There is a recurring figure in fiction that I can only think of by the unsavory name of the erotic uncle.
The erotic uncle is distinct from the creepy uncle. A niece is always excessively familiar with her creepy uncle, who’s been looming over her, leering at her, and making inappropriate comments about her for years. He’s a figure of contempt, not excitement; he’s a pest who doesn’t even arouse feelings of real danger, only annoyance. He doesn’t excite the viewer either, not when the grinding, pervasive sexualization he represents is, again, incredibly familiar. He gets eye rolls and moues of disgust.
The erotic uncle, on the other hand, appears to the girl much more rarely. He blows into a claustrophobic domestic life with stories of an independent adult existence, and she’s never had the chance to get sick of him. He’s younger than her father; she knows he doesn’t feel like her father. There’s a glamour to him.
You can only have an erotic uncle in a stifling environment, because the whole appeal for the inexperienced girl is that this is an attractive, appealing, unfamiliar man who is nonetheless, by a quirk of biology, allowed within her sealed life. She doesn’t usually get to meet people like this, and if she does, she doesn’t have the opportunity to get to know them. Here, she has nothing but opportunity, because her family has already tagged the relationship as innocent and safe. No supervision necessary.
Only we, the audience, know that this is where the real danger comes in. We’re invited to see what the family misses and remember what the girl wants to forget or overlook.
Park Chan-wook’s Stoker, like its model Shadow of a Doubt, draws all this out in a magnificent fashion. He’s one of the only directors who could take the film’s intensely gothic scenario and successfully treat it as a moving, if warped, coming of age story, one where all the taboo-breaking passion, obsession, grooming, death, and biological fatalism is ultimately just grist for one girl’s mill, material she will use to become her own person. She’ll be a person entirely shaped by where she comes from and what she’s gone through–she opens the film by telling us that–but she’ll also be complete, ready to act instead of only being acted upon. She doesn’t break in a way that emphasizes the damage, and she doesn’t heal by reconciling herself to an ordinariness that was never a part of her.1 She’s not defeated in any sense. She becomes. She moves on.
The girl in question is India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), eighteen years old, an eccentric and a crack shot, growing up strange and brooding and artistic. Her father dies, and his long-lost brother, Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) comes for the funeral. Her mother (Nicole Kidman) is immediately attracted to this charming young man who reminds her of better, happier days with her husband, and she allows him to move in. He flirts with her for cover, but we can tell he only has eyes for India, whose bristling mistrust of this usurper changes as she realizes he’s not actually auditioning for the role of “father” at all. He has something else in mind, and he always has.
There’s so much beautiful and horrifying strangeness here, from an iconic shot of Nicole Kidman’s hair seamlessly fading into a grassy field to the way a piano duet is filmed as breathlessly as a sex scene; Park, like India, is awake to all sensations, seeing things others would not and taking big, heedless swings, responding to an excessive world with excess of his own. There’s very little sense that he cares about morality. It’s not that Uncle Charlie–who solves both practical and emotional problems with murder and luxuriates in the idea that he and India are soulmates–is wrong (he is, but both Park and Goode find some moments of sympathy for him), it’s that he’s wrong for India. She outgrows him very quickly, but she keeps the shoes he gave her and the lessons he taught her. He thought he could awaken her sexuality and her violence and then have it all be for him. But whatever she has, however shaped by others, is purely her own, and the film ends on that (well, and on murder). She’s grown from endangered to dangerous, and he’s just a memory.
Stoker is streaming on HBO Max.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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What did we watch?
Justified, Season Six, Episode Ten, “Trust”
“Now when you are gone, you never again set foot in Harlan County.”
“You ain’t got to ask me twice.”
“Anybody ever tell you that you should talk less?”
“Yeah. One guy.”
“You think I don’t know who you are, Mr Markem?”
“I thought I introduced myself at the door.”
Oh, hey, Wynn’s backstory! The reveal of him being a lifelong rat is one thing, but this really dives into it, which is how I knew he was about to be fucked up even before Mike attacked him. Nobody comes out of a backstory completely unscathed on this show; one of the things that makes this fun to watch is working out what’ll happen to Wynn.
Also, Boone is a very different Justified Dumbass. Choo-Choo was relatively unmalicious; Boone is nothing but malice, the personification of fascism (as opposed to a regular fascist, like most Justified Dumbasses). Jonathan Tucker is pretty great as a sleazy guy who knows you’re repulsed by him and takes pleasure in that fact; merely existing around him gives him a power over you.
Biggest Laugh: N/A
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: The clown car gag of the number of guns Mike pulls off Wynn. Also: “Meet a lot of guys with gator tooth necklaces, do ya?” / “I used to work in Florida.”
Top Ownage: “Jesus, woman. What did you do?”
I’m saving the details on this for later, but Wynn is at the heart of one of the biggest double-takes I’ve ever done reading a showrunner’s commentary on something.
Babylon 5, “Midnight on the Firing Line”
You all knew this would happen eventually, right?
I know there was a movie-length pilot as well, but the discs I’m watching start here, so I will too. This is a strong start, even if it’s been so long since I’ve watched this era of SF TV that I had to settle back into its groove a little. We’ve already got a reasonably complicated, reasonably nuanced clash, complete with moral dilemmas, which is the way to my heart, and everything Londo and G’Kar was terrific (to the point where Sinclair gets cooler just by referencing it all later: “Be careful, Ambassador. Not every dream I’ve heard lately ends well for you”). I like that we get some genuinely weird alien design with Kosh. If the episodic conflict gets too neat a button on it–Sinclair’s attempt to dodge a political duty he doesn’t want or agree with by joining a space dogfight winds up revealing the truth about the Narn attack on Ragesh 3–it’s a layered and well-plotted neatness.
Bug
Well, that escalated quickly. Fantastic, intimate psychological horror that puts the pedal to the metal; this is small in scope but immense in scale and impact. (Friedkin also knows how to get the visuals to sing: the way the bug zappers light up a room lined with aluminum foil is both stunning and alien.) Also a romance, one that’s heartbreaking in proportion to its horror. Take Shelter seems positively uplifting in comparison.
Oh wow is Bug great. Hilarious that Tracy Letts’ other plays are so extreme that his award-winning domestic dramedy about pill popping and incest felt like a mild sell-out move.
Oh hell yeah.
The pilot can be skipped – most of the characters in it are never seen again – but it feels emotionally wrong, even without Talia being an important character down the line. The neat moral ending will also spin out later; if it seems too neat, it’s because it really is.
And I knew you’d lock onto G’Kar and Londo immediately. I still love the very first scene we have of Londo talking about him. “G’Kar! G’Kar!” Fist shaking in the air and everything.
The Last Action Hero – For all its myriad flaws – dear lord, how could you still be making a movie a week before it opens? – this remains an underrated bit of over the top action movie making. It’s been a long while since I watched Ahnuld in his prime and I forget how effortlessly charming he can be, but he also is really good conveying the sadder side of Jack Slade. Mc Tiernan is of course good at action and at comedy, even if this one does not really find a balance. And there are enough utterly nuts gags to let me ignore all the misfires. But outside of our leading man, this belongs to Charles Dance as one of the better screen villains of the era. Also, just weird to have Robert Prosky dissing politicians with a future politician and to see tension between the fictional Ahnuld and Maria years before that marriage cratered. Wacky fact: the young actress who played Jack’s daughter has been married to tennis star Pete Sampras for over 25 years.
Elementary, “View with a Room” – The neuro-atypical coder who helped our heroes a few episodes is back, and starts to date Sherlock. The show is really trying to both figure out dating (as opposed to sex) for Sherlock and to depict people on the spectrum sensitively, but isn’t quite there. Meanwhile, a cop undercover with a biker gang is killed just when he was supposed to be hacking their computer. Another less than satisfying mystery that seems to have been built around the idea of “what if someone faked a murder by creating a fake of another room?” Didn’t that happen on Monk?
The Odyssey – Has some of Nolan’s best ever visuals and his weakest story ideas he’s specifically bringing to the table. (I also strongly dislike the use of American English though I have no issue with American accents.) He’s pushing himself here, going deeper into the mystic (Hades and the pigs are terrifying) and struggling to reconcile this with his own material nature, and the effect is messy. So much to recommend here – every actor is unforgettable in some way or even at a peak, with Robert Pattinson visibly enjoying playing a sleazeball and Lupita N’yongo creating an indelible, haunting impression in perhaps five minutes of screentime – but I don’t think the theme of guilt and reconciliation works as well as in Oppenheimer. It is still often bravura filmmaking nevertheless.
(I also strongly dislike the use of American English though I have no issue with American accents.)
Yeah, every time Tom Holland said, “Dad,” I said, “No.” It was the closest I’ve ever come to being a stern father figure.
Agreed on all of this. (My theater was rightfully howling at Pattinson in the final fight, cowering while repeatedly yelling for weapons: amazing stuff.) I’m impressed by a lot of its individual pieces, and that goes pretty far, but the cohesive vision isn’t a knockout like Oppenheimer.
SPEARS, GET THE SPEARS is hysterical. My theater didn’t laugh (I did, starting with “You’re Odysse-“) but it was in IMAX and overwhelming.
Me when people criticise The Odyssey at this point:
https://morbotron.com/comic/img?b=AQIBBlMwMkUxOBJICQABEvQBygMmWW91J3JlIGFsbCBudXRzLgpTaHV0IHVwLiBMZXQgbWUgdGFsay4F
Saw this in a theater for free, some unforgettable shots here thanks to Park’s sense of visual clarity and ugly beauty. I’d hated Goode in Watchmen (which wasn’t his fault given how badly Snyder misunderstood his character) and here his cold, estranged eyes were put to incredible use.
Park has such a great eye for talismanic objects, too. (Most obviously in Oldboy, probably, but also here: the shoes, the belt, the sunglasses.) I don’t think anyone could have possibly done this better.
The last shot! The belt in particular is iconic.