Reading List: January.

Non-Fiction: 

Patrick Radden Keefe: Say Nothing. A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. 
Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb. 
Mark Miodownik: Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World.
Leslie Jamison: The Empathy Exams.
Jaquira Díaz: Ordinary Girls. A Memoir.
Annalee Newitz: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember. How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction.
Nathalie Olah: Steal As Much As You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in an Age of Austerity.
Julia Serano: Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity.

Fiction: 

Jacqueline Woodson: Red at the Bone.
Annalee Newitz: The Future of Another Timeline.
Charlie Jane Anders: The City in the Middle of the Night.
Olaf Olafsson: The Sacrament.
Tiffany Tsao: The Majesties.

Fims: 

Ready Or Not (2019, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett).
Bar Bahar (2016, Maysaloun Hamoud).
How to Survive a Plague (2012, David France).
120 battements par minute (2017, Robin Campillo).
Little Women (2019, Greta Gerwig).
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019, Tim Miller).
Knives Out (2019, Rian Johnson).
Bombshell (2019, Jay Roach).
Gisaengchung (2019, Bong Joon-ho).

Shows: 

The Expanse, Season One, Two, Three.

Reading Notes: William Gibson's Agency

Foreign policy glimpse

This week has brought new developments in the impeachment trial, mainly via a leaked excerpt from former national security adviser John Bolton's upcoming book. It reveals that Bolton was directed by President Trump that military aid to Ukraine would be contingent on an investigation into Hunter Biden's activities.

Elsewhere, Elizabeth Warren has published an article in the Atlantic that details her foreign policy objectives: withdrawing American troops from the Middle East, focusing on "statecraft", and "promoting prosperity and lessening inequality; addressing the climate crisis; answering resurgent right-wing demagogues who are undermining the strength of our democratic alliances; and countering globalized corruption and authoritarianism led from Moscow and Beijing". After a surge last year, Warren is currently struggling in the polls against Sanders and Biden, but she can claim an endorsement by the New York Times editorial board (who chaotically endorsed both her and Amy Klobuchar) and by the Des Moines Register leading up to the first primacy caucus in Iowa on February 3rd.

Ready or Not

"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.” 

William Gibson: Count Zero.

Ready or Not, slasher horror flick, intentionally or unintentionally a flaming critique of obscene capitalist wealth, begins similarly to Get Out with the introduction of an outsider into a tightly-knit family unit. The anxiousness about the unknown is followed by a process of acquaintance meant to soothe nervousness, which is then quickly undermined by the appearance of increasingly escalating weirdness. But, like Margaret Atwood’s bathtub, the escalation happens slowly enough that by the time that true extent of the family’s psychopathy becomes obvious, it is already too late to get out. 

The source of horror thus becomes two-pronged: one is the usual horror of facing something evil alone and having to find the resources to beat it, and two is the fact that other people’s families can have radically different rules than your own, from you’re your perception of normal stems from. In the case of Ready or Not’s main heroine, Grace (Samara Weaving, previously on Picnic on Hanging Rock), her sense of normal is already precarious, since she grew up without a family of her own, and has put all her hope into her fiancé Alex’ (Mark O’Brien, Halt and Catch Fire). She is keenly aware that she is an interloper in terms of class, that these heirs of a board-gaming empire may consider her poor upbringing as a social faux pas. 

At first, it seems as if the family is for the most part weird, but welcoming to its new member. Alex and Grace marry. But soon, in fact, a couple of minutes after the ceremony finishes, weirdness descends. Alex informs his new wife that they must all partake in a game at the strike of midnight, a family tradition that sounds harmless if it weren’t for Alex’ obvious anxiety about the whole thing, and a growing feeling that “game” here doesn’t necessarily mean what Grace understands. Sure, it may appear weird that there is a secret room in the mansion designated for this ritual, that the father (Henry Czerny, for me forever that guy from When Night Is Falling) presents a mysterious riddle-box, from which Grace is asked to draw a card that will decide the midnightly game. Aunt Helene (Nicky Gaudigni) may be hostile to Grace, but then, who doesn’t have an evil aunt in their family? Except we, the viewers, at this point already know more than Grace, since the opening scene of the film depicts a wedding night from many years ago, in which the groom was eventually hunted down with bow and arrow. The card that Grace ends up drawing says Hide and Seek, and a silence of horror descends – perhaps because everybody, including the brothers, remember the night from the opening scene as the previous time the family has played this game. It turns out that most of the cards are harmless (which explains the number of dimwit outsiders that have somehow survived their initiation ritual – especially Fitch, played by a Kristian Bruun who basically just gives another performance as Donnie Hendrix). If Grace had drawn a different card, the night may have ended in a game of chess, and she wouldn’t have been any wiser as to this family until the next unfortunate member decided to get married. Instead, Hide and Seek is the wild card – every single family member present in the mansion is now tasked with finding and then ritually murdering Grace, who isn’t entirely clear on the rules and thinks it’s a harmless game of hide and seek, until people start to die (when Alex’ unhinged sister Emilie, played with gusto by Melanie Scrofano, begins accidentally killing people left and right, fuelled by drugs and incompetence). 

The idea that families are people’s foundational comprehension of what normal entails, and that this always holds the potential for violence and ideological indoctrination, has been explored in detail in many other films, none more disturbing than Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kynodontas. Without an outside source to measure your family against, it becomes hard to understand the socially accepted range of normal, and the Le Domas’ here have an insular, isolating quality to them that makes it appear as if nobody save Alex has ever even left the mansion. The children grew up hearing the foundational story of their family repeated again and again: that their great-grandfather made a deal with the devil (because how else to explain obscene generational wealth) that allowed the Le Domas all of their riches, but requires frequent ritual sacrifices. In off-years where no unlucky bride or groom draws the wild card, the Le Domas sacrifice a goat to the devil. The pact is potent because in case of failure to deliver, each family member is doomed. It is a potent foundational myth that can only continue to exist in a structure that allows the obscenely rich so much leeway that people can simply disappear on their property without any investigation, that allows them a hold over their staff that is strong enough for them to participate willingly in the slaughter. The Le Domas seem to exist outside the bounds of society, outside the grasp of the judicial system (and indeed it is the greatest dream of the most obscenely rich to simply leave the grasp of nation states, perhaps into the open sea or space), and the crimes remain unrevealed because they target individuals who already vulnerable in some way. Grace has no parents, Alex’ brother’s wife, who happily participates in the hunt, mentions a background of poverty that she would rather die than return to, and nobody would miss Fitch if he had disappeared on his wedding night. Capitalism has always reproduced itself through the sacrifice of the underprivileged, an in this case, the only way into privilege is to accept the values that place the family’s continued existence and wealth above the lives of strangers. 

The idea of self-preservation acts like a poison, even though knowledge of the actual consequences of following through is limited to rumours and whispers. Nobody gets out clean either, and the worst offender (perhaps from the beginning if we’re being honest) is Alex himself, who starts out trying to help his wife to survive, hedges his excuses about not revealing the truth about his family to her by blaming the marriage on her and claiming it was highly unlikely she would draw the card that she did, and then makes a full turn into sheer evil at the end, when he realises that Grace now knows him, and could never love him again. If he cannot possess her by saving her, he would rather sacrifice her to complete the ritual. The only person who does maybe attempt to pay for his sins is Alex’ brother Daniel (Adam Brody), but he does so perhaps because he considers his own life not valuable enough to be worth saving. 

In the end, the only way is to burn the whole shit down, and Grace survives because she shakes off all the pretences of trying to fit in. She rips off her dress, she wears her beat-up Converse, she finds resources beyond imagination for her own self-preservation against the over-powering mechanism she is up against. Her sole point of contact to the outside world in the film happens when she manages to steal a limousine and contacts the helpline, only to have the guy shut down the car because it was reported stolen. In the end, the structures outside the remote mansion also mostly exist to protect the property rights of the wealthy, and there is no outside source of justice that Grace can appeal to. The devil acknowledges a game well-played, but he won’t have a hard time finding a new mark. 

2019, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, starring Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O'Brien, Henry Czerny, Andie MacDowell, Melanie Scrofano, Kristian Bruun, Nicky Guadagni.

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu

We're in the same place. Exactly the same place. 

Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a painter and daughter of a painter, is sent to a remote island off the coast of Brittany to draw a portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), which is to be sent to Milan for inspection by a possible suitor. Héloïse must be kept in the dark about the plot, as she has destroyed a previous painting of her, and so Marianne is presented as a companion to watch over Héloïse, a task that becomes more obviously essential after the death of her sister, who perhaps fell or perhaps jumped off the cliffs after being promised to the same man who is now awaiting the new portrait. Héloïse is unsure which it was, except her sister never called out before disappearing over the edge. 

Marianne’s task is difficult, since she must steal moments with her subject and scribble her impressions in secrecy, somehow assembling a full portrait from the bits and pieces she is able to collect, as well as Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), a maid, standing in so she can see how the dress would fall. The completion of the portrait becomes more difficult when Marianne’s impressions of the other woman gained from their time together begins to diverge from what she is painting – the more closely she begins to have a sense of Héloïse’s desire for freedom, which she cannot achieve because the only way off the island is through marriage, the less the composite on the canvas matches her. Attempting to make the portrayed woman more agreeable by following the conventions of portraiture, she ends up looking nothing like Héloïse, containing none of her spirit and rage over her imprisonment. 

In the end, Marianne finds herself unable to keep up the pretence, and reveals herself to Héloïse, who is also unhappy with the finished portrait, and perhaps would like for Marianne to stick around a little longer, and share more of her free life with her. More than that, there few moments together betrayed a growing intimacy and mutual fascination, Héloïse with Marianne’s claim to a kind of life that she cannot imagine a woman leading, and Marianne with Héloïse’s ferocious sense of wanting more than is given to her. In a crucial scene before the reveal, Marianne attempts to explain orchestral music to someone who has previously only heard music played by an organ in a church, trying to capture the beauty by playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on a harpsichord for her. Marianne destroys her first attempt, and is given a few more days to finish a second, while Héloïse’s mother travels. Thus, a short period of freedom is achieved. 

This is also a complete turning point for this film, and not just in the sense of suddenly allowing Marianne and Héloïse the freedom to fall in love with each other as equals (Héloïse explains to Marianne, once she begins to sit for her portrait, that what Marianne is painting is as much a portrait of her as it is of the painter, whom the subject of the painting regards, and learns to know just as well as the other way around). As soon as the mother leaves, it isn’t just the distance between Marianne and Héloïse that breaks down into an even closer intimacy, but also the class difference between the two of them and Sophie, the maid. Almost immediately, Sophie becomes an equal to them as well, and the week they spend together alone in the house looks like a utopia of women leaving freely together, without being bound by conventions of structures that would limit their freedom or put them into an economic hierarchy. Instead, they help Sophie obtain an abortion, Marianne after being given permission taking the opportunity to sketch something that is real, and far from anything that she would have otherwise been permitted to paint. The goal of their togetherness becomes a sort of truthfulness to life, an escape from the limits imposed on them. They read Ovid’s Metamorphoses together, attempting to understand Orpheus’ decision to turn back and cast his beloved Eurydice back into the underworld, and coming to the conclusion that he took an artist’s stance attempting to preserve forever in his memory what is doomed to die eventually anyway. It’s both a beautiful and a harrowing interpretation considering what is playing out between Héloïse and Marianne, because the great piece of art that Marianne is creating, the one that will now capture Héloïse in all truthfulness, without lying about its subject, is what will enable the marriage which will inevitably trap Héloïse in a life that she did not choose, because other options are not open to her (whereas Marianne’s father has made an unconventional life possible for her by teaching her a trade and bestowing his reputation upon her). Héloïse is being preserved forever, sacrificing a lifetime with a woman she loves, but also captured truthfully for the ages. As their romance plays out, the spectre of Héloïse’s marriage begins to haunt the house, to remind Marianne that only the art that they are creating together (creating together as an equal cooperation, rather than a hierarchical relationship between painter and object) will outlast this time spent together. Thus, the moments they share burn into Marianne’s mind, and become inspiration for her artistic life going forward. In the first scene of the film, we see an older Marianne teaching her students, who have discovered a stored painting of one of the most memorable moments that the two women have shared, when they attended a village feast and Héloïse’s dress briefly caught on fire – the literal fire to the symbolic one that attracted Marianne in the first place, which are both referred to in the title. 

At the end of their time together, they must part suddenly, without being granted the grace of a true goodbye. Marianne, recounting, shows us the two times that she saw Héloïse again – once, in gallery into which she had smuggled one of her own paintings, under her father’s name, in which she found another true portrait of Héloïse, who appears with her daughter – but also with her finger bookmarking Metamorphoses, on the page in which Marianne left her a portrait. It’s a secret message for eternity to mark the impact of their romance, its constancy through time in spite of their tragic circumstances. The second time, Marianne sits across from Héloïse at a performance of Four Seasons, watching her steal away from the life she did not choose, to be deeply moved by the music that Marianne shared with her. 

2019, directed by Céline Sciamma, starring Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Luàna Bajrami, Valeria Golino.