Metropolitan Mixtape: February 2025
Brave new whirl
In
Civilization VII (2025)
: I’ve documented my addiction to Sid Meier’s Civilization games in The Metropolitan before, and here’s a new iteration, come to steal my time. When Civilization IV came out I bought it one afternoon and decided to have a quick game before supper to try it out. All of a sudden it was 5am and I was very hungry. I haven’t had that experience with Civilization VII yet, not least because I’m too old to stay up all night and these days I have to make supper for more people than just myself. The game has some interesting new twists on the formula. You now play as several different civilizations through the course of history, passing from the Celts to the Anglo-Saxons to the British; and the tools for diplomacy have developed. Under the hood, though, it still has that ‘one more turn’ addictive mechanic. And the new diorama-inspired visuals are terrific.
Schindler’s List (1993)
: Yeah, I know - subscribe to The Metropolitan for all the hot new content. I’ve always avoided watching this precisely because I thought it was going to be incredibly upsetting, and it is, indeed, incredibly upsetting. But my dad was visiting and had just watched Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) *twice*. (Dementia doesn’t have many upsides, but at least you never run out of things to watch.) So we thought we’d move swiftly on to the next thing on the iPlayer — which turned out to be Schindler’s List — before we ended up watching it a third time. I don’t have much new to say about Schindler’s List. It’s worth anyone’s time. Tobias said he had been worried it would be mawkish, but the acts of premeditated sadism and random violence are so sudden and persistent that there’s not much space for sentimentality. Most of what there is is in the relationship between Schindler and his Jewish worker Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley.
Ralph Fiennes (with a plump youthful face) is truly terrifying; Liam Neeson has the right amounts of charm, egotism and dissolution. The decision to shoot in black and white — because, Spielberg said, ‘The Holocaust was life without light’ — didn’t quite work for me, but equally it didn’t get in the way. (Getting in the way would have been quite welcome at some points, to be honest.)
What struck me is that Spielberg has, I think, very deliberately produced a corpus of documentary-style work about The Holocaust and, more broadly, about the Second World War in Western Europe. (He has done less about the other fronts in the War, although he did direct Empire of the Sun in 1987 and co-produced The Pacific for HBO; and of course, the most notorious death camps in the Holocaust were in Eastern Europe.)
The items in Spielberg’s War corpus aren’t documentaries: they’re fictionalised, quite heavily so at points. The young girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List probably didn’t exist in the form she’s shown in the film; at least, she isn’t based on any one person. There was a US Army mission to save one surviving brother from a family of brothers, but the family’s name wasn’t Ryan and the rescue didn’t happen in the way shown in Saving Private Ryan. Easy Company did help to liberate a concentration camp in Germany, but the story told in Band of Brothers is a composite of a few different experiences at a few different camps.
But the broad outlines of Spielberg’s War material are hellishly accurate. Many veterans attested that the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan was a very close representation of what happened on Omaha Beach in the early hours of D-Day; at several points in Band of Brothers you think ‘that can’t be true’ only to find out that it is. This cleaving to the essential facts is important; nobody can accuse Spielberg of making things up out of whole cloth. And when it comes to the Holocaust, we are sadly never short of people looking for an excuse to claim that it didn’t really happen.
Spielberg was born in 1946, 18 months after the War ended; for all of the adults he knew, it was foundational. And, of course, he is Jewish; his father lost around 20 family members in the Holocaust, and a Holocaust survivor taught him (Steven) how to read numbers using the tattoo on his arm. But Spielberg’s preoccupation with the War and with the Holocaust outstrips that of many other directors of a similar age and with similar backgrounds. This interest is personal to him (although he shares it with his frequent collaborator Tom Hanks), rather than speaking only to the circumstances of his youth.
I wonder whether he has made these films and programmes as a deliberate effort to fix the facts of the Holocaust vividly in the minds of his generation and the couple of generations that came after him. (Gen Z won’t watch these things, and will have to find out in their own way.) I wonder whether he decided that this is the best contribution that a talent like his can make to the memorialisation of the Holocaust and the insistence on the fact that it actually, truly happened. When it comes to cementing something firmly in the mainstream, you can’t beat a storyteller of genius working in the most widely accessed visual mediums.
The Colour of Pomegranates (1969)
: I wrote this month about the exquisite pleasure of being forced to ‘sit forward’ and pay attention while watching The Singing Detective (1986) and this feeling was compounded by watching the Armenian art film The Colour of Pomegranates via the BFI channel on Amazon Prime. More properly called Sayat-Nova, the film is a poetical biopic of the eighteenth century Armenian poet of that name. It is also entirely incomprehensible, especially if you are ignorant of eighteenth century Armenian poetry or, indeed, as in my case, Armenian anything.However, it is also incredibly watchable. It is a series of stunning tableaux, full of oneiric symbols and alien ornamentation, beautiful colours and mysterious movements. Its challenge to comprehension was also a challenge to ‘second screening’; I didn’t look at my phone once, even as I was in turn exasperated, delighted and amused.
The argument for ‘casual viewing’, wallpaper TV, as outlined in this terrific piece by Will Tavlin, is that viewers will be inevitably distracted and so you must not interrupt their distraction. This ignores the obvious alternative: make something so good, so well made and compulsive, that it's impossible to be distracted from it, even when it’s as ludicrous and obscure as The Colour of Pomegranates.
Out
Severance (2022—present)
: Severance is the opposite of wallpaper TV; it actively requires a second screen on which you can do your homework and research all the details you missed in past episodes. It is a twisty thriller based on a high-concept premise; it’s extremely well directed, acted and made (which we’ve talked about before); and it delights in throwing curve balls at the audience. This demand for revision is part of the appeal with some shows, often those — such as the Star Wars and MCU shows — set in fictional universes. I understand why people enjoy them; I’ve been boning up on comic book lore since I could read, and one suspects that many viewers of Amazon’s Rings of Power are watching not with their phone in one hand, but with a marked-up copy of the Silmarillion.
This homework ethic is now becoming increasingly common in less nerdy shows, and in the case of the new, second series of Severance it proved an exam question too far. The first episode made us realise we were going to have to watch the first season all over again if we were to have any hope of understanding what was going on. This was followed by an equally rapid realisation that — given the time and effort required — we weren’t going to, and so we moved on to other things. Which a lot of people have been doing with Marvel movies and Star Wars shows too.
Severance has distinct whiff of Lost, a show that was better at creating mysteries than it was at solving them. When you realise this it tends to make you reluctant to give it so much of your time. Severance is, though, extremely good looking and deliciously quirky; if the reviews for this season are good, I suspect I’ll end up doing all that revision eventually.
Shake it all about
This month’s playlist: ten stand-out tracks that Tobias has enjoyed this month.
The playlists are all on Spotify.
‘Tout doux tout doucement’ - Marcel Amont. Listened to this while writing this as the train was pulling out of Edinburgh Waverley, and let me tell you: this is the perfect soundtrack for a rail journey.
‘Hot Knife’ - Fiona Apple. The opening of this inevitably reminded me of The Monkees’ ‘Randy Scouse Git’, but the rest of it couldn’t be more different.
‘Soothing’ - Laura Marling. Wonderfully slinky, witchy track this, possibly slightly too spooky to be actually soothing.
‘I’m Shadowing You’ - Blossom Dearie. I have to admit I have a massive soft spot for Blossom Dearie, with her sharp, witty little stiletto lyrics hidden in the soft voice and chiming tunes. Particularly fond of these ‘70s recordings.
‘Cello Song’ - The Books feat. Jose Gonzales. A beautiful remix of a beautiful Nick Drake song. I can’t believe its taken me until my fifties to discover Nick Drake.
‘Peach, Plum, Pear’ - The McTague Twins. Another cover, this one a lovely sweet sour version of Joanna Newsome’s ‘Peach, Plum, Pear’.
‘Kaputt’ - Destroyer. This gets extra points for mentioning Sounds magazine alongside Smash Hits, Melody Maker and the NME.
‘The More I See You’ - Chris Montez. A splendid piece of ‘60s pop. The crocuses are starting to come out here, surely it's time for a swinging spring now?
‘Step Too Far’ - Pearl Charles. The new track from Pearl Charles. Who says we don’t bring you new music on The Metropolitan, even if it does sound like it was recorded 50 years ago.
‘Love Letters’ - Ketty Lester. Yep, still thinking about David Lynch.
This month’s mixtape has also included:
I used to be a staunch completionist—if I started a TV series, book, or whatever, I *always* finished it. Lost cured me of that. lol
Some years ago Spielberg created a library of oral testimonies from dozens, maybe hundreds of survivors of the Holocaust, before they grew too old to tell their stories.