Culture

The Real Macbeth

Based on Macbeth: High King of Scotland 1040-57 AD by Peter Berresford Ellis, Frederick Muller Limited, 1980

Peter Berresford Ellis’ Macbeth is a short biography that debunks the version of the medieval Scottish king that we see in the famous Shakespeare play.

But Ellis defends Shakespeare himself, making it clear that the great playwright based his work on the only sources which were available to him in 17th-century London. It is mainly these sources which are to blame, not Shakespeare himself.

Ellis’ book goes right back to the earliest primary sources, the sagas and chronicles of the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland, of the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. Macbeth’s age, the mid-11th Century, was a fascinating time, obscured by a scarcity of sources, and it’s worth reading this book just to get a sense of the period.

Shakespeare does make an effort to populate his play with kerns and gallowglasses and other medieval Celtic trappings. But ‘cannons overcharged with double cracks’ intrude into an otherwise brilliant depiction of an early medieval battle (Act 1, Scene 2). Again and again (as we will see below) 17th-Century pathologies rear their heads.

This is one of the great things about Shakespeare. His flagrant anachronisms place his stories in, as Ellis says, a ‘never-never-world’ which makes it easy to apply them, to adapt them, to reset them in new contexts.

School textbooks today will all point out that the play is historically inaccurate. But they don’t go into much detail. Let’s go through it, act by act. By the way, this book was written over 40 years ago and I haven’t read much on Scottish history aside from this. This is all based on what I’ve read in this book and my previous readings on Celtic society. Many of the points below will tie in with Celtic Communism? a series I wrote last year.

From IMDB. Ian McKellen and Judi Dench star in Trevor Nunn’s 1978 minimalist film version of Macbeth, the best film version I have seen. Mandatory Credit: Photo by REX USA (95938a) IAN MCKELLEN AND JUDI DENCH Judi Dench actress Ian McKellen in play Macbeth

Act 1

Scene 1: The play opens with three witches. They are not in the contemporary and near-contemporary sources at all. The witch-burning craze was a 16th and 17th century phenomenon. These three characters appear as nymphs or goddesses in Shakespeare’s immediate sources. But Shakespeare knew his audience (his company’s patron King James, author of a book on witches titled Demonology).

Scene 2: We get a vivid description of bloody battles. Two rebel Scots, Macdonwald of the Western Isles and the Thane of Cawdor, assisted by the Norwegians, are making war on the good king Duncan. Duncan prevails thanks to the assistance of Macbeth.

In reality, this was a war between Duncan and his cousin Thorfinn, jarl of Orkney. Duncan was defeated, and Ellis believes that Macbeth probably fought against him, and caught him and killed him in the aftermath of the battle.

Scene 3: These titles – thane of Glamis, thane of Cawdor, etc – are all wrong. Macbeth was Mormaer of Moray – which was one of the highest positions in Scotland. Banquo, meanwhile, was invented later as a mythical ancestor for the family of King James. He’s another figure who does not appear in the early sources.

The king throws around titles as rewards: Thane of Cawdor, Prince of Cumberland. In the Gaelic political system, these positions were elective. Duncan, by the way, was High King and not King.

Lady Macbeth had a name – Gruoch – and a son by her previous marriage, Lulach, whom Macbeth treated as his own heir. The evil Lady Macbeth is really Shakespeare’s own invention. So none of the evil female characters were in the original sources.

In all of Duncan’s scenes, we see him using the royal ‘we’ and being showered with all kinds of toadying and extravagant flattery. I’m sure this was how kings behaved and were treated in Shakespeare’s day. But I would guess it was not the case in Celtic Scotland.

By the way, although they were cousins, Duncan’s family and Macbeth’s were mortal enemies going back generations. Someone, probably Duncan or his allies, slaughtered Macbeth’s father when Macbeth was a child. This elaborate flattery is therefore doubly inappropriate. The relations between these men should be tense.

Duncan and Macbeth were not just individuals but representatives of rival factions, rival kingdoms even: Moray and Atholl. Or Moireabh and Fótla, Donnchadha and Mac Beathadh– as Ellis reminds us, the people of Scotland spoke Gaelic at this time and for hundreds of years after.

Screenshot from Macbeth (dir Rupert Goold, 2010), another film version. This one imagines Macbeth as a Stalinist dictator.

Act 2

Throughout this Act, killing Duncan is treated as a sacrilege. It is ‘A breach in nature for ruin’s wasteful entrance.’ His blood is golden. His virtues will ‘cry out like angels, trumpet-tongued, against the deep damnation’ that is his murder. He is ‘the lord’s anointed temple.’

Gaelic Scotland, according to Ellis, would not have seen in that way. They had a duty to depose and kill defective kings. And the historical Duncan was an unsuccessful warmonger.

What would have been seen as sacrilege would be the murder of a guest. Ellis says it would have been impossible. This is because the rules around hospitality were so strong in Gaelic culture.

In Shakespeare’s text, Macbeth’s real crime is not that he killed a nice man – it’s that he killed a king. The Early Modern mind reels at the unthinkable sacrilege. Yet within a few decades of the first performance of this play, the English cut their king’s head off; I think Shakespeare protests too much, and his play manages to channel some of that cultural substance which would go on to flow powerfully into the English Revolution.

At the end, there is a little hint of elective kingship. The characters remark that ‘’tis most like the Sovereignty will fall upon Macbeth.’ But this is only the tiniest hint.

Act 3

Feudal imagery continues – barren crowns, fruitless sceptres. This imagery also suggests primogeniture, which was alien to Scotland at the time.

The play implies that a short time has passed since Macbeth was crowned. The significance of the banquet scene is that Macbeth’s authority and sanity are already starting to unravel. He has had no chance to enjoy being king.

But the historical Macbeth ruled in relative peace and stability for seventeen years. His reign was far longer than those of his immediate successor and predecessor.

The banquet scene is an absolutely brilliant moment in the play. But as we have noted, Banquo was not real.

Three strange figuresː Macbeth by Arthur Rackham, 1909 (Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb). Another memorable, iconic scene from the play which does not appear in the earliest sources.

Act 4

Macduff is another character who was probably invented hundreds of years later. As for the slaughter of his family, another invention.

Act 4 Scene 3 shows England as a wonderful utopia ruled by a saintly king, in contrast to Scotland where ‘new widows howl’ every morning.

In reality England at this time was torn by upheaval and conflict between Norman, Danish and Anglo-Saxon lords. Scotland only saw one internal revolt during the long years of Macbeth’s reign, and that was isolated and put down quickly. Funny, that! I thought primogeniture was supposed to bring stability.

There is a long conversation between Malcolm and Macduff, a tedious part in what is otherwise such a well-written play, where they catalogue exhaustively all the characteristics of a good monarch. As well as being slow, this is in fact a catalogue of anachronisms.

Act 5

In the final act an English army invades Scotland, supported by a universal revolt of the Scottish people ‘both high and low.’ The people have risen against Macbeth: ‘minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach.’ Macbeth is holed up in a fort, losing his mind, lashing out in madness or in ‘valiant fury.’ The enemy army marches on his fort disguised behind the boughs of trees. He fights to the last almost alone, his own side deserting him and refusing to strike the enemy. Then he is killed and his severed head is displayed.

How accurate is all this? Let’s start with the good (I’ll have to reach a little).

The depiction of the English-Danish Earl Siward is accurate, including the detail of him losing his son in the battle and his stoic reaction. Ellis goes further into this.

It’s also interesting that Malcolm makes his thanes into ‘earls, the first that ever Scotland in such an honour named’ and also promises to ‘reckon with your several loves and make us even with you.’ The first quote reflects how Malcolm, and more so his descendants, brought many English feudal customs to Scotland. The second quote is true in that he rewarded those who had helped him, including by giving large estates in Scotland to English invaders.

But the rest is fiction. Macbeth met Malcolm and Siward in the field (yes, probably near Birnam), and while he lost he survived, and inflicted heavy casualties. His enemies were so battered they could not follow up on their victory; Macbeth ruled for another three years! That deflates the ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech, doesn’t it? Ellis reckons Malcolm annexed Cumberland and Macbeth remained High King of Scotland. Three years later, Malcolm resumed the struggle and this time killed Macbeth and took the title of High King. Macbeth was buried with the full honours due to a High King on the holy island of Iona. This distinction was denied to Malcolm when he died.

But Malcolm’s descendants went on to rule Scotland for centuries. The myth of the evil Macbeth had to be invented in order to improve the image of Malcolm, a beggar prince and a foreign-backed usurper.

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How Dune gets away with it

When it was briefly mentioned on The Mindy Project, it was described as (something like) ‘That book that every guy loves for some reason.’ I read Dune at age 15. The years passed and I forgot some of the details of the story, but it held on in some remote sietch in the back of my mind, from which echoed phrases like Gom Jabbar, Muad’Dib, Kwisatz Haderach; mantras like ‘Fear is the mind-killer’ and ‘Who controls the spice controls the universe.’ The recent film captured some of that hypnotic power, and gave me an urge to visit that strange place again.

Re-reading it was a trip. Here are some things that struck me. In each case I was left wondering, ‘How does the novel get away with that?’

There is no scene of space travel in Dune. A chapter on planet Caladan ends; the next chapter begins with the characters literally unpacking their bags on planet Arrakis. The author Frank Herbert tells us that the Guild of Navigators have a monopoly on space travel, but he is not interested in exploring the technical details. He is more interested in the Guild as a political force. Therefore, unlike both of the movie versions, the space travel happens off-screen. It’s a bold move but it works. It brings focus to the story.

Below, a spice harvester. Above, one of many attempts to portray an ornithopter. From fontsinuse.com, as is the cover image.

Dune’s rich and strange world

In the early pages we are immersed in a kind of Renaissance space feudalism. It’s all nobles having conversations in palaces; it really shouldn’t be so interesting. I don’t think space capitalism, let alone space feudalism, is plausible. There are books I’ve abandoned because there were too many nobles, too many palaces. But somehow Dune gets away with it. It confronts us with a world that runs on its own rules, and doesn’t care what we think of it. Its people are medieval in outlook, and they don’t make any effort to relate to us on our terms. Not only do these people all do drugs, drugs are at the very the centre of their society. They have slaves, they hold entire planets as fiefs and some of them have psychic powers.

In short, Herbert doesn’t try to meet us half-way. We must either dismount from the great sandworm that is this book, and watch it slither away into the distance wondering to what fascinating places it might be going, or else cling to it stubbornly in spite of its efforts to shake us off.

By the way, I was converted to the idea of space feudalism being plausible. Humanity expanded across the stars, but suffered some kind of social and cultural catastrophe as a result. Their machines advanced to the point of being dangerous, so they waged war on the machines in the Butlerian Jihad. Feudalism didn’t bring humanity to the stars; humanity, having reached the stars through some advanced social system, reverted to feudalism, a feudalism modified with the remnants of the technology built up in ancient times.

Foreshadowing

But I wouldn’t have read on for long enough to care about the Butlerian Jihad unless the foreshadowing was laid on thick. The switches between different characters and their points of view, the dense undergrowth of exposition – these are not fashionable in sci-fi/ fantasy writing today. But  anyone who notices these unfashionable features and concludes that they are dealing with a clumsily-written book is mistaken.

When we ‘observe the plans within plans within plans’ we begin to wonder how these plans (within plans within plans) will work out. The story does not go from A to Z, from safety to danger. It goes from Y to Z, from less extreme danger to more extreme danger. We know the Harkonnens are going to attack. The Atreides know it. If they didn’t, the book and its sympathetic characters would be very irritating. We know Yueh is a traitor; if we didn’t, the revelation would be a pretty limp and predictable twist. We are not waiting to see if this Jenga tower will come down. We are waiting to see how.

While we are waiting for the Harkonnens to strike, we get sucked into the Duke’s administrative and political problems in a way that lulls and distracts us.

The writing and worldbuilding are open to criticism in places. I didn’t like how squeaky-clean and wholesome the Atreides were. ‘Good nobles’ vs ‘ bad nobles’ – come on. They’re an unelected ruling class who think they’re better than us. They’re all degrees of bad.

There’s a whole double-bluff intrigue where the Duke is pretending to be suspicious of Jessica. This is a tedious sub-plot, totally far-fetched. It’s just conflict for the sake of conflict. The book would be better without it. The mentat Thufeir Hawat is closely connected with this plot, but all in all I don’t see what he brings to the table. I think the book would pack a heavier punch if this sub-plot was gone and this character stripped back 90% or so.

Phallic sandworms

Paul is 15 but completely devoid of horniness or sexual neuroses; in the banquet scene, an attempt to seduce him falls flat. This is no doubt because of his Bene Gesserit training. But the repressed sexuality is central to the story. It’s more obvious to my grown-up mind that the sandworms are basically big dicks. And to paraphrase the book, who controls the big dicks controls the big dick energy. After Paul learns to harness and steer the big dicks, the climax of the story soon follows. Sorry for saying climax.

How does Frank Herbert get away with this insane sexual imagery? It’s even more obvious than King Solomon’s Mines. But it works because the sandworms work on their own terms. Arrakis without them wouldn’t be the same. Herbert doesn’t give a damn about space travel, but he cares about ecology. He reveals how this ecosystem works, and it is not a lecture we endure but a story mystery that is very satisfying to engage with and to solve.

Dune’s rich and strange hero

Speaking of Paul, even as a young reader I never quite liked him, and I never thought he was a good person. I rooted for him, and was invested in him. But I didn’t like him. He wrestles with his ‘terrible purpose’ and his visions of jihad for most of the story. As we read on, it becomes clear that is the story about the rise of a vast and terrible historical figure. It’s visible from the start, but the shock of the Harkonnen coup shakes something loose in him. As readers we come to respect the Fremen, but Paul is deceiving and manipulating them. Near the end (page 504) Gurney reproaches him when he reveals that he doesn’t really care about those killed in the final battle. He doesn’t care much about his murdered son either. And around the same time he finally embraces his ‘terrible purpose’ of galaxy-wide jihad; in his view there is no other way to cleanse the stagnant social order. The upheaval of the jihad will put a mixing spoon into the galactic gene pool and give it an almighty stir. This is the way he sees the world.

The unsettling presence of Paul’s little sister Alia is significant; he is only a little bit less weird than she is.

I haven’t read the sequels; I have been discouraged by some who have. What’s more, I consider the story complete and self-contained. It’s obvious to me that Paul is on track to become a genocidal god-emperor. There are no narrative questions left to answer.

The book suggests that Herbert does hold some beliefs that are repugnant to me: in the efficacy of eugenics, and in deep, inherent differences between men and women (‘takers’ and ‘givers’). He is cynical about humanity and believes that we will always be in thrall to religions and monarchs. But it seems clear enough that Frank Herbert doesn’t approve of Paul’s ‘terrible purpose’ or of the Bene Gesserit and their biological intrigues.

Atreides of Arabia

The ‘white saviour’ stuff is pretty blatant; Paul joins the Fremen and two years later has risen to be their messiah. This clearly takes inspiration from Lawrence of Arabia, and went on to inform Jon and the Wildlings, Dany and the Dothraki, etc.

With the Fremen, the Muslim coding is not just heavy but overwhelming. I didn’t see any problem with this when I was 15. But there was something more positive that I didn’t see either: that this is a text about the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s. The Muslim stuff could be read as a tribute (perhaps a clumsy one) to the anti-colonial struggles of the Arabs, the Algerians, the Libyans. In fact the wikipedia page tells me it was also inspired by struggles of Caucasian Muslims against Tsarist Russia (hence, no doubt, the presence of a baddie named Baron Vladimir). The new film version appears to be leaning into this reading.

Conclusion

As an experiment, try to describe Dune in bald terms. It’s about a teenager who vanquishes his enemies and becomes emperor of the galaxy by convincing native people that he’s their god and by harnessing the power of huge phallic monsters.

When you put it like that, it actually sounds embarrassing.

What rescues Dune from being ‘That book that every guy loves for some reason?’ What raises Dune above the level of a basic power fantasy?

First, the world and the hero are so strange. Neither invites you in. You are forced to approach as a stranger. Paul is not the avatar for your fantasies; you end up walking many miles in his stillsuit, but you are never at all comfortable in it.  

Second, it’s primarily a story about ecology and religion, not violence. It’s a story that forces us to pay attention to things we take for granted in life, such as water and faith. The indigenous people, taken for granted above all others, turn out to be the key not just to Arrakis but to the universe. It’s a book that humbles the reader, that confronts the reader with vast superhuman forces.

Last, it forces to reader to consider the cost of power. The more Paul masters these forces, the more alienated we are from him as a character. The Fremen are liberated, so it’s a satisfying ending. The ‘plans within plans within plans’ produce the most terrible blowback – for the Emperor, for the Harkonnens, for the Bene Gesserit. But Paul has reached a place where he is both all-powerful and inhuman. The worst blowback might be for the billions of innocents who will die in his jihad.

Everything feels earned. It feels earned because the desert exacts a terrible price for every blessing it gives, and there are no happy endings in this social order.

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Appendix:

A note on Dune and videogames.

Dune 2 was the first strategy game, and it adapted straight from the novel a model of resource-collection that went on to exert a huge influence. There is a single resource, the spice, which lies on the surface of the ground. It is collected by huge harvesting vehicles. In Command and Conquer, the spice became tiberium, which has its own interesting back-story but is functionally identical, with the big harvesting vehicles and all. In the Red Alert spin-off, the spice appears in an alternate-history Cold War setting as Ore, a single one-stop-shop resource. Armies supply themselves by mining this resource on the battlefield. Helpfully, it is spread in pockets evenly across the surface of the earth from Manhattan to the Siberian taiga. 

Reddish spice in Dune 2. From Quora
Green tiberium, in Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. From CNCC.com
Yellow ‘ore’, in Red Alert 2. From Mod DB

So when Frank Herbert wrote about spice-harvesting in the early 1960s, he was creating a model which videogame developers would still be using in the 21st century. It was such a useful model for gaming that the plausibility of the game world of Red Alert was stretched to the limit just to accommodate it.

Review: The Don Flows Home to the Sea by Mikhail Sholokhov (Premium)

‘Cossack versus Red Army . . a war of unparalleled savagery […] A story of incredible brutality, well-larded with sexual adventures […] This book makes compulsive if horrifying reading; it is on a plane of human conduct as bestial as if it had occurred in the Dark Ages.’

From the blurb to The Don Flows Home to the Sea: Part One, 1960 Four Square Books edition

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Bono’s Terrible Poem: An Autopsy

On March 17th Bono wrote a poem about the Ukraine war. Without even proofreading it, he sent it to a top US politician, and she read it out at a public gathering. Then he decided to post it on Twitter,

‘It wasn’t written to be published, but since it’s out, here it is,’ he tweeted. No, he didn’t want it to be out. He just sent it to a luncheon involving top political elites in the most powerful country in the world.

The poem was so bad it was a shock to the senses. But now that a few weeks have passed we should take a closer look. What are the specific features that make it so bad?

It’s on the nose

Usually poems weave in symbols and imagery and metaphors. For example, a poem about a vicious invasion might use snake imagery to signify evil. It might weave the metaphor into various vivid images.

Instead of doing that, Bono simply tells us what his poem’s symbol is: ‘For the snake symbolises/ An evil that rises…’

From this we can surmise that if Bono had written ‘The Road Not Taken’ he would have begun, ‘A fork in the road symbolises a major life choice…’

But that’s not quite it. We need more comparisons to really do it justice. If Bono had written ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ he would have begun, ‘This Greek vase is a symbol of stuff not getting old.’

Or ‘This Greek vase is like a wife who you’ve married but haven’t had sex with yet.’

It’s a textbook case of Irish narcissism

How are we to read the line ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now the Ukraine’? It seems that he’s saying Ireland had sorrow and pain in the past, and now Ukraine is getting a taste. As if Ukraine was some kind of bucolic hobbit village during the twentieth century – as opposed to a land ravaged by two world wars, famine, terror, the Nazi Holocaust, nuclear disaster and looting by oligarchs.

In this poem, Bono responds to the horror in Ukraine by talking about Ireland. There are grounds for empathy in our shared history of national oppression. But can’t Irish people engage with global events with a bit of taste, without making it all about us?

It’s largely babble

Let’s repeat that phrase; ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now the Ukraine.’ Sometimes in long complex sentences, we mistakenly switch between the singular and the plural. But what excuse does Bono have here, in a phrase eight words long?

Even if he had written ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ ARE now the Ukraine,’ what would that phrase even mean? I struggle to put it into words. Our emotions have been transferred to another country? …have been transformed into another country?

An updated version of the poem reads ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now in Ukraine.’ Did we put our sorrow and pain on a container ship and send it over to the port of Odesa?

‘And they [saints] struggle for us to be free/ From the psycho in this human family.’ Us? But Bono is already free from Putin! Putin doesn’t control any territory in which Bono or his offshore money reside.

‘For the snake symbolises/ an evil that rises/ and hides in your heart/ as it breaks.’ What does this line mean? You, Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of US politicians, have got evil hiding in your heart. I’m not entirely sure that’s what Bono meant to say. And what’s this about hearts breaking?

All these musings are a waste of time, because later we are told that ‘the evil has risen my friends [sic, no comma] / From the darkness that lives in some men.’ All of a sudden, the evil is not something that rises in the hearts of Bono’s heartbroken friends in the US political elite. It is an outside force that threatens us. From context we can guess that it is Putin.

More examples of this incoherence are nailed down here.

It’s banal

When the poem is coherent, it is usually not saying anything worth saying.

What does itactually say about the war in Ukraine? Only that from time to time ‘sorrow and fear’ come along, because of evil. In this poem, evil is a category which includes (presumably amongst other things), paganism in Fifth Century Ireland and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But evil no longer hides in Nancy Pelosi’s broken heart. The source of the evil is now ‘the darkness that lives in some men.’

How unfortunate that darkness lives in the hearts of some men. If only it had taken up lodgings in some more convenient place. Then this war wouldn’t have happened.

It’s absurd

When the poem is coherent and not banal, it’s absurd.

It is entirely possible to write a poem paying tribute to the armed resistance of the Ukrainian people and to the resilience of civilians and aid workers under the bombs. But Bono does not go down that route; instead he singles out the politician who happens to be in charge of Ukraine at this time, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And not only does Bono praise this politician, and not only does Bono compare him to St Patrick. No, at the end of his poem Bono says that Zelenskyy is Saint Patrick.

Because this is the image that comes to mind whenever I hear the name ‘Volodymyr Zelenskyy.’

So St Patrick was personally brave. And yes, it appears Zelenskyy is also personally brave. But there the similarity ends, because (A) St Patrick was never an actor. And (B) he didn’t have a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group on his payroll.

But even if the comparison fit… So Putin is a snake and Zelenskyy is Saint Patrick. Zelenskyy is banishing Putin. But… why? Why say this?

It’s tasteless

In his tweet Bono explains that every year he sends a funny limerick to US politicians for their St Patrick’s Day luncheon. As you do.

This year, he explains, instead of sending a cheeky little rhyme, he felt compelled to send a serious and heavy limerick. Yes, a heavy limerick. Because this year things are different. There’s a war on. People are dying.

Not like all those other years, when there was no war on and nobody was dying. And if there were any wars happening, the US politicians who chuckled at Bono’s funny Irish limericks certainly had nothing to do with any of those wars.

But even leaving all that aside, maybe you shouldn’t write a limerick about a war. Maybe you shouldn’t try to discuss the nature of evil in a limerick. You see, the limerick genre has certain limits.

But as Bono admits, it’s an ‘irregular’ limerick. You can say that again. Limericks are disciplined, with a tight rhyming scheme and rhythm.

For example, ‘There once was a singer from Dublin/ Whose tax situation was troubling…’ etc.

Limericks have to scan well, or else they sound contrived. And they are short, like five lines.

It’s not a limerick

When I first read Bono’s poem, it scanned so poorly I didn’t even realise it was a limerick. There were words that I didn’t realise were supposed to rhyme with other words. I only learned that it was a limerick because Bono said so. Then I went back and read it in the sing-song jokey rhythm of a limerick. It sounded so much more tasteless and bizarre. In other words, it’s not an irregular limerick, it’s an atrocious limerick.

If Bono had written something like the following, it wouldn’t have been quite as bad:

A snakey old psycho named Putin

Escalated the bombing and shooting

But Zelensky had tactics

Because he is St Patrick

And so for Ukraine I am rooting.

It’s absurd, offensive, tasteless, baffling. But it’s brief, and it’s actually a limerick.

And it says everything Bono takes fifteen lines to say. That’s it. All the essential points are there. But to create the impression that he’s saying something deep and heartfelt, he ties the poem up in knots with vague phrases that mean nothing. He does not succeed in covering up his poem’s essential banality and absurdity, only in adding a layer of incoherence.

Nothing to see here in… Hollywood

Review: Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood – dir Quentin Tarantino, 2019

Some movies have lines which are repeated and stressed so that they stick in your head for years after. Spiderman has ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has ‘Fuckin’ hippies.’ The phrase comes up again and again, right up to the moment when the last fuckin’ hippy is burned alive with a flamethrower. If you close your eyes, it’s like you’re watching South Park.

Another tic in this movie is the way the camera and script keep lingering on the titles and tropes of old racist westerns. In a lot of these movies the American Indians were an evil force, menacing the good (white) people of the frontier. Of course, director Quentin Tarantino is against racism and is highlighting this stuff in a mocking way. But he must be smart enough to realise that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a movie in exactly the same mould, where good people are threatened by an outside evil. The frontier is Hollywood in the 1960s, and the evil natives are the Manson family.

The film is compelling. We follow the travails of a washed-up actor and his stuntman buddy. At first we tag along with impatience as we want to get to the Manson bits, then we get drawn into the story of these two characters. But it remains in our minds that these guys are on a collision course with the Manson family, and we want to find out what Tarantino has to say about the Tate-LaBianca murders. Here’s a Hollywood movie made by big Hollywood names, directed by a Hollywood iconoclast. Surely these people have access to some folk memory, rumour or inside information. What will be revealed?

Meanwhile we get a warm nostalgic portrait of Hollywood in the 1960s: costumes, music, parties, and neon signs. This is just a wonderful place. Within this world, the worst thing that can happen is not so bad: an actor and a stuntman who kind-of deserve to be washed up are in danger of being washed up.

But lurking on the boundary of this world is a malicious presence which we know of as the Manson family but which the main characters simply see as (say it in your Eric Cartman voice) a bunch of fuckin’ hippies.

That’s it. That’s what Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has to say about the Tate-LaBianca murders: that Hollywood in the 1960s was great, until the Manson family came along; and wouldn’t it have been great if someone had been in the right place at the right time to stop the murders? So precisely nothing is revealed.

I watched this movie shortly after reading Chaos by Tom O’Brien. This extraordinary book charts a journalist’s attempt to follow up some of the many loose threads of the Tate-LaBianca murders. Bad shit was going on at the Polanski house. Manson knew big Hollywood names (which he gained by pimping teenage girls). The book explores a labyrinth of other strange connections and mysteries, driving at a point which contradicts Tarantino’s movie: that the Manson family were very much a part of the Hollywood ecosystem, and not an outside evil at all.

There is a gesture in this direction in the film. Near the end, one of the Manson family speculates that maybe the experience of growing up watching the violence of Hollywood is what made them violent. But we are expected to see this as pretentious studenty rambling. It is set up for us to dismiss it with self-righteous contempt.

Now, Chaos and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came out in the same year and Tarantino could not possibly have read the book before making the film. But if you think about the Manson murders for ten minutes it should be clear that all is not as it seems. It’s probably not a coincidence that Manson, the guy who drugged and pimped out minors, showed up at the doorstep of Roman Polanski, the guy who later fled the United States after he drugged and raped a minor. Not only does the film fail to delve into any of the mysteries surrounding the case, it makes no reference to this elephant in the room.

If you’re looking for Hollyweird revelations about the dark underbelly of the movie industry, all Tarantino’s got to say to you is ‘Nothing to see here.’ This is not a film about the Manson murders. It is a western movie about an aging gunslinger and an outlaw who find redemption by defending a settler from the natives; only it happens to be set in1960s Hollywood. If you go in expecting an interesting pastiche along these lines, you will not be disappointed. Pitt and DiCaprio play an amusing pair of fuckups and antiheroes. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that the film mocks the Manson family instead of mythologizing them, for example when Brad Pitt mangles Tex Watson’s one-liner – ‘some devil shit.’ The ultra-violence of the ending could easily be interpreted as righteous fury.

I’ve usually enjoyed Tarantino’s movies but this was more of a mixed bag than usual. The journey was unexpectedly compelling; somehow the film got me to feel sorry for this blustering actor who’s had a successful career and has plenty of money. This journey has texture and verisimilitude. This movie knows Hollywood and cares about it and gets us to care. But the destination, when we finally get there, is disappointing. The ending just left me with screams of agony and the words ‘Fuckin’ hippies’ echoing in my head.

Game of Thrones: an alternate ending

Last week I presented a lukewarm defence of the controversial Game of Thrones Season 8. I argued that the final season was actually OK, and to add further support to my case here is an outline for an alternative final episode. The point here is to illustrate that even as late as the final hour, the show could have been rescued from some of the worst elements of that final season.

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The second-last episode (‘The Bells’) ended with King’s Landing burned to the ground. The final episode (in my mind) begins fifteen or twenty years later. Middle-aged Danaerys rules from a rebuilt Harrenhall. The Unsullied and the Dothraki form her army, her retainers and some of the major lords of the kingdom – but they are in pimped-out new armour and uniforms. In them we see a new merging of the cultures of Westeros and Essos. The wild nomad riders have become complacent petulant knights. The eunuchs are now just an aging cadre within the Unsullied.

What is the impression we get of Dany’s regime? It is not a new world. The wheel has not been broken. Things look and feel different in the culture. Her regime is more just, stable and functional than the status quo back in Season 1 – but only by a modest margin. The ruins of King’s Landing and the visible presence of the maimed and the bereaved serve as a reminder of the price paid and pose the question of whether it was worth it. But like the Tiananmen Square events in China, the burning of King’s Landing is a taboo subject. Drogon is a fat, lazy creature but still powerful and fierce.

Danaerys has to tax everyone hard to pay for the upkeep of the Unsullied and to deal with the consequences whenever a Dothraki khal decides to go bandit. Her power keeps the nobles in check. All in all, she is no better and no worse a ruler than the usual run. No Triumph of the Will visuals, but no white saviour fantasies either. The exalted myths about her have come down to earth. The wheel is still turning, just with her on top.

A crisis threatens – it doesn’t matter what. Let’s say Lord Bronn of Highgarden has betrayed the kingdom and risen up in revolt (which is absolutely what would happen, probably a lot sooner, if he was given a position of power). Maybe he has even killed Drogon. Dany decides there is only one person who can deal with this challenge, who can lead an army against the rebels: Jon Snow.

Sansa is Queen in the North and middle-aged Jon is serving her regime. The kingdom consists of northerners and wildlings rebuilding and resettling the North after the apocalypse of the wight invasion. Some are talking about going beyond the wall.

Tyrion arrives as an emissary from Danaerys. Jon and Dany have not spoken in years; he departed right after the burning of King’s Landing, and took the Northern forces with him. Tyrion asks Jon to come south. Dany wants Jon to serve as Hand of the King and to lead her armies. There are powerful echoes of Season One, when Ned was summoned south by Robert.

Jon agonises over the decision. He has deep meaningful conversations with Tyrion and with whatever other fan faves the writers decide to give screen time to. Te main characters have still not addressed or mentally processed the horror of the burning of King’s Landing.

We cut away from Jon as he makes his decision – but we don’t know what it will be.

The Iron Throne, as imagined by Marc Simonetti in The World of Ice and Fire (2014)

Cut back to the South, to Harrenhal. Tyrion returns to Dany and tells her that no, Jon will not be coming South. He explains that Jon doesn’t want to get caught up in all this dirty politics and bloody warfare all over again. Dany is angry, and remarks that while Jon has a conscience to wrestle with, she has a kingdom to rule. The last we see of her, she is giving decisive commands to deal with the rebellion. But we get visual hints that behind her stern facade she is just as cut-up as Jon.

Cut back to the North. (As in the real-life version of the final episode) Jon is leading a crowd of people into the wild wastes beyond the wall, and spring is coming.

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A brief comment on what I like about this ending.

It would be immensely satisfying to see these characters years later, even if their dialogue was only passably well-written. Just as Game of Thrones happened in the shadow of the events of Robert’s Rebellion all those years ago, now we get a glimpse of another era, one overshadowed by the events of Game of Thrones.

Within the framework of this episode, each secondary character can get a little ending of their own, as we see who is serving Sansa and who is serving Dany, and in what capacity, who has turned cynical and who is still trying to seek a better world, etc. For example I think a creepy adn inhuman Bran is serving her as a spymaster.

Martin is very good at showing us characters who have illusions, and then shattering those illusions. Think of the poor Dornish prince in A Dance With Dragons. The key theme of the whole story seems to be disillusionment. Characters set out with the ideologies of this society deeply-ingrained in their heads. These illusions come up against the friction of reality, are sanded down, rubbed raw, eventually break.

This alternative ending hits that theme hard. The myths about Dany are shattered, not by crudely portraying her as a Nazi, but by showing she’s not much better than the rest of them.

It’s still a fundamentally conservative message – if you take Jon’s point of view, stay out of politics, it’s too dirty, and don’t try to change the world; if you take Dany’s, be realistic, settle for incremental improvements, the sacrifices are worth it for the greater good. But at least there are different perspectives. We’re not being beaten over the head with the writers’ irrelevant opinions about 20th Century history.

This is not a perfect ending. A perfect ending would require a much better run-up from Seasons 7 and 8. But it’s a morally grey ending for a morally grey story. It’s an ending that suggests ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same,’ while also leaving space for this cynical conclusion to be refuted. It’s an ending in which Ice and Fire, instead of coming together in a contrived situation where one must destroy the other, are finally and forever parted.

Game of Thrones: the final season was OK, actually

Nearly three years have passed since groans of disappointment met the final season of Game of Thrones. A lot has been said and written about how it was badly-written, incoherent and rushed, about how it let down its characters, about how the story’s themes, once promising, descended into cynical platitudes. In particular I recommend and largely agree with this and this and this.

On the other hand there have been some attempts to say that it deserved a better reception. I’m not fully convinced by any of the defences I’ve happened across. But enough dust has settled now that we can start pushing back with a revisionist history against the consensus. The final season was not actually bad.

A Bayeux-style tapestry depicting an event from Season 7 of Game of Thrones – ‘Outline sketch for the official Game of Thrones tapestry produced in Northern Ireland.’

Did you really expect it to be brilliant?

My expectations for Season 8 were low.

Seasons 5 and 6 were solid, but there were obvious problems with the writing. For example, there was Arya doing effectively nothing for twenty episodes; there was Jaime’s half-baked and clumsy sojourn in Dorne. Plot armour and Elder Scrolls Fast Travel sped up the plot but wore down the friction and texture of the world. 

Season 7 was a carnival of the silly and the unsatisfying. Problems evident in sub-plots and isolated moments of 5 and 6 came to dominate the main storyline in 7.

By the way, the first episode of Season 8 (‘Winterfell’) was the worst-written of the whole show. Not a single line landed. Everyone was just milling about awkwardly in the castle. Critics and audiences said it was great at the time. They would flip to hyper-criticism a few episodes later.

Thankfully every other episode in the season had more narrative momentum and better dialogue than this lifeless opener. But the first episode was another warning to temper expectations.

I guess people withheld their impatience at 7, hoping 8 would salvage the situation, then vented their anger on 8 when it didn’t. The hype around GOT was such that people believed the showrunners were playing 12-dimensional chess when in fact they were flying by the seat of their pants. There was a widespread expectation that Season 8 would be a sublime revelation rather than a crash-landing.

And it was a crash-landing – not a crash. All in all, it was better than Season 7. Things were messy but it hit the ground intact and held itself together until it came to a shuddering halt, and that was the best we could have hoped for.

While I was writing this post my one-year-old son just happened to dig out my Game of Thrones tankard from the back of a drawer and accidentally smashed it into tiny pieces. By some miracle, he did not cut himself on the broken edges. Naturally, I took it as a sign from the Lord of Light, and used it to stage a cover image for this post.

Writing isn’t everything

An interesting feature of the Game of Thrones phenomenon is how every viewer became a critic. What emerged around the show was the kind of commentary you’d expect to surround a mass movement or a charismatic leader. Early on, fans debated the story’s conflicts as if they were real; later, they turned from debating the internal politics of the story to debating the merits of the writing itself.

Something held me back from commenting at the time; the clamour surrounding the show was too much. The GOT-commentary industrial complex had grown dangerously vast and all-consuming. I wanted to enjoy it as a TV show, and not feel obliged to have developed opinions and to defend those opinions.

William Goldman’s 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade laments the fact that the contribution of writers is underrated in Hollywood. But things have changed; our generation posts hour-long videos on Youtube about character arcs and themes.

But writing is not the only element in film. With GOT we have focused on it to the exclusion of all else.

Season 8 was poorly written. But TV is not prose. What about the other aspects of the production?

The cast carried the whole thing along convincingly, delivering lines that should have felt like golf balls in their mouths. The sound, music, set and costume design were great. Nobody really noticed that silly thing with the coffee cup. The Battle of Winterfell, once you adjusted the brightness on your TV, was awesome to look at and compelling to experience.

The attack on King’s Landing was powerful. There was real visual storytelling here (shame about the verbal storytelling). Arya’s struggle for survival in the burning city was harrowing and original, like a hybrid of The Lord of the Rings with Come and See or Children of Men.

Of course, this was the very episode that was so controversial. But it was so well-done visually, it packed such a punch, that I believed it in spite of my misgivings. I was carried along. And in the moment, so were you, most likely. For a time you felt what the show wanted you to feel: dismay that Dany would do this, rather than dismay that the writers would do this.

The writers without a doubt committed an atrocity far worse than anything Danaerys did to the people of King’s Landing. But the real atrocity was not in that episode. That penultimate episode is open to different interpretations – such as this which makes some very good points.

The real atrocity came in the final episode – when the writing battered us over the head with trite moral lessons, when Dany was ‘put down like Old Yeller,’ when the city was magically rebuilt, right down to the Small Council chamber now staffed with an audience-pandering collection of fan faves.

If George RR Martin is planning to end it in a similar way, I shudder to think what that might look like on the page.

‘I murdered my intimate partner,’ said Jon Snow gravely, ‘as the prophecy foretold.’

Tyrion laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You had no choice. The whole story bent over backwards to contrive a situation where you had to do it.’

For a moment they were silent as the winds of winter howled outside.

Jon sighed heavily. ‘I still don’t understand. What does it all mean?’

Tyrion began to pace the floor, his hands clasped behind his back. ‘All liberation movements end in totalitarianism. Freeing slaves is a slippery slope. And at the bottom of that slope – genocide. And before you ask, yes,’ he added with a pained smile, gesturing toward the Martin Niemoller and Leni Riefenstahl references scattered about. ‘This story is implying that Dany was, at the end of the day, as bad as Hitler, and by extension that Hitler started out like Dany.’

‘I’m not sure which of those two claims is worse.’ Troubled lines creased Jon Snow’s face. ‘But these references make no sense. Not in our medieval-esque setting. Sam Tarly would say they’re… Uh, anachronisms.’

Tyrion smiled again, this time wryly. ‘So are dragons.’

Jon frowned. The dragons had been easier to swallow than the reactionary platitudes.

The tragedy of it all was that the writing let down the other aspects. But those other aspects deserve to be appreciated. A small army of people worked on them, and their work was not in vain. The production convinced me in key places where the writing failed.

It ended badly. But it ended.

The great virtue of Season 8 – even of that final episode – was that loads of stuff was happening. The Mountain and the Hound batter the crap out of each other, then plunge to fiery deaths! Marvellous! A dragon melted the Iron Throne. Jon is going with the wildlings back to their homeland, and spring is coming.

Everyone talks about how this season would have been so challenging to write. I don’t agree at all. Everything had been set up for seven seasons; all the showrunners had to do was knock down the dominoes in a reasonably competent manner.

Sometimes the writing was more than just competent. The second episode (‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’) was by far the best of Season 8 – as doom approaches, the main characters have a lot of talky but heartfelt scenes. This was great writing.

True, there wasn’t much great writing. But even basic competence went a long way. Big, dramatic stuff was happening, and things were being resolved – this was the rocket-fuel that kept Season 8 moving forward in spite of its big problems. For stretches, it was easy to be carried along – as long as your focus was ‘Am I enjoying this?’ not ‘What will I say about this on the internet?’

The same tapestry, now in colour

Let’s take a moment to reflect on how great and how rare it is to see stuff happening on a TV show. The usual practise with TV is to drag things out, to tease, to defer gratification; to leave things unresolved just in case there’s another season; to forcibly jump-start a broken-down story just to get the punters back on their couches. The general rule is: you keep making the show until it stops making money.

Some critics say that Season 8 was too rushed and that they should have made two, three, four more seasons. I don’t agree. If we’d got more seasons, we’d have got more rushed and unsatisfying seasons.

For most of its run, my main worry with Game of Thrones was not the possibility that it would end badly, but that it would not end at all. I worried that GOT would taper out in a dragon’s tail of dismal seasons, an endless winter of exhausted characters shambling through the long night of lifeless plots.

But that is not what happened. Game of Thrones ended with a bang, when we all still cared enough to criticise it.

When the show is no longer a recent memory it will be rediscovered. The quality of those early seasons was real, but it was far from a perfect, sublime, unproblematic show. In the future, viewers will appreciate the show in a critical and balanced way. They will groan good-naturedly at the ending but they will not feel betrayed.

Next week I’m going to post my alternate ending for GOT – to illustrate that even as late as the final episode, all was not lost.

But that’s kind of an appendix to this post. For now, that’s all. Game of Thrones Season 8 was an enjoyable few hours of TV. It was fine, it was OK, it was grand. The problem is, with Game of Thrones fine, OK and grand couldn’t cut it. Its own hype was its own worst enemy.

Why Jeremy Clarkson hated V for Vendetta

When I first saw V for Vendetta in the cinema aged 15 or 16 I was very impressed, but when I came back to it after reading the original comic the movie seemed cheesy and tacky by comparison.

I watched it again recently. Yes, it’s tacky. The politics of the comic are de-fanged. But it clips along nicely. If the lines aren’t all well-written, the story structure and scenes have momentum. There are enough ponderous and self-important films out there, and a lot more since 2005 when this first came out. Making this film a lot lighter in tone than the comic would not have been my favoured creative choice, but it was a fair creative choice.

In the mid 2000s I used to read Jeremy Clarkson’s film reviews in the Sunday Times. He heartily approved of 300, a fantasy so violently racist it makes Storm Saxon look harmless. He hated The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach’s film about the Irish Revolution. He didn’t like V for Vendetta. He sneered at it and predicted that its message would fail to strike a chord with young people. His words were something like, ‘Kids these days just want to fight for their right to party.’

Six years later, the Guy Fawkes mask from this movie became a global symbol of youth protest against dictators and bankers. In other words, Jeremy Clarkson hadn’t a clue.

Along with the brilliant Children of Men, released one year later, V for Vendetta was part of a cultural backlash against the violence, authoritarianism and fear of the so-called War on Terror. Of course being a right-winger Clarkson didn’t like this message.

But re-watching it now, I figured out another reason why the film might have rubbed him up the wrong way.

The TV show Storm Saxon, which is popular in the fascist England of V for Vendetta, and which Jeremy Clarkson would probably say was ‘good old-fashioned swashbuckling fun’. From the original comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

There is a character in V for Vendetta named Lewis Prothero, ‘the voice of London,’ a blowhard TV commentator and regime mouthpiece (played by Roger Allam, who also portrays the useless MP in The Thick of It). In one scene Prothero rants over the phone demanding the firing of ‘that Paddy’ who works in the studio. ‘He doesn’t know how to light. He makes my nose look like Big Ben.’

On a completely unrelated note, in 2015 Jeremy Clarkson split his producer’s lip open and called him a ‘lazy Irish c***,’ all because the stupid Paddy could not magically produce a steak in the middle of the night for a pissed Clarkson to stuff into his face.

I doubt that was an isolated incident. Clarkson was probably up to similar behaviour around the time he saw V for Vendetta and declared that young people would not like it. On top of the political message, my theory is that he felt personally attacked. Maybe Roger Allam’s portrayal of a ranting anti-Irish gammon had struck a little too close to home.

Squid Game, like capitalism, is equal and voluntary – in theory

Spoilers below.

What makes Squid Game different from Hunger Games and Battle Royale? The fight to the death in Squid Game is not just bigger and bloodier. It is voluntary. Stephen King’s Running Man also features a lethal game whose contestants are volunteers. But King’s novel, and its movie version, and Hunger Games and Battle Royale, are set in future dystopias. Squid Game is set in our world, right now.

The conditions in North Korea are so desperate that Sae-byeok risks death to escape. But when she enters the game she risks death again, this time to escape from the desperate conditions for the poor and working class in South Korea, to escape from capitalism. As someone says in Episode 2, it’s worse out there than it is in here.

The final episode of Squid Game hammers home an anti-capitalist argument that has been running through the whole story. Many have commented on this, including the writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk. This article goes into some detail. But I want to focus on the voluntary nature of the games and how this plays into the anti-capitalist message.

In-ho’s words in the last episode make this point very clear. He says words to the effect that ‘You chose this,’ ‘You signed up for this,’ ‘Nobody forced you.’ Another villain, the psychopathic Sang-woo, insists on Gi-hun’s personal responsibility for all the killing.

Within formal logic, In-ho’s argument is unanswerable. But Gi-hun recoils against his words and against Sang-woo’s. They are wrong. Gi-hun knows it in his gut, and so do we.

It’s true that the game is voluntary. In-ho himself, undercover among the contestants, casts the deciding vote for them all to leave. But for some reason, we don’t accept their arguments.

‘You chose this,’ ‘You signed up for this,’ ‘Nobody forced you.’ That’s what we hear when we complain about our jobs, our mortgages, our car payments. We even hear a version of this in the cliché that ‘people get the government they deserve’ – ie, the people are responsible when their elected leaders betray them. In the most formal sense, it’s all true.

The game’s overseer keeps insisting on ‘equality’ as the fundamental principle of the whole operation. In theory, capitalism is fair and we’re all equal. In theory, the worker and the boss meet one another ‘in the marketplace’ (wherever that is) on a basis of complete equality. They agree to a contract which is satisfactory to both: I work for you, and you pay me. The law says these two people are completely equal. The law says this contract is voluntary.

But the reality is very different from the theory, and from what the law says. That reality is illustrated in every episode of Squid Game.

When we first see Gi-hun, we are invited to see him as a waster and a messer. Then in mid-series we hear about the auto workers’ strike Gi-hun was involved in ten years ago and about the lethal police violence. This sacking was a catastrophe from which his life has never recovered. He got into debt with failed business ventures (Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Isn’t that what they tell us to do? Be an entrepreneur?). His family has broken down. No wonder he’s in the situation he’s in. It could happen to you or me.

Another contestant has decades of experience as a glassmaker. We can assume he’s got a similar story to tell. And we see with our own eyes how Ali was scammed by his boss.

The final episode hammers home the point. A TV or radio playing in the background of a scene reminds us about the crisis in household debt. Early on in the series, we might think, ‘OK, these contestants are people in extreme situations – gambling addicts, refugees, gangsters.’ But the final episode insists: this situation is general.

For all its brutality, Squid Game is written with compassion and humanity. These games are not a public spectacle or a reality TV show. They are secret. The public at large do not enjoy the games. They would be sickened if they knew the games were happening. The audience, lapping up other people’s suffering for entertainment, are the handful of billionaires who bankroll the whole operation – and who got rich making everyone’s lives so desperate and precarious in the first place. The indebted and desperate Gi-hun lives on a different planet from these ‘VIPs.’ To claim they are equal is a vicious lie designed to keep Gi-hun in his place – and, perhaps, to soothe the consciences of the wealthy.

People are drawing parallels with Money Heist, another series on Netflix. Like Squid Game, it has won a colossal audience in spite of the fact that it’s not in English. This Spanish crime series is knee-deep in socialism. A miner from Asturias who calls himself ‘Moscow’ sings ‘Bella Ciao,’ talks about the 15M movement and supports his trans comrade; in a fierce battle in the ruins of the national Bank of Spain, the robbers denounce the forces of the state as fascists and draw inspiration from the Battle of Stalingrad. But what’s more important than any of these Easter eggs is what this guy said: that what makes Money Heist popular is the class rage it channels.

What is it about red jumpsuits and masks? Money Heist (above, image from Dress Like That) and Squid Game (Image from Insider.com).

Money Heist and Squid Game tap into our despair and anger at the brutal and unfair system we live under. Hundreds of people being gunned down in a scene that’s part Red Light, Green Light and part Amritsar Massacre – that’s not a fantasy. That’s what it feels like to live in this society. If a story can tap into such a feeling, language is not a barrier. We live under the same system and even if we speak different languages we can relate to common problems and struggles.

We live in a time of mass protest movements against the wealthy and the state on every continent (Colombia, Sudan, Lebanon, Myanmar, and the list goes on and on). It would be strange if this mood was not reflected in some way in popular culture. But it’s a sign of the times that the entertainment industry – and maybe to an extent audiences – are not ready for a story that is simply about class struggle (with surprising exceptions like Superstore). Politics is a dirty word. It has to be smuggled in, disguised in more wholesome and palatable fare, such as a story about the origin of a mass murderer, about a bank robbery, or about a game show in which four hundred people die horrible deaths. In cynical times, the earnest and compassionate stories we secretly crave can only be packaged in the trappings of cynical and pessimistic genres.

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Thanks to all my readers. This week I took a break from Battle for Red October, my ongoing series about the Russian Civil War. The series resumes next week. If you like what you read here, leave your address in the box below and get an update whenever I post.

Featured Song: ‘Tangled up in Blue’

Tangled up in Blue (Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks, 1975)

The lyrics to this fine song get tangled up in apparent non-sequiturs, making you ask questions, making your imagination work overtime. The whole story is short on details, but we feel like the narrator has told us more than he really has. The lyrics are heavy with suggestion like branches bent under the weight of fruit. Dylan makes us work to extract the meaning, and we are grateful for it.

For example:

But he started in to dealing with slaves/ And something inside of him died/ She had to sell everything she owned and froze up inside/ And by the time the bottom fell out I became withdrawn…

What does that mean? How does one thing lead to the next? Things are skated over in vague terms, as if the narrator is wary of the legal implications, doesn’t want to open a can of worms, or just doesn’t want to think about it all.

It’s not just the usual obscurity and symbolism of Bob Dylan lyrics. It feels as if someone drunk and a little maddened by hardships, charismatic in his way, has sat down beside you on the bus and begun to tell you their history with a red-haired woman you’ve never met. Or maybe you’re overhearing one half of a stranger’s phone conversation – you missed the start, you’ll miss the end and you’re only hearing the answers, not the questions.

I read that Dylan tried, in writing this song, to dispense with any sense of time entirely. That was the first impression I got – that the timeline was all jumbled up, that there might even be multiple narrators, multiple situations connected only by theme. But by my 10th or 20th compulsive listen, it was starting to come together.

The song has a consistent thread. It tells the story of a relationship between the narrator and a woman. They get separated, but they drift back together, get separated again, but maybe they’ll be reunited… Is her nickname Blue? Does she have blue eyes? Or is it a reference to Joni Mitchell?

She was married; he ‘helped her out of a jam, I guess/ But I used a little too much force.’ The narrator probably didn’t kill the husband but he must have beat him up or something. They headed off on a journey together but ‘split up on a dark sad night, both agreeing it was best.’ The narrator is lying; he was devastated by the separation, but he doesn’t tell us that directly, or why they split up.

They meet again in Louisiana years later. She is working at a strip club and reading Italian Renaissance poetry; she lives in a basement with the narrator and another man, the one who ‘started in to dealing with slaves,’ whatever that means.

On rare moments we get detail. The ‘dark sad night’ when they split up is seared into the narrator’s memory and when he tells us about it he is not summing up and skipping over, but quoting her in real time. ‘I heard her say over my shoulder/ ‘We’ll meet again someday on the avenue.’

Then we skip ahead years and thousands of miles, until the narrator and the woman who ‘never escaped his mind’ are by chance reunited. We get verse after verse, describing the reunion almost iin real time.

He’s not an expressive or emotive guy – ‘you look like the silent type;’ ‘I muttered something underneath my breath.’ But we can tell how he’s feeling. He hints and summarises and skims over most of his life but then gets drawn into fine detail when he’s talking about her. The specifics he gives us are not the ones lawyers or cops or journalists might want to know. They are the things that matter to him.

I’ve had my ups and downs with Bob Dylan. He was as immaculately frightful as any surreal, pitiful denizen of Desolation Row when he accosted me in a pool hall impersonating Jack Kerouac and tried to sell me a Chrysler. But I’ve listened to his 2017 Nobel Prize lecture through from start to finish, multiple times. It’s a pleasure.

I think in that speech Dylan threw a sidelight on ‘Tangled up in Blue’ when he talked about Homer’s Odyssey and how he relates to it:

In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good. 

The parallel lies not at all in the specifics – but in how he can find and bring out the epic and the immortal in the mundane, how he elevates his narrator to the status of a hero.