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On Luigi Mangione

The Luigi Mangione thinkpieces have begun and most of them sound so lamentable and out of touch to anybody who has followed his story without immediately pursing their lips, uttering ten Hail Marys and shielding their children’s eyes, as to be practically laughable. For the Evening Standard, Mangione stands for a divided America; a thinkpiece in the Independent considers the online comments “less helpful than salacious”; France’s traditionally leftwing paper Libé published an op-ed calling for an end to the hero worship of Mangione.  On Instagram, the comments under this article immediately went hog-wild: “How legitimate is it for bourgeois newspapers to take part in this debate when they spend their time legitimising social violence?”; “Lol, Luigi rid us of a deadweight. While income gaps keep widening, you should expect us to revolt against those who benefit from the system”; “Good evening - no.” You can’t understand the phenomenon of Luigi Mangione if you aren’t online; indeed, ...
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On Wicked

It starts as a fairytale. Tall gates rise up, melting into a strange cage where monkeys roam, before we see the grounds of Xanadu, shrouded in mist, and the great house looming overhead with its sinister gothic windows; a mysteriously ominous music plays. These are the opening scenes of Citizen Kane before we see the protagonist, a dying man, utter his last word: "Rosebud." And with this, the tyrant mogul Charles Foster Kane sends us scurrying back into his hinterland, in a story told almost entirely in flashbacks, to work out how he ever became the "Citizen" Kane of the film's title. The movie's last reel gives us - and only us, in an act of blackest irony - something of an answer, but not before we have been warned by a character, giving up on ever finding the meaning of 'Rosebud', that no one thing could ever explain how somebody became as they are.  Citizen Kane (1941) may offer up a template for the origin story with which we now find ourselv...
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On getting older

Last week I was lying around on my bed with my kids, nattering about this and that, occasionally boffing one another with a pillow, and grabbing them for a kiss or a stroke of their hair. These are the times in which you see each other intently; when it isn't rude to stare at someone and drink them in. (I suppose those moments also happen post-coitum, when the intimacy of somebody else's presence makes you see them in another light, and you can revel in the curl of their eyelashes, the purr of their breathing and heat of their limbs.) The children seem to appreciate these sort of listless playfights we have, and of course I also cherish these times: the miraculous softness of their skin; their hair, bed-curled and gleaming; and the rot they come out with, a rag-bag of references, overheard opinions, absurd hypotheses and nonsensical babble. The intensity of their gaze can be ferocious, and they often poke at me, feel my moustache, jiggle my earring, and observe something unbidd...
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Waiter!

 A couple of weeks ago I received news, in short order, that I had finally obtained two things I had been waiting for for three years or so: an allotment of land I can tend; and official confirmation that I have ADHD. To get an allotment and an ADHD diagnosis, you have to put yourself on a waiting list and then bide your time, while various people ahead of you die. It's not really a joke! When I spoke to the doctor in charge of assessing me I said that I felt I had been waiting an eternity, and she told me that in some wards in the UK, the wait can take up to seven years. I said: "Oh man - we must be losing some of those people, along the way." She looked up: "Are you asking if they're killing themselves?" "Yes." "Yes."  Getting both things in such a short space of time felt strangely serendipitous: here, after months of waiting - when waiting is officially one of the things I am least good at! - was a diagnosis that my mind was justified...
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On Barbie

A brief summary of the film, before we get into the whys and the hows and the Ryan Goslings. Barbie (Margot Robbie) is a Barbie girl in a Barbie world, where - generally speaking - life in plastic is fantastic. Barbie, like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, lives in a simulacrum of the real world, where every day is very similar to the one before - she and gazillions of other Barbies do things like go to the beach, have dance parties, win Nobel prizes for literature, while various Kens stand around and look pretty - until thoughts of mortality spur her to leave her own world and join the 'real' world (Los Angeles). One of the Kens (Ryan Gosling) joins her on this trip. Barbie discovers that her feelings of estrangement have been caused by a pair of real-world humans, a mother and daughter (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt) who are growing apart; the mother cherishes her daughter's old Barbie dolls (and also works for Mattel (?)), while her daughter is now a moody litt...
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A recap of events in the landmark Gwyneth Paltrow trial

 It's been a wild few days or perhaps even weeks, who's to say, in the landmark trial opposing Gwyneth Paltrow to a man or woman alleging that something happened to do with skiing. The court case could have huge implications for [??]. A quick recap of the crazy events we simply can't get enough of is in order.  First off, the contention itself. Accounts differ as to what actually went down on that fateful morning or afternoon in Aspen, the Alps or possibly even Japan, why not. The Emma actor - during a skiing holiday with her children, at least one of whom is called Apple - was skiing, or on a chairlift maybe, when some guy alleges that, I want to say, they collided? Causing him to have pain? Paltrow, for her part, denies this version of events, counter-alleging that, I mean, what the fuck can you counter-allege to that, I dunno, that they didn't in fact bump into each other or something. At stake is, probably, the guy's hospital bill.  The actor said many funny an...
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On Close, or Paradise Lost

I’ve become annoyed lately with people asserting that such and such a film, or book, or television show “broke” them. Hyperbole is the internet’s shared language, of course, and we all fall victim to it: films “destroyed” or “ruined” us; we were “in pieces” at the end. Such phrases are so common as to have become practically meaningless - besides which, the fact that someone cried at a film tells me almost nothing about that film if I do not know the person well; perhaps they cry easy, who’s to say? Crying is an honest reaction, but it is not a critical one: it’s easier to point to your tears than articulate an intellectual position. It feels almost like there is indulgence there; we say that a film devastated us, because in a cultural landscape where so much washes over us, we are at pains to show that our emotions are still intact; we are relieved to find ourselves still vulnerable, and readily tell others about our weeping.  But Close, the new film by Lukas Dhont, broke me. It’s...
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