...

"White supremacists are angry; those who claim that title and those who do not but who act in the interests of white supremacy. Not only are they angry, but also “we” are told that their anger must be understood--that “we” must make room for it.
This “we” is across race, sex, class, gender, and geography.
This unmoral, unethical anger has the full support of the state. It is the only anger that the state recognizes; the only anger not criminalized or met with deadly brutal force. It is the anger of Ryan and Ammon Bundy and the understanding of the jury of their all-white peers that found them not guilty of the illegal occupation and armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. It is an unmoral anger that hits in the register and the grammar of violence, in the logics of law and order, in electoral victories and the grammar of reconciliation with kin by any means."

The New Inquiry: Lose Your Kin, November 16, 2016.

Reading List: October.

Non-Fiction: 

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Message.

Gary J. Bass: Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia.

 

Fiction: 

 

Rivers Solomon: Model Home.

Tan Twan Eng: The House of Doors. 

Kailee Pedersen: Sacrificial Animals.

Melanie Cheng: The Burrow. 

Joe Hill: NOS4A2.

Del Sandeen: This Cursed House. 

Hannah Martian: Long Time Gone. 

John Banville: The Drowned.

Films: 

Cuckoo (2024, Tilman Singer).

Les chambres rouges (2023, Pascal Plante). 

The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat).

The Wicker Man (1973, Robin Hardy).

Vox Lux (2018, Brady Corbet).

Lee (2023, Ellen Kuras).

Civil War (2024, Alex Garland).

Alien: Romulus (2024, Fede Álvarez).

His Three Daughters (2023, Azazel Jacobs).

Shows: 

Monster, Season One, Two.

Sweetpea, Season One.

Horror Wednesday: Civil War

Does Civil War count as a horror film? I was going to write about Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (for which Demi Moore certainly deserves all the laurels), but it turns out that something about this new wave of grotesque body horror films, reminiscent of 1980s films like The Blob and Society, and David Cronenberg’s work, doesn’t quite click for me – or maybe it does, and it’s just difficult to capture the way they utilise disgust to invoke horror in words. Alex Garland, director of Civil War, is well-versed in horror – he’s written 28 Days Later and Sunshine, and directed Annihilation and Men. What all these films share, on some level, is transformation on some levels – sometimes literally, physically, sometimes more esoterically. A specific experience, or a historical event, or trauma, change society, a group of people, an individual protagonist. This isn’t limited to horror – it’s general fuel for storytelling, to depict impact, but I find it easier to consider Civil War is the context of what Garland portrayed as the true horror of 28 Days Later (not zombies, but the loss of humanity in reaction to them, and the attempts by the main characters to hold on to connection in spite of it).
I think what makes Civil War interesting isn’t any question about its depiction of the United States in its titular rift: there are many debates about Garland’s vagueness, his non-commitment to outlining ideologies according to what the viewers might expect if they’d extrapolated from the current moment into the future. The ambiguous image of an antifa massacre that can be read in two different ways is deliberate, but so are the two moments of the film where the vagueness is replaced by the very conscious choice to model a speech by the President (Nick Offerman, who was also very good in Garland’s Devs) to resemble the jumbled, histrionic words of Donald Trump, and to have Jesse Plemons’ character decide who dies based on their place of birth, how truly “American” he considers them, as he is standing over the mass grave of his victims. The driving force behind the film isn’t a story about the transformation of a democracy into the chaotic, violent reality of a civil war. It’s the transformation of Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie into a war photographer who no longer flinches, or considers the moral cost of making a shot instead of intervening in the unfolding horrors.
In that regard, Civil War is almost a straightforward Bildungsroman of sorts, delivering a set of situations (stations of a kind) for the characters to pass through to arrive at the final image that they have set out to capture. The goal that propels them forward, with disregard of their own safety, is a career-making scoop: the tides of war have turned enough that an end is in sight, and the embattled President will likely not survive once the Western Front troops reach DC. Kirsten Dunst’s seasoned photographer Lee wants to capture a final shot of him, Wagner Moura’s reporter Joel will ask him hard-hitting questions, just before the end. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a journalist for “what is left of the New York Times” tags along because he cannot stop, even though he outlines the way that they will all certainly die in the attainment of their goal – shot or garrotted on the lawn of the White House by Secret Service Agents (here the film captures how the adrenaline rush of being in the midst of it is an addiction that none of these doomed characters can quit). Spaeny’s Jessie, in her early twenties, stumbles into their car in a way that seems accidental: she spots her idol, Lee, during a protest. Uncredentialled, she doesn’t have the press vest that keeps Lee and Joel safe (the idea that it makes a difference makes Civil War feel almost too optimistic). Lee assumes responsibility for her, as if Jessie’s idolisation of her and her profession mean that she has to, but she also seems to see her own instincts in her, and help her become better. She is still horrified to find that Joel has decided to take Jessie with them into a situation that is inevitably going to cost lives.

Garland deliberately tips his hat to the decision to name Lee: a reference to Lee Miller, war correspondent for British Vogue during the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau. It’s one of the odd coincidences of pop cultural history that Ellen Kuras’ Lee, a biography of the photographer, came out last year: championed by Kate Winslet, who stars in the titular role, it’s fascinating to see how close the two performances are. We encounter Kirsten Dunst’s Lee at the height of her career, struggling with the images that are stuck in her mind (it must have been a deliberate decision to have the scene in the bathtub, considering what shot Lee Miller is most famous for). She doesn’t speak about the cost to Jessie: her teaching is about finding a shot, identifying what would make a good image, and how to stay as safe as possible so as not to be a burden to the others. In one of their first stops, the group ends up in a gas station, and Jessie follows one of the armed men to a car wash, where two “looters” have been strung up. Jessie is scared out of her mind, but Lee follows them and immediately assembles an image. While Lee photographs, the man asks them to decide what should happen to the captives: death or life. Neither of them makes a choice, and Jessie struggles with not having intervened, or saved a life (Sammy points out that the outcome would have likely been determined anyway). Worse, she couldn’t even bring herself to take a single photograph, a moment wasted. But she learns quickly. Lee imparts on her that their job isn’t to intervene, but to tell the story truthfully: and Jessie, eloquently, asks if Lee would capture Jessie’s death.

The entire film turns around that question: it shows the camaraderie of shared peril, the necessary light moments in-between necessary to mentally survive. Lee and Joel have been friends and partners for years, and they both care deeply for Sammy. And yet, their entire job depends on putting themselves in danger, and pointing a camera and witnessing death and atrocity, including when they become part of the story themselves. Holding a camera means not holding a gun, but to take the shot, Lee and Jessie can’t act, they can only document, which leads to a thorny question about culpability. The decision to pursue the story at all cost is juxtaposed with Jessie’s and Lee’s parents, who are living out the war on their respective farms, “pretending this isn’t happening”, which is as close to a moral judgement of specific actions either of these characters get (looking away from atrocity deliberately). The choice that Garland makes here is interesting: the longer Lee travels with Jessie, the less she follows her own paradigm. When Jessie and another journalist they meet on the road are kidnapped by Jesse Plemons’ group of soldiers, Lee watches them through the lens of her camera. She sees as they kneel down, as the moment of execution approaches. By her own rules, she should stay where she is and take the shot, but instead she decides to intervene and attempt a rescue (Jessie survives, the Hong Kong-born journalist is shot). They narrowly escape, but Sammy is fatally shot during the heroic rescue, and Lee from that moment on seems incapable to continue as she was before. She deletes the final shot of her friend. She photographs less and less, just as Jessie gets more and more confident and reckless. Whatever cold-bloodedness is inherently required to do the work has become inaccessible to Lee: she is no longer unaffected, and she has taught Jessie all she could teach. 

The film culminates in the final battle to reach the White House. Lee, Jessie and Joel follow as the troops press forward under heavy fire, and enter along with them. Jessie is at the peak of her recklessness, disregarding considerations of safety to get her shots. Lee ends up saving her life, putting herself in the line of fire, and dying: Jessie is the one who photographs her, and it’s not even a death that the film affords them any time to contemplate. Lee is now just one of the many bodies on the floor, and the group moves forward to the ultimate goal, the last moments of the President of the United States.
This decision not to ponder Jessie here, or to show in any way if and how this death affects her, is so effective – it’s the logical outcome of everything that has come before, but also opens up questions that the film deliberately doesn’t attempt to answer. What has Jessie lost in the transformation from someone horrified at her own indecision to save a life to someone who can unflinchingly point a camera at a dying friend? What has Lee gained, in changing so radically in the process of caring for Jessie, even though she dies in the end? In the final moments, Joel gets his quote – the dying words from the President, where he asks for help, words recorded for posterity but ultimately of no consequence, as they appeal to someone who is only there to create a record. Jessie gets the money shot, and completes her transformation to become who she idolised.

2024, directed by Alex Garland, starring Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nelson Lee, Nick Offerman.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Mabe Fratti - Kravitz (on Sentir Que No Sabes)

Horror Wednesday: Les chambres rouges

In Alfred Tennyson’s 19th century lyrical ballad “The Lady of Shalott”, Elaine of Astolat lives in a tower near the legendary castle and court of King Arthur. Cursed, she must weave on her loom but can never look directly at the world outside her window, instead watching people passing on the busy road to Camelot through reflected images in a mirror. “Half-sick of shadows”, she sees Sir Lancelot, her mirror cracks, she escapes her tower, finds a boat and floats down the river towards Camelot, but dies before her arrival.
Kelly-Anne (played by an arresting Juliette Gariépy, the entire venture of the film depending on not being able to look away from her), uses Lady of Shalott as her username on the dark web. Her screen background is John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Pre-Raphaelite painting of the lady, lying dead or dying on the boat, the painting saturated with gloomy ochre-greenish colours that give everything a sickly pallor. Her AI assistant is named Guenièvre, after another character of Arthurian legend, wife of Arthur and lover of Lancelot. Guenièvre has been reprogrammed from her factory settings, improved from the flaws imparted in an entity that has been raised on the digital wastelands of online forums, and is, for the first part of the film, the only voice that Kelly-Anne deliberately communicates with. In her sparse apartment, with light emitting primarily from her double-screen, it isn’t difficult to see the parallels to Tennyson’s heroine. The mirror through which life is reflected is her screen, and with the exception of the photo shoots she attends (where in turn, she is captured to be mirrored on a screen herself), her entire social life unfolds there.
The exception is the trial. We begin the film following Kelly-Anne into the courtroom, disoriented because there are no markers as to what is unfolding. She has spent the night sleeping on the street, but doesn’t look like she does so frequently. She is clothed in an almost Gibson-esque – Cayce Pollard Units outfit, broken up only by a small cross. As she takes her seat on the spectator benches and watches a man emerge to sit in an isolated glass chamber, her face remains inscrutable. The prosecutor gives a harrowing introduction to the trial, outlining how the man in the dock is accused of torturing, raping and killing three teenagers and livestreaming the horror to paying customers on the dark web (it's an update to the conclusion of Olivier Assayas' Demonlover, perfected through technology). Her introductory remarks are emotional, preparing viewers along with the jury for the abominable details that will follow as the trial continues over two months. She has seen two of the videos, been made witness to unmitigated violence that is impossible to keep away from her dreams – and it is now her job to inflict upon those tasked with delivering a verdict in court what she has gone through.

Plante is preoccupied with the question of seeing and witnessing violence: there is the prosecutors outraged description of how it has changed her, there are the anonymous viewers of the red rooms who have paid for being able to access the material, there are the reactions in the court room, witnessed through the doors by Kelly-Anne and Clementine (Laurie Babin), who have been sent outside as spectators but hear the screams through the closed doors, see the mother of one of the victims leaving in horror, and finally watch the medics arrive for someone who has collapsed from the violence of the images. There is an obligation to witness for the jury, to comprehend the crime and follow along with evidence given that identifies the masked man in the videos by his eyes and stance as the accused Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). There is something else, not an obligation but a compulsion, in Kelly-Anne for having traced the videos on the dark web and watched them herself, a revelation that changes the course of the film.
Kelly-Anne’s inscrutability is juxtaposed with Clementine’s openness about her motivation for following the trial. She is convinced that Chevalier is innocent, not based on any evidence that she has of his character, but because she has projected innocence on him, and no amount of factual evidence can change her mind. She insists that everything the prosecution presents is fake – that the videos are photoshopped, that the identification of Chevalier under the mask is a lie, that the whole trial is a conspiracy against an innocent man. She has never spoken to him, and has no pre-existing relationship: she is a true crime groupie, but not in the sense of emotionally connecting with who she knows is a killer. Instead, she has constructed a fantasy in which whatever is presented in court is incapable of proving Chevalier’s guilt.
Clementine also assumes, as she begins trailing Kelly-Anne and essentially forcing a connection through persistence, that Kelly-Anne attends the trial for the same reason, an assumption that Kelly-Anne never confirms or denies. She gives nothing away, but her embrace of Clementine comes as a surprise: it feels tender, somehow, for a character who is so essentially isolated to make these attempts at friendship, to break out of the routine we have seen her follow: work-outs, online poker, an appointment to be photographed, using her AI assistant to respond to emails. Clementine is invited to sleep over, to share a pizza, is gifted a racket to play squash, where Kelly-Anne, instead of ridiculing her inaptness, insists on coaching her to some success. Kelly-Anne explains that she makes her money from online poker tournaments, and it’s the first time that she seems to give something away of herself. She targets emotional players and takes them for all they have, exploiting their weakness. Clementine, half-jokingly, calls her evil for it, but it’s as close to a hint at what is going on as we’ll get. 

As a film that is so concerned about the consequences of bearing witness to violence through a screen, the turning point of the story, the moment where it gathers momentum, comes after Clementine realises that Kelly-Anne has access to the torture videos. Remember that Clementine has insisted that these videos are not real, are part of the conspiracy to convict an innocent man, or that if they are real, they do not show what the prosecutor is insisting they do. She wants to bear witness herself, and I think that Kelly-Anne is torn between knowing that Clementine will not be able to bear it, and wanting someone else to share the experience of watching them with her, even though it is clear from their entire interaction that they are very different people. They go back to Kelly-Anne’s apartment, and watch the videos in front of her screens. Bathed in the red light from the videos, their reactions unfold in contrast. Plante makes the decision to stay on their faces – again, the only thing breaking through to the viewers are the horrible sounds of the torture. The point here is not to titillate the viewer with the gore that has been described in detail by the prosecutor, but to show the effect that it has on the characters. In an earlier courtroom scene, the director documents the effects of seeing the artifacts of violence when the prosecutor creates a trilogy of images for the mother of one of the victims: it starts with a school picture, the details of the girl’s uniform, then turns to pictures of just the uniform as discovered by the forensic team, covered in blood, and then, in a glimpse that disappears almost immediately but still has the searing quality of something that cannot be unseen, a decomposing jaw. In showing this image to the mother, even if just for a moment, the prosecutor wants not only to make a point about identification (the retainer that her daughter was wearing), but to elicit an emotional response from her, and in turn from the jury, seeing her reaction. Not dissimilarly, Kelly-Anne watches the video and her reaction to it is detached, clinical, accustomed to violence or maybe capable of seeing it from a distance because it unfurls on a screen. She focuses on the kind of details that the investigators trying to identify the killer would have had to see: the eyes, the gait, the arms of the perpetrator. Meanwhile, next to her, Clementine cannot bear it. She closes her eyes, she cries. She is horrified, and essentially, incapable of insisting that the video is fake now that she has witnessed it, and incapable of insisting on her belief that Chevalier is innocent. The images have fundamentally changed her, and in seeing that Kelly-Anne remains the same, she leaves (the apartment, but ultimately also the narrative for the most part, except for a bit at the end where she attempts to explain herself in a talk show). The connection that the two women forged over an assumed similarity has been irreversibly severed, and Kelly-Anne is back to being alone with Guenièvre (who is changed by the experience of having encountered Clementine, and now tells jokes and has the vibes of having an unsettling amount of insight into Kelly-Anne).

There is another interesting parallel here to the story of The Lady of Shalott and her mirror. Kelly-Anne interacts with the world through her screen, but in her awareness of data security or lack of it – she hacks the emails of the mother of one of the victims to retrieve the code for a door lock, to be used later – she seems unreflected by the screens. She sees through them, but they do not see her, even when her image appears on fashion sites, where she is changed through make-up and outfits. The warning that a technical expert gives in the trial haunts her. He describes investigators as hackers who follow the trails of those committing crimes on the dark web, who are doomed to make mistakes eventually. Forewarned, Kelly-Anne’s project, which comes into view in the second part of the film, after Clementine’s departure, feels precarious and dangerous, as if in descending into the abyss and trying to buy the missing video file in an online auction, the abyss is looking back at her. She is asked to take a photograph of herself, and her image suddenly appears, ominously, seen through the video cameras of the lobby and the court house. Her inscrutability, her invisibility, is compromised through the same channels that she uses so expertly. That concept is interesting here because in a way, Kelly-Anne is morally compromised already by her ability to watch the video unflinchingly, to regard violence without having an emotional reaction to it. A mirror does not just reflect the outside world, but also the person looking into it.

Early on when they meet, Clementine tells Kelly-Anne that if she were younger and had blonde hair and blue eyes, she would be the exact kind of person the killer targets. As she is pursuing the third video, Kelly-Anne enters the courtroom in a wig, wearing a school uniform under her coat. In the courtroom, she puts in a retainer. The mother sees her, horrified, and she is removed, but the point of the exercise is to see Chevalier’s reaction – a man, who throughout the film shows little emotion, and gives nothing away. He leers at her. He waves, as she leaves. If there had been any doubt as to his culpability, it is now resolved.
Plante’s stated inspiration for this film was his fascination with women becoming serial killer groupies and becoming obsessed with true crime narratives, which predominantly document horrors that happen to women. It’s clear how Clementine fits into this narrative, but Kelly-Anne’s involvement is thornier. I’ve gone back and forth on what her motivation is: she ends up with the video, leaves it in the mother’s house like the worst gift that a cat could possibly give as a present, and forwards the elusive trail of bitcoin for the investigators, leading to Chevalier’s conviction. In the process, she annihilates herself in all the ways that she has existed before: her career as a model is over, she destroys her phone and personal assistant, she is absent, in the end, when the Montreal skyscape dissolves into the fuzziness of a lagging videostream. Was her goal to insert herself into the investigation itself, by extending her stance towards poker into this horrendous crime, trumping emotional players with calculation and focus? Did she apply her specific talents to prove that she could, conveniently filling all the gaps pointed out by the defendant’s lawyer, thereby proving his guilt without any reasonable doubt? Chevalier, the knight, has irrevocably changed her, has tempted her out of her tower, has cracked the mirror, and she is left drifting in the boat towards a place she may never reach alive – but maybe Plante doesn’t have to spell that out for us.


2023, directed by Pascal Plante, starring Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos.

Horror Wednesday: Cuckoo

 

 

Watching Cuckoo as someone who grew up one country away from the Bavarian Alpine village this film is set in (and used to holiday in places that look pretty similar to it), I wondered how widely known cuckoo facts are outside the borders of Europe, especially as the American members of the family don't seem to necessarily share its most distinctive feature. Someone who doesn't go into the film and just based on the title can take a solid guess at what kind of horror will unfold maybe has a different experience of the denouement. I don't know when I was taught this, but definitely by the time I was in primary school I knew that cuckoos lay eggs in other birds' nests ("brood parasite" is the very effectively horrible actual term), and I think we were also communally told stories about adult birds then killing the competing baby birds of other species sharing that co-occupied the nest. If you were interested and fascinated by how the natural world sometimes comes up with nightmares that parallel those a gifted writer of horror may dream up, then this is definitely up there. German director Tilman Singer, who also wrote the script for this film, presumably had a similar schooling, and combines this bird trivia with a very topical (see also the double feature quality of The First Omen and Immaculate) anxiety about forced pregnancy and loss of bodily autonomy - the very contemporary way in which horror films digest reality post the Supreme Court's overruling of Roe v Wade. 

I the context of these two horrors - the natural and the political - it's especially interesting to think about how the idea of "conservation" works: it is after all what conservatism claims to be all about. Conservation is what the movie's most clear-cut villain is after: the comically German Herr König (played by Dan Stevens, who is having a great run in horror film villainy), who runs a resort hotel in the Alps, has dedicated his life to the preservation of a species that just happens to be a highly effective predator of humans, and needs them for reproduction. The cost of his conservation process is the destruction of some of the human guests in the resort, and it is a price he is all too willing to pay. Under his guidance, the entire village infrastructure has been fine-tuned to serve this purpose: the local police man is in his pay to tie up loose ends, the local hospital specifically outfitted for the medical procedures necessary to facilitate the process, and document the results (something about the idea of institutions being co-opted in this way to serve a single, ideological purpose that callously harms humans feels like a very specific German anxiety). 

Gretchen (played fantastically by Hunter Schafer) gets caught up in these machinations when her father (Marton Csokas, whose characters I disliked on sight because of the character he played in The Monkey's Mask many years ago, even though he is much more famous for Lord of the Rings), moves her and his disturbingly inappropriately young second wife Beth (Jessica Henwick, The Royal Hotel) along with their eight-year old daughter Alma (Mila Lieu) to a modern house near the resort. Luis and Beth are designing a new resort for Herr König, and they have been connected to him ever since spending their honey-moon there eight years ago. From the start, Gretchen is obviously an outsider in her father's new family: her step-mother is critical of her, her little sister doesn't speak (but seems eager for her presence), her father is aloof in a way reminiscent of other fathers who have made a new family and find the remnants of their old ones burdensome. Before things get weird in a more traditionally horror film way, Herr König is already a looming and disquieting presence, overly familiar, somehow always there even when it seems inappropriate, like his stake in this family is much higher than it should be if they were only acquaintances and business partners. Gretchen has a difficult time figuring out where the boundaries are: if this is just a weird Germanness she can't quite parse, or if something else is going on. The alienation of place translates perfectly into the resort hotel that Gretchen is soon tasked to work in: everything feels out of time, her use of a smartphone (mainly to listen to music and to leave messages to her mother that never receive a response...) in aesthetic conflict with the Eighties interiors and paper filing system. Tilman's deliberate use of architectural juxtaposition is particularly effective here: it serves to disorient and creates unease even before the monster makes its first appearance. 

 

Hunter Schafer's physicality is the driving force behind the film: arriving in an unfamiliar place that she doesn't want to be in, she spends most of her time under big headphones listening to playlists, hunching her shoulders whenever she encounters new people, retreating into herself. It makes her look vulnerable, but there is also a level of prickliness that makes it immediately obvious when a situation or person makes her feel uncomfortable (which happens frequently). As the story escalates, she accrues injuries that limit her ability to move - first it just a head-wound from being chased on her bike on the dark mountain roads (Herr König's insistence that the dark isn't safe that she again can't quite parse as either inappropriate over-protectiveness, attempts to limit her freedom of movement, or admittance that something much more weird is going on, is the first sign that this is not a good or normal place), then a broken arm from a car accident when an escape attempt fails, and finally, after the epic battle at the end, a complete physical collapse (it reminded me of Angelina Jolie in Salt, or Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde). Gretchen almost goes beyond being a classic horror movie final girl here and becomes, at time, a full-blown action hero, navigating her injuries and succeeding in spite of them. One of my favourite scenes is early on, when she encounters a new guest at the hotel reception and the prickly discomfort and stand-offishness turns into the charming and awkward stance of someone who is immediately and absolutely attracted to someone: Astrid Bergès-Frisbey's Ed offers a very short-lived, temporary reprieve, and an opportunity at escape that fails tragically (but it is the one connection that in the end opens the road to true liberation from all the horrors of the film, including that of her useless father). 

The emotional core of the film is Gretchen's relationship with Alma, whose muteness is explained once the pieces fit together: She is the product of Herr König's breeding programme, in which female guests are unknowingly turned into carriers for the species he is trying to conserve. Gretchen starts off not even recognising Alma as a sister, in a stubborn attempt to protest her father's abandonment of his former family, and the horrors of now having to live with them in a strange place. But among all the people that are meant to care for her, especially in light of what the film eventually reveals is the death of her mother (hence the unanswered messages), Alma turns out to be the only one attempting to reach out, to ease her suffering, even though she is only a child, and not quite human. Gretchen, the outsider, realises that this non-human family is the truest one she has, and decides to save Alma from both  Herr König and a discharged cop (Jan Bluthardt) with a personal stake's attempt to end the breeding programme. They escape this horrible fairy tale (Dan Stevens playing a flute to attract the monster like some even more twisted version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is an image that will stay with me for a while), and drive off into the night, far away from the Alps.

 

2024, directed by Tilman Singer, starring Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens, Mila Lieu, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey.

Some (un)collected thoughts on Industry

 

 

I spent the last month catching up with Industry, just in time to watch the final episodes of the third season as they came out. I've been ambivalent about the show ever since starting it. It's clearly incredibly brilliantly written and acted - whittled down to the bones, propulsive, frequently frenetic in its pace. It tickles my brain: I've never been anywhere near the financial industry, or any workplace that looks remotely like this, and so can't judge if the portrayal of the culture is accurate, but from how the proposed values and actions influence the world we live in, I wouldn't be surprised if it was. And yet, I find it hard to connect deeply to the characters when the centre of the show, or its main thesis that it is exploring, is how the commodification of everything - personal relationships, love, friendship, care - leads to a gaping abyss that swallows people whole, and turns them into moral black holes. The propulsive force behind the characters' actions is always self-interest, selfishness, future gains, and everything is always a zero-sum game, a win-lose scenario with a literal body count. It reminds me of a slew of other shows that left me with a similar feeling of deep emptiness (the expectation of this feeling kept me from ever watching Succession, which may be the most obvious comparison here): the now mostly forgotten legal thriller Damages, in which Glenn Close and Rose Byrne engage in a destructive struggle for power, the political thriller House of Cards (equally rarely mentioned now, though for very deeply depressing reasons). Some aspects feel reminiscent of Mad Men (maybe an ultimate show about the commercialisation of everything, eloquently executed up to the final scene), especially in how mentor-mentee relationships play out ("That's what the money is for" would work perfectly in Industry as well, with remuneration being a replacement for any kind of emotional care that human relationships depend on).  

 

Abuse and predation are baked into the business model. In season one, Daria (Freya Mavor, Skins) serves up associates to a predatory client like a buffet, knowing fully well what will happen to them once she leaves them alone with Nicole. Nicole is an example of this world: a woman who thinks that the money that she is putting into Pierpoint entitles her to use its employees at will. From the start, the stakes are made clear when the first episode presents new graduate Hari as a potential main character, only for him to die in a toilet stall halfway through, after trying to keep up with the pressure through constant consumption of energy drinks and drugs. The idea of ethical investing is ridiculed as either a naive play ignorant of political and economic realities or as a cynical attempt to commodify changing attitudes towards climate change (RIP Lumi). Corporate social responsibility is consistently a thin, fragile mask over a reality of abuse and predation.

What Industry does so perfectly is translate the business model of Pierpoint, the investment bank where most of the action is set, into an ideology that affects all the relationships between the characters. It functions like a virus, like an infection.  A predatory model of money-making at all costs, only very loosely constrained by laws which are frequently presented as obstacles to be overcome rather than red lines, turns every relationship into a quest for power. Information is essential, especially in a place where power if distributed so unevenly (from the start, the new associates are told that they are competing against each other for a few permanent spots), and so mining for information becomes the primary occupation of especially Harper (a truly outstanding Myha'la Herrold), who is already disadvantaged as an American in a British bank who has forged her educational credentials, competing against associates who have graduated from prestigious universities and come from highly networked, rich families. Much of the show contrasts Harper's struggle, which has turned her into a shark, with Yasmin's (Marisa Abela, who shines in the third season especially) privileged background: they are sometimes friends, sometimes feuding, a this question of whether true friendship is even possible in the environment is maybe the driving emotional force behind most of the show. Yasmin accuses Harper of being incapable of genuine feelings, Harper accuses Yasmin of being unaware of her privilege, and riding on someone else's coat tails, being spoon-fed the kind of access that Harper has always had to fight for. 

The third main character for most of the show (others come in and out) is Robert (Harry Lawtey), an Oxford graduate from a working class background. Robert is used on the show to explore how rigid the British class structure is, how not even going to a lauded university truly changes his odds against other competitors who grew up in rich families, or have the money to dress the right way, or haven't had to teach themselves to talk a certain way to be taken seriously. Where Harper and Yasmin's relationship asks questions of the possibility of friendship, Robert begins a complex (and disturbing) psychosexual relationship with Yasmin, who wildly oscillates between her deep insecurity at work and obsession with power in her personal relationship with him - and instead of going the more trite route of interpreting Yasmin's power of him as some kind of feminist attainment, the show instead portrays their whole dance as damaging to them both, with Yasmin immediately turning anything that feels like love and care into something "ugly" (she verbalises this to him in the final episode of the third season), and Robert unable to cut himself free because he's fallen in love. 

I'm fascinated by where everyone ends up at the end of the third season: Harper, who was fired from Pierpoint because her mentor Eric, who recognises himself in her but doesn't like losing control of his assets, gets rid of her (her forged credentials hang over her like an anvil throughout the first season), leaves a seemingly functional work environment built on mutual trust and shared decision making that is ill-suited to her worst instincts. She instead wants to use corporate espionage and forensic accounting to build a fund that specialises in shorting over-valued companies ("it's only criminal if we get caught" is a perfect summation of her approach to this business), utilising the money of a shady financier who is as contemptuous of laws and boundaries as she is. Harper is presented as an opportunistic character, who takes the credo of the financial industry she works in the most serious: anything is allowed as long as it makes money. This is undercut by the fact that she mixes in a solid dose of vengeance for past transgressions, as most of her decisions in the third season are driven by trying to get back at people she feels have wronged her (a move for which Eric appears to respect her enough to give her a quote for her appearance in the Forbes' 30 under 30 list). This approach gets a literal body count when she throws Rishi, a fellow Pierpoint trader, under the bus. Rishi is a different kind of personification of what happens when an industry appears to reward risk-taking and gambling with few constraints attached: he's fallen into deep gambling debts due to his addiction to risk, and his inability to pay them leads to the most shocking scene of the show so far, when the man he owes money to shoots his wife. 

Yasmin, the focus point of the third season, ends up maintaining the privileges of her upbringing which she was about to lose due to legal action against her father by marrying a member of the aristocracy (Kit Harington doing great work with Henry Muck, in a world he seems to know well). Torn between what Robert has to offer, a kind of quaint normal life (Industry shows him buying a scratchy ticket, an action that Yasmin observes with a mix of deep fascination and abhorrence, a mix that describes her relationship to him well), and the safe and secure mantle of protection that moneyed power (not just that of the aristocracy, but also the protection of a yellow paper owner, uncle to Henry) could extend to her should she marry into it. Yasmin's father has been revealed to a be a serial abuser of children and women, and hinted to have abused Yasmin as well, even though the show never goes so far as to definitively confirm it (there are many transgressions, and deeply gross moments between them), instead offering it as a possible explanation for Yasmin's trauma response. Robert gets left behind but is likely better off for it, jumping ship at Pierpoint to become a money guy for a psychedelics start-up (the show's most obvious reference to Mad Men is his sales pitch - earlier in the season, an Ayahuasca trip is presented as mind-changing and beautiful, but the characters experiencing it immediately turn to ways to turn a profit from it) just before Pierpoint implodes. There's a continuing sense here that the only escape hatch from the abyss is to leave permanently, not just Pierpoint but the show altogether (like Gus, played by David Jonsson, who hasn't been seen since leaving for the US). 

All of this is very compelling, and brilliant: especially when traumatic pasts are translated into deeply troubled relationships, when characters feel like they are searching for something genuine beyond the constraints, but can't quite get there, because they are primed to seek some kind of advantage in every interaction.

2020-, created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, starring Marisa Abela, Myha'la Herrold, Harry Lawtey, Ken Leung, David Jonsson, Freya Mavor, Conor MacNeill.