Metropolitan Mixtape: August 2024

Anytime, cowboy

In

True Grit (2010)

Tobias Sturt

: My Grandmother loved Westerns. She’d watch anything with a horse in it, the way I watch anything with a spaceship in it; and I spent a lot of time with her, so I ended up watching a lot of Westerns too. I recently rewatched The Searchers (1956) and realised I’d been basing my clothing style on John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards ever since. I mean, the man is a monster, but his wardrobe is astonishing.

So I was already well acquainted with the 1969 version of True Grit, and was absolutely delighted when the Coen Brothers remade it with Jeff Bridges in the John Wayne role as Marshal ‘Rooster’ Cogburn. Rowan hadn’t seen it before, so we ended up watching it this month. As you would expect from the Coen Brothers, it has its cake and eats it: it splices a degree of revisionism — everyone is dirty, disreputable and drunk — with their usual dry comedy (Hailee Steinfeld’s Mattie Ross is splendidly straight). The juxtaposition of prolix, stilted Victorian dialogue with the wild and weird wonder of the unsettled West gives it an arch tone. Most importantly, they kept the best line of dialogue from the final gunfight: “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!”

Paris Texas (1984)

Tobias Sturt

: More wild and weird West in Wim Wender’s 1984 drama, which is back on the big screen – the best place to appreciate Robby Müller’s beautiful photography. In part, it’s a film about lost time and our relationship to the past, so it’s appropriate that this viewing made me realise that the way I think about it has changed a lot since I first saw it decades ago. 

I no longer see Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis and Nastassja Kinski’s Jane as doomed romantics, but instead largely as irresponsible narcissists who abandoned their son, Hunter, because they were too self-involved to look after him. On first viewing I suspect I found Aurore Clément’s Anne – Travis’s sister-in-law – irritating, but now it's her story I want to hear. She and Travis’s brother (Dean Stockwell) took Hunter in and treated him as their own child while Travis wandered off into the desert to wallow in his own self-pity for four years. Then Travis comes back and just takes Hunter away. I could have done with a little more about the impact of this on Anne, and a little less of Harry Dean Stanton monologuing in a strip bar. (Although he monologues beautifully, and we wouldn’t get a glimpse of John Lurie without that sequence.)

The other revelation was just how in love with America we all were then. There are plenty of panoramic vistas of the Mojave Desert, but the film also spends a lot of time on the highway, in shabby motels and run-down rest stops. The characters are forever on the edge of things, behind the back of America. For Wenders and Müller these places are just as extraordinary as the wilderness. You get this same emphasis in other films of the period, such as Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984). It was partly a way to kick back against Reagan’s bombastic vision of America, but was also an insistence that America is cool, even its most decrepit and humdrum places and lives.

Jarmusch, Wenders and Cox were all Europeans or weirdo outsiders (or both, in Cox’s case); in the ‘80s and ‘90s it was normal for such people to be fascinated by the idea of America. Not so much anymore. Just anecdotally, no young adults of my acquaintance are planning the kind of Wenders-inspired American road trips I was dreaming about at their age.

Damascus Station (2021) by David McCloskey; Kolymsky Heights (1994) by Lionel Davidson

Rowan Davies

: I’ve been enjoying a run of dumb espionage thrillers this month and these were the best by some distance. McCloskey is a self-proclaimed ex-CIA analyst (are you supposed to talk about this in public?) and Damascus Station, set in Syria under the Assad regime, conveys a convincing sense of place as well as including all sorts of persuasive field-craft details. Kolymsky Heights has a strange, distant tone and a non-standard central character (a genius-IQ Canadian Inuit who is also a total ninja). Like Damascus Station it operates as a fascinating travelogue, this time across Japan, Siberia and the Bering Straits. Davidson, who died in 2009, didn’t write many books, perhaps because – as seems plausible in the case of Kolymsky Heights – he had to do years of research for each one. The plot is absolute hokum, but don’t let that put you off. 

Both are a cut above everything else out there at the moment (except perhaps Slow Horses, although I’m not quite as entranced by those as everyone else is). Also: hey there, book publicists! Please stop saying that every contemporary espionage thriller writer is ‘the new le Carré’. You’re not doing the authors any favours by inviting the comparison, and as a reader I’m offended that you think I can’t tell the difference. In the case of McCloskey, a better comparison – and still an enviable one – would be Lee Child; Damascus Station is very Jack Reacher-esque.

Running on Empty (1988, Sidney Lumet)

Rowan Davies

: I’ve only seen this once before, in the cinema when I was a teenager, but it’s one of those films you don’t forget if you see it at the right age. I must protest that this wasn’t a hormones thing; its star, the late River Phoenix, never particularly appealed to me. But I was at exactly the same stage of life as Phoenix’s character, and I found the premise – growing up and leaving your birth family – absolutely devastating. 

Phoenix plays Danny, the 17-year-old son of political activists (based on Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground) who have been on the run from the FBI for 15 years. The family moves from place to place at the drop of a hat, never putting down roots outside their own enclosed and mostly happy unit. The action takes place during the last few months of Danny’s last year in high school, as he begins to realise that if he wants to live the life of a normal young adult he’ll have to leave his family behind.

I’ve been meaning to re-watch it for ages and was prompted to finally do so by this episode of the Zeitgeist Tapes podcast featuring fellow Substacker

Emma Burnell

. The podcast includes an interesting discussion of the revealed politics of the film, which co-host Steve Fielding calls ‘a Hallmark movie for terrorists’. They’re probably right that nobody would make a sympathetic film like this about violent right-wing activists; but then, these days you probably wouldn’t make a deeply sympathetic film like this about any kind of violent activism. The Vietnam War and the associated protest movement was such a distinct event, and such a breach in the Boomer consciousness, that it seemed to cause all kinds of aberrant cultural behaviour.

If you put the politics aside, Running on Empty is still a remarkably moving film about love and family and growing up. As Tobias noted, it’s the kind of film they just don’t make very much any more: a film that’s appealing to almost everyone except men under the age of 25, who would probably rather die than watch it. Christine Lahti is particularly great as the terrorist/mother, and the script does a wonderful job of illustrating different perspectives without losing sight of the narrative motor. If you don’t cry at the scene between Lahti and Danny’s grandfather then you might as well just turn yourself in to the police. 

Next month: Terms of Endearment.

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Out

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (2018)

Tobias Sturt

: This has a terrific concept at its heart: Gosford Park crossed with Groundhog Day. The protagonist wakes up every morning in the body of a different guest at a classic Golden Age house party that culminates in a murder; the only way he can escape the time loop is by finding out whodunnit. It’s extremely well written and a rattling good read, but the ending made me very angry.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

At the end it is revealed that the whole time-loop-country-house-murder-mystery scenario is a kind of prison in which criminals are forced to solve murders in an attempt to make them more empathic. But while the author was willing to spend an awful lot of time working through the intricacies of his murder mystery, he didn’t bother thinking much about how this presumably futuristic (or maybe alien? Or maybe cross-dimensional? Virtual reality? Quantum-entangled consciousness?) prison worked. He just handwaves it. I was partly annoyed because of what this revealed about the pulp fiction pecking order (detective stories can be taken seriously but sci-fi can’t); but I had more specific complaints too. 

The murder-mystery part of the book works incredibly well, revealing the truth slowly by making us see events from multiple viewpoints; but with this ending it suddenly lurches from showing to telling. After the twist is revealed, an avalanche of exposition is suddenly dumped on top of the reader. This is particularly problematic because the development includes a big reveal about one of the main characters, which is largely robbed of its emotional heft. It’s also a lost opportunity: thinking through how this strange prison worked could have opened up whole new ways to tell this meta-story, adding another layer of deception and uncertainty to the book.

I suspect I was only angry because I am a nerd and bothered by such things. You probably won’t care so much. Four-fifths of it are a good book, after all. 

(Note from Rowan: I thought it was great, and I liked the twist at the end, and I was not persuaded by any of Tobias’s kvetching.)

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Shake it all about

Tobias: Here’s this month’s playlist. It's basically what I’ve been listening to for the last few weeks. The playlists will all be on Spotify.

“There but for for the Grace of God Go I” by The Gories, a splendidly stompy bit of garage rock that’s all about the perils of leaving the city, appropriately enough given this month’s essays.

Then a hard turn into ‘Cognito’ by Aksumi, for a little rest in minimalist jazz

‘Undo the Blue’ by Irina Mancini, proving that everything old is new again. One of the pleasures of being as old as I am is hearing the music of my childhood reinterpreted by kids for whom it is history.

‘La Meg’ by Okay Kaya is a lovely, sleepy thing, made especially dreamlike for the Anglophone by having lyrics at least partly in what I think is Norwegian.

‘Sreo Sam Te’ by Branko Mataja is equally dreamy. Apparently be built his own guitar while in an internment camp for refugees in Yorkshire in the 1930s. And how beautifully he plays it.

It’s still just about summer but now its cooler, it’s the perfect time for flaneuring about town listening to Harry Nilsson and ‘I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City’

And if ever a song sounded like stepping out onto a city street on a quiet summer’s morning, its ‘Peaceful’ by Georgie Fame

‘Ecoute mon coeur’ by Rita Bartok, on the other hand, is twilight coming on across the rooftops.

Now, Martha and the Vandellas are terrific, obviously, but ‘No More Tearstained Make-up’ is here for Smokey Robinson’s lyrics. Holy Moly, they’re good.

‘Forget Me Not’ by Say She She is another perfect example of the music of my youth being reinvented and transfigured into something new and brilliant.

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There’s been a lot of children’s books this month, so the latest episode of the podcast is

Rowan Davies

reading her piece on ‘Ballet Shoes’