Tag: story

The one thing George Orwell’s 1984 got wrong

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The lapsing of copyright has triggered an avalanche of new editions from various publishers but not a total free-for-all. Letters and unpublished essays uncovered after Orwell’s death by the late scholar Peter Davison remain restricted. Hamilton has trademarked phrases such as “Big Brother is watching you” to ensure that Orwell merchandise continues to maintain certain standards, and to make money for the Orwell Foundation. And in the US, where copyright lasts for 95 years after publication, Animal Farm is protected until 2040, and Nineteen Eighty-Four until 2044. Given that many Trumpian conservatives are convinced the latter book speaks to them, perhaps that has saved us from a novel in which Joe Biden is a “woke” Big Brother.

Orwell-curious filmmakers face a steeper hurdle. Just days before her death, Sonia Orwell sold the movie rights to Chicago attorney Marvin Rosenblum, who produced Michael Radford’s adaptation in 1984. Even now, the US rights still reside with Rosenblum’s widow Gina. “So many suitors over the years have gone off to talk to her, and six months later they’ve come back pulling their hair out,” says Hamilton. A new version was in development for years with producer Scott Rudin and director Paul Greengrass, but its current status is unclear. “She has been unable to get a remake made, which I think is a scandal,” says Hamilton. “It’s a ridiculous waste of an opportunity.”

An unforgettable fictional world

Orwell wrote six novels, three classic works of non-fiction, and more than a million words of journalism, but in IP terms everything else is dwarfed by the twin peaks of his career: Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. They are two very different books with a shared political agenda. First Orwell explained the rise of Soviet totalitarianism in the form of a farmyard allegory; four years later, he used dystopian science fiction to anatomise the methods of an all-powerful totalitarian state. One was a lesson from the recent past; the other a warning to the future. For as long as regimes seek to distort reality and suppress liberty, these books will have anxious readers.

Taylor recalls a recent event to promote his biography: “I said, ‘Put up your hand if you’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and 48 out of 50 hands went up. It was the same with Animal Farm. But nobody’s really read the earlier novels.” In the past three years there have been two new stage versions of Animal Farm, with Andy Serkis’s animated movie version currently in production after a decade of delays. Newman and Biles both suspected that there would be a flood of post-copyright Orwell novels but, so far, the only other attempt has been Katherine Bradley’s poorly reviewed The Sisterhood, another story about Julia. “I did feel a race against time,” says Biles. “Unnecessarily, it seems. It’s astonished me that we haven’t heard of similar things happening.”

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November 6, 2023
How Madras check became a preppy style essential

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“The weaving of cotton textiles in South India was renowned for centuries prior to the British building a harbour in Madras in the 18th Century, but it was this port and the British East India Company that led to textiles from Madras being traded throughout the modern world,” says Shah.

Chennai-based textile researcher, Sreemathy Mohan, says that the Coromandel coast was always renowned for its fabrics, especially hand-woven checked fabrics. “In Tamil culture, a grid has always been a powerful symbol [for example in] kolams [designs drawn on the floor]. Even deities in our temples have been clothed in checked fabrics. Wedding sarees in many communities have been checked, and they were hand-woven usually only in the colours of red, blue, white and yellow.

“Woven by handloom on muslin cloth, these simple checks were known by different names – Madras checks, real Madras handkerchief, George cloth (after Fort St George in Madras), Guinea cloth or bleeding Madras. In the days of simple pit looms, this was just alternating colours used in warp and weft,” says Mohan. Its smell “of oil and vegetable dyes” was also distinctive.

A checkered past

In her book Asian Embroidery, art historian Jasleen Dhamija dates the first export of checked fabric under the name “Madras” to 1660, when British merchants used the term Real Madras Handkerchief, or RMHK, to describe 8m-long bales of fabric that could be cut into three square kerchiefs to evade a tax. RMHK cloth has been traded with West Africa since the 16th Century. Portuguese slave traders bartered the cloth in London in exchange for enslaved people to send to the Americas.

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November 5, 2023
Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me: The celebrity memoirs that reveal the truth

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But other events, like the birth of two sons in two years with ex-husband Kevin Federline, are transformed by Spears’s telling, as she describes her struggles with depression and the loneliness she felt at the height of her fame. And those details are causing readers to reexamine their feelings about the celebrity.

“I hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early,” she writes. “Because I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue. Once the babies were born, I added on my confusion and obsession about the babies’ safety, which was ratcheting up the more media attention was on us. Being a new mom is challenging enough without trying to do everything under a microscope.”.

It’s this kind of intimate detail that draws readers in, making them feel as if they alone are privy to the secrets of the ultra-famous. And for many, that connection challenges their preconceived notions of celebrity authors.

Amelia, 39, a copywriter who lives in New York, says she is “obsessed” with celebrity memoirs, especially those written by women who were notorious during her teenage years. She says The Woman in Me has caused her to re-examine her adolescent feelings about Spears. “Britney was one of the stars who taught me the rules of being a woman, but it was through the lens of gossip bloggers like Perez Hilton,” she explains. “Now, as an adult and a mother to a daughter I am doing my own internal correction. I think, ‘whoah, I grew up during a toxic time’. Hearing from Britney Spears herself is just really nice. It’s not just nostalgia, it’s almost like an apology for participating. Like yeah, I’m really sorry we gossiped about you in such a nasty way back then.”

A lucrative partnership

Celebrity memoirs have existed in some for as long as people have been famous: stage actress Sarah Bernhardt published hers, My Double Life, in 1907. Now, as social media has allowed A-listers to connect more intimately (or at least para-socially) with fans, many celebrities are keen to continue that connection, and to wrest the larger narratives of their lives from tabloids and gossip blogs. And fans are eager to read all about it.

Layton Turner says that feeling of connection is common and intentional. Many of the most successful celebrity authors of the last decade have chosen to collaborate with a ghostwriter, a professional who can help create a riveting narrative arc that is faithful to the source material. Layton Turner notes that even while working with a ghostwriter, celebrities themselves are still doing a great deal of literary and emotional heavy lifting. For many of the mega-famous, writing a book may be the first time they’ve had a chance to sit and reflect on the experiences that shaped them – and that sense of raw emotion is what makes them so popular with readers.

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November 3, 2023
Did American History X foreshadow the resurgence of white nationalism in the US?

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Derek’s crime was an act of intense brutality, portrayed in gut-wrenching detail. In a monochrome flashback, Derek, clad only in white boxers and black military-style boots, his chest emblazoned with a swastika tattoo, shoots two black men in his front garden who’d been trying to steal his car in a turf-war retaliation, killing one instantly. The other, wounded but still conscious, lies sprawled in the grass and Derek proceeds to kill him by stomping his head on the kerb. Soon after, police sirens arrive to bathe Derek in shimmering light, and he raises his hands behind his head in an almost messianic pose of martyrdom. From this pivotal moment, the film traces the circumstances that kindled Derek’s rage and shaped it into racialised grievances, the hollow disillusionment that follows, and his uncertain quest for redemption.

Writer David McKenna drafted the script in six weeks as the 1992 LA Riots, set off by the Rodney King beating, raged outside his apartment. After finishing a second draft, he consulted with Tony Kaye, a British ad director who had been tapped to direct his first feature film. Kaye led McKenna to a skinhead party where the screenwriter took down information from a white nationalist. “For a half hour I talked to a guy with an M-16 tattooed to the side of his head. It was pretty intimidating, if not terrifying,” recalled McKenna. After shooting on the film wrapped, Tony Kaye’s behaviour went from mercurial to outright bizarre. At meetings with New Line Cinema representatives, he brought along a religious retinue of a rabbi, a priest, and a monk in a strange bid to convince executives that his film was not a commercial product but a prophecy.

But a real fight began when Norton inserted himself into the stalled editing process to cut a version of the film that added 18 minutes to its runtime – and played to rave responses from test audiences. In a jealous fury, Kaye dumped $100,000 into paid advertisements in the Hollywood press savaging what he saw as duplicitous meddling by his lead actor. When the studio moved forward with Norton’s cut, Kaye fought to strip his name from the credits, and finally filed a $200m lawsuit against New Line, which was ultimately dismissed. A decade on, Kaye admitted his ego got the best of him: “Whenever I can, I take the opportunity to apologise to all the people that I aggravated. I was doing my best, it was my passion, but I was still completely in the wrong.”

Challenging a persistent myth

A brilliant film emerged from these skirmishes – but its core insight still takes work to unpack. For generations, a persistent myth that black families were irreparably broken by sloth and hedonism had been perpetuated by US culture. Congress’s landmark 1965 Moynihan Report, for example, blamed persistent racial inequality not on stymied economic opportunity but on the “tangle of pathologies” within the black family. Later, politicians circulated stereotypes of checked-out “crackheads” and lazy “welfare queens” to tar black women as incubators of thugs, delinquents, and “superpredators“. American History X made the bold move of shifting the spotlight away from the maligned black family and on to the sphere of the white family, where it illuminated a domestic scene that was a fertile ground for incubating racist ideas.

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November 2, 2023
How Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group unbuttoned Britain

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And there are some more obvious Bloomsbury sartorial rebels: figures like Woolf and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, and her lover Grant, who rejected restrictive clothing in favour of dishevelment, comfort and flow. Women like Dora Carrington, the painter, or Sackville-West, who consciously embraced androgyny. Or Lady Ottoline Morrell, who forged her own unabashed and inimitable style, wearing elaborate dresses that were considered deeply unfashionable.

Yet we still have a tendency to get things about them wrong. It is true, for instance, that Woolf and Bell did float around in waistless, longline, drapey garms. But the entrenched idea that these were always in muted tones – mauves and sage, brown and dulled blues (think of the murky colour palette in The Hours, or the similarly restrained BBC drama Life in Squares) seems to be, at least in part, due to assumptions derived from the fact that they were always photographed in black and white.

Reports from the time suggest many of the set were actually big into bold colour – exactly as you’d expect, if you looked at Bell and Grant’s paintings or at Charleston, where they painted every available surface in mustard, tangerine, chartreuse and turquoise, as well as softer pastels.

It was something that really struck Porter in his research. “The number of times people talked about the jarring colours they wore… these vile clashes,” he recalls. He quotes Bell writing to Grant in 1915, asking for her yellow waistcoat – and one can only imagine what she was planning on pairing it with. “I am going to make myself a new dress,” she continued, adding, “you won’t like the dress I’m afraid, as it will be mostly purple… Also I’m going to make myself a bright green blouse or coat”. As Porter points out, these are “bold colour fields, just like her abstracts”.

A rejection of old mores

Bloomsbury was self-consciously revolutionary in various artistic ways – as early as 1908, Woolf was insisting that she wanted to do nothing less than “re-form the novel” – and so it is tempting to assume that they were all planning out this fashion revolution, determining to “make it new” (as fellow modernist Ezra Pound famously said).

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November 1, 2023
The Crown to Doctor Who: 12 of the best TV shows to watch this November

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11. Archie

Jason Isaacs plays one of the most dashing stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age in this four-part biopic about Archibald Leach, better known by the name a movie studio gave him, Cary Grant. The series goes back and forth between 1961 and the past, with several younger actors also playing Archie, and Harriet Walter as his mother. The series’ writer, Jeff Pope (co-writer of The Lost King and Philomena), has said that Grant’s impoverished childhood in Bristol was “the key to everything” in his future. Grant’s former wife, Dyan Cannon, and their daughter, Jennifer Grant, are executive producers of the show. Photos suggest that Isaacs, whose many varied roles include Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, really captures Grant’s look. How? “I play him in his 80s, so that’s a lot of prosthetics,” Isaacs told Empire magazine. “When he’s much younger, there’s lots of architectural things pulling me up with hooks and strings”.

Archie premieres on 23 November on ITVX in the UK, and in December on Britbox in the US

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October 31, 2023
Taylor Swift’s 1989: The real meaning of the song Slut

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If the mood is less righteous anger than weary resignation, it makes sense. This was a song written a decade ago, when Swift was still figuring out how to deal with the media obsession over her relationships. If 1989 is the album that signalled Swift’s transition from country star to fully fledged pop icon (“I was born in 1989, reinvented for the first time in 2014” she writes in the accompanying album notes), it was also the record that saw the then 24-year-old start to grapple with her public persona.

In her late teens and early 20s, Swift dated several high-profile men, including Joe Jonas, Harry Styles, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer and Taylor Lautner. She wrote about the good, the bad and the ugly of these early loves in her songs – turning heartbreak into material, as songwriters have for decades. But besides inspiring some of her best music (fan favourite All Too Well chronicles a doomed romance with actor Jake Gyllenhaal), her relationships also became the subject of intense fascination for the media and public.

While the word “slut” wasn’t explicitly used, Swift was nicknamed a serial dater and called “boy crazy”. One TV commentator said: “She’s going through guys like a train.” At the 2013 Golden Globes, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about keeping Swift away from Michael J Fox’s son. In an appearance on Ellen Degeneres’ show, the host flashed up images of famous men on the screen and told Swift to ring a bell when the man she’d written a song about appeared. Swift appeared uncomfortable, but tried to laugh along. For a while, that seemed to be her coping strategy.

She started playfully referencing her public persona in her songs – notably on 1989’s Shake it Off (“I go on too many dates, but I can’t make them stay”) and Blank Space (“Got a long list of ex-lovers, They’ll tell you I’m insane”). For the latter, she created a character inspired by the media coverage that was “so opposite my actual life.”

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October 30, 2023
The Friends episode that really showcased Matthew Perry’s genius

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Over the 236 episodes of Friends, Chandler has numerous laugh-out-loud moments, of which everyone will have their personal favourites. There’s season four, episode 15 where he pretends to be moving to Yemen to escape his annoying girlfriend, Janice, and in a beautiful moment of exquisitely-played farce, scuttles back through the airport gate, where Janice is waiting to see him off, pretending he doesn’t see her, before laugh-crying when he actually is forced to board the plane (“Well then, I guess I’m going to Yemen!”). Or there’s season one, episode seven when he’s stuck in an ATM vestibule with the Victoria’s Secret model Jill Goodacre and launches into a tortured inner monologue (“Gum would be perfection? I loathe myself,” he scolds) that hits every comic beat, all the while exposing Chandler’s crippling sense of inadequacy. But if there’s just one episode that encapsulates the scope of Perry’s gifts as Chandler, it’s perhaps The One Where Everybody Finds Out.

A glorious game of bluff

Coming halfway through season five, it is the climax to the storyline in which Chandler and Monica have been secretly seeing each other. When Phoebe accidentally observes the couple in the throes of passion, she and Rachel decide that she should seduce Chandler, in a bid to force him to admit he’s going out with Monica.

In the opening skit of the episode, we get an example of Perry’s unique delivery that famously changed the way millennials spoke, when the gang mention Monica and Rachel’s ever-nude neighbour Ugly Naked Guy’s butt. “And now we’re done with the chicken fried rice,” Chandler says, staring at his takeaway carton, his downward inflection on the sentence as ever serving as a counterpoint to the peppy and upwardly-rising intonation of his co-stars. Perry later explained in his 2022 memoir how he honed his niche in comedy via his distinct line-readings. “I read the words in an unexpected fashion, hitting emphases that no one else had hit… I didn’t know it yet, but my way of speaking would filter into the culture across the next few decades,” he wrote. “For now, though, I was just trying to find interesting ways into lines that were already funny, but that I thought I could truly make dance.”

The proceeding love-bluff game is a delightful display of slapstick, in which having cottoned on to the fact Phoebe and Rachel have found out about their relationship, Chandler and Monica decide to play them at their own game. “The messers become the messees!” exclaims Chandler delightedly.

The seduction scene perfectly demonstrates Perry’s impeccable comic creativity and timing. Chandler has to go through the push-pull of both pretending to be into the idea of a hook-up with Phoebe just enough, while stopping things from going too far. As Chandler tries to force an air of insouciant cool, Perry masterfully plays with the many layers of body language required of him, which really adds to the joke: take Chandler’s fake-jaunty little walk into his flat with Phoebe or his hand hovering over her breast then rising to lie awkwardly upon her shoulder instead, as he almost shudders.

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October 30, 2023
The Buccaneers review: This Apple TV+ costume drama is the new Bridgerton

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It’s been so expertly made that you have little choice but to just surrender to it. Resistance is futile. It looks absolutely beautiful. The costume designers have fully understood the assignment. And, take a bow, bonny Scotland, where it was filmed, and which doubles for New York, Cornwall and London. The music, from the likes of Warpaint, Bikini Kill and, of course, the mighty Swift, is excellent.

The up-and-coming Froseth is a very likeable lead. Nan’s moxie takes a knock in the first episode when she learns a hurtful family secret, and Froseth plays her with a beguiling mixture of defiance and vulnerability.

There’s a suitably detestable villain in Conchita’s brother-in-law, the dastardly, gaslighting James (Barney Fishwick), described by his own sister, Honoria, as “a monster”. A sweet clandestine romance develops when the strait-laced, repressed Honoria (Mia Threapleton) allows Mabel to loosen her strait-laces.

There are, amidst all the froth and fun, some gritty themes such as abuse, coercive control and grooming. And when Conchita, a woman of colour, feels rejected by the titled and entitled white family she has married into and asks “What if they look at my baby the same way they look at me?” it is not difficult to think of a contemporary parallel the creators may be going for.

And although Apple TV+ is remaining officially tight-lipped at present, certain plot points suggest a second season is a certainty. So, the makers seem to think they have a hit – and so do I.

★★★★☆

The first three episodes of The Buccaneers is streamed on Apple TV+ on 8 November, followed by new episodes weekly, every Wednesday.

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October 30, 2023
‘I had no idea I’d become a national event’: Orson Welles on the mass hysteria of The War of the Worlds

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There were threats of lawsuits, and calls for censorship and regulation of radio content. CBS hastily called a press conference, where Welles repeatedly denied that he had intended to deceive anyone. Ultimately the Federal Communications Commission investigated the incident and found no law had been broken, but networks did have to agree that they would be more cautious with future programming.

The scandal only served to boost Welles’s reputation as a creative genius with a mastery of storytelling. It would go on to propel him to Hollywood, where he would direct and star in 1941’s Citizen Kane, often cited as the greatest film of all time.

As this clip in the BBC Archive reveals, when asked about the broadcast afterwards, Welles, ever the raconteur, made a big claim about the lasting impact his show had on shaping public opinion. He recounted how, a few years later, news broke that Japan had launched a surprise attack on the US base in Pearl Harbor during a patriotic performance he was giving on radio.

“I was in the midst of some hymn of praise to the American cornfields or something of the kind,” he recounts, “when suddenly, a gentleman darted into the radio studio, held up his hand, and said, ‘We interrupt this broadcast to bring you an announcement: Pearl Harbor has just been attacked.’ And of course this very serious and terrible news was never believed. Not for hours, by anybody in America, because they all said, ‘Well there he goes again, really, rather bad taste, it was funny once, but not a second time’.”

In the years since, there has been much debate about whether the level of panic the broadcast actually caused has been overstated, or indeed how many people actually heard the broadcast, as opposed to reading the newspaper reports about it. But regardless, it remains a landmark moment in broadcast history, and a testament to the power of storytelling to capture the imagination of an audience.

In History is a series which uses the BBC’s unique audio and video archive to explore historical events that still resonate today.

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October 27, 2023
The Enfield Poltergeist: Why the unexplained mystery that shocked 1970s Britain continues to disturb

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“There’s a huge amount of evidence there, which is something that is normally absent from paranormal cases,” says Robins. While people have referred to Enfield as one of the UK’s most credible hauntings, he says, “there’s a case to be made that it’s just the most photographed”.

The case also took place at the “sweet spot”, in Robins’s words, when there was a lot of public interest in ghosts, UFOs and other unexplained phenomena, and when newspapers also had the resources to send journalists to investigate these cases. There was also a degree of public trust in the media that led the Hodgsons to call the paper for help.

In general, when it comes to the supernatural, Robins is neither believer nor sceptic, but approaches every case with an open mind – as he does, too, the Enfield Poltergeist. “Enfield is a really murky, complicated and deeply intriguing case,” he says. Though Grosse and Playfair had, he feels, the best intentions, “their presence certainly created a very heightened sense of drama around it”. But despite this, the case is “clearly robust enough to deflect sceptic inquiry”, he believes – for while there have been many convincing sceptic theories on it, “none [has been] significant enough to completely debunk it in the same way that the Amityville haunting has been debunked in the US”. Enfield remains culturally resonant, Robins concludes, because “it retains its mysteries”,

The Enfield Poltergeist is out now on Apple TV +. The Enfield Haunting is at the Ambassadors Theatre in London from 30 November until 2 March 2024. Uncanny is on BBC2 in the UK, and Danny Robins is currently touring the UK with Uncanny Live: I Know What I Saw.

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October 26, 2023
Napoleon to Priscilla: 12 of the best films to watch in November

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(Image credit: A24-Philippe Le Sourd)

Including Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Sophia Coppola’s Priscilla Presley biopic and the Hunger Games prequel – Nicholas Barber lists this month’s unmissable movies to watch and stream.

1. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

It’s prequel time again. In December, we’ll get to see the founding of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory in Wonka, but first there’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Based on the dystopian YA novel by Suzanne Collins, the prequel is set 64 years before the previous Hunger Games films. Donald Sutherland’s character, Coriolanus Snow, is now a teenager played by Tom Blyth, and Rachel Zegler is the woman he has to train for the Capitol’s 10th annual death match. It is, says Collins, a rough-and-ready, low-tech contest. “Even as the victor in the war, the Capitol wouldn’t have had the time or resources for anything elaborate. They had to rebuild their city and the industries in the districts, so the arena really is an old sports arena. They just threw in the kids and the weapons and turned on the cameras. The 10th Hunger Games is where it all blows wide open, both figuratively and literally.”

Released internationally from 15 November, and on 17 November in the US and the UK

2. The Marvels

Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel returns to save the planet from evil aliens, but her job is made considerably harder this time by a cosmic glitch that links her to two other superheroines. Every time she uses her powers, she swaps places with either Photon (Teyonah Parris) or Ms Marvel (Iman Vellani). Speaking of Marvels, Marvel Studios themselves have struggled to regain momentum since Avengers: Endgame came out in 2019. Could the 33rd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe get the company back up to speed? “The biggest difference from the other MCU movies to date is that it’s really wacky, and silly,” the director Nia DaCosta told Total Film. “The worlds we go to in this movie are worlds unlike others you’ve seen in the MCU. Bright worlds that you haven’t seen before.”

Released internationally from 8 November, and on 10 November in the US and the UK

3. Saltburn

Emerald Fennell follows her Oscar-winning debut, Promising Young Woman, with the satirical tale of a promising young man. Essentially “The Talented Mr Ripley Revisits Brideshead”, Saltburn stars Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) as a gauche Oxford University student who is invited to spend the summer at the stately home of the most popular boy in college, Jacob Elordi. Will he survive the company of the boy’s absurdly over-privileged family, including a lady and lord of the manor played with hilarious gusto by Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant? Ella Kemp at the Evening Standard says: “Saltburn is so delicious in its twists, the gorgeously lensed disasters and endless farces, that it’s impossible to ignore the work of a truly gifted and haywire filmmaker.”

Released on 17 November in the US, the UK and Ireland

4. Dream Scenario

Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is a happily married university professor, although he is so uncharismatic that most of his students don’t listen to him. But then, inexplicably, he starts popping up in people’s dreams: whatever anyone is dreaming about, Paul is there in the background, strolling by. Does this weird phenomenon make him special? And should it make him rich and famous? A surreal comedy that echoes another of Cage’s films, Adaptation, Dream Scenario is an unsettling commentary on celebrity in the social-media age, when it’s possible to become globally famous for doing very little – but globally notorious, too. “Kristoffer Borgli’s dark social satire goes all in on its Twilight Zone premise,” says Peter Howell at the Toronto Star, “giving Cage one of the best roles of his career as he rages from comic to horrific, sometimes in the same moment.”

Released on 10 November in the US, the UK and Ireland

(Credit: A24-Philippe Le Sourd)

5. Priscilla

A year on from Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of Elvis Presley, Sofia Coppola has made a biopic of the King’s wife Priscilla – and it could hardly be more different. While Luhrmann’s film exploded with noise and colour, Coppola’s is a subdued, intimate drama that concentrates not on showbiz glamour but on its young heroine’s increasingly fraught domestic life. It begins in 1959, when Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is a 14-year-old girl on an American military base in Germany, and Elvis (Jacob Elordi) is a homesick soldier who takes a shine to her. “Priscilla is a radiant, empathetic, and yet not naive look at the first love that caught the whole world’s attention,” says Kristy Puchko at Mashable. “Coppola paints Priscilla’s world with all the attention to detail that the young girl does her fingernails. Every stroke matters and pays off, creating a glossy but not glossed-over coming-of-age tale of love, loss, and moving on.”

Released on 3 November in the US and Canada

6. The Killer

David Fincher’s last film, Mank, was a sprawling, black-and-white chronicle of political and personal conniving in Hollywood’s golden age, so you can hardly blame the director for choosing a simple, stripped back action thriller as his next project. Adapted from a French graphic novel by Alexis “Matz” Nolent, The Killer stars Michael Fassbender as a freelance assassin. He takes pride in the unshowy efficiency of his methods, but one day he accidentally shoots the wrong person in Paris, and he is forced to fly around the world, bumping off all the people who want to pay him back for his blunder. The film is “a return to form”, says Lex Briscuso at IGN. “Marrying a tight and effective script from Andrew Kevin Walker, smart performances from Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton, and sharp editing, this assassin odyssey is one you’ll want to watch again and again.”

Released on 10 November on Netflix internationally

(Credit: courtesy of TIFF)

7. Next Goal Wins

In 2001, American Samoa was beaten by Australia at football, with a humiliating final score of 31-0. Determined to shed their reputation as the world’s worst footballers, the American Samoans hired a Dutch-American coach, Thomas Rongen. Their underdog story was made into a documentary, Next Goal Wins, and now Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok, Jojo Rabbit) has turned it into a feelgood comedy drama starring Michael Fassbender, who can also be seen in The Killer this month. BBC Culture’s Kaleem Aftab says: “Waititi’s winning, winsome film is his most accessible and mainstream movie to date, Marvel aside, one that successfully mixes in funny jokes with zeitgeisty social commentary.”

Released in the US and Canada on 17 November

(Credit: Rocket Science/Sky)

8. May December

Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) have been married for 20 years, and now live a comfortable life in an enviable lakeside house with their three children. The twist is that they got together when Gracie was 36 and Joe was a 13-year-old schoolboy. Does their subsequent domestic bliss cancel out the crime? And are they really all that blissful? In the new psychological thriller from Todd Haynes (Carol, Far from Heaven), a Hollywood star (Natalie Portman) signs up to play Gracie in a biopic, and starts her research by coming to stay with the family. “It’s sort of a movie about guilt, sort of about conscience, sort of about exploitation,” says Alissa Wilkinson at Vox, “but Haynes’s wrapping it in camp trappings reminds us that this is the stuff of tabloids, and the lightness of touch makes it entertaining and uncomfortable all at once.”

Released on 17 November in the US

9. Fallen Leaves

One of this year’s smaller and quieter films, Fallen Leaves is also one of the most acclaimed: Aki Kaurismäki’s typically deadpan romantic comedy won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and currently has a perfect score of 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. The film is set in Kaurismäki’s usual quirky and melancholic version of contemporary Helsinki. Ansa (Alma Poyst) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) are both scraping by in depressing, low-paid jobs, but they might just stumble into a loving relationship. “It’s a wonderful film with not an ounce of fat on the bone,” says David Jenkins in Little White Lies, “and Kaurismäki still managed to thread the needle between a style of ironic detachment and emotions that are big, bold and instantly affecting.”

Released on 17 November in the US

10. Wish

Walt Disney celebrates its 100th anniversary with a cartoon that incorporates the themes and animation styles of the studio’s first century. Directed by Chris Buck (co-director of Frozen) and Fawn Veerasunthorn, Wish is a musical fairy tale set in a magical land where King Magnifico (Chris Pine) can grant his citizens’ wishes. But a 17-year-old girl, Asha (Ariana DeBose), questions whether the king should keep that power all to himself. She wishes on a star – and the star then falls from the sky to help her. Buck told Jackson Murphy at Animation Scoop that the film is “kind of our love letter to Disney, to Walt. What he brought to the world and us. And it’s for the fans, too … Not only is it made for fans but it’s made by fans. We’re some of the biggest Disney fans on this planet.”

Released internationally from 22 November

(Credit: Strike Back Studios)

11. Pencils vs Pixels

Disney cartoons had a renaissance in the 1990s, with such modern classics as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King coming out year after year. But the release of Toy Story in 1995 changed everything. Within a decade, 3D computer-generated animation was the norm, and traditional hand-drawn 2D animation had been pushed into a specialist niche. Pencils vs Pixels tells the story of this transition, but also surveys a century of Hollywood cartoon craftsmanship. Bay Dariz and Phil Earnest’s documentary is “a potted history of the medium in America, and a chance to educate audiences on pivotal artists like the Nine Old Men and Mary Blair,” says Richard Whittaker at the Austin Chronicle. “By bringing together an extraordinary roster of talking heads… [the film] provides an incredible viewpoint from the artist’s side of the wonder of American animation and its rich legacy.”

Released on 7 November in the US

12. Napoleon

Ridley Scott’s 86th birthday might be approaching, but the director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator seems to have more drive and energy than ever. His 28th film is an epic biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, with Joaquin Phoenix as the French general, and Vanessa Kirby as his wife Josephine. It’s reported to be three hours long, with six major battle sequences – although it’s as much a character-driven drama as it is a war movie. It’s “a film that is, at once, the kind of battle-fuelled behemoth you want from the director of Gladiator, and the exact opposite of that, too,” says Ben Travis in Empire. “[Napoleon], above all else, is about trying to get into his head… to find out exactly what made him tick.”

On general release from 22 November

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October 25, 2023
Killers of the Flower Moon: Does it do right by Native Americans?

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Martin Scorsese’s latest film has been heralded as a big moment for Native American representation on screen – but is it really progress? Indigenous commentator Kate Nelson gives her view.

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As a Native American woman, I admit I was both excited and apprehensive to see Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s new film about the brutal 1920s murders of the Osage people over their oil-rich Oklahoma reservation lands. I’m not Osage, but I’m also no stranger to the atrocities that Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island have endured, including attempted eradication, forced assimilation, and the purposeful decimation of our traditional ways of life. Even today, the lingering effects of colonialism plague our communities. We die younger, experience inordinate violence, and suffer disproportionate rates of poverty, disease, addiction, and suicide.

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Adding insult to injury, we’re rarely authentically represented in media. That is, when Native characters are shown at all, which is less than 1% of the time in US TV and film, according to recent studies.

Killers of the Flower Moon showcases a whole host of Native American talent – but doesn’t tell the story from their perspective (Credit: Apple TV+)

As writer and actor Franklin Sioux Bob, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, told me about his experience of depictions of South Dakota’s destitute Pine Ridge Reservation, “Most white directors just want to show the poverty porn.” (His recent film, War Pony, which he co-wrote with fellow tribal member Bill Reddy and directors Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, was a corrective to that.) Put another way, our stories have been told about us rather than by us, often resulting in problematic portrayals that feed into stereotypes and paint us as relics of the past.

For months, Killers of the Flower Moon has been heralded as the movie that would change all of that – the first feature film to honestly depict Indigenous genocide. Scorsese has been commended for earning the trust of Osage tribal leaders and engaging them to shepherd their horrific history onto the silver screen. As I settled into my cinema seat to take in the three-and-a-half-hour epic, I couldn’t help but wonder: did Scorsese get it right?

A mixed bag

The answer to that is complicated. First, it’s an undeniable accomplishment that this movie was made by a major studio with a major player like Scorsese. So too is the fact that the famed filmmaker had the wherewithal to rework the script from its source material, David Grann’s bestselling book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, to focus less on the FBI investigation and more on the Osage plight. And I can’t overstate how absolutely thrilling it is to see so many Native talents on the big screen, including Lily Gladstone – winning acclaim for her portrayal of Osage survivor Mollie Burkhart, whose family was targeted – but also Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Tatanka Means, and many others.

But doing the story justice in its fullest, richest form would mean centring the Indigenous experience, which the film fails to do. I was relieved to hear Osage language consultant Christopher Cote, who worked on the movie, express this exact sentiment at the Los Angeles premiere. “I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that,” he said. Herein lies the paradox: Native Americans can both be elated that our stories are finally being told yet still wish they were told from our perspective.

Instead of shining the spotlight on Gladstone’s Mollie, the filmfocuses on her husband (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he schemes alongside his uncle (Robert De Niro) to steal her family’s oil riches. On the face of it, this is not a wholly wrong or unexpected approach, especially considering Scorsese’s back catalogue, with its focus on corrupt men. But it does position the white perpetrators as the protagonists of the plotline while pushing the Osage people to the periphery. The movie also noticeably neglects to mention the harmful federal policies that have oppressed and exploited Indigenous communities, such as the acts that exiled the Osage to Oklahoma in the first place.

VIDEO: Behind the scenes with Scorsese and his most iconic actors

Here’s where it gets even more complicated. One could argue that the only way to accurately tell Native stories is to have Native creators tell them. After all, the acclaimed TV series Reservation Dogs, which recently finished its third and final season, proved how powerful that approach can be, with its all-Indigenous team of writers, directors, and regular actors.

But I’m not naïve to the fact that there’s a sizeable segment of society that’s far more likely to watch Killers of the Flower Moon or even Yellowstone than they are to tune into Rez Dogs. Or the reality that white male directors and showrunners like Scorsese and Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan have access to opportunities and resources that many Native creatives sadly don’t. Which leads us to this question: is it better to have Americans – who have largely remained ignorant to Indigenous injustices – see some authentic Native representation, even from a white gaze, rather than none at all?

The progress needed

However, Gladstone herself has debunked this false dichotomy. “There’s that double-edged sword,” she told Vulture. “You want to have more Natives writing Native stories; you also want the masters to pay attention to what’s going on. American history is not history without Native history.”

Wrestling with my thoughts about the film, I sought counsel from trailblazing playwright Larissa FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota tribe and the first Native woman to produce a play on Broadway. “I believe non-Indigenous creators can help tell Native stories as long as they’re uplifting tribal communities and giving them voice in the process,” she explained to me.

Recently ended TV series Reservation Dogs benefited from an all-Indigenous cast and creative team (Credit: Alamy/FX)

Despite my disappointment about the disproportionate screen time DiCaprio and De Niro receive relative to Gladstone and her Native co-stars, it’s irrefutable that Scorsese has achieved that. “The film lays bare the truth and injustices done to us, while challenging history not to be repeated,” Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear said in a statement. “We honour our ancestors who endured this time by continuing to survive and ensuring our future.”

In the end, righting all of Hollywood’s historical wrongs is a heavy lift, even for a heavy hitter like Scorsese. And that’s not what he set out to do here, even if it’s the unrealistic expectation many people have unwittingly mapped onto this movie.

So when it comes to Native representation, is Killers of the Flower Moon perfect? No. Is it progress? Yes. The film meaningfully moves the entertainment industry forward, making a strong statement that it’s no longer acceptable to extract valuable assets from Indigenous communities – whether that be our stories or our natural resources – without our consent and input. Let’s hope this is the first of many feature films produced by and with Indigenous peoples that tell our stories in all their uncensored, uncomfortable, and undeniably complex beauty.

Killers of the Flower Moon is out now

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October 25, 2023
5 positive ways students can use AI
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Key points:

Don’t fight AI–learn to embrace it for teaching and learning

Using AI will help quell fears about how it could harm education

See related article: Navigating generative AI: Promoting academic integrity

For more news on AI in education, see eSN’s Digital Learning page

You’ve heard all the news about kids using ChatGPT to cheat, but there’s another side to this story. Just as the internet revolutionized education, AI will be the next game-changer. While the fears of cheating have definitely been legitimate, have you actually tried writing an essay using just AI? Hate to say it, but the outcomes aren’t instant gratification.

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Education is changing because the world is changing. During the pandemic, teachers and students rapidly adopted new tools to pivot to remote and hybrid learning.

Now in his 10th year of teaching, John Arthur’s students have gained national recognition as champions for children and immigrants like them through music videos and other digital content they create and share across platforms.

I believe that the low supply of STEM professionals can be attributed to significant barriers to entry originating in educational settings–this is to no fault of teachers and administrators, but how the educational system is structured.

The benefits of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education are numerous, and one would be hard-pressed to find a school district that doesn’t have a project, initiative, class, or lesson with the acronym in its title.

Prior to the pandemic, reading achievement had been showing little to no growth. Scores have continued to decline, in part because of pandemic-related learning interruptions.

Indiana is in the midst of an enormous undertaking to improve literacy rates. The approach: Align state standards, curriculum, and teacher training programs with practices rooted in the science of reading.

When it comes to digital equity, U.S. schools are well-positioned to help families get online with low-cost, high-speed internet options through the federal government’s Affordable Connectivity Program

Mentorship is an essential aspect of professional growth and development for early childhood educators, but for many training programs, mentorship components are either not well supported or are missing altogether.

Educators face myriad dilemmas in the wake of ChatGPT’s explosion, with some of the most popular including teaching with ChatGPT and how to address student use of AI chatbots in assignments.

Belonging is a fundamental human need. We are all searching for a sense of connection with the people and places in our lives. Students and school staff are no different.

Tags cheating, Education, internet, IT, kids, news, story, students, teach, writing

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October 25, 2023
The 10,000-year-old origins of the sauna – and why it’s still going strong

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(Image credit: Ants Tammick/ Alexandra Film)

The Nordic countries believe that having saunas is essential for physical and emotional wellbeing. Clare Dowdy explores saunas past and present to find out why.

The new documentary feature film Smoke Sauna Sisterhood won an award at the Sundance festival (Credit: Ants Tammick/ Alexandra Film)

The current sauna craze belies the fact that the sauna’s origins are thought to go back 10,000 years. Their first manifestation was as a pit sauna, literally a pit dug into the ground, with a pile of stones at the bottom, which was heated with a campfire. “Once the stones had warmed up, the pit was covered with wattle, thatch or peat, and then water was thrown on the stones, to create steam,” explains Dalva Lamminmäki, folklorist and doctoral researcher of sauna culture at the University of Eastern Finland.

Early sweat houses, dating back to the Bronze Age, are being unearthed all over the UK and Ireland. Saunas and sweat lodges were also prevalent in the ancient Islamic world as well as in the indigenous cultures of Mexico and North America. According to a study by Harvard University, the Native American tradition of the sweat lodge involved ceremonies and rituals, including “rites of preparation, prayer, and purification”. In Japan, “natural caves were used as sweat baths, and these evolved into bathhouses at temples and next to monasteries”, explains Emma O’Kelly in her book Sauna – The Power of Deep Heat.

O’Kelly writes that, “every culture, through every age, has enjoyed its own form of sweat bathing. From the Ottoman hammam and Mayan temazcal to the Japanese mushi-buro and kama-buro, from the banyas of Russia to the saunas of Finland, heat therapy has stood the test of time, waxing and waning in popularity, and crossing continents in various iterations”.

Löyly public sauna in Helsinki, Finland is featured in the book Sauna – The Power of Deep Heat (Credit: Maija Astikainen)

Many people these days treat a sauna as the latest addition to their suite of self-care practices – along with yoga, massage and facials – the perfect antidote to busy 21st-Century lifestyles.

However, in bygone centuries, their role went far beyond creating a sense of well-being and a place to relax. As well as a place to wash, they were used for cooking, drying flax and rye, making soap, doing the laundry, tending to the sick, washing the dead before burial, and giving birth, explains Lamminmäki. “The sauna was also a place to sleep and to meet someone in secret, and the role of weekly sauna was to cleanse people for church and the Sabbath, and to mark the change of one week to another,” she adds.

The sauna’s spiritual aspect was important. O’Kelly explains in her book that traditionally, the ancient Finns, like Native Americans, worshipped the four elements – air, water, fire, earth – in the sauna. “It was a microcosm of the three levels of the universe: the upper realm, the sky world; the middle realm, the Earth; and the underworld of the dead. All of its core symbolism replicated the cycles of growth, interconnection and symbiosis, with the end goal of altered states, raised consciousness and rejuvenation.”

For Finns, saunas and cold swimming are a way of life – Löyly sauna, Helsinki, is located next to the Baltic Sea (Credit: Maija Astikainen)

“Sauna in Finland was an important part of folk healing,” Lamminmäki says, “It was sterile, warm and private, and people believed that it was ‘loaded’ with the power of ancestors and deities. Sauna was not just a building, it was liminal place and space between this world and the other world.”

Much of this sauna mythology appears in the Kalevala (Finland’s work of epic poetry) and Finnish runic songs. “The poem has created a lasting foundation for the sauna as a key symbol of Finnish identity,” O’Kelly writes, “and it’s not uncommon to see the gods and goddesses of the Kalevala carved into sauna doors and windows”.

This idea of the spirit world extended to the Saunatonttu, a one-eyed elf who was said to check people behaved properly in the sauna. “Children must always behave respectfully in the sauna to avoid upsetting the Saunatonttu,” This is Finland website explains.

However, the benefits of sauna have not always been appreciated. “In 1890 in Finland, folk healing was declared illegal, and speaking of spiritual or supernatural sauna practices became taboo,” O’Kelly writes, “Wisdom was passed on in secret, through word of mouth by elderly female bathers, guardians of the healing sauna.”

Spiritual and practical

Since then, some modern-day Finns and others with deep sauna roots like its Scandinavian neighbours, the Baltic nations and Russia, are starting to appreciate this combination of the spiritual and the practical.

New, innovative sauna design can be seen across the Nordic region, including the Badstufolk Eldmolla sauna in Norway (Credit: Maija Astikainen)

And although the Finnish word sauna is thought to come from the Sámi word soudnje, meaning “pit in the ground”, the Finns don’t own the sauna. Estonia, for example, has its own strong saun heritage. In 2013, the Estonian smoke sauna was placed on Unesco’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. These are typically wooden huts with no chimney, where rocks are heated by an open fire to produce a soothing aroma.

In Finland, the sauna is “one of the key national symbols”, says Lamminmäki, precisely because it’s very much an everyday ritual for Finns, with 3.3 million saunas in a country of 5.5 million inhabitants. “Everyday practices are relevant to national identity also because over time they form a widely shared understanding of the culture and what it is like to be a citizen of a country,” she adds, “It’s said that sauna creates a basis for understanding what Finnishness is.”

In 2020, Finnish sauna culture followed Estonia, making it on to Unesco’s list. Unesco describes how “Sauna culture is an integral part of life for the majority of the population, and most people have their first sauna experience as babies”.

The sauna at Björnholmen’s fishing harbour in Sweden sits on a jetty in the North Sea (Credit: Maija Astikainen)

That Finnishness is also wrapped up in the 500-year-old philosophy of sisu, which Helsinki-based author Katja Pantzar describes in her book, Finding Sisu, as “the unique Finnish strength of will, a determination not to give up or take the easy way out”. She thinks of the country’s unofficial motto, “Sisu, sauna and Sibelius” as “intended to sum up the essence of the country and its identity”. Sibelius refers to Jean Sibelius, the great 20th-Century composer of the patriotic Finlandia hymn).

Sisu was embraced in 1917 “by the new powers that be as a particularly Finnish quality, after the country gained independence [after more than 100 years of Russian rule, preceded by six centuries of rule by Sweden], and is still seen as the ‘social glue’ that holds Finnish society together,” O’Kelly writes. Finns aspire to sisu, a personality trait that comes in handy when you’re living in such a cold climate with long winters. It can also help when you’re jumping from a cold-water swim into the heat of the sauna.

Video: Saunas – The essence of Finland’s heartbeat

The new-found popularity of both saunas and cold-water swimming has turned sauna tourism into Finland’s number one attraction. Helsinki’s Löyly, which opened in 2016, attracts more than 200,000 visitors a year.

But Lamminmäki points out that this sauna renaissance sometimes ignores one of the most important qualities of the sauna experience: “Sauna is a place of equality. We welcome all genders and sexualities, all kinds of bodies. Sauna loves bodies with one breast, bodies with one leg, bodies that have aged. Sauna loves people who are poor, people who don’t have work, people with seven children and people who are sad because they’re childless. Sauna is a place for introverts – it’s okay if you don’t talk – it’s a place for lonely people to have company and it is a place to have me-time.”

Sauna: The Power of Deep Heat by Emma O’Kelly is published by Welbeck. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is screening in selected UK cinemas now and in the US from 24 November.

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October 24, 2023
The Last Airbender Returns in Live Action on Netflix in 2024: A Promising Adaptation

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The Last Airbender to Return in Live Action on Netflix in 2024

Nickelodeon’s popular series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, will be making a comeback in 2024 in an exciting new Live Action version, with Netflix taking the reins. After the disappointing 2010 film adaptation, this latest adaptation looks promising, as Netflix has released images of the characters from the Land of Fire. The story follows a young boy who is the last Airbender and future Avatar, tasked with restoring order between the four nations of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. When the previous Avatar died, the Fire Nation seized control, disrupting the peace. Now, the last airbender must discover a way to restore balance. Fans can expect this highly anticipated series to release next year, aiming to stay faithful to the original material.

Netflix’s Commitment to Staying True to the Source Material

Netflix has assured fans that they will use the original material as a guide to create the Live Action adaptation. The platform aims to give a fresh visual dimension to the 2005 animated series. This is not the first time Netflix has revived an anime, as they previously produced a successful live action version of One Piece. For those eager to revisit the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the animated series is currently available on the SVOD platform.

The First Reactions are Very Positive

Since the release of the trailer, fans have taken to social media to express their excitement. Messages such as “Netflix, I trust you, don’t be wrong” and “Oh my God, this is so good. I can’t wait” flooded the official Netflix tweet revealing the Fire Nation actors. Currently, no further information about the story or additional cast members has been disclosed. However, Netflix has hinted that more details will be revealed during GeekedWeek 2023, which will take place from November 6 to 12.

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Alice Zampa

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October 24, 2023
The Laughing Cavalier: The masterpiece that became a meme

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“Frans Hals made things that were extremely difficult look easy,” says Joseph. Compared to Rubens or Michelangelo, “his brushstrokes look almost flippant”, he says. By contrast, Joseph’s Laughing Legend with Stratocaster was a “slow and exploratory process” which took seven years − not least because, unlike Hals, who had life models, Joseph had to work from a photograph, a process he describes as “extremely difficult”.

Many of our greatest artists not only created work inspired by Hals, but learnt from him by attempting to replicate some of his most ambitious works. Édouard Manet, Antoine Vollon, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, William Merrit Chase and Max Liebermann all made pilgrimages to Haarlem to make painstaking copies of Hals’s paintings.

Joseph is keen to point out, however, that Laughing Legend with Stratocaster is different. “I wasn’t trying to copy Frans Hals. It’s impossible!” he says. “You may be able to copy one of Picasso’s paintings, it may be possible to copy a Caravaggio or almost fool people with a rendition of a Da Vinci − but that’s not going to work with Frans Hals. That technique, I’ve never seen it used anywhere else.”

The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Frans Hals is showing at the National Gallery, London until 21 January 2024.

‘Beam Me Up, Sweet Lord!’, an exhibition of Tam Joseph’s paintings and sculptures from the 1980s onwards, is on display at Felix & Spear, London until 29 October.

Tam Joseph – I Know What I See is published by Four Corners Books.

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October 23, 2023
‘The police were feeding information to the press’: The Australian mother wrongly convicted of murder

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Despite the miscarriage of justice, the official cause of death remained the subject of speculation and innuendo in the years following. In 1988, the Chamberlain case was turned into the film, A Cry in the Dark, starring Meryl Streep as Lindy and Sam Neill as Michael.

Lindy herself wrote a book, Through My Eyes, in 1990 detailing the profound impact the episode had on her and her family’s lives. In the BBC Wogan interview, she said it was almost a form of protection for her three children, whose lives had been dominated by the whole affair.

“They have had so much information that is wrong put in front of them, my children have a right to live with the correct information. And with people continually approaching you in the street and asking you questions, at least this book answers a lot of them.”

In 2012, a coroner issued the final report in the Chamberlain case, formally stating that their daughter Azaria was attacked and taken by a dingo – something that Lindy and Michael had always maintained from the start.

The judgement in the Chamberlain case caused much soul searching in Australia. How so many people in the general population, the media, the police and the courts were so willing to believe an innocent woman was guilty and punish a grieving mother has been difficult for many Australians to reconcile.

“Australians always thought of themselves, and this country, as being the country of fair play,” said John Bryson, author of Evil Angels, the definitive book on Azaria’s disappearance, which the film Cry in the Dark was based on. “That certainly wasn’t the case.”

In History is a series which uses the BBC’s unique audio and video archive to explore historical events that still resonate today.

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October 22, 2023
Ellen von Unwerth: Intimate images capturing star quality

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In the resulting images, Spears’ kohl-lined eyes glare into the camera, daring you to tell her she can’t do whatever she wants. Like a fiercely feminine force of nature, her hair whips around her bare shoulders, her gloved hands resting casually on her hips. She is a woman who – despite what we know now about her father’s control – looks thoroughly, joyfully in control of her image.

“Britney was, and still is, amazing,” says the photographer. “One of my absolute favourite shoots was for her Blackout album cover [in 2007]. It was in New York, she had just shaved her hair, and arrived, put this wig on, and immediately started posing. She has such a great stage presence, playing the bad girl, and she wasn’t scared to be a little provocative. When we finished, she left to pick up her children from school, just like nothing happened.”

Decades later, album covers are more likely to show up on Spotify than on CD shelves, but despite the dominance of digital and social media, in 2018 Von Unwerth launched her own glossy magazine Von. “It is sad to see more and more magazines close down,” she laments. “They were once the epitome of fashion. It was great when you had the opportunity to create a real story with amazing models and styling. It was the way to create real stars because the public saw them in all the magazines, shot by many different photographers, on covers and in different campaigns. Today, stars are created on the runway or by social media. I do get a bit nostalgic about the time of the supermodel and that time in fashion.”

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October 20, 2023
From Victoria Beckham to Coleen Rooney: How the WAGs became the women that Britain ‘loved to hate’

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The WAGs (wives and girlfriends) of footballers hold a strange fascination for Brits, with tabloids blaming them for the England team’s loss in the 2006 World Cup. As two new documentaries tell the stories of Victoria Beckham and Coleen Rooney, Clare Thorp explores why the WAGs exert such a pull.

T

There’s a moment in the first episode of Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story – a new documentary series telling the story behind her blockbuster libel case with Rebekah Vardy – in which paparazzo George Bamby remembers the first time he was sent to photograph an unsuspecting Rooney, then known as Coleen McLoughlin. It was 2002 and her 16-year-old footballer boyfriend Wayne had just scored his first Premier League goal for Everton. The British tabloids wanted to know everything about this new star – including who he was dating. Coleen was the same age, still in school, and suddenly her walk home involved navigating the men hiding behind bins to get her picture.

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Coleen and Wayne met when they were 12, and starting dating a few years later. In the new documentary she explains that Wayne did all the chasing – he says he “knew she was different to all the other girls” – but as soon as the young couple hit the spotlight, it was she who was seen as the lucky one. “Coleen was in a position that so many young girls of her age would dream about, being with a Premiership footballer,” says Bamby.

Coleen Rooney is the subject of a new documentary, following the story of her ‘Wagatha Christie’ court case (Credit: Disney)

At the start of the 21st Century, footballers were painted as the most eligible bachelors around. Since the start of the Premier League in 1992, player earnings had shot up dramatically – with Manchester United signing Roy Keane for £3.75m in 1993 and Rio Ferdinand for nearly £30m in 2002 (in 2009 they would pay a world record £80m for Christiano Ronaldo). Football and popular culture – especially music and fashion – were increasingly intertwined too, thanks in no small part to one particular player: David Beckham.

Another recent documentary, Netflix’s Beckham, charts the ups and downs of his career on and off the pitch, and his relationship with wife Victoria. Unlike Coleen Rooney, Victoria Beckham – then Adams – was already a household name when she met David in 1997. “I wasn’t one of these girls who would be interested in footballers because they’re famous,” she says in the TV series. “I don’t mean this in an arrogant way, but I had that for myself.”

The new Beckham documentary allows Victoria to tell her side of the story (Credit: Netflix)

As one-fifth of the biggest girl band in the world, Spice Girls, she was undoubtedly the bigger star at first (“I loved being in her world,” says Beckham). Yet, a few years later, Beckham, like Rooney and dozens of other young women who happened to be the wife or girlfriend of a famous footballer would find her identity reduced to a single label: “WAG”.

The partners of footballers had always attracted some degree of interest: in the 1966 World Cup, photographs captured the England teammates’ wives enjoying a celebratory banquet together at a London hotel. But for the most part, footballer’s wives weren’t regular tabloid fodder, and that’s how many managers wanted it to stay – not least Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson, who famously clashed with Beckham over his high-profile relationship.

While footballers’ wives (pictured at a 1966 banquet) had always been of interest, they became tabloid fodder in the early 2000s (Credit: Getty Images)

The acronym WAG started floating around in 2002 – used in a Sunday Telegraph article to reference a nickname given to players’ wives and girlfriends by a Dubai hotel. That same year ITV launched its camp – now cult – drama Footballer’s Wives. But it was at the 2006 World Cup in Germany that the term – and concept – really exploded.

In total, 22 wives and girlfriends (out of a total of 23 players) descended on the spa town of Baden Baden that summer to support their partners. The cohort was led by Victoria Beckham (dubbed “Queen Wag”) and Girls Aloud’s Cheryl Cole (then Tweedy), and also included Coleen McLoughlin and Abbey Clancy.

While the back pages covered England’s performance on the pitch, the front pages lapped up stories of the “WAGs” dancing on nightclub tables, working their way through magnums of champagne and hitting designer boutiques. The women were photographed walking the streets of Baden Baden in a pack, like Reservoir Dogs, but with better tans, bigger hair extensions and more shopping bags.

The 2006 World Cup was the peak of the WAG phenomenon (Credit: Alamy)

There were stories about feuds – Victoria Beckham apparently shunning raucous nights out for quiet dinners (the explanation that she had two small children with her didn’t stop the rumour mill) – but, mostly, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. It was like a hen party on steroids.

At that time, the obsession with celebrity culture was peaking. Competition among the tabloids and a new raft of celebrity magazines created a constant thirst for stories, while the rise of reality TV had fuelled a desire for famous faces that were relatable, rather than untouchable.

Part of the appeal of the WAGs was the rags-to-riches element. Many were young, working-class women, often childhood sweethearts of the players. As Coleen Rooney says of her and Wayne in her documentary: “All of a sudden, we were given opportunities to go places, to do things we hadn’t experienced before.” Rooney, like many others, grabbed many of the opportunities offered to her – writing a magazine column, publishing an autobiography and releasing a work-out video. Wayne Rooney’s agent says in the documentary: “At the beginning it was like a Disney story. Here was this young couple from a very working-class background thrust into glamour, limelight, riches.”

The blame game

But a backlash was looming. The early 2000s was a time when famous women like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan received frequently cruel and misogynistic treatment in the media. Whether it was their dress sense, their body or their behaviour on a night out, there was always something to criticise – and the WAGs were soon subject to the same treatment.

During the tournament, Spanish newspaper ABC wrote: ”Not even the stores of Vuitton and Gucci can keep up with the daily attack of the hooligans with Visas.” The British newspapers – happy to profit from the girls’ antics – also started sharpening their knives. One Daily Mail writer said: “Their lack of imagination and narrowness of outlook is staggering. They possess no curiosity about anything other than clothes, champagne and their reflections.” The disdain expressed for the WAGs often reeked of classism, as well as misogyny – as if these women should know their place.

When England got knocked out by Portugal in the 2006 quarter-finals, some laid the blame on the WAGs for being a distraction (Rio Ferdinand described Baden-Baden as “a circus”). Ahead of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, manager Fabio Capello announced that wives and girlfriends would only be allowed to visit players one day a week, after matches. Without the supposed distraction, England crashed out even earlier, defeated 4-1 by Germany and only winning one of the four matches they played.

That same year, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission criticised the term WAG, calling it “offensive” and saying it was usually used to demean women.

Over the following years, the rise of social media stars and the phone hacking scandal somewhat stymied the tabloid hold on celebrity culture, and WAGs no longer dominated the headlines in the same way.

A feud between Rooney and Rebekah Vardy dominated tabloid headlines and ‘broke the internet’ (Credit: Getty Images)

Rooney retreated from the limelight, concentrating on raising her and Wayne’s four children. Until late 2019, that is, when one Instagram post – in which she publicly identified Rebekah Vardy, wife of football player Jamie, as the owner of the account leaking stories about her to The Sun newspaper – thrust her back on to the front pages.

Quickly dubbed the “Wagatha Christie” case, the media and public revelled in the public spat. Two footballers’ wives going to battle was hard to resist and the story spurned endless memes, jokes and coverage. But, as Coleen points out in her documentary: “I personally didn’t find it funny.”

Vardy sued Rooney for defamation, leading to one of the biggest libel trials in UK history. Vardy lost and was ordered to pay an estimated £3m in legal costs. “It was a pathetic reason to go to court,” admits Rooney, who says she just wanted “justice for telling the truth”. In doing so, the woman who had been followed by paparazzi photographers since she was 16 exposed the inner workings of the tabloids, and took back control of her own story.

Victoria has been called ‘the MVP’ of the new documentary (Credit: Netflix)

In the Beckham documentary, too, Victoria gets to tell her side, including the vile chants from fans at games and the blame heaped on her for her husband’s poor performances on the pitch. “I was always the villain,” she says, recalling the intense criticism she received from the media for not immediately joining her husband in Spain when he sighed to Real Madrid.

Both women touch on the pain caused by their partner’s alleged affairs – while the players themselves apologise for any hurt they caused and reiterate how important their wives and families are to them. “Looking up to the stand and seeing Victoria, it was the one thing that spurred me on,” says David.

As for the term WAG, Rooney told BBC Woman’s Hour: “We all live different lives. We are all individuals. So to bring us all together in one term is unfair.” Even Rebekah Vardy has called the term “outdated.”

The term may be obsolete, but as interest in these new documentaries shows (Beckham is Netflix’s most watched show in the UK this year), and Victoria has been called the MVP of the series) – we’re still fascinated by these women’s stories. The difference is that now, they get to tell them themselves. And it’s proving that, actually, it’s their husbands who were the lucky ones all along.

Beckham is now streaming on Netflix, and Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story is streaming on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK.

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October 19, 2023