Like a lot of trans people, I'm beginning to wonder why Brianna Ghey's mother seems to be so happy to appear in outlets like The Guardian and the BBC blaming her daughter's death on social media instead of, you know, the institutionalised transphobia of the places that seem so strangely keen to platform her. Especially when the policies she calls for seem almost certain to make it harder for other trans kids to find community online, and will indeed make it harder for abused kids of any gender to access what could be lifesaving support.
So I thought to myself, why on Earth would she do that? And, well, you know where that tends to lead me:
Esther’s Baby
She learned, when she was very small,
that every mother wants a doll,
and not somebody who desires and dreams,
and seeks a place outside of others’ schemes.
Something to dress and show around,
a bump to bear with beaming pride
and, presently, a bouncing babe!
Not something for itself, no - a thing made,
pure product, matrix-minted issue,
wee feet to fit a dainty little shoe:
a brand new dolly, just for her;
a merit badge proclaiming care,
A sign that she was in the club,
A girl fulfilled. A woman. Mum.
And should her darling fail to settle,
should nights become a sleepless battle,
even her complaints next day
would, to a fellow mum, convey
a maker’s pride in execution.
Her lovely boy. Her job well done.
And if boy became something that child would chafe,
I asked myself the question: what does someone like Wes Streeting do for fun? And then a vision descended on me, as it had before when I learned the horrifying truth about Keir Starmer, and reader: I knew.
The thoughts I outlined about different forms of performance yesterday were on my my mind as I watched The Last Showgirl. It really is as good as everyone is saying, but the thing that struck me the most about it is a kind of performance which is by no means restricted to professional entertainers.
The titular protagonist of Gia Coppola's film, Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is struggling to come to terms with the fact that the Las Vegas revue she's been part of for thirty years is approaching the end of its run, and, in the process, having to reassess her place in the landscape of contemporary employment and gender politics. You realise, as the film goes on, that for Shelly the casino stage is more than just her workplace, it's her safe space, her refuge from a changing world she understands less and less as she gets older. In this respect Shelly reminded me a lot of Mickey Rourke's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson in The Wrestler, and like that character, another major strand of Shelly's story is her attempt to reconcile herself with her estranged daughter Hannah (played by Billie Lourd).
Shelly has a habit of saying things about her show which sound like PR lines from a press release she long ago internalised, which are routinely shot down by the younger members of the cast:
Shelly: We were ambassadors for style and grace...The costumes. I mean it makes you feel like you're stepping out of the pages of Vogue magazine. I think that's why women like to come to the show. The glamour is undeniable.
Mary-Anne: The glamour is undeniable. I think I could deny the glamour.
The most brutal of these takedowns comes from Hannah, in a scene where she confronts Shelly for leaving her 'in the casino parking lot with a Gameboy while you did two shows a night':
Shelly: I mean if you can do what you love for thirty years, you know, and be passionate about your career...
Hannah: What kind of career is this? You're in the goddam back of 80 topless dancers! This was worth missing bedtime for most of my childhood? Was it?
You're in the goddam back. This line sums up the cognitive dissonance Shelly spends the film struggling with. It may be her on the show's poster but it's her from thirty years ago, when she was young. Shelly isn't the star of the show now - she's in the back, just another body on the stage, sewing up her own torn wing-cape so the cost of having it repaired can't be docked from her pay, even as she tells others (and herself) that her job gives her freedom, that she's doing what she loves, and that it's something she is 'passionate' about.
Ah yes, 'passion'. That word began showing up in advertisements for jobs around two decades ago regardless of - indeed, almost in inverse proportion to - the degree to which the job would seem to give workers something to be passionate about. One wonders how many people, by now, have had to pretend to be passionate about ready meals or tennis shoes or ISAs in order to convince a middle manager or a recruitment consultant who surely knows that they're lying that there's no lie they won't tell to get a job. Or, worse, no lie they'll eventually convince themselves to believe.
This popular motivational slogan started life as the title of a searing exposé of the Amway pyramid scheme. These days it's used unironically. It's meritocracy all over again.
I read today that due to a crisis in the broadcasting industry, senior TV producers are having to take jobs stacking shelves in supermarkets. I imagine these producers having to perform 'passion' for the supermarket experience to some retail manager in order to land those jobs. I imagine them sitting in the breakroom, looking at posters exhorting them to perform some version of positivity trademarked by their company's internal advertising department, no doubt with a cutesy acronym devised by somebody who can use the word 'learn' as a noun without feeling an urge to throw up.
They've seen the prices going up. They've seen more and more young men and women with sunken cheekbones trying to sneak food out past security. They've seen more and more goods get security tagged. Meat, when they started, then cheese. And then butter.
The manager, who sat there during the interview and made notes on a piece of branded paper while they tried to demonstrate their passion for hooking people up with skimmed milk or tinned fish, won't hear a word of sympathy spoken for the shoplifters. 'It's organised,' he says. 'They're gangs. They sell it on. I saw a programme on the telly.'
And the producer thinks about explaining that she knows exactly how programmes like that are put together, how press releases and video packages get laundered into a vague simulacrum of fact, but she decides against it because she has a mortgage, she has kids. She needs the shifts. So she just blankly says 'yeah' and makes herself smile once again as she wheels a trolley of white sliced bread to the shelves which face the in-store bakery.
We may not have our tits out; we may not wear sequins and crowns: but, under neoliberalism, we are all the last showgirl.
A bit of self-promotion to start with: on Saturday March 15th I'm performing at Transtock, an all-trans music and poetry festival at The Globe pub in Newcastle. I'm really excited about this one, not just because it's my first proper gig since December but also because I'll get to see Gaydar, which I've been wanting to do for ages. Of course it also means I have to work out and rehearse a set list, which has got me thinking about performing.
Well, that and the fact that, as I've mentioned before on here, I'm in the process of getting an official diagnosis of autism and ADHD. This has led to me thinking a lot about the ways in which I've found certain workplaces so difficult to cope with over the years. And what I've realised is that one of the reasons I found them so difficult was that, as well as getting stressed-out from all the normally anxiety-inducing aspects of those jobs, I was also in a state of perpetual nerves from the aspects of those jobs most of the people around me found relaxing.
Because I can't manage small talk. I can't just chat with people. I can't 'banter' (and indeed, as you'll recall if you're a longtime reader of this blog, I frankly have some issues with the existence of banter itself as a concept). If something which interests me comes up, then I can talk to people about it but I know that, even then, I can come off as weird to a lot of people. It's hard for me to just stay at the surface level on things, to not see connections or go off on tangents. And if a conversation strays into the area of something I feel strongly about, it's hard for me to stay civil or just laugh shit off, because, like a lot of autistic people, I have an intense sensitivity to injustice.
(And not to go off on a tangent here, but why is that pathological and not the fact that neurotypical people seem so much more relaxed about things being unjust? Why is being able to not give a shit about people considered the healthy behaviour? I mean do you ever stop to think about whether or not that might be why the planet is irreparably fucked up? Seriously, if the rule we followed brought us to this, of what use was the fucking rule?)
...and the possibility of not being able to rein in an outburst like the above is why I find myself trying as hard as possible to stay on guard at all times in even the most minor social interaction. Smile politely. Don't be weird. Say the right words. Don't be weird. Oh they said something back. Don't be weird. What do normal people say at times like this? Don't be weird! Why are they looking at me like that don't be weird don't be weird. Wait are they looking as well oh God no don't be weird don't be weird don't be wait what did they just say? Don't react don't react don't, oh God don't don't be weird don't be weirddon't be weird oh SHIT oh FUCK NOW THEY ALL THINK I'M FUCKING WEIRD.
People always used to compliment me, at work, on what a professional sounding telephone greeting I had. And this always used to bother me because as far as I could tell I was just basically saying exactly the same thing as them. I was doing what we were supposed to do - create a sentence we could repeat in our voices with the correct rhythm and intonation a hundred times a day if necessary, and rehearse it until we could say it in our sleep, if necessary (guess what I say most of the time whenever I answer a phone in my dreams, regardless of the context?).
It has taken years for me to realise that most of them had just noted that it said 'polite, friendly greeting' and some bullet points on the call script and would just work on that, instead of devising and refining their own personal antiphon. It's like the time I realised some people weren't lying when they say they had a happy childhood all over again.
And I'm beginning to see now that the reason these people still had energy left over after work while I was completely drained was because they were actually able to relax by spending time in each others' company on breaks and over lunches, whereas I, from the moment I left the house until the moment I got home, was engaging in a work of supreme method acting to play the character of Normal Person.
But hang on, AJ, why should that be a problem for you? I mean, you opened this entry by talking about a gig you have coming up. Why should you have trouble performing, when you're a performer?
Well, indeed I am, but performing on stage and performing in everyday life are different things. For one thing, there's a clear demarcation between being on stage and off. Or rather there's a demarcation between the type of performing I do on stage and the kind I do when I'm hanging out with people afterwards because, yeah, I'm still worrying about Not Looking Weird when I'm at the bar or whatever. In fact, it sometimes feels as if being on stage is the only place where I get to be as weird as I want to be without having to make any excuses (and if you've seen me perform, you know it can get pretty weird).
A stage is somewhere I have full control and total freedom. It's my time. I know exactly what I'm going to say, how I'm going to say it, what movements I'll make with my body, what topics will be addressed. If there is something I feel is unjust I am going to talk about it, and in words I have prepared and refined to have maximum impact. I do not have to worry about taking turns because the audience knows how long I am meant to be on stage for, and I needn't worry that I'm rambling because I have edited down everything I am going to say, even the bits between poems, and I have rehearsed with a stopwatch to make sure I bring things home on time. It is, quite simply, so much easier than LARPing as a Normal Fucking Person.
Brian Kiteley, author of The 4 A.M. Breakthrough, a book of 'unconventional writing exercises' I am currently reading because I am in the process of preparing a creative writing course for students at the Recovery College where I currently volunteer, quotes Fran Lebowitz as having once observed that 'After forty, Christmas seems to arrive every three months.' From this I take it that, at least from her forties onwards, Ms Lebowitz has known sufficient material comfort that Christmas has never been a financial problem for her. I say this because I am 47 years old and, for the past five years, I have not known a year in which I was not crushingly, grindingly aware of the gravity of that festival and the dent it would put in my bank account.
I say gravity because, like a planet, Christmas, for the poor, distorts all the space around it - both the months beforehand, in which money for presents, cards and wrapping must somehow be found, and the months afterwards, in which one must, Sisyphus-like, attempt the impossible feat of stretching even less than usual out until payday, to the point where the brevity of February is experienced as a profound fiduciary mercy. With the advent of March, one can breath again - a little. But by September at the latest the fretting over gifts begins anew.
Last year I tried to follow a saving regime which I thought would make Christmas a breeze. The theory seemed simple: on the first day of the month, transfer one penny from the current to the savings account; on the second, save two pence; on the third, three, and so on. Going up in increments of only a penny a day, and starting anew at the beginning of each month, I calculated that I could save enough money to handily pay for all the expenses associated with Christmas, might perhaps even be able to purchase my relatives something which felt properly special for once.
This did not work. The cost of living increased; my flat flooded; soon enough I found myself forced to empty what little I had saved back into my current account, and Christmas, which had seemed tame, resumed its place as what it had always been: the dragon waiting at the summit of the year, eager as always to exact its crippling tribute. And I resumed, again, my state of knowing, in the depths of my pockets and the pit of my stomach, every single step I would have to crawl up to that summit.
Yes, I know I used this yesterday. I'm going to use it as the actual thumbnail when I record the last entry for my YouTube channel as well. Deal with it.
Let's join some dots. In the preceding entry, we looked at Todd Field's Tàr, and the way in which it has been misread, perhaps intentionally, by many critics as a tale of artistic genius destroyed by cancel culture when anyone who pays attention to the film clocks pretty quickly that its protagonist is both unambiguously an abuser and very obviously faking genius: Lydia Tàr has worked out how to give off the signifiers which allow her to pass as a cultural icon while avoiding any truly challenging artistic engagement. In much the same way that Stephen Fry is a stupid person's idea of a clever person, Tàr is a Radio 3 listener's idea of a contemporary classical artist: committed to the canon, apolitical, dismissive of the avant-garde, happy to trot out an amusing anecdote and make the kind of cultural references that inspire a sensible chuckle in her aging and affluent audience. Happy to flatter the pretensions of that audience - to reassure them that they must be very clever, very cultured people if they consume her content. And thus well-placed, until the revelation of her career of abuse, to function as one part of an edifice of cultural product based around flattering and indulging that audience.
And in the entry before that, I drew your attention to Elizabeth Sandifer's essay The Cuddled Little Vice, which dissects the life and work of the fantasy author and prolific rapist Neil Gaiman. In that essay, Sandifer pretty comprehensively documents the process by which Gaiman, too, learned how to give off and manipulate the signifiers which allowed him to pass as a cultural icon while never producing anything too challenging, anything which might prove too alienating towards a mass readership. While there were moments in his early work where he threatened to do so, most notably in some arcs of Sandman and some of his earlier, more personal works like Violent Cases and Mr. Punch, it was a con Gaiman had perfected by the time of the publication of American Gods, his first prose novel which was not either a collaboration with a more experienced author (Good Omens) or a retread of something he had first approached in a different genre (Neverwhere, Stardust) - after which Gaiman, unlike Orpheus or Lot's wife, never looked back. After American Gods, Gaiman also became part of that midcult edifice, with his own affluent readership to flatter. Until, like Lydia Tàr, his crimes caught up with him.
It is worth thinking, though, about how those crimes caught up with their perpetrators, both in Field's film and in Gaiman's real life. In Tàr, the revelation unambiguously comes from below - from the young women Lydia abuses and tosses aside. The circumstances of Gaiman's downfall were murkier. While, most notably in a thorough (and thoroughly damning) New York magazine article, the voices of the women Gaiman abused are now being heard, the first people who brought the case against him to public attention were very much not bringing the news from those below.
Indeed, one of the people responsible for the Tortoise media podcast that first brought Gaiman's crimes to public notice is Rachel Johnson, the sister of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a man whose attitude to sexual assault is, to put it lightly, somewhat concerning, and who attends parties given by the Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev, which are reputedly also attended by 'models' who, like Gaiman's victims, are made to sign non-disclosure agreements. As it happens, Lebedev owns the Evening Standard newspaper, which employs Rachel Johnson as a columnist (undoubtedly entirely on merit), and where she made a rather interesting admission about her reasons for exposing Gaiman in a column titled 'I broke the Neil Gaiman story, but I never wanted him cancelled like this'.
In that column, in which Johnson is careful to note that Gaiman 'was a kind, vocal, public ally of all the most worthy, trendy minorities and causes from refugees to trans kids', she claims that it was never her intention to bring about his 'blanket cancellation'. Rather, she wanted to 'probe the greyest of grey areas - allegations of sexual abuse within an otherwise consensual relationship', noting that many cases of intimate partner violence go unreported and that prosecutions can be undermined because the victims 'very often send their alleged abuser loving messages afterwards, that can be used as the crux of any defence', before weakly concluding that 'it's...complicated' and ending by saying 'I hope everyone listens to the podcast', which she links to.
It's almost a nothing of a column, but it's important for what it represents. You'll recall that I ended the Tàr essay by musing on the mechanisms by which that film's protagonist would probably, over time, be able to return to some version of the spotlight. My belief is that in Johnson's column we are seeing those mechanisms operating pretty much in plain sight. A lot of trans people, myself among them, feel that the people behind the podcast that broke the Gaiman allegations did so because they hoped to provoke us into rallying round to protect a prominent ally - the way the transphobes at the Guardian suddenly lost all enthusiasm for believing and protecting women when one of their star columnists, Nick Cohen, was outed as a serial groper. As always, the terverts projected their own behavioural standards onto us (the same way they do when they call us 'groomers'). But we don't roll that way. Trans women had no hesitation in kicking Gaiman into the goddam gutter, never mind the kerb, for what he did. Indeed, the title of Sandifer's essay comes from a series of remarkable, vitriolic sonnets trans author Roz Kaveney wrote out of the sheer rage she felt on learning the truth about a man she once called a friend.
In saying she never wanted Gaiman's 'blanket cancellation', Johnson is, partly, expressing her frustration that we didn't close ranks in the way she expected, but she is also offering the now-disgraced author a quid pro quo. Drop your support for those 'worthy, trendy minorities', Neil. Write something suitably penitent about the 'grey area' you drifted into. Blame it on the trannies, blame it on your trauma, say you got all turned around but now your head's screwed on and looking in the right direction - and you can have it all back. Let us help you.
Cancellation comes from both above and below, but you only stay cancelled if the people with the real power decide you should stay that way. If Neil Gaiman abandons his previous, vocal support for trans rights, some of the very same people who condemn him now will be all to happy to aid him in his return to literary respectability. If he doesn't, then he will stay cancelled and we will know that he does, at least, have some kind of character, some form of moral centre. But frankly: the man is a rapist. I doubt that he does. If The Cuddled Little Vice tells us anything it's that Neil Gaiman, who 'learned about the world from ruthless people', is ruthless in pursuit of getting what he wants.
To be brutally honest, I fully expect him to turn his back on trans people if that's the price of regaining the spotlight he thinks he deserves, and the only reason I'm writing this is so I can say I put it down as a marker for when the bastard does it.
I am, to an embarrassing degree, a fan of Cate Blanchett. And yet, for a long time, I resisted seeing her Oscar-winning performance in Todd Fields' movie Tár because I absorbed the critical consensus on it as a portrait of an artistic genius unfairly brought low by the dreaded and definitely real phenomenon of 'cancel culture'. This has been the consensus about the movie whether or not one agrees with its supposed central theme. For an example of criticism that takes Lydia Tár's side, at least on the hoary old question of 'separating the art from the artist', consider this video from YouTuber The Misfit Pond; for an excoriation of Field for his 'regressive aesthetics' and political views, there is this review of the movie by Richard Brody for TheNew Yorker. Despite taking very different points of view both of these pieces of criticism have two things in common: firstly, they believe that Field presents Tár as a great artist who is undermined and destroyed by identitarian mediocrities who would rather have a safe space than a challenging encounter with the classical canon; and, more importantly, they are both completely, almost comically, wrong.
In Brody's case, there might be an element of standing up for his employer at play: one of the themes Field actually tackles in the movie is the role of the classical music establishment, and indeed the whole bourgeois culture racket of which it forms a part, in enabling Tár's abuse of her young female protégés, both directly in terms of looking the other way or being intimidated into silence, and indirectly by building up the legend of Lydia Tár. Field presents that legend to us almost at the very beginning of his film, via the device of a fawning interview between Lydia and Brody's New Yorker colleague Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker Festival. This téte-â-téte is intercut with scenes of Tár and her assistant, Francesca, doing the work of constructing the conductor's visual legend (significantly, by having a tailor construct an exact replica of Claudio Abbado's suit from the cover of a previous recording of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, the piece Tár will shortly begin to rehearse with her orchestra).
This sequence establishes two things about the film's protagonist right from the outset: first, that Tár's behaviour towards her younger female colleagues is unambiguously inappropriate (we see her place her own bare foot on top of Francesca's in a gesture of dominating intimacy); and, second, in ways both large and small (she fails to correctly pronounce the word 'Pauline' - as in 'conversion'; her interpretation of Mahler 5 is utterly facile and sentimental) she is, as a popular YouTube thumbnail phrase would put it, a HACK FRAUD. You can almost sympathise with Brody, in a way. If he has any insight at all as a critic he must surely sense, on some level, what this scene is saying: but to admit as much would be to insult one of his colleagues, the magazine he works for and the bien-pensant readers who shell out for tickets to see Gopnik lob softballs to the likes of Epstein associate Malcolm Gladwell.
Call me a drama channel if you must, but this liar needs to be taken down
(Somewhat to his credit, Gopnik seems to have known his role at least a little - in a piece for Esquirehe notes that 'the scene was, in a way, a spoof of a certain kind of cultural occasion which I had often been part of'. He also observes that, when he expressed some doubt about Tár's supposedly having been mentored by Leonard Bernstein, 'Todd...gave me a steady opaque non-look, making me realise that this truth must be both germane to the story and crucial not to over-italicise'. Given that he is playing himself in this scene, one is given to wonder what truths germane to the story Gopnik has chosen not to over-italicise in his real life interviews.)
The scene The Misfit Pond chose to base his video on, in which Tár gives a class to Juilliard students whose time she chooses to waste by spending most of it singling out one of them, Max, for humiliation, is one of the more popular clips from the movie on YouTube. It's especially popular among right-wing types who read it at surface-level as an entry in the 'Big Smart Person in Suit OWNS WOKE College Student with FACTS!!! and LOGIC!!!!1!!!' genre because, early in their exchange, the student Lydia spends most of the lesson degrading identifies as a 'queer pangender BIPOC' individual, and expresses a dislike of Bach for what that student perceives as his misogyny. Both Pond and the chuds see Tár in this scene as standing up for an engagement with challenging music against those who would prefer to stay in their safe space.
This reading, however, completely ignores the context: Lydia is pivoting the entire lesson from discussion of the work of contemporary composer Anna Thorvaldsottir to a celebration of Johann Sebastian Bach: a blatantly obvious attempt, having been challenged by the students' choice of music, to force the discussion back into her safe space. Even there, she does a poor job of making the case for Bach: Max may decry the randy old goat as a misogynist, on the grounds of his having sired a massive quantity of offspring, but here is the sum total of what Lydia Tár, classical maestro, tells Max in an effort to defend one of her (and my!) favourite composers from this charge:
1) Albert Schweitzer wrote a book about Bach, which people really like.
2) The conductor Antonia Brico was so taken with Schweitzer's book on Bach that she travelled to Africa to learn from Schweitzer himself.
3) A picture exists of Antonia Brico, presumably on this African odyssey, wearing a pith helmet: Lydia has this picture somewhere in her collection.
As a defence, this is risible. Tár tells us one fact about Albert Schweitzer, one and a half about Antonia Brico, and an amusing detail about her photography collection. She tells us nothing about why we should care about Bach, but she does reveal something of herself, something we see again and again throughout the movie: she is obsessed with gossip and trivia about artists and intellectuals - the kind of stuff that plays well at midcult circle-jerks like the New Yorker Festival, where she dutifully reels off that well-worn Radio 3 nugget about Jean-Baptiste Lully, the first classical conductor, keeping time by banging a staff on the floor and injuring his foot in the process. When her mentor Andris, played by Julian Glover, refers to Schopenhauer in a conversation which threatens to tread too deeply into the question of her sensitivity to noise, Lydia steers the conversation into more comfortable territory (for her) by asking if it's true that the philosopher was once sued for knocking a woman down the stairs.
I don't think Tár invokes Bach in this scene because of any deep connection she feels towards his music: I think she does so because she's casting around for an example of a composer from the canon, and she picks Johann Sebastian because he represents the ne plus ultra of 'music clever people like', an impression only strengthened by her decision to drag poor Max to the piano and play them surely one of the least aesthetically challenging bits of Bach you can pull out of your toolbox, the Prelude in C Major (a piece so clichéd it merits mention in Innuendo Studios' excellent video 'List of Songs that Represent "Smart Music"'). In terms of Blanchett's performance, this is one of the highlights of the film for how heavily she leans into what a narcissistic creep Tár really is, overacting and doing some real fingernails down a chalkboard voicework as part of Lydia's schtick. The actor playing Max, Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist, also deserves praise for the way he conveys how uncomfortable his character feels at being subjected to this performance: at one point Max looks out in desperation at their fellow students, as if begging one of them to come to their rescue. As an artist who occasionally gives workshops myself, I can only hope I've never given any student I've taught any reason to give their classmates such a look.
Perhaps it's out of some fellow feeling for Max that a student later releases an edited clip of Lydia's behaviour that makes her look even worse - or perhaps they do it just because they realise how much of Tár's performance is for her own benefit and not that of the students. Not that she doesn't claim otherwise: in a line which tells us a lot about how shallow her engagement with music really is, the great conductor tells the class she prays that they will 'be spared the embarrassment of standing on a podium with 4'33'' trying to sell a car without an engine' and admonishes them that their time at Juilliard is the time 'to conduct music that actually requires something from you.'
As misunderstandings of 4'33'' go, this is on par with Columbia University Professor John McWhorter's complaint, in the New York Times, that he could not play that piece during a seminar this year because 'the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building.' The point of John Cage's seminal piece, much derided by those who enjoy the low-hanging fruit of mocking the avant-garde for its supposed pretension, is of course that during any particular performance of it, whatever sounds are heard during the piece are the piece: if you believe that John Cage devised it in order to draw our attention to the soothing sound of birdsong, you are misunderstanding it, and Cage, badly. And you are doing likewise when you dismiss it as something that does not require something from the conductor. In fact, it requires the conductor to get out of the way: to stand still, in silence, and do nothing. We see how difficult Lydia would find that when we finally get to see her conducting: Tár's style is theatrical and overbearing, which, as conductor David Bloom noted when interviewed by Vanity Fair, 'is probably shaped by the way Blanchett sees and plays this character'. As far as Lydia Tár is concerned, she doesn't just start the show, she is the show: that's one reason why the film's ending, in which she plays second fiddle to a screen showing footage from Capcom's Monster Hunter: Worlds for an audience of cosplaying gamers, is such a humiliation for her.
What it is not, of course, is the dreaded 'cancellation'. Or, more accurately, it is a depiction of the reality of what those who write long editorials about the horror of cancellation in magazines like The New Yorker actually mean by that word. Because Lydia Tàr, for all that her career has supposedly been destroyed by the revelations of her history of abusing her assistants and students, is still working as a conductor. Working in circumstances she finds humiliating and, in one memorable scene, vomit-inducing, but working nevertheless. We even see her meet with her new talent agency, who discuss her road back from being exposed as a predator. Field presents cancellation not as an inescapable apocalypse, but a temporary setback, a chastening of the ego perhaps, but an eminently survivable one - as it has proven for figures like the once-cancelled Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, or indeed former Gopnik interviewee Malcolm Gladwell, who parlayed the revelation of his association with Jeffrey Epstein into yet another of his faux-intellectual, glorified self-help books.
What has changed for Tàr after her exposure is that she will never have the kind of unquestioned acclaim she once experienced. She will never finish the Mahler symphony cycle; she will have to dine in restaurants with less expensive linen and less storied histories than she's used to; she will experience pushback far more serious than what she got from Max if she tries to give another celebrity seminar at Juilliard. She may experience the humiliation of seeing students turn their backs on her, en masse, if she tries to give a commencement address. But the same midcult culture racketeers who made her career and enabled her offending will, over time, help her back into some version of the limelight. There will be the opportunity of a 'searing' interview about her experiences, followed by articles, perhaps in journals which lean somewhat more to the right than The New Yorker (maybe The Atlantic will find her more their speed?), followed, in time, by a memoir.
It will never, however, be possible for Lydia Tàr to pretend that she sprang unbidden from the head of Zeus. The mechanisms which keep her in the spotlight will now be a little too visible; it will be a little too obvious that she achieved her position not solely on merit but, as her wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) points out, through astute politicking. And in laying bare the midcult circle-jerk she owes her once-exalted position too, her cancellation risks, in turn, calling into question the status of her accomplices in the culture racket - the Gopniks, the Andrises, the Gladwells, the omniscient gentlemen (of whatever gender) who keep the log happily rolling - and it is that, ultimately, which the forces that enable Tàr's real-life analogues truly fear about the spectre of 'cancellation': not that it might definitively end any one career, but that, in letting in too much daylight on how the con works, it might break the kayfabe they owe those careers to.
In retrospect it was an act of supreme hubris to commit to updating this blog more regularly the week before I managed to acquire a copy of Sniper Elite: Resistance. Regular readers will be familiar with my love for this games franchise due to subtle clues like the fact I've written about it for this blog twice now. I dare say there will probably be some similar thoughts incoming on its latest iteration, once I work out how to connect it to some theme like the reaction to The Zone of Interest or the increasing lack of public street furniture. In the meantime, after rereading the draft of my essay on Tàr I'm not sure if I have anything to add to it beyond the current final paragraph, so I may (emphasis very much on may) finally get around to uploading that this week.
At any rate, my apologies to anyone who may have been tuning in regularly expecting more frequent updates after my First Reformed piece. I do still intend to update more frequently, but the planned semi-daily schedule is not going to be tenable for at least the next week or so, while your girl is wandering around a virtual recreation of 1940s France doming Nazis.
As a trans woman who named herself after a character in Gaiman's collaboration with Pratchett, I was relieved to learn that character is probably one of those for which the latter was responsible.
If you are looking for some online reading to tide you over, however, I wholeheartedly recommend Elizabeth Sandifer's piece The Cuddled Little Vice over at Eruditorum Press. This epic essay began life as a series of entries on The Sandman and its author, Neil Gaiman, which Sandifer had written as part of The Last War in Albion, her psychochronographical survey of the magickal feud betweeen Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and its ripple effects on popular culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The career of Neil Gaiman having been one of those ripple effects, it was always going to have to be covered in some way: recent revelations about Gaiman himself, however, meant that most of what Sandifer had already written had to be jettisoned in favour of writing something new which addressed the American Gods author's decades-spanning career as a serial rapist.
The Cuddled Little Vice is, I think, both the definitive work on Gaiman and one of the finest examples I've seen of a writer stepping up to the plate when the situation demands it. Sandifer provides a full and fair aesthetic assessment of Gaiman's oeuvre and investigates what elements of his own upbringing may have made him what he is, while never treating either as an excuse not to address the full horror of the crimes he perpetrated, and the effect of those crimes, and their revelations, on both the victims themselves and the many women Gaiman used to enable his ascent to literary stardom, women like Roz Kaveney, Tori Amos, Jill Thompson and Karen Berger. There is something kind of sickening, actually, about how crucial women have been to Gaiman's success - famously, Sandman was a comic known for having a substantial female readership - but then, that's the thing about predators. They excel at camouflage, at seeming plausible.
And when I say Sandifer makes a full and fair aesthetic assessment, I mean that she is just as willing to blame as she is to praise. Sandman and much of the work Gaiman did at around the same time are rightly valued, but she doesn't hold back from assessing Gaiman's post-Sandman, post-American Gods work as cynical hackery - describing The Graveyard Book as being like something you would get if you asked a generative AI to create a Neil Gaiman story, and calling Norse Mythology 'a book of plot summaries'. I remember the latter work, in particular, receiving high praise from the Guardian review and similar midcult literary staples. I wonder if those critics praised it because it reflected their own lack of intellectual ambition, or because they recognised Gaiman as one of their own in matters of ethics?
But I digress. The Cuddled Little Vice should give you more than enough to be going on with while I decide what to put up here for the weekend. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to shoot some fascists.
Since we seem to have gotten into something of a groove discussing movies about Christianity lately, let's roll with it and talk about the big one - the controversial blockbuster made by a wild-living, bad boy Catholic director with a troubled relationship with the Holy See, which presents the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus with a raw, heartbreaking physicality and is, in my opinion, essential viewing if you want to talk about Christianity and kino.
In fact I would go further. I would say that if you call yourself a Christian of any variety and you haven't seen Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ you're only LARPing.
Yes, you can see what I did there. But actually let's back up a little before we get into the film criticism, and set down a little of the simple events of my day.
I spent yesterday afternoon helping out with a symposium which was being held at ReCoCo, the recovery college I've been attending and, lately, volunteering at. What I was helping with was running the refreshment stand - providing people attending the symposium with tea or coffee. Five years ago this was something I would take in stride, but between the lower back problems I was starting to get even before the First Year of the Plague, and the post-covid fatigue syndrome I've been saddled with since, after finishing my two hour shift I was a wreck. And the fact I still had an errand to run in town gave me ample opportunity to really confront how utterly broken my body is these days. I've written before about how dependent I've become on the availability of public seating in order to simply be in public (heck, I've even written poems about the shortage of such seating), and on my walk from Carliol Square to Monument I had to take advantage of every opportunity to sit and get some rest. Sadly, when I got to Monument itself I found my rest disturbed by a young man haranguing the good people of Newcastle about Jesus.
To be honest I could hear the noise before I even got to Monument, but it was only there that it resolved itself from noise into something resembling speech. I say 'something resembling' because there was, to be frank, very little real content to it - just a near stream-of-consciousness delivery of various thought-terminating clichés about Christ: Jesus saves, all you have to do is believe, this world isn't real, it only exists to test your faith, God will raise you up, jam tomorrow, etc etc. It couldn't be denied, though, that the young man delivering this sales pitch was doing it with a great deal of energy and a supremely confident delivery. It was certainly more impressive than some of the other street preachers I've seen in town, who often find themselves going off on tangents which undermine their effectiveness (one lady really seems to have a bee in her bonnet about tattoos and jewellery, and it's never very long before she lets us know that come judgement day anyone with ink or bling is really going to get it, just you wait). This chap was really, to put it in profane terms, giving it some bollocks.
It's just a shame that it didn't have anything to do with God, Jesus, or Christianity, really.
Of course it never really does. It's been pointed out by people better qualified than me that the real purpose of this kind of street preaching is not to attract new converts, but to foster in-group solidarity among members of the sect in question by exposing them to a hostile public and confirming the dogma that says the rest of the world really is a nest of sinful vipers. But in the case of the preacher I saw yesterday, it wasn't that aspect of the performance that was the most egregious. No: what was really off-putting was how obviously the guy was getting off on it. He had no genuine interest in the actual salvation of the people he was addressing: he was just using the situation as an opportunity to masturbate his ego.
And it was this that drove me, when I got home, back to Scorsese's adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel about the struggle between the human and divine sides of Christ, written (at least in part - Scorsese and Jay Cocks also did uncredited rewrites) by First Reformed scribe and frequent Scorsese collaborator Paul Schrader. As the opening paragraph of this piece implies, I think it knocks Mel Gibson's pompous ThePassion of the Christ into a cocked crown of thorns. Part of the reason for that is the humility displayed by Scorsese in choosing to adapt a story about Jesus rather than declaring he is giving us the story; part of it is that Last Temptation is just hands down the far superior film, in terms of acting, cinematography, editing, and so on and so forth; and a key part of it is that Scorsese actually achieves what Gibson tells us he is trying to achieve, but so spectacularly fails to do: he gives us the abjectness of Christ.
The YouTube channel Acolytes of Horror does a good job of explaining the major problem with Gibson's portrayal of Christ in his Passion: macho Mel can't help but make his Jesus into a heroic figure. But that isn't the point of the story. It isn't what made Jesus such a compelling figure compared to the myriad of other dying and reviving gods who pop up in myths throughout the ancient world - indeed, a good heuristic for measuring the seriousness of someone's intellectual engagement with Christianity is to see how much stress they lay on the Resurrection which, theologically speaking, is basically a magic trick compared to the much more important matter of the Crucifixion itself: Good Friday is far more important than Easter Sunday. And again, this is another point where Scorsese wins handily, having the guts to end his film with Christ's cry of 'it is accomplished' rather than, as Gibson does, giving us the Big Comeback in his final scene (and don't miss Passion of the Christ 2: The Repassioni Resurrection, in cinemas this year! No, seriously, they are actually doing that).
What made Christ such a fascinating figure to so many cultures which already had dying and resurrecting gods of their own is the very fact that Christ's sacrifice is not treated as heroic. He isn't just tortured, he's humiliated. He begs to not have to go through with it. On the cross itself He excoriates God, his Father, for forsaking him. He is, to put it absolutely bluntly, and if this sounds blasphemous then I would put it to you that you still aren't getting it, a whiny little bitch about the whole thing.
And that is what fascinates, because it makes him human. He doesn't seem like a god or a hero. He's not Odin, hanging on the world-tree to be initiated into secret knowledge. He isn't Achilles, sulking in his tent because he gets no respect. He's like us. It's this humanity which Kazantzakis' novel, and Scorsese's adaptation of it, address so well. The idea of the last temptation itself - that, at the last possible moment, Satan might tempt Christ with the possibility of just sacking the whole thing off and living a quiet life - fits the accounts we have in the gospels so perfectly, and makes that cry of 'it is accomplished' such a bitterly triumphant thing because it helps us appreciate how hard-won it is.
And the thing is, there are a lot of people who call themselves Christians who really don't like the idea of Christ being abject or weak, actually (Ernst Toller gets harangued by one when he sits in with a megachurch youth group in First Reformed). To them, it seems weak, it seems unmasculine, it seems undignified, it seems faggy. And it is! And that's the whole point! But they hate it, because they don't want to see the qualities they work so hard to repress in themselves represented in their saviour. They don't want the suffering Christ. What they want is Touchdown Jesus.
You know, for a queer lapsed Catholic heretic I sure like a lot of movies about priests.
John Michael McDonagh's Calvarymakes a good companion piece to First Reformed in a lot of ways: both follow a lonely Good Priest who grapples with the moral context of his times and whose sincere ethical engagement with their religion is contrasted with that of their fellow Christians. Both turn on a challenging encounter between that priest and one of his parishioners: in First Reformed Reverend Toller argues the merits of bringing a child into a world on the brink of climate apocalypse with his eco-activist congregant Michael; in Calvary Brendan Gleeson's Father James Lavelle hears the confession of a parishioner who calmly informs him that he will kill him in a week, as an act of retaliatory terror against the Church whose priests repeatedly violated him as a child (importantly, this unrepentant penitent chooses to kill Lavelle precisely because he is not one of the clerics who hurt him: killing a good priest, he thinks, will cause people to sit up and pay attention).
At the climax of the film, as the priest and his killer confront one another on a beautiful County Sligo beach, the killer/victim rages that 'We were the lucky ones! There's bodies buried back there! Buried like dogs!' And this reminded me of a film I saw for the first time this week, and which I will probably be thinking about as much as I think about Calvary and First Reformed, RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, which shows us life literally through the eyes of its two protagonists, Elwood and Turner, two black teens who find themselves incarcerated at a segregated reform school during the sixties. The brutal new reality the idealistic Elwood and the more streetwise Turner find themselves confined in is also divided between the lucky ones and those who are not so lucky. Indeed, as such places often do, Nickel Academy operates a kind of hierarchy of luck: the white students are incarcerated in nicer premises, and not subject to the harsher conditions of the black students, who are further stratified based not just on the Academy's overt system of four ranks (beginning at 'Bug'), but by what kinds of punishment they find themselves subjected to: brutal beatings in a room with a fan that drowns the sound of screaming for those who are a little less lucky; confinement to a rooftop sweatbox for those unluckier still; and, for those whose luck is worst of all, being taken 'out back', murdered and buried in an unmarked grave in the part of the school all the students know to call 'Boot Hill'.
I am using the word luck because that is the word that the killer in Calvary uses, but it is of course not quite the right word. Luck is an impersonal force, a random factor which cannot be controlled for: but every child who died at the hands of the Church in Ireland, every child murdered at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, the real life inspiration for Nickel Academy, every child buried in the grounds of the Canadian Residential Schools, is there because of decisions made by adults, who calculated that they could get away with murdering those children because those deaths would never be discovered, because any children who spoke out would not be believed, because those children did not matter. And that goes too for the 'lucky ones' - the kids who were only shoved in the sweatbox, only sexually abused, only taken away from families and cultures the authorities wished to wipe out, only forced to wear a different name and kneel before a cross. These were not just things that happened. They were things that were done to children, by adults.
And they are things that are being done again now, with the full knowledge and connivance of our oh-so-moral authorities. In the US, depending on what state they are unlucky enough to live in, trans children are already potentially subject to judicial kidnap and fostering out to 'good Christian families', with all the horror those three words usually entail. In the UK our Health Secretary cheerfully restricted access to puberty blockers for trans kids, a wilful and sadistic act of mass child abuse which will leave those children feeling under attack from their own bodies. Like the pious facade of the Catholic Church or the Nickel Academy, these actions are taken under the cover of morality, but they are really about creating and maintaining a population of children who can be abused with impunity, and they will result, just as they did then, in the bodies of dead children and, in a decade or more when, as the saying goes, everyone will have always been against this, in a generation of traumatised adults who will have the burning cold comfort of knowing that they were the lucky ones.
Lately, it seems as if every left-wing media outlet big enough to worry about maintaining its visibility on social media, and every nominally left-wing figure with a book deal, has been opining about the so-called 'death of woke'. The Young Turks have pivoted to full transphobia, and over at Novara Michael Walker has just about fully come out of the closet as a tervert, and Aaron Bastani is hot on his heels as he tries, with pitiably obvious desperation, to impress the big skinhead lads at his gym. It's probably a little unfair of me to use Ash Sarkar in the above screenshot, to be honest, as her new book, Minority Rule, is more about how anti-woke talking points are used as a distraction by the real minority that controls everything (the rich, obviously), but the video's title was too good to resist.
The inconvenient fact in all this is that the only actual sense in which 'woke is dead' is that all the right-wing paedophiles who complained about it have started saying 'DEI' instead, because their grift requires them to cycle their buzzwords every five years or so. 'Woke' in the sense that the likes of GB News or the Daily Mail decry it never really existed - like a lot of terms that suddenly gain widespread popular usage it was ripped off from black culture and repurposed by white people to mean something else, to the point where it became a free-floating signifier which could be made to stand in for anything that the particular white person using it was getting upset about - which was usually the fact that media was acknowledging the existence of people who weren't exactly like them.
In its original usage, however, 'woke' simply meant exactly what it sounds like - awake. To be woke was to be aware of what was going on, to no longer be lulled into a false sense of security by the lies of a racist, ableist, queerphobic system of control. And that system hasn't gone away just because the people who profit from it have found a new buzzword to use to complain about the fact that people keep trying to resist those systems. Right and wrong don't switch places just because a slightly different flavour of senile white man sits pissing himself in the Oval Office. La lutta continua - the struggle today is the same one it was yesterday and the same one it probably will be tomorrow, and anyone with even the slightest amount of genuine intellectual seriousness knows that.
Of course, our midcult media are entirely lacking in intellectual seriousness, which is why we see spectacles like that soi-disant 'serious' journal, The Atlantic using the 'death of woke' as an excuse to hire a nonentity called Thomas Chatterton Williams because he is a black man who has made a tidy career out of being willing to say 'anti-woke' things, and can thus be relied on to launder their racism. I came across some of Mr Williams' self-important sermonising on Bluesky yesterday evening and was entirely unsurprised to learn where he had found employment - unsurprised because he seems, in his Chomskyan understanding of why he has been hired and what he is permitted to say, to be a quintessential example of the 'omniscient gentlemen' whose number Maureen Tkacic had back in 2012 in her piece for The Baffler which remains the only thing you will ever need to read about Mr Williams' new employers.
I understand that Mr Williams divides his time between the US and France, and that prior to his recent putting about of himself on social media he was most well-known for having someone ejected from his chateau for being beastly about Bari Weiss. This provoked in me a strong desire to watch, once again, the documentary Meeting The Man: James Baldwin in Paris, a great example of an engaged intellectual refusing to play along with a documentary director who wants to draw a neat and tidy dividing line between his writing and his activism; refusing, indeed, to do what Mr Williams and those I talked about at the beginning of this piece have chosen to do, which is to allow themselves to be turned into products which are to the liking of the ruling powers. What makes Meeting the Man such an instructive film, especially in times like our own, is the way Baldwin resists. The film itself is currently only available on MUBI, but you can get a feeling of what he has to say in this clip:
The great thing about seeing someone else resist is that it reminds you that you can, too. You don't have to pander to bigots because you're afraid of losing views or book deals. You can be better than that. Indeed, as Baldwin observes, you have to be.
Today I did something I have been meaning to do for weeks: I handed in some forms to my GP. These forms were self-assessment questionnaires used in the diagnosis of autism and Attention Deficit Disorder. I was advised to fill them out by a professional I've been working with as part of my ongoing attempt to try and find my way into some kind of employment which won't be sabotaged by my tendency to have violent meltdowns and damage company property in noisy work environments. As I had expected (see the last clause of the preceding sentence) I scored a positive, though only a mild one, on the questionnaire for autism. What surprised me, however, was that I scored very high on the measure for ADD.
Of course, the very fact it took me weeks to complete the simple act of handing these forms in to my GP is itself a pretty good indicator that I have some problems with my executive function. And not the only one. I have had, I am now seeing, a tendency to not address things that other people would have dealt with almost instantly. When the heating in my flat went out two years ago it seemed, somehow, easier to buy a small portable heater, put it in my bedroom, and stay in there when things got too cold, rather than report the problems with the heating to my letting agents. It is only recently - again, with some prompting from the person who urged me to fill out the forms I handed in today - that I have addressed this problem. Just as it is only in recent weeks, again thanks to outside intervention, that my flat has ceased to be a minefield of clutter resembling the floor of Francis Bacon's studio.
Why did I let things get this bad? To say it was because it just seemed easier is to undersell the situation. Say, rather, that to do otherwise seemed impossible. I felt as if in some way I would not survive handing in the forms, or telling the letting agents about the heating, or seeking help to get the untidiness of my flat sorted out. They were things I might one day be up to addressing, but today was not the day. And so it seemed better to deploy my resources towards something that could be accomplished, and to tackle these issues another day.
But every day these things went unaddressed they seemed to only gain in power while I grew less capable of accomplishing them, not least because now the sense of the futility of doing these things was joined by a sense of shame in not having accomplished them yet. A shame which I also didn't want to have to face. Here is a shame that I have not wanted to face for years now: my passport has been out of date for a decade, and I have not updated it because doing so, as a trans woman, is a complicated process involving getting letters from psychology professionals and then presenting these alongside the original expired passport and one's deed of change of name. Only by providing all these ingredients in the correct combination can one be assured of both the name on the passport and the relevant gender marker being updated.
And at one point I had all of these, yet still delayed because of this fear that I would in some way be found to have somehow completed the process wrongly, fear that in some way I would be questioned or undermined or have to have an encounter I did not feel comfortable having, and in doing so, somewhere, along the line, while I still have my old passport and I still have my deed poll and they, together, are enough for most things, at some point, due to having had to move house so much in the years during which I came out and due to my chronic inability to remain organised and tidy I, shame of all shames, lost the letter, and I cannot find it and even if I could I do not know if the psychologist who wrote it is still practising and what effect this would have, and at the same time I fear starting the process again because of the shame of not having got it done properly the first time. And because, in today's much more hostile environment towards trans people, I fear that the process will be much harder this time around, and that my failure to see to it quickly the first time will go, in some obscure way, against me.
And really, it doesn't need to be said that this is not a great time to be a trans woman whose papers aren't in order. My inability to see things like this through really could get me killed.
I watched Sebastian Silva's Rotting in the Sun primarily because the preview image on Mubi showed Silva (who plays himself in the movie) reading E.M. Cioran's The Trouble With Being Born, which I had read last year. In fact, perversely, I had bought the book to read with some money I had been given for my birthday. Cioran was a Romanian philosopher of the pessimist school, perhaps most famous for his aphorism that 'it is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.' We see Silva reading the book in the film's opening scene, and we also see him googling effective and painless suicide methods on his mobile phone, so I found myself expecting his arc to be one of those movies where a suicidal protagonist gradually discovers the will to live again. Sort of like It's A Wonderful Life, but with more cocks and ketamine.
In fact, the film does not go down that road. I'm not going to say much more about the plot, because it depends to a great degree on a sudden, utterly unexpected event which sends the story off in a very different direction, but it is not a finding-a-reason-to-live movie, and I respect that a lot.
Set in Mexico City, Rotting is a bilingual movie which makes bilingualism part of its plot - we see several scenes in which Jonathan Firstman, a gay influencer who also plays a version of himself in the film, has to talk with Silva's housekeeper, Vero (Catalina Saavedra) via the medium of the translation software on his mobile phone. This detail of the plot reminded me of Park Chan-Wook's Decision to Leave, in which Park Hae-il and Tang Wei's Korean cop and Chinese murder suspect have to do the same thing, and in which the presence or absence of a mobile phone plays a key role in the plot - a plot which, like Rotting in the Sun, revolves around suicide.
I watched Decision to Leave again earlier this week, having first seen it around this time last year. It's another film I think about a lot. The final sequence is genuinely heartbreaking, almost operatically so (again, I'm trying not to give a lot of the plot away, because Decision, like Rotting, has a big twist roughly halfway through which drastically changes things), and it gets a lot of its power from the way the story leading up to that point asks a lot of questions about why we live, what we live for, and what we do when what we live for is suddenly taken away. Do you make a dramatic exit or plod on as a shadow of what you used to be, nodding along meekly as others suggest daily sunbathing sessions or softshell turtle extract, but knowing deep down that you're just Xing days off a calendar? Some shots at the end of Rotting in the Sun suggest that film's characters, too, are going to have to discover their own answer to that question. As, I suppose, are we all.
