things i've watched lately

Here is a list of some of the TV/movies I’ve been enjoying during quarantine time:

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

I had made plans to see Portrait of a Lady on Fire in the theaters a while ago — it was going to be my treat to myself, if only I could meet a few semi-arbitrary housecleaning goals. (A girl can have little a French lesbians, as a treat.) (That was going to be the title of this newsletter until I figured it might get flagged in some email spam folders that way.)

Anyway, I never got around to hitting those goals, and then we ended up with a pandemic and all the theaters are closed now anyway, and I was lamenting having to wait until the video — er, DVD? — release, and then Hulu saved me.

Seeing a love story about women, written by women, directed by women, starring women, is honestly — and sadly — a rare occurrence. Writer and director Céline Sciamma lets her characters be bold, lets them rage, be angry and ugly and bitter and cutting. Female intimacy without a hint of the male gaze was so remarkable that I still find myself thinking of the movie, of the way Marianne and Héloïse are allowed to exist on screen for us, weeks after I first saw it.

It makes me angry, really, that it is the year 2020 and this is the first time I’ve seen a film that so clearly and honestly portrays women. There’s a complexity to them that just makes me mourn how many of our stories are told by men.

The story is slow, taking time to build the tension between Marianne and Héloïse until it snaps, all at once. You know their romance is doomed — the story is told as a flashback, and the opening scene doesn’t exactly leave much room to imagine that they somehow manage to find a happy resolution — you just don’t know how, or why, or when. As if to drive home the fact that this movie will not have a happy ending, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is evoked several times. Nothing that talks about Orpheus and Eurydice ends well. Nothing.

You will know when you’re approaching the end of the movie without even looking at the timestamp on the film. I won’t spoil it, because I truly think everyone should watch this, but it’s not the parting of Marianne and Héloïse that finally broke me — but it did put the cracks in all the right places for the final scene, which did in fact break me wide open. It’s been a while since I had a good ugly cry at a movie that lasted long after the credits rolled, but this one did it to me. The vulnerability from Adèle Haenel in the final scene is exquisite, and it is devastating, and I still sit with it, weeks later.

John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch

And now for something completely different?

I’d managed to miss this when it first came out by virtue of being the last person on earth not to be using a friend’s Netflix password. Well, I solved that issue and spent a lunch break watching an hour-ish of pure chaos.

The Jake Gyllenhaal segment is the one I was most familiar with, without having seen the show previously, and it is a delightful bit. For all that Gyllenhaal is a ~*~serious actor~*~ he also has such a knack for playing a completely unhinged character like Mr. Music. I am glad that Jake Gyllenhaal the Actor exists in this world, to deliver, like, Jack Twist on one side of the coin, and Mr. Music on the other.

All of the cameos and bits on here are just spot on, and the kids are worldly and savvy and smart without coming off as too pretentious. (Or when they do, it’s intentional, not irritating.) They felt exactly like kids I could have plucked out of some of the museums and shops I stopped in last time I was in NYC, which I guess says these kids all are either very good little actors, or they’re all playing true to type, you know?

While this is “a kids show”, I think it resonates with any one of us who grew up with Sesame Street — and if you remember seeing the episode where they teach the kids about death, after the death of the actor who played Mr. Hooper, then one particular scene in here will darkly resonate with you even more.

(How they managed to get André De Shields for this, I’ll never know, but he was amazing.) (Also I’m pre-emptively furious that COVID-19, among other things, is probably going to put the kibosh on a long-planned trip to NYC in July to see Hadestown.) (I spent so much time in New York last year! And was like, ah, nah, I don’t need to try to scrounge up a ticket to Hadestown right now; you’ve got a ticket for July! Just be patient and see other shows you were interested in seeing!)

The Terror

I have a love/hate relationship with television, in that under normal circumstances, I don’t have the free time in the evenings to watch much, and once I get too far behind on anything, it’s usually like, well, I might as well not even bother! (See also: why I watched the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale, or The Man in the High Castle, or scattered other shows that I saw some of, enjoyed, and then just never finished.)

But I’ve got nothing but time now, so decided to cross the first season of The Terror off my list. Going in, I knew it was about a doomed Arctic expedition, and that a lot of my friends spoke very highly of it, but that’s about it. A friend described it recently as “horrifyingly grim”, which hits the nail exactly on the head. What I got was a tense story set in the frozen-over, desolate Arctic that checked off a good number of my boxes of what I want in a show to obsess over.

I could write about The Terror for ages but here are some of my main thoughts — with some spoilers, for anyone else who’s also two years behind the times like I was:

• Knowing that the true-life story resulted in lost ships with no survivors means you’re automatically spoiled for the fact that the show isn’t going to end well, but the how and why and when of the deaths, especially to key characters, caught me very off guard, in a good way. No one is safe, but not knowing when death is going to come calling kept the tension going the whole way through.

• For a show about sailors lost in the Arctic, it also sure is a pretty poignant meditation on death (What is a good death, anyway? What does it mean to die? Does it matter, if you get to choose the way in which you go? A suicide, yes, but a sacrifice, too?) and imperialism (All these white dudes where they do not belong!) and hubris. Maybe religion, too, if you want to consider the fact that Sir John Franklin makes some of his terrible decisions in part because he has a steadfast belief that God will guide them true. The more agnostic Francis Crozier is owed a big I-told-you-so moment that he’ll never truly get. (I was reading something that said that, looking at the real-life path the ships took, by the time they reach the major decision point in the show — press on and hope to outrun the ice, or consolidate ships and change direction — that they were actually already pretty well screwed, but, of course, they don’t know that.)

• Adam Nagaitis, as Cornelius Hickey, has joined a very short list of actors who I may not ever be able to see in another role without thinking of them in a role in which they played a villain to such perfection that I just can’t unsee it. Every time he was on screen, I was like: this fucking guy, and that only continues to escalate throughout the series. He plays the best, most charismatic bad guy; it’s easy to see how he could convince so many men to go along with his plans. (My friend Bessie recently wrote about The Terror in her own newsletter — she’s much more successfully doing the daily thought/good music newsletter than I’ve managed. She raises a good question: Does television primarily about and for straight people deserve a queer villain like Cornelius Hickey? Why is it that the first character we meet who’s explicitly queer is also the one who turns out to be the bad guy? Does the relationship of John Bridgens and Harry Peglar do anything to make up for this, balance the scales?)

• What seals The Terror as a show that I want to re-watch and dive into again — despite how bleak it is, despite knowing how it ends — is the phenomenal acting and character development. The book that the show is based on is over 700 pages long. The show easily could have been stretched out for two seasons, particularly given the big truncation in timeline that I’m already seeing between the book and the show, but the show-runners mined the book for the best character notes and motivations, and did so with great precision to create a 10-episode series. Things aren’t spoon-fed to the audience: you’ll catch on to what you miss eventually, and the show will be there for you when you do.

• The slow reveals of backstory — Jopson’s mother, Crozier’s failed courtship, Fitzjames’ everything, Hickey’s motivations — come at just the right moments to move the plot along and to open up new aspects of characters you thought you knew. The path of Crozier and Fitzjames in particular, from two men who appear to be quite polar opposites, to men who would be there for one another in the darkest hour, is particularly well done and believable. Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies both are excellent here — Harris as Crozier, who at different points in the series is cautious, critical, excessively drunk, foul-tempered, bitter, but, in the end, the consummate compassionate leader of men; Menzies as Fitzjames, who starts out as just another puffed-up Naval officer, prone to pumping his own tires, as it were, someone who tries hard but never quite gets the admiration he thinks he’s due, but by the end is laid bare (“We are at the end of vanity”), is a different man entirely. Menzies plays a lot of those guys — tries hard, but in the end, it doesn’t even matter sorts — and I fully expected Fitzjames to go down that same path, but his burgeoning respect and eventual friendship with Crozier is handled so deftly, with such grace.

The show is just haunting. There’s no other way to put it, I think. Eerie and haunting. I didn’t quite binge, instead watched over about a week or so, but when I’d finish watching for the day, I’d usually end up turning on an episode or two of something more light-hearted to try to clear away the sense of dread I got from watching the show. After the credits of the final episode, I found myself just sort of staring at the screen, letting everything sink in. It’s show that sticks with you.

Here are the drawbacks of the show: with the exception of the main cast and a few supporting characters, I spent a good 75% of the time not being able to tell anyone apart. I need to go back and rewatch it now that I can recognize more faces. Also, if you’re someone who has a hard time with accents, watch with captions on. (I watch almost everything with captions, so honestly would recommend this for anything you watch, ever.) Also if you’re squeamish, well. Maybe there’s a Youtube cut of just the good character scenes without all the gore. I don’t find myself particularly squeamish but still had to look away from the screen more than a few times.

(This scene is full of spoilers, but it is so, so good, especially when you’re looking at it from a character development perspective. The Crozier and Fitzjames of episode one would have never had this conversation. The Arctic had to break these men to make this conversation possible, and Tobias Menzies absolutely kills this monologue.)