So Long, Suckers

So Long, Suckers

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  1. 09/21/2025

    Episode 016: The Lock-In (2022/2024)

    Stanley Schtinter's 450-minute edit of the British TV soap opera EastEnders is a magical and strange thing that confines us, for over seven hours, inside a fake pub in the year 1999. Time, culture, nostalgia and alcohol are just four of the major themes of this unique odyssey, which Calum explores at length in a solo essay. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit solongsuckers.substack.com

    1h 16m

  2. 11/22/2024

    Episode 015: JFK (1991)

    Fellow conspirators, There are few “reads” in modern history more trite than the “end of innocence” narrative that surrounds the assassination of John F Kennedy in November, 1963. The death of Camelot; the bursting floodgate heralding a decade of American unrest and a half-century of swelling ambient paranoia. Hey, we ain’t gonna deny it’s compelling. And it’s precisely this grand reading that undergirds Oliver Stone’s epic 1991 dramatic treatment of the assassination’s aftermath. If it’s a surprisingly naïve reading for a filmmaker who had, by that point, established himself as a fairly robust critic of his country’s recent evils, that’s basically because JFK proceeds from the perspective of its protagonist, Jim Garrison—a respectable attorney whose journey through the story is one of credulous patriotism souring into a painful enlightenment. Believe his conclusions or not, the core of his wisdom is undeniable: the government can lie, and it will lie; it can kill, and it will kill. This journey is presented with clarity but not irony: we follow Garrison’s journey as it goes along, hearing the case as it’s put together. But, as we discuss on mic, there’s an extent to which Stone—a classic Boomer, born in the mid-40s and evidently influenced by the perspective of his respectable, patrician American father—fails to escape his own credulity towards the myth of his country’s essential greatness. His screenplay, co-written with Kennedy expert Zachary Sklar, hinges on the dual notions that the US citizenry can fight for the truth and set an example, and the Government can aspire to open, democratic goodness. These truths the writers apparently hold to be self-evident. The screenplay uses strong terms indeed in its accusation of the CIA, the Secret Service and even Lyndon Johnson—but its plea is ultimately for a return to innocence: implying that there was an innocence, an essential morality, to begin with. Because of course, what does this grand exercise in paranoia build up to? A shot of the upright American family walking hand-in-hand towards the light. In real life, Garrison and his wife divorced not long after his epic court case against Clay Shaw. (She was not on board with his project.) Stone and Sklar pointedly ignore this, as their closing text—entreating the audience to continue the battle for truth and justice on behalf of “the young”—materialises over an image that, in its courthouse setting, deliberately combines the institutions of family and government. It’s interesting that much of the film treats Garrison’s investigation with a paranoiac aesthetic which privileges not only the information involved, but its proliferation. This is a carefully chaotic movie, one where every other sequence—masterfully—feels like it’s going to collapse, as if the film reel itself could snap through sheer exertion. But its frequent swerves into a kind of postmodernist inquiry always come back to the reassurance of generic structures—for instance, the investigative mode, resolving in a grand summation—before that ultimate closure on the reunited family. The big word invoked within the film, the one that describes the essence of the situation, is “fascism”. JFK pleads that its audience notices, investigates and roots out the fascism of the American deep state, on behalf of children, family and nation. The problem is: the appeal made by fascism is often precisely in terms of protecting children, family and nation. So again, we return to contradiction—which is, itself, crucial to the embedded paranoia. At its heart, this is a biopic not of its title character or of its protagonist, Jim Garrison, but of a situation: a country confronted first with a moment of major horror played out in unprecedented real time (the USA’s last presidential assassination had been in 1901—spiritually, a millennium removed in terms of mass communication media); subsequently, the existential confusion conjured by the Garrison investigation, which commanded real mass attention for a conspiracy theory that directly implicated elements of the country’s government in some particularly grim shenanigans at home. So, if the film’s conclusions grow somewhat confused—being as it is a radical leftwing screed ultimately in favour of the American family—that very confusion is, at the very least, appropriate to the situation. Fundamentally, JFK is a film named after an absent figure—a narrative lacking its centre. And that narrative, in turn, is about a man—one who thinks of himself as ordinary, homely, traditional—searching for a centre; an answer; an explanation, and a retribution. And the film ultimately finds its creator searching for the same. No such answer or centre is forthcoming. Perhaps that’s the real meaning of the closing shot: in a film defined by an editorial approach that places re-creation, fiction and documentary, as well as evidenced fact, supposition and imagination, onto precisely the same experiential plane, Garrison’s walk through the courthouse with wife and son (played by Stone’s own son, Sean) is just one more unattainable dream. We’re through the looking-glass; there’s no going back. Thanks, as ever, for listening. Calum & Eddie This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit solongsuckers.substack.com

    1h 36m

  3. 08/30/2024

    Episode 014: Malcolm X (1992)

    Dear friends, If there’s one thing, just one thing, guaranteed to feature in a Spike Lee joint, it’s the phrase “By Any Means Necessary”. The words, followed up by the printed call-and-response “Ya dig | Sho nuff”, adorn the closing credits of each of Lee’s films, forming the two-pronged slogan for his production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks—and, in turn, a kind of mission statement. No matter the film, its themes, its message, we will be asked at the end to carry away that simple, vital phrasing: “by any means necessary.” Though decontextualised, the basic meaning of these four words should be clear to most viewers. Used and popularised by Malcolm X during the last year or so of his life, it refers, quite simply, to the potential, adaptable “means” that may be necessary to achieve social, racial justice and change. It’s been often interpreted, somewhat facetiously, as an incitement to violence; really, it conveys the fluidity of such “means”, the goalposts ever moving in a system set up to prevent any such justice from being easily, if ever, achieved. Per Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), which specifically quotes both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the “means necessary” may be as low-key as, say, arguing for wider representation on the walls of a neighbourhood pizzeria; they may be as active as throwing a trashcan through that pizzeria’s window in reaction to an instance of murderous police brutality. Lee himself, of course, plays the character who throws the trashcan, and who then expresses regret over the greater ensuing destruction; in turn, his film (including those closing quotations) works through and weighs up various “means necessary” from incendiary protest to community cooperation, with a galaxy of ideas dotted betwixt. When taken, however, sans context and appended to the final moments of each of these motion pictures, the phrase “By any means necessary” becomes less a broad social rallying call and more an exercise in personal branding. This need not be a criticism: the mantra serves as a floating reminder of the struggle for equality and justice; a framework of engagement to which Lee, whether in Bamboozled (2001), BlacKkKlansman (2018) or even his OldBoy remake (2013), intends always to strive. Lee’s 1992 biopic of Malcolm X himself is, for better and worse, probably the key to the filmmaker’s career. It famously transformed the assassinated activist into a branding exercise long before release, in an attempt to drum up anticipation for this unprecedented epic of Black American history. Upon its release, critic Armond White wrote two (very good!) withering pieces on the film that took umbrage with Lee’s design of a towering “X” on posters, hats and T-shirts; as well, indeed, with Lee’s bombastic methods of self-promotion in TV and print interviews, which had drawn their own share of ire from other Black commentators and public figures. (Some of whom, admittedly, were members of the Nation of Islam, an organisation that obviously had an interest in discrediting Malcolm X.) In any case, before the first scene begins, this film remains defined by the paratextual status that its director worked so hard to cultivate. On the one hand, Lee presented this as a work of great import in terms of Hollywood subject matter, American film semiotics more generally and as a space of sociocultural resistance that the white-dominated studio system worked as much to sabotage as to help in producing. On the other, it was an opportunity for Black-made art to compete as a mainstream, capitalist object—no longer in the independent-cinema mode that Lee had come up through, but a full-fat “quality blockbuster”. In the end, Malcolm X works on both levels. It is, certainly, a towering work of biography crafted by a young and idiosyncratic writer-director who knows his craft inside and out; who possesses such a potent voice as to expertly draw out a slew of startling sequences, moments and details that can inform, evoke and rouse in equal measure. Lee’s approach distils facts, conjectures and “ecstatic truths” into (a) a clear and direct celebration of his subject’s life, words and iconographic status as an activist-thinker and (b) a few-holds-barred attack on the specific machinations that tore Malcolm back down and murdered him. (And in 1992, the film’s direct implication of the Nation of Islam in the assassination was still a controversial statement to make.) Yet, for all its multifaceted brilliance, Malcolm X is also successful as a product, a marketing exercise tethered so clearly to the unique perspective of Spike Lee as to render it strangely compromised. This is evidently inherent to all biographical writing; but from those baseball caps on down, Malcolm X bears its own type of strangeness in the way it rather repackages its radical title figure into an historical context that he never lived to see: the early 1990s. Lee makes his stamp clear from the film’s first moments. Malcolm X opens by cross-cutting between a full-screen, Patton-style Stars-and-Stripes, on which are overlaid the credits, and footage of the LAPD assault on Rodney King, which had occurred a short 20 months before the movie’s release. Towards the end of the credits, the flag begins to burn from its edges, leaving that gigantic “X” standing in the centre, as high as the cinema screen. The meaning of this montage is clear enough: Malcolm and his words may now be considered “history” but the problems he addressed linger. All at once, the viewer must deal with an urgent call-to-arms (the King beating, juxtaposed with the flag) and that reclaimed baseball-cap logo (the X branding); we are then swooped down into 1940s Boston where, moments after his name hovers on screen, we see Spike Lee sauntering confidently into the space. After a few minutes, we are introduced to Denzel Washington’s young and cheery Malcolm, who is “conked” by Lee’s Shorty. The dressing of a teenaged Malcolm’s hair is something of a mythic scene in his autobiography: his entryway to manhood, modernity, the city. It represents the birth of one of the many Malcolms who evolve throughout his story. Lee’s decision to cast himself as the mookish sidekick Shorty is really just of a piece with his prior supporting roles, not least as the mookish sidekick to Washington’s trumpeter in Mo’ Better Blues (1990). But it is nevertheless significant that in Malcolm X the Lee character is essentially the protagonist’s guide into the whole tale. Shorty confers on Malcolm an entire way of being, one that defines the first act but is also, in its rejection, key to the rest of Malcolm’s profound evolution throughout. This is a fun metatextual element that underscores the clear directorial identity that Lee uses to steer the whole film. His canvas makes generally judicious use of both classical and more modernist styles, animated throughout by the radicalism of its deceptively simple semiotics. As the film’s producer, Monty Ross, wrote in the 40 Acres and a Mule book on the production of Malcolm X, “All media, including film […] has been one of the slowest outlets in allowing Blacks to control the reflected image of their culture, to control the expressions of themselves.” Certainly, the grammar of this film is such an expression; while much of Lee’s focus in the second half is on Malcolm’s speeches, which he treats with respect and awe, his own editorial approach is designed as its own discursive contribution, an evocation of the same fiery rhetoric. What’s interesting is the way the form of the rhetoric is clearly of interest to Lee as much as its content. As he makes clear in that accompanying book, Lee respects Malcolm’s well-documented ability to “market” his ideas—initially, as the Nation of Islam’s number-one door-knocker (Malcolm even merited some mention in EU Essien-Udom’s early-60s book Black Nationalism, not because he was yet a public figure in his own right but because he accounted for so much of the Nation’s growth in membership) and later as an internationally-known champion of Afro-American advancement. And of himself, in his own capacity as both filmmaker and a promoter of his films, Lee wrote, “the only person who does marketing better than me, as far as artists go, is Madonna.” This does little to contradict Armond White’s note that “Lee treats Malcolm X as a pop star whose achievement was fame rather than enlightenment.” Agree with this or not, the director clearly appreciated not just the message but the manner in which Malcolm could convey his ideas, and that fascination underscores much of the film. This is essentially what makes Malcolm X a knottier biopic than it is often given credit for. Lee’s brilliance is in pushing his medium to match his subject in its communicative directness, clarity, intelligence and ambition. But, per the curse of any biography, Lee also swaddles the film in himself: his propensity to hawk his personal “brand” as much as his work and its messages. During the making of this film, Lee—discussing his marketing, his hustling production process and his attitude to cinema viewership—cheerfully described himself as a capitalist. It doesn’t take a scholar of Black history to tell you what Malcolm X thought of that word: “You show me a capitalist, I’ll show you a bloodsucker.” Lee ends his film with a bravura and very moving extended montage of sound and image, plundering archive material and setting it to Terence Blanchard’s rather stately score and the voices of Martin Luther King Jr, Ossie Davis, Nelson Mandela and, finally, Malcolm X himself—with those four words, “by any means necessary.” In addition to the social and historical meaning this ending works through, it also has textual purchase as a kind of transcendence of the biopic form. Is it, even, an admission of

    1h 27m

  4. 05/03/2024

    Episode 013: Oppenheimer (2023)

    Dear fellow travellers, Christopher Nolan is no stranger to imagining disaster. His Dark Knight trilogy, adapted from various Batman comic-book stories, toys with various visions of urban destruction, both physical—those involving guns and explosions—and psychological, with each of the films’ major villains threatening no less than full-scale urban breakdowns. The cycle even concludes with the detonation of a nuclear bomb: here, symbolically the ultimate threat and one that even, shock horror, appears to kill our hero. Following these, the director’s sci-fi epic Interstellar explored the aftermath of what would, in the real world, mean effective apocalypse—irreversible climate change; global crop scarcity—but in this tale is heroically mitigated with an interplanetary expedition and, indeed, an actual, quantum alteration of history. Tenet, another film that fantasises the pliability of time, follows the attempt to avert another disastrous detonation, this time of a weapon that could destroy not just a single metropolitan area but the whole world. (“Including my son,” intones Elizabeth Debicki, insightfully.) Such imaginings, of course, are ten-a-penny in Hollywood and have been for decades. Susan Sontag, in her influential 1965 essay ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, aptly summarised the links between the looming nuclear threat and the then-recent cycle of speculative science-fiction films; her observations have remained relevant through the subsequent years and countless cultural trends. Much of Nolan’s work certainly sits within this space of allegory and speculation. With Oppenheimer, however, he pushes further and does something fascinating: he swings his lens right to the source of modern pop cinema’s apocalyptic fixation. His film, in so doing, explores and to an extent explains this very fixation. As discussed on the podcast, many of Oppenheimer’s roots are in the Hollywood of the 1950s—a milieu, incidentally, that’s ambient in the film’s red-scare subplot. This is a large-format, star-studded historical epic released into the midst of a global downturn in popular cinema-going, itself partly fomented on the one hand by sweeping structural changes within the film industry and, on the other, by a revolution in home-viewing options. So far, so Film History 101. But in its subject matter the movie also, unavoidably, refers to that aforementioned sci-fi cycle. In a sense, then, it uses its prestige trappings to outline the psychological conditions for the modern disaster imaginary, described by Sontag as the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the 20th century when it became clear that, from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life under the threat not only of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost insupportable psychologically—collective incineration and extinction which would come at any time, virtually without warning. This film is a biopic not just of J Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, but of the bomb itself: its design; its birth in the New Mexico desert; its role in the murder of thousands of Japanese citizens; and the profound long shadow it would soon start to cast on the psyche of the global body politic. Nolan, after Sontag, clearly argues that the atom bomb’s legacy is basically existential, serving an omnipresent ambient threat. Meanwhile, the film’s smartly jumbled narrative structure serves at least three purposes: one, it aptly represents a quantum-level interpretation of time and space; two, it evokes Oppenheimer’s guilt-ridden psychology as he works through his own memories of the Manhattan Project and its aftermath; and three, it reflects that broader state of existential panic that comes with contemplating this whole, sorry issue—that is, the “trauma” as outlined above. The terrifying hallucinations experienced throughout the film by our protagonist are often, pointedly, part of the general narrative flow engineered by editor Jennifer Lame; existing on the same experiential plane as both the film’s factual and subjective material. In this way, the movie formally maps the basic thought process of, surely, any viewer afeared of global annihilation. It’s something like a prestige history picture crafted as an extended nightmare. Oppenheimer, then, seeks to explain something inherent to various strains of visual art and popular culture these last several decades. It also, clearly, seeks to explain Christopher Nolan’s cinema more specifically. As outlined above, Nolan’s films (at least post The Dark Knight, the billion-dollar hit that initially brought him industrial carte blanche and pop-auteur purchase) are marked by their working-through of disaster, violent threats to loved ones and outright Armageddon, and with Oppenheimer he steers his usual obsession with clever-clever chronology towards something quite direct and personal. Through this, could the film serve, secondarily, as an allegory for large-scale filmmaking? Of course. Just look at Oppenheimer’s meticulous visualisations of the Los Alamos team’s process; those small details, right down to things like white labelling-tape and blast-radius calculations, that Nolan focuses on as he follows the gestation and explosive birth/death of the first test bomb, bespeak an interest in, if not obsession with, the mundane work that builds such a monumental end product. This is, for its first two hours, essentially a movie about project management. But after the first test explosion, Oppenheimer’s underlying linear structure pushes instead into a drama that explores guilt, culpability and the bureaucratic banality of evil: the moral rot that attends project-managing the end of the world. At this point, we can return to Sontag. Her notes on the imagination of disaster conclude rather more complexly, as she thinks through the ways that genre movies have simultaneously spoken to her generation’s Cold War fears and neutralised them, confining them to the realm of fantastical fiction. She allows that this “is no more, perhaps, than the way all art draws its audience into a circle of complicity with the thing represented.” But the films nevertheless “inculcate a strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation, contamination and destruction” or, in other words, an “inadequate response” to the nightmare of reality. One can therefore spiral further through Oppenheimer’s various layers: to what extent is Nolan, who wrote much of his screenplay in the first person and at one point casts his own daughter as the hallucinated victim of an atomic blast, aligning himself not only with his protagonist’s genius for project management (I know: riveting) and his anxiety over a nuclear reality, but also with his deep guilt over his own product? Is the film as much a rejoinder to Nolan’s own prior imaginations of disaster as it is an explanation for them? (As an extreme, and far less abstract, example of this: one wonders how often he reflects on the unfortunate and doubtless unsettling fact that a screening of the third entry in his techno-militant Batman vigilante series was the setting chosen by a schizoid loner to carry out a gun massacre.) It is this underlying uncertainty toward its own existence, its own need to be, that aligns Oppenheimer with what is perhaps its most peculiar context: the 100-minute Mattel company stock-jacker that comprises the other half of the global “Barbenheimer” phenomenon. Greta Gerwig’s effervescent comic fantasy, released to cinemas on the same day as Nolan’s nervy, middlebrow epic, takes its titular doll out of the plastic, fantastic Barbieland and into the world of humans, where she undergoes education in biology, patriarchal oppression and—far more awkwardly—the cultural legacy of the Barbie brand. If Oppenheimer is a spectacular, whorled biopic of the atomic bomb and the origins of an entire global mindset, so too is Barbie a loose biopic of a product and its influence on the popular psyche. Of course, where Nolan’s film is pretty clear in wishing its central product had never been made, Gerwig’s mission is marked by an ambiguous and perhaps inherently doomed blend of critical comment, corporate compromise and deep personal connection between filmmaker and subject. Barbie succeeds when it articulates the role of the doll in Gerwig’s own childhood, and the emotional importance of toy to human; more often, though, its screenplay is a confused apologia, constantly mounting the beginnings of necessary critique before shortly neutering itself, its ingenious satire on unearned masculine dominance quickly ceding to a far less-than-radical statement of corporate, self-serving, ultimately very Hollywood quasi-feminism. The point of this brief comparison is simple: to highlight the way that Oppenheimer, as with its unlikely blockbusting sibling, reflects through its fractured, personal presentation of an unsettling totem of recent history the ethical confusion forced upon all of us in a post-nuclear, post-plastic, decidedly terminal-capitalist globalised world. Like Gerwig, Nolan bakes both a fascination, scepticism and even disgust with his subject into his film and finds a way to articulate the fact of its cultural centrality. (And in a vague sense, the outsize financial success of both releases rather prove that centrality.) As that perfect adolescent complaint goes, none of us asked to be born; and Nolan captures, within and without his film, something of the compromise that attends simply existing in the years since that severe atomic irruption and the American empire’s plasticky postwar industrial growth-spurt: the evils one may be complicit in while going out of our way to do good in other areas. Rather uncomfortably, it’s possible that the real summation of all this came with the director’s acceptance speech at the A

    1h 18m

  5. 10/03/2023

    Episode 012: Too Old to Die Young (2019)

    Dear neon demons, In July 2018, some 10 months before premiering his Amazon Prime Video series Too Old to Die Young at Cannes, Nicolas Winding Refn wrote an op-ed in the Guardian with the headline, “our times need sex, horror and melodrama”. His straightforward and, we think, perfectly admirable argument can be boiled down to the following: We need to be pushed out of our comfort zones – of complacency, and, for most of us in the west, an easeful life. I’m not advocating physical pain, but I do believe mental pain can be a way to stimulate and reset the brain. What’s needed is art: good, challenging art, not good-taste art, which is the chief enemy of creativity. Problem is, most of our culture comes to us via a small number of conglomerates whose sole purpose is the bottom line. Refn wrote this piece as promotion for his independent and esoteric streaming service, byNWR, and—significantly—while in America shooting his own debut streaming production for Amazon, then ranked by Forbes as the world’s second most valuable company. The column has its broad socio-cultural-political angle, of course; a wider application for the “use”, if you will, of art—at any point in time, in any place on the globe. But one may also take it specifically as a guidebook for Too Old to Die Young itself.  Too Old to Die Young was written by Refn in collaboration with the veteran comics writer Ed Brubaker, whose own work represents a fascinating and consistent ongoing project that tinkers around with crime genre conventions. For the series’ latter portion, which evolves to focus more clearly on the female leads, the men were joined by Brubaker’s one-time Westworld colleague Halley Gross, a TV and videogame writer whose expertise lies in sci-fi and dystopian narratives. Refn shoots largely in chronological order, cultivating a loose and fluid approach to the story as it goes along (Brubaker has described the director’s approach as involving “a zillion daily rewrites”) which renders it difficult to judge the specific contributions of his co-writers. But the broad generic elements that interest this trio are all brought to bear on a visionary series that is, perversely, just as muddled as it is coherent. Much of our podcast episode on this series-cum-long film focuses on its contradictions and complications, so we’ll focus in this short companion essay on its successes as a stylistic exercise. Many of the work’s key dynamics and ideas rely on duality, contradiction and hypocrisy—so it’s probably appropriate that any serious criticism of it should proceed from a point of schizophrenia. Refn’s Guardian column specifically highlights the role of Donald Trump—then, of course, President of the USA—in engendering an “apocalyptic” sensation across the country and the world. It is to this condition that the director chooses to respond in Too Old to Die Young. But of course, the show itself never names the President, or any of his cohorts, or America’s Republican party, or political conservatism, or the far right. It instead—rather more smartly—chooses to broadly evoke… well, not so much America as it exists but a poetic idea of America, “Late” America, as the bloated corpus of contemporary screen media presents it. The Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Mexico of Too Old to Die Young bear only the most bizarro relations to the real deals; by comparison, the LA of Refn’s Drive (2011) is a model of careful realism. In turning away from direct, 1:1 political commentary and instead throwing a mélange of abrasive social ideas, nightmare motifs and weird jokes into this Boschian melting-pot, Refn does find something genuinely compelling: a deadpan parody of America, or perhaps the myriad, prismatic cultural images that make America up. His Guardian column may be framed, like so many late-2010s liberal acts of cultural criticism and marketing—the two sometimes indistinguishable—in the over-familiar terms of “the show/film/song/book/Twitter account/standup act we need now”, but the series itself refuses to quite bear this out. It is, despite its glacial pacing, an hysterical scream. To an extent, the 2017-20 Trump presidential term will be forever associated with two peculiar new conditions of consumption: social media, of course, on the one hand; but also the so-called Peak TV moment, a coincidental development no doubt but one that has a broad epiphenomenal relevance. As alluded to above, many of the television and streaming series vying for views during a moment of, well, peak worldwide attention engaged in a kind of displaced cultural battleground—nothing new to that—but come the late 2010s surely exacerbated by a concurrent proliferation of both “official” critical sites and blogs and “unofficial” social-media commentators all of which could, would and continue to hold any creator’s feet to the fire in terms of social or political outlook, even demanding and often enjoying “course correction” for future editions of a given work. Hopefully it’s obvious, given what we do here, that this is no screed against the concept of criticism, or indeed against using art for tacit, obvious or direct political comment. But the particular, outsized relationship between the cultural economy of Trumpism and both the cultural and literal economy of Peak TV “content” making and its exegesis is itself something that needs interrogating. We’ll settle here for merely flagging it, and moving on… The point is, Too Old to Die Young occupies a fascinating and, perhaps, truly subversive place in its landscape not by being discomfiting or extreme in its content, as Refn’s words on the matter imply, but by turning, in its very approach, so puckishly away from its Peak TV peers. It is deeply, obviously political—and about its very specific moment in time, no less—yet refuses to commit to much beyond ambient notes of commentary. When it does go on-the-nose, whether in dialogue or image, it is extravagant and cartoonish, as if to mock the very idea of making a concrete political statement in something as startling and fluvial as the Trump era. But forget the politics: at a “content” making level this is, fundamentally, not something that the vast majority of viewers could possibly bother with past the first half-an-episode. It is far slower, surely, than any other Peak TV series (even Twin Peaks: the Return, to which it owes a lot), and operates through a digressive dream logic that often leads to contradiction and, intriguingly, a kind of self-aware self-problematising—an unwillingness to definitely say the right thing. This style is designed not to allow for the clarity and catharsis of serious statement; it’s also designed to be almost provocatively boring. Refn wanted to push his Amazon Prime audience out of their comfort zones; it’s safe to say he ticked all the boxes. And, goshdarnit, that’s why Too Old to Die Young somehow, remarkably, works. And when Refn complains, “most of our culture comes to us via a small number of conglomerates whose sole purpose is the bottom line,” then takes a stash of money from a company that exerts an absolutely dreadful overall pull on culture, society, economics and the overall global psyche, in order to create a pseudo-commercial, totally abstruse and anticommercial product that’ll make back precisely zilch in terms of whatever number-fudging counts as “revenue” in this context—that’s punk, baby, and it’s also cynical to the point of nihilism. In other words, stop looking for meaning in Refn’s images and Brubaker and Gross’s words; the medium, in this case, is the message. What could more aptly convey the apocalyptic, terminal-capitalist, postposteverything cultural abyss presented by Too Old to Die Young than the very existence of Too Old to Die Young? As ever, thanks for listening—please share us around, recommend us, rate/review the pod on your podcasting app of choice, etc. etc. etc. Finally, Calum briefly refers on-mic to an Atlantic article about Better Call Saul and its “slow” approach to television. Here’s yer link. —Calum & Eddie This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit solongsuckers.substack.com

    1h 58m

  6. 05/24/2023

    Episode 011: Winter Sleep (Kış Uykusu) (2014)

    Dear friends, Perhaps what really marks out Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s seventh feature film, Winter Sleep (Kış Uykusu), against his prior work is the different method by which it encodes time. It’s not necessarily inaccurate to taxonomise this in terms of “cinematic” drama versus the distinctly “theatrical”—but of course, things are never that simple. At the very least, Ceylan’s talky, Chekhov-inspired tragicomedy uses its stagey sense of conversation in a manner that remains specially and intrinsically filmic. The nuts and bolts of the film’s form are simple: the drama consists of lengthy dialogues, each held within one of relatively few settings. Ceylan cuts more frequently than in his earlier, so-called “slow” films—Uzak (2002) being the exemplar—but the cutting he deploys here, during those lengthy conversations, deliberately implies continuous time rather than elision and other filmic trickery. From the off, Winter Sleep—a film about the travails and the considerable ego of a former stage actor, turned landlord and hotelier—seems to be consciously aping the temporality of a stageplay. Ceylan's use of style, though, creates real tensions between the stage and the screen, and so actively interrogates those differences in medium. Whatever its storytelling approach, this is obviously conceived as a film, and much of its atmosphere comes from the director’s characteristic use of uniquely beautiful establishing shots; his awareness and understanding of landscape and its poetic opportunities. The exacting rhythms of these conversations are key, too: Ceylan and his co-writer (and wife), Ebru Ceylan, would often bring rewrites to successive rehearsals and even shoots, working with the actors to craft material that ultimately lies at some precise stylistic intersection between the philosophic, the mundane, the comic, the serious, the contemporary, the timeless. One can certainly use similar techniques in honing a play, but with film the simple act of selecting the best take of a scene—or threading together different takes—creates something totally different: a meta controlling presence that immediately redefines the moment in which that take was filmed. So it is that, like many good films adapted from plays, the typical feeling of stage-time throughout these long dialogue scenes is instead displaced; made something else. In that sense, though Winter Sleep is not—as we remark on the podcast—strictly ”slow cinema”, its primary concern is still adjacent to that mode, in that it explores how the cinematic object exists within the flow of time. And this film, unlike many good films adapted from plays, reflexively reminds us that there is such a thing as “real time”—but in a different medium, one where the performers are unmediated by the screen. Ceylan then practises a judicious editing style that simultaneously clings to the “real” time of the stage (and the “stagey” film) and takes full advantage of film’s fluidity as a means of encoding this time. It is significant that the source for the Ceylans’ screenplay is not, in fact, a play; the writers instead use their lead character Aydin, a retired thespian (played ingeniously by Haluk Bilginer), as a means to create and explore staginess, in a manner seemingly incidental to the key themes of the stories from which they draw. The temporal tension, then, is less an end in itself and more a brush with which to paint the film’s more specific socio-political musings. Winter Sleep’s unending eristic, its constant combative chatter that seems to emanate from the very consciousness of its belligerent, entitled, pathetic protagonist, is undergirded by the film’s palpably constructed, almost fussy dramatic cadences. As a final thought: this multi-pronged link between duration, pace, structure and meaning (as well as between “the theatrical” and “the cinematic”) is subtly reinforced by Ceylan’s use of action. Punctuating the lengthy conversation scenes are illustrative physical moments—a rock thrown at a car; the capturing of a horse—that stand out for their directness. The majority of Winter Sleep’s runtime is dialogue, defined in the Ceylans’ writing by its disputation, evasion and obfuscation; these less wordy punctuations, however, allow the plotting to aim for the apparent; the indisputable. In so doing, the writers allow us to re-situate the characters and their endless chatter, and so puncture their justifications, self-definitions and, ultimately, agency. In other words: whatever they may say about themselves, and even whatever the filmmakers seem to be saying, it is we, with our lengthy opportunity to observe the characters, who get the final say. (Ceylan has spoken often of his desire to avoid providing his own outright interpretation.) This is explored in a rather playful manner during the movie’s fiery dramatic climax, for which Ceylan and co-editor Bora Göksingöl break from their prior editorial approach and create extended parallel action, cross-cutting between scenes that respectively focus on Aydin and his wife, Nihal (Melisa Sözen). It’s a whole new sense of time that creates a whole new sense of drama, and it finds the film’s makers thinking through the characters in a whole new way. It demonstrates ultimately that despite the confessed literary and theatrical influences of Winter Sleep, Ceylan’s practice here relies on a type of rigid control, not just of theme and character, but time itself, that only comes with the cinema. The final grace note? That, for all this, our protagonist learns absolutely zilch. Now, that’s how you steer a long drama. Thanks as ever for listening! —Calum & Eddie This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit solongsuckers.substack.com

    2h 5m

  7. 01/16/2023

    Episode 010: Gangs of Wasseypur (2012)

    Quick note: this has been a while between recording and release. You’ll notice almost immediately, when we say David Warner died, er, “last week”. Dear friends, Dramatic payoff is one thing, but there’s an immense and specific satisfaction to the climaxes of the very best crime films. This is, to be sure, a pretty nebulous generic designation that can centre gangsters, professional thieves or small-town crooks; or indeed lawmakers, enforcers or civilians caught up in the middle. But it seems axiomatic that all such films have in common an appeal inherently absent from, say, a romcom or a family drama: whether the film’s payoff lies in the success or the defeat of its criminal element, and no matter the film’s overarching perspective or alignment, its buildup rests on the audience’s willingness to play around in the margins of society and morality. Even an unambiguously pro-law flick such as Richard Fleischer’s US Treasury-supported semi-doc Trapped (1949) rests entirely on the thrill of spending time with slimy, nasty counterfeiter Lloyd Bridges, and realising at the end a simultaneous moral gratification (the narrative parts fit together; the government operation succeeds and Bridges gets what’s coming to him) and, if only to a very minor extent, sympathy with the outlaw who can’t get away. The two-part epic Gangs of Wasseypur takes this to still more extreme lengths over its near five-and-a-half hours, focusing on two successive protagonists as well as myriad supporting players and subplots, using digressions and digressions from digressions as it spins the fictionalised tale of 60-plus years in India’s Dhanbad region. We are aligned with various members of the Khan family, organised criminals who are driven simultaneously by prosaic ambition and a highly dramatic thirst for vengeance against the kingpin who had patriarch Shahid killed back in 1947. (It’s a foundational part of the film’s symbology that this occurs at the time that the Indian subcontinent was declared officially independent from the British Empire and blithely left to sort out its own complex social and geographic divisions.) When vengeance does come, in Wasseypur’s final minutes, it is prolonged and operatic: a practically never-ending stream of bullets, bursting squibs and hardcore techno music. With admirable self-consciousness, director Anurag Kashyap seems to say to us: here you go; this is what we all wanted; we’re finally there; enjoy it. In other words, if the text is the story of pay-back, the metatext is all about pay-off. Much of the movie’s subplot-heavy structure, and therefore its unusual length, is redolent of India’s masala movie tradition, though Kashyap is one of a number of fairly recent innovators who have found ways to blend this heightened approach with something more consistently naturalistic. It’s a stylistic binary that comes to undergird the many binaries littering the (again, bipartite) narrative—and one summed up deliberately during the final act by “big bad” Ramadhir (the marvellous Tigmanshu Dhulia), who attributes his long-term success in the real criminal world to not preoccupying himself with the fictive realm of Bollywood movies. It’s a puckish detail from a screenwriting team determined to have their generic cake and eat it. Perhaps the single sequence that most resembles our idea of aesthetic “long-ness” is one that also explicitly works through the stylistic binary. Four hours and 20 minutes in, the prologue (Oh yeah, you think, I remember that) is revisited, and then extended (or answered). The sequence in its initial form is pure spectacle within a grand mainstream tradition: a bunch of gangsters come and shoot up their enemy’s sanctum. It is loud, flashy, quickly edited. When Kashyap and team return to it, however, the second part of this event—the one that shows what, exactly, happened to the attack’s target—is an almost total stylistic reversal. Here, Khan family leader Faizal (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) escapes across the rooftops… but slowly, cautiously, quiet as a mouse. Kashyap stays up there with him. Cinematographer Rajeev Ravi draws focus not to the technical brio of the apparent eight-minute unbroken take, but to the expressive physicality of Siddiqui’s performance. The soundtrack consists of Faizal’s heavy breathing, his footsteps, and, more quietly, the flashes of gunfire below him that signify this moment’s ostensible rejection of spectacle. At one point, Faizal lands badly on his ankle and sits there for a minute, in pain, before getting up and escaping underground to reunite with his family. All the generic action of this shoot-out is absented, and concentrated through the image of a single person trying to avoid that action. It rocks! The sequence not only speaks back to its own prologue, it also has obvious parallels with other moments across the film—perhaps most obviously the murder of Faizal’s father, Sardar (Manoj Bajpayee), which closes Part 1. Each moment sees these men, who are successive leaders of the family enterprise and successive protagonists of the movie, targeted in a hail of bullets that they deal with in lengthy detail. Of course, where Sardar is shot to death, Faizal escapes entirely, but both attacks are presented as much through the balletic movements of the leading men as through the usual motifs of bullets and squibs. A further parallel then arrives at the very end when Faizal does meet his maker. Having survived his big hail-of-bullets scene, he is ultimately despatched while in a car, the same as his father. All this is to say that Gangs of Wasseypur, as a grand structure, possesses the same knotty, fractal scaffolding as several films previously discussed on this podcast. It points, therefore, to one of the more fascinating “uses” of lengthy filmmaking: it provides the space for artists to really open up a given genre, poke around within and explore in great detail its variations, complexities and contradictions. In this film, the tight payoff of the crime genre and the subplot-heavy tradition of the masala movie are stretched, multiplied and elevated to an almost unwieldy superstructure that contains the flow and repetition of history in all its horror. The project encodes a postcolonial critique as well as a Marxist reading of criminality, via a genre-focused discussion of popular culture—and so much more besides. It has a lot on its mind! And is four minutes longer than the first two Godfathers combined! As ever, thanks very much for listening. Please do go and rate/review us on Apple/Spotify/wherever else you find us. And tell your friends, so we can continue to expand our criminal empire! —Calum & Eddie This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit solongsuckers.substack.com

    1h 20m

  8. 07/07/2022

    Episode 009: Andrei Rublev (1966/1971)

    Fellow travellers, In the late 1960s, Soviet students and lecturers held a debate on the merits of Andrei Tarkovsky’s second feature, which had premiered to controversy in December ‘66 and would not be passed for release—slightly cut down—until 1971. Tarkovsky quotes from the debate’s transcript in his diary of September 1, 1970, and this speech from one of the film’s defenders sounds eerily familiar to us Suckers: Almost every speaker has asked why they have to be made to suffer all through the three hours of the film. […] It is because the twentieth century has seen the rise of a kind of emotional inflation. When we read in a newspaper that two million people have been butchered in Indonesia, it makes as much impression on us as an account of a hockey team winning a match. The same degree of impression! We fail to notice the monstrous discrepancy between these two events. The channels of our perception have been smoothed out to the point where we are no longer aware. However, I don’t want to preach about this. […] Only the point is that there are some artists who do make us feel the true measure of things. That closing description—attributed to a Maths professor—could either be of Tarkovsky himself or of Tarkovsky’s subject, the medieval monk and icon painter Andrei Rublev. This duality is, to say the least, appropriate for the film, being as it is about art and art-making—or, more precisely to its oblique, elliptical presentation, around art and art-making. How does one begin, or end, with something this fluid, that takes the complexities of the historical film (whereby it is about the era on screen and its era of production; about the figures on screen and the figures presenting them; and so on) to such esoteric, instinctual extremes? This is, to put it modestly, a biography of a Great Man—although it only rarely decides to analyse that man, and sometimes declines to involve him in the narrative at all. And, of course, much of this biography is completely made up. Though ultimately named, simply, Andrei Rublev, this epic is better thought in terms of its original title, The Passion of Andrei, which would refer more generally to the events and hardships that surrounded its subject (played by Anatoly Solonitsyn). Tarkovsky and his co-writer, Andrei Konchalovsky, understand their biopic not as that of a Great Man in the classic sense, nor even its cousin, the wannabe “complex” picture of a Tortured Genius. Their Rublev is, rather, part of the landscape, something of a Great Conduit for a higher calling, a possibly divine talent—that which we call art. In other words, their subject is not presented necessarily as some special genius in and of himself. He is little more (yet no less) than a spiritual vessel who channelled his historical moment (and, to follow the mindset of both Andrei the monk and Andrei the filmmaker, his access to God) into something creative. Historically Great, yes, but the provenance of that greatness is here profoundly diffused. This complex view of creative sensitivity—where the artist is at once passive, reactive and active, an onlooker and an agent, a face in the crowd and the story’s protagonist—infuses every part of the film and adds up less to another workaday hagiography than a living, breathing manifesto on the nature and meaning of artistic creation. It continues to demonstrate how cinematic biography can be used fully as cinema rather than the prosaic, over-plotted, essentially unimaginative point-and-shoot televisual garbage that comes around like clockwork every so-called awards season. (Tarkovsky once commented on filmmakers who rely on adaptation: “they have no ideas of their own. … If you stand for the truth, then you have to speak the truth. And if you do that it’s not always going to please everyone. So directors turn to adaptations.”) This thoughtfulness is manifest in the film’s loopy structure, which sees the whole break down not just into its 11 given chapters (including prologue and epilogue) but into a galaxy of small details that reflect larger moments elsewhere across the running time. One of its governing “Russian doll” type motifs (credit to Eddie for that comparison) is to comment upon its own structure in various microcosms within that structure. (An example of this is the prologue, which climaxes with an instance of the film before us “becoming” the result of its ballooning protagonist’s innovation and struggle by literally giving us an airborne panorama; so too the whole film climaxes with the film simply exhibiting Rublev’s paintings to us and thereby “becoming” the result of Rublev’s struggle.) This is all something of a foreshadow to the film’s striking and satisfying final minutes—but again, this nonpareil quasi-biopic is not working towards such straightforward, cause-and-effect narrative teleologies as one would expect. Here’s, perhaps, a better framework: Andrei Rublev is a work of art, made up of small details, all about the small details that make a work of art. The real key to understanding Rublev’s rhythms, dualities and contradictions comes with a short essay Tarkovsky wrote at the end of his life that constitutes the conclusion of his book, Sculpting in Time (completed and published in 1986). Here, the filmmaker posits that the most fulfilling approach to life rejects established social systems—including, necessarily, socialism, or at least the democratic socialisms that had been practised up to that point—but renounces, too, a rejection of society. One must instead be “responsible for [one]self,” to accept “the objective value and significance of the ‘I’ at the centre of [one’s] life on earth […] advancing towards the perfection in which there can be no egocentricity.” Having done this, one can participate more thoroughly, more responsibly, in the society, the community, surrounding them. In short, one must accept “society” as a collection of more-or-less altruistic individuals rather than something administrated by systemic governance, in order to start building a way forwards. This naturally says a lot about Tarkovsky’s work in general, but Rublev seems to enact his particular politics the most directly, not least in the way the film’s lead undertakes a vow of silence that essentially walls him up from his fellow man before a crucial revelation about the role of the creative that drives him to speak again and reconnect with the people. The means by which Rublev presents “what we feel about the age of Rublyov” (per a later line from the director’s diaries) is so defined by rumination, ellipsis, digression and unresolved debate as to come perhaps closer to “life”—that oblique, unresolvable entity—than any of his later, still more experimental films. It is this lived-in-ness, this sense of unfurling ideas straining against the ostensibly strict, “literary” structure, that sustains the film’s three unhurried hours. The rigorous use of unobtrusive editing, long takes and fluid, apparently observational camera movements bolster that thoughtful screenplay in a way that allows the work’s fractal nature to work as a sensory, lively—rather than purely intellectual—experience. Why, then, are viewers made to “suffer” throughout this long film? Well, the simple answer is that, alongside the suffering, there is beauty, contemplation, bravery and even humour. Rublev is rugged and lyrical; an earnest attempt at a work of Russian nationalist art that also expresses its director’s singular perspective. It is, in many senses, extraordinarily difficult for anything positive to emerge from any point in history, be that the 1400s, the 1960s or the 2020s, but the film is keen to stress that something positive can still emerge. That Maths professor quoted above concludes his thought on the role of artists, and this film’s particular focus on suffering, thus: … there are some artists who do make us feel the true measure of things. It is a burden which they carry throughout their lives, and we must be thankful to them. Thanks, as ever, for listening. Please do go for a wander into the muddy wilderness and tell whomever you encounter. —Calum & Eddie This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit solongsuckers.substack.com

    1h 30m
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  • Creator
    So Long, Suckers
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2025
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Explicit
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    © So Long, Suckers
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