Sober Drinks

Last night's dream was much too sober--I dreamt I killed a man, hit him in the head with an axe, I think, to protect a woman I was certain he was trying to rape. She got really angry and insisted I'd misread the situation, I began to doubt myself, there was a police station and afterwards the impression of complicated legal and counselling proceedings and thinking back on it I find myself saying, "How's that even a proper dream?"

Somehow I think this is related to the fact that I haven't had alcohol in two weeks. I just look at a bottle and am overcome with meh. Maybe I'll have some wine to-night or something.

I've been drinking no alcohol and more caffeine--I'm at three cups of black coffee a day. I'm thinking I'll try going back to tea, however bad it makes my teeth look, but it's going to be hard coming down. Any heroin or cocaine addicts reading, feel free to express your disgust in the comments.

At the moment, I'm drinking coffee with cocoanut milk and I tried putting about half a shot of tart cherry juice in it. It's surprisingly good, like coffee and cherry pie simultaneously. I can't believe I'm thinking about watching Twin Peaks again--I've watched through the whole series twice already in the past three years. And each time I think, "You know, you'd enjoy this more if you waited longer in between viewings."

With lunch to-day, I read the new story in the new Sirenia Digest, "Elegy For A Suicide", which was good, another impressive example from Caitlin of using supernatural elements of a story to illustrate a mental state. As the title suggests, it's about a suicide--it's told in first person, by one of the only two characters in the story, a pair of lovers. Caitlin often mentions how her stories are autobiographical and of this piece she says, in her prolegomenon for this Digest, it is "one of the most intensely personal things" she's ever written. Considering the suicidal woman in the story is referred to only as "E", and the woman in Caitlin's life who committed suicide was named "Elizabeth", it's not hard to see how this story is personal although the circumstances differ in the vignette from how Caitlin's described them occurring in real life in several crucial ways. There are several references to things like Wikipedia and iPhones that didn't exist during Elizabeth Aldrige's lifetime. I think this may be a reflection of the fact that Caitlin considers the issues presented by the experience to have remained current for her in all the time since. Maybe the more significant differences are in the creation of a strange, horrific hole in the ground which supplies E with her method of suicide and the physical infection that represents the mental state leading to suicide. These are two things the speaker is in constant contact with. That is to say, she has very clear evidence that something is clearly wrong so that it functions as the spirit of the sort of compulsive thoughts that occur in the aftermath of a loved one's suicide. Guilt, a sense of a possible direct responsibility through inaction or even exacerbation as the protagonist describes having sex with E as also being like having sex with her infection, even suggesting that the adrenaline from intercourse is what provides E with the courage to carry out the suicide.

It's a very good story at making the interior exterior, taking thoughts and manifesting them in a form that communicates to the reader the oppressive nature of unending self-reproach.

A Diluted Shadow

One could describe most bad movies as doing too much and one could describe the same movies as doing too little. Perhaps it's simply best to say a bad movie does things wrong. And yet, there are one or two aspects of 1994's The Shadow I kind of liked, beginnings of good ideas I wish had been explored, and bad ideas too fully realised.

Like Brett Ratner or David Goyer, The Shadow's screenwriter David Koepp was a mediocre talent who managed to perpetuate his career in Hollywood by associating himself with successful movies which were effective primarily due to contributions of other creative talent involved. I say "was" because time has finally told on Koepp. There's no Jurassic Park or Spider-Man for him to glom onto now and someone's head had to roll for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. So he's finally been relegated to the industry dustbin, some of his old friends seeing to it that Premium Rush and Angels & Demons receive inexplicably good reviews, but mainly Koepp's consigned to movies no-one particularly cares about and unless he's lucky he won't be coming back. Though of course the voodoo economics of the self-perpetuating Hutt movie industry will see that Koepp receives a stipend more generous than peons like you and I can ever dream of.

Though of course, the dim-witted slime ball quality of the industry wasn't so big or as obvious in 1994 and it easily could afford the failure of an intended blockbuster like The Shadow without much fuss and a hack like Koepp played for lower stakes. According to Wikipedia, he'd listened to The Shadow radio serials since a child. I'm a fan of the serials featuring Orson Welles as The Shadow/Lamont Cranston and I appreciated a few nods to them that appeared in the film.

I even kind of like Koepp's idea to include a past of terrible wrong-doing for Cranston as an explanation for how he knew so well "what evil lurks in the hearts of men."

But here's a good example of going too far and not far enough at the same time. The movie introduces Cranston as a Tibetan druglord who's known for exterminating entire villages and ruthlessly killing friend and foe alike when it suits his purposes.

How does he become a force for good? A mysterious master of hypnosis abducts him and tells him he's going to. Cut to seven years later in New York and he's The Shadow. This is the first of many ways in which the film keeps us at arm's length from the characters.

Far worse is the villain played by John Lone, a descendent of Genghis Khan whose desire to rule the world is written without even the tiniest shred of distinction or creativity. Think of the blandest default superhero villain you can think of and then make him twenty times more boring and you'll have John Lone in The Shadow.

What's even more annoying about him is he almost always seems to have the upper hand on Cranston. He starts the movie off knowing the Shadow's real identity. In fact, there are only two scenes where the Shadow gets to use his power to cloud men's minds in the way he almost always used it in the radio serials--one at the beginning when he spooks a bunch of gangsters trying to throw a man off a bridge and once near the end where he manipulates Tim Curry's character into killing himself.

That was my favourite scene as Curry alone in a room is freaked out by shadows crawling up the walls around him and the Shadow's laughter coming from every direction. His demise isn't orchestrated as cleverly as some of the kills in "The Three Ghosts", for example, but it was a spot of devious fun.

Considering Cranston's past in the movie, you would think there was plenty of room for the sadism exhibited by the Shadow in the radio serials yet it's rarely seen, despite Alec Baldwin's nicely subtle, mysteriously amused performance.

I thought he was actually quite right in the role. He had the voice and the attitude. And Penelope Ann Miller was fine as Margo Lane, though the movie wastes too much time providing an introduction between the two characters that doesn't really properly make sense of when their relationship settles into the dynamic it begins with in the radio serials. There's an attempt to update it with argumentative flirtations and Lane's given an innate mind-reading ability so she becomes yet another of the many characters and situations that diffuse Cranston's powers.

Her father's played by Ian McKellen before he was Gandalf or Magneto, though well after he'd had his amazing turn as Macbeth. Peter Boyle's similarly sidelined in a role as The Shadow's cab driver. All this talent and John Lone takes centre stage as an extraordinarily dull villain. So many wasted opportunities.

I'd like to see a Shadow movie directed by David Lynch. I'd like a movie that concentrates on the psychology of the villains and portrays the Shadow almost like Satan ready to drag them to Hell--which is what the serials were sort of like. The story tended to concentrate mainly on the villains and victims, their motivations and fears, and then The Shadow would show up with his laugh--and they'd never, ever see him. Instead of a vague villain like John Lone's, they could have someone like the bomber in "Circle of Death". I would say emphasise that character's resemblance to the Boston bombers. I suppose there's no chance it'd ever happen, but I think there'd be some real potential there. Giving the Shadow a big past is kind of interesting, but making him seem almost like a force of nature might be more interesting. Like the Joker in Nolan's The Dark Knight--he doesn't have a past and yet his motives have an evocative, self-evident depth. Add to that a filmmaking style, like Lynch's, dreamlike and particularly suited to manipulating perceptions and I think we'd see something extremely interesting.

The Shadow: Circle of Death from The Radio Ghost on Vimeo.

Lunch and Violence

Well, to-day's been a series of unexpected delays and little obstacles, beginning with the fact this was the third day in a row the internet has been inexplicably sluggish here. After about half an hour attempting to watch something on YouTube, I decided to go out to lunch and then maybe to a nearby Starbucks to use the WiFi there that would inevitably be better than my fucking cable modem at this point.

It was a hot day so I decided to treat myself to some gasoline and drove my car for once, going downtown to gaze at the Convention Centre wistfully and pretend it was still Comic Con--and maybe avail myself of some of that great WiFi at the Lion Coffee place.

I went to Pokez for lunch and got one of their weirdly cheap, massive vegan burritos. The place was deserted besides myself and the staff, and I sat by a window near the entrance. From here I was two feet away from the fight that broke out on the corner outside. I kept eating my burrito, only leaning reflexively a couple times as the two young men scuffling in that weird perpetual hug most fights seem to disintegrate into got close to the thin wall between me and them.

One of the waitresses went outside with napkins to administer to one of the fighters, who had a bloody nose. It turned out later, when the cops had shown up, that one of the guys, a skinny little Mexican guy, was the proprietor of the restaurant--"That your shop?" the cop nodded towards Pokez while talking to the guy--the other man had left before the cops had appeared.

"Yeah," he said and went on explaining, "Me and him, we're really old friends, I got in a few good hits, he got in a few good hits . . . We're old friends, we were just fighting like old friends."

"What's his name?" asked one of the cops.

"Uh, Omar, I think."

Another guy, a big white man in shorts, flip flops, and a red shirt with a nurse fetish pinup girl on, was angrily telling the cops how he had come downstairs from his nearby apartment when he heard the noise and he certainly wasn't involved in the fight because he had a broken ankle, he kept saying. He was walking with a cane but I noticed neither of his bare ankles appeared to have a cast or bandage of any kind. Before the cops had shown up, after the fight had ended, I had seen the guy in the nurse shirt yelling to "Omar" has he drove away, "Fuck you!"

The nurse shirt guy complained to the police "Omar" had been yelling at him. "Did he hurt your feelings?" joked one of the cops.

"He said he was going to fucking shoot me!" said nurse shirt, angrily. I think we all inwardly rolled our eyes.

I hung around at the request of the cops, since I was a witness, but they sent me away before questioning me, apparently deciding the whole affair was too trivial to warrant further questioning.

After that, I took a long drive through surface streets to get to Tim's Radio Shack to get his advice on what modem I ought to buy from Best Buy. I wasn't sure how to get there from downtown, but I like exploring. I didn't anticipate getting caught behind a garbage truck on one of the skinny old San Diego streets, a garbage truck that was driving backwards for two blocks because it had evidently taken a wrong turn at some point.

But now I'm back. I hope this modem works. The guy from Cox (the local internet provider) was rather vague on the phone as to whether or not the modem was the problem but, I figured, it's a more then ten year old modem, it's probably about time it was replaced in any case.

Twitter Sonnet #537

Long blue cardboard bends the chalky discus.
Three paper bars cracked the coffee signal.
Disposable leaks fill the hot ruckus.
Cotton candy throttled the Grand Guignol.
Chalkboard galaxies press eternity.
Choking tanks urged forth the blistered traffic.
Chessboard asphalt glittered with enmity.
Cereal suns ask diets less drastic.
Rabbit cathedrals bleed pea soup at dusk.
The bright ourang-ootang took to murder.
Poe is no pea when it comes to the busk.
No e-train travels without a girder.
The old Omar is not his name to Punch.
Nosebleed love will threaten a larger lunch.

Every Body Get Up

As usual, I'm not particularly a fan of the number one hit song of the summer, in this case Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines". I certainly hear a lot of it because I listen to The Howard Stern Show and Stern's a big fan of the song, possibly because the video famously features topless women. Which is something I liked, too, not just because the women are beautiful but because the situation depicted feels very innocent, and it's nice to see something in popular media that does not feel the need to connect sex with horror or violence. But the song, while certainly an earworm, isn't interesting to me and Robin Thicke seems like a George Michael impersonator and I'm not a big fan of the original George Michael.

But while I was out yesterday, it occurred to me to google "Blurred Lines Male Gaze" and I couldn't repress a grin. Few things give me a thrill of melancholy schadenfreude like the invocation of that term in any critical discussion of art because I know it usually means I'm about to hear someone who thinks they're being very smart about to say something very stupid in the name of justice.

Sure enough, when I got home and googled, I found several satisfyingly tangled essays, most of which directly contradict one another, in their attempts to explain why "Blurred Lines" and its video are crimes against humanity.

One thing going in I assumed would be common among the criticisms would be an address up front of the fact that the video was directed by, and the concept of the women being topless in it came from, a woman, Diane Martel. I knew it would be too easy if people were put off by this one detail, still I figured people would want to take at least a paragraph to explain why a work that was literally the product of a female gaze is a strident example of the male gaze.

As it turns out, nearly all of the essays fail to even mention the music video's director, side stepping entirely any quotes from the artists as to their motivation behind the depiction of nudity in the video. I found only two essays that mention the director, one of which, this one, only brings her up in the concluding paragraph; So, in conclusion, yeah the song is fun and has a catchy tune BUT the music video objectifies women and the lyrics are truly concerning. The fact that the director of the video is a woman doesn’t erase these facts, nor does Thicke’s pathetic, weird and ignorant claim that he’s trying to start a “feminist movement” through this song. Also, note to Thicke: if you have to state in your music that you have, ahem, impressive genitalia, you probably don’t (overcompensating much?).

This person seems to assume that simply by acknowledging the fact that the director was a woman the fact becomes irrelevant.

So, oddly, it falls to me to present the argument as to why a woman's vision would be an example of the male gaze; as a commercial director working in a world dominated by a patriarchy, even a female director might be conditioned to present imagery that depicts women as inferior and/or subservient to men, as nothing more than visual objects to please men.

Here's what the director says her intentions were;

I wanted to deal with the misogynist, funny lyrics in a way where the girls were going to overpower the men. Look at Emily Ratajkowski’s performance; it’s very, very funny and subtly ridiculing. That’s what is fresh to me. It also forces the men to feel playful and not at all like predators. I directed the girls to look into the camera, this is very intentional and they do it most of the time; they are in the power position. I don’t think the video is sexist. The lyrics are ridiculous, the guys are silly as fuck. That said, I respect women who are watching out for negative images in pop culture and who find the nudity offensive, but I find [the video] meta and playful.

And I must say . . . I think she succeeded in her intentions. I do feel like the women in the video are the ones truly wielding the power. The song is about Thicke making this argument that women are just as sexual as men and that he knows this because he picks up on perhaps subtle signals. The women in the video, with their goofy dances and casual nudity seem to be saying, "Yeah, genius, congratulations on catching up with the rest of the class." Even the bit with the woman dancing in front of "Robin Thicke has a big dick" in big letters, which is something Thicke has said repeatedly in interviews wasn't his idea, seems to be ridiculing male sexual preoccupations.

A lot of the essays I read mention the many parodies that have come out about the song, apparently one of the first of which was this one by a "boylesque" group called Mod Carousel;

This article at Raw Story effusively praises the parody.

What struck me as so wonderful about this video is that, unlike other attempts at exposing how routinely women are objectified by casting men in their roles, the men in this piece are fully committed to being sexy, when usually in stuff like this, the men are subtly mocking the idea that men can be sex objects at all. Most of the time, when men agree to pose in classically “objectified” poses, they’re winking at the camera, using irony to give themselves distance from actually having to live in a traditionally woman’s space. None of these guys give off a “me so silly!” vibe that undercuts what this work is trying to do.

. . . Not only are the men stripped down to thongs and wearing make-up, but they are striking all the pouty-sexy poses of the interchangeable naked women of the original video and it’s sexy.

Which surprised me. The author of the article is a woman and most heterosexual women I know don't find guys like those in the video above especially attractive but, I say, any woman who does, more power to them. The video, as an attempt to reverse the paradigm to where I as a male viewer might feel corresponding discomfort at the supposed objectification of men . . . don't really feel uncomfortable watching the video. Actually, it just looks like a group of friends having a good time.

Which other articles, less pleased about the Mod Carousel parody but equally incensed by the Robin Thicke video, point out. Which necessitates a parody more directly employing the male gaze interpretation;

This video, and the article linked to above, demonstrate the fundamental disconnect here. And I should say here that, yes, there is a real problem in the modern world in regards to gender relations and sex crimes. Statistics are clear that a frightening number of women are raped or in other ways sexually assaulted every year. And I've personally witnessed men presuming a right to a woman's body too many times to say it's not a problem. However, I don't think that's where this mediocre song, "Blurred Lines", comes from.

The line which provokes the most outrage is, "I know you want it," and the video above is critical of a man who would say that when he doesn't really know she wants it. The article concludes with, "Next time, guys, make sure you know she wants it."

So, obviously if a guy knows she wants it, then it's okay. So why shouldn't we believe Thicke when he says he knows she wants it in the first place? Partly this is due to an inability to identify the sources of intent in the lyrics. Here someone criticised Thicke's lyrics in the form of running annotation;

"Tried to domesticate you"

From a feminist viewpoint, this is a very problematic line.

To ‘domesticate’ suggests three things.

a) that the girl (in this case a referent for all girls) are inherently wild and in need of taming. This in turn suggests that ‘girls’ lack a certain control and cannot be trusted with their own natures. They are closer to animals than people. Dangerous ideas…

b) that it is the job of a man to control women and make them fit for the house. Literally, Thicke is likening the girl to a pet. In doing so, he contributes to a centuries old tradition of female subservience to a dominant male, evidenced in literature throughout history.

c) that men are naturally superior to women, in that they are in a position to control and tame (‘domesticate’) them.

And yet, when listening to the song, it's clear Thicke is presenting the attempt to "tame" women as a bad thing.

OK now he was close, tried to domesticate you
But you're an animal, baby, it's in your nature
Just let me liberate you
Hey, hey, hey
You don't need no papers
Hey, hey, hey
That man is not your maker

These are really cheesy lines but clearly opposite to the interpretation presented above.

But the most common misinterpretation I'm seeing is of the title itself--"Blurred lines".

This article presents a predictably inarticulate quote from Thicke about the song and an angrily obtuse interpretation of the title;

The BBC asked Thicke what the lyrics mean. He replied, "For me it was about blurring the lines between - two things - one between men and women and how much we're the same. Like my wife, she's as strong as I am, as smart - if not smarter, stronger and she's an animal too and she doesn't need a man to define her or to define her existence. So the song was really about women are everything a man is and can do anything a man can do. And then there's the other side of it which is the blurred lines between a good girl and bad girl which, you know, even very good girls have a little bad side to them. You know you just have to know how to pull it out of them." The interviewer followed up asking about criticism of his song as a rape anthem. Thicke answered, "Yeah I think they should all - I mean, I can't dignify that with a response, that's ridiculous."

Given the chorus - "I hate these blurred lines" - it's hard to decipher Thicke's interview. His hatred of the blurred lines means he greatly prefers clear gender lines and hates his wife's strength and smarts. Alternately, Thicke wrote lyrics meaning the opposite of his intent and doesn't know it. Alternately again, Thicke wrote lyrics that fairly represented his intent which he misrepresented to the BBC. One of these has to be true.

Well, not really. Going back to the running annotations critique, let's look at this section;

If you can’t hear what I’m trying to say
If you can’t read from the same page
Maybe I’m going deaf,
Maybe I’m going blind
Maybe I’m out of my mind

Arguably, there is a moral ‘blindness’ at play here.

In the context of a party, gender inequalities don’t really hold much of a bearing, but this can be dangerous insofar as it blinkers men to the dangers of their own lusts. This song, and its controversial original video, highlights this danger. Men, having a great time, are casually subjugating women, oblivious to their wants, feels or needs.

I am reading between the (blurred) lines here, but it is interesting that, at least on a subconscious level, Thicke is aware of the dulling of his social sensibilities.

No, what Thicke is saying is that he's doubting his senses. He thinks he's receiving signals, but he feels anxiety that he might be wrong. That's the blurred line--a happily married woman who's content is a clear line. A married woman who flirts with other men is a blurred line.

I actually found one positive review of the song by googling "Blurred Lines Male Gaze", a woman who writes about a part of the song universally ignored by the negative critiques;

I know you want it
I know you want it
I know you want it
But you’re a good girl
The way you grab me
Must wanna get nasty
Go ahead, get at me

If she is grabbing at him, then we can only assume she is a willing participant. The song never sounded to me like Robin was sexually assaulting anyone, so much as viscerally sexualizing a woman who has been denied that kind of attention from her current partner.

By now, maybe you wonder why I've spent so much time defending a song I don't particularly like. Well, as someone who hopes for a day when sex isn't associated with shame and assault and more often then not celebrated in the media as something beautiful, I tend to be rankled by people who, as Oscar Wilde might have said, "find ugly meanings in beautiful things."

So I'll leave you with a better music video that happens to feature nudity;

Dreams On the March

I doubt to-day will be as productive as yesterday, when I pencilled and inked two pages. Last night sleep was impaired by it being inexplicably hot, just in my bedroom, and the fact I'd played chess just before bed, which I ought to know better than to do by now. It always leaves me wired.

Last night's dream is hard to explain because it's based on a series of presumptions I had about reality in my dream that I don't have in waking life. I think I presumed that everyone lived out their lives on three hundred year old sailing vessels and after death, everyone went to a shadowy balcony in a cathedral around fifty times the size of Notre Dame. However, I was somehow disabused of this presumption when I realised all my experiences and knowledge of life were compassed by a group of around fifteen people, a group I was a member of, and none of us actually died. Each of us was tasked with remembering every moment of our lives in exact detail before we could end our solitary life at sea, at which point we passed this knowledge onto the next person in the group and we were reincarnated into another ship in the next slot. I think we may have all existed within the same lifetime, just always in different parts of the sea.

Somehow the newest Monogatari episode still hasn't been subtitled, so I've gone back to watching my favourite arc, the Suruga Monkey arc from the first season. I thought again about how strangely superior that first season was to everything that came after. I think what it boils down to is that the show was written about people in its first season and now it feels more typically fetishised. Albeit of a higher class of fetishisation than most anime.

The story in the new season of Hanekawa overcoming her repression is okay but feels sabotaged slightly by the show's fan service shots of her. Her internal monologue lacks the mile-a-minute stream of Araragi's--the original series had a lot of direct parody and criticism of otaku culture that was nice mainly in how it allowed the characters to move past these issues to the real needs of the people underneath.

A couple days ago, I watched again this pretty good analysis of Evangelion and I thought about End of Evangelion's criticism of otaku double standards regarding women.

School for Sitcoms

My expectations for 1960's School for Scoundrels were a little too high. I was hoping to see some really devilish stuff, not necessarily outright murder and mayhem, but at least perhaps financial ruin or public disgrace wrought by the subtle and clever machinations of a graduate from that school. But that's the usual innocence of 50s and 60s comedy for you--instead it's a movie about rich people outdoing each other in tennis games and cars to impress a girl. Still, it has a few genuinely clever moments and Alastair Sim, as the school's headmaster, is a delight.

I'm starting to think, though, that Alfred Hitchcock was the only one who really knew how to use Sim properly, as he did in Stage Fright. But I think Hitchcock was the only one who understood quite a lot of things about cinema in his time. For one thing, he understood audiences are genuinely morbid. I've only seen a few Alastair Sim movies, though, so I still have hope I'll get to see another one where he gets to indulge again in truly black humour.

But School for Scoundrels is directed by Robert Hamer. Even putting aside the innocence of the story, the movie suffers from broadness. The protagonist, Henry (Ian Carmichael) begins the film as an unbelievably gullible pushover of a wealthy young executive. His employees think nothing of walking all over him, guys at a car dealership succeed in selling him a very obvious lemon.

Then, after a few weeks at Sim's school, he's outwitting the dealers, using subtle manipulation to dominate his employees, and easily beating his rival at tennis. He essentially turns into a different character entirely which dampens any pleasure one might vicariously take in his revenge.

The girl at the centre of the dispute is pretty but portrayed completely without personality. I'd say it's insulting that the movie suggests techniques like an intentionally spilled glass to get her to remove her dress and get into Henry's kindly offered dressing gown would actually be what leads a woman to fall in love with a guy except none of the characters are portrayed with really human intelligence.

Sim has some nice, small pieces of business, though. I like when he makes Henry say "Sorry" for asking Sim to return the pen he let him borrow.

Twitter Sonnet #536

Water bottle hills look down on oat hikes.
Disapproval pervades the pineapple.
The year four thousand, ten Joels fight ten Mikes.
Batman peeks shyly round his black grapple.
Constellations of goo shone on the ghost.
Gumby archways protect protractor quakes.
Apostle raisins may be in the host.
Only a dry grape can know what it takes.
They say crystal spit's still okay to eat.
Jalapeno gallbladder taints the beans.
The pink ham shaped cloud's really made of meat.
Everyone please drink the vapour in teams.
Oxygenated carapace draws spite.
Resentment and Mountain Dew drowned love's Sprite.

The Atlantic's Angry Earphones

Now that I've finished season three of Game of Thrones and season four doesn't start until spring, I feel slightly like I don't have a TV show. I guess I have the rest of the final season of The Sopranos to watch but I'm finding it hard to get through even one episode. Maybe it's because there was so much pressure on the writers by that point, but all the characters feel like theoretical constructs of statistics.

So last night I tried two pilots, two shows that ended up being comedies about perpetual anger as a means of getting through life--Eastbound & Down and The Thick of It.

Danny McBride is so good at embodying and satirising the unquestioning, massively overreaching American sense of entitlement. For McBride's former Major League Baseball pitcher turned substitute high school P.E. teacher, Kenny Powers, everything and everyone is an obstacle to be overcome by shouting, pushing, a middle finger, or all of the above.

He has no money but plenty of merchandise with his name on it. In one of my favourite scenes, Powers sits in his truck outside the high school listening to himself reading in the audio version of his self-help, motivational book.

"I'm the man who has the ball, I'm the man who can throw it faster than fuck," his recording tells himself. "And that is why I am better than anyone in the world."

The episode has the parody of an arc. Kenny Powers begins the show feeling like the world is wrong, no-one understands his greatness and that's why his career has gone the way it has. In the climax of the episode, he has his version of an epiphany wherein he realises he's great and the world is wrong and fails to appreciate him and that's why his career has gone the way it has.

Using his anger much more effectively is Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, which is a satire of the political spin machine in Britain. Tucker is the Prime Minister's "Enforcer" whose method of dealing with any conflict is to explode with anger at the implicit idiocy of any contrary idea, as though he simply can't believe the person he's talking to could have possibly missed the (his) rational point of view.

The plot of the first episode involves an MP, Hugh Abbot, Tucker's just put in place calling a large press conference to announce his first policy idea. But he has to change plans swiftly on the way to the conference because Tucker calls him and becomes apoplectic over the idea that the Prime Minister saying they "should" have policies like the one Abbot's suggesting is the same as the Prime Minister saying "Yes" to Abbot's specific policy.

The consistent idea throughout the episode is that there is no subject too complex or nuanced for Tucker not to become wrathfully indignant that no-one knows the solution to, and then to become equally wrathful when anyone suggests that events going contrary to his predictions just might be an indication that Tucker was wrong somewhere along the line. It's pretty simple, but the fear with which everyone seems to regard Tucker feels pretty credible. I suspect it's all not too far from how things actually happen in many political offices.

Blurred Light in a Drowned Night

Your average crime movie, even a good one, will probably be about a guy's choice to lead a life of crime, the danger of perpetrating a heist, and how the sinful lifestyle leads to the protagonist's downfall, even if he isn't evil at heart. 1981's Thief, meanwhile, is about the hazards of the unregulated company structure of organised crime as compared to freelance crime, the prison system as an incubator of criminal behaviour, and how the police are without reservation organised to get a steady income of bribe money from the mob. As the protagonist, a thief called Frank played by James Caan, says during a beating from cops for refusing to give them a cut, "It never occurred to you to try to work for a living, take down your own scores?"

This Michael Mann film is based on a book by a real life thief, John Seybold, and several real thieves served as technical consultants for the film. The tools used to break into safes are real tools, used in the way such tools were really used to crack safes at the time of filming. The system of fences and thieves portrayed with Mann's restrained style has the feel of authenticity. What I loved is the way the characters portrayed internalise this rich cache of detail.

The people in the movie, crooks and cops, seem like strange, emotionally malnourished beings who've attempted to put roots through a bedrock of cynicism. Leo, a mob boss Frank reluctantly does a job for, equates investing a portion of Frank's agreed upon earnings into business fronts with familial bonds. The cops don't have the faintest idea of being law enforcement, they see lucrative bribes as their meat and potatoes. Somehow Frank has managed to nurture a work ethic in this world--he and his partner pull a difficult job, they get paid for it. He's managed this so far by keeping his business small and fiercely independent. But it's fostered in him some peculiarly innocent dreams.

He carries around a little collage he made from magazine clippings and photographs he's personally taken that represent everything he wants out of life. As the movie begins, he decides it's time for him to marry a woman and have a kid and big, proper home.

So he asks a waitress named Jessie out on a date he shows up two hours late for, grabs her by the arm, throws her into his car, drives off and proposes marriage.

The scene that follows could have gone quite wrong, could have fallen apart as simply absurd, but instead works brilliantly thanks to the writing, direction, and performances. Caan is very good as he explains to Jessie, played by Tuesday Weld, how he spent ten years in prison for stealing forty dollars--an initial short sentence was gradually extended as he got in trouble in prison--how he now has to catch up with life in a hurry.

It's not just what he says but how he says it that brings Jessie over. With his actions and manner, Frank clearly is a guy who's been short changed in a lot of ways in his emotional maturation. He doesn't have any idea why his tactics with Jessie are bad and awkward and with this he exudes a vulnerability that stands in contrast to the story he tells her of how in prison he had to shut himself down. To beat the other guys, he had to stop caring about himself, about them, about everything. But of course the fact that he would resort to any kind of self preservation is evidence that he does care. His stone face is a boy standing still in a man's body.

Throughout the film, Mann's filmmaking style is well suited to these damaged personalities. Rather than describing it as heavy with shadow, it's more like colour comes in small, isolated spots in blackness. And those spots are often luridly bright and bleeding.

The Yellow Sun and the Super Lizard

This lovely lady was waiting for me right outside the front door this morning. She suffered me to take two macroshots before wriggling off.

Lizards this size always seem to flee out of annoyance more than any fear of me.

A few days ago I had a longer photo session with a wasp;

I don't think I've seen a wasp like this around here before. I love how the wildlife around here never stops surprising me.

I've been colouring all week. I ought to pick up the pace, I suppose. I don't see how I can, though, now that I do so much airbrushing. It takes me twice as long now to colour a page as it took me to colour the average Venia's Travels page. I keenly feel I'm doing the work of three people.

Sometimes while colouring, I've been listening to Carl Sagan's Cosmos this past week. Still a great series but how sad it is to hear him enthusiastically talking about how 1980 was just at the beginning of the era of space travel. And it is sad to hear him talk about creationism as though it's a curiosity from a primitive part of human history. Now I have a creation museum in the town where I live which Caitlin told me is infamous.

I usually stop colouring at eight or nine o'clock feeling like I'm several days behind where I ought to be and play a couple hours of The Secret World, which I finally feel like I'm starting to make headway in again. There's an "Innsmouth Academy" in the game which has a lot of good missions and unlike in World of Warcraft you're able to repeat missions as many times as you like, which is a much nicer way of grinding than killing monsters over and over.

My brain feels a bit mushy to-day which is what usually happens on the Saturdays where I delay lunch and afternoon caffeine for a chess tournament. And, as usual, I only won two out of five games. Everyone I play against either seems insanely good or like they just started playing a few days ago. Well, my friend, and co-owner of my chess club, Celia took home the top prize, so I'm happy for that.

Twitter Sonnet #535

Oysters open to gulp down acid rain.
Angels strung on fishing line dress the Bride.
Industrious Vulcans soon go insane.
In murky murals goddesses confide.
Blue pastel rings surround the pale swimmer.
Steam pulverised bear skins under pink flesh.
Softly, the reclined jaundiced eyes glimmer.
Blue stained marble bends the floor's waxy mesh.
Horizontal figure eights trick the knight.
Silhouette goblins hate "Mood Indigo".
Banner tongues lick hydrogen at great height.
Altitude and nuns trigger vertigo.
Soft eyes stand at the metal chimp vanguard.
Lizard noblemen will waddle westward.

Dreams in the Box

I dreamt last night I was Kim Novak and in my backyard I had what might be called a backpack tree. It was an extremely large version of the backpack I have in waking life with a hole in the bottom and a large sequoia trunk going up through the middle of it, suspending it at least fifteen feet off the ground. Inside were enormous versions of various old things I own, not limited to the sorts of things I carry in the backpack--there was my sleeping bag I've had since I was twelve, lots of papers including a stack of manila folders with the cellophane still on, and socks. I needed to get something out of the backpack tree, so I climbed up the trunk and was searching inside when I found a nest with three enormous baby birds with sparse, spiky black plumage and glittering green eyes that all stared at me from the darkness of the backpack tree. I decided I was going to take the birds as pets--I was going to name them Jimmy, Scottie, and Johnny. I somehow knocked down the tree and brought the backpack inside. It occurred to me afterwards I might have injured the birds, but when I searched through the bag with a flashlight I could find no trace of them.

I've mentioned I'm a big fan of Vertigo, right?

I didn't watch a movie last night, just a lot of television. I watched the final two episodes of Game of Thrones' third season. Not quite as impressive as season two but still quite good. Daenerys taking over the army of slaves relied on her opponent being improbably stupid but it was still a rather satisfying moment. I didn't really care about Theon Greyjoy from the beginning of the series but I came to really despise him as he bored me, whining through dull scenes where he's tortured by a stock psychopath character. I hate all the Greyjoys--the whole section from season two where Theon goes back to them, I was annoyed by what a whiney bitch he was and I was annoyed by his sister and father smugly mocking him. I really hope to see Daenerys kill all the Greyjoys. The White Walkers could kill them, too, that would be fun. Either one of those would be more entertaining than the boring torture guy. This may be a reflection of how jaded I am, I get the feeling viewers were supposed to be kept occupied in those scenes by the novelty of medieval torture portrayed on screen.

It was disappointing Tyrion had a less proactive role to play this season and a lot of the stuff between him and his father felt redundant--how many times can Tyrion act surprised when his father tells him he's ashamed of him? I get the feeling this may be one of the drawbacks of adapting novels for a television series--there's pressure to give a lot of the characters plenty of screen time even if they don't appear in the books for many chapters so the writers have to tread water with them a little bit. On the whole, though, I'm still very excited about this format. I love how organic the character arcs feel. Standard television character development feels really stilted by comparison--Game of Thrones has brought a virtue of the novel to television I didn't expect ever to see. One of my favourites is Arya Stark's story. Her progression from Eddard Stark's little tomboy to death worshipping, lost teenager works really nicely. I love how everywhere she goes, everyone seems to die or meet with disaster and her personality development as a result of it is nicely complimented by her actress' physical maturation. A lot of the child actors on the show began season one as twelve and thirteen year olds and are now fifteen or sixteen. It must be a strange way to grow up.

The Red Wedding sequence was terrific, especially since the Starks were generally pretty dull next to the Lannister and Targaryen plotlines. David Bradley is pretty delightfully disgusting as Walder Frey, but I kept looking at him thinking about how he's playing William Hartnell in An Adventure in Space and Time, an upcoming special about the making of Doctor Who for the show's 50th anniversary. He does actually kind of look like William Hartnell.

Part of me wonders if An Adventure in Space and Time isn't a big ruse, like Blue Harvest for Return of the Jedi. Maybe the sets constructed and actors cast in the name of An Adventure in Space and Time are secretly part of the real anniversary special's production and they've cast another actor for the First Doctor, just as was done for the twentieth anniversary special. That would be kind of nice. I'm hoping all the lies Steven Moffat claims he's telling about the special are concealing very cool things.

Also last night, I watched "Forest of the Dead", the second half of the Tenth Doctor two parter Moffat wrote, the story that first introduced River Song. It all takes on a new meaning after one's seen River's whole story during the Eleventh Doctor's run. The quality of the Tenth Doctor story actually seems to be diminished somewhat by knowing how weakly developed River turned out. The strangeness of her familiarity with the Doctor in that first story was actually rather endearing when I first saw it but it became pretty tired in subsequent episodes as she never seemed to move past that square. Moffat's much better at writing meet-cutes than he is at writing relationships, I think. Maybe that's not surprising as his chief virtue seems to be in constructing disconcerting, often pleasantly surprising, plotlines.

After that, I watched the first part of Pyramids of Mars and went to bed. Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen have really great chemistry in that story, I enjoy it a lot more every time I watch it.

Enlarging Whale Men

Among several inaccuracies in the Wikipedia entry for Herman Melville's novel, Moby-Dick, is its identification of the book as an example of Romanticism. Moby-Dick is a Gothic novel and like Melville's other works, and those of Poe and Hawthorne, it is in many ways a reaction against Romanticism. Captain Ahab is a parody of the Byronic hero.

But Wikipedia wouldn't be the first to categorise the story wrongly. Such a mistake is at the heart of why the 1956 adaptation doesn't work despite direction by John Huston and a screenplay by Ray Bradbury.

I thought Bradbury was a strange choice as screenwriter from the start. His best works depend on an underlying morality in the universe, people who are genuinely, fundamentally good or evil and Moby-Dick is an enthusiastically amoral work. In another unfortunate example of Wikipedia editing, the film's entry contains a section on what it says are the only four, very slight, differences between novel and film. The differences it lists are indeed differences between novel and film but they are neither slight nor by any means are they the only differences.

Naturally there would be a lot of changes made to fit such a famously long novel into a two hour film. Among changes not mentioned by the Wikipedia is a general streamlining of the narrative--Ishmael meets Stubb at the Inn and first sees Ahab on the street outside. The filmmakers still manage to keep Ahab's face hidden until over twenty minutes into the film--the Captain doesn't emerge from his cabin until the Pequod's been at sea for some time, just like in the book.

Queequeg is rather unfortunately portrayed by a fifty six year old, skinny Polish actor with a great deal more subservience than is ascribed to him in the book, though the way he follows Ishmael like a porter onto the Pequod may have been intended only as condensing.

I like the film's very beginning where Ishmael's description from the book of the pull of the sea is juxtaposed with Richard Baseheart as Ishmael walking beside creeks.

But after the first third of the film, it's no longer a story that bears much resemblance to the book. There are a lot of things Bradbury and Huston did possibly just in the name of streamlining that in fact exert an entirely different philosophy than the one presented in Melville's work.

Morality and Christianity are brought to the forefront much more. Early in the film, Orson Welles plays Father Mapple impressively and Huston gets some terrific shots of the bow/pulpit in a somewhat exaggerated version of what's described in the book;

Welles' version of the sermon--supposedly Welles scripted this scene himself--is a short version of the one from the novel that retains its peculiar call to self-assertion.

"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"

Queequeg is shown refusing a bible offered to him in the movie, but in the book the pagan's character is juxtaposed with Christianity a little more markedly, as this description of him immediately follows the sermon;

Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.

One of the changes made at the end of the film--one of the few noted by Wikipedia--is Starbuck suddenly zealously pursuing Moby-Dick after Ahab's failure. The reason for this wasn't hard to see as another of the differences in the film was to give Starbuck a more strongly dissenting voice in Ahab's pursuit of the whale and to tie it conspicuously with Starbuck's religion. Starbuck continually remarks on how Ahab's behaviour isn't Christian. So Huston or Bradbury needed an explanation as to why Starbuck is damned along with the rest of the crew.

Unlike in the book, Ahab prevents the crew from taking other whales in order to get Moby-Dick. Again, this was probably done in the interest of streamlining but the crew's compliance is given a somewhat magical quality because of it.

The characterisation of Ahab in the movie is a big problem. Gregory Peck was unhappy with his own performance in the role, I didn't think he was so bad, though my friend Ada mentioned that Klaus Kinski would have been better suited to it and I couldn't agree more. But the main problem is that the filmmakers were too much in awe of Ahab. The movie lacked some of Ahab's more humiliating episodes involving his false leg, as when he attempts to climb aboard the Samuel Enderby.

But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody—except those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen—to clamber up a ship's side from a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.

This is one of a number of jabs Melville takes at the Romantic, Byronic hero. Moby-Dick is much more realism than Romantic--instead of Manfred who can use magic to stand alone against heaven and hell, Ahab is a man in a world with a million realistic considerations that make heaven, hell, and his belief in himself absurdities.

The white whale is the physical embodiment of horribly un-Romantic reality. A murderous, dangerous animal next to the unforgiving, lethal sea itself is the perfect foil for the Romantic notion of nature intrinsically offering spiritual salvation, redemption, and comfort. The whale is portrayed by not wholly ineffective models in the film.

Some of you who've only seen the film in its pan-and-scan, overly saturated televised versions may be surprised by the muted colours of these screenshots. This is actually how the movie was meant to look--despite conventional ideas in the U.S. of how Technicolor ought to look, John Huston rather boldly experimented with subtler palettes in films like this, his 1952 film Moulin Rouge, and his 1967 film Reflections of a Golden Eye, the entirety of which he tinted yellow.

The Wallpaper Goes and I Do Too

My latest Twitter sonnet is based on my randomised desktop wallpaper--I usually write a quatrain at about 8pm so I decided to just write about whatever my wallpaper happened to be. It cycles every thirty minutes through a selection I made of about twenty wallpapers.

Twitter Sonnet #534

Burgundy hands briefly imprint on black.
Red lids inspected as dumb petals pass.
The proud pommel of scimitar drew back.
Dark currents said many birds here won't last.
White eucalyptus leaves watch from pink limbs.
Earnest acorns repress a blush over bare throat.
Naked shoulders frame two clasped white gloved thumbs.
A fawn's adoptive mother seeks a goat.
Candles march out from a busy darkness.
The ruddy men ready musket and drum.
Shock cries by a chick to brocade harnessed.
Sleepless faithful figure a shifting sum.
Seeming purple petulance blackens red.
Pale bystander can't hear the louder dead.

Embarrassingly enough, the first quatrain was based on some of my own artwork, the wallpaper of Nesuko I made for my new comic;

Burgundy hands briefly imprint on black.
Red lids inspected as dumb petals pass.
The proud pommel of scimitar drew back.
Dark currents said many birds here won't last.

It is one of the first wallpapers I've made myself I'm almost happy with. I always feel awkward doing cover or pinup images--I need some kind of motivation for the character. It was a little easier with Echo Erosion since the protagonist was a pin-up model and I felt drawing those gave me some good practice. Here, I wanted some nudity to help entice people into reading the comic and I also wanted to try making a really pale nude with a dark background like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. I ended up basing the image on some photographs of the nearby river on an overcast autumn day. Having Nesuko wash up after a kill provided me with some of the motivation I needed for her.

The second quatrain is based on this publicity still of Audrey Hepburn from Funny Face.

White eucalyptus leaves watch from pink limbs.
Earnest acorns repress a blush over bare throat.
Naked shoulders frame two clasped white gloved thumbs.
A fawn's adoptive mother seeks a goat.

I wrote about the movie in 2008;

It was a decent movie. Fred Astaire was still fantastic at 58, seeming as though he walked right out of a movie from the 30s--his style and everything about him was an unconscious anachronism, except maybe for the dopey cardigans and ascots he wore. Audrey Hepburn's cute as a button, and even the fact that she can't quite sing is kind of cute. I don't know if she's much of a dancer, but it's hard to tell because she's definitely a charming dancer. Gawky and elegant at the same time, which is pretty much the essence of Hepburn's charm. I see Cyd Charisse was originally up for the role--something I suspected all through the movie--but although Charisse would've been a better dancer, it's Audrey Hepburn who has the real funny face.

There were some annoying beatnik caricatures in the movie, but I find that's something I often have to put up with from Hollywood movies of the late 50s. There seems to have been a real resentment for the new culture, even as there was an attempt to adapt. Hepburn dancing in the club in black sweater and slacks and Astaire dancing with the unexpectedly great Kay Thompson, are nice sequences, but exist way off in their own dimensions.

The third quatrain is about The Night Watch or The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq by Rembrandt.

Candles march out from a busy darkness.
The ruddy men ready musket and drum.
Shock cries by a chick to brocade harnessed.
Sleepless faithful figure a shifting sum.

Like the Pre-Raphaelite paintings I was seeking to emulate, Rembrandt was great--really much better--at using light to make things pop naturalistically. I love the rich, waxy look his people have. But I didn't really appreciate him until I heard he was a huge influence on cinematographer Jack Cardiff.

The final couplet is about The Play Scene from Hamlet by Edwin Austin Abbey.

Seeming purple petulance blackens red.
Pale bystander can't hear the louder dead.

As it happens, I was watching a bit of Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet last night. I didn't get too far, I'm afraid. There are elements I like, mainly the costumes, sets, and locations. But the tone is completely wrong for me, particularly the first scene with Jack Lemmon as Marcellus, the night watchman. I like Jack Lemmon but next to the two British actors who clearly came from an entirely different school of acting he sticks out like a sore thumb for more reasons than his familiar face. And the rushed and urgent manner with which Horatio delivers his exposition about Denmark's relationship with Norway feels odd. Usually it comes across like, despite the ghost of the dead king turning up, the sentries have to pass the long night with conversation and they're all stuck with a growing dread. Here, it sounds like Fortinbras is about to attack in twenty seconds.

This is followed by Claudius and Gertrude addressing an enormous assemblage and then having extremely private discussions with Hamlet in front of them. It makes more sense when Claudius is delivering his initial speeches to a smaller, more intimate gathering of councillors and family.

What Branagh does here is create a more, almost cartoonish hugeness to Claudius and Gertrude trying to talk Hamlet out of his grief. There ought to be a discord here--that Hamlet is made to feel weird for grieving for his father but I felt this overplayed it.

I do like Derek Jacobi and Julie Christie as Claudius and Gertrude, though, maybe I'll give it another shot. I did watch the whole movie at some point in the late 90s and I think I remember enjoying it.

A Matter of Everything and Nothing

One perhaps does not expect a 1946 movie about a man dying and going to an afterlife to be at all reminiscent of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. And yet that's precisely what I thought of as Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death opened with a slow camera crawl through an illustration of space and a narrator informs us when we're seeing a globular cluster of stars or a supernova. The filmmakers didn't like the film's American title, Stairway to Heaven, and didn't want the afterlife depicted to explicitly be the Christian conception of heaven. It's heavily hinted that the experiences David Niven, the World War II RAF pilot protagonist, has in this other world are due to neurological damage.

I find this view far more interesting not from the point of view of my philosophy on religion but because a man's brain creating this elaborate and strange set of experiences is to me a far more interesting story than one of a man hovering between Earth and Heaven. For me, this is not one of Powell and Pressburger's best films but it's certainly a very good and moving portrait from the human brain.

And Marius Goring as an angel of death is the prettiest little French leprechaun ever to grace the screen. He embodies one fascinating bit of weirdness, benefiting from Jack Cardiff's peculiar Technicolor chiaroscuro. All the scenes on Earth are in colour, all the scenes in the other world are in black and white.

Something I thought rather appropriate because black and white is not natural, at least not for those of us who can see colour. The real world is colour, the world possibly in Peter's (David Niven's) mind is like a movie, black and white.

There's an extraordinary sense of authenticity in the diagnoses from the doctor treating Peter who remarks on how Peter smells fried onions whenever he sees Marius Goring. The doctor's played by Roger Livesey, an actor whose voice I just feel happy hearing, probably from watching The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp a few hundred times.

Livesey has such a charming fundamental, wise affability. Niven is somewhat more insecure by contrast but he's disarmingly laid back in his first scene as he plummets to certain death and yet flirts with the American radio operator, June, played by Kim Hunter.

Otherwise there's not a great deal distinguishing Peter's personality--aside from his love of chess--which is why it's helpful to think of the other world as the activity of his mind.

In the trial, there's argument as to whether Peter's apparently accidental survival--according to records in the afterlife--constitutes "borrowed" time, something which Peter actually had no right to. When considering whom to choose for his defence council, he's inexplicably adamant in not choosing someone famous like Abraham Lincoln or Plato.

These things add up to a subtle existential statement, that a man's life is his own and that any human is worthwhile. It's in this way Peter's mind tries to harmonise his own personality with frightening scope of existence made plain by World War II, an impression strikingly given as the Saganesque tour of the universe at the beginning is drawn to the gravity of fog and bombs on Earth, the narrator's tone becoming urgent and frightened as it does so.

Vague Dream

I think A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is overrated. It's lazily written with no indication anyone ever cared about the characters while making the movie and the music, by Angelo Badalamenti, proves that when separated from his usual collaborator, David Lynch, a decent musician can produce tripe.

"But wait," you may say. "Calling it overrated implies someone's gone on record as liking it."

Yes, as a matter of fact, just last year Joss Whedon listed a character from the film among his top five favourite horror characters.

She was so badass. [Dream Warriors] changed the dynamic of the horror movie in a way that I appreciate—the idea that the people facing horror could be empowered by it and confront what they were fighting. It’s very Ur-Buffy as well.

He's talking about Jennifer Rubin as Taryn White.

In her dreams she's "beautiful . . . and bad!"

Not bad enough for a real mohawk, apparently. She has perhaps one whole minute of assertiveness for the whole movie--this moment where she introduces her dream "power" and an awkward knife fight she has with Freddy that ends quickly with her being injected with Freddy's finger syringes.

The hazy, After School Special junkie story is actually what dominates her subplot. I did kind of like the effect of little eager mouths for the needle scars on her arms.

The cartoon logic of Freddy's dream tricks is the best part of the film probably because the writers didn't have to do any research for it or consciously write about things genuinely important to them. The Ray Harryhausen-ish Freddy Skeleton Warrior was kind of cool, too.

The big concept with the third Nightmare on Elm Street movie was that the kids in this one were using the fact that one can do and be whatever what one wants in a dream in order to fight Freddy, the malevolent ghost of a child molester who attacks them in dreams. I think even when I saw the movie as a kid I wondered at the surprisingly weak abilities the kids picked out for themselves, most glaringly Patricia Arquette's power to do somersaults.

But outright insulting is the Dungeons and Dragons guy, who was written as though someone said to the writers, "You know who'd really be into dream powers is one of those role playing geeks."

And the writers grudgingly said, "Yeah . . . okay . . . but we're not going to spend any time figuring out what role playing is or how Dungeons and Dragons actually works."

As a result, the kid's written like a sitcom nerd who feels the need to say, "In the name of Lowrek, Prince of Elves . . . demon, begone!" And Freddy beats his power just because. The nerdiness, I guess.

Actually, you never get the impression anyone's dream power means anything.

Also, Heather Lagenkamp's back in the movie as the heroine from the first film. I don't think I can describe her performance better than I did in 2009 when writing about the first film;

Heather Langenkamp delivers one of the most anesthetised performances I've ever seen. She always seems like she's had a gallon of novocaine injected into her skull a few seconds earlier, and when she speaks her head subtly sways like a wind sock, her eyes seem to be aimless blue jelly beans. There's a guy in Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale who was totally blind playing someone who had sight, and watching him, I was more convinced of his ability to focus on objects than I was of Langenkamp's.