The Pale Blue Eye

Speaking of breaking the basic rules of fair play in a whodunit, my first fiction read of 2023 was the historical mystery thriller The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard. I first heard of this novel late last year when the teaser for the Netflix film adaptation arrived. A lifelong Poe devotee, I was immediately intrigued. I dithered over whether to read the novel as I have had some of my own Poe-related fiction simmering for a few years, but as I don’t have Netflix and the basic premise wouldn’t leave me alone, I decided to go for it.

I read it in just a few days right after the New Year. I’ve been thinking about and reconsidering it ever since.

The film has been out a while now so the broad outlines of the story should be familiar. Retired New York City constable Gus Landor is called one fine autumn day to meet with the commandant of the United States Military Academy at West Point. The commandant, Sylvanus Thayer, tells Landor that one of the Academy’s cadets has been found hanged. Thayer has already ruled out suicide, as after the victim was discovered his body was cut down and his heart cut out. The corpse they removed to the infirmary. The heart has yet to be found. Thayer asks Landor to investigate, both to find the killer and to protect the Academy, which is still new, untested, and the object of suspicion among some citizens of the young republic.

Landor, a consumptive who lives continuously aware of his impending death, agrees to his request with some strict conditions and begins. He questions witnesses, examines the body, searches the barracks, and goes over the grounds of the Academy and the place near the Hudson where the body was found. In the course of his searches he meets a first-year cadet from Virginia, one Edgar A Poe, who offers Landor one sharp bit of advice and disappears. His curiosity piqued, Landor later seeks Poe out at a local tavern and the two strike up an odd partnership built around solving the crime—part crime-fighting duo, part mentor-protégé, part estranged father and orphaned son.

Their partnership is deepened and tested when more cadets are murdered and, even more disturbingly, evidence mounts of some kind of satanic worship extending right into the ranks of the Academy itself.

I don’t want to give much more away, as the unfolding of the investigation, the accumulation of clues, and the working relationship between Landor and Poe is one of The Pale Blue Eye’s great joys. It is also, as it turns out, one of its great frustrations.

Before I get into the one major spoiler, let me praise the two best features of the novel. First, the narrative voice: wry, sardonic, blunt and straightforward but with a finely honed poetic edge, Landor tells his story in such a way that a reader is guaranteed to be hooked. Even when the story’s pacing flagged—as it does in a few places near the middle—I was drawn along by Landor’s narration, which never lost my interest.

The other strength of The Pale Blue Eye is its portrait of young Poe. His semester and a half at West Point is often passed over as a biographical curiosity, but Bayard gives Poe’s time there a central place in his life story and brings this young man, burdened with a hard background and self-sabotaging flaws but buoyed by a tremendous trust in his own gifts, to vibrant life. (Bayard’s interpretation owes too much to Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman, who psychologized and pathologized and autobiographized Poe’s work to death, but that angle is probably only discernible to the enthusiast.) I’ve seen some readers complain that the novel is dull whenever Poe is “offscreen”; I disagree, but it does take on an irresistible energy whenever he appears.

That said, I’ve been reflecting on The Pale Blue Eye ever since I finished it not only because I enjoyed it so much, but because its conclusion, its climactic revelation, was such a cheat: it turns out that the first murdered cadet was killed by Landor himself.

In my post about Glass Onion’s failure to play fair with its audience, I mentioned Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective fiction. Knox’s rules had been on my mind because of that movie and I sought out the specific rules again because of this novel. In the case of The Pale Blue Eye, rules seven and eight are broken: “The detective himself must not commit the crime” and “The detective is bound to declare any clues he may discover.”

Given the structure and narration of The Pale Blue Eye, violating the one necessitates violating the other. Landor, having already murdered the first victim when the novel begins, withholds key information—namely, that the cadet had been one of several who had gangraped Landor’s daughter, an act that drove her to suicide. Instead, Landor misleads, telling everyone he meets and us, the readers, directly, that his daughter has left him. This is left as vague as possible: perhaps she ran off with a man, perhaps she died… somehow. Landor’s own tuberculosis offers the reader a red herring by association. His tragic backstory, when it is alluded to, is only a tragic backstory, presented with no apparent connection to the events at the Academy because Landor never gives any specifics regrading what happened to his daughter.

The point is that, until Landor explains precisely what happened in the final pages of the book, the reader could never have guessed at these relationships or events. Even when, about halfway through, I first darkly suspected that Landor was involved in the first murder I told myself it couldn’t be—there was nothing to base that suspicion on. Once Landor confesses to Poe and the reader, it recasts not only the meaning of every event in the book like a good twist should, but the very premise of the story itself. It just doesn’t work. The reader rejects it. The revelation is meant to be a tragic surprise but feels like a betrayal, a betrayal compounded in the last few pages by absurdity as Landor, somehow, narrates throwing himself over the same cliffs where his daughter killed herself.

As I mentioned last time, rules are made to be broken, and I didn’t look up Knox’s rules to hold The Pale Blue Eye accountable for some minor breach of protocol. I despise that use of rules for fiction. (Here’s the worst offender, an utterly arbitrary and stupid measure that many readers take as gospel.) But rules like Knox’s exist for a reason. Think of them less as an imposition of external standards on how to tell a story and more an empirical record of what doesn’t work.

A master, fully cognizant of the rules and of the risks he runs in purposefully breaking one, might get away with it. I’ve mentioned Agatha Christie in this connection before. But more often you will get a novel like this one.

The Pale Blue Eye is a case study in taking such risks and failing. It is brilliantly and often poetically written, full of well-realized characters, spooky gothic atmosphere, evocative and realistic Jacksonian-era period details, and a striking portrait of a real person at a formative moment in his life. But its final twist undermines the entire novel up to that point, making the reader doubt whether it was worth the investigation at all.

My problems with Glass Onion

Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: “No, it’s just dumb!” Note the literal lampshade.

I’ve mentioned twice now, once in my initial review and once in my 2022 at the movies post, that I had some nagging misgivings about Rian Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc mystery, Glass Onion. I’ve been mulling those problems over ever since I saw the movie around Thanksgiving and wondering whether I should ever try to work through them in writing. Well, a couple weeks ago my friend Danny Anderson of The Sectarian Review offered a short, pointed critique of the film that I’ve taken as permission and encouragement to do the same.

As I wrote at the time I first saw Glass Onion, I can’t lay out my problems with it without giving too much away, so consider this a spoiler warning.

Briefly, what I most admired and enjoyed about the film when I first saw it was its intricate structure and its humor. I think I mostly stand by that, though what I remember of the humor has somewhat soured on me since I first saw it. We’ll get to my deeper problems momentarily.

In his post, Danny faults Glass Onion for being clever but hollow, for jerking the audience around by offering a mystery without an actual mystery, and for its self-righteous indulgence in pillorying shallow, cartoonish characters.

Any disagreements I have with Danny’s assessment are only in degree, not kind. Or to put it another way, I agree with every point here, albeit with differing levels of intensity. To take these one at a time:

• Glass Onion’s structure still impresses me, but as other elements of the story have continued to bother me I’ve come to see the film’s fugue-like transparent layers as unworthy of the story it tells. It’s like a perfectly crafted sonnet in praise of cannibalism.

• I agree completely with Danny about the way the film manipulates the audience. Johnson’s self-awareness, the constant calling of attention to storytelling conventions and what he is doing, goes beyond the tongue-in-cheek or the meta to the pathological. Johnson displays an utter contempt not only for the characters he creates—leading one to ask “Why bother?”—but for his audience. Again, why bother? Is this purely about showing off?

• Danny’s last criticism, Johnson’s political point-scoring via ridiculous caricature, is where he spends most of his time, and while I agree completely on this point the characters bother me somewhat less because Glass Onion is pretty clearly a farce. For all the music-box intricacy of his plotting, Johnson doesn’t deal in nuance when it comes to human beings. I don’t necessarily like that (note that in my original review I described every character as “annoying”) but I’m willing to give it a pass purely for the sake of the genre.

To these I would add a few more misgivings of my own, some minor and technical but others, like Danny’s most serious complaints, what John Gardner called “faults of soul.”

First, and related to Danny’s point that Johnson continuously plays false with the viewer, Glass Onion breaks some of the classic rules of fair play in a whodunit story—namely Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective stories. The film bends or breaks several of these, as you can read about in greater detail here, including artificially withholding important clues. But the biggest and clearest cheat is against rule ten: “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” Compare The Prestige, a film in which twins are part of the mystery’s solution and Christopher Nolan sets this revelation up expertly.

Two possible rejoinders occur to me: First, that rules are made to be broken, a point I’ve made plenty of times myself. Agatha Christie rather famously violated a number of Knox’s rules. And second, Glass Onion is not really a whodunit after all, but a combination revenge story/heist caper. To these I say: Rian Johnson is no Agatha Christie, who could match her mastery of plot and boldness in experiment with genuine compassion and a keen understanding of human nature; and to argue that presenting the audience with a mystery but having it turn out to be something else is just another dodge. And don’t make me bring up “subverting expectations.”

Second, and related to Danny’s argument about political point-scoring, there is Johnson’s obvious and already much commented-upon pandering to leftwing identity politics. But this is so much the norm for Hollywood now that it feels pointless to complain about. (Interestingly, both Danny and I discerned that Johnson’s worldview is shaped entirely too much by the anti-discourse of Twitter, a point that even made its way into the Honest Trailers spoof of Glass Onion.)

But—to use the same note about politics as a jumping-off point—my most serious misgivings always had to do with the climax of the film. When the aggrieved Andi finds her mission of vengeance stymied by Miles Bron and company, she simply starts smashing his collection of glass curios, a spree of vandalism that culminates in a (somehow) non-lethal explosion that destroys Bron’s glass onion house, an act Andi can only top by deliberately destroying the Mona Lisa.

Remember Johnson’s political pandering, and the strawmen he has peopled his film with, and remember as well that Glass Onion takes place in the late spring of 2020, a setting Johnson is not only mining for quarantine and masking jokes. I’d wager that a climax in which injustice is not corrected but simply reacted to with a childish tantrum—by breaking other people’s stuff, setting things on fire, and destroying art—is not coincidental. And I’d argue absolutely that this is an instinct that does not need to be encouraged, much less held up as the satisfying final act of a drama of theft and restoration.

So the more I’ve reflected on Glass Onion, the more it’s struck me as precisely what Danny described in his post: hollow and self-satisfied, slick but contemptuous, a triumph of “precociousness over substance,” and a marriage of political shallowness with irresponsible virtue signaling. And these problems—“faults of soul,” as I mentioned above—originate with the film’s creator.

As so often, Chesterton comes to mind: “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

Kingsnorth (and Lewis) on nostalgia and progress

Last week Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake, one of my favorite novels from the last ten years,* posted a marvelous reflection on nostalgia on his Substack The Abbey of Misrule. He includes this personal note near the beginning:

We all recreate our preferred old world. Mine was—probably still is—an awkward melange of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer culture and rural England before the First World War. Is it possible to wander the whited hawthorn lanes of Edward Thomas’s south country, the barrows intact up on the downs, smoke curling from the chimneys of the old inns, the motorways and superstores nowhere to be seen, whilst also hunting mammoths? Probably not, though it might make an intriguing backdrop to a fantasy novel I will never write.

That’s a charming way to highlight the hodgepodge quality of the imagined pasts that attract us, an attraction sharpened by the sense that every bit of this “melange” gathered from across the centuries is now equally lost. Maybe sometime I’ll describe some of my own hodgepodges. But Kingsnorth also drives deeper into the substantial appeal of nostalgia:

I’ve never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but I have often been addicted to dreams. This is the lot of the writer. You become a writer because the world you encountered in the stories you read as a child is more exciting than the world you are actually living in. More exciting and, in a strange way, more real. Your world is school and suburbs and bus stops and breakfast cereals and maths homework and being forced to wash your dad’s car at the weekend and wondering how to talk to girls and listening to the charts to work out what kind of music it’s permissible to like. This is not Lothlorien, and neither is it Earthsea. The worlds created by Tolkein [sic] and Asimov and Verne and Howard are better than this, and there is no doubt at all that given a splinter of a chance you would prefer to live in them. Then, one day, you pick up a pen and realise that you can create your own.

Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in the Machine. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away.

Further on, Kingsnorth engages the usual dismissive (and often deliberately rude) responses to wishing for a vanished—or, more painfully, vanishing—world:

Nostalgia is a curious thing. The love of a dead past is, on the surface, pointless, and yet it seems to be a universal, pan-cultural longing for something better than an equally dead but often less enticing present. This is something which its critics never seem to understand. ‘That’s just nostalgia’, they say, dismissively, when you suggest that a high street made up of independent shops might have been better than one giant superstore, or that folk songs around the fire in the pub might be better than Celebrity Love Island.

Spot on. Curiously, I have encountered this most forcefully in defending traditional architecture against the unsustainable and impractical eyesores of modern architecture. Calling Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall ugly or the Gherkin (aka the London Egg or the London Suppository) a blemish on the skyline or suggesting that church spires and Victorian market squares are in some way superior to what has replaced them makes a certain kind of person angry. This is strange to me because it seems like architecture, which as the late Sir Roger Scruton noted creates an aesthetic ecology we all have to engage with publicly, as a community, is the most straightforwardly concrete argument for the value of tradition and beauty.

But I digress.**

Kingsnorth goes on to suggest that nostalgia is often, in fact,

a rational response to a world heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps a practical response too. If the Machine is destroying so many things of value, from the home to the ancient woodlands that once surrounded it, then remembering those things is not only an act of rebellion, but can also be the first stage in an act of necessary restoration.

Which immediately brought to mind one of CS Lewis’s many reflections on “progress,” the ultimate God-term of the last century:

“If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road.”

— CS Lewis

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. . . . There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

That’s from Mere Christianity, which originated as a series of radio talks during World War II. Lewis knew whereof he spoke. And, writing now eighty-odd years later, I think it is pretty plain that the world has taken the pig-headed route.

To return to Kingsnorth, he reflects as well on the way “nostalgic” is used as an insult, a rhetorical cudgel, and how to defeat it:

[T]he fact that ‘nostalgic’—like ‘Romantic’, ‘Luddite’, ‘reactionary’ and any other word that suggests attachment to anything before progressive Year Zero—has become a term of mockery makes it a tempting label to embrace if you are conducting a personal rebellion against the Total System. Being called names is supposed to scare you into silence, but it doesn’t work if you wear the names like a medal on your chest. Romanticising the past, you say? Well, maybe I do. But it’s a hell of a lot better than romanticising the future.

Hear hear.

I strongly recommend the essay in its entirety, especially the second half in which Kingsnorth examines three possible responses to the decline and fragmentation characteristic of the present age. Two, he notes, are traps. One is the unthinking acceptance of the Myth of Progress. The other—perhaps surprisingly if you’ve read this far—is nostalgia itself. While it is “vital” to be “guided by the past,” Kingsnorth is alert to the dangers of nostalgia, too: “[A]s we stand against the Machine, we need solid ground on which to brace ourselves. Neither Progress nor nostalgia offer that solidity.” Kingsnorth goes on to suggest a third way, one seasoned by both resignation and faithful hope, “to watch the great fall, accept its reality, and then get on with our work.”

An intriguing and profoundly challenging conclusion, one that jibes with things I’ve meditated upon for years but that confronts me more forcefully with what this kind of fruitful nostalgia must mean if it is to be of benefit to anyone. I have to wonder if Kingsnorth has read Jünger’s The Forest Passage. I mean to reread that soon. Food for thought.

Notes:

*The Wake is the first of a loose trilogy set in the distant past, the present, and the distant future of England. I have read The Wake, which takes places at the time of the Norman Conquest, and the second volume, Beast, but have not yet gotten to the third and final novel, Alexandria. Kingsnorth writes a good bit about what inspired it near the end of this Substack essay. I briefly reviewed Beast here last year.

**Let me here recommend Tom Wolfe’s clique-puncturing From Bauhaus to Our House and move on.

Jünger and the homo religiosus revisited

At the beginning of last year I posted a passage from Ernst Jünger’s short series of interrelated essays The Forest Passage about the homo religiosus—man as a religious animal, with a need for religion that will be filled by something. Now, just over a year later, I’m reading his allegorical novel On the Marble Cliffs, and unsurprisingly given the novel’s context the same concern is manifest.

On the Marble Cliffs takes place in the Marina, an idyllic Mediterranean region by the sea. The unnamed narrator tells the story of how the tyrannical host of the Head Forester, a warlord in the forests far to the north, infiltrates and turns the Marina to the Head Forester’s will. Unlike the Marina, which seems to exist in a placid mix of genteel paganism and the gutsy but learned Christianity of the Church Fathers or the early medieval Benedictines, the northern forests are the home of brutal idol worship and crude nature gods. The narrator mentions the Æsir explicitly, as well as a grotesque bull god worshiped in a sacred grove.

As the narrator tells his loose, dreamlike story, the avenues through which the Head Forester gains control over the Marina become more and more clear, but the religious one proves particularly striking:

Yet who would have believed that the gods of fat and butter who filled the cows’ udders would gain a following in the Marina—of worshippers, at that, who came from houses in which offerings and sacrifices had long been mocked? The same spirits who deemed themselves strong enough to cut the ties that bound them to their ancestral faith became subjugated to the barbarian idols’ spell. The sight of their blind obedience was more repugnant than drunkenness at midday.

Per CS Lewis, whom I also quoted in last year, “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served.” The scoffing abandonment of the old religion does not leave the apostate unreligious; it just leaves an opening that must be filled by something else, probably something worse.

On the Marble Cliffs was completed in 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland. When it was published it was pretty quickly interpreted as a fabular broadside against the Nazis, an interpretation that is certainly hard to avoid. It was even taken seriously enough by the Nazi regime that Goebbels tried to have the book suppressed.

And yet Jünger insisted that it is not just an anti-Nazi parable but more broadly applicable, and the insight offered above—that irreligion, especially the elite ability to see through it and treat it with derision, leaves the scoffer open to far worse in the form of ideology and political contagion—is certainly relevant in our day and age. I have certainly seen plenty of acquaintances abandon religion as closeminded and oppressive only to embrace far more shrill, narrowminded, intolerant—and, not insignificantly, much less fun—political ideologies, and with a “blind obedience” that makes me feel pity for them more than anything else.

I’m reading Tess Lewis’s new translation of On the Marble Cliffs for NRYB Classics. It’s excellent so far and I hope to finish it this evening, after which I’ll read the introduction and other apparatus. For those interested, Thomas Nevins also gives the novel pretty extensive treatment in his book on Jünger, which I mentioned a few weeks ago in a much more lighthearted context.

Johnson's rhino

One of my longtime favorite writers, historian and journalist Paul Johnson, died earlier this month aged 94.

I discovered his work in grad school when I read his notorious volume of character studies, Intellectuals, a searing takedown of destructive know-it-alls from Rousseau onward. My appreciation deepened not long before I got married and began teaching with A History of the American People, a massive narrative account of the origins, founding, and ups and downs of the United States written explicitly as an answer to the mendacious Howard Zinn. These two books demonstrate Johnson’s foremost gifts—polemic and grand narrative, the one with sharp elbows and cutting voice and the other with wide, eager eyes trained on far horizons.

In the first years of my marriage and teaching I enjoyed Johnson’s late-career venture into short biographies of great historical figures: Jesus, Napoleon, Churchill, Darwin, Socrates, Washington, Mozart. I have especially fond memories of Eisenhower: A Life, a little book I smuggled into the warehouse area of the sporting goods store where I worked to read furtively during the rare downtime of the retail Christmas season. My wife and I were expecting our first child and I was supplementing my adjunct paychecks from two colleges and a once-a-week tutoring gig. Stealing away to be with Ike for a page here, two pages there, and in Johnson’s brisk and elegant prose, was a great encouragement amidst the cold, the customers, and all the uncertainties of that time.

But I noticed after I finished Eisenhower that no more Johnson books were forthcoming. I looked off and on for years, checking in on Johnson via Google and hoping always for a newly announced title. I regretfully concluded that he was in decline. His death a few weeks ago makes my memories of those books all the more special.

Of the obits and appreciations published after Johnson’s death one stood out to me: a shambling, unstructured, and therefore endearing reminiscence by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger. Amidst the anecdotes and interesting tidbits (at Oxford, Johnson studied under AJP Taylor) Nordlinger included a mention of Johnson’s “Rhino Principle,” which Johnson explicated in a 2006 essay for Forbes. Here’s the principle:

Now, the rhino is not a particularly subtle or clever animal. It’s the last of the antediluvian quadrupeds to carry a great weight of body armor. And by all the rules of progressive design and the process of natural selection the rhino ought to have been eliminated. But it hasn't been. Why not? Because the rhino is single-minded. When it perceives an object, it makes a decision—to charge. And it puts everything it’s got into that charge. When the charge is over, the object is either flattened or has gone a long way into cover, whereupon the rhino instantly resumes browsing.

Few people think of learning from a rhino. But I have. And when I hear of an author who cannot finish or get started on a book, I send him (or her) a rhino card. I paint a watercolor of a rhinoceros on the front of a postcard—something I do well, as I’ve practiced it a great many times. And in the space next to the address I write: “Stop fussing about that book. Just charge it. Keep on charging it until it is finished. That’s what the rhino does. Put this card over your desk and remember the Rhino Principle.”

And the crucial point:

Now, the Rhino Principle may not produce the perfect book, but it does produce a book. And once a book is drafted, it can be improved, polished and made satisfactory. But if the Rhino Principle is ignored, there is no book at all.

Like Johnson’s Ike in the chilly shipping area of the Academy Sports warehouse, this was precisely the encouragement and inspiration I needed right now, and I’m grateful to Johnson for it.

To the ranks of the great proverbial possessives out there—Buridan’s ass, Morton’s fork, Hobson’s choice, Chesterton’s fence—let us add Johnson’s rhino.

Paul Johnson, journalist, critic, commentator, controversialist, and guide to the epic sweep of the past, RIP.

What are you doing here?

I’m currently reading Thomas Nevin’s Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-45. In his chapter on the Weimar Era, Nevin describes how, after several years of writing for nationalist military magazines and other right-wing outlets, Jünger branched out in the intellectual company he kept:

He was friendly to the national Bolshevist Ernst Nieckish, to the Bohemian anarchist Erich Mühsam, to the putschist Ernst von Salomon, to the national socialist Otto Strasser, to the communists Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller. These men could get together in a room and talk in a civil way. It is facile to conclude they were united in opposing the republic. In fact, strong in intelligence, they were political weaklings.

One sympathizes.

This is a rich cross-section of Weimar political persuasions, with these men belonging to groups that were sometimes literally fighting each other in the streets. Indeed, the left-wing Nazi Otto Strasser and the anti-Nazi nationalist Ernst von Salomon were veterans of the Freikorps. (Von Salomon lightly fictionalized his experiences in The Outlaws, which I read two years ago.)

Nevin goes on to describe the regular salons Jünger and others would hold throughout 1929:

Regularly on Friday evenings . . . Jünger and brother Fritz met at the home of Friedrich Hielscher on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse. These gatherings usually included von Salomon, the publisher Rowohlt, Otto Strasser, the expressionist writer Arnolt Bronnen, and Vormarsch illustrator Paul Weber, soon famous for his prophetic drawings depicting Nazism as a cult of death.

Again—so far, so Weimar, especially when you look into some of the lesser-known figures and find that peculiar cocktail of playwrights, businessmen, and neopagans that could only make sense in that time and place. But then, just before describing how Joseph Goebbels himself began attending these meetings with the express aim of winning Jünger over to the Nazis, Nevin casually tosses this in:

The American novelist Thomas Wolfe also attended.

I, like Jim Halpert, have just so many questions.

In all seriousness, this was a great surprise, and something unexpected and new to look into. I’ve already had this out-of-print Wolfe biography, which gives good coverage to the years he spent in Germany, where Look Homeward, Angel was apparently a huge hit, recommended by a co-worker and Wolfe relation.

A reminder that one of the purest and strangest delights of studying history is stumbling across connections between seemingly separate things you’re interested in, connections that throw both subjects suddenly into a strange new relief—in this case, Ernst Jünger and interwar Germany and the Southern literary world of the same period.

Joel Coen on movies vs TV

In my 2022 movie year-in-review I mentioned my exhaustion with TV and my preference for movies. Joel Coen, from a 2020 podcast with longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins on why he and brother Ethan have stuck to movies and not ventured into TV, explains a little of what goes into my preference:

[L]ong-form was never something we could get our heads around. It’s a different paradigm. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it.

We’ve all watched TV shows like this. Even some of our favorites fit the arc Coen describes here.

One of the reasons I hope movies and movie theatres survive is that the discipline of the form makes moviegoing better than binge-watching even a good TV show. The discipline of the filmmakers to turn out a compact, well-crafted, self-contained jewel—rather than giving themselves permission, as so many TV showrunners do, to sprawl all over the place—and the discipline of the audience starting a story and not being able to stop it, having to receive it continuously in the form intended by the filmmakers; these are virtues that dissipate in the size and potential aimlessness of a TV series.

There are exceptions, of course, but who has time to find them? And I’ll carve out space for mini-series, which demand some of the same beginning-middle-end discipline as a two-hour drama. Not for nothing is the five-episode Chernobyl and the six-episode The Night Manager the best TV I’ve seen in the last few years.

I’m currently listening to the full Deakins-Coen interview on my commute between campuses. I discovered it and the passage above thanks to this short post from World of Reel.

On ancient and medieval “propaganda”

It is commonplace among certain kinds of historians to refer to some ancient and medieval sources, especially anything produced at the behest or under the patronage of a king or nobleman, as “propaganda.” Among those that come to mind from my reading in the last couple years are Asser’s Life of King Alfred, the anonymous Life of King Edward (the Confessor), and Augustus’s Res Gestae Divi Augusti. And this is without taking into account the purely literary works that critics occasionally label propaganda, like the Aeneid.

Calling these sources “propaganda” seems to me wrongheaded and misleading for several reasons, foremost among them the anachronistic connotations embedded in the word itself.

While the word has innocent origins (and a quite interesting and revealing evolution) and it can, technically, still mean only “official information,” its technical sense, as with “Dark Ages,” has been almost entirely swamped by negative connotations. Labeling something “propaganda” immediately freights it with insinuation as to its origins and the ulterior motives of its creators. To me, the word propaganda suggests:

1—the direct involvement or oversight of a state or ruling power,
2—a carefully crafted and controlled programmatic message,
3—ideological motivation and rationalization for either distorting the truth or outright lying,

and, in terms of material conditions,

4—a means of mass production or at least mass dissemination, and
5—a corresponding mass readership.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment of where propaganda comes from, what it’s for, and what it needs to do its work, and yet by these standards most ancient and medieval texts offhandedly labeled “propaganda” by modern historians would fall far short.

Just the culture of widespread literacy required by 4 and 5 would eliminate almost all sources before Gutenberg and from most of the following two or three centuries, and 1 and 2 are seldom as obvious from a face-value reading of such sources as some historians would like you to believe.

To take the examples I gave at the beginning of this post:

• In Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Asser himself asserts authorship, openly acknowledges his personal connection to his subject, and explains why he wanted to write about him. What is not clear is that Alfred was directing Asser (1) or dictating how he was to be presented (2). And what certainly is clear, given how books were produced during the 9th century, was that Asser could not publish or widely disseminate his version of Alfred’s life (4) and that only a small number of people like Asser—clergy, religious, and a small number of educated laymen like Alfred himself—would ever read it, nixing (5).

• Ditto the Life of King Edward, with the added uncertainties of who precisely commissioned the book and who wrote it, so that it is even more speculative to argue for (1) and (2). Further, the Life survives in one manuscript, which is empirical proof that even if whoever commissioned the book aimed at (4) and (5), they did not achieve it.

• Of the unscientific sample I referred to at the top, the one that comes closest to fitting the definition of propaganda suggested by the term is Augustus’s Res Gestae or The Deeds of Augustus. Here you have the emperor himself dictating the text (1), much of which is political in nature (2), and widely reproduced as a monumental inscription (4). But even here it is not clear how many people could read the Res Gestae even when it was available inscribed in a public place.

So much for the anachronistic implications of the term. But there is a deeper level of error to which calling an ancient or medieval source “propaganda” leads.

What is missing from all of the sources I worked through above but fundamental to all modern propaganda is (3), an ideological framework that either allows or requires lying. This is not to say that these sources are 100% truthful, but flattery, omitting awkward or controversial topics, or simply not knowing things and not recording them are not the same thing as ideologically motivated suppression or fabrication of facts.

Assuming ancient and medieval sources to have the same pragmatic relationship to the truth as modern propagandists (or, increasingly, historians) is a clear case of projection. Their ways were not our ways. As Orwell wrote on this topic in a passage I posted last year:

Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. . . . A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. . . . Some of the facts . . . were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.

Further—and this is especially the case for sources like the Life of King Alfred and Life of King Edward—the dearth of alternative or parallel sources for many of the events they describe means that even the forms of non-propaganda bias listed above can only be inferred. Guessed at. Speculated.

Which I think gets at what’s really going on with accusations that such sources are “propaganda.” Calling a source propaganda grants the historian permission to read between the lines and construct alternate histories purely negatively, with a kind of kindergarten “opposite day” hermeneutic that ends up as a license to fabricate. And the problem is only more pronounced in those periods when we have precisely the lack of sources that requires us to rely on those commissioned by kings or abbots or emperors.

By all means, approach sources produced through some connection to or the patronage of a king or ruler or other authority with caution, and always, always look for bias. (It’ll be there, though that doesn’t mean anyone is lying.) But avoid dragging in words with such strongly modern associations and implications, and certainly don’t use that as an excuse to concoct the “real” story behind the sources we actually have. That way lies bad history.

If only we had a word for that kind of untruthful, selective, ideologically motivated storytelling.

High-profile targets

Which one do more people recognize? Which one are more people mad about? Which one deserves it?

More than four years ago, in the early days of this blog, I reviewed a short biography of Raphael Semmes, captain of the Confederate commerce raider Alabama. In passing, I noted that despite his success and notoriety during the Civil War, he was now obscure enough that an announced demonstration at his monument in Mobile attracted no protesters. A vision of a vanished world, surely, but this was despite continued and well-publicized protests at monuments to General Lee and other figures.

On a recent episode of his excellent new podcast Uncancelled History, Douglas Murray interviewed historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan and many other books on Spanish history and the Age of Exploration. After thorough comparisons of the much-maligned Columbus to other figures from that era—specifically Magellan, who actually did some of the heinous things Columbus is only accused of doing—Murray and Fernández-Armesto turn to the question of why some historical figures attract outrage, protest, and cancelation and others don’t:

DM: How is it all of these reputations, these very different people with very different attitudes, have sort of got wrapped up together? I mean, Magellan, for instance, I suspect that of those who know him today, relatively few will know what a kind of villain he was, but he gets wrapped up with Columbus. Everything in the Age of Explorers has got merged, somehow.

FFM: The paradox is, it’s got nothing to do with the facts! It’s very hard to say that about Magellan. And yet, you know, Columbus—the guys are tearing down his statues, they’re besmirching his reputation, they’re smattering him with obloquy, they’re treating him as if he were some kind of proto-fascist, and yet Magellan, who really was a bad guy, has escaped all that! You know? His statues are intact! Nobody is saying, Let’s tear down his statues. Nobody is saying, Let’s, you know, revise his reputation, et cetera—except me. No one is saying, Why don’t we right the injustices that have accrued from Magellan’s voyage. In fact, quite the contrary. There are all these scientific prizes and university programs and whole species and constellations named after Magellan, and nobody is saying Lets, you know, change those names. So it’s quite amazing that the relatively good guy gets all the brickbats and the relatively bad guy gets all the praise. And I think the reason—you know, it’s very hard to explain that—but I think it’s an example of how prejudice is inviolable by fact and that no matter what the truth is of an episode in the past, people decide what they think about it on the basis of their prejudices and on the basis of what it does for their own programs and agendas, and it’s very unfortunate that Columbus has become the victim of specifically American agendas to do with Native American identity and slavery, things that he really had nothing to do with but which have become associated with him historically in the course of the long—oh, I don’t know—sort of unfolding historiographical story between his day and ours. Whereas Magellan didn’t make any contribution to the United States, never even got anywhere near here, and is therefore pretty much ignored by public opinion in America.

In short, Columbus is well-known—for reasons specific to American pathologies—and Magellan is not. Columbus conjures strong associations and vivid if inaccurate mental pictures, and Magellan does not. So if the historically ignorant are going to attack an explorer—again, for reasons specific to American pathologies—they will attack Columbus.

But activists can take an alternate tack, as this discussion suggests. Murray calls it “wrapping up.” One might also call it “guilt by association” or simply judging all by the example of the worst. Being too ignorant to be specific, and to make specific, historically literate arguments about people like Columbus, it is easier to judge according to broad categories carefully presented—usually through cherrypicked evidence or simply shouting—as inarguably evil.

So while some poor sap somewhere might be tempted to argue the merits of “canceling” Columbus, it is harder to argue against a sweeping condemnation of all “colonizers.” Assuming these arguments are presented in good faith in the first place—an assumption I am unwilling to make.

This is clearly the case in the category of “Confederates.” Lee is famous in the first place and has intractable defenders today because he was a genuinely good and great man, and so efforts to attack this high-profile target, one of the few Confederate leaders anyone could name, were always going to be difficult. But shift the discussion to “Confederates” writ large, oversimplify and ignore context and specifics—striving always for “the clarity of caricature”—and even the obscure figures whom activists could never have otherwise named or recognized can be swept up in the net and liquidated.

Which brings me back to Raphael Semmes, whose statue did come down in just such a trawling approach in the summer of 2020. Like Magellan, he could never bring out mobs of protesters the way Lee (or Jefferson, or Washington, or Lincoln) could, but “wrapping up,” attacking categories, showed that actually knowing something about targets doesn’t matter. (Tellingly, an article on the removal of Semmes’s statue was headlined “Who was Confederate Adm. Raphael Semmes?”)

Food for thought, something this podcast is good for. I certainly recommend Murray’s interview with Fernández-Armesto, but perhaps the best episode I’ve listened to so far is the most recent, in which Murray talks to Thomas Chatterton-Williams about the woke campaign against the classics.

Material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys

Yesterday I started reading John Buchan’s Huntingtower, a 1922 adventure novel that introduced recurring character Dickson McCunn, a Glasgow “provision merchant” or grocer. Newly retired at the age of fifty-five and with his wife out of town, taking a cure at a Continental spa, McCunn decides to go on an adventure. Buchan informs us that “Mr McCunn—I may confess at the start—was an incurable romantic.”

The source of this incurable romanticism? His imagination, as fueled by decades of reading:

“He . . . sought in literature for one thing alone. . . . material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys.”

He had had a humdrum life since the day when he had first entered his uncle’s shop with the hope of some day succeeding that honest grocer; and his feet had never strayed a yard from his sober rut. But his mind, like the Dying Gladiator’s, had been far away. As a boy he had voyaged among books, and they had given him a world where he could shape his career according to his whimsical fancy. Not that Mr. McCunn was what is known as a great reader. He read slowly and fastidiously, and sought in literature for one thing alone. Sir Walter Scott had been his first guide, but he read the novels not for their insight into human character or for their historical pageantry, but because they gave him material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys. It was the same with Dickens. A lit tavern, a stage-coach, post-horses, the clack of hoofs on a frosty road, went to his head like wine. He was a Jacobite not because he had any views on Divine Right, but because he had always before his eyes a picture of a knot of adventurers in cloaks, new landed from France, among the western heather.

C’est moi. Like McCunn, what I wanted out of anything I read as a kid was to feel these things—to fall in with dangerous pirates, to narrowly escape kidnapping and murder, to wait in the cramped dark to spring a surprise attack, to go undercover among enemies, to fight monsters and elude giants, to witness the unfolding of world-shattering battle—and the exhilaration of living through it all. I would not just “watch” in my mind’s eye but imagine myself there thanks to all the raw, vivid, concrete sensory detail good writers provided, and would go on “to construct fantastic journeys” of my own. Like McCunn, I was a daydreamer. Still am. And like McCunn, I sympathize with the desperate, the uncertain, the underdog—with adventurers.

Recently the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore shared a list of the historical novels that inspired his love of history. I may have to put together just such a list of my own. In the meantime, here’s his list (or this screenshotted version to avoid the paywall). And Huntingtower is a delight so far, much the kind of adventure McCunn himself would have enjoyed.

We better not

Reviewing a new mini-series adaptation of Ben MacIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends, the story of notorious Communist agent Kim Philby, Charlotte Gill takes issue with an invented character named Lily Taylor who is scrupulously designed to appeal to certain sensibilities—a working class woman who don’t take guff off of nobody. Gill argues that Taylor’s intrusion into what is meant to be a dramatization of a true story is evidence of the filmmakers’ ideological capture. I don’t disagree.

Gill briefly outlines many other problems with the series from an historical and storytelling standpoint, but the fictional Lily Taylor highlights a problem with the storytellers themselves, and with modern storytelling more generally. Gill:

But what is most perplexing—not just with [A Spy Among Friends], but every drama or book that sees the past as a canvas that can be reworked—is why writers think their fiction (which they call history) is better than reality. It takes a certain arrogance to believe that you can improve it, worse still that you have the moral responsibility to erase parts you find objectionable. There is a reason people come back to the Philby story; because it is fascinating in itself—without the need for Lily Taylors. Sadly, as in the case of Kim Philby, ideology will remain paramount for some.

Spot on. And I have often wondered by filmmakers and all the others “reworking” historical stories or great literature for “modern audiences” don’t grasp that the appeal of most stories, whether historical or literary, is the story as it stands. It’s already interesting. It takes ideological capture, arrogance (but I repeat myself), and—it should be added—a startling lack of creativity not to see this.

Some years ago that great YouTube seer, Mr Plinkett, reviewed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in his inimitable style. Near the end, in considering whether it was a good idea to make a fourth installment in the series at all, he laid down a good prudential principle: “We all love Indiana Jones, yes, but everybody needs that part of their brain that says ‘We better not.’”

Ditto those who would “improve” the past to suit their own preconceptions.

Naturally, I have a lot of thoughts about the use of fictional characters in true stories or settings, as they are often an important tool in adaptation. I may delve into those here sometime soon.

2022 in movies

I almost named this year of movies The Year of Indifference. After struggling along for several years, I finally turned a corner in the spring and just stopped caring about most of the movies that came out.

I can remember the moment. It was April, the year barely begun. I was sitting in a theatre waiting to watch The Northman when the non-stop pre-trailer fluff turned toward the mandatory Disney agitprop. Two youthful people announced—as if any of us could have forgotten—that next month Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness would arrive in theatres. Fine. Whatever. But their second sentence was something like, “Here are all the movies and Disney+ shows you need to catch up on before the movie!”

I’m still not sure if I said it out loud, but I certainly thought, “Well, the hell with that.”

I had most looked forward to three movies in the spring of 2022. As it turns out, those were my three favorite movies of 2022. From the last of those in late spring right up to New Year’s Eve, I slid downhill into utter apathy. Movies came and went and I did not care. I did not see the new Dr Strange, or Jurassic World, or Thor, or Black Panther, or any edgy A24 stuff, or any prestige movies about movies like The Fabelmans or Empire of Light or Babylon, or anything that came out on any streaming service, and I probably will not in the future. Not that I felt any hostility toward these movies—the only one I bestowed hate upon was Avatar: The Way of Water, which I certainly will not see—I just did not care. Even the things I felt some flicker of interest in I could not be motivated to go pay money to watch. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.

But I hope so, because while the lows of 2022 were, for me, very low, the tiny handful of high points were most high indeed.

So having explained how I came to be even more pessimistic than usual about the state of filmmaking, let me focus for the rest of the post on the purely positive. Rather than The Year of Indifference, I’m taking a cue from a coincidental symmetry in the titles of my top three films and dubbing 2022:

The Year of The _____man (and Top Gun: Maverick)

Top Gun: Maverick

The hype is real.

I have little personal attachment to the original Top Gun, but grew more and more interested in Maverick as it kept getting delayed and as I learned more about it. By the time it arrived in theatres I had even allowed myself to get excited, and boy was that excitement rewarded. A carefully crafted, well-executed action movie with clear stakes, straightforward old-fashioned storytelling, solid if not deep characters, some resonant themes of guilt, mentorship, hard work, and courage, and genuinely awesome action, Top Gun: Maverick thrilled me.

What is more, the movie holds up. I saw it twice in theatres in the late spring. My wife gave me the Blu-ray for Christmas, and my dad set up a great family movie night in his office’s conference room over Christmas break—massive TV, loud, bassy speakers, and plenty of pizza. The movie was just as exciting as the first time I saw it on the big screen.

You can read my full review from May here.

The Batman

The Batman was my first big movie of the year, but one I had looked forward to with some trepidation. I intentionally avoided reviews and information about the movie because I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I went in almost cold, with few expectations though admittedly some hopes that it would be good.

Those hopes were fulfilled. The Batman proved a legitimate crime movie, serial killer mystery, police procedural, action thriller, and detective story all at the same time, with a good script, excellent acting, a wonderfully detailed Gotham City—the best I’ve seen in a Batman movie, in my opinion—just oozing and dripping the gloomy atmosphere I’ve always imagined, and a subtle but effective coming-of-age story for Batman. Like Top Gun: Maverick, The Batman takes familiar material and elevates it not only through its surehanded and expert storytelling but through the mature, old-fashioned themes it dramatizes.

You can read my full review from March here, with some further notes, thoughts, and observations here.

The Northman

The Northman is the best Viking movie ever made, and perhaps the only thoroughly good one. (Though I do have a soft spot for one very old-fashioned one.)

Robert Eggers’s stated intention in The Northman was to make a film that felt and worked like an undiscovered saga, one of the many Old Norse stories of outlaws, heroes, revenge, and the supernatural recorded in Iceland a few centuries after the end of the Viking Age. He succeeded brilliantly. This film drops the viewer into an alien world, one utterly indifferent to our modern values or pieties and one in which strength, victory, and the ruthless fulfilment of personal obligations—most notably revenge—offered the only guiding morality. It is a bracing vision, simultaneously breathtaking in its boldness and courage and disturbing in its bleak callousness. Again—accurately capturing the spirit of this lost world.

The Northman is the movie I was most excited about going into the spring of 2022. And while I might have enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick more as rock-solid entertainment, The Northman satisfies my most niche historical and cinematic interests like no other film. It’s brilliantly executed and deserves a watch.

You can read my full review from April here.

Three runners-up

In addition to my three favorites, all of which came out in the late winter or spring, here are three good, solidly-made movies I saw that didn’t quite rise to the top. Like my top three, I happen to have already reviewed all three of these in greater detail here on the blog. Links are included with each short recap below.

Devotion—The story of two fighter pilots in the newly integrated US Navy, Devotion follows wingmen Lt Tom Hudner and Ens Jesse Brown—one white aviator, one black—as they get to know each other, testing and pushing one another until a deep bond of friendship grows between these two quite different men. All this plays out as the Cold War slowly escalates, culminating in Hudner and Brown’s deployment to an aircraft carrier providing close air support to Marines in the first terrible winter of the Korean War. It’s here that Hudner and Brown’s skill as aviators and their devotion to one another as wingmen and friends will be tested.

Glenn Powell, who plays Hudner here and another naval aviator, Hangman, in Top Gun: Maverick, was a producer on Devotion and clearly learned a lot of lessons about how to shoot aerial sequences with real aircraft from his experience on Top Gun. So it’s unfortunate that Devotion and Top Gun: Maverick ended up coming out the same year, as I’ve heard several unfavorable comparisons between the two. Devotion is a different kind of movie, with a statelier pace and a greater emphasis on character drama, but it is well-crafted, well-acted, and handsomely shot and both deserves and rewards viewing.

You can read my full review of Devotion—a dual review with Glass Onion—here.

The Tragedy of Macbeth—Joel Coen’s solo adaptation of my favorite Shakespearean play is a fast-moving but stately and intensely moody film. The acting is excellent, but the real draw is the film’s style, an atmospheric throwback to impressionistic black-and-white silent films complete with stagey sets and dramatic high-contrast lighting, all of which intensifies the drama of murder and deception and the pervasive eeriness of the story. This adaptation captures the mood of Shakespeare’s play better than any of the other film versions I’ve seen.

You can read my full review of The Tragedy of Macbeth from January here.

Glass Onion—This is the one exception to my statement above that I saw nothing released on any streaming service, but that’s only because Netflix gave this a short theatrical run ahead of its streaming release. This is apparently a trend, and I hope it continues. Glass Onion is a lot of fun (though I erred in my review when I wrote that it was probably the most fun I’d had at the movies that year, as that distinction obviously belongs to Top Gun: Maverick), with the same whimsical, trickster style of Knives Out but more outright comedy. Writer-director Rian Johnson deftly satirizes the fatuity and self-congratulation of modern day influencers—whether tech billionaires, do-gooder leftist politicians, celebrity fashionistas, or the rise-and-grind types hawking male-enhancement drugs—and the intricate overlapping construction creates genuine mystery, surprise, and humor. I have a few reservations and misgivings about Glass Onion, but as pure entertainment it was a rare treat.

You can read my full review of Glass Onion—a dual review with Devotion—here.

New to me

While most of the movie year was a bust for me, I did see some great old films for the first time. These were the best—or at least most entertaining—of the lot:

The Beast—This is a lesser-known 1988 film directed by Kevin Reynolds, who would go on to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a few years later. The Beast (aka The Beast of War) takes place during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and begins with a platoon of Russian T-55 tanks destroying an Afghan village. The tankers wantonly murder civilians and try to torture information out of a tribal elder by slowly rolling over him—from the feet up—with one tank. After the massacre one tank becomes separated, and its efforts to escape hostile territory as well as violent disagreement among the crew form one half of the film’s story. The other half follows Taj (Steven Bauer), now the Khan of the tribe attacked at the beginning of the film, as he and a band of mujahideen seek revenge. The two stories intertwine suspensefully, converging on the character of Koverchenko (Jason Patric), a Russian tanker tested both by his commander, the violent Daskal (George Dzundza) and the mujahideen. Both a harrowing small-scale war film and an intense, well-acted character drama, The Beast was the best surprise of my year and deserves to be much better remembered.

Dunkirk—Not to be confused with the more recent Christopher Nolan film, this 1958 Ealing Studios film starring John Mills, Richard Attenborough, and Bernard Lee retells the title story of collapse, retreat, desperation, and rescue in the traditional style one would expect from the late 1950s, and it’s excellent. Well-acted, told on a grand scale, and moving between multiple stories that converge in the evacuation, Dunkirk gives the real events well-rounded and unsentimental treatment and represents old-fashioned war movies at their best. Far from being superseded by Nolan’s more stripped-down modern action-thriller, this Dunkirk holds its own. The result is two movies about the same events in two dramatically different styles. The two complement each other well and would make a great double-feature for fans of film history, action, or war movies. Regardless, this Dunkirk is well worth seeing for its own sake.

The Mummy—I have a set of the classic Universal monster movies on Blu-ray and have been working through them for Halloween over the last few years. I had seen Frankenstein and Dracula before, but this year I finally got to the original 1932 version of The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. Slow, quiet, and straightforwardly told, The Mummy nevertheless achieves a wonderfully eerie atmosphere—helped in no small part by Karloff’s creepy and tightly controlled performance as Ardeth Bey—and steadily builds tension from beginning to end. This was one I didn’t expect to enjoy nearly as much as I did, and I look forward to revisiting it.

Grizzly—I’m not going to pretend that this movie is good, but it was highly entertaining. (See my carefully qualified introduction above.) Grizzly is an obvious, beat-for-beat knockoff of Jaws, but instead of a shark in the ocean the threat is a bear in the woods. The woods in question are those of Rabun County, Georgia, and part of the fun for me was spotting all the recognizable local places used in the film (e.g. the Rock House in downtown Clayton, an intersection on the Tallulah Gorge Scenic Loop used as the entrance to a fake national park, and the driveway and lab room of my childhood doctor’s office, a moment that gave me the willies because the perspective in the film was exactly that of a patient sitting down to get a finger prick). Also, my dad is in it as an extra. I gather that RiffTrax has done one of its commentaries on Grizzly, and that sounds like it’d be worthwhile. I’d recommend this as a potential Lousy Movie Night classic.

Special commendations—TV

I long ago gave up on most TV shows, not out of the indifference I plummeted into this spring but out of the inability to pick where to start. There’s so much TV out there. And a TV show takes up hours and hours and hours of time I’d rather spend on reading, or playing with my kids, or watching multiple movies. But, given the dearth of good stuff at the theatre, this year my wife and I did get into two excellent shows that provided some of the highlights of our 2022.

“Ghosts”—This is the original BBC series, though there is a recent American adaptation. “Ghosts” follows the centuries’ worth of dead people who have, for whatever reason, not departed the once-stately Button House in the English countryside. There’s a decapitated Tudor nobleman, an early 1990s Conservative MP who died in a compromising situation and so dwells in eternity with no pants, an infantile Georgian lady, a genteel Edwardian lady who falls screaming from an upstairs window every night, a Scoutmaster who died in an archery accident, a Romantic poet killed in a pistol duel, a stalwart British Army officer from the Second World War, a basement full of medieval plague victims from a mass gave under the foundation, and—reaching way, way back—perhaps my favorite character, a caveman.

As befits a show developed by and starring the “Horrible Histories” team, “Ghosts” is hilarious, packed with wit, slapstick, and lots of great historical humor. All these characters from many time periods, plus the two new owners of the house, make a wonderful ensemble, with a rich variety of personal foibles, conflicts, affections and rivalries, and running gags. The show also proves surprisingly moving at times, as in an episode in which the Scoutmaster’s now-elderly widow and son make their annual visit to the house.

My wife found “Ghosts” on DVD at our local library and we watched the entire first season in a few days, stopping ourselves after two episodes each night so that we didn’t stay up until the wee hours binging it. I can’t attest to the other seasons of the show, but season one was a great show that was funny without being mean-spirited, dirty, or insulting to your intelligence. We look forward to watching more.

“Bluey”—Let me repeat what I said about Top Gun above: the hype is real. “Bluey” is a pure delight—a kids’ show that isn’t insulting or annoying, that prizes playfulness and imagination, that showcases a loving, functioning family in which all the members love and respect each other, and that is beautifully animated. It’s also so well-crafted and -written that it works on multiple levels, so that in my family, all three kids—ranging in age from three to seven—as well as my wife and I can enjoy the show together and get different things out of it. (Favorite line: Bandit, the dad, while plunging the toilet: “What are these kids eating?” Based on a true story.)

And speaking as a father, I appreciate seeing a show in which the dad is fun but not an idiot, and has a relationship of mutual love, respect, and hard work with the kids’ mom. That’s vanishingly rare in modern entertainment, and one of the many, many things that make “Bluey” special.

What I missed in 2022

Movies from this year that I wanted to see but, for various reasons—including not wanting to pay for a half-dozen streaming subscriptions and finding Redbox a bit of a pain—I didn’t get to. I’m hoping to see these in the new year.

• Operation Mincemeat—Based on the excellent Ben MacIntyre book, a fascinating true story performed by a great cast.

• Munich: The Edge of War—Based on Robert Harris’s novel, a political thriller with personal stakes in a crucial historical setting. Jeremy Irons looks like an inspired choice to play Neville Chamberlain.

• See How They Run—Looks like a charming historical whodunnit. My wife and I actually made plans to see this but it was gone from cinemas before we could make the arrangements for a date night.

• Nope—I still haven’t seen any of Jordan Peele’s films, but this one involves—or at least appears to involve—UFOs, and is supposed to have smart and hard-edged satire.

• Amsterdam—An intriguing premise and kooky characters hooked into a fictionalized version of a fascinating true incident—the “Business Plot” to overthrow the US government.

• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story—I love Weird Al and, far from a straightforward musical biopic, this looks like an appropriately irreverent parody of what is perhaps the most cliché-ridden genre in Hollywood.

• The Banshees of Inisherin—Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, two favorites who have previously starred in one of my favorite films, In Bruges, reunite with that film’s director for this dark comedy about a man from a small Irish village who inexplicably but very pointed ends his long friendship with another.

• The Menu—This didn’t look like my kind of thing when I first read about it, but I’ve added it to the get-around-to-eventually list on the strength of favorable comments from friends.

• All Quiet on the Western Front—A new adaptation of one of my oldest favorite novels, and the first in the novel’s original language. I eagerly anticipated this when the first trailer finally dropped but, since then, have had a number of the film’s major departures from the book spoiled, so I’m somewhat more hesitant about it now. Still hoping to see it at least once in the days to come.

So, again, there may be several more great movies out there leftover from 2022 that I’ve simply missed, but I’m going to have to overcome quite a lot of weariness and inertia to seek some of these out.

What I’m looking forward to in 2023

I’m afraid my superhero burnout and general apathy continues as I look ahead at 2023’s release schedules, but the few films I look forward to I really look forward two. In order of anticipation, from highest to lowest, they are:

• Mission: Impossible—Dead Recoking Part I—I don’t see how this could be terrible. Cruise, McQuarrie and company have been on a roll for the last several films in this series. I’ll be there opening weekend.

• Oppenheimer—It’s striking to me that Christopher Nolan, out of his twelve films, has made three superhero movies, three near-future sci-fi thrillers, three crime films, and three historical films. And out of this last category, two out of the three have centered on crucial events from World War II. I’m very curious to see how he approaches the seemingly uncinematic story of the Manhattan Project’s R&D of the atomic bomb and J Robert Oppenheimer’s role in it.

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—Please don’t be terrible. At least be better than the CGI in the trailer.

• Dune: Part Two—Villeneuve’s Dune was one of the most pleasant surprises for me at the movies in the last several years, and as a result I am, to my continuing surprise, quite looking forward to Part Two.

• Napoleon—Ridley Scott has a shaky relationship with historical fact but his movies are always breathtaking to behold, and Joaquin Phoenix, who brings a nigh-insane sense of drive and intensity to every part he plays, should do something interesting with old Boney.

These are the ones I am actually excited for, but let’s hope that, as in any moviegoing year, there will also be some nice surprises along the way.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the top, despite my overall negative impression of film and the film industry in 2022, the good things I saw weren’t just good, but excellent. I gladly recommend any of the films praised above. Here’s hoping for much more like them in 2023!