Triumph of the Strange | Revisiting The New Weird – M. John Harrison, China Miéville

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So China Miéville’s taken home the Goldsmiths Prize while M. John Harrison snagged the Booker at the ripe old age of 81 for The End of Everything.

For an old kid who wrote their English lit. Master’s dissertation on ‘The New Weird’ – the subgenre both authors are associated with – this feels like a revenge of the nerds far more satisfying than the kind foisted upon us by Silicon Valley over the past couple of decades.

The idea of slippery genres speaks to queernesses of all kinds – from the gender, down to the immigrant experience – and looking back, it’s hardly surprising that I would find stimulation, and a strange solace, in a genre that gleefully attempts to encompass sci-fi, horror, fantasy and literary surrealism.

With ‘the New Weird’ making the rounds in the mainstream media discourse following Harrison’s Booker win, I am reproducing the chapter of my dissertation which attempts to grasp at a definition of this genre.

The following is a lightly edited excerpt from ‘Reljic, T. (2010). Getting on with the weird anyway : China Miéville and the New Weird (Master’s dissertation)‘


***

The creation of a term

‘In the new weird order, no rules apply’ – ‘Tank Girl’

As a tentative literary movement, or even sub-genre, the New Weird appears to have sputtered out the very moment the two words came close to gaining some sort of stability within the field of contemporary speculative fiction. Having floated in the ether for some time (as an invigorating possibility, as a call to arms for writers tired of several status quos), it finally gained a concrete shape in 2008, with the publication of The New Weird, an anthology edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. But the introduction to this collection of essays and stories by New Weird-associated authors, precursors and pundits, ends with a resolutely sober announcement: ‘The New Weird is dead. Long live the Next Weird.’ (Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, The New Weird (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008), p. xviii.)

Now that it is supposedly dead, and therefore quantifiable, it is safe to assume that, throughout this particular introduction at least, the Vandermeers are operating from a point of view that affords a certain degree of objectivity. And as such, it may be useful to reproduce Jeff Vandermeer’s ‘working definition’ of what the New Weird in fact is:

New Weird is a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects — in combination with the stimulus of influence from New Wave writers or their proxies (including also such forebears as Mervyn Peake and the French/English Decadents). New Weird fictions are acutely aware of the modern world, even if in disguise, but not always overtly political. As part of this awareness of the modern world, New Weird relies for its visionary power on a “surrender to the weird” that isn’t, for example, hermetically sealed in a haunted house on the moors or in a cave in Antarctica. The “surrender” (or “belief”) of the writer can take many forms, some of them even involving the use of postmodern techniques that do not undermine the surface reality of the text. (Jeff Vandermeer, p. xvi.)

Knowing the steep and beleaguered slope the term had to climb in its embryonic stages, the above description – otherwise tentative and open to a myriad of possibilities – is a remarkable feat of compression, comprehension and, above all, clarity: mapping out possibilities and terrains while leaving each individual author – and indeed reader – to choose which path to take and fill in the final trek of each individual strand of influence and tradition.

But it took some time before such a measured, ossified definition could have been attempted. The anthology was born out of a sprawling online discussion which began in 2003 on the message board of The Third Alternative Press, the British publishing house responsible for some of the country’s forefront genre fiction publications – now including Interzone, Crime Wave and Black Static.


A post by acclaimed speculative fiction author M. John Harrison was a catalyst for an often-heated debate that in the end spanned over a hundred thousand words: ‘The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?’ (M. John Harrison, ‘The New Weird’, April 29, 2003 posting, as partly archived on https://urchin.earth.li/~twic/cgi-bin/wiki/view.pl?page=TheNewWeirdAnnotations)

In and of itself, the inaugural, three-tired question was never answered in any clear cut way. What in fact emerged out of the discussion was, more than anything else, the desire for a genre, a label, a rallying call for a type of fiction that is neither ashamed of its roots within genre nor restricted by it. As such, the discussion spanned both specific, near-technical minutiae of genre aesthetics and broad polemics about its relation to the so-called literary mainstream, with particular emphasis on its fraught relationship with speculative fiction.

Broadly speaking, one definition of the New Weird in particular appears to have held ground throughout the entire discussion (and, indeed, is at the crux of the Vandermeer précis reproduced above). Propounded by Harrison and Miéville in just slightly varied iterations, the aesthetic and philosophical crux of the New Weird is defined as a type of fiction that refuses to characterise its relationship with the fantastic as either literal or metaphorical. Instead, the fantastical elements of the fiction would pertain to both narrative and interpretative ‘planes’, thus allowing for a purified, effective fiction of complete defamiliarisation.

This idea is first articulated by Miéville himself, who arrives to the discussion in medias res to deliver some thoughts and tentative definitions from a practitioner’s point of view. While Harrison was the main catalyst for the discussion, and while his writing – particularly the ‘Viriconium’ sequence can be confidently classed as deeply influential to the entire endeavour – it is Miéville’s work that is seen as the first shining beacon of the subgenre-to-be (Jeff Vandermeer, p. xi-xii) and an implied ‘secondary mission’ of the forum discussion is precisely to locate and identify any other authors that might be mining the same vein.


The thrust of Miéville’s argument is coloured by an idea common to most of the discussion participants who welcome the New Weird. It comes down to the appeal of ‘having the cake and eating it too’, by embracing all the genres it wants to embrace while never sacrificing the quality of the writing. In fact, Miéville’s initial argument on the message boards culminates in: ‘New Weird is fantasy and sf, and horror, and whatever else the fuck you want, that knows that, and gets on with the weird anyway.’ (my emphasis). (China Miéville, ‘Function Follows Form: New Weird 2, May 19, 2003 posting.)

He arrives at this by problematising some crucial issues related to taxonomy and aesthetics, and delineates some personal preferences that are taken up by other members of the discussion, and seen as at least an important aspect of what makes the genre of the New Weird truly unique. Miéville’s conception of the fantastic as opposed to ‘whimsy’ is pertinent here:

I am interested in the fantastic, the weird, and I think that Whimsy is actually *fundamentally opposed* to the weird. That’s because the fantastic, and most specifically the weird fantastic, is about a complete surrender to an aesthetic of radical estrangement, which is why the project of World Creation, so often a bad joke, is at least potentially a truly estranging and Weird moment, as it is about pitching a reader into a self-contained, paranoid totality. (Miéville, ibid.)

It is worthwhile to note Miéville’s attitude as being acutely representative of the very tension that, arguably, gives birth to the desire for the New Weird.

Whimsy – or any ‘deflating’ mechanism for that matter (it should come as no surprise that Miéville regards most metafiction in a similar light) – is seen as inimical to the aims of the true weird artiste because it undercuts the creation of a believable world. This is particularly interesting when juxtaposed with the attitude most prominent practitioners of the New Weird have towards Tolkien, who famously and meticulously constructed a world and mythology with the doggedness of the most assured of realists.

(A notable precursor – Michael Moorcock’s infamous ‘anti-Tolkien’ essay, ‘Epic Pooh‘)

In the passage quoted above, Miéville appears to be making a concession to the grandmaster of 20th century fantasy, which is interesting considering the contrarian attitude that he and other New Weird colleagues have towards him (which will be looked into in more detail in the third chapter). Secondary world creation, Miéville seems to suggest, when employed in the ‘right’ manner for the ‘right’ ends, can be a useful tool for properly weird work, because immersion, no matter how it is achieved, is crucial to the crafting of a ‘self-contained, paranoid totality’.

But there are significant differences between what Miéville is proposing and the Tolkien approach. The ‘self-contained, paranoid totality’ cannot simply be made possible by throwing the reader into an inverse, unpleasant-as-opposed-to-escapist version of Middle Earth… writers should pay attention to details of mimetic construction that would not come to mind when considering Tolkien’s work. Miéville points out that in the case of metafiction in particular, when the text breaches its own reality to point at ‘our own’, the author is assuming that the reality outside the text is stable and fully knowable, free of ambiguity or chaos:

It pretends to be radically estranging, but it is so easy to slip into mannerism by which the moment of literary self-reflection is in fact *comforting*, because it corrals the weird, by relying for its moment of estrangement on a raised eyebrow, a wink, a nudge-nudge. The joke is an inside/outside one – ‘I know we are all really outside the text, and we can share in the pleasure of enjoying the text while looking in on it’. OK, but the problem is, we’re looking in on it *from where*? This is a question-begging moment. Here’s where politics comes in – in much (not all, of course) metafiction the reality from which we are ‘looking in’ is implied but neither stated nor questioned – in other words, metafiction and whimsy (closely related moments) are literary techniques often *predicated on an unstated assumption of an existing status-quo reality* – a stable ‘outside’ is needed so that from either side of the text, the writer and reader can nod at each other. (Miéville, ibid.)

Miéville is effectively calling for a type of fiction that does not take a staid and conventional conception of reality for granted but also, it is implied, a fiction that is not satisfied with a simple re-creation of similarly held together, mapped and knowable worlds such as Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Miéville hopes, in fact, that the New Weird would be able to capture what is ultimately a more genuine kind of verisimilitude because it would, in its oblique way, account for dislocation and strangeness throughout:

Where much traditional [science fiction and fantasy] thinks of itself as ‘escaping’ something (reality), New Weird knows there is no escape, *and gets on with the weird anyway*. So it *knows* that its paranoid fantastic will riff and reverberate inevitably and tellingly with the real – and it trusts itself and its readers to get on with the political job of mapping the cross-hatching. (Miéville, ibid.)

‘Getting on with the weird anyway’ is a crucial motto… it asks authors complete allegiance to the philosophy of the weird at the expense of both mainstream literary acceptance and comfort within the confines of more ‘traditional’ genre fiction. The weird exists in the fiction despite itself – it is not immersion for immersion’s sake, but an irruption that cannot help but exist and proliferate, according to Miéville. As such, those undertaking the weird need pay no heed to the insipid ‘positivist bean-counting’ that is the priority of far too many works of science fiction and fantasy (Tolkien here being one example), but neither should they censor themselves from employing genre tropes if these aid the overall process of disorientation and estrangement.

This is also why New Weird is radically opposed to narrow ‘utopian’ or ‘dystopian’ or (god help us) ‘metaphoric’ fiction, in which supposed weirdnesses are marshalled to make metaphorical political points. Because to do that is – as with metafiction – to subordinate the strange to another job (in this case finger-wagging). The New Weird is engaged but not didactic. To the New Weird, *the weird is its own end*… and, paradoxically, is all the more politically savvy and theoretically sharp for that. (Miéville, ibid.)

The literary implications of such a stance are many, and throughout the discussion, the figure of Margaret Atwood is used as a scapegoat, largely because of her refusal to define works such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake as examples of science fiction (‘metaphoric’ in this case refers to Atwood’s work). This position not only implies snobbery towards genre fiction but also, in an argument articulated by Miéville, points out that a lack of knowledge of and enthusiasm for generic tropes ultimately makes for tepid work, especially if the only reason for Atwood’s desire to appropriate stock science fiction tropes is to employ heavy-handed allegory (basically, the argument is: if you’re not having genuine fun doing it, how can you expect your readers to?).

What this effectively amounts to is a desire for a fiction that can withstand critical scrutiny (a key concern for genre fiction) because it strives to produce work that is, first of all, well written, while also never shying away from employing elements of the fantastic in a bald-faced manner.

Harrison echoes this approach when he identifies his own ideal form of fantastic fiction. In response to comments on the board that brought up the publication Conjunctions – which, not too long before the discussion had taken place, released an issue featuring Harrison, Miéville and other authors associated with the New Weird and functioning under a similar rubric – and the Philip K. Dick story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’, Harrison articulates his own version of Miéville’s argument by pushing for an aesthetic which takes pride in ‘doing the reader’s head in’ by crafting a fictional space within which the fantastic can both exist and not exist simultaneously:

Sophisticated technique, liquid boundaries and high levels of humanity enable statements that are at once pure fantasy and outright metaphor. Even in the New Weird those two modes are supposed to be mutually exclusive. Some of [the stories featured in Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists] are so precariously balanced that precariousness becomes a strength in itself. You don’t know which way they’re going to fall – mainstream or fantasy. Then, when you push them, you find you can’t *make* them fall. They’re held rigid (& you with them) in this exquisite paradox, fantasy/not-fantasy. MJP said something like this, in a post some way back, when he talked about a Philip K Dick story, the hero of which is brought to know that he is simultaneously x and not-x. Both statements are true. They don’t alternate rapidly – They aren’t exchangeable as a function of viewpoint or frame – The wavefront doesn’t collapse. They are simply both true at the same time. An understanding of that kind is fleeting and precarious – or it’s supposed to be. We have a growing opportunity to write work that turns that precariousness to strength. (Harrison, ‘The New Weird 3: The New Weird’, June 1 2003 posting)

Miéville and Harrison are presenting a challenge. A challenge born out of an awareness of aesthetic shortcomings within genre fiction, and an indignation towards its treatment at the hands of mainstream literary culture. There is of course a danger in lumping the two together so blindly – it is important to map out where the two converge, but they differ significantly on certain issues – such as the attitude towards mainstream culture: Harrison, a critic for the TLS, does not view ‘literary fiction’ as the oppressive bogeyman, while Miéville shamelessly casts its exponents as ‘panto villains’, even as recently as 2010.

(In fact, during his acceptance speech at the 2010 edition of the coveted Arthur C. Clarke awards, Miéville poked fun at John Mullen, judge of the Booker Prize. Some controversy had arisen earlier in the year as one of Miéville’s fellow shortlistees, the SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson, complained about the genre’s marginalisation from such awards, to which Mullen responded by saying that contemporary SF is an inherently ghettoised genre, occupying “a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.” Miéville, in turn, hit back with: “He totally means us! I know it’s very very cheap to rally the crowd against a pantomime villain, but I never said I was expensive!”)

This echoes a defensive attitude which is telling, particularly in terms of the participants’ attitude towards the mainstream, since it implies an embedded ‘us and them’ attitude. Harrison, as ever, also provides some pertinent critiques of genre fiction from within. He claims that science fiction and fantasy suffers a degraded reputation due to the fact that a lot of it insists on taking tropes for granted and relying on ‘unreinvented tools’:

The reason for genre’s incredible tiredness, the reason it has become the habitation of lazy writers and readers, the reason its intellectual, artistic and – yes – spiritual reputation has sunk so low, is that it teaches the use of unreinvented tools. F/sf is a tribe that turns its most beautiful and ephemeral acts of bricolage into rigid sytems of taboo. (Harrison, ibid.)

However, Harrison still believes that fantasy has great potential when handled properly, with writers who make a priority out of reinventing the wheel, since it is a genre that is ‘about defamiliarisation and very little else,’ and it therefore ‘must not get itself a toolbox and a set of professional qualifications.’ And the New Weird is viewed as a stepping stone towards this aesthetic. Harrison in fact views the idea of the New Weird as a ‘recombinative sport’, a process that would enable writers to play merry havoc with their influences, as opposed to simply aping them:

Recombinative sports like the New Weird are good precisely because recombination is a way of grubbing up the ancestors, stealing their valuables, using them for *all the wrong purposes*, then throwing them away because in that process you have learned to make the thing you really wanted to see. I’ve had a million ancestors. I’ve ate the lot. They were good, but I’m on to the next thing now. (Harrison, ibid.)

This is New Weird as coping mechanism, as a way to channel influences creatively while aggressively pushing aside any of their less desirable qualities. Harrison’s Bloomian wrestling isn’t difficult to notice; one could say he even buys into it wholeheartedly and promotes it – he simply assumes that emerging victorious should not be too impossible a task (the implication here, of course, is that one has to be talented enough to take on the New Weird challenge fully).


But what all this does above all is to highlight the idea of the New Weird as a process: it takes care of both the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ in on fell swoop: fantasy should be defamiliarising, and the way you defamiliarise is to let go – let go of the neurotic desire to ape your literary antecedents and strive for unique effects of your own. This point is furnished with some specific examples towards the end of the discussion, as Harrison lists authors who achieve similar effects while entirely ignorant of generic tropes:

Any kind of imaginative fiction improves when it is written by people who *have no idea what imaginative fiction is about*, naive & angelic people who invent their goals as well as their tools. Who wouldn’t rather have a genuine act of the imagination made by ‘someone who doesn’t know enough about f/sf’ than yet another clever rearrangement of the ‘tropes’ by some professional tosser? 
[…] I’m talking about Bruno Schulz or Dino Buzzati, or the utterly unbelievable Alfred Kubin – or for that matter, Mervyn Peake, who was hardly steeped in knowledge of the f/sf genre… Writing is subservient to the need to speak. If you have that need, and you want to use your imagination, all you need to know is that it’s possible. It doesn’t matter what bits and pieces you pick up out of the general cultural environment to enable that speech. Indeed the more random and untutored your choice, the more lively the outcome. What matters is the talent and the will, the metaphysical and intellectual vise in which you grip your crummy bits and pieces from the wasteland. (Harrison, ibid.)

Harrison’s critique of staid genre fiction writers comes at the expense of romanticising early 20th century figures within the fantastic but at least it brings his argument to full circle and provides a concrete goal for the kind of fiction he is proposing.

Miéville argues an inverse, but inherently similar point (not to mention the fact that he has an admiration for the authors brought up by Harrison, Schulz and Peake in particular). When, once again, he brings up Atwood’s ‘dabbling’ in science fiction, he expresses his dissatisfaction with her work because it is simply not done with the requisite – and, Miéville implies, infectious – joy that comes with crafting a convincing work of fantasy fiction. Whereas Kubin et al are mentioned because they created immersive and inspiring works in spite of (and, it is implied, partly because of) their ignorance of genre fiction tropes, Atwood and her ilk are criticised for not engaging with their tools in an intense enough way:

The problem with much mainstreamers-go-SF writing (The Handmaid’s Tale) is that it is embarrassed of the non-mimetic Literal, so it doggedly and vulgarly stresses the metaphoric, printing in invisible ink” ‘It’s OK! It’s really about Something Important!’ on every page. That’s why it’s so tub-thumping. One of the many problems with this is that it’s disingenuous – look at Oryx And Crake – I simply don’t believe that Atwood hasn’t had a whale of a time with her lamely imagined genetic monstrosities, because that’s part of the *fun* of the non-mimetic. Conversely, some of the worst SF affects a philistine disdain for any ‘interpretation’ – it pretends all there is the non-mimetic Literal, which leads it to deny i) the philosophical incoherence and ii) the lamentable politics embedded in many of its artefacts. The best Weird Fiction has always walked this line well, precisely because it *knows* that the human mind will process metaphors, and that therefore interpretation and ‘meaning’ is inevitable, but that the weird itself is also a source of pleasure, and it has therefore *trusted the reader* to get on with the job of Meaning-Mining, and not fucking signposted every authorial concern with a big neon flash, and nor has it shied away from revelling in the simply-bizarre. An early example is Gulliver’s Travels, in which Swift is clearly making all manner of satirical points, but always making time to describe a sword-fight with a giant wasp simply because *how cool is that?* (Miéville, ibid.)

In both cases there is a desire for purity… fantasy employed not as lazy, exploitative short-hand for dramatic effect, nor as telegraphic device for weak allegory, but simply existing because it is natural for it to do so. Getting on with the weird anyway. This is a call for authenticity, both from the genre camp – whose neurotic desire for detailed world-construction and tendency towards indissoluble tropes maims artistic innovation – and the mainstream which, according to Miéville at least, tends to feed on genre without bothering to go through the process of feeding on its ancestors first, as delineated by Harrison.

The discussion’s key points therefore isolated a desire, both for the recognition of worthy talents within the bourgeoning genre tentatively referred to as the ‘New Weird’; as well as pointers about ‘work that needs to be done’ when it comes to living up to the best works belonging to that moment.

Her Private Hell: Let’s All Go for Broke

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The real pleasure of Nicolas Winding Refn’s work for me lies in the mere spectacle of watching someone go for broke so beautifully.

And it’s no accident that we’re talking about someone who literally lived out that metaphor: we owe the Pusher sequels to him going into debt and desperately having to recoup expenses.

Her Private Hell was hated by plenty for all the obvious and usual reasons: it is indulgent, the dialogue is stilted to the point of being laughable, the plot is paper-thin and largely incoherent, and its melange of genres and aesthetics is pitched as primarily fetishistic, rather than being narratively functional in any way.

And he’s been mocked by even one of my favourite film critics for saying that this is a film that AI could never make, particularly when the result is something so easily mockable so as to be equally easy to dismiss outright, to the point that you’d take any slop over what ‘NWR’ is offering this time around.

But it is this very brazenness that runs counter to the algorithm. The deliberate evasion of what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘proper’ taste; of what counts as sleek and digestible storytelling, is in itself a statement these days. Taken as such, it sounds like damning with faint praise. You could just as easily say that Chuck Norris movies from the ’80s are more worthwhile cultural experience because you can luxuriate in the hints of film grain that still mark their analog nature; away from green-screens and excessively focus-grouped approaches.

What really makes Refn’s ‘late’ period so intoxicating, though, is that he exists in a plane that is merely a single swerve away from just that kind of homogenisation. The naked artificiality of Her Private Hell, compounded further by a setting that skates across sci-fi dystopia, post-war Japan and an actual alien planet on a set that may or may not have merged with the core ‘reality’ of the film anyway, in some ways makes it vulnerable to the kind of digital copy-paste experiences we’ve been trained to see as not only normal, but even entirely acceptable by the Marvel Cinematic Universe-induced status quo.

And in some ways, we could argue that Refn had at least partly succumbed to the lure of the mainstream midway through his career, when Drive truly announced this Danish auteur to the world, and gifted him with a Hollywood leading man collaborator in Ryan Gosling, who would bravely and gamely play against the expectations set up in the previous film in the subsequent Only God Forgives; an anti-hero’s journey if there ever was one.

That Refn didn’t simply coast along with the low-hanging fruit that was doubtlessly offered to him after Drive will scan as regrettable to those who appreciated the marriage of his stylistic excesses with the tight plotting offered by that film’s source material, and a script by the reliable Iranian-British journeyman Hossein Amini.

But do we really want to live like this?

Do we really want to measure out our filmgoing and film-watching experiences as if we’re counting calories, ensuring a correct ratio of one element to another, and scoffing through any idea of excess?

Naturally, we are all moved by some ingrained and often shadowy forces within us that dictate our priorities. There’s probably good evolutionary reasons for why we value ‘substance’ over ‘style’, but there’s also a thrill in stepping outside of that binary and seeing what else is out there.

Her Private Hell positions three of the most striking humans in Hollywood right now – Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu and Charles Melton – into a freewheeling world that exists as a dream dictated by someone who loves the outer reaches of genre cinema, and who is using the financial goodwill he has accumulated not to merely replicate what works, but to open up further reaches inspired by those weird subconscious wrigglings that were likely responsible for the original genre mainstays that have now become staid.

Rather than being incoherent, its plot is as porous as its characters, and their apparent archetypal flatness exists for us to have as transportive an experience as viewers as they do, navigating this misted land in search of loved ones and in fear of a boogeyman whose wrath, alas, may offer the kind of contradictory delights that Jane Schoenbrun also gave voice to in the equally unapologetic exploration of the dark libidinal pull of genre cinema, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

My own shadowy forces led me to take pen to paper the morning after I sat down to finally watch Her Private Hell. Because the film reminded me that all art is ultimately porous and that any categories are assigned after the fact.

If NWR is willing to be embarrassed by desire, what’s stopping the rest of us nobodies?

Against the Tyranny of Low-Hanging Fruit: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Emily Wilson’s ‘An Uncomplicated Man’

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I’m glad Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey exists. It’s heartening to see that a largely analog blockbuster is doing remarkably well at the box office in this age of AI slop and persistently reheated Marvel / DC franchise installments, with a welcome side-effect being that its victory lap offered Nolan a chance to weigh in on the AI-in-filmmaking debacle that made the proponents and apologists for this “glass Trojan horse” look like flailing, petty fools.

For better or for worse, when Nolan talks, people listen. And on this subject, he is thankfully very much on the side of the angels, albeit those of a flesh-and-blood variety, which I suppose makes them both less and more angelic in their composition. This is an awkward, pained metaphor that gracelessly melds the literal and the symbolic. And I think that a similar blight plagues Nolan’s take on Homer’s 3K+ year-old epic poem.

Like most of his work, it is undeniable in its architecturally awesome construction; once again pulling off that seemingly delicate balance of creating a piece of pop-spectacle that at least grasps at serious, high-minded concepts and themes. But it is ultimately a construction bereft of elasticity and charisma, with masterfully crafted disparate elements glued onto a large structure that threatens to topple under its own weight.

But this is fine. I don’t think we should attempt to shame ambition into silence during a time when entertainment of any kind is otherwise rendered utterly banal by algorhitmic repetition and dizzying, distracting and constant availability. I’ve snarkily referred to Nolan as ‘Michael Bay for pretentious normies’ in conversations with friends but when you think about it, is that really so bad? Bay is unlikely to ever accept a paycheck for Marvel, and you can tell you’re watching one of his films a couple of seconds into the experience, even if you’ve stumbled in mid-way by accident.

All of this is to say that Nolan’s take on The Odyssey is very much his own, and that I believe this is to be cautiously applauded because our pathetic times have reduced such individual acts of expression into a rarity, at least when it comes to works at such large and expensive scale that otherwise make accountants and executives so nervous as to either say no off the bat or pull the plug mid-way through the process. And classics exist to be reworked, so Nolan has every right to do his own thing with the material.

(The caveat here being that, alas, I highly doubt Karyn Kusama, Jane Schoenbrun or Celine Sciamma will ever get a shot at their own $250 mill version, with all that that implies.)

There’s certainly stuff in it that I like. The practical effects yielding brain-searing creature work: Polyphemus and Circe’s pig-trick… like both Ray Harryhausen and An American Werewolf in London, all grown up. Robert Pattinson going all-in as the eminently hissable Antinous, proving once and for all that his diet-goth-heartthrob days are very much behind him, even if he’s still playing in the mainstream arena by dint of being our current freaking Batman. That we don’t ever really see Benny Safdie as Agamemmnon because his Darth-Vader-like helmet obscures any distinguishing facial features into oblivion: a fitting design for an obstinately single-minded warrior who sacrificed his own daughter to ensure military success.


It’s something of a relief that the sum of its parts contains just so many intricately crafted bits. It means that most of us will get at least something to enjoy, and that includes the likes of yours truly, who certainly didn’t appreciate the lumbering whole all that much. Which is, really and truly, of a piece with how I’ve been experiencing Nolan’s work of late. Yes, I did see The Dark Knight in cinemas not once, not twice, but three times (in two separate countries) in the summer of 2008. But his subsequent work failed to elicit a similar electric charge. (Imagine if Heath Ledger had remained alive to serve as a returning collaborator?)

Which brings me to my critical touchstone for this whole experience – Emily Wilson’s now-infamous review of the film. Very handy for me, since I can now just shoot a link to it to whomever asks my thoughts on the matter. (Though I’m not sure whether a 4,000-plus article really does the desired trick with the necessary economy).

More than the review itself, however, it’s the online backlash to it that I found to be quite telling of where we are as a supposedly living, breathing, thinking-and-reading species.

***

I won’t quote chunks of ‘discourse’ directly here, partly because I can’t quite be arsed but also because citing such opinions in the same way you would cite a primary source just cuts to the root of the problem for me – I know it’s a done thing in legitimate critical spaces, but this is my own space with all of its particularities, and it’s not down to me to determine how legitimate it actually is – but I’ll summarise some of what I’ve heard in line with what I feel is most relevant to me right now.

And it mainly comes down to:

“Emily Wilson is being irrationally mean towards the film, almost as if she holds a personal grudge against it. Some of her comments and asides just feel like catty insults and are out of place in what should otherwise be a clinical dissection of the film as a standalone piece of art – surely that’s what film criticism is in the first place? To that point, however: let’s remember that while Wilson may be one of the most respected living translators of Homer’s work into English, she is not technically a film critic or reviewer, so for all of the authoritative bluster evident in the piece, isn’t she technically coming at all this as an upstart?”

(This is the kind of summary you would have asked your favourite LLM to churn out, here I am reminding you that even a hack such as myself managed to whip it up in less than two minutes. Believe in yourself, kids)

There’s lots to get into here, and I’m almost tempted to bullet-point my way into dissecting each side of it. But I’ll once again go for synthesis instead.

What I find baffling about this reaction is that it actually reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what film criticism can and should be at its very best. Nay, cultural criticism of all kinds. An engaging piece of writing trumps any ‘points-driven’ assessment of a work. Criticism becomes exceptional only when it exists as an engaging piece of writing, or broadcasting, in its own right. Using it as a barometer of whether you should watch something or not is not the purview of the greats in the field – and nowadays, that function has been delegated to Rotten Tomatoes anyway.

Pauline Kael hated Blade Runner (!) – I still read her and will continue to do so. Because she is an excellent stylist with fantastic verve who happens to have been focused on an area of life that I’m predominantly interested in (cinema). I don’t agree with Mark Kermode’s verdict on every single film he yaps about, but the yapping is irresistible either way. Susan Sontag certainly pulled no punches when her galaxy-brain applied itself to whatever area of cultural production was in her crosshairs at a given time, but her sharpness and precision is precisely why we continue to read her and hold her in such high esteem.

This is not about critics trolling or triggering on engaging in ‘hot takes’ for the sake of it. These are people interested in weaving an argument and contributing to the rolling tapestry of conversation and insight that the original work inspires.

Christopher Nolan undertook the massive task of adapting one of the foundational texts of world literature into a three-hour feature film. A bunch of us gave him it its full attention in a darkened room full of strangers. Our smartphones tucked away on silent. Our brains flitting from one narrative timeline to another as the many nested stories of The Odyssey unfold, ricocheting from character to location, from numinous to profane.

Whatever we made of that experience, I would suggest that we now supplement the film’s apparent mission – made as it is, in opposition to the current tendency towards attention-sapping fragmentation and ‘content’ optimization – by giving the scholars and critics a similar space in our minds.

Wilson’s review appeared in the London Review of Books; a broadsheet specialising in long-form critical reviews of primarily books but also other media, which tend to be written with an unhurried care that feels positively meditative in this day and age. There’s many others like it, of course, but we tend to forget about them in the din generated by their more social-media-friendly counterparts.

But much like Nolan’s most recent film, the fact that they still exist proves that we do not have to succumb to the tyranny of low-hanging fruit.

Doctor Obvious’ Rinse & Cleanse Solution

Posted on by under Life

It’s often our dumbest beliefs that end up sticking the hardest, which is probably why they stick in the first place: surely we couldn’t be that dumb, and these beliefs, these persistent thoughts, couldn’t be our own. We’re bigger and better and wiser than all that, right?

It’s probably why I’ve allowed myself to internalise the belief that the arts are ‘soft’ and that virtually all other academic and professional paths are more concrete and serious. This did not dissuade me from placing the arts at the centre of my life in all the ways that could possibly matter. But neither did this Superego-ish thrumming of the status quo embolden me to adopt a stance of rebellious resistance, to reshape these attacks into a permanent middle finger that could serve as both shield and sword as I’d go about my business of creating, working and living.

Instead, I accepted that I am “like that” and that the rest of the world is “not like that” and so I will continue to exist as a lesser aberration worthy of some scraps, but little else.

This is all a cliche’. Both the self-identification as an artist, and the casting of oneself against a hostile, machine-like world whose sole aim is, apparently, to crush you and ‘others like you’ (only a nominally more nuanced category than the above) because the world, apparently, has very little else to do but to train its crosshairs on your psychic obliteration.

But this is what I mean about dumb beliefs.

They are those flat, single-hued, pastel coloured slogans that remain latched onto us like childhood friends we never thought to shake off despite the fact that it’s clearly not working out for either party, at least not anymore.

I guess I never thought to excise it wholesale because it allowed me to slide into something resembling a stable identity, while also making it look like I’m marking myself safe from the pitfalls of delusion. I wouldn’t hide from the fact that I wanted to make art, and would even gesture towards making it known that I would like this to become a sustainable full-time career some day. But the self-deprecating gene would creep in, because this is the gene that transmits a secondary dumb belief: the idea that debasing yourself while adding an ironic wink to the proceedings would ensure you are socially accepted because you’ve denuded yourself of any possibility of self-exposure.

But enough, now.

Working in the arts, within whichever of its many-stranded disciplines and at whatever capacity, means that you build a resilience that virtually no supposedly ‘more serious’ member of society can even dream – or have nightmares – about. I don’t want to dismiss the micro-hardships of anyone’s journey, necessarily, but… I’m pretty sure it’s fairly straightforward for a lawyer’s son to also become a lawyer and have 1.5 kids and 2 cars and the house if they just keep their head down and stick to the established path.

Our Hypothetical Lawyer Friend will never have to churn out creative work in the grouting between ‘mundane’ jobs, while also battling the twin hydra of: ‘this may not even become anything at all’ and ‘you still need to give it all of your focus and energy – this isn’t something you can phone in’.

Neither will he have to deal with troubling inter-personal dynamics within collaborative creative environments, where there’s rarely any union and almost certainly no HR department to report exploitative, abusive, toxic or manipulative behaviour to.

And while failure and obliteration is potentially baked into every single area of life, and while Hypothetical Lawyer could easily find themselves staring down a barrel of a case that doesn’t quite go as planned, with a disappointed client even potentially ending up behind bars, there’s something uniquely pungent about putting up a show that nobody shows up for and a book that nobody ends up reading.

This is all obvious, but it’s the obvious stuff that we forget first. And obvious is the antidote to dumb.

MaxXxine was my favourite of the trilogy

Interviewer & Interviewee | An Evening With Jeff VanderMeer – Talking Maltese at The Movies on Top il-Full

Posted on by under Uncategorized

You can find me bothering YouTube again!

Here’s a couple of updates:

An Evening With Jeff VanderMeer at the Malta Book Festival 2025

This was a bucket list moment. And Jeff was generous, gracious, gregarious and just overall Good. So was I, but that was mostly down to the residual power imbued onto and upon me by John Carpenter t-shirt.

Top il-Full on RTK

A fun chat in Maltese in film and TV on Bradley Cachia’s radio show, flanked by director-producer Martin Bonnici, with whom I’ve collaborated on A Vipers’ Pit, Camilla and a couple of other things.

Enjoy!

edict

Posted on by under Books, Writing

after ‘The Western Wind’ by Samantha Harvey

The moon was made to mush and I poured it into the bowl and added water and stirred with my grandmother’s wooden spoon and I worried it would break, crack against the thick glop that refused to budge until I stirred and stirred harder, working against my fear of breaking until it rewarded me with an uninterrupted swirl. 

The moon gave in to its new liquid shape and I was glad to have finally done something, anything. 

The room in the tower with the wooden table the wooden cups tucked into carved holes made snug to fit. I hear that the other villages have tables of marble but, no matter. 

The three baby giraffes had the cups to their chins. The table was high, at least on this it was enough – made just right to allow them to sit and drink without straining and distending. 

It would have been something to witness them drinking the mixture in. I poured the moon from the bowl and into the three wooden cups with my backs to the baby giraffes. I imagined their eager, liquid eyes. Blackness, but not of night. The blackness of early innocence. Enveloping, pure. 

Another source of pride, and I stung to resist it. The pride: pouring the moon so neatly into the cups that an equal gap was left up top. The rare, brief elegances. But this was not mine. This is where I was drawn, and I merely followed. 

I set the cups down onto the gaps and now, at least, I could look. They did not look at me – they were too eager for their meal. But in this eagerness I found gratitude, and I held it warm to my chest. The warmth turned into the remembered words of the Edict: “You are to pour, the rest is theirs. You are to then turn and walk away. They will only flower in your absence.”

It was not in me to break edicts, least of all this one. So I allowed myself this one small thing, this one last thing: to look upon the giraffes as they drank the moon with a total abandon. The abandon of rest. The marker and promise at the end of my mission. All that makes edicts and towers necessary. 

I took the spiral staircase and when I opened the wooden door that released me from the tower, I looked up to the moonless black sky and thought about the consuming gardens to come. 

We Are the Hollow Men | The Bear – Season 4 (Christopher Storer et al, 2025)

Posted on by under TV

“I don’t know what I’m like”.

Carmy’s confession in the final episode of the fourth season of ‘The Bear’ is an existential wrecking ball, all the more so because by now, loyal viewers can easily – nay, with the glistening, wretched smoothness of tragic inevitability – chart the origin of that realisation.

A clenched man who has willed himself into a new persona that is all about end result, all about proving yourself at every turn… the embodiment of the truism that ‘you’re only as good as your last [project]’. 

Of course you don’t know what you’re like, you dumb fuck – you never even considered that you could be you. That you could be *a* you to begin with. 

In Carmy’s case, the the surface story-metaphor and plot engine is of course tied into him being a superstar chef – a career-rung he only managed to climb after accumulating a fresh barrage of abuse to complement the legacy-pain he suffered under the auspices of his volatile alcoholic mother. 

But like any good metaphor, it is not there to exclude and close off but to include anyone willing and keen enough to pay good attention to what’s going on. 

Showrunner Christopher Storer must have made Robert McKee proud, whether he knows it or not or whether he likes it or not. I’m referring to one of my favourite takeaways from McKee’s ‘Story’, in which McKee is actually channelling someone else – I forget who it is, and I actually think it’s one of those bona fide lines whose original utterer has long since been lost to memory, and it’s now become community property – and it’s this: 

“If the scene’s about what it’s about, you’re in deep shit.” 

Of course The Bear isn’t ‘just’ about cooking. Of course it’s not ‘just’ about the travails of running a catering establishment (or two) in downtown Chicago. 

But Carmy’s mistake is assuming that life can in fact be just that. That if life becomes limited to ‘just’ that one thing, everything will be okay. After all, this is a form of self-annihilation that he can easily justify and perpetuate because it has the potential to create joy for others. Who doesn’t love good food? And the community feeling of a restaurant – HIS restaurant – clearly justifies him erasing everything else by that. He’s performing a service. Nay, he’s a martyr. 

Until the cracks start to show. Until we realise about how his ego is running things to the ground. An addiction to excellence is just another addiction after all, and you chase the high in ever more elaborate ways. In Carmy’s case, this becomes manifested in him changing the menu every night to accommodate a twisted idea of greatness and abundance, draining both his staff and the restaurant’s already-on-thin ice resources. 

That is the hypnotic fallacy that looms large over many a quest for ‘greatness’ in any given field, when it’s employed as a tool of evasion by damaged men (and let’s face it, it’s mostly men who are afflicted by this because it’s mostly men who get access to this arena – see Sydney’s journey in The Bear itself as a useful bit of contrast).

“If I break through an undeniable barrier of greatness all of my previous problems and traumas will become irrelevant because I will have ascended a higher plane, where I will be impermeable and indestructible, and the thought of my mother driving her car through the living room won’t ever bother me again, ever. It’s like that. Trust me, it’s like that. It will be like that. Believe, just believe.” 

But Carmy doesn’t want to become a god. What he really wants – what he really needs – is to become a real boy. He’s a Pinocchio with no Gepetto and no fairy and no Jiminy Cricket. (The Whale is the Bear is the bear is the bear…). 

And so much of Hollywood is ostensibly about this. So much of our mainstream storytelling pays lip service to an idea of what “just be yourself” means. ‘The Bear’ even risked having its version of the manic pixie dream girl in Molly Gordon’s Claire (she even had a cutesy nickname: Claire-Bear!) but luckily that trope was swerved into an opposite pathway and in so many ways, it could only ever be that way: who could possibly be more manic than the Berzatto’s anyway? 

But Carmy is so divorced from an idea of a foundational self that even the mere idea feels ungraspable. Jeremy Allen White’s glassy, thousand-yard stare isn’t a placid, contemplative mode – he’s reaching deeper and deeper into a vast nothingness. 

All of his motions are the repetitive striving of a crazed phantom. He has no access to generative movement, growth and interaction and so settles into what he knows and just runs in place. 

If only his food production were a ritual. It is a ritual, or it could be. If only the running in place were the ecstatic dancing of an indigenous tribe calling forth rain, a good crop… anything that would serve the wider community. 

But instead, it’s a stomping down to silence another tattoo. A beat whose sole aim is to stomp on the mere notion that you are a person at all. 

Here we go round the prickly pear  

Prickly pear prickly pear  

Here we go round the prickly pear  

At five o’clock in the morning.

Hard-Won Agency: Hot Milk (Deborah Levy, 2016; Rebecca Lenkienwicz, 2025)

Posted on by under Books, Films, Life

We all begin from a place of idiocy when tackling family trauma.

This is largely because very few of us can hit the ‘pause’ button on life and explore our damage at our leisure, taking our time with our healing journey and tending to each scar with the requisite care and tenderness.

Like death, trauma is one of the few instances of the ungraspable numinous we still encounter at an alarmingly regular rate in our otherwise secularised existence; it’s slippery and hard to categorise, and you cannot pin it down and name it like Adam was instructed to do when first placed on earth.

And even though we’re popularly guided to apply a cause-and-effect template to trauma (‘I am like this because X happened to me when I was young’), the ghostly after-effects will still linger, and will not be sucked into ectoplasm boxes any time soon. So we can’t analyse. We can’t sit down to calmly pore over things. Still babes in the woods. Still dumb to what came before and what will come next.

Which is why I appreciated Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk: a wry, caustic treatment of trauma and how it seeps down into a mother-daughter relationship, zooming in particularly at a volatile time in both Rose (mother) and Sofia’s (daughter) lives, during which they arguably attempt to undertake what I’ve described above: hitting pause on life so that Rose – but only Rose – may finally heal her ailment (inability to walk) for good.

***

The mixed reception to both the novel – I get a feeling that most people viewed its Booker Prize shortlisting as a perfunctory gesture, riding on Levy’s reputation – and now Rebecca Lenkienwicz’s film adaptation is likely down to a number of factors.

Characters rendered in oblique psychological brush strokes – at times incomplete at best, insufferable at worst. A loaded narrative proposition which never tips into melodrama but offers us little by way of conventional catharsis either. The dangling promise of a queer sub-plot which in the end makes no attempt to say anything politically significant about such an arrangement…

And so on.

I do agree that the novel is somewhat slight, and that other writers would have perhaps filled out the story with a more generous well-spring of empathy towards our characters, particularly the leading female triumvirate that leads the show: Sofia, Rose and Ingrid – the enigmatic, bandana-sporting seamstress who, in the film, appears to Sofia like valkyric vision: astride a horse on the hot Spanish beach: unlikely, unpredictable and ultimately, affected to a fault and hardly the safety raft Sofia needs. But we should all learn to take work on its own terms, and the gaps that both Levy and Lenkienwicz leave out are spaces where discomfort and tension is allowed to grow.

It’s the same tension that grows mushroom-like out of the idiocy of our own thwarted attempts at understanding just what’s wrong with us.

***

Rose has been paraplegic for as long as her aspiring anthropologist daughter can remember, and when we meet them they have temporarily relocated to Almería from London to pursue a last-ditch attempt at treating this ailment for good: enlisting the costly and unconventional services of Dr Gomez, whose methods have more in common with a version of talk therapy than anything resembling a hard medical approach.

Sofia is her mother’s keeper, and has been for a long time. (Her Greek father Christos is out the picture – having flown the coop back to Athens years ago; he now has a baby daughter by his “child bride”). She is prematurely bitter as a result, and her training as an anthropologist only serves to widen the scope of her pain. Crucially, however, this default mode – the paralysing cycle of familial duty and a stalled approach to her academic development – leads to no breakthroughs.

It’s a recipe for an endlessly deferred existence; a purgatory made even more deeply manifest by their stay at the scorching Spanish seaside. Because Rose isn’t keen on solutions either – Lenkienwicz adds a ghost of trauma to keep the clock ticking there too – and finds comfort in endless deferral.

Which is where the matter of tackling trauma by employing agency gets particularly tricky.

***

The most significant coup of the film adaptation is arguably its casting. For all that Emma Mackey supposedly came in late in the day – our screening in Malta was happily accompanied by a surprise Q&A from the film’s co-producer, Christine Langan, who revealed as much – there is something inevitable to the Sex Education star flexing her dramatic muscles here: effectively, she builds on the easy charm of that show by depicting another sensitive and intellectually curious young woman in, however, a far more sombre and mercurial key.

Fiona Shaw makes for an equally obvious fit for Rose: the veteran actress knows her way around that toxic mix of haughty entitlement and whiny dependence and understands that it’s part and parcel of how she wields her power over her daughter.

And I’d be hard-pressed to imagine anyone other than the prolific and dependably luminous Vicky Krieps in the role of Ingrid. Sofia is swept along, and so are we. At least we are at first, until her accumulated deceptions – and the underbelly which animates them – chip away at the implication that she is here to create a welcome oasis of bliss for Sofia.

On this subject, I also have a bone to pick with some of the ripples emerging from the critical consensus on the film, both in mainstream publications and online commentary, namely that Ingrid is yet another example of a ‘manic pixie dream girl’ trope.

In many ways, she is. And that is precisely the point. Ingrid is clearly someone who has internalised, and weaponised, her status as something that could be construed as a real-life manic pixie. But as the story progresses, we see that crumble right before our eyes, and we follow Sofia closely on that journey of realisation.

Like Rose, Ingrid shapes her entire identity around her inability to cope with the defining traumatic incident of her life. She knows it happened and what it implies, but she’s either unable or unwilling to process it, so she gilds and embellishes a persona out of the elisions and deviations she takes to avoid confronting things head on (her being a seamstress feels apt, here).

In the middle of it all is Sofia – whose coping mechanism is neither aggressive self-pity (Rose) or promiscuous hedonism (Ingrid) but repression. In this way, she becomes the perfect bedrock on which both Rose and Ingrid can vent their fears, desires and complaints, assuming that Sofia will stick around to absorb it all.

In fact, Sofia’s troubled and troubling pursuit of agency is the true ticking clock of the narrative, and it’s a strand that resonates deeply, particularly with those among us who have been forced to become parents to their own from a young age.

***

You could say that my parents were a mix of both Rose and Ingrid. Charmingly bohemian and easy to love among the social circle they frequented, they were also inept at managing their own emotional landscapes and taking the temperature of their kids’ true needs. Ridiculously young immigrant parents going at it alone with only nominal support (and at a long distance) from the extended family, and relying on badly-managed improv and reheated cliches to ensure we somehow stayed alive.

It’s no wonder that they took any complaint as an affront. That keeping the peace was top priority. We all took pride in not shouting, even if a good row would’ve released energy that would remain suppressed, set to do poisonous damage many years down the line.

Following a stroke, my mother was left in a coma for ten years; the stroke occurred just a few months before my own father suffered his first, which he survived, only to suffer a fatal one a decade and a bit later… largely the result of unheeded medical advice and the same, Rose-adjacent refusal to comprehend that eternal passivity and dependence on others cannot be a permanent life goal.

As such, I very much identify with Sofia’s default setting: keeping the peace by keeping mum. I felt the ripples of damage her repression causes, and I sympathised with her falling for Ingrid: this is an image of who you want to be – a free spirit; ironically, in my case, the same projection of bohemian freedom modelled by my parents in life.

Watching Hot Milk in 2025, after the fallout of losing both my parents, I’m beginning to understand why I’ve always been drawn to coming-of-age stories, of which this is a finely wrought and arthouse ready reminder (none of the tropey, self-help-booky Hollywood takes on that sub-genre here). I found kindred spirits in these retreating protagonists, but also the hope of some kind of release when they finally gain the confidence to break out of the vicious cycle which defines them.

In a weird way, this is aspirational fiction for me. And Sofia’s small wins – working up the courage to steal a fish from the market; liberating a noisy neighbours’ dog from its cruel confinement atop a sun-baked rooftop – feel as they are presented: welcome irruptions of healthy transgression, the promise that you can change things around.

That agency is more than just a myth.

Divide and Conquer: Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

Posted on by under Films

SPOILERS all the way. I’m not kidding. Consider yourself duly warned.


The vampires in Sinners do not represent white supermacy per se. At least, not in a definitive form, insofar as vampires CAN be definitive metaphors of any kind.

Because white supremacy doesn’t need supernatural gilding to appear menacing, devouring and oppressive, even in Ryan Coogler’s triumphant and moreish genre exercise – blending Jim Crow-era realism with the baroque stylings of an action-horror romp. The covert Klansmen implanted at the periphery of the film, and whose role culminates in the latter half of the third act, embody the most prosaic kind of evil imaginable. But this doesn’t make them any less of a threat. If anything, they have one advantage over the nocturnal bloodsuckers – they can roam freely over any territory both day and night, invited or otherwise.

No, the vampires here – at least their leader, Remmick (Jack O’Connell) – are simply the manifestation of yet another fallout of systemic oppression. Remmick is of Irish origin and speaks to the suppression of the magical power of his own region’s folk music by the imperialist lurch of both Christianity and the English.

And for sure, a white man wanting to assimilate and fold blues musicians into his ‘rainbow coalition’ project that would seek to upend mundane oppressions with a new vampiric world order does also speak to another layer of exploitation faced by our black protagonists.

But what’s also interesting here is that it’s Remmick who is given the role of ‘too-radical villain’ who may have “a point” but whom nobody in their right minds would follow to the end. Compare this to Coogler’s mainstream breakthrough, Black Panther. In it, we have Killmonger, played by Sinners’ own Michael B. Jordan, who responds to bigotry in kind, but whose actions ultimately have to be dialed up to an unjustifiable extreme for Marvel’s status quo to be maintained.

Sinners never allows for such a boring return to old tropes. Nobody is a saint here, for sure, barring perhaps young Sammie (Miles Caton), but only because this is something of a coming-of-age story for the musically gifted preacher’s son, whom the ordeal leaves “wiser and sadder” and allows him to gradually make a life for himself as a musician further down the line (transforming into Buddy Guy, no less in a mid-credits flash-forward sequence).

Though hardly the ‘alpha’ of the story, Sammie is the hero here because he manages to slink out of the oppressive binaries imposed by his world. He rejects his father’s pious cocoon, but he also grows out of wanting to be like his cousins – Jordan’s twins Smoke and Stack, whose return to their hometown after a stint with Capone in Chicago kicks the whole shebang into being.

But the undercurrent of sadness that we still feel envelop Sammie at the end – which Smoke warned him about, and which animates the spirit of blues either way – is, I think, down to the loss of the rhapsodic community spirit that we glimpse for a brief, glorious moment when the Twins’ project appears to be succeeding in what it’s trying to do – a sequence in which Sammie’s public debut as a musician ushers forth a wall of sound that pulls in musicians from past, present and future; a chorus which busts open the gates of perception and plucks at one of the animating chords of the universe.

But instead, we find him playing to appreciative but fragmented audiences in a cosmopolitan jazz bar in the big city.

White supremacy has allowed for neither the black community to exist and thrive in peace, much in the same way it crushed the pre-Christian Irish communities attuned to a sense of the numinous that would likely be branded heretic at the drop of a Pope’s hat.

It leaves us scrambling for scraps, and we’re often left scrambling alone.

Haunted Out of Life | Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Posted on by under book review, Books

The central couple of Vincenzo Latronico’s fourth novel Perfection –– translated into English by Sophie Hughes and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions — are living the digital nomad dream c. 2015 when we first meet them: crafting brand identities, catalogues and interfaces for trendy businesses, having successfully uprooted themselves from an unspecified Southern European country of origin to build a new life in Berlin.

That much of the novel centres on their outward success — which only appears to require minor upkeep — is the key to its own triumph as an insidious but blistering satire of the white, middle class and now variously mobile zeitgeist.

Novels like Perfection are judgemental rather than satirical in the broader and more creatively energetic interpretation of that genre, but it’s Latronico’s unsentimental sharpness that makes it into something more than just a pained litany of complaints against a generalised — and generational — mass of people, one so keen for individualised gratification that they come out on the other end of that equation.

Anna and Tom are so thoroughly homogenised in their curated desires that Latronico almost always refers to them as a collective unit. The rare moments where this device is broken are also rare moments of rupture for the couple, but which scan as a relief for us. Could this be the point where some genuine self-awareness can creep in? Or at the very least, a shifting of gears, a recalibration?

The recalibration does come, as it happens, but in the end, only results in repetition. A relocation from Berlin — never fully a committed separation, more of a sabbatical — for more of the same in Lisbon, or Sicily. There is a parasitic dimension to these movements… which has of course become something of a truism in discussions around the phenomenon of 21st century gentrification. This is probably among the more caustic of Latronico’s landmines, cousins and variants of which are dotted all throughout the short, sharp sliver of a novel: the idea that Anna and Tom’s actual job is to serve as worker-ants in an ongoing gentrification project, all the while believing they are in fact agents of an unprecedented form of self-actualisation.

Their labour alienation reaches an apex that previous generations were at least spared from dreading: they are alienated from work they’re not even aware they’re engaged in executing. (Latronico shrewdly articulates the couple’s own arm’s length awareness of gentrification: they respond to it much in the same way that an unrepentant smoker shrugs off the threat of cancer, and anyway — they reassure themselves that they are never bona fide gentrifiers).

Latronico’s minimalism doesn’t allow for interiority, but this is what lends the novel its merciless hammer-drop. The whole novel essentially one long arc of a braining hammer, so it’s a mercy that it’s so short, lest byways of specificity and complexity upend its ‘perfect’ journey. We may wish for Anna and Tom to be rendered with more psychological complexity. Indeed, experiencing them as separate human beings would be a decent enough start.

But psychological realism would run the risk of scuppering the social and cultural realism that Latronico is going for here. There are numerous ways in which either Anna or Tom would be able to justify their lifestyle and its attendant ambitions through psychological byways, through reappropriated therapy-speak… because the neoliberal status quo has made a bedfellow out of all this, the closest equivalent we have to a spiritual resting point.

So in choosing to merely observe their motions through spare, unsentimental prose, we see just how oblivious their drive is; how the constant push towards the comforts of good taste for its own sake merely leads to hollow replication — an addiction whose cure can be indefinitely deferred because its damage is not so readily apparent.

This is how we are haunted out of life.

*

Reading Perfection brought to mind the Gen X variant of the ‘state of our time’ novels that I’d devour in my late teens and early twenties: choice cuts from Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh and the like. These writers were either hailed or reviled as often-gratuitous purveyors of their generation’s excesses: rubbing our faces in its nihilism and emptiness for the sheer sadistic — if not subversive — thrill of doing so.

But there was an undercurrent to my reading that I felt but never quite confronted, but I’m ready to confront it now because Perfection brought it bubbling back up and, I guess, I find myself in a less insecure space than that jittering post-teen used to occupy while thumbing through these books in between breaks and on buses while attending Sixth Form.

This is a deeply moral work. If not a spiritual one.

The hollowness it depicts is also a call to action. Of course, articulating it as such would break the spell of the shimmering, sharp minimalism of the work — would introduce that crucial element of earnest humanity into what is otherwise a mini-opus of ‘perfect’ cynicism.

But that is precisely how Latronico — and the previous writers I’ve mentioned, at their best — operates.

The status quo wants us to believe that Anna and Tom are the ultimate aspirational figures. Latronico spends upwards of 100 pages convincingly arguing otherwise.