And the Light From You

When Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs landed in theaters in 1991, and went on to become one of that year’s biggest hits and pick up a shovelful of Oscars, many in the audience didn’t realize that it was, in essence, a sequel. Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal serial killer who has become a somewhat troubling cultural touchstone, was introduced by writer Thomas Harris in his 1981 novel Red Dragon, which he followed up with The Silence of the Lambs in 1988. In between those books, in 1986, Red Dragon was adapted by Michael Mann into a film called Manhunter. By then Mann was deep into his day job as executive producer of Miami Vice, but that show’s success didn’t seem to help Manhunter: it failed at the box office, and reviews were not entirely kind. I, on the other hand, have always loved the film, which I first saw in the late ’80s on VHS. In fact, apart from a brief period of confusion when I labored under the delusion that The Silence of the Lambs was superior, I’ve long understood (note that I didn’t say “believed”) that Manhunter is the best Lecter film, and indeed the best thing to ever come out of the career of Thomas Harris. It achieves emotional and cinematic peaks with this material I’ve seen from no other film.

The plot of Manhunter is a lot like the plot of The Silence of the Lambs: an FBI agent sorta-kinda joins minds with an incarcerated Hannibal Lecter to catch an active and particularly brutal serial killer. Lecter couldn’t care less about innocent people being murdered, but his arrogance, and genius, and love of fucking with the minds of those who hope to understand and cage him, compels him to answer the questions the agents put to him. That’s the simple version of both stories. In Manhunter, the FBI agent is Will Graham (played by William L. Petersen), who when we meet him seems to be retired after several harrowing cases, including the one that brought down Lecter, during which Graham was nearly killed. Jack Crawford, played here by Dennis Farina, wants Graham to come back to stop a killer (Tom Noonan) dubbed The Tooth Fairy by the press because of the bite marks he leaves on some of his victims. The Tooth Fairy baffled the FBI in the course of killing entire families in their homes. Graham, of course, agrees to try to take down The Tooth Fairy.

Apart from Michael Mann’s considerable achievements here, about which more in a bit, it’s hard to imagine Manhunter being as bracing, troubling, and emotionally exciting if William Petersen hadn’t played Graham. In 1986, Petersen didn’t exactly get rave reviews for his performance; Dave Kehr wrote he’d been “saddled” with a “whispery monotone,” and the Los Angeles Times’s Sheila Benson suggested that “although he’s good enough in the role, Petersen is less than charismatic. The camera doesn’t much love him and neither, I fear, do we.” First of all, what’s this “we” jazz? Second, it seems to me that “charisma” is kind of beside the point when considering Will Graham, and Petersen’s performance. As Mann says in his commentary track for the director’s cut of Manhunter on the Scream Factory Blu-ray, “there is a killer inside Graham.” In other words, the reason Graham is so good at his job is because he has been suppressing his own violent urges, possibly his whole life. Lecter knows it, too. When Graham first visits him in prison, Lecter (an absolutely brilliant Brian Cox, and we’re going to stick with Lecter despite Manhunter’s odd decision to brand him “Lecktor”), Lecter intuits that Graham doesn’t really care what he thinks about The Tooth Fairy: “You came here to get a look at me, to get the old scent back again, didn’t you? Would you like to leave me your home phone number? Do you know how you caught me? The reason you caught me, Will, is we’re just alike. Do you understand? Smell yourself.” It should be pointed out that while Lecter is saying all this, Graham is pounding furiously on the locked door to signal the guard that he wants to leave. There is a snake in Graham’s brain. It would be a mistake to play such a character with a spark, a twinkle. Petersen plays him as a sentient thundercloud, and that strikes me as exactly right.

Of course, Peterson could light up the screen like no actor before him, but it wouldn’t make any difference if Michael Mann didn’t also step up to the plate. Again, at the time Mann was steeped in Miami Vice (though strictly speaking, it wasn’t his show; he didn’t create it, and he’s not credited with directing a single episode), and his aesthetic as a filmmaker has long been compared to that show, both favorably and unfavorably. As far as I’m concerned, it pays off swimmingly in Manhunter. Look at Petersen’s Graham: thundercloud though he may be, his clothes could not be more fashionable, his facial hair any more finely trimmed. This suggests not the blind following of a pre-selected aesthetic, but rather a precision in the mind of the character. Look at the all-white, brutalist prison housing Lecter, or the aggressive, even unnatural blue of Graham’s sanctuary, the beach home he shares with his wife (Kim Greist) and son. Blue is probably Mann’s defining color; it practically envelops Heat and The Insider, bathing each, and Manhunter as well, in an oceanic wash that can feel, depending on the film, cold and isolating or, counterintuitively, warm and welcoming. Mann is able to twist colors to his will.



Part of Manhunter’s power derives from how it comes off as both of the 1980s and against the 1980s. The scenes with Graham and Crawford working with their task force in a blindingly lit conference room seem to exist in a world that could have never imagined Beverly Hills Cop or Lethal Weapon or Die Hard. They are plain in a deliberate sense, stark, conversational, professional, in a way that reflects Mann’s deep understanding of his subject.

Where Michael Mann is perhaps most distinguished, however, in the sense that his talents in this area become almost alchemical in nature, is in his use of incidental pop music. I’m not alone among fans of this director’s work in thinking that, not infrequently, Mann will use a song in one of his films that I would never listen to under any other circumstance, but which in the context of a particular Mann film absolutely soars. This is all in the ear of the beholder, of course, but consider “Heartbeat” by Red 7, which closes out Manhunter. I can’t imagine reaching a point in my life when I would actively choose to listen to this song, yet Michael Mann, because of the mood and vibe he has meticulously constructed, makes it seem, if not quite triumphant, than at least a signal of positive transition.

See also “Strong as I Am” by the Prime Movers, played here in the moment that The Tooth Fairy — real name Francis Dolarhyde (a character name so perfect you can’t even explain why, and full credit to Thomas Harris) — mistakenly decides that his blind girlfriend Reba (Joan Allen) has been unfaithful. Francis’s mind, which had possibly been repairing itself in the wake of Reba’s sincere affection, snaps anew, resulting in a fresh spasm of violence. It’s a big song, all breathlessly operatic vocals and blamming drums that somehow drown out the demurely screeching guitars, but it comes off like a recording of Dolarhyde’s psyche in that moment — his ability to murder gives him strength over everybody. Listening to the song just now, it didn’t do a hell of a lot for me. But I can’t imagine Manhunter without it.

Then again, musically speaking, it’s not always so complicated with Mann. Most obviously, the original score to 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman is world-class, one of the great film scores period; and then also, more relevantly, his application of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” at Manhunter’s climax, which cannot be described, but only experienced. But the most powerful use of music, at least of incidental rock music, in a Michael Mann film may well be Shriekback’s “This Big Hush.” More even than “Strong as I Am,” this is Francis Dolarhyde’s song. As played by the great Tom Noonan, in a towering performance, Dolarhyde is one of the most terrifying human beings ever put on screen. We’ve seen him inflict pure horror on another person (specifically Lounds, the tabloid asshole, played by Stephen Lang who is twitchy, sweaty, awful, great) in a scene that is almost cosmic in its psychotic grandeur (“Here I … am.”). And we will hear Graham sum up his position on men like Dolarhyde in a way that I, at least, find it difficult to argue with: “My heart bleeds for him, as a child. Someone took a kid and manufactured a monster. At the same time, as an adult, he's irredeemable. He butchers whole families to pursue trivial fantasies. As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks.”

But crucially, Mann shows you that the monster was manufactured. After his first night with Reba, the painfully self-conscious Dolarhyde lies awake in bed, Reba asleep beside him, and he pulls her hand over his mouth and sets it there, and he begins to weep. This is a man who has probably been happy only one time in his entire life, and that was last night. Now he’s already beginning to disbelieve it, as Shriekback plays: “The ashes and the fire/Turning this night inside/And the light from you.” This is the power and humanity of Manhunter. If this is style over substance, I’ll take it.

The Human Spirograph

In 1988, Bob Hoskins starred in the Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a massive, effects-heavy Hollywood blockbuster directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Steven Spielberg. As down-on-his-luck private eye Eddie Valiant, Hoskins acted opposite cartoon characters like the titular rabbit, the rabbit's wife Jessica, and several nefarious weasels, as well as more famous creations like Betty Boop, Yosemite Sam, and so on. Hoskins made what must have been rather difficult look effortless. The film was an enormous success, boosting Hoskins’ profile in Hollywood, and remains a pretty delightful piece of work. He worked steadily in America thereafter. To this day, it seems like a small miracle that Hoskins (by no means Spielberg or Zemeckis’ first choice) got the part, not least because in one of the films he appeared in the previous year, Mike Hodges’ A Prayer for the Dying, Bob Hoskins plays a priest in Northern Ireland battling with a troubled past (while trying to help remorseful, yet nihilistic, IRA terrorist Mickey Rourke find redemption) who at one point beats in the face of a gangster with the lid of a garbage can.

Hoskins could successfully embody both characters thanks to his very specific look: Short in stature, compact in build, constantly in the process of balding, he was like an ambulatory, unpredictable fire hydrant. His gruff, cracked voice and thick Cockney accent could be made to sound incredulous, or innocent, or malevolent. His eyes could make him look naive, or like he had murder in his heart. The most remarkable thing about this range is that Hoskins, either by chance or because he sought out these parts, could often do all of this in the same movie. A Prayer for the Dying is a decent case in point: His Father De Costa wants only to see the end of violence in Ireland but has a clenched fist inside him aching to be swung. But Hoskins made a clutch of British crime films in the 1980s from which this idea emerges almost as a connective theme.

An even better example is 1980s The Long Good Friday, one of the defining, and best, films of Hoskins’ career. Directed by David McKenzie and written by Barrie Keeffe, it’s arguably the true epitome of the British crime film. (Its stiffest competition is likely Get Carter directed by, hey look at that, Mike Hodges.) One thing that distinguishes The Long Good Friday is its fairly ingenious premise: British gangster Harold Shand (Hoskins) is working on an important deal that will at least partially legitimize him (at least in his own mind) as a businessman, but on the day — which happens to be Good Friday — that the deal is to be solidified, the murders of his confederates destabilize everything. Who is behind these killings? How can they be stopped? The film, which takes place over the course of that one long Good Friday, mercilessly puts the screws to Shand until everything explodes.

Hoskins’ approach to the role is surprising. Looking out from Hoskins’ eyes, Shand can, for long stretches of the film, seem like a fairly normal, even friendly person. But he wields as a weapon a brutality equal to whatever group is apparently stalking him. In one scene, he has members of rival gangs brought to a meat locker, hung upside down by their ankles, and threatens to freeze them to death if they don’t tell him who’s behind the murders. Later, when he discovers that his right-hand man (Derek Thomson) stupidly set into the motion the chain of events that led to this mess, Shand goes from anger to a sudden, untethered rage, which he uses a broken bottle to express. It’s sudden, and terrifying. This confused little bulldog has just turned psychotic.

But it’s that confusion that is the key to Hoskins’ genius. In a scene late in the film, Hoskins and his girlfriend Victoria (Helen Mirren) are at home, each at a loss about what to do next. Running his hand over his head, sitting down numbly, Shand says “What’s happening to it? … For 10 years, it’s been calm. Now this.” Victoria breaks down and the two embrace on the couch, weeping. “I don’t want to die,” Victoria sobs. “Don’t let them kill us.” Shand says he won’t let that happen, but in Hoskins’ face you see he is just as terrified. And of course, in The Long Good Friday’s famous last shot, all the viewer gets is his face again, for minutes on end, Hoskins as a powerful mob boss, now completely helpless and terrified. It’s among the most pure, expressive, and chilling pieces of acting I’ve ever seen.

Five years later, Hoskins would star in a film that would earn him Best Actor at Cannes, an Academy Award nomination, and would change his career: Mona Lisa. Written and directed by Neil Jordan (who would later go on to make The Crying Game, a film that is essentially a reworking of Mona Lisa), it’s a British crime film done as a romance. Hoskins stars as George, a low-level member of a criminal organization run by Michael Caine. George was recently released from prison, and has re-entered the gang as a kind of chauffeur. The audience knows that George did his time without giving up anyone else; given this, he thinks he should be treated with more respect. But he’s too meek, too naive, and has too much misplaced respect for Caine’s Denny to be very aggressive about it. So he earns his living driving around a prostitute named Simone (Cathy Tyson) to visit her rich clients. George and Simone initially butt heads, eventually become friends, and finally George falls in love with her. Crucially — and the audience can see this before George can — Simone does not fall in love with George. The reason why a romantic relationship is impossible will become clear in time, and leave George furious, alone, feeling disrespected and impotent. His anger at Simone is both just and unjust, and he knows that, and so his frustration builds.

George, though the lead of the film, never becomes the hero. Nor does he ever descend into villainy. His wish is merely to free Simone from Denny’s clutches (he wants this before and after she rejects him). However, while he has the necessary bravery, he never has the cunning. If Simone’s going to be free, someone else will have to take charge. Mona Lisa, like The Long Good Friday, has its own eruption of impulsive violence, but this time Hoskins’ character has nothing to do with it. In fact, he cries out for it to stop. The whole film, George is in over his head, and Hoskins plays him at first with a certain warmth  and eagerness. Hoskins had a big smile, and his George seems like the friendliest gangster you could ever meet. It’s that friendliness that gets him in trouble. Hoskins plays George as someone who was not cut out for the world of crime. He’s used by Denny, and he’s used by Simone, and so really what he should do is just leave and spend time with his daughter and his best friend (Robbie Coltrane). There is ultimately a sweetness to Mona Lisa that suits Hoskins. The fact that the nihilism of The Long Good Friday also suited him is why we remember him.

Bob Hoskins passed away in 2014, less than two years after announcing his retirement from acting after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The hole in world cinema caused by his absence is considerable; not only is his marvelously unique talent and presence gone, but gone, too, is the era when someone like him could be cast as the lead in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I even doubt, were Hoskins still alive and Jordan making Mona Lisa today, that Jordan would be able to get the film financed with Hoskins attached. Jordan would still want to, of course, but the market wouldn’t permit it. Or so the argument would go. Fortunately for us, his filmography is extensive and varied: One random six-year span of his career includes roles in Atom Egoyan’s weird and sinister Felicia’s Journey, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates, in which he plays Nikita Krushchev, Stephen Frear’s light ribald comedy Mrs. Henderson Presents, and an episode of Frasier. He was, in the end, an actor everyone loved. Charming, funny, endearing, whose mere presence in a film immediately improved it.

But speaking for myself, I will never forget that mad dog impulsiveness, or that broken bottle.

Our Brief College Days

When David Mamet’s play Oleanna premiered on Broadway in 1992, the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings were less than a year in the past. Perhaps – or even more than likely – as a result, Oleanna, which is about, let us say, escalating tensions between a male professor at an upscale but unnamed college and a shy, struggling female student, became in the eyes of critics and audiences an acerbic examination of sexual harassment and political correctness. Much controversy ensued, leading in some cases to actual protests, and threats made against William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon, the stars of the play. Though it would be disingenuous to claim the Hill-Thomas case played no part in inspiring Mamet to write Oleanna, his insistence at the time that power, not sexual harassment, was his subject, is impossible to refute when you look at the play or the subsequent film that Mamet himself directed just two years later. A film made, maybe, in the hopes that people would get it this time.

That film was provided, by some marketing department somewhere, with the tagline “Whatever side you take, you’re wrong.” This has the whiff of empty provocation about it, and doubtless that was the spirit in which it was written, but it’s also fundamentally accurate. However, before going any further, the basics of Oleanna should be laid out. John is a professor at what one might take to be an Ivy League university, who, as the story begins, is in his office, talking on the phone with his wife, discussing the house they’re trying to buy. The audience can assume this is after his normal office hours, but also present is one of his students, Carol (this time played by Deborah Eisenstadt), who has come to talk to John about the failing grade she received on a paper she wrote for his class. When the two are finally able to talk, Carol, who is in a panic about failing the class, practically begs John to help her because she sits in class and doesn’t understand a word anyone is saying. John, not unwilling to help but also in a hurry and kind of, let’s face it, a prick, at first dismisses her as someone who knew the rules of grading when she came to college. Gradually, however, her fear and vulnerability break through and he does attempt, sincerely, to help her. Over the course of the remaining, say, 70 minutes of the film, this goes increasingly poorly.

In the final scene, we see that Carol has completed her journey from mousey and skittish to angry and confident in her own righteousness, while John has spiraled into near-hopelessness. In addition to being fired (they’re meeting again in his office, maybe during his last week there), we’re about to learn, at the same time John does, that Carol has formally accused him of attempted rape, a crime of which we know he is entirely innocent. Added to this is Carol saying to John, while he, furiously dismissing her from his office and back on the phone with his wife, to whom he says “I can’t talk right now, baby, “Don’t call your wife baby.” Which I hope we can all agree is none of her business. Though perhaps we can’t. Oleanna’s not controversial for nothin’. In any event, this tears it, as far as John is concerned, and he begins to viciously beat Carol.

I can imagine there are some people in the audience, both of the play and the film, who, when this happens, were at minimum inwardly gleeful over this release of violence. I can imagine with similar ease that there are people who flinch from it but believe the intent is to excite those vile pigs elsewhere in the theater. Well, whatever side you take you’re wrong. At the end, John, about to batter (kill?) Carol with a heavy wooden chair, freezes, a look of dawning horror coming over his face. “Oh my God,” he says, and then repeats it. A tearful, cowering Carol replies “Yes, that’s right.” Down goes the curtain and/or up comes the lights.

In an interview with John Lahr for The Paris Review, some years after the film came out, David Mamet said John, in that moment, “realizes that he is perhaps the cause of the plague on Thebes.” If you know your Sophocles, you’ll recall that in Oedipus Rex it is revealed that Thebes has been ravaged by a terrible pestilence due to a curse that Oedipus, the Theban king, inadvertently brought upon the city himself by, as a result of a complicated mix-up, killing his father and sleeping with his mother. He didn’t mean to do it, but he still did it.

But if John didn’t attempt to rape Carol – and he didn’t – and he if Carol should keep her nose out of the terms of endearment used between John and his wife – and she should – then what did John do? Well, let me tell you what he did. And it’s interesting, when you consider that as divisive a figure as Mamet already was, how he only became more infuriating (to some) when in 2008 he declared that he was “no longer a brain-dead liberal” (his work subsequent to that announcement was declared, and not unreasonably, by many of those who were newly infuriated to be not much different in theme or tone to what had preceded it), to look at Oleanna in 2020 and ask (rhetorically and in one’s own head) the people outraged by the play and the film, and by Mamet in general, “But wait, don’t you agree with almost everything he’s saying here?”

The key moment comes after John has warmed to Carol and decided he genuinely wants to help her (but also after she has snapped at him for interrupting her, which both of them do to each other constantly anyway) and she asks him about his apparent disdain for higher education. Carol quotes him: “You said that education was ‘prolonged and systematic hazing.’” John says “Yes, it can be so.” Carol, naturally enough, wants to know if this is the case, why does he teach? To which John replies “I do it because I love it.”

At this point in the film, Mamet cuts to Carol for a beat. What John meant by “I do it because I love it” can be reasonably interpreted as “I love to teach, I love to impart my knowledge onto the youth of America” or something like that. But in the context of their exchange, and in the context of their relationship, Carol is wondering, and not unreasonably, if he might actually mean “I do it because I love prolonged and systematic hazing.” Add this on to John agreeing to wipe out her failing grade and give her an A for the whole class if she will agree to meet with him for private instruction (something he seems sincere about, with no ulterior motive, but, I mean…) because, as he tells her, “I like you,” and who can really blame Carol for suddenly feeling immense, if confusing, pressure?

And while she wants help, and wants to pass, John’s solution to simply give her an A, however generous his motives, she takes as an insult. As she says in the second scene:

“And you think it’s charming to ‘question’ in yourself this taste to mock and destroy. But you should question it. Professor. And you pick those things which you feel advance you: publication, tenure, and the steps to get them you call 'harmless rituals.' And you perform those steps. Although you say it is hypocrisy. But to the aspirations of your students. Of hardworking students, who come here, who slave to come here – you have no idea what it cost me to come to this school – you mock us. You call education 'hazing,' and from your so-protected, so-elitist seat you hold our confusion as a joke, and our hopes and efforts with it.”

It would be unreasonable, I suppose, to write anything about Oleanna in 2020 and not make some kind of joke about William H. Macy, and the college admissions scandal he and his wife Felicity Huffman found themselves embroiled in last year, but please, I beg you, let my bringing it up at all count as that joke. On the other hand, when that story broke, of course somebody went to David Mamet for a statement on the matter. His response was published by The Hollywood Reporter. I’m not going to quote it at length, but the opening sentence should have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Oleanna: “I worked for very many years in and around our Elite Universities. I am able to report that their admissions policies are an unfortunate and corrupt joke.” Oleanna is not about college admissions, at least not explicitly, but it’s also not not about that (“you have no idea what it cost me to come to this school”). The whole idea of Oleanna is the ruthless power that Mamet believes colleges wield, however unconsciously on the individual level of professors like John, over their students. As Carol gains strength from her sense of righteousness (fueled by a vague “group” she says she’s joined, and which is often interpreted as radical feminists but which, in the film, is much more clearly a student’s rights advocacy group), she lectures John about his privilege that lets him feel so casual and entitled about his place in the university in relation to hers. And Mamet means this. He’s not taking down “political correctness” when he has Carol say “Do you know what you’ve worked for? Power. For power…And you sit there, and you tell me stories. About your house, about all the private schools, and about privilege, and how your are entitled. To buy, to spend, to mock, to summon.” The height of John’s lack of self-awareness comes when, after smugly denouncing higher education, he mentions the frustrations inherent in trying to get his son into private school.

But John did not try to rape Carol. He didn’t. He does, at the end of the second scene, put his hands on her in an attempt to get her to stay and listen to him because he’s desperate that they should work out their differences. But he doesn’t try to rape her. The fact that by the end of Oleanna her assertion that he did has gained traction at least within the university, thereby destroying his career, only strengthens Mamet’s claim that this is about power, not harassment or political correctness. When John had power, which he gained by Carol choosing to take his class, his attempts to educate her come with smug condescension, self-regarding generosity, and a complete ignorance of the sacrifices Carol and her family had to make to put her in his office in the first place. When Carol takes power for herself, which she obtains merely by accusing John of an awful crime he didn’t commit, she takes the opportunity to lecture him about everything wrong he’s done in his life and career, from regarding education with a cynical eye to calling his wife “Baby.” They're both only trying to help. But you can't help if you don't have power.

Edited by Sonny Bunch

Where I've Been

Hey everybody! If you don't follow me on Twitter, but read this blog, you should know two things: one is that this blog is not dead! Second, lately I've been writing about films over at Rebeller. I keep mean to mention that here and then I forget, so I'm doing it now while it's still fresh in my mind. There have been four pieces so far. Please see the links below!

(By the way, it's a subscription site, but it's only a couple bucks a month. Also I believe there is a free option, where you get a certain number of articles free per month. You can learn more on the main page.)

An essay about how some films try to make the audience hate their villains before the villain has done anything wrong, through political and cultural signifiers.

A look at the self-criticism that's right out in the open in Clint Eastwood's True Crime.

A celebration of Bob Hoskins, mainly via The Long Good Friday and Mona Lisa.

And finally, hot of the presses, this piece about the many bad faith criticisms of the work of Wes Anderson, which always ramp up when he has a new movie coming out.

Read them all! Please and thank you.

Trying to Win the Race Against the Goats: The Books of 2019

Well here we go again, fellows! I'm going to do my best to dispense with the preliminaries, not least because I feel like the last couple of years I've allowed a certain defensiveness to creep in to this part of my annual "Best Books Which I, Bill Ryan, Read in [GIVEN YEAR]." So what made the list made the list, and what didn't, didn't. The full tally of what I read in 2019 comes at the end. Far fewer books this year than in the previous two. I hope to get back on track in 2020.

As usual, these are unranked, until you get to the last three, which I'm confident are the three best novels I read in 2019.

Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li - When I finished reading this novel, about a group of friends in China and the mystery surrounding the poisoning of one them, I considered it a disappointment. There is an oppressive distance to the prose -- no one ever eats anything specific, just food, or listens to a named song, just music -- that I struggled with (in a way, I might as well admit, I don't with the cinematic equivalent), and found unabsorbing. But eventually, I realized the prose so exactly mirrored the psyche of the character who the whole novel revolves around that I had to concede Li's bone-chilling brilliance. And I read this pretty early in the year, yet I remember it more clearly than others I read later, and which I, ostensibly, like more.

Anno Dracula by Kim Newman - Exactly the novel I hoped it would be: a Victorian horror/adventure/mystery awash in an encyclopedic knowledge of the various genres Newman is playing with, without ever letting his references become the point. Add to this the fact that Newman is a gifted writer of prose -- such a rare thing in genre these days -- and I'm not sure what kept me from this for so long. The first chapter, which climaxes with the reveal that Dracula's Dr. Seward is in fact Jack the Ripper, is a small masterpiece.

The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge - Bainbridge, one of my perennial favorites. This one could be seen by some readers as "typical" of her, but when you're as good as Bainbridge was this doesn't diminish her power. A discomfiting story about a couple of aunts and their niece.

Walking Bones by Charlotte Carter - The only stand-alone novel by Carter, who is better known as the author of the series of detective novels about jazz saxophonist Nanette Hayes. Of the three Carter novels I've read, this one's the best -- a weird, erotic psychodrama about a black woman and a rich white man which is all about abuse, guilt, shame, race, and our individual helplessness in the face of things we don't want to want. Something like that, anyhow.

Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell by Nathan Ballingrud - My one regret about this book, Ballingrud's long-awaited follow up to his previous horror collection North American Lake Monsters, is that, for good and understandable reasons, he had to jettison his original title, The Atlas of Hell. In addition to being a better and more striking title, it also helps the reader understand that the stories in this one have a thematic, and pulp, link. That atlas comes up more than once, is what I'm getting at.

There are six stories here, all terrific, and when I think about pointing out my absolute favorites I discover that I'm about to name four of them. But "The Atlas of Hell," "Skullpocket" (which I wrote about here), "The Visible Filth" (adapted into a very good film called, and here's the explanation, Wounds), and the extraordinary "The Butcher's Table," a period-set, grotesque, fantastical pirate/Satanic cult extravaganza, which includes the most stunning angel imagery I can remember encountering, as well as the most bracing and disturbing use of the phrase "Hail Satan" I can think of, deserve to be singled out. "The Diabolist" and "The Maw" are merely excellent, I'm afraid.

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan - In many respects, McEwan had a bad year. At this point, it looks as though people, when thinking about McEwan in 2019, they'll remember his tiresome, unfunny political satire The Cockroach (one of many such books from the last couple of years) which has come in for quite a bit of bad-natured, but deserved, ribbing; and possibly also the completely ignorant and denigrating comments he made about science fiction while doing the promotional rounds for this one, which is a science fiction novel. This is too bad because I think Machines Like Me is excellent, a genuine science fiction story, told with invigorating precision, about social and scientific ideas that are on the minds of pretty much everyone these days. The protagonist, not a rich man, saves up to buy a robot, does so, and then McEwan sees where that goes. The masterstroke is to set the novel in an alternate universe in which Alan Turing is still alive, a choice which provides Machines Like Me its brilliant ethical reversal.

Pretty bad cover, though.

The Wrong Case by James Crumley - As shambling, digressive, and alcohol-soaked as Crumley's previous (and more famous) The Last Good Kiss, one of those fascinatingly relaxing-yet-cynical, morally bracing "hang-out" crime novels from the 60s and 70s that pulled from Chandler but didn't attempt to simply plant the 1940s Marlowe into the current time. Rather, Crumley imagines people who grew up reading Chandler, felt inspired, and then failed, with little spots of tainted moral victory along the way.

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin - Baldwin's fourth book, and second novel, about David, a gay man in France, his romance with a woman, his romance with a man, Giovanni, a man who faces execution as the novel opens, and David's attempts to distance himself from the tragic climax of the latter situation. It's a novel as much about guilt as it is anything else, and the cultural environments that can force people to choose guilt in order to survive.

The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria - A strange political horror novel about a fantastical library and murderous, gigantic monsters. The climatic imagery is grotesque and haunting, and will be with me forever.

Concrete by Thomas Bernhard - Rudolf is unable to write even the introduction to his study of Mendelssohn, but he is able to write this, a 160-page series of complaints that inadvertently reveal him to be a miserable, pompous hermit. Good stuff.

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald - Winner of the 1979 Booker Prize, about a community of people -- including families -- who live in houseboats anchored at Battersea Reach, on the Thames. Fitzgerald gets a lot of mileage out of this unique setting, and out of imagining the minds of the sort of people who would choose to live like this. The novel is both nonjudgmental and extremely dubious, as well as funny and empathetic. One of four books by Fitzgerald I read in 2019, and the best.

Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence by Richard Aleas - Written by Hard Case Crime founder Charles Ardai under an alias (ahem), these two novels about private detective John Blake must be read, if not back-to-back, then at least without too much time in between. Taken together, I've never read anything quite like them in the private eye genre.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters - An absolutely marvelous ghost story, quite traditional in a lot of ways, but not less compelling for that -- indeed, part of what makes it so engaging might be Waters's understanding of where it sits in the tradition. But really, really beautifully realized, with a narrator you come to understand you'd probably be better off staying away from, should you ever meet him, because, well, anyway. The last line kills.

The White Book by Han Kang - So sad that at one point I actually gasped.

A Good Day to Die by Jim Harrison - See my entry for Crumley's The Wrong Case, but this is not a detective story. Instead, this novel is about a trio of drug-addled idealists who believe (quite wrongly) that a dam is going to be built in the Grand Canyon, and set out from Florida on a road trip to stop it. A crime novel, but only sort of. Completely doomed. My first Harrison, but not my last.

The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock - A sort of autobiographical novel about a not-really romance he had with an older woman, a widow, when staying with his parents at their lake house, when he was in his 20s, and one particularly disturbing night. It's impossible to know what Rock really experienced (a local artist is brought up time and again, who research revealed to me is a fictional version of a real sculptor), but it sure doesn't matter. Wonderfully discursive, jumping from the main story to Rock's (or anyway his narrator's) thoughts on art, painting, his children, an ex-girlfriend, stories, and so on. Completely absorbing, and beautiful.

Savage Night by Jim Thompson - Absolutely extraordinary, a crime novel masquerading as a horror novel. A twisted novel about a hitman, our narrator, whose job in a small town becomes a reminder to the narrator of all that he can never have, and the novel, therefore, is occasionally kind of sweet (!), until that which is sweet becomes unutterably perverse and terrifying. The last few pages are breathtaking. The last line is unforgettable. Its closest ally in Thompson's oeuvre that I know of is A Hell of a Woman, so if you know that book but not this one, then you know you'd better prepare yourself.

Any Old Iron by Anthony Burgess - I used to read Burgess a lot when I was younger -- too young, one could argue. This novel, about a Welsh family that is joined by marriage to a Jewish family prior to World War II, is the first I've read since reaching what I would consider adulthood, or anyway my version of it. Typical of Burgess, it seems to contain the whole world, and all of history, within a rambunctious, funny, bawdy, adventuresome novel, that is on a fundamental level about King Arthur, and metal. As I say, typical of Burgess.

The God of Nightmares by Paula Fox - You might, after reading this one, consider the title somewhat aggressive, given its narrative about a young girl fleeing (in a sense) from New York to New Orleans, in the 1940s, where she encounters all sort of decadence among the artistic class. But the title fits, ultimately, as the novel takes in all manner of everyday human suffering -- addiction, illness, death, failed relationships, betrayal, failure (and anyway, you'll see that the title wasn't pulled out of a hat).

And deeply engaging, written with clear-eyed poetry. A coming-of-age story, and isn't that just too bad.

Peace by Gene Wolfe - A novel about Alden Weer, an old man living in the Midwest, who goes to the doctor, and meets people, and has lots of memories, some of them sad, or confusing. A curious title for a novel often described as a horror story, and reading it you might question that genre designation. Maybe it isn't. I think it might be.

The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns - Like Beryl Bainbridge, another of my perennial favorite, and this time writing at the height of her powers. About a young girl sent to live with her, quite frankly, awful aunt due to her parents's financial difficulties, The Skin Chairs expands subtly into a story about death and money and, somehow, the macabre -- that title is literal, everybody. In the town where the bulk of the novel is set lives a retired general who has in his home six chairs, brought home from the Boer War, that are upholstered in human skin. This is dealt with matter-of-factly, as objects of dark, childish interest by our heroine, and turns up now and again, to somehow both ground the novel in the awful truth of things, and send it spinning into metaphor and imagination. The ending is so perfect that I don't understand how Comyns did it.

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell - "For it was Elizabeth who had determined the shape his life would take, from the very first moment he saw her."

About the Morison family, a Midwestern family, as told by first Bunny, the youngest son, who believes his older brother hates him; then Robert, that older brother, who does not in fact hate Bunny, and finally James, the father, and what all of them think of, and owe to, Elizabeth, the mother and wife, during a catastrophic flu epidemic. One of the most emotionally overwhelming novels I've ever read, and the best thing I read all year.

Soho Sins by Richard Vine

Little Girl Lost by Richard Aleas
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
My Abandonment by Peter Rock
The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem
Needle in a Timestack by Robert Silverberg
Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams
Molloy by Samuel Beckett
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li
Heyday by W.M. Spackman
The Testament of Caspar Schultz by Jack Higgins
The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar

The Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spire

The Wrong Case by James Crumley

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
Songs of Innocence by Richard Aleas
The Golden Child by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson
The White Book by Han Kang
Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud
Peace by Gene Wolfe
The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth by Roger Zelazny
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
The Thirty-First of June by J.B. Priestley
Star by Yukio Mishima
The Curfew by Jesse Ball
Pasmore by David Storey
A Good Day To Die by Jim Harrison
Cari Mora by Thomas Harris
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke
Any Old Iron by Anthony Burgess
The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge
Firebreak by Donald E. Westlake
Here Comes a Candle by Frederic Brown
Walking Bones by Charlotte Carter
The Dark Country by Dennis Etchison
Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro
They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You by Scotto Moore
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria
The Watcher by Charles Maclean
Elbow Room by James Alan Mcpherson
The Day the Leader Was Killed by Naguib Mahfouz
Charlotte by David Foenkinos
Cat Chaser by Elmore Leonard
The God of Nightmares by Paula Fox
The End of Everything by Megan Abbott
Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd
The Servant by Robin Maugham
The Anarchist by David Mamet
Invisible by Paul Auster
Voyage of the Dark by Jean Rhys
Concrete by Thomas Bernhard
Quiet Days of Clichy by Henry Miller
The Line That Held Us by David Joy
The Cockroach by Ian Mcewan
Anno Dracula by Kim Newman
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns
Red Doc> by Anne Carson
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus
The Shores of Space by Richard Matheson
All Shot Up by Chester Himes
The Devil's Mambo by Jerry A. Rodriguez
The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock

Coq au Vin by Charlotte Carter

Savage Night by Jim Thompson

Gilliam

A Source of Innocent Merriment

In the song "A More Humane Mikado," from the operetta The Mikado by Gilbert & Sullivan, that character, the Mikado, a Japanese emperor, believes himself, and proclaims himself, to be entirely sympathetic, unquestionably so, while going on to list all the different ways he will suitably punish the various criminal types whose fates fall within the scope of his rule. The Mikado being light opera, many of the punishments are rather silly, though, crucially, not all ("The advertising quack who wearies/with tales of countless cures/his teeth, I've enacted, to be extracted/by terrified amateurs"); moreover, the crimes for which many of these citizens are being punished are hardly crimes at all -- women who dye their hair, "idiots" who write on train windows, bad singers. Add on top of this the Mikado's insistence on his own humane nature and essential goodness, and not only that, but that his pursuit of these questionable punishments is actually evidence of his basic human decency ("A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist/To nobody second I'm certainly reckoned a true philanthropist/It is my very humane endeavor to make, to some extent/each evil liver a running river/of harmless merriment) and the audience for this 1885 musical can't help but conclude that this man positively exhales great clouds of disingenuousness.

Jump ahead 134 years. Todd Phillips, our modern W.S. Gilbert, and previously the director of the scam documentary Frat House, such decent but disposable comedies as Old School, and such empty, insulting shock-banality comedies as The Hangover Part 2 (the first Hangover film having begun, if one is being generous, in the "decent but disposable" category before being spaghettified by the black hole of its successor; both of them have since collapsed into The Hangover Part 3 which may not exist) has now, Todd Phillips has, won the Golden Lion at this year's Venice Film Festival. The Venice Film Festival is no joke, as these things go, and the Golden Lion is its equivalent of the Palme d'Or. Past winners include Agnes Varda's Vagabond and Eric Rohmer's The Green Ray. Phillips won it for Joker, about the evil clown villain who is Batman's archnemesis. I myself am a great fan of the Batman character, as well as the Joker. Well, I'm not a fan of the Joker, but he's a great character -- at his best he's weird, and funny, and actually frightening, a hyper-verbal genius who has somehow turned Vaudeville into violence, and who will do anything. The Joker has changed over the years, becoming more grim and nihilistic since Batman himself shed his 60s goofball frivolity and reclaimed his noir-ish freakshow roots in the 1970s. The Joker has followed suit to become a figure of true evil in the comics and in his various cinematic incarnations, most notably in Christopher Nolan's 2008 film The Dark Knight, in which Heath Ledger gave a tremendous performance as a twitchy, mysterious, vile, murderous comedian who, we're told in arguably the film's most famous line, "just wants to watch the world burn." So that's where we were basically with the Joker when Todd Phillips got his grubby mitts on the character and thought "Well I'm the most cynical asshole on the planet, let's see what this gets me." Hello, Golden Lion!

The phenomenon of Joker is something that...well, listen, I can't be a hypocrite about this. I've engaged in the online hullaballoo, and have made my doubts about Phillips's movie, sight unseen, very clear. I've also made very clear that critics who run through the streets like Kevin McCarthy, begging anyone within earshot to heed their warnings about the violence movies like Joker will without a doubt inspire its dunderpated audiences to commit (it used to be conservatives who did this, which meant it was paranoid and authoritarian; now its liberals, which means it's fine) are condescending fear-mongering, sniveling, cowardly little shits. But having now seen the film, I want to make it even more clear that it has become impossible for me to engage in the discourse about Joker any longer because it doesn't deserve even the stupid fucking arguments people have been having about it. Joker has absolutely zero going on in it, it is thoughtless, frequently dull, silly, anticlimactic, a waste; it's thieving, insincere, stupid, carpetbagging nonsense. With a couple of good shots that as far as I know Todd Phillips came up with all by himself.



The film stars Joaquin Phoenix, one of our great actors, as Arthur Fleck, a sort of, I don't know, clown for hire? Who works for a sort of clown subcontractor, hiring guys like Fleck out to dress up in clown gear and hold signs outside of their stores, or perform at children's hospitals. You know, a clown subcontractor. From frame one of Joker, we know that Arthur Fleck is mentally ill. We will eventually learn some specifics, such as that he has a condition which, in moments of extreme stress, causes him to laugh uncontrollably, despite laughter being at odds with his mood. He has a laminated card he hands to people who might be startled by this. He lives with his mom (Frances Conroy) in a scummy little apartment in the middle of Gotham City. They're very fond of each other, but his mom can't stop bringing up local billionaire Thomas Wayne, to whom she frequently writes letter, but from whom she never gets a response. At night, the two of them, otherwise lonely, bond over a late night talk show, hosted by the Johnny Carson-esque -- or rather, the Jerry Langford-esque (but actually resembling neither) -- Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). Franklin is Fleck's hero. Fleck is an aspiring stand-up comic, in addition to being a clown. But unlike any other character in the history of cinema, Fleck's dreams of comedy success are badly hindered by his mental illness. He regularly sees a social worker (Sharon Washington), but funding's about to be cut, and Fleck won't be able to get his pills anymore. And he keeps getting beat up. Then again, he seems to have made a connection with a neighbor in his apartment building (Zazie Beetz). But on the other hand he keeps getting beaten up. One night, after being fired from his children's hospital gig for carrying a gun, he's on the subway when three of those Wall Street Guys, you know the type, start making fun of a woman and throw what appear to be Cheetos at her. Arthur starts acting weird, so the Rich Fellows decide "Let's destroy this guy" and they start harassing Arthur, but then Arthur pulls that gun he had and shoots them all to death.

I'll try to speed through the rest of the relevant plot summary. This triple murder, committed by a clown against three Rich Fellows (aka Wall Street Guys) somehow instantly inspires the creation of a massive city-wide protest, with citizens dressed as clowns holding signs that say "Resist" (held upside down! How punk!) and "We Are All Clowns", which is doubtlessly true. But I'm not kidding, this happens overnight. If Todd Phillips's aesthetic approach was (God forgive me) "gritty realism," then shouldn't some of this make any sense at all? There's no build up to any of this. After maybe 40 minutes of boredom involving Fleck's sad inactivity, Joker leaps into full-on "Gotham is ablaze!" mode. The same can be said for Fleck's relationship with Zazie Beetz's Sophie, although that bit has a twist to it, which might seem obvious. But the fact that what is revealed about their relationship plays as a twist (and here's the twist: they're not in a relationship, Fleck imagined it all, and it turns out Sophie is frightened by him) means that Phillips, that fucking numbnuts, thought that the two of them being in love, as he presented it, somehow worked, that it played, even though Sophie is a normal person raising a child by herself, and Arthur is never depicted as anything other than, at best, a genial psycho, and that when he pulls back the curtain, by which I mean, when he steals from M. Night Shyamalan, he thinks we should be thinking "well what the fuck I thought they'd spend eternity together."

Speaking of stealing. Before he "left" comedy (about which more in a bit), and in between Hangsover, Todd Phillips released Due Date, a film that is a naked rip-off of John Hughes's Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Evidently pleased by how that all worked out for him, Phillips decided his narrative and aesthetic approach to Joker (which he co-wrote, as well as directed) should be to graft large chunks of classic Martin Scorsese films onto the two ideas he had (those two ideas being Arthur Fleck's laughing disorder, and to sometimes have Fleck walk into a room, point the camera up at him from the floor, and move it around a bit), and then sort of just shove it in front of an audience. Because, I mean, that Zazie Beetz stuff is just a bad version of the De Niro and Diahnne Abbott material from Scorsese's King of Comedy, a film which is also the source of all the talk show stuff in Joker. And the PTSD/violent retribution stuff from Taxi Driver, etc. Everybody knows this before they even see Joker. It's shameless, and because the marketing has led with this, it's not even interesting. You can't even say "Aha, you brigand" because, smirking cynic that he is, Phillips got ahead of it. He gets to "be" Scorsese (he won the Golden Lion!) by being the opposite of Scorsese, by innovating nothing, by adding nothing. Phillips's shield is that he roped Scorsese in to help him line up Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Scorsese's producing partner, to work on the film. Had John Hughes not already been dead when Phillips was making Due Date, a similar arrangement would have surely been made.

A good hint of what's to come can be found right at the beginning, in the opening credits font. It's a kind of old-fashioned curlicue which I think might be meant to evoke Vaudeville but actually, to me anyway, brought to mind fairy tales, but in any case is "ironic" in the "oh that font is fun, but that guy just got beat up while I was enjoying the font" sense. This is more or less the cinematographic philosophy throughout. The two good shots are the one from that early poster, the one of Joaquin Phoenix in his Joker makeup, enveloped by that municipal green paint and boiler room-lighting, arms up, appearing to be caught in a moment of almost religious grace (this is one of those shot-from-below bits I mentioned earlier, and it does pay off, however briefly). The other comes late in the film, after the Joker commits an act of violence which cannot be hidden. Again he's in full makeup, and in his full purple suit (the Joker look designed for this film is a good one, I'll admit that much), now with blood on his face. That's a cliché, but the shot is almost of Phoenix's profile -- he's smiling and trembling at once. It's the trembling that makes it all work. Phoenix seems to be actually shaking in the adrenal aftermath of a life- and mind-changing explosion. It's Phoenix's best moment, from a performance that is otherwise fine, but a pale shadow of his work in films that ask much more of him. I would, for instance, defy anyone to point to a role and performance that is anything like what he was asked to do, and did, in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. In comparison, Phillips seems to have said "Okay, be crazy, but quiet. And...action!"



Which is another thing: why make a Joker film, and make the character so inarticulate? In the comics, and in the various Batman films in which the character has appeared, The Joker is a chatterbox, gleefully, maliciously, verbal. That's a big part of the idea -- the guy makes a lot of jokes! In Joker, Arthur Fleck is, to borrow a line from a film made by one of Phillips's "key" "inspirations," a mumbling, stuttering prick. He can barely finish telling a joke. We see him do stand-up once, after he's gone off his meds and is just a total mess. If we're going to have The Joker explained to us, then maybe make his interest in comedy a little bit more a part of it all. Better a little bit, than nothing. Anyway, a video of that stand-up performance, which is disastrous, makes its way to Murray Franklin, who plays it on his show, which leads to the film's climax. Which is very violent, and rides the wave of that sudden revolutionary impulse among Gothamites that Joker's random train murders began, and which includes a surprising amount of Batman lore. All of which I found utterly ridiculous. "Is that fucking Alfred???" I asked myself at one point. And then at the end I got to watch Phillips pilfer Frank Miller. It's all nonsense, the film so obviously believes it's above comic books and comic book films, yet relies on them for its big boost at the end.

I mean, if you refuse to show The Joker making jokes (with all his shots of Phoenix all decked out in purple walking in slow-motion while Gary Glitter(!) plays, or etc., Phillips seems more interested in making him look cool), to show him being funny while he's being vicious, then why is any of this even happening? But of course, Todd Phillips is serious now. In a recent interview, Phillips said that he stopped making comedies because what with "wokeness" and "cancel culture," it's impossible to be funny anymore. I'm fairly conflicted about this, because I don't tend to like the kind of comedy that Phillips argues has been ruined by the current political climate, but, on the other hand, I sometimes do, and I think those who wish to do away with it are breathtakingly hypocritical, lacking in self-awareness to such a degree that they might literally fade into nothing. But also a bullshit hypocrite is Phillips. Early in the film there's a scene where Arthur goes to a comedy club, as part of the audience. Performing that night is Gary Gulman, an actual stand-up, and playing himself, in a sense, because he's doing one of his own routines, a bit that, if you keep up with current stand-up at all, is pretty well-known. It's an extended piece, ostensibly about the sexual role play Gulman and his wife engage in, involving a male professor and a female student, but which very quickly becomes an extended complicated story about the difficulties of  being a professor dealing with a difficult student, a story that almost instantly sheds any and all sexual connotations. It's very funny, and very clean. It's absurd, and is guaranteed to offend not a single person on earth. So if Phillips thinks comedy is impossible now, why is he aware of, and why does he approve of, Gary Gulman? And approve of his comedy so much that he puts Gulman in his film doing one of his own bits??

Probably because, as others have said, Phillips doesn't believe a goddamn word he says. "Meaning what I say" isn't part of the plan. "Saying it" is enough. This goes for the sympathy his film pretends we're supposed to feel for Arthur Fleck. That sympathy, or the idea of it, is what's caused the film to become such a controversial piece ever since Warner Brothers released the first trailer. But it's all a hoax. It's a scam. Why everybody at the Venice Film Festival bought into it, I don't know, but I guess Don't Look Now, The Comfort of Strangers, and Robert Aickman were right. But when you create (using that word loosely) a character who is mentally ill, and have him kill only people the audience is meant to hate, and who have done him, this poor fellow, wrong, and pretend, then, as Phillips has done, that the audience isn't meant to (this doesn't mean they will) approve of this behavior, at least as a piece of entertainment, then you're having it both ways, or trying to, which means you're lying. And again, I think the critics predicting violence in the wake of Joker's release are behaving reprehensibly (the only group I'm aware of who has reacted to the film with frothing positivity are the critics who saw it in Venice). But, Phillips will insist, do not criticize me, for I have behaved nobly. My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime. And make each prisoner pent, unwillingly represent, a source of innocent merriment, of innocent merriment.