re: challengers, if i, noted homosexual, could face my sports related trauma, our gracious host should not deny himself the pleasure of seeing, through Luca’s queerwashing lens, zendaya serving pure c**t.
Thanks, just Henry will do nicely! (Though 'Brother Begler' has a nice ring to it). You're totally right about plot, though I think in Bellow's case the plot is often there, it just happens to be in illustrating the movement of the soul from one state to another. By the end of Herzog you feel like you've been on a comparable journey to Pierre's in War and Peace, it just happens to have taken place in some very quotidian interactions. Where Amis fails is that by the end of The Information at least, I didn't feel as if I were in a very different place from where I started, for all the fireworks in between.
Re your footnote's footnote: I'm surprised I haven't seen much talk about Queer in the public sphere: maybe Challengers exhausted all the discourse (also, I expect better than sportsballisms from you! -- pro tennis at its height is the supreme clash of wills, like watching an hours-long dissection of someone's soul in public -- DFW for all his faults knew this).
Anyway it's a rather awkward marriage between, if you'll permit some broad white ethnic stereotyping, Luca's operatic sad boy passion vs the icy, categorizing WASP sensibilities of Burroughs, who only hints at the melancholy soul within after you've read pages and pages of pretty sick stuff. But it has stuck with me, there is some unforgettable imagery, like Death In Venice meets Altered States, and Daniel Craig, who initially seems so wrong, gives a strange, sweaty, speed-addled performance. Burroughs was a very important writer for me and I expect he will be back on trend at some point but it hasn't happened yet. I think he's a victim of his last period of prominence having been being big in the 2005-2014 or so Mark Fisher-JG Ballard-"we're surrounded by the totalizing machines of capital" circles, which is a valid reading of his work I suppose but misses the pain and loneliness and utopian longing that you find in something as superficially shocking as Cities of the Red Night.
There's also another instance of high Mediterranean passion in theaters that also seems to have passed by the critics: Maria, the Angelina Jolie last-days-of-Maria Callas biopic. Another strange film anchored by a strange performance, though Jolie is barred out rather than sped up. In both cases, I spent the first 30 minutes in profound skepticism -- in Maria's case I was convinced I was witnessing a disaster, one of the worst movies and performances I've ever seen in a theater -- but by the end of both films I found myself quite moved. Although burying Maria on Netflix is a huge disservice, I expect half my reaction just came from hearing Callas's voice through some big theater speakers. I think there's lots to chew on in both, if you get around to them I hope to hear your thoughts!
Thanks! I do generally agree with you about Bellow. He's a bit of a straw man for the point I was making in the above, but the soul transformation you mention is there, whereas Amis, as James Wood said in his elegy, is very 18th century, deals in types, almost in humors, as far as I could tell from London Fields.
I intellectually accept the metaphysical legitimacy of the sporting life, it's just not one I have ever been able to get interested in. I accept the "sportsballism" critique, though, and it's no doubt accurate, a Millennial hipster tendency, acquired in my suburban Daria-esque adolescence, that I've never outgrown.
I definitely want to see Queer. I haven't read the book but found what Burroughs I did read compelling for just the reasons of utopian longing you mention. I am intrigued by your descriptions of the film. I keep meaning to write something here about Anora, which I loved—not Mediterranean but Slavic passion, sort of, and also "operatic" in its more farcical-cynical register.
18th century! What a good observation. It’s tough with James Wood — half the time he’s the master of the unexpected connection and half the time I want to throw his fusty high-Anglican bullshit across the room.
Yes, no obligation to enjoy sports ofc — if it doesn't speak to you emotionally it can be a very dismal, toxic spectacle. I have a few essays half-written trying to explain the appeal but it’s extraordinarily hard to write about well without going full cornball or cliche. Although I am a sucker for A. Bartlett Giamatti, father of that Giamatti, former commissioner of MLB, and scholar of Spencer and Donne, who wrote some goofy “baseball is a ritual of Platonic formal beauty” stuff. (Also I will say I admire both of Pittsburgh’s major teams — the gritty, last-of-their-kind Steelers, a team of doomed majesty, of the heroic, desperate goal line stand in bleak midwinter, and the beleaguered Pirates, whose Arcadian ballpark is a bucket list destination for me.)
I would like to hear your take on Anora, I enjoyed it but the final scene didn’t work for me and kind of soured the experience, I get what they were going for on a character level but it didn’t feel as if the film had earned it— it gave you 2 hours of heightened reality, sparkling screwball romance and twitchy one-long-night comedy and then was like “Oh you enjoyed that? Well newsflash — it’s actually really fucked up!” I could be convinced otherwise though.
Yes, I definitely grew up in the shadow of those '70s-era Steelers, despite my general and ressentiment-laden indifference to the game! It's a big football town, though in my experience baseball is discussed less. I've never been to PNC Park, though I believe I was taken a time or two to the late lamented or late imploded Three Rivers Stadium in my youth.
Anora...I honestly didn't read the ending that way, as a Brechtian-feminist attack on the audience, and wouldn't have liked the movie if I had! I thought it was the immensely affecting illustration of the premise underlying the whole film, the slow novelistic melting away of the fairy tale and farce to get to the essentially sympathetic souls of the characters underneath, emblematized in some Levinasian way at the conclusion (I've never read Levinas) by Anora's face in close-up, but also relevant in the cases of her kidnappers, who each also become humanized over the course of the film. The clue is in the early scene where she's talking about her tattoos, and her co-worker has dollar signs but she has a butterfly, i.e., the psyche or soul.
Regarding Bellow, I'm gonna quote myself, from a comment I left at a review on the (old) Pistelli website: "My overriding impression is that he was the literary equivalent of a great barroom talker, the sort of person who has a fascinating way with words but is not necessarily a good storyteller."
He was a novelist but at the same time he wasn't a novelist. But I don't think he really suffers from that, either.
Frankly, I felt Luca was out of his depth (since we're all on first name terms here).
What made Call Me by Your Name and Challengers exciting was the eroticisation of the quotidian: la dolce vita, if you will. The sexual dynamics are complex but there is no moral didacticism. The flesh is pure pleasure. Look at him eat that banana! Look at that dimple! Look at it! Yes, the characters suffer - but they still look hot doing it.
The problem with his Queer, overall, is that everything is TOO beautiful. Look at the shadows cast by the modernist architecture! Look at that nipple! Look at that lemon yellow of the arches inside the Ship Ahoy (but seriously, I would kill for this exact shade of yellow). I would like to say that it is Wes Anderson on acid, but most of the time it is just straight-up Wes Anderson. Every frame tries to be an Edward Hopper painting. There is very little of the sordidness that is never far from the surface with Burroughs.
The actors, though, understood the assignment. Daniel Craig - accurately described by Peter Bradshaw as "needy, horny and mesmeric" (two out of three aint bad, my gen z boyfriend says gesturing in my direction) - deserves an OBE for, inter alia, sucking like a champ. Daan de Wit is a dream from beginning (that look!) to end and will henceforth be a pleasant fixture in all of my best dreams. Jason Schwartzman is a delight as the queer and fat-bodied sidekick, basically a bridge troll compared to the rest of the ensemble (The film also joyfully fails the Bechdel test, accurately representing the queer reality.)
The less said about the Jumanji-style Jungian symbolism and the interpretative dance sequence meant to convey the intensity of an ayahuasca journey the better, but Luca achieved the neoconservative aim of making drugs look as lame as possible - you shoot up and then you just sit there and listen to like 90s dude rock? Sounds boring. It seems to do wonders for the body, though, at least to the image of the body, and that is in the end what matters, isn't it? Isn't it?
Luca's thrilling amoral hedonism is revealed to not go very far beyond good and evil: we end up with the beautiful and the not so beautiful - although even the ugly is portrayed as beautiful: the blood and guts are art directed for the gods. Like Saltburn, it edges towards the truly shocking, but pulls away too quickly. Like The Substance, it does not so much pay homage to Jodorowsky and Lynch and Coppola and Kubrick and Kubrick and Kubrick as directly replicate them. Why do we seem fated to relive a facsimile of the 70s, culturally speaking? Or will we be moving swiftly to the 80s now?
A missed opportunity (there hasn't been a good drug movie since, I dunno, Enter the Void?), especially since the refrain of the film sounds like an affirmation that everybody's favourite non-binary e-witch Ash del Greco might have offered to one of their clients: "I'm not (a) queer, I'm disembodied..."
I appreciate even the passing references to God's speech against personal vengeance -- so much of what feels vile about this Luigi episode is the real-time attempt to aestheticize the grainy, CCTV-footage violence, the wish to beautify what is ultimately an ugly act by a depraved man against ugly and impersonal systems. (Nothing new to this, but its foul taste is always new again.) Some immoral acts simply overcome our art-making instincts, at least while they're still the present and not yet history.
But to the film adaptation question, because there will be one: would that script be a job for a younger DeLillo who could put aside his novelistic distrust of the screen? The killer seems a nut but still a normie, as you noted -- would making him a pathetic avatar in a comical, jaded script (not a tragic one of earnest, vaulting passions) make more sense? DeLillo could probably describe the commentariats' wish to depict the killer as more than he is, while also partaking of the Wop Boy Winter you envision (love that, by the way).
Thank you, totally agree on your first paragraph! DeLillo would definitely get the media frenzy and media chorus right, and he's always good on lone men turning violent due to obsessive thoughts and interests...it's just hard to make that work in any tone other than "comical, jaded" when the lone violent man's reading material is Atomic Habits or whatever. The early farcical 70s DeLillo could do it, but is it worth doing?
I'd say it's not worth doing, since it does tempt a sort of nihilism. That won't stop American filmmakers, though -- I'd guess the early farcical DeLillo is a better pick for such a story, especially compared to an Adam McKay or any comparable contemporary who would attempt to make the killer into the moral icon that mainstream films require (rather than leaving him as an uninteresting vessel empty, but empty enough for a troubled society to fill with its wishes.)
The short story isn’t dead. At least not in genre circles. What mark it leaves is arguable, but I do like a well curated collection (and not just the author plopping together a bunch of stories they’ve written regardless of quality). I’ve read two collections recently by Eliza Clark and Leyna Krow that I liked very much (I reviewed them both for Locus and her on the ol’ Substack).
Yes, I was thinking mainly of the realist "Chekhov" type of story that was the mainstay of prestigious often university-funded journals. I agree on genre. For example, the collection I praised last week, Anna Krivolapova's Incurable Graphomania, while very "literary" in style, is genre-adjacent (thriller, conspiracy, true crime) in subject matter.
Odd connection, but that Twitter poster’s name is clearly referencing one of the all-time best episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Good taste on both counts.
re: challengers, if i, noted homosexual, could face my sports related trauma, our gracious host should not deny himself the pleasure of seeing, through Luca’s queerwashing lens, zendaya serving pure c**t.
Thanks, just Henry will do nicely! (Though 'Brother Begler' has a nice ring to it). You're totally right about plot, though I think in Bellow's case the plot is often there, it just happens to be in illustrating the movement of the soul from one state to another. By the end of Herzog you feel like you've been on a comparable journey to Pierre's in War and Peace, it just happens to have taken place in some very quotidian interactions. Where Amis fails is that by the end of The Information at least, I didn't feel as if I were in a very different place from where I started, for all the fireworks in between.
Re your footnote's footnote: I'm surprised I haven't seen much talk about Queer in the public sphere: maybe Challengers exhausted all the discourse (also, I expect better than sportsballisms from you! -- pro tennis at its height is the supreme clash of wills, like watching an hours-long dissection of someone's soul in public -- DFW for all his faults knew this).
Anyway it's a rather awkward marriage between, if you'll permit some broad white ethnic stereotyping, Luca's operatic sad boy passion vs the icy, categorizing WASP sensibilities of Burroughs, who only hints at the melancholy soul within after you've read pages and pages of pretty sick stuff. But it has stuck with me, there is some unforgettable imagery, like Death In Venice meets Altered States, and Daniel Craig, who initially seems so wrong, gives a strange, sweaty, speed-addled performance. Burroughs was a very important writer for me and I expect he will be back on trend at some point but it hasn't happened yet. I think he's a victim of his last period of prominence having been being big in the 2005-2014 or so Mark Fisher-JG Ballard-"we're surrounded by the totalizing machines of capital" circles, which is a valid reading of his work I suppose but misses the pain and loneliness and utopian longing that you find in something as superficially shocking as Cities of the Red Night.
There's also another instance of high Mediterranean passion in theaters that also seems to have passed by the critics: Maria, the Angelina Jolie last-days-of-Maria Callas biopic. Another strange film anchored by a strange performance, though Jolie is barred out rather than sped up. In both cases, I spent the first 30 minutes in profound skepticism -- in Maria's case I was convinced I was witnessing a disaster, one of the worst movies and performances I've ever seen in a theater -- but by the end of both films I found myself quite moved. Although burying Maria on Netflix is a huge disservice, I expect half my reaction just came from hearing Callas's voice through some big theater speakers. I think there's lots to chew on in both, if you get around to them I hope to hear your thoughts!
Thanks! I do generally agree with you about Bellow. He's a bit of a straw man for the point I was making in the above, but the soul transformation you mention is there, whereas Amis, as James Wood said in his elegy, is very 18th century, deals in types, almost in humors, as far as I could tell from London Fields.
I intellectually accept the metaphysical legitimacy of the sporting life, it's just not one I have ever been able to get interested in. I accept the "sportsballism" critique, though, and it's no doubt accurate, a Millennial hipster tendency, acquired in my suburban Daria-esque adolescence, that I've never outgrown.
I definitely want to see Queer. I haven't read the book but found what Burroughs I did read compelling for just the reasons of utopian longing you mention. I am intrigued by your descriptions of the film. I keep meaning to write something here about Anora, which I loved—not Mediterranean but Slavic passion, sort of, and also "operatic" in its more farcical-cynical register.
18th century! What a good observation. It’s tough with James Wood — half the time he’s the master of the unexpected connection and half the time I want to throw his fusty high-Anglican bullshit across the room.
Yes, no obligation to enjoy sports ofc — if it doesn't speak to you emotionally it can be a very dismal, toxic spectacle. I have a few essays half-written trying to explain the appeal but it’s extraordinarily hard to write about well without going full cornball or cliche. Although I am a sucker for A. Bartlett Giamatti, father of that Giamatti, former commissioner of MLB, and scholar of Spencer and Donne, who wrote some goofy “baseball is a ritual of Platonic formal beauty” stuff. (Also I will say I admire both of Pittsburgh’s major teams — the gritty, last-of-their-kind Steelers, a team of doomed majesty, of the heroic, desperate goal line stand in bleak midwinter, and the beleaguered Pirates, whose Arcadian ballpark is a bucket list destination for me.)
I would like to hear your take on Anora, I enjoyed it but the final scene didn’t work for me and kind of soured the experience, I get what they were going for on a character level but it didn’t feel as if the film had earned it— it gave you 2 hours of heightened reality, sparkling screwball romance and twitchy one-long-night comedy and then was like “Oh you enjoyed that? Well newsflash — it’s actually really fucked up!” I could be convinced otherwise though.
Yes, I definitely grew up in the shadow of those '70s-era Steelers, despite my general and ressentiment-laden indifference to the game! It's a big football town, though in my experience baseball is discussed less. I've never been to PNC Park, though I believe I was taken a time or two to the late lamented or late imploded Three Rivers Stadium in my youth.
Anora...I honestly didn't read the ending that way, as a Brechtian-feminist attack on the audience, and wouldn't have liked the movie if I had! I thought it was the immensely affecting illustration of the premise underlying the whole film, the slow novelistic melting away of the fairy tale and farce to get to the essentially sympathetic souls of the characters underneath, emblematized in some Levinasian way at the conclusion (I've never read Levinas) by Anora's face in close-up, but also relevant in the cases of her kidnappers, who each also become humanized over the course of the film. The clue is in the early scene where she's talking about her tattoos, and her co-worker has dollar signs but she has a butterfly, i.e., the psyche or soul.
Regarding Bellow, I'm gonna quote myself, from a comment I left at a review on the (old) Pistelli website: "My overriding impression is that he was the literary equivalent of a great barroom talker, the sort of person who has a fascinating way with words but is not necessarily a good storyteller."
He was a novelist but at the same time he wasn't a novelist. But I don't think he really suffers from that, either.
Saw Queer yesterday.
Frankly, I felt Luca was out of his depth (since we're all on first name terms here).
What made Call Me by Your Name and Challengers exciting was the eroticisation of the quotidian: la dolce vita, if you will. The sexual dynamics are complex but there is no moral didacticism. The flesh is pure pleasure. Look at him eat that banana! Look at that dimple! Look at it! Yes, the characters suffer - but they still look hot doing it.
The problem with his Queer, overall, is that everything is TOO beautiful. Look at the shadows cast by the modernist architecture! Look at that nipple! Look at that lemon yellow of the arches inside the Ship Ahoy (but seriously, I would kill for this exact shade of yellow). I would like to say that it is Wes Anderson on acid, but most of the time it is just straight-up Wes Anderson. Every frame tries to be an Edward Hopper painting. There is very little of the sordidness that is never far from the surface with Burroughs.
The actors, though, understood the assignment. Daniel Craig - accurately described by Peter Bradshaw as "needy, horny and mesmeric" (two out of three aint bad, my gen z boyfriend says gesturing in my direction) - deserves an OBE for, inter alia, sucking like a champ. Daan de Wit is a dream from beginning (that look!) to end and will henceforth be a pleasant fixture in all of my best dreams. Jason Schwartzman is a delight as the queer and fat-bodied sidekick, basically a bridge troll compared to the rest of the ensemble (The film also joyfully fails the Bechdel test, accurately representing the queer reality.)
The less said about the Jumanji-style Jungian symbolism and the interpretative dance sequence meant to convey the intensity of an ayahuasca journey the better, but Luca achieved the neoconservative aim of making drugs look as lame as possible - you shoot up and then you just sit there and listen to like 90s dude rock? Sounds boring. It seems to do wonders for the body, though, at least to the image of the body, and that is in the end what matters, isn't it? Isn't it?
Luca's thrilling amoral hedonism is revealed to not go very far beyond good and evil: we end up with the beautiful and the not so beautiful - although even the ugly is portrayed as beautiful: the blood and guts are art directed for the gods. Like Saltburn, it edges towards the truly shocking, but pulls away too quickly. Like The Substance, it does not so much pay homage to Jodorowsky and Lynch and Coppola and Kubrick and Kubrick and Kubrick as directly replicate them. Why do we seem fated to relive a facsimile of the 70s, culturally speaking? Or will we be moving swiftly to the 80s now?
A missed opportunity (there hasn't been a good drug movie since, I dunno, Enter the Void?), especially since the refrain of the film sounds like an affirmation that everybody's favourite non-binary e-witch Ash del Greco might have offered to one of their clients: "I'm not (a) queer, I'm disembodied..."
I appreciate even the passing references to God's speech against personal vengeance -- so much of what feels vile about this Luigi episode is the real-time attempt to aestheticize the grainy, CCTV-footage violence, the wish to beautify what is ultimately an ugly act by a depraved man against ugly and impersonal systems. (Nothing new to this, but its foul taste is always new again.) Some immoral acts simply overcome our art-making instincts, at least while they're still the present and not yet history.
But to the film adaptation question, because there will be one: would that script be a job for a younger DeLillo who could put aside his novelistic distrust of the screen? The killer seems a nut but still a normie, as you noted -- would making him a pathetic avatar in a comical, jaded script (not a tragic one of earnest, vaulting passions) make more sense? DeLillo could probably describe the commentariats' wish to depict the killer as more than he is, while also partaking of the Wop Boy Winter you envision (love that, by the way).
Thank you, totally agree on your first paragraph! DeLillo would definitely get the media frenzy and media chorus right, and he's always good on lone men turning violent due to obsessive thoughts and interests...it's just hard to make that work in any tone other than "comical, jaded" when the lone violent man's reading material is Atomic Habits or whatever. The early farcical 70s DeLillo could do it, but is it worth doing?
I'd say it's not worth doing, since it does tempt a sort of nihilism. That won't stop American filmmakers, though -- I'd guess the early farcical DeLillo is a better pick for such a story, especially compared to an Adam McKay or any comparable contemporary who would attempt to make the killer into the moral icon that mainstream films require (rather than leaving him as an uninteresting vessel empty, but empty enough for a troubled society to fill with its wishes.)
The short story isn’t dead. At least not in genre circles. What mark it leaves is arguable, but I do like a well curated collection (and not just the author plopping together a bunch of stories they’ve written regardless of quality). I’ve read two collections recently by Eliza Clark and Leyna Krow that I liked very much (I reviewed them both for Locus and her on the ol’ Substack).
Yes, I was thinking mainly of the realist "Chekhov" type of story that was the mainstay of prestigious often university-funded journals. I agree on genre. For example, the collection I praised last week, Anna Krivolapova's Incurable Graphomania, while very "literary" in style, is genre-adjacent (thriller, conspiracy, true crime) in subject matter.
I’ve got a copy of Incurable Graphomania. I’ve had it for some time and your rec has pushed it up my TBR pile.
Odd connection, but that Twitter poster’s name is clearly referencing one of the all-time best episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Good taste on both counts.
I forgot about that one, but I just re-watched the credit sequence on YouTube and it all came back to me. Now if the name had been Rowsdower...