Hunger (2008)

UK / Ireland, 96 minutes

Director: Steve McQueen

Writers: Enda Walsh, Steve McQueen

Photography: Sean Bobbitt

Music: Lee Abrahams, David Holmes

Editor: Joe Walker

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Brian Milligan, Stuart Graham, Liam McMahon, Helena Bereen, Helen Madden, Des McAleer

Director and cowriter Steve McQueen (not that one) took a bit of a risk with his first feature-length picture, making a “based on real events” show, which is often the kiss of death for me in Hollywood hands. McQueen solves the problems, to the extent that he does (problems of believability chiefly, but also of a sort of pious woodenness), by electing to take the story in the direction of an art film. The setting is Northern Ireland in 1981, the heart of “the Troubles,” and the prison where Irish political prisoners were housed. Labeled terrorists, often convicted of violent political crimes, as prisoners they staged no-wash and hunger strike protests.

Specifically, Hunger is about the second such protest. The first began in 1976, when the prisoners were reclassified from “prisoner of war” status to “criminal.” “No-wash” protests involved refusals to bathe and, in at least this case, smearing excrement on cell walls. Hunger strikes of course are refusals to eat. The second protest, in 1981, escalated into a mounting PR confrontation with prime minister Margaret Thatcher, doing her iron dame thing and reminding me anyway of why she was so reviled. She’s often heard in voiceover here from archival sources. In many ways she is rightly a main target of this picture.

“The School Friend” (1964)

This longish story by Robert Aickman is another of his many good ones—bland and straightforward on the surface, with churning undercurrents. Often, as here, somehow in the last third of his stories I feel like I’m in a dream. This one is about two women who became friends as young teens. Sally is precociously brilliant, raised by her father, who is an academic of some kind. Mel is the first-person narrator, gifted herself—a novelist, we learn, though presently, in her 40s, financially reduced to living with her parents again. There is a subtle but strong suggestion (she understands the illustrations in an edition of Petronius) that Sally has been sexually assaulted by her father. Even if that’s not the case, she’s under her father’s iron will, forced to spend her time doing housework or studying and little else. Sally and Mel go their own ways in their 20s and 30s. Mel follows Sally’s successful career from afar. Now in their 40s, they reconnect. Mel is living with her parents again and Sally’s father has recently died. Sally sends a postcard to Mel to invite her for a visit, even though they live within steps of each other. The picture on the postcard is Mitylene. I had to look into it to find out that Mitylene is the capital of the Greek island of Lesbos—another strong note of sexuality, submerged. Meeting again is a fraught moment in both their lives, at onset of encroaching middle age and perhaps predictable life crises. Then Sally has an accident which lands her in the hospital. She calls on Mel to check on her house and get things for her. It is Mel’s first time in Sally’s house, another strange note in this strange story. In the neighborhood where I grew up there was only one house I never entered. I was a little afraid of the matron who wouldn’t allow entry even to friends of her kids. It feels like something like that is going on in this story. Mel takes advantage of being in the house by herself to thoroughly explore it. All the things she discovers and what she and we the readers can make of them constitute the rest of this excellent story. Only Robert Aickman can make a situation like this work on so many levels at once. Something about this story is chilling and deeply unsettling, though it’s hard to put one’s finger directly on whatever that might be. In other words, it’s another great Aickman story.

Robert Aickman, Dark Entries
Story not available online.

Run-DMC, “Slow and Low (Demo)” (1985)

[listen up!]

I was today years old (as people say) when I realized the Beastie Boys included a cover of this workup on their 1986 album Licensed to Ill. The Beasties found out Run-DMC were leaving it off their second album and went for it. Indeed, the Run-DMC version did not really come to light until the 2005 deluxe edition of King of Rock. Forward another 20 years or so and there I am sitting with the very self-same LP. You know those cheapie “Original Album Classics” packages? Five albums from the same artist, usually their first five, in rudimentary slipcase envelopes. I discovered that some of them, such as the Run-DMC set, include the deluxe versions with all the extras. So anyway, I’m sitting there listening, having myself a Run-DMC renaissance, and this comes up. And I can’t quite get over it. It is ridiculously stripped down to the rhythms. There’s big muffled thumping that is counterpointed with separate strains of lighter, higher-pitched clinking. It is quietly irresistible. The raps are the usual Run-DMC bellowing back and forth, but the recurring words of the chorus go directly to the point: “Let it flow, let yourself go / Slow and low, that is the tempo.” They could have sexualized it but they didn’t. They could have brought in electric guitar—King of Rock continues the experiment that would culminate in the Aerosmith collaboration—but they don’t do that either. Maybe they would have if they’d put it on the original album. But they didn’t, and the simplicity has a lot to do with what makes it so great. The verses do offer some taste of their tendency toward unfortunate cliche (“you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” “on The Gong Show I won’t get gonged,” etc.) but I could not care less about that. The point is the thumping and the clinking and the intricate interplay, with just the right sentiment: “Slow and low, that is the tempo.” It’s a kind of master class in its own right.

The Big Time (1958)

Fritz Leiber has a big reputation in horror and science fiction circles, but I haven’t read enough yet perhaps to be impressed myself. This very short mess of a novel (about 100 pages, a length sometimes considered a novella) won a Hugo (for “Best Novel or Novelette”). Wikipedia says it a nice way: “The Big Time is a story involving only a few characters, but with a vast, cosmic backstory.” That backstory is basically time travel, which can change history and erase people (who can then be “resurrected” somehow). It’s an interesting concept but explanatory exposition is scant here. These characters are similarly in a place, called “a Place,” which requires explanation. But, again, in medias res, baby. Catch the clues and keep up. It started to feel make-believe in childish ways. The Place, by the way, has affinities with Samuel Beckett’s let’s call it universe. It’s possible that reading The Big Time again, knowing what I learned the first time, might open it up more impressively for me. People see something in it. It won a Hugo and is included in a Library of America anthology of science fiction novels. There are some gems among the nine novels gathered there—notably Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination and Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man—but more often they felt slight to me and poorly done. The Big Time could maybe have been bigger and more descriptive, which I hate to say in this era of bloat—big novels part of big series. It was kind of refreshing to see a novel coming in at 100 pages. But it is dense and work to fathom. For about the first 20 pages I could barely make out what was even happening. There’s something that stinks a little of the MENSA mentality going on here, the arrogance and contempt. I’ve seen it in science fiction before. Maybe it’s a tradition. I’m thinking here of Philip Jose Farmer, to name names. And maybe Fritz Leiber too. All I can say about what I’ve read of Leiber is that it usually leaves me cold, but I’m thinking I should give it or him another try. All that love. There has to be something to it. But tastes in genre can often be stubbornly individual, I guess. Ramsey Campbell is another even more extreme example of my lack of understanding.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

The Wall (1979)

The other day I saw a social media post asking about albums worth listening to in their entirety, from beginning to end. I was surprised to find this double-LP behemoth among the most frequently mentioned, not least because I had spent the summer playing it that way and found myself crawling up the walls, so to speak. “Dreary blob of audio,” I noted one day. The other odd factor for me was that I never had listened to it that way in the first place—I never owned it (nor Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, for that matter, the other big burger from that autumn). I liked “Another Brick in the Wall” and “Comfortably Numb” enough that I did not turn them away when they came up on the radio. In retrospect this is where the Roger Waters takeover was complete. Pink Floyd had looked to me like a bloat job anyway since at least Dark Side of the Moon, though I’ve since found some (not a lot of) interest in Wish You Were Here and Animals. Waters wrote every bit of the music on The Wall and also scripted the freaking 1982 movie directed by Alan Parker (Midnight Express, The Commitments). I saw it when it was new and it left me, er, uncomfortably numb from the assault of bleak paranoia. The grit felt ground into grime. The album is just a lot of weak sauce. I wonder if anyone mentioned to Waters that “Goodbye Blue Sky” scans way too close to “Goodbye Ruby Tuesday” in the clinch of the chorus. But the song also has some effective moments of tension, so all right. “Vera” harks to Vera Lynn, the iconic World War II UK singer who hit with “White Cliffs of Dover” and especially “We’ll Meet Again,” for a weird-toned moment of genuine nostalgia (I think) in this mess. “The Trial” strains for the Kurt Weill note. And I don’t know about you, let alone Waters, but I do not find children singing “We don’t need no education” to be at all a comforting sentiment. The only saving grace about this puffed-up operatic strudel may be that the libretto is essentially incoherent (except the occasional lines and dramatic readings about public school failings). You have to study The Wall, including a look at the movie, to get the heavy bring-down vibe. My recommendation is don’t study it. In fact, I think you can skip it altogether—I know, 50 years too late again. The one bright spot musically is David Gilmour who steps in, seemingly only when Waters allows it, and chips in some very enjoyable guitar solos and the best music here.

Jeff Buckley, “Forget Her” (1993)

[listen up!]

Word is that Jeff Buckley specifically wanted this song left off of what turned out to be his only album, the 1994 Grace. “Forget Her” is a bittersweet breakup song, plurality of emphasis on the bitter, and Buckley wanted to stay friends with his former and presumably worried she would not react well to it. But I’m glad it finally made it out. It’s too good not to release. Anyone who’s had a broken heart (viz., everyone) is likely to feel this down deep. “Don’t fool yourself / She was heartache from the moment that you met her,” he wails. The dramatic scene is that he’s walking the streets, walkin’ after midnight so to speak, to stop his weeping. It’s the terrible moments at the first of the break, when eating and sleeping is self-denied and a kind of catatonic state descends. No appetite, no stopping the brain. On the Kubler-Ross scale of grief, the singer is flitting between anger and bargaining. Indeed, a case can be made that choosing to leave the song off the album was itself a bargaining ploy. None of that is my business or has much to do with why and how this song goes right through me. I have my own history, of course, and this song opens up some of my own darkest, saddest days. It’s cathartic, in a way—certainly I’ve had my daily infatuations with it. It has often stolen up on me unexpectedly one way or another. More than that, at this point, it’s a reminder I survived, made it past, and found happy places for myself that are reasonably free of grudges and resentment. I hope Buckley got there himself before his sad, untimely end. He was obviously a sensitive soul in many ways on many levels and deserved the peace. This beautiful song is one example of what was lost.

Project Hail Mary (2026)

I usually try to avoid comparisons between novels and the movies based on them, not for any particular noble motives but because I don’t often get to books before I see the movies (indeed, if I ever even get to them, looking your way Traumnovelle). This case is an exception—I know Andy Weir’s third novel is reviled by a certain cohort of SF cognoscenti and equally beloved of other readers who may favor entertainment in SF over heavy themes. I can understand how Weir’s jokey, heavily online voice can put off people looking for intellectual heft, but a friend pressed Project Hail Mary on me earlier this year and it turned out to be just what I needed at the time—funny and entertaining yet satisfyingly full of scientifically plausible and complex ideas. Alas, the movie, even at its punishing length near three hours, necessarily simplifies a lot of what is easily the greatest strength of the novel. A mysterious space algae has begun to consume energy directly from the sun, in enough quantity that it will affect the climate on Earth, cooling it to a degree that will likely wipe out human life if not all life. A whole region of the Milky Way has been affected, except for one star about 11 light-years away. A suicide mission is slapped together, sending Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) with two others to investigate and report back—report back via smaller probe ships, that is, because there’s only enough fuel for a one-way trip. There Grace encounters another ship on the same mission. The two throw in together—ultimately Project Hail Mary is a first contact story approximately cubed—and accomplish the mission, though not without many bumps in the road. The movie keeps its explanations lucid but truncated—I have a sense the people who will get the most out of the movie will come into it having already read the book. That’s what I suggest, noting that the movie is not really necessary. You’re probably better off reading the book again, but there’s enough Hollywood magic going on here to make it worth your time. Gosling is just plain good, as always, even in these obvious paycheck blockbusters he’s inclined to do. The story is fun but also realistic about scientific possibility and quite creative and imaginative in addressing the limitations. I mean, that’s mostly Weir, and it’s mostly better in the novel. But if you like movies you’re sure to have a good time here if you already know and like the book. Good with popcorn.

Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste (2003)

This Lester Bangs collection, edited by John Morthland, was intended as a nonredundant companion to the collection edited by Greil Marcus and published in 1987, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Altogether that’s about 800 pages of the original gonzo rock critic. As a general rule the Marcus collection contains most of the hits—including the famous faceoff with Lou Reed and the previously unpublished piece in which Bangs disinters Elvis Presley’s body and reaches into his guts for undigested pharmaceuticals—whereas this later collection more documents the workaday product of the rock critic: scads of record reviews, including one of Bob Dylan’s Desire in which he takes Dylan to task for making shit up. It’s kind of refreshing to see (see also Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech), but we should remember Bangs regularly made shit up himself, albeit with qualitative differences from what Dylan does. There is a sympathetic meditation on Sid Vicious and his ugly end. We find out much more about Bangs’s status as a jazzbo. There is a great feature piece and interview with Captain Beefheart. In many ways, somewhat surprisingly, Bangs is a stern moralist, although it is sadly somewhat undercut by his life as an alcoholic and drug addict, his death in 1982 at the age of 33 the result of a Darvon overdose. It’s been long enough now that another factor has come into play. I wonder a lot about what he would make of subsequent developments, even about the artists he knew like Lou Reed and Miles Davis, and certainly all kinds of things since then. His literary tastes strike me now as wrong, elevating Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs above all others. He even slags Allen Ginsberg (but not Jack Kerouac). This is all wrong according to me. Some of Bangs’s experimental writing is found here, but not as much as in Carburetor Dung. Full disclosure, that’s a good thing by my lights. That stuff has generally not aged well. But Lester Bangs remains in spirit an important model for anyone considering the commitment to being a rock critic. He’s cheerful enough often enough about being out of touch or at odds with the mainstream, acknowledging his own “bad taste.” You could do worse on primers about how to rock critic.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Great Dictator (1940)

USA, 125 minutes

Director / writer: Charles Chaplin

Photography: Karl Struss, Roland Totheroh

Music: Charles Chaplin, Meredith Wilson

Editors: Willard Nico, Harold Rice

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Reginald Gardiner, Henry Daniell, Billy Gilbert, Maurice Moscovitch

Getting back to this movie after decades, I was reminded of the old chestnut that “history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes” when a character named Epstein showed up. He’s Jewish and a powerful financier who must be turned to for assistance by the fascist and openly antisemitic regime of Tomainia, which is basically Germany in director and writer Charles Chaplin’s clonking sendup. Chaplin is Adenoid Hynkel, the Phooey (Fuhrer) of Tomainia, which happens to be in an uneasy alliance with Bacteria (Italy). The Tomainian swastika is two X’s, called the double cross. You can tell Chaplin was not holding back here (though an editor or collaborator might have come in handy). For a 1940 Hollywood picture it’s unusually blunt about its points, which is not to say always inspired. Chaplin also plays a Jewish barber and veteran of World War I who lives in the ghetto of an unspecified Tomainian city (he probably couldn’t think of a Warsaw gag ... where are Mad magazine writers when you need them?). The Jewish barber must endure the problems you would expect.

The picture is bloated at over two hours, ham-handed to an infinite degree (did I mention Rome here is called Aroma?), and so self-righteous it verges on chest-pounding narcissism, which are reasons I haven’t been back to it in a long time. In retrospect, this is the beginning of the end for Chaplin. I hated to see it and all that followed—some, admittedly, with bright moments, but it was also the period when he ruined The Gold Rush by trying to add sound. Still, nevertheless, I could not deny that The Great Dictator hits different in 2026. That’s what made the details of a relatively background character named Epstein so eerily remarkable.

“The Erl-King” (1993)

Elizabeth Hand offers some interesting ideas in her long story, such as reaching for Andy Warhol and his Factory clan, featuring a sort of glitter-era rock star figure who seems to exist somewhere between Robert Fripp and the Moody Blues. I wasn’t much persuaded by it, or more often felt vaguely embarrassed it was even being attempted. But there are also lots of things to like, including, paradoxically, that someone is making the attempt at all. The magic is positively Merlinesque. The rock star’s name is Lie Vagal—“Lie” from Elijah and no idea about the last name, though it’s a pretty good rock star name overall. His neighbor, or tenant—it’s complicated—is Aurora Dawn (another good name), a hanger-on Lie knew back in the day, now washed up, middle-aged, and drunken. Think Nico in the ‘80s. Exotic animals populate the story, as rock stars are wont to go for, which draws Aurora’s daughter Linette and her best friend Haley, staying with her for the summer, to Lie. As the plot develops it becomes silly with reveals that are only unlikely, if not entirely unexpected. Lots of details are planted as foreshadowing for what’s to come. The structure of the story tends to make everything feel obvious or hard to believe or both. Did I mention Vagal is mentally ill? Sounds like schizophrenia. He hallucinates and thinks he sees, or is actually able to see, mythical creatures such as fairies and this Erl-King. This stuff is basically not for me, except maybe the rock star part, a theme Hand has also pursued elsewhere. Hand seems to be reasonably well regarded, winning her share of awards and nominations. This story veers closer to fantasy than horror for my taste but I suspect I will be running into her stuff again. “The Erl-King” does have some nice girl power elements, which is always good to see, though perhaps faint praise on my part. I would label it as a kind of “classy” horror, closer to gothic but not as skilled as the best gothic. Just evoking a sort of semi-contemplative mood. But I always appreciate the attempt to bring decadent rock culture into the horror mix.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.