The original form that created the ancient Greek tragedy was presented as part of religious festivals, meant to commemorate Dionysus; the very concept described by Aristotle of catharsis, creating a mixture of pity and awe, is a feeling of religiosity, our human failings rendered grander and bigger than mere frailty.1 The etymology of the phrase “tragedy” is up for debate, as it may come from “goat song” (the prize for satyr poems: a goat) or it may stem from a choir of boys whose voices have not yet dropped. Either way, tragedy comes from song, notes pitched towards the heavens.
Stephen Sondheim wrote the booming, literally dreadful chorus of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”, the main theme of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street – “Swing your razor wide, Sweeney! Hold it to the sky! Freely flows the blood of those who’d moralize” – to be the melody of Dies Irae, part of the Catholic Requiem Mass, in reverse. Dies Irae‘s Latin lyrics, sourced from a medieval poem, describe the Last Judgment, the summoning of souls to God. Some will be saved; others will perish without salvation. Sweeney, when he appears onstage, summoned by ecstatic Londoners, cries out that he “served a dark and a vengeful god!” Is it the Abrahamic God Sweeney serves, delivering souls with slit throats, their baptisms by water null, devoid of (dubious) Christian redemption thanks to the red rivers Sweeney Todd unleashes? Or is it something even darker? My devoutly Jewish friend once told me that in context, early Jewish history involves several tribes deciding which demon they will worship in order to survive. Perhaps this is the creature Sweeney pays tribute to when he sings, “They all deserve to die!”
When I was 14, I would play the 2006 arrangement of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” over and over, obsessed with the intricacy of the singers in contrapuntal harmony, their differing notes and lyrics carefully blending together into a single word, single sound, the unified fervor bringing forth the demon barber, back from the dead to live on in our dreams and folklore. I felt something I could not describe at the time – dread mixed with awe, a power that was not pleasant but felt more real to me than whatever sat in the Catholic church both my grandmothers loved.
There’s a theory that horror differs from other art because it brings out feelings of the numinous, of an encounter with the spiritual, something greater and more powerful than your own flesh and blood. I don’t know if I believe in a loving and devout God, but I am no disbeliever when it comes to the metaphysical or the spiritual. I have felt it, something Sublime and sometimes frightening, thrumming under certain works of art, certain sensations and experiences, certain places. (Go to the Tower of London and, please, tell me there is no such thing as psychogeography or psychic energy.) I feel it within Sweeney Todd far more than with any other musical2, let alone most works of art, and try to serve that “dark and hungry god” in my own way, though I avoid mass murder and cannibalism. Sweeney Todd doesn’t need my help with his work anyway – he’s as real as any flesh and blood creature, first given breath by the penny dreadful and animated by the collective unconscious: a great, unending song reaching somewhere far above as well as down, down below.
About the writer
C.M. Crockford
C.M. Crockford is a writer and editor with one book, an obsession with Hannibal, and a fixation on iced coffee. He lives in Philadelphia with his cat Wally.
C.M. Crockford’s ProfileTags for this article
More articles by C.M. Crockford
It exemplifies what The Bear and Life & Beth typically miss out on: (1) your character’s motivations are dramatic AND funny, and (2) you can take control of the tone, so the drama immediately follows the comedy, and vice-versa.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Six, “Strange Revelations”
It’s truly amazing to me how mixed this show is; Lyta is great but the plots we’re in right now aren’t. Anything to do with Londo and G’Kar is fantastic but also pointless, even masturbatory. I’m also going through The Shield again just for a refresher on drama writing, and I’m into season four, which shares many qualities with this season in the sense that many plots are done, but are echoing out into consequence. Except that’s amazing on The Shield and frustrating here; mostly because the story of The Shield isn’t over (there’s always a forward drive that’s missing here) but also because I just don’t think Straczynski has the imagination – or, to be even meaner, the desire – to see the hard work that comes with getting what you want.
He’s kind of flailing here, perhaps because of a variant of millenialism? I’m talking out of my ass here, but perhaps Straczynski is enthusiastic about the work of doing but not the work of maintaining that doing, and he’s struggling to make actual stories out of dealing with the consequences of your actions, which is a shame because that’s generally the most interesting part of the season. Dealing with the work of maintenance means the risk of revealing your heroes aren’t quite as smart as you set them up to be (and is in ironic counterpoint to the first season). To be far less mean, if Straczynski had a new kind of world to build up to, he’d be struggling a lot less.
Twin Peaks, S2 E19 “Variations on Relations” – this doesn’t quite keep up the high level from the previous episode, the stuff about Windom Earle recruiting a goofy stoner guy and using him as his next chess piece is just a bit… stupid. The buildup to Miss Twin Peaks is also a little weak, although it has its moments. Cooper and Annie remain a delight, and Gordon’s scene with Shelley (and Bobby) is incredible, so there are high highs – just need that extra bit of Lynchy darkness back, which I believe will happen very soon.
Elementary, “The Games Underfoot” – In a story inspired by the massive landfill dumping of the purportedly terrible ET video game, an archaeologist hard up for cash going digging in an old landfill and finds not cartridges but illegal dumping of toxic waste. And is soon enough dead. The mystery is a bit flat, though seeing Sherlock trying to wrap his head around video game obsessives and playing an 80s game is fun. Meanwhile, Sherlock works to get his friendship with Alfredo (the fellow addict kidnapped in the third season finale) back on track. As usual, this part of the show is quite effective.
Barney Miller, “Graft” – A former colleague, disliked by all for his abrasiveness and petty bigotry, is now at Internal Affairs and investigating our regulars. Leading Barney to tell his wife not to accept so many little favors from friends, none of which have anything to do with him being a cop, and to everyone confessing a litany of petty sins. Of course, in the end the IA guy doesn’t actually do anything (he’s in fact demoted for trying to investigate the commissioner), but the scene where everyone confesses is tense and not funny in the usual way, a sign that the show is not going to go only for laughs. The first episode directed by fomer actor Noam Pitlik, who would be in the chair for 102 of the show’s 171 installments.
PBS Eons, “Life and Death in Pangea,” part one – The long running YouTube series about “deep time” – the state of the natural world from the beginning of Earth’s formation to the rise of humanity – has made its way to your TV set. Assuming you still watch PBS on your TV set. This six part series looks at The Great Dying, the largest mass extinction event ever, and how the species that survived managed to hang around and start things over. While there is an actual budget here, allowing the hosts to travel and to conduct interviews, it’s the same show as ever. I happen to enjoy the YouTube series a lot, so of course I like this as well, but I have no idea if these will find a new audience. Beyond that, there is what strikes me as a backwards distribution approach: only the first episode will be on YouTube for now. The rest will only be at PBS’s site and app. Instead of trying to build PBS’s brand on YouTube, it’s more important to move the audience. Which is the exact opposite of what my employer and most stations are doing. Also, I saw no attempt at all to raise funds for PBS. None of this surprises me, but it’s best I don’t say more other than PBS is behind the curve.
Hardwood Vault, “How did the Knicks Win when the Spurs Controlled 72% of the Finals?” – Another YouTube vid! This is both a smart and balanced analysis of how the NBA Finals turned out the way they did, and a chance for me to see everything I missed and rewatched everything I didn’t. Dammit, I am still getting teared up every time Mike Breen says it’s okay for Knicks fans to cry.
Live Music
Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Tiny theatre in Delaware, occasioning a crack that at this point he’s only playing venues older than himself. Two hours or close enough. Started with a clip of Alpert appearing on What’s My Line? in ’67 and the large screen got a lot of use, showing moments of him and the TJB throughout the years, clips of him and Louis Armstrong talking on a special, a funny moment with Sérgio Mendes. Not being a huge fan, I wasn’t aware that Love Potion No 9 was coming, and it was about fifteen percent nastier than anything else in the set–never quite getting to the point of funk, but just loose enough to contrast with the rest of the night. Some old school bandleadering, directing with hand gestures while facing the audience. You get the nod, you solo. Bill Cantos on piano and marimba was probably the night’s MVP, but obviously the baseline competence onstage was sky high. My sister is the horn player of the family, and she confirmed that his posture (he spent most of the set in an office chair center stage) was the kind you get from either knowing everything about horn playing or have just started, and that his breath control was pretty solid given that, you know, ninety-one. Ninety-one years old and the man is still on beat.
I had no idea he is still alive. Wow.
That’s pretty much what I said when I saw he was playing Philadelphia two or three years ago. I missed that one and figured I’d better make it happen this time. I wouldn’t describe myself as a huge fan, but I’m not immune to A Taste of Honey, you know? And it seemed like he hit a lot of the songs people were there to hear, plus Ladyfingers, which blew up on TikTok a little while back.
Deconstructing Harry — In hindsight this is less out of left field than we thought at the time. Sure, it’s vulgar and angry, but seeds of that existed in Mighty Aphrodite and Bullets Over Broadway, not to mention Husbands and Wives. In many ways this is a throwback to Allen’s earlier work, with a series of sex-obsessed comic sketches, albeit held up by a dramatic scaffold. I’ve said in the past that this film was misunderstood as Allen’s cri de couer and is more a rumination on living without restraint (a lá Phillip Roth, hence the Richard Benjamin appearance). And I still think that’s right, but maybe there is little more honest anger here than I first saw. But also self-examination — Harry is funny and he’s the protagonist so we forgive him much of what he does, but he is also highly self-centered and casual about the consequence of his actions on those he professes to care about. And in that way it may actually be meant in part as an apology.
Of course as always the most striking image is in the crowd scene at the very end there is a shot in which an elfin blonde with a pixie cut stands just out of frame and collapses the distance between the fiction and reality. But I was ready for it this time. This is why I will always dismiss people who say Allen isn’t a visual filmmaker.
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Two, Robert Service
Posted this last week, but I was late, so just to recap: Decided on a new project: go back over the biographies of the Soviet Union leaders I own, chapter by chapter, starting with Lenin. It’s good to reread books every now and again, and it’ll be fun to go deeper into them than I did before.
This chapter covers Lenin’s childhood, and if you want nature and nurture together, both are covered. He immediately comes off, even before he can walk, as a self-driven, intelligent, and belligerent child; expressing rage as he teaches himself to walk. He also is given every advantage of privilege you could imagine; mainly, education at a great school, but even outside of the books he’s given – Service notes that Uncle Tom’s Cabin surely shaped his worldview as strongly as Marx did later – and the hobbies and practices he’s allowed to indulge in, his parents actively cultivate intelligence in their children (I was struck by his mother using the then-cutting-edge and consistently effective phonics-and-flashcard method of teaching; this is also what I had as a kid, and I understand it’s one of the most effective teaching methods).
It’s often noted that the most successful revolutionaries grew up with this kind of background; a strong grounding in the Classics (which is partly why I’m visiting them now), as well as a clear and broad education and the connections that come with this. Service notes that Lenin’s parents are firmly middle class in their expectations and morality; horrified by the small amount of violence they witness and shielding their kids from it (oddly, comparable with Greta Thunberg today in a privileged background dedicated to activism). If you’re looking at this from a modern day perspective, it speaks to how one ought to use all of one’s resources without fear of hypocrisy.
I find a lot of value in rereading, both in terms of the pleasure it gives and the deeper immersion and insight I get when the narrative drive often becomes a bit more leisurely. (Although sometimes I find myself racing through a reread because I know there’s a part I want to get to.) I was just thinking the other day that I haven’t been doing enough rereading lately, outside of things for YOTM (which I’ll comment about in a moment). It provides some necessary mineral to the literary diet. So I’m really looking forward to these intensive breakdowns.
And just added this to my wish list.
I might circle around to this, but I need time after trotting with Trotsky.
Further into Shawn Levy’s Paul Newman bio: The Color of Money is coming out, and Paul is not getting his hopes up at all for winning the Oscar. It takes a long while before Levy finally says that the beer-guzzling actor/director/race care driver(!) is a functioning alcoholic. I feel like Levy isn’t really sure how to deal with it since the impact on Paul’s life from all that drinking seems minimal outside of Paul not having the standing to help his addict son before it was too late. It feels like the drinking is from some other person’s life. Movie-wise, the biggest revelation is that The Color of Money was not a work for hire for Scorsese. He loved The Hustler and worked with Richard Price closely to rework the sequel novel into the movie. Which does not explain why the movie feels like a work for hire to me.
I’d describe THE COLOR OF MONEY as a rehabilitative film, for both Newman and Scorsese, in terms of both substance abuse and professional ego. For the actor, it was achieved by dialing back the actorly “business” and letting his charisma show for itself (Kind of the “anti” Pacino). For Scorsese it was delivering the showiness on time, on budget, and not losing the narrative thread to morose introspection. It’s a minor film, but I think it was essential in reviving their careers.
Ghost Story, by Peter Straub
This got its own YOTM piece, but I took a more narrow focus there–and since that focus led me to talking quite a bit about what I think the book does badly, I’ll say here that there’s still much to appreciate. The opening sequence, where Straub puts the reader in the shoes of a man who has kidnapped a little girl (he thinks she’s a monster, but at this point, a first-time reader can’t be sure, which gives it all a queasy dread), is tense, fraught, and magnificently written, with a sense for commercial, anonymized roadside Americana that’s so well-done that I’m sorry Straub abandons it for the “genteel small town” atmosphere of the rest of the book. A lot of the nested ghost stories, from the Turn of the Screw riff to the demon lover tale inflected with California cults and academic embarrassment (there’s a horror all its own in giving a rambling, incoherent lecture that winds up getting sarcastic applause).
And while in some ways Straub’s vision of humanity is too narrow, his vision of (white) masculinity is not, and there’s something endearing about having one of his key protagonists be an elderly clotheshorse of a man, a gentle person who overlooks his wife’s affairs; you can also at least see that he’s making a genuine effort with one of his female characters, even if that effort also makes his inability to land the plane more noticeable.
Also, the man could turn a phrase, to both terrifying and aphoristic effect.
This made me realize I also didn’t put another YOTM book in these threads, even though I reread it, so:
Flowers in the Attic, by V.C. Andrews
V.C. Andrews, on the other hand, could not turn a phrase, at least not on purpose–the article has my favorite passage of unintentional no-holds-barred hilarity (it could win a comedy award if it had been written in that context). But the over-the-top domestic Gothic of this book, where everything goes to eleven all the time, was huge for me as a kid and is still engaging to me now; I wish more authors were this unabashedly fearless about setting up incredibly dramatic situations and then exploring them in relentless and idiosyncratic detail. It just rules to see someone going all-in on their very personal vision, if without many literary chops. Outsider art has its own punch.
Further adventures into the Guardian Top 100 Novels list:
Persuasion, Jane Austen – this finishes pretty strongly, which was a bit of a relief because I can’t honestly say I got all that much out of it otherwise. The early 19th-century language is a bit of a struggle but I don’t think I’d mind too much if I found the story compelling. The protagonist just isn’t all that interesting, she’s mostly defined by being quiet and kind and not as unpleasant as the rest of her insufferable family, I guess I was pleased that she managed to navigate the trials of being rich and idle 200 years ago but the writing never really got me invested in her. Hoping to find a bit more to enjoy in the other Austens on the list when I get around to them.
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino – pivoted back to something more modern and the relative safety of an author I’ve enjoyed in the past. I loved this one too, such an odd, poetic book with the tiny micro-chapters about these real / imagined / abstract cities consistently delivering some fascinating ideas and images. One of my favourite books is “The Atlas of Remote Islands” by Judith Schalansky and I feel like she must have been influenced by this book, although she’s applying the formula to real (albeit mysterious and little-documented) places. If the framing story with Kublai Khan and Marco Polo tied things together a little more then I might have been tempted to call this my favourite from the list so far but I’d say I enjoyed this more as a series of tiny postcards than a complete narrative, but either way it was excellent.
And a palate cleanser:
The Leaf Collector, Nev Clay – a book of poems by a songwriter that I love. I would say the common theme is kinda character studies of eccentric local characters, perhaps? There’s some pretty witty observations although I definitely prefer his songwriting to his poetry, perhaps inevitably given my biases. A few of these hit pretty hard though and it was an interesting read.
I feel vindicated in my position that Persuasion is my least favorite Austen! (To the point where I actually sort of didn’t like it, whereas I really like-love-adore all the others.) Mansfield Park is also somber, but I think it has more going on (it’s at least occasionally been my favorite); all the others are often very funny, with Northanger Abbey–a lively Gothic spoof–as an underappreciated fave. So I think you’ll have better luck with her moving forward.
I should still reread Persuasion, though–I haven’t revisited it at all, and maybe I’d be able to appreciate it more now.
Definitely encouraging to hear that you got more out of the others! Emma, Mansfield Park and (inevitably) Pride & Prejudice are the other ones on the list, I’m looking forward to Emma having enjoyed multiple adaptations of it but I don’t know much about Mansfield Park and oddly haven’t seen any of the P&P adaptations although of course I feel like I know the basics through cultural osmosis.
I’m just adding the publication dates into my tracking spreadsheet and I have to admit I’m QUITE pleased that most of the stuff on the list is at least a little more modern. But maybe I just picked the wrong starting point for This Kind Of Thing.
P&P is the only one I’ve read and perhaps it is overlong, but while the Bennetts are financially comfortable, there is a financial sword of Damocles hanging over them which puts some meat on the bone.
Beautifully written essay. I love that sense of the sublime, including the dark sublime, and it combines so well–and on such a deep level–with music. I find it fascinating that “melodrama” as a term comes from specifically describing (Victorian) theatrical drama accompanied by an orchestral (melodic) score: we’ve all heard hamfisted scores that want to shove you into feeling something not merited by the actual action, but it’s interesting nonetheless that an acknowledgment and suspicion of music’s ability to move us is embedded in a genre term that’s often used with a certain degree of disdain.
Thanks! Might have to expand this into a longer essay as I didn’t even go into the use of the “devil’s chord” throughout the score, banned by the Catholic Church because of said acknowledgement. Even the Church knows when something grabs ya.