Loose Thoughts on...vampires.

 By Jay Stringer

Midnight Mass sent me on a bit of a Vampire fiction binge. I'm sure the season helped. It gets dark in Glasgow this time of year. I've said it on here before, but once the end of October hits, Scotland has a way of reminding you that we're on the same latitude as Moscow. There's an inky quality to the darkness here. A thickness. It seeps in, if you let it, and my tastes tend to turn towards horror when the skies get dark. Asking questions like, do we create monsters in the shadows because we're scared of the dark, or did we learn to be scared of the dark because that's when the monsters came? 

But from Midnight Mass I started listening to the audiobook of Salem's Lot. And watching a lot of vampire flicks and TV shows. Some worked. Some didn't. I became fascinated trying to spot the patterns. 

The thing that's easy to forget about Dracula is what a modern novel it was. A century of seeing it as a period piece, as Lugosi, Lee, Hammer Horror, wigs and capes. But when the book came out it was a contemporary story, about a very modern town being met by a very old problem. Van Helsing was a doctor, a scientist. The book was epistolary, made up of journal entries and -if memory serves- a transcription from a wax recording. Today it would be a book made up of blog entries and a podcast. If it was a movie it would be found footage, webcam maybe. 

And so that's the first thing that I think is needed. The story needs to be set now, and needs to feel like it's about now. Period piece vampire fare just doesn't do it for me. An old threat in an old world. 

This is related to the second key point. Science. Medicine. The story needs to have some form of scientist or doctor trying to figure out the rules. Whether they succeed or fail, the collision of science and mystery is key to the genre. 

What we know vs what we don't. 

There needs to be some form of fellowship formed. We face our own personal demons alone, but to survive in one of these stories we need to believe in something bigger than ourselves. It doesn't need to be god, but it needs to be something, or somebody. We need to put a team together. Which leads right into a final act twist that is also key. A change in genre. No matter what the story has been up until this point, no matter how dark or light, how scary or funny, to really succeed a vampire story needs to turn into an adventure in its final act. The race of the fellowship against time, against the sun, chasing down the Count on horseback, or by car, or on a daring raid into a spooky house. Some vampire fiction tries to subvert or ignore this aspect. It aims for nihilism, or loneliness, or a conspiracy-style open ending. But we need that spirit of adventure and teamwork. 

But I also keep thinking about an element I would be interested in subverting. 

As I said above, the battle between what we know and what we don't is key to this genre. And folklore by its nature is about us providing some rules to life, about figuring things out. The vampire usually enters the story with a sense of those rules. Once they turn up, certain questions about the universe are answered. And, more importantly, the vampire already knows those answers. They know their place in the pecking order. They know their rules, their mythology, their purpose. They tend to know all about the history of their species, and what their powers are, and how.

But I'm interested in finding the human level of that. Where are the atheist vampires? The ones who have as little real sure knowledge of the universe as we do. Sure, they have ancient books telling them their creation myth, just as we do, but beyond faith what do they really know? Why do they get to be so sure? I'm interesting in thinking about a story of vampires who have no more understanding of the meaning of life (or death) than we do. They wake up, they exist, they feed, they sleep, they occasionally look up at the sky and wonder what's up there. Some of them can be religious, some not. Some have carried out experiments and studied to know how their biology works, most haven't. They're just creatures existing on this planet and getting by day by day...by hunting. 

I might have a story in there, fighting its way out. 

Loose Thoughts on James Bond......Again

 By Jay Stringer

I've continued thinking about James Bond over the last two weeks. Which brings the grand total of time I've spent thinking about James Bond this year to two weeks. 

The question facing the producers right now is about broom heads and handles. Or the ship of Theseus. How many things about a Bond movie can be changed before it's no longer a Bond movie?

There's a certain section of the internet that will give you very firm answers on this. Bond is a straight, white, womanising, hard-drinking, defender of the British Empire. Any deviation from that is a surrender to the evil forces of wokeness. 

Or something. 

These legacy characters are incredibly flexible, but just how far can they flex? How far should they flex?

When it comes to Bond, I'm open to any interesting and fresh casting ideas. But I do wonder why a person of colour -or any minority for that matter- would want to take on a role so embedded in colonial identity. I have my own complicated identity with ethnicity and the British State, and I go back and forth over whether I would want to write a character like Bond. Although I've tiptoed in that direction with the character of Joanna Mason in my Marah Chase books. I can't speak to the lived experience of an actor of colour, and if someone out there has a take on Bond and wants to go for it, I'd be interested to watch. 

I suspect No Time to Die -as much as it was a send-off to Daniel Craig- was testing out a format for the future. Keeping Bond as the straight white fella of lore, but filling the world out around him with more diverse and interesting characters. Toning down on promiscuity, allowing women to exist and be strong characters around Bond without him hitting on them every ten seconds. 

In many ways, this leans more into the Mission Impossible movies that I tend to enjoy more than Bond. But that still brings me back to broom handles and heads. I keep thinking of the form. The structure. The DNA of a Bond story. 

Mission Impossible, at heart, is a heist. A team is assembled, the plans are made, the heist is carried out, things go wrong, changes are made on the fly to get things back on track, and there are six billion double crosses. The team element is crucial to a heist story. And this same team element could be used to give everyone a bit of what they want from a modern Bond movie. But then...Bond's DNA is different, Bond stories, at heart, are much more Philip Marlowe, much more of the lone gumshoe. Bond takes on a job. He follows a trail. Clues from A to B, in a sequence, encountering lower-level threats until he uncovers the big bad. And there will be a big rich man's mansion of some form, whether it's a missile silo or a hollow volcano. He doesn't have much of a team. 

Two different forms, at heart. Different DNA. 

To my mind, understanding the form is as important a question as the casting. Bond can probably survive being portrayed as something other than a damaged, alcoholic, misogynist, relic. I think he could comfortably survive being portrayed as a decent guy in a tough job -a compromise that any adult watching the film could relate to on some level- without all of the outdated baggage. But how far from the underlying structure would a film go while still being a Bond film? Following the Mission Impossible template would lead to fun movies, but not James Bond. Whoever is cast, does the story need to follow the Bond DNA? Or is it more interesting at this point to break all the rules and do something else?

How much of the ship can be changed before it's a different ship? 

Loose Thoughts on James Bond

 by Jay Stringer. 

Now, with a couple of weeks to digest the latest movie - I didn't need it, my thoughts formed in real time during the film and haven't changed- I've been mulling over the state of play with James Bond. 

Here be the thing. 

There's a big mistake, in my opinion, at the heart of much modern Bond. 

Now, first of all, let's get the obvious baggage out of the way. Bond is a fantasy figure. And not, on balance, a particularly healthy one. He represents the schoolboy fantasies of Ian Fleming, and his defence of the realm -leading to every speech by every Bond movie villain about Bond defending a fading empire- was already a wistful notion in the 1950's. Bond was formed in the same post-war myth-making period that has led to so much of Britain's modern identity problems, the self-defeating nature of repeatedly voting for people who promise to return us to a country that never existed. 

But with that revisionist take on revisionist history in mind...I'm going to argue that Bond is stuck in a very specific brand of revisionism. 

The 1980's looms large in pop culture. It seems every other Netflix horror movie or series evokes the decade. That in itself isn't unusual. When I was teenager in the 90's, there was a pop culture bubble of embracing much of the 60's. We're always consuming media that lifts the look and feel of thirty years previous, without really understanding what the time period was about. We live in pastiche. 

But more than that, I think much of our current action and adventure pop culture is stuck in 80's revisionism. That decade was the time of Frank Miller's Batman. The caped crusader had been a largely different character in each of the preceding decades, always reflecting the times. In the 80's, this became about being "gritty" and "adult" and "analysing the character." You'd have to be a pretty fucked up individual to dress like a bat and beat people up, and so Bruce Wayne has to be dark and tortured and broken. Never mind that people become orphans all the time, and that dressing like a Bat has never emerged as a human response to grief, we have to keep pretending that this formational event someone turned Bruce Wayne into the darkest, grittiest, and most fearsome motherfucker in Gotham. Each new film adaptation lays it's hat on the peg of being the one to "make Batman real" and "take him back to his roots" and "do something new" when doing slightly rearranged versions of the same 1980's thing. 

The same has happened with Bond. After the cool sexism (hey, remember him raping Passing Galore?) of Connery, the complete racism of OHMSS (That banana scene? good grief. Where are all those think pieces?) and the buffoonery of Moore, the 80's was a time to make Bond real. We had to go back to Fleming's original, and make the character reckon with his sexism, his imperialism, his alcoholism. Dalton's Bond was fairly straight-up, Brosnan's Bond was an ironic remix, and Craig's Bond has been a fantasy figure of a broken, alcoholic, tortured man. 

But there be the thing (part two). 

We're not analysing Bond, in these versions, we're analysing Ian Fleming. 

Fleming was all of the things we take Bond to be. All of those flaws. All of those weaknesses. But he wasn't writing Bond to be those things. The Bond of Fleming's imagination was an honourable schoolboy. A flawed-but-decent human being who was self aware about being in a job that required him to do indecent things. 

We can see two different takes on this in the Bond of modern literature. Jeffrey Deaver's Carte Blanche was a modern reboot, and seemed aware that the trick was to update Bond as a flawed-but-decent schoolboy fantasy. Here the super spy did super spy things, but was good to women, had unrequited feelings for someone, and thought through the darker deeds he was forced to do. Ultimately, it was a fun and modern story about a reasonably modern fun fantasy figure. And Bond purists complained. On the other hand, we have a series of books from Anthony Horowitz that place Bond back in Fleming's world, taking place during the 50's and 60's, and Bond purists love these books. 

Because we're stuck. 

Do I argue we need to ignore the problematic elements of Bond? Not at all. I'm not entirely sure why a person of colour would want the role of one of pop cultures creates imperialists. And we need to be open to accepting -as I didn't earlier- the deeply problematic misogyny encoded into the previous films and books. But there are so many ways to tell a story that admits to the past, and too problems, while still having fun with fantasy figures. 

Let's take a look at Steve Rodgers. Steve is an honourable schoolboy fantasy figure. Perhaps because of his 'canonical' story - ever since Stan Lee thawed him out of the ice he's been a Boy Scout out of time- Steve gets to be portrayed as a very different, very earnest, fantasy figure. As the figure who can hold up a mirror to whatever decade he is in, and show how much b better things can be if we show empathy, decency, and stand up for the right people. Steve's great comic books counterpart, Clark Kent, has become bogged down in the same 80s revisionism as Bond and Batman. Clark can't just be a decent guy who tries to do right by people, he has to be moody and tortured. 

There were moments in No Time To Die where we got to see a more fun modern Bond. Mostly the sequence in Cuba, when he worked with Paloma without the need to force it into either a flirtation or a hey-isn't-Bond-a-dinosaur act of revisionism, and Craig's Bond was simply a fantasy figure professional who trusted another professional and then congratulated her on doing a good job. I don't think it's a coincidence that Paloma came out of that film as one of many people's favourite parts. She was elevated by being in a scene that got it right. It was in the quiet matter-of-fact way Q was allowed to reference a boyfriend without the story needing to stop or draw any attention to it.

Letting Steve Rogers be Steve Rogers has never meant shirking any responsibility about showing real-life problems. But we did get to have some fun, some laughs, and some excitement along the way, and his last scenes meant so much more because of it. Watching Craig's closing scenes as Bond, I couldn't shake the feeling of heaviness, of leaden self-hatred that Bond seems to have to carry now. 

And let's dispense with the idea that Craig's Bond is realistic. He's equally a fantasy figure. Just a very weird, fragile, broken fantasy figure. Someone who can do all of the things that the other fantasy figures can do, while taking pain and angst and trauma to superhuman levels. I don't see much that's relatable or human in his take, past the one-two of Casino Royale and Quantum off Solace. So if he's a fantasy figure, let's be honest about it, and then ask ourselves what exactly this fantasy says about us?

On the other hand, I'm sure we could relate to someone who is trying to do right, and tries to treat people right, but has to try and figure out how to do that in a job that forces him to constantly compromise and make bad decisions. Just...dialled up a bit and including explosions and car chases. 

If Bond is to have anything fun, fresh, or interesting to say about real modern life, then maybe it's time too do it while entertaining us with a modern take on Fleming's honourable schoolboy, not yet another re-examination of Ian Fleming's own flaws. And maybe, just maybe, it's time to have a Bruce Wayne who felt the ultimate moment of loneliness and fear at 8 years of age, and committed himself to saving other children from feeling the same way. Maybe it's time to let Clark Kent be Clark Kent. 

Hey, remember, this book is out. 

Loose Thoughts on The Shining and Pet Sematary

 By Jay Stringer

I type this as I watch the director's cut of Doctor Sleep. I've never seen the theatrical cut, so I have no previous version to compare it to. But the film is wrapping itself around some thoughts I've had for a while. 

Based on the novel of the same name, it acts as both an adaptation of the book, and a sequel to the film version of The Shining. No mean feat, considering the Stanley Kubrick film diverted so far from the novel that Stephen King disowned it. 

I have my own complicated relationship to The Shining. I've long been drawn to stories of addiction, or seem to end up loving works by people who've struggled with it, including my great touchstones of the Replacements, Elmore Leonard, and Tom Waits. In High Fidelity we are asked the question, "did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?" And so King's book, and Kubrick's adaptation, are both things I've circled back to and tried to engage with.

But I always fail. 

I'm going to say something mean about a master here. Forgive me, I'll make up for it soon. (And hell, what's my opinion mean, in relation to him getting out of bed?) I find The Shining hammy. Silly. The moves are obvious. The subtext is text. It's just all a bit cartoony for my tastes. I'm in no place -as nobody else is, either- to judge how King battled his own demons, and he's been very vocal about the dark places he went to. But the book feels too shallow for my tastes, someone not yet really engaging with the problem. 

But -and here's where I start to make up for it- I think King told exactly the same story later, in a much better form. In one of the best forms ever set to page. 

Pet Sematary is a dark book. Nothing, not even hope, makes it out alive. I think it's possibly the best horror novel ever written, and a perfect distillation of the darkest moments of addiction. But more than that, I also read it as a reboot of The Shining. The Overlook Hotel was the practice ground, Danny's bike the training wheels. When King circled back and tackled the dark soil beyond the deadfall, he really told the truth. The sugar coating was ripped away. 

Both stories have main characters who are lying to themselves, their darker impulses spurred on by a pull to a literal bad place, a place that feeds on your mistakes, your fears, and your death. Jack Torrance is very much an alcoholic in The Shining, it's the text, the surface level that we're presented with on every page. Louis Creed doesn't have any great battle with the bottle. His darker self pulls at him from a different direction. And the lies he tells himself are masked in good intentions. He knows he's lying, when he promises not to take that little bundle to that place, and we know he's lying, and the dread comes in waiting for the truth to hit. He just keeps 'drinking.' 

Both books have a child who seems to have some form of second sight, some insight into the darker things, with Danny's shine and Ellie sensing the harm that comes to Church, and the harm about to befall Louis, Jud and Rachel. Both stories have someone racing to try and stop the inevitable - Halloran's race against the weather in The Shining and Rachel's race across country in Pet Sematary- being held back by the dark force throwing obstacles in their way. 

The most terrifying element of Pet Sematary is the way everyone is taken down when things fall apart. From the enabler, Jud, who realises too late that his own good intentions have have helped create a monster, to a family who are ripped apart. There's more hope to The Shining. The hotel burns. Three people make it out alive, and only the addict himself dies. King would return to that world later, of course, in Doctor Sleep, to play around with the legacy and trauma of Jack's fall, but in the book itself there is hope if you want to find it. You can choose to believe the cycle ends. Danny's powers -and his connection to Halloran- help him to survive. Pet Sematary gives you no such room. In fact, it takes a step back at the end, switching perspective to an outsider, a witness to everything that's happening, who almost feels himself pulled into the tragedy simply by being present. In the epilogue we see the cycle continues. The questions remain unanswered. And Ellie's own second sight contributes to the downfall, spurring her mother to head home to stop whatever is happening. 

Do we want hope? Of course we do. I lean towards thinking that's what art is. Moments of hope. Moments of connection. Moments of meaning. But every now and then, we stop to observe a simple truth. And we have to be honest with ourselves -just as the addictive voice tries to lie- about how far down you can fall. The simple, stripped-back, honesty of Pet Sematary is what makes it so chilling. It's also what elevates it, for my money, above The Shining. 

Loose Thoughts on Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass

 By Jay Stringer

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW AFTER THIS WEE PICTURE...

(Copyright me, don't be a dick.)

I've watched Midnight Mass twice. Once in one long marathon when it came out, and then again spaced out over a few days after I found I wasn't quite done thinking about it. I don't know that I can gather my thoughts together into a coherent essay, so let's call call this a random list. 

It's a LOT. 

There are certain things the show makes obvious. And I appreciated that. Marketing departments might find it helpful to withhold the V word, and to bury the 'reveal' until after the opening weekend, but the show doesn't really care how quickly you figure out the broad strokes. It seemed clear to me as soon as we got to the island that we were playing around a little with Salem's Lot. Giving us the best adaptation of the classic vampire novel while never being an adaptation. Sure, throwing in a few Needful Things, and some common touchstones of the genre, but I felt the Lot from the start. 

Part of this is no doubt because Mike Flanagan is so effective at capturing the feel of early Stephen King. There's just something in the air, in the soil, in the shadows, of Flanagan's work that evokes the smaller moments of King's work. At this point it's not fair to keep reviewing him only in those terms. Flanagan, as with any of us, has his influences, but he's incorporated them into his own style. 

I don't always engage with his work. I like Hush quite a lot, loved Hill House, but never really connected with Bly Manor and have yet to see Doctor Sleep. However, I always find things to like in the tone and the feel of his work. He creates lived-in spaces, and gives room for the actors to do the same. It's in their eyes, faces, and silences. The years bear down on them. The performances are stellar across the board, but I want to draw a special mention for Rahul Kohli for his use of silence and his instincts to trust his presence. Quiet acting is the most important ingredient in any ensemble piece, providing the glue that holds everything together. 

As I said before, the show doesn't try too hard to hide things that don't need to be hidden. The more familiar you are with genre -and the sooner you know which specific horror genre the show is dealing in- you can see familiar beats, a story following the rules. But the real trick of genre is that, if you trust the viewer or reader to pick up on these things and don't try to hide them, you have license to treat these elements as your right hand, waving at the viewer, keeping their attention from all the things you're holding in your left. Midnight Mass does this perfectly. Some reveals are obvious, if you want to see them, but they only work to sneak other surprises in past you. 

Addiction as shorthand for...

Something that often annoys me in crime and horror fiction is the use of addiction as shorthand for corruption or failure. All too often we see Checkov's monkey on a character's back, and start the clock ticking for the moment they fall, fail, compromise, or give in. In Midnight Mass we are presented with two alcoholics (well, I would say three, but that's a conversation for another time) in the show. And they both die. I guess there's room there for people to be angry that neither of them are allowed to make it out alive, but for me, on a deep level, I appreciated that they both died sober. None of us get out of life alive, but if we win our daily battles we can face death sober. Flanagan has been quite open about his own journey to sobriety, and I'm sure this part of there story was a conscious choice. 

Let us not prey...

With a show that deals so much in religious themes, there will be plenty of better writers than me discussing them. For me, I revelled in the human questions at play. Whether there is a god or isn't is above my pay grade. And everyone's relationship to god is a personal matter. But down here on the ground we have questions to face over our relationships with each other. What god can forgive is out of our control, but what we can forgive is key to our quality of life and mental health. You come out of the show wanting to forgive most of the people for most things, and probably convinced that at least one person deserves to burn a lot longer than they do. There are many small beautiful moments of forgiveness that come once the horrors have been done. This is another level on which I'm sure Flanagan is discussing addiction and recovery. We shouldn't confuse redemption with forgiveness. That can get overlooked sometimes in the social media dissections of films and tv, about which characters do or don't get 'redeemed.' Forgiveness is a whole other deal. Nobody can -or should- ever force you to give it, but if you can, it's a kindness to both parties. And sometimes you also just need to forgive yourself, to be kind to yourself. Because kindness is so much of what it takes to make it through this whole 'life' thing. 

Deus Ex Maybe?

Something that has always annoyed me about the film Signs is the moment M. Night Shyamalan stops trusting the audience. Throughout the movie we have been left to put the pieces -the signs- together. But during the final confrontation between the family and one lone, trapped, alien, we are given flashbacks to all of the pieces along the way. Pieces we had already put together ourselves. And, with that, we are also forced into seeing a clear position taken by the film - there is very much a god in the story machine. 

Flanagan holds off from making this mistake. The conclusion is left to the viewer. If you look for a god in your material, then there are plenty of signs. We could see the way fate has moved all the pieces into place, from a car accident, an unexpected pregnancy, an oil spill, a stray bullet, cancer, and a child's conversation with her mother about clipping wings. We could see all of those moving parts lining up together and conclude that god made it happen. Or we can watch it without looking for the divine, and simply enjoy the drama. The conclusions are ours to draw. 

Summarizing the sermons. 

One of the few criticisms I've seen online is that Pruitt's 'turn' back comes too quickly. One minute he's shouting from the pulpit about joining god's army, the next he's recognising the wolves in the darkness. But for me -and purely for me- this misses the point of the sermons. Each one is a conversation Pruitt is having with himself. The gods army sermon is an argument he's having with himself. One of the deep truths about addiction is self-deception. And on many levels, it's a deception the addict is always conscious of. They know they are lying too themself, at the same time as they are telling themself they believe the lies. All that happens here is that Pruitt reaches his moment of clarity, when he can no longer lie to himself.