History – Mediaclature

THE MEDEA COMPLEX (2015)

March 7, 2025

It’s Victorian era London and Anne Stanbury has sentenced to rehabilitation in an asylum for killing her son. Her lower-class husband, Edgar, deeply resents her for destroying his chance at assuming the Stanbury estate. Compounding matters, Edgar is drowning in debt while surrounded by in-laws and servants who hate his guts, not to mention being pestered by his alcoholic parasite of a father.

This is Rachel Florence Roberts’s debut novel THE MEDEA COMPLEX, and everyone is not as they seem. Was Anne gripped by a bout of madness, or was she right-of-mind when she killed her son? Does Edgar truly love Anne? What sort of duplicity are the in-laws and staff up to?

“You’re lying to yourself.”

THE MEDEA COMPLEX is a gripping page turner, propulsive but also reflective; it has sensational action, but also features an array of interior musings by the major players in the tale. Each character is intriguingly complex, and their motives and full back-stories unfurl through the pages, until you realize that each and every one of them are selfish assholes.

I love a book chock full of despicable folks, especially when they’re acting out of faulty reasoning.

While THE MEDEA COMPLEX was spurred into existence by Roberts’s postpartum depression, it was also inspired by the Victorian-era realities of inheritance and estates, barbaric grasp of psychiatry and mental illness — which included the belief that madness in women can be induced by reading — and cruelty of some ‘baby farms’

Baby farms in the Victorian era were a service where individuals took in children whose parents could not support, either because of finances, illegitimacy, or other reasons. While some farms were well-run, others were little more than profit centers and often resulting in exploiting the children or worse: allowing them to die due to starvation, or simply killing them.

As detailed in the author’s notes, Roberts emphasizes that — while a number of the characters are absolute fabrications — some are inspired by real-life scumbags, such prolific baby farmer/serial killer Amelia Dyer. *¹

There’s nothing like drawing from the well of actual historical criminals to give your morally grey character a pitch-black veneer.

While the characters often act cruel and perform reprehensible acts, they are often the actions of necessity and of survival, especially the acts committed by women. One of the few well-meaning characters, Anne’s doctor — Dr. George Savage — is extraordinarily sexist, but in a blunt manner that was professionally accepted at the time. Roberts handled the reality of the situation by having Anne and others subvert his expectations in satisfying ways, ways that come to haunt him in the end.

Colorfully dour and unsavory, with characters sinking lower and lower with every page, immersed in a historically accurate and unsentimental rendering of Victorian London, MEDEA is delightfully cynical while not quite being nihilistic. It’s a taunt work of intrigue that confidently scrutinizes the effect of patriarchy on medical matters, on generational inheritance, of the fiscal and mental fallout of motherhood.

“After all, ranking is merely an accident of birth.”

If you’re interested in reading about how lurid Victorian murders were and how they were portrayed and detailed by the media, I highly recommend Judith Flanders’s THE INVENTION OF MURDER (2011). It’s telling that baby farming is only allotted a handful of pages and not considered nearly as scandalous as other acts of the time!) ↩︎

FIVE LITTLE INDIANS (2020)

February 26, 2025

CONTENT WARNING

This post discusses trauma, including physical and sexual abuse.

I write a lot about media that tackles trauma because, well, artistic works have helped me realize and come to terms with a lot of my own trauma. It’s not a subject that you can easily broach with others and, often, something that is buried instead of confronted. The works that do reckon with trauma can be a provocation or a balm or both.

Michelle Good’s FIVE LITTLE INDIANS was certainly both for me.

FIVE LITTLE INDIANS scrutinizes five Indigenous youths who were forced into the same Canadian Indian residential school. If you’re unfamiliar with the practice, Canadian Indian residential school system was a program instituted by the Canadian government and overseen by church members. At the age of six, one is cut off from your parents and hauled off to a boarding school. You’re taught European and Christian ideals until you’re 16 years old. You’re then booted out, left to fend for yourself in an unforgiving world.

The intent was to indoctrinate and assimilate by whatever means deemed fit by their institutional headmasters. Instead it cut thousands off from their culture and heritage and ruined lives. This government-mandated cruelty lasted for over a century, well into the 1960s.

Good’s five Indians — Kenny, Maisie, Lucy, Howie and Clara — are have overlapping stints in the 1950s at the Mission School. All five of them are starved, humiliated, and suffer physical and sexual abuse from their overseers. Both Kenny and Howie manage to separately run away, whereas Maisie, Lucy and Clara serve all ten years.

All five of them, one way at one time or another, find their way to the slums of Downtown Eastern Vancouver and into each other’s lives, bound together by what they endured at the Mission.

While FIVE LITTLE INDIANS is specifically about the trauma inflicted by colonizers and how it was specifically enacted to bulldoze cultures, the ways the characters confront or cope or ignore their trauma are easy to identify with.

For example, take this exchange between Kenny and Lucy as they discuss reparations the government is preparing to make:

“They call us survivors.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think I survived. Do you?”

“I just don’t know. I’m so tired, Lucy.”

Kenny later states:

“Sometimes I think I did die, I’m just still walking around.”

Reading the two of them reflecting on the label of ‘survivor’ rattled me, as I’ve had the same exchange with my therapist when they have labeled as a ‘survivor’. The only difference? I stated that all I did was ‘continue to exist’. They responded:

“That’s surviving. A lot of people who have been through the same did not…”

That’s undeniably true, especially in FIVE LITTLE INDIANS, as all five of them have been affected by those who did not survive what the Mission had wrought. All five feel like they’ve survived nothing, that there’s no glory or satisfaction in having made it to another day.

Empathizing with the thoughts and sentiments expressed in FIVE LITTLE INDIANS is why I write about works that focus on lesser-discussed topics such as abuse and traumatic experiences. These topics that are rarely discussed outside of physical and mental health offices and are assumed to be verboten and off-limits, even to those closest to you. It may make others uncomfortable, it may make them view you differently, or you simply might feel that it’s unworthy of sharing.

All of the above are touched on in FIVE LITTLE INDIANS, as they don’t have any kind of template or guide to help them process what they’ve lived through. Similarly, the Canadian government is also struggling with addressing the abuse these people endured. Mostly, it’s financial reparations, but also through acknowledgement that these acts occurred and that these acts were acts of cruelty and abuse and physically and mentally devastated so many.

It’s this recognition, not just in the past by those who have lived it, those who have inflicted it, those who were complicit in it, and Good for weaving this tale to bring attention not just to the acts, but the acts and the fallout, that is so important.

The power of words, of phrasing, of articulating, of airing these matters — both personal and sociopolitical — can help to heal, even if it hurts at first. Some may say it can bring closure. Frankly, I don’t believe that; for many reasons I know I’ll never have closure for the acts done to me, despite finally confronting it. It’ll always be there; so much of who I am, how I interact — or fail to interact — is entangled with that history that … there is no hope for closure, but that isn’t the point — that isn’t the endgame — of acknowledgement and recognition of abuse, neglect, and exploitation.

This may come across as rudimentary or obvious but reading stories like these, fiction centered around fact — be it historical events or simply lived experience woven into a tale — can elicit awareness in a number of a ways, from those who have experienced it, those who can empathize, those who can sympathize, those who can relate, and those who were previously oblivious.

FIVE LITTLE INDIANS works on all of the levels while also unfurling an engrossing multi-generational arc of nuanced characters. It might be a book you can read for some insight on the crimes of the past, or it might be something that’ll open your eyes to events others may have endured, or it might trigger you, or it might make you feel slightly less alone in the world, it may help someone talk to you or to talk to others about trauma, or maybe it’ll do all of the above as it did for me.

FIVE LITTLE INDIANS is available through Bookshop. Support indie bookstores!

ASSASSIN’S CREED: MIRAGE (2023)

January 8, 2024

15 years of playing as assassins. We’re at the point where Ubisoft’s ASSASSIN’S CREED franchise is old enough that folks who grew up with the series are now the ones designing the series. Perhaps that’s why ASSASSIN’S CREED: MIRAGE (MIRAGE going forth) is such a throwback to the first game.

MIRAGE is more concerned with recreating the past, of hiding in shadows, of killing silently instead of taking on hordes of enemies to the tune of bonus points and combos. In other words: it’s cribbing from ASSASSIN’S CREED 1.

MIRAGE has no interest in the convoluted absurdity of modern technology/game developer company Abstergo. There’s no mention of this being a virtual reality recreation, throwing someone in current times to relive the past. The Abstergo Animus tech never quite appears — except in one clever moment near the end — and you’re simply roaming around Baghdad around the time of the Islamic Golden Age. Yes, The Order — the nefarious group of corrupt individuals whose terrible deeds have persisted throughout the entire series — still exists, as obviously the Hidden Ones (basically: the Assassins), however this is a far more grounded work.

The story is mostly boilerplate, at least until it isn’t: Basim and his bestie Nehal are destitute thieves until Basim finds a higher calling in the Hidden Ones. Basim is haunted in his dreams by a daunting and dark djinni, and hopes that by joining the Hidden Ones he’ll be rid of it. Matters escalate, wildly by the end, tying into some very mythic and outlandish events in the prior game, ASSASSIN’S CREED: VALHALLA.

All of that said, the story is rather banal, especially the yawn-worthy high-concept swings at the end. The gameplay and scenery is paramount here, all sand and stone and beams and air. It’s rather gorgeous, even if it’s not quite what one would call a technical marvel.

However, my favorite part here is the history the game imparts. For a number of years, the ASSASSIN’S CREED franchise has included historic details into their games, even adding educational free modes for schools. Previously, most of them felt facile, even insultingly irreverent. (One game featured a far-too-jovial character who would dictate the history of the era to you, and it felt like a 12-year-old telling you about a book they read that they didn’t quite comprehend.)

That’s not the case with MIRAGE. MIRAGE doesn’t quite put learning as a top priority but they do foreground it. It feels as if you’re reading a history book instead of text in a murder simulation. It quickly became my favorite facet of the game because I’m a big nerd. I do not know much about Baghdad or Middle Eastern history, much less the Islamic Golden Age but I found all of it fascinating and I quickly sought out every historical point I could. That’s what the ASSASSIN’S CREED games excel at: showcasing history, the lands, the environments and, especially, the architecture.

MIRAGE doesn’t come close to the emotionally evocative storied characters of my favorite ASSASSIN’S CREED game, ASSASSIN’S CREED: ORIGINS, but it does feel substantial even if it’s far smaller-scale and less boisterous and less action-oriented than the recent games.

FROM HELL (1999-ish)

June 22, 2023

Dovetailing with the prior post about Julia Wertz’s TENEMENTS, TOWERS & TRASH, here’s Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell’s vastly detailed exploration of late-19th century London through the eyes of detectives, prostitutes, and one serial killer.

I’m not going to lie: I have been to Whitechapel. I’ve attended one of the many Ripper tours. I’m really not into that sort of thing — true crime doesn’t hold much of an allure for me — but I’ve found off-beat tours are often the best ways to discover the delights of an unfamiliar land. (If you’re ever in New Orleans, definitely indulge yourself in one of their many tours, especially those that feature cemeteries!)

FROM HELL is an astounding achievement. As Alan Moore often does, he manages to intertwine the personal with the political, the social, and the spiritual. While FROM HELL is, at the heart of it, a tale of a disturbed person who murdered more than a few prostitutes and also about those tasked to attempt to bring him to justice, it’s mostly about London itself.

I first read FROM HELL while in London — I still have a copy of the map I picked up at the Imperial War Museum that I used as a bookmark — and I cannot recommend a better guidebook to the city apart from an A-to-Zed map. It made me understand and see and pay attention to the city so much more than I would have without it. It imbues so much with Campbell’s visual details and focus on landmarks, often without calling it out in the text itself.

One major example is their detailing of Cleopatra’s Needle, which plays a bit of a role in the book, and whose significance would have mostly been lost on me if I hadn’t read this graphic novel.

Like I said with TENEMENTS, TOWERS & TRASH, illustrated works are astounding guiding compasses when you’re on unknown soil or concrete. Rick Steves is great and all, but if you’re a misfit, if you bristle at being called a tourist, these are the roadmaps you’re looking for.

I’ll note that there is a FROM HELL COMPANION, which is a deep dive into, well, FROM HELL, from both Moore and Campbell. It’s informative, but it is mostly text and copies of scripts and I find the original work to be a better guide; the companion sketches more into it, but will not help you navigate the city.

(Lastly: skip the film.)

CUNK ON EARTH (2022)

April 18, 2023

(Netflix) Back when I was a pre-teen, I had a casual friend who absolutely knew how to make me laugh. The jokes were puerile — again, I was a youth and he was slightly older — but he told them in such a rapid-fire way that within a few minutes I was doubled-over in laughter, absolutely rolling on the ground, covered in dirt.

Again, they weren’t good jokes, but they endlessly built up, which actually served to be more memorable in the long run. (One tries to forget that too much laughter literally inflicts pain — which causes a perverse feedback loop for me — but you don’t. Not really.)

Over the years, I’ve found that sort of comedy to be more of an enigma than anything else. THE JERK accomplished it, for sure — one of the greatest times of my life was seeing it at Los Angeles’ TCL and being tongue-tied meeting Carl Reiner. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, well, the first two seasons at least. It’s more of a vaudevillian sense of humor — make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh! (to quote SINGING IN THE RAIN) — but when that work is firing on all cylinders, it’s like nothing else. To be crass: it culminates to a mind-blowing comedic orgasm that you shakily walk away from.

And now we have CUNK ON EARTH, the latest from Charlie Brooker (BRASS EYE, and oh, a little dystopian show named BLACK MIRROR you may have heard of.) It’s basically ‘What if we had an insta-dumb Lucy Worsley navigating us through history?’ While the character has been around in Brooker’s WEEKLY WIPE and also featured in CUNK ON BRITAIN, this was my first exposure to her.

I’ll note: this is a very specific show. If you love the humor of Kate Beaton, if you love nerdy historical and literary comedy, if you’ve even entertained the idea of watching BLACKADDER, this show will come close to pleasurely killing you. The joke ratio is off of the fucking charts. Not a single word or glance or motion is wasted and, even better, it all builds up to character lore. It’s amazing — if you’re a nerd.

I had to cut myself off after three episodes, at least for the time being. I love to laugh, but I was laughing far too much. That said, I can’t think of a better way to endorse a series than ‘I watched it until it made my sides ache and then bleed.’ It’s a brilliant work, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Also, as someone with several prominent moles, I love how she rocks hers.

GOOD TIME PARTY GIRL (1966)

June 19, 2022

GOOD TIME PARTY GIRL is a self-reflexive work of sorts: penned by POPULAR HOME magazine editor Robert Dougherty, it’s a recounting of “The Notorious Life of Dirty Helen Cromwell”, straight from her mouth, according to Robert.

Dirty Helen Cromwell (Helen, from here on forth), was — for some time — a Milwaukee fixture from the Prohibition age. While she was reluctant to lay down roots anywhere, she did find a home in Milwaukee with her boozy outpost THE SUN FLOWER INN, which is where Robert first met Helen.

What follows is Robert jotting down Helen recalling a good forty years of ‘good times’ as a self-proclaimed ‘woman of pleasure’. In other words: a sex worker. There’s a moment where she wishes that the term ‘call girl’ was popular in her time.

The tales recalled in GOOD TIME PARTY GIRL are certainly those of a willful, self-possessed woman, one who isn’t a skin-flint, but values what remains in one’s pocket, while still living a remarkable life, one the that included all sorts of fashionable dovetailing, as well as shoulder-rubbing with Al Capone.

“My advice is not to accept initiations to these cruises if you aren’t prepared for certain eventualities.”

That’s about as dark as Helen deigned herself to deal with, but as one dives deeper into GOOD TIME PARTY GIRL and reads about the litany of dead husbands, and the brave face she plastered on, the harder the read becomes. This is a memoir/auto-bio where the absence of details are more damning than the inclusion; you can almost feel the hurt in certain eras of hers that she glosses over, ambiguous hurt that hits harder than when she discusses the death of one of her several husbands.

That said, yes, you do have to read in-between the lines for that. Otherwise, it’s a bold, brash tale of a bold and brash and gregariously singular woman who made her place in Milwaukee. That alone is reason enough to read her tale.

Purchase: https://feralhouse.com/good-time-party-girl/

LIZZIE: THE MUSICAL (2010+)

October 15, 2021

(Theatre/YouTube) Another theatre production, but this one is far more accessible, as there’s an original cast album and a number of clips and performances available on YouTube. As you might surmise from the title, it’s a rock opera with a different take on the legend of Lizzie Borden, authored by Steven Cheslik-deMeyer, Tim Maner, and Alan Stevens Hewitt. The official website describes it as so:

“LIZZIE is four women fronting a six-piece rock band.

“LIZZIE is Rage! Sex! Betrayal! BLOODY MURDER!

“LIZZIE is American mythology set to a blistering rock score with a sound owing less to Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber than to BIKINI KILL, the RUNAWAYS, and HEART.”

So, yeah, that ticks all of my boxes, and hopefully yours too.

The production I saw was executed by Chicago’s Firebrand Theatre who are an “equity musical theatre company committed to employing and empowering women on and off the stage” and it was a goddamn blast. I can’t wait to see another of their offerings, but definitely jump at the chance to catch any production of it, if it hits your area.

HOUSE OF BORDEN (one of my favorite renditions of my favorite number, but I’m not sure why they had one of them play two parts):

What may be my new favorite YouTube theatre trailer, for what looks to have been a brilliant Canadian production (although it does untether the actors from their mics, which is not in line with prior productions):

Lastly, every time I rediscover this musical, I can’t help but endlessly re-listen to it.

THE DROWNING GIRLS (2008+)

October 14, 2021

(Theatre) I rarely write about theatre because it’s so niche, privileged (as in: expensive and caters to those who can afford it) and ephemeral, but this piece has stuck with me. THE DROWNING GIRLS is a stageplay from Canadian playwrights Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson, and Daniela Vlaskalic, based on the actions of real-life Victorian George Joseph Smith who drowns three older women he recently married in their bathtub, mostly for profit and, probably also: sadism. In other words: a cautionary ghost short for the women in the audience, just like so many horror tales.

While most of the productions follow the same simple staging — three bathtubs, three women in nightgowns, mostly soaking wet for 70 minutes straight — I’m sure they all vacillate wildly in tone. (After all, that’s one of the fascinating parts about theatre.) The production I saw was helmed by Madeline Keller and was stunning and powerful and vengeful.

No matter the production, I think it’s interesting enough to chance it.

GOTHIC (1986)

June 28, 2021

(Plex/tubi/VOD/Vudu) This is the predictable final entry in a three-part series of recommendations regarding films about Mary Shelley. It is, of course, Ken Russell’s GOTHIC (1985). Again, I’m no Mary Shelley scholar, and — given this final entry — it should be obvious that I have no interest in discussing the veracity of the portrayal of these real-life persons. (I simply don’t have the knowledge, but I don’t begrudge those that do.)

While GOTHIC is, on the surface, about the storytelling night between Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire, it’s primarily concerned with Mary and her life and her way of coping with this foursome, which becomes heightened via what one surmises is a fever dream.

GOTHIC is essentially fan-fiction, occasionally slash-fiction and, surprisingly, posits Mary as, for all intents and purposes, the Final Girl, with Lord Byron being the executor of the madness they endure. (Or not; there are many ways you can read it, but that’s my interpretation.)

There’s a lot to unpack in this film, far more than I can do justice to in a simple post, so I’ll just note a few highlights and leave it at that:

As usual, Russell has a ton of visual anachronisms, one of the boldest being the hexagonal ceiling molding designs, which are then mirrored when Mary finds herself as a prisoner.
It portrays Mary as someone who doesn’t buy into Percy’s ‘free love’, and touches on her problematic pregnancies.
I just happened to be going about this three-part project as I was reading MEN, WOMEN, AND CHAIN SAWS, which spends a significant amount of time talking about horror films’ handling of eyes, then Percy seeing nipples as eyes, which MEN, WOMEN, AND CHAIN SAWS author Carol J. Clover touches on regarding the feminine masochism viewing perspective, and yeah, there’s not more perfect film for that than this.
I’ll also note: I first saw this film at what I think is absolutely the perfect time in one’s life, in my mid-teens, thanks to my friend Chris, although I do know I spent a lot of time staring at the LaserDisc cover well before actually watching the film. I hadn’t re-watched it until today. It is far crazier and hornier than I remember, and I can’t believe we got away with watching it while his parents were away.

My friend Mark pointed out two other Mary Shelley films, both released in the late 80s, which I have yet to watch — there are DVDs available of both, but they can’t be streamed — that I hope to catch, and perhaps you may be interested in them as well:

ROWING WITH THE WIND (1988):

HAUNTED SUMMER (1988, which certainly backgrounds Mary, but is very much about her):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltoEFL4jcn0

And, of course, here’s the trailer:

MY BRILLIANT CAREER (1979)

May 13, 2021

(Criterion/HBO MAX/VOD) I previously recommended Gillian Armstrong’s OSCAR AND LUCINDA but, apart from her 1994 adaptation of LITTLE WOMEN, she’s perhaps best known for her first feature film MY BRILLIANT CAREER, an adaptation of Miles Franklin debut novel of the same name.

MY BRILLIANT CAREER stars Judy Davis (she’s been in everything from BARTON FINK to NAKED LUNCH to FEUD: BETTE AND JOAN) as Sybylla Melvyn, a rather immature, somewhat naive, headstrong young woman in late 19th century Australia who wants to create, to impress herself on the world, and certainly doesn’t settle for simply getting married and settling down, even when she finds herself enamored with Harry Beecham (Sam Neill in one of his earliest film appearances).

MY BRILLIANT CAREER was released midway through the Australian New Wave film movement and, while it’s Armstrong’s first feature, it’s a remarkably well-executed film — she clearly knew what she wanted to do with it — and Donald McAlpine’s involvement as cinematographer lends a rustic, but striking atmosphere to the film, ably switching from pristine upper-class interiors to dust-enveloped farms.

Yes, Sybylla can be a bit much and maddening at times, but her journey is a worthwhile and rewarding one, without being treacly.