To celebrate the publication day of The Great Unwatched: 200 Films Must See Movies You May Have Missed here’s an excerpt

Walker (1987)

Directed by Alex Cox

Written by Ray Wurlitzer

With Ed Harris, Richard Masur and Peter Boyle

If Alex Cox had only done one thing in his life and that was Moviedrome, that would have been enough for the world to be grateful: but Cox was also a talented and exciting director and Walker is one of his boldest and most rewarding films.

Set in the mid-nineteenth century, Walker should be a conventional biopic of one of the Great Men of History, but with Cox’s irreverent punkish attitude and Wurlitzer’s radical script, it deconstructs that myth, showing its lead character, played with messianic charisma by Ed Harris, as a dangerously deluded adventurer to a man driven psychopathic by power as he siezes control of Nicaragu. This is a critique of American imperialism at the very moment Ronald Reagan is once more using Nicaragua as a distraction from his own domestic woes.

The closeness to contemporary history is revealed in a series of brazen anachronisms - Pepsi, a zippo light, oh and a helicopter - and a newsclip of Reagan at the end for the slow-witted. Imagine Joseph Conrad but shot by Sam Peckinpah. Cox’s Walker is also the closest where ever likely to get - in spirit at least - of a rendering of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

Cox throws everything at the screen. There are homages to silent cinema as well as Spaghetti Westerns and the aforementioned Peckinpah. And yet altogether it is also very much an Alex Cox film.

Order The Great Unwatched: 200 Films Must See Movies You May Have Missed here.

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The writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb made a very good point in one of his books that suitcases have existed for over a hundred years and wheels have existed for … well long before that … and yet it took about a hundred years before someone put the two together and created the trolley case. Until then everyone had to deal with the exhausting inconvenience of the suitcase, hefting it from pillar to post, walking miles with it, before using it as a seat while the nerves grew back into our arms.

For films, luggage was almost always lightweight except when it wasn’t. Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton in The Bell Boy hoist around very obviously empty suitcases, but verisimilitude was never the point. Likewise, in Some Like It Hot, Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis turn up in drag at the railway station with their featherweight suitcases as does Marilyn Monroe. In North By Northwest, Cary Grant takes Eva Maria Saint’s pile of baggage through a railway station with one suitcase tucked under his arm as if it were nought.

Another train film decades later, the Whitman family will run for The Darjeeling Limited, slinging their Louis Vuitton baggage in ahead of them as they go. Later, they will let go of the baggage in a metaphor that is so on the nose as to be (hopefully) comic

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Of course, this is about how drama only needs to deal in signs, mime effectively what is going on and shed the encumbrances of actually doing it. Watch any restaurant scene in a movie and you will note that not a lot of eating is going on. Actors will chaparral their food around their plates with a lot of knife and fork business all the time pantomiming chewing but doing their best not to put food in their mouths which would be a bitch for continuity and line readings both. Plus they might be shooting this scene all afternoon and how much lukewarm shrimp do you feel comfortable eating.

Ditto for luggage. The luggage tells the audience, we’re going somewhere, or returning from somewhere, but unless it has uranium in it - Kiss Me Deadly and Repo Man- or Ving Rhames’ soul - Pulp Fiction - it’s not like we need to even open it up. The actor doesn’t really need to act as if its heavy because just the sight of the size of the suitcase ought to do that. See John Candy’s trunk in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

People often get pissed off at this sort of inaccuracy. It’s one of those pet niggles that goes with how people never say goodbye at the end of a telephone conversation, or wait for change. This series of posts is made up of these discrepancies between lived experience and the fantasy world of film, regardless of genre.

But do we really want our films to be accurate?

There is a theory of perception that evolution has evolved our processing of information that we receive from the outside world to maximise our survival and this means that we accept inaccuracy if it is economically sound. In other words, we’d rather see something quick and wrong and live than slow and accurate and die. Is that vine a vine, or a snake? Well, I could’ve sworn it was a snake: it looked just like one, but it was a vine. The tenth time this happens and it is a snake, the perceptive individual who is taking her time to get an accurate picture is already bitten and the poison is working its way towards death.

So drama just wants to give us the information as quickly as possible and prioritise what is important over the other stuff. You know suitcases are heavy. The actor doesn’t need to be paying attention to that at the cost of the rest of the performance.

Also this is part of the fantasy we want. We want our actors to live in a world where their arms aren’t tired and their wrists cracking. We don’t want them to be whining: that’s our job. They’re supposed to get on with the important stuff. The dramatic events which put together make the plot.

Sometimes the plot can involve suitcases and usually the reason is because of the mix up of bags. What’s Up Doc? features a mix up between four suitcases. Fight Club uses a suitcase mix up as a way of kicking off one of the main plot points. Pulp Fiction features a stolen briefcase, and Dumb and Dumber has another suitcase mix up: the satchel switcheroo as the trope is popularly named.

I don’t really have anything else to say about this.

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There’s a shot in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) that had the censors in a fluster. Not the adulterous afternoon sex; not the transvestite; not the naked shower; not the stabbings. The shot was very specific. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) has written her sums on a piece of paper. The money stolen minus the money spent. She tears up the pieces of paper and puts them in the toilet and then flushes the toilet. That shot of the water swirling in the pan of the toilet was the first time the shot had been allowed onto American screens. He insisted that the audience needed to follow the chain of evidence until the toilet chain was pulled, he insisted, but really he just wanted to show a toilet.

Hitchcock had form. A man of many obsessions, one of these was sticking the sound of a toilet flushing in all his films. It was something about how everybody had a body. That admission of something obvious and yet so apparently taboo. He had a morbid fear of vomiting and yet gorged himself relentlessly. He wanted to have sex with beautiful women but he couldn’t so he tortured them on screen and off.

But Hollywood was weirder than Hitchcock. In fact, that’s why Hitchcock was so successful in Hollywood. He matched their weird. They shared psychoses. They understood each other. Hollywood always adored its own paradoxes; its own hypocrisies. Up until Psycho, Hollywood didn’t just refuse to show toilets being flushed, even showing toilets in bathrooms was out of bounds for the Hays Code. Plumbers fixed sinks. People had bubble baths, but no one used toilets. For anything.

So in 1960, we got a toilet but even then it was used as a convenient liquid version of a wastepaper basket rather than for its primary purpose. It would be another seventeen years before someone used a toilet for something else. That was Jane Fonda in Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), but before you get too excited she just sat on it and talked to Dick (George Segal).

Europeans (as ever) were more relaxed. Luis Bunuel had dinner guests sitting on toilets while at the table in The Phantom of Liberty (1974) all taking shits instead of eating, then they retire to a private space to eat chicken and what-not alone, embarrassed that the food might leave a smell.

Just as Hitchcock the European had become American, so Stanley Kubrick the New Yorker had become European, allowing him to have Malcolm McDowell pissing in A Clockwork Orange (1970) and Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980) going to the gents to have advocaat cleaned off his red corduroy jacket by Grady. Kubrick shows two suicides in bathrooms - Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), but in the latter is actually sitting on the porcelain throne. In Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Kubrick went the whole hog and had Nicole Kidman sit and take a wee and wipe.

But what about number twos? They are as rare as five-second Bela Tarr shots. To be fair it’s not as if Mr. Ploppy visits culture generally. James Joyce has Mr. Bloom take a well described shite in the jakes near the beginning of Ulysses. Charles Bukowski said that you can go years without having sex but can’t go two weeks without have a dump but there are hardly any poems about dumps and thousands of love poems. Chuck spent the rest of his career trying to make up the deficit. Unless you’re counting Rodin’s the Thinker, I can’t think of many sculptures or paintings that take on the struggle of squeezing one out. Marcel Duchamp made a major work with a urinal turned the wrong way round and called it the Fountain, which was great. I mean it wasn’t a sit down toilet but still… Piero Manzoni canned his own poo as art in 1961. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule. If they weren’t exceptional they would work as shocking.

Back to movies. Going to the toilet is obviously a widespread taboo. People don’t go to the toilet in films. One exception is Vince (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction (1994), until it finally gets him killed, Bruce Willis’ Butch is alerted to Vincent’s presence by the flush. Then at the end of the film he’s magically resurrected by the achronology of the film to once more emerge from the toilet and this time almost save the day. His interruptions are often comic: they show he is a man who needs to retreat to the little boys room to have a read or think, as when he finds himself attracted to his gangster boss’s girlfriend. It might also be something with the fact he’s a junkie and junkie’s have a relationship with their bowels which is anything but regular.

Ewan MacGregor for instance in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) suddenly realises he’s in dire need of the bathroom for an emergency evacuation as his junkie’s constipation is suddenly giving way due to his going cold turkey. Unfortunately, he’s just shoved a morphine suppository up his arse and so a visit to the worst toilet in Scotland ensues. In a decidedly weird choice, this becomes a moment when Boyle’s film takes a surrealistic turn, relinquishing its realism for a more LSD flavoured trippiness. MacGregor is swallowed by the shit-encrusted disgust bucket and finds himself in an underwater world of coral and fish.

The whole episode is played out as a fantasy that comes from a yuk moment of comedy. Another comedy poo happens in the film when fellow junkie Spud (Ewan Bremner) shits the bed at hi girlfriend’s house after a night out. It’s not Noel Coward but it is funny.

The comic potential of needing the toilet has become a go-to of American gross out comedy. In Dumb and Dumber (1994), Harry (Jeff Daniels) is dosed with laxatives by his friend Lloyd (Jim Carey) as revenge for getting a date with a girl that Lloyd fancies. Harry must go to the bathroom very quickly on arriving at his girlfriend’s house and what ensues is what Daniels referred to as his Oscar clip. It was a masterclass in acting and sound design: an extended combination of gurning and whoopee cushion sound effects. It also manages the topper punchline when it’s revealed that the flush doesn’t work.

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A laxative cocktail is also used in American Pie (1999) to comic effect, whereas in Bridesmaids (2011) a Brazilian restaurant and a case of food poisoning leads to a middle of the road evacuation by the bride-to-be played by Maya Rudolph, dressed in her full regalia. The Jackass team have used laxatives and enemas likewise to induce horrified hilarity, pushing the crap envelope just as far as it can go. It’s like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom but literally for shits and giggles.

Toilet stuff is unlikely to ever take centre stage in movies, because it rarely takes on centre stage of our lives. It is something by very definition we do off to the side, in our private little tabernacles to the lower parts of the abdomen. Drama can’t be interrupted by a need to use the bathroom and if it is then the effect is bathetic and necessarily comic. There are no longer taboos so much as there are considerations of taste. A punk artist like GG Allin, as documented in Todd Phillips’ Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies (1994) might defecate on stage and even eat it if they want to - just as Divine in John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972) had eaten dog-do some years earlier - but the audience for such extremity was relatively niche. You can show it on film now, the question is: why would you want to?

In Ulysses, Joyce had wanted to include all life and that meant all the bodily functions his characters might experience in the course of the day and evening, from going to the toilet and masturbating, to eating a cheese and pickle sandwich and picking your nose and eating it. Very few movies have that ambition to embracing life so non-judgmentally and completely (to be fair very few novels do either). Our movie stars are like the late Queen of England. We except that at some point they must go to the toilet: but we also know that they absolutely don’t. Not ever.

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I’ve got chills. They’re multiplying. And I’m losing control. Because the high schoolers in the movie, Grease (1978), all have five o’clock shadow. Danny Zucko, the leader of the bad boys, was played by twenty-three year old John Travolta. He was in summer-loving with the innocent Sandy, played by twenty-nine year old Olivia Newton John. She was advised by the wiser Betty Rizzo, played by Stockard Channing who was thirty-three at the time. Several of Danny’s gang were in their thirties.

In a sense, it doesn’t really matter. As a musical, Grease isn’t supposed to be realistic. It’s a heightened fantasy. The casting director is looking for the cast who can sing and dance and act. The fact that the difference between the kids and the teachers is only marginal is neither here nor there. There’s a role play aspect. These are adults dressing up as kids. There’s a problem with that, as you can imagine. During the final sequence where Sandy transforms from ingenue to … well … MILF. I can’t help but worry poor Danny might have bitten off more than he can chew. It’s like the Saint Trinian’s (2019) movie, adult women playing school girls is suspect to say the least.

The practice of casting older actors in school-age roles is widespread. And there are obvious practical reasons. Minors have restrictions on how long they can work and in what circumstances, which adult actors don’t have. Also when it comes to publicity duties to promote the film, it’s better to have your stars showing some maturity. Also from the point of view of continuity, adolescents going through puberty can age visibly before a film is completed. That process has slowed down by the time they get to their twenties.

Also if the actors are required to do nudity, or sex scenes, it will be easier/legal with an adult actor. In the seventies, Nastassja Kinski made several films featuring nudity when she was thirteen and fourteen. One of those Wim Wenders’ Wrong Move (1976) she requested to be withdrawn and the director issued an unreserved apology and did just that. To the Devil a Daughter (1976) also featured her in the nude at the age of fourteen. Taxi Driver has Jodie Foster playing a child sex worker, who in one scene is seduced by her pimp played by thirty-six-year old Harvey Keitel. She was twelve-years-old at the time. This might have been a moment to hire an adult actor who could play young. After all Florence Pugh plays thirteen in Little Women (2019) when she was in her twenties.

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In Carrie (1976), there are scenes of nudity, violence and horror, and all the actors, including John Travolta again, were in their twenties, including Sissy Spacek who was twenty-three at the time of filming. She’d first starred in Badlands (1974) as her first film with Martin Sheen playing a teenager when he was almost thirty.

In fact films and TV shows that cast young actors have a tendency to stand out as breaking conventions. Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), written by the nineteen-year old Harmony Korine, starred teenagers such as as Leo Fitzpatrick (16), Chloe Sevigny (19) and Rosario Dawson (15). Clark was fifty four and came under heavy criticism on the release of the film which was a raw view of the lifestyle of young people in New York, their active sex lives, drinking and use of drugs. Most of the cast were found by Clark in a skater park clique who he was photographing. Dawson he found on a stoop in her neighbourhood. Several of the cast went on to have long successful careers either in acting or in the art world generally, inspired by Clark, but at the time there were accusations of exploitation. He was dead set on making a real teen movie, dead against the Hollywood stereotype and that meant getting real teenagers.

In a sense and for all the indy-movie bells and whistle, Kids is an old fashioned social problems movie, like Blackboard Jungle (1955). It has the same ingrained oscillation between moral panic and the kids are alright. In Blackboard Jungle, two of the pupils Glenn Ford tries to set on the right path are Sydney Poitier (28) and Vic Morrow (26). Malcolm McDowell was twenty-eight by the time they finished filming A Clockwork Orange (1970), which makes the visit from the social worker for “little Alex” missing school seem odd. In the novel, he’s fifteen.

Some actors are fresh-faced to get away with it. All the Spider-Mans (the Spider-Men?) have been older than high-school nerd Peter Parker is supposed to be. Tobey Maguire began in his early twenties, Andrew Garfield played him at twenty-nine and Tom Holland plays him now. Tom Holland despite his Paul-Rudd-smoothness is thirty.

Ultimately, though Hollywood treasures/worships youth, it also requires some practical necessities which make placing multi-million dollar investments on very young actors dangerous. Better for Zendaya and Ryan Gosling to have their youths spent training on Nickelodeon or Disney Club than fronting Hollywood movies. For every childhood actor who makes it into adulthood intact - Scarlett Johansson for instance - there are many who cannot deal with the fame or the lifestyle, or simply decide to do something else. The fate of the likes of River Phoenix and Corey Feldman show the dangers of using age-correct performers.

Tell me more, tell me more!

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I wrote a piece for the New World about the new documentary film by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, produced by the Guardian, Jim Wilson and exec produced by Jonathan Glazer. You can read it here.

One of my readers replied to my personal email, expressing concerns about the veracity of the documentary and assuming that it was based on unverified material, faked testimony etc. I wrote a reply this morning and I wanted to put it out there in case others have similar concerns. Here it is:

Thank you for your email and for engaging in my work.

I’m afraid I have to disagree with you about the nature of the documentary NAZA. There has been a long tradition and practice of using anonymous sources and whistle-blowers in journalism and documentaries going back to the beginnings of the form. The reporting on Watergate by Bernstein and Woodward was for instance rooted in information provided by the source “Deep Throat.” More recently Alex Gibney’s Zero Days used an actress to read the testimony of a whistle-blower from the NSA as a way of protecting his source. Welcome to Chechnya is another recent example. Far from being “vilified” and disqualifying, this is common practice.

The filmmakers and journalists know the identities of their sources and so can verify their testimony is credible - checking that they served in the military when they said they did and corroborating evidence of events they said took place. The Guardian’s team have an international reputation for professionalism and integrity that they would not risk unless they had checked and double-checked the claims made in the film. Likewise lawyers will have looked at the claims prior to the film’s premiere to make sure it wasn’t making ungrounded information. Everything will have been verified even if that verification cannot be presented as to do so would compromise the anonymity and endanger their sources. An utterly reasonable journalistic practice.

As for dates I assume you haven’t seen the film as it has a chronological structure. There are some specific dates that can be understood via news reports and public events that are shown on screen.

In terms of putting “the other side” again I assume you haven’t seen the film as this point is factually wrong. There are several clips of politicians including Netanyahu and his cabinet delivering speeches, justifying the action in Gaza. There is also a demonstration shown calling for the freeing of the hostages. In fact THE ENTIRE FILM is shot in Tel Aviv and consists of an Israeli journalist interviewing over twenty Israeli service people about their activities. Some of them express remorse. Others don’t. Many don’t give an opinion one way or another. Their testimony is simply and in detail about HOW the military action was conducted. The conclusion that it was genocide is inescapable as the killing of innocent civilians by the thousands was utterly intentional and committed with full knowledge. Further evidence of this can be seen in the figures accepted by the IDF of casualty rates as well as footage of the moonscape Gaza has become.

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I take seriously your wish for the truth but the filmmakers of NAZA have achieved that journalistic standard. The IDF and the Israeli government on the other hand have consistently lied and obfuscated from October 7th on. The reports of decapitated babies for instance was entirely fabricated and then repeatedly used by military and political spokespeople even when that fabrication had been proven and confirmed.

The first civilian hospital to be hit in Gaza was reported as a Hamas Rocket misfiring when it had been deliberately struck by an Israeli missile. The identification of safe zones towards which Palestinian civilians were told to flee were then deliberately attacked by IDF bombs and forces.

The western media - I am sorry to say - has been less than alert to these lies and less able to verify as they were banned from entering Gaza. They have also had a tendency to use emotional language when talking about the hostages and October 7th - children, savagery - and neutral language describing Israeli violence perpetrated against Palestinians - minors, incidents.

Palestinian Journalists were deliberately targeted and killed. 242 journalists were killed in Gaza. None by Hamas. All by Israeli military action by the Middle East’s only democracy.

The reaction to NAZA has been similarly mendacious. The filmmakers faked everything - over twenty witnesses! - and revealing Military secrets is treason. Both of which can’t be true.

Either it’s a lie or it’s a secret.

It’s also noteworthy that in Israel “the other side” doesn’t get a hearing. Only yesterday the Arab parties were banned from the upcoming election.

NAZA is a film that has the power to change minds. I hope you see it with an open mind.

Again thank you for reading my work. And best wishes

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This is a moment where I really feel my ignorance. I was debating about asking a female writer to do this one for me (maybe I still will) but then I realised that my ignorance is kind of the point. What I mean is as a man I am woefully ignorant of a part of a significant element of women’s lives. And I am a man who is surrounded by women. I’m married with two now adult daughters and I have taught for three decades students, the majority of whom have been female. My colleagues are mostly women. Yet this part of their monthly experience is something I’ve only learned about relatively recently.

I started asking what it actually feels like: what are the sensations. Fortunately, my daughters don’t have much by the way of filters and what they told me was graphic. The cramps, the mood swings, the flow. I’ve learned to be aware that when my students ask to go to the bathroom to let them go. They might be pale and bent double in pain with stomach cramps. There are variations in experience but I got that this was a painful, mood-altering experience with plenty of potential for social embarrassment, made worse by the ignorance and lack of sympathy of men whose experience is restricted to jokes, or it being a potential interruption to the possibility of sex, usually motivated by their own distaste rather than a decrease in appetite on the part of their partners.

Periods have been taboo in many cultures over time. The monthlies have seen women physically removed from the tribe, considered unclean. Cinema simply removes periods from depicted life. It very rarely shows an experience that has happened to more than half of the population every month. This erasure is in itself significant. Imagine for a second if men had periods. There would be entire genres of period movies. There would be moments in every “coming of age” film when the young protagonist gets his first period. It would be a Maguffin in action adventure films as someone has found a cure for periods and James Bond or whoever chases it. Women would be shouted at for not having enough understanding. Heavy periods would be seen as a proof of manliness, as the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger experienced intense flows while climbing mountains and shooting bad guys.

What depictions we do have of (female) periods is noteworthy in continuing to treat and reinforce the taboo. Brian de Palma’s Carrie, based on Stephen King’s novel, features Sissy Spacek’s Carrie White having her first period in the shower of the school gym. She is an awkward girl, brought up by her intensely religious mother and is wholly unprepared when she begins to bleed. This is compounded by the cruelty of the girls who round on her, tease her and throw tampons at her: “plug it up.”

Everything about the film is sparked by this bloody coming-of-age. Her name White is in opposition to the red of the blood and the extension of the girls’ bullying arrives when a bucket of pig’s blood is dumped on her head at her moment of Prom Queen triumph — though she’s only been voted Prom Queen in order to position her under the bucket. Even her dream come true is a prelude to humiliation. Her revenge, when it comes, is a bloodbath fuelled by her telekinetic powers and we are both horrified and thrilled as the power fantasy is intensely satisfying as well as obscenely excessive. Even teachers and classmates who were sympathetic to Carrie get caught in the conflagration. In the midst of it, Carrie, still drenched in blood, now looks serenely indifferent, wearing the blood like a robe.

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Although a male perspective of periods — King, de Palma, and screenwriter Laurence D. Cohen — I imagine many women could empathise with Carrie and feel some of her rage. Of course, the main villains of the piece are also women: the mother and the horrible gaggle of high-school girls. The men are just uncomprehending lumps who are only interested in sex and beer. This is still a ring-fenced girl thing.

Carrie is by no means the only horror movie to feature menstruation. Ginger Snaps has its female protagonists realise their identities as werewolves following their first periods. Films like Raw and The Witch could also be seen in this light. Although they can be seen as empowering and reclaiming the power proffered by taboo, they are also to some degree reinforcing the taboo. The Love Witch breaks it, showing the audience a used tampon as the protagonist comments that few men have ever seen one.

Horror and disgust can be manifested in a different way. In Superbad, Jonah Hill’s Seth is in a party when a woman begins to dance with him. She dances close and then her face registers a slight change of expression and she excuses herself and leaves. It’s an inexplicable scene, an interruption in the character’s journey through the night of parties. Only when he leaves the dance floor does a guy notice Seth has a stain on his leg which he quickly surmises is period blood. Seth wretches: “That’s fucking disgusting.” The other guys yuck it up and want to get a picture and show their friends. Perhaps an accurate depiction of male ignorance and attitudes but we’re kind of laughing with rather than at the disgust.

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Women in comedy put period anxiety in their films like Amy Schumer in Trainwreck worrying about her boyfriend’s reaction to finding a tampon in the toilet. “And not like a cute, oh, it’s a tampon, it’s the last day. I’m talking like a crime scene tampon. Like Red Wedding, Game of Thrones. Like a Quentin Tarantino, like a real motherfucker of a tampon,” she says. The anxiety is real and funny, but there’s no sense as that the guy should grow up and accept a woman for what she actually is.

More female-centric films such as My Girl and Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret feature more positive versions of the first period and the troubling nature of that moment and how it is received. But these are few and far between and are outweighed by the comedy and the horror.

Or worse still the insignificance. The invisibility. This could be explained away to some extent as to how unbodily cinema is. The body only becomes keenly apparent on film when it is the object of sexual attraction or the location of physical pain, or sometimes both. Illness and disease get their dramatic look-in as well. But periods rarely feature in the same way bathrooms and toilets don’t. Minor irritations like nettle stings, insect bites, colds, allergies, hay fever, toothache and mouth ulcers rarely appear because they’re not going to do anything to the plot. Is this the same with periods?

To some extent, probably. But even so the absence of casual references to periods as part of the daily lives of a significant portion of the audience is telling. Also issues to do with period poverty, are almost never addressed. One exception that proves the rule is Padman, the 2018 Indian film about a man (Akshay Kumar) who creates hygenic sanitary towels for the poor. Kumar is one of the most famous Bollywood stars. It would be the equivalent of Brad Pitt, but Pitt can dream of being so adored.

Periods will undoubtedly become more normalised in film, seen as a part of the fabric of women’s lives, and not just a weird moment of horrific transformation. But we’re still a long way off.

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I attend roughly ten film festivals a year, which is a privilege and which is way too many. But at the same time it does give you an eye as to what works and what doesn’t and particular gripes. Apologies for the inside baseball nature of this post but I guess this is partly what substack is for. And you’re not paying for it so…

could you tip me perhaps

Anyway here are some suggestions about how Venice Film Festival could be improved.

1. Get more toilets. Specifically, get more female toilets. It’s absolutely appalling that a culture event which thousands of people attend on a daily basis is so poorly provided with loos. And the provision for women, as with every event, is particularly galling. Seeing women queuing outside and down the corridor is not a good luck.

2. Get some free water provision. With temperatures hitting the high thirties in celsius and a number of medical emergencies due to the heat, why was there no water provision? There was one free water fountain that I found, but we need more. This is about a duty of care to attendees, many of whom are old and get dehydrated easily. And yes I’m talking about myself here.

3. Impose an interval on any and every film over 140 minutes. So we can go and have a free drink of water or avail ourselves of the many many lovely toilets.

4. For every old man, Werner Herzog (84), Paul Schrader (80), Nanni Moretti (97) you have to have two directors whose ages add up to that age. This would keep the oldies down to a manageable number.

5. There were two women directors in competition this year, though one was co-directing a film. This is nuts. Barbara Kopple could easily have been in competition with Union Town.

6. Sort out the sections. Open Venice sounded like Whatever Venice. Venice Spotlight? These non-competitive sections just felt all over the place. A midnight movie or two might work better. And less films that are obviously streaming shows that just haven’t been divided yet. Musk at four hours is just waiting to be cut up and streamed.

7. Let’s have some more genre in the competition. Or indeed some.

8. And I tihnk finally it’s time that Alberto Barbera passes on the role of Artistic Director to someone younger and with a beard, and who is originally from England, but with an Irish mother, but lives in Italy and has a podcast dedicated to “Books on Cinema” and has written a book on Terrence Malick and one on Jonathan Glazer and is currently working on a biography of Sean Connery. These conditions have to be respected strictly. I’m not sure where we can find such a man (or woman).

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My favorite Stephen King adaptation is probably The Dead Zone. I love Michael Kamen’s score, David Cronenberg’s chilly direction, Walken’s performance and King’s original novel, the first tome of his I read as a teenager. Walken’s schoolteacher, Johnny, has a car accident after a date with Brooke Adams. The truck he hits is carrying milk: a detail I loved. No point crying over spilt milk, after all. Following the accident, Johnny is in a coma for five years. He awakes to find a. his girlfriend is now married b. he is psychic, with the ability to foresee the future — “The ice. Is going. To. Break.”

In Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Uma Thurman is beaten and shot in the head on the day of her wedding. She slips into a coma, throughout which she is raped by numerous men, for four years. When she awakes, her feet are a bit numb, but that’s resolved after a bit of toe wiggling. Lots of opportunity for Quentin Tarantino to film Uma Thurman’s feet.

In 28 Days Later, the coma last for… well, it’s actually in the title. Insidious and The Cell also feature comas, as does Coma. In Hard to Kill, Jean-Claude Van Damme spends seven years in a coma, before escaping his hospital ward, by using a janitors mop to row his bed down the corridor like a canoe. Maybe it’s naive to hope for reality to impinge on the muscles from Brussels, but the truth is that most of us will hopefully have little to no experience of being in a coma or observing someone close up who is in a coma, and so most of our knowledge comes from depictions in film and TV.

Along with horror films and revenge thrillers, comas pop up a surprising number of times in romcoms such as While You Were Sleeping, Just Like Heaven and Forever Young.

So far, so accurate, right?

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Not exactly. First of all, anyone in a coma that lasts more than a year has a 90% chance of death. Then for those that do survive there is a likelihood that the patient will be mentally or physically disabled in a serious way. A way that just talking to your toes isn’t going to solve.

All of these films essentially use comas as a sort of Rip Van Winkle effect. A form of time travel. Someone misses a stage in their life and comes back to a changed situation. They have a different perspective, or in the case of the horror movie, other powers. They can also come with a touch of amnesia, so the protagonist can learn about their lives and their relationships along with the audience. When Tony Soprano was in a coma, there were two episodes of an alternative universe.

As a dramatic device, it offers many possibilities. Relationships can change: you are born again into a world that has shifted forward in your absence. People might even think you’re dead, so that you can set about your campaign of bloody revenge on the front foot.

Recently, in an episode of the TV show, parents are informed that their child is in a coma and it takes a whole series of tests to convince them that in this case the kid is not going to wake up. He’s dead. To all intents and purposes. The mother keeps saying but in the movies they wake up. And I think many of us harbor this belief. As long as there’s a machine beeping, a screen showing a pulsing heartbeat, we’re just waiting for the third act miracle.

In fact, in Just Like Heaven, Reese Witherspoon’s ghost teams up with grieving Mark Ruffalo (he’s grieving an unrelated definitely dead person) to rush back to the intensive care unit where Witherspoon’s coma locked body is about to have the machine switched off, due to her DNR.

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It must be fun for the doctors to explain to the fans of this film that people in comas who have signed DNRs and show no real hope of recovery must have their wishes adhered to. “But in this movie I saw with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo…” comes the reply.

Do films have a duty to be medically accurate?

It depends. We learn about the world more through drama: in films and television than we do through anything other than perhaps life itself. If we think about electric shock therapy, we will picture Jack Nicholson getting zapped in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In fact, if we think about mental health and hospitals for the mentally ill, we’ll think about the same film, or a series of gothic asylums from horror movies. None of these are accurate and all of them serve not only to stigmatize people with mental health issues but people caring for people with mental health issues.

Movies don’t tell us when they’re lying. They don’t say the depiction of medical conditions in this work are grossly inaccurate. They don’t say miracles don’r really happen in real life so trust your doctor. In fact, they usually say the opposite.

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We want the good guys to win. We want the baddies to be defeated. In the comedies, we want the powerful and self-important to fall on their faces and be covered in mud or pie; and in the action movies, we want the immoral blown to pieces in slow motion.

In crime movies, we want the gangsters and the robbers caught; we want the cops to win. We might enjoy seeing the gangsters living it up for a while but ultimately they have to get shot down like dogs, or humiliated in the court room. The femme fatale might wind up dead. We want the detective to rub his chin and walk away. Maybe, back to the girl, or back to the long-suffering wife.

In Westerns, we want the bandits, the Mexicans and the Indians shot. We want the evil ranchers to be defeated and the humble homesteaders to be protected and prosper.

In high school movies, we want bullies to learn a lesson and pompous headmasters to be brought low.

In science fiction films, we want the aliens to be annihilated and the evil empire to be destroyed.

In fantasy films, the forces of darkness are up front about it. Sauron doesn’t even try to put on a semblance of goodness.

And even if the hero is killed, we want his death to inspire a brighter future to served something bigger, so we can see it not as a death, but as a sacrifice imbued with meaning. If Braveheart gets hung drawn and quartered, it’s not for nothing that it seems like a biblical outrage. William Wallace will serve as inspiration for the rebellion to come and which ends the film.

In Saving Private Ryan, Matt Damon will be told and we as an audience will be told to earn the sacrifice that Tom Hanks and his greatest generation has made.

Second World War films are popular because for once a military victory coincides with a moral one. In other words, the good guys did win. We can watch barracks-worth of soldiers being wiped out in Where Eagles Dare and The Dirty Dozen; an entire cinema of film-goers going up in flames in Inglourious Basterds, and be sure we’re on the right side of history. It’s so unusual that it reveals how contingent morality is in all the other cases.

We can’t watch Zulu, or Platoon, or Full Metal Jacket, with anything like the same complacency. That is why many later films set themselves up as stripped of all politics: Black Hawk Down and Warfare. You fight for the man beside you, the comradeship, and there is disdain for any higher argument for conflict. Which of course is a political decision. Fascistic in fact. The “Trenchology” of Italy during the First World War was where fascism was born.

So when we are watching those military films, the goodness or otherwise comes down to the clothes being worn, the uniforms and the cultural signals. The side we’re on. There’s no goodness at all. We also see it in the crime films and the westerns. We are culturally programmed to find people in uniforms being violently assaulted more upsetting than people without uniform being assaulted. People semi-naked are savages. “Naked savages” are two words which go together as easily as eggs and bacon.

So there are two things here.

First, the winners are not good. The cowboys, the cops, the cavalry, the FBI, the army, the West, the Whites. Movies want us to think of them as good. Assume their goodness as a given. We’ll be closer to them; empathise with their humanity; recognise their sense of humour; be glad they’re properly dressed; understand what they’re saying — even as we note regional differences we recognise. If they were so obviously good, why would we need so much convincing?

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In fact, winning is about dominance; it’s about power. It’s difficult to win without destruction and without glorying in it. You have to or you might find yourself questioning what you’re doing. Feeling guilty. “So much violence,” Kevin Costner says at the end of The Untouchables as if he hadn’t enjoyed every minute of it.

When the red rebels blow up the Death Star, the ultimate symbol of power of the fascist Empire, they celebrate with a ceremony straight out of a Leni Riefenstahl film. Robert Kolker in The Cinema of Loneliness thought this was evidence of its ideological confusion. I disagree. I think George Lucas is saying that victory, especially victory which involves massive indiscriminate violent death is inevitably fascistic. You will become what you fight.

Almost every American action film has the moral that the answer to violence is some greater more skilfully applied violence by someone familiar and attractive. This is known as the Keanu Reeves rule.

The second point is that the good guys — the real good guys — don’t win. If you look at the statistics. This has never been more apparent than today. The poor, the humble, the self-sacrificing are not rewarded by society, or by the universe. The non-violent or those who have no real access to violence are constantly defeated, their freedom and lives are taken. The rich and the powerful are less regulated. The trillionaire is not the best man in the world, the most deserving. The President of the United States will not be humbled or have a pie in his face. Those who are not wearing uniforms are constantly being slaughtered by those who are wearing uniforms.

There is a sub-genre of fiction, alternate histories in which the Germans won the Second World War. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Robert Harris’ Fatherland, Len Deighton’s SS-GB — they’re thrilling to read. Horrific, because the culture is dominated by the values of the Nazis and Japanese Imperialism, instead of British, European and American Imperialism. The British or American reader also feels that terrible sting of being defeated and made to participate in the humiliation of defeat, where every reenactment, movie and book takes for granted the rightness of the victors.

It must be how indigenous Americans feel like watching a western. And even the well-meaning white saviour revisionist westerns would just be a further humiliation. The late stage humiliation.

There is an argument perhaps that we go to the movies for the fantasy. It is exactly to seek comfort for the manifold injustices in real life that we need the reassurance of seeing good triumph at least here, on the big screen. To see Gary Cooper as Mr. Deeds or James Stewart as Mr. Smith triumph over the elites. The bully get his comeuppance; the tyrant fall and justice restored. The fantasy is still a lie. Just one we want to believe and are willing to pretend isn’t a lie.

And we’re not making those sort of films anymore and we no longer have those sorts of heroes. All we want to see is schlob Bob Odenkirk suddenly acquiring unexpected killing skills. This is the fantasy of individual revenge, the mass shooter, the nihilistic power fantasy. Change is impossible, so it will just be “I don’t like Mondays.” It’s more apocalyptic than revolutionary.

The good guys don’t win in real life. The bad guys always do.

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Liverpool. 1996. Two white guys. Crime heads. Chandler. Hammett. Jim Thompson. Wanted something contemporary. Lawrence Block. Maybe? Scoped Waterstones. Blackwells. Charity shops. Oxfam. White Jazz? Demon Dog of Crime? What is this? £4.99 and a packet of Twix. 2 pints of bitter. Golden Virginia tobacco and a packet of Rizlas.

Home. Shoes off. Outside, the night rages. But, you know, quietly.

I open the book. Da fuck? Murder. Savagery. Mayhem. A quartet? The LA Quartet, I learn. Too late. This is the last one. Another comes free with GQ Magazine. The Big Nowhere. Violence, sex, depraved. The stuff you need a shower. After you read. You want to have a shower inside your head though. Get that out. You race through the novels. This time in the right order. Take no prisoners. You pop Rolos and slug mugs of tea. Ah!

The Spice Girls and Oasis on TV. But you’re in Los Angleses where serial killers think in italics. And everyone effs and jeffs like it’s goin’ out of fashion. Flipping heck, you think. Blimey. And the violence. Faces are slashed. Ears cut off. Nipples twisted. Groins stomped on. Heads mushed in. Elbows poked. Hair pulled. Spines turned this way and that. Buttocks flicked.

No one’s happy. No one’s in love. Everyone is obsessed. The women all look like someone else and seem austere and beautiful. And then succumb. Reveal hidden depths of submission to male fantasy. Nutty these gals. People scream; sometimes cry. Weep. Go crazy. No one eats Twix, or Rolos. No one has a cup of tea. They smoke stick and jab themselves with heroin needles. Though they don’t seem to enjoy it much. They howl. Go crazy. There are no heroes. Except for the hero. Who does terrible things. But is still the hero. Because he’s white.

Sexual perversion abounds. Real people get involved. Famous people. Real names. Daring! The defencelessly dead get pummelled by libel. Starlets are raped postmortem. Film stars are outed hither and yon. Homophobia would be the accusation if it wasn’t for the author’s ragin’ hard-on being in the way. Making the claim if not moot, mute.

Oh and the racism. The n-word covers the pages like spittle on a hate tract. Every other slur, like piss sprinkles on the outhouse floor, each one offering a curvy window reflecting a miniature reflection of the author’s tiny dripping member. The author liked to play Nazi at school, go on racist rants — a cry for attention, he says. Argued they should reinstate slavery — he was being ironic, he says. These liberals, they hate the truth tellers.

But it’s bullshit. Sylvia Plath knew it. All the liberals love a fascist. Otherwise, whither Bill Maher? Especially a literary one. Ezra Poundshop over here. Mouthing the slurs as they read. Scab-picking for men who fear they’re too bookish. Happy to live in the trousers of a pornographer for a while, someone who “tells it how it is” — even if his Los Angeles is as realistic as Narnia.

Everyone I know who reads him is a white man.

The demon dog rants. The Quartet complete, American Tabloid charts continues the outward expanse. Maybe his best book. Followed by The Cold Six Thousand, maybe his worst. Every sentence three. Words long.

By now he’s done the circuit of the media and become its darling and pet rabid Rottweiler. He’s photographed with a Rottweiler in case we missed the point. He wrings his murdered mother dry over a memoir, a series of essays, a novel and a documentary, tying her to the Black Dahlia murder. They make a good movie. LA Confidential. And a bad movie. The Black Dahlia.

Blood’s a Rover, I read. Perfidia, I read. This Storm, I read. Widespread Panic, I read. The Enchanters, I read. I don’t think I’ll bother with Red Sheet. None of them are good. They all give me the same Ellroy jolt. His books don’t have humans in them. They have interchangeable fantasy figures. No one has a real life. No one eats a Twix. Has a cup of tea. A genuine emotion. They’re all just fuel for the churn of the author’s nihilistic sixth form alt-right shock-jock politics. The OCD repetition of tried and tested writing techniques that beginning to read like typing techniques and the faux be-bop hip-speak. White jazz indeed.

Some’ll say: yeah but he hates fascists too. Woo-hoo!

But I don’t think so.

A plague on both your houses isn’t above politics. It’s another political position. Everyone is corrupt — means I can fuck everything up. It’s the purge, baby. A free for all. A pseudo-sophistication for those who don’t want to think too much. It’s the ultra-violence of a man who’s never been in a fight. Inventing straw men to batter with baseball bats and tire irons.

Maybe it’s demon dog shit. But in the end. It’s still dog shit.

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‘I was eleven years old when my dog died,’ I said. ‘Didn’t just die, let’s be clear. Some swine killed him. Let me… let me start again.’

‘I…’

‘No, wait. It doesn’t matter. Let me just get this off my chest. You have to understand I’ve never told this to anyone. I mean, you’re really very privileged. You should be flattered. Are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘So, let me set the scene. I was brought up in this small village. Not even a village. Five houses and a dangerous bend. I didn’t get on with many people. There was my sister but she was a girl so that was that. Then my mum and dad were always working. The next door neighbour… he was a sick toe rag. So, my dog - Harry – he was my best friend, if you like. We spent all our time together. Over the fields. We’d go down to the beach, to the estuary, the rock, the slag pier. Or up the fell to the stone circle and the quarries.’

‘What kind of quarries?’

‘Slate,’ I said. ‘Everything there was built of slate. A cold stone. Slate. It’s mud you know. Fossilized mud. You tap it with a hammer at the edges you can break it off in sheets as thin as paper. Why am I talking about slate? Ah. I see what you’re up to. Trying to delay the inevitable, huh? I admire your spunk, sir! And we’ve got time, so I don’t mind. But anyway, Harry and I were best of pals. And when I found him dead, I was… well, I wasn’t happy. Not one bit. I wasn’t blowing up balloons and hanging streamers from the rafters. An eleven-year-old boy faced with such a thing? Horrible. But it was done. There he was; eyes bulging and tongue agog. A pool of dried blood as hard as treacle-toffee stuck to his head and the road.’

‘He was run over?’

‘No, he wasn’t run over. No, I told… pay attention or there’s no point me telling you this! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. It’s just, I appreciate the opportunity to tell someone this. I’ve been walking around with it for years like a terrible secret, even though, I personally don’t think it’s a terrible secret at all. In fact, I think it’s almost like a gift. Anyway, where was I?’

‘Treacle toffee blood.’

‘Gotcha. Yes. So, me and a pal of mine - Gary Hardwick - we put him in a plastic bin-liner and we tied it to a stick and we took him down to the estuary, but the tide was out. So, I decided we’ll take him to the end of the slag pier where we can throw him off the end. There’s always water out there. A channel that goes out to sea. Gary didn’t want to do it though. It was beginning to spit with rain, and he wanted to get home and watch The A-Team. Gary thought Mr. T was amazing. Mr. T?’

I shake my head.

‘So we have a bit of a to-do and Gary ends up going off crying and I end up dragging Harry with the bag half-split and the bloody spilling out all the way to the slag pier as the rain starts to come down in earnest and what with Harry being dead, and me getting soaked and the wind blowing in one ear hole and out the other I am not a happy camper.’

‘Listen, I think that…’

‘Hear me out, first. Please. Don’t interrupt. Unless, you know, you want to ask a question. Resolve something that is confusing you. Could you do me that courtesy please? Don’t change the subject though. That’s just rude.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Okay. Let’s see. I’ll try and cut it short because I can see you’re eager we get on with…’

‘No, I’m fine. Please. Tell the story at your own pace.’

‘Why thank you chief! Very nice of you. Okay. We are on the end of the slag pier and I’m standing on the edge holding a corner of the bag. I want to heave Harry right into the middle of the channel. That’s how I’d seen it in my head, and I was sure that would be the best thing to do. But I was alone now, and Harry was heavy, and I was tired, and you have to remember I was eleven years old at the time and not as strong as I am today. So I made a right pig’s ear of it. I swung the bag back and then forward and then as I let go the bag tore and I lost my balance and I fell down and there was this enormous splash and I was in the water and it was freezing. So cold. I mean, I don’t know if I can say freezing because it would have been ice if it was freezing, but someone told me once that water can be below zero and not freeze if you keep stirring it so that ice doesn’t get a grip so to speak and this was salty sea water remember and I’m tumbling about in it. And I can feel the current tugging at me. But I reach out and obviously the first thing I grab is Harry and he’s no use whatsoever. His bulging eyes and dirty flopping tongue rolling over me in the water. A sloppy embrace at best. And I’m beginning to panic. I’m beginning to think, this is it. I’m going to die. Eleven years old and my life is done. Staring at death. Have you ever been in that…? Never mind.

‘Luckily, there was this low shelf of slag and I got a hand on it and I pulled myself up. And it was dark. I dragged myself over the stone and I lay there heating myself up with gasping and shivering and I don’t know if I passed out or what, but it seemed like time had passed and it was now really dark. I looked around and I was in a small cave that the tide had gouged out underneath the slag pier and would probably be underwater once the tide was properly in. I was looking about myself when this light - this golden light – shone from the dark end of the cave.’

‘A light?’

‘At first I thought my dad must have come to get me and I wasn’t relieved one bit because he didn’t half enjoy slapping children my dad. You have to hand it to him, as much as he neglected us in every other respect, he did not spare his own enthusiastic and imaginative brand of corporal punishment. As it was, I was liable to get a pasting, turning up with wet clothes, but if he’d had to get out of his chair to come and look for me. Perhaps Gary had grassed me up. But I didn’t need to worry because the light wasn’t a torch and it was coming from the inside of the cave. From deeper within.’

‘What was it?’

‘It was a vision.’

‘A….?’

‘Don’t laugh, don’t… You can see why I never told anyone this and personally I never believed much in this stuff myself. Yes, we were Catholics. Mum took us to church three times a week, the bitch, but I just sat there with my finger in the missal willing the priest to skip to the end. Father Kieron had a stutter though. Just my luck! Ha ha! You have to laugh, or you’d cry, wouldn’t you?’

‘I suppose.’

‘But we had heard all about Lourdes and stories of Prophets being visited and all the rest of it, so I knew what I was seeing as I was seeing it. A bloody vision. Gold and shining bright, lighting up the cave and it were warm. I mean physically warm. I stopped shivering and my clothes began to steam and I stepped closer. And then I saw in the heart of the beautiful gold light there was a figure emerging.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Roger Moore.’

‘The actor?’

‘I recognised him straight away. He was wearing a white tuxedo, black tie and had a cigar in his hand, like this. And he said, “Good evening Samuel.” Samuel. Not Sammy.’

‘You’d hit your head, or something.’

‘No, no, no I hadn’t. It was a real vision. A visitation. As real as I’m looking at you right now. I know you don’t believe me. No one ever believes me. It doesn’t matter though. It really doesn’t. He was so clean, so suave, so effortless. And he spoke to me like no one had ever spoken to me before and he told me what I could do. What I should do. He told me I was talented and should not be ashamed of my talent. He said that we were the same and our mission was holy. That I should do what he had done. That he would guide me. Visit me and guide me throughout my life, my journey he called it. And I was filled with the most overwhelming sense of well-being and love. Nothing made me feel this good. Nothing ever has. It’s what made me who I am. I was warm and dry and for the first time in my life I knew who I wanted to be: Roger Moore.’

‘But that isn’t Roger Moore.’

‘What?’

‘You’re visualizing James Bond, Roger Moore playing James Bond. Roger Moore never…’

I shot him once in the face and once in the chest.

‘Shit,’ I said to myself. The contract said to make it look like a suicide and Murray Pembleton might be something of an arse but even he wouldn’t kill himself twice.

I sat back to consider my options.

The hotel room was doused in a golden light, emanating from the en suite bathroom.

A reassuring voice spoke from behind me: ‘Don’t worry Samuel, the man was provoking you and got exactly what he deserved.’

‘They never believe me Roger. I tell every single one the story and they never believe me.’

The sound of a cigar being lit.

‘They don’t have to believe you, Samuel. Only you need to believe.’

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“This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.”

Thus begins Fargo (1996), directed and written by the Coen Brothers. The “exactly” should’ve been the tell for anyone taking it at face value. The fact that it was a Coen Brothers film should’ve been another one. This did not stop several real life murder cases being linked to the film as potential inspiration. Wood-chippers have been used to dispose of bodies, husbands have paid third parties to kidnap or dispose of wives, so examples could be found. At the end of the film, however, the usual legal disclaimer is included in the final credits: “This motion picture is a work of fiction... any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”

The Coen Brothers have frequently enjoyed writing their own versions of established genres. When I interviewed Ethan a few years ago, he told me that they wanted to make a Dashiell Hammett movie, but they couldn’t find a novel or story they wanted to film so with Miller’s Crossing they simply wrote their own Dashiell Hammett movie. With Fargo, I suspect they simply wanted to write their own “true crime” movie without having to dig up a sufficiently interesting true crime.

The fact that “True” can indicate a fictional construct like a genre should also tell us something about the lie that is being played out with the True Story genre. Biopics are an obvious place to start because by their very nature they claim to be true but, in fact, the amount of inaccuracies, exaggerations and misrepresentations in the genre means that almost any biopic feels like the most lying of all genres. If you throw a rock in the biopic restaurant you’ll hit a liar, “And do me a favour Fink!” as Giesler says in Barton Fink “Throw it hard!”

Night and Day (1946) told the story of Cole Porter as a traditional heterosexual romance despite the fact Porter was gay and the marriage was an arrangement. The casting of Cary Grant might itself of been an indication as those in the know were aware of his ambiguous sexuality. When Porter’s life became the subject of another biopic in 2006, De-Lovely, Kevin Kline plays Porter as gay but it also takes liberties with the chronology in which the songs were written and suggests that his writing finished when his wife died — it did not.

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You might think erasing homosexuality, or bisexuality was something we are passed by now but you would be wrong. A Beautiful Mind (2001) tells the story of John Nash, Nobel-winning mathematician and troubled genius, who hallucinated Paul Bettany and felt himself embroiled with the CIA but managed to come through because of the love of Jennifer Connelly. Nash was schizophrenic, but not quite so cinematically. He had auditory hallucinations and was violent to his wife. He was also gay. His winning of the Nobel Prize was part of a team and not the individual act of redemption seen in the film. So far so hetero-normative.

Mel Gibson puts gay people into every film he can, but usually to then throw them out of windows. He’s never gone in for historical accuracy as such. When I asked him in Venice about his film Heartbreak Ridge and why the Japanese soldiers didn’t just cut down the net the American's were using to scale the cliff, he said that he was hoping no one would think of that. It turns out the net didn’t exist and they’d made it up because “it looked good”.

As for his Oscar success, not only did William Wallace of Braveheart fame, not have a relationship with a French Princess who was three at the time of his death; he never wore face paint, or a kilt; there was no “right of the first night” and the battle of Stirling Bridge didn’t take place in a field but, as the name suggests, on a bridge. He was not even called “Braveheart.” That was Robert the Bruce.

There are other ways of approaching “Based on a true story.” Andrew Dominik’s Blonde (2022) is based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name and in keeping with the novel, takes huge liberties with Marilyn Monroe’s life to the point of defamation of not just Marilyn, but studio heads, co-stars and husbands. Many people got rightly angry with this and the outcry was unavoidable, but at least the novel was understood by most to be the source of the fictionalisation. In a smaller film like Shirley, in which Elizabeth Moss played horror writer Shirley Jackson. It is also based on a novel, this time by Susan Scarf Merrell, and tells the story of the author in a moment of frustration as she writes a novel and battles depression and agoraphobia. There’s a murderous tension and her husband, Stanley, is seen as a cynical academic willing to destroy and manipulate the young couple they befriend and use. None of this is true. Jackson actually had a house full of children, so much so that her most popular writing during her lifetime were her reports on her witty books and journalism centred around her housekeeping and unconventional child-rearing. And yet almost all the reviews referred to the film as a “biopic” rather than a work of fiction. Unlike Blonde, there aren’t a whole load of versions of Shirley Jackson out there, or a lot of defenders beyond her surviving relatives, who were incensed by Josephine Decker’s film.

Another way of being “Based on a True Story” which has become popular is the Adam McKay version. We’ve seen this done in his political satires, specifically The Big Short (2015) and Vice (2018) when disclaimers claim that despite the secretiveness of their subjects “we did our fucking best”. I, Tonya is another film which begins with a meta-disclaimer: “Based on irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly.” It even occasionally stops the action of the film to throw up title cards which read a version of: “This actually happened.” It’s the post-truth version of post-modernism that we live through, where our belief in what is occurring is toyed with. If we believe it, more fool us. But it did happen.

Films which are based on a true story will often feature credit sequences where the real people depicted will appear in photographs, even side by side with their actor counterparts. Dead Man’s Wire concludes with a series of pictures depicting key moments from the film in which it is noticeable that the actors are much more attractive that their subjects. Likewise The Smashing Machine concludes with Mark Kerr doing his shopping and not looking anything like Dwayne Johnson, despite Dwayne Johnson not really looking like Dwayne Johnson. I’ve never understood the reason for this. It adds nothing to the film. In fact all it makes me think is if they lied about the looks of these people, what else did they lie about.

The most famous credits sequence where fiction and reality come together is the end of Schindler’s List (1994) when survivors and relatives of “Schindler’s Jews” put stones on his grave in Israel. It should be very poignant, and it is…

But again instead of bridging a gap you are showing me a huge gap. You’re making the film a memorial, an obituary. This is fine, but what about Abraham Bankier? Bankier was a Polish Jew who owned a factory. He was the man who came up with the idea of using the factories as a way of saving Jewish workers. He persuaded Schindler to do this but does not feature in the film, or at least not as himself: his role and that of Mietek Pemper is subsumed into the character of Itzhak Stern, who was based also on Itzhak Stern.

There might be honest reasons for not including those characters in the film: keeping the narrative lean etc. But it is worth considering ideologically as well. Intentionally or not, slimming down the number of characters involved in the conception and carrying out of the scheme that would save so many lives makes us think that heroism is the act of certain individuals and not others. We increase the respect we have for Schindler, who is unique, and squish the three Jews who were instrumental in conceiving and carrying out the idea into one wise mentor figure. I’m not discounting Schindler, but I’m wondering why the other people become invisible. Story-telling economy should lead us also to wonder, why can’t we think of groups of people being responsible for something rather than one person, or at most two?

A film that is based on a true story and is relatively accurate Spotlight (2015) manages to depict a team of journalists going about uncovering a complicated cover up about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Boston. More recently Reality (2023) had the arrest of Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) play out in real time with the script made up of a transcript of what was said that day. This was a procedure inspired perhaps by Carl Theodore Dryer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which used court transcripts of the trial as a basis for the film and included details such as the shaving of Joan’s hair before her execution.

But these are the exceptions.

Ultimately, there is a contradiction in the two words at the heart of the lie. True. Story. A story is a fabrication: but then again maybe the truth is a fabrication. It isn’t as if we experience the world through transparent means. Perception isn’t a passive reception of information from outside, it’s an interactive sorting of stimuli into narrative streams. We build a model of reality with the electrical activity of our brains and we use the various inputs from our senses to finesse it and correct it, but it is never identical to the reality that is out there. The truth that we story is always a nearly truth, and sometimes a lie.

So what is that based on?

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I met Sean Connery when I was nine years old. It was on the beach and there was no one else there: beneath Hampton Rock near where the sad little 9-hole golf course, worn out by the wind, gave up and the sand dunes began. The Ice Age had dumped Hampton Rock on the shore. A lump of limestone capped with long grass. Small white clouds raced under a tall blue sky and I was sitting at the mouth of the cave that always dripped, looking out at where the tide was coming in over the biscuity sands. I was crying, or trying to cry, and I looked up and a man was standing there.

‘Do you mind if I use your cave?’ the man said. ‘Just for a moment.’

I couldn’t see him properly because my hair was in my face and my eyes were bleary. He waved a cigarette in the air. ‘I need some shelter to light my cigarette.’

I squidged over and nodded and he stepped forward and crouched out of the wind. He clicked a lighter, a flame sprang up doing a little dance, the size of a lady’s fingernail, and cupping his hand, he managed to get the cigarette lit. He puffed on it to make sure the flame held, the smoke wreathed his face like a dissolving beard, and then he straightened up. He was very tall, was balding and had a moustache.

‘You’re Sean Connery,’ I said.

‘I am,’ he said, with an end-of-discussion firmness. He turned and looked out at the tide. ‘It’s coming in fast.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Golf,’ not looking at me, he waved a hand towards the golf course.

I let him smoke. Talking to strangers was forbidden by Charlie the Cartoon Cat but it was Sean Connery, so he was hardly a stranger. I dried my eyes and nose with the cuffs of my jumper, leaving snail trails of snot.

‘Why have you been crying?’

‘My dog died.’

‘Yes?’ he blinked. ‘That’s too bad.’ He kept his hand cupped around the cigarette as he smoked, and plumes of smoke sometimes came out of his nose as if he was a dragon and the inside of his head was on fire. ‘Are you a boy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry,’ he chuckled. ‘It’s just with your hair… and the crying, I thought you might be a little girl.’

I rubbed my face with the heel of my hand until I was sure there were no tears. Earlier I had been trying to cry and now that I didn’t want to, I felt like I might burst into tears at any moment. ‘I’m a boy. My name is Samuel.’

‘Well, Sammy,’ – no one called me Sammy – ‘it’s no good moping, is it? That never changed anything. Tears? We have no time for tears.’

He stood for another moment. The wind lifted the strands of hair that he combed over his bald head, waving them like ribbons. He took another drag of his cigarette and then swallowed the smoke. The side of his face had folds. ‘You were upset about your dog, Sammy?’

‘Yes. My dog died.’

‘Name?’

‘Allan.’

‘Your dog’s name was Allan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it suicide?’

‘What do you…? No. It wasn’t suicide.’

‘A dog called Allan!’ Connery shook his head. ‘Unbelievable.’

He took three quick drags of his cigarette and then flicked the butt up into the wind and away over the sands. He smoothed his hair down with both hands and took a flat cap from his pocket, unfolded it and settled it firmly on his head. He turned to me and stuck out his hand. I reached out and he grabbed it hard, like he was squeezing some force into me.

‘Sammy, do me a favour.’

‘Yes, Mr. Connery?’

‘Get your hair cut.’

I nodded, aware that my hair was being whipped around my face like a scribble annihilating a bad drawing. He was staring hard into my eyes. I felt he would detect it if I was lying so I decided I would ask mum to take me to the barber and I’d get my hair cut and as soon as I made the internal decision, I was able to say with tearless strength: ‘Okay. I will.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

He let go of my hand and nodded. ‘Good man.’

He peered behind me into the darkness of the cave and then turned back to the horizon, the sea, the sand and the wind. He waved, but I called to him before he got too far.

‘Mr. Connery! Mr. Connery!’

He only half-turned so he was in profile; his hands thrust deep in his pockets, bending slightly.

‘My dad does a really good impersonation of you,’ I called.

He nodded taking it in and then walked back to me and leaned close, so he didn’t have to raise his voice.

‘Your dad sounds like an asshole,’ Sean Connery said, but it came out ‘shounds like an ash hole’ which was how my dad would do it too.

And then he was gone…

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Enter any urban space in most of Western Europe, Australia or America and your senses will be battered to buy, buy, buy. From billboards to TV spots, park benches, shop windows, TV screens, phone screens, packaging and walls, everything is designed to catch your attention and buy, buy, buy. But when you watch the movies this is drastically reduced. Characters walking through a subway station or into a bar, down a high street or into a shop even will find their environments blandly thinned out of commercials, certainly ones you might recognise from real life. Why is that?

The reason is licensing. If a film shows a Nike poster and no deal is in place, then the filmmakers most pay Nike a licensing fee. This can even work for the products themselves. In the original script of Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Elliot tempted his alien friend into the house with a line of M&Ms. However, the company which owned M&Ms, Mars, refused the filmmakers permission to use their product and so Spielberg went with Reese’s Pieces replacing the candy, owned by Mars competitor Hershey’s. Reese’s Pieces got a bump in their sales as their product which hadn’t been particularly well known plays a role in the most popular movie of 1982.

The makers of The Italian Job (1969) likewise had terrible trouble getting the British carmaker to agree to the use of their Mini Coopers, whereas FIAT was willing to pay for the budget of the film if they swapped to FIAT 500s.

Those were the innocent days before companies fully understood how movies could boost their products. The tobacco industry understood very early on that having their stars smoke their brands of cigarettes meant that patrons of the theatres might even light one up with Bogie or Bacall when the moment came on the big screen.

So it was with costumes as well. A fashion craze for a certain dress — Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)— beret — Bonnie and Clyde (1967)— or style of sunglasses — Alain Delon in any film — or even poncho — A Fistful of Dollars (1964) — might take off due to exposure in a film. As companies cottoned on, deals were struck with filmmakers for movie-tie ins and product placement. James Bond would wear a certain watch; Kim Basinger wear a certain dress.

Throughout the eighties, the practice of product placement became an important revenue stream. Patrick McGilligan in his biography of Clint Eastwood recounts how when directing Heartbreak Ridge (1986), Eastwood was so keen to get the Budweiser sign in the bar in focus that the characters in the scene were out of focus. Excessive product placement can become distracting and annoying. Will Smith taking pleasure in his new Nikes in Bad Boys (1999) no longer strikes us as the character so much as the actor bagging a freebie.

Having product placement provides money to the filmmakers and allows them to use real life objects and brands in their films, but then part of the deal is they have to be exclusive, so no other competitor brands can be used. This thins out the variety that litters our daily lives as we might notice everyone seems to be driving the same kind of car, drinking the same range of soft drinks, or eating at the same fast food restaurants. This also means that the world is surreptitiously cleaned of the messy advertisers competitors produce.

And it becomes important who uses what. The hero can be seen googling but the villain will use something generic called “World Search” so as not to offend any corporation.

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Mike Myers in Wayne’s World (1992) attempted to parody product placement but soon entire films were becoming advertisements as IP was exploited from products ranging from Lego to Barbie to Pop Tarts. These universes are entirely one product or one brand universes and the option of buying something else is literally thinking out of the box. Too far out of the box. You can be Barbie but you can’t be a Cabbage Patch Kid unless Mattel have bought that product as well.

One way of avoiding all of this bother is to make up your own adverts, and even products. Quentin Tarantino invents a host of products which he uses throughout his films as a way of avoiding paying for clearance licensing or endorsing any particular brand. So his characters smoke Red Apple Cigarettes and eat Big Kahuna Burgers, listen to K-Billy and drink K.O. Juice. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character even shoots a commercial for Red Apple as a post-title sequence.

This doesn’t stop them from talking about Le Big Mac and David Lynch also likes his characters to talk about their favourite beers (Blue Velvet) or cigarettes (Wild at Heart). We are products of capitalism so of course we have our preferences and they tell us about who we are.

In Blade Runner (1982) we see Coca-Cola signs only because Coca-Cola want to still exist in the future even if it is a dystopia. But if that dystopia points to consumerism as part of the problem as in john Carpenter’s They Live (1988) then the adverts can’t be for real products. Roddy Piper finds a pair of special glasses which reveal to him the truth of the world. Some of the population are aliens and adverts and products are actually transmitting secret messages such as “Obey,” “No Thought” and “Marry and Reproduce.” But without the glasses the adverts are for made-up products like “Control Computers” rather than IBM.

It’s an interesting lie that movies tell us about the world. Living in the world, cleaned of most advertising, characters aren’t distracted, are left envious of others, left miserable about their own lives. Truman might dream of going to Tahiti in The Truman Show (1998) but this is a mono-wish: his artificial world is entirely bereft of adverts except for the products which the show has licensed, products entirely gettable for Truman.

This means everyone we see in a film is essentially a Truman. As characters, they don’t feel the yearning which advertising produces, the low-key dissatisfaction that goes along with it, the sense that somehow our lives could be better if we just had that car we can’t quite afford or those expensive sneakers Will Smith looks so comfortable in.

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On the wall, there hung a series of pieces of paper. At one end they were blacked out entirely and then as they progressed left to right an image began to emerge. A newspaper front page and then it was clear for one of the iterations and then by the final pieces the headline and photograph and page were whited-out entirely.

A little girl — maybe six years old — wandered into the room and looked at the picture and sighed “oh no!”

I got what she meant immediately. Someone had messed up. The majority of the pictures were ruined. And the ones which were clear in the middle didn’t seem to be worth the effort. It didn’t make much sense to explain to her that Marshall McLuhan had said that “the medium was the message,” as the introduction to the exhibition at the Dox Gallery in Prague noted. My feeling was she had got it absolutely right. Oh no.

I’m not comfortable in art galleries, as I’ve already noted in a previous post. But I persist in going to them. They can be sources of nourishment as well as indigestion. I find myself photographing the people photograph the pictures. The people going around the art gallery, rather than being irritants (though they’re that as well) tell me more about the world I live in than the art on the walls. The exhibition called “Hit by the News,” by the way, is excellent. Some truly fascinating stuff in there. And the not so fascinating stuff, I can walk past pretty quickly without getting annoyed.

The Dox Art Gallery is situated across the Vitava river in the former industrial area of the city in a factory space that used to make train carriages. The whole area has opened up to food stands, cultural spaces and reinvention. The Soviet era architecture isn’t as florid as the baroque overdrive of the Old City which drips in architectural statuary. Every lintel seems to have a crouched giant braced beneath, holding it up; all the lightning rods have pennants; every corner has a turret hatted with a cupola. Synagogues, churches, tenements, public buildings and department stores. The trams net the city and there are cafes, beer halls, cinemas and theatres.

In front of the Kafka museum, two naked men piss in a pool shaped like the map of Czechia. Their bums and penises move as they write messages with their wees in the water. If you send an SMS to a certain number, they will spell out a personal message with their wee. Down the road the narrowest alley in the city takes you into a restuarant and then you have to circle back up the stairs to come out ten feet from where you were. In the Shakespeare and Co book shop, a grumpy berk with a beard tells me I can’t buy the books I want because they’re from the wrong pile. “My mistake,” I say. “I confused this for a book shop.” I am also a grumpy berk with a beard. I resist the urge to think of this as Kafkaesque.

Kafka wanted to go and live in Palestine. A few days ago, Mohamed al-Wahidi, a Palestinian aid worker who’d been organising watch parties for the World Cup had been killed by the IDF minutes before the Egypt v Argentina game. The missile killed two brothers aged eight and 10 and another man who was in the street. The IDF said “Whoops!” Or something like that.

Football and genocidal violence come together. There’s no holiday respite. There’s no getting away from it. I find myself disinclined to visit the synagogues of Prague, despite their beauty and rich history. Subconscious, unintentional conflation becomes inevitable even in the most wary.

Sometimes you just encounter something in front of you and can’t help but yelp, “Oh no!”

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Environmental disaster? Remember the Ozone Layer? Unscrupulous rich men buying the means of communication for their own aims? Ever heard of William Randolph Hearst? Wars and massacres? Just take a scan of the headlines of the 20th Century when we ran out of names and began to number our wars.

T’was ever so, we say.

Well … t’wasn’t.

Let’s take them in reverse order.

The current wars, as costly in human life and brutal as they are, are not comparable to the loss of life in the Second World War. The genocide in Gaza is a genocide but it isn’t the Holocaust. In Ukraine, Russia has lost more soldiers than it did during the Battle of Stalingrad, but that figure is dwarfed by what it lost in WWII. Iran, Lebanon, Sudan and other conflicts are horrific but not yet on a scale that we have seen in the past. So why am I in despair?

Because the President of the United States has a fascination with breaking precedent and no POTUS since Truman has dropped a nuclear bomb in wartime. The chances that he he’ll pull one up like an impulse buy on Amazon and drop It on Tehran, just to see what it looks like, what it feels like, are not only non-zero, I’d say they’re high. Anyone hoping Pete Hegseth will talk him down hasn’t been paying attention.

Secondly, the rise of the tech bros is not just a replay of the barons and moguls of the last century. A trillionaire has more money than Norway. People don’t realize what an obscene amount of money that is. If a dollar is a second, a million dollars is 11 days, a billion dollars is 31 years and a trillion dollars is 31 thousand years. No individual should possess such wealth. Even a kindly person with an old-fashioned patrician attitude, David Attenborough shouldn’t have that much money, but an out-and-out Nazi? As in Hitler salutes and white power declarations?

These are men who see regulation (which by the way is just a word rich people use for rules they want to break) as the enemy. They want the world to be lawless so they can use their wealth to rule with the kind of autocratic power not seen since the Pharaohs. And they have the technology and will to fight and crush all dissent. They have the funds to finance entire political infrastructures which their communication networks can big up as if they were popular movements. Independent media organizations and political parties who haven’t taken the donations are sidelined and demonized, cowed into submission. All the institutions of liberal democracy can be overtaken and used to promote the increased power and wealth of these individuals (see the USA).

The Ethnonationalism they promote is not a coincidence. It divides the world into strictly delineated classes of mutual hatred, which distracts us from the injustice that is being perpetrated both nationally and globally. The EU passed strict deportation laws to the chants of “send them back!” Liberal institutions will be overtaken and used by the boot boys of the tech bros to spread hatred.

None of this will lead to an effective tackling of the one existential issue that the human race is facing: climate change. The ozone layer resulted in world wide action which was effective. Climate change has not provoked the same response and activists have had to fight unscrupulous and wealthy interests every step of the way. Oil companies denied the ocean levels would rise while quietly allowing for ocean rise in planning their offshore drilling platforms. They are tobacco salesman who won’t let their children smoke. The public have been confused and deliberately misled, and their own passions have been aroused by non-existential problems dominating the news cycle. Pris in Blade Runner puts it best, “Then we’re stupid and we’re going to die.”

Unfortunately we are not equipped to deal with much of what is novel in our situation. The very idea that “t’was ever so” shows this, like the dog in the meme sitting with the house on fire and saying this is fine. Too many people are too easily fooled for too long and that includes me. I’m fooled by the books I’ve read, the apparent stability of the world I’ve been brought up in and lived in. I look at black and white film of bombed out houses or news footage of strafed refugee camps and I assure myself: I didn’t live then; I don’t live there; I am okay. I have a anesthetic, Netflix, a kindle.

But one morning Hiroshima was just another city in Japan; Auschwitz the German name of a town in Poland. And then it wasn’t.

No one had ever flown planes into the Twin Towers and the pentagon and then they did. The precedent is repeated: the new thing that has never happened before happens. People in Pompeii told each other: “what’s the worst thing that can happen?”

This is the part of the post where I reassure you that actually there are glimmers if hope, examples we can follow, things we can do…

Yeah, no.

People will say that they want you to despair. They want you to feel hopeless. But maybe they want you to be optimistic. Maybe they don’t care. They’re too busy buying Norway. Or the UK. Or the EU.

Maybe the radical conclusion (not that it matters) should be the realization that we’re fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it.

We’re stupid. And we’re going to die.

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Everyone wants to punch someone in the face sometimes. It doesn’t have to be because you hate someone or you’re particularly angry. It could be because you want them to stop talking, you don’t like the cut of their jib, or they have the misfortune to possess what an ex-girlfriend once referred to as a “supremely punchable face.” (Yes, she was talking about my face.)

Motion pictures tell us that this is an utterly normal thing to do. In fact, they reassure us that an exchange of punches to the face can resolve disputes, settle rivalries, win the affection and admiration of the opposite sex and even cement male friendships as a kind of ritual of mutual pain-giving to take the relationship to another level when anal penetration isn’t the preferred or convenient option.

A sock in the jaw can be all we need, maybe inducing unconsciousness: “Why you knocked him plum cold!”

Or we might go for an all out slug-fest as witnessed by many a saloon fight in the westerns. Bar room brawls have the added fun of breaking furniture over your opponent and bottles, throwing drinks in people’s faces and occasionally taking an illicit gulp of some booze, mid-fight.

The western is one of the prime genres for the traditional Hollywood fist fight.* It is often a lighthearted comedic affair, as a non-fatal alternative to the other form of combat: the showdown. It’s difficult for you to make up with a roughed up Dean Martin or Lee Marvin if you’ve shot them full of lead.

The techniques of the fist fight on film relied on a limited number of moves that the actors could master, with doubles stepping in for anything more complex or dangerous. Wide roundhouse punches were thrown, which was also known as the haymaker, or the Hollywood Hook. The reaction sold the punches - the stagger, the head thrown back, the look of bewilderment, but rarely pain. The head shake recovery. The fights almost always involved a give and take pattern, like a dance, where movement around a wide space was needed. This give and take might not be one for one, but tidal with an opponent having the upper hand and then the protagonist getting their own back and the opponent rocked on their heels. Blocking could be employed and ducking was an option - occasionally resulting in a person behind you being punched in the face (hilarious if it’s a girl who gets punched).**

In the aftermath of the fight, the fighters have mussed hair and maybe a visible bruise (but no swelling) and a trickle of blood from a lip corner. It’s quite decorous, and hey, sexy. They might also be gasping for breath, exhausted and sweaty. Let’s face it, there’s a post-coital element to it. Am I saying that all fist fights are supplements for repressed homoerotic desire? Yes. Absolutely all of them.

Which brings us to the Duke. John Wayne was in a good number of fist fights and they were often fairly friendly affairs. He fights Randolf Scott in The Spoilers (1942), Lee Marvin in Donovan’s Reef and Stewart Granger in North to Alaska (1960) and Bruce Dern in The Cowboys (1972). He fights a bunch of people in a mud hole in McClintock (1963). He helped to originate a “passing technique” which had the fist pass the face at an angle to the camera which made the blow look more realistic. His most famous and longest scrap though was in The Quiet Man (1952), where his ex-boxer Sean Thornton fights Victor McLaglen across Ireland for nine minutes.

Despite increased realism in seventies cinema, the Hollywood fist fight lasted through the seventies and eighties. Clint Eastwood’s Any Which Way… films featured a bare knuckle boxer with a “comedy” orangutan called Clyde. Each film ended with an extended punch up. Charles Bronson also played a bare knuckle boxer in the lesser known The Hard Times (1975). In 1988, John Carpenter filmed one of the longest fight scenes in They Live when professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper revealed why he was hired in a five-minute fight against Kevin David. Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies was a proponent of the old fashioned fist fight but by then he was on a fairly solitary path.

With the success of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, fighting techniques in films became more elaborate and martial arts oriented, influencing the James Bond and Jason Bourne films, as well as a whole rash of action movies from the likes of Jason Statham.

Now so far you might say, okay, but where are the lies? All of this sounds perfectly reasonable. Let’s go through them.

First of all, nine minutes? Five minutes? Even the shortest brawl will usually last for a few minutes, but the vast majority of fights in real life last twenty seconds and the number of blows exchanged are minimal. One of the depressing features of social media is now we can see real life violence, fights on pavements between drunkards outside kebab shops and in the streets outside nightclubs, and it is messy and not fun and people tend to jump up and down a lot for no real reason. No one seems to be really enjoying themselves. As Thomas Hobbes once wrote about his penis, fights are often “nasty, brutish and short.”

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One of the reasons for their brevity comes with the other lie. We’ve been taught by films that fighting involves hitting people in the head and face with our fists. There are 27 bones in a human fist: after a fight there’s a good chance you’ll have 30 or more. The bones you see are small and relatively delicate and easily broken, especially when smashed against larger heavier bones such as the skull. Any punch delivered with John Wayne force would hurt the puncher so much it’s unlikely there’d be a repetition. Nine minutes my arse!

The use of furniture, kicking, bottles etc can cause massive physical damage and death. Even a single blow to the head can kill someone. A blow that renders someone unconscious is life-threatening and can cause brain damage. In fact, has caused brain damage. That’s why you’re no longer conscious. Injuries involve swelling, cuts and bleeding. Even a slap can break a jaw.

Finally, violence in movies generally but fist fights in particular, downplay any sense of consequences. Very few people get arrested and charged with assault and sent to jail for a fist fight in a movie. It’s almost an unspoken rule between combatants: “Let’s settle this outside! Man to man!”

But in the most litigious country in the world “settling something” and “settling something” are two totally different things. Rather than slugging from a whiskey bottle in the mud post fight, someone’s heading to the hospital to be fitted with a neck brace and has their personal injury lawyer on speed dial.

The movie lie that violence resolves problems rather than itself being a problem is kind of a problem. A well delivered punch or slap can finish the argument and we’ll all be better in the morning. We’ll bond and learn something. It’s the honourable way to get to the other side of this. Domestic violence and beating your kids: you might think is unrelated but women are not immune from being on the receiving end of the violence, usually for comic relief or to tame a wild shrew and as for kids, well, I grew up watching this stuff and lapping it up. It absolutely linked fighting with masculinity. Even today a man will bristle at a question as to whether he’s been in a “real fight,” be he ne’er so liberal.

As for me, I’ve never been in a real fight post-school. I’ve been hit as a child by teachers and parents. I’ve been on the receiving end of physical violence (perhaps it’s that punchable face) on a number of occasions. It’s not been fun. Added to the physical injury - a broken nose - and PTSD, or screaming willies as I prefer to term them, there’s the sense that not having fought back or even got a punch away, I was somehow less than I should be. Even writing these words make me feel that. And what makes me feel like this are the things I love: the movies. It’s like having a stern older brother you really respect be disappointed at you.

But that brother is full of shit.

All of his fights are fake.

John Wayne might have been punching the faces in of all his co-stars for pretend but he didn’t volunteer for World War 2 and the only bruises he got were those put on by the makeup lady.

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*I’m leaving martial arts movies out of this as they have their own lies to tell.

**This also reveals how close the fist fight is to the custard pie fight.

The birth of this lie is coincidental with the birth of cinema via the birth of D. W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation in 1915. The film was an extraordinary blockbuster and was the first film to be officially screened at the White House, where it was greeted by the acclaim of the President Woodrow Wilson with the line: “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

This reaction is itself of dubious origin and is more likely to have been concocted by the film’s publicist. The film was based on the best-selling novel from 1905 The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr, a playwright and politician who wrote it in part in reaction to Harriet Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. An ardent white supremacist, Dixon believed the Antebellum South to be an idyllic pastoral community and the Civil War to have been caused by the overreaching of the government into the rights of states to govern themselves. His father was a slave owner and he saw the consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction particularly to be disastrous. His uncle, to whom he dedicated his novel, was a leading KKK figure and had personally been involved in lynchings.

Griffith’s film reproduce the racism of its source material faithfully. The blacks are portrayed mostly by white actors in black face and are shown as subhuman, unintelligent except for animal cunning, lazy, animalistic and lusting after white women. The North is shown as corrupt, hypocritical, devious, exploitative and vengeful. They lack the virtues of honour and gallantry, straightforwardness and integrity that the heroes of the South possess. This image of the South as gallant losers compared to a rapacious and rapey (never far away) North is embedded as a trope which continues throughout the century.

Though the son of two Yankees and born in Kansas, Buster Keaton was a huge fan of Birth of a Nation and when he came to make his own Civil War epic in 1926, The General, he decided to grossly rewrite history in order to bring it into line with his own and his audience’s prejudices. In the Great Locomotive Raid in 1862, a group of Northern soldiers led by the civilian James Andrews, grabbed the locomotive the General from Georgia and headed north sabotaging the line along the way. When they were captured, several including Andrews were summarily executed as “spies.”

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Despite researching the historic event carefully and insisting on authenticity in the filming, Keaton and his team changed Andrews into a southerner - even as it keeps his civilian status - and showed the northerners once more to be the villains. No one was worried about offending northern sensibilities even though the film’s audience resided in the North. For now even (white) northerners had begun to believe in the Lost Cause myth, propagated as it was by the Daughters of the Confederacy and other organisations which sought to recast the Civil War in a light favourable to the South. In The General, race is not part of the debate, and slavery has nothing to do with the war. Except of course it does. There are a pair of slaves shown at the beginning of the film, heaving a heavy trunk from Buster’s train, but they are not “seen”. Buster wants to join the Confederate Army and his beloved and her family see his not joining as dishonourable. By the end of the film, he has waved a Confederate flag, engaged in the battle with the Unionist and will be rewarded with a uniform and his girl, who may well be the daughter of a slave owner. The General isn’t as viscerally and visibly racist as Birth of a Nation, but in defaulting to the Confederate side as the goodies, it is implicitly a work of White Supremacy. Regarding the film as neutral or apolitical is a pretzel manoeuvre of moral flexibility. You can no more be neutral about a war involving slavery as you can both-sides the Holocaust. As a huge fan of the film and Keaton, it gives me no pleasure to consider this, but this blog is all about honesty.

Another epic in 1939, Gone with the Wind would create technicolor propaganda for the myth of the Lost Cause, the paradigm of the comically stupid black person, the happy slave Mammy, the conniving carpetbaggers of the North and the heroic romanticism and gallantry of the South. Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for playing Mammy, even though she had been unable to attend the film’s premiere because the theatre in which it was held was Whites Only. When she died in 1952, her last wish to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery was denied as it too was segregated.

So the Civil War might have been won by the North at Gettysburg but in Hollywood it was the South which remained the victor. This strange dissonance between actual history and its fictional/semi-fictional portrayal can sometimes be seen in the films themselves. Take Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne in John Ford’s The Searchers, one of his finest westerns, filmed in 1956. Edwards is an outsider, a former Confederate soldier, he turns up at his brother’s ranch with a sabre and his officer’s great coat, a bag of gold coins and a chip on his shoulder. He is repeatedly accused of criminal violence though the local Captain of the Texas Rangers (Ward Bond) is sympathetic and ultimately avoids or delays confrontation with him. Edwards refuses to swear an oath to the US government because he says he swore one oath (to the South) and he intends to keep that one.

Whether we are supposed to find his intransigence heroic or anti-heroic is unclear. Is it part of what leaves him a bitter man, unable to return properly to society? He is a racist ideologically, but in practice his innate decency wins, as seen by his changing relationship to Martin Pawley and his decision in regard to Debbie at the end of the film. When he meets a Union soldier, he asks him to turn around so he can see his back and only then admits to recognising him. He’s only “funning” he tells the offended young soldier, but it’s an odd joke. After all, how did the Confederates lose the war if the Union soldiers were all so cowardly?

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Throughout the film, Edwards is seen as losing elements of his Confederate personality. He gives his sabre and medal away, his gold is spent in pursuit of the Comanche who took Debbie, his great coat is used to cover the body of her sister. He even rides alongside soldiers of the Union. Scar, his enemy, increasingly is depicted as a mirror of Edwards. He has the same rage; the two exchange nicknames — Edwards is called “Big Shoulders” — and he wears Edwards’ medal. Both men would also rather see Debbie dead than taken by the other. This is a much more complex and nuanced version of the ex-confederate soldier.

In more modern Westerns such as Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, he plays a character who becomes the enemy of the Union soldiers only because he becomes victim to their renegade violence. At the time, the film was praised as a parable of the Vietnam War but Josey Wale’s being forced to take sides because of the brutality of the so-called good guys is similar to the way James Stewart is forced to fight against the Union in Shenandoah (1965). Stewart’s character has never owned slaves, we are told but has to fight against the northern forces because they take his son. The political is always trumped by the personal.

Clint also starred in The Beguiled (1971), directed by Don Siegel, in which his Union soldier becomes the captive of a girl’s school. It’s a Southern Gothic drama, which at least includes a house slave, whereas when Sofia Coppola remade the film in 2017, she whitewashed it with a throwaway line about the slaves “running away,” leaving the white women uncontaminated by charges of racism. The Long Riders and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford both have their outlaw James brothers identify themselves with the Confederacy, or more accurately with “Quantrill’s Raiders,” a pro-Confederate guerrilla outfit. The Confederacy is once more about individuality and freedom, rather than racism and white supremacy.

In Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil (1999), the pro-Confederacy group, the Irregulars, fight a pro-Union militia called the Jayhawkers. Confusingly, an ex-slave played by Jeffrey Wright fights for the Confederacy “so no one will ever call me n—— again”. The trailer exalts the film as being in the borderlands where you “didn’t fight for the Blue of the Grey, you fought for your friends.” Hollywood loves to view war as apolitical, just something characters end up doing, almost accidentally.

The way in which the South is fetishized can be seen in the background of many films. The TV series The Dukes of Hazzard featured a car called the General Lee with the Confederate Flag painted on its roof and two good ol’ boys. Confederate flags and memorabilia feature uncritically in the background of many a film.

This largely uncritical romanticism of the South will be defended as not wanting to offend the losers, not wanting to be triumphalist. Buster Keaton said it was difficult to make a Yankee the hero. To which the question has to be both: why? and really?

Ed Zwick managed to create a truly heroic version of the North with Glory (1989), but it’s telling that one of the only films to include not only a northern perspective but also a large black cast — albeit led by Matthew Broderick — have to lose in order to be the heroes. Similarly, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) was an effort to write the anti-slavery cause back into the Hollywood record.

Ultimately, slavery and slave-owning is the huge elephant in the room. The white audience who loved Birth of a Nation were more than happy to see their fellow whites as noble even if they were on the other side. By not accepting that the Civil War was about slavery, then not only could the romantic underdog myth of the lost cause be successfully promulgated but also the Jim Crow laws could come into practice with little or no intervention for decades, and more recently the defence and promotion of Confederate statues and street names could continue. The Supreme Court recently gutted the Voting Rights Act by pretending that race is no longer an issue in the United States. This has already led to a wave of gerrymandering to eliminate or marginalize black representation. Movie lies matter because the culture creates an atmosphere in which real world decisions can be made. This has been one of the most consequential.

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