Metropolitan Mixtape: 2024 October

Election fever

Treat

Primary Colors (1998)

Rowan Davies

: On the morning of November 9 2016 I woke up to hear that Trump had won the US election. My friend and work colleague Becky had stayed over the night before and that morning, after we’d stared at each other in horror for a while, we set off to walk to the train station together. 

It had been raining all night, and the walk up to the station was biblically wet. Water was running in the gutters and flooding across the surface. At one point we had to navigate around an enormous sinkhole in the pavement that had filled up with rainwater, and when I’d got past it I realised that Becky had disappeared. 

I turned full circle a couple of times, but couldn’t see her anywhere; not ahead of me, not behind me, not to either side. I looked back at the sinkhole. I looked up in the air, just in case. I stood still, trying to spot her and drawing irritable exclamations from all the other miserable commuters. But time was ticking on, and I was getting wetter and wetter, and I had to get to work, and Becky just wasn’t anywhere. So after a minute or so I began to trudge onwards towards the station, minus one friend. 

Which is when she tapped me on the shoulder (to this day I don’t really understand where she had been) and said: ‘Oi! Meathead! You can’t just carry on walking like I’d never existed.’ 

I had been so defeated and upset by the malignant absurdity of everything that instead of having a normal reaction to Becky’s disapparation – she must be somewhere around here, I’ll stand to one side and wait – I had just accepted it. I’d considered it, processed it, and moved on with a numb cognitive shrug: Becky’s gone. Disappeared. Aliens? Maybe fell in that hole and drowned. Oh well. 

And now, in a couple of weeks, it could all happen again. Well, the bit where Trump gets elected. The bit with Becky and the big hole was more of a one-time thing.

This month we’ve been staving off our terror with a few films about US elections, and Primary Colors is one of the better ones. The script by Elaine May – who collaborated with the film’s director Mike Nichols in a groundbreaking 1960s comedy act – is funny and sharp, and the story has real guts. (It’s taken from Joe Klein’s initially anonymous novel, which was based on his experience of covering Bill Clinton’s 1992 Democratic Primary campaign.) All the performances are enjoyable, but the whole thing is punched up several levels by Kathy Bates’s Libby Holden, a 200-pound ‘gay lesbian woman’ who’s hoping against hope that her ill-disciplined, philandering friend-and-candidate won’t let her down again. (I mean: spoilers…)

Halloween Movies

Tobias Sturt

: despite being a massive scaredy cat (passim), I always try to watch a few horror films during October, usually ones I haven’t seen before. This year’s include a lot of haunted houses and one haunted train:

• House (1977): psychotronic, psychedelic Japanese pop grand guignol. The Banana Splits directed by Tarantino. Never a dull moment, never a comprehensible one.

• The Raven (1963): who could resist Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre as battling wizards, with a young Jack Nicholson as the bumbling ‘hero’?

• Coco (2017): curiously uninspired Pixar movie with absolutely inspired design drawing on the Mexican Day of the Dead.

• The Halfway House (1944): Creaky wartime ghost story with creaky wartime acting and accents set in a creaky wartime Welsh ghost pub that I absolutely want to live in.

• Horror Express (1972): Cushing! Lee! Savalas! Zombies! Alien invaders! Spies! Inventors! More ideas than it knows what to do with or is indeed able to deal competently with. Would make a great RPG scenario.

• The Lighthouse (2019): Ludicrous, overdone, weird, unsettling, utterly terrific. All atmosphere and sensation, like all the best horror stories.

• Werewolf of London (1935): The first full-length werewolf movie and part of the ‘30s Universal monster cycle. Weird to see the cinematic werewolf lore in the process of gelling.

• The Witch (2015): I guess I’m a Robert Eggers fan now. Exemplary folk horror that feels like a modern riposte to the prurient patriarchal repression of movies like Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971).

• An Inspector Calls (1954): It kind of qualifies as a Halloween movie, since the Inspector is possibly some kind of supernatural avenger. Anyway, I want to be Alistair Sim when I grow up. Mind you, Rowan says I already am.

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The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

Rowan: Another appropriately bloody recommendation: a historical thriller from writer and director Scott Cooper, set at West Point Academy outside a tiny New York in 1830. Detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) investigates a series of murders, aided by a young military cadet by the name of Edgar Allen Poe. It’s grisly and gothic and gorgeous, and features an eerie performance by Harry Melling (also known as Dudley Dursley; Melling is very much the best of the Harry Potter alumni, although this is admittedly not a very competitive field). It is not remotely based on a true story, although Poe did go to West Point. It got dreadful reviews on release, and we really don’t understand why. Speaking of which…

Trick

Ludwig (BBC, 2024)

We seem to be getting into a habit of being mean about things that other people like. If it helps, we’re probably more bothered by this than you are. Take Ludwig, the BBC’s new cosy-crime series starring Britain’s favourite David Mitchell as David Mitchell, playing the character David Mitchell. It’s ‘utterly delightful’, says Camilla Long in the Sunday Times. It’s ‘fantastic’, according to Richard Osman and Marina Hyde on ‘The Rest Is Entertainment’. 

We really wanted to like it, but we just didn’t. I suspect in part it’s because neither of us wholly buys into The Whole David Mitchell Thing. You either find his brand of jumpy neurosis inherently funny or you don’t, and apparently we don’t. Without that fundamental affection for the central character you’re in trouble, because nothing else about Ludwig is done with any conviction. 

There’s no craft in it; every single element is slapdash. It’s supposed to be a murder-mystery series, but I’ve seen more enigmatic and troubling things in the display cabinets at Costa Coffee. Ludwig is supposed to be a genius at solving puzzles, but the creative direction fails to visually dramatise the puzzle-solving in an entertaining and enlightening way. The arc plot about Ludwig’s missing brother means there’s not enough time in an episode to do the murder-detective bits properly; but the arc’s function as the story engine for the murders means that the arc plot cannot be meaningfully progressed. The script is full of bits of joke-shaped dialogue in which the writers have forgotten to include actual jokes. This is all summed up by a recurring visual gag in which Ludwig repeatedly parks badly in the bays outside the police station. Instead of cycling through all the visually funny and increasingly ludicrous ways you could park a car badly, the show has him parking exactly halfway between two bays. Every single time. 

However cosy or predictable your premise, you have to stake your artistic claim somewhere; you have to take at least one thing seriously. Morse and Endeavour took nothing seriously except the central relationships. Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club books are as cosy and silly as hell, but his empathetic portraits of old age give them a surprising heft. In Ludwig the load-bearing element should be the puzzles, but they are introduced and then dismissed without any elucidation, dissolving like a morning mist. It’s a Potemkin series. Its single authentic purpose is to give David Mitchell something to do.

And if you think that’s mean, just be glad we haven’t written down what we thought about Rivals.

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Monster Mash

Tobias Sturt

: Here’s this month’s playlist. It's basically what I’ve been listening to for the last few weeks, but, especially for Halloween, crafted into a horror movie soundtrack. The playlists will all be on Spotify.

‘Bed & Breakfast’ by Isolde Lasoen. What could be more romantic than a weekend getaway in a remote backwoods cottage? This all seems idyllic by daylight.

‘Satin Curtains’ by Molly Lewis. But as the sun sets and the shadows deepen under the trees, everything starts to look more sinister…

‘In The Village’ by Piero Umiliani. In the local pub, everyone stops talking as you enter. What’s with the corn dollies everywhere? What are those weird mobiles of shells and bones hanging from all the trees?

‘Full Bloom’ by Josiah Steinbrick. And now a local amateur scientist wants to show us round his special conservatory of strange flowers.

‘Ode to an African Violet’ by Mort Garson. He claims that certain esoteric frequencies can awaken the dormant consciousness of nature.

‘Summoning the Monkey God’ by Sorcerers. Wait, summoning the what now? What’s that weird thrumming from the woods? What are those strange figures dancing out there?

‘Buchanan Hammer’ by Los Tones. Everything’s going crazy! This whole village has gone insane!

‘The Good Ones’ by Widowspeak. Someone has to stop this mad scientist and his backwoods nature worshipping cult! Where are the good guys?

‘Who by Fire’ by Skinny Pelembe (feat. Beth Orton). There’s only option left: cleansing fire. Burn this devil worshipping village to the ground.

‘Hooligans’ by Count Lasher. Slow track back as the car leaves the burning village, the heroes dazed, sooty but still alive.

As usual, the full playlist is on Spotify:

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As befits October, our podcast this month is a departure from the usual: a ghost story for Halloween.