experience can be believed. When you combine these things with dangerously low resources, you have a recipe for disaster.

I’m not saying that any of this is easy. On the contrary: I’m saying that all of this is very bloody difficult. When it comes to resources I am of the ‘just pump in billions of pounds’ persuasion, but then I don’t have to take the Winter Fuel Allowance away from pensioners while hoping to win the next election.

But I am saying that the NHS must come to terms with the fact that pregnant women are intelligent, autonomous human beings who tell the truth about how they’re feeling, and who have an absolute right to consent or not consent to any procedure. Something very big has to shift in the culture of maternity services; review after review, tragedy after tragedy has shown how horribly persistent this culture is, and how badly it needs to change. So maybe it needs a big bang moment.

After Bill Kirkup’s Morecambe Bay report, NHS England set up something called the National Maternity Review, an expert panel of medics and stakeholders that was given the brief of examining the state of maternity services and recommending ways to improve safety. There’s no reason you should have heard of it; I only know about it because, as a representative of Mumsnet, I was a member of the panel. My role was to help to reflect the views and experiences of ‘service users’ — that is, pregnant and postpartum women. And let me tell you: it was a bit of a struggle, and I don’t think I did it very well. The outcomes were certainly disappointing.

What I really remember about the National Maternity Review is the day we opened the discussion about ‘birth choices’. This is medic-speak for the decisions that pregnant women make about how and where they give birth, and the options we were discussing were: at home, in a birthing centre, in a labour suite in hospital. And I got up on my hind legs and asked why — given that everyone on the panel was talking so much about how choice was really important — we weren’t discussing the option of letting women choose elective caesarians. This mild (I thought) suggestion provoked real, puce-faced outrage from one of the obstetricians on the panel, and was politely ignored by everyone else, as though I’d just poured coffee over my head.

This kneejerk flinch is exactly why I think Yvette Cooper, the new Secretary of State for Health, should instruct the NHS to offer elective caesarians to all pregnant women: not for ‘good’ medical reasons, but just if — after a proper examination of the risks and benefits — that’s what they want. Yes, there are downsides (and it would, of course, be expensive); but that’s partly the point. Patients are allowed to make choices that medics don’t want them to make. And until pregnant women are truly conceived of as discrete and competent service users, I’m very much afraid we’re just going to keep on getting news stories about ‘the biggest maternity scandal in the history of the NHS’.

In case you haven’t had enough on birth injuries today, there’s always Rachel Weisz’s version of Dead Ringers.

Some years ago I was trying to explain to a younger animator the style I wanted for a piece of work. After quite a lot of back and forth I ended up showing him an episode of the ‘70s children TV series Paddington. He watched, rapt, and, at the end, shouted: ‘What was the brief for that? “Make the most fucking awesome thing you can”?’

We have to assume that that wasn’t actually the brief. But they did it anyway.

Like Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin at Smallfilms, the animator Ivor Wood quietly moulded the impressionable minds of Gen X without us ever really knowing who he was. So let’s get into that first. Wood was born in Leeds but he was half-French, and he was working in Paris when he met the French animator Serge Danot and was hired to work on Danot’s children’s series Le Manège enchanté (1963—67) — or, as the Brits know it (thanks to the genius of Eric Thompson), The Magic Roundabout. Wood then came back to England to work with the production company Film Fair, where he collaborated with the author Michael Bond on The Herbs (1968), The Wombles (1973—75) and Paddington.

Each of these series has a distinct style, allowing us to observe the evolution of Wood’s approach. The Magic Roundabout has stop-motion puppets in a stylised setting with iconographic, two-dimensional trees and foliage. The Herbs keeps the puppets, but makes the settings more three-dimensional and less stylised. The Wombles has similar settings (if slightly less fantastical), but the characters are much more like animated plush toys.

For Paddington, however, Wood made an entirely different, and brilliant, choice. He did away with the settings entirely, replacing them with simple black ink drawings on white card. Most of the world is monochrome; important humans get coloured in, but only Paddington himself is three-dimensional. Not only is he operating on all dimensional axes: he also has a texture (furry). This differentiation is carried through to the animation of the characters. Where Paddington is thoroughly — and charmingly — animated throughout, the humans are much more limited in their movements. Sometimes their animated heads or arms are attached to a static body; sometimes they simply adopt a series of static poses. Only Paddington and his belongings, the things he interacts with, are real. Everything else is a suggestion, or a series of snapshots.

Wood suggested that his visual choices were economically motivated; Paddington is set in London, and it would have been overwhelmingly difficult to use traditional stop-motion animation for busy streets and crowds. But you get the impression Wood also just loved the idea of animating Paddington in this way. (After all, it created just as many problems as it solved; lighting all that reflective white card proved to be a nightmare.) And thank goodness for that.

There is not even any lip sync, mostly because there isn’t any dialogue. As with Postgate and Firmin’s The Clangers (1969—72), there is just a narrator, who doesn’t even do ‘voices’ for the characters; the splendidly wry and warm Michael Hordern refused to do them, which was the correct choice, because he already had one of the best voices in the world.

All of this had the happy result of focusing the production on the visuals. This is animation boiled down to the sparest parts: a single stop-motion character, a monochrome sketched-in world, a lone voice telling the story. But this is not paring away: it is distilling. The result is pure and intoxicating, an abstract ideal of animation.

The amazing thing is that Ivor Wood went to these experimental, extraordinary lengths for a five-minute animation for kids’ TV. It is a textbook example of being better than you need to be. As Michael Bond — no creative slouch himself — said of Ivor Wood: ‘if genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains, then Ivor certainly qualified for the title.’ The audience wouldn’t have known any different; we barely knew anything at all. Sure, Paddington looked different to Bagpuss (1974) and Roobarb (1974), but then both of them were extraordinary works too. As far as we knew, as we sat on the living room carpet in the mid-70s, all cartoons were that good.

As is often the case, the magic ingredients were the constraints: the limits of budget, the editorial demands of the channel, the lack of options. In a world of three TV channels a lot depended on the taste of Monica Sims, the BBC’s head of children’s programming. (She was renowned for her devotion to public service broadcasting, and also for her idiosyncratic opinions: she once decried Sesame Street for its ‘indoctrination and a dangerous use of television.’) But these constraints just allowed Ivor Wood to escape convention and make something no one else had ever thought of. And, as ever, we return to the distinctive genius of the BBC, because one constraint Wood wasn’t working under was the pressure to be commercial, which in this context meant marketable.

Other than being economical, Wood had two jobs: to tell the stories, and to make something as good — indeed, as fucking awesome — as possible. Telling the stories, of course, was non-negotiable. Wood’s visuals aren’t there just to be arresting; they’re also integral to the drama. Paddington is an outsider: he is an anthropomorphic bear in a human world; he is a Peruvian in London; he is an earnest childlike innocent interacting with the strange adult world; he is an (illegal) immigrant to whom the native customs are foreign and confusing. By distinguishing him visually and physically from his surroundings, Wood doesn’t just distinguish the central character; he emphasises his difference. Paddington literally stands out, three-dimensional in a flat world.

As you’ve probably already realised, Wood isn’t just dramatising Paddington’s world; he’s dramatising the viewer’s world too. It is significant that as well as Paddington himself being three-dimensional, everything he touches is three-dimensional. He and the things he uses are ‘real’; everything else is just backdrop. Paddington’s outward behaviour is very much that of a small child, and so is his egomania, the intense focus on himself and his little world. These points of audience identification are created through characterisation, but also through Wood’s visualisation.

This is what makes the show stand out, even now. The innovative animation is specifically suited to the stories; it not only captures Paddington’s own experience, but also signals to the audience that this is an alternate view of the world, in which the mundane is revealed as bizarre and the ordinary upended, tipping the extraordinary out from inside.

There’s something about Paddington that makes creatives try that little bit harder. Perhaps it’s his earnest desire to help other people; perhaps it’s Aunt Lucy’s label entreating them to ‘look after this bear’. Paddington (2014) and Paddington 2 (2017) are extraordinary examples of nostalgia-bait movies that are actually good, just as their TV predecessor stood out against all the imported-toy-commercial cartoons that have themselves now spawned throwback movie franchises.

Paddington (the character) has now become a sort of national psychopomp, summoned by the British popular imagination whenever a celebrity dies; in this new incarnation he is the embodiment of an emotionally reserved neighbourliness, and a carefully hidden but bone-deep sentimentality. To a Gen X audience who grew up with Wood’s cosily idiosyncratic versions of the stories, this new universality — this ascent from character to symbol — feels surprising; after all, egomaniacal pre-schoolers aren’t the most obvious candidates for universal adoration. But this benediction has happened, of course, because of the movies, in which Paddington’s character has become considerably less self-involved. (Indeed, Paddington 2 ditches Bond’s stories entirely for something far more ludicrous and uproarious.)

The films also don’t have Wood’s visual inventiveness (although it is referenced in the design of the pop-up book that features in the plot of Paddington 2). Nevertheless, their production design is stellar, which feels like a tribute from a production team that is certainly old enough to have been awed by Wood’s vision at an impressionable age. And the screenwriting is, of course, fucking awesome. (We have not seen Paddington in Peru, which seems to have disappointed a lot of people.) It just goes to show quality is not uncommercial; it is not unpopular. Equally, the popular and commercial are not undeserving of quality. If you make something good enough, and take enough pains, you can make something that noticeably distorts the culture. And you can blow young people’s minds fifty years later.

The Paddington films are very much a shining example of something that is ‘better than it needs to be’:

La France Profonde

As you may have been beginning to suspect, The Metropolitan has been on holiday for the last two weeks. We’ve been away not only from Substack, but also from the UK, noise and light pollution, and, largely, people; we’ve been in a tiny hamlet halfway between Poitiers and Angoulême, where there was nothing to do but agonise about which cheese to have for lunch and discuss the class taxonomy of French supermarkets.

The closest supermarket to us was a Super U, which (like the Co-op in the UK) has its origins in the co-operative movement, but which felt a degree more middle class than British Co-ops. With its big chiller cabinets of handmade ready meals, pseudo-market-stall layouts of fruit and veg and local produce, and understated and elegant own brand stylings, it felt somewhere between a Sainsburys and an M&S Food Hall. The local Intermarché, on the other hand — more cramped, more scruffy, more utilitarian — came across as a little bit Asda. I’m only sorry that we didn’t get a chance to visit a nearby E.LeClerc to get a fuller picture. One thing you really notice about all French supermarkets, though, is their hyperfocus on French produce: there are literal walls of cheese, nautical miles of fresh seafood and acres of pork (SO MUCH pork), but nary a lime leaf or a pot of fresh pesto. The only foreign food the French really dig, on this evidence, is Emmental. Also, it was weird (although entirely appropriate) to find Marmite in the ‘weird forrin stuff’ aisle.

There hasn’t been any film watching (pretty sure they’re not really interested in films in France) so there’s no Letterboxd diary this week. Instead we went to look at a lot of historically significant religious sculptures, like this statue of a mighty Gallic warrior:

If you know anything about Angoulême, you’ll know precisely what I did while we were there, because Angoulême is known for this stuff: that’s right, I visited the Musée de Bande Dessinée (the Museum of Comics). It was an absolute delight. Can you imagine how excited I was to see original Hergé pencils?

They had a big show about comics publisher Editions Delcourt which made me think that we still don’t have much of a national comics tradition beyond classic kids’ comics like The Beano and the hallowed institution of 2000AD. (At some point I’m going to write my piece about how 2000AD created the pop culture of the 21st century, I promise.) This is despite the fact that British comics writers and artists have had a massive international impact through their work in American comics (particularly from the late ‘80s onwards). It’s a shame the form isn’t celebrated here in the way the French celebrate their comics. That said, we do have the splendid Cartoon Museum in London, although it doesn’t have the space or prominence of the museum in Angoulême. And we also have the amazing new Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, housed in a restored eighteenth century water works (largely courtesy of the architect Adam Goodfellow, who just happens to be a friend of The Metropolitan).

Anyway, that wasn’t the only visual storytelling we saw.

The area between Poitiers and Angoulême was on the ancient pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. (Probably for similar topological reasons, this area — which was on the border between Occupied France and Vichy-controlled France in the Second World War — was also very active in Resistance efforts to smuggle downed Allied airmen into neutral Spanish territory.) It is thus full of particularly rich medieval churches in the Angevin Gothic style. Their faces are covered in intricate, graphomaniac sculptures: a riot of escalating martyrdoms, miracles and monsters. (Pictured above: mad stylings in Poitiers, Angoulême and Ruffec.)

Which made a splendid accompaniment to what we did do, which was read:

The Greatest Knight (Thomas Ashbridge, 2015)

The biography of William Marshal, a medieval Zelig who started life as a child hostage during the Anarchy — the devastating twelfth-century civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda, during which it was said that ‘Christ and all his angels slept’ — and ended it as the most powerful man in England, the regent for the young Henry III. Over the course of his life he knew and/or worked for somewhere between five and eight English monarchs, depending on whether you count Matilda, Young Henry and Eleanor of Aquitaine. (As the street sign in Poitiers had it: ‘Reine de France, et alors Reine d’Angleterre.’)

Among other things Marshal was threatened with being dashed against his father’s castle walls from a catapult, played ‘knights’ with King Stephen round the throne, saved Eleanor of Aquitaine from being captured, became a star of the tournament circuit with the Young King Henry, palled around with the Templars in the Holy Land, fought alongside Richard the Lionheart in France, rebelled against King John in Ireland and was instrumental in framing Magna Carta.

This was particularly relevant to our holiday because the house we were staying in is on Rue du Bois Ricard, the Ricard in question being Richard the Lionheart (or Coeur de Lion, I guess). It was also not far from a village called Montjean, which is thought to be named after Richard’s younger brother and canonically the worst English king ever: John. We weren’t very far from where Eleanor’s party was surprised by the troops of Guy de Lusignan and Patrick, Earl of Salisbury and William Marshal had to fight a desperate rearguard action to give the queen a chance to escape. Angevin lands, in other words.

Because Marshal didn’t live in a world of neatly delineated nation states. There were places called ‘England’ and ‘France’, but they weren’t exactly the same geographical places we think of now, and they certainly weren’t the same conceptual places. Marshal grew up in a world as close to the setting of Beowulf as it was to Agincourt and Joan of Arc. His world was defined by the proto-feudal structures of Northern Europe and its post-Roman barbarian peoples: Franks and Angles and Saxons and, most of all, Northmen. He wasn’t a citizen of a country; he was a subject of his King, who (from Henry II to John) was the ruler of the Angevin Empire.

By the time Marshal died he was Earl of Pembroke, which meant holding marcher castles in an independent (and very Wild West) Wales. He also held colonized lands in Ireland, and owed fealty to the King of France for his lands in Normandy. Historians sometimes call the Angevin Empire ‘a composite monarchy’, and Marshal was something like a modern multinational corporation: a string of local branches, licensed brands and subsidiary holdings, with multiple allegiances and operating in many different roles.

But he also lived at the exact moment all of that was changing.

I spent an awful lot of the book looking up from the book and exclaiming to Rowan: ‘John was absolutely the worst’. His epithets at the time were ‘Lackland’ and ‘Softsword’, both of which also describe how instrumental he was in the end of that early medieval world. You’ll note, for a start, that being a ‘hard’ sword wasn’t a bad thing; a king was supposed to be martial and violent. That was the feudal bargain; that chain of fealty from the king downwards was one of mutual dependence and defence. John’s real crime, though, was that he lost the Angevin lands in France. This had bigger implications than just the shrinking of a tax base. Like Hrothgar in Beowulf, a king was supposed to be generous. In losing land John lost the ability to share treasure and bind his nobles to him. Not that he would have anyway, because he was paranoid, selfish and cruel. (Again, cruelty wasn’t necessarily bad, so long as you were performing it on the Welsh or the Jews or thousands of nameless peasants; but you weren’t supposed to hide noble rivals in dungeons and murder them in secret.)

‘Softsword’ and ‘Lackland’ led directly to Runnymede and the original Magna Carta. And while that was more about the barons trying to protect their own interests than it was about anything as ghastly as democracy, it was the beginning of a legalistic constitutional politics. It was the moment when the Sword and the Land started to give way to the Statute and the Law. It was the end of that feudal world and the start of the modern one.

And William Marshal was there for it.

I would say I want someone to dramatize his story, because it would make for amazing TV. But they’d only cock it up, wouldn’t they?

Hyperion (Dan Simmons, 1989)

Rowan has been reading George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice, which I have tried and failed at. I suspect I am too big a fan of both medieval European history and J. R. R. Tolkien and hence find his pallid mix of both too little of either.

It did make me want to read some swords and sorcery, though, as I haven’t recently. I tried something ranked very highly on lists of the best fantasy books of all time and the writing was so terrible that I had to stop after a page and a half. It’s amazing what you can get away with if you start your book with a map and insert a few apostrophes into some of the names.

Next on the list was Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, which is science fiction, but of a space opera mode that scratched the itch. To start with he very sensibly does not use silly made up names for things, instead repurposing conventional terms or picking words from the poetry of Keats, just as Tolkien raided Anglo-Saxon epics and Frankish king lists for his language and names. More importantly, it was much better written and a much more gripping story.

Notably to me, it’s very reminiscent of Iain M. Banks’ science fiction novels, the first of which, Consider Phlebas (1987), was published at more or less the same time. Both of them feature diverse, democratic, more or less post-scarcity, technologically advanced meta-civilizations who find themselves at war with militaristic and religiously extreme cultures.

Interesting that both books were being written on the eve of the first Gulf War, as a diverse and democratic meta-civilization unleashed their technologically advanced weaponry on a religiously distinct militaristic dictatorship.

Yet more evidence that science-fiction tends to predict the present, rather than the far future.

Playlist

: Since we’ve been thoroughly franked for the past couple of weeks, I thought a French playlist might be in order.

How Is the Weather In Paris — Allain Romans.

The theme from Jacques Tati’s Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953). I once went to a showing at the BFI on a weekday afternoon thinking that a cinema showing a largely silent black-and-white ‘50s French comedy would be empty. I hadn’t realised it was half term and the place was full of grandparents and their grandchildren, all of whom, aged 9 to 99, were in hysterics throughout. One of those great communal cinematic experiences that you absolutely don’t get watching a film alone in the living room with the curtains closed.

La Ville Inconnue — Edith Piaf.

An eerie and stifling song that absolutely sounds like a hot and dusty French town on a deserted and somnolent summer’s afternoon. Which was exactly what Angoulême was like when we stopped there.

Exorciseur — La Femme

Another spooky track, a sort of psychedelic, psychobilly hip-hop.

Panique -- Juniore

I’ve seen Juniore called ‘yé-yé noir’, which sounds about right: a sort of surf pop with a catchy doominess.

Fallait pas écraser la queue du chat — Clothilde

Speaking of ‘yé-yé’, the distinctly French ‘60s pop, here’s Clothilde with something slightly unhinged.

Ondulé — Matieu Boogaerts

This is a lovely little track, thirty years younger but still with a yé-yé poppiness.

Tour du monde — Aquaserge

A sort of garage jazz, chugging and brassy.

Nuages — Django Reinhardt avec le Quintette Hot Club de France

Speaking of French jazz, one cannot do without the great Django

Vous oubliez votre cheval — Charles Trenet

The perfect song for when someone has forgotten their horse.

La Marseillaise — Claude Bolling Big Band

If the World Cup made anything clear, it’s that France has, indisputably, the greatest national anthem of them all.

We travelled to Poitiers by train, which meant crossing Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare Montparnasse by… subway

“I truly feel pity for you both. You are grown up now! And yet you still act as children, who want to do nothing but run and play. You cannot run and play all your life, Dianne!” 

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

1992 was a bad time to graduate from university. I was lucky to have gone at all, of course; just 19% of students went on to higher education then (53% do so now). I was even more lucky to graduate without student debt. The friendly taxpayer stumped up for my tuition fees and I spent three largely untroubled years rolling around campus, giggling.

Just what is it that you want to do?
Well, we wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do
And we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time

Primal Scream, Loaded (1991), after The Wild Angels (1966)

But it was a bad time to graduate, nonetheless. I remember smoking on the back step of my parents’ house on a beautiful autumn day, listening to radio news headlines about chaos in the financial markets. It was September 16 1992, Black Wednesday, and sterling had fallen out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. 

There's a disconcerting 47° slope against the Dollar, Yen and Deutschmark, and if we project in four months the Pound leg is effectively amputated, leading to a rogue leg with no hip constituency at all.

Collateley Sisters, The Day Today (1994)

The British economy nosedived, graduate salaries slumped and job opportunities dried up.1 Over that first post-university year, as it was repeatedly brought home to me that I wasn’t going to get a job in editorial at Penguin, our group of friends fell into two camps. There were a few – three or four – who found a toehold on a career path that genuinely excited them; and then there were the rest of us, who worked purely to earn money to spend in the pub. Not much money, mind you. As the theme tune to Friends (first aired in 1994) had it: ‘Your job’s a joke, you’re broke.’ 

Is there anything else you can do?
Well not much – I've not been trained
I can sit and stand, beg n' roll over

Happy Mondays, Wrote for Luck (1988)

This is, of course, a story about class. Some of us had working-class parents who had scrabbled to give us the unfair advantages they had lacked. Others came from families with a well-worn glide path from mortar board to boardroom. All of us had been carefully invested with potential; nobody had questioned whether we would fulfil it. We’d been raised on stories about turning up in London and being offered a job at the BBC by a funny little man you met on a bus, which in turn enabled you to buy a four-bedroom house in Belsize Park for £7,000. 

Why can't I have an audition? It's ridiculous. I've been to drama school. I'm good-looking. I tell you, I've a fuck sight more talent that half the rubbish that gets on television. Why can't I get on television?

Withnail & I (1987)

It’s entirely possible we would have spent our twenties in a humiliated fug even without the left hook of Black Wednesday, because being twentysomething is structurally painful. Banished from childhood and thrust into the vast anonymity of the world, the very nature of your quest – find a career, make new friends, fall in love, make a home – drives a constant, pitiless analysis of your many faults and bottomless inexperience. Almost everyone you meet, from recruiters and managers to rental agents and attractive strangers, makes an assessment of your worth. Most of them find you lacking.

Hey girl, what's it like to be in New York?
New York City – imagine that!
Tell me, what's it like to be a skateboard punk rocker?

Michelle Shocked, Anchorage (1988)

But we didn’t know this was something everyone struggled with; we thought we had been judged to be uniquely underwhelming. Our cosseted childhoods had left us unprepared for this stunted entry to the world of grown-ups. And so we lapsed into a peculiarly bourgeois strain of sulky disappointment (‘entitled’ had yet to become an insult). My grandfathers had been miners; my grandmothers had been domestic servants. As we sat in our cattle pens doing data entry, to whom could we possibly have complained? And what would we have complained about? What on earth do you do, when the world suddenly stops indulging you? There is a mature answer (try harder, learn more, focus, dig in) but we chose something else: the soft, hazy, sun-filtered option of taking a lot of illegal drugs. 

MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one’s twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one’s essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991)

Taking drugs in the early ’90s was hardly rebellious. Youth culture was still coming down from the Second Summer of Love, and the media was full of tripped-out ravers and recycled psychedelia. We weren’t ravers, though. Rave culture had a working-class core we couldn’t penetrate, and its extrovert enthusiasm didn’t mesh with our disabling self-awareness. Instead, we aped the blissed-out insouciance and drawling disaffection of 1970s art-school freaks and dropouts; we were art-directed by Gus Van Sant, accessorising our miniskirts and oversized jackets with cigarettes and glassy stares. We consumed parts of the culture that reflected our underachievement, and there was a lot to choose from: the entire premise of Friends, the affect of Slacker (1990), the foundational text of Generation X (1991). 

Ross: What is Chandler Bing’s job?

Rachel: Oh gosh, it has something to do with numbers.

Monica: And processing.

Rachel: He carries a briefcase.

Ross: Ten seconds, you need this or you lose the game.

Friends, ‘The One with the Embryos’ (1998)

I experienced moments of total social dislocation, particularly on the Tube; a sense that I was connected to the world by a few bare strands, and that my life was nothing more than a slippery chain of accidents. I could just as easily have been a clean and neat young blonde, leaving a job in PR and going back to a fiancé, a restaurant dinner and a flat in Fulham. Being stoned enabled me: both to escape my maddening internal dialogue, and to ignore my problems. Swathed in chemical euphoria, I was constantly starring in the opening montage of my own indie film, and if I screwed up my lines I could just go again.

Most people don't know how they're gonna feel from one moment to the next. But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

Several years passed in torpor and stagnation before our sense of a birthright started to reassert itself. Some of us began to experience serious mental health and addiction issues; we all began to worry about our lungs. Couples sprung up and moved in together and we saw our smelly, chaotic lives reflected through the unimpressed gaze of new partners. The economy sprang back to life, and with barely a backward glance we scrubbed up, bit down and scrambled aboard the middle class gravy train, leaving only our affected nonchalance behind to mark where we had stood. You knew someone was moving on when an enviable purchase suddenly appeared in their home: a brand-new sofa, a fridge with a proper freezer compartment, a pram. Our thirtieth birthdays were approaching and we began – finally – to grow up. 

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television.

Trainspotting (1996)

Sometimes now, working with people in their early twenties, underneath the bright patter about side-hustles and hype-pods I catch the same sense of desperate freefall. If 1992 was a bad time to graduate it must be even worse now, amid the relentless pulse of successive global calamities. When I’m tempted to participate in complaints about entitled young people or discourse about avocados, I try to remind myself how it felt, becoming stalled in the vastness and failing to launch. Graduating sucks, but what comes next is worse, and the single saving grace of your twenties is that eventually, they come to an end.

People may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing.

George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72)

Next week: we sail with a wizard to find dragons via a Portakabin in South Ascot

It’s been an odd couple of weeks, waving my youngest child off to university and finding myself with an empty nest. (Tobias has taken to saying the family home is like a seaside town in winter: ‘all of the infrastructure and half of the people’.) Given that I’ve been feeling a little out of sorts (if I gave birth to you, don’t read this bit: ABANDONED, EXISTENTIALLY UNTETHERED, FALLING WEIGHTLESSLY THROUGH A PSYCHOLOGICAL SPACE OF NEAR-INFINITE PROPORTIONS) I’ve been looking for books, films or TV programmes that reflect some of this back to me, and I’ve been genuinely surprised by how little cultural coverage there is of such a common experience.

It’s not that I’ve been looking for answers, because ‘is my child allowed to grow up and leave me?’ isn’t really a question. (Well, it’s not a question you’re supposed to ask, out loud.) What I’m looking for is the feeling that somebody has been there before me, and came out the other side OK. It’s nice to have a template, a model; it’s comforting to know that you’re not the first micro-bereaved mid-lifer to watch a toddler pottering around a cafe and blurt ‘she’ll be off to university before you know it’ to her bemused granny. (Sorry, cafe lady.) So where are we all? Or, more accurately, where are the brilliant cultural artefacts that accurately represent us? Where’s my script? 

I started off by flipping through my mental Rolodex of things I’ve already consumed. There’s the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard, a series of novels about an extended family covering a 20-year period from the late ‘30s to the late ‘50s. They feature a finely drawn portrait of a mother, Villy, and her bitterly confused relationship with her daughter Louise. As Louise grows to full adulthood and Villy grows older still, Howard gives a horribly convincing account of a relationship - already twisted by resentment and misunderstandings - whose difficulty is compounded by emotional and physical distance. 

Howard is very good at conveying this sense of lengthening space, the gap that opens at the moment of birth and just keeps growing. All of the stages, from toddler tantrums to teenage nights out, are parts of an exorable process that culminates with you standing in a vacated bedroom, looking at the things they chose to leave behind. Suddenly you don’t know anything: where they are, what they’ve eaten, how they’re feeling. The intimacy of daily family life with its intricate exchange of detail is lost overnight. Your WhatsApps make you sound like a distant aunt: are you enjoying school? Are you making friends? (Here’s a top tip: when your child finally gets in contact to ask a question - the question will be about laundry - demand three pieces of information before you tell them the answer, like a menopausal Rumpelstiltskin.) 

There’s little reassurance in the Cazalet Chronicles for the empty nester, although you will at least be distracted by how bloody good Howard is. The relationship between Villy and Louise is a portrait of pain and lifelong damage; it’s not very cheerful. And if you’re wondering where Louise’s dad is in all this, I can only repeat Hilary Mantel’s injunction on Howard - ‘Read her. That’s my advice’ - and warn you not to get your hopes up.

‘There’s no such thing as a happy family. How could there be?’ writes novelist Sarah Perry in an essay about the Cazalet Chronicles, riffing off Tolstoy’s famous opening to Anna Karenina.  This complacent and imaginatively stunted consensus - that functioning family relationships are boring, that they hold no narrative potential - began to irritate me as I looked around for comfort. I steeled myself to watch Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), a film I’d avoided because everyone said it makes you cry. (A celebrated portrait of a boy’s life from pre-school to university, it was filmed over 11 years to allow the actors to age naturally.) But by the end of it I was just cross.

Patricia Arquette’s character, Olivia, is the mother of the central character, Mason. At the end of the film as her son is packing up to go to college, Olivia turns into a snarling, sobbing wreck. After delivering some self-pitying nonsense about having nothing to look forward to except her own funeral, she screams at him to get out:

‘This is the worst day of my life. I knew this day was coming, I just didn’t think you’d be so fucking happy to be leaving.’

This is such a clumsy eruption, entirely at odds with an established character, that it can only have sprung from a failure to see Olivia as a real person. Has Richard Linklater ever met any parents? Like, parents who aren’t total fuck-ups? We feel all of these things and yet - get this - we don’t scream them at our kids. (There’s no discrete noun for ‘adult child’; it’s like the English language rejects the entire concept.) On the day they leave for university you get up after a sleepless night and you cheer them on as they kick the dust of your cherished home off their shoes, and you drive them however many hundred miles and you carry several tonnes of doohickey up and downstairs, and then you give them a hug and you walk away, carefully erasing yourself as you go. And you don’t let yourself cry until you get home and find the cold tea you made them that morning in their favourite mug.

What annoys me about this isn’t the emotions Olivia is feeling; I recognise all of them. It’s the total failure to convey the critical space between emotions and actions, which is the space where the interesting stuff of ordinary parenting happens. It’s the space where parents constantly split and reconfigure: themselves, their most cherished relationships, and their sense of what is appropriate and justified. This space contains a thousand untold stories.

Up until this point Olivia had been something of a model parent: hard-working, responsible, thoughtful, loving, physically brave. As well as being a certified grown-up she is also an actual psychology lecturer. But the film suddenly loses all interest in exploring her as an authentic person. As Mason leaves she is experiencing a fundamental rupture in the mother-child dyad, but you would expect this character in particular to simultaneously be thinking about how best to love her child and protect their future relationship. (And if that sounds like hard work, it’s because it is.) Instead of imagining how such a parent might deal with her own sadness, the script turns her into a neurotic middle-aged female lunatic to provide an oven-ready third-act catharsis. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is boring.

That aside I found Boyhood OK-to-good, although possibly that’s because it wasn’t made for me. It’s about the experience of being a young male human, written and directed by a man, and was most rapturously received by male critics. But then, where does one look to find the stories written by post-menopausal women with grown-up kids? We are not exactly over-represented in the arts. It’s almost like there might be a structural reason for that. (It was around this point in my researches, just as I was getting on my high horse, that Tobias played me ‘Poor Mum’ by Molly Drake, who was the mother and also the vocal twin of Nick Drake. A song about an ageing mother, it is so astonishingly annoying that cultural oblivion might actually be preferable.)

And so I went back to Twentieth Century Women (2016), a film written and directed by Mike Mills that’s one of my most reliable comfort blankets. Annette Bening plays a single mother, Dorothea, bringing up her son with the aid of a found family of friends and acquaintances. I absolutely love Twentieth Century Women; its characters have all kinds of flaws but in the end what matters is their intent, and their inconsistent, muddle-headed attempts to really see each other and be good to each other in amongst the serious business of living their own lives. And it has an absolutely banging New Wave soundtrack.

Mills employs an odd trick of telling you a series of stories about the central characters. Sometimes these stories are about them, and sometimes they are about their interrelationships. Each time a new story begins you think ‘Aha! And THIS will be the central narrative!’, until after an hour or so you realise there isn’t one; there are just these people and their stories. There is no central narrative, because life, and family, rarely has just one. Its texture is built up through the accumulation of stories and experiences, overlaid on personalities and preferences and dynamics, until every family, happy or unhappy, is utterly compelling. 

Twentieth Century Women is rare in its truthful depiction of adults changing and growing alongside kids; changing and growing because of their kids and other young people around them, experiencing their challenges, updating their priors, working out which principles really matter and which ones you had just acquired without much consideration. It also - which is also rare - shows the young people listening to older people and considering their points of view. There’s a wonderful scene in which Greta Gerwig’s twentysomething Abbie is playing a noisy punk record by The Raincoats and Dorothea comes into the bedroom to ask what the appeal is:

Dorothea: They’re not… very good. And they know that. Right?

Abbie: Yeah. It’s like they’ve got all this… this feeling and they don’t have any skill, and they don’t want skill because it’s really interesting what happens when your passion is bigger than the tools you have to deal with it. It creates this energy that’s raw. Isn’t it great?

As a description of young adulthood, that’s hard to beat. And the converse -which is unstated in the film, but clearly implied in Bening’s marvellously expressive face - is that getting old is about having big, powerful tools and choosing when to use them, sometimes at the expense of your passion.

Dorothea is shown as being intelligent and flexible enough to keep growing, and to recognise that while she could raise her boy alone, she could also choose to loosen her grip on her ‘ownership’ of him before he is old enough to do it himself. It’s not really a film about kids leaving home, except in the sense that everything about parenting is ultimately about kids leaving home. But this time, as with every time I’ve watched it, I felt like it had me covered.

Abbie: Having a kid seems, like, the hardest thing.

Dorothea: Yeah. How much you love the kid… you’re just pretty much screwed.

For more on cinematic mothers and their adult children, what about Carrie Fisher’s ‘Postcards from the Edge’?

Irresistible Bliss was the second album from the New York hipster band Soul Coughing (proponents of ‘deep slacker jazz’). The opening track ‘Super Bon Bon’ was a relative hit ( and breached the Top 40 in the UK when it was re-released in 2024).

4 out of 5

4 out of 5: the title of one of my favourite songs on this album, and also a state of mind. Not bad. OK. Above average. Which was something to aspire to in 1996, when British music was very average indeed.

This was the age of Britpop, which felt like the results of a public opinion survey on ‘what can you remember about the ‘60s’. And in 1996 we were suffering the worst of it: the media-confected battle between bland indie bands, and the insurmountable cringe of the officially sanctioned Cool Britannia. If the late ‘80s had been one long Boomer cultural mid-life crisis, with every middle manager blasting Brothers in Arms from the stereo as he drove his secretary to a Travelodge in his new convertible, then the ‘90s felt like their second childhood: an attempt to create a theme park version of the ‘60s, without the radical politics and the threat of nuclear apocalypse. Here’s Tony Blair in a Harold Wilson costume shaking hands with Noel and Liam, an even more stupid version of The Who (not something that had previously been thought possible). And here’s the Kod Kinks Knees-up Blur, giving us a ‘90s answer to Tommy Steele while missing that that had been a rhetorical question in the first place. Here’s Supergrass, who have somehow come as all of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

At least we had Jarvis Cocker, a modernised and etiolated Jake Thackray; but the British answer to American Grunge had turned out not to be something thrillingly new, but instead a mass market, microwave-ready version of a thrilling newness from thirty years ago. This was a generation trying to recreate, from memory, the records their dads had made them listen to in the ‘70s. Top of the Pops was appropriately reminiscent of those old Top of the Pops LPs, on which a covers band would wearily plod through vaguely recognisable versions of ancient hits.

Against this background, Soul Coughing sounded remarkably fresh despite being essentially a pale retread of the ‘60s New York scene. (Like the Velvet Underground and Talking Heads, they came out of a Manhattan art-music scene, this time centred on the club The Knitting Factory in Alphabet City.) But at least they weren’t trying to sound like the Velvets. They at least were aware that hip hop and electronic music existed, as did jazz and funk and new technologies that had prodded pop beyond two guitars, bass and drums. They at least acknowledged that it was, in fact, the ‘90s.

‘4 out of 5’ is a good illustration of this. It’s a sticky, intoxicating cocktail of influences: Mark degli Antoni’s woozy samples heaving into a sloshing rhythm out of which sudden tunes emerge, Sebastian Steinberg’s growling bass, Yuval Gabay’s intricate little beat, M. Doughty’s sardonic, beat poetry half-rap. Soul Coughing produced not so much songs as sound pieces, experiments and experiences. They were an impression of something that hasn’t quite happened yet. Which pretty much describes my life in the ‘90s.

The chorus of ‘4 out of 5’ is a chant composed of simple maths problems:

Four and five, therefore nine
Nine and nine, therefore eighteen
Eighteen and eighteen, therefore thirty-six
Four and five, therefore nine

This was a decent summary of my working life, which consisted of sitting in a hessian cubicle entering data into a green screen terminal. I plodded back and forth through the grimy London streets, from work to tube to flat to tube to work, surrounded by the screech of trains, the growl of traffic, the clatter of mechanical keyboards in an open plan office. That is what ‘4 out of 5’ sounds like: the bang and roar of the inchoate city, half-heard music seeping out of a pavement grate, coming from some subterranean bar the entrance to which you will never find.

The cover of their 1996 album, Irresistible Bliss, recalls that tenuous world: after computers, but before the Internet. The band’s name is rendered in Microsoft Word Art alongside a collection of junk shop and joke store finds collaged together in Paint. That’s the ‘90s, right there: a half-assed magpie acquisitiveness. Everything is a remix, everything is in flux, everything is interesting. Modern life might be rubbish, but you can make all kinds of things out of the odds and ends other folk leave behind.

In the context of Britpop, a definite 4 out of 5, I’d say. Better than average.

Soft Serve

The title of my absolute favourite song on this album, and also a glorious metaphor for late twentieth-century consumerist capitalism. Soft serve ice cream — which we Brits know as Mr Whippy, or the traditional 99 Flake — is a UHT liquid or even a powder that is flash-frozen at the moment of serving; it was invented because it was convenient to have ice cream that didn’t have to be stored in freezers. It maintains its light, creamy texture because it is full of air, ideally somewhere about 40%. There is even a persistent myth that the young Margaret Thatcher worked on formulating the British version when she was a chemist at Lyons Maid. This seems too good to be true, but let’s print the legend.

So: a mass-produced treat that is barely there at all; that was purposely designed for passing trade; an impulse purchase, made and sold in the moment; an accessory for idle afternoons, for cheap and meaningless leisure. Weightless froth: a perfect symbol for disposable petty luxuries, for planned obsolescence, for vapid marketing and meaningless advertising promises.

There is a sarcastic, disappointed tone in M. Doughty’s lyrical delivery. The ‘90s was full of cynicism about the future, and disgust at the perceived shallowness of this widening, commercialised culture. And there was the further sense that it hadn’t always been thus: that pop culture, thirty years before, had been inventive and vital and revolutionary (at least, so we were assured by endless documentaries and retrospectives). We had grown up with the idea that the ‘60s had been ‘the greatest decade in the history of the world’, as Withnail & I’s dealer Danny puts it; we were mere footnotes, the quotation generation, patching together our Cargo Cult fashions out of the cultural detritus all around us. We were living among the remains of an earlier, great culture, the decaying works of giant (sic. That’s collage culture for you: mashing up the ninth century Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer with Oasis’s idiosyncratically spelled album title).

What’s more, the generation that had apparently changed the old world had built this new one. This consumer paradise was theirs. Commercialisation had swallowed everything; they had sold hippie wigs in Woolworths, and now they were selling us flannel shirts and Union Jack dresses. Dissent had, in the words of The Baffler magazine at the time, been commodified. Every new trend was a fresh marketing option; every rebellion provided a new advertising slogan. As a result Gen X was obsessed with the horror of ‘selling out’, wary of doing anything in case it led to success, the ultimate solecism. And so we did nothing. We hung out, stayed in, got high. And we listened to ‘Soft Serve’, sweet and light like the eponymous ice cream, languid and lolloping. M. Doughty called it ‘slacker jazz’: the sound of lollygagging around on an aimless summer afternoon.

There was a voracious demand for lo-fi beats to smoke dope to, to shoot the breeze over. As well as slacker jazz outfits like Soul Coughing, G Love and Special Sauce, and Odelay-era Beck, there was also trip-hop, chill-out, acid jazz and an easy listening revival (the ‘60s the Boomers tried to hide from us). Uneasy ease was as much the sound of this era as Britpop. This was the space between so many things: the Cold War and 9/11, the City’s Big Bang and the crash of 2008, the censoriousness of the ‘80s and the Internet firehose of the new millennium, centrist governments in power and liberal democracy having apparently won.

That data entry job I had was incredibly dull and poorly paid, but I did have a job, and one that meant I could share a flat in Zone 2. A flat we could furnish with cheap accessories from IKEA because we were all surrounded with cheap consumables, a whole world of soft serve. We thought those intangible, inessential treats were just a distraction. Little did we know that that was the best we were going to get.

Also from 1996, the great classic of slacker pop, Beck’s Odelay:

Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) can’ t sleep, so he takes a job as a taxi driver on the night shift: going anywhere, anytime. This confronts him with all the worst aspects of a big city, against which political campaigner Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), looks like an angel. But Travis is incapable of wooing Betsy, and her rejection only weakens his already shaky mental health; he begins to spiral into obsessive loneliness. At first he plans to assassinate the candidate she works for but, in the end, he goes on a shooting spree to save a child prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster). All of which means that the taxi driver is seen not as a mad, lone wolf killer, but as a hero.

The Legend

Seeing Taxi Driver for the first time as a teenager felt like being inducted into a new stage of adulthood. Here was a grown-up film. Not only was it set in the grim and gritty New York streets, but it was also a dense text, ripe for interrogation. It wasn’t a Hollywood adventure story or a carefully plotted Hitchockian thriller; it was narratively looser and more artistically controlled, an impressionistic psychological portrait packed with meaning. To me it was a new kind of cinema, not something I had consciously engaged with before.

It was also, of course, part of a new kind of cinema for America. Taxi Driver is one of the key movies of ‘the New Hollywood’, which took the techniques and approaches of the experimental Nouvelle Vague and applied them to American movies. Taxi Driver does this consciously: it includes a direct visual reference to Godard’s 1967 film Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, and marries it to a ‘50s-style score by Hitchcock’s favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann, the last work of one of the great geniuses of classical Hollywood.

The journey from Nouvelle Vague to New Hollywood was a kind of hall of mirrors, but one in which the mirrors redouble and focus, aiming bright light at previously unpenetrated murk. The French had taken the street-level grittiness of the American Film Noir of the ‘40s and developed a new visual language for a poppier ‘60s. Now that approach was being reintroduced into American cinema to create a new ‘realism’, reinventing not only movies but also the vision of the country. For instance: Travis Bickle’s obsession with the .44 Magnum revolver immediately calls to mind Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (1971); but where Harry Callahan is just a swearier sheriff out of a Western, an authority figure whose moral correctness gives him permission to circumvent law and custom to do what’s ‘right’, Bickle is a much more questionable figure.

For Travis, self-reliant frontier individualism is not freedom but a prison. Alone among millions of other individuals, he is unable to connect; he cannot make sense of his own identity and purpose in the face of an overwhelming and implacable society. Trying to stay independent, to define himself without reference to anyone else, he drives himself mad with a young man’s rage.

As Paul Schrader’s introduction to his screenplay puts it:

He has the smell of sex about him: Sick sex, repressed sex, lonely sex, but sex nonetheless. He is a raw male force, driving forward; toward what, one cannot tell. Then one looks closer and sees the inevitable. The clock spring cannot be wound continually tighter. As the earth moves toward the sun, Travis Bickle moves toward violence.

Schrader told De Niro that the gun the actor had fantasised about using when younger was a symbol of De Niro’s talent, the hidden power he could unleash on the world. (This also gives a little Freudian insight into how Schrader thought about his own talent.) But the gun is a distance weapon, and a distancing weapon; it allows the carrier to kill at a remove, a terminal intervention without interaction.

Taxi Driver is a film about a crisis of masculinity, but it is also about a crisis of America. Schrader was inspired by his own experience of living alone in Los Angeles and feeling himself lose his connection with his surroundings; he intended it as much as a comment on the shallowness of that society as he did the fragility of the individual.

Travis, mentally unstable and a danger to himself and others, is hailed as a hero because his eventual violence resulted in the deaths of criminals, not politicians. Instead of being vilified, he is lionised; he appears to be ‘better’ than he is (better adjusted, better integrated). But the last shot of the movie tells us otherwise. Travis, having had a final, chance encounter with Betsy in which he appears to have behaved like a reasonable adult, catches sight of himself in the rearview mirror and is disgusted, instinctively flipping the reflection away so that it is replaced with the teeming streets of New York. The headlines and cover stories that say that Travis is whole, healed and a hero; but he, and we, know better.

Taxi Driver, both in its subject and its substance as a work of arthouse cinema, stands against what it sees as the commercial shallowness of ‘70s American culture. It shows the bright veneer of cultural gloss over seething social discontent. Travis’s appearance is radically different to that of the characters that surround him; with his cropped hair (and then mohican), his thrift-store western-wear and army surplus jacket, what he looks like is a punk, like all my alternative friends ten years later. He looks like the coming generation, the generation that reacted to the ‘70s with anger and nihilism.

Scorsese had to fight hard to get something so apparently uncommercial released. The fact that it was then commercially successful suggests that his vision was both right and wrong. The ‘70s audience recognised its message, and were also willing to engage with something deeper than a man in a white hat gunning down varmints in black ones.

The Reality

Part of the challenge and fascination of Taxi Driver as a work of art is that it is told entirely from the point of view of an obsessive, racist, misogynist loner whose sanity is crumbling before our eyes. It sets itself the task of looking at a crisis of masculinity, rather than society or — god forbid — femininity.

Travis is an unreliable narrator. He claims to have sent Betsy flowers, and yet his apartment is full of unsent bouquets in increasing stages of putrefaction. Is it really her he is talking to on phone, in the famous shot where the camera is forced to veer away from him in embarrassment and film an empty corridor instead? Did he ever really talk to her in the first place? Did he ever even serve with the Marines in Vietnam?

To watch the film is to sit with the worldview of a self-hating man who projects his nihilism and antagonism. Scorsese has said that he believes the film comes from a fundamentally feminist position, one that sees this form of masculinity as inherently poisonous. It is essentially a dramatisation of Germaine Greer’s maxim: ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’

...it takes macho to its logical conclusion. The better man is the man who can kill you. This one shows that kind of thinking, shows the kinds of problems some men have, bouncing back and forth between the goddesses and whores.

This can sometimes seem like the film is wolfing down its cake while shaking its head and complaining about how awful the cake is. It gets to include all kinds of transgressive language and imagery in the cause of telling us how bad it all is — which we already know, because otherwise it wouldn’t be transgressive.

Now, that language is getting less transgressive by the day. We are more aware of the Travis Bickles among us than we ever were. They are less lonely now. As Schrader has said: ‘They’re all talking to each other on the internet. When I first wrote about him, he was talking to nobody. He really was, at that point, the Underground Man. Now he’s the Internet Man.’

One of the editors on Taxi Driver was Marcia Lucas; her next project was a goofy kid’s sci-fi film made by her husband George, and that’s not the only link between Taxi Driver and Star Wars (1977). George Lucas was, at least in part, inspired by the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell. In A Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) Campbell argues that certain heroic legends from around the world share the same basic narrative structure because they are fulfilling the same basic social purpose: they provide a metaphorical structure for the passage from childhood to adulthood. The journey of the hero — in which he leaves home to defeat monsters and returns with a prize for his people — is a model for the process by which self-obsessed and coddled children overcome their fears and narcissism to be become integrated into their society as engaged individuals, using their talents for the benefit of all. Campbell suggests that ‘it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid.’

When George Lucas reinvented the hero’s journey in Star Wars he set in stone the structure of every Hollywood action movie since: the Call to Adventure, the Belly of the Whale, the Meeting with the Goddess, the Atonement with the Father, and the Magic Flight in return to the real world. Did Star Wars establish new rites of passage for the modern world? Well, Campbell might have been describing the present-day Star Wars fandom when he went on to say: ‘We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood.’ But, in fairness, he warns against trying to fit these ancient patterns into modern life; society has so thoroughly changed that they can no longer be relevant.

Travis Bickle, like Luke Skywalker, has all the characteristics of a mythological hero. He is a young man from a distant rural backwater recruited into a war he barely understands; he wants to defeat the dark father, storm the evil castle and rescue the princess. He wants to be a knight errant, wandering the wild wood on his big yellow destrier. Like Galahad, he is appalled at the corruption around him; like Perceval, he wants to resist it; like Lancelot, he wants to rescue the virgin. He believes he is the main character not just of his life but of the world, and is frustrated by the world’s refusal to agree with him.

This hero’s journey cannot work in the real world. Bickle’s failure and descent into madness comes from his failure to treat the mythology as metaphor; he does not recognise the opportunity to ascend into adulthood. And Hollywood’s version of the hero’s journey has lost all contact with Campbell’s theories of initiation rites and integration into the grown-up world. It has become entirely focussed on the enchanted individual, the lone hero standing above and against society. This is the reverse of Campbell’s intention.

Taxi Driver wasn’t just part of the beginning of something, a new American arthouse cinema; it was also part of the end of something. After Star Wars, the Hollywood blockbuster took over the movies. Taxi Driver doesn’t just stand against Hollywood blockbusters: it says that the myths they enshrine can be actively dangerous, and might spawn a whole generation of Travis Bickles. The Internet Men.

1976 was considerably less alarming if you were a child. Apart from Brotherhood of Man who were almost as disturbing as Travis Bickle.

Four Seasons (2026)

: Tina Fey is about my age, so I assume she saw the Alan Alda / Carol Burnett film Four Seasons (1981) as a teenager, as I did. Which just makes her contemporary remake all the more delicious. Watching the original was, for teenage me, a tantalising window into a sophisticated, funny, grown up world, which makes the contrast with being a not at all sophisticated and frequently ludicrous grown up all the more hilarious.

One thing that struck me is that the Boomers in the Alda film are all in their forties while Fey’s Gen Xers are all in their fifties. I guess they have to be in order to have kids who have left home, but have we delayed our midlife crises the same way we delayed having kids?

The first season of this was great, so a second season was inevitable, but it was also pretty much inevitably going to be an anti-climax. It’s not as good, BUT it still has actual laughs in it, which is remarkable enough.

Star City (2026)

We have to admit we kind of lost interest in the alternate history version of the space programme in the original series For All Mankind (2019 to the present), but we’re very much enjoying this spin-off set in the USSR of the ‘60s—’70s, in which the Russians try to capitalise on reaching the Moon first, while dealing with an oppressive state and American spies.

It is, inevitably, a somewhat cartoony version of Soviet Russia, but it is very entertaining. In order to contrast it with the American original it’s full of British and colonial actors, include Anna Maxwell Martin being splendidly sinister as a KGB officer and the always-welcome Adam Nagaitis being as weird and shifty as only he can be.

Letterbox Diary

What has watched this month:

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975)

*****

So, I finally got around to watching the greatest film of all time and it turns out to be pretty good. But perhaps not at the time.

Chantal Akerman’s film is ‘slow cinema’, full of long takes with an unmoving camera, as the title character peels potatoes or has a bath or sits in an armchair, thinking. This is one of the reasons that this has been hailed as a feminist masterpiece, foregrounding unseen ‘women’s work’. And also highlighting, not coincidentally, just how dull it is.

That monotony becomes monotonous for the viewer as well, but gradually you start to realise that it is performing a narrative function. By teaching the viewer Jeanne Dielman’s routine in excruciating detail, the film sensitises you to its eventual unravelling. You start to see Jeanne’ mental anguish in her moments of inaction or wrong action. Going into rooms for no reason, starting and abandoning a series of tasks, making and remaking coffee and never drinking any of it.

Hitchcock always held up the terrifying cafe bomb sequence in The Battle of Algiers (1966) as the epitome of tension: the audience knows there is a bomb under the table even as people laugh and dance around it. Jeanne Dielman is an equal but opposite illustration of tension: not a dramatic irony, but a psychological, internal tension, a tension the audience feels build without being able to see the bomb. Not until it is too late.

I was very sorry that I had read, somewhere, the ending of the film. I wish I had seen it without that knowledge, so I’m not going to repeat it here. But I will tell you that part of Jeanne’s monotonous grind is doing sex work to keep herself and her teenage son. That sex is merely part of her rigid and unsatisfying routine is another part of the ‘70s feminist reading. It is also another task that begins to come unstuck. The eventual conclusion is a shock but, crucially, not a surprise. Having seen Jeanne slowly, quietly break apart over the previous three hours, it comes as almost inevitable.

The ‘slow cinema’ style makes for an interesting watch. At first it is a curiosity, then a bore, then, finally, a kind of deep immersion in the fiction. Meditative and engaging. The fact that it is also a gradually developing narrative of psychological insight creeps up on you, opening like a flower, with a motion you don’t see but are delighted by when you finally notice it.

This also means that the film stays with you. You absorb it while watching and then digest it over the following days. It was four-and-a-half stars when I finished it and gained half a star in retrospect for being, well… at least one of the best films ever made.

Two Prosecutors (2025)

***½

More ‘slow cinema,’ but here the metaphor is the unseen unsettling of the state, rather than the self. A newly appointed prosecutor in 1937 Stalinist Russia discovers the truth about the NKVD’s use of systematic torture and murder, and tries to do something about it.

The slowness of the film-making dramatises the inexorability of the outcome. In Hollywood’s hands this would have been full of tension and energy and personal risk. The novice prosecutor would have been angrily seeking the truth, and would have come out with at least his integrity intact. Here, instead, he is just quietly dogged in his naive quest for justice; and the state is equally dogged in its quest to see injustice done.

The wheels of the bureaucracy grind slowly and smally, but they catch up with him just as they catch up with everyone else. As the prison governor’s joke has it: ‘Do you know what Radek said when they asked him what he’d been doing before the Revolution? “I was waiting in prison.” And when they asked him: “And after the Revolution?”... “Prison was waiting for me.”’

Thames Film (1986)

*** ½

A slow documentary this time. A meditative study of the Thames mixing film of the ‘80s river with footage from the early twentieth century, and illustrations from the 18th and 19th centuries, creating an image of the Thames as living things, connecting London not just through geography but through history, too. Space and time.

With John Hurt’s narration, it inevitably brought to mind Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), but it lacked the latter’s impish sense of humour and simultaneously parodical, fantastical and insightful psychogeography.

An ‘80s seriousness in the face of the Thatcherite future, rather than the ‘90s hollow laughter from the Britain it created. And worth it for all those glimpses of ‘80s London where the nineteenth century still clung on, before it was all built over with concrete and money.

Nouvelle Vague (2025)

****

The Sight and Sound critic’s poll that ranks Jeanne Dielman as the greatest film of all time quite rightly has Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) as the best of the Nouvelle Vague French films of the ‘60s (right there in my Letterboxd Four, folks). Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960) is at number 38. It’s not as good a film as Cleo, but it is important. It is the opposite of Jeanne Dielman, which is a still window into the internal world. From Belmondo’s Bogartisms to the famous jump cuts, À bout de souffle is a film about film, a film by cinephile for cinephiles, by a critic for critics; it is a film in which the making, the physical and experiential object of the film itself, was more important than the plot.

And now a film about a film about film: Richard Linklater’s dramatisation about the making of À bout de souffle, which puts the Hollywood back into the film that deconstructed Hollywood. It has none of the brio or radicalism of the original, but it does have a plot, and some splendid performances. It simultaneously pokes sly fun at the pretentious critical posturing and communicates just how inventive, imaginative and innovative the movement — and Godard in particular — was.

The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)

***½

Nigel Kneale knew the deal.

While Rowan was watching a lot of ‘90s reality programming for her piece on Big Brother, I went away and watched Nigel Kneale’s ‘60s TV play The Year of the Sex Olympics, in which he managed to predict twenty first century TV with unnerving accuracy.

It’s set in a future Britain where the populace is kept docile with a steady feed of pornography, including a sort of competitive OnlyFans in which different couples compete to appear in the Sex Olympics. When the Sex Olympics show is disrupted by an artist the producer starts to doubt his job, and volunteers for a new kind of show in which he, an old flame and their child will be marooned on an island, broadcast live around the clock as they try to survive without modern conveniences. The production is extremely period, with a lot of daft costumes and ludicrous future slang. But it does feature a young Brian Cox and a slightly less young Leonard Rossiter, so there are some splendid performances. (I have been inoculated by watching slightly too much early Doctor Who, and so can bear more of this stuff than most.) And it is fascinating to see how obvious it was where stuff was headed, even in 1968. It is particularly perceptive in seeing how reality TV would inevitably become a drama, a heightened and structured form of reality, always pushing towards greater shock and extremity.

There’s a reason why Nigel Kneale is worshipped by a certain kind of writer.

Ghost Trail (2024)

****

A Syrian refugee searches Europe for the man who tortured him while he was imprisoned. The film is particularly notable for the depiction of oppression and the refugee experience in the context of a spy thriller, which gives it a new urgency and immediacy. Themes of justice and revenge are complicated by the themes of identity and belonging that come with immigration. It features a tremendous performance from Adam Bessa as the driven but conflicted protagonist.

The Fall Guy (2024)

****

Not one of the greatest films of all time, but a lot of fun. It’s an adaptation of the 1980s TV show of the same name, but it reminded me much more of a different one: Moonlighting. It has exactly that sense of knowing precisely what kind of entertainment it is and leaning into doing it as well as it can, using the rumpled Gosling charm and Emily Blunt’s smart ease intelligently. And it has the same meta approach to the material. Set around the making of a terrible sci-fi movie, the film is a stunt-heavy action movie about stunt-heavy action movies, full of jokes about films and film-making.

The Metropolitan couldn’t help but wonder whether its lack of box office success might also have something to do with the fact that it also felt like a very Gen X film in its references, its crew — writer Drew Pearce and director David Leitch were both born in the ‘70s — its media literacy, and its meta instincts.

Badlands (1973)

****

We rewatched Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) recently and I was really struck by how the voiceover ruins it. The cod-philosophising and adolescent poetry just make the characters seem less likeable and more stupid, where the acting and direction were already having the desired effect. This is not true, however, of Holly’s (Sissy Spacek) voiceover in Badlands, which effectively complements the action and direction, adding a whole new layer to the film.

The full list is on Letterboxd

Playlist

Tobias Sturt: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

Out of Context - Library Card

Members of the Metropolitan household have started their first internship at a big corporation this week, so here’s a track about the insanity of corporate life to soundtrack it.

You’re Supposed To Be My Friend - 1990s

A friend of mine once had a gig and I got talking to a chap in the audience about how I was really there not to support my friend but to see the headline act, The Yummy Fur, because I thought they were just incredible. Anyway, that chap turned out to be Jackie McKeown, the lead singer of the Yummy Fur and now lead in the 1990s. He’s still great, too.

I Was Born (A Unicorn) - The Unicorns

Here’s a slightly more summery slice of indie pop so we can pretend we’re having fun in the sun. Which we’re not. It’s dreadful.

Strange World - La Luz

A grunge little track slightly better suited to what we are doing with our summer, which is cowering in the dark with the fans on.

Banana peel - corook

This is a lot more summery, though - musically, at least, in a delicious counterpoint to the lyrics.

pat - wished bone

Something very ‘60s singer songwriter about this one

Requiem for a Ladybug - Raya Yarbrough

Some sultry jazz for some sultry weather

Blue Chords - Shola Adisa-Farrar

A little more summer jazz

West Of Samoa - Speedy West

In case you haven’t guessed yet, the UK is having a heat wave, and this kind of weather always makes me turn to weird easy listening for comfort.

LALELEI - LEAO

And having had the easy listening version of Samoa, here’s the real thing.

The whole playlist can be found on Spotify:

There’s a lot of Soviet Russia in this month’s viewing, so here’s a link to Rowan’s piece about growing up during the Cold War:

A grim and gritty updating of Batman for the late ‘80s that put the dark back into the Dark Knight, while pushing out any sense of chivalry. An aged Bruce Wayne (55! Soooo old), realises that Gotham City has grown worse since Batman retired ten years ago, and so struggles once more into his monogrammed onesie and pointy ears to fight a feral street gang, a hypersexual psychopathic Joker and, finally, the biggest villain of all, an immigrant journalist who stands for a just and fair society: Superman.

Preface

‘Biff, Bang, Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!’

If there was one thing more common than headlines like that in the mainstream press in the late ‘80s, it was interviews with comics aficionados and professionals in the trade press complaining about headlines like that.

To be fair to that mainstream press, though, in the late ‘80s comics like The Dark Knight Returns were new -- or at least, they appeared to be new to mainstream observers. Comics about superheroes that were nevertheless not for children; comics about pulp do-gooders that were nevertheless about the moral ambiguity of crime-fighting; primary coloured cartoon strips that were nevertheless aspiring to be art. Enthusiasts were kvetching because they knew this had been going on the whole time; it was just that up till now, only kids had been paying attention.

Batman himself is an excellent example of this. The character was invented in the wake of the bolt out of the blue that was the arrival of Superman in 1938, when everyone was trying to think of a new iteration of this new idea: the superhero. Unlike the bright, sci-fi Superman, a hero who literally derives his powers from sunlight, Batman is made of older, more shadowy stuff. His Frankensteins, Bill Finger and Bob Kane, patched him together out of gothic odds and ends: Dracula, the 1926 mystery movie The Bat, the sinister, gun-toting pulp vigilante The Shadow, outlaw figures like Zorro, Robin Hood and The Scarlet Pimpernel.

In his origin, Batman’s entire purpose was to scare people:

‘Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot. So my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible…’

He was supposed to be an alarming figure. His early adventures are the stuff of film noir and prohibition-era gang war, his rogue’s gallery monstrous and freakish like Dick Tracy’s mobsters, his methods summarily two-fisted with a ‘hearty sense of malice’ as Frank Miller, the writer of The Dark Knight Returns, put it.

Miller is, in fact, something of a connoisseur of pulp himself; he went on to produce the Sin City series of hard-boiled crime stories. As the ‘returns’ in the title implies, The Dark Knight Returns was not just about Bruce Wayne coming out of retirement; it was also about returning Batman to his shadowy origins.

This too was not an original ideal; Batman had already been reinvented in a gritty mode in the ‘70s by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, who were responding to the child-friendly antics of the ‘60s TV show. But outside of comics, the TV show remained the image of Batman in the public imagination: a dependably square uncle with an odd dress sense and weird hobby; Adam West, hilariously straightfaced in his wrinkly unitard, trading Pop Art ‘BIFF’s with scenery-chewing character actors in heavy makeup.

The contrast between that childlike and childish TV fun and Frank Miller’s nihilistic, violent and explicit comic made the latter seem significantly more surprising and mature. Pow! Comics weren’t just for kids anymore. They were something more grown up: they were graphic novels.

Contents

Comic book aficionados also knew that the term ‘graphic novel’ wasn’t new; there’s a decent argument that the notion is as old as the form. Visual storytelling predates written language (indeed, it’s the origin of written language) but the closest thing to a first ‘comic book’ is the Histoire de Mr. Vieux-Bois (1827) by Rodolphe Töpffer, a picaresque novel told in graphical form.

Then there was the European tradition of the comics ‘album’, the adventures of Tintin and Asterix and Corto Maltese: pulp adventures told with graphics and bound up as comic ‘books’. Even when the great master of the medium, Will Eisner, used the term ‘graphic novel’ to describe his own work in 1978, he admitted he knew it wasn’t his coinage.

But, if only by dint of being a story about a globally recognisable superhero, A Dark Knight Returns is a key exhibit in the use of ‘graphic novel’ as a marketing term: a means of packaging and reselling monthly comics, and also a way to establish a new critical acceptability for a medium mostly seen as dumb entertainment for uncritical kiddiwinks and readers who needed the pictures to help them with the words.

The Dark Knight Returns is at least definitely a novel, in the sense of a self-contained work of extended narrative fiction. And, unlike most commercial comics, it was the work of a singular, individual vision. It was written and drawn by Frank Miller, and then inked by Miller with help from Klaus Janson (comics are generally first drawn in pencil before being inked over in clear lines and then coloured). The colouring of The Dark Knight Returns, a beautiful, muted watercolour palette, was by Lynn Varley. All three were tight collaborators, but The Dark Knight Returns is primarily Miller’s work. His artwork is of a piece with his story, tight and propulsive, while his line is expressive and full of pulp dynamite.

He uses a basic sixteen-panel grid – four rows of four panels – which makes for an exceeding dense page. The panels often feature tight close-ups, repeated with dense captions and speech around them. This gives a driving rhythm to the pages, packing in story and characters at a considerable rate. Miller builds on this with an exceptionally ‘80s multimedia approach; the panels frequently become the rounded rectangles of cathode-ray TV screens as talk-show hosts and news anchors comment on the comic’s proceedings. This builds an image of a seething, crowded Gotham, tense and ferocious like Miller’s Batman.

Against this rigid structure his art scratches and writhes, all sketchy lines and expressive, cartoony anatomy or gestural silhouettes of solid ink. When it does succeed in breaking out, as when the bright yellow of the Bat Signal breaks out of the grey, rectangular city architecture, it does so in operatically dramatic splash pages, full of action and emotion. The dialogue, boiled hard and welded to the bottom of the pan, rages inside its little boxes:

‘I play the shadows, forcing the hood to come close. He makes less noise than a Mack truck. There are seven working defenses from this position. Three of them disarm with minimal contact. Three of them kill. The other -- hurts.’

It’s not surprising that the comic was partly inspired by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movie Sudden Impact (1983), the sort of movie that Frank Miller has referred to a ‘a right-wing version of… old [Batman] comic books’. This is the rugged self-sufficiency myth of the Wild West transposed to the diverse and culturally fecund twentieth century city, and finding itself very uncomfortable there. A politics suspicious of everything – government, reform, other people – but wholly convinced of its own correctness, the unassailable moral rightness of the Great Man.

Of all the superheroes, this mode is most appropriate for Batman, a character whose roots are in the gangster-haunted cities of Prohibition-era America. Here is a billionaire so convinced of his own exceptionalism that he spends his money not on philanthropic projects, but on a single-handed war on crime. While wearing his jimjams.

Afterword

Much like prehistory, superhero comic history is generally divided into Ages, and these Ages are thought of as having gradually declined: from the 1940s Golden Age of Superman and Batman, through the giddy Silver Age, to the grimmer Bronze Age of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The Dark Knight Returns is one of the works that introduced what is sometimes known as The Dark Age of comics.

I thrilled to its darkly cynical politics when I read the comic as a teenager, just as I thrilled to the art and the pulp action. I had a fundamental adolescent need to besmirch the treasures of childhood, just as others pointed out the hidden swearing in The Clangers, pondered the exact nature of the relationship between Bert and Ernie and sniggered at Barbie’s lack of genitals.1 It’s all part of an attempt to reconcile childish delights with the grown-up world, just as a teenager tries to fit their childhood identity into adult clothing. This is certainly part of the appeal of The Dark Knight Returns. The mesmerising revelation that the Batman I knew from the ludicrous TV show, from Dinky Batmobiles and rubbery Mego action figures, was now growling ‘Welcome to hell’ from the shadows as he beat up machine-gun toting gang members.

The Dark Knight Returns had the same impact on comics as it had on me as a teenage reader. Suddenly, all the primary-coloured do-gooders of my childhood were indulging in overwrought narration, bad language and a little bit of the old ultra-violence. This wasn’t Miller’s fault alone; a cadre of British creators also brought a more acerbic and satiric mode to American comics (although at least two of the major figures of that invasion, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, have since repudiated a lot of this excessively grim posturing). But the influence of The Dark Knight Returns is nevertheless inescapable. It became the jumping-off point for a whole cavalcade of movie Batmen, from Tim Burton’s 1989 gothic Batman to Chris Nolan’s po-faced angst and Zack Snyder’s monochrome objectivist slugfests. And it’s still there in DC’s new Absolute Batman line, which adopts Miller’s TV inserts as a deliberate homage even as it tries to establish a completely different politics for the character. Even a working-class, anti-1% Batman must also be a massive, impassive slab of muscle, just like Miller’s.

A lot of that impact came from the fundamental idea of taking Batman seriously. What would a mask-wearing, crime-fighting billionaire actually be like? He’d be insane, right? He’d be just as psychopathic as the Joker or Two Face or The Mad Hatter, or any of the other weirdos he fights. This, ultimately, is the real legacy of The Dark Knight Returns. What if we took superheroes seriously? What if, instead of them just being halftone smudges on pulp paper, they were actual people; or at least, real-life actors in convincing costumes and not-quite-as-convincing CGI settings? What if they were multiple-million-dollar smash-hit movies? What if they were a cornerstone of global pop culture? What then?

‘Biff, Bang, Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!’

Of course, there were plenty of comics in the mid ‘80s that weren’t for kids and also weren’t, more importantly, about superheroes:

The early 2000s weren’t all sparkles and rainbows (the clothes were awful, for one thing); but there was a sense that — to adapt the New Labour anthem — things could get better. On TV, as observed recently, this mood translated into a glut of reality shows about DIY and home improvement, a deliriously satisfying weekly template in which ordinary couples looked around at their semi-detached three-beds and thought: ‘but what if we built a Moroccan souk in the conservatory?’ And, as Barry Norman used to say, why not.

Once the entire global supply of MDF had been wedged into the nation’s crevices, this sense of potential for improvement — of having the headspace and financial ease to think about how things might be better — was turned upon the self. How could we dress better, eat better, communicate better, relate better, parent our children better? How could we be… better? For the answers, TV turned to a strange mishmash of real-time soap opera and pop psychology.

The first British series of Big Brother, transmitted on Channel 4 in the summer of 2000, was initially presented as a social psychology experiment. Ahead of transmission we were told it would be an investigation into how ordinary people responded to artificial conditions: the impossibility of privacy, stressful ‘tasks’ and capricious restrictions on food intake and sleep. What would these things affect their behaviour and their relationships, and what could we learn from that? Each week there was a show dedicated to the observations of Big Brother’s tame psychologists, who at this point were still taking the premise quite seriously.

And then, instead of being a boring bit of social observation, Big Brother took off like a rocket. It became an insanely compelling real-life soap opera, in which producers chose narratives and meddled in ‘storylines’ (budding friendships, secret crushes, furtive unpleasantness). Those of us who started watching it out of curiosity — and I am absolutely including myself here — couldn’t look away; there is something absolutely riveting about the minutiae of human relationships, and, of course, there was a more dramatic narrative around ‘Nasty’ Nick and his ‘manipulation’ of the voting process. (To this day, I have no idea how much of this was real and how much of it was constructed in the editing suite). The viewers, for their part, quickly decided that their role was to determine which of the housemates were most deserving of punishment, in the form of ‘eviction’. Big Brother became a screaming success not because of the contestants, but because of the strong instincts it aroused in the audience.

One strange outcome was that in the first season of Big Brother, we were closely watching people who did not know that they had become massively famous. Suspended in an oblivious air-gapped bubble, the housemates thought they were being watched by the standard late-night Channel 4 audience, ie a couple of hundred thousand chin-strokers. None of them had entered the house with the expectation of shrieking tabloid celebrity; indeed, once the novelty had worn off, many of them weren’t even enjoying the much more limited exposure that they thought they were experiencing. At one point one of the housemates, Anna — who was missing her girlfriend — composed a sad little song and sung it quietly to herself:

And when I put my arms around you, you will know
You’re the only one for me
And when I put my arms around you, you will know
I hate being on TV

But we didn’t heed her warning. The social-psychology-TV genie was out of the box, and every channel soon wanted a self-improvement show that might also offer an opportunity for self-righteous gawping and judgement. How could we learn to feed ourselves more adventurously, and yet more healthily? Why, by watching Jamie Oliver put a squad of unemployed youngsters through an artificially accelerated cookery course in Jamie’s Kitchen (2002). How could we learn to feel more positive about our size 16 bodies? Here come Trinny and Susannah to explain What Not to Wear (2001); and if that means watching a woman standing in the middle of a 360-degree mirror and contemplating her back-fat while crying — well, so much the better.

The ‘casts’ of these reality shows often displayed a touching child-like quality: a willingness to learn, and a brave, open countenance as they uncovered their grotty underbellies, literal and metaphorical. But these formats presented an underlying problem: there is a significant difference between making over your garden, and making over yourself. Turning your back yard into a Zen gravel pit decorated with lanterns from Asda needn’t involve any personal revelation; it needn’t involve ugly emotions, vulnerability, and careful personal work. You don’t have to tell anyone that you’re doing this because your dad hated you. But when the format revolves around personal behaviours or difficulties, everything gets very serious, very fast.

Take the premise of How Clean Is Your House?, a reality format that featured the incredibly camp Kim Woodburn and her ‘scientific’ Scottish sidekick Aggie Mackenzie. How Clean Is Your House? was not supposed to be a show about personal development; it was supposed to be a show about tidying up. Each week the uncomfortable duo of Kim and Aggie (there really was not a lot of chemistry there) swarmed into a home to ‘show’ its inhabitants how to wipe surfaces and take things to the dump. It was clearly intended to be superficially similar to the satisfying ‘before and after’ format of Ground Force and Changing Rooms.

The problem was that people who let their homes get epically dirty or messy tend to have much deeper problems. If you haven’t so much as washed a mug for six months, we’re probably not looking at a skill issue. In the random episode I found on YouTube, the voiceover announces that Angela’s house is ‘letting down the neighbourhood’: ‘this is a RAT HOLE’ shrieks Kim, writing ‘FILTH’ in the dust on the TV screen. Angela’s ‘lazy’ husband David complains he’s being ‘pushed out of the door’ by the mess, over footage of him calmly watching telly in a small tunnel he has made between mountains of crap. But Angela’s fundamental distress keeps breaking through. Blink and you’ll miss it, but we learn that she is a full-time unpaid carer, and sleeps on the sofa at her mum’s house. In the opening ‘video call’ describing her predicament, she openly admits to feeling depressed.

How Clean Is Your House was a deeply uncomfortable watch because the underlying difficulties experienced by its participants were so extraordinarily visible, and so resolutely ignored. This wasn’t a show about cleaning; it was a show about distress and rubbernecking. The whole thing was a grotesque mangle of serious problems, inappropriate solutions, and irrelevant blather about E. coli bacteria.

At the other end of the problem/solution scale was the BBC’s The House of Tiny Tearaways, in which clinical psychologist Dr Tanya Byron invited families to live in a childproof ‘home’ for a week so that their children’s behaviours could be observed and addressed (which almost always meant observing and addressing the parents’ behaviours). The Tiny Tearaways house looked creepily like the Big Brother house, and was similarly full of two-way mirrors and fixed cameras. And, like Big Brother, it gave a lot of space to its subjects; each week in the house was given six hours of transmission time.

I found Tiny Tearaways utterly addictive; I only meant to watch one episode, and instead binged an entire series of 18. You quickly become genuinely interested in the subjects (both children and adults), and when Byron intervenes to address something problematic, it is extremely cathartic. Byron did proper therapeutic work (including off-camera follow-up) with the families, and most of the parents seemed to gain a genuinely improved understanding of where they’d gone wrong. She stoutly defended the show on this basis: ‘the current glut of reality programming is all about social psychology [but] you have endless programmes with people who are deeply unqualified giving advice to incredibly vulnerable people.’

No: the real problem with Tiny Tearaways was that the children themselves could not possibly have consented to any of this. Inescapably, part of the enjoyment was of the ‘look at that little shit’ variety; tantrums had by other people’s children are always glorious, as are other people’s parenting mistakes. This mean-mindedness — of which, to be clear, I am absolutely guilty — is bad enough when turned on adults.

Early on one week, one of the ‘tearaways’ rips off her mic pack and runs away from it; she is pursued by her mother, who is anxiously explaining that she must wear it at all times (this has clearly been spelled out by the production team in no uncertain terms). This kid — who also quickly susses out the precise locations of all the cameras — has understood the deal, and she does not consent; and this is one piece of behaviour, curiously, that none of the adults in the house want to address. Later in the week, aware that she is being observed and judged in moments of distress, she sobs: ‘What’s this place called?’ ‘London,’ her mum says. ‘I hate London then,’ she cries: ‘I hate that lady [Byron], I hate everything in this house and I hate everything in London.’ In other words: she hates being on TV. Smart kid.

This mistake — of shoving unwary people, and most particularly kids, into the judgement panopticon — was largely generational. Gen X parents have been absolutely terrible at shielding our kids’ privacy in an age of ceaseless public self-revelation. Newly captivated by our own potential as content-production units, we mistook our children for wholly-owned subsidiaries. Millennial parents, in my experience, are much savvier about all of this. And people who had access to the social web in their teens are also much savvier about the audience; they understand that any personal content, however heartfelt or authentic or vulnerable, carries the risk of an outsized and hostile public response.

Perhaps the self-improvement/punishment bubble truly burst with the public disgrace of Jade Goody, who had won the third series of Big Brother in 2002. When she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2005, her racist behaviour towards the eventual winner (the actor Shilpa Shetty) — as well as the creeping suspicion that she was herself extremely damaged — seemed to prompt some reflection. ‘Ordinary’ people were slowly learning that these shows could be life-altering in a bad way. Twenty years later, the only people willing to take part in reality soaps are fame-seeking missiles, and the audience understands these shows as wholly artificial (not that that stops them judging). Our experiments in mass social psychology produced — as Dr Tanya would say — some real learning. It’s just that none of it has felt very improving.

Of course, even before reality shows, there was still plenty of social rubbernecking on TV: