Lines Under Strain

A tugboat captain finds himself torn (or tugged?) between two women in 1941's Remorques. The title translates to "towlines" according to Wikipedia, which makes a lot of sense, but the less imaginative English title is Stormy Waters. The movie's a lovely little melancholy portrait.

Jean Gabin plays Andre, the tugboat captain. His job is rescuing ships or people from ships in stormy waters or other distressing situations. Like many movie wives of guys in dangerous, life saving jobs, his wife (Madeleine Renaud) resents the fact that he does it, though in her case it's more a kind of jealousy as she senses he loves the sea and his ship more than her.

But then another woman enters the picture, Catherine (Michele Morgan), who makes a desperate journey across violent waves in a raft from the ship Andre's trying to rescue one terrible night. He orders her placed in his quarters. It turns out she wasn't escaping the ship so much as its captain, her abusive husband. Andre has no time for this, telling her she oughtn't have come and, as a woman, really didn't belong at sea. He leaves and she remarks to his first mate, "He's a frank man," to which the mate replies, "Yes, he's a man."

Honesty and forthrightness are presented as essential qualities of masculinity throughout the film and Andre is continually tested. The heart of the film is a sequence in which Andre meets with Catherine in Paris, hardly admitting to himself why he's doing it. There's a beautiful aerial shot of a deserted beach with the shadows of clouds drifting over it. He and Catherine tour an empty house and the two have an interesting conversation in which she checkmates him by saying that if he's a simple man, as he claims, he'll be honest with her and himself about his feelings. Meanwhile, Andre's wife is diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Some would argue that the film ends without a resolution but I would say it ends in just the right place. There are only a few unfortunate choices on the road ahead for Andre, it's on the edge of them that the film reaches its true conclusion.

Remorques is available on The Criterion Channel.

Jasmine Jingoism

I finished watching Angel, season four a couple days ago. The second half of the season is much better than the first half, and much better than I remembered. The first time I watched it, I remember not liking Jasmine, the villain played by Gina Torres, and I really hated Connor, Angel's son played by Vincent Kartheiser. I'm not sure who more deserves to be called "The Wesley Crusher of the Buffy-verse", Connor or Dawn. I feel kind of bad saying that since Michelle Trachtenberg passed away. Well, you know, on my recent rewatch I was impressed how well the initial Dawn stories conveyed a credible relationship between sisters. Dawn had a very credible mixture of resentment and admiration for her older sister. So, yeah, I'll call Connor the Wesley Crusher of the Buffy-verse, though I don't find him as annoying as I used to and it's effectively tragic how he continues to worship Jasmine even when he's unaffected by the charm spell she uses to keep the world enslaved.

Angel season 4 always seemed like Joss Whedon's dry run for The Avengers. Loki in the first Avengers movie, which Whedon went on to write and direct not long after Angel, had the same argument Jasmine has in the penultimate episode of Angel season four. Which is that, as bad as she is, in the long term, fewer people die. With everyone forced to be her cheerful minions, there's no chance for the routine massacres that occur between humans. The price is just that she eats a dozen or so people a week. Oh, and free will, of course. People lose that. But not Connor, the dumb bootlicker.

Fallout season 2 just posed the same question. Is free will really worth it when it means lots of people inevitably die? Would life truly not be worthwhile if we didn't have choice? Angel doesn't really provide a final answer to the question but it's more satisfying in its ambiguity than the Fallout series was. Things get even murkier when Angel and his crew take over the evil law firm of Wolfram and Hart with the aim of bending the considerable powers of evil to the effecting of good deeds. Season four ends with a big moral question and season five takes over with an unrelenting moral challenge. I still think season five is the best thing Joss Whedon has ever made and I'm looking forward to watching it again.

The question may be a moot point considering absolute power is only truly attainable in fantasy. There's always a revolution ready to go, always someone who holds a contrary view to the wouldbe god. The decisive battle only lasts until the question inevitably comes back to the floor. Jasmine's own defeat is perhaps the best counterargument.

Toupee Olé

While doing laundry yesterday, I listened to this interview between Bill Maher and Cary Elwes. The show, Club Random, really earns its name, time and again. This was better than Ron Perlman's appearance on the show, during which it rapidly became clear the only one of Perlman's movies Maher had seen was Quest for Fire. I'm not sure he's seen a lot of Cary Elwes movies but the conversation veered off in other directions.

I watched the beginning of the interview in which Maher compliments Elwes for still having so much hair at his age. I don't know why he does that when so many of his guests are clearly wearing toupees, as I think Elwes is, judging from that oddly sharp hairline. He seemed even on the point of admitting it. Asking him about it surely puts him in an awkward position.

There was a boxer recently who lost his toupee in the middle of a fight. It's amazing this guy felt the need for one when so many black men can look good with a shaved head, and this guy's toupee was just like a little disk on top. It's sad watching him try to laugh it off as the whole world learns his secret. But why is it so important for guys? I kind of get it with an actor, like Elwes, because he needs to maintain a certain look for the roles he plays. But why would a boxer want one so badly?

A lot of guys in Japan wear toupees. It's kind of surprising given how much baldness is incorporated into traditional Japanese male hair styles.

I guess having big hair is associated with youth and vigour nowadays in Japan, as you might surmise from all the big hair styles in anime. And baldness is something that gets mocked. Kids sometimes make fun of my own thinning hairline and the fact that I don't care doesn't seem to phase them. One kid used to sing a "hage" (bald) song around me sometimes and I'd dance little for him. I really don't care.

A few years ago, I worked in a school where a well-liked teacher had a big bald spot and one of the students who liked him said something to me about how we can never tell him that he has a bald spot. As though he somehow didn't know. This is a very old aspect of Japanese culture, where if there's something wrong with you, people carefully try to keep you from realising it. You can see this in Kurosawa's Ikiru in which the main character only learns that he has cancer because he overhears some people talking about him accidentally. Traditionally, people aren't even told if they have a terminal illness. I think this has relaxed a bit because I knew a guy here in Japan who was well aware that he had diabetes. I guess he'd have to be told, though, so he can properly manage his diet.

It seems like there were more openly bald men in Hollywood movies before the 2010s. I guess Sean Connery was the last one who could get away with it while also being a sex symbol. Or maybe he's the only one. Is anyone unironically attracted to Telly Savalas?

And, of course, there's Patrick Stewart. And some would say William Shatner. Given how many men in Hollywood wear toupees, it's odd that Shatner gets picked on so much for it.

Some actors are oddly open about their toupees. Like when Christopher Lee didn't wear his toupee for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. I guess in cases like that, it really is a matter of men wearing toupees for their careers while having no particular desire to be seen as someone with hair.

Why am I thinking about this? I don't know, it's just funny. I need more coffee.

X Sonnet 1981

Beyond the colour tunnel, things are ash.
No questions blurred the hairy petri dish.
Your science joined a million dollar bash.
So shave your silly head and make a wish.
Returning forests stifle gormless snow.
Now look alive, for banshees came for bronze.
Diana knocks a flower to her bow.
The music played before the coming Fonz.
Machines betray the leather jacket men.
With teeth of hounds, the teddy boys arrayed.
We mix the olives well with plenty gin.
You see a simple drink too long displayed.
Where skies were grey, we longed for azure blue.
When hair would fall, we added special glue.

What Better Place?

One of the great cock-eyed procedurals has to be William Friedkin's 1985 film To Live and Die in L.A.. Co-written with Friedkin by a former U.S. Secret Service agent, this ranks among the most credible crime movies ever made but also boasts remarkably stylistic cinematography by Robby Muller and a forceful score by Wang Chung.

William Peterson is Richard Chance, an agent whose partner (Michael Greene) goes on a dangerous mission alone, days before retirement, one of the few moments in the film that felt really cliche. But, to be fair, this may have been one of the movies that set that standard.

Afterwards, Chance is driven to bringing down a counterfeit ring headed by a man named Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe). To do so, he poses as a man interested in doing business with Masters and when his boss balks at providing the 60 grand necessary to convince Masters that Chance is a serious investor, Chance contrives to rob another crook for the funds necessary. This detour turns into an amazing car chase sequence that's likely one of the reasons this movie is on a playlist of great stuntwork on Criterion this month.

The detailed twists and turns of Chance's dealings with informants and Masters' dealings with clients always feel remarkably authentic and the dialogue is delivered with terrific performances. Standouts in the supporting cast include John Turturro, Dean Stockwell, and Darlanne Fluegel.

Shakespearing Ears

Recently, I was doing some laundry and listening to this decent audio adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I.

It has Julian Glover in the title role and his real life son, Jamie Glover, in the role of Henry IV's son, Prince Hal. Julian Glover has had a long career playing villains. He played villains on Doctor Who, in The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and various other things. Among the many disappointing things about the last couple seasons of Game of Thrones was the abrupt killing off of his character that had been subtly built up to be a secret badass over the first five seasons. He's so good at playing a villain, though, he makes for a somewhat simplistic Henry IV. One of the interesting points about the play is the ambiguity of the King's moral position. Who's being rash and irresponsible, Hotspur or the King? Does the fighting start because Hotspur wouldn't turn over his prisoners to the King's representative or because the King was being too inflexible? With Glover in the role, it seems unambiguously the latter. Alan Cox as Hotspur actually comes across as uncommonly affable. I really enjoyed the scene where he and his cohorts are hanging out with Glyndwr and the woman starts speaking in Welsh. It's oddly relaxing.

Jamie Glover as Hal is not memorable. Doctor Who fans may know him for playing William Russell in An Adventure in Time and Space. In this Henry IV, his voice comes off as weak, like he's not used to raising it. On the other hand, Richard Griffiths is a fantastic Falstaff. I really wish there were some video of him in the role.

The Shakespeare Network has a lot of Shakespeare plays in audio format. I was also listening to the Romeo and Juliet from the series which has Joseph Fiennes as Romeo and David Tennant as Mercutio, which was mostly frustrating because I kept dearly wishing their roles were reversed. Well, it probably would've been best for Joseph Fiennes not to have been in the project at all.

Memories of the 13th

A few nights ago, I succumbed to the urge to watch Evil Dead 2 again. I'd been in the mood since last Friday, which, as you remember, was a Friday the 13th. I'm not really into the Jason movies so I didn't want to watch one of those but that Friday also happened to be my last day at one of the schools I've been working at at one of the junior high schools here in Kakogawa. I took the opportunity to talk about the superstition around Friday the 13th since part of my job is to talk about western culture. In the past, there's been a 50/50 chance that I'll be working with a Japanese teacher who'll listen to me along with the students when I say no-one really knows the origin of the superstition despite a number of theories or a Japanese teacher who will tell the students a very specific history about how Friday the 13th is definitely related to the crucifixion of Christ.

I was sorry to bid farewell to this school, especially since I'd been with them such a short time. It's a small school so I'd been assigned to work there for only about two months, cumulatively, though that period was spread out in small chunks throughout the school year. This last bit was only a week, actually just four days because Wednesday was a holiday. There were several students with whom I developed a rapport from each of the three grades (junior high school is three years in Japan). Riffing off Friday the 13th with the first year students, we started talking about horror in general. When we were talking about using the verb "have" to talk about illness, I started giving absurd examples like "I have lycanthropy", "I have the plague," and so on, and I looked over at one boy who started smiling in a surprised, knowing way when I wrote "lycanthropy" on the board. He clearly knew the word already, which impressed me, of course. As is so often the case, I had the feeling that Japan would be much better at English if the kids were allowed to get their own imaginations involved more often.

From there, someone mentioned Chainsaw Man, a recent anime about a guy with chainsaw limbs. As always when someone mentions Chainsaw Man, I had the urge to recommend Evil Dead 2. Really, I should've recommended Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. The mixture of slapstick comedy and horror in those movies is so perfect for that crowd of students, it's rare I've sensed such a perfect match of movie and audience.

As usual, I felt like I got to know the art club students the best. There was one girl who got into trouble and was banned from the art club until my last week there, which was really too bad because, like most of the independent-minded students I've worked with, she was one of the most rewarding to talk to.

Among the second year students, there was a guy on the basketball team who had a surprising interest in westerns and with whom I talked extensively about films. There was also a girl with a surprising fixation on the actor Clancy Brown.

The third year students were a little harder to talk to because they had a science teacher who for some reason had an ax to grind with me. But there was a girl on the student council whose English was surprisingly excellent and she and I were able to speak about movies and music quite a bit.

Even if it weren't the end of my period at the school, I wouldn't be seeing the third year students again. Every year is a heartbreak. There's not a group of students I've worked with that didn't have among them individuals who distinguished themselves with fascinating interests and personality traits.

Robert Duvall

Robert Duvall has died at the age of 95. He had a long and illustrious career as one of the greatest actors to come out of the New Hollywood era. He's best known for his supporting roles, particularly in the Godfather movies in which he played consigliere Tom Hagen. The fact that consigliere became a term with some currency in the U.S. is due in some part to Duvall's performance. When watching the movies, certainly for the first time, it's tough to see him as anything other than Tom Hagen. He was an actor who disappeared into a character. There were times when his characters didn't stand out and that was always in service to the broader purpose of the film.

His first film role, after working some time in television, was in the famous 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird in which he plays the mysterious recluse named Boo Radley. It's not a speaking role nor does it occupy a lot of screentime but it's a crucial role and required an actor who could communicate a lot with subtle body language and expressions. He was more than equal to the task.

He did have lead roles, though, most significantly in George Lucas' first film, THX 1138, a grim, dystopian film about an emotionally oppressed culture dominated by an artificial police force. Duvall's natural humanity contrasts well with the sterile surveillance state.

I also recently saw him in a lead role in The Outfit, a film highly praised by Quentin Tarantino for its dynamics between Duvall and Joe Don Baker.

Duvall's last film came out in 2022 and he passed away at his ranch in Virginia.

Japan is Beating the Drums

That's Japan's prime minister, Takaichi Sanae (on the right), drumming with the South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung. The first song you hear them drumming to is "Golden" from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, an interesting choice given that it was at least cowritten by Americans, if not entirely written by songwriters who are products of American culture. Of course, the movie itself was released through Sony, a Japanese company.

I worked for five years in Takaichi's hometown, Kashihara. I don't find her mix of conservatism and rock and roll at all strange, although many of the residents I talked to in Kashihara about music disliked rock, or if they tolerated it, it was nothing heavier than The Beatles. A lot of students did talk to me about their love of rock, particularly early in my tenure. Over time, students seemed more and more inhibited by the Eye of Hazukashi (embarrassment), preventing them from directly speaking of their musical interests. But I still remember the student who was an avid fan of Nirvana and the student with whom I chatted about the differences between punk and metal.

I was thinking about the irony of Takaichi, a woman who has cited Margaret Thatcher as an influence, adopting the trappings of punk. A punk rock Margaret Thatcher is kind of like a Joker Batman. But of course, she's not punk, she's metal, which is almost as opposite to punk as Thatcher was to punk. Punk is about breaking down institutions and oppressive traditions while metal often paints pictures of decadent and cruel satanic hierarchies. I asked a teacher what bands specifically Takaichi likes but he was too much of a partisan to give me an honest answer, telling me her favourite band is XJapan. A google search tells me she in fact favours Deep Purple and Iron Maiden among other influential metal groups while mentioning XJapan as a favourite Japanese group.

But it's fair to say there's something rebellious in Takaichi's spirit. Fareed Zakaria said as much when comparing and contrasting Takaichi with Britain's Keir Starmer. Takaichi has been seen being quite chummy with Trump, who, despite what the American left would like to believe, is about as punk as a politician can be, despite his leanings to authoritarianism. But that's the pattern, isn't? There's the punk of breaking down the institution before there comes the metal of erecting the edifices of a new authority. I'm not sure Trump has the discipline to do that, but Takaichi undoubtedly does.

She's a hawk who wants to change Japan's constitution to allow the country to have a proper military again, empowered to start wars, and with her super-majority thanks to the snap election just over week ago, she may well get what she wants. Outside observers may ask, to what end? Is this the dog chasing the car, not knowing what it'll do when it catches it? With Japan's population decline showing no sign of slowing, this seems hardly the time to for colonial ambitions. Takaichi's anti-immigration policies make even less sense than Trump's. But it didn't make much sense for Japan to enter World War II as Japanese intellectuals said at the time. It was a matter of pride and competitive instinct more than anything. Has Japan gained enough capacity for critical thinking in the years since World War II to stop another such military snowball effect? Time will tell.

Dangerous Papers

The staff of a tabloid find themselves with blood on their hands after exposing a murderess in 1931's Five Star Final. Unremarkably for the period, the film presents a morally simplistic dichotomy of heartless journalists and their innocent victims. But certainly it was true then, and perhaps even truer to-day, that tabloid journalism can be quite vicious.

Edward G. Robinson stars as Joseph W. Randall, an editor who's fed up with his paper's unscrupulous practices. But he reluctantly accepts instructions from the paper's owner to publish a story on a woman named Nancy Voorhees who murdered her boss twenty years earlier. She was acquitted by a jury when it was found that she was pregnant with the child of that boss and that he had cast her aside.

Meanwhile, one of the paper's journalists, played by Boris Karloff, poses as a priest and in this guise speaks to a woman who reveals to him that she is Nancy Voorhees, living in secret. Her daughter (Marian Marsh) is about to be married to a respectable young man. Naturally, Boris Karloff has no compunctions about exposing Voorhees, even though it means scandal and potentially the end of the young woman's chances at marriage.

This is a pre-Code film, on Criterion this month as part of a collection of pre-code Mervyn LeRoy movies. That means this movie has frank references to women's body parts and suicide. The story's climax hinges on something that couldn't even have been portrayed in American movies after the code was enforced in 1935. The extremes LeRoy was able to indulge in contribute to the story's simplicity. One could almost use it as an example of how the code led to filmmakers being more creative. But Edward G. Robinson gives a good performance and Marian Marsh is beautiful.

The Oppression of Innocence

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. I chose to watch The Age of Innocence again, Martin Scorsese's 1993 adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1920 novel. I first saw the movie a few years before reading the book so I was surprised by how funny the book is. Wharton's merciless satire of 19th century New York high society becomes a melancholy tale of lost love in Scorsese's hands.

The movie's certainly well cast. Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder offer the perfect contrast of a sharp, intelligent woman obliged by society to bear a yoke of quiet indignity and a pretty young woman for whom the world is a simple, pretty place. There's a wryness in Wharton's narrative that's largely absent from the movie. Pfeiffer's performance is more wounded while the impression of the scandalous divorcee in the book is a little more one of boldness. Still, it's a lovely film.

As with a lot of period films, I couldn't help being reminded of Japan to-day. Many of the manners depicted in the film and book, particularly the inability to speak of many things directly, still have currency in Japan.

The Age of Innocence is available this month on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet 1980

The roughly mannered goat was given grass.
A tardy status formed the gist of gold.
The other lookers deemed the man an ass.
Still more were wont to call him merely old.
But smarter sorts were wont to ponder on.
A tray of tiny pearls was served to God.
Such actions call for sorting wicked prawn.
But which of them were bad or simply odd?
Let judges show for what they're paid for life.
Let war and peace be brokered by the bed.
The chorus holds there be a better strife.
A pretty kind that ends with no-one dead.
So raise chimeras over states and kings.
And break the fingers wearing evil rings.

To Old Heights

Who wants to talk some more about Wuthering Heights? The new one, despite everyone complaining about it, is dominating the box office in the U.S. Probably because everyone's complaining about it. On the other hand, right wing YouTuber Snarky Jay took a break from constantly complaining about the live action remake of Snow White to offer gushing praise for the new movie. You know, I don't think Snarky Jay's very snarky. She's more like Angry Jay.

I don't know when, if ever, I will see see the film (it's not coming out 'til the 27th in Japan) but I did watch the 1939 version> last night. I'd seen it before, just over twenty years ago. Here's my very short blog entry marking the event including a broken link to my old Doll Merchant web comic which used to be hosted on davidbowie.com. I wish BowieNet were still around. Anyway, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon are very sweet and the cinematography is lovely. Cathy and Heathcliff are so much more effusive than they are in the book and they reminded me quite a bit of 1920s romance movies. Kind of starchy, almost like animated marble. Of course, both performers are white, though I saw one modern review that referred to Oberon as "passing" for white because one of her parents was from India but, in fact, that parent was a Burgher, a group descended from Portuguese and Dutch settlers in India. It's by no means a bad movie but I definitely sympathise more with critics who lament the lack of an adaptation that accurately conveys the story of bitter, relentless revenge in the book.

It's funny Rotten Tomatoes calls it a "David Niven movie". Niven has a supporting role as Edgar Linton. Do they think Niven is better known now than Olivier? Interestingly enough, Merle Oberon originally got top billing.

I feel like I've seen at least part of the version with Ralph Fiennes. I have a vague memory of finding it so frustrating that I switched it off. I'm not sure if that actually happened or if I dreamed it.

This month, Criterion is hosting two adaptations, the 1939 one and the one from 2011, the only one that deigned to cast a person of colour as Heathcliff. I plan to watch that one soonishly. Did I just invent an adverb?

A Vampire Day

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone.

I was in the middle of a re-watch of Angel a couple years ago when Disney+ in Japan decided to pull it. A decent VPN was no longer in my budget and the free ones only sporadically worked on Disney+. I don't even currently have Disney+ but I finally got too frustrated at being cut off mid-Angel and bought some season four episodes on Amazon. Last night I watched Orpheus from March 19th, 2003, an episode in which Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer guest stars in order to restore Angel's soul.

This was also the episode where Cordelia kind of abruptly goes full villain. It feels kind of like the writers decided to take this course after realising that the writing for her character in season four had been kind of lame and making her a villain was the only way to make sense of things like her deciding to sleep with Connor. Cordelia's character was just a mess by this point anyway. I guess this was around the time the behind the scenes drama was happening between Charisma Carpenter, the actress who played Cordelia, and series co-creator Joss Whedon. I wonder if anyone's taken into account the possibility that the tensions were arising because Cordelia had become dead weight and no-one knew how to confront it. Willow and Wesley have a slightly too tongue-in-cheek dialogue about how they both went down dark paths since they last interacted in Buffy season three. Somehow the transition feels more natural for both characters than Cordelia's transformation from shallow comic relief with occasional hints of hidden depths to holy team mom. What could they do with that moral certitude but make a villain?

I'd forgotten about the flirtations between Willow and Fred. It's a shame that never happened.

Still Walking

I wonder how many times I've seen Fire Walk with Me. That's a question I might've asked myself when I was in high school three decades ago and have trouble coming up with an answer. But I was watching it again last night, having recently finished another viewing of Twin Peaks season two. I fell asleep about halfway through the movie, though.

How many times have I willingly watched and unironically enjoyed Chris Isaak's lousy performance as Special Agent Chet Desmond? It's strange how often great singers make for poor actors. There's so much nuance in his vocals when he's singing but he just delivers every line flat as old coke when he's acting.

Still, I do like him and Kiefer Sutherland together. Sutherland's performance as the dopey but still basically competent Sam Stanley makes their double act work. It was originally supposed to be Dale Cooper in Chet Desmond's place but Kyle MacLachlan wanted to minimise his role. If it had been Cooper in Desmond's place, it would've made more sense of all his comments in the pilot episode about local law enforcement not playing nice with the FBI and Albert being more on the ball than Sam. It still basically works, though.

Not all singers are bad actors, as we can see when David Bowie shows up shortly after Chris Isaak's character disappears. It's a shame Bowie couldn't have come back for the role in season three.

The Corrupt and the Cruel

I'm having two lines of thought this morning that are converging. I'm thinking about the Epstein files and Gothic fiction. The connexion is ruthlessness and an untrustworthy world.

I haven't read the Epstein files because I don't have a year to devote to them. I'm amazed when articles say "only" three million or so e-mails have been released. The impression that any name just mentioned in the e-mails is an indication of shared guilt in Epstein's crimes has led to some people, like Jon Stewart, feeling compelled to explain brief mentions of their names in e-mails Epstein exchanged with various people. This morning I watched a video of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explaining that her name is mentioned in one of the e-mails simply because Epstein knew someone who went to one of her conferences.

I like how she takes the opportunity to criticise the spreading lack of conscientiousness in her field. A lack of conscientiousness similarly exists in journalism which often seems not only driven for sensationalism but by personal vendettas. This is the impression I got from coverage of Neil Gaiman. I was reading the substack of TechnoPathology, the guy compiling evidence of the malfeasance in coverage of the allegations levelled at Neil Gaiman. TechnoPathology has shared posts from a sexual assault survivor named Effie who draws attention to one of the most obvious things about the Vulture article, which was the tone. It was not the dispassionate tone of a journalist but of someone crafting a narrative about a villain.

What ruthless and vengeful person have I been reading about lately? Oh, yeah, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Repeatedly throughout the book, characters ask Heathcliff if he doesn't have any morsel of compassion in his soul and proves again and again through his words and actions that he has none. No guilt haunts him unless it's the literal ghost of Catherine. It's a reminder that Gothic fiction was in many ways a reaction against the Romantics, specifically the love the Romantics had of nature and for the "Byronic hero", the hero who casts aside all fidelity to any kind of moral system and pursues only his own pleasures. Frankenstein, by the way, operates both as a work of Romantic fiction and Gothic fiction in this way. Mary Shelley's portrait of the creature simultaneously sympathises with and condemns him.

But characters in Gothic fiction, in its full bloom, like Heathcliff, like Dorian Gray, like Dr. Jekyll, like Captain Ahab, like the killers in Edgar Allan Poe's stories, all show us the horror and disaster wrought by men who act solely in the name of they own selfish urges. Generally they're not bothered internally but externally, by supernatural forces. In one of the Epstein files, Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein talk about Trump losing sleep because of dirt the two of them have on him. On the contrary, I think Trump sleeps perfectly well. He's shown again and again that he doesn't particularly care if he's seen as moral. As the title of Kurosawa Akira's 1960 movie says, "The Bad Sleep Well (悪い奴ほどよく眠る)". That movie was based on Shakespeare's Hamlet and it's noteworthy that it's not the murderer who's haunted in that story but the protagonist, Prince Hamlet. Likewise, Richard III isn't haunted, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund aren't haunted. If you want to find a bad person, look for someone who seems utterly content with his or her moral position.

The Hazardous Lives of Pretty Journalists

A beautiful woman is found dead in the hotel room of a famous double act and, fifteen years later, another woman tries to get to the truth behind the matter in 2005's Where the Truth Lies. Another Atom Egoyan film featured on Criterion this month, this one's much closer to what I would have expected from the director of Chloe and Exotica; a pulpy, slightly campy daydream dressed up as a thriller. It's a lot of fun.

Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth play Lanny and Vince, a double act very obviously modelled on Martin and Lewis. One morning, just before the two are scheduled to host a telethon, a dead woman is found in their bathtub. The autopsy is said to point to a drug overdose but, fifteen years later, a young reporter named Karen (Alison Lohman) gets to work ghostwriting an autobiography for Vince and starts to realise there's something fishy about the dead woman, or, more accurately, lobster-y. What do I mean by that? That would be a spoiler but, suffice to say, we see her with lobsters at one point.

Some critics said Lohman was miscast but I would say that's precisely where critics didn't understand the movie. Lohman is absolutely perfect, if you ask me, because she seems so wrong. Her elaborate, anachronistically '40s hairstyles never look natural on the ruthless, trashy teen from Bully. She seems like a kinky gal engaged in sexual role play. It may be fairer to say Kevin Bacon was miscast. Someone with a sense of comedic timing would have been better in the Jerry Lewis role. I've been watching The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel again lately and this movie almost seems set in the same universe in which the viewer has to strain their imagination to take the professional entertainers at the centre of the stories as geniuses despite nothing they say on stage being funny.

The film's mostly interior locations, shot in England though set in L.A., add to the sense of artificiality. I was interested in the murder mystery but mostly as an aphrodisiac, a pretext for the sexual tension and sex.

Where the Truth Lies lies on The Criterion Channel.

Himeji Besieged by Snow

Yesterday I visited Himeji Castle with my friend and co-worker, Miss Kimura. Himeji Castle is the largest in Japan and most of its current structures date from the early 17th century.

The castle has appeared in a number of movies, including Kurosawa's Kagemusha and Ran and the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice.

I don't know the lady with the interesting coat.

The lane leading up to the castle was decorated with Japan's ubiquitous nude statues.

What saxophonist wouldn't want to be memorialised wearing only a flatcap while playing?

Miss Kimura pets some naked pigeon statues.

Here we are together with the castle's main keep in the background, photo courtesy of a passerby.

By gad, my feet are big. Those boots are actually a size too small for me, too.

There was a surprise snowstorm while we were there. It was intensely cold but very dramatic. After lunch at a terrific noodle shop recommended by Miss Kimura, who is a resident of Himeji, we visited the castle's adjoining garden.

The snow came down the hardest when we were inside a little tea house. It was very picturesque.

Miss Kimura's picture of me taking pictures:

Me taking a macro shot:

And the shot:

Diminishing Heights

I've been listening to an audiobook of Emily Bronte's great 1847 novel Wuthering Heights lately, I suppose because of the Emerald Fennell movie coming out next week. Here's the trailer:

Fennell is best known for directing Saltburn which starred Barry Keoghan as an outsider charming his way into the world of rich people. Wuthering Heights is also a story about class and wealth disparity so it makes sense as a followup project. Unfortunately for Fennell, most of the discussion about the film so far consists of disapproval for Fennell's apparent and stated disinterest in the source material. "It's just a book," she said when asked about whether she felt pressure to stay faithful to it. When confronted about casting a white actor as a character that is clearly described as not white in the book, Fennell gave this evasive and vague response: "The thing is, everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so, you can only ever kind of make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it."

Paradoxically, she has also claimed to be deeply passionate about the book, calling it her "favourite book in the world." Maybe that's not saying much if her "just a book" quote is an indication of her feelings about books in general. It may be like naming a favourite mailbox or fire hydrant.

When the casting was first announced, I knew immediately people would complain about Jacob Elordi in the role of Heathcliff. I'm not in principle against changing the race of a character from source material to adaptation but I was surprised she would invite the headache. Wuthering Heights has been adapted to film many times and Heathcliff has usually been cast with a white actor, the most notable version being the William Wyler film with Laurence Olivier in the role.

Of course, in 1939, a movie depicting romance between people of different races would not likely have been funded by any major studio. Heathcliff's race is an important aspect of the novel so it's difficult to see how someone who claims to be passionate about Bronte's work would fail to retain this element. This line from Heathcliff in the book makes it quite explicit:

“But, Nelly, if I knocked him down twenty times, that wouldn’t make him less handsome or me more so. I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!”

Heathcliff is the only brown skinned person in the small Yorkshire community. The experience of being so isolated is plainly a prominent aspect in the formation of his personality. Every time I read the book, I marvel again at Bronte's ability to create a work of such psychological complexity, particularly considering that she finished writing it when she was only twenty-eight years old.

Fennell has made some other unfortunate choices. Margot Robbie is too old for the role of Cathy and there's an overall sense of a modern fashion photoshoot. The book's location, the harsh landscape and weather, is another crucial aspect to the story though Fennell's inability to connect with physical reality is more in step with the current culture that psychologically lives in an incorporeal digital space.

On the positive side, it does look pretty. Normally I'm all for an artist saying "Fuck everything" and pursuing an original vision. But, jeez, it's such a great book. Fennell may feel superior to it but I can't help suspecting she's not.