Tag: story

The Cloud: The nuclear novel that shaped Germany

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She sees this legacy reflected in present-day German horror films such as the Netflix hit series, Dark: “You can better understand those kinds of German scary movies, and their 1980s roots, if you read Gudrun Pausewang.”

Even Pausewang’s admirers concede that the books can be painful. “It was so overwhelming, this scenario, so huge, that I didn’t know how to cope with it, as a child,” says Rémi, recalling the effect of reading The Last Children of Schewenborn. Then again, she argues, it’s a realistic depiction of how children experience systemic meltdown. “Her texts encourage readers to engage with big questions: the environment, anti-nuclear issues, but also, especially in her later years, the Nazi era, Fascism, dictatorship and political radicalisation.” And by rejecting a heroic narrative, one in which the child might triumph through some individual act of bravery or cunning, Pausewang places the responsibility squarely on the adults, and the system they created. (She also had less subtle ways of getting that message across: In The Last Children of Schewenborn, the children scrawl “Cursed Parents!” on a wall, and one of them cries: “The bomb is your fault!”.)

Overall, Rémi says, the question that haunted Pausewang remains hugely relevant today, at a time of climate change and conflict: “What did we inherit from the past, and what are we passing on to the next generation?”

Given that I am a member of Generation Pausewang, re-reading The Cloud for this article did make me reflect on how her gloomy outlook shaped me. I devoured her books as a child and teenager, and admire her commitment to truth-telling. But I also wish she had, perhaps, broadened her view of human nature just a little, and allowed for the possibility that people do sometimes choose to be brave, hopeful, altruistic and forgiving – and thrive. Of course, Pausewang would have found that suggestion naïve, and worse, patronising. As she once said, at the age of seven she already disliked books with a happy ending, and felt the writers didn’t take her seriously. She promised herself: “If I’m ever going to become a writer, I will take my readers seriously, regardless of whether they are six, 16 or 60. And I did become a writer, and I do take my readers seriously.”

Sophie Hardach is a journalist and writer living in London. Her latest novel, Confession with Blue Horses, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award.

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November 2, 2022
Synaesthesia: The ‘superpower’ behind great art

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How synaesthesia has inspired artists from Van Gogh to Pharrell Williams

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November 2, 2022
Ley lines: The UK’s mysterious ancient pathways

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And yet, ley lines continue to weave their allure. Perhaps it’s not surprising. “Humans have always searched for inner and outer maps or frameworks to help them navigate the world,” reflects Jake Farr, coaching psychologist, psychotherapist, and co-founder of Leading Through Storms, a community-interest company supporting meaningful adaptation into the future. “The need to belong is also a primary human driver,” she tells BBC Culture. “Where do we belong, who do we belong with, what’s our place? Contrary to this, the modern western world pivots towards individualism, capitalism’s bed fellow, leaving many feeling lonely and lacking connection to place and community. Ley lines may provide people with a way to map felt connections to place and, on a deeper level, may speak to the interconnectedness of all life; reaching for harmony and balance which, of course, buying the latest product simply can’t touch.”

Thus, the Irish have their fairy paths, now mainly tourist attractions dotted with picnic sites, and make believe grottoes, but many Chinese people still believe in “dragon lines” and feng shui. The Incas used “spirit-lines” or ceques with the Inca temple of the sun in Cuzco as their hub, marking the routes with wak’as, stone monuments that represent something revered. For the Aboriginal people of Australia, songlines, also called “dreaming tracks”, are paths across land and sky, which mark the routes followed by localised “creator beings”. The paths are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance and painting; by singing these songs in sequences, indigenous people can navigate the deserts of Australia’s interior.

Even hardened sceptics may be floored by the route of the UK’s most famous ley line, St Michael’s. First discussed by Michell in A View over Atlantis, the ley line runs 350 miles across numerous sites dedicated to the archangel, from St Michael’s Mount, to the Norfolk Coast, all the while oriented towards sunrise on 8 May, when the Latin liturgy celebrates the Apparition of St Michael. Or, as Michell wrote: “The St Michael Line of traditional dragons sites in south-west England… appears to be set between two prominent Somerset hills, both dedicated to St Michael with ruined churches on their summit. These two hills are Glastonbury Tor and ‘The Mump’ at Burrowbridge some 10 miles to the South-West. Both these hills appear to have been artificially shaped so that their axes align with each other, and their orientation, 27 degrees North-East can be read off a large Ordnance Survey sheet.”

Now a new generation, including bones tan jones, are harking back to myth to explain the world around them; this time, in the context of a planet on the brink of collapse and a natural world, mourned as it disappears. And they are creating their own myths in return. Tan jones eschewed the laboriously intricate mappings of earlier ley line-hunters, and instead followed their instinct. “All I knew was I had a start and a finish, and maybe a few stop-offs,” they say. “I took it serendipitously and found my next location by talking to people.” They visited the site of the now-abandoned Heathrow action camp, Grow Heathrow, a former hub for activists, creatives, and local residents; encountered the 2,500 year old Anckerwyke Yew, and the grounds opposite, where it is said the Magna Carta was signed in 1215; explored Chobham Common nature reserve, originally created by prehistoric farmers, in Surrey. Still, the Harrow Way, running East-West across southern England, remains a highlight.

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November 2, 2022
Fritz the Cat at 50: The X-rated cartoon that shocked the US

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Neither studio heads nor distributors wanted to touch what many saw as a doomed, pornographic project, although Warner Bros eventually agreed to finance the film. But after a disastrous pre-screening where Bakshi and Krantz horrified executives with a controversial sex scene and disputes about toning down other sexual content, they pulled their money; however Fritz won funding from exploitation distributor Cinemation and the film was released. “At this time, independent production was growing, because there were certain tax incentives and the studio system itself was breaking down during the 1960s,” says animation historian and critic Maureen Furniss. “It wasn’t that unusual to have independent producers, but Ralph Bakshi was a force unto himself, he was a totally different kind of guy – and very challenging to work with.”

Capturing the zeitgeist

Like the US itself, the animation establishment was undergoing a period of change, and Fritz burst out from decades of censorship as well as this shift in the studio system. Antitrust legislation and the emergence of television combined to help dissolve the dominant studio system of Hollywood’s “Golden Era”. Audiences were increasingly disconnected from the “block booking” packages that the movie theatres were forced to show, where A-movies, B-movies, newsreels, and animated shorts were combined into one package. Suddenly, shorts were not viewed as profitable or desirable. So when the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio closed in 1957, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera left to found their own studio, which began producing more rough and ready, made-for-TV cartoons in contrast to their bigger budget Tom and Jerry shorts they were making at MGM – eventually creating successes like the Flintstones.

Independent, experimental films were gaining steam in the post-war period, pushing back against the censorious backdrop of moral policing and policy. The National Legion of Decency, a Catholic pressure group dedicated to identifying morally egregious films, tried to blacklist everything from Rififi (1955) to Buñuel and Rossellini, while the decades-long Hays code, created in the 1930s, clamped down on films that were sympathetic on the side of “crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin“. Eventually, in 1968, the official classification system would emerge from these kinds of groups as moral guidance; and a few years later, Fritz burst onto the scene as the first of its kind in the “X” category – bundled together with pornography, slasher flicks, and dramas like Midnight Cowboy (1969). So, while Fritz was the first X-rated animated film, the category hadn’t been around for long. “While adult content had already made its way into a number of Golden Age Hollywood cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s,” Dr Christopher Holliday, Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s College London, tells BBC Culture, “the playful eroticism of characters like Betty Boop was dialled up by the outlandish ‘rude and crude’ style of Bakshi’s animation, and particularly in his adaptation of Robert Crumb’s X-rated adult comic.”

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November 1, 2022
9 of the best TV shows to watch this November

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9 Willow

Playing on nostalgia and also aiming to reach a younger generation, Willow brings back Warwick Davis as the Nelwyn sorcerer hero of the beloved 1988 fantasy film. In a story set 30 years after the original, Kit (Ruby Cruz), the daughter of Sorsha – a warrior in the movie, now queen, and played once more by Joanne Whalley – seeks out Willow and asks him to find her kidnapped twin brother. Willow recruits a motley band (is there any other kind?) and they head off on another adventure into fantastic realms. Kevin Pollak and Rick Overton repeat their roles as Brownies, with Christian Slater playing an undisclosed new character. Jonathan Kasdan, writer of Solo: A Star Wars Story, is the showrunner. There will be fairies, knights, special effects, and presumably the conquering of evil. In the teaser trailer, Kit sets the tone when she tells Willow, “The world needs you again. It needs your magic.”

Willow premieres on 30 November on Disney+

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October 31, 2022
Living to Breaking Bad: the film and TV facing up to death

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Outside of Ikiru/Living, perhaps the most moving, near-euphorically tranquil death scene is that of Maude in Hal Ashby’s 1971cult classic Harold and Maude. In it, the character slips away on her 80th birthday after a final dance with her young lover Harold, saying she “couldn’t ask for a lovelier farewell”. In Chumbley’s experience, such bliss right at the end of life is possible, and she has seen “some really wonderful celebrations in people’s end-of-life experiences. I’ve seen people get married, I’ve seen people heal relationships. It can be a time where you see the very simplified heart of humanity when everything else is stripped away”. Maude’s life ending profoundly affects Harold; previously, between staging his own suicide and attending strangers’ funerals, he was fascinated by all things morbid but to shallow effect. But by bringing him into her final days, Maude teaches him what it truly means to live and die. For Chumbley, beyond the clinical and legal value of an “end-of-life plan”, it can also be an opportunity for human connection. “There’s affirmation when you appoint someone your power of attorney [for example]. It’s a chance to show someone they are loved by you, valued by you, and that this responsibility is because of the richness of your relationship.”

The idea of looking inwards for fulfilment before it’s too late is at the core of what Ishiguro wanted to express in Living – along with the acknowledgement that you “can make your life full and worthwhile beyond a sense of external achievement that the world recognises. You can have a very humble small life, but you can make a supreme effort within the limitations of that life.” In this way, the ultimate accomplishment of Mr Williams with his playground is small but meaningful: he may not receive uproarious public recognition, but that is not the point. “There’s a very lonely sense of success and failure that we’ll be left with when we are really trying to assess whether our lives have been led well in just those terms,” as Ishiguro says.

And while truly contemplating our life and death may be a private interior act, watching films like Living can help us along the way. Part of what makes Living such a striking piece of work is that it comes to us at a time when death has been on everyone’s minds as a result of the pandemic. Yet, unlike with Mr Williams’ personal epiphany, there has been no substantial collective re-evaluation of what really matters. As Critchley puts it, “we are in a process of really rapid forgetfulness with regard to the pandemic. So many people were lost, and now we’re back at it, and life is back to normal. Why don’t we remember? There’s a desperate tragedy to being a tightly formed narcissistic shell just ploughing through life when it’s actually joyful to remember and accept one’s position as someone who mourns and is vulnerable and open”. That is the joy that can be seen radiating from Bill Nighy’s character when, towards the film’s end, he sits on a swing in the playground he has helped get built while the snow falls. Like so many before him, in confronting his death, he has finally started Living.

Living is released in UK cinemas on 4 November and US cinemas on 23 December

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October 30, 2022
10 of the best films to watch this November

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10 of the best films to watch this November

(Image credit: Warner Bros)

Including Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Knives Out, Steven Spielberg’s autobiopic The Fabelmans, and cannibal drama Bones and All starring Timothée Chalamet – Nicholas Barber lists this month’s unmissable releases.

1. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

How often these days does Hollywood make a sequel to any film that isn’t a cartoon, a horror movie or a CGI-heavy action blockbuster? The answer is: not often at all. But Knives Out was so ingenious, and its central character was so delightful, that Rian Johnson has written and directed another murder mystery in the same gloriously complicated vein. Daniel Craig returns as Benoit Blanc, the brilliant detective with an extravagant vocabulary and an even more extravagant Southern drawl. As in Knives Out, he’s sniffing out a killer among a group of wealthy, entitled Americans, but this time the setting is a private Greek island and the suspects (played by Ed Norton, Dave Bautista, Kate Hudson, Janelle Monáe and others) have made their millions from tech and social media. BBC Culture’s Caryn James says that “this hugely entertaining follow-up [is] filled with delicious cameos and loaded with more comic moments than the previous film”.

Released in UK and US cinemas on 23 November, and on Netflix internationally on 23 December

2. Bones and All

Luca Guadagnino and Timothée Chalamet, the star and director of Call Me by Your Name, reunite for another tender tale of budding romance, adapted from a novel and set in the 1980s. But Bones and All is different in one key respect: its young lovers can’t resist eating human flesh. One of them, the 18-year-old Maren (Taylor Russell), thought she was the only person with this unconventional dietary requirement, but as she drives around small-town America, she finds that “eaters” are surprisingly common. Among her cannibalistic new acquaintances are the handsome Lee (Chalamet) and the horribly menacing Sully (Mark Rylance). “Guadagnino has created an effective and gruesome shocker,” says John Bleasdale at Sight & Sound. “But Bones and All is also the tale of a lost young pair, finding each other and themselves. It is wryly funny, gleefully entertaining and oddly touching. Delicious and nutritious.”

Released internationally on 23 November

3. The Fabelmans

Roma, Belfast, The Hand of God… there’s a trend at the moment for films about their directors’ own formative years. The latest example is Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, a tender, autobiographical coming-of-age drama that has been widely tipped as a best picture contender at the Oscars. Its young hero has been renamed Sammy Fabelman (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord, and then by Gabriel LaBelle), but his life story follows Spielberg’s own, as he falls in love with cinema, moves from New Jersey to Arizona to Northern California, and witnesses the marital problems of his father (Paul Dano), a computer engineer, and his mother (Michelle Williams), a pianist. “This is the movie we’ve been waiting 45 years for him to make,” says David Fear at Rolling Stone. “It’s one man’s thank you to the movies for saving him. And it’s a great American artist utilising his skill as a great storyteller to finally tell his own… It’s one of the most impressive, enlightening, vital things he’s ever done.”

Released on 23 November in the US, 24 November in Portugal, 25 November in Poland and Turkey, and 27 January 2023 in the UK

4. The Wonder

In a remote Irish village in 1862, an 11-year-old girl (Kila Lord Cassidy) is said to have survived for months without food, so a sceptical English nurse (Florence Pugh) is sent to observe her. The local bigwigs (Ciarán Hinds, Toby Jones, Tom Burke) want answers: is she a miracle or a cheat? A mastermind or a pawn in someone else’s game? Adapted from the novel by Emma Donoghue (Room), Sebastián Lelio’s “eerie and unusual period drama is a magnetic and mysterious little marvel rich in atmosphere and allure”, says Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. But the real miracle in this “incredibly involving” film is Pugh, who is “never less than utterly, mesmerically convincing. She’s so totally in command here that it almost feels as if she’s directing the film from within”. Don’t be surprised if she picks up several best actress nominations this awards season.

Released on 16 November on Netflix

5. Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Having won a Golden Globe for playing Lady Diana Spencer in The Crown, Emma Corrin stars as Lady Constance Chatterley in Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s film of DH Lawrence’s groundbreakingly torrid novel. (Is this the kind of book “you would wish your wife or servants to read,” asked the prosecutor in the British obscenity trial of 1960.) Jack O’Connell co-stars as Oliver Mellors, the rugged gamekeeper who gives the Lady the physical attention she craves after her husband, Sir Clifford (Matthew Duckett), is paralysed from the waist down in World War One. And Joely Richardson, who played Lady Chatterley alongside Sean Bean in a 1993 television series, is Sir Clifford’s nurse, Mrs Bolton. Tomris Laffly at The Wrap says that the film is “a handsome introduction to this feminine saga of sexual awakening, laced with both something old and something new, and plenty of frank, tastefully choreographed and actually steamy eroticism dearly missed in today’s increasingly sterile mainstream cinema”.

Released in UK cinemas on 25 November, and Netflix internationally on 2 December

(Credit: Searchlight Pictures)

6. The Menu

This month’s other satirical tale of the super-rich getting their comeuppance on a private island (see also: Glass Onion), The Menu features Ralph Fiennes as a devilish celebrity chef who presides over one of the world’s most exclusive restaurants. Nicholas Hoult and Anya Taylor-Joy play two of the gourmands who have signed up for the $1250-a-head fine-dining experience. But they soon find that while the chef’s “molecular gastronomy” (including a rock covered in bits of seaweed) is not exactly lip-smacking, the way he treats his customers is even worse. “The rarefied world of haute cuisine is not exactly a hard target to satirise,” says Wendy Ide at Screen Daily, “but this deliciously savage comedy from Succession director Mark Mylod makes every bitter mouthful count. A bracingly spiteful and very funny picture.”

Released internationally on 18 November

7. Good Night Oppy

Nasa’s Mars exploration rover, Opportunity, landed on the Red Planet in 2004. It was expected to function for just 90 days, but the solar-powered, remote-controlled robot kept trundling around, analysing minerals, for 15 years. (Fifteen Earth years, that is, which translates as eight years on Mars.) It’s little wonder that scientists started to see it – or her – less as a machine than as a friendly relative of R2-D2 and Wall-E. Viewers of Ryan White’s documentary might have similar feelings. Alongside Nasa’s own footage, White uses computer-animated sequences to show Oppy’s Martian travels. That means that the “inspirational and wonderfully engaging… Good Night Oppy is more than just a documentary,” says Peter Debruge in Variety. “It’s an animated film as well – and a hugely entertaining one at that.”

Released in UK cinemas on 4 November, and Amazon Prime internationally on 23 November

8. Aftersun

Charlotte Wells’ debut as a writer-director is one of the most acclaimed films of the year. Essentially a two-hander, the wistful, intimate Aftersun stars Francesca Corio and Paul Mescal (Normal People) as an 11-year-old girl on a rare holiday with her 30-year-old father in the late 1990s: she still lives with her mother in Scotland while he has moved to England, with no intention of returning. They tour the discos, amusement arcades and karaoke bars of a fading Turkish resort, but it becomes clear that Calum isn’t quite the happy dad he is struggling to be. “Deftly constructed and utterly heartbreaking,” says Pat Brown at Slant Magazine, “Aftersun announces Wells as an eminent storyteller of prodigious powers.”

Released on 18 November in the UK and Ireland

(Credit: Walt Disney Studios)

9. Strange World

Don Hall and Qui Nguyen, the director and writer of Raya and the Last Dragon, use their latest Disney cartoon to pay homage to the classic science-fiction adventure yarns of Jules Verne and HG Wells: the cartoon’s explorer heroes, voiced by Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal and Gabrielle Union, discover a land of weird and wonderful flora and fauna under the Earth’s surface. But like The Incredibles, among other Disney and Pixar films, Strange World is also about family life. “We know this is about Don [Hall] and his dad,” Nguyen told Jamie Jirak at ComicBook.com, “about his children, and what he thinks is important to the world and what he wants to give to the world as a legacy… it’s our love letter to our kids as both fathers and sons.”

Released internationally on 23 November

(Credit: Walt Disney Studios)

10. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Chadwick Boseman was so revered as King T’Challa of Wakanda, aka Black Panther, that when he died of cancer in August 2020, executives at Marvel Studios knew that they couldn’t recast the part. Instead, Ryan Coogler, the film’s director, made a sequel which pays tribute to Boseman. In part, the film is about T’Challa’s Wakandan friends and relatives battling the aquatic armies of Namor, the Sub-Mariner (Tenoch Huerta). But it is also about a nation grieving for its lost king. “I dreaded the start of this shoot because I could not imagine how we would proceed without Chadwick,” Lupita Nyong’o told Devan Coggan at Entertainment Weekly. “It was unfathomable to me. But Ryan managed to honour his life and his role in both the film and our lives with his moving, truthful, and clear vision.”

Released internationally on 11 November

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October 27, 2022
The bizarre Dracula film that saw him meet the hippies

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Newman – who would later use the Johnny Alucard name for one of the main characters in his Anno Dracula series of novels putting forward an alternate history where Count Dracula marries Queen Victoria – believes the film got a harsher reception than it should have done due to it being a later Hammer horror at a time when the company was struggling. ” There wasn’t resistance to the idea of a contemporary-set vampire movie,” he says. “A few years later, Salem’s Lot was basically Dracula reset in Peyton Place. Hammer were struggling to stay in the game, and some at the time saw only gimmicks – see also Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde or The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires for odd hybrids.”

So though it was not quite sure what it wanted to be, and while it was perhaps not wholly successful in portraying the immortal Dracula at play in hip London town, Dracula AD 1972 has developed quite a following in the decades since. After its first DVD release in 2006, in particular, it found a new, appreciative audience. As the Classic Monsters website surmised, “the movie did what it was meant to, bringing a tired franchise up to date whilst retaining enough of its heritage to remain credible”. And as the Grindhouse Database said, it is “an example of 1970s exploitation filmmaking at its most quirky and capricious … a delightfully entertaining experience”.

What would Bram Stoker have thought of it? We’ll never know, of course, but his great grand-nephew Dacre Stoker, who has written many books on his ancestor’s creation, thinks that, if nothing else, the film paves the way for Dracula to escape his Victorian bounds.

“It did provide an opening for authors and screenwriters to modernise Bram Stoke’’s Victorian horror story, and unleash the Transylvanian count on a wide variety of audiences,” he tells BBC Culture, adding jokily that “I would have thought that the music soundtrack was bad enough to kill the Count, but instead he was impaled by a spoke of a wooden carriage wheel, which I did think was quite clever.”

Without the ambition of Dracula AD 1972 and its at-the-time daring and controversial move to bring Dracula into the modern era, the seed might not have been sown for other writers and film-makers to update the vampire legend themselves. Three years later, Stephen King published the aforementioned Salem’s Lot, and the basic concept of the 1972 movie was repeated with turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood horror Dracula 2000, starring Gerard Butler as the Count, and its two sequels. Who knows, without AD 1972 we might never even have had modern-day vampire stories like Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire, published in 1976, or the Twilight series, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It may be a faintly humorous curio in the horror canon, but it’s an important one nonetheless.

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October 26, 2022
Enheduanna: The world’s first named author

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But change was under way, and by 2400 BC, a vessel fragment shows a female deity visualised in human form. Wearing a horned crown with leafy, vegetable-like material protruding from her shoulders and holding a cluster of dates, she has the aspects of fertility and fecundity associated with Inanna, but the animal-like crown also suggests fierceness.

With the reign of Sargon and through Eneheduanna’s hymns, an ever-more war-like female deity begins to be depicted: Ishtar, seen portrayed in the exhibition with weapons coming out of her shoulders and her foot atop a lion whose leash she wields. In her poems, Enheduanna similarly portrays Inanna/Ishtar as a powerful goddess of combat and conquest as well as of love and abundance. And, according to Babcock, cylinder seals in the exhibition actually illustrate scenes from her poem, Inanna and Ebih.

The text pits an embattled, enraged Inanna against her enemy, a mountain range that refuses to bow down or cede to her. We see the goddess, armed with knife and axes, cause the mountain’s stones to cascade downward, and kill the mountain’s male god. “She sharpened both edges of her dagger. She took Ebih’s neck as if tearing up grass. She presented the blade into its heart,” and “yelled like thunder” so that “the stones making up Ebih crashed down its back.” She then celebrates her conquest by triumphantly placing her foot atop the fallen stones. “This is the first time you have illustrations for a text, ever,” Babcock comments – another first for Enheduanna’s literary legacy.

Which is another way to say that Enheduanna not only wrote, but she continues to endure in many realms: as a significant figure in ancient Sumer, in the history of women and feminism and not least, in literature, as well.

She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca 3400-2000 BC is at the Morgan Library, New York City, until 19 February 2023.

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October 25, 2022
White Lotus review: The show that skewers the super-rich

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The three-generational Sicilian-American family, the Di Grassos, provides the most comedy. F Murray Abraham is the patriarch, Bert, a relentless flirt at 80. His son, Dom, is a Hollywood player whose affairs have earned his absent wife’s fury. Michael Imperioli plays this remorseful, weak-willed clod with down-to-earth naturalism in what may be his best work since Christopher on The Sopranos. Dom’s son, Albie (Adam DiMarco) is an earnest Stanford University grad. The series’ hilarious moments come when the three fumble through a discussion of sex, and when they visit the tourist-trap location where the Sicilian segments of The Godfather were shot. To his father’s and grandfather’s horror, Albie goes off on an explanation of why the overrated film plays into men’s nostalgia for “the salad days of the patriarchy”. The actors’ impeccable comic timing makes you believe they are a family.

Coolidge and White once more brilliantly define Tanya, who is sad, lonely (despite being married) and pitiable, but thoughtlessly callous toward people she considers the help. Haley Lu Richardson makes Tanya’s assistant, Portia, the most realistic character, a young woman with an edge of desperation about her future. In tears, she tells a friend on the phone, “I feel like I’ve just been stuck at home, just doom-scrolling on my phone the last three years”. White includes another nod at a world shaped by Covid and other blights when Harper says she has trouble sleeping because of “everything that’s going on in the world”. Daphne blankly asks what she means, and the appalled Harper explains, “I don’t know, just, like the end of the world”. Well put, but White leaves it at that. Real-life disasters never intrude on this engaging show.

While the guests seemed hermetically sealed inside the Hawaiian resort in season one, here they roam around (partly due to fewer Covid restrictions during shooting.) There are trips to an extravagant villa in Noto, another extravagant villa in Palermo, and the grand opera house, where we get a snippet of Madame Butterfly, until the series begins to feel like a tourist video. It’s just a matter of time before someone sings That’s Amore, but White savvily uses the song with a sad irony, a hint of the darker underside of The White Lotus that has yet to emerge.

★★★★☆

The White Lotus season 2 premieres on HBO on 30 October.

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October 24, 2022
My Policeman: Is gay sex still taboo on screen?

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To make a more recent comparison, My Policeman’s approach to same-sex intimacy, specifically, feels similar to Carol, Todd Haynes’ 2015 romantic period drama starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. Carol was also set in the conservative 1950s and its passionate sex scenes portrayed two characters who were only able to fully express themselves behind closed doors, with their bodies entwined. “In My Policeman, we’re dealing with a period in England where gay sex was illegal,” Grandage tells BBC Culture. “I wanted to make sure that you were able to see these two men have total freedom during intimacy, because they couldn’t elsewhere.” And as a viewer in 2022, there is still a sense of liberation to be felt in seeing that intimacy candidly expressed in a starry, relatively commercial movie like My Policeman.

Queer cinema has come a long way since 1964, when Brock Peters played one of the first openly homosexual characters in the US film Pawn Broker. Back then, same-sex intimacy and nudity on screen would have seemed unthinkable. But today, whether it’s the lusciousness of My Policeman, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams characters’ voracious lovemaking in 2017 drama Disobedience, or the gay orgies in Andrew Ahn’s Jane Austen-inspired gay rom-com Fire Island, queer sex scenes are gradually becoming more frequent and varied. Alongside My Policeman, another mainstream LGBTQ+ film that has been making waves in recent weeks is the studio gay rom-com Bros, which has been heralded by its comedian writer-star Billy Eichner as a historic moment for gay representation in film – although its supposed radicalness has been disputed by some critics. The film casually drops in several sex scenes, from disappointing hook-ups described as “weird sex with strangers that you don’t like”, to group sex scenes which explore relationships beyond monogamy. Some of the sex offers comedic value, while other scenes are more sentimental as the protagonists fall in love.

The ‘purpose’ of sex scenes

If the simultaneous release of these two glossy, mainstream films with an upfront approach to gay male sexuality is heartening, debate over Styles’ comments has highlighted that gay sex on screen remains a contentious issue. Some feel that progress is being made, with more films depicting it with relative openness, but others remain frustrated that mainstream cinema still shies away from it too often. In some ways, this is an offshoot of a wider debate that has been going on more recently, about the purpose and validity of sex scenes in films full stop. For Grandage, the sex scenes in My Policeman were primarily about narrative. “I wanted the intimacy to move the story forward, and you can’t do that if you get too coy with it, or move the camera away from it,” he says. Clarisse Loughrey, film critic at The Independent, agrees that intimate scenes should ideally further the story. “Sex scenes work best when they’re rightfully serving the characters, the narrative and the tone of the film,” she says.

Yet Richard Lawson, chief critic at Vanity Fair, also thinks we need to be careful not to become too prescriptive about sex scenes in film, or puritanical about their reason for being. “Right now we’re in this period where sex scenes have to drive forward the narrative. But really, they can also be there because they’re sexy,” he says. “It’s nice when they serve the narrative, but it’s not always a problem if they don’t.”

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October 23, 2022
The Secret History: A murder mystery that thrills 30 years on

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Bret Easton Ellis – an early reader of Tartt’s manuscript for The Secret History – introduced his friend to his literary agent, who secured a $450,000 advance for the book. On its publication in 1992 the reviews were overwhelmingly positive (Time magazine called it “viscerally compelling”, Newsday labelled it “a thinking person’s thriller” ) – though not entirely, with The Independent saying “style is confused with substance time and again”. Still, the hype machine was already in full swing – with Tartt landing an eight-page profile in Vanity Fair and accompanying photoshoot alongside her pug, Pongo. Speaking to the New York Times at the time, her publisher Sonny Mehta said: “We didn’t know what she looked like when we bought the book, but it certainly hasn’t hurt.”

That Vanity Fair profile introduced her with the line: “Donna Tartt, who is going to be very famous very soon…” – but from the start, Tartt preferred to keep an air of mystery, brushing off questions about her personal life. The scant details that emerged were quickly mythologised: Her answer phone message was TS Eliot reading The Waste Land; she bought her clothes in Gap Kids; she could drink Bret Easton Ellis under the table.

Throughout her career, interviews have been rare – usually only to promote a new book, of which there have been just two more in the subsequent 30 years, The Little Friend in 2002 and 2014’s The Goldfinch. The mystery has only added to her legend. “The Secret History is enduring because The Secret History is so good,” says Anolik. “But it certainly doesn’t hurt that Donna has brilliant instincts about cult obsession and understands how to manage an enigmatic reputation.”

Still, the idea of her as a total recluse is overstated. In an interview with Italian publication Rivista last year, she talked openly about her love of fashion, her favourite contemporary music (Lana Del Rey) and her writing routine (“three hours in the morning”) – and hinted that a new book might be on the way. She also declared, to no one’s surprise, that she’s never used social media.

Viral prose

It’s ironic then, that social media is the reason The Secret History is riding a whole new wave of popularity, thanks to “Dark Academia” , a subculture on TikTok and Instagram that romanticises learning and celebrates an aesthetic that is “traditional academic with a gothic edge.” The book is seen as Dark Academia’s essential text, and videos with the hashtag #thesecrethistory have more than 150 million views on TikTok – featuring everything from young people cosplaying the book’s characters to fans reciting favourite passages or showing off their annotated copies. “It has been a joy to see a new generation discover Donna Tartt’s masterpiece,” says Isabel Wall, editorial director of Tartt’s UK publisher, Viking – which is publishing a special clothbound edition of the book to mark the 30th anniversary.

To Petrou, it makes total sense that the book continues to connect with young readers – even if the world depicted in it feels more distant than ever from today’s digital age. “It’s youth, right,” says Petrou. “Those same things that struck a chord for me as a young person, strike a chord for young people over and over again.” Anolik agrees that the book is timeless. “I think young people are natural snobs. And The Secret History is the great young-snob American novel, as Brideshead Revisited is the great young-snob English novel.”

Thirty years and millions of readers later, discovering The Secret History still somehow feels like joining an exclusive club. “To experience that book for the first time is see someone at the best in their craft,” says Petrou. “I envy those that haven’t read it yet.”

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October 20, 2022
The stories hidden in the ancient Indian craft of kantha

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Most traditional kanthas had an image of the Sun or a lotus as the central focal point. But the motifs used in kantha varied enormously, with characters from folklore and mythology, to elements of nature such as oceans, birds, animals, the tree of life, rivers and sealife, and the things the makers saw around them, such as palanquins, chariots, temples, mirrors and everyday objects like umbrellas.

Along with Indian inspirations, kantha was also influenced by colonial rule and Portuguese traders. Kantha with silken threads was created under Portuguese patronage, with motifs like sailing ships and coats of arms. A 19th-Century kantha at the National Crafts Museum in New Delhi has motifs of playing cards, sahibs and memsahibs, chandeliers and medallions of Queen Victoria, side by side with scenes from Hindu mythology in which Shiva looks like a Madonna in a Christian painting, and Rama and Lakshmana appear as European boys.

Kantha also often represented a family’s hopes and aspirations, from weddings and happiness, to family and fertility. The light quilts were useful in the monsoon and winter and some were used as prayer mats. More elaborate examples were gifted as wedding dowries, made by mothers and grandmothers with their hopes, wishes and family histories graphically weaved in.

Each piece of kantha was unique as there were no formal rules. Although some symbols and motifs were universal, each design depended on the creator’s individual composition, technique and colour scheme. It was a handicraft that belonged to communities, and was never something that was commissioned by the royal family or rich landlords. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, under British colonial rule, many Indian handicrafts took a backseat, though kantha continued to be practiced among rural women.

Many public figures have shaped kantha’s journey over the years. In the 1940s, a revival of kantha was spearheaded by Pratima Devi, the daughter-in-law of the poet and Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, as a part of a drive to empower women in rural areas. Unfortunately, the Partition of India in 1947 led to kantha declining again, as many people left from India to Bangladesh. Meanwhile, outside India, one US institution that has contributed to the revival of kantha is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which preserved the kantha collection of Stella Kramrisch, a US art historian and curator, who had acquired an extensive collection during her time in India in the 1920s as a teacher in Santhiniketan.

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October 20, 2022
The Banshees of Inisherin: Could Colin Farrell win an Oscar?

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The Banshees of Inisherin is quiet, steadily paced and slightly repetitive, but it’s always compelling, and it eventually grows hauntingly sad. McDonagh doesn’t stint on daft jokes and jovial banter, but his film gets bleaker, stranger and more poetic as it goes on, until it feels as if the men’s pointless falling out has broken something important, and that things can only get worse for them, the island, and the world. The hints of mysticism and the slow, insistent rhythms turn these two stubborn eejits into mythical figures: timeless embodiments of the masculine, self-destructive refusal to be reasonable.

Farrell, who won the best actor prize at September’s Venice Film Festival, has a pained, confused naivety that’s reminiscent of Stan Laurel, so The Banshees of Inisherin could be viewed as a pitch black homage to Laurel and Hardy. But the refreshing part about it is how different it is from most other films, including McDonagh’s own. It has the ring of a tall tale that has been told in pub after pub, gathering weird new details every time, until it has become a part of Irish folklore. It’s a story that you’ll want to hear – and tell – again and again.

★★★★☆

The Banshees of Inisherin is released in the US, UK and Ireland on 21 October.

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October 19, 2022
Are soaps in danger of extinction?

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The streaming era has also coincided with the rise of “prestige” television. Soaps used to thrive off a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out), where viewers would feel left out if everyone else seemed to be watching. But from Succession to Game of Thrones and Killing Eve, Big Little Lies and Euphoria, the most talked-about shows are now high-budget spectacles. Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is the most expensive TV show ever made, with a budget of £399m for the first season, eclipsing the latest season of Netflix’s Stranger Things, which cost a reported £232 million.

In this new TV environment, episodes are often longer and seasons are shorter, while the actors are frequently Hollywood stars now moving freely between the big and small screen. A limited series like HBO’s Mare of Easttown, starring Academy Award winner Kate Winslet, captivated viewers in 2021 and gave its audience a huge payoff after just seven hour-long episodes – a much smaller time investment than most major soap storylines. “Viewers are now much more used to watching shows with fewer episodes and flipping between shows, rather than sticking with a show for a long period of time,” Bryan says. “And right now, younger viewers maybe aren’t as keen on soaps compared to a very polished, very expensive-looking drama.”

The perception of soaps as “low brow” dates back to the genre’s origins. Soaps became popular in the US before the UK. In fact, the BBC’s first radio soap opera, 1941’s Front Line Family, did not initially air in Britain at all but in North America. The US’s first daytime TV soap opera, These Are My Children, arrived in 1949, followed by Britain’s first TV soap opera, the BBC’s The Grove Family, in 1954. The soap opera form gets its name from the US, where they were produced by companies such as Procter & Gamble, who used them to sell cleaning products, including soap, to a daytime audience of mostly women. US soaps have always been a staple of daytime TV, whereas most soaps in the UK air in the evening. Generally speaking, US soaps tend to be more glossy and “aspirational”, following the lives of wealthier people. British soaps revolve around everyday communities of working and middle-class people, often with a pub as a central fixture. (There are exceptions, like the BBC medical soap Doctors).

Elana Levine, professor of media, cinema and digital studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History, tells BBC Culture that the perception of soaps as “low art” is connected to their original association with women. More so than other mediums, soaps have put women in prominent, significant roles and made them central to the narrative. Over the years, Levine says soaps have explored concerns that have been historically associated with women, so there is an element of misogyny in how easily they are deemed frivolous. “Soaps revolve around interpersonal relationships, family, questions of trust and honesty, treasured and private secrets,” she says. “All humans care about those things. But culturally, at least in Western cultures of the 20th Century and beyond, those things have been feminised, meaning they’ve been associated with women.”

Yet the irony is that now it faces a threat from another genre that is also repeatedly, and some would say unfairly, dismissed as lowbrow. Reality TV is often derided despite being one of the most influential genres of the 21st Century. But its unstoppable rise has presented further difficulties for soaps. Reality shows are generally cheap to make by comparison, and a show like Love Island in the UK (which has also spawned a hit US version, screening on Peacock) has managed to bring in millions of viewers every night for many weeks. “Right back to the rise of Big Brother [in the early noughties], reality shows have been able to create national conversations,” Bryan says. “Since then, I think soaps have found it a little bit harder to do that.”

What’s more, “structured” reality shows, like Made in Chelsea in the UK or Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise and Netflix’s Selling Sunset in the US, which follow the lives of wealthy people, brand themselves as “living soap operas”. And in recent years, there has been a noticeable audience crossover: several well-known soap stars, like Lisa Rinna and Eileen Davidson, have joined the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, while their co-star Erika Jayne landed a recurring role on The Young and the Restless. “Younger viewers who may have watched soap operas can get some of those same pleasures and enjoyment through reality TV,” says Levine. “Reality shows being similar to soap operas is part of what has allowed for their success. But it’s also made soap operas less prominent and secure as a cultural form.”

Losing the plot

Added to that, there’s a question around whether soaps, in trying too hard to snare audiences’ attention, have in fact lost something of what made them special. There has been a long tradition of soaps tackling social issues, ahead of other mediums. In the UK, the first same-sex kisses on TV, between two men and two women, were both in soaps: EastEnders in 1989 followed by Brookside in 1994. Alongside Nicholas Donovan, Cashman was one half of the first gay kiss on British TV. The scene provoked a tabloid backlash, including a notorious article written in The Sun by Piers Morgan.

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October 18, 2022
The painter who revealed how our eyes really see the world

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What Cézanne reveals about the visual processing of the human mind

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October 18, 2022
Alan Garner: The magical master of British literature

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The novel captured the imagination of author Edward Parnell, whose autobiographical journey around places associated with British folklore, Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country, was published in 2019. “For me, it was first of all the setting: this claustrophobic Welsh valley, seemingly almost cut off from the rest of the world – when I visited the actual place Garner based it on, it felt a little like coming home because he’d rendered the real so wonderfully on the page,” Parnell tells BBC Culture. He was also drawn to Garner’s portrayal of adolescence, “and add in the seamless way he ties in folklore and the stories from the Mabinogion with this sense that you can’t really escape your past or the confines of your present, then for me it seems pretty close to perfection.”

After winning the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian award for children’s fiction, The Owl Service was soon adapted by Garner himself into an eight-part series by Granada Television (part of ITV), which was the network’s first major series to be shot entirely on film, in colour and on location. With its strong central performances, striking cinematography and production design it has lost none of its power. Its avant-garde animated title sequence – featuring a gentle harp interrupted by a roaring motorbike exhaust and the sound of talons tearing paper – sets the surreal tone, and images such as a flash of Alison’s face tattooed with the floral plate design are arresting and unnerving. The series also exacerbates the simmering jealousies, class tension and sensuality of the novel – these are teenagers grappling with emotions too adult for them to yet comprehend.

As the writer Kim Newman points out in his essay accompanying a new Blu-ray restoration: “It’s unthinkable that something as complex, ambiguous, difficult and strange as The Owl Service could be broadcast on British television in a prime-time slot these days – let alone on ITV1 as a children’s programme.” Indeed, with its heady mix of mythical beauty and terror, The Owl Service has now been canonised as a “folk horror” classic as well as a memorable children’s programme, most recently by the 2021 documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, which dissects the genre. Ritual sacrifices, demons of the past reawakening and the unspoiled countryside hiding dark secrets are all signifiers of folk horror.

A folk horror renaissance

The term “folk horror” is a relatively recent one; while it was used by journalist Rod Cooper in 1970 in his review of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, it was popularised by Mark Gatiss in his 2010 BBC Four series, A History of Horror. Much like Garner’s writing, folk horror is rather difficult to characterise. As Roger Luckhurst writes in his 2021 book, Gothic, “[folk horror] has proven to have very flexible boundaries, incorporating music and half-remembered children’s television shows as easily as films and horror novels.” The key texts are usually considered to be the “unholy trinity” of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973), all made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And, while they encompass the most well-known early examples of the genre, The Owl Service predates all three. While Garner himself resists any labelling of his writing, its unnerving rural weirdness, reverence for nature, disdain for rigid class structure and sense of the past haunting the present arguably place it at the centre of the folk horror tradition.

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October 16, 2022
My Policeman review: Harry Styles’ sad love triangle film

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My Policeman immediately begins playing with points of view when it turns to their younger selves, first seen from Marion’s (Emma Corrin) perspective. She is a schoolteacher who falls for Tom (Styles), a policeman eager to broaden his cultural horizons. Together they form a friendship with Patrick (David Dawson), an aesthete who is a curator at the Brighton Museum of Art, forced by the era to hide his life as a gay man. As the triangle develops, Corrin beautifully establishes Marion’s innocence, and then reveals it fading away.

When another flashback gives us Patrick’s perspective, we see that even while Tom is courting Marion in gentlemanly ’50s fashion, he is beginning his affair with Patrick, an especially fraught move for a policeman at a time when homosexuality was illegal. When Tom makes the first move, grazing his finger along Patrick’s neck, he seems startled and confused by his own gesture. Styles plays that initial confusion well, without any winks at the camera to evoke his off-screen persona. The sexual hesitation doesn’t last long, although the deception all around does. The story soon revolves around questions of who knew what and when. How long is Marion truly, or maybe wilfully, blind?

The camera stays discreetly on Styles’ face through that first sex scene. And a later scene between the men in bed is composed of graceful images of entwined bodies occasionally reflected in a mirror, the nudity never full-on or frontal. This is movie sex, not raw, messy real-life sex, and anyone wanting something more visceral really wants a different film.

The deepest flaw in My Policeman is that we grasp too little of the characters’ inner lives. When Tom proposes to Marion in the apartment he has borrowed from Patrick, you have to wonder: what is he thinking? That’s not a rhetorical question. What is he actually thinking? The screenplay by Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia), based on Bethan Roberts’ novel, could have explored much more from his perspective, young and older. Despite that, Styles evokes Tom’s genuine, if selfish and callous, need to keep both his life with Marion and his lover. Roache is totally in sync as the older Tom, still charismatic and handsome, with an anger that suggests he remains in denial. McKee vividly shows Marion grappling with her memories. There is a long-buried betrayal and a guilty admission that are easy to see coming, but the plot is not the point, even when the period’s homophobic laws come into play. The film works best at capturing the pain and occasional joy of the triangular arrangement.

Grandage is still best known as a theatre director. His first film, Genius (2016), with Jude Law as the writer Tom Wolfe and Colin Firth as his editor, Maxwell Perkins, is also quiet and understated, which may be why it is underappreciated. My Policeman almost invites a similar fate. Unlike Style’s off-screen persona, it is the opposite of explosive, but it is true to its director’s eloquent vision.

★★★☆☆

My Policeman opens in cinemas in the US and UK on 21 October, and will be available to stream on Amazon Prime from 4 November.

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October 14, 2022
Triangle of Sadness and the grossest films ever made

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Since then, the Farrellys’ style of rom-com has fallen out of fashion, but gross-out has exploded, Mr Creosote-like, in directions that would have been unimaginable even in the 1970s – unless it was John Waters doing the imagining. Team America: World Police (2004) gave us puking puppets. Borat (2006) and Jackass: The Movie (2002) brought scatology into the real world with a daring not seen since Pink Flamingos; look up the “Poo Cocktail Supreme” sketch in Jackass 3D (2010) if you don’t believe me.

Gross-out horror movies have also gone to almost unbelievable extremes. While Jim (Jason Biggs) was putting certain body parts in unorthodox places in the American Pie series, other body parts were being lopped off in Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999) and Ichi the Killer (2001) and in Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005), as well as in Saw (2004) and numerous other so-called “torture porn” films. Then there was Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), in which Choi Min-sik eats a live octopus. And yes, that’s an actual live octopus. And yes, Choi actually eats it.

As repulsive as these horror films can be, gross-out comedy usually has an inclusivity to it that warms the heart, even while it turns the stomach. The theme behind every candid depiction of an out-of-control body is our common humanity – the often-overlooked fact that we’re not gleaming robots or clouds of philosophical thought, but fleshy, fallible creatures prone to all manner of squelches and stinks on a daily basis. To gasp and wince during a gross-out sequence is to have a giddy moment of connection with the people on the screen and in the cinema. All the barriers between us are dissolved by those sloshing bodily fluids. True, maybe we haven’t all been sick on someone’s head, used a washbasin as a toilet, or defecated in the street while wearing a designer wedding dress, as Melissa McCarthy and friends do in Bridesmaids (2011). But we all know that something like that could happen to any of us. Gross-out is a great leveller. “A lot of comedy depends on the idea of superiority, and laughing at someone who’s inferior to you,” says King. “But in gross-out comedy, the characters are going through something that you could be going through yourself.” The next time you’re on a cruise liner, bear that in mind.

Triangle of Sadness is out in US cinemas now and will open in UK cinemas on 28 October.

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October 13, 2022
‘The emojis of the 19th Century’

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Why the Victorian language of floriography is now back as a way to communicate

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October 13, 2022