Trump's victory was inevitable. I felt that way before Harris took over the campaign from Biden. Harris was more qualified than the ailing Biden so I hoped that might turn it around but, let's face it, Harris had lost the primaries when she'd properly run for president and when she became the presidential candidate this time she had a fraction of the time to campaign most candidates get. Trump had at least two traditional edges, being a former president and a man. But he had a lot of uncommon assets, too. He'd survived a public assassination attempt. His followers generally have the sense of him being wrongly persecuted.
It's remarkable that we have a convicted felon for president. Think back to over twenty-five years ago when Democrats fought tooth and tail to argue Bill Clinton didn't deserve to be removed from office for cheating on his wife (the surface argument about him lying was just that, a surface). Expecting the public to go that way on the issue then adopt a different standard for Trump was deranged.
As in 2016, but even more clearly this time, I have the sense this is an election the Democrats lost rather than one Trump won. You're not crazy if you think Trump is obviously unqualified, but the key word for his supporters is not "unqualified" but rather "obvious". Trump's motives are always plain. Even when he doesn't follow through, people excuse him because they understand the motive behind his bluster and hyperbole. Trump is dumb, but he lives in reality. The Democrats have failed to adapt to a culture whose zero fucks for traditional values have been reduced further into the negative range by a steadily diminishing economy. So, yes, people feeling oppressed by grotesquely high rents preferred to vote for a greedy landlord. They're that put off by the obfuscations and radical politics of the Left.
Trump's interview with Joe Rogan really made it clear, contrasted with the Harris interview with Howard Stern. Hardly anyone even deigned to notice the Harris interview with Stern, or Biden's interview with Stern. In the '90s, a presidential candidate going on The Howard Stern Show would have been big news. To-day, it's all but meaningless. Things changed. The Democrats didn't.
Oh, well. Here we go again. Hopefully next time the Democrats can find themselves another Obama. Someone who seems real and qualified.
A woman tests a small town's morality and patience in 1963's Il Demonio. It's a film that avoids giving the audience easy answers and highlights how abominably people can behave in ambiguous situations.
A beautiful young woman called Purif (Daliah Lavi) is passionately obsessed with Antonio (Frank Wolff), a young man of her village. He vigorously rebuffs her as she continues to physically cling to him, but he can't resist a few kisses. Nor can he resist the wine she gives him. After he drinks it, she tells him she mixed her blood into it.
Purif is a practicing witch and as her antics become more severe, she's subjected to religious punishment and exorcism, which inevitably becomes sexual abuse. The spirit of a dead boy seemingly converses with her. There are signs that Purif really is in contact with Satan, yet this actually contributes to a sense of the villagers' diminished moral standing. As their punishments of Purif become excessively cruel and clearly driven by sexual compulsion, Satan starts to look like a fellow of comparatively good integrity. At least Purif has no delusions about who she is or what her motives are. Of course, provoking the town into brazen moral hypocrisy may have been Satan's plan all along.
The film's beautifully shot and Daliah Lavi gives a brave, unrestrained performance. Il Demonio is available on The Criterion Channel.
I've been having some interesting dreams lately but I've been doing a bad job of remembering them. So, a few nights ago, when I woke at 2am after having one, I immediately typed up a description as best I could with eyes that were not quite ready to open and look at my bright computer screen. Here's the description I wrote, typos and all:
Dream about a big yellow dog
girl looking for him
Indoor park
dark street
she stares at tehe camera, short hair, big eyes
Dog is mustard cooour
eats cildren
is sometimes '80s acto
I have no idea what "'80s acto" is supposed to mean. I guess the dream must have been set in the '80s. I do remember the dog seemed dirty, streaked with black and dark green, like egg yolk with black, melted rubber.
Anyway, Happy Guy Fawkes Day, everyone. It comes early to Japan, where it's unobserved. In America, where people used to not know about it, of course it's election day this year. Quite a confluence since one candidate is accused of inciting a mob that stormed the U.S. capital. I think the left has largely mischaracterised that event but, all the same, I want to urge any Americans reading to vote for Kamala Harris. If you're worried about getting a president manipulated by powerful outside interests, Trump's the one you gotta worry about, not Harris. If the demons spinning yarn around his head can be considered outside interests. I'm not just talking about his bizarre hair style. He's clearly possessed by ideas, recklessly fueled by resentment, possibly also by the inability to cope with his position on the world stage, about his own unrecognised merit. He'll cling foolishly to anyone who flatters him as a consequence. This speaks to the basic lack of the maturity requisite in the leader of a country. Please, don't make us joke again. Or not more of a joke, anyway.
X Sonnet #1895
The heartless robber stole the horse's hoof.
A captive plant would dream of aphid death.
Entire teams were seen on Scrooge's roof.
The track could only lead to Walter Neff.
The clown was routed back to Hades' court.
Reversing time required counter spin.
The game's diminished, it's a console port.
When all the lot would conquer, none could win.
With helpless hands, the gloves discussed a meal.
Without the buns, the burgers changed in shape.
A simple food would prove its health is real.
The flying man would wear a crimson cape.
A whale collision rocked the briny deep.
Pervasive error coos itself to sleep.
A whale collision rocked the briny deep.
Pervasive error coos itself to sleep.
People don't tend to think about how dangerous a crocodile is, but one is certainly bad enough to serve as a horror movie villain. 2007's Black Water shows this quite well, so well that it remains effective despite a kind of ridiculous third act.
Grace (Diana Glenn) and Lee (Maeve Dermody) are on vacation with Grace's husband, Adam (Andy Rodoreda), and decide to take a boat tour through a swamp. Their boat is capsized by a croc, their guide is chomped to bits, and the three of them are forced up a tree.
The film builds tension nicely and the editing is intuitive as we follow their lines of thought about what the best course of action is. Should they try for the boat, should they try hopping from tree to tree, risking short swims here and there? The croc is fast, appears suddenly, and keeps his victims, and the viewer, guessing about his speed, reach, and location.
Then it gets a little silly. Obviously, not everyone can die right away, or there's no movie, but the reasons the movie gives as to why some people survive a croc attack are pretty flimsy. At some point, it's clear the movie's playing by video game rules. But it never becomes truly bad.
I watched this, I supposed you could call it a debate, yesterday. I was fascinated by how one sided it was. I'd heard another conversation between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, a sort of impromptu meeting at a university, and Dawkins had come off much better than Peterson. Each was respectful of the other but Dawkins had no patience for Peterson's inferences about meaning in recurrent mythological symbols in disparate cultures. This time, though, it was almost like a Jordan Peterson lecture in which Dawkins occasionally spoke to say that he wasn't interested in what Peterson was speaking about. And yet, by the end, incredibly, Peterson seemed to bring Dawkins around.
Peters expresses something I've long thought needed to be brought across to hard line atheists who tend to be so dismissive of religion as to see it as comical. Peterson articulates, and I think finally manages to convince Dawkins of, the importance of religion as an anthropological subject and in many ways a constructive phenomenon, regardless of whether or not one literally believes in a divinity. Peterson finally drags Dawkins into the epiphany via memes and how religious ideas are kinds of memes, which seems like a bit of an appeal to Dawkins' ego. It's basically pointing out to Dawkins that he is interested in the thing because he's most famous actually for rephrasing the thing.
I was a little shocked by Dawkins' admission that he knew little of scientific history and the relationship between Christianity and the development of science as a discipline. It made me wish I were there so I could show him the connexions between the Reformation, the Puritans in England, and the development of the Royal Society, all a continually refining process to find the methodology for determining observable, objective truth to the absolute best of human capability. But surely he must have read all this at some point? I simply can't believe that his education never encompassed that. Hell, if he'd just watched Cosmos, he ought to have some idea. I guess it goes to show atheists are as capable of selective perceptions as anyone. I've often thought that people who believe themselves most immune to unconscious bias and selective memories are the most susceptible to them.
Both Dawkins and the moderator try to get Peterson to definitively answer whether or not he believes in the miracles described by the bible, such as the virgin birth. I'm not the only one who clearly understands why Peterson avoids directly answering the question--I see even some of the commentators on the YouTube video picked up on it. He doesn't want to alienate his Christian fans. But he's certainly not being deceptive when he says such questions are kind of irrelevant, particularly the question as to whether or not Cain and Abel actually existed. As Peterson puts it very well, if Cain and Abel were real people, the characters described in the bible we have to-day would likely bear very little resemblance to them for all the changes and revisions the text went through over the centuries. It isn't important that those two brothers were real, it's important that they represent an obviously real, observable phenomenon in human behaviour. It is really strange that Dawkins, a man who came up with the concept of a meme, wouldn't be interested in stories that survive the centuries due to their enduring utility.
I don't think Peterson's interpretations are as inevitable as he seems to believe they are, though. I think the real debate ought to have been about how religious texts can just as well be utilised for twisted, oppressive interpretations. At the same time as scientific thought was developing in 17th century England, Galileo was imprisoned in Italy for his heretical observations. It was an interesting conversation but strange for a number of omissions.
The two part Agatha All Along finale was good television. Not amazing but nonetheless satisfying and possessed of a storytelling integrity notably lacking in most of the Marvel series on Disney+. I suspect this is something Drew Goddard alluded to in a tweet about the new Daredevil series, that Disney/Marvel is abandoning the "treat series like movies" policy and going back to the format that made the Marvel Netflix series so consistent. Even the weakest of those, Iron Fist, benefited from the lack of the indecisive committee mentality that I think undermined so many big budget Disney+ shows.
The contrast is particularly clear when it comes to the differences between Wanda/Vision and Agatha All Along. Both series were created and ran by Jac Schaeffer but while Wanda/Vision had suspiciously odd plot twists, the most infamous being the Ralph Boehner one, Agatha All Along had elements that were clearly planned from the start and which Schaeffer followed through with in the finish. There was Patti LuPone's mental dislocation last week, and this week we get the reveal that Agatha knew from the start about Wiccan/William and that the Witch's Road was entirely his creation. If one goes back and watches the series again, the reveals at the end will lend new meaning to everything in a way that a Boehner style twist does not.
That's not to say I don't think people making film and television can't change course in the middle of production, that such a thing can't yield good results. I think the motivations behind such course changes matter, though. If it comes from a good storytelling instinct, it can be as interesting as the Darth Vader hallway sequence in Rogue One. But if it's a studio being indecisive over issues of branding and product roll-out, the results tend to be pretty lame.
Agatha All Along sure made good use of that song. Good thing it's a good song. Wanda and Wiccan creating realities, and thus creating narratives, is kind of reflected in Agatha and Nicholas' creation of the song. It's like micro-propaganda; Agatha took a melody crafted with artistic sincerity and then used it as a tool to manipulate her victims (I'm so happy the show didn't try to morally redeem her). It's like the Nazis using Wagner or the Soviets using Eisenstein, just on a micro-level. Of course, it's very Postmodern.
Lately I've been thinking about a trending criticism, the tendency to say some people act like "they're the main characters of their own stories". This one really puzzled me for a while until I realised most peoples' exposure to fiction is much more limited than mine so they assume "main character" is another term for "hero". Naturally, if your life is a story, then you're the main character. If not you, who? Name anyone and you'll sound pretty pathetic. "My boyfriend/my mother/my dog is the main character of my story." Oof. It's Wiccan and Wanda who actually make everyone else be supporting characters in their own stories, a much better way of getting at the egocentrism the criticism is supposed to be aimed at. Agatha may be the main character of this series, but from Wiccan's perspective, she's definitely a supporting character, a morally complicated villain.
One of the things I really liked about Wanda/Vision is that Wanda did not act heroically. Yet there were people who defended her, taken in by the tone of the story and sympathy for Wanda's love for her children. Agatha All Along's superior artistic integrity allows that moral complexity to sit in the minds of the viewers unfiltered, allowing for more interesting debate. I'm happy about that.
