SATANIC PANIC: POP-CULTURAL PARANOIA IN THE 1980s (2016)

October 1, 2022

Since this is the world we live in, the thick of 2022, and apparently people aren’t terribly familiar with the Satanic Panic but there seems to be quite a bit of discussion concerning it as of late, I will direct your attention to the FAB Press essay collection SATANIC PANIC: POP-CULTURAL PARANOIA IN THE 1980s.

If you are too young to be familiar with the Satanic Panic: it was a period of time during the 1980s where suburban institutions insisted that the ills of culture were due to teens being wooed to devil worship via media and coercion. At the time, it was inescapable. The scare permeated all of commentary and political culture which, as you can imagine, resulted in the Streisand Effect, boosting anything and everything, having a reverb effect on all artistic endeavors.

FAB’s SATANIC PANIC is an expertly curated collection of scrutinies of life during that time, one that ranges the gamut from what you’d expect: D&D, cartoons, metal and MTV, to forgotten culture like the wall-to-wall lies of the memory recovery of Michelle in the book MICHELLE REMEMBERS as well as HBO’s INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL. It also looks at Satanic Panic beyond the US, including the UK and Quebec and Australia.

It’s an extraordinarily comprehensive look at the irrational pop culture paranoia of Satanism at the time, all wrapped up in an immaculately attractive package.

You can wrangle your own copy at:

https://www.fabpress.com/satanic-panic-paperback.html

SEE HOW THEY RUN (2022)

September 27, 2022

I am an unabashed Agatha Christie fan. I’ve read every Christie-penned Poirot novel. I’ve seen a live rendition of THE MOUSETRAP, albeit, not in London’s West End (although, not for want of trying). I’ve spent many hours watching adaptations of hers, partially because I’m simply fascinated with how folks adapt her works.

Folks nitpick her, saying she’s a sloppy storyteller, which due to possible Alzheimers, that’s fair concerning some of her later works, but when she was at the top of her game she was endlessly inventive, and constantly challenging herself and her readers.

I can’t say that SEE HOW THEY RUN is as ambitious as Christie’s best works, such as THE A.B.C. MURDERS or THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD or AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. However, it is slightly more ambitious than the Christie work it’s riffing on, THE MOUSETRAP, which is a very thin, very perfunctory murder mystery radio play — originally named THREE BLIND MICE, as Christie loves utilizing nursery rhymes and schoolyard songs — that Christie adapted into a short story. It then became the longest running theatrical play in history; perfect for dinner theatre, but not much else.

Famously, Christie sold off the film rights with the caveat that production could start shortly after the West End play closed. It’s still playing there to this day.

Instead of creating an adaptation of THE MOUSETRAP, SEE HOW THEY RUN is a meta-version of THE MOUSETRAP, where the murder mystery takes place during a production of THE MOUSETRAP. Not the cleverest conceit, but it’s serviceable enough to bring in a game — albeit underutilized — cast, which includes short-lived Adrian Brody, Sam Rockwell as the inspector, and the highlight of the film, Saoirse Ronan as the delightfully winsome Constable Stalker.

Frankly, I just want an entire series about Constable Stalker, and Saoirse’s endless enthusiasm practically sells the film in-and-of-itself.

That said, SEE HOW THEY RUN also has some stellar production design and camera work, and comes together far better than, say, Branagh’s tragedy of DEATH ON THE NILE, although it is a bit too tidy.

I can’t say this film will please everyone, but if you’re into Christie, it fits the playbill.

SHE-HULK: ATTORNEY AT LAW (2022)

September 24, 2022

(Disney+) John Byrne’s SHE-HULK run absolutely blew my mind when it was initially published, and was particularly formative for me. It was one of those rare times where you encounter a work that opens your eyes, that makes you say: “Wait, you can do that?” It was unlike any Marvel comic I’d previously read; it focused more on Jen reconciling her personas and how she presented herself to the world, and repeatedly broke the fourth wall in smart, funny, sexy ways. There’s one moment early on in his run where She-Hulk literally tears through the page and traverses through a comic book buyer guide, and it was littered with in-jokes which still feels fresh even today (even if most young comic book readers wouldn’t know what a comic book buyer guide is).

My main qualm with most Marvel film/TV works is: it feels like they’re trying to re-invent the wheel, instead of working off and improving on prior narrative formats. With the exception of THOR: RAGNAROCK, they all feel extraordinarily clumsy to me, even WANDAVISION, an extended meta-riff on the history of TV that -should- know how to handle TV tropes, often felt like folks writing off of Cliffnotes.

SHE-HULK: ATTORNEY AT LAW feels like Marvel’s stab at ALLY MCBEAL. That’s not a complaint at all, as ALLY MCBEAL doesn’t get enough credit for being a 90s version of THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW and, you know what? We don’t have enough of those shows. It’s fun, quippy, but also often confronts the issue of being a single woman navigating a male-centric workplace, and nothing has changed.

So, while I do gripe a bit to myself about Disney+’s SHE-HULK: ATTORNEY AT LAW not being as much fun as it could be, not as inventive as it could be — after all, I doubt we’ll get a scene where she bursts through the Disney+ interface — I do sincerely love it. Every Wednesday I wish it were Thursday because I could really use the lift it provides halfway through my week. Do I wish they had dispensed with the CGI and just put Tatiana Maslany in green and lifts, because she can do anything? Yes, yes I do, and the CGI is distracting, and also: she could have retained her curls, because She-Hulk is unbridled. However, I will take what I can get, because it’s a thoughtful and comedic take on a somewhat horrific turn in life, and we need more of that in our cultural diet.

TRASH, ART, AND THE MOVIES (1969)

September 13, 2022

Pauline Kael’s TRASH, ART, AND THE MOVIES is an essay I want to hand out to everyone.

Kael simmers about being bored with films, about how she luxuriates in the garbage nowadays as opposed to the ‘prestige’ pictures, such as 2001 (a film she deftly eviscerates, an unpopular opinion around here, but one I respect given how she backs it up).

Ultimately, it’s Kael saying: stop trying to preach, give me something new, something interesting, take big swings! Trash with a glint of charm is far more intriguing than most art, and stop pawning off all film as art, because so many works are born of a simple consumerist need.

It’s a timeless piece, one that holds up over fifty years later, one that is still provocative.

Instead of blathering on about it, I’ll simply send you along to read her words. The entirety of TRASH, ART, AND THE MOVIES is available here:

https://genius.com/Pauline-kael-trash-art-and-the-movies-i-annotated

Or in her third collection of film reviews and essays, GOING STEADY: FILM WRITINGS 1968-1969:

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780714529769

Or if you have a HARPER’S MAGAZINE subscription, you can read it here:

https://harpers.org/archive/1969/02/trash-art-and-the-movies/

WHY KEEP BOOKS? (2022)

September 10, 2022

Again, deviating from the norm here to egg you on to read the New York Times piece ‘How Many Books Does It Take to Make a Place Feel Like Home?’ (Hey, essays and articles count as media, and this is an article worth reading!)

Whenever my wife and I have searched for a new place to live we’ve told the agent: “It has to have a lot of wall space. We have a lot of shelves.”

We currently live in a standard-size condo carved out of a 1890s Chicago house, so it’s not extremely spacious. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any free wall space not taken up by shelves or other furniture. In fact, we refer to our front room as ‘the library’, even though media shelves wrap around the rest of the condo.

So, when we read this article, we started guessing at how many books we have, whether we’d have the 1,000 to be ‘book-wrapt’ (a phrase I promise you I will never type again). At first guess, I thought I might have around 400 books. Then I did a rough count and it turned out to be around 1200. (Obviously, I suck at carnival games.)

Coincidentally, I’m in the process of whittling down my collection, something I do every few years. I realize some consider that blasphemy, as in: “Every book I buy is a book I want to keep!” That’s a nice thought, but I change over time, and I also receive a number of books I simply have no interest in. Also, I am simply running out of space. (I’ve included a photo above, which should speak for itself. The boxes in the lower left are for books to donate, as well as books to put into storage.)

I realize not everyone feels the same way I do. Some folks move a lot, or they don’t have the space or the inclination to cultivate their own home library. Hell, I even know writers who keep very barren bookshelves. However, not a day goes by where I don’t peruse my stacks, looking for a quote or a fact or a bit of prose that I think I may be misremembering, and I know that our place would feel incomplete without our homegrown library.

ON USED BOOKS (2022)

September 9, 2022

If you’re a writer, or just a casual reader, the essay “What Working at a Used Bookstore Taught Me About Literary Rejection” by Carl Lavigne is an insightful look at how people seek material to read, and the ennui of confronting reams of books that have been discarded.

At one point in the essay, he notes that the bookstore he works at stocked a signed copy of his friend’s novel. Carl brought the book back home, afraid of the repercussions that would occur if his friend would see that that unread book on the shelf.

I trawl through used bookstores all the time — usually picking up books from authors I’ve never heard of but appear intriguing — and often find that I’ve inadvertently purchased a signed copy. In fact, the book I’m currently reading — I won’t name it — was signed to a friend of the author who had invited them to a writer’s colony that, presumably, they used to work on the novel. Like Carl, I thought: “Maybe the friend died. Maybe they had a falling out. Maybe the friend loaned it to someone, never got it back, and the loanee sent it along. Maybe it was simply an unwanted copy.”

Every writer wants a physical copy of their work to be cherished, especially if it’s a copy you took the time to sign.

MAGGIE (2022)

September 6, 2022

(Hulu) Within the first ten minutes of Hulu’s MAGGIE I thought: “Oh, the jokes are smart! And there’s SUPERSTORE’s Nichole Sakura! This feels pretty cozy and winsome, albeit a bit basic.”

As if in response, the show then started laying into folks named “Glenn with two N’s” which, if you haven’t read the About section of this site, is my first name. I did not react well:

“Well fuck you too, show. I didn’t want to like you in the first place.”

(I’ve had a hard past few months and had hoped this would be a slice of escapism, but apparently not!)

That said, I didn’t turn it off in anger, but let it wash over me and I’m glad I did because this rom-com has a quick wit and is far deeper than it may first appear to be.

MAGGIE, created by LIFE IN PIECES co-creator Justin Adler and alum Maggie Mull, centers around the titular Maggie (Rebecca Rittenhouse), a 30-something who has been psychic her entire life; she sees her visions via touch. It took a long time for her father, Jack (Chris Elliot) and mother Maria (Kerri Kenney) — those are some quality gets, folks — to believe that she truly could see the future, but they finally accept her, and she currently resides in half of the bungalow her parents own.

While her parents may have been skeptics during Maggie’s youth, her best friend Louise (the previously mentioned Nichole Sakura) was mostly there for her through high school, at least when she wasn’t studying night-and-day to get into med school.

In the first episode, Maggie is giving psychic readings at a party and one of the partygoers, Ben (David Del Rio), takes a shining to her, asks for a reading. Maggie obliges and sees a vision of herself marrying him, gets frightened and runs off.

The next night, while consoling Louise after a bad date, she runs into Ben, and Louise eggs her on to roll with it and Maggie does, right into bed with him.

The morning after, as Ben makes breakfast for her, Maggie sees another vision of him marrying someone else, and she rushes out.

Fast-forward a bit. Louise and Maggie are heading back to Maggie’s bungalow and they run into Ben. He explains that he and his on-again-off-again girlfriend Jessie (Chloe Bridges) are moving into the same bungalow as Maggie’s. Along the way, we meet Ben’s off-kilter sister Amy (UNDONE’s Angelique Cabral), who got married to people-pleasing partner Dave (WESTWORLD’s Leonardo Nam) at Burning Man.

The first half of the season is primarily concerned with Maggie and her love life in a way that recalls GILMORE GIRLS (Maggie :: Lorelai, Ben :: Luke) and, like GILMORE GIRLS, Maggie gets involved with bearded Daniel who is basically Max Medina in this situation, and it feels very formulaic, albeit with wildly vacillating tones; one ep in particular feels like a 90s three-camera sitcom.

Then the second half of the season kicks in and the show snaps into view. You realize that the psychic gimmick meant to individuate the show is essentially a stand-in for neurodivergent brains. The show fully leans into that and matters turns serious, without dialing down the jokes.

Without spoiling much, there is one moment where Maggie realizes that an important person in her life doesn’t believe that she is psychic, and she is absolutely crushed. It’s not just that she doesn’t feel seen, it’s not just that she feels this person doesn’t believe her, it’s not just that this person is utterly dismissive towards this foundational aspect of herself and her history, it’s also that she — an actual psychic — is blindsided by the news.

Anyone who lives with any kind of invisible issues can identify with the fear that you won’t be understood or believed. MAGGIE’s writers know it, and they are fully putting it on display.

One more example, although this has major spoilers for Episode 11 – ‘You Will Experience a Loss’:

Spoiler

Maggie is at a bachelorette party. She’s had an abnormal number of visions all day and immediately feels like she shouldn’t be there, feeling extra-sensitive. Nonetheless, she’s dragged onto the dance floor and bounced around like a pinball. As she pings off each tightly packed partygoer, every hit induces a vision until her world goes white, as if a flashbang has gone off in front of her. When her sight returns, she immediately grabs Louise and demands to ‘read’ her:

“What happened to no readings for friends?”

“NOW!”

Maggie drags her from the dance floor and presses Louise’s hands.

“What do you see?”

“…nothing.”

Yes, the classic ‘powerless’ trope. While this is a tried-and-true superhero trope — for the first half of the season I mused to myself: you could have saved yourself so much trouble if you’d learn from X-MEN’s Rogue and just wear a thick pair of long sleeve leather gloves — it’s surprising to see the device deployed in a rom-com.

The rest of the season deals with the fallout of her loss of her mystic foresight, of her grappling with being normal, of no longer being the one looked to for answers, to problem solve, to shoulder it all, while lamenting the perks of being psychic.

[collapse]

While the show tackles mental matters in a surprisingly far more interesting way than most, it does have a number of issues, such as the shifting tone, spotty ground rules of Maggie’s abilities, and the fact that Maggie’s voracious Black psychic mentor self-named Angel (DON’T TRUST THE B— IN APT. 23’s Ray Ford) seems to be the sole queer representation on the show.* While Ford knows how to calibrate his performance, this approach feels very dated, and hard to overlook.

If there’s a second season — and that’s a big if — I could see this show really coming together and become something special. The end of the first season raises more questions than it answers, and exploring the potentials of its mysticism could open up a whole new world.

  • It’s possible that there are passing mentions regarding other characters, but if so, I missed them or they weren’t prominent enough to count.

UPDATE

Sadly, the show has been canceled and essentially scrubbed from the interwebs due to Disney and their ownership of Hulu. There’s no legal way to watch, but I’m sure y’all are resourceful, right?

HARLEY QUINN (2019-)

August 27, 2022

(HBO MAX) Despite being a pretty hardcore comic book nerd as a youth — I still have the long boxes to prove it — I never quite embraced comic book movies or TV. Apart from the occasional oddity like MYSTERY MEN or BIRDS OF PREY or THE SUICIDE SQUAD or LOKI or that one trauma-laden flashback episode of WANDAVISION, they’re rarely as weird or imaginative enough to keep my interest.

I’ve previously stated that I stayed away from comics for years because I thought they were just endless stories of people punching each other and, while I eventually found comics that consisted of something more that endless fight scenes — or at least used the fight sequences to communicate something larger — most of the MCU and DCU works consist solely of sexless, soulless, dull rope-a-dope tropes that exist solely to prop up future films; all sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Sorry, Will.)

This lead me to initially punt on the animated DC TV show HARLEY QUINN. Sure, BIRDS OF PREY was a sparky lark, and I ate up BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES when it aired waaaay back in the day, but I assumed HARLEY QUINN would be just as defanged as most of its film brethren.

How wrong I was.

I don’t know how the fuck this show got made, but it’s such a filthy delight. The pilot itself is a marvel of a mission statement: it scrutinizes the toxic relationship between Harley and The Joker, sees her free herself from him (kind of) and discovers a new found family of D-list villains, including who I know to be her one-true-love, Poison Ivy.

It’s kinetic, it’s weird, it runs a mile a minute, it’s extraordinarily punk, and it’s unapologetically smutty but it’s always in service of the story. It’s an encapsulation of being liberated from live-action. It fully leans into all of the potential of animation, which given that most comic book movies nowadays are essentially an array of CGI sequences, you think there’d be more experimentation, but nope!

It also, just like LOKI, acknowledges that the characters are smart but completely askew. It literally features the following exchange from Harley to herself:

“Ooooh. You’re smart.”

“I know. I’m you.”

It ticks all of my boxes, and I haven’t even finished watching the first season yet. (So far, there are three seasons. I would not be surprised if HBO MAX shelved it, which is why I finally pulled the pin on watching it.)

Now, a few choice quotes:

JOKER: “You know she has HPV?”

BANE: “Most sexually active adults do.”

POISON IVY: “That potion makes people fall in love with me, and then kills them.”

KITEMAN: “Whaaat?”

POISON IVY: “YES! What did you think, you kite-fucking-freak? My name is Poison… Ivy!”

KITEMAN: “This is why I stick with the kites. So simple.”

“I hate you, dad.”

“I hate you, too, son.”

HARLEY: “This is so fucked up, but weirdly moving.”

(Plays far better here than it did in FLASHFORWARD!)

HARLEY to IVY: “I can’t listen to ya when you’re dressed like a 40s housewife who is fucking her husband’s boss.”

“You are truly the Shakespeare of the sea!”

AQUAMAN: “I prefer to think of myself as the Dickens of the deep!”

HARLEY: “Oh, I did it! Although no one said I could run a crew!”

IVY: “What? Hello? Hi. I said you could run a crew.”

HARLEY: “Yeah, but you’re my friend, I mean, come on, it’s like when your mom says you’re the prettiest girl in school.”

KING SHARK: “That’s what my mom said!”

HARLEY: “I just tried to touch myself! That is a stripper rule!”

To cap it all off, it has a banger of an intro/outro, one that I always have to fucking keep HBO MAX from skipping over because you can’t fucking prevent auto-play with HBO MAX.

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

I haven’t even touched on the amazing voice acting! Lake fucking Bell! Ron Funches! Kaley Cuoco! Alan Tudyk! Christopher Meloni! J.B. Smoove! Jim Rash! Tony Hale! Jason Alexander! It is an embarrassment of riches!

This show brings me so much joy at a time in my life when I’ve desperately needed it — although it is worth nothing that S01E05 deals with trauma-centric disassociation that is not fun if you’ve lived through it, but is still excellently well-played. And if you have lived through it, well, you’ll feel seen.

BETTER CALL SAUL Season Six (2022)

August 23, 2022

Warning: spoilers ahead!

There’s a lot to unpack about the final season of BETTER CALL SAUL, so much so that one can almost forget about the foundation of the character of Saul Goodman and his issues with his brother, one of the best slow-burns I’ve ever seen on TV.

However, I want to call attention to one facet that I haven’t read much about: Kim’s shift. Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) was always the heart and soul of the show, a brilliant workaholic who always wanted to do good, but was often drawn towards the thrill of darker places, towards the power she could enact through her smarts and her voice and brazen, bold blonde ponytail.

However, at the end of the series she goes brunette, trades her signature ponytail for bangs, and is now in a relationship with the most milquetoast dude in the world. That’s not the worst of it, though: she has relinquished command of her voice.

“Maybe?”

“I don’t know?”

“Perhaps?”

Past Kim was always declarative, decisive, but after seeing what her voice had wrought — the inadvertent death of Howard — she obviously made a conscious decision to stop using her coercive powers. Instead, she mutters indecisively or stuffs bland tuna fish sandwiches into her mouth. She even re-edits her own dull ad-copy on the website of the sprinkler supply company website she oversees.

What I have always loved about Kim is: she’s smart. She’s far smarter than Jimmy/Saul. Jimmy was the clever enabler, the slick man that made it fun for her to do bad things, and she finds that she loves to manipulate, loves toying with people, especially those she’s felt wronged by (and by simply being a woman in America, that list is very long).

By the end of BETTER CALL SAUL, we see her afraid of her own voice, her potential, her command, afraid of what she has wrought, afraid of what she’s capable of. She feels guilt, shame, but is still restless. We finally see her volunteer at a local legal non-profit, silently shuffling papers, a bit of a callback to her prior legal work. We see her telling her story, the events that lead to Howard’s death, through printed words, entirely unspoken but plain on the page.

Kim gets it. At the end of the day, it’s all about communication. And she checks out of it and checks into a life that doesn’t require it, for better or for worse.

MADE FOR LOVE SEASON TWO (2022)

August 8, 2022

(HBO MAX, for now) I’ve written about MADE FOR LOVE twice before — first concerning the initial HBO season and second regarding the original novel. Now I’m writing about the second and, sadly, final HBO season so, this will probably be the last time I’ll write about it.

Both the initial novel and the first HBO season dialed in on a very sloppy woman named Hazel who routinely made bad decisions and rarely thought about or regretted them, which lead to the trauma of being a woman escaping from a technological bubble created by Byron Gogol, an obsessive man’s technological spider-web. She ultimately gets roped back into the bubble — The Hub — but MADE FOR LOVE’s second season is a tad more flip, far more darkly comic, albeit at the cost of a lack of focus.

While the end of the first season of MADE FOR LOVE aptly set the stage for a second season — going against the grain of its source material, I’ll add — the second season feels like a wild swing for the fences; it tackles a number of wide-eyed high-concepts in ways that recalls cyberpunk classic MAX HEADROOM while still hewing close to its character study of Hazel’s difficult relationship with her father, how she can course-correct her life, and ultimately find a better version of her self.

There are times when the season feels rushed, however there are also a number of subplots and character arcs that feel tantalizing but sputter out — especially the reintroduction of Zelda, the dolphin that aided Hazel’s escape in season one. However, the highs exceed the lows — this season ventures into batshit-crazy territory and completely exploit the universe. I wish I could say why without spoiling matters.

Season two bites off more than it can chew, certainly, but goddamn it is an aspirational piece of high-concept work that utilizes tech and humanity in ways that feels revitalizing.