Year of the Month<em
Spinning fictional plates, doing good, and the sainthood of an author.
“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
This is, I believe, the most famous and celebrated passage from any Discworld book. Its context is that it’s spoken by Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of the city of Ankh-Morpork, to Vimes, the cynical and hardbitten protagonist, immediately after they’ve managed to clean up the mystery of the dragon that has bedevilled the city. Vimes has spent the book as a noir protagonist – wavering between parody and sincere example, as is Pratchett’s style – who bemoans and celebrates the scrabbly, cynical, self-serving human nature he observes in his city.
Vetinari, by comparison, rules over the city with a delicate touch and total ruthlessness; he completely accepts human nature for what it is, and uses that to keep his city in order; famously, quite a few of the plots attempting to depose or undermine him are run by himself, although my favourite example of his ruthlessness is the fact that he legalized the Thieves Guild and turned them into a business. Vetinari’s quote summarizes his attitude quite well; there’s goodness, there’s fairness, and there’s order, and Vetinari will use the second to achieve the third with no interest in the first.
At the beginning of the novel, Vimes is lying drunk in the gutter, weary and sad because one of his crew has died. He is the captain of the Night Watch, the least respected, worst paid civil servants in the great (or at least large) city of Ankh-Morpork. The fascinating thing about Pratchett books is how they’re six different things at once – they’re moral statements and they’re very funny and they’re canny statements about human nature and they’re moving and they’re densely plotted with nothing out of place and they’re incredibly quotable. In this case, Vimes is both Pratchett’s reflection on idealism and works very well as a sympathetic character (emphasis on the pathetic) who we want to see win and will feel really good about when he comes out on top at the end.
The reason I chose to write about this particular book at this particular moment is because its particular feelings on achieving goodness feel particularly relevant right now. Pratchett passed away about a decade ago, and in that time, he seems to have gone from knighthood to sainthood in many people’s eyes; he has gone from an excellent writer to the last word on right and wrong and our guide through evil – I think particularly of this person, who describes his attitude as that of ‘militant decency’ and speaks of it as central to being a human being.
There are a lot of reasons for this. One big one, of course, being the visible hand of fascism; physically disgusting, verbally abusive, and spiritually noxious presences in the White House, the highest echelons of business, and every aspect of our social media for an obvious example. I strongly suspect the outing of Neil Gaiman as a rapist predator is another big reason for Pratchett specifically to be canonized; having had the rug pulled from one beloved English author from our childhoods, people have run to the open arms of another for protection. Pratchett represents a warm, beautiful humanism that feels comforting in horrific, ugly times.
(My friend RD Olivaw suggested that Gaiman had specifically been cultivating Pratchett’s reputation due to their short relationship as protection in case what he did would come out exactly as it did, which I find a pleasing bit of irony)
Sadly, like most simplifications, this is both vast and scrubs out much of what I find meaningful in Pratchett. The least obvious reason people are drawn to Pratchett is just as that person observed: because he, in his own way, gives the reader permission to be angry. Vimes is a creature of a deep, welling rage at the injustices he sees around him; not just big ones, like that someone has summoned a dragon that’s killing people and burning down buildings, but the little things, like the onlookers who find a way to justify it so they don’t have to risk their own lives. People look at things like this and believe that Pratchett is telling them yes – you need to be exactly what you want to be anyway.
This flatly ignores things like, for example, the lone man who stands up to the dragon and gets effortlessly burned alive for the trouble. Night Watch delves much more strongly into Vimes’s anger and his grappling with it, but I chose to talk about G!G! for two reasons: firstly, I haven’t actually read NW yet, but also because I’m more interested in the fact that even now, right at the start of his story, Pratchett is questioning the rightness and expression of Vimes’s anger. He does it partially through Vetinari, who makes decisions solely based on their ability to cause an effect he seeks, but also through Carrot.
The whole joke with Carrot is that he’s secretly the actual lost king of Ankh-Morpork and nobody quite realizes that (least of all Carrot himself). This will sound like a smug gotcha or an insult – either to him or his fans – but I promise it isn’t: Pratchett was, above all else, a genius propagandist. He had an incredible gift for presenting you with an idea and making you feel like you were both learning something and already knew it all along; that he was simply giving name to something you already knew. He did this in various ways; number one being by making your basic person both stupid and cunning, like the people reasoning out that a dragon eating people every now and again could be a perfectly acceptable state of affairs. You know this, you’ve seen this, and you shake your head alongside both Vimes and Pratchett as it happens.
My favourite example of this is Carrot’s sword. Pratchett tells you that of course most people would think a hero’s sword is shiny and new when of course an actual sword people actually use would be dented and old; he has made you feel quite cynical and wise, able to see through the obvious lies people tell themselves, and he’s managed to do this without seeming obsequious. This is, naturally, part of his ability to write entertainment; Pratchett has a Tarantinoesque knack for creating cynical, world-weary characters, making the reader empathize with their world-weariness, and then pulling the rug from under everybody.
(One can compare it with this Tumblr post. I’m not saying it’s bad, or the message is bad, or the person is stupid – just that it doesn’t evoke the feelings that Pratchett’s writing does despite aiming for similar goals; indeed, it wouldn’t shock me to discover he wrote a passage on a similar theme. This is perfectly fine, straightforward writing, but it doesn’t sweep me off my feet and carry me off into the distance the way Pratchett does. In spite of it all, I do believe the internet has been an overall good for humanity, but it’s hard to see this and not believe it’s led to people who are less interested in being good writers and more in being good posters.)
Carrot is interesting because he’s absolutely not cynical or world-weary – his central trait is that he’s inherently noble, and the question is how a noble person could operate in this world. He absorbs the Law with dutiful literalism, and his story becomes how to express that as effectively as possible. What begins as bloody-minded literalism evolves very quickly; the interesting thing about Carrot is that he’s exactly as emotional as Vimes, but that emotion defines the direction he goes as opposed to his day-to-day decision-making. For the most part, he’s less interested in the Goodness of people around him and more in the Goodness of his own character; the world is simply a practical thing to move through.
Oh, there’s also the villain of the book. I’ll refrain from spoilers, if only because my process of writing this essay has led me to mostly avoiding them, but I can say the villain really isn’t that different from Vimes – he’s also driven by a frustration with the stupidity and immorality around him, and his actions are taken to try and control it with sheer force, only for that force to come back on him (comparisons between this plot – a group of small, pathetic, entitled, everyday men who propped a monster who ruined their lives – and the Trump administration will be delivered flippantly).
The question isn’t ‘should you get mad about evil’, the question is ‘what’s the correct way to deal with evil?’, and the answer is, unfortunately, a lot of hard work. The interesting thing about the book is that Vimes and Carrot actually have very little pragmatic effect on it; if they hadn’t been there, the entire plot actually probably would have turned out pretty much the same. There are two clear exceptions: Vimes saving one person’s life at the end, and, possibly, him choosing to take care of a swamp dragon and carrying it around at appropriate moments. It was this, more than anything, that saved the day; a simple and basic act of kindness that spread out to something bigger (and even then, I think that swamp dragon would have gotten where he needed to be). The actual arc of the book is more personal; Vimes and the Watch being in a more comfortable position, literally and emotionally. Admittedly, perhaps that’s the best many of us can hope for.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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The Man as caricature, straight presentation, and parody.
Year of the Month
We've seen this all before, and we'll see it all again.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Swashbuckler Summer #8. The French Revolution said, “Eat the rich,” and the Scarlet Pimpernel said, “Not on my watch!” But if you can take an English baronet rescuing French aristocrats from the guillotine, huge whacks of this are delightful: funny, tense, and charged with romanticism.
I owe Leslie Howard an apology: I wasn’t really familiar with his game. I spent years assuming this guy didn’t fuck just because he played Ashley Wilkes. Here, he’s electric, holding a ton of power in reserve behind a perfect “silly ass” act and seemingly generating incredible chemistry with his co-stars on demand. (There’s a scene where he puts his arm up next to Merle Oberon that feels like positively indecent.) He’s excellent at both the comedy and the intelligence and courage coiled underneath.
And while Oberon’s Marguerite feels a little underwritten, Raymond Massey is as magnetic as Howard. I love how his Chauvelin, assigned to hunt down the Scarlet Pimpernel, seems genuinely amused by Blakeney’s antics even as he presumably looks down on him. It’s like he thinks this foppish fool is so obviously not the Pimpernel that spending time with him is a rare chance to relax from his task.
The adventure parts of this adventure film are, alas, not as compelling as all the charged (and exquisitely, sharply written, and very quotable) conversations, so once more active espionage kicks in, the film has a sleepy stretch. But the good sections are very enjoyable, and if Wikipedia and Criterion both want to class this as a swashbuckler despite a distinct lack of swordplay, I guess I’ll go along with it. The vibes are there.
Ripe for a reimagining with an earlier working class Pimpernel helping oppressed French peasants, though. Someone should get on that.
The Crimson Pirate
Swashbuckler Summer #9. I love how colorful and even Looney Tunes-esque this is. It’s a rousing, splashy entertainment that, in a grand old tradition, is happy to use everything it can to keep its audience grinning. Shirtless Burt Lancaster! Acrobatics! Exotic dancers! Piracy! Peril! Weird steampunk-adjacent science! Comedy! Miming! Romance! Double-crosses! Hearts of gold! Beautiful Technicolor!
Lancaster plays Captain Vallo, a pirate captain looking to parlay a captured ship and all its stolen guns into a bigger and more life-changing prize than a regular treasure haul could ever provide. But it takes a few complicated moves that intersect with island and colonial politics, and that means there are a lot of chances for things to go wrong—and for him to change his mind and priorities. It’s actually a pretty solid throughline, almost like a crime movie plot, and then it’s frilled-up in a beautiful fashion with tons of slapstick and action and gleeful anachronisms. Did everyone working on Aladdin watch this before creating the “One Jump Ahead” sequence in that movie? I feel like they must have. (Or at least Capcom developers must have before making the SNES game. I was having flashbacks.)
Terrific, goofy fun.
The Odyssey
Visually sumptuous and surprisingly well-paced for a film that, by its very nature, has to be somewhat episodic. The standout players for me are Hathaway, Pattinson, Nyong’o, Morton, Leguizamo, Theron, Bernthal, and Page, who all really make their material pop whether they’re playing in accordance with epic poetry or in conscious dissonance with it. I admire how grotesque this is willing to get: the fleshy, sweaty physicality of the swine transformation scene feels like a more somber take on Brian Yuzna, for example, and I say that as high praise. If I have a slight criticism of it, it’s that maybe somberness predominates here a little too often, leaching away some of the color and variety the tale could otherwise have, but that’s more about my taste than the actual skill of the execution. (And Pattinson gives great cowardly sleaze to provide an acidic counterpoint, even so.)
If you had a lot of time on your hands, this would make a superb double feature with Oppenheimer in the “men commit acts that end wars and then come to realize those acts have also ended their entire world” genre: a small but excellent film niche.
I think this kicks The Dark Knight out of my Nolan Top 5, so now it’s—in no particular order–Memento, The Prestige, Oppenheimer, Dunkirk, and The Odyssey.
“Pimpernel” Smith
Leslie Howard produced, directed, and starred in this WWII riff on the Scarlet Pimpernel, whom he played so well back in 1934. This time, he’s Horatio Smith, an archeologist who puts up a vague, absentminded, and hidebound front in order to get away with secret expeditions to spirit people out of Nazi Germany.
This can’t lean as far into light comedy as its predecessor did, for obvious reasons, though it shows an occasional deft touch in that area: Smith’s German nemesis’s stilted readings of classic pieces of English humor, for example, and his American student’s hero worship and shoehorned-in slang also have a go at lightening the mood. It doesn’t completely abandon moments of breezy adventure. But it knows when to play it straight, and it gets some tense and even moody thriller sequences when it does. There’s a great eye for shadows here, especially in the charged scenes between Howard and Mary Morris. Heroism with noir lighting turns out to be a great combo.
Howard also kills it in the final scene, when he gets to completely abandon his façade and speak plainly to von Graum: his calm, poised satisfaction with his work against von Graum’s petty acts in the service of evil. We should make more movies where rescuing people from fascists makes you incredibly cool and sexy. (See also: Benicio del Toro in One Battle After Another.)
Case in point, this inspired Raoul Wallenberg to rescue almost 10,000 people from the Nazis. So in terms of lives saved as the result of cool propaganda, this is one of the greatest films of all time.
The Nazis shot down Leslie Howard’s plane two years later, killing him without knowing, probably, how many people his work had already helped save.
Oh, hey, I also just got back from The Odyssey. I’ll put my thoughts about it up tomorrow, but basically: Heavy Is The Head That Wears The Crown and also I think this builds off almost every single Nolan film.
I’m seeing it tonight so it sounds like the REAL Odyssey will be “discussing it tomorrow on Media Magpies dot com”
It will take us so many years to have this conversation!
I had no idea that Wallenberg was inspired by this movie (a movie I had in fact never heard of).
I hadn’t heard of it before watching Howard’s original Pimpernel take and then looking him up afterwards! It’s a good movie, albeit with a couple flaws (pacing, some stilted humor, and an early scene that’s more jarring than Howard probably meant it to be), but obviously its biggest and most incredible legacy was outside of cinema. I’ll probably pick up a physical copy at some point, but in the meantime, I’m still gobsmacked by it influencing Wallenberg.
Despite my childhood love of Zorro and Robin Hood among other swashbucklers, weirdly my only experience with the Scarlet Pimpernel is the parody in Blackadder the Third.
I’m still floored by the lack of actual swashbuckling in this highly influential adaptation of a swashbuckler classic, but everything with the silly persona vs. the more serious truth is A+.
“the fleshy, sweaty physicality of the swine transformation scene feels like a more somber take on Brian Yuzna”
KILL BILL KLAXONS INTENSIFY
Happy Endings, Season Two, Episode Two, “Baby Steps”
“I finally figured out what my store needs.”
“Customers? Haha!”
“What kind of bank won’t let you make a deposit?”
“Give it a minute.”
“Why would you deposit money in a sperm bank?”
This is the kind of thing I would intentionally say to amuse/annoy my friends.
“How did you not know that was a dress?”
“I had my suspicions.”
“Lobbing the school board to accept the metric system.”
“It just makes more sense.”
“So I got all pretty for nothing?”
“Well, I just ordered a pizza so technically this is a bed-and-breakfast.”
“Max, how many times do I have to tell you – Scotty Pippin is not in a financial position to hire a sexy butler.”
“That is just my dream/reality pitch.”
This definitely goes in the file of great Normal People fiction, particularly Normal People comedy. Max in the truck clinched it for me – this takes place just to the left of people living regular lives and working regular jobs. Not as insanely imaginative or philosophical as something like Rick & Morty or Futurama or whatever, but also more accessible. And funny, of course. This is what most people are thinking as they go about their days; the kind of joke most people would make, but not in a shitty Family Guy kind of way.
This also has a good crossover between plots.
I love how much comedy they make out of how insecure and easy-to-manipulate Penny is.
“Which one should I wear: put me to bed, or I pooped? I just answered my own question.”
“This chest hair is majestic! People get lost in it!”
“Good luck finding that ring, Frodo Baggins!”
“This is a food truck! We’re appealing to the broadest base possible!”
“You are cutting the crust off my sandwich.”
“You’re from the future? Do I ever stop peeing my pants?”
“I’m sorry I had to fire you. I only did it because you were incredibly incompetent.”
“You know when I don’t know what a word means, I automatically assume it means my testicles!”
“Wow. For best friends, we are rarely on the same page.”
“Boom! Rent! Eat it! Wait, don’t, it’s money and the only thing dirtier is airplane ice.”
“And by the way, Jews are great tippers, don’t know where that came from.”
In the grand scheme of Sitcom Sentimentality, this sits somewhere between 30 Rock and Bob’s Burgers. 30 Rock is the gold standard of Sitcoms Where The Characters Have Real Emotional Journeys Every Episode, where it’s always just sincere enough for us to care but the actual action itself is extremely absurd (I also think Community is a great example, but it’s also reaching for a level of ambition where the stories are also rip-your-heart-out-and-throw-it-on-the-stage sincere and extremely ambitious in creativity).
Something I’ve found interesting so far in the Good Bits of HE is that the characters aren’t as aggressively unlikable as in, like Always Sunny or even Futurama, but the show is already enjoying having them be at least a bit ‘naughty’, even if it backtracks on that a little – I think this factors into it being a Normal Person Show, where this is your average person’s naughty thoughts arranged in a funny way. It’s still got a bit of Bob’s Burgers attempt to save the characters at the end, but it’s happy wallowing in slightly dickish behaviour.
Bob’s Burgers, Season Eleven
This far into the show, the contradictions in its viewpoint have become really pronounced, even bothering me a little bit. It really feels like a show that’s trying to have its cake and eat it too; specifically, what’s caught my attention is the characters are so dismissive and even contemptuous about reading books, learning anything, or even following basic health and safety, and yet every episode climaxes in a heartfelt lesson on something… but those ‘lessons’ themselves are delivered in such a half-assed way (even by the actors reading their lines), and not in a funny way the way you get with Futurama B-plots or anything the Gang does on Always Sunny. You know exactly what the lesson is gonna be in the first scene of the plot, too.
Appropriately, this half-works for characters; Bob actively tries to get out of doing anything, Tina is aggressively sincere but also insecure, both Gene and Linda are shallow enough to have messy conclusions on subjects, and most of all, Louise is impulsive enough to cause trouble in the first place and smart enough to recognise when situations are her fault. But it still feels weirdly condescending and unnecessary – not enough for me to even Not Enjoy the show, just weird.
Of course, this is an extremely popular show that has won awards and churned out two dozen episodes a year for seventeen years; this is a Werner Herzog situation, where I’m seeing what the people want to see. From a creative standpoint, I actually get it – when your whole life is based around making this one show, you can have these competing instincts – to make something that makes people laugh, but also to make the world a better place, to want to be edgy but also approachable and even intellectually impressive.
My basic taste – the thing I’m straightforwardly drawn to – is something that takes an idea way too fucking far, way further than anyone else would; this is, perhaps, a result of being autistic. I neither apologise for that nor consider it a superior trait, just observing it’s there and something like this appeals to, again, Normal People. I think most people have this drive to be and do everything at once, constantly going a certain distance and then trying to curtail it, and that’s how you get something like BB.
Sometimes there are things like The Simpsons or Terry Pratchett, who are spinning a lot of plates at once – heartfelt emotion, intense comedy, gripping plot, sincere philosophy. If you’ll forgive the tortured metaphor here, we’ve established BB as one of those shows that has a high floor and low ceiling; it’s never gonna blow your mind, but it’s never gonna veer off anywhere terrible. The true metaphor, I suppose, is that it’s built a very small sandbox, it’s never gonna leave that sandbox, and it’ll police it thoroughly to make sure nobody pisses in it.
Part of what draws me to the show – aside from the fact that it consistently amuses me, and also the person I’m sleeping with is showing me it – is that this honestly, if perhaps unintentionally, reflects a very specific but broadly popular mindset (and in a way less cruel and evil than, like, NCIS or The Big Bang Theory). On a basic level, Bob is sympathetic because he’s found a small, specific, unambitious task he enjoys doing – cooking burgers – and the show itself reflects that, enjoying telling the exact same story over and over in a hundred variations (something that both drives me wild and is part of the show’s ethos is that plots rarely even intersect a la Seinfeld).
And that’s what most people are like – they want to get very good at one thing, and they want to spend all their time with the same dozen people (cycling in a new person every other week or so and letting them stick around if we like ‘em), and they want to be edgy without being mean, and they want life to be fairly straightforwardly predictable, and they want to get a lecture in every week so long as they don’t have to think about it too hard.
“This far into the show, the contradictions in its viewpoint have become really pronounced, even bothering me a little bit. It really feels like a show that’s trying to have its cake and eat it too; specifically, what’s caught my attention is the characters are so dismissive and even contemptuous about reading books, learning anything, or even following basic health and safety, and yet every episode climaxes in a heartfelt lesson on something…” I am doing the guy at the window meme at this.
On the other hand, have you considered:
Wagstaff, you’re a school
I wanna be inside of you
And the poo poo, and the pee pee
And the pee pee, and the poo poo
Spider-Noir, “Double Cross” – Another new case, this time from mob boss Silvermane himself, that ties to the previous case, and leads to several double crosses. Two things really stand out: Ben Reilly playing entirely by noir rules and doing things the typical Spider-Person would not; and Brendan Gleeson having a lot of fun but also lending a lot of gravitas to the role of a successful but worn down and suspicious kingpin. Oh, and a great cliffhanger.
Did not watch nor listen to the World Cup final since I was tired of Fox’s American announcers. I don’t think I missed much of note.
The Invite – really sharp comedic filmmaking from Olivia Wilde, I never got around to checking out Don’t Worry Darling but it sounded like a bit of nightmare. This seems like a smart bit of course correction, Booksmart showed she was good at handling funny dialogue and this film is just four characters bouncing off each other in a single location and basically all of it worked for me. A smart bit of setup, a crackling middle act as the other couple are introduced and then a well-handled finale that does tackle some more serious themes / feelings but never forgets to be funny. Loved the choice of end credits song too.
The Master – was looking forward to revisiting this one as it’s one of the PTAs I’d only seen once. I still find it to be a pretty hard film to love, it’s fascinating and beautifully crafted but unlike some of his other films where I’ve been able to adjust to the right wavelength on a second viewing I still found myself bouncing off this one just a little.
Live Music – local emo heroes Crash of Rhinos, back for their first show in 13 years. I’m a big fan of most of the band members previous projects but this one never quite won me over, so I was partially there just to see a bunch of old music-scene faces I hadn’t bumped into in a while, but they are a very good band and put on a great show even if it wasn’t as exciting a reunion for me as it obviously was for a lot of others.
Seinfeld, S8 “The Pothole” – one of the later episodes where the zaniness didn’t quite pay off for me, although the way the plots converge at the end is pretty hilariously convoluted and has a lot of fun messing up Wayne Knight’s face. Elaine’s desperate quest to order Chinese food from a restaurant that doesn’t QUITE deliver to her area was probably the funniest plot for me, Jerry’s weird hygiene battle with guest star Kristin Davis fell pretty flat.
World Cup Final – glad Spain won, Argentina’s entire strategy this tournament seemed to be “we can’t lose if we refuse to play” and watching them was a slog. I skipped the slightly pointless third-place match but probably should have watched that instead, because it sounded like great fun. Anyway, let us never talk of football again.
Or at least for the next four years.
Woooooo live music! Woooo old scene heads!
I really do need to rewatch The Master, because I absolutely bounced off of it the first time. I think I wanted it to be a different movie than it was, because it had very much been sold as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s not-L. Ron Hubbard forming a cult in the ’50s, and I was very much in the mood to buy. And what we got just didn’t compel me by comparison. It’s certainly well crafted, but I remember thinking that we got a character study of the least interesting character in the thing.
It’s an odd one, I like that it exists but I definitely get a lot more out of PTA’s other “deeply flawed dude character study” movies. I’ll be happy to give it another go in another few years and see what more I can squeeze out of it, though.
Person to Person — Dustin Guy Defa’s short, as opposed to the feature a few years later, in which a record store nerd finds a woman passed out in his apartment after a party. Bene Coopersmith is not abrasive but he doesn’t know how to handle the woman’s insistence on sticking around (Deragh Campbell portrays this as both being hungover and also curious about the situation she’s in) and his inability to deal with this on someone else’s terms is comically frustrating. A failed meet-cute, well-observed.
Andor, episodes 3-7 — the show purposefully parallels Andor and Syril, as they are both huge dumbasses. The heist stuff is very solid even as the structure undermines it here. This is a heist movie for the most part, but also Mon Mothma is there because it’s a TV show and we need to check in with people (same with Syril). The heisters blur a bit because of this, although Ebon Barrach-Moss kills it as always. The contrast with the scrabbling amateur rebels (everyone is fronting, Mon Mothma in particular but even Luthien) figuring out as they go and the scrambling authoritarian Empire freaking out is interesting, lots of laughs at the big bad bluster from the boss in episode 7, but the show’s nature means spending time with Empire people and being invested in their politics, it is fun to watch Deedra and her rad supervisor Patagatz navigate this. Andor himself is not as fun, what a dingus. Glad he’s REDACTED and the show is presumably over now.
Watched a rip of Ragtime the musical with a friend on a Discord call watching at the same time because of the wildfire smoke – 2026, everybody! Something that’s striking here is how much the book struggles to keep the plot/vignettes part of a consistent whole, sometimes sanitizing a very dark plot in the process. (Evelyn Nesbitt is a much lighter character than in the novel apparently, which tracks for a woman whose insane sex slaver millionaire husband shot her ex-lover in a party!) The Coalhouse Walker plot also feels creaky and problematic, trying to strike a balance of respectability politics with fetishizing Black suffering and reducing the characters to stereotypes. Black people sure do die and dance a lot! To their credit, Joshua Henry and Nichelle Lewis are extraordinary and transcend said characters – Henry is one of the baritones currently on Broadway, if not ever – and Lewis’ “Your Daddy’s Son” reduces me to tears. The music as a whole is terrific, even the more expected big ballads, especially the opening number where the different ethnic groups each enter in a procession then circle around each other and begin to intersect, the characters forced to engage via the dance, whether they want to or not. It’s a great visual metaphor for what the story wants to do as a whole though it doesn’t quite succeed.
Oh, I meant to write a “darker” character re: Nesbitt, damn it.
The Odyssey — I liked this pretty good, although Oppenheimer was better and Tenet, despite its incomprehensible, was more fun (Although the wife loved this one.) But the best thing about it is Nolan repurposing his love of jumbled chronologies and puzzle box storytelling to create a portrait of our main character that grows and recontextualizes as the film goes on. Also, the prologue in Ithaca before we get to Troy is too long, which is not true of the film as a whole. Nolan has a real challenge adapting a character from such a different moral culture than the one his audience lives in. Mostly he manages it. Great performances by Damon, Hathaway, Holland, Patel and others. (Especially Hathaway, of course.) Zendaya needs to stop taking roles where she stares at the protagonist in sad-eyed silence (here and Dune), because she brings some inappropriate Disney Channel breadth to those scenes. She’s way better when she has dialogue, or even just an emotional mien other than knowing disappointment. (Challengers, for example.) But this is a grand old time at the movies and you should go see it.
World Cup Third-Place Game and Championship – The third-place game was a lot more exciting than it had any right to be; I declined to put it on as England ran up the score in the first half, but when France cut it to 4-2 I checked it out. And in the championship, I suppose the good guys won, which is nice. I guess between beating France and Argentina, Spain is pretty well deserving and probably the clear world #1, eh?
Ted Lasso season 1, through “For the Children” – I guess maybe the World Cup had me interested in revisiting this? Or maybe I wanted to remind myself how good season 1 was so I can be accurately disappointed by season 4. Anyway, I actually skipped the pilot – but that’s not uncommon for me on rewatches, since I think the pilot is about a B- while the rest of the season is mostly A to A- with maybe a B+ in there. And, yes, it’s still that’s good.
InfoWars – The Onion produced version, of course. Tim Heidecker’s Alex Jones impression is pretty good (he’s playing “Tim Heidecker,” but he nails the gravely voice and the vocal tics), and some of the other segments are really good and suitably asinine (I liked seeing the return of Jim Haggerty, especially after Porkin’ Across America), but the unexpected delight here was Edi Patterson calling in as Tim’s ex-wife Chesapeake. “Cindy Jo, you listen to me, bitch. Have you looked at his butthole? If you looked at his butthole, you would know there are demons in there.” “I will hop on him like Lady fucking Godiva. I will go right in front of your house with my titties out, and I will say ‘Remember when you used to have this?’ meaning my titties and the horse.”
Live music. Bits and pieces of a set by Elles Bailey, Judy Collins, Richard Thompson. Not super high on my list of people to see while I can, but definitely on the list. Collins’ phrasing on This Land is Your Land brought me back to grade school when it was first taught to me. If this is her final tour, she’s going out strong. Thompson was expectedly wry and a much more fun stage presence than I expected. Dude didn’t quite rip but all the skill is still there and he sounds damn good for seventy-seven. I may dig out a copy of I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight and give it another spin in the coming weeks, it’s been a long time.
What did we play?
Disco Elysium – I got pretty deep into this on Switch previously but it kept crashing and losing a bunch of progress until I eventually got too frustrated and gave up. Noticed it was on sale on Xbox and I had some store credit so decided to take the plunge again. I’m a few hours in now and… I just had the first crash that lost a bunch of progress. FFS! This is obviously a fascinating game but I honestly can’t quite understand how it has managed to maintain such cult admiration when it’s so frustratingly broken. I will be proceeding with more quicksaves, I guess.
Trying to get back the rhythm for text based RPGs is really hard.
A friend of a friend is a game developer so they sent me an early version of a simple desktop horror game they created, clearly inspired by Saw but seemingly much stronger because it’s not trying to do some bullshit morality test. You’ve been captured by some supernatural killer and have to use a mechanized knife to play the traditional knife game – preferably you hit these random bugs and every time you hit your own hand or sever a finger, you lose some XP. Super fun, my critique was mainly that the bugs were a little harder to kill than they should be.
I suspect part of the canonization of Sir PTerry is because by the end of the books, a lot of the characters had gone from very flawed and very human to nearly saints themselves. Surely if Vimes is somehow a role model and Tiffany Aching is so much more kind and likeable than Granny Weatherwax, well, Pratchett has clearly become as much of a role model as them for all things, right? And let’s not mention the non-Discworld books like Dodger. It wasn’t his intent, I am sure, but late run Pratchett, perhaps due to his ill health, wasn’t the same.
Hmm — Tiffany was a purposeful new tack, both in genre (more YA-ish) and in character. It makes sense that she’s different from Granny and has some new ways of thinking. Vimes evolves as a character but I do think he gets softer and righter as he goes.
Softer, righter, and unstoppable. His final appearance he might as well be Batman.
I’ve actually read shockingly little Discworld and need to read more. I got the impression when I was in high school that I wouldn’t like Pratchett (I don’t know how I squared this with the fact that I very much did like the novella of his in Silverberg’s Legends anthology), probably because I found Good Omens hit-or-miss and, since I’d loved almost all the Gaiman I’d read, assumed the parts I didn’t like had to come from Pratchett. (And then the way some people talked about him started getting on my nerves, for the reasons you elucidated.) But then I finally read Monstrous Regiment a few years ago and adored it, so I need to finally give Discworld some proper time, even if I may not aim for completionist status. Certainly all this sounds very relevant to my interests, as I’ve long suspected the Vimes books would be.
One of the strengths Pratchett had–obvious even within my limited experience–is a genius-level gift for aphorisms, which in his case feels like the natural result of both a lot of thought and a lot of very precise, tight writing; that’s a rare skill, and I feel like it’s even rarer for it to be combined with storytelling that can get at the complexities the concise aphorisms can’t, which obviously happens here.
I think you’d go nuts for Small Gods, which is one of the standalone ones.
“I found Good Omens hit-or-miss and, since I’d loved almost all the Gaiman I’d read, assumed the parts I didn’t like had to come from Pratchett” — exact same reaction for me, although I found no hits in the five or so pages of Good Omens I managed to get through before putting it down. I think the two have said they wound up writing like each other during the course of the book, either way it’s way too strained without the deceptively light touch Pratchett has. Like you say, he is very precise and tight (well, he loses some of this later on because of Alzheimer’s) but he misdirects from that, in part through aphorism and its low-minded cousin the footnote, and this all contributes to his books being so rereadable — there’s a lot going on but it never overwhelms.
I think I read Good Omens after maybe just one or two Pratchetts – loaned to me by my future wife – and I enjoyed it well enough that we watched the rather messy TV show (which worked only insofar as David Tennant and Michael Sheen are always good). But odds are if I went back now, I would not care much for it. But worth adding that I stopped liking Gaiman’s solo stuff long before the Gaiman the person’s behavior hurt Gaiman the writer’s sales.
Of all the fantastic creations in Discworld Vetinari is the most unbelievable — a leader who is comfortable with diffusing power instead of consolidating it and one open to change. Pratchett writes him so well and deploys him very purposefully, Vetinari as protagonist would not work, that the fantasy totally works though.
“The actual arc of the book is more personal; Vimes and the Watch being in a more comfortable position, literally and emotionally” — you compared Vimes to a noir protagonist earlier and the book follows Vimes from that isolated position to part of a functioning unit, becoming a cop for real, and the Vimes books going forward are procedurals. A lot of detective fiction is about a Vimes-ish dude, beaten-down and furious, fighting against a corrupt society, but Pratchett’s great project in Discworld (and the Vimes books in particular) is creating society. I think this is part of the more complicated parts to him that you talk about being sanded over, part of Pratchett doing this is surely that “cop solves mystery” is an extremely solid foundation for a series of books but he’s also wrestling with how to maintain order in society, and for who. Vimes directs his anger (and Pratchett’s anger as a writer is one of his best traits) in a more productive way than the Marlovian PI does by working for the state. Pratchett will tweak this, especially with some later Discworld books, but he’s not ACAB by any means.
I always wonder what Pratchett would have done with Vimes in the face of a world where cops like Vimes are increasingly as much of a fantasy as rulers like Vetinari.
And how he would have reacted to the bizarre Night Watch TV show that seems to have lost everything Pratchett set out to do.
One thing I thought about but never ended up going into is that Pratchett was inarguably liberal-not-leftist – aside from the fact that one of his most beloved characters is a cop, Vimes and Ankh-Morpork each have a gradual arc of getting civilised – Vimes marries into money and just keeps rising and rising, whilst Ank-Morpork gains institutions that are increasingly refined as it goes on.
I would note that the farther you get in the series the more everyone knows that Carrot is the True King of Ankh-Morpork. And it doesn’t matter because Carrot knows that Vetinari keeps the city running and doesn’t want to harm the city by stepping into his “rightful” place. Pratchett himself is also pretty firm on the fact that just because Carrot might be a good king, it doesn’t mean monarchy is the right way to rule the city.
I love these books so much and cherish the fact that I got to meet him once. No, he wasn’t a perfect person by any stretch–and I promise you Tiffany had her share of anger and made stupid decisions and so forth, even if she wasn’t exactly Granny–but it’s worth noting that one of the rules at his book signings was that the obviously pregnant, disabled, and so forth got shuffled to the beginning of the line rather than make them stand in it for a long stretch of time. Angry, yes, but also decent, a thing sadly missing in so many people today.
I only got to see him in person once – didn’t bring anything for him to autograph – but I am glad I did. And in the course of his program, he asked if anyone in the crowd had read anything by Donald Westlake. I was maybe one of five people there who had. He was a big fan and I loved that one of my favorite writers liked one of my other favorite writers. (Westlake was, if not a big fan – I think overall Westlake steered clear of fantasy as much as he did scifi – at least well versed enough in Pratchett’s stuff to write a positive review of a Pratchett book for the Washington Post.)
It’s interesting that Carrot is as much a pragmatist as Vetinari (thinking of the end of Men at Arms in particular) — they share the goal of a well-run city and work in their separate realms to make it happen.
Dr. Mario & Puzzle League – Game Boy Advance – Nintendo Classics on Nintendo Switch
Played some Puzzle League. This looks and sounds good, but is a little limited compared to other versions. And I was curious if I could beat the CPU on the highest difficulty on the first try and guess what, I did.
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound on Nintendo Switch
Started it over the weekend and it’s very good. I already knew it looked great, but it plays even better. Fast, responsive, and nimble. Builds off the style of the NES games, even putting you in the middle of the first game’s famous opening flashback cutscene, but feels modern and responsive. Might just go for it, if I don’t circle back to the conclusion of Hollow Knight.
X-Men – Marvel MaXimum Collection on Nintendo Switch.
Played a few more levels. Still not entirely sold, but there’s good stuff here. Will definitely try it online before I make up my mind on it.
SNK VS. CAPCOM: SVC CHAOS on Nintendo Switch
Always heard this doesn’t hang as well as SNK’s other work at the time, or even Capcom’s take on SNK characters. So far I agree, though I can’t quite place what’s off. At least the banter between Chun Li and Mai Shiranui is very entertaining.