Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass is Singing is a masterwork about her life in Rhodesia – as I understand it, she considered it what would happen if she’d made the opposite decision at every step of her life, with a protagonist – Mary – who is successfully publicly shamed into giving up her free-spirited individual life in a boarding house and marrying a farmer on impulse, only for both of them to get dragged down in a miserable and increasingly bleak existence. The novel’s illustration of racism and colonialism in a small environment is well-celebrated; Mary considers her black workers with a mixture of fear, contempt, and buried sexual attraction as she attempts to use them to run the farm, which is really a sublimated attempt to feel control and pleasure in her own life.
What’s less discussed, as far as I can tell, is the novel’s illustration of the pitfalls of reason, and even how this can be tied into larger thoughts about Western civilization and colonialism. One of the things that makes the novel so heartbreaking is that each step of the way is a perfectly rational action based upon what the characters know, how they think, what they want, and what they’ve experienced. Mary’s least rational step at right at the beginning, when she impulsively marries Dick Turner, and that’s driven by the entirely understandable humiliation she feels when her community – the most important thing to her – is making fun of her.
But the single most potent moment of Reason in the story – the ‘scenes’ that justify the whole book beyond its general beauty and sadness – is when Dick gets sick and Mary is both motivated and required to take over the farm. Dick’s irrational action was to keep his wife away from all the actual work of the farm; something that came from his desire to live up to the idea of a man (the most the story explicitly engages with the ideas of Western civilization, as opposed to demonstrating them through action).
When forced to through sheer pragmatism, Mary quickly discovers Dick is unsystematic in his approach to the farm; aside from the disorganized approach to finances, Dick doesn’t really enforce any kind of discipline on his workers, who show up and leave when they feel like it and work on parts of the land when they feel like it. As laid out in the novel, her reasoning seems sound, and Dick seems foolishly haphazard. The novel then immediately flips this over as she brings her own approach; Dick was halfassing his approach to running a farm, but he was also working around human nature as best he could, and Mary’s inhuman punishment and enforcement of her own personal views of the world alienate the workers and drive them to rebel.
The overall effect isn’t quite that Dick and Mary are incompetent, it’s that the land itself is simply not suited to what they’re trying to get from it. Literally, in that it seems the land is not suitable for farming, but also in a general sense as they fail to appreciate the beauty of the place and keep trying to use it to generate the archetypes that even they don’t really believe in – the white man in control of his environment. The aggressive rationality is what really gets me here; what the characters do not only worsens their situation, it worsens their mental state, but you can’t really argue the characters out of their situation because it seems, based upon everything about them, the right move.
The connection to Western values is palpable. The main criticism of Western values from the outside that I’ve heard is valuing hard data and the bottom line more than spiritual matters or the big picture; businesses that chase ever-increasing profits over delivering a good service or product (or at least one that doesn’t poison the planet), for example. When you’re pursuing as much money as possible, it’s rational to dismantle elements of that service that are good but cut into profit, or to shove as many ads in as you can fit.
The common defence of unfettered capitalism is that people are rational actors who will, ultimately, choose the safer and better option; the common response is that people aren’t rational, but it would be more accurate to say that, unfortunately, they’re extremely rational – chasing short-term and personal comfort over a bigger picture, either unaware of or indifferent to the larger consequences of their decisions, even when those decisions come back on them personally. Eastern thinkers – as I understand it – essentially argue that Westerners have it backwards; that we pick a goal that we ‘should’ rationally achieve that will make us a lot of money, and then make emotional decisions trying to get there, if we make emotional decisions at all, only to get neurotically caught up in decision-making because we’re doing things that make us unhappy.
The Grass is Singing shows that kind of ‘myth’ from the inside – from the people perpetuating it. Mary and Dick’s goal is to live up to an idea of a person and they’re stubbornly fighting reality to get there (the least rational aspect is Mary’s inherent, unshakeable contempt for the black residents); the last shot Mary had to be happy was to ignore the tittering of her friends and consider what she really, personally wanted over the general idea of being a Wife And Mother to fit in – to embrace an irrational desire.
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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Year of the Month Spinning fictional plates, doing good, and the sainthood of an author.
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?
Happy Endings, Season Two, Episode Three, “Yesandwitch”
“Imagine you’ve got abs, but on your neck.”
“So, it’s not the comedy kind of improv.”
“This is a weird Superbowl party.”
“Damn. She even makes Columbus Day sound cool.”
Oh, hey, Megan Mullally!
“And that is why I can say I am one of the few people who played Sudoku with Neil Sudaka.”
“That’s not a meal. You can’t have pork and steak at the same meal, you’re not the king of England.”
Also, hey, the limo Max bought is coming back. Didn’t expect that.
“You’re just jealous because your neck is skinny.”
“You can’t ‘neck’ yourself!”
“Can’t I? Can’t I though?”
“Now I’ve just discovered scientists have just discovered something… called the J spot. Two more than G.”
“So this is definitely a Navajo thing and you feel good about that?”
“She who buries her victims in the many dunes.”
“Is it always like that?”
“You tell me.”
“Your cut is that you’re building a strong relationship through improv.”
🎶“It’s like that time you told me we were camping when really we were evicted!”🎶
🎶“Record execs love boats, that’s a fact!”🎶
“You’re my Greg Proops.”
“Not that easy–”
“You’re my Ryan Stiles.”
“Yes!”
“There is a silver lining around every… anyone want to join in here?”
“You know how I told you guys I want you to do a roast for me? I don’t want it anymore. I can’t handle it.”
“It’s in the works.”
“You’re an acquired taste. Like goat cheese or Mr Bean.”
“Mr Bean?!”
“It’s on the fly.”
“On the fly? Everyone else got–”
“You guys don’t think I’ll be alone at fifty, do you?”
“Oh come on, you’re not gonna make it to fifty.”
“You told me how I could have any job Barbie had? I have had three so far.”
“You want duelling Kennedys? You got duelling Kennedys!”
“Oh, no, honey, there’s already a boat called “Yeah Buoy”.”
“Guys, these are all great ideas, but I cannot afford all these boats.”
The LEGO Movie
Shocked by how much I hated this. It’s obviously a visual marvel, but the script was so inane that it made me angry.
Bahaha now I want to read your longer take on The Lego Movie – I dug it at the time (and still enjoy yelling “Darkness/no parents/money makes it sort of better!” as a Batman fan) but that really lessened on the second watch.
Batman’s song is the only part of it that has really stuck with me. Very fun, even if the rest of the movie is hyperkinetic enough to give me a headache. I think the Batman Lego movie is better than the first Lego movie–all graded on the scale of what they are, of course.
Great episode. Inspired casting choice of Mullally to play Penny’s mother (and one of the rare times on TV you could legitimately believe they’re parent / child – only Brad and his dad are ahead in that one).
“You are one-sixteenth Navajo, and don’t let that white lady take that away from you!”
🎶 But you learned how to build a garbage-can fire
And not every nine-year-old can do that 🎶
Every now and then, my weekend (including Thursday, in this case) viewing looks cohesive and planned. And then there’s this set:
Anne of the Indies
Swashbuckler Summer #11. Splashy, emotionally vibrant Jacques Tourneur piratical drama. It was actually surprisingly hard to guess where this going at the start, as Jean Peters’s violent, stormy Anne, a fearsome pirate, begins a love affair with a Frenchman, a captive on a ship she’s raided, who turns out to have more going on than she knew. Anne’s relationships, emotions, and drives are all well-developed, whether they’re leading her toward disaster or a kind of grand tragic redemption. It’s impressive how this one tapdances around the Hays Code to provide a female antihero that it ultimately valorizes despite her time in full-on villain mode. Really interesting film, surprisingly dark in places. Recommended. I’d write it up if it were actually available to stream for free, but alas, it falls outside my remit.
Piranha
Not a good movie, but you can see the obvious, if still developing, core competence of both Joe Dante and John Sayles, especially in the eccentric touches that spice everything up, the occasional genuine sense of dread or impact (that beach strewn with the dead and injured), and the magnificent “nope, we’re all fucked” ending. It’s interesting that there was a lawsuit floated about this ripping off Jaws–Spielberg put the kibosh on it–because I’d say it was a film that was obviously influenced by and even inspired by Jaws but is actually doing its own thing.
The Sheep Detectives
The CGI of this was a little too uncanny valley for me at first, but I got used to it. I don’t have much to say about it, but there were some nice moments and it was pleasant.
Unlawful Entry
Unhinged Ray Liotta is a cop who investigates a break-in at Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe’s place and becomes obsessed with Stowe. Never underestimate the allure of a trashy ’90s thriller, especially with this kind of cast. More on Wednesday.
All That Jazz
For Movie Club. Masterpiece, with a potential career-best performance from Roy Scheider. This captures both a distinctive way of thinking–and a very art-driven way of thinking; I pegged that he was going to steal his girlfriend’s line for a future show even before he said so–and a kind of warm, expansive joie de vivre that takes pleasure in work and human connection as well as in sex, booze, and drugs. The final musical number is one of the most beautiful scenes the movies have ever given us.
Hadestown: The Musical – I have no idea why the subtitle was needed. Is there some other version of Hadestown people would be expecting? A movie of Ani DeFranco playing the version from the original concept album? Anyway, wife and I made our first trip to the cinema since December 2019, at long last feeling comfortable enough to go to a movie (albeit still masking). This was one of those auditoriums refitted with reclining seats, but neither my wife nor the friends we went with cared for them. Happily, as this was a matinee, we didn’t pay that much for the questionable privilege. More annoying were the endless, endless ads, half of them for home security. I appreciate the handful of ads on my streaming services more now. (Also had trailers for Digger, which looks interesting only because of the cast; some scifi thing with Jenna Ortega as an android; and a movie about classic music with Pedro Pascal that is from Dan Gilroy and didn’t mention he is the man behind Andor).
As for our feature presentation, it’s the latest in what seems to be a whole slew of pro-shoots of musicals, hardly a new idea but no longer just the domain of PBS. Director Bruce Sullivan does a good job capturing the energy of actually being in the theater, and makes good use of closeups and the occasional unusual angle. Is it a movie in any real sense of the word? No, but it looks good enough on a big screen and sounds better than it would on my TV to justify going to a theater. As for the show itself, it’s generally enjoyable. The mix of folk, jazz, and indie rock works nicely much of the time, and turning the story of Orpheus and Eurydice into both romance and sociopolitical commentary is successful at least some of the time. (A few of the songs added when the show moved to Broadway are way too on the nose.) The staging is innovative and smart, the dancing is solid, and the cast is generally excellent, especially Broadway legend Andre DeShields as the active narrator Hermes and Patrick Page as Mr. Hades. The show’s weak spot is Orpheus, a wet noodle of a character in any version of the story, played by Reeve Carney (Broadway’s first Spider-Man, opposite Page as Green Goblin) with little charisma and a very run of the mill voice, singing a song that is supposed to fix the world and consists mainly of La La La. It’s a tribute to how good everything else is that it doesn’t come crashing down around his feet. Overall, I see why this is a beloved musical, even if I suspect I will not track down any of the recordings of it. (My wife, OTOH, will go on loving it to bits, and will stick with the Off-Broadway version.)
Elementary, “A Controlled Descent”/”The Past is Parent” – Season three ends with Holmes on a harrowing journey: he must help his former dealer find a missing sister (also an addict) or his friend Alfredo will die after being kidnapped. While Joan and the cops look for Alfredo, Holmes is dragged back through junkie hell, and ultimately ends up nearly killing his dealer and falling off the wagon for one night. Unlike previous season finales, this did not look to end an arc, but instead set up future things while above all else taking with Holmes on the tightrope of his life. As such, this was a very gripping hour. The fourth season starts days later. Holmes did not hide his actions, and now faces the possibility of criminal charges and the certainty that he and Watson will no longer work for the NYPD. But a rich sleaze Holmes confronted in his search for the missing sister (hey, it’s Patrick Page of Hadestown!) asks our man to figure out what happened to his missing wife. Right before shooting himself. The mystery is well done enough if kind of standard – of course David Zayas of Dexter fame is the killer – and exists mainly to distract Holmes and to allow him to prove that even if he doesn’t deserve a job, Watson does. Holmes is in a very weird state of mind. He is willing to accept his fate easily, and going to three meetings a day, but he’s off balance. A very interesting way to play it that avoids the usual “falling off the wagon” cliches. And then Sherlock’s father shows up. And John Noble joins the cast in full Denethor mode. More to come.
Barney Miller, “Ramon” – My next sitcom project takes me back to the 70s and to s show that carries the gritty and somewhat depressed sensibility of all those 70s NYC police procedurals to TV, and unlike Kojak to comedy. The tone is set right away as Barney’s wife (Barbara Barrie in a role that would fade to the background quickly) listens to a litany of terrible news stories from the city and beyond (A reminder if nothing else that the world has always been horrible.) Barney is a jovial and somewhat kind detective who loves his job and whose wife worries too much. At work, he has to talk a Puerto Rican junkie into surrending the gun he stole from Abe Vigoda, and of course does a good job. Hal Linden, a Broadway veteran and very much a New York Jew, plays the part well immediately, though his sense of humor and his timing are very much like another sitcom star, Alan Alda. I watched most of the show as a kid and it will be interesting to see how it holds. The cast also includes Gregory Sierra as a Puerto Rican cop (which we only saw rarely on Kojak) and Ron Glass (long before Firefly) as a very well dressed Black detective.
Seeing Hadestown tomorrow; I actually got into the musical because someone cited my article on autism in theater – and how annoyingly cutesy that portrayal can be – to discuss Orpheus being an autistic-coded character.
Live Music – headed up to a small (500-capacity) music festival in a forest in NW England. It hasn’t rained here for a full month but inevitably that changed as soon as I was staying in a tent for a couple of nights, classic weather. It was a good time apart from that though, standout performances from La Securité (post-punk / new wave / riot grrrl vibes from Canada), R. Aggs (electronic-leaning solo project from the driving force behind a bunch of great UK indie bands) and Good News (Sheffield post-punks who I’ve seen a few times and have had a bit TOO much of a skeletal sound for me previously – they’ve added a band member and leaned into the funkier end of the genre with good results). Also a few well-chosen acts who brought excellent festival energy even if they weren’t totally my cup of tea – Blind Yeo’s psychedelic jams and Suntou Susso’s kora shredding and extremely slick backing group. Really cool seeing all of this in a forest clearing with an enthusiastic crowd. Also my girlfriend’s band played and they were great!
Joy Uncensored – there was also an (indoor) arts section of the festival and when we ducked out of the rain we caught a screening of this 15-minute doc about a woman who took early retirement to pursue artistic endeavours and got into poetry, then performance poetry, then… battle rap? The film follows the build up to her first battle, and she’s determined to take it seriously rather than being a novelty – the climactic footage of the battle itself is great, her opponent comes at her hard and her response is really smart and equally brutal without going too lowbrow. Really fun.
Twin Peaks, S2 E17 “Wounds & Scars” – the “Harry mourns Josie” episode, I remembered this being a low point for the show and yeah, it’s definitely one of the weaker episodes. Lots of pretty dumb “Windom Earle in disguise” stuff, a lot of time dedicated to the pine weasel fashion show, and it’s hard to really care about Sheriff Truman’s grief because Josie sucked and the show never really knew what to do with her. A couple of positives though, Annie arrives and is immediately charming, Major Briggs and the Log Lady swap mysterious woods stories (I love this shit) and Pete being the town’s resident chessmaster continues to be fun. I’m realising that my previous jaunts through this show have been quicker (usually a couple of episodes a night) which gets through the bad spell quicker, watching it with more of a traditional weekly check-in this time really makes the S2 doldrums feel endless. But I think things start to improve from here.
Seinfeld, S8 – “The English Patient” was a little mixed, I liked Elaine’s plot about being the only person who didn’t enjoy the titular movie, Jerry and George’s plots were pretty solid too but Kramer attempting to import Cuban cigar rollers only to end up with Dominicans… not great. “The Nap” was a little better, I enjoyed the “indecisive handyman” guest character and George’s attempt to customise his office for better naps escalating to ridiculous levels. Again the Kramer plot let things down a bit, his attempts to broaden his swimming horizons are full of terrible green-screen FX and excessive zaniness, I guess the show has moved in more of a Kramer direction this season which pushes his stories into aggressively wacky territory at times that don’t always pay off.
Elaine is right. And Kahn on King of the Hill thinks so too.
Shakespeare At Dusk – Went to a small all-ages Shakespeare festival in Narberth my friend invited me to do a soliloquy at; naturally, I chose Hamlet Act 1 Scene 2, especially as it’s one I can mostly do off the top of my head, and I got some great compliments. There was apparently some behind the scenes drama going on, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. It was a lovely intimate fest with live music, BBQ catering, people dressed up for reciting, and a paper lantern procession afterward with the kids.
Tales From The Crypt, “Split Second” – Russell Mulcahy directing a very noir-coded episode narrated by a waitress who’s been around and impulsively marries the local lumber mill owner. Turns out, however, that he’s got a jealous streak, and that’s bad for the bored wife and the hot new worker. Ends on a genuinely shocking, gruesome image of…labor solidarity? (Tracks that a guy known for helming Duran Duran videos would be good at crafting a great final shot.) Mildly loopy in how fast the plot turns, worth it for that ending.
great movie weekend.
Odyssey. Incredible. I’m going to start with criticisms though. The problem, and its a fundamental problem with adapting a nearly 3000 year old poem, is that the basic weirdness of ancient Greece is mostly lost and replaced with a recognizable, Christianized, enlightenment-ized morality. Nolan has a very different adaptation philosophy from say Robert Eggers, and I would like to see someone give Eggers $250M to make the Iliad, which, is actually more possible now, so this is barely even a criticism.
The score is incredible. The sound design, typically something that Nolan is not actually good at apart from being loud, is incredible. The aulos-driven sirens scene is one of the best scenes a movie has done. The lyre twang of the bow string is so incredibly rich and evocative.
The thematics were a little heavy handed maybe, but it’s justified with the final recap of the sack of Troy, and it all comes together there. I felt like Frank watching Mac’s interpretive dance. I get it. This is Nolan’s whole career: the fight between the sins of men and memory, the pain of alienation and exile and knowing that you’re the reason you can’t truly go home. Everything from Memento to the top in Inception to the twist in the Prestige (Michael Caine first lies and describes drowning as “like coming home” and then as the most painful thing a person can experience) culminates here.
.
Also great work from the whole cast. Pattinson stood out for his scenery chewing and the way made “beggars” sound like a slur. (I’m seeing this memes on tiktok as “beggar” with a hard R.). Holland seemed to enjoy being in a real movie for a change. Elliot Page was good (I’ve seen people joke that you can tell Christopher Nolan is a trans ally because Elliot Page transitioned and then Nolan gave him a much more complex, interesting character than in Inception).
Obsession. Like Odysseus, Bear just wants to get to the woman he loves and is doomed by his hubris. I like odysseus, Bear has no redeeming traits whatsoever. This is good as everyone says. It’s a clever conceit to basically invert the story; Bear is the monster and Nikki is the victim. The moments the real Nikki peaks through are horrifying and intense. Indie Navarette gave an astounding performance. If horror movies got Oscars she should get one. (But maybe Sinners and Weapons broke the seal?).
I like that we don’t fully get a glimpse into how the willow works. Is it a monkey’s paw situation? Or is everything that happens a natural consequence of the wish? How much of the capacity for possessiveness was already there in Nikki? Is that even still Nikki?
What did we play?
Disco Elysium – I think I’ve mostly caught up to the progress I made during my previous playthrough now, albeit with some slightly different tangents that illustrate how well the game responds to different approaches. I haven’t had any more crashes either, so hopefully the ominous one I ran into early on was a rare issue rather than the extremely common ones I ran into trying to play this last time on a different console. I have been trying to play a little differently but I find it hard to lean into the darkness too hard – I’m sure there’s an appeal to playing this as a fully corrupt wrecking-ball type character but I just can’t quite bring myself to follow that path.
Master Key – also playing this lo-fi Zelda-style game, which has all the exploration / secrets / non-linear progression you’d expect from the earlier entries in that series but married to monochrome visuals and no dialogue. Pretty fun so far and it’s doing a great job drilling into the satisfying elements of the genre without feeling like a knock-off.
Two games I own on Steam, neither of which I’ve played yet.
No games yet but my wife’s long time DM is looking to do some short-run 5th Edition campaigns later this year, and I am all in for that. For some reason he also wants to do a 4th edition campaign, I think just to be weird.
Good work; The Fifth Child has the reverse situation, a couple who are very unified in their goals for life (get married and have a large family) in a countercultural moment that is spectacularly disinterested in convention, but their fifth child is a monster of some kind, as if punishing them for their hubris. This results too in irrational decisions when there seems to be only a rational decision to make.
F-Zero X – Nintendo 64: Nintendo Classics on Nintendo Switch
It used to be that I couldn’t beat a Grand Prix on Master. Now I can’t beat it on Expert, which is easier. Might try with other cars, but there’s 30 to choose from. It might take a while.
X-Men – Marvel MaXimum Collection on Nintendo Switch
Finished it. Solid game, but doesn’t rise to greatness. The story is wacky though, and it’s pretty funny how little grasp they have of the X-Men’s powers, like with Magneto shooting lasers from his hands. Will try it on multi-player when I can. But when has Juggernaut needed a gun?
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound on Nintendo Switch
Finished another level, beat another demon, found a second, female playable character.