How They Cover Their Hands Now

I've been noticing a lot of sock puppet videos on YouTube lately, floating to the top of my particular algorithm soup. For those who don't know, in internet lingo a "sock puppet" is, according to Wikipedia, "a false online identity used for deceptive purposes . . . Sock puppets include online identities created to praise, defend, or support a person or organization, to manipulate public opinion, or to circumvent restrictions such as viewing a social media account that a user is blocked from." Mostly I've been seeing Japanese sock puppets aimed at foreigners, particularly pro-Sanseito sock puppets, like this guy called Shohei Kondo who has a lot of videos about video games and dating that casually slip in messages about how actually Sanseito isn't as crazy as its reputation suggests and they just want what's best for everyone, etc.

Yesterday I came across this guy called Evan Edinger whom I can't say for sure is a sock puppet but his videos somehow generate over a million views despite being extremely bland. The video I watched part of (and linked to) begins with him explaining how he, as an American, grew up in an environment where guns were a fundamental part of life and Britain introduced him to this novel idea that maybe the average person doesn't need to own a gun. His voice and cadence sound so fake (not A.I. fake just phony shill kind of fake) that I assumed he was a sock puppet before I saw his regular view counts. Could so many people really be interested in a sock puppet's content? Maybe he's just a really good sock puppet. So far I'm not seeing it but I never understood Dancing with the Stars either. Anyway, speaking as an American myself, I never experienced that feeling of having to own a gun and I don't know if anyone I knew did. Even people I knew who owned guns gave me the impression that it was their own particular predilection rather than an omnipresent need everyone in the social group feels to own a gun. I'm sure there are people like that but the YouTuber's description of it as just an every day fact of every American's life is ridiculous and feels like anti-American propaganda.

This is all, of course, why I've always said fiction is superior to non-fiction. Non-fiction, by its nature, asserts truth as its province and implicitly sets itself against that metric. Fiction is just ideas with no pretense at being otherwise.

Now that it's starting to feel like autumn I've been listening to more Elvis Costello lately. I don't know why exactly but Elvis Costello is associated with autumn for me.

Just Because X Doesn't Mark a Spot Doesn't Mean It's Irrelevant

Scully and Mulder find their investigation frustrated by lies and surveillance devices in a February 1994 episode of The X-Files called "E.B.E" ("extraterrestrial biological entity", which doesn't roll off the tongue like simply "E.T."). I like how this episode lays a groundwork of uncertainty for everything else.

For one thing, Mulder finds out there's a limit to how far he can trust his mysterious "Deep Throat" source, who in this episode lies and even deliberately gives Mulder false evidence of a U.F.O. in an effort to manipulate him. Meanwhile, Scully finds a listening device hidden in her pen. That's gotta be a small device to fit in a pen but not at all far fetched. Can you imagine how small cameras and listening devices can be now? Ask someone from a country like South Korea or Japan where voyeurism is at epidemic levels.

Back in the U.S. in the '90s, though, surveillance was something the government used against pesky FBI agents. Mulder tears apart his apartment looking for hidden bugs, finally finding one in a power outlet. He Scully then split up and carefully meet up at a convenience store in another state before embarking on their plan to follow a freight truck that may be carrying a crashed alien ship. But whoever's manipulating Mulder is using his own desire to find aliens against him, a plot device I really liked.

This is also the episode that introduces the Lone Gunmen, those lovable crackpots.

It occurs to me that there's been a massive shift in how Americans commonly regard conspiracy theories and exploring ideas of government deception. Now it's Trump's White House staging bogus inquiries into classified U.F.O. intelligence and it all seems like a sad pantomime. Or maybe they took a page from the shadowy characters who sought to use Mulder against himself. Scully has a nice line in the episode, "The truth is out there. But so are lies."

The X-Files is available on Disney+ in Japan.

Only Trophies in the Building

On last night's Only Murders in the Building, the team confronted the three billionaires in a wonderful faux-17th century manor house.

I want to live in this place so bad. It's better than Major Clive Wynne-Candy's house. All those creepy hunting trophies! The weird tusk table!

It was basically a funny episode, too. Oliver wanders off in the woods and Loretta (unseen in this episode) calls in a "silver alert". This paired well with all the lavender Oliver wears in this episode.

It was funny when Charles and Mabel had to answer Broadway trivia questions with Oliver absent. Do these kinds of life or death situations ever actually occur?

Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+.

That Old Slasher Magic

A masked man goes around killing people and only one young woman seems to be taking the disappearances seriously. 2004's Toolbox Murders feels like a throwback to slasher movies from twenty to thirty years earlier so it's appropriate that it's directed by one of the masters of that period, Tobe Hooper. It's certainly refreshing.

I found myself thinking of Ginger Rogers' criticism of Saturday Night Fever, that the young people think "they can dance with their faces." Where she and Fred Astaire showed their dancing prowess with full frame long takes, musicals of the '70s and '80s preferred to conjure energy with editing and composition. Similarly, one of the most memorable parts of Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first attack from Leatherface, when a shot that began of a woman standing at a door transforms when he rushes out to grab her. A typical modern slasher would feel compelled to cut quickly between Dutch angles. Somehow Hooper was better able to convey a sense of watching a real nutcase spring from the shadows and inflict gruesome injury.

Toobox Murders is a remake of a '70s movie not directed by Hooper though apparently it shares nothing much in common with its predecessor's plot. In this one, Angela Bettis plays Nell, a young, recently married woman who's moved into a haunted Hollywood apartment building with her husband. When odd absences start to occur, no-one believes her when she insists something weird is happening.

So it's a slasher film with elements of supernatural horror, though it may just be insanity believing it's supernatural. It's good and creepy anyway. Juliet Landau is also in the movie all too briefly.

Toolbox Murders is available on The Criterion Channel.

A May Dismember Romance

A young woman with a lazy eye has a horrific experience with first love in 2002's May. There's also a creepy doll and many references to Frankenstein but this film mostly put me in mind of Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Like that film, it's anchored by an exceptional performance from its lead actress, in this case Angela Bettis.

The doll works as a metaphor for the young woman, May's, sexual repression. Other kids won't talk to her, we see in flashbacks to May's childhood, so her mother gives her the doll, Susie, in compensation. However, she's instructed to keep the doll in its glass case and not to remove it under any circumstances. As May starts to crack up over the course of the film, cracks start to appear in the glass case.

She works as a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital where the secretary, Polly (Anna Faris), doesn't disguise her lusting for May. But May's fixated on her neighbour, Adam (Jeremy Sisto), whose hands she considers beautiful.

Like Repulsion, May does a good job blurring the line between what might be May's derangement and what might be her bad luck in meeting so many assholes. Adam's character is a slightly implausible form of jerk who makes gory, independent horror movies but completely backs out of a relationship with May when she bites his lip during foreplay.

Bettis' performance is a little more over the top than Catherine Deneuve's in Repulsion and I'd say Polanski's is undeniably a superior film. But May is certainly a pleasure.

May is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Road to Space

A young woman finds her deceased husband apparently back from the dead but with the personality of an alien in John Carpenter's 1984 film Starman. Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen give earnest, focused performances that compel similar focus from the viewer. It's a lovely romance, too.

This is one of Carpenter's lone, oddball man against the world movies, like They Live and Escape from New York. Bridges' alien visitor is certainly the most mild-mannered of the lot. Bridges plays the character with a mechanical, clicking cadence but his natural warmth can't help but come through, giving the character a nice nuance.

Karen Allen holds on tight to every line and Carpenter gives her copious closeups, making use of those massive, communicative eyes of hers. I like how she never for a moment believes the alien is her husband. Watching the two fumble their way through odd but undeniable chemistry is really charming. It's also a pleasant road movie as their journey from Denver to Arizona gives a nice context. Carpenter compared it to It Happened One Night, another romantic road movie, though Bridges and Allen aren't nearly as fractious as Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.

Starman is available this month on The Criterion Channel as part of a playlist of John Carpenter movies.

X Sonnet 1963

A half a line was cut from cookie luck.
Remember spuds when singing songs of love.
Potatoes mashed or stewed could woo a buck.
A patron courts a waitress hand and glove.
Entire scrolls of jokes were rolling out.
The comic court was steps from stately elks.
The forest here is choked with faerie clout.
The instrument at hand was Lawrence Welk's.
The scent of garlic bread pervades the air.
Preserving such was past the ken of man.
The tasty bread would sate an angry bear.
But people still from local grizzlies ran.
The loss of leaves has marked the fall of grace.
Abandoned books have robbed the human space.

Robot Woes

I watched 1987's RoboCop over the course of the week. I kept falling asleep during it. Again, that's just a sign of what a sleepy fellow I've become in my 40s, not a reflection on the film's quality. I'd seen it before, of course, but when I was a kid. I found the two parts I remembered best remain my favourite parts of the film; ED-209 coming down the stairs, and one of the thugs falling apart when his body's exposed to some kind of toxic waste.

The animation on ED-209 was worthy of Ray Harryhausen (but it was actually Craig Davies). You can sense it thinking as it stands at the top of the stairs, weighing the wisdom of actually pursuing RoboCop down the stairs. One can't help but interpret it as hubris when it makes the fatal decision to go ahead.

The thug melting in the big action sequence at the end is one of those random details that effectively push an action sequence to another level. I remember on the Godfather Part II commentary or in an interview, Francis Ford Coppola remarking on the scene where Vito kills that crime boss and a light bulb just happens to break. Having some random but plausible surprise in your action sequence really breathes life into it. The melting man in RoboCop adds to a sense of an untethered nightmare symphony. I love it.

The RoboCop movies are currently available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

Dagon and Dagoth

On Wednesday, walking to and from work, I listened to The Shadow Over Innsmouth read by Dagoth Ur. It seemed an appropriate enough way to begin October. Dagoth Ur is the villain with a distinctive voice from the 2002 Elder Scrolls game Morrowind. Someone doing an impression of the voice has been uploading recordings of him saying or reading various things, including a number of HP Lovecraft texts in their entirety. It was funny at first but now I seem to be enjoying it unironically. Dagoth Ur, as a reader, hits a nice medium between performance and straightforward oratory. I like how he gives the colloquial speech of Zadok just a little bit of an accent instead of trying to extrapolate Lovecraft's theoretical, ancient New England dialect.

One of the obvious reasons The Shadow Over Innsmouth hasn't had a film adaptation that captures the novella's power is Lovecraft's ability to conjure mood through suggestion. The best example being the people of Innsmouth and their famous "Innsmouthian look".

He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm.

It would be difficult to show this in film without going too extreme or too subtle. The human mind has a powerful capacity to quickly rationalise the bizarre in real life but is less inclined to do so when watching a film. In prose, the reader can imagine the Innsmouthian look within his or her own conceptions of plausibility, within the realm in which one might reasonably expect a community of human/fish monster hybrids to live relatively undetected in a seaside American town for more than a century. That line is going to be different for everyone so it would be difficult to capture in film in a way that's as satisfying as Lovecraft captured it in prose.

Only Pop Stars in the Building

Meryl Streep returns in this week's new Only Murders in the Building. She and Martin Short continue to have great chemistry though I found her unexpected bonding with Dianne Wiest over an opera stage dagger a little more interesting.

Meanwhile, Mabel's conflict with her former friend and current pop star Althea comes to a head. Althea's fictional popular song sounds suspiciously similar to Sabrina Carpenter to me and I wonder if there's some real life cattiness at play from real life pop star Selena Gomez, who plays Mabel, aimed at Carpenter.

Charles's trouble in this episode revolves around a dating app. Mabel upbraids him for wearing an earring in a scene that really made them seem like a married couple.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+ in Japan and on Hulu elsewhere.

Enjoy Something Fake

This seems to be the only official video on YouTube of the AI actress, Tilly Norwood. There are more short clips on her instagram. But Norwood isn't the only artificial feature of the above video; everyone you see in the video is AI generated. It's written by AI and I assume the voices are AI generated as well. I'm trying to pick out the patterns that indicate AI writing and one thing I can see is that it's very dreamlike. It's like a dream in which everything makes sense while you're in it but if think for a moment you realise things don't add up. For example, when Norwood, in the video, apparently on a red carpet, says, "Three seasons and a podcast." Three seasons of what? What podcast is she talking about? The company behind the video and Norwood have said nothing about a podcast or series.

Naturally, SAG-AFTRA is on its ear about Norwood. I don't foresee AI performers replacing real ones in the near future but I can imagine them becoming a phenomenon unto themselves. Virtual YouTubers are popular throughout Asia and those are real people using artificial images, essentially like puppets. I can easily imagine totally artificial YouTubers cornering a market.

Yet the writing feels disconnected. Like a lot of people, I've been wondering if Disney has been sneaking AI writing into their productions. I was watching Alien: Earth last night, the fourth episode, and there was a decent scene in which Wendy, the protagonist, is in an operating room and we find out she can hear and repeat the language of the aliens. It's basically a reworking of an idea from Alien: Resurrection but it's not so bad. But it's followed by a scene between her and her brother which strongly reminded me of Ahsoka. The performers spend an inordinate amount of time delivering peculiarly flat dialogue. Wendy asks her brother where he was while she was in the hospital and he assures her that he would have come if he'd known where she was. Is there a reason she'd suspect he wouldn't? Is there a reason we linger on him assuring her? It seems like no. Nothing here is to introduce character nuance or depth but to fill time in a sort of theoretical way, like something or someone is focused more on convincingly creating an actual television scene than on creating or expressing something interesting. I'm not sure if this is Disney employing AI or if the screenwriters actually wrote a few interesting scenes and then just had some software fill in the gaps. Or maybe it's just good old fashioned bad writing.

Let's imagine Tilly Norwood becomes a sensation. I think conversation will quickly become about ethical considerations. It would be possible to depict Norwood doing or saying things no human actress would do. The video above even already has a joke about ignoring consent. I certainly don't think Particle6 is going to be able to stop the creation of unauthorised Tilly Norwood porn. I wonder if the conversation will shift to focus on what people compulsively watch. To what new depths of depravity will AI take us?

The Implied Tormentor

The subjective and arbitrary nature of censorship becomes apparent when one looks at media from the past or other cultures that faced it. 1977's The Devil Probably (Le Diable probablement) was banned in France for viewers under eighteen years of age. This Robert Bresson film of beautiful cinematography and non-professional actors solemnly discussing environmental disaster, religious schism, and the nature of love in their moody love triangle was somehow seen as more threatening to youth than the many celebrated tragic and/or erotic melodramas of the country. People were evidently concerned the film would inspire young people to commit suicide.

It begins with a newspaper headline informing us the young protagonist, Charles (Antoine Monnier), committed suicide. This is followed by another newspaper that claims he was murdered. From there, the film cuts to a few months earlier and we find Charles among a group of attractive, disaffected youth with a penchant for wearing suede jackets while solemnly watching footage of baby seals being clubbed. I don't think the irony in the choice of wardrobe was intentional but it's worth noting the horrific reality in the environmental disasters Bresson depicts in the film.

With these screenings as a recurrent tangent throughout the film, the characters also gloomily discuss the dynamics of their non-traditional romantic relationships as well as the moral fibre of Catholicism versus Protestantism. Something seems to be going wrong everywhere, something fundamental, the characters muse on the bus. A man in a nearby seat overhears them and, when asked who or what is responsible for all this, he gives the film its title, "The Devil, probably." In this we get a figure of ultimate menace along with the perhaps more menacing observation that the truth is not and cannot be known.

Wikipedia has this quote from Bresson:

What impelled me to make this film is the mess we have made of everything. This mass civilisation in which the individual will soon no longer exist. This demented tampering with things. This immense demolition job in which we shall kill ourselves by trying to go on living. This incredible indifference shown by people, except for some of today’s youth who see things more clearly.

It's worth noting this statement seems as fitting to-day as it may have seemed in 1977 or would likely have seemed in 1877 or many other times in history.

Bresson's preference to cast non-professional actors, following in the Neorealist tradition, sometimes yields performances of uniquely raw emotion. Here, it gives us something cold and remote. The characters are more like subjects of paintings than of a film, rendered as they are often silent and still in the gorgeous lighting, particularly in the restored edition on the Criterion Channel (which, sorry, is leaving the service at the end of the month). The horror of this civilisation's decline is emphasised by the ephemeral beauty of humanity.

The Familiar Alien

I finally started watching Alien: Earth, the new series set in the universe of the Alien franchise. I'm kind of surprised by how bland the first couple episodes are, given the kind of talk I've heard about the show. I assume the show must improve later, at least I hope so.

Some have been calling it Andor for the Alien franchise. It does feature an actor from Andor, Alex Lawther, who played the tech guy who wrote a manifesto in the heist arc in Andor season one. I saw yesterday that Andor star Denise Gough got a role on the otherwise unpromising new Narnia movie from Greta Gerwig. So Andor seems to be having the Game of Thrones effect in which actors from the series steadily appear in other projects for years afterwards. We still live in a post-GoT world as far as casting goes. I just finished watching Sandman which had at least two GoT actors.

The primary protagonist of Alien: Earth seems to be Wendy (Sydney Chandler), who's a young woman implanted with the brain of a child who'd been dying. So we get some dialogue about how she thinks it's weird to have breasts now. How can we go back to TNG Lal when we've had Pretty Things' Emma Stone? Anyway, Wendy is among a group of "hybrids", the brains of kids with terminal illnesses transferred into adult bodies with super strength and reflexes. The child in adult body idea has been explored in many other science fiction and fantasy media, this example has yet to distinguish itself.

The other side of the show is a very faithful recreation of the Nostromo interiors, though the ship is not the Nostromo, just another of the same model. We get another crew eating a meal around a table after cryosleep. I know they were going for the nostalgia but mostly what it does is invite an unflattering (I know that word has fallen "spectacularly" out of favour but I'll use it anyway) comparison. It's like a thought experiment--what if Ridley Scott had been fired at some point in Alien's pre-production and a hack studio director had been brought in? It's Alien for ADHD. The pacing is faster, the dialogue doesn't overlap as much, there's no effort to make the crew especially realistic. The "space trucker" vibe is replaced by the usual "office worker" vibe. But maybe that's just a difference between something made in the 1970s versus something made in the 2020s.

So far, I'd say it's not so much the Andor of the Alien franchise but the Ahsoka. Okay, that's too harsh. Maybe the Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Alien: Earth is available on Disney+ in Japan.

Mouse Hand

I was just looking at the Japanese Wikipedia page for Mickey Mouse. I'm fascinated by the profile section which differs significantly from the English version. The makers of the Japanese version evidently felt compelled to describe Mickey's body parts and justify the discrepancy between Mickey's hands and the paws of mice.

A picture of a rat is used to illustrate--the Japanese don't generally distinguish between rats and mice. Both are called "nezumi" despite the fact that they are different species. Of course, English also makes distinctions that don't really exist between animals such as ravens and crows and doves and pigeons.

The Wikipedia entry goes on to explain that since the forepaws of mice are "grotesque" (the English loan word is used) Mickey's hands appear human.

I wonder if anyone had a nightmare about Mickey with true mouse hands.

X Sonnet 1962

Reviving brains renewed the mission goal.
Now many pumpkins pile over land.
A team of bats harass a tricking foal.
Some children rove and raise a rude demand.
You see the bodies playing cut and slice.
Betwixt the webs of mist are spider ghosts.
Your coffee drinks a season's famous spice.
Above the blaze, a captive slowly roasts.
A hill of beans could fill a giant cup.
A percolating thought contains a fish.
The time arrives for ghouls to roughly sup.
A tomb becomes a big communal dish.
The famous feast begins and ends with death.
A glowing face commenced to draw a breath.

Final Garments

This season of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt concluded with two episodes this week. The first contained two stories, the second of them being the first part in a four part narrative that concluded in the subsequent episode. They dispensed with most of their movie references in the first story, which is primarily a Nightmare Before Christmas parody with throwaway references to Gremlins, Edward Scissorhands, and a mashup of Cast Away and Terminal. I know from experience, by the way, junior high school students in Japan generally don't know who Tom Hanks is. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I'd say Panty and Stocking is made exclusively with American audiences in mind. Nightmare Before Christmas and Gremlins, oddly enough, both have cultural currency in Japan.

In this parody, one of the demon sisters replaces Santa for the holiday as the jolly old elf claims to have worn out his hips having marathon sex with Panty. I wish the show had shown what the demon sister then gives to all the world's children but I suppose at that point it would be less of a parody and more of a remake of Nightmare Before Christmas.

The long four parter following this is framed as a Star Wars parody with its titles but there's nothing especially Star Wars about the stories. Panty and Stocking are unexpectedly recalled to heaven by God. Previously, God had been implied to be the live action legs of a woman in lingerie protruding from the clouds. This figure is revealed to be God's wife, Queen Silk, who wears a creepy metal mask, and God Himself is more properly known as Luniere, King of Gods. Oh, I loved it. Especially the design of God as a little old bald man with an enormous beard.

These episodes kind of reminded me of the end of Kill la Kill, another project masterminded by Imaishi Hiroyuki, and his most successful. I think Kill la Kill really evolved from Panty and Stocking in that both are stories are about girls who wear clothes that have or confer on them special powers. The conclusion of Kill la Kill is the most unsatisfying part of that series and Panty and Stocking's is similarly so. It's mainly characters screaming and things blowing up. It all feels a bit obligatory. But some of the action is good.

Panty and Stocking is available on Amazon Prime.

Five Years of the Murder Building

I finally got caught up on the new season of Only Murders in the Building. Every season seems to be a little better than the last. This one is focusing much more on comedy and less on pathos. The murder, this time, is of the doorman, Lester, who turns out to have been tied to an underground, mob-run, casino frequented by the three richest people in the world, played by Christoph Waltz, Renee Zellweger, and Logan Lerman. Each is pretty funny but I was surprised to find Zellweger's character the most effective, a thoroughly cold-hearted media guru named Camilla White.

It feels like Steve Martin has more to do this season. His character is having--I guess it wouldn't be a "mid-life crisis" since he's 80--I guess a late life crisis. This leads to him taking testosterone supplements. He has an amusing date with a mob widow played by Tea Leoni. I still feel like, deep down, the writers really want to pair him with Mabel, Selena Gomez's character. She's lost a lot of weight this season which kind of makes her seem older but I think the nearly fifty year age gap between the two of them is insurmountable. It's easy to forget when the three leads are written at the same maturity level.

Martin Short is good for a lot of gags this season. At least so far, there's no serious side to anyone's arc this time.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.

Claudia Cardinale

One of the most beautiful actresses in the history of cinema, Claudia Cardinale, is dead at 87. She began appearing in small roles in Italian films in the late '50s before rising to stardom in the '60s with the roles she's best remembered for to-day. She appeared in 8 1/2, The Leopard, and The Pink Panther all in 1963. Audiences were treated to her remarkable beauty and steely performances. There was always something tenacious about her.

These qualities served her well in the role she's most celebrated for these days, the lead in 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. Sergio Leone's most operatic Spaghetti Western, it stars Cardinale as a prostitute from New Orleans who heads to the dusty western plains hoping for a new life with a new husband only to find her brittle dream shattered by the cruel hand of a villain. It's from the point of view of this profoundly stranded woman that we witness the battle between Leone's distilled extremes of good and bad men, Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda.

She continued to get work throughout the 70s and 80s and appeared in Werner Herzog's legendary Fitzcarraldo in 1982. She was always an indelible asset to any film.

His Hellboy and Yours

I was saying the other day that "self-inserts", as they've come to be called, used to be cool in fiction. It was a variation of "write what you know"; write the protagonist as someone with formative experiences and/or opinions similar to your own. I revisited an example of how that philosophy once held sway over the weekend, 2004's Hellboy.

The first film adaptation of Mike Mignola's great Dark Horse comic, it was directed by Guillermo del Toro. Mignola and Del Toro held discussions about the creative direction of the film adaptation and Mignola felt that, as director, Del Toro ought to be free to express his own creative vision. The biggest change to the story Del Toro made was to introduce a romantic relationship between Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Liz (Selma Blair). It was a kind of Beauty and the Beast story that he would explore again in his Oscar winning film The Shape of Water. It's not hard to see how this might be a personal story for Del Toro. At the time he made Hellboy, he was married to Lorenza Newton, an attractive young woman beside Del Toro, who grew up a nerd without good looks.

So the film has a lot of angst that's not present in the comic. Hellboy is self-conscious about his looks in comparison to the human, attractive Liz. The satisfying emotional arc of the story is in how both characters come to terms with their respective monstrous qualities and see how they're united by them. Some would say Shape of Water is the more mature film because being monstrous doesn't come with really useful superpowers. Hellboy may be a monster, but he's also really cool and admired as a mysterious and strange hero. But, hey, Del Toro's pretty cool and admired among filmmakers, so maybe that's as valid an aspect of the character.

The modern dislike of "self-insert" characters seems, like the scorn for people believing themselves to be "the main character of their own story," to come from a weakening grasp of what fiction can be. It's almost as though modern armchair critics are jealous of anything gratifying that writers take from their own work.

Which is not to say I think it invariably works. I certainly don't commend Vincent Gallo's unabashedly narcissistic films. But as with many other aspects of fiction, I would say writing about oneself, or using oneself as fodder for character building, will vary in quality depending on the honesty and courage of the individual writer.

Hellboy is available on Netflix.