Midnight Mass: The Sun Rises on the Good and Bad Alike

 

Writing a review of the Netflix horror miniseries "Midnight Mass" that does what I want it to do is hard.

On one hand: I want you to watch it. If your bar for entertainment is watching series on streaming services, and you care enough about mythic themes and/or class analysis to be reading this, then this is a series you will derive enjoyment from. The acting is fine, the dialogue is fine, the plot is fine, the cinematography is fine. All more than fine, really. A solid B+ or even A-. If you can spend your time watching She-Ra or Westworld or Shang-Chi, than you damn well will find this show as entertaining as any of those.

Of course, as a horror mini-series, much of it turns on a couple plot revelations we could call spoilers. I'm not gonna sink to the level of trying to really dig into this work while avoiding the basic plot structure and themes, so reading this review will spoil you if you haven't seen it. And I just encouraged you to see it. So that's an unfortunate Catch-22 that cuts out most of my audience. (This reminds me of a famous review of Litany of Earth, a genre story.)

But the biggest problem is that all the interesting things I have to say are about how this story fails. As a way to pass the time, I recommend this series. As high art worthy of appreciation, I don't think it measures up. But why it doesn't measure up is in fact really important and illuminating. So it's also worth watching just to understand that, or contest my interpretations. Even though after reading a bunch of criticisms, people usually don't want to invest seven hours in something to see it for themselves.

(Don't worry I'll also casually point out a bunch of themes and moments that are perfectly obvious, but every single hot take and review out there will either miss, or cover like a holy revelation. Did you notice that each episode title is a part of the Bible that corresponds roughly to the place of this episode in the plot arc? I sure hope so.)

And as always, I have some meta-narratives about the nature of art I want to get at in this review, that it will be sad not to share just because of that dreaded word. So I've made it possible to jump over like, the actual substance of the review to the conclusion.

I don't even think knowing the spoilers ruin the enjoyment of the story, so read on if you can throw caution to the wind. But yeah, spoilers from these three asterisks to the next three.

***

The first thing is to say how much the author (writer/director/producer) Mike Flanigan loves the idea behind this story. You can read from this heart-opening essay by him how long he had been trying to get the idea translated into any form.

Midnight Mass has been part of me for so long, it’s difficult to remember when exactly it started. There has probably never been a project more personal to me. Its journey to the screen was very long, I’ve changed enormously since I began working on it (as has the world in general) and as of this writing, it’s the single most rewarding professional experience of my life. 

I don’t remember the first time I started thinking about the doomed residents of Crockett Island, but I recently dug up the pages from my first stab at a Midnight Mass novel from early 2010. I have also found pages from an attempt at a feature script dated May 2012, before I quit my job as a reality TV show editor and began prepping Oculus – my first “real” movie – later that summer. 

I have a more advanced screenplay from 2013, and I remember the moment when I realized it wasn’t going to work: I was well over 150 pages into the draft, Riley Flynn and Father Paul Hill were having their first consequential conversation about alcohol

...

It’s fascinating to me, looking back at early drafts of Midnight Mass, just how plainly my own issues with alcohol were driving the story. Riley Flynn, former altar boy turned atheist, stares through bloodshot eyes at the car accident he caused, watching an innocent teenager die on the pavement because he drove drunk. And this is how we meet the protagonist. Riley was always a thinly disguised surrogate, an avatar unlikely to fool anyone except myself, who wouldn’t admit how much I had in common with my own character for many years. 

Nothing wrong with putting his own personal demons into one of the main characters. And really this essay is using vagueness and focus on biography to avoid what he is really talking about because of that dread word Spoilers.

To put it bluntly and simply: Midnight Mass is story about a priest bitten by a vampire who sees the monster instead as an Angel of the Lord and brings it back to his declining parish who turn it into a Catholic mystical cult. This works in how much of Christianity makes references to resurrection, everlasting life, drinking someone's "blood", obedience to authority, holy war and cataclysm, and ornate ritualism. It also works in how declining fishing and post-industrial communities are places of pain and hopelessness and can be suckered into new addictions easily. It also allows you to address ideas of forgiveness, what we believe lies after death, and the sociology of religions. It allows you to build a couple of characters very richly, full of angst about past decisions, as well as populate a whole town from pattern-cut stereotypes (the busybody nun, the town drunk) and and more modern characters who are millennial cultural commentary (the Muslim sheriff dealing with racism and suspicion, the daughter of the abusive alcoholic everyone ignored.) It invites a ton of moving-but-stock imagery, from desolate northern coastlines to Catholic liturgies covered in blood. And you know the end is going to be an orgy of violence, perfect for sweeps week.

There is in short, a lot of meat on the bones of this idea.

Anyone who has kept a private passion project that they worked on for years, watching as it seemingly built itself out in your head, knows what this is like. There were just so many good ideas that could hang on the structure of this central idea, that you want it born out in a larger and larger format. A novel, no a movie, no a TV-miniseries, no a whole franchise with spinoffs and an tourist destination. So having seen the series, you know exactly what Mike had rambling around in his head for over ten years, wanting to show the world.

But that is the root of the problem. Because you look at it, and other than the desire for "largeness", you ask "why couldn't this be a novel? Or a 2 hour movie? Or a comic book?" You'd have to add or remove characters to fit the particular length, but otherwise there's nothing about the story that tells differently on the big screen than on the page. Because it's not really "Midnight Mass the tv series" it's "the idea of Midnight Mass, as interpreted through the media of streaming series."

A golden example is the monologues. Frequently in a heated scene, one character will begin giving a speech without interruption for 3-5 minutes. There's one each for defending Christianity, Islam, atheism, and holistic spirituality, but also ones for public secularism, potential visions of life after death, living with enormous guilt, living with hate for someone who hurt you, or even just apocalyptic understandings of what Christianity calls us to do. They are well written speeches - but that's it. They are entirely unrealistic in the scene in particular, because the person they are arguing with just sits back and takes it and never interrupts or asks a difficult question. And even if you forgive that for poetic license, the delivery by the actor really is not much better than if you just read it. (To be fair, the actors often go for "understated wrestling with emotional pain" which is better than hamming it up, but still not a lot is shown.) I don't hate these speeches, but they stick out like a sore thumb and feel like a tumblr blog post written at 3am. I totally read tumblr at 3am. But because I read so much of it, I don't need to watch a show with a 7 figure budget to read speeches like that.

Another example is the monster. Fun fact: the word vampire is never used in the series. Even the captions refer to it as "angel". It's a bony, inhuman creature whose only evidence of sentience is participating in certain rituals in an orderly manner and occasionally wearing clothes. Otherwise it's nothing more than a flying vermin that acts on instinct. The real transubstantiation of it is how humans interpret it as the holy messenger they want, dress it up in other words, and project into it the mission they hope it has. This story doesn't actually give any credence to Catholic mythology - there's no reason to actually believe this is the sort of angel prophets had spoken of - and that's a cool thematic decision to explain how religion is a purely human interpretation on events.

But also the monster looks kind of dumb. Well, cheap. Definitely not terrifying. When it's a couple eyes in the darkness, sure that's scary. And wearing vestments, yeah that's cool. But it's wings look too much like TV-scale CGI, and all the violence it wreaks is filmed just like any Stephen King TV monster. There's nothing that says "yes, I sure am glad you showed me this with your cinematic talents, rather than drawing a comic panel or simply writing about it."

This is especially important in horror, where your one advantage is that you are allowed, even encouraged to evoke discomfort and strong emotions in your audience. (Which, they do very early on with the dead victim of Riley Flynn appearing to him before he goes to sleep.) That's the difference between film - conveying an emotion through manipulation of the visuals and sound and speed - and television - we pointed a camera where the plot and dialogue were going on and hopefully it's not distracting in any way. 

The second to last episode captures the feeling of being trapped in a small church as some people die, resurrect as vampires, and begin feeding on the people trapped in there. Right on. The last episode, as the new vampires spread out to the island, completely fails to capture this. We see shadows in the distance, and logically we know it's bad, but we're not being put in the eyes of someone running from their own child who is suddenly crazed for blood and clawing at them. It's the Jurassic World pterodactyl scene, not the magic of found footage.

The one exception to this is a plot hole / literary device. Some people start lighting buildings on fire with the hilarious logic that:

• Every vampire will burn in the sunlight come morning.
• They control the church (and rec center which is thematically very distinct)
• If they burn every other building on the island, they can select who they want to hide during the day in the church, and everyone they don't like will die.

Okay yes, this is a very dumb plan. Destroying every single structure on a large island capable of providing shade is pretty much impossible. Especially if you consider that people can quickly build new structures if all they really need is a roof. When someone replies "well hide in the boats" they're told that a group of 4 people managed to destroy every boat on the island in the middle of the dark night. Hell one shot shows people standing on a bridge as they wait for the sunrise to come kill them as we see under the bridge is enough shade to hide them.

But we can accept it as a thematic statement. This person would rather burn the whole rest of their world if it means they get to control the one means of survival. And then when just one person is willing to burn that refuge too, they've written their own death warrant and caused the death of everyone in their project.

But the visuals go beyond even this. On a very large island a few houses are burning. And instead we see orange burning horizon everywhere. Loud explosions going off every 15 seconds for about half an hour of screentime. It's like being in the middle of an epic warzone. All from, at most, twenty-ish people tossing alcohol-soaked rags into several houses.

But at least this fits the Revelations imagery. It feels like being at the end of the world, where all is flame and ash. It's not a tactical-realistic depiction of house fires, but it conveys the fear of apocalypse. I salute that, they just didn't do it with any of their other epic violence imagery at their climax.

Which is all a pity, because again, the author chose some really interesting linkages and I can see why he wanted them to get coverage.

Multiple characters wrestle with the legacy of alcohol addiction, but because they are used to the struggle when they are faced with the power and hunger of blood-thirst, they have the will to fight it that other characters who looked down on them lack.

Someone gives a speech about how we never really die so long as the world we are a part of lives on... as we see the island that was their entire world completely annhilated down to every building and remaining soul, by their hand.

The priest's character is excellent. The nun's character - busybody moralist who seeks to be a wild eyed servant of the apocalypse - is my favorite. And their alliance and eventual conflict shows what happens when beautiful ideals crash up against those who would execute them.

The show is very, very clear that if you believe in universal love at all, it has to encompass the convicts and the drunks and the racial minorities and the people who ignored you. (Though bony vampires and fetuses are left up as more ambiguous. Whoo boy their fetus theology is... complex.)

The various small characters who aren't center stage - the Muslim kid whose assimilation to local Christianity breaks his father's heart, the elderly woman aged back to her youthfulness in what she understands was a monstrous sin, the town mayor, the weed dealer - are great ideas but even in a seven hour series don't get enough time to breathe and so feel like half-silent pieces of scenery for the more central characters to act at. Flanagan has an actual town in his head and only had this miniseries as a portal to show us parts of it. (Even originally the town was supposed to be larger, but COVID filming demanded they have no extras, so he left it extra desolate. Which is atmospheric but also begs "how do you even have a high school class?")

*** END SPOILERS

So, why do it? If you've got a perfectly good novel, or comic series, why the need to make an expensive and extremely draining filmed series. Sure we can say "the money" as an explanation for Mike, though he clearly takes pride in the story having such a platform. So where does this pride come from?

And really we are asking: why do we care? If we have a story we already love - in book form, or a videogame, or podcasts or comics - why are so many of us WILD to see it on "the big screen." Do we have ideas for how this specific visual medium will convey what's important to us about the tale?

Why do we care about yet a third big-budget Dune adaptation? Why are so many people worked up about who is voicing Mario in some animated movie coming out? Why do we sit around saying what famous actors should play niche characters from our favorite fantasy book (myself included)?

Especially when well over half the time, the adaptation is disappointing. And even a significant percentage of adaptations that are good, are so because they reject important elements of the original work: Starship Troopers, anything involving Philip K. Dick, and arguably Lord of the Rings.

Wanting something to be a movie (or streaming series) is not a process that reliably gives us something good. So, why do we do it?

My theory is that we want to be real. We want ourselves to be real in a way that everyone in the world knows who we are, and we are a constant point of reference for others. And failing that, we want the things connected to us to be real. "You work for Mr. Soandso? I met him at a party, we really hit it off." "Yeah I contribute to that group blog, yeah I played in that LARP too!" and so we want that realness for the things we really care about. We want everyone to know about our favorite characters. And if they have a visual identity and actor they are linked to, that makes them even more real. (Even if that usually means their realization won't be what we loved about them.)

It's the same reason that even after an anarchist mob throws out the monarch in the name of THE PEOPLE, everyone tries to gather close to touch the hem of the demagogue who will become their face. So they can tell their friends "yes, I was there, I touched his boot, it smelled of soup."

Part of this is just numbers. Your fanfic doesn't get any advertising. Books barely get any. But movies do get some, and so more people will "know" of the work and consider seeing it, than novels few ever hear of. (By this logic, big budget movies are "more real" than streaming series, which does seem to be the attitude people have, even though series always bring more content from the original story.)

Mike Flanagan had an idea. By getting it on Netflix it had more reality than if he just wrote it in a book or got Vertigo comics to draw it.

But that doesn't really make it better than if he had done those things.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels

Watching this movie was a fairly weird experience. I recommend watching it for anyone who can stomach it. It has a 50% review rating on Rotten Tomatoes which... I think is the most interesting rating to have, don't you?

So bad news first: yeah, there's a lot of sex. More sex than I've seen in any movie I can recall. And the film portrays an *attitude* about sex that is hard to swallow (nymphomaniac addiction used to hurt yourself to pierce through the ennui of a directionless life.)  If you're not disturbed by the movie, you're probably viewing it with too much credulity. And we here at Prequels Redeemed heartily frown on the sort of "Law and Order: SVU" tactic of "show you violent sex and tell you it's morally bad and risky" so you can have your titillations and judgments in the same sitting.

But Oh My God, the cinematography. This unknown, straight-to-Prime-streaming, mid-low-budget novel adaptation has the most gorgeous, intentional cinematography and well thought out shot framing of any movie I have seen since "Long Day's Journey Into Night". Some of it is of the sex, yeah, and in particular the camera loves showing off the tattooed body of Takehiro Hira (the main character father of Giri/Haji.) But the same eye is applied to everything. There are so many shots within shots (through mirrors and hallways and windows) and perfectly symmetrical (or uncomfortably asymmetrical) shots. Every single time you look at the screen, you knew the director cared what exactly you were seeing, and was not just providing a platform for plot or characterization.

Like watch the trailer.

And you think "well this is very stylized trailer and the movie won't be like that" aka Bullshot, but no, the entire damn movie looks like this trailer. It's so great.

The movie is haunting. It's claustrophobic. It's muted. The actress looks bored and vapid because the main character is bored and vapid all the time, even when she's having bad idea sex. It contrasts with how attractive these people are and makes us feel dissonant. In a movie about intimacy, all of these elements heighten the narrative, such as it is.

You could say it fetishizes Japanese culture but it's not really about Japanese culture in any way (the Yakuza-ness of the sexy dude doesn't really go anywhere, like a bang bang shoot out ending - we only get one very brief glimpse of shibari.) It's about someone hoping to find themselves there in all the wrong ways, and decidedly not doing so, until they leave. But the plot isn't going to help you moralize very much (except against its obviously toxic elements), so most half of the reviews hate it.

RottenTomatoes: The website's critics consensus reads: "While it's a well-acted and occasionally involving mood piece, Lost Girls & Love Hotels often dampens its erotic elements with listless ennui."

Someone is missing how often a person's kink is listless ennui.

Black and White and Red All Over

 

When the trailer first came out, my reaction was "this isn't a successor to Maleficent, this is a successor to Joker." I only had no idea how right I was. This was a great movie to be the first film I've seen in a theater since early 2020.

The movie is a heavily filmic homage to the late 70's and early 80's fashion/art scene in London and New York. It particularly loves the "Anarchy in the UK" vibe of that time. It excuses these aesthetic indulgences with the story of mad genius who becomes a superhero/supervillain alter ego with the power and morals of fashion. To this con-artist, style is substance.

And like Joker, the director realizes "wait I can get hundreds of millions of dollars from a studio to make this homage to 70's film... if I just say 'by the way the main character shares a name with some other IP', with no actual obligation to fit any pre-existing canon or imagery? Radical."

So watch it without thinking of Disney canon, and just drink in the visuals, the camerawork, and the conflict between our human self and our inhuman ideals.

Ideally, you'd watch this movie turning off the dialogue. The soundtrack is fantastic (again, homage to the 80's punk scene). And the visuals and camerawork are luxurious. The actual dialogue is a lot of bad accents, bad plot exposition (oh god the voiceover), plotholes the size Cruella could drive a Rolls Royce through, and middling witticisms. You can pick up "what is happening, how people feel, what are their motivations" entirely through the visuals. (The most you miss is a punchy running joke about saying "thank you".) I realize this won't be an option for most people, but in twenty years when this is a cult hit being watched on HD-mini-USB-chips or whatever, I think they'll go for the dialogue-less option.

Anyway, assuming you have seen it, or don't care about spoilers, let's talk about what we actually saw:

***

The first thing that jumps out at you about this fashion-obsessed movie is color. Unsurprisingly, they do a lot with the black and white motif. More surprisingly, they are consistent about the meanings of those colors.

One of the complaints people seeking to understand the foundations of racism make, is how we attribute black as the negative color, and white as the positive color. Cruella - with her half black, half shock white hair - subverts that. Like her hair, she has one white ethnic friend/goon and one person of colour friend/goon, who each offer different advice.

In the movie black (as in black hair) is the color of: conscience, conformity, the middle-class, a desire to fit in and take the straight and narrow. It's how you would think the hair of a small child or twenty something would actually looking. (And it's the life path her South-Asian friend pushes her to. And every person of colour in the movie - including the new Roger and Anita - are part of a middle-class "goodness.")

Whereas white is the color of: age, aristocracy, the will to power, crime and violence. It's how the villain/mentor primarily appears. It's how her white hair stands out. (And it's the life path her Irish friend pushes her to.)

[Recall the bit in 101 where the Dalmatians try to get away by rolling in so much coal dust that they look like black dogs with white spots.]

The third color we see is of course, red. Red appears in many ways (an inappropriate red dress at the B&W ball) but most strikingly it appears as a cut that bleeds. Red is the color of messy humanity, that doesn't fit in the conformity vs ambition balance of the rest of the world.

If someone set it out to create a movie where "the color white represents evil" this is what they would have arrived at (well, after the Hunger Games.) Which is of course why vicious Dalmatians kill her mum.

Here's the thing about the Dalmatians. Cruella doesn't want revenge on them, which is most commentator's interpretation of the scene where they know her off a cliff. We see later from the glint in her eye that Cruella fears those dogs. And Cruella's first coping mechanism is to go towards the things she fears. She always runs headlong at the thing she is afraid of, because she has no room to run away. In this movie she moves towards the dogs to sit down near them, and in the future she will make a coat out of them. Because she can't afford to give fear an inch.

She learned this from the villain, the Baroness.

Of course, the movie tries to build up the Baroness as some great figure of evil, despite a boring name and no franchise history we know of, which is doomed to be disappointing. But what is interesting is how much of this character is just straight up Cruella, which the protagonist embraces whole-heartedly. In most superhero origin stories, we get some scene of the supervillain saying "you're just like me!!!" and the hero saying "neverrrrrr!" But instead for this costumed superstar, she consciously embraces the lessons of the fashion world prima donna.

Baroness: If I had cared about anyone or thing, I might have died like so many brilliant women with a drawer full of unseen genius and a heart full of sad bitterness.

It's a rallying cry for second wave feminism, and a rationale for why it's okay to skin puppies.

***

I suppose for the people who haven't seen it - or who have but resist reading - I need to explain why this is a superhero origin story. It's because it starts with a "normal" human who wants to fix a wrong in the world and to do that creates an alter-ego who performs superhuman feats and poses as a symbol of their ideals.

In this case, not only does the protagonist take on the mask of "Cruella", but she literally has a funeral for her old, human self (Estella.) She makes clever costumes. She even fights seven goons in a show-off-y manner. And more plot and shenanigans revolve around keeping these two identities separate and secret than in eighteen MCU movies about superheroes.

If anything, Cruella is more like Superman than Batman or Iron Man - Cruella (with the bicolor hair) is who she really is, and Estella is a wig she wears on top of that. (One of the awkward bits of dialogue is that "Estella didn't get anything done, Cruella does," when as far as we can tell, Estella was a heartless and successful thief.

What's her superpower? Well when Estella gets pushed off a cliff to fake her death... she survives with a literal parachute skirt. Improbable, maybe, but it's wholly in keeping with her nature.

Not a few critics have complained that this prequel pulls its punches by not having Cruella kill a single dog - or single person, or even do anything really bad besides steal from the underserving and emotionally ignore her henchmen (who she learns to make up with.) And it is true that it's weak to revel in how EVIL your style is, while shying from anything that might get you an R rating. But they do the next best thing: Cruella frequently mentions the possibility of killing someone or a dog, and when the normie is shocked shocked at doing such a thing, she laughs it off as "obviously a joke." This is what some call the "Nelly defense," and often stands for "this person is totally willing to do such a thing but society so far won't let them."

This is not a story like Maleficent. This is not even a story like Spider-man. It would however fit in the DCEU.

***

Tragically, I can't analyze the fashion like this movie deserves. Other bloggers will have to take up the mantle. The outfits do take center stage, is all I can say. Obviously this blog is going to love the asymmetry and use of garbage in her designs.

There's also a lot more to say about dogs in this movie. Cruella has a complex relationship with the famous Dalmatians (including using them in her coup d'grace, bringing them to heel with a command, and gifting them to Roger and Anita.) And once again with the duality, she has a dog she was raised with that she loves, and another (one-eyed) dog that came as part of her grifter life, coming to represent the emotional and manipulative parts of her soul, respectively. So she doesn't kill any dogs, but they are still involved in her narrative arc.

It would be impossible for class not to feature prominently in any movie about getting revenge on an aristocrat in Britain. However, despite this surface rebellion against the established order, the class reading doesn't go much deeper. Obviously rather than overthrow the hierarchy, Cruella just wants to install herself at the top of it

The Nevers

I never intended to talk about the Nevers, because it's on HBOMax which even most twitterati aren't going to bother to pay for, and because Joss Whedon's work like this seems very repetitive, and of course his star has gone down in flames. It seemed unlikely his last series would get much discussion or acclaim, nor deserve it anyway.

And all of that would stay true if we only talked about the first half of the pilot episode. If you really, really wanted Buffy writing but in steampunk London updated for 2020 sensibilities, you got exactly that.

I am going to take the rare step of declaring SPOILERS. If you think you are possibly going to watch this pilot (again, on HBOMax, which lets be honest we only subscribed to for the Snyder cut) then do so before reading this.

The first half is, you know, fine. It's a show in an oppressive patriarchal society with women running around kicking superpowered kung fu butt. It adds to Buffy a much more distinct awareness of *class* (because we are talking about the times with the tropes of Victorian aristocrats and industrialization and slums), and the show is using disability as a its central metaphor. All of the superpowered marginalized outsiders are "Touched" in a term that has both negative connotations alongside pretty awesome results, and much of the dialogue is like a tumblr talking about being disabled. Not wrong really, but very much what you'd expect.

The period setting production values are expensive. The actors are good actors and *very pretty*, despite jokes about "the ugly one" no one in a Whedon universe is ever not gorgeous. It is kinda regrettable that their central actress, Laura Donnelly, looks and sounds so much like Eva Green when the show this will be most compared to is Penny Dreadful. The problems this Orphanage for Gifted Youth face are detailed in the pilot: high nobility who consider any disruption to the status quo a threat, fey pimps who want to coerce the Touched and sell them in a sexual manner, rebel Touched who are murdering people in back alleys alluding to Jack the Ripper and are led by someone named Maladie, and mysterious mechanical-like men who are just outright kidnapping vulnerable Touched. The Orphanage itself is an idyllic Garden of Eden where all the Touched use their delightful superpowers to make a harmonious utopia and get along without drama - all threat comes from the outside. (Very reminiscent of the classic tumblr argument about the differences between Storm and Rogue.)

It's fine, a return to pre-Avengers form for Whedon, and due utterly to be forgotten especially as its creator's star fell. (For the record, directorial tyranny on set of the like Whedon has been widely accused should disbar someone from having that sort of power again. Though it seems likely this abuse is widespread in Hollywood and Whedon should not be its sole scapegoat. We need structural solutions.) It's smoothly entertaining but entirely predictable. One should always keep in mind Supermechagodzilla's critique of Whedon's entire political project, which applies here as much as ever.

Then the second half begins, with Maladie slitting the throat of a man costumed as Satan in the middle of the opera, giving a tour de force monologue rant.

I killed the devil. Is no one going to say “thank you”? It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay, petal. It’s not your fault. It’s the doctor. Oh! Oh, there’s so many people. Did you all come in hats? Now all of your brains are naked. No? You shall have a wreath of eels with the tail in your mouth.

Devil’s specialty is eels. Which is known by you as a serpent. Oh, but it’s only Adam. It’s all the same when it slithers. (whispers) Eve had a cunt.

Why am I here? I came to kill an angel witch. Oops. But the closer I came, the more I felt I was here for a r… 

Because I… saw God. He was all light. And He put on me His wreath. He came. He came to us all, and you all turned your backs on Him. You lied. You said He never.

But He makes hum. Oh, He sings. (gasps strained note)  I could never make it out, but I feel His hum, like a comb in my throat.

And I feel it. I feel it. Him. Here. Who… Who…

Ah, bugger it. Take the angel.

The performance is somewhere between Summer Glau at her craziest in Firefly and Eliza Dushka in her most murderous roles, so still not super original. But the scene takes her insanity much more seriously than any Harleyquinn wannabe in Whedon's toolkit has before. This is someone who saw God and was driven mad by the experience. Mad enough that she is forever trying to kill the devil, like an abandoned Archangel.

There's a chase and a fight scene, some sublime singing by a plot-important Touched, and some confrontations full of weighty reveals (the fey pimp is commanding the salt of the earth detective, both once again very entertainingly acted.) An Evil Doctor talks about dissecting the Touched to find "where God touched then" and the two main characters have a heart to heart about the mission to rescue the girls.

Then we cut back to what we were seeing at the start of the show, three years ago when all these marginalized innocents got their powers. And we see...

A steampunk spaceship of glowing white light descend out of the clouds, dissolving over London, as every character looks up in awe. The snowflakes of the dying ship drift down and Touch the characters we know to be of that affliction. And the way every character uniquely interacts with the snowflakes tell us how those characters relate to God. Some reach for God, others are restrained while God falls onto them, others are literally dying and rescued by God, some collapse to the ground with His presence.

It is the best scene Whedon has been involved with since second season Buffy, just these last 5 minutes of the show. We see the glory of God that has driven Maladie insane. And we see everyone (but her) just forget the ship as soon as the dissolution is complete.

It's an exploration of transcendent luminance I did not expect from the first half of the show.

Now, I am very doubtful that as the lore of the show develops, this spaceship will really be the divine presence. It's almost certainly going to have a wikipedia like explanation as some cross between Worm backstory and Asgard from the MCU. Advanced aliens who think Earth needs to stop oppressing marginalized communities to be welcomed into galactic society, etc. This spaceship and its species will inevitably be normalized and made banal by all the "mythology" that will end up being behind it.

But those explanations are in the future. For this particular episode, the imagery was of a vessel of God, anointing angels. And that was much more than I expected today. (Though not enough for me to pay for the rest of the series.)

Bug People

 A full review of the Snyder Cut is going to wait a few days, but before I disappear I just wanted to add a voice to the chorus against what is consistently the worst offense of both the MCU and the DCEU: bug people.

Problem: We want to show our heroes kicking ass. But we don't want our heroes callously killing hundreds of human beings. They're smart enough and liberal enough to know you don't solve problems on Earth by slaughtering other people. And aliens that look like and act like people, that also leads to too many ethical questions.

Solution: We make alien hordes that are just human enough to fight, but not an inch of empathy more than that. 

Result: The six pictures above came from six different movies (Avengers 1, 2, IW, Endgame, Suicide Squad, Justice League) and yet are depressingly similar. I estimate 10 hours of my past year has been watching superheroes fight these same, boring Bug People.

They don't make for good fight scenes, and half the time you can't even see what they are doing.

They don't make for good ethics, because "there exists a faceless horde you can slaughter to solve your problems" is still the fantasy that needs to be destroyed. The only thing in our world is other people who need to be interacted with as people. That doesn't mean violence will never be an answer, but it does mean violence always has a cost. Bug people are the fantasy of violence without cost.

I Care (About Bodies) A Lot

 Netflix has the It movie of 2021 so far, with Rosamund Pike and Peter Dinklage about the evils of capitalism. I'm sure all the review sites will tell you about how great it is and how much you should watch it based on those facts. It's... okay (Pike and Dinklage certainly deliver funny performances) and you'll probably enjoy it based on how hyped you are for it.

It's unfortunate, because there *is* a lot to say about this movie, that is going to make it into very little coverage. Let's resist going into the depths of the movie, and dance along its surface, both insightful and troubling:

First off, it's best understood as the sequel to 2016's Neon Demon.

Fisher King of Staten Island

I always wish there was more writing that was analysis of movies, and less reviews. You can go anywhere to find someone to tell you whether to see the movie, what the actors and directors said about it in an interview, and whether it is funny/well paced/too long or whatever. They'll even give a platitudinal description of what it means.

But it's much rarer to find analysis that talks through a scene or filmic techniques used. Especially not if any of it is from the back half of the film and thus intrudes on dread "spoilers."

It's one thing to admit that newspapers and other first-line media are really just selling a complement to advertising and helping people to decide what to see. But why is the fucking Atlantic limiting themselves to such banalities. Are people really reading a thousand word piece in essay-periodicals to see where to take their date to this weekend? [Anachronism for when people "went out" to movies.]

For the love of god, at least discuss the desire to be a "tattoo artist" as a dream that involves the ability to leave permanent marks on people.

Anyway, as a review, this one by the Atlantic for Judd Apatow's and Pete Dickinson's "The King of Staten Island" is fine. Nothing offensively wrong about it at least. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/06/king-staten-island-review/613006/

I did want to talk about two scenes that particularly struck me for their metaphorical power.

Early on, Scott's under-the-table girlfriend is talking with their group of friends about her professional goals. She wants to work in city planning and turn Staten Island into a hipper part of New York - the nxt Brooklyn.

The movie is King of Staten Island. The main character is Staten Island - awkward and a failure but with the undeniable heart of someone incapable of selling out. The reactions here are really about Scott.

Scott: Staten Island (me) sucks and nothing will fix it.

Scott's Stoner Friends: Staten Island is fine and should never change.

Scott's Love Interest: Staten Island is cool but I just want to help fix it up so more people appreciate it like I do.

***

My favorite scene is the surreal bit just before the end. Scott is alone at the fire station and a large, dirty man wanders in, with blood visibly coming through his shirt. You have to understand that this man out of nowhere is Scott - he is the childish baggage holding Scott back.

The man acknowledges he has a wound, but downplays it as something not worth getting official attention. He makes up three dumb excuses, before being pressured into admitting that it was a gunshot or stab. But he doesn't want cops involved and wants this random kid to just stitch him back together (he says Scott must have a needle and thread, a reference to his failed career as a tattoo artist.)

Scott says he can't help because he's high. The stranger says he is high too.

Scott carries the guy to the hospital, and the stranger offers to switch identities with him. Scott can only get him to actual medical attention once he gets help from Ray (his surrogate father) and his mother who randomly show up.

"Tell my father I hate him and I love him and I forgive him. Tell my sister I know she's my mother."

It's hilarious because of the absurdity of it, but also a good fantasy for the "person with depression finally seeks help in a serious way" that ends most of these movies.

Edit: Title changed after I realized a better pun.