Metropolitan Mixtape: May 2024

Beliefs and attitudes of its time

We’ve had two guests chez Metropolitan this month: Rowan’s dad’s dog, and Rowan’s dad, who is currently recuperating from knee replacement surgery (one star, would not recommend). This has occasioned a lot of scrabbling about to find things to watch that suit both 50-somethings and 80-somethings.

In

1. The Deal (2003)

Rowan: I am on a New Labour kick, again; I must have felt that election announcement coming. The 18-hour recording of the 1997 election coverage is back up on iPlayer (please don’t ask me how I know this) and we re-watched Channel 4’s The Deal, an early Peter Morgan TV film about the infamous private meeting at which Blair and Brown divvied up the Labour leadership between themselves. David Morrisey as Brown and Michael Sheen as Blair perform uncanny impersonations – Morrisey has perfected Brown’s unfortunate way of suddenly dropping his jaw, like when Marley takes off his winding sheet in A Christmas Carol – and the casting of Paul Rhys as Mandelson is amazing. It holds up pretty well. If you like Morgan’s The Crown (2016–23) and The Queen (2006), step this way. If you can’t imagine anything worse, please at least enjoy this cartoon (by K J Lamb, stolen from Private Eye), which is the hardest I have ever identified with anything.

2. The Spy and the Traitor, Ben Macintyre (2018)

Tobias: I read Ben Macintyre’s biography of double agent Oleg Gordievsky for my piece on 1983 in the Cold War. Macintyre’s extremely good at this kind of thing: telling a true story with all the pace and drama of fiction, but driving home the real-world implications. It’s highly readable as well as being an amazing story. It was a huge relief after struggling through Major General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War: The Untold Story (1982), a sort of futuristic alternative history of a Soviet invasion of Europe, which is basically a long list of artillery specs and NATO command structures. Who knew that the apocalypse could be so dull? (There’s also a new BBC/Open University documentary series, Secrets and Spies, about the Gordievsky story, Able Archer and all that jazz. We watched the first episode in an effort to keep Rowan’s dad entertained, and it seems pretty good too.)

We then watched Operation Mincemeat, for which Macintyre wrote the script while taking considerably more liberties with the historical truth than he does in his books. It’s all a bit walnut-dash, extended-TV-play British cinema, and Macintyre is a lot better at prose than he is at scriptwriting. It does feature copious amounts of Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton and ‘Hello to’ Jason Isaacs, though, so at least there’s something to watch.

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3. Jules et Jim (1962)

Tobias: I finally watched Truffaut’s nouvelle vague classic Jules et Jim, something I have been meaning to get around to for, oh, about thirty years. Like a lot of New Wave films it still feels technically astonishing, even after sixty years. The extraordinary First World War sequence, in which Truffaut mixes footage of different stocks, aspect ratios, photography and film, is a brilliant way of capturing the turmoil and cultural upheaval, and is still visually startling. The New Wave had an enormous effect on mainstream cinema, but this kind of visual invention remains rare. And then, of course, there’s the sense of a story being allowed to unfold at its own pace, free of conventional structures; that refreshing sense of a narrative approach outside of Hollywood habits. Also, Georges Delarue’s music is terrific (see this week’s playlist) and all the clothes are stupendous, especially the jumpers. I want all of Oskar Werner’s wardrobe. On the other hand…

Out 

1. Jules et Jim (1962)

…as you might fear from a ‘60s French movie about the nineteenth century, the sexual politics are appalling. The title makes it obvious: Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine exists purely as an ‘et’ between the two men, a mere conjunction, nothing but a sexual element that drives them apart and binds them together. Small mention is made of her own artistic abilities, but she is basically required to be mad and maddening, a mere force of nature. 

2. The Long Goodbye (film, 1973)

Rowan: Robert Altman’s film of the Raymond Chandler story The Long Goodbye (1973) features Eliot Gould – Mr Geller in Friends – playing a mumbling and half-awake version of private detective Philip Marlowe. Tobias and my dad had both formed positive impressions of the film several decades ago, whereas I had never seen it before. 

It quickly became apparent that it is one of those films: it embodies a very specific kind of ‘70s misogyny, in that every single female character is a semi-nude toddler with the cognitive capacity of a dog. I’ve never read any Chandler, but given Lauren Bacall’s character in The Big Sleep (1946) (sexy, yes; thick as pigshit, no), it’s tempting to blame Altman himself. I’ve had a deep suspicion of him ever since Short Cuts (2003), in which he bent over backwards to show us Julianne Moore’s muff for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever. 

I still find it hard to get my head around what things were like in the 1970s, around the time my mother had a baby girl and called her Rowan. I have no idea what to do with the constant revelation that the most lauded cultural products of my childhood saw women as stupid-but fuckable children, as fundamentally less than an adult male. This wasn’t the universal attitude of ordinary people (my parents, whose families were coal miners and domestic workers, didn’t have a trace of this kind of thinking); it was the hip interpretation, the one that was culturally garlanded, the one that got the Oscar nominations and the adulatory career retrospectives and the black-and-white magazine covers. How in the world did our mothers get through all the bullshit and come out the other end intact? Perhaps they were too busy seeking our fathers’ permission to open bank accounts to worry about what was happening on the screen.

And I still don’t know whether it’s sufficient to think – as I usually do – ‘this is the bullshit product of a bullshit mind, I simply cannot be arsed’; or whether that’s simultaneously too limp, and too easily dismissive of flawed human beings and the passage of time and enormous parts of the canon. After all, if we never consumed anything that didn’t reflect the values of contemporary progressive discourse, nobody would watch or read or look at anything made before 2022. And, to be recklessly honest, I find myself capable of watching and even sometimes enjoying things that are objectively racist or homophobic by current standards, which is pretty much everything from the ‘80s and ‘90s; I might squirm a bit, but I am capable of finding value and interest in them in other respects. I’m not proud of my inconsistency, but there it is. It’s only and always misogyny that sends me stomping from the room. 

It all made me think about the real value of the ‘beliefs and attitudes of its time’ warnings on streaming content. The warning doesn’t wipe away the offence, but it does acknowledge it. It says ‘The thing you’re about to watch is casually [racist/homophobic] as hell. People from the ‘70s/’80s/’90s thought this was normal! Bloody hell! Thank god we’ve moved on a bit. Anyway: we see you, and you’re not crazy. Here’s the show.’ Perhaps this act of acknowledgement does nothing more than soothe people, but in doing so it might encourage some of them to stay on the sofa long enough to find out whether the product has any redeeming qualities. 

I say all of this because I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these acknowledgements before films and shows that are ‘only’ misogynist. And I think I would quite like someone to acknowledge that I’m not crazy. Although I probably wouldn’t have stayed to watch all of The Long Goodbye anyway, because it’s shit.

(Tobias: I still maintain that Gould is the best Marlowe, even better than Dick Powell  (while also providing the model of Tom Waits’s entire ‘70s persona), and that Altman’s sun-bleached noir LA, all white beachside buildings and hot neon nights, is stylistically and visually amazing. I am also glad that Rowan stormed out long before Sterling Hayden’s performance got properly bad. He’s awful in this.)

2. Priscilla (2023)

Rowan: It’s a shame that Priscilla isn’t a better movie, because god knows it’s not structurally misogynist. Director Sofia Coppola delivers another highly empathetic portrait of a young woman in a gilded cage, granting the young Priscilla Beaulieu – who was 14!!!! when she met Elvis Presley on a US Army base in Germany – all the interiority, nuance, fortitude and authenticity you could ask for. Cailee Spaeny, who was great in The Mare of Easttown, is again great here (and absolutely tiny; the physical difference between her and Jacob Elordi’s Elvis is actively sinister). But it’s so boooooring, and here is no narrative thread. By the time you get to the scene that lasts for less than 20 seconds and delivers precisely two expository lines it’s all starting to look like a major screw-up. One suspects that Priscilla Presley’s presence as Exec Producer may not have been artistically helpful. But Coppola’s Zen/Xanax dreamy affect is always pleasant, and as ever her styling and music choices reward attention. According to Coppola, the best way to soundtrack Priscilla’s youth is with everything but Elvis Presley.

In presenting Priscilla’s story as a series of short episodes it recalls a better film, Twentieth Century Women. It’s interesting that ‘typical’ women’s stories (with due respect to all the women for whom this isn’t true) lend themselves to this percussive, jerky approach: puberty–sex–marriage–pregnancy–baby-raising–child-wrangling–domesticity, and then – and only then – starting to work out what you actually want. Men’s stories can have a similar shape, of course, but perhaps with a dialled-down sense that biology is not only grabbing the mike, but haring off down the road with it. 

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Shake it all about

Tobias: Here’s this month’s playlist. It's basically what I’ve has been listening to for the last few weeks. It actually includes a couple of new releases this month. Although one of those is from a man in his ‘80s. The playlists will all be on Spotify.

In memory of Steve Albini, who died this month, here’s a track from an album he produced by the greatest punk band ever. As long as you agree Talking Heads aren’t really punk.

But if you really want to épater les bourgeois these days, you’ve got to go for something like Steely Dan, who Albini famously hated. He was wrong.

I don’t know why this old Cat Power track appeared in my listening this week, but I found it reassuringly uplifting.

Before last week I’d never heard of Daniel Ögren and still know nothing about him, apart from the fact that he’s from Stockholm and he makes nice, lo-fi hip hop.

This is Georges Delarue’s ‘Vacances’ theme from Jules et Jim, which I have been unwittingly whistling ever since I saw the movie.

Nico Kasanda was apparently a pioneer of Congolese music. He earned his nickname ‘Docteur’ from his extraordinary guitar-picking skills, which were admired by Jimi Hendrix, among others.

This kind of quirky, queasy, sampled easy listening always sounds somehow quintessentially Gen X to me: the sound of ‘90s London.

The first of our new tracks this month. This one features Metropolitan favourite Beck, speaking of the sounds of the ‘90s.

And then a brand new track from the second-greatest living Welshman and all round underground hero: John Cale. This would pair nicely with ‘Barracuda’ from his 1974 album Fear.

The greatest living Welshman is Ro’s dad, obviously.

Finally, for no reason at all, Wanda Jackson’s ‘Thunder on the Mountain’, simply because it’s been getting me through a lot of very fiddy animating this month.

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For your further listening pleasure, here’s this month’s podcast, continuing our Cold War theme with Tobias reading his piece about Doctor Who, Britain and America in 1985: The Loved/Hated One